Original Cin

Obama Turns FDR Upside Down - WSJ.com

….the economic well-being of the country is not measured by how much taxes the government can collect, or even the size of the deficit. Rather, it is measured by the country’s productive capacity. Our theoretical entrepreneur’s 11.2% decline in taxable income reflects both less effort on his part and a less efficient use of his income in order to avoid confiscatory tax rates. Or, to put it directly, Sen. Obama’s plan would reduce an entrepreneur’s after-tax profits by $70,000 – $56,000 in lost profits and $14,000 more in taxes – just to produce a net revenue gain to the government of $14,000.

It is shocking to think that we have a presidential candidate who would make the private sector $5 poorer in order to make the government $1 richer. More likely, given the calculated political design of the proposal, no one in the Obama campaign told the candidate about the economic, ethical or historical consequences of his suggestion.

Via Thinking on the Margin via Greg Mankiw.

While looking for information on Japanese names, I found this:

Looking Good in a Big Brown Bathrobe - Jedi Training
The true test of a real Jedi is not whether she can blow up starships, or kill evil overlords, or refrain from giggling at Yoda’s Fozzie Bear voice. The true test is how good she looks in a big brown bathrobe.

The aspiring novice does not merely don the big brown bathrobe and suffer in it until she finally looks good. She advances through a number of stages, each time pitting herself against successively greater sartorial challenges. Her master guides her carefully, avoiding both allowing her to rest on her laurels and forcing her beyond endurance until her fashion sense breaks and she refuses to shop anywhere but at the Gap.

McCain calls for building 45 new nuclear reactors

Sen. John McCain called Wednesday for the construction of 45 new nuclear reactors by 2030…

This is a concrete plan that will do more than shuffle the pie around.

I was talking with my friend Jeff today, and we were discussing the economy. I mentioned that GMU Professor Bryan Caplan has pointed to the falling dollar at EconLog as a cause of rising gas prices. The article at US News pointed to by Caplan has a more detailed explanation, but, alas, no charts….

I wrote another 500+ words for the second “People Have Value.” I know how I want to end the series, and I knew how I wanted to start the story, but until today, I was having a lot of trouble with the setting in this particular part. I basically had a serious problem with believability. Rob — the oldest son in the family — has disappeared. I need his family to go looking for him in order to write the ending I want. I originally just had them follow him in right away, but the dialog I wrote to justify this decision seemed… well, boneheaded:

Brian scanned his surroundings and straightened his mustache, lost in thought. “It doesn’t look like a military base. That’s good as far as it goes. If we get in there and explain what’s happened…”

Erm, no. That’s just stupid. When confronted with a giant, mysterious pyramid of unknown origin, how many people would say “not a military base, must be safe?” I have, fortunately, figured a way to get the family inside the pyramid without turning them into brain-dead idiots.

I was working with XUL and Javascript yesterday, and I ran into some interesting problems. I’ve set up my chrome so that the project I’m working on in Eclipse is available in Firefox as “chrome://twodee/content/exampleScreen.xul”. I wanted a function I wrote to accept a filename as an argument, but no matter what I tried, a relative path wouldn’t work.

Well, of course not. You can’t just arbitrarily go from chrome-based URLs to file locations. Tossing a chrome URL into a function that’s expecting a file path is going to have some bad results. Specifically, “not a file” exceptions.

So, this works:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="chrome://global/skin/" type="text/css"?>
<window id="2DYouSee" title="Demo &quot;Game&quot;"
	xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"
	onload="Start2D(’C:\\Users\\Nic\\workspace\\2DYouSee\\content\\demo\\gameworld.json.txt’)”
	width=”650″ height=”490″>
	<script src=”io.js” />
	<script src=”json.js” />
	<script src=”twodee.js” />
	…
</window>

This does not:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="chrome://global/skin/" type="text/css"?>
<window id="2DYouSee" title="Demo &quot;Game&quot;"
	xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"
	onload="Start2D(’gameworld.json.txt’)” width=”650″ height=”490″>
	<script src=”io.js” />
	<script src=”json.js” />
	<script src=”twodee.js” />
	…
</window>

I did a little bit of work on Apochswords tonight, the massive space opera trilogy that I’ve been working on since… 2003? 2004? A very long time indeed. Maybe even 2002, since I remember that I discussed StorySage.com with my roommates in college my freshman year.

Tonight’s work consisted of some chapter outlines for the third book in the trilogy. Apochswords has dynamic characters, lots of them. Some of them have a broken moral compass, or a moral compass that breaks in response to the drama of the conflict around them. One such character is, well, evil at the point I’m writing about. But how to show that this character is evil?

In the release order, what’s the very first thing Darth Vader does in Star Wars? He steps over the bodies of those that oppose him. And, for that matter, some of the people that were helping him.

