Closer To The Ideal

Kind of funny, kind of odd. Darren Hoyt notes a Republican candidate re-using his Obama theme:

Today Geoff Fox tipped me off to something ironic: the website for Republican congressional candidate Daria Novak is using a WordPress theme I designed back in 2008 for Obama supporters. What’s interesting is that soon after Geoff made the observation, Novak’s web team removed all references to Obama from the CSS and templates, even changing the name of the /theme/ directory.

Darren Hoyt has a great write up about Dribble:

Finding intimacy among groups of friends and colleagues online isn’t always about limited numbers. Sometimes it’s just a matter of finding the right people. But once you’ve found an intimate place, how long can it last?

At some point in 2008-2009 everyone I’ve met in my entire 35 years got a Facebook account. Instead of trusted recent friends, my circle expanded to acquaintances from high school. People who I never intended on re-establishing contact were now privy to my every silly status update. I got self-conscious and had to create filters so that certain people didn’t get certain updates. This idea of relationship-filtering will continue being an uncomfortable part of our lives as social media grows.

Currently, Dribbble feels pretty intimate. Among the nearly 1000 members, there are still clusters of friends that form little subgroups. Within your trusted circle, you can be yourself and post private/client work without worrying much about it.

This intimacy is important as many of us designers spend our time maintaining an airtight wall of professionalism on our personal/portfolio sites. We publish only the most pixel-perfect portfolio samples. We still use the royal “we” when describing the work done at our one-man design studios. The web allows us to contrive whatever identity we want for ourselves.

Dribbble is a nice escape. You can be loose and be yourself. It’s more personal. There is no veil of professionalism. Because it is private, people post wacky stuff they might not

Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective. This is great stuff. The essay is ostensibly about how to handle the recording of gay marriage in a database. But it uses the issue of gay marriage to go through every classic issue of database design, from foreign keys to normalization to the degree of abstraction needed to handle polyamorous marriages. From now on, when I’ve got a friend trying to learn how to design databases, I will send them to this essay.

There are various objections to expanding the conventional, up-tight, as-God-intended “one man, one woman” notion of marriage but by far the least plainly bigoted ones I am aware of are the bureaucratic ones.

To be blunt, the systems aren’t set up to handle it. The paper forms have a space for the husband’s name and a space for the wife’s name. Married people carefully enter their details in block capitals and post the forms off to depressed paper-pushers who then type that information into software front-ends whose forms are laid out and named in precisely the same fashion. And then they hit “submit” and the information is filed away electronically in databases which simply keel over or belch integrity errors when presented with something so profound as a man and another man who love each other enough to want to file joint tax returns.

Speaking as a computery-type person, altering the paper forms is not my department. It’s probably expensive and there are probably millions of existing incorrect forms which would need returning or recycling or burning instead of using. Or maybe it’s simple. I don’t know. The real question from my perspective is how you store a marriage in a computer.

Altering your database schema to accommodate gay marriage can be easy or difficult depending on how smart you were when you originally set up your system to accommodate heterosexuality only. Let’s begin.

Sexual Reproduction for Gay Couples. If you take genetic material from both parents, and then fertilize an egg with that material, then you get a child that is biologically descended from both of its gay parents (or, if we are talking about 2 women, take genetic material from one woman and use it to fertilize an egg in the other woman).

A big surprise, found with birds:

It was previously thought that sex chromosomes in birds control whether a testis or ovary forms, with sexual traits then being determined by hormones.

The researchers, however, identified differences between male and female cells that control the development of sexual traits. The scientists have named the phenomenon, cell autonomous sex identity (CASI).

I wonder if this is true for mammals as well?

Here is a screen shot, note the yellow box that advertises their new book:

I pay $30 a month for Basecamp. I do not want ads on Basecamp. Not even ads from 37 Signals.

I am intrigued by the idea that some people are simply unable to learn to program:

It has taken us some time to dare to believe in our own results. It now seems to us, although we are aware that at this point we do not have sufficient data, and so it must remain a speculation, that what distinguishes the three groups in the first test is their different attitudes to meaninglessness.

Formal logical proofs, and therefore programs – formal logical proofs that particular computations are possible, expressed in a formal system called a programming language – are utterly meaningless. To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact: they are capable of seeing mathematical calculation problems in terms of rules, and can follow those rules wheresoever they may lead. The inconsistent group, on the other hand, looks for meaning where it is not. The blank group knows that it is looking at meaninglessness, and refuses to deal with it.

On LinkedIn, someone posted a job alert, saying they needed a PHP-GTK programmer. Below is one of the responses. I have managed teams in India, and I found it somewhat exhausting, partly because of the language barrier:

Hello:
Greetings!
How are you doing, I am contacting you with respect to the job you posted. I would like to get a chance to work together and to have an employee leasing contract in between our companies as I am so sure, its my privilege to gift you this message.

We facilitate remote employee leasing. We are so sure that this fruitful service is quiet good for you. You may not yet thinks about remote employees, there is no difference in between remote employee and in-house one except they works remotely. For remote employment, we start from $1400/- as a monthly salary for an individual expert.

I am expecting your reply in order to give you more and more samples of works we did for global standard clients. We are ready to give you many references from almost all the hot spots of the globe. Currently we have great clients from UK, USA, UAE, Astralia, etc.

Our site address is www.rispostaindia.com and you will be able to find our primary client list and our portfolio from http://www.rispostaindia.com/portfolio.php and http://www.rispostaindia.com/logos.php .

Please reply as we are waiting for a long term and reliable relation with you.

Wishing you a very great day!

