Aperture and Apple's "Pro" Failure

Apple recently announced that they would stop developing their flagship photography product named Aperture, in favor of their forthcoming consumer application called "Photos."  I am an Aperture user and this affects me.  But since Aperture's popularity was declining anyway, Apple's announcement really doesn't affect anyone else, right?  Not so fast.

Apple's Aperture and their primary competitor, Adobe's Lightroom, are photography management software products, sometimes called digital asset management software.  Unlike Photoshop, which allows you to edit your photograph once — destructively — Aperture and Lightroom save the step-by-step "recipe" of changes you apply to each image, and you can go back and adjust the recipe later.  This is an extremely powerful feature, and is almost like a simple "programming language" for editing images.

Aperture was billed as one of Apple's "Pro" products.  This is their marketing language for products targeted at professionals (or professional wannabes like me).  When I bought it in 2010, Aperture appealed to me because I thought their user interface for editing, adjusting and cataloging photographs was better than Lightroom.  There are some truly excellent features like face and geographic tagging.  But another thing that appealed to me was that, up to that point, Aperture was competing head-to-head with Lightroom, releasing new versions every year or so with great enhancements.  This was the kind of behavior I was looking for: excellent quality and a pattern of performance suggesting that Apple would continue to improve the product.  Boy, was I wrong.

Almost from the moment I bought Aperture, Apple scaled back significant development.  Sure, there were several minor "point" releases that added some small new features and improved stability, but Aperture 3.4 today has mostly the same feature set as Aperture 3.0 did in 2010.  Most of the development has been to keep up with Apple's inexorable push towards iCloud and their camera roll concept from other products, but not to add true new features to Aperture.  Meanwhile, Lightroom has been leaping ahead with new features like lens perspective corrections and truly awesome RAW development improvements.

Not only that, but the Aperture developers did not fix bugs that persisted across multiple versions of the product.  I reported several bugs within Apple's Radar bug reported system that were trivial, obvious bugs.  Bugs like typos and arithmetic failures.   I provided clear evidence of where the bug was within the program, and yet the bugs languished for years without being fixed by Apple.

So perhaps it's not a big surprise that, after nearly four years of quasi-stagnation, Apple finally admitted that it would stop development of Aperture.  They will release a version of Aperture compatible with Yosemite, Apple's forthcoming version of OS X... and that's it.  There will be a new application called Photos which will supersede iPhoto and Aperture, and have some of the features of each.  Notably, Apple does not claim that Photos is a "Pro" application.  Apple will truly be terminating a "Pro" application, not replacing it with another "Pro" application.  This does fit in with Apple's trend toward basic high-end consumer-oriented products, and avoiding complicated products, but it stinks for photographers who committed to Aperture.

One response I've seen is that Apple just stopping new development, and is not taking away the existing version of Aperture from me, so the result is not so troublesome.  Nope, that's not a reasonable response.  We expect software to have basic upgrades, and not to rot.  For whatever reason, Apple has tied Aperture intimately to the inner core of their operating system in the past.  New versions of Aperture typically do not work with old versions of the operating system, and vice versa.  Once Apple stops upgrading Aperture, it will probably only be one or two more years before it no long functions with the current OS X release.  New camera?  Sorry, your old version of Aperture doesn't support it.  New computer? Sorry, you can't use it.  Want to upgrade to a new OS?  Sorry, it's not necessarily compatible with Aperture.  Want to run Aperture under older version of OS X in a virtual machine?  Sorry Apple doesn't support that.  Apple has basically spelled out the eventual lock-in doom of the product, even if they haven't forbidden me to continue to use it.

Some people will say, "oh well, you'll just have to learn some other software instead."  By which they mean to learn Lightroom, which is the only other game in town.  And yes, now I'll have to learn a new set of software idioms to manage my photographs.  But that kind of comment misses the point.

Most of the time I spend is not learning the product features, but using the product features to edit photographs.  Those editing "recipes" are locked within Aperture's proprietary library storage system, and not open for inspection.  The recipes are not compatible or transferrable to a new software system.  All the hundreds of hours I spent editing photographs are now locked in to Aperture.  Moving to new software means I have to somehow replicate all of those recipes.  Unless Lightroom developers do a mammoth reverse-engineering process, the recipes will probably be stuck within Aperture forever.  

