Shower Thoughts

You may start to think I'm a little obsessed with showers, but in fact I'm a little obsessed with everything.

Showers are a small protected space in the day. The requirements are simple as is the activity. You walk into the shower and a few minutes later you walk out warm, wet, happy, and cleaner. The act of washing is simple and repetitive. It requires very little thought, which clears the way for everything else. Showers put the lie to any notion that I am a single unified self. There are multitudes inside me.

Take this morning. I have been playing a lot of music and it is common for me to sing in the bathroom and shower. This morning I was singing "Summertime", the same verse over and over, but a jazzy scat version with lots of embellishment and some pushing of the harmony. As with much bathroom singing I thought I was doing a pretty good job of it and part of my mind started wandering to think about what it would be like to give a regular short weekly concert, maybe a half hour or so, at a very nice concert venue at Colorado State University. I would love to do this, but the University is quite closed off. I've pursued ways to work with the music school, but there are roadblocks and nothing has panned out. It would be really nice to bring in other musicians I have been playing with for this little non-existent concert. Oooh, for a long time I have thought it would be nice to find a reasonably accomplished tabla player to improvise with -- and flute/tabla music starts running through my head in along with "Summertime".

All this is going through my head as I am singing, taking off my robe, adjusting water temperature, and climbing in to the shower. After a minute enjoying the warm water, I stop singing. For the rest of the shower, and even now, "Summertime" is still floating through my head. It is a little musical background to everything else I am thinking and doing, but my mind moves over to thinking about this multi-processing going on and how I find it an interesting story, maybe I should write it up. Meanwhile I'm rinsing my little mesh body scrubber, washing my hair and starting to lather up. The lack of musical venues for me is running through my head as I re-imagine various schemes that I may or may not work on to secure spots and I'm idly thinking of pieces for these little short concerts. This is at the same time, I'm observing this mix of events and "Summertime" is still there, with variations, running through my head.

Is it any wonder that sometimes after having been in the shower for five minutes, I honestly cannot remember whether I have washed my hair or not?

Quitting my Job

At the beginning of January I quit my job, leaving corporate America. My employer was surprised but I had been working on my escape for quite some time. I had been saving money and acquiring equipment for my next adventure, a coffee house.

A major complaint I had about my employer was a shift to completely bottom line thinking. I decided that my leaving the company should be on the same terms. I submitted my resignation at an inconvenient time for the company with an offer to continue working for some period of time for, effectively, more money. They refused and I left. I won't be requesting a recommendation.

It has now been a couple of months and the results are mixed. In some ways my life has improved. I have been spending more time at the gym. Over the past three or four years my fitness level has plummeted and my weight spiked. Since I quit both my weight and resting heart rate have slowly decreased. I have also moved more toward what I consider my genuine self. I have volunteered time to a local food co-op and even marched in the Martin Luther King day parade.

On the other hand, my stress level has not decreased. The new business is a gamble and progress has been slower than I would like. This has left me with free time that I have not used as productively as I would like. I should be writing more blog posts. I should be playing more music. I should be working more aggressively on some business related activities. I don't always deal with stress in the most productive ways.

Heath care in the US outside of a corporate umbrella is difficult. Assuming we can get any coverage at all it looks like the best I can do is about $450/month with a $10,000 yearly deductible. That means Sarah and I are on our own in any year we spend less than $10,000 out of pocket. On one hand this is what insurance is for, protection against catastrophic loss. On the other hand, the rates seem high for this kind of protection.

A number of years ago one of my swim buddies was irritated with his wife. He likes beer and she sometimes worries that he is drinking too much. She mentioned this in an exam with his doctor. He said that even if he had a problem, his doctor should be the last person to hear about it. If his doctor wrote anything down, it would go into the insurance database and future insurance coverage might either increase in cost or be denied.

Sarah and I ran into a version of this in our insurance application. Before I left my corporate job, we made sure that we had preventive care done. I got my eyes checked (I do this every couple of decades) and Sarah went in for a physical. One of the tests recommended for someone of her age is a bone density scan. The results showed lower density than desired. While this is good to know and treat, on our insurance application it comes up as a potential chronic, expensive condition. By requesting the scan, the physician actually did Sarah a disservice. A possible consequences is that we may be denied coverage for anything related to bone density for one or more years. At worst, our request for insurance may be denied altogether.

Yes, there is a global health database maintained and used by all the major US insurance companies. If you have health insurance, one of the papers you sign is an agreement to disclose everything to the insurance company. That information goes into the shared database. The database is not used to improve your health care, it is used to determine risk and reduce insurance company payouts.

The coffee house is progressing. I am negotiating a space and think I have basically come to terms with the landlord. The location is good and the costs look do-able. The next few months will be really exciting. I expect that all free time will evaporate and just hope I can keep up the gym visits.

Humor? You be the Judge!

Looking back through my posts, I don't think readers can actually get a sense for who I am as a person. For example, my posts are pretty completely humorless. I think this is more an artifact of the act of writing than a reflection of personality. Apparently I am not a comic writer. I like to believe I'm actually pretty funny, though my humor tends toward puns, the completely stupid, and shaggy dog stories.