–
Thanks and regards
Business Head
Risposta IT Services
www.rispostaindia.com

#19, ITES Habitate Centre,Kaloor – 17, Kochi, Kerala.India

I have never worked with Rispostaindia.com, so for all I know, they are fantastic. My own experiences with out -sourcing have left me ambivalent. When you need to communicate complex concepts, such as what a piece of software is suppose to do, minor misunderstandings build up into major headaches. Also, the firm we worked with seemed staffed mostly by very junior programmers – 21 and 22 year olds who had just finished some sort of training at a local technical institute.

This kind of thing really scares me:

They had a theory of the disease that made sense, fit the evidence, but was utterly wrong.

I am interested in cases where technology goes backwards and important scientific break throughs are forgotten, so this story about scurvy got my attention:

Now, I had been taught in school that scurvy had been conquered in 1747, when the Scottish physician James Lind proved in one of the first controlled medical experiments that citrus fruits were an effective cure for the disease. From that point on, we were told, the Royal Navy had required a daily dose of lime juice to be mixed in with sailors’ grog, and scurvy ceased to be a problem on long ocean voyages.

But here was a Royal Navy surgeon in 1911 apparently ignorant of what caused the disease, or how to cure it. Somehow a highly-trained group of scientists at the start of the 20th century knew less about scurvy than the average sea captain in Napoleonic times. Scott left a base abundantly stocked with fresh meat, fruits, apples, and lime juice, and headed out on the ice for five months with no protection against scurvy, all the while confident he was not at risk. What happened? …

This pattern of fresh meat preventing scurvy would be a consistent one in Arctic exploration. It defied the common understanding of scurvy as a deficiency in vegetable matter. Somehow men could live for years on a meat-only diet and remain healthy, provided that the meat was fresh.

This is a good example of how the very ubiquity of vitamin C made it hard to identify. Though scurvy was always associated with a lack of greens, fresh meat contains adequate amounts of vitamin C, with particularly high concentrations in the organ meats that explorers considered a delicacy. Eat a bear liver every few weeks and scurvy will be the least of your problems.

But unless you already understand and believe in the vitamin model of nutrition, the notion of a trace substance that exists both in fresh limes and bear kidneys, but is absent from a cask of lime juice because you happened to prepare it in a copper vessel, begins to sound pretty contrived.

Doctors of the era looked at this puzzling evidence and wondered. Other diseases had recently been shown to have their source in bacterial infection. The bacterial model was new, and had already had spectacular success in identifying and treating diseases like typhus, tuberculosis, and cholera. What if the cause of scruvy had also been misunderstood? What if instead of a deficiency disease, scurvy was actually a kind of chronic food poisoning from bacterial contamination of meat? Thus was born the ptomaine theory of scurvy, and Koettlitz became its enthusiastic backer

Cramster looks like an impressive resource for students looking for help. I am especially impressed with the number of textbooks that they are able to help with, for every subject, such math. Things like this make me think I should stay out of the education market, though it is a field I’ve thought of getting into.

Caterina Fake on the New York startup scene

Matt Mireles advances the classic arguments for why NYC is not a good place for a startup in his piece for Business Insider — raising money is hard, and talent is scarce — but I’d like to make a couple of points to the contrary

Read the whole thing.

It is interesting that 2 people can look at the same thing and see such different things:

I don’t think it’s an accident that 7NC Luxury Cruises appeal mostly to older people. I don’t mean decrepitly old, but like fiftyish people for whom their own mortality is something more than an abstraction. Most of the exposed bodies to be seen all over the daytime Nadir were in various stages of disintegration. And the ocean itself turns out to be one enormous engine of decay. Seawater corrodes vessels with amazing speed—rusts them, exfoliates paint, strips varnish, dulls shine, coats ships’ hulls with barnacles and kelp and a vague and ubiquitous nautical snot that seems like death incarnate. We saw some real horrors in port, local boats that looked as if they had been dipped in a mixture of acid and shit, scabbed with rust and goo, ravaged by what they float in….

Here’s the thing: A vacation is a respite from unpleasantness, and since consciousness of death and decay are unpleasant, it may seem weird that the ultimate American fantasy vacation involves being plunked down in an enormous primordial stew of death and decay.

Or maybe the sea is abundant with life? Maybe some organisms die but are then eaten by other organisms which then grow? Things change, I won’t argue that, but if an 60 kilogram woman dies and becomes 60 kilograms of bacteria, then the world still has the same amount of life, merely in a different form. It works the other way too, of course, things die, get absorbed into the soil, get absorbed into some stalks of wheat, get turned into some bread that I eat, get absorbed into who I am, and thus allow me to type these words. The blog entry I linked to was called “Things fall apart”. But it seems describe as much life as death.

In 1994 I was living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and a friend of mine, a biologist, told me that it had been discovered that some viruses had receptors that allowed them to listen to the hormones that humans emit when under stress. That was my introduction to the idea that organisms listen to each other. Researchers have since discovered a great deal more:

But it’s Bjarnsholt’s latest discovery that reveals microbes’ gift for language: the bacteria aren’t just talking amongst themselves, but also quietly listening in on signals sent by their human host. So when a cavalry of white blood cells arrives to repel the invading bacteria, the entrenched biofilm senses their presence, and launches a coordinated counterattack (Microbiology, vol 155, p 3500). The microbes release deadly compounds called rhamnolipids, which burst the white blood cells, killing them before they can even take aim, says Bjarnsholt, who is at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

This of course suggests new kinds of treatments:

Then there’s our own immune system’s battle to prevent P. aeruginosa making itself at home in our lungs. Bjarnsholt is hunting for the signal P. aeruginosa uses to “listen out” for white blood cells, and ways to block it. He doesn’t think of the bacteria as being physically aware of their hosts. To them, the signals they detect are just foreign compounds they have to fend off. But it’s certainly a far more sophisticated take on the host-pathogen relationship than we’re used to, notes Atkinson. “Rather than the pathogen just piling into the host cell and taking over its DNA, it’s about signal production, interception – and maybe even coercion of the host to do something that it wouldn’t normally do.”

