photo credit: bensonkua

One of my new favourite applications is called Time Out.

Time Out is donationware created by indie Mac developer, Dejal. The program does only one thing. Every X minutes, it darkens the screen for a set period of time, acting as a gentle reminder that you really ought to take a break. That’s it. That’s the whole app.

The key is that it does it really, really well. You didn’t know that there were over a dozen ways that you could tweak the experience of having your computer screen darkened after a predetermined amount of time, but there are.

It may be something that is special to Macs because of the way they OS architechture works or is may be because a certain kind of person gets attracted the software and hardware look and feel. It’s even possible that my impression is prejudice based on my own failure to find equivalent apps on the PC. But it seems like there is a wealth of applications available from indie developers on the Macintosh that only do one or two things but do them really, really well. I contrast this to the kind of massive bloated suites of software like Open Office or MS Office, both of which feel kind of out of place on my computer.

Has anyone else noticed this? Mac people does your experience mirror mine? PC people am I just being obtuse?

photo credit: monkiemag

I made some bad choices relating to some credit cards that I have and I have been slowly paying off my debts. The big problem was that the amount of money per month that I was putting on the cards was only a little bit more than the amount of money per month that my interest charges were adding. Progress was slow.

I handled this by calling the bank and transferring to a credit card with a lower interest rate. From now on, more of my monthly payments will go to the principal instead of the interest. During the call, the guy suggested that if I could find money equal to the balance on my card, I could zero the credit card,and then write one of those Visa Cheques that have 2% interest, giving me an even better ratio of interest to principal payment.

This plan is conceivable because I have friends and family who might have enough cash lying around that I could borrow it from them for a few days to enact this scheme. It’s one of the nice things about being middle class: you are surrounded by people who have spare resources that you can borrow from time to time to help with tough spots.

Poorer people don’t have access to the same kind of resources. This is one of the reasons that the Grameen Bank is so important as a tool for alleviating poverty.

Easy access to temporary resources is something that you might call a privilege of being well-to-do.

Privilege

I have a problem with the common use of the word “privilege” in phrases like “male privilege” and “white privilege”. To my mind, privilege connotes things that you get that you don’t necessarily deserve. Special powers or nice things that lift you above others. Platinum plus membership cards and so on. I’ve since spoken to a number of other people about this and found that a lot of different people have very different reactions to the meaning of the word.

If you click on that “white privilege” link, you’ll come to a list of 50 things that Peggy McIntosh considers to be special privileges of being white. Read the list. The overwhelming majority of those things should not be (my definition of) privileges, they should be inalienable rights. Mixed in are some things that look more like (my definition of) privileges (”26. I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.“).

Pareto Optimality

A Pareto optimal condition is one where it is impossible to to make anyone better off without making someone worse off. A Pareto optimal move is one where you make someone better off without making anyone worse off.

We should be able to fix “15. I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection.” without needing to make any white people worse-off. Same thing for “20. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.” There are a number of things on the list that should just be a part of human dignity, that we should be able to fix in a Pareto optimal move.

Under my instinctive definition of privilege, these are not privileges that white people have. These are things that EVERYONE should have but do not. We should be working to make it so that everyone else catches up.

Compare those to items like “44. I can easily find academic courses and institutions which give attention only to people of my race.” This strikes me as a privilege which white people will probably have to give up. With a limited number of hours per year for teaching, if there’s going to be more diversity in curricula the proportions will have to shift and white-only parts would have to come down.

Confusion

The problem I have with common use of “___ privilege” is that it mixes both types of unfairness. Things that I have that other people could also have are different from things that I have at the expense of other people. Confusing the two creates resistance and disagreement where otherwise none might be.

They are different flavours of problem with different kinds of solutions. They should have different words.

I came across this at the National Art Gallery of Canada.

It’s a bathroom door. It’s a little dark, but you should be able to make out the nice shiny metal rectangle where they thought that people would push to open the door and the white worn-away patch where people actually do.

photo credit: vgm8383

In 1990, Neil Postman gave a talk at a meeting of the German Informatics Society called Informing Ourselves to Death.

The speech has been held up as an important counterpoint to the general technological gee-whizzardry of publications like Wired. I bring it up now, because 18 years after the speech was given, we have some hindsight.

It’s worth remembering what was happening in 1990. Computers were on the rise, but there wasn’t much of an Internet to speak of. The first version of the World Wide Web would not go public until 1991. Windows 3.0 had just been released in May. Apple was on System 6.0.5 for the Mac. Laptops and desktops looked like this.

It is in this context that Postman says:

In the case of computer technology, there can be no disputing that the computer has increased the power of large-scale organizations like military establishments or airline companies or banks or tax collecting agencies. And it is equally clear that the computer is now indispensable to high-level researchers in physics and other natural sciences. But to what extent has computer technology been an advantage to the masses of people? To steel workers, vegetable store owners, teachers, automobile mechanics, musicians, bakers, brick layers, dentists and most of the rest into whose lives the computer now intrudes?