That's also the reason that simply exporting the photographs from Aperture is not a solution.  Any edits are baked into the resulting images and not easily readjustable.

As a "Pro" product, I really would expect Apple to keep the community informed about their product plans.  Unfortunately, this is not how Apple works.  Apple is notoriously secretive about new product plans.  Apple fans are often gleeful at how secretive Apple is.  But secretiveness is not an appropriate behavior for a "Pro" product.  As customers who dump thousands of hours and manage thousands of photographs with this software, we deserve to see where the product is going.  If Apple can't figure this out, then they are pricks or fools, or maybe both.

The irony here is that Apple fans (including me) merrily pointed out that Microsoft eventually reneged on their "Play's for Sure" product marketing campaign for music players, when Microsoft could no longer guarantee that customer's music could be played for sure.  But the Aperture experience is precisely another "Plays for Sure" type of event.  Apple's apparent commitment to a product means nothing if they don't continue to back it up.

What does this all mean?  Your personal data is not safe in a third party's hands, ever.  I trusted that Apple's highest level "Pro" product line and pattern of performance meant something, but they did not.

People rushing to use iPhones or iPads in their life or business, please be very careful.  Apple has no commitment to support your future use of these products or the data stored within.  iPhoto and the new Photos application have exactly the same lock-in problems that Aperture has.  So if these products are canceled, do you have a data exit strategy?

People rushing to Apple's new iCloud offering should really take notice.  Apple doesn't really provide any commitment to you that this will be supported in the future.  Remember iWeb, .mac, or MobleMe?  Well they're gone now, and so is the data hosted there.  Past performance is probably a pretty good indicator of what's going to happen to your iCloud data.

Apple dropping out of the professional photo management software business will also be a blow to the category as a whole.  Now, with Lightroom being the single dominant product in the category, there is little true competition any longer.  Adobe's promises to "double down" to support Aperture customers sounds good on paper, but Adobe really doesn't have a strong incentive to increase their support at all, since there are not many other realistic competitors that Aperture customers could go to.

As for me, I'm not quite sure what I will do.  I already own a copy of Lightroom, so that's the obvious migration path, but I don't relish all of the work to actually do the migration effort.   And for that matter, I don't really trust Adobe to do any better on storing my data for me, but at least they have a longer track record now than Apple does.  I wish there were an open alternative for photograph editing and management in the same style as Aperture or Lightroom, but there really isn't.  I would really like my computer and software to serve me and my needs, but more and more often, I find that I am the one who is serving my software, and the corporate makers of the software.

A Memorial for my Refrigerator

When she was born, I was a boy.  I walked three blocks to my neighborhood school every day to attend the sixth grade.  My teacher's name was Ms. Skaros.  The Rubik's Cube had just been invented, and the hot new teen fashion style was "preppy."  My voice hadn't broken yet.  My "girlfriend" was Anne Schultz.
"The Wall" was still hugely popular, although "That Wall" had not yet been torn down.   The military action of the day in Afghanistan involved the U.S.S.R., not the United States.  Rambo had just tasted his First Blood.  The Officer was just becoming a Gentleman.
James Rockford could have put his $0.79/lb steak in this refrigerator.  The Muppet Show could have had one of these refrigerators in their green room.  The Talking Heads hadn't started making Stop Making Sense yet.
A handful of computers existed on the "Internet," although the web was still a decade to come.  The hot new computers were from IBM and the software was from Wordstar.  Microsoft Word hadn't been invented.  Pac Man was the video game craze.  Apple's new Lisa computers were a flop.
The big Packer's "B" was Bart, not Brett.  The Milwaukee Brewers took their only trip to the World Series.
Pioneer 11 had encountered Saturn three years before, paving the way for Voyager 2's first real close-up and color pictures of this ringed planet and its moons.  The controversy over how fast our universe was flying apart was starting to rage.
This is the world my refrigerator was born to in the year 1982.  Someone else purchased this refrigerator then to keep their vittles cold, and I inherited it.  Now it is time to move on to a more efficient and useful one.  May she rest in pieces at the landfill.