Of course, some bacteria is friendly to humans:

Many of the early examples of cross-kingdom communication that Atkinson and Williams catalogued are less than congenial, but there is also good evidence for cooperative interaction between bacteria and their hosts, says Atkinson – particularly between ourselves and our microbiome, the huge population of bacteria that live in us and on us.

These days we’re all well acquainted with the millions of microbes lining our insides. Yogurt adverts have taught us nothing if not to love the friendly bacteria which line our guts, helping to keep nastier bugs at bay. Microbes don’t just make themselves at home in the intestines, however. They’re in your mouth, up your nose, and covering your skin, all the while releasing a cacophony of quorum-sensing signals.

Atkinson thinks our own cells exploit this same signalling system to monitor and cajole our personal population of microbes, just as they eavesdrop on and manipulate us. In other words, we don’t passively host this bacterial colony, but actively engage it in conversation. We’ve evolved together, he says. “We have to consider that we’re intrinsically linked.”

Since there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of words (chemicals) in use among these organisms, it is going to take a lot of work to learn this new vocabulary:

The team is using an imaging system based on mass spectrometry to detect swathes of signals at the same time. They grow their bacteria on a stainless steel plate, and use a laser to vaporise their signalling molecules, feeding these into a mass spectrometer to catalogue the molecules present.

As proof of principle, Dorrestein and Straight have mapped the interactions between two species of soil-dwelling bacteria (Nature Chemical Biology, vol 5, p 885). Even in this simple case, the instrument detected as many as 100 different signalling molecules fired off by the two bacteria, only 10 of which the team managed to match to known molecules. Despite the huge scale of the problem, the team is already starting to translate their work into inter-kingdom studies, probing the interactions between bacteria and cells of the human immune system. By imaging cross-talk between different species, they even hope to identify inhibitors for Staphylococcus aureus, the hospital superbug that has evolved to defend itself against whole groups of our most effective antibiotics.

I’d guess that before the year 2100 humans will figure out ways of living for very long periods. By then, it seems likely we will unravel the puzzle of the tortoise and figure out what metabolic strategies are in use in long-lived species, and which of these might also be usable in humans. I was interested to read that last year a drug was found that does seem to extend life-span in some mammals:

One of 2009’s most significant breakthroughs in biogerontology (or in any field; q.v. Science, WIRED) last year was the announcement that the macrolide drug rapamycin can extend longevity in mice.

More specifically, rapamycin can accomplish this when administered to adult, wildtype mice. In other words, no genetic modification or early-life intervention is necessary, making rapamycin one of the first compounds that meets the criteria for an anti-aging drug that could be used for people who are already alive and well down the road toward aging themselves.

The lifespan extension achieved is modest (~10%), but this is more impressive in light of the fact that the mice were quite old at the time treatment began, and the study used only a single dose rate. Future studies will undoubtedly seek to optimize the dose and regimen with the goal of achieving greater enhancement of lifespan.

One thing I note about long-lived species is that they keep growing. The rule seems universal – trees, tortoises, some types of fish – every species that has an exceptionally long life span also keeps growing in size. There is no fixed, final form that one can associate with adulthood. For humans, of course, our size is fairly fixed – nearly all adults are between 5 feet and 6 feet, 6 inches. Perhaps if we just kept growing, we’d live to be 200. But then, I suspect, we’d end up with some terrible spinal pain and injuries. Humans are not designed to be 10 feet tall. Maybe long-life is reserved for those species who have a structure that can comfortably keep growing.

There is a story in the Economist about the practice of sex-selection by parents having children. I find it interesting that India and China have felt the need to ban the practice, but Sweden has legalized it:

The use of sex-selective abortion was banned in India in 1994 and in China in 1995. It is illegal in most countries (though Sweden legalised the practice in 2009). But since it is almost impossible to prove that an abortion has been carried out for reasons of sex selection, the practice remains widespread. An ultrasound scan costs about $12, which is within the scope of many—perhaps most—Chinese and Indian families. In one hospital in Punjab, in northern India, the only girls born after a round of ultrasound scans had been mistakenly identified as boys, or else had a male twin.

The preference for boys is universal. Even in the United States, there remains a preference for boys – a couple that has 2 daughters is 15% more likely to get a divorce than a couple that has 2 sons. I would guess that some sub-cultures in America skew the results by having a preference that is stronger than that 15% indicates.

However, I think the practice should be legal everywhere. Why not allow parents take this to whatever extreme they want? If a society ends up with 3 boys for every girl, then perhaps the parents will begin to re-think their attitudes? Apparently some areas are close to having 3 boys for every girl:

If you take just second children, however, which are permitted in the province, the ratio leaps to 146 boys for every 100 girls. And for the relatively few of births where parents are permitted a third child, the sex ratio is 167. Even this startling ratio is not the outer limit. In Anhui province, among third children, there are 227 boys for every 100 girls, while in Beijing municipality (which also permits exceptions in rural areas), the sex ratio reaches a hard-to-credit 275. There are almost three baby boys for each baby girl.

