I liked the whole post, Vikram. One of the things I often say about myself after study, research, etc: "I don't have any answers; but the quality of my questions is greatly improved." "Why do objects have inertia?" is a good enough question to last a lifetime.
One of the interesting things is that before the contemporary ninja/Highlander sorts of myths, both the katana and the longsword were heavy infantry weapons: stand here, armored and shielded, shoulder to shoulder, and hold this piece of land; alternatively, go take that piece of land from similarly-equipped men. Individual combat with both weapons was an afterthought.
The only place where steel got cheap enough for civilians was in Western Europe. The rapier and later the small sword were the weapons of choice when it was one-on-one sans armor. Thrusting weapons that were small, light, fast, capable of attack from odd angles. Weapons suited for an urban setting, largely worthless to the military. The kings in both France and England worked hard to stop the use of those, as they were too damned lethal and both countries were losing too many of the nobility.
Because theatrical needs are different, all of these fights are unrealistic in two ways. Trivially, the footwork sucks -- I don't think there are any martial arts where coaches don't complain about the students' footwork. The more important is that the distance is far too short to be realistic. Exercise for the student -- go find clips of Chuck Norris fighting full contact in competition; compare the distance between Chuck and his opponent there to the distance between fighters in Chuck's movies and TV shows.
There are some moves across lines that would make me nervous if I were trying them with a cross-guard that could cut my hand(s) off. I'm not pinning my hopes on getting more than we did with Darth Maul's two-ended light staff, which people loved at first glimpse -- one fight sequence and that's it. Given the apparent properties of the light blades -- very little mass, highly selective inertia, ability to cut through anything but another light blade -- I wouldn't opt for a weapon styled on either a Japanese katana or a northern European long sword. Give me a Renaissance rapier and dagger combination.
This strikes me as more of the East-West divide rather than D v R.
Precisely.
They can’t just keep letting the west burn every year.
Would you care to make a small wager on how long they're willing to let the West burn? This is one of the things that some people predicted when the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act passed Congress without a single "aye" vote from the western states -- that the non-West, having taken permanent charge of the federal lands in western states, would neglect them.
Tangentially related to the sentencing part, in Denver this week. Dexter Louis, found guilty of stabbing five people to death, was sentenced to life without parole. The prosecutor was seeking the death sentence.
We can hope. The Congress critters from the western states have introduced a steady stream of bills with (western) bipartisan support over the last few years. Rep. Paul Ryan, chair of the House budget committee, shot all of them down. Rep. Ryan appears to have it in for the Forest Service generally. He's moved on to Ways and Means, but I don't have much expectation that things will change -- of 22 Republicans on the House budget committee, there's only one from any of the states west of the Great Plains.
B1: As summer winds down, Denver and its western suburbs are getting a rash of bear visits. A sequence of unusual weather events have resulted in reduced natural food supplies up in the foothills, so the bears are foraging farther afield.
Seems like the response to Trump is a collective “Right Arm!” “Yeah!” “You tell ’em, Donald!” stuff like that. And that’s why I keep on thinking that eventually this is going to go away.
A problem the other candidates have is that their message is "You ought to be angry about X, which I'm angry about!" Each of those candidates gets a part of the angry base, those who have bothered to think about why they're angry and agree it's X. Trump tells them "You're angry! And you deserve to be angry!" But he doesn't tell them what they're angry about, leaving it up to the people in the audience to decide for themselves. Some of them know, but many of them can't articulate it and will settle for a candidate that does a "I feel your anger!" shtick.
A larger problem in multiple ways is that there's a significant number of really angry voters out there, who don't know exactly what they're angry about. They're not going to go away, and they're not going to be satisfied, and they are going to put a some people in the Senate, more in the House, and a whole bunch in state legislatures. I expect the ugliness to get much worse before it gets better.
One of the things I noticed was that the reading suggestion you got was from the A&S school, not from the university. I have been unable to determine if the Duke reading went to all incoming freshmen, or only to their A&S freshmen (Duke has two schools, one A&S and one engineering). While this particular debate is about conservative students who find the material offensive, it is quite common to find similar complaints from engineering students who find such material irrelevant. Those arguments are, IMO, largely the result of confusion about universities that are doing two different things: there's the traditional "college education" thing, and then there's the four-year trade-school "engineering" thing. When the latter was becoming a thing, it looked enough like what colleges already did, and was so obviously lucrative, that universities went into that business.
I'd be inclined to have incoming engineering students read Sobel's Longitude, but that's just me.