And why are computers failing to offer advantages to regular people? There is so much information that regular people no longer find the world comprehensible. This, says Postman, began in medieval times.

There was a time when information was a resource that helped human beings to solve specific and urgent problems of their environment. It is true enough that in the Middle Ages, there was a scarcity of information but its very scarcity made it both important and usable. This began to change, as everyone knows, in the late 15th century when a goldsmith named Gutenberg, from Mainz, converted an old wine press into a printing machine, and in so doing, created what we now call an information explosion … The printing press began that age, and we have not been free of it since.

But what started out as a liberating stream has turned into a deluge of chaos. … Everything from telegraphy and photography in the 19th century to the silicon chip in the twentieth has amplified the din of information, until matters have reached such proportions today that for the average person, information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems.

Whether you accept his understanding of medieval history, there is merit in his concern that there can be too much information. That is to say: too much information all at once.

Consider the failure of US intelligence to predict the September 11th. When it was over and they were sifting through the material, all the information that they needed to figure out what was happening was available. It was hidden in plain sight by being part of an insanely enormous field of data. The issue was not a lack of information, it was a lack of the right kind of organization and perspective.

The term that geek workers use for this is “the firehose”.

Postman recalls fondly the time before the information age, when people were blessed with certainty.

There existed an ordered, comprehensible world-view, beginning with the idea that all knowledge and goodness come from God. What the priests had to say about the world was derived from the logic of their theology. There was nothing arbitrary about the things people were asked to believe, including the fact that the world itself was created at 9 AM on October 23 in the year 4004 B.C.

Pay special attention to this next bit:

The medieval world was, to be sure, mysterious and filled with wonder, but it was not without a sense of order. Ordinary men and women might not clearly grasp how the harsh realities of their lives fit into the grand and benevolent design, but they had no doubt that there was such a design, and their priests were well able, by deduction from a handful of principles, to make it, if not rational, at least coherent.

The argument here is that if the information available in the middle ages was wrong, at least there wasn’t too much of it. With no conception of a way that we could better organize information and the fear that computers will be hard for regular people to use and you can see his concern. It’s at this point that his talk falls flat on its face.

Certainty is NOT a good if you are WRONG.

Postman should have been calling on the people making computers to make them better at processing, sorting and handling information. In a world with an abundance of information the solution is not wishing there was less, it’s in wishing that there were better ways to organize it.

Postman seems to miss this entirely.

Luckily, others did not. Instead of a firehouse, we have Digg, Yahoo! and Google. Instead of ivory towers of data for the few, we have Wikipedia and Gapminder. Instead of top down news organs, we have Ushahidi and IMC. As time went on the trend moved towards more powerful and more accessible tools for dealing with the deluge.

The critical lesson here is that in 1990, most people still didn’t have a faint fucking clue about what computers would mean in a mere 10 years. The consequences of Moore’s Law (coined in 1970) were not being taken on board. This is Postman’s biggest failure, the failure of imagination to understand what it could mean to common people that computers would double in power every 2 years, effectively driving the price of processing power down to free ($100 Laptop!).

I have a printing press in my bedroom (when I had a bedroom)! I have a AV broadcast station on my lap. I can MAKE MOVIES with about $3000 worth of equipment (and next year it’ll be cheaper). I can do my own accounting and I have screen savers, SCREEN SAVERS, that process vast amounts of data in an effort to fold proteins!

The saddest thing about Postman is that he approaches the whole question of human history as an endless conflict between winners and losers as a result of each technological change. It’s as if I showed him an automatic drilling machine and he complained that all the people who used to dig mines were losers because they were out of a job, instead of winners because they no longer had to GO DOWN INTO A MINE.

I would MUCH rather be middle class in modern times (or even lower class) than ruling class in the 1400s and I say this knowing that on my Grandmother’s side of the family, there’s a castle somewhere. I am literally wealthier than the wealthiest medieval king across almost every measurement of wealth that you can think of. I will live longer, I can travel further, I can remember more, I eat better food (and have access to more of it), my house is more comfortable, and I have access to equipment and abilities far beyond his wildest dreams.

When Postman tells the story of the Benedictine monks and their devotional clocks, he anticipates his own failure of imagination. The point of his story is that with technological changes come unintended consequences. And there he is in 1990, looking at computers, seeing only benefits for large institutions, projecting forwards only benefits for large institutions, missing the possibility of unexpected changes for everyone else.

I’m glad he was wrong.

Overcoming Bias is a blog that is new to me but which I subscribed to right away. When I tell you that I have spent the last two weeks viciously slashing down my RSS subscription lists you will understand immediately how big an endorsement this is and what an idiot I have been when it comes to managing my time and attention.