As a change of pace I give you two original jokes. I have told each of these numerous times (as anyone in my family will attest). The first has occasionally elicited a small smile. Even I cannot tell the second one properly and I can honestly say no one has ever laughed at it. I throw these out into the universe in the hopes they can find a small home outside my imagination.

At a small Turkish restaurant in Chicago two men often come in for lunch. This is completely unexceptional except that they insist on receiving their bill written on rocks. I mean actual stones. They are good customers and the waiters humor them. Whenever the men come in, the busboy is sent out to find rocks on which to write each of their tabs. However, in the middle of a city there is a limited supply of rocks with flat surfaces suitable for writing. One day the men come in and the busboy can only find one. Since the men pay separately, the waiter has no idea what will happen. He writes both their receipts on the single rock and presents it to the pair. To his joy, they pay without complaint. After they leave, the waiter shouts in joy. "I've done it. I've billed two Kurds with one stone."

Knowing the success of food marketing campaigns that popularize unfamiliar foods (Avocados, Filberts renamed Hazelnuts, Yogurt...) a businessman decides to move the Garbanzo Bean into the mainstream. He buys large quantities of the beans, processing facilities, and a large marketing workforce. One area of interest is the entertainment field so the businessman questions one of of his salesmen. "Do you know how Garbanzos are doing?" The response: "I don't know. Hummus, a few bars."

Sometimes Common Sense Doesn't Make Sense

Sometimes sensible sounding positions make little sense. Here are two radically different examples. The first is helping birds by keeping your cats inside. The second is using intensive user testing to improve products.

First let's look at bird populations and cats. Many species of birds, particularly songbirds are in trouble Disappearing Common Birds Send Environmental Wake-up Call. It is also true that cats are tremendous predators. By some estimates cats kill hundreds of millions of birds in the US each year. The conjunction of these facts leads to a call that owners should keep their cats indoors Give Birds a Break, Lock up the Cat.

There may be good reasons to keep your cat indoors (though I haven't found one that convinces me), but bird killing is not one of them. It is a sop that makes people feel better without addressing the real problems.

Almost every article that seriously looks at bird loss talks about loss of habitat as the main threat. This includes the Washington Post, the Audobon Society and even Australian scientists.

My city is about seven miles on a side. Inside this area of about fifty square miles, there are essentially no native species. Fifty square miles of prairie grassland was bulldozed and replaced with asphalt, houses, stores, Kentucky Bluegrass and non-native trees. It is a nice enough town, but it does not provide much habitat for native birds.

The range of a cat is on the order of thirty or forty hectares. That is roughly a third of a mile on a side. If my city is a square seven miles on a side, cats extend each side by a maximum of about one third of a mile. The amount of severely disturbed land goes from forty nine square miles to about fifty three square miles. This is less than a ten percent increase. Complaining about bird loss due to urban cats is like killing a deer with your car and worrying about its broken antler.

Suppose that cats were a main cause of bird disappearance. Keeping your cat indoors will still not solve the problem. About one third of all cats are feral. Cats breed prodigiously and feral cats exist because there is an ecological niche for them. Even if all owned cats were kept indoors, the birds would keep dying.

I use cats and birds as an example, but we suffer from an epidemic of glossy arguments that may not stand up to any real scrutiny. A second, less supported, example has to do with product development.

It seems sensible that if you are developing products to meet some consumer need, it would be a good idea to know what those consumers want and how they will react to you product. There are a number of established techniques for this. For example, focus groups. Software organizations, often talk about user centered design.

I have developed products using these techniques. I can honestly say that every in-depth interaction I have had with customers has changed my view of the product I was developing. Sometimes I have found out that my view of the problems and their solutions is quite different from my customer's. Sometimes I have found that users had much less tolerance of complexity than I imagined.

That said, I don't think this kind of external facing, user centered process develops better products.

To support this you need only compare Microsoft and Apple. Both these companies have the time and money to investigate, measure, and improve their product development. Microsoft has a user centered development process. Apple has a completely different, inward focused product development system.

On the whole Microsoft products are, at best, acceptable. Commonly they are a complete mess. Just look at the appalling Microsoft Project. It has done more to ruin project management than any other single tool. Everyone uses Microsoft Word, but I can't think of anyone who actually likes the program. It is larded with obscure, mostly useless, features. Nothing is easy and the resulting documents are extraordinarily difficult to re-purpose.

On the whole, Microsoft follows the market. They re-implement what others have done and often do it worse. This pattern started with the operating system extends through their software products, and includes their hardware.

Apple, in contrast, is known as an innovative company that leads the market. Their customers don't just like the products, they love them. MP3 players with much the same functionality as the iPod existed before the iPod, but the Apple developers came up with a whole ecosystem for music. When the iPhone came out, it erased and replaced peoples ideas of how to interact with a that device in their pocket that sends and receives phone calls.

