Fnord.

This is really a post about two things, so bear with me. Cast your mind back a few years to Bush’s heyday and Medicare Part D, the infamous drug benefit. Due to pharma handouts and dishonest accounting now coming to light, they couldn’t afford real coverage and came up with the infamous ‘doughnut’ gap in coverage. From Wikipedia:

The plan requires Medicare beneficiaries whose total drug costs reach $2400 to pay 100% of prescription costs until $3850 is spent out of pocket. (The actual threshold amounts will change year-to-year and plan-by-plan.) 

I have to assume that the soulless bastards who came up with this consciously refused to consider the human stories of suffering and tragedy it would inevitably cause. I consider this a prime example of ‘getting captured by a large system and the rationalizations that ensue.’

Stories like… but I’m getting ahead of myself. The other thing this post is about is ‘Weblogs that I enjoy’. Allow me to introduce you to the self-proclaimed ‘Drugmonkey‘, an anonymous, foul-mouthed, cynical, liberal pill peddler at some large pharmacy chain. He has most excellent stories and I highly recommend him. As with some of my favorite blogs, he gives you a glimpse into another world. The title of his blog is ‘Your Pharmacist May Hate You’, which gives you some idea of the content…

Today, I was clicked through to his site and reading some old stories when I found this one. He used to call himself ‘drugnazi’, and it explains why he changed. Go read it; it’ll simultaneously move you to tears and also to find the asshats of Part D for a serious beatdown.

‘Compassionate conservatism,’ my ass.

that this is rather related to this. Off to ponder my grey locks, I guess.

Penelope Trunk’s blog is sometimes interesting, but with this post she’s hit a home run. Funny but serious, insightful and worth a read: Career Lessons from Elliot Spitzer’s prostitute. Seriously. I won’t even try and summarize it, as its short and excellent.

Secondly, ever what the door to hell looks like?  How about this?

Or maybe this?

Apparently a gas well in Uzbekistan that’s been burning for 35 years. Worth a read and to look at the pictures; quite striking.

I’ve been a fan of Leonard Cohen for a while now. He’s kind of an acquired taste, but so are many worthwhile things. On a related note, Chris got into ‘The West Wing’ a while ago, and from that had me buy a copy of Jeff Buckley’s ‘Grace’ album for his cover of ‘Hallelujah.’

I gotta admit, the cover is excellent, and changes the song completely. What I didn’t realize was that Hallelujah has become a complete cliche, and was used dozens of time in various versions, n TV shows and movies.

But wait, it gets better - it was used so often that there’s an excellent paper about the songs, how its used and what it all means. The bad news is that all of the ambiguity, complexity and politics of the original are lost, and it becomes a signifier of loss and sadness. Ahh well.

What they’re singing there, aside from what I believe professionals call “twaddle,” is the chorus of a Leonard Cohen song. This is mildly incredible. Twenty-five years ago, a character on the TV show The Young Ones named Neal–the hippie–said, “I’m beginning to feel like a Leonard Cohen record, cause nobody ever listens to me.” Today, in contrast, one particular Leonard Cohen song is featured prominently in no less than three separate episodes of teen uberdrama The OC, and can be heard in at least twenty-four separate movies and TV episodes, almost always as the soundtrack to a montage of people being sad.

What I hope to show today is how, exactly, that happened to a song called “Hallelujah.”

The author is Michael Barthel and the paper is “It Doesn’t Matter Which You Heard”: the Curious Cultural Journey of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”. Well worth a read.

As a renter in one of the nation’s most overpriced markets, I’ve been reading about real estate since before we moved here. Piggington, Calculated Risk and many others. It doesn’t take too many graphs like this one to make one wary:

Anyway, a couple of days ago a thought-provoking essay “The Next Slum?” was posted on The Atlantic positing that the detached-house suburbs would become the new ghettos:

…A structural change is under way in the housing market—a major shift in the way many Americans want to live and work. It has shaped the current downturn, steering some of the worst problems away from the cities and toward the suburban fringes. And its effects will be felt more strongly, and more broadly, as the years pass. Its ultimate impact on the suburbs, and the cities, will be profound.

Arthur C. Nelson, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, has looked carefully at trends in American demographics, construction, house prices, and consumer preferences. In 2006, using recent consumer research, housing supply data, and population growth rates, he modeled future demand for various types of housing. The results were bracing: Nelson forecasts a likely surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (houses built on a sixth of an acre or more) by 2025—that’s roughly 40 percent of the large-lot homes in existence today.

For 60 years, Americans have pushed steadily into the suburbs, transforming the landscape and (until recently) leaving cities behind. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay.

