Bounded in a Nutshell

When it comes to gas prices, I'm torn. Speaking as a consumer, they're rather high these days. On another level, they're not high enough.

In the interests of full disclosure, it should be said that I drive a lot. How much is a lot? I've had my current car for just about 22 months, and in that time it's accrued about 59,000 miles. Maybe as many as a thousand of those were without me in the car, due to complicated arrangements to minimze the cost of a car rental and other such considerations, but still. Mnay many long-distance road trips.

Are the current gas prices going to make me discontinue my road trippin' habits? No, not likely. They're not nearly high enough yet for me to start considering the alternatives (airplanes, buses, trains, or just staying put), because all of the alternatives are still more expensive. (Well, staying put is cheap, but too much of that is bad for me.) I believe this is an example of what economists would call an inelastic commodity: the demand decreases very little in proportion to the increase of the price.

Various government officials at various times have come forth with rhetoric of conservation. We're running out of cheap oil (which is true), and so people should start using less of it. Well, guess what? That's not going to work. Just telling people to conserve isn't in and of itself a viable solution, since even if you accept the model of people as rational agents, they're not so rational that they're going to seriously take the dim and misty future into close consideration. If the state is serious about wanting people to conserve fuels, then they need to offer either incentives (like tax breaks for people who buy -- or companies that develop -- more efficient technologies) or disincentives (like big honking levies on gasoline). To balance out the latter, one might offer tax rebates for those persons and businesses (like truckers) that absolutely require gas to be in business.

Of course, implementing such a program changes the externalities as well: fewer vehicles on the road means better driving for the people left, by and large. That's just an instinct, of course, and I have no data to back it up, but I'm curious if anyone's done a study indexing the number/frequency of car collisions with gas prices. High gas prices might make good public policy in more ways than one.

I have joined the few, the proud, the innundated with automatic advertisements. I have a GMail account.

I'm not sure what I think of the idea, actually, but it's new and shiny so I figured I'd give it a try. They're very careful to assure users that it's not people that snoop through your e-mail looking for keywords so that you can be targetted for the right kind of ads, it's only computers. Which does not mean that there's aren't people that are reading summaries of what's getting fed to subscribers. Or, for that matter, summaries of certain bad words that then get passed to the relevant authorities. Oh, I suppose there's a privacy policty, but there's also a Patriot Act, and I've got this feeling that the two might cancel out.

Of course, I don't really need another e-mail account; I've already got no fewer than four addresses that I use regularly for various purposes, plus at least two more that I can think of off the top of my head. But hey, new and shiny. The magpie impulse is strong in this one.

So in case I've managed to pick up any readers who don't actually know me (and hence know one of my other addresses), you can now contact me at the address com dot gmail at nutshell, reversed wordwise and with proper punctuation substitutions.

Ponder with me for a moment: what does it mean to link to someone in a blog?

An immediate and naive answer is that linking is an endorsement. One links to a site that says something cool, or something that one wishes that one has said oneself, or something that one feels needs saying. This would seem to be the idea that stands behind blog-ads: group X pays blogger Y to put up a link to X's site, as an indirect endorsement of group X to Y's readers.

As an answer, this is inadequate. For one thing, while it makes sense for X to see things that way, I've read comments on a number of blogs that indicate that the bloggers themselves don't see themselves as endorsing their advertisers necessarily. For another, it doesn't explain the common practise of linking to a site that one disagrees with, to then (attempt to) tear down the post/site/person in question. So while an endorsement is sufficient grounds for a link, it's hardly necessary.

I think a better answer is this: linking to a site is making -- and propogating -- the observation that one's readers should visit the site. Maybe because it's worth reading; maybe because it's not worth reading, but without visiting it one won't know where the blogger in question is coming from. Thus, Big Media Matt can (and does) link to InstaSomeone with the intent of demonstrating the wrongness of that Someone's viewpoints. It wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to make the demonstration without a reference to the subject, and on the Web a reference is just a link away.

So turn it around: what should it mean when a link is withheld? One answer (though probably not the only one) comes from the contrapositive of the above statement: if one links to a site to say look at this, then if one doesn't want one's readers to look at something, one won't link to it. And hence by talking about another web site without linking to it, one can make a certain statement: This is not worth looking at.

Of course, when dismissing a site this way there is always the danger that others won't know what one is talking about. That may or may not be relevant; personal blogs, especially, are an unusual mixture of public and private information. Posting information that only a few people will understand is relatively common, I suspect. Besides, bloghounds are generally pretty savvy folks when it comes to the Web; one can easily point to a site without linking to it, by providing sufficient information about it.

A dear friend of mine writes a blog. That blog has recently been attacked by some random pseudonymous blogger. Let's call that otherwise unnamed blogger U. One of U's many (baseless, mostly incoherent) points of contention is that my friend's HTML skills are lacking.