The problem may be that focusing on the views of potential users directs your attention to those views. Those views are often very restricted because most folks don't really think about what they are doing and what is possible. When you talk to a lot of potential customers, the tendency is to aim for the lowest common denominator. The end result seems to be products that serve a purpose, that most people can use, but that no one really cares about.

Like keeping cats inside to protect birds, asking customers to help develop products seems to make a lot of sense, but may not be sensible.

Singular Memories

I have noticed a memory phenomenon that I haven't heard discussed. Memory is normally discussed in terms of persistence. There are at least three layers of memory: sensory, short term, and long term. As is often the case, wikipedia has an excellent primer on this, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory. What I have noticed is what I will call a singular memory. This is a specific long term memory where we only remember one of a series.

The quintessential example of what I call a singular memory is the combination for a lock. If you ever went to school in the United States, you undoubtedly owned a series of combination locks. Every day you unlocked the lock, perhaps several times. If you ask someone the combination of the lock they had two years ago, they probably will not remember it. It is as though there is one spot in memory for a lock combination and remembering a new one erases, or at least substantially dims the memory of the old one.

Another example is parking spots. When you park your car at a store, you remember its location for hours. This implies that the memory is long term. on the other hand, if I asked you where you parked at the same store two weeks ago, you may have no recollection at all.

Though I call this a singular memory, in fact it is not completely singular. One year at school I absent-mindedly wandered to a locker I had several years before. I was in the middle of dialing the combination I had for that locker before I realized I was in the wrong place. In the same way, if I remind you of exactly what you bought at the store two weeks ago or an incident that occurred on the way out the door, you may remember where you parked the car that day.

I believe that these singular memories may be a byproduct of the mechanism of recall. Memories are not replayed. They are reconstructed. This reconstruction is a mini re-enactment where the neurons involved in the original experience are re-activated. During this reconstruction the original memory is subject to change. I think that when we memorize a new combination for a lock, it is as though we misremembered the old combination and re-stored the new combination as the original memory. When I wandered to my old locker, I was not just trying to remember a combination, I had the entire sensory experience of an earlier year. That sensory experience triggered the original memory in context as opposed to the more abstract number whose memory was normally reinforced by a new locker location and other details.

To summarize I have proposed a new type of memory, a singular memory. I gave a couple of examples, then demolished part of my own argument by showing that the memories are not actually singular. Finally I proposed a mechanism that might explain how this type of memory, which may not exist, works.

Language, Dialect, Idiolect and Beliefs

Linguists have a set of words to identify variations in speech. These are language, dialect, and idiolect. A language is a set of words and the grammatical rules used to put the words together. A language enables a set of people to communicate. Even when people speak the same language there are often regional or class differences in the pronunciation, word choice, and grammatical structures. These are called dialects. For example, on the East coast of the United States many people put an extra "r" sound at the end of words, so "idea" sounds like "idear". These same people usually have pronunciation that distinguishes the words "Mary", "Marry" and "Merry". In the mid-west, those three words usually sound the same and are distinguished by context. In "standard" english the word "you" can mean either one person or a group of people. In the southern United States these are distinguished. "You" means a single person, "y'all" means a group of people, and "all y'all" means every single individual in a group. Idiolect refers to a particular person's pattern of speech. Each of us has idiosyncratic patterns of words and expressions.

The division of speech into languages, and languages into dialects is not precise and different people will argue for different lines, but there are clearly different languages and different dialects. Even people raised together in the same family differ in word choices and modes of expression.

These same sort of groupings exist in many other areas of human life. For example, Christianity is analogous to a religious belief language, Lutherans have a "dialect" of Christianity. If you question closely you will find that each individual Lutheran has a particular and distinct set of beliefs. The same is true of politics. The industrialized democracies of Western Europe and (to a lesser extent) the United states have similar structures to create and change government officials through elections. This is the political language. The dialects typically have the words "liberal" and "conservative" attached to them, though the meanings of these words is different in different times and places. Finally, there are personal differences. Even the most ardent "conservatives" will differ on basic issues.

With belief structures, it is often true that the most violent disagreements occur between groups that agree on almost everything. For example, Shiite and Sunni muslims. In Christianity there were centuries of violence between Catholics and Protestants. When someone has beliefs that are completely foreign, it seems to be easier to dismiss them as outsiders to be ignored or tolerated. If someone almost agrees with you, then the differences are stark and it is hard to understand how the other person can be so sensible on some issues but so obviously and completely wrong on others.

There is a quote attributed to various people (including Wilde and Shaw) describing the United States and Britain as "Two great nations divided by a common language". In some sense we should treat everyone this way. Be aware that words and phrases, and hence the ideas they represent, have different nuances of meaning for each speaker. It is necessary and desirable in common conversation to gloss over these differences. But, when the stakes are raised and common understanding must be achieved, be very careful about examining these differences.

The hardest social problem I know

As humans, many of our problems are social. I want to share what I consider to be one of the most difficult problems I ever encountered as a parent. If you find a person who has humanely (or even inhumanely) solved this, I think you are in the presence of true social genius. The problem:

Get a junior high or high school girl to ride a bicycle to school wearing a bike helmet.