Parallel Theories

I happened to see "Parallel Universes," one of those History Channel shows where they bring together a bunch of astronomers and glitzy graphics to expound on some exotic topic. In this case, the topic of parallel universes. As usual, they pull out stacks of stock animations for fill, and interview real life astronomers to enhance the credibility of the show. Most of the water is carried by Michio Kaku, Max Tegmark, and History Channel mainstay Alex Filippenko. There are parts of the show which are quite interesting, and I grant that the show's producers have done a workman-like job of explaining very difficult topics.

Along the way they give a lesson on string theory of all things. More amazing to me is that they basically claim that string theory is accepted and is a wonderful description of the universe. Back in reality-ville, I can't think of an prediction by string theory that has been verified by observation. Strike that, I'm not aware of a single clear observational prediction made by string theory PERIOD! For that matter, many of the theories of the parallel universes described by the program ("level 1", "level 2", and so on) are described with such absolute certainty that the viewer might be fooled into believing that we already know they exist. We don't. The entire show is really on the borderline with fantasy science fiction.

These kinds of shows are cute, and at some level they build awareness of science in the general public, which is a good thing. On the other hand, their focus on the exotic and extreme topics is disappointing. Our universe is wonderful and beautiful enough by itself that it doesn't need to photoshopped and video toasted to death.

By taking marginal theories and pretending they are mainstream, History Channel is not really doing the public a service. And the professional astronomers who offer sound bites come out looking a little kooky. I wonder if they knew how much their interviews were going to be edited they would have done the show in the first place. There are several places where comical visual effects are used to make them look somewhat like buffoons.

(Except perhaps for Max Tegmark who comes off looking very serious but a little sickly.)

Putting snarkiness aside, I have this request:
Dear History Channel, overall the quality of your "Universe" shows is very high. Keep it that way by sticking to facts, and at the very least, noting where the show dips into speculative territory. Thanks.
(image credits: History Channel, excerpted for the purposes of commentary)

Pioneering Misinformation

Slashdot is running a story about a physics experiment to be performed with the Rosetta spacecraft,

...but the slingshot itself will allow ESA scientists to examine the trajectory for unusual changes seen in several other probes' velocities. An unaccountable variation was first noticed as excess speed in Pioneers 11 and 12, and has since been called the Pioneer Anomaly.

Uh, no, sorry, that would be Pioneer 10 and 11, not 11 and 12. I should know, I've done a little work on the subject.

The so-called flyby anomaly that would be measured with Rosetta is quite distinct from the "Pioneer Anomaly." Both are unexplained discrepancies between measured Doppler shift data and currently understood theory, but the Pioneer Anomaly pertains to unexplained gradual velocity shifts of spacecraft cruising through deep space, while flyby anomalies pertain to sudden impulses as a spacecraft swings by the earth. Both discrepancies have been observed. In all likelihood, these experiments are telling us that our models of the classical physical forces affecting these spacecraft are not complete. Perhaps, on the odd chance that there is "new physics" involved, both anomalies are related somehow. But they definitely not the same observed effect.

Thankfully the original ESA press release gets these points correct. The more subtle points seem to have gotten lost in translation on the way to publication in Slashdot.

Thunderbird 3 Beta Review

Summary:

• Thunderbird version 3 is a significant upgrade and improvement to the Thunderbird line
• The application is faster and more responsive
• The new search capabilities are impressive
• The user interface has gotten more cluttered and difficult to use, especially in regards to the message pane and "gloda" search results
• Indexing and re-indexing seem a little clunky still
• The Dock icon on the Mac has become next to useless for me now

I've been using the Thunderbird email client for the past 2-3 years, and it has been pretty good. It hasn't received a real refresh in that time, but that is about to change. Thunderbird version 3 will be coming out soon. I've been using the "beta" versions (beta's 2, 3, and 4) to see how it works.

The first very noticeable thing is that the client is much faster. Thunderbird 3 is now using underlying libraries which are faster (and the basis of Firefox version 3). The speed is most noticeable at start-up. Also, accessing messages, which often used to require a long pause, are now available much more quickly.

Another big change is the new "gloda" search engine. The engine basically indexes all of your messages, regardless of mailbox, into a giant database that you can search. Where before, you had to choose which mailbox to search ("inbox" or "outbox"?), now you just search everything. The resulting display is actually quite cool: you see a little time history of all your messages with your search terms, and you can click on a particular month, year, or person to zoom in on something more specific. It seems quite handy.

