The Windkey and the Lamplighter

place to visit. I’ve been staying at the Red Lion Inn. They have a
big statue of their mascot in the parking lot:

Sadly, the place wasn’t very clean, the desk service sucked, they use
the same awful perfume as Holiday Inn. Outside the desk of the Red
Lion Inn, there’s a friendly, open culture: people feel about as
fast-paced as New England, but with smiles more similar to the
Midwest. And they do have a sense of humor:

I took time last night to go visit Powell’s Books, a
bookseller the size of a city block. It’s a warren of little rooms,
much larger than the average Borders Books—and much more dense.
Unlike Borders, there was value to wandering around and seeing what
the structure of the store suggested to my eyes. I’d love to find a
place like this in Boston. Even the smell was right. It takes a
decade or so for a bookstore to soak in the smell of paper, glue, and
cedar.

They didn’t have a copy of Dzur yet, but I did find a number of
books to go look at later. One book on supercharged overachieving
kids; one nice history of algebra and its transition from seeking
solutions to equations to consideration of groups; one history of
Jefferson’s oratory (thanks to Justin Sheehy); Seth Lloyd’s book on
modeling the universe as quantum computation; a tempting copy of
House of Leaves (on my list thanks to Jon Herzog)… and one
Certified Lunatic. This is Helen Caldicott:

The first thing I heard her say was that Pebble Bed Reactors embed
fissile materials in millions of graphite spheres—and that graphite
is what burned at Chernobyl. Then she said that they tried to hide
the contamination at Chernobyl, and now they say Pebbled Beds are
walk-away safe, immune to meltdown. Her opinion on other energy
sources was similar: that the world can run on renewable energy, and
all it takes is some smart people thinking about it. Also, that Bush
and Cheney are both so foolish as to not understand these principles
of nuclear engineering—clear to literati such as herself—and
malevolent and scheming enough to interfere with all the smart people
trying to fix the world. This was in support of her new book. Most
of the audience ate it up, but as I was leaving I saw one gentleman
with a big gold block on his right ring finger start to question her
scientific facts and press her on her descriptions of DU ammunition,
Uranium extraction, enrichment, and depletion, and advanced chemical
recovery of nuclear waste. That made me proud and happy—so I left
before the audience could shout him down.

Now it’s time to head to the airport, carefully checking everything
liquid. PDX-DEN-BOS, and I should be home by 1am Eastern Time.

Maybe this will (semi-accidentally) send the right message to [Sony
BMG][] After falling in love with the (illegal?) mp3 version of
Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine album, I eventually
decided to buy it. I heard the released version was a little
different, and had an extra song. Ooh! Extra song! I <3 Fiona Apple.

So, through the magic of Amazon Prime, a pretty little box showed
up at my door yesterday. Today, it’s going back to Amazon. Why?
Because Sony’s copy protection won’t let the disc play on my iPod.

I saw the "The audio side of this CD does not conform to the CD
standard" label on the outside, and did some research before even
opening it—I remembered from the news a few months back stories of
Sony’s Rootkit for Windows, and didn’t want to take the risk.

If Amazon reports "bought and returned unopened" as a category to
Sony, hopefully this will tell them "I really wanted to have this
music, but not enough to let you r00t my machine."
(Not that I think it would have damaged my PowerBook, but y’all know
what I mean.)

I guess I will have to find some other artist to <3.

A friend of mine, frustrated, commented to me that
Massachusetts does not appear to in any way distinguish "I caught the
corner of my porch in a 5mph scrape that managed to mangle my door
pretty badly" and "I ran into somebody’s rear end at a stop light at
30 mph".

She’s right, in a direct sense: an accident which causes over $ 500 in
insurance payout gives you 3 points for an at-fault accident plus an extra
point for not having an incident-free year. This is true regardless
of the details of the accident.

Financially, this means you either pay out of pocket for the damage,
or (for a driver without any previous accidents) pay an extra $ 1920 in
insurance fees over the next six years. For a $ 2000 accident,
reporting stops looking like a good idea.

So is this a broken set of incentives?
It could be, for three sets of people:

• The insurance company
• The state of Massachusetts
• Your family

Let’s start with the insurance company.
If you get in lots of accidents, but can always pay for the damage,
the insurance company pays nothing. Their costs are the same as if
you’re a good driver. If you get in lots of accidents, but report
them and have insurance pay, you’re costing them a lot. They
therefore report back to the state, which allows them to charge you
more for insurance. Perfect! No perverse incentives here!