Many of us have found a way to get the girl on the bike, but I know of no way to get a helmet on that girl. Having perfect hair is just too important.

I also believe that these same girls show us the true limits of human endurance. Go to a cold climate and observe junior high students. Beanpole girls with negative body fat will have bare legs and light jackets at twenty below. They must be part hummingbird to have a metabolism that can heat a body in those conditions.

Nanny nanny boo boo

Some time ago when I both had and worked with young children I noticed an interesting thing. Kids of particular ages have their own expressions that are not used by either adults or children of other ages. My favorite example is from kids under about six years old who chant "Nanny nanny boo boo." This is a shortening of the full expression "Nanny nanny boo boo. Stick your head in doo doo." This taunt is typically used in chasing games and means "You can't catch me you ...". I have heard this chant in multiple locations thousands of miles apart, and I have heard it over a period of years. As far as I can tell it is: persistent, widespread, and completely restricted to young children. I don't think I have ever heard an adult use the full expression.

Other age groups seem to have similar cultural artifacts. Junior high kids who would never dream of being so immature as to say "Nanny nanny boo boo" may tell you the joke about the pygmy tribe called the fakawi. In tall grasslands, people of this tribe can be found jumping up and yelling "We're the fakawi". Say it with a Brooklyn accent - its an aural joke. I had an adult neighbor repeat this one to me the other day, but I believe it is largely confined to junior high aged kids.

This is anecdotal and I have no real conclusions about the phenomena, I just find it fascinating that culture can be transmitted horizontally through an age group without the mediation of adults or even family.

Mangled Alphabet

There are times when it is important to have the correct spelling of a spoken word. Because many English letters are difficult to distinguish when they are spoken (c, g, z), it is common to distinguish them by using a word. There is a standard word alphabet for this: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo...

But suppose your desire is not to be understood, but to be obscure. For example, the Internal Revenue Service calls to track down your offshore bank account. You don't want to be convicted of perjury, but you don't really want to be helpful either.

Here is a mangled alphabet for your pleasure. Just imagine being on the phone and saying "My name is Jim, J as in jalapeno, i as in ingenue, m as in mnemonic. What do you mean repeat myself, don't you speak English?".

The alphabet is a combination of spellings that do not match sounds, sounds that say a letter that is not the one of interest, accents on a misleading syllable, and obscure words that distract from the task at hand. With some letters I found it hard to be truly misleading. Suggestions are welcome.

A - Aoife (EE-feh) Irish female name
B - byssus (BIS-uhs)
C - cent (sent)
D - Django (JANG-oh) Django Reinhardt jazz great
E - elephant (EL-uh-fuhnt)
F - feign (feyn)
G - gnostic (NOS-tik)
H - honor (ON-er)
I - ingenue (AN-zhuh-noo)
J - jalapeno (hah-luh-PEYN-yoh)
K - knife (nahyf)
L - llano (YAH-naw)
M - mnemonic (ni-MON-ik)
N - nigeria (nahy-JEER-ee-uh)
O - opossum (POS-uhm)
P - phrenology (fri-NOL-uh-jee)
Q - quran (koo-RAHN)
R - Rhone (rohn)
S - sent
T - tsar (zahr)
U - umbilical (uhm-BIL-i-kuhl)
V - verisimilitude (ver-uh-si-MIL-i-tood)
W - whole (hohl)
X - Xerox (ZEE-rox)
Y - Ysolde (ee-ZAWL-duh)
Z - zakat (zuh-KHAT)

Running the dog

In looking through old writing, I ran across this letter I wrote to the city after receiving the second in a series of tickets. The topic of the letter is of less than earth shaking importance, but there are serious issues on the function of government and freedom versus order.

After writing the letter I did some research. I discovered that the level of injury and death caused by dogs is almost exactly the same as that resulting from baseball, and the most common victim in both cases is children. It also turns out that dogs are most likely to cause trouble in or near their homes and least likely to cause trouble in public places. In addition to normal animal control my city (through its Natural Resources department) spends on the order of a quarter million dollars a year enforcing leash laws. The leash law applies to all animals including cats, but there is a specific exemption for birds under voice control.

In the end, the city had its way. The fines double on every ticket and I could no longer shoulder the burden. I made some attempts to change the law, but could find no leverage point. I no longer spend much time at the park. Other dog owners have also been driven away. When I do go by the park the dogs are gone, and so are many of the people. I was genuinely surprised at how important the simple pleasure of running the dog at "my" park was to me, and how betrayed I felt at having local government stop me. When my dog running disappeared, so did my pride and sense of responsibility toward the city.

The Letter

This note is about a bad law that has been badly applied. On September 29, 2004 I received a ticket for having my dog off leash in Spring Creek Park (animal at large). This is my second ticket. Each ticket was issued by park rangers I had never seen before and have not seen since. Each of them said they had no discretion in issuing the ticket. The second ticket was issued in what looked like a concerted effort by the city to crack down on unleashed dogs in the park. There were at least two rangers, one of them driving a pickup truck through the park to make sure lawbreakers did not escape.