A final big change relates to the user interface. In previous versions, the "toolbar," which appears at the top of the main window, provided a lot of actions which you could apply to the message or messages you were viewing. Now, these tool icons appear attached to the message itself, not on the main toolbar. If your muscles are used to clicking in a certain position for "reply" or "delete," they will now be quite surprised because most of the tool icons are gone.

I think this is one area where Thunderbird as started to derail. The user interface appears to be getting cluttered and unpolished. Some icons are still sitting in the main toolbar (such as "tagging"), but others are relegated to the message pane. How these choices were made is unclear, but it makes for a tacky and confusing appearance. Thankfully, you can customize your toolbar, and bring back many of your favorite icons if you want.

I'm also unhappy with the layout of the message pane in another respect. In early betas, the message header was nice and compact, occupying a few lines of screen real estate showing the most important properties of the message such as the sender and send date. In beta version 3, this option was removed, and the message header occupies an enormous part of the screen, usually with irrelevant stuff that most people simply will not want to see. This is a big step back in the usability of the client because it forces you to scroll more, or to open the message in full screen mode just to see its contents. Thankfully, there is an extension called CompactHeader which brings back a more compact look, and also allows you to choose which "action" icons are visible for each screen. The mainline developers should look at putting this feature back in.

There's another area where polish is not quite up to snuff yet. The new gloda search can be quite handy, but the search results appear cluttered and a bit unreadable. The results are mostly message text with very tiny separators between each message. Search terms should be highlighted but are not, which makes it harder to determine the relevancy of the message to your search. For that matter, it's unclear how search results are ordered, and it's difficult to wade through all of them when you get a large number of hits. Some effort needs to be expended to make the presentation a little better in order to fully exploit this feature.

A bit more on performance. The first time you start up Thunderbird 3, it will spend a long time indexing your mail folders. This is more or less a one-time operation, but it will consume a significant amount of time and CPU while its happening. The upside is that once it's complete, you get all of those great search features. The downside is that the program seems to want to re-index quite often. Re-indexing doesn't try to do everything at once, but it's unclear what it's actually doing since there appears to be a bit of fumbling around by the program before it declares itself done.

I have a few peeves. This new version of Thunderbird no longer shows the number of "new" messages - messages I have just received - in the Dock icon. Instead it shows the number of "unread" messages. For someone like me who has thousands of unread (but useless) messages, the unread message count is next to useless. I want the icon badge to show me when new mail has arrived!

The new index files consume a significant portion of disk space (a few gigabytes). In this day and age, that's not a big deal, and we should use disk for these kinds of conveniences. However, every time any one of your messages changes, or if you get a new message, the index file changes. If you have a regular backup schedule (you should!), then you will find that it is now backing up a huge monolithic index file every time. This is a recipe for exhausting your backup space that much more quickly than before. There is not much the developers can do about this, but I would recommend that the new index files be placed in a separate directory. Most backup programs like Apple's Time Machine, allow you to exclude directories from the backup operation. If my hard drive crashes, it's no big deal that I wouldn't have a backup: I'll just reindex my mail.

Overall, this is a significant improvement, and it's nice to seem some activity in the Thunderbird line. There's some creative work going on there, especially regarding the message search functions. On the other hand, the usability of the application has taken a hit, which is unfortunate.

Double Whammy

Imagine that you are a young person that had a file sharing application on your computer, and that you shared 24 songs with other people.

Now we can debate if song sharing is bad or not, but basically it's against the law, and there are penalties for breaking the law. And there's a civil lawsuit brought against you by the music industry, and you lose. Twice actually.

You might imagine that the penalty is somehow related to the cost of the songs, maybe the number of files shared. How much is that, 99 cents per song on iTunes? Oh wait, maybe because of iTunes shenanigans, most of those tracks cost $1.29 now. So what is that, $31? OK, so even with treble damages, the total penalty should be less than $100, right?

Could you imagine that the penalty is actually $80,000 PER SONG? So that your actual total penalty for all 24 songs is close to $2 million!!!