Perhaps the value of women will rise, when they are scarce enough? Apparently this is already happening, in small ways:

Violence is not the only consequence. In parts of India, the cost of dowries is said to have fallen (see article). Where people pay a bride price (ie, the groom’s family gives money to the bride’s), that price has risen.

The thing is, this is clearly a trend that can not continue forever. At some point there will be so many boys and so few girls that a re-thinking of the value of the various genders becomes somewhat inevitable. This apparently happened in South Korea:

Yet the story of the destruction of baby girls does not end in deepest gloom. At least one country—South Korea—has reversed its cultural preference for sons and cut the distorted sex ratio (see chart 3).

I would guess that the men of this generation will grow up opposed to this practice. These are the men who will lose out the most – pure math indicates that a huge number of them will never be able to marry. By the time these men are 25, they will likely be committed to ending the practice. They will know how much harm it can do. As China’s one-child policy makes clear, the government can create distorted incentives when it intervenes in a couple’s decisions about what children to have. I think Sweden got this one right – the government should never be in the business of telling a couple what kind of children they can or can not have.

Yesterday I wrote that patents are often bad for the economy.

Today, I see this article about how patents delayed the Industrial Revolution:

In late 1764, while repairing a small Newcomen steam engine, the idea of allowing steam to expand and condense in separate containers sprang into the mind of James Watt. He spent the next few months in unceasing labor building a model of the new engine. In 1768, after a series of improvements and substantial borrowing, he applied for a patent on the idea, requiring him to travel to London in August. He spent the next six months working hard to obtain his patent. It was finally awarded in January of the following year. Nothing much happened by way of production until 1775. Then, with a major effort supported by his business partner, the rich industrialist Matthew Boulton, Watt secured an act of Parliament extending his patent until the year 1800. The great statesman Edmund Burke spoke eloquently in Parliament in the name of economic freedom and against the creation of unnecessary monopoly — but to no avail.[1] The connections of Watt’s partner Boulton were too solid to be defeated by simple principle.

Once Watt’s patents were secured and production started, a substantial portion of his energy was devoted to fending off rival inventors. In 1782, Watt secured an additional patent, made “necessary in consequence of … having been so unfairly anticipated, by [Matthew] Wasborough in the crank motion” [2]. More dramatically, in the 1790s, when the superior Hornblower engine was put into production, Boulton and Watt went after him with the full force of the legal system.[3]

During the period of Watt’s patents the United Kingdom added about 750 horsepower of steam engines per year. In the thirty years following Watt’s patents, additional horsepower was added at a rate of more than 4,000 per year. Moreover, the fuel efficiency of steam engines changed little during the period of Watt’s patent; while between 1810 and 1835 it is estimated to have increased by a factor of five.[4]…

In most histories, James Watt is a heroic inventor, responsible for the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The facts suggest an alternative interpretation. Watt is one of many clever inventors working to improve steam power in the second half of the eighteenth century. After getting one step ahead of the pack, he remained ahead not by superior innovation, but by superior exploitation of the legal system. The fact that his business partner was a wealthy man with strong connections in Parliament, was not a minor help.

Was Watt’s patent a crucial incentive needed to trigger his inventive genius, as the traditional history suggests? Or did his use of the legal system to inhibit competition set back the industrial revolution by a decade or two? More broadly, are the two essential components of our current system of intellectual property — patents and copyrights — with all of their many faults, a necessary evil we must put up with to enjoy the fruits of invention and creativity? Or are they just unnecessary evils, the relics of an earlier time when governments routinely granted monopolies to favored courtiers? That is the question we seek to answer.

RafalLos writes:

Now – without doing any actual hacking, I immediately noticed that something was wrong. While it’s hard to read the SQL error – it reads “ADODB.Field error ‘80020009′ Either BOF or EOF is True, or the current record has been deleted. Requested operation requires a current record. /menu.asp line 0″ Without even pulling out the Google search I already knew what that meant – I wasn’t the first one there with malicious intent.

Immediately the folks at the back of the room took notice of the error, and started asking each other if anyone had heard that the site was having issues, or was down…

I decided to quit, in case this site was down intentionally, or something was actually broken… but the gentlemen in the front row pressed me to continue, to “see if there was actually a vulnerability”. Quickly I took a simple glance at the URL line, and appended the tell-tale test for SQL Injection, the single tick ‘ .

Marco Arment says software patents are bad for the economy:

I’ve considered the arguments by Stallman, John Gruber, and Tim Bray on software patents, and I side with Stallman in that software patents are inherently problematic and are a net loss for society.

The major difference in their arguments is that, while all three mention the realities and dysfunctions of the patent system, Stallman focuses strongly on the difference between what it’s intended to do and what actually happens. He also illustrates the reality of trying to develop any nontrivial software in a patent-filled landscape.

Many argue that inventors should be protected and incentivized by patents, otherwise they would stop inventing. It’s a nice theory, but it doesn’t hold up for software.1

We can argue about what the system should do, or what it theoretically does, or what it ideally does, but that’s an academic exercise at best. To evaluate whether software patents are a net gain for society, we need to evaluate their reality, which differs quite a bit from most arguments for why patents are necessary.

I’d go further. Most patents are bad most of the time. They are dangerous and need to be limited, no matter what industry we are talking about.

Patent is a government monopoly. In a liberal society, monopolies are usually seen as bad things. Monopolies, in general, can lead to non-optimal allocations of resources, and when the monopoly is defended by the government there is no way for any entreprenuer, no matter how talented, to offer a competitive alternative. Monopolies encourage rent-maximazation rather than innovation (in other words, the owner of the monopoly simply sucks up as much money as possible, and feels little need to innovate or reinvest their profits).