Netpbm. Converts pretty much any image format you can think of into anything else. Dozens of manipulation tools. Unlike ImageMagick, which is a swiss army knife, Netpbm is a zillion individual programs that each do one thing and use UNIX-style pipelines to combine things together. Back in the day the pipeline approach was valuable to me because I could quickly write a one-time special-purpose image manipulation routine and combine it with all the others.
I am blessed by living in a large suburb with a long history of accommodating cyclists: trails, bicycle lanes, wide sidewalks separated from the biggest arterials where the speed differences are especially dangerous. Yes, there are asshole cyclists. But for every asshole cyclist I see, I see two drivers who insist that the bike lane is a right-hand turn lane whether cyclists are present or not, or who stop at the traffic light completely blocking the crosswalk the pedestrians and cyclists need to cross safely. Last week I was stopped at the light in the clearly marked bike lane, and some idiot came up behind me with their right turn blinker on and honked because I was in their way.
University towns/areas are absolutely the worse. Lots of cyclists. Lots of newbie cyclists. Lots of newbie, young, arrogant, preoccupied, easily-distracted cyclists. Combine that with streets laid out assuming a small number of cars (that would be parked in the alleys), which have become frighteningly narrow as on-street parking ate away at the width. It's a perfect storm. Not that that's an excuse.
Sure. mcain6925 at gmail dot com if it's private; I don't worry much about security on that address, it's easy enough to run down for anyone making an effort.
Yes, I have software to straighten my pictures. Same open-source command-line software package I've used to manipulate images for 20 or so years. Why command line? Because it works exactly the same way on Unix, Linux, Mac OSX, Windows, OS-9, and every other operating system I've had to deal with. Because it's trivially scriptable -- work out the details, then do exactly the same thing on the other 47 files. Because I know what algorithms are being applied. Because it lets me control exactly how many lossy serial encodings get done. So, why didn't I make use of it?
Frustration. This was the first post where I was allowed to use the WordPress post creation tool the editors use. I apologize, deeply and sincerely, to all of the editors over the years who have forced my hand-crafted HTML guest posts into the creation tool. I promise to figure out why the initial published version of my HTML rendered properly on Firefox but reduced the images to roughly 2x2 pixel dots in Safari, and not to repeat that particular mistake (no promises about different mistakes).
Impatience. After two weeks, first at a niece's wedding and then at a granddaughter's birthday, I wanted the post up now (see first count about access to the creation tool). Placeholder images leaning to the left remained in, with an "explanation". Alternatively, call this one laziness.
Pettiness. Would anyone call me on the failure to tidy up the images? Would they be polite? (Yes.)
What can I say? Over the last few years I have been tempted to submit a resume to the Colorado Republicans with a cover letter that says basically, "You should hire me to do tactical planning for you. It's a sure thing that I won't be worse than whoever is doing it for you now."
I don't have any inside information, but I think the Colorado thing is more about local concerns. For contests farther down on the ticket, the party needs the booming population of the leftward-drifting Front Range suburbs north of Douglas County to not think of the Republicans as the party of crazy. There's been enough miscues over the last two or three election cycles that removing the chance of the caucus poll looking whacko is, I think, a sound tactic.
One of this winter's projects is going to be modifying my handlebar/control layout. My neck is not as young as it once was and I'm going to have to make my posture a bit more upright to accommodate it. I've test-ridden a couple of recumbents; unfortunately, the one that I really like costs three times what I paid for my current road bike (although the quality of the build is really lovely).
Along the northern Front Range, there are several tributaries that form the South Platte River that are all about the same size, named "creek" or "river" rather arbitrarily. All of them are roughly comparable in length and natural drainage to the Los Angeles River. More water volume over the course of the year because of (a) actual snow pack, (b) diversions from the west side of the Continental Divide and (c) downstream water delivery obligations.
Why they'll put graffiti in places that are (a) difficult to reach and more importantly (b) where almost no one will see it. Art, political statement, or just vandalism -- why do it where it's so seldom viewed?
Unless you own a significant percentage of that stock, then I bet your voice is heard a bit more loudly.
Or special classes of stock, with many votes per share. That practice used to be rampant in the cable TV industry, where a small number of closely held shares had >50% of the votes. And yes, it's legal. Caveat emptor: the existence of those privileged shares is public knowledge, so you knew what you were getting when you bought your ordinary (powerless) shares.
The cable industry was also full of examples of another share-voting scam. There were large numbers of cross-ownership deals between the cable companies and the content companies. Traced back far enough, there were cases where a majority of the voting shares in large publicly-traded companies were controlled by a handful of people, or even a single individual.
Working in the cable industry made me rather cynical about corporate control.
