Mom and baby are both doing well.

The little tiger is born on Purim. This wasn’t planned, but it certainly fits her name well. Perhaps someone up there approves

There’s still a lot to do, but I’m going to get some rest for now.

The report disclosed for the first time the F.B.I.’s theory that Dr. Ivins embedded in the notes mailed with the anthrax a complex coded message, based on DNA biochemistry, alluding to two female former colleagues with whom he was obsessed.

The report described how an F.B.I. surveillance agent watched in 2007 as Dr. Ivins threw out a article and a book, Douglas Hofstadter’s ‘Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid,’ that could betray his interest in codes, coming out of his house in Frederick, Md., at 1 a.m. in long underwear to make certain the garbage truck had taken his trash.”

(Via NYTimes.)

The man actually wrote a message with DNA, back in 2001. We really do live in the future, and science fiction is fact.

This man frightens me far more than 9/11 ever did.

The measure was designed to raise revenue (through payroll taxes and reducing underreporting of taxes by programmers if they were self-employed).

Nowadays, most people (including programmers) jump to the defense of this law by arguing that it prevents employers from exploiting workers by misclassifying them as independent contractors to save on taxes. But this was not always how people saw the matter.

The law change essentially killed off the notion of programmers as independent skilled professionals, much like lawyers and doctors. Instead, the idea of the programmer evolved towards the direction of “information workers” — employees who need a lot of structure, direction, and management, and whose work, incidentally, can be commoditized and shipped overseas easily.

In a fundamental way, I do not think that computer programmers are all that different from lawyers (having worked in both professions, I think I’m qualified to make this judgment).

Both work with systems of rules (the programming language, the legal code) to produce creative solutions (the program, the contract) that follow the rules to accomplish a specific task (compute investment returns, generate investment returns). The independence, skill and judgment involved in a lawyer’s work, in most instances, is no more and no less than the independence, skill and judgment involved in a programmer’s work.

Yet, the lawyer’s profession has, so far, resisted the pressure to evolve into a subspecies of commoditized “information worker.” (It’s true that most lawyers now work as employees of law firms, but a sizable population of lawyers still work as partners in firms or as independent practitioners.) It’s unclear to me how much longer this will last though.

Years and years ago, people saw the devastating consequences of this policy decision on the technology industry. If we could do it again, should Congress still choose to go down this route?

Now I’ve written a story inspired by her work.

Here’s my mouse path for 24 hours (from 11:30 last night to 11:30 tonight). I didn’t really use the computer that much: some edits to a story, a little web browsing, some image editing. Note that the program only recorded my movements on one of my two monitors.

You can download the program for Mac OS X here (it’s really a Java program). Windows version here.

I first read this book, an account of how motion-study expert Frank & Lillian Gilbreth (really the first management consultants) raised their 12 children, in a Chinese translation when I was very young. I remember loving it back then. Encountering it again now in the English original, I have to say I prefer the translation.

Before I get into my criticisms, let me just assure you that this is a very funny, moving book about growing up in a large family, and Frank and Lillian come across as model parents, the sort of parents that children dream of having as their own parents. If you buy it and read it, you will not be disappointed.

But now that I’m a far more cynical person, some of the book’s more saccharine aspects grate on the ears. As well, with our recent cultural obsession about memoirs that “aren’t 100% factual,” I keep wondering if the too-neat and too-perfect stories in this book were “100% factual.” (Personally, I don’t care, but it’s hard to maintain a careless attitude when you are bombarded daily by sermons from the keepers of our culture about how people who write such “fake memoirs” and blend the line between fiction and non-fiction are horrible people.)

Finally, the book shows its date by the numerous politically incorrect phrases and images that litter its pages. Again, I don’t mind them — they add color, literally, to the page — but they are a gentle reminder of how things have changed in a century. Some samples:

If Dad saw motion study and teamwork in an ant hill, Mother saw a highly complex civilization governed, perhaps, by a fat old queen who had a thousand black slaves bring her breakfast in bed mornings.

I doubt that a modern author writing for children would be able to get away with this image involving “a thousand black slaves.”

And here’s a description of a Chinese cook and his torture at the hands of a little boy for humor value:

He was sinister looking and uncommunicative, and had a terrible temper… [H]e launched into hissing Chinese…

One afternoon Chew Wong opened the oven door and was leaning in, on tiptoe, to see whether a cake was browning on all sides. Bill crept up behind him, placed a shoulder against his rear, and hunched. Then he held him there.

“Blad boy, Wong,” he said in a sing-song imitation of the cook. “Bleely putee in oven and cookee brown and eatee. Hi-hi-hi-hi.”

Aunt Elinor was in the pantry and heard the conversation and Chew Wong’s screams.

More gems:

Like Grandma and Dad, Aunt Anne thought that all Irishmen were shiftless and that Tom Greives was the most shiftless of all Irishmen.

“All I know is that even self-respecting streetwalkers wouldn’t have dressed —”

“Frank!” Mother interrupted him. “I don’t like that Eskimo word.”

And Dad and Mom puts on a minstrel show for the kids:

He turned to Mother. “What do you say, Boss?”

Mother protruded her lower lip, sagged her shoulders, and let her hands hang down to her knees.

“Did you say mo’ ‘lasses, Mr. Bones?” she squeaked in a querulous falsetto. “Mo’ ‘lasses? Why, Honey, I ain’t had no ‘lasses. Git yo’ coats on, chillen. Yak. Yak.”

It’s kinda hard to believe that this book isn’t banned from school libraries with that passage above, isn’t it? Well, let’s hope it doesn’t.