Over the past nine and a half years I have come to Spring Creek Park at least twice a day virtually every day: rain, snow or shine. I spend between ten minutes and half an hour at each visit. That makes about 7000 visits to the park or about 1400 hours. I think it is accurate to say that over the past ten years I have spent more time in Spring Creek Park than anyone else. Until receiving this latest ticket, it was my intention to create and publish a photo essay book showing daily views of the park over an entire year.

The purpose of those 7000 visits to the park has been to run my dog. She is an impeccably trained border collie. If you have ever been around a border collie, you know that they are active dogs that need to run. I have trained Josie to run laps around the ball fields. She is getting old now and has slowed down. In her prime she would routinely run 20 or so laps around the ball-field as a warm up. After the laps she generally has the energy to do other training exercises. Her record is 50 laps, or about eight miles, at a full run. I have taken her to the dog parks, but there is nothing there that can provide the flat out running that she both enjoys and needs. She is completely disinterested in other dogs and humans.

I stopped bringing a leash to the park years ago. I can honestly say that, in all our visits, not once has my dog been a danger to any person in the park. By training and temperament, Josie rarely acknowledges that there are people in the park. As a border collie, she is all business and her business is running in the patterns that I tell her to.

Josie is a fixture at the park. She is known by the workers and the neighbors. She is admired for her ability and her training. I have received countless compliments on this dog. The number of complaints can be counted on the fingers of one hand. On the rare occasion someone looks nervous or says something, I take Josie out of the park. Periodically, either in Spring Creek Park or in other parks, an animal control person will stop by and tell me about the law. Without exception, those folks have complimented me on Josie's obedience and asked me to take her out of the park. To make life easier for all of us, on those occasions I leave the area. One animal control person said they were responding to complaints about dogs in that particular park. He suggested other places where he would not be patrolling that day.

The animal control workers and the visitors to the park have understood something the city ordinance and the park rangers do not. My dog running in the park is an innocuous and safe activity that improves my life, the dog's life, and is largely a joy to other park visitors.

While I am at the park, I pick up more dog waste than Josie leaves. I collect and throw litter away. Every couple of years I find a stray that has wandered away from home. I track down the owners and return the dog. One time I found and returned a wallet that had been stolen from a truck in the neighborhood. The owner didn’t even know it was missing. When teens rolled one of the trash barrels out onto the frozen lake, strewing garbage along the way, I recruited a couple of fire-fighters from the next door station. We retrieved the trash barrel and picked up the garbage.

Of course, the fact that my dog is well behaved does not make the law bad nor does it excuse me as a lawbreaker. What makes the law bad is that it worsens rather than betters the community. I have spent a lot of time researching human behavior, particularly in cities. We know a lot about what makes good, vibrant communities. One of the most important factors is that neighbors know each other, are aware of their surroundings, and take responsibility for the community. Parks can be marvelous places, but many towns have the problem that their parks are dangerous, particularly in off-hours. One of the major differences between a safe park and a dangerous one is community use. Crime and trouble avoid public view. When good people are near and watching, trouble moves away.

Over the years it has been interesting to see how people use the park. Almost no one simply walks through the park enjoying it. People come because they have a reason. They do what they planned to do, then they leave. Parents who bring their kids to the park stay very close to the playground. The more adventurous will walk over to the ball field to play for a couple of minutes. Ball players stay on or next to the playing field. Walkers and runners tend to either walk in a straight line through the park or they travel the perimeter. Sunbathers invariably pick a spot away from these main uses. Except for dog runners, most of the park is simply unused other than as an attractive backdrop to the other activities. People with dogs off lead almost always stay away from other park users and run their dogs in the open, unused spaces.

I seem to be pretty typical of the people who take their dogs to Spring Creek Park. These are neighborhood people who care about the neighborhood and take care of the park. I know this because I see them every day. I see them talk with each other and pick up after themselves and others. Some of the dogs are on leash, most of them are not. The difference seems to be in the temperament of the owner and the dog. If someone has a dog that will not obey or is flighty, they will only take the dog off lead once or twice. The adventure of screaming at your dog while chasing it through the public park or nearby neighborhood is a powerful deterrent to letting untrained animals off lead. People with leashed dogs behave more like walkers. They move through the park rather than spend time in it.

I am sure the Parks Department receives complaints about dogs running wild through the park. Many people feel threatened by dogs on the loose and many people simply do not like the idea that others violate the law. If the city banned blue flowers, I am sure it would receive many calls about the law violators with blue flowers in their yards.