You, the poor defendant, argue that the penalty is so unconsionably high that it could not be constitutional. After all, you are but a poor individual, not a money making song pirating outfit. $2 million is nowhere near the value of the songs shared, nor the amount of damages, nor what you could even pay.

But guess which administration has just filed a legal brief that $2 million is absolutely constitutional. In fact it is "carefully crafted." Yes, you guessed it, the Obama administration Department of Justice. This is a government agency intervening in a civil trial on behalf of the music corporations, against an individual, claiming that a $2 million damage award is just fine.

Sigh.

In reality, these penalties were established by Congress, at the urging of the music industry, to prevent industrial-scale music "piracy." The large fines were intended to deter business enterprises from entering the illegal music copying business. And yet, here this law is being used to destroy a young person.

The young person in question, Jammie Thomas, admitted she did share the songs, and her trial is part of a larger strategy by the music industry to file lawsuits against their own customers because file-sharing. Thomas definitely was not a saint. But there's no way that $2 million is in any way comparable to the amount of actual damage done. Or that she deserves her own government to go to bat for the other team.

It's a double whammy really. The law with an $80,000 penalty was "crafted" at the urging of music industry lobbyists, and Congress and the (then) president were happy to sign off on it. So already the deck is stacked once against the little guy. But then -- and here is the second whammy -- the government's lawyers intervene on behalf of the music industry during the trial to say that this law is great. Indeed it was finely crafted! How can Ms. Thomas have any chance at all? I don't doubt that this intervention is actually more payback for political contributions. Department of Justice lawyers know who butters their bosses' bread.

If music file sharing were a rare and extremely damaging thing, there might be a point to having extraordinary penalties. But in fact, there are tens of millions of file sharers, and in surveys, most people considering some file sharing to be morally acceptable. The actual damage is small. As noted above, sharing a few songs with others would cost the music companies at most a few hundred dollars in lost sales. The actual punishment, $80,000 per song, is so usurious it is absurd. The fact that tens of millions of people may be liable for such huge penalties just shows how arbitrary the whole process is. Whether you get caught in the music industry's dragnet or not is the difference between sharing a few songs and sure bankruptcy. The fact that the administration's "Justice" department is intervening in favor of wreaking such personal destruction is very dismaying.

My Dark Little Secret

All these years I've been trying to keep my true citizenship a secret.


Darn you, kenyanbirthcertificategenerator.com for finding my birth certificate!

Noctilucent Emissions

There's a new study suggesting that "noctilucent clouds" are caused by the plumes of space shuttle launches, which is somewhat ironic for me. For those that don't know, noctilucent clouds are the highest clouds found in the Earth's atmosphere. They are ice crystals floating high in the mesosphere, where large amounts of moisture are not typically found, and are usually only seen in twilight when the setting sun illuminates them against the dark sky. There is also evidence that these clouds are a modern phenomenon, within the past century, and so they may be related to human activity, or perhaps climate change.

Noctilucent clouds over Lake Saimaa. Photograph taken by Mika Yrjölä. Permission by Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License (from Wikipedia).

Early studies have suggested that noctilucent clouds were caused by space shuttle launches. The space shuttle exhaust plume is composed mostly of water vapor. As the shuttle launches into orbit, it can dump significant amounts of water vapor into the upper atmosphere as it passes through it. More recent studies by Dr. Michael Kelley have added credence to that idea: shuttle launches in 2003 and 2007 produced corresponding noctilucent clouds.

NASA launched a satellite called AIM in 2007 to study noctilucent clouds. AIM stands for Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere. AIM continues to study the phenomenon using several instruments, including two imagers and a meteoric dust measuring device.

The part I find ironic is that NASA launched a satellite to study a phenomenon caused... by the launch of NASA satellites!

OK, there are far more noctilucent clouds than can be entirely explained by shuttle launches, so this is not a complete exercise in navel-gazing. The shuttle-noctilucent connection was known before AIM was selected by NASA.

Update 2009-07-30: Added noctilucent cloud image from Wikipedia.

Solar Dud or Doozy?

There is some news in the past few days that the a few new sunspots are appearing, it may be that the next period of solar activity has begun. Will it be a dud or a doozy?

The sun has a quite regular cycle that repeats about every 11.5 years. Each cycle represents a reversal of the the sun's magnetic field -- magnetic north becomes south, south becomes north -- so it actually takes 23 years for the sun's magnetic field structure to return to its starting configuration.

