A Popgun or the Crack of Doom?

"The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom." --Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar" (1837)

Hackers

Stuff about hackers:

1. The 1995 film Hackers.
2. "The Hacker Manifesto," from a 1986 edition of Phrack ezine
3. Wikipedia's entry on "Hacker (computer security)"

The Exxon Footnote

"From One Footnote, a Debate over the Tangles of Law, Science, and Money," from the New York Times

I have an opinion about this. The fact that Justice Souter's footnote is even remotely controversial is ludicrous. Exxon commissioned the research; Exxon funded the research; Exxon continued funding the research only when it said what they wanted it to say; legal representatives hired by Exxon were responsible for bringing the research before the Supreme Court. Exxon provided the idea, the means, and the conclusion. The only thing they did not do was conduct the research themselves. Therefore, the research is invalid. Period.

Bailout for Wooden Arrow Companies

One of the guys I traveled with last week told me that the $700 billion "bailout bill," passed in October, contained an earmark for companies that make bows and arrows for children. I didn't believe him. Pork-barrel spending is way too politically unpopular right now, and the public is scrutinizing this process way too closely, for this claim to be true, I thought.

H.R. 1424, "To provide authority for the Federal Government to purchase and insure certain types of troubled assets for the purposes of providing stability to and preventing disruption in the economy," Division C, Title V, Subtitle A, Section 503:

"Exemption from excise tax for certain wooden arrows designed for use by children."

Why study stories?

1. To determine what a story says about the culture from which it came.

2. To determine how a story from the past relates to a contemporary situation.

3. To determine how a story was received by different audiences at different times.

4. To determine an author's original intended meaning and purpose.

5. To determine how a story participates in a particular storytelling tradition or traditions.

6. To determine the relationship between a story's form and its content.

7. To determine a story's genre.

8. To determine the relationship between stories in different genres.

9. To determine the relationship between stories from different cultures.

10. To determine which stories are the best and why.

11. To determine how stories reflect ideologies, even when those stories are not overtly ideological.

12. To determine how stories reflect biases, stereotypes, and attitudes with respect to race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, or religion.

13. To determine how a story participates in, or subverts, a particular intellectual tradition or traditions, such as Marxism, feminism, or psychoanalysis.

14. To determine the relationship between stories and economic systems.

15. To determine the relationship between stories by different authors.

16. To determine a story's moral content.

17. To determine the role of symbols in stories.

18. To determine how stories utilize and reinterpret pre-existing symbols.

19. To determine the elements of a good story.

20. To determine how cultural practices like law, science, technology, and medicine shape the way stories are told and interpreted.

21. To determine how specific technological advances transform the act of storytelling.

(That's all I can think of right now.)

Simplifications

"To simplify something accurately, you've got to understand it deeply."
--Thomas Friedman, qtd. in The New Yorker

I love that quote, but the problem I run into almost daily is, how do you know when someone's simple explanation reflects deep understanding, and when it reflects simple-mindedness? I like it when people use simple analogies and plain language to explain complex systems. For people who have spent a lot of time studying complex systems, like the financial markets or the human genome, it is a real gift to be able to explain them simply to people who aren't as familiar with those systems. But simplicity is also a useful tool for people who want to pretend they know more about a subject than they do, for people who think they understand the subject better than they actually do, or for people who want to influence public opinion on the subject.

My general solution is to trust simple explanations from people with good credentials on the subject, and to be skeptical of simple explanations from people who probably don't understand the subject in a very nuanced way. But even that is occasionally problematic, since some of my acquaintances have an uncanny ability to understand complex systems just by keeping up with the news and talking to people, and other acquaintances have a tendency to think they know a lot about a system when they really only know a little about it.

Hate Crimes Against the Homeless

Here's an op-ed an intern and I wrote in response to an editorial in the Los Angeles Times:

The recent murder of John Robert McGraham, a 55-year-old homeless resident of Los Angeles' Mid-Wilshire area, is chilling testimony to the unique vulnerability that often accompanies homelessness. On October 9, McGraham, while sitting on the sidewalk, was doused with gasoline and set ablaze by an unidentified perpetrator. In spite of the assistance of passersby, McGraham failed to survive the attack.

A few weeks later, a similar occurrence took place in Long Beach, where five homeless individuals were shot dead in a homeless encampment.