In terms of actual danger or harm, I cannot speak with authority because I do not have the figures. I can speak from my experience and observations. Fossil Creek Park just opened. It is a beautiful park and heartening in terms of its design. For some time parks have been dumbed down to make sure that no visitor can be injured. Fossil Creek Park seems to have very thoughtfully constructed play areas, but ones where the users must take responsibility for their actions. The skate park at Fossil Creek is marvelous and seems to be heavily used. Even without seeing the figures, I can guarantee that there are more injuries in that skate park in a single week than dogs have caused in Spring Creek Park in the past ten years. Of course there is a difference between me falling off my own skateboard and being accosted by a strange dog. One I control, the other I do not. Whenever a skateboarder lets his board fly and it hits someone else or a dog owner has a dog that is out of control, they should be held accountable. But control is the problem, not the activity.

The Parks Department is in an awkward position. There is a law on the books. Until the law is changed, they must either ticket the offenders or turn a blind eye. I would prefer that the law is changed, but this is an area where emotion runs high. Not many politicians will stick a neck out for a fight that will gain them nothing but animosity, regardless of the facts. We, unfortunately, live in a time where many areas of civil behavior have been written into law. Most of them are well intended, but many of them are violated routinely. If a policeman decided to ticket every lawbreaker he saw, he could never get to a violent crime scene. He would spend all his time ticketing speeders, jaywalkers, and litterers along the way. When laws are numerous they are, and always will be, selectively enforced. I suggest that the Park Rangers would be better employed by spending more time getting to know the neighbors who do the real policing in the parks and less time driving them away by ticketing them for harmless activities.

Bad Smells and Complexity

I work with software. A few years ago a couple of influential folks, Kent Beck and Martin Fowler, started using the term "bad smell" to describe a situation where something doesn't seem quite right. When you pour a glass of milk, you may catch an odor. Everything may be fine, but you probably don't want to gulp it down until you have investigated a little further. The notion of bad smells can be used in any complex human endeavor. Experienced people quickly recognize when something is off, even if they cannot express exactly what it is.

Sometimes it is hard to figure out whether something is just complex or if the investigators are simply lost. Migraine headaches are a good example. A few years ago I started getting occasional migraine auras though, thankfully, not the headaches. When I researched the topic I found that there were several proposed causes and any number of proposed treatments or ameliorations. Sufferers look for triggers of the headaches. Different people have proposed different triggers. Trigger lists include: changes in air pressure, bright light, smells, foods including meat, wine, chocolate, beans, cheese, pickled or marinated food, nuts, herring, figs, raisins, citrus, tea, coffee, chicken livers. Of course the old standby "stress" is included in the trigger list.

Lists like the migraine triggers are a bad smell. If you stop any person on the street, you will undoubtedly find they have been exposed to one or more of these triggers in the past 24 hours. It may be that triggers are quite individual and that different people have a small set of different triggers. I find it more likely that people in pain are grasping at straws to find something that might enable them to avoid the pain in the future.

Sometimes complexity is not a bad smell, but just complexity. For a long time I have been interested in questions that different people answer differently. I live in a place without a lot of crime. A number of years ago I asked folks whether they locked their doors when they were in their house. I thought the answer might give an indication of risk tolerance. Sure enough, some people answered always, some answered never. One person said he only locked the doors when he was home because he cared about his own safety, not that of his possessions. I don't know if this was a truthful answer, but it was an interesting point of view.

It is an open question whether we can use some relatively small set of traits to characterize our behavior. Even identifying traits that influence behavior is problematic.

For about a century western society has been very interested in measuring "intelligence" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_testing). A Welsh friend of mine used to say that people in the United States have a peculiar fascination with reducing complex phenomena to a single number. Certainly intelligence testing fits this pattern. It is not clear what "intelligence" is and how many aspects of it there are (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences), but that doesn't stop us from measuring and assigning a single number.

There have also been attempts to measure both moral beliefs (Moral Judgment Test) and religiosity (The internal structure of the Post-Critical Belief scale). As it turns out, these may not be correlated (Religiosity, moral attitudes and moral competence).

Psychologists have tried a number of personality characterizations. There are classifications of pathologies and personality disorders (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_disorder). Some of this is clearly cultural. For example, homosexuality was listed for a time as a personality disorder. There are tests, Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory for example, to help diagnose these disorders.

There are also more general classifications. The Myers Briggs Type Indicator test is based on Jung's analysis of perception (sensation and intuition) and judgment (thinking and feeling). Based on this, four dichotomies were established: Extroversion/Introversion, Sensing/iNtuition, Thinking/Feeling, Judging/Perceiving. I always joke that Myers Briggs test is much better than astrology because astrology has only 12 categories to explain us, but Myers Briggs has 16.

The "Big Five" model comes from linguistic analysis. The thought is that essentials of personality are expressed in language so an analysis of language can lead to a understanding of personality. The big five are: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

In looking at all of this I don't detect that much bad science or even many bad smells. I come to the conclusion that people are just complicated. The theories project this complexity onto a number of different spaces, but none of them fully encompass us. We are just too complicated for simple analysis.

Blog Comments, Families, Us and Them

I started this blog not because I expected anyone to read it, but because the act of writing clarifies thought. I had been meaning to do more writing for some time, but didn't have an excuse or outlet.

