While visiting Amy and Max the other day I noticed that they had posted a writ on the wall at the request of their 4 year old son that listed rules for eating at the dinner table. I don’t recall the exact rules but they had to do with not playing with your food and other eating related etiquette. I went off on a tangent about it and started thinking about how every family over time creates their own sets of rules and sometimes they are codified into laws like the piece of paper hanging from the dinner table and other times they are simply verbally agreed upon. I poked around and there are sites like Kids Contracts where people have spent time building some legal agreements for kids and parents. What I didn’t see was the idea of a household constitution where a family sets-up a small-scale democracy or other form of government with a base set of law that then guides the construction of additional laws for the family. While it might be nice to have a pre-built system it would lack in the fit for a given cultural style for a single family. Working through the process itself to gain consensus and buy-in from different parties (kids and parents) and likely multiple of each could lead to the formation of a set of family laws that would be respected. I’m interested in setting-up a government of sorts in my own household to sort through the rules as Madeline becomes old enough, probably another year, to appreciate how rules can help to define expectations and ultimately drive success based on incentives in the rules. I also am generally interested in anthropology so it gives me a chance to run a little experiment with my own family unit. If all went well I can imagine that we’d create a great little blue-print family constitution and laws in a wiki that could be copied and modified by other families who might find it interesting as a point of reference to save time. Ultimately we might end-up recreating a lot of what’s already in religions since they rightly took a lead in this type of framework a long time ago. But I’m not interested in the antiquated stuff and don’t subscribe to anyone else’s religion. Plus they involve praying which doesn’t seem to help much for most things I would worry about around the house.

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:47 PM | Permalink

During the past week we happened to rent both “Blood Diamond” and “Fast Food Nation”. It was hard not to notice that these two movies were a little different from the movies with people dressed in leotards pretending to be bat-men or comedies involving Will Farrell as an incompetent (insert weird profession here). I liked both movies but they both had within them some deep political agendas to educate people about issues we would normally be blissfully unaware of spoon-fed as drama with brand name actors and musical stars. In the case of Blood Diamond the basic message within the action packed drama was that the DeBeers family controls the diamond industry as a cartel and that nice rock that westerners are paying $5-$20K for as a down payment on a wife is the source in a land far away of children being recruited to becoming soldiers and countless victims of machine gun fire in senseless wars. The Fast Food Nation thesis was something similar but in this case more about how we are so divorced from the source of our beef that we don’t appreciate what happens on the killing room floor, who is suffering in substandard conditions to bring the food to us (illegal immigrants), and that our food probably has a lot of cow dung mixed in with it because nobody cares to police it that hard. In this case the meat packing giants replaced the DeBeers family.

So I make a couple of observations from the spoon feeding of this information to me. The first is that I, like most folks of my generation, no longer actively seek out this sort of information. I go to my regular source of information/entertainment, Hollywood Video, and consume whatever they give me. In order to communicate social issues to me you need to package them in a format that I can digest, usually something with a love affair between Jennifer Connelly and Leonardo DiCaprio with lots of explosions and body count. I can also sit through seeing that guy from the Seventy’s Show, Greg Kinnear, and Bruce Willis.

But the other more obvious fact is that there is something that hasn’t quite been worked out in the modern world in terms of balancing the supply chain with old-fashioned ethics. It seems that given the world of corporations and the need for profit established in a capitalist society, connected with the public’s need not to know dirty details about the sources of their consumer products, it is more than likely that the suffering by some will be created inadvertently by the consumer machine. This was unlikely to have been as much of a problem in a world where travel and transportation was more restricted. That is a highly ironic fact given that many people thought that the birth of international travel was a great peace keeping event. So I’m hoping that the next generation is getting fed proper visibility into the repercussions of their lifestyle so that actions of consumers, myself included, can be somehow directed to lead to ethical supply systems. It may be impossible to do but the alternative… that’s what we have now and it isn’t working ideally in some cases.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was reading an article the other day about the Iraq war and they mentioned that October was likely to be a large spike in coalition (mainly US) casualties. I recall seeing the number and it was the first time in a while that I didn't see the number as a representative item like I was taught to replace oranges or apples as a kid. 2 apples can be substituted for two apples. But 109, the current count of coalition casualties in Iraq struck me as more than just numbers. I could see stuck into the numbers the dying and the dead people. It was as if were I to take a magnifying glass over each number deep in the text there would be bodies filled with gunshots, burns, and missing limbs. I am not sure who to address unhappiness towards because of these deaths. My first and favorite people to place responsibility on are the people who are killing coalition soldiers. They are the people most to blame. But as an early supporter of the original war and wanting to see democracy replace a dictatorship maybe I am one of the primary people to blame? Things haven't turned out the way I had imagined they would when we first went in there.