(Full disclosure: I went to school with Max Krohn and Sam Yagan, two of the four founders of OkCupid. We also worked together as teaching assistants for some CS classes. It’s good to see them doing well in their new venture. I’m not pitching OkCupid to you, though it does seem to be a pretty good site. I just think the data they are releasing is very interesting.)

In particular, take a look at this post on dating and race.

Note that in every race, women are more “conservative” than men (in the sense that more women than men would strongly prefer to date someone of their own race) except Asians, where the women are far less likely than men to strongly prefer dating someone of their own race. (I don’t think the 1% difference between Pacific Islanders men and women is significant). And White women are the only group where a majority strongly prefer dating someone of their own race.

I believe this is in line with the data from published academic studies. Exactly what this means is open to debate. For example, I think similar data was used in one study to reach the conclusion that the so-called “Asian fetish” is largely illusory because the prevalence of White-Male-Asian-Female couples is simply an artifact of the preference of Asian women for men that are not of their own race (and a preference for White men in particular) rather than any special preference among White men for Asian women. Others dispute this reasoning.

Another possible weakness of this data model is that it conceptualizes “race” in a particularly Americentric manner. It seems especially problematic to create a race called “Asian” in America — yes, I use the label too, more out of necessity than choice or a belief in its validity. “Skin color” and “race” are simply not the most relevant categories for many individuals lumped into the “Asian” category. The racial category of “Asian,” more than any other racial grouping in America, is an invention that has no basis in culture or history (even if it could be supported in biological terms.) Indeed, the idea that Thais and Mongols and Chinese and Koreans and Japanese and Vietnamese and Hmong and Tibetans can be lumped into one “race” when deep historical and cultural differences as well as contemporary prejudice and enmity exist between these groups, is not only shockingly foolish and analytically unsound, but in fact exhibits the very definition of “racism.” (At least OkCupid doesn’t lump “Indians” into “Asians,” as some other places still do. That’s an improvement.)

I don’t believe that any other racial group listed in that chart contains the level of diversity and internal conflict and difference that are masked by the label “Asian” (even “Hispanic” is united by language, which is certainly not the case for “Asian”).

Thus, it’s important to understand that the answer given by “Asian” respondents to the question “would you strongly prefer to date someone of your own skin color/racial background” cannot be taken to be analogous to the answer given by a Black or White respondent. It may well be that a Japanese person will conceptualize herself to be closer to Whites than to the Chinese. (Insert your own pairing of “Asian” nationalities and ethnicities here.) And this complicates the analysis of just what this all means.

I am not aware of any academic studies that have been done on how the data on “Asian” respondents would change if the question as to mate preferences were re-asked with “nationality/culture” substituted for “skin color/race.” It seems a very fruitful area of research, however.

But some e-book buyers say that since publishers do not have to pay to print, store or distribute e-books, they should be much cheaper than print books.

“I just don’t want to be extorted,” said Joshua Levitsky, a computer technician and Kindle owner in New York. “I want to pay what it’s worth. If it costs them nothing to print the paper book, which I can’t believe, then they should be the same price. But I just don’t see how it can be the same price.”

Just what e-books are worth is a matter of debate. Publishers argue that printing and distribution represents a small proportion of the total cost of making a book.

Given my stance against copyright, my hostility towards DRM, and my constant valorization of derivative creativity and cheap copies, you might think I’m on Amazon’s side on this one.

I’m not.

(This really shouldn’t be surprising. My opposition to current copyright law has always been because of the way authors are able to use the laws as a way to control how their ideas can be used and modified by others (see, J.K. Rowling, Salinger, etc.). I want to give more rights to derivative creators and secondary authors. As for the “rights” of “content consumers” — I’ve never cared much about them.)

The stance that e-books should cost $9.99 each (much less than paper versions) has always been suspect.

1. It ignores the fact that most of the costs of producing a book have nothing to do with moving atoms: design, editing, proofing, layout, and last, but not least, actually writing the text that go into a book.

2. It suggests that all books are essentially equivalent. They are not. It does, in fact, cheapen the creative act to treat all books as “equally valuable.” In doing so you are declaring that the paper and ink, which really are commodities, are the only things on which value can be placed. It’s Orwellian to mandate that all ideas be of equal value — which is equivalent to declaring that they have no value.

3. The idea that e-books are too expensive is disingenuous. Books cannot be “consumed” the way music can be because books are very very expensive in terms of the attention they require from people. The primary cost of a book is not in terms of money, but in time and attention. It is impossible to read more than a few books a year for most people with busy lives, and most readers are not, in fact, truly price sensitive. If we were forced to spend $20 for every single book we buy, it would not affect our pocket books that much, and it would not significantly alter how many books we read — note I said “read,” not “buy.”

Now, I actually have no problems if we decide to abolish copyright altogether. As I’ve argued many times in other posts, if copyright were abolished, there will no doubt be a fall off in certain categories of creative works, but there will be a rise in other categories. People create, for the most part, because they want to, and the idea of the professional writer/artist is a very recent invention that is neither necessary nor sufficient for “great art” or “good entertainment.”

But as long as we are going to have copyright, it makes no sense to treat the very thing that copyright is protecting — the economic value generated by the artificial scarcity created by copyright monopolies and differential demands for different ideas — as worthless by mandating that all e-books be priced exactly the same.

2010 shakes you awake from that dream and dumps you in a tub of cold water, and then punches you in the stomach for good measure.

Maybe he’s right. There is something about its portrayal of the 数盲 mandarins that rings deeply true. When it comes to China, it’s hard to know who’s closer to the truth.

Which makes it all the more strange that his work isn’t translated into English. You’d think this view would be pretty popular in the West.