Monday this week, I was at lunch with the family and Adam (my son) kept bumping Gabrielle (my wife) with his elbow while cutting up his breakfast burrito.

"You are on the left corner of the table! Why are you manspreading to the right?"

"I'm cutting!"

"With your right hand?"

"... yeaaaaahhhh?"

Then she looked at me.  I also, as a left hander, fork with my left and cut with my right. Apparently after 25 years together we never noticed that we did this differently.  Gabrielle, as a righ hander, uses the OLD european style of using the knife in the right hand then moving the fork to the right hand to eat.  She's a switcher.

So I did what I do, and asked Twitter.

Ok. Poll. If you are right handed, do you switch your fork hand after cutting food? And if you are left handed, do you not?

— Bill Sempf (@sempf) June 26, 2017

It's only 24 hours later currently, and I have 70ish replies - more than enough to do some analysis, so here goes.

Not a surprise, 80% of left handers do not switch.  some folks cut left and some cut right, but most of us do not change hands while eating.  You know what they say, left handers are in their right minds.

What WAS a surprise is that 70% of RIGHT handed respondents also do not switch. This is survey bias of my followers though. My community is, well, made up of geeks.  Fully half of the folks that replied admitted that they taught themselves to not switch because it is more efficient. The other half - still bias.  They are European. Which leads to a whole new question. Why?

As it turns out, there have been a few articles written about this. Originally, in Europe, switching was cool, and then it wasn't.  But like with measuring, Americans didn't get the memo. I understand that. It used to be hip to put to spaces after a period. Things change.

What I don't understand is why, my results notwithstanding, it appears that left handed people keep their fork in one hand by default, and right handed people switch by default (at least in the U.S.) If you have any feedback on that, I'd appreciate insight in the comments.

Codemash - probably the single best regional development conference in the country - sold out of 1200 tickets in 20 minutes.  This is pretty impressive, but hardly unheard of.  ShmooCon, the DC security conference, sells out in a few seconds every year. and has gone to a lottery system to distribute tickets. This is not optimal because many who want to go and should go are not admitted by pure bad luck, making the conference worse overall.  While degradation in quality is an effective way to reduce queue length, it isn't one that anyone really wants.

I am fascinated with the economics and psychology behind popular events and their queues.  Generally, for something like a concert, you will drive the queue length down with cost.  You want to see Madonna?  Fine - $350. Too rich for your blood? Good - we had too many people anyway.  This works for a lot of entertainment topics, actually, since there is no moral standard for admittance.

Colleges are another story.  A good college will have an abundance of admissions, but only a few will be accepted.  Private schools will filter with cost as well - but is this a good idea?  Do you want those with the most money, or those who have the best chance for success? Those two items won't always overlap.  The Objectivist seminar that used to be in Virginia every year had a good solution: they filtered with high cost but had a scholarship program.  To apply for a scholarship, you needed to do a LOT of writing, and it had to be GOOD.  Few went to the trouble, but those who did REALLY wanted to be there. I know, because I was a recipient in 1997.

But how to reduce the queue for something like Codemash? Eventually something like a lottery will have to be instituted, because next year noone trying to register more than a few people at a time will be able to get tickets. But see, that is a problem, as this is a conference where people who really WANT to be there, should be there.  High prices have a similar problem - in general the community is not short on funds so that will probably do nothing except tick people off. (Although a charity could get involved which would be neat).  Even then, do we really want to put the con out of the reach of students? Early registration - effectively reserving space WAY in advance - is another possible solution. I am sure there are other options - guess I need to get out the queuing textbook from OSU.

When I was a sophomore in high school, we had a unit in our World History class about the Holocaust.  Fran LaBuda, a German Jew who escaped to the US through despite the Nazis, would stand at the door of our classroom and bark orders to us in German as we entered, using a pointer to tell us where to sit, and even push us around as necessary.  A militant looking fellow (later I learned it was her son, and as gentle a guy as you could imagine in real life) escorted anyone who didn’t take it seriously out of the room, rather roughly.