During one of these 11.5 year cycles, the sun's magnetic field gets tangled and wound up in its circulating convective zone, located in the outer third of the sun. Once in a while, the magnetic field pokes out from the beneath the surface, and a sunspot appears. So sunspots are indicators of the how chaotic the magnetic field is within the sun.

Solar activity is a problem for us on the earth since the energetic particles ejected during solar storms can affect communications, power grids and the orbits of satellites. Being able to predict the the solar cycle, both timing and strength, is a valuable tool that can save lives and equipment. Unfortunately, predictions have been more of an art than a science.

I was really intrigued by a presentation at the 2005 AAS conference several years ago by Peter Gilman and Mausumi Dikpati, which claimed an improved method for solar cycle prediction. Their solar model showed that the solar convective zone had large scale circulations, almost like oceanic currents on earth. They also showed that it takes approximately three solar cycles for the solar flows -- which are almost like conveyor belts -- to make one circuit. Thus, they could train a reasonably accurate predictive model, based on the known solar activity from three cycles before (with the added benefit, that it produces predictions for about three cycles into the future as well). Their prediction was that the current solar maximum would be delayed by 6-12 months, but 30-50% more intense than the previous cycle. The "conventional" predictions were calling for the beginning of the cycle to begin in early 2007, while Dikpati and Gilman's group were calling for activity starting in the late 2007 to 2008 time frame.

Well at this stage, it's clear that both the conventional and new Dikpati/Gilman predictions were wrong, since we're past halfway into 2009 before any serious solar activity has appeared. But it's interesting that the onset of the cycle has indeed been delayed from its expected appearance, which indicates that perhaps there is something behind the Dikpati/Gilman model. The "conventional" prediction was recently revised, and now claims that the next cycle will be a dud -- weaker than usual. I've had a little harder time determining if the Dikpati/Gilman group has revised their forecast for the strength of the cycle.

Either way, I think it will be an interesting cycle to watch. I actually hope this solar cycle is an extreme -- either a dud or a doozy -- rather than an average one. Extremes are much better test cases for theories than boring average cases. While I have something to lose if this cycle is a strong one, at least it would be lost in advancement of science.

Ipod 3.0 software update

The iPod3.0 touch software update doesn't look that compelling for the iPod touch first generation. Here's what they advertise as new:

• cut and paste - want
  
• landscape keyboard - kind of want
  
• spotlight search - meh
  
• buy media on your ipod touch from itunes - do not want
  
• stereo bluetooth - could not use (2nd generation only)
  
• head to head games - could not use (2nd generation only)
  
• shake to shuffle - do not want
  
• parental controls - do not want
  
• new languages - do not want
  
• automatic wifi hotspot login - do not want
  
• push notifications - probably won't use
  
• itunes store account creations - do not want

My question is whether I will have to pay the $9.95 just to keep
up-to-date with security updates and bug fixes for the older
version of the iPod touch operating system.

Damn the Torpedoes

Warning: spoilers!

Recipe of the Star Trek movie: (1) One part damn the moral dilemma, full action ahead! (2) Two parts damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! (literally) (3) Three parts damn the bridge procedure, I'm going on the away team! (4) Most. powerful. mining ship. evar. (5) Seasoned to taste with a pinch of red matter. (may substitute deus ex machina juice if required) Smooth over plot holes with a frosting of computer graphics. Served as a non-stop space action movie with a Star Trek logo pasted on top.

The tasting: I liked it for the action part, I quite liked the acting and character interactions, but as a Trekkie film, it wasn't really there for me.

Pick a Side, Any Side

Does it matter what we believe, as long as we believe something? That's what a television news commentator would urge us to do:

Believe in something! Even if it's wrong! Believe in it!

-- Glenn Beck, Mar 2009

The video is in this Comedy Central clip, around time 3:10:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
IndigNation! Populist Uprising '09 - The Enragening
comedycentral.com

OK, you might argue, this is just a typical opinion
entertainer on one of the several "news" networks, trying to
fill up on of the 24 hours the network is on the air, every day.
Let's even excuse the fact that Beck seems to believe all of what
he is saying, down to the teary-eyed professions of love for his
country and the little guy (see video above). Is there something
to what he says?