So, of course, my character is going to kill someone, without any chance for surrender or mercy, and in the goriest, most over-the-top way possible. [Evil smile]

Found while I was searching for something completely different: Disk Clock - A new conception of time for the OS X Dashboard. Be sure to look at the online demo in Firefox; the clocks are pretty, if confusing, and you don’t need a Mac.

Someone out there believes that gas prices are going to fall, or at least not rise very much in the future, and Chrysler seems to believe them. The company is currently offering to pay the difference between $2.99 and whatever the current cost of gasoline is, if you get one of their vehicles.

This is interesting, and there’s been a fair amount of discussion about it online. But I haven’t seen anyone point out that this means that Pricelock/Chrysler are basically shorting gasoline over the next three years. Pricelock’s website focuses mainly on the volatility of gas prices, but this really doesn’t make sense for a three year timeframe. Pricelock could change the guaranteed price every year, or every six months, and still provide a huge buffer against changing gas prices at far less obvious risk to themselves. So, what’s going on here, given that I’ve even heard some people swearing that $10/gal gas is right around the corner?

First of all, an overview of shorting. Let’s say that I’m really sure that Nintendo and Sony are going to drive the XBox line into the ground, mini Linux-run PCs like the Asus EEE are the wave of the future, and Google’s support of the ODF format and its Google Docs platform means that Office will optional software for businesses in the future. Basically, suppose I think Microsoft is doomed. I can short MSFT today at about $29.99 - basically making a promise to buy shares at some point in the future and getting the market price per share today. Let’s say I do this for 1000 shares. Disregarding brokerage fees, if the stock becomes completely worthless, I’ve just made $29,990. If the price falls to $10 (maybe only two of my three predications came true) then I’ve made $19,990 after I spend $10,000 to keep my promise to buy shares.

But, suppose instead that Linux is proven to cause cancer, Nintendo and Sony both bow out of the console market, and Google pulls the plug on Docs, and the price of MSFT increases dramatically, to $200 a share. When I make good on my promise to buy 1000 shares, I’ll be out an uncool $170,010! People often say that shorting has “unlimited risk.” This is not literally true (it’s just plain silly to think that the market capitalization of any stock could exceed the U.S. GDP, and lots of barriers will be encountered well before that point), but shorting anything is risky.

Now, look at the $2.99 “Let’s Refuel America” deal from Pricelock. It’s short-selling, but the target is gasoline instead of the common stock of a company. Even (especially) if you consider the profit from selling the car itself, it’s still shorting, just at a higher effective price than $2.99 per gallon.

Someone is making a huge gamble here. Pricelock, the company, could hardly be more opaque. Their website seems to have been run by a domain-squatter until late last year. Here’s my guess: this company was specifically created just to make this gamble. But regardless of who’s inside Pricelock, Chrysler would not play along if it thought that they weren’t able to make good on their promise. This means either insanely deep pockets to the extent that Chrysler is sure everything will turn out O.K. no matter how high gas prices get, or Chrysler has determined that gas prices are not really going to rise that much, that fast.

Who has the best information on the demand for gas in America for the next three years? Who has “inside information”? You can make good guesses based on trends and demographics and do fairly well, but only automakers can take this and also consider inside information on the availability of super-fuel efficient cars and cars that run on alternative fuels.

So, here’s Chrysler, signaling something about what it thinks fuel prices will be. I wouldn’t necessarily bet with them — the auto industry has made plenty of boneheaded decisions in its time. But, you’d be a fool to bet against them.

From News Flash: Money Does Buy Happiness:

If you start every morning with a bottle of whiskey and a slice of chocolate cake, you might be pretty happy all day too.

I just happened to find Ponoko, a site that will laser-cut things based on EPS files. Oh, and they have Inkscape templates available.

The lyrics to Sarah McLachlan’s song, “Oridinary Miracle” are not what I’m talking about when I say that the world is strange and mysterious:

Sun comes up and shines so bright
And disappears again at night.
It’s just another ordinary miracle today.

What’s strange and really inspiring? What if I told I had personally been in a place where the sun didn’t set? And it just happened to be near the foot of 23000+ ft high mountain?

Seen on Technology Review: Blogs: Ed Boyden’s blog: How to Think:

Two practical notes. The first is in the arena of time management. I really like what I call logarithmic time planning, in which events that are close at hand are scheduled with finer resolution than events that are far off. For example, things that happen tomorrow should be scheduled down to the minute, things that happen next week should be scheduled down to the hour, and things that happen next year should be scheduled down to the day. Why do all calendar programs force you to pick the exact minute something happens when you are trying to schedule it a year out?