The Founding Fathers of America were on intimate terms with the harm that arose from government granted monopolies. At a stretch, we could interpret the whole American Revolution as a patent dispute, for it was when the British government granted a monopoly on trade to British merchants that the Americans were first moved to revolt. One of the first and largest American protests was the Boston Tea Party of 1773, during which the British East India Company, a large multi-national corporation that, at that time, had dealings in almost every nation on Earth, had its Boston inventories of tea destroyed. (In this case, the East India Company had a monopoly on “tax free” trade, whereas all American merchants had to pay an import tax, and therefore were at a competitive disadvantage. For instance, in 1768, John Hancock’s ship ‘Liberty’ was seized by customs officials and he was charged with smuggling.)

Because the Americans had suffered so much at the hands of government granted monopolies, they were commited to placing extremely careful limits on their newly independent government’s ability to grant monopolies. Thus in Article 1 of the Constitution, Section 8, they wrote:

“To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries”

The purpose of this section was likely meant to be two-fold: to allow government granted monopolies in one, limited, case, and to ban them in all other cases. Although the monopoly abuses of the Stuart Kings are now forgotten, they were vivid for the Founding Fathers In fact, in 1774, when the government of Virginia asked Thomas Jefferson to write up its formal letter of complaint to the British King, Jefferson starts off with the early history of Virginia and the Stuart Kings: “A family of princes was then on the British throne, whose treasonable crimes against their people brought on them afterwards the exertion of those sacred and sovereign rights of punishment reserved in the hands of the people for cases of extreme necessity.” That is to say, the King had to be killed because he commited great crimes against the people and oppressed them politically and economically. Among those crimes was an extreme abuse of the government’s ability to sell monopolies to the hightest bidder, as described in this passage from Christopher Hill’s book Century of Revolution:

It is difficult for us to picture for ourselves the life of a man living in a house built with monopoly bricks, with windows of monopoly glass; heated with monopoly coal, burning in a grate made of monopoly iron. His walls were lined with monopoly tapestries. He slept on monopoly feathers, did his hair with monopoly brushes. He washed his face with monopoly soap, his clothes in monopoly starch. He dressed in monopoly lace, monopoly linen, monopoly belts, and monopoly gold thread. His hat was monopoly beaver, with a monopoly band. His clothes were held up with monopoly belts, monopoly buttons, and monopoly pins. They were dyed with monopoly dyes. He ate monopoly butter, monopoly currants, monopoly red herrings, monopoly salmon, and monopoly lobsters. His food was seasoned with monopoly salt, monopoly pepper, and monopoly vinegar. Out of monopoly glasses he drank monopoly wines and monopoly spirits; our of pewter mugs made from monopoly tin he drank monopoly beer made from monopoly hops, kept in monopoly barrels or monopoly bottles, sold in monopoly-licensed ale-houses. He smoked monopoly tobacco in monopoly pipes, played with monopoly dice or monopoly cards, or on monopoly lute strings. He wrote with monopoly pens, on monopoly paper; read (possibly through monopoly reading glasses by the light of monopoly candles) monopoly printed books, including monopoly Bibles, printed on paper made from monopoly collected rags, bound in sheepskin dressed with monopoly alum. He exercised himself with monopoly golf balls and in monopoly licensed bowling alleys. Mice were caught in monopoly mousetraps.

…Monopolies interfered with the normal channels of trade. By the late 1630s, the economy was suffering. “If such a system had been maintained,” Mr Unwin wrote of Stuart economic regulations in general, “the Industrial Revolution would never have happened.”

Against this the citizens of the British Empire revolted, killed their King, and, after an interlude, passed the English Bill of Rights. Jefferson’s point was that the rights described in the Bill Of Rights applied to the colonists as much as to the citizens in the home country, but the British Parliment disagreed. Therefore when the colonists won their independence and set up their own government, they were keen on ensuring for themsevles certain rights, and protecting themselves from certain abuses, among them the abuses of monopoly.

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution makes clear that the American Federal government will not be handing out monoplies on tin, rags, golf balls and butter. Monopolies will be reserved for one limited case: “securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries”. The Founding Father’s knew that government granted monopolies were dangerous, and needed to be carefully limited. This is a bit of wisdom that the US government has largely forgotten in recent decades. Patents are dangerous, and need to be carefully limited. For many industries, they should never be allowed.

Jim Stogdill writes:

The question of data privacy and ownership comes up over and over in our Yammer discussions. The last time it came up the thread ran for nearly 100 responses. Even though the typical post is something like “Who is using Grails?” or “Is the X application slow for everyone today or just for me?” data privacy is simply one of the biggest concerns going for a lot of companies these days. The mere suggestion that our data isn’t under our control is a big deal.

This point was demonstrated to me in a personal and compelling way during my first week on Yammer. I mentioned a client meeting so that I could share a few tidbits with colleagues. Hours later I was surprised and dismayed when a Google search revealed that my comments had been re-posted to the friendfeed of someone I didn’t even know. Someone on our network had written a quick and dirty app to follow his Yammer RSS feed and re-post everything to friendfeed. Then for good measure he followed everyone in our network. When I “politely suggested” he take it down he equally politely explained to me that I just didn’t get Web 2.0.

I think about this in relation to WP Questions. We haven’t yet offered truly private uses of the software, but I suspect that is something we will need to offer soon, if we are going to capture all the niches to which such software can be used.