Overcoming Bias: The Evil Pleasure.

We feel a deep pleasure from realizing that we believe something in common with our friends, and different from most people.  We feel an even deeper pleasure letting everyone know of this fact.  This feeling is EVIL.  Learn to see it in yourself, and then learn to be horrified by how thoroughly it can poison your mind.  Yes evidence may at times force you to disagree with a majority, and your friends may have correlated exposure to that evidence, but take no pleasure when you and your associates disagree with others; that is the road to rationality ruin.

Michale Pollan tells stories about nature so that we can begin to FEEL the reality of science, rather than just “know”. It’s been 150 years since Darwin, he says, and we are still all Cartesians. “We still think it’s human vs nature.”

The most important point in the talk: We are just as sophisticated as rice, because WE HAVE BEEN EVOLVING FOR THE SAME LENGTH OF TIME (rice actually hare more genes than humans).

photo credit: litmuse

I’m one of those types of people who signs up for online survey panels. Sometimes it gets me free food, sometimes it gets me sneak previews of ads or a chance to critique bottle designs (not kidding). Tonight it got me a chance to see a survey written with a pretty clear intent in the questioning.

The survey opened with some questions about the kinds of things I liked to do in Toronto, moved into asking me how much I liked going to the ROM and asking me if I was interested in a seeing an exhibit on the dead seal scrolls that will be coming in 2009. Then we moved into pricing.

Right now, it costs $22 for an adult to go. It is a rare thing for a group of friends and I to get together and decide that we want to spend $22 each to walk around the museum. Bear in mind that I count among my friends a group who ran a monthly event called “science club” where people did presentations on science topics for each other. If there is a target market for the ROM it’s us and school busses.

The questions went like this:
Do you think $22 is good value for your money? (No)
What if we raised it to $25? (No)
How about if $25 got you to see the special exhibit as well? (No)
Running a museum is expensive, how about $25 now? (Still not coming to your museum)
Shouldn’t the government be paying for this?

At no point did they ask about lower prices or offer any of the usual variety of questions that I’ve seen that would indicate that they were trying to find the sweet spot that would maximize income.

If you see stories in the paper about how 75% of Canadians support increased government funding for museums, you’ll know why.

The future of gay marriage in California. - By Kenji Yoshino - Slate Magazine.

Finally, the effects of Prop 8 on the national movement for same-sex marriage are significant but not devastating. Before Tuesday, court opinions legalizing same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, California, and Connecticut suggested that the right was gaining traction. The passage today of constitutional bans on same-sex marriage not just in California but also in Arizona and Florida provides a counterpoint.

Nonetheless, generational and global trends both ultimately favor full marriage equality in this country. The situation here is similar to the two-steps-forward, one-step-back trajectory that led to the legalization of interracial marriage. To be sure, Prop 8 represents a large step back. But the nation’s march toward marriage equality won’t stop.

I agree with the last paragraph. The march of the history of western civilization is the march of recognizing more and more entities as human beings and broadening the rights granted to them. It’s a messy process, but I think that it’s inevitable.

In this sense, the social conservatives are right. It is a slippery slope. I just think that the slope is in the right direction.

Fight on.

photo credit: tsevis

Last night, partly out of excitement and partly as an experiment, I went on to the Obama home page, found the “contact us” section and sent in a congratulatory note.

I woke up to find this reply in my inbox:

Dear Tim

Thank you for contacting me, and for your kind words and support. I’m receiving thousands of messages right now from across the country and Americans around the world. I am honored and deeply humbled by the confidence the American people have placed in me and Senator Biden.

I am hopeful about the opportunities and clear-eyed about the challenges our nation faces. I look forward to working with all Americans, regardless of who they voted for, in the great project of American renewal. Enlisting the energy and ingenuity of the American people is the only way we will create the changes that so many people want to see, so Senator Biden and I hope you will remain active in your community and involved in national policy debates.

Sincerely,
Barack Obama

—
A note from Obama for America: If you have questions, suggestions, or comments about the federal government, policy, or the coming Obama/Biden Administration, please stay tuned for more information and a new website coming soon that will tell you how to get involved.

If you’re contacting us because you’ve been energized by your participation in our grassroots movement, we want you to remain active in your community and involved in national policy debates. Please continue to visit www.BarackObama.com regularly. We’ve built one of the most comprehensive nationwide organizing networks in history, and our victory on November 4th is only the beginning of the work we will do together.

If you have other thoughts or business with the campaign, you can continue to reach us toll free at 866-675-2008. We appreciate hearing from you and hope you’ll continue to work with us as we build America’s future together.

———————–
Paid for by Obama for America

Pay special attention to the second half of the note. That’s how you do politics, that’s how you begin ensuring your re-election and hopefully, that’s how you get things done.