"Maximize shareholder value" is a pretty tricky phrase. Which shares, the special ones that hold 51% of the votes or the ordinary ones that represent 98% of the capital? Over what time frame? In what form (eg, share price increase versus a steady stream of dividends)? Does that goal justify going farther into the gray areas on accounting? How should other risks be treated?
I seem to recall reading that the concept of "only the shareholders matter" became a thing in the 1960s, starting with Milton Friedman and the rest of the U of C economists. OTOH, since that period also coincides with the beginning of the decline of dividends (which were just as good for the shareholders as a share price increase) and the rise of stock options as compensation (for which dividends are worthless, only the share price matters), it seems to me that in practice the shareholder thing could have been just a ruse the CxOs used so they could loot the company.
As an economist friend says, "If the CEO's compensation plan is an annual salary of a million dollars, an annual bonus of a million stock options that vest over a short period, and a twenty million dollar retirement package if the company is sold, no one should be surprised if the CEO's efforts turn out to look like putting lipstick on the pig for a few years and then selling it." I might add that said CEO is likely to privately root for the Fed to blow asset bubbles, since a 25% increase in the share price due just to the bubble makes the options valuable.
Based on my experience over the years, I feel safe in making the prediction that the year after I die, the whole set of tax-deferred savings vehicles -- 401ks, traditional IRAs, etc -- will be made tax-free. All major shifts in US tax policy are scheduled to take effect the year after they would have benefited Michael Cain. I suspect the Cigarette-Smoking Man is behind it:
When I was ~17 in Nebraska, I was approaching a group of 10-12 bison on foot across open short-grass prairie from downwind. About the time that I got close enough for the bull to start paying attention, it finally got through to even my male teen-aged brain that this was not a smart thing to do.
Since then I've been a big fan of really long lenses for nature pictures.
I won't argue the plus-or-minuses of low rates for very long-term capital gains. I will argue that shorter-term gains should simply be lumped in with "labor" income, much the way that gambling profits are. For the most part that's what trading, and particularly short-term trading, in stocks that pay no or negligible dividends is.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The Richard Feynman Guide to Parenting”
I liked the whole post, Vikram. One of the things I often say about myself after study, research, etc: "I don't have any answers; but the quality of my questions is greatly improved." "Why do objects have inertia?" is a good enough question to last a lifetime.
On “Weekend!”
One of the interesting things is that before the contemporary ninja/Highlander sorts of myths, both the katana and the longsword were heavy infantry weapons: stand here, armored and shielded, shoulder to shoulder, and hold this piece of land; alternatively, go take that piece of land from similarly-equipped men. Individual combat with both weapons was an afterthought.
The only place where steel got cheap enough for civilians was in Western Europe. The rapier and later the small sword were the weapons of choice when it was one-on-one sans armor. Thrusting weapons that were small, light, fast, capable of attack from odd angles. Weapons suited for an urban setting, largely worthless to the military. The kings in both France and England worked hard to stop the use of those, as they were too damned lethal and both countries were losing too many of the nobility.
Because theatrical needs are different, all of these fights are unrealistic in two ways. Trivially, the footwork sucks -- I don't think there are any martial arts where coaches don't complain about the students' footwork. The more important is that the distance is far too short to be realistic. Exercise for the student -- go find clips of Chuck Norris fighting full contact in competition; compare the distance between Chuck and his opponent there to the distance between fighters in Chuck's movies and TV shows.
"
There are some moves across lines that would make me nervous if I were trying them with a cross-guard that could cut my hand(s) off. I'm not pinning my hopes on getting more than we did with Darth Maul's two-ended light staff, which people loved at first glimpse -- one fight sequence and that's it. Given the apparent properties of the light blades -- very little mass, highly selective inertia, ability to cut through anything but another light blade -- I wouldn't opt for a weapon styled on either a Japanese katana or a northern European long sword. Give me a Renaissance rapier and dagger combination.
On “Linky Friday #129: Scary Things”
This strikes me as more of the East-West divide rather than D v R.
Precisely.
They can’t just keep letting the west burn every year.
Would you care to make a small wager on how long they're willing to let the West burn? This is one of the things that some people predicted when the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act passed Congress without a single "aye" vote from the western states -- that the non-West, having taken permanent charge of the federal lands in western states, would neglect them.
"
Tangentially related to the sentencing part, in Denver this week. Dexter Louis, found guilty of stabbing five people to death, was sentenced to life without parole. The prosecutor was seeking the death sentence.
"
We can hope. The Congress critters from the western states have introduced a steady stream of bills with (western) bipartisan support over the last few years. Rep. Paul Ryan, chair of the House budget committee, shot all of them down. Rep. Ryan appears to have it in for the Forest Service generally. He's moved on to Ways and Means, but I don't have much expectation that things will change -- of 22 Republicans on the House budget committee, there's only one from any of the states west of the Great Plains.