Either way I wonder what is so casual about a casualty. I did find a web site where they tally the dead and injured in Iraq www.icasualties.com. It even has XML RSS feeds if you wanted to syndicate such information onto your own web site.

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was good to see the Steelers win the Superbowl on Sunday. We had a little gathering in Newton but it wasn’t nearly as intense as the past few years with the Patriots in the big game. Before the game Sarah and I took a walk around Crystal Lake with Madeline. At one point on the lake just after getting off of Beacon street there is a cove where you can climb into the water. I have some good memories of that cove like the time that I went skinny dipping with Ami and Ilana after college and getting covered with leeches. It also was the site of the closest I ever came to getting arrested.

A friend and I were swimming in the late evening on a hot august day. A police officer spotted us swimming in the lake outside of the designated public swimming zone. He waved us in and then gave a long speech about how illegal it is to swim in the lake and went over the potential for it to go onto our permanent records and ruin our future lives. The officer then called my parents to let them know that I had been breaking the law. My father had a chuckle about it when he received the call since he is no fan of the policy that people can’t swim in lakes. I think the officer was just collecting every high school student in town into his little arrest book. I bumped into him at a wrestling meet a few years later and he bragged that he had every student in the high school in his book with the crimes they had committed. I challenged him because I thought I was enough of a goody-goody to be in his book. Sure enough he had me in the little notepad with the date and time of the lake swimming incident.

Sarah noticed a beautiful house across the street from where I had been stopped for swimming. I remember that house because it was Anna Rosenblum’s house. Her father was a famous sculptor and in 9th grade during French class I had developed a crush on my partner – Anna Rosenblum. We had gotten together to study, practice, write a sketch or something in the house. It had been the closest to a date with a girl that I had been on so I was flush with hormones, pheremones, and insane developmental illnesses. She was wearing a pair of 80’s pre-faded and pre-torn blue jeans. Due to an intense mixture of fear in all directions I panicked and pretended to hate Anna in front of my friends to avoid embarrassment. I then played a prank on her that roughly equated to providing an imaginary secret admirer. Since I was too chicken to actually be the secret admirer it was easier to make it into a mean prank than to be straightforward about it. The massive fear in all directions is the odd thing about being in 9th grade. You are afraid of girls, being unpopular, failing in school, disappointing your parents. It’s a scary time. You do very strange things that one would only expect to see in a bad teen movie. For this reason alone I am willing to believe any motivation for a character in a bad teen movie.

I have been thinking often about fear lately. Maybe it is because the US is so focused on these people called “terrorists”. Terror is the extreme of fear. But using fear to control behavior is nothing new. In marketing we don’t focus on what products can do but what pains the products can alleviate. People don’t buy things –five blade razors, luxury motor cars, political mantras, or enterprise software unless they are convinced that the purchase will alleviate a fear that has been nagging them for ages. So us marketing folks try to highlight the chronic pain that they or their organization is in and suggest the potential circles of hell that they will land in if they don’t purchase our product. Some people tend to think that only a dictatorship can be run on fear but a pure democratic capitalist society with everyone marketing their own personal messages of fear are bound to accumulate a large collection of fear. So do we really fear the terrorists because of the murderous crimes that they perpetrate or because of the media machine, politicians, and corporations have something to sell and the fear is the easiest way to get us to buy?

So just to return to the big marketing event - the Superbowl. We do get some football sugar to help the medicine go down. But the medicine this yaer is to buy cars that run on corn power. Somewhere hidden between the State of the Union and the Superbowl is some secret pact between the politicians, the farmers, and the automotive industry to give our American car manufacturers an edge. We're moving to corn power according to the Superbowl advertisements and it is coming too fast for the foreign car companies to make better cornmobiles. Since we control our own super economy we may as well take advantage of the monopoly by adjusting the scales. Maybe we can avoid some foreign wars this way. Isn't that the idea behind the cornmobile. Go daddy go!