It’s an interesting essay, and I recommend it to you. I debated posting it, but it kept running around my head as I tried out his arguments, so perhaps that’s a good sign. His data seem solid, but the argument he makes about desire to return to urban life is more sketchy. Personally, I couldn’t agree more and often have the same debate with exurb co-workers, but that’s beside the point. Question is, do large masses of people really want to desert the burbs and go urban?

Even if they don’t, will economics force the issue? The article quotes Arthur Nelson of Virginia Tech as projecting a surplus of 22 million suburban homes by 2025; 40% of the volume in existence today. That sort of surplus would crush pricing, and the article also explains the progression from vacant to crime statistics; it rapidly becomes a self-reinforcing rout.

If you read pessimists like JH Kunstler or The Oil Drum, this sort of scenario is old hat. I was quite surprised to see it in the mainstream media, well backed up with statistics and experts. Chaotic times ahead, I fear.

Despite the Bush administration and SoCal driving. This, from the excellent ‘Scalpel or Sword’ blog, really made my day. (It also made for some introspection… heroism can do that to you.)

It seemed like a typical overdose. Another teenage girl who took too many pills, more in a cry for help than any real desire to harm herself. So I ordered the mega laboratory panel and gave her some charcoal. Nothing too exciting or dramatic, she drank it without putting up a fight. She had a friend who had driven her to the ER and remained at the bedside the whole time. Three hours, maybe more, I can’t remember. Her friend seemed very compassionate and was obviously concerned about her. It seemed like they were close friends, maybe even sisters.

Eventually, I learned that her friend wasn’t even an acquaintance. She was a stranger who had noticed the patient crying in a parking lot and asked her what was wrong. The patient then admitted that she took a bunch of pills, so this remarkable young woman drove her to the ER and stayed with her until she was safe.

The patient really didn’t have any friends, and her family lived hours away. After she declined admission and promised not to harm herself, the saint even drove her home.

(Link to article)

Via Damn Interesting:

“It’s like… at my first job,” he continues, “I was stealing maybe a thousand bucks a month from that place. And this kid, he was new, he got wise. And he was going to turn me in, but before he got the chance I went to the manager and pinned the whole thing on him.” Now he is grinning widely. “Kid lost his job, the cops got involved, I don’t know what happened to him. And I guess something like that is supposed to make me feel bad, right? It’s supposed to hurt, right? But instead, it’s like there’s nothing.” He smiles apologetically and shakes his head. “Nothing.”

His name is Frank, and he is a psychopath.

Wikipedia clarifies that the correct term is antisocial personality disorder and defines it a bit more precisely: “The essential feature for the diagnosis is a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.” (That’s actually from the DSM).

The essay is a good one, and really made me re-think some of the people I’ve known. One tidbit that surprised me is the prevalence - 1% for men and .3% for women. So it’s a statistical near-certainty that we all know a few of ‘em. (Update: DSM via Wikipedia claims 3% for men and 1% for women…scary.) Makes you think, doesn’t it?

One thing noted in the article is that the qualities that make them are strongly selected for in management - ruthlessness, self-confidence, charisma. Yay. What he didn’t note was that these qualities are also expressed by corporations at times; see The Corporation (2003). So it’s even more likely you’ve worked for one. Explains a lot, doesn’t it?

For instance, while it may sound like a cynical joke, it’s a fact that psychopaths have a clear advantage in fields such as law, business, and politics. They have higher IQs on average than the general population. They take risks and aren’t fazed by failures. They know how to charm and manipulate. They’re ruthless. It could even be argued that the criteria used by corporations to find effective managers actually select specifically for psychopathic traits: characteristics such as charisma, self-centeredness, confidence, and dominance are highly correlated with the psychopathic personality, yet also highly sought after in potential leaders.

In reading something like this, where you’re really reading about predators evolved to prey on non-psycho humans, one early reaction is “How do I tell if I’m dealing with one?” The article says that

The psychopath does not merely repress feelings of anxiety and guilt or fail to experience them appropriately; instead, he or she lacks a fundamental understanding of what these things are. When asked a question such as “What does remorse feel like?” for instance, the typical psychopath will become irritated, deflect the question, or attempt to change the subject.

Which makes me wonder if something like an fMRI would spot one. Lack of blood flow to regions involving affect, perhaps? Indeed, a quick search finds a couple that look like they might be doing just that (1,2). Hard to tell since just the titles are available. (I’ve ranted about this before.) PLoS to the rescue!

Bingo! “Law, Responsibility and the Brain” by Mobbs et al. Here’s a picture from that paper showing the brain scan of a sociopathic patient, with a lesion in the orbital frontal cortex:

So there’s a lot of work on brain function and morphology correlating with anti-social behavior. How long until that becomes part of the hiring process, eh?

