Out of my hat

Anyone know what the standard period of mourning for an ex-president is? It’s been over two weeks now & still almost every flag in town’s flying low.

Y’know, not that long ago the governor of this state died — and that’s actually the seated governor, not a former governor from a couple of decades ago — and I’m pretty sure the flags were back at the top of their poles after about a week. What gives?

Gah. Sitting in my office waiting for a student who may or may not show up, and once again I neglected to do anything about breakfast this morning. Like, say, have any.

My problem with breakfast is this: I like half-sleep a whole lot. That period at the beginning of the day when you’re still mostly asleep and yet conscious that you’re asleep, and your blankets are nice and warm because your body temperature hasn’t risen to normal levels yet… it’s just swell, I think. And so I have the bad habit of indulging in the simple pleasure of prolonging semiconsciousness for as long as I can.

Of course I’m still mostly asleep at this point, and so the idea of long-range planning isn’t really available to me very readily. And hence, I’ll generally put off getting up until it reaches the critical point of my needing to be on campus in half an hour, and of course by then unless I want to grab McD breakfast biscuits (which I usually don’t), I’ve shut off all possibility of a morning meal.

[Two minutes later:] OK, now that’s done with. On beyond lunchtime!

I’ve noticed numerous commenters on the political blogs that I follow make very strong statements about the results of the presidential election this fall… usually along the lines of X has no chance or sometimes just plain old Y will win. All of these people sound supremely confident that they’re right, which indicates that at least some of them are probably going to look pretty silly in five months’ time.

People looking silly online isn’t a concern of mine; I mean, really, that’s what online is here for. No, I think that the thing to do is to make a little money off of it.

It works like this: suppose you get someone (call them X) who is absolutely positive that Bush is going to win. (There’s a fair number of people who express this opinion around.) If X is serious in their opinion, and at all rational, then they should be more than willing to accept the proposition:

I’ll bet you $100 against $100,000 that Kerry will win.

…because after all, in the world of their personal expected value calculations, you are offering them $100. Seriously. And while it’s possible that you might have to walk them through how to work out the mean of a probability model, it’s really not particularly hard in this case.

Now if they refuse to bet with you, then you can probably force them into an admission that they’re not as confident as they actually want people to believe… which is at least a rhetorical win, which can pass for currency in the blogosphere. If they take the bet, then the thing to do is hedge yourself by finding an equally fervent supporter of Kerry and goad them into a similar proposition. Result: you’ll lose some small amount of money on one side of the column, and win a much much larger one on the other. Not so shabby.

I suppose this is actually an advantage of having such a polarised electorate: it creates a truly lovely little arbitrage of this sort, since each side is going to be convinced that they’re going to win because losing would be disastrous. Of course, I suppose this is only an advantage if one is willing to sacrifice all other political and ideological concerns for the sake of making a quick buck (or more to the point, thousands upon thousands of quick bucks). Somehow, I doubt that there’s any shortage of such people.

It’s looking like I get to vote in two federal elections this year, one for each of my citizenships. In an attempt to be a good little citizen of a democracy, today I investigated the websites of the four declared candidates in my home riding. (Note to my American correspondents: a riding is the Canadian equivalent of a congressional district, more or less.)

Overall, it’s sort of an interesting field. The Liberal candidate‘s a former CFLer with a doctorate in biological/ecological sciences, but points against him for not bothering with a web page of his own. The NDP’s man has been a journalist and a pastor, has a good track record in corrections reform, but isn’t as funny as he thinks he is. The Greens have put up an engineer who’s becoming a teacher, owns and operates a small organic farm, and is building a straw bale house: very cool, if that’s the sort of thing you’re into, although again no individual web page.

And then there’s the Conservative candidate. Retired brigadier-general, undergrad degrees in math/physics and philosophy. On paper, a pretty good candidate. But there are aspects of his beliefs that seem a little incoherent to me.

To wit: he claims that self-reliance is something he believes in: the government should be one’s last resort in resolving problems. However, you’ll note on his positions page that he seems to call for significant government intervention in any number of areas. He feels that an MP should be permitted to vote freely on as many issues as possible, but should also support his (sic) party positions. (Self-reliance should be made of sterner stuff.) He believes in normative meritocracy, although how that’s going to happen without government intervention (i.e. laws) isn’t clear.

I know I’m being much tougher with this guy than with the others, but that’s only because every indication is that he’s going to win; the vast majority of the current riding was, before the lines were redrawn, part of the easternmost Alliance riding in Canada. He says a lot of the right things, but with enough weasel-room and backtracking that it’s not entirely clear what his true positions are. If it were just him — if the choice was honestly one of a representative for the riding — then I might even consider voting for him.

Of course it’s not just him. He’s in Harper’s party, and the implication of the bit about how an MP should vote their party line under most circumstances indicates to me that it doesn’t really matter how good a candidate this guy is personally, because it’s not him personally that one would be sending to the Hill.

You know what would be even better than having a recently-renovated stadium seating cinema right across the road from my apartment complex?

If they’d included proper sound insulation in the renovations.

As soon as they get around to indexing either this year’s Congressus or the current JCMCC, I’ll have more publications on MathSciNet than Ahmad Chalabi.

I’ve still got a couple to go before I can compete with Ted Kaczynski. OTOH, I’ve got a lower Erdos Number than either of them.

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’m a fan of the post-modern propaganda posters that various people have been designing over the past few years (for instance, the ones in Bill Maher’s book). If you are too, then go check out The Diebold Variations.

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.