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While I wouldn’t vote for the guy I did manage to read through Bush’s 2006 State of the Union Speech to get a feel for where Bush and the American leadership is coming from. I read the transcript on CBS.

The first big chunk of the speech was dedicated to working to convince people that we need to stay the course in Iraq and suggested that we need to open some new fronts in places like Iran. I happen to agree that leaving Iraq at this stage in the interests of American security, saving troop lives and costs, is a bad policy. I understand that we made some major mistakes in how we went into Iraq, predominantly through a false misleading pretense of WMDs, a weak coalition that failed to get support from other major countries, and a totally ridiculous estimate of costs. Among my first reactions when I saw the budget for Iraq was that if it was going to take $80 Billion to invade the country then why wasn’t there a discussion of what it was going to take to rebuild the country. Basically if you are going to blow-up a building and replace it your budget should include a lot more than the budget to blow the building-up. But rather than destroy one regime just to run away and have it replaced by another tyranny we should work to build a stable self-sustaining representative government before returning our military home.

I did find this line below entertaining:

“We are the Nation that saved liberty in Europe, and liberated death camps, and helped raise up democracies, and faced down an evil empire.”

What makes it odd is that the people that we define as terrorists and insurgents like to call America the evil empire. So from an outside perspective evil can be conveniently defined to be – the other guy’s way of doing things. In the case of the Islamist fundamentalists the evil is the opposition to a faith based rule according to Islam’s religion. That doesn’t seem to stop Bush from pushing his own faith based agenda.

"Wise policies such as welfare reform, drug education, and support for abstinence and adoption have made a difference in the character of our country....Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research – human cloning in all its forms … creating or implanting embryos for experiments … creating human-animal hybrids … and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos. Human life is a gift from our Creator – and that gift should never be discarded, devalued, or put up for sale. "

Here he is putting in his two attacks in the pro-life agenda. The first is that we are going to accept a plan using abstinence and adoption as an alternative to birth control, sexual education, and abortion. Most pro-life arguments suggest that if we just had more adoption programs then abortion could be ethically made illegal. How many kids have Bush and Cheney adopted? The other objectionable area is the attack on human cloning as an egregious abuse of medical research. Basically he is saying that stem cell research is ethically wrong. But to start with “human cloning in all of its forms” is somewhat comical since most genetic research of any kind involves some form of cloning of human DNA. Isn’t a plasmid used for basic research a human-animal hybrid? Anyways the man has a screw loose caused by religious beliefs that I will refrain from calling evil.

" We need to encourage children to take more math and science, and make sure those courses are rigorous enough to compete with other nations. We have made a good start in the early grades with the No Child Left Behind Act, which is raising standards and lifting test scores across our country. Tonight I propose to train 70,000 high school teachers, to lead advanced-placement courses in math and science … bring 30,000 math and science professionals to teach in classrooms … and give early help to students who struggle with math, so they have a better chance at good, high-wage jobs."

Not to complain but is training the teachers more in advanced placement courses the solution? Maybe it would help if we actually taught evolution (science) in schools. It also wouldn't be a bad idea to pay teachers more or to create stronger incentives for people with a math and science education to become teachers. Or how about helping to fund childrens educational television effectively so they don't need to beg for private funds to produce programming that is for the public good? In general teachers and the education system isn't as respected of a profession here as it is in other countries. It would be nice if someone could fix that problem.

Among the “evil” things Bush is doing has been the warrantless wire taps. We mean warrantless not that they weren’t necessary but that they are not overseen by a legal process so any surveillance on anyone could fit into the program without anyone knowing about it. He tried to push this into the realm of a security plan:

“I have authorized a terrorist surveillance program to aggressively pursue the international communications of suspected al-Qaida operatives and affiliates to and from America. Previous presidents have used the same constitutional authority I have – and Federal courts have approved the use of that authority. Appropriate Members of Congress have been kept informed. This terrorist surveillance program has helped prevent terrorist attacks.”

This is an interesting dance for Bush because on the one hand he is trying to say “Democracies replace resentment with hope, respect the rights of their citizens and their neighbors, and join the fight against terror. Every step toward freedom in the world makes our country safer, and so we will act boldly in freedom’s cause.” But on the other hand he is defending a policy that is clearly ignoring a constitutional freedom called the fourth amendment.