How about the state? They regulate insurance prices to protect
consumers, but they have to balance that with their desire to keep
insurance companies operating in the state. But they also use the
insurance system as part of their licensing system

The state has to protect its citizens, so they want to track bad
drivers, and be able to take away or restrict those drivers’
licenses. So wouldn’t they want all accidents reported?

Not really. If you’re a driver who only harms their own property, MA
has less incentive to take your license away—they only have to
protect others from you, not you from yourself.

Because of the financial incentives, you will still not report
low-value single-car accidents (they cost too much). You will be
more likely to report multi-car accidents, since if you’re at fault,
the other party wants you to pay for their damage. The other party is
not penalized for reporting an accident—their insurance premiums do
not increase—so those will be reported. This is exactly what
Massachusetts wants to see.

That leaves your family. Is it worthwhile to buy insurance, report
when in a big accident or a not-at-fault accident, and not report in a
single car at-fault accident? Absolutely. The $ 2000 in damage due
to an at-fault accident is approximately equal to the $ 2000 you’ll
pay in insurance premiums over the next 6 years, until your accident
times out. But if you’re in a $ 10,000 accident, you’ll want that
coverage. Conveniently, the state requries that you be
covered—explaining why the insurance companies can afford not to
raise your premium when you are in a not-at-fault accident. Uninsured
drivers are vanishingly rare, so there’s always someone at-fault with
insurance that will pay.

[Bad Astronomy Blog][] pointed me to [an article on monster movie
biology][] which is just fantastic. Why are little people in fantasy
often described as frenetic? Well, a 1 inch man, scaled linearly,
would have his "relative strength has increased about 70 fold", and
"will be bouncing around like a mouse on amphetamines" due to his
increased metabolic rate. Of course, that same metabolic rate would
require him to "to eat his own weight daily just to stay alive. He’ll
also have to give up sleeping and eat 24 hours a day or risk starving
before he wakes up in the morning (unless he can learn the trick used
by hummingbirds of lowering their body temperatures while they
sleep)."

So, Earthdawn Trolls, don’t blame the Windlings for being annoyingly quick. It’s just biology!

"I bet not too many people have seen crepuscular rays converging on
the anti-solar apex", says the Bad Astronomer, and he’s right.

This is way cool.

Silly memes don’t generally belong over here, but I could not resist
this one, because of it’s answer.

katallen –
A master blogger

Okay, that done, if you haven’t seen this video of what a [meteor
impacting the Earth][] would look like, you should.
I think before this had a Japanese voiceover. Now it just has cool music.

Finally, I believe in Global Warming, or at least in
Boston-warming. Ew.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYgEwXWilUc

I read this because of a response to literary criticism, which an MIT
alum sent to be published in Twilight Zine.
(Yes, for those keeping track, I read the book in response to a
response to a response to the book. I’m okay with my meta-ness.)

It turned out that I had read it before—although I didn’t remember
any of the plot before getting to it, I remembered almost all the
scenes as I got to them. No matter—it was fun anyway.

I feel, though, like people take Heinlein’s stories a bit too
seriously. Friday is certainly without the Puritanical sexual mores of
a typical modern American, but she seems to be about halfway between a
set of poles in her own society. Heinlein uses this to comment on a
number of unspoken taboos, but also to make us laugh at the
assumptions that a "rational" person would make about how our
society’s sexual indoctrination must be structured. (In particular,
her comment that the human sexual taboo concerning incest must be a
taboo on talking about it, not doing it, for how else would children
learn?)

Anyway, it was fun, mostly brain candy, and got me thinking about how
not-fun it would actually be to be a spy or other participant in
illicit activities. In Friday’s case, it was nearly her only choice,
but I wonder what the other people in her organization thought about
their choice—the peace and security of the repressive states, or the
uncertainty and freedom of the illegals.

Books Read in 2006: 22

I like these books. Stross has written a really fun series, with just
enough meat to keep them from being total mind-candy.

On the other hand, I could really do without more authors who end
their books on cliffhangers. Whatever happened to finishing a story?

Yar.

Books Read in 2006: 21

I really didn’t like this. I kept reading, because I kept thinking I’d
like it on the next page—that Vonnegut was just warming up. I
thought this until the last page, where the story (as much as it was a
coherent story—it certainly wasn’t a "beginning middle end"
narrative) just faded away into several blank pages.

This is all far too modern for me—I think I just don’t get it. The
review on the cover claims it’s "poignant and hilarious…(with) the
cataract of a thundering moral statement". What moral
statement??? "People die"? "Being a POW is really unpleasant"?
"War is bad"? There wasn’t enough here to be a statement… maybe a
"st" or perhaps a "ment".

Books Read in 2006: 20