I see this article about how cells repair double-strand breaks in the DNA:

Humans utilize at least two major pathways to repair DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs): homologous recombination (HR) and non-homologous end joining (NHEJ), and there are at least two genetically discrete sub-pathways of NHEJ: classical-NHEJ (C-NHEJ) and alternative-NHEJ (A-NHEJ). Since the products generated by each of these three repair (sub)pathways differ substantially from one another, it is biologically critical that certain DSBs are repaired by certain DSB repair pathways. How this pathway choice is made in human cells was unclear. In this study, knockout human cell lines that are defective in core C-NHEJ factors were generated. These cell lines are by-and-large extremely deficient in DSB repair, proving that C-NHEJ is the major DSB repair pathway in human cells. Unexpectedly, cell lines reduced for the C-NHEJ factors Ku70 or Ku86, carried out proficient DSB repair because of hyperactive A-NHEJ. In published work we have also demonstrated that Ku suppresses HR throughout the genome and at telomeres. Collectively, these data imply that Ku ensures that C-NHEJ is the major DSB repair pathway by two mechanisms: i) enabling C-NHEJ and ii) by actively suppressing HR and A-NHEJ. Thus, Ku is the critical regulator of pathway choice in human somatic cells.

Since double strand breaks can lead to cell senescence, then Ku factors must play a role in how people ages. If I was a biology researcher, I’d follow up on this to find the connection between Ku and senescence.

Jason Pelker makes a good point about the frequency with which projects get underestimated:

90% of the time, the freelancer is going to get screwed on the estimate. My guess is that 9.9% of the time, the client gets screwed (I use the term loosely—as long as the site is completed within the contractual constraints of the project, the client is generally happy). That leaves 0.1% of all estimates that accurately reflected the correct amount of time it took to accomplish the project. Of course, any time valuable should to be taken with a grain of salt because what takes an hour today might take 90 minutes or 45 minutes tomorrow depending on all external factors, not the least of which is distraction.

The bigger point is that clients hate unexpected change, especially a price increase due to underestimation on your part. There are few things most likely to guarantee that you won’t be asked to do second project with a client than raising the cost of your invoice halfway through a project (in fact, most contracts aren’t going to permit this anyway, so again, you’ll likely eat the extra time and costs yourself, anyway).

Using a Retainer to Eliminate Guessing

Herein lies the beauty of the retainer block. You might already be using retainers after the project is complete for tasks like website maintenance or social media marketing (if you’re not, you should—it’s a great way to earn residual income).

I have suggested to a number of clients that they simply pay me a flat monthly fee, but then they worry about the months when not much is changing – why would they want to pay me then? Estimation is a point of pain in the relationship between developers and clients. It is difficult to educate the clients so that they can understand why things cost as much as they do. Its tragic how many times I’ve seen a potential client go with the lowest bidder, knowing full well that the bidder was planning on ripping the client off, because the price was far to low to do what the client actually wanted.

Here is a great post on extending a blog plugin for Symfony. There is a new hack attack going around for WordPress, so I’m thinking about switching to Symfony for my blogging.

A theory that reduces all measurement by any kind of science to 4 basic types. I find this an interesting way to organize the different kinds of mental activities involved in the different branches of science.

Nominal scale

At the nominal scale, i.e., for a nominal category, one uses labels; for example, rocks can be generally categorized as igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic. For this scale some valid operations are equivalence and set membership. Nominal measures offer names or labels for certain characteristics. …

Ordinal scale

In this scale type, the numbers assigned to objects or events represent the rank order (1st, 2nd, 3rd etc.) of the entities assessed. An example of ordinal measurement is the results of a horse race, which say only which horses arrived first, second, third, etc. but include no information about times. Another is the Mohs scale of mineral hardness, which characterizes the hardness of various minerals through the ability of a harder material to scratch a softer one, saying nothing about the actual hardness of any of them…

Interval scale

Quantitative attributes are all measurable on interval scales, as any difference between the levels of an attribute can be multiplied by any real number to exceed or equal another difference. A highly familiar example of interval scale measurement is temperature with the Celsius scale. In this particular scale, the unit of measurement is 1/100 of the difference between the melting temperature and the boiling temperature of water at atmospheric pressure. The “zero point” on an interval scale is arbitrary; and negative values can be used. The formal mathematical term is an affine space (in this case an affine line). Variables measured at the interval level are called “interval variables” or sometimes “scaled variables” as they have units of measurement…

Ratio measurement

Most measurement in the physical sciences and engineering is done on ratio scales. Mass, length, time, plane angle, energy and electric charge are examples of physical measures that are ratio scales. The scale type takes its name from the fact that measurement is the estimation of the ratio between a magnitude of a continuous quantity and a unit magnitude of the same kind (Michell, 1997, 1999). Informally, the distinguishing feature of a ratio scale is the possession of a non-arbitrary zero value. For example, the Kelvin temperature scale has a non-arbitrary zero point of absolute zero, which is denoted 0K and is equal to -273.15 degrees Celsius. This zero point is non arbitrary as the particles that compose matter at this temperature have zero kinetic energy….

How to lose, in this case, Sun losing out to Linux:

Linux the operating system project completely confused Sun, even the Sun engineers, who you would have thought at least understood what Linux was trying to do. The best example of this is the wonderful email exchange between Linux kernel hacker David Miller, who at the time was one of the Linux Sparc maintainers, and Bryan Cantrill, a Solaris engineer. It’s worth quoting:

David Miller wrote (at the end of a long email explaining how Sparc Linux used cache optimizations to beat Solaris on performance):

“One final note. When you have to deal with SunSOFT to report a bug, how “important” do you have (ie. Fortune 500?) to be and how big of a customer do you have to be (multi million dollar purchases?) to get direct access to Sun’s Engineers at Sun Quentin?  With Linux, all you have to do is send me or one of the other SparcLinux hackers an email and we will attend to your bug in due time.  We have too much pride in our system to ignore you and not fix the bug.”