Our organization, the National Coalition for the Homeless, has kept track of unprovoked attacks against the homeless such as these since 1999, when we released our first annual report on the topic. In our 2007 study, we reported that at least 160 homeless persons were violently attacked in that year--with at least 28 of those attacks resulting int he victims' deaths. While the nature of these attacks varies, they are most frequently committed by young men and teenagers against older male victims. Many attackers draw their inspiration from pop culture fads such as "Bumfights" videos and the YouTube phenomenon "Bum Hunters," in which actors assault, throw projectiles at, or set on fire unsuspecting, real-life homeless people. Only occasionally, according to our findings, are such attacks committed for material gain.

In response to mounting evidence that systematic, dehumanizing bias is at the heart of so many violent crimes against homeless persons, we advocate passage of the Hate Crime Against the Homeless Statistics Act (H.R. 2216) and its sister bill, the Hate Crimes Against the Homeless Enforcement Act (H.R. 2217). The former would direct the FBI to collect data on potential hate crimes against the homeless, while the latter would add "homeless status" to the list of protected categories under existing hate crime statutes--a list that currently includes "actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, disability, and sexual orientation."

Expanding hate crime laws to protect homeless individuals would indeed mandate stricter sentencing for bias-motivated attackers. Our judgment that hate crimes warrant more severe punishment than some other forms of crime--those motivated by retribution or material gain, for example--has been corroborated by the U.S. Supreme Court, who in 1993 unanimously agreed that "bias-motivated crimes are more likely to provoke retaliatory crimes, inflict distinct emotional harms on their victims, and incite community unrest." Furthermore, our statistics, measured against the FBI's indicate that a higher proportion of attacks against homeless individuals results in death than do those against individuals of all other protected categories combined.

More significant to us, though, is the federal government's recognition that dehumanization and neglect of homeless persons is a cultural problem that manifests itself at all levels of society, from laws to attitudes. It is this recognition, we suspect, that has earned our proposed legislation the co-sponsorship of 20 members of Congress and the support of over 150 national, state, and local organizations, including the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

It is not our desire to suggest that crimes against the homeless are categorically worse than crimes against anyone else. Whether or not the recent attacks in the Los Angeles area warrant the "hate crime" label, we are unable to say. Sadly, however, our research suggests that violent crimes against homeless victims, motivated by little more than prejudice and hate, are not without precedent. As long as it is within the realm of possibility that homeless individuals like McGraham have been targeted solely on the basis of their homeless status, the hate crime question should continue to be asked.

"How the Mobile Phone in Your Pocket is Helping to Pay for the Civil War in Congo"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/congo/3407217/How-the-mobile-phone-in-your-pocket-is-helping-to-pay-for-the-civil-war-in-Congo.html

Deep Thoughts about Genomics

"Scientists have learned that the canonical 'genes' account for an embarrassingly tiny part of the human genome: maybe 1 percent of the three billion paired subunits of DNA that are stuffed into nearly every cell of the body qualify as indisputable protein codes. Scientists are also learning that many of the gene-free regions of our DNA are far more loquacious than previously believed, far more willing to express themselves in ways that have nothing to do with protein manufacture."

Fascinating stuff. Especially since I spent so much time in biology and chemistry classes learning that genes are codes for protein synthesis. Four articles from the NY Times that I haven't read all the way through yet, but plan to do so in the near future:

"Scientists and Philosophers Find That 'Gene' Has a Multitude of Meanings"

"Now: The Rest of the Genome"

"In a Novel Theory of Mental Disorders, Parents' Genes Are in Competition"

"The Promise and Power of RNA"

Are Jack Handey jokes examples of parody or pastiche?

Both parody and pastiche are forms of imitation. The parodist, writes Fredric Jameson, "capitalizes on the uniqueness of [the subject's] styles and seizes on their idiosyncrasies and eccentricities to produce an imitation which mocks the original." Parody usually carries with it an ulterior motive: to satirize or cast ridicule on its subjects. In such cases, parody therefore carries with it "the feeling that there is a linguistic norm in contrast to which the styles of [its subjects] can be mocked." In other words, parody presupposes a norm, and satirizes deviations from that norm.

Pastiche is similar to parody in that it involves "the wearing of a stylistic mask," but contrary to parody, it is "a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody's ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic." In Jameson's words, pastiche is "blank parody.

After giving it some thought, I generally accept the distinction that parody is more humorous than pastiche. But then, what about Jack Handey jokes? Those are definitely more pastiche than parody, but they're also hilarious. Or am I wrong? Are they parody? Are they not hilarious?