As it turns out, perhaps. A recent survey by Anthony Leiserowitz asked television viewers which of several "news" shows they watched before the general election in 2008, and about their general beliefs. Of those who watched the specific shows of interest, they broke down approximately evenly between left-leaning (such as Olberman, Colbert and Stewart), and right-leaning shows (such as O'Reilly, Hannity and Limbaugh).

What fascinated me was this question,

We should always be willing to fight
for our country, whether our country is right or wrong.

A whopping 70% of those who watch right-leaning shows agree
with this statement. Which means if our country is wrong, no
matter how egregiously wrong, 70% of these viewers would still
support military action? The left-leaning shows are really not
much better, with 30-40% of viewers responding that they agree
with the statement. Of the respondants that didn't watch any of
the specific shows, about half agreed that we should be willing
to fight no matter what.

Note that the question was not about whether we
should "support the troups," although that phrase has it's own
moral ambiguities. No, the question was whether we should
support our country, in military action, even when that action is
something we know to be wrong. I wonder if the right-leaning
watchers still agree with this statement, now that a Democrat
holds the presidency.

I'm a little taken aback by this philosophy. It basically
says that a large number of citizens place country above
morality. Or rather, that our nation creates its own
morality by virtue of its existence. These respondants are
willing to hold and support beliefs that they know to be wrong,
simply because the name of their country is attached to it. I
guess I would prefer it to go the other way: that our country
earns the respect of the righteous by actually doing the right
thing in the first place.

Der Party Starter

One of the Superbowl commercials that I really laughed at...

Just how much is a teenager worth these days?

Sadly, we now know the answer:

"Martinez had arranged through a third party to have his [14 year old] daughter marry the older teenager, identified by authorities as Margarito de Jesus Galindo, of Gonzales, California. In exchange, Galindo was to pay Martinez $16,000 and provide him with 160 cases of beer, 100 cases of soda, 50 cases of Gatorade, two cases of wine, and six cases of meat, Greenfield Police Chief Joe Grebmeier told CNN.

Apparently it's a common practice in the Oaxaca province where the people involved were from, but it's also a little chilling to know the negotiations revolved around a few cases of gatorade.

Merry Mitchella Repens!

Merry Christmas!


I found this on the forest floor today. My best identification is Partridge berry (Mitchella Repens). It's supposed to be edible, but not tasty, so I didn't try it, but it did remind me of the season.

When Good Democracy Goes Silly

Voting is such a joke. Well, it must have seemed that way, for some people as they made their way to the Minnesota polls. I've watched a little of the Minnesota Canvas Review Board webcast at theuptake.org, and in the space of a few minutes some crazy ballots came up, reflecting our dear Minnesotans' sense of humor.


The first one thought it would be fun to change the name of candidate Franken, to Frankenstein, but I bet they didn't expect their mischief to appear on state-wide TV! [ Especially since they spelled it wrong. ] The Coleman campaign advocate was brazen enough to suppose that the voter was voting for someone else named Frankenstin, and definitely not candidate Franken!


The second ballot voted legitimately for Senate, but on lower level offices, our voter clearly subscribes to Flying Spaghetti Monsterism. All hail to His Noodly Appendage!

I'm glad for my Minnesota brethrens' senses of humor, but perhaps the voting booth is not the place to express it.

Update: Here's one more. I for one welcome our new Lizard People overlords.

Tomato Legacy

Well, today I finally finished the last of my summer garden tomatoes. The last bunch was picked green before the frost right before Thanksgiving, and they slowly ripened over the past few weeks. Most of those last ones were small cherry-like tomatoes, and not so tasty, but a few were great! I had a grand total of 70 tomatoes from three plants. I will definitely try this again next year.

Multiplier Effect - some results

My previous post, "Multiplier Effect," outlined the economic impact of various possible stimulus packages. On the top of the list -- those stimuli that provide the greatest productivity improvement per dollar spent -- were capital infrastructure improvements.

President-elect Obama's new plans include:

Save one million jobs through immediate investments to rebuild America's roads and bridges and repair our schools: The Obama-Biden emergency plan would make $25 billion immediately available in a Jobs and Growth Fund to help ensure that in-progress and fast-tracked infrastructure projects are not sidelined, and to ensure that schools can meet their energy costs and undertake key repairs starting this fall.

and...