To which Bryan Cantrill replied with this amazing retort:

“Have you ever kissed a girl?”

Talk about missing the point and underestimating the competition. You can read the entire exchange.

Bryan Cantrill gets to sound macho by implying he spends more time with women than Miller, but Cantrill’s company has ceased to exist. Hubris leads to defeat.

What the hell? I thought restricting XMLHttpRequest to the current domain was one of the central security features Javascript enforced? Of course, I’ve found it a pain to always use the script tag hack to get info from other domains. So I’m surprised to see this in Gecko/
FireFox:

XMLHttpRequest
Cross Domain XMLHttpRequest
Allows XMLHttpRequest to other domains

Derek Lowe is in awe of anyone with the courage to work with Dioxygen Difluoride, and so he is impressed with this 1962 effort from A. G. Streng of Temple University:

And he’s just getting warmed up, if that’s the right phrase to use for something that detonates things at -180C (that’s -300 Fahrenheit, if you only have a kitchen thermometer). The great majority of Streng’s reactions have surely never been run again. The paper goes on to react FOOF with everything else you wouldn’t react it with: ammonia (”vigorous”, this at 100K), water ice (explosion, natch), chlorine (”violent explosion”, so he added it more slowly the second time), red phosphorus (not good), bromine fluoride, chlorine trifluoride (say what?), perchloryl fluoride (!), tetrafluorohydrazine (how on Earth. . .), and on, and on. If the paper weren’t laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you’d swear it was the work of a violent lunatic. I ran out of vulgar expletives after the second page. A. G. Streng, folks, absolutely takes the corrosive exploding cake, and I have to tip my asbestos-lined titanium hat to him.

Even Streng had to give up on some of the planned experiments, though (bonus dormitat Strengus?). Sulfur compounds defeated him, because the thermodynamics were just too titanic. Hydrogen sulfide, for example, reacts with four molecules of FOOF to give sulfur hexafluoride, 2 molecules of HF and four oxygens. . .and 433 kcal, which is the kind of every-man-for-himself exotherm that you want to avoid at all cost. The sulfur chemistry of FOOF remains unexplored, so if you feel like whipping up a batch of Satan’s kimchi, go right ahead.

The advantage of focusing on a niche.

In fact, you might be better off in a tiny niche that seems like it’s too small to be viable, because it’s likely under the radar for almost everyone else, except your audience. So the next time you find yourself thinking about how much you love polka-dotted socks made in Middle-Eastern countries, or Middle-Eastern country music singers who wear polka-dotted socks, think about starting a blog on the topic. You never know where it might go.

This is pretty funny, except, sadly, it is wrong:

Strictly speaking the complaint was phrased in terms of “diversity”. This is the peculiar diversity of the American academy, where a gay Jewish man in New York, an Englishman in London, a 4th generation zainichi kankokujin (ethnically Korean who was born in Japan), and an Irish Catholic dogmatist living in a rice field in Central Japan are so close they are practically brothers. True diversity, of course, is the 5-member iStockPhoto of attractive twenty-somethings sitting on the college quad who check different boxes on the demographic inventory and think alike in every way that matters.

That is a good joke about how diversity is often defined in the US, but my friends in the Academy are generally showing more nuance, especially these last 4 or 5 years. The true stereotype being attacked here is the one formulated mostly by marketing departments at corporations across the land. The iStockPhoto described sounds like something out of the Apple marketing division, no doubt used to promote iPhones.

This is a good question:

If demographic diversity is a proxy for diversity of thought, is there some reason we’re not measuring diversity of thought? Is it hard to measure somehow?

Yes, it is hard to measure, especially if you want to measure diversity of good ideas. It is impossible to measure diversity of good ideas when you are hiring, because only the passage of time will reveal if an idea was good or not. Starting with a diversity of staff is form of buying insurance – get diverse staff and hopefully you will get a diversity of thought.

Short term anecdotal evidence is bad:

I mean, I would be sympathetic to “We can’t build products for women if we don’t have more women in the room” if it weren’t so laughably false. (Context if you need it: 90% of my customers are ladies. They’re also older, better educated, less coastal, and more religious than would be anticipated of the customer base of most B2C startups. I’m pretty much your typical 27 year old male engineer… well, for certain quirky values of “typical”.)

Diversity of thought is useful in the same way diversity of genetic traits is useful – it is at its most useful in a crisis, when you face an inflection point. Therefore, it plays out mostly over the long term. You need 15 years of data before anecdotal data begins to carry weight. You need to survive a crisis.

My beef with the discourse of “diversity” in a nutshell: it screams “give us more women” and whispers “give us more women like us”. We want more women to be early stage startup employees working for equity and battling code until 2 AM in the morning.

Not sure who the word “us” refers to. I’ve read arguments that career trajectories should be reshaped to allow parents to both work and spend time with their family. But, to me, the question of “Why are there no women in tech” is less interesting than “Why are there less women in tech than 20 years ago?” One can’t argue “It’s biological” when one is comparing one group of women to another.

But my gut instinct has always been that people avoid joining startups because joining startups sucks. The question isn’t what are we doing that’s keeping ladies out of the Valley, gentlemen. The question should be why in God’s name are we still here.

A common rhetorical technique – Phillip Greenspun tried the same thing here. Also, pointless. As long as men are willing to do startups, it remains a valid issue to ask why are there so few women.