The point was to show us in general how easily we could be cowed by a force we didn’t understand taking our power of independence.  These are upper middle class high school students, and used to getting their way.  Their parents bought them the cool clothes and looked the other way when the rules were transcended.  They wore their ego on their shoulder like a badge of honor.

But when the going got rough, they folded like a bad hand at cards.  Only one person tried to joke about the event with Mrs. LaBuda, and was taken from the room.  He was the class clown, but was nearly in tears when pushed out of the door by the enforcer.

Fast forward to today.  I was in line at the TSA’s security gate at SeaTac.  Walking up and down the line was a rather militant looking fellow yelling out in plain, though loud, English:

“If you do not take your liquids and gels out of your carry-on luggage you will not be allowed to get on your plane.  You will be escorted to enhanced screening, and there is a half day wait.”

Next to me stood a seventy year old woman, grey hair, a Russian Jew by her accent; tears were streaming down her face.  She was frantically digging through her plain bag looking for the satchelof toiletries that was plainly sitting on the table in front of her, unnoticed.

“Your bottles are right here,” I showed her.

“Oh, thank you son,” she sighed in relief.  “I’m just trying to get home to Florida to see my grandson.  I’m so terrified that these people will lock me up.”

She was so terrified that those people would lock her up.  People that were purportedly trying to keep us safe, but who were instead driving this woman, others, myself to tears with worry that one wrong move with the toothpaste could cost us time with loved ones, money, business, whatever.

The terrorists have won.

The goal of a ‘terrorist,’ and thus the name, is terror.  They don’t really care, as a group, if they kill anyone.  As  long as the people they attack live in fear.  They state that they want to kill Americans, and then, largely, don’t.  They just want us to think that they will. (Remember, while 9/11 was a huge tragedy, it doesn’t make much of a mark in the numbers that have died in simple in-fighting in the Arab Alliance. The deaths weren’t the point.  The after-effects were the point.)

We, as a country, as a people, as individuals, have folded.  Just like that classroom of sophomores 20 years ago, we have turned in our independence to the authorities with our papers and our shampoo.  Even the clowns in Washington, once a source of hope, are led crying from the classroom the moment the chips are down.

Please don’t think your humble author is putting himself above you, the reader.  I had planned on traveling with a firearm this trip: because I can, then lock my luggage with my locks, and pretend that I am more secure than most.  I did not, fearing hassle, fearing delay, or just fearing – I’m not sure which.

I don’t have a solution to suggest, dear reader.  I simply needed to lament the passing of a once great country – the greatest of social experiments – into the waste bin of political history.  I do not believe that is within any of us to turn the social tide now, unless Atlas truly does shrug and some number of us retreat to a contemporary Galt’s Gulch.  The slope of our decline is too firmly now in place.  We have lost.

For almost 200,000 years, humans were indistinguishable from animals. 

For 5,000 years, we had only achieved the advancements of agriculture and prostitution.  Nothing to be sneezed at for sure, but certainly not the pinnacle of potential.

In 100 years, we went from farming to the Industrial Revolution.  There were a lot of reasons, but note the sudden easy availability of fiction.  I know, I know, correlation doesn’t equal causation, but I can’t help but wonder how much the insurgence of fiction, and how it influenced the play of children, impacted the next generation and the ideas they worked from.  Factories? Space travel?  Computing?

Fast forward to Asimov, Clarke, and the other Science Fiction writers of the 50s.  They pointed our eyes to the stars and our minds to the unimaginable.  Is it a surprise that the generation that grew up reading their books and reenacting it in their play gave us the fathers of the Internet?

Please don’t dismiss child’s play as a waste of time.  Please don’t assume that the introduction of fictional universes into a children’s playtime is an “overdose of media.”  You don’t know what the availability of universes is doing for our children’s fertile minds.  Wouldn’t you rather let them run with it and see what becomes of it, rather than shut it down, afraid of the future it might bring?

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

-Kipling

(from "The Renaissance Page", circa 1995)

Economics

Another subject that I hold dear. I adore the simplicity of economics, almost as much as its accuracy. The New Classicals have what my dad would call a "Good Point" almost every time they open their mouths.