Not from Bush’s speech tonight. “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Maybe he just should have said - we should repeal the 4th amendment.

Another front laid out for us is the future fight in Iran. “The Iranian government is defying the world with its nuclear ambitions – and the nations of the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons.” I am not sure where it will lead but at least this time America is going to “rally the world to confront these threats” rather than go out and dive into a conflict without the world behind them first. At least the guy learned something from Iraq. Get the world behind you before charging into another country on the basis of spreading democracy. No wait - we are going to charge in this time because they are making a weapon of mass destruction. Well he learned that it works to go after the WMD FUD.

Bush also thinks that the American worker is the greatest worker in the world.

"With open markets and a level playing field, no one can out-produce or out-compete the American worker. "

I wonder if the American worker has a bad enough math and science education to believe this? Having taken a look at what global competition has given as evidence in information technology and manufacturing I have to say that with open markets and a level playing field, China and India can out-produce the American worker. That is unless the level playing field means that we enforce wage equivalence and lifestyle standards of third world countries.

I was glad about the plan to improve IT for healthcare. We will make wider use of electronic records and other health information technology, to help control costs and reduce dangerous medical errors." It makes our consulting business prime for some growth.

The other interesting area was that they are paying some lip service to alternative energy strategies to reduce our dependence on oil.

"So tonight, I announce the Advanced Energy Initiative – a 22-percent increase in clean-energy research at the Department of Energy, to push for breakthroughs… (like) zero-emission coal-fired plants; revolutionary solar and wind technologies; and clean, safe nuclear energy, cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn but from wood chips, stalks, or switch grass (to) help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.”

Good idea! Someone should have thought of this one sooner. Wait haven’t we been talking about alternative energy for a very long time but in reality doing far more research and far less implementation? The problem is that oil is still too cheap to use other types of energy because everything comes with a cost. IMHO - The real solution…. tax the crap out of oil companies in order to represent the real costs (like wars in Iraq) to force more reasonable economic incentives to come about. Create a national nuclear energy infrastructure like we did with the nuclear arms infrastructure to compete with oil. The most likely result of this plan is that we are going with the status quo and need to wait for the price of oil to get really high to force Toffler’s third wave economy to compete with the non-renewable resource economy.

In all I am behind the stuff about staying in Iraq and spreading democracy as an alternative to theocracy, getting ourselves off of foreign oil, and improving American education and medicine. It would be nice to see some consistency like understanding science enough to keep God out of our test tubes and government, respecting American democratic liberties, and investing more money in creating a culture of education in the US as well as building real strategic national energy programs other than research.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was at a wedding last year when I met with some of my old "liberal?" Jewish friends from college and happened to get into some discussions about the Bush administration. What had changed since college was an unexpected growth of neoconservative Jews who were supporting Bush because the general positions of conservative economics and Middle Eastern intervention were projected as pro-capitalist and pro-Israel. In general Jews don't support right wing Christian candidates who would like to implement Christian values through the government. Most Jews tend to be liberal because Jews have had enough historical experience, going back to Egypt, with civil rights issues to know that in general local majority religious values coded into laws don't work well for people who aren't in the majority religion. The Yom Kippur and Passover messages communicate to the Jewish kids that historically living as Jews in a minority requires fighting for minority freedoms and ultimately the separation from church and state in the US.

To the neocon Jews at the wedding last year it was considered a reasonable trade-off to them to support some minor undesirable Christian religious government aspects of the Republican party. So they built-up an ends justifies the means argument of putting Bush and the Republicans into power as being better for Jews and Israel than the Democrats. The counter argument that I took and continue to take is that placing the religious right into power with two supreme court justice seats up for grabs is a formula for long term civil rights disaster. The stated goal of the religious right wrangling into control of the Republican party, Bush, and appeasement of many splintered groups like the neocon jews was to start to push agendas to accomplish things like pro-life, pro-Christian family, and anti-homosexual legal adjustments.

So now we come to some dark days of political harvest with two supreme court justices now nominated by Bush. The latest appointee, Miers, appears to be the pro-life crony for Bush that the right wing Christians have been waiting for. It looks like the fight is behind us now that the supreme court is inevitably shifting for a long time to the right. The Christian majority is no doubt gearing-up to roll-back the "liberal" civil rights fought for in the past half century to return them to the level of the fifties. A filibuster won't stop the supreme court now.