If you look through the posts, at least so far, the comments are made by a small set of people. These folks are my immediate family, the clan for which I am the "Pater Familias". That title does not come from the Roman honor, but from a line in the movie "O Brother Where Art Thou". The title of that movie came from a fictional book in another wonderful movie, "Sullivan's Travels".

I am finding out that the comments are an interesting part of the blogging experience, even if they mostly come from my own family. The comments themselves usually have something to say. They are also touchingly protective. They announce "See, I'm reading this. I care". This protective attitude is amusing because, when my children were little, they assumed I was indestructible. To this day I am often mistaken for a trampoline. On an emotional level, one of the favorite pastimes of the family is putting me in humiliating situations. For example, when I had some friends over on Halloween to help in building a fence, my clan insisted I spend dinner dressed up in drag as a beauty queen, complete with toilet paper sash announcing my title "Miss Evil Colorado".

This is part of what I call the hierarchy of social identification. Most of us identify with a whole set of groups that extend from family to peers to school/work, community, nation... This is one of the most powerful forces in human society and sets the stage for collective action. On the dark side, it separates "us" from "them" and allows our collective action to be unspeakably cruel. A family, as with most social groups, has plenty of internal friction. But facing outward, will present a united front and protect its members.

It is demonstrably true that humans band together into trust groups. Innate traits like skin color or epicanthal folds are easy markers. As a regrettable consequence, each of us tends to exclude those with innate differences as not part of our group. This is natural, but not inevitable. For example, imagine a room with two black and two white men. If one white man and one black man both have gang tattoos and one black man and one white man are both wearing expensive business suits, they will initially pair up based on clothing rather than skin color.

None of us belong exclusively to a single group and all of us are capable of forming strong associations with almost anyone. Put a group of musicians from around the world in a single room and in short order they will be forming new associations based on their shared passion for sound.

The identification with social groups and antipathy toward outsiders seems to be a base human trait. I know of no social group without some degree of this. The positive part of this tendency is the ability to come together to work toward a common goal. On the negative side, the separation between us and them allows “us” to treat "them" without any consideration other than our own aim.

Separation of "us" from "them" is often justified because “they” are different from “us”. Biologically, this is hogwash. Each of us has parents and there are familial traits. Some of us are blonde and some have black hair. Some groups of people have lived with enough isolation to show adaptation to their surroundings. For example, groups living farther from the equator tend to have lighter skin. These differences are marked enough so that pathologists can identify human groups from these physical traits. That said, humans are also nomadic and relatively recent. This underlies a remarkable degree of genetic homogeneity. I liken the differences between humans to the differences between brown spotted and black spotted Dalmatian dogs. As a species, we have so little genetic diversity that some scientists postulate that the species was reduced to a very small number of individuals in the not so distant past.

Because there are physical differences between human groups, it is interesting to ask if there might be analogs in other areas. For example, some groups of humans might be more or less capable of mathematical reasoning or eye/hand coordination. I think this is unlikely. Variants like skin color give an advantage in a particular region. Mental and social advantages have no such geographic constraints. People with the advantage will quickly spread the genetics outside their own group. Only extreme geographic isolation could keep advantageous adaptations out of the general gene pool. Human history is filled with tales of travel, conquest, and stranger's babies. Unjustified claims of essential differences between groups of people have been used to justify genocide. To counter this tendency, the standard of proof for assertions of fundamental differences between groups must be extremely high. I know of no evidence that there are physical differences between human groups that elevate the fundamental capabilities of any group. This is especially clear when we look at genius. Genius is characterized by some capability that is far greater than normal. Think Leonardo da Vinci, Mahatma Gandhi, or Michael Jordan. Genius springs up around the world and cannot be characterized by family, "race" or any other factor I know of. There are musical families, but to paraphrase Aaron Copeland : there was nothing to indicate that Leonard’s parents would produce a Bernstein.

Our upbringing affects who we are, not just emotionally, but physically. There is evidence, for example, that people brought up speaking a tonal language tend to respond differently to sound than those brought up speaking non-tonal languages. In those cultures, a higher percentage of people perceive absolute pitch. Our bodies change based on our environment, but are especially malleable before adulthood. There are some abilities, like language acquisition, that fall off as we grow older.

Humans are genetically pretty homogeneous, but in values, and hence behaviour, we vary greatly. Because we learn behaviour from each other, values and behaviour tend to be cultural. The biggest influence is family followed peer groups and finally the culture as a whole. Some societies are monogamous, some have men with multiple wives and some have women with multiple husbands. In some societies butchers are respected and prosperous. In others they are outcasts. Food taboos are so strong that it is difficult to imagine violating them. Culturally forbidden foods include fish, insects, dogs, and pigs.

Even in groups with strong cultural mores, there will be rogues. Every society has outcasts and criminals. Some people, gangs, clans, and governments are dangerous to outsiders. That is one of the reasons that we look for cultural allies. They may help protect us from the dangerous humans. But the tendency to bond in groups is more than a need for protection. We also have a need for acceptance by others in our group. The combination of fear and the need for acceptance and protection is very powerful. A social group can manipulate individual humans to do literally anything. They will rape, torture, and murder neighbors with whom they have lived peacefully for years. They will kill themselves and their own children. That is, the very groups we rely on for protection from the dangerous humans can also transform us into those dangerous humans.