"
B1: As summer winds down, Denver and its western suburbs are getting a rash of bear visits. A sequence of unusual weather events have resulted in reduced natural food supplies up in the foothills, so the bears are foraging farther afield.
On “Donald Trump Is More Important — and Dangerous — than You Think”
Seems like the response to Trump is a collective “Right Arm!” “Yeah!” “You tell ’em, Donald!” stuff like that. And that’s why I keep on thinking that eventually this is going to go away.
A problem the other candidates have is that their message is "You ought to be angry about X, which I'm angry about!" Each of those candidates gets a part of the angry base, those who have bothered to think about why they're angry and agree it's X. Trump tells them "You're angry! And you deserve to be angry!" But he doesn't tell them what they're angry about, leaving it up to the people in the audience to decide for themselves. Some of them know, but many of them can't articulate it and will settle for a candidate that does a "I feel your anger!" shtick.
A larger problem in multiple ways is that there's a significant number of really angry voters out there, who don't know exactly what they're angry about. They're not going to go away, and they're not going to be satisfied, and they are going to put a some people in the Senate, more in the House, and a whole bunch in state legislatures. I expect the ugliness to get much worse before it gets better.
On “Skipping The Summer Reading”
This is really outstanding, Burt.
One of the things I noticed was that the reading suggestion you got was from the A&S school, not from the university. I have been unable to determine if the Duke reading went to all incoming freshmen, or only to their A&S freshmen (Duke has two schools, one A&S and one engineering). While this particular debate is about conservative students who find the material offensive, it is quite common to find similar complaints from engineering students who find such material irrelevant. Those arguments are, IMO, largely the result of confusion about universities that are doing two different things: there's the traditional "college education" thing, and then there's the four-year trade-school "engineering" thing. When the latter was becoming a thing, it looked enough like what colleges already did, and was so obviously lucrative, that universities went into that business.
I'd be inclined to have incoming engineering students read Sobel's Longitude, but that's just me.
On “Weekday Morning Cult Service”
Netpbm. Converts pretty much any image format you can think of into anything else. Dozens of manipulation tools. Unlike ImageMagick, which is a swiss army knife, Netpbm is a zillion individual programs that each do one thing and use UNIX-style pipelines to combine things together. Back in the day the pipeline approach was valuable to me because I could quickly write a one-time special-purpose image manipulation routine and combine it with all the others.
"
I am blessed by living in a large suburb with a long history of accommodating cyclists: trails, bicycle lanes, wide sidewalks separated from the biggest arterials where the speed differences are especially dangerous. Yes, there are asshole cyclists. But for every asshole cyclist I see, I see two drivers who insist that the bike lane is a right-hand turn lane whether cyclists are present or not, or who stop at the traffic light completely blocking the crosswalk the pedestrians and cyclists need to cross safely. Last week I was stopped at the light in the clearly marked bike lane, and some idiot came up behind me with their right turn blinker on and honked because I was in their way.
"
University towns/areas are absolutely the worse. Lots of cyclists. Lots of newbie cyclists. Lots of newbie, young, arrogant, preoccupied, easily-distracted cyclists. Combine that with streets laid out assuming a small number of cars (that would be parked in the alleys), which have become frighteningly narrow as on-street parking ate away at the width. It's a perfect storm. Not that that's an excuse.
On “Divining Day”
Sure. mcain6925 at gmail dot com if it's private; I don't worry much about security on that address, it's easy enough to run down for anyone making an effort.
On “Weekday Morning Cult Service”
@ck-macleod
Guilty, on several charges.
Yes, I have software to straighten my pictures. Same open-source command-line software package I've used to manipulate images for 20 or so years. Why command line? Because it works exactly the same way on Unix, Linux, Mac OSX, Windows, OS-9, and every other operating system I've had to deal with. Because it's trivially scriptable -- work out the details, then do exactly the same thing on the other 47 files. Because I know what algorithms are being applied. Because it lets me control exactly how many lossy serial encodings get done. So, why didn't I make use of it?
Frustration. This was the first post where I was allowed to use the WordPress post creation tool the editors use. I apologize, deeply and sincerely, to all of the editors over the years who have forced my hand-crafted HTML guest posts into the creation tool. I promise to figure out why the initial published version of my HTML rendered properly on Firefox but reduced the images to roughly 2x2 pixel dots in Safari, and not to repeat that particular mistake (no promises about different mistakes).
Impatience. After two weeks, first at a niece's wedding and then at a granddaughter's birthday, I wanted the post up now (see first count about access to the creation tool). Placeholder images leaning to the left remained in, with an "explanation". Alternatively, call this one laziness.
