How Americans think

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John F. Kennedy, 1961:

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

Ronald Reagan, 1980:

Are you better off than you were four years ago?

NPR, 2012:

Are You Better Off? That’s The Question As Democrats Gather

Back in the 1980s, we used to ask ourselves whether asking that question meant that we had become self-centered narcissists, caring more about our individual well-being than our country. I guess now that’s a given.

Update 8:40 AM: Krugman with another angle on why it’s a horrible question.

Bring out your dead (ebooks)

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This is one more reason why I believe the current DRM model of distributing media is doomed.

Who inherits your iTunes library?

Many of us will accumulate vast libraries of digital books and music over the course of our lifetimes. But when we die, our collections of words and music may expire with us.

Someone who owned 10,000 hardcover books and the same number of vinyl records could bequeath them to descendants, but legal experts say passing on iTunes and Kindle libraries would be much more complicated.

CS50: Forced to say something nice about Harvard

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I’m usually pretty happy with my mad geek skills, but most of what I know about programming is self-taught. Someone thought it would be a good idea to put me in front of a teletype terminal in 1976, and I’ve been hooked since then. But back when I was actually learning stuff for a living, I majored in American Civilization and Communications instead of playing with computers.

Unfortunately, there are lots of gaps that come from this kind of educational process, so I sat down and took Harvard’s Intro to Computer Science over iTunes U last week—and I have to say, whoa. This is an amazing class. David Malan is both an excellent teacher and an interesting presence on stage, and goes through the concepts with skill and humor. I ended up learning a lot about C, and while I was able to whiz through most of the web-based technologies at 2x speed, I picked up quite a bit of useful information there as well.

Also, the demonstration of a Huffman tree is possibly the most beautiful intellectual theory I’ve seen in a very long time.

Malan’s class is currently the #2 class in iTunes U, so fire up iTunes and find it there (in the iTunes store under the iTunes U tab; the class is a free download), or use Harvard’s own web presence at cs50.tv. The class is geared for an audience with no programming experience; starting with C will throw you into the deep end, but that’s part of why I’m so impressed with Malan and the materials that Harvard has published to help you through it.

The SEAL report is setting off my spider-bullshit senses

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I’m not in the least surprised to hear that the SEAL team had orders to kill, not capture Osama bin Laden. But I’m also not going to believe it just yet.

According to the AP, the new SEAL memoir says that the Obama administration lied about whether the team was given capture orders. The memoir also says that no one on the SEAL team is an Obama supporter, alongside several other tidbits quoted by the AP that would make good fodder as GOP talking points.

Here’s where I have questions: I consider it somewhat convenient that this kind of information would hit the airwaves in the pre-election window. In fairness, though, the AP reports that the book was originally pegged to a 9/11 publication date, which strikes me as an excellent, although tasteless, marketing ploy.

It’s remarkably unclear from the piece whether the AP has an advance copy of the book, or whether they’re quoting a Dutton press release. It states, “The Associated Press purchased a copy of the book Tuesday.” But the book isn’t available until 9/1, and advance press copies aren’t typically for sale—so are they working with an advance copy? Had they said nothing, I’d assume they were, as I’d assume that the AP would be on the gratis list. But since it’s also news that the DoD is only now getting their advance copies, this is a bit odd.

This might be a bit too inside-baseball, but the difference is this: give the AP an advance copy, and you’ve got 330 pages of book that could conceivably generate a headline. Give them and others a press release only, and then you’ve got a much better chance of dictating what headlines are going to make the news. People marketing the book won’t much care either way, as both will sell copies. People caring about framing the political message are definitely going to prefer the latter.

In any case, what’s really confusing me is this: I’m one of the people who are happy to hear that Obama might have ordered bin Laden’s capture, because I believe bin Laden was a criminal. But this puts me into a remarkably small focus group of Americans—so there is damned little to gain politically by the Obama administration to appeal to me, especially since just about everyone in that cohort is going to lean Democratic for many other reasons.

Sounds to me like we’re about to hear a shitstorm of attacks on the Obama administration for lying to appeal to people like me. Which the Obama administration doesn’t normally care about doing. And that’s the biggest reason why this headline is striking me as bullshit.

Mitt Romney metafail

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How to waste your campaign ad dollars:

  1. Jeff opens a web page.

  2. Fail #1: a video advertisement for Mitt Romney starts autoplaying somewhere on the page. I can’t see the video, so I can’t see where to turn it off.

  3. Fail #2: a second copy of the same advertisement starts autoplaying somewhere on the same page, so the audio is now playing in an echo chamber.

  4. Fail #3: the few words I can still make out are Romney Olympics something something efficiency something high quality management.

  5. Fail #4: I mute the sound. Still have no idea where the video is, but now I don’t care.

  6. Worst (or best): the page in question? Failblog.

Putting women in a Skinner box

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Back when I was in college and getting radicalized, one of the major political arguments in favor of my pro-choice beliefs was the theory that removing abortion from the table essentially turned women into walking incubators. The alternative view: women can consider themselves fully functioning members of society—until they get pregnant, or are at risk of getting pregnant. After that, well, think of the children and give up your control over your health and your body.

As it seems to me that every woman between the ages of fifteen and fifty are at least nominally at risk of getting pregnant, this is a no-brainer. As it also seems to me that there is absolutely no situation where a man is ordered to give up his own freedoms in such a way, well, it seems to me that any self-respecting man should agree with me.

That’s why I’m posting this link: as a member of the “have not spawned” community, it seems to me that most of my peer group goes a little batshit crazy about monitoring the absolutely perfect health of their offspring (as if that were possible), and it’s 1,000 times worse for pregnant women. Sure, it’s easy to stay on the side of opposing laws that restrict a woman’s freedom—but in the case of women who voluntarily do so in order to abide by societal rules, well, the problem seems to be getting worse with no easy fix.

Salon: My pregnancy rebellion

Jonah Lehrer on smart people making stupid mistakes

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Ironically, within a few minutes after my news feed told me that Jonah Lehrer resigned from The New Yorker, my articles-to-read randomizer plucked out this piece from June titled “Why Smart People Are Stupid”, which begins with an apology that Lehrer self-plagiarized the beginning of the piece.

FWIW, I think Lehrer is a smart writer and I’m going to miss his long-form pieces. I don’t necessarily think there’s a correlation between fabulizing a quote and the accuracy of the overall piece, hence the link.

When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions. These shortcuts aren’t a faster way of doing the math; they’re a way of skipping the math altogether.

Corollary: smart people are more likely to trust these shortcuts, IMO.

Buckyballs now filed under “Cuban cigars”

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I’m normally entirely behind regulations coming down from the CPSC, but I can’t quite agree on this one. Shouldn’t the federal government have a “but it’s so fucking cool” exception?

More to the point, I disagree with the idea that the product should be outlawed for everyone because some parents shoot for retroactive Darwin awards by giving neodymium magnets to their offspring.

Farewell, Buckyballs: Consumer Agency Files Suit Against Magnetic Toys