Update: For more info, “The Mask of Sanity” by Cleckley looks like a good place to start.

You may or may not agree with the following:

The Allegretto from Beethoven’s 7th is the greatest piece of music in the Western canon. Schubert said so; Wagner agreed; and though I’ve long considered The Right Brothers’ “Bush was Right” a strong contender for the title, in the end where Wagner goes I go.

Personally, I’m not sure. It’s a personal favorite, but anyway. The point of my post is that this page has done something that I’ve not seen before: They used YouTube to propose an hypothesis, defend it with musicology and portions of the clip, and generally used the Internet to do interactive musical education.

That’s damned cool.

In this, Bernard Chazelle talks, very knowledgeably, about the structure and progression of the Alegretto and why its so affecting. (Seriously, the peak of the movement would move a stone to tears.) The clip is the Berlin Philharmonic, Karajan conducting, and Bernard’s explanations are readable and fascinating.

Probably other people have been doing this, and I just missed it, but it struck me that the YouTube + music + HTML combination was wonderful. If you’ve taken a music appreciation class, you know how much easier it is when the professor is pausing the music and explaining. I’ve tried, but the same thing from a bound book just doesn’t work. If you can imagine the music from reading the score, then you’re probably not the person a music appreciation text aims for… Ironic, that.

Anyway, read the page, watch the clip and if you’re like me, go and play your CD of it on your stereo, loud.

Behold, the Asus Eee subcompact laptop:

(Best place to learn about it quickly is probably the Wikipedia entry.)

Summary: Subcompact, up to 2G of memory, solid-state disk (2, 4, or 8G), optional VGA webcam, wireless, 10/100 ethernet, 800×480 screen, runs Xandros or XP.

Cost? Between 250 and 400 (e.g. here on Amazon for one configuration), and likely to drop soon since it just hit the market. As this essay points out, its about damn time that the computer market started to get cheap at the low end. (Good essay, by the way.)

The Eee isn’t quite the disposable computing resource I’ve been wanting — they’ll have to shave a zero off the price tag for that — but it’s close enough for now. It does the basics I need, runs portable cross-platform applications and editing open file formats, and if I leave it on a train or sit on it or something my immediate reaction will be to swear, check my backups, and buy another one, rather than to whimper and go talk to my bank manager. Which is as it should be.

I don’t have a compelling need for one of these, but I can think of several people who do - those who want a long-life subcompact, cost-constrained people who want a real machine and so forth. One of these would be perfect for field deployments where space, weight and cost are large constraints.

Cool.

Via Anarchia, the magnificent obscenity that is Bourne Shell Server Pages, with the appropriate extension of, yep, ‘.shit’. The author has a definite set of opinions that I found hilarious:

The basic idea behind all server page technologies is this: rather than writing code that generates an HTML document on-the-fly by writing it out as a series of print statements, you start with a “skeleton” HTML document and embed the code right inside it. Voila! Instead of having a tangled, unreadable, unmaintainable mess of HTML embedded in source code, you have a tangled, unreadable, unmaintainable mess of source code embedded in HTML.

Bourne Shell Server Pages are ordinary ASCII text files, with the special extension .shit, which denotes “Shell-Interpreted Template.” The result of invoking the page compiler on a .shit file, is, naturally, a shell script. (It occurred to me that this file extension might seem objectionable to some, but since it quite accurately—if unintentionally—conveyed my sentiments toward Web technology in general, I decided that it should be left unchanged.)

and, I have to agree with him here:

How does the Bourne Shell Server Pages technology fit into the bigger picture of Web Services? It’s a legitimate question. For that matter, what the hell are “Web Services” anyway?

I’ve read quite a bit about Web Services, and have had some in-depth, first-hand experience with the technologies that form their underpinnings. To the best of my knowledge, here is an accurate definition of the term:

Web Services

noun A software development meme that espouses the notion of tying together disparate software components via a crude, non-typesafe, remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism that consists of sending and receiving data encoded in an excessively verbose, plaintext format (XML) over a largely inelegant, stateless file transfer protocol (HTTP).

Whew. That doesn’t sound glamorous or exciting at all. It’s not even object oriented. There must be more to this than just inferior reinterpretations of old ideas? Sadly, there isn’t.

One particularly curious aspect of Web Services is that all communication between components must take place over TCP port 80. The other ports (all 65,534 of them) constitute a veritable Pandora’s Box of perceived dangers, horrors and evils, and so Thou Shalt Not Bind Them. It’s painfully clear that Web Services exists along three distinct axes: a technical one, an emotional one, and a decidedly religious one.

It’s a great essay, and an interesting idea. The code is tiny, too.