Eliezer Yudkowsky writes “If You Demand Magic, Magic Won’t Help” on Overcoming Bias:

Born into a world of science, they [fantasy fiction readers] did not become scientists. What makes them think that, in a world of magic, they would act any differently?

If they don’t have the scientific attitude, that nothing is “mere” - the capacity to be interested in merely real things - how will magic help them? If they actually had magic, it would be merely real, and lose the charm of unattainability. They might be excited at first, but (like the lottery winners who, six months later, aren’t nearly as happy as they expected to be), the excitement would soon wear off. Probably as soon as they had to actually study spells.

This is not exactly the same as my “the world is strange” principle, but it is very similar. Alas, I can’t remember where I read that a sense of wonder about the world makes someone more likely to be successful.

The famous David D. Friedman writes on his blog about the decision against homeschooling in California:

The term “fascist” has been overused, and in any case I know nothing about Croskey’s views on economics. But I find it extraordinary that he would be willing to explicitly argue that public schools exist largely to indoctrinate children in views the government approves of, with or without the consent of their parents.

Indeed…

I’ve been running a game of Exalted online for two of my friends, and the last session turned out very, very badly (e.g. boring). I already have lots of ideas on how to make the next one better, but I thought it’d be worthwhile to reflect on some things regarding my writing and storytelling.

Things are valuable when they’re scarce. I think this gives me a clue for why my own prose tends to sound overwrought and verbose when I read it. I have a confession to make: My name is Nic, and I am an adjective addict. I have difficulty disregarding irrelevant details, eschewing oddball colors, scents, and sounds, and eliminating background noise. Oops. Somewhere along the way, I forgot that “show, don’t tell” means to use verbs.

Moving on, what’s scarce in an RPG? Experience points are scarce, but they don’t have value outside of their fictional world. Character to beat up are a bit scarce, but the PCs could become marauding pirates and beat up lots of NPCs every session and I don’t feel that it would inherently make the campaign more or less interesting (it would give it a radically different flavor and plot).

I was told it needed some challenge, and I agree. But here’s where I really think I failed — the situation I created in the last session was very pedestrian - students talked to some people on campus, met a someone new at a nearby event. <sarscasm>Well, it’s not like people do that all the time!</sarcasm> Novel situations are scarce, perhaps not in RPGs, but definitely in real life. Throwing exotic characters in mundane situations sometimes creates an exotic situation, but you can’t depend on that to happen.

So, from now on, I’m going to try to create a new, unusual situation as the foundation for each session. I don’t know if I’ll succeed, but that’s my goal.

One thing I’ve been assuming for the clock is that I’d run it off of batteries. This may not be realistic.

I used to sell batteries, so I know a bit about them, albeit not nearly as much as I’d like. The capacity of a rechargeable battery is measured in amp-hours, or milliamps-hours as appropriate. According to the LED wizard I found online, a mere 12 of the LEDs I’ve bought for the model I’m building would make a circuit that “draws current of 960 mA”.

A rechargable NiMH cell I just happened to have around has a capacity of 2500mAh.

2500mAh/960mA = 2.6 hours

2.6 hours of operating time is not acceptable for a clock. Not even close. Having to “wind up” the clock by popping in new rechargeable cells every 3 or 4 days might be acceptably retro, but this is not.

Also, as a battery is used, its voltage decreases; the exact discharge curve depends on the battery, particularly the battery’s chemistry. Most batteries, IIRC, have a real voltage which is higher than their nominal voltage initially, but can fall dramatically at time goes on (the internet has plenty of charts of real batteries’ discharge curves).

Batteries will do fine for a model to show what the clock is supposed to look like, but probably not for the real deal.

Since I’m an impatient person, I’ve put a little PHP based version of the clock right in this blog’s sidebar. I’ve also changed the way the colors switch after realizing that Green changing into Red looked way too Christmaslike.

I’m now running StorySage on WordPress; there’s only one story there now instead of two, but it looks cool with its custom theme, NDASH.

Last time, I wrote that it’d be very difficult to work through the clock’s logic if I used only 5 output pins. Fortunately, there’s no requirement that says I need to do so — leaving two pins available for input should be sufficient. I can use 1 pin to denote AM/PM, and that leaves 10 pins available.
In general, the fewer pins make up a combination for a particular hour, the easier the logic will be to work through, so I’m starting by assigning every available combination that uses only 1 or 2 pins first (for AM and PM, respectively) then I move on to 2 and 3 pin combinations:
0000000001 1AM/PM
0000000010 2AM/PM
0000000100 3AM/PM
0000001000 4AM/PM
0000010000 5AM/PM
0000100000 6AM/PM
0001000000 7AM/PM
0010000000 8AM/PM
0100000000 9AM/PM
1000000000 10AM/PM
1000000001 11AM/PM
1000000010 12AM/PM