My latest deals with taxes, and the power of government. (This will be discussed further in Philosophy.) Imagine there are but two types of firms: monopolies and perfect competitors. I know, in reality nobody is either; but, if you filter and carefully select your inputs, you can compare firms like this. If the State (my word for the government of the US) needs control of a firm, its easiest recourse is to tax. But there is more to it than that.

In the case of a monopoly, let's take OPEC and the gasoline industry, the government saw an opportunity to fund the Department of Transportation. The more a consumer drives, the more money that driver should give to the DOT. Therefore, a per unit tax has been imposed on gas. You see, a firm produces where its marginal cost equals its marginal revenue. In a monopoly, the amount the average cost exceeds the marginal cost is the excess profits of the firm. If a per unit tax (a la the gas tax) is imposed on gasoline the average cost will be affected along with the marginal cost. Less gas will be desired, at a higher price, but the firm will suffer no loss of profits. Thus, the government has gotten the tax money from the consumers, the consumers don't know, and the firms are not hurt.

Now let's take a monopoly such as the caviar import trade. The government would really like to see it shut down. They know that, as a luxury, caviar has a very elastic demand curve. Therefore, a lump sum tax that effects average cost, but nothing else, will cut heavily into the firm's profits.

This is just something to think about. Run the curves (Basic Micro should get you through it) and see what you think then drop me a line. Remember - the more you think, the better off everyone is.

I just spent the evening playing board games with my four year old son.  For a lot of people this would be an exercise in boredom, but it shouldn't be.  Teaching games is something that is very similar to teaching the kind of thinking that makes software design work.  It’s important, logical thinking.

Board games with young children doesn’t have to be limited to chutes and ladders and Candyland – random games with zero strategy.  Kids need to LEARN strategy.  The only way they will learn is to be led, hand in hand, though the process of making game decisions.  For instance, tonight Adam and I played Living Labyrinth . He can’t quite read the cards, and he has a hard time making decisions about how to use the cards.  But how else will he learn?

We played open hand, and I walked him through every move.  I reminded him to play his card first then move, and point blank told him what moves to make and why.  It wasn’t competitive, but it was a blast, and Adam learned a ton.  I’m betting that next time we play he’ll remember the cards and be able to make some decisions about his card use.

After that, we played a much less sophisticated game, Guess Who? This game is a deduction game similar to the old logic puzzles with the grid that we all did in the puzzle magazines.  The kicker here – Adam beat me five out of five games.  I can’t explain it, unless it is just that he is a good guesser.  We play fair and square, no help, no hints, and he has to sound out the name of the mystery person for his final guess.  Beat my pants off.

Next time I am introducing him to Kids of Catan .

This remarkable game will not only be a great rule learning adventure, but the pieces are cool and we can make up our own games – another important skill.

Plus, I can have him play against Jeff Blankenburg next year at CodeMash.

My current client has blocked Twitter and Live Mesh at the firewall.  At what point are organizations going to realize that social networking is beneficial to project progress?  Now, I can no longer access my network of peers (well, I "can" but they are trying to prevent me), which has already provided me with many leads, links and ideas related to making this project better.  Now I can no longer access my repository of project files, where I am getting all of my templates and reference documentation.

What is the point?  Are they trying to prevent people from wasting time?  How about blocking YouTube?  How about uninstalling Solitare?  How about not providing access to the external internet at all?  There are a lot of clericals here, and many of them are temps, so why don't you just lock everything down?  If that is too draconion, how about two firewall profiles, one for developers and another for clericals?

This fear of the Internet is remarkable in this day and age.  Watching organizations (especially government organizations) try to bridge the gap of providing free access to information and keeping the temps from surfing porn is very frustrating for me.

This site is getting probably twenty spam comments a day.  I know that these are inexpensive workers that are paid by the post to get past my Captcha.  They say something unrelated and put their employer's URL in the Link field of the post to increase the link count for that URL, thus increasing the Google rank for that post.  It is one of the ways that the fake SEO companies 'guarentee' you a top ten ranking for your URL.

I have a message for these people.

All comments on this site are approved by me.  I don't approve spam posts.  You are wasting your time, and taking money out of your OWN POCKET bothering to spam here.  Please leave me alone.

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.