Everyone thinks they have things they will do and things they will not do. However, the power of circumstance and persuasion move these lines. Totalitarian regimes recognize this so they create programs to make everyone complicit. Right now you would not think of killing the Jew/Black/Korean/Armenian shopkeeper on the corner, but in light of the past actions of people like him, would you be willing to keep an eye on him and report suspicious activity? Would you if there were a payment? One thing leads to another. Lines are drawn between us and them. They are clearly threatening. You are one of us. You have shown it by your actions – even accepting favors or money. But your status is provisional and must be earned by showing your commitment to us. You must show your commitment to us by acting more strongly against them.

We are all susceptible to these forces, but we can also recognize them. It is up to each of us to recognize both the danger and the opportunity in the strangers among us. Some wariness is important for self protection. But given a chance, that person who is currently part of "them" may be a valuable part of "us" in the not distant future.

The Search for Life in the Universe

Just some small thoughts on the unlikeliness of finding an extra-terrestrial civilization that is not deliberately trying to contact unknown civilizations.

If a civilization is not trying to contact others, we would have to detect their actions. Over interplanetary distances, the only thing we can detect is electromagnetic radiation (light, radio waves ...). If we could take detailed photos of a planet surface, we might see cities or other evidence of civilization. We might also detect their attempts to communicate with each other (think radio, TV, cell phones...). In both cases the frequencies we would look for are those that are not absorbed by the planet atmosphere. In all cases, detection involves the recognition of patterns in the signal that indicate intelligence. Planets are next to suns. Suns transmit huge amounts of energy that mask planetary signals. Without traveling close to the solar system, we will probably never get detailed enough information to isolate sources from a particular region of a planet. That is, we won't be able to resolve images that would show us cities.

There is a chance that something like a radio signal might be regular enough and powerful enough to be distinguished from the background, but this is likely to occur only briefly in a civilization's history. Our own experience indicates that communication feeds on itself. The tendency is to try to increase the amount of information transmitted. Over time, all bandwidth that can be used will be used and that every given bandwidth will be saturated. In our case, we have compressed signals, which reduces the direct intelligibility. We have used both time and frequency multiplexing which smears signals together. Finally, we have reduced the power for any given communication to a minimum both to increase the number of devices that can communicate and to reduce interference.

The end result is that our civilization's internal conversations, and likely any other technologically advancing civilization, will be essentially undetectable. There is an infinitesimal increase in heat at frequencies transparent to the atmosphere, but no possibility of detecting intelligible transmissions.

If a civilization inhabits multiple planets or stars, we might detect traces of those signals, but this too is extremely unlikely. Such signals have a known destination and are likely to be highly directed. That makes eavesdropping difficult. Even if we received the signal, we probably could not recognize it as such because, again, available bandwidth will probably be saturated and the signals, in effect, disguised by compression and multiplexing.

That leaves only communications from civilizations that are deliberately trying to contact unknown civilizations.

Ugly US Money

I think United States money is the ugliest in the world. You can check out money from other countries at http://www.banknotes.com/images.htm. Compare this sample from Papua New Guinea http://www.banknotes.com/pg29.htm with the new five dollar bill from the US. http://www.moneyfactory.gov/newmoney/main.cfm/currency/new5. Honestly, can you think of anything more idiotic looking that those yellow 05s pasted randomly. Oh wait, there is the huge purple numeral five. I am sure these "features" serve a purpose. I am also sure the purpose could be served in an artistic fashion.

When the treasury department announced a redesign of US bills I had great hopes. The US public was extremely resistant to change and it was the threat/actuality of massive counterfeiting that forced redesign. Before that, it seemed that George Washington had produced the designs after 40 days on Mount Sinai.

My hopes have been dashed. As it turns out, the new designs were solely concerned with protecting the currency. Check the Bureau of Engraving and Printing at http://www.moneyfactory.gov/. There is no indication that the engraving bureau thinks AT ALL about the appearance of the money. It is obvious that artists had little influence and no control. In other countries they realize that protection mechanisms can be implemented to create bills that are both beautiful and functional.

I highly doubt that this post will ever be seen by anyone in the Bureau of Engraving and Printing but, just in case, here is a concrete suggestion.

Currency should be designed by artists. A single artist should control the design of a single bill. It may be best if the same artist designs a whole series. The controlling artist should be aware of security and usability constraints. Security and usability people should be able to veto a design, but they should never be able to pick up a pen and modify a design.

If there are artists involved in the design of US currency, they are either not very good, or they have no real control of the design. For a case study on how currency should be designed see the lecture by Oootije Oxenaar at http://www.rgaros.nl/money/oxenaar/index.html.

At the Engraving Bureau, clearly the wrong people are doing graphic design. Even Antarctica, http://www.banknotes.com/aq16.htm, gets better looking money than the United States.