I sadly predict that somewhere within the next few cases pushed to the supreme court there will be a couple that are designed to have maximum impact on Roe v. Wade, gay rights, and civil rights. The Republicans may wait until 2008 to drop the bomb in order to stay in power, but I am sure something big is heading for the new supreme court to make all of this wrangling of neocons into the tent worth the right wing's while.

Posted by Melody at 03:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The world is conical
While reading the World is Flat I quickly became annoyed in the first chapter about the fundamental premise that the world is flat. I understood the basic idea that the world had evolved in terms of geographic barriers coming down but for me the picture of a flat world looks just like it should before Columbus. At the time geographically things were lined-up on maps so that distances can't be traversed in circles.

A number of geometric rules have been put forth to figure out what geometry that you are in that you can learn about in Feyman's Six Not So Easy Pieces in a chapter on Curved Spaceused to figure out whether Space-Time is curved or not. They generally focus on how a bug experiences their space not knowing it's contour. For example, if a bug tries to walk in a square by turning at right angles on a globe with equidistant measures they won't return to the point where they started.

Now we not only can traverse distances through low cost light speed communications/software, but to me that isn't a flat surface at all. The surface is just redefined where distance is related to the level of sophistication of the communications network and infrastructure. So flat is actually a bad way to describe how things are now. For instance I am closer to Bangalore than to Otis, MA on a telecommunications sophistication map because Bangalore is super wired while Otis hasn't gotten too far in wiring itself.

So if the world isn't flat - then what shape would it look like if we could visualize it. Some smart people at Princeton managed to visualize what the United States looks like through the lens of Presidential politics in the Princeton 2004 Election maps. So why not build some other maps about the world.

While trying to figure out the shape of the cyber-world is a wierd question it may not be possible to do and to create a new map structure from it. My first guess was that I could see the world first in a flat structure but upon adding that Bangalor is close to Boston the map would need to somehow put these points closer to each other. A reasonable way to do this would be to first flatten the map into a circle (since it is the base of a cone) with oceans towards the edges as best as possible. Then above the map build a cone ending at a point above it at the top. Rather than having mountains above the map the height of the area would rise upwards through the cone to the top based on how connected it was to the Internet, etc. If the resolution was infinite then two people talking on a telephone in cyberspace to each other would both be stretched to the top of the cone and facing each other. But since this would be an approximate map, just like the flat maps of the world not showing relief, the average in a region of connectedness to the world through a number would set the height of the peak for a region and the pull into the central point of the cone. The distance between any two places would actually no longer be readable on the lower circular map of the world but from their relative heights or a path that factored both geographic distance and the relative heights.

This new cyberworld map unfortunately would be very hard to read because things get pretty dense towards the top of a cone. If 750 cities all ended-up in a point it would have a lot of labels sticking out of it. This isn't a new problem. You can't read road signs on a map of the whole globe. You need to be able to zoom in and out. So one solution is to be able to change the view from the bottom to the top. At the bottom you have standard road sign problems but since the top condenses a lot your views probably should take cross sections - from height a-b and display what's in them labelled correctly.

In another way to approach this the world could be looked at with two dimensions. Each point would be defined A) by a two dimensional E-W land area (like a district, suburb, etc.) and B) by a number from zero to one representing a measurment number. The reason for measuring from zero to one would be to normalize the measurement such that every area was on the same scale, whatever that scale was. An actual number could be used but then a scale would need to be figured out to translate it into a picture. The measurement itself would be important for determining the outcome of the map but it could measure -- % saturation of cell phones, % users with Interet computers, etc. Next the little squares with E-W land areas could be sorted by range from 0-1 into a line. Now this doesn't look like a map yet but it does provide a start for displaying how close things are. The other dimension could be another arbitrary item including longitude and latitude mixed into a variable that would project a full globe onto a line such that Boston would still be somewhat near Bedford.

I unfortunately don't have the time to make such maps. If you are from Wired Magazine or Time or Princeton and you would like to collaborate with me and give me a team of programmers in Bangalore to create the maps... you'll know where to find me. I am somewhere midway up the cybercone near the US cluster.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)