Create a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will address the infrastructure challenge by creating a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank to expand and enhance, not supplant, existing federal transportation investments.

It sounds promising, but of course the devil is in the details. As this Washington Post article points out, many of the actual projects will be more maintenance-type activities, rather than huge monorail systems. But if the goal is to improve the job situation at the same time as improving national infrastructure, these types of projects will certainly help. The big risk, when spending large amounts of money quickly, is of fraud, theft and corruption. In that case, the money will still have a stimulative effect -- even the thief spends his swag -- but the national will not get the full benefit.

"A goodbye kiss from the Iraqi People"

From the BBC, Shoes thrown at Bush on Iraq trip (click link for video):

A surprise visit by US President George Bush to Iraq has been overshadowed by an incident in which two shoes were thrown at him during a news conference.
...
In the middle of the news conference with Mr Maliki, a reporter stood up and shouted "this is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog," before hurtling his shoes at Mr Bush, narrowly missing him.

Around the world, American leaders are now welcomed with open arms and bare feet! Who knew that in Iraq, it was a sign of endearment to play doggy-fetch with your slippers?

Multiplier Effect

Because of the developing economic crisis, I've been reading more economics blogs. My favorites are Econbrowser, hosted by Profs. Hamilton and Chinn; Macro-Man an anonymous but extremely incisive and hilarious day-trader^*; and Follow the Money by Brad Setser. Any other reader favorites?

One excellent post by Prof. Chinn has direct relevance to governmental policy initiatives to deal with the economic problems. Her post is based on work by Mark Zandi of Economy.com. The question is: given that the economy needs to be stimulated, what method of stimulation yields the largest economic benefit. The benefit here is expressed as the stimulus multiplier, which is the amount of increase in GDP per unit of stimulus. For example, if we simply gave every person in the country $1, each could go out and buy a McDonald's value menu item. But the benefit doesn't stop there because with the increased consumption, McDonald's has to hire more workers, who in turn consume more; purchase more supplies from its suppliers, who in turn hire more workers, etc. So in principle, a $1 stimulus package can have more than $1 benefit to overall production.

So which economic stimuli had the greatest benefit? The top three were:

• Temporarily Increase Food-stamps (multiplier 1.73)
• Extend Unemployment Insurance Benefits (multiplier 1.64)
• Increase Infrastructure Spending (multiplier 1.59)

The first two items have the obvious benefits of keeping people on their feet, but also provide an extra 64-73% advantage beyond the direct stimulus. Of course these benefits can only be temporary. On the other hand, the third item has the advantage of improving neglected infrastructure -- a long term "capital gain" -- while at the same time providing an extra 60% bang for our buck.

Now for the worst stimulus concepts:

• Make Bush Tax Cuts Permanent (multiplier 0.29)
• Cut Corporate Tax Rate (multiplier 0.30)
• Make Dividend Tax Cuts Permanent (multiplier 0.37)

Since these multipliers are less than unity, it means that for every dollar of tax break, the country's production actually goes down. Of course some small segment of the population may benefit from such tax cuts, but in hard economic times, it's not clear why they would deserve a benefit when the broad population and the overall economy do not. To be fair, a few of the tax cut concepts do a little bit better, most most are break-even at best.

Note that these tax cuts that are discussed most readily as the solution to the economic problems have some of the worst possible effects on the economy. In fact, a tax cut actually hinders production, compared to other stimuli. Dr. Chinn discusses some reasons this may be true.

What fascinates me is the question of whether the multipliers work in reverse. If reducing corporate taxes by $1.00 hobbles the economy by $0.70, then would raising taxes by $1.00 improve the economy by $0.30? As heretical as that sounds, it seems that while raising taxes will withdraw $1.00 from corporate coffers and hence from the economy, it enables the government to spend $1.00 on more needful and worthy areas (say, on stimuli that have a large multiplier!).

The situation is somewhat more complicated because each of the stimulus concepts have different time scales, so it would require a more delicate touch than brute force. But it would be nice if, in the political dialog about what to do next, actual economic data would be used rather than mindless rhetoric with zero substantiation.