Pettiness. Would anyone call me on the failure to tidy up the images? Would they be polite? (Yes.)
On “Divining Day”
What can I say? Over the last few years I have been tempted to submit a resume to the Colorado Republicans with a cover letter that says basically, "You should hire me to do tactical planning for you. It's a sure thing that I won't be worse than whoever is doing it for you now."
"
I don't have any inside information, but I think the Colorado thing is more about local concerns. For contests farther down on the ticket, the party needs the booming population of the leftward-drifting Front Range suburbs north of Douglas County to not think of the Republicans as the party of crazy. There's been enough miscues over the last two or three election cycles that removing the chance of the caucus poll looking whacko is, I think, a sound tactic.
On “Weekday Morning Cult Service”
One of this winter's projects is going to be modifying my handlebar/control layout. My neck is not as young as it once was and I'm going to have to make my posture a bit more upright to accommodate it. I've test-ridden a couple of recumbents; unfortunately, the one that I really like costs three times what I paid for my current road bike (although the quality of the build is really lovely).
"
Along the northern Front Range, there are several tributaries that form the South Platte River that are all about the same size, named "creek" or "river" rather arbitrarily. All of them are roughly comparable in length and natural drainage to the Los Angeles River. More water volume over the course of the year because of (a) actual snow pack, (b) diversions from the west side of the Continental Divide and (c) downstream water delivery obligations.
"
Why they'll put graffiti in places that are (a) difficult to reach and more importantly (b) where almost no one will see it. Art, political statement, or just vandalism -- why do it where it's so seldom viewed?
On “Tod’s Life Lessons For You to Hate On #3: Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner”
Unless you own a significant percentage of that stock, then I bet your voice is heard a bit more loudly.
Or special classes of stock, with many votes per share. That practice used to be rampant in the cable TV industry, where a small number of closely held shares had >50% of the votes. And yes, it's legal. Caveat emptor: the existence of those privileged shares is public knowledge, so you knew what you were getting when you bought your ordinary (powerless) shares.
The cable industry was also full of examples of another share-voting scam. There were large numbers of cross-ownership deals between the cable companies and the content companies. Traced back far enough, there were cases where a majority of the voting shares in large publicly-traded companies were controlled by a handful of people, or even a single individual.
Working in the cable industry made me rather cynical about corporate control.
"
"Maximize shareholder value" is a pretty tricky phrase. Which shares, the special ones that hold 51% of the votes or the ordinary ones that represent 98% of the capital? Over what time frame? In what form (eg, share price increase versus a steady stream of dividends)? Does that goal justify going farther into the gray areas on accounting? How should other risks be treated?
"
I seem to recall reading that the concept of "only the shareholders matter" became a thing in the 1960s, starting with Milton Friedman and the rest of the U of C economists. OTOH, since that period also coincides with the beginning of the decline of dividends (which were just as good for the shareholders as a share price increase) and the rise of stock options as compensation (for which dividends are worthless, only the share price matters), it seems to me that in practice the shareholder thing could have been just a ruse the CxOs used so they could loot the company.
As an economist friend says, "If the CEO's compensation plan is an annual salary of a million dollars, an annual bonus of a million stock options that vest over a short period, and a twenty million dollar retirement package if the company is sold, no one should be surprised if the CEO's efforts turn out to look like putting lipstick on the pig for a few years and then selling it." I might add that said CEO is likely to privately root for the Fed to blow asset bubbles, since a 25% increase in the share price due just to the bubble makes the options valuable.
On “My morning read; global economics, leadership, and sex”
Based on my experience over the years, I feel safe in making the prediction that the year after I die, the whole set of tax-deferred savings vehicles -- 401ks, traditional IRAs, etc -- will be made tax-free. All major shifts in US tax policy are scheduled to take effect the year after they would have benefited Michael Cain. I suspect the Cigarette-Smoking Man is behind it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Dh2lkzkPnY
On “Questions From the Headlines”
When I was ~17 in Nebraska, I was approaching a group of 10-12 bison on foot across open short-grass prairie from downwind. About the time that I got close enough for the bull to start paying attention, it finally got through to even my male teen-aged brain that this was not a smart thing to do.
Since then I've been a big fan of really long lenses for nature pictures.
On “My morning read; global economics, leadership, and sex”
I won't argue the plus-or-minuses of low rates for very long-term capital gains. I will argue that shorter-term gains should simply be lumped in with "labor" income, much the way that gambling profits are. For the most part that's what trading, and particularly short-term trading, in stocks that pay no or negligible dividends is.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.