U, of course, can't manage to tear him/herself away from the Transitional DTD. This is because he/she can't seem to lay out a web page without using TABLEs: for those of you who don't write web pages, take my word for it that this is a no-no from the point of view of good HTML. Or better yet, don't take my word for it; check the specs:

Tables should not be used purely as a means to layout document content as this may present problems when rendering to non-visual media. Additionally, when used with graphics, these tables may force users to scroll horizontally to view a table designed on a system with a larger display. To minimize these problems, authors should use style sheets to control layout rather than tables.

Add that to his/her bizarre method of captioning pictures, and his/her insulting little rant between NOSCRIPT tags that assumes that you've deliberately turned scripting off and aren't, say, using Lynx or something perfectly reasonable... well, one might wonder where U gets his/her authority to question the HTML skills of another.

Oh, and U? If you're reading this, you might want to consider the benefits of E-mail. That way if you really feel the need to trash someone, you can actually do it to their face. And if you want your sniggering little friends in on the action so they can silently applaud your irrational and unimaginative rants against The Enemy, then you can use the Blind Carbon Copy header. Of course, if courtesy and courage aren't virtues in your world, then forget I said anything.

Oh, wait, you already have.

I've been considering moving lately; I've had enough problems with the water in my current apt. that a change of venue seems like a good idea, and I'd really like to make walking to campus in under an hour a feasible plan.

What I'd like to do is to rent a house. (I flirt occasionally with buying, but given that I'm not really looking to be living in my current city for a long period of time -- indeed, given that I'm hoping to vanish with very little warning indeed someday -- such a course is probably unwise.) Of course, renting a house brings with it any number of attendant annoyances: lawn care, snow removal, etc. Also, it seems not uncommon hereabouts to ask renters to supply their own refridgerator, which is a little weird but I can dig it.

However, see vanish above; when I do eventually move away, the fewer posessions I have the easier it will be. Also, I feel like I have better things to spend money on than a lawnmower... which I don't really want anyhow, since my ideal lawn would consist of clover and other plants that don't grow more than a decimter or so high and maybe a Zen garden.

So it's looking like more apartment living for me.

So people talk about Massachusetts liberals as though they're the very worst kind, and by extension that there's no place more liberal than Massachusetts. As a Canadian, I find this funny. Particularly when the (Republican) governor is now talking about bringing back the death penalty:

Massachusetts can create a capital punishment system that is as infallible as humanly possible by narrowly defining the eligible crimes and requiring the use of DNA or other scientific evidence, according to a report that will be released today by a panel appointed by Governor Mitt Romney.

There's a couple of points to make here. First of all, I'm not sure how reducing the number of crimes that can warrant the death penalty will increase its infallibility except perhaps in a purely statistical sense: the fewer such crimes there are, the fewer people the State will put to death and hence the fewer innocent people the State will put to death. This is assuming probabilistic independence, which may or may not be valid.

A far more significant concern, though, is the mutilation of the sense of infallible that's going on here. Infallible is an absolute: either you is or you ain't. You can sort of justify using terms like mostly infallible, if you really try, but as infallible as humanly possible? What the hell does that mean?

Of course, this is Massachusetts we're talking about here, home of such prominent Catholic politicians as JFK and JFK2, so from a strict Catholic perspective as infallible as humanly possible is logically equivalent to infallible, since the Pope is human and (at least on certain matters) infallible. QED. If one wants to take a more humanistic stance, then as infallible as humanly possible must mean fallible, since nobody's perfect.

So in other words: a commission is proposing bringing back the death penalty in Massachusetts and is trying to sell it on its fallibility. It's pronouncements like this that remind me why I'm never, ever likely to become a politician.

Logging on to my pseudo-bank's website, and I accidentally hit the caps-lock key when tabbing from "Account number" to "PIN". I was vaguely aware of doing this -- I do it fairly frequently, after all -- but I wouldn't have been able to tell from typing because the PIN field is "TYPE=PASSWORD" and hence conceals your input behind a sequence of -- on my browser -- dots.

Except -- and here's the cool part -- that a little "shift-up" sort of icon thingy appeared at the right side of the text box in question. I'm imagining that I'm not the only person who hits Caps Lock along with Tab, and the friendly folks at web support for this institution got tired of asking people to check. Hence, a very pretty little solution.

By contrast -- by which I mean, "On another subject entirely that's only barely thematically related to this one" -- I was recently going through my archive files and made the unpleasant discovery that the "break into paragraphs" feature that Blogger allows is more BReak and less Paragraph, if you follow me. This displeases me, because I'm a bit of a purist about formatting languages. So I'm considering doing something drastic, like migrating to some other system.

As it happens, I started writing a home-brewed blog software complex a couple of months ago, back before I had to learn Calc 2 at long last. Now that my semester is almost over, maybe I can get back to that & solve my problem that way.