Your sales pitch as a startup is “Turn your back on all that! We’ll work you 100 hours a week, pay you nothing while requring you to live in a freakishly expensive area, give you social status one rung above the homeless, take two to three years of your life, ruin your relationships, and with better than 90% probability subject you to the most crushing defeat of your professional career with no lateral move except into doing the same thing over again.”

Maybe there is something in this. The bit about “100 hours” is nonsense – I’ve got 3 female friends who became doctors, all of them had to work an endless stretch of 70 to 90 hour weeks. Women are not afraid of working extremely long hours. Possibly the extreme riskiness of startups plays some role, though I’d be curious how that risk interacts with gender. My friends who became doctors at least knew that if they could make it through then the rest of their future would be relatively assured.

If we fix this, it will result in more ladies at the margin seeing startups as an attractive career choice. It might not change the percentages in the Valley. Heck, it might even make it more skewed towards the guys. I don’t profess to know and, honestly, I don’t really care that much either — it is worth doing regardless for the benefits to human welfare.

True, most of the advice is good in terms of human welfare. I suspect most of it is wholly irrelevant to gender issues.

Interesting:

This year 2.25 million Americans will get married—and a million will get divorced. Could birth control be to blame for some of these breakups? Recent research suggests that the contraceptive pill—which prevents women from ovulating by fooling their body into believing it is pregnant—could affect which types of men women desire. Going on or off the pill during a relationship, therefore, may tempt a woman away from her man.

It’s all about scent. Hidden in a man’s smell are clues about his major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes, which play an important role in immune system surveillance. Studies suggest that females prefer the scent of males whose MHC genes differ from their own, a preference that has probably evolved because it helps offspring survive: couples with different MHC genes are less likely to be related to each other than couples with similar genes are, and their children are born with more varied MHC profiles and thus more robust immune systems.

This is also the main reason that monogamy is rare in the animal kingdom. There are only a few dozen species that practice true monogamy. For females, there is the drive to get diversity of MHC in their children, therefore there is a drive to have children with different males. Only in those rare cases where the task of raising a child faces extra special challenges (like the brutal cold of Antarctica, for penguins, or the extremely prolonged immaturity of human children, due to their huge brains) do males and females team up to raise the child together.

George Orwell describes a school in Pennsylvania (a bit of parody on my part, and then, afterward, the original text):

Inside his bedroom a voice was reading a list of figures which had something to with recent school team scores, from various sports. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. The student turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the built-in computer it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way to turn it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagerness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were part of the uniform worn at the School. His hair was fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and the cold of the winter that had just ended.

Outside, even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no color in anything except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black-mustachioed face of the principal gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house front immediately opposite. SCHOOL OFFICIALS ARE WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into the student’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering th single word DARE. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a blue-bottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the Drug Task Force snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Drug Task Force mattered.

Behind the student’s back, the voice from the built-in computer was still babbling away about various team victories. The built-in computer received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that the student made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision that the medal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the School Officials plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

The student kept his back turned to the built-in computer. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometer away the Central High school, his place of education, towered vast and white above the grim landscape. This, he thought, with a sort of vague distaste – these were the suburbs of Philadelphia.

The Central High school was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, into the air. From where the student stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the School:

DRUGS LEAD TO DEATH

SEX LEADS TO DEATH

FAILURE TO GET INTO COLLEGE LEADS TO DEATH

…
For some reason the built-in computer in the bedroom was in an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which the student was now sitting and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, the student was able to remain outside the range of the built-in computer, so far as sight went. He could still be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.

But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer. It was peculiarly beautiful book. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it. Students were supposed not to go into junk shops (”Drug dealers could be in there,” it was often said), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things such as authentically vintage clothing which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance up and down the street and then had slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home in his backpack. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary, a paper one which the School Officials would be unable to read. This was illegal (since there were no longer any rights for students), and if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by either death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced labor camp. The student fitted a nib into the pen. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real pen. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into Speakwrite (voice to text software) which was of course impossible for his present purpose. He faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:

The principal is an asshole

He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him.

…For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The built-in computer had changed over to strident military music. It was curious that he seemed not merely have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that had had originally intended to say. For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything woudod be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years. At this moment, however, even the monolgoue had dried up.

…He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that it was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step.

This is, of course, in reference to the way schools are run in Pennsylvania.

I offer this as a contest. Take the opening pages of 1984 and do your own remix. Post it either in the comments here, or on your own blog. I post below the material I was working from.

Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way to turn it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagerness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were part of the uniform of the Party. His hair was fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.

Outside, even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no color in anything except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black-mustachioed face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a blue-bottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the Thought Police, snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.

Behind Winston’s back, the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig iron and the over-fulfillment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the medal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew,even a back can be revealing. A kilometer away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought, with a sort of vague distaste – the was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth century houses, their sides shored up with balks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger path and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden like chicken houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright lit tableaux, occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.

The Ministry Of Truth – Minitrue, in Newspeak – was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

…
For some reason the telescreen in the living room was in an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.

But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer. It was peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He could guess, however, that the book was much older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops (”dealing on the free market,” it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things such as shoelaces and razor blades which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance up and down the street and then had slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had carried ti guiltily home in his brief case. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by either death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced labor camp. Winston fitted a nib into the pen holder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficult, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speakwrite, which was of course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink, and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:

April 4th, 1984

He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was 39, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.

…For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had changed over to strident military music. It was curious that he seemed not merely have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years. At this moment, however, even the monolgoue had dried up.

…He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that it was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step.

Clearly, if totalitarian rule ever comes to the US, it will justified as necessary to protect the children.