more on O’Dorney

This is a bit of (okay, a lot of) a rant, but Idyllopus is right.  If being “properly socialized” means attacking a 13-year-old genius who did nothing worse than be a little awkward on TV, then I’d rather not be.

in defense of fluff

I will not join the Paris Hilton naysayers already lamenting the media coverage of her travails. Sure, it’s mostly fluff, but the classic storyline of the spoiled debutante finally getting her comeuppance is too good to resist.

Besides, there are real issues involved. Wealthy, white people, never mind celebrities, get preferential treatment from the justice system all the time, but it usually takes an extreme example like this to bring attention to it. And maybe there are a few intrepid reporters out there who will use Hilton as a jumping off point to examine the greater problem. Sometimes you have to get the eyeballs any way you can.

Sure, the nonstop cable news coverage of Hilton is a bit sickening, but very little that cable news does is not sickening, and we are better off avoiding it altogether. I’ll take the best of both worlds from the New York Times, where we can catch all the gossipy details of the Hilton story while simultaneously getting our digs in at those shmucks on CNN:

The news about Ms. Hilton dominated news coverage today. At CNN, the news was breaking during the cable news network’s daily CNN International news hour. The Paris story led the show after one commercial break, coming even before updates on the G8 Summit and Italy’s Rendition Trial.

“It’s the kind of day where we’ll always have Paris,” Stephen Frazier, one of the anchors, said, trying for a wry delivery.

For those who like their fluff with an even thicker veneer of respectability, we have this story on the Tom and Jerry cartoon-like efforts of the press covering the G-8 summit to avoid protesters:

Plan A called for the press to ride a quaint little locomotive train, ordinarily a tourist attraction, for the 12-minute trip from nearby Kuhlungsborn to the grounds of the Kempinski Grand. When protesters lay down across the tracks just as Mr. Bush was to have lunch with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, the organizers quickly invoked to Plan B: army boats.

But the sea, alas, was choppy and some in the press corps got sick. Then the protesters themselves took to the water, in a speedboat and the police ordered the army boats docked, leaving the new president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, about to hold his first Group of 8 press conference with no French reporters on hand. So the French came to Heiligendamm via Plan C: helicopters.

That is only the middle blurb in a story that covers President Bush’s awkwardness around German Chancellor Angela Merkel after the shoulder massage incident at the last summit, and his later show of rubbing his stomach to refute earlier claims of a tummy ache that may have offended the German hosts.

The real news is still out there for anyone to find, but a little supplementary fluff never hurt anyone.

Photo by Flickr user sarahinvegas obtained under a Creative Commons license.

hooray for nerds

Check out this wonderful video of Evan O’Dorney, the recent national spelling bee champ, on CNN. The spelling bee is one of the few, if not the only, popular national competitions that rewards something besides looks and made-for-TV social skills, and it is priceless seeing the anchorwoman try to handle this brilliant, yet hopelessly awkward, kid.  He can’t spell the word if you don’t say it right, lady!

Freedmen again

Indian Country Today gives a brief history of the struggle between Cherokee abolitionists and slaveholders during the Civil War, and how that influences today’s crisis over the Cherokee Freedmen. It shows that both competing definitions of native citizenship have deep roots within the Cherokee people. It is false to say the freedmen and others were imposed on the tribe solely by outsiders. Hopefully someday the Cherokees can rediscover the better angels in their own history.

assault rifles, keyboards, and trains

The AK-47: an open source assault rifle? Andrew Leonard also mentions the QWERTY keyboard, which really has a remarkable story behind it. It just popped up in my reading of Guns, Germs, and Steel (highly recommended, and I’m sure to have more to say about it later):

Unbelievable as it may now sound, that keyboard layout was designed in 1873 as a feat of anti-engineering. It employs a whole series of perverse tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as possible, such as scattering the commonest letters over all keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left side (where right-handed people have to use their weaker hand). The reason behind all of those seemingly counterproductive features is that the typewriters of 1873 jammed if adjacent keys were struck in quick succession, so that manufacturers had to slow down typists. When improvement in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trials in 1932 with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95 percent. But QWERTY keyboards were solidly entrenched by then. The vested interests of hundreds of millions of QWERTY typists, typing teachers, typewriter and computer salespeople, and manufacturers have crushed all moves toward keyboard efficiency for over 60 years.

The secret lives of taken-for-granted technologies is fascinating by itself, but there are also some political lessons hiding in there. Leonard mentions the benefits of the open-source business model, but more generally we can see that markets, the invisible hand notwithstanding, are really a conglomeration of interest groups formed in many ways by the quirks of history. Even if we assume efficiency and growth are the most important goals of society, which I don’t, corporations and other capital enterprises may be working for interests that are totally inefficient.

It doesn’t even require a monopoly, the typical boogeyman of unfettered capitalism. As we see from the above examples, entrenched cultural practices may be enough to impede all sorts of clear technological improvements. Another great example is mass transit, of which us Okies and other midwesterners are largely deprived. The failure to establish a light rail corridor from Norman, Oklahoma to Wichita, Kansas has a long and sad history, but one excuse given by opponents is that it would not be profitable. Yet as long as no convenient, inexpensive option is available, and the hidden costs of driving everywhere are suppressed, then people will remain uninterested (the link goes to the Times of India, but with a few exceptions his examples apply just as well here).

It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, all too eagerly propagated by the highway construction and the automobile industries, as well as the politicians they pay for. To break the cycle, we need both innovation and regulation, to make visible the hidden costs and tilt the economics in a more socially beneficial direction.

The world is running fine on QWERTY keyboards, inefficient as they may be, but in other areas the entrenched interests are steering us (pun intended) towards disaster.

Photo by Flickr user orangeacid obtained under a Creative Commons license.

Phoenix on Freedmen

The Muskogee Phoenix is brief, direct, and totally right about the Cherokee Freedmen and constitution.

the bees

The mystery behind disappearing honeybees have gotten a lot of press coverage, some of it misleading and overblown (hint: it wasn’t the cellphones).  But up at Salon is an excellent dialogue between four scientists and farmers that does a great job of putting in perspective and fleshing out the many factors that may be involved.  In precis: bees are going to be alright in the long run, but their recent plight is one symptom of larger changes that will have uncertain consequences.

Photo by Flickr user garynoon1961 under a Creative Commons license.

bug blogging

The week in DC was followed by the week of weddings, hence the blogging hiatus. But now I’m back, and ready to talk about bugs!

Pictured here are some Colorado potato beetle larvae, currently in the process of eating my potatoes. I’ve always wondered where these things come from. They only ever show up on potato plants, but they are almost always on those plants, and in force. But how does a critter with such a limited diet manage to be so widespread? I live in an urban area, no hub for potato agriculture, and the plants only got there from the throwing old vegetables at the brick wall on the side of my house game.

According to this site, the beetles simply fly around until they find the right plant. So they are traversing the countryside, ready to settle down in every small garden potato and eggplant they might find. For some reason, this thought makes me happy.