What's with the British... taps

OK, this is a consistent, albeit minor annoyance I've noticed since moving here. For some unfathomable reason, the British seem to insist on having separate hot and cold taps, rather than a single, adjustable one. Now, on the face of this, who cares? They're taps, it's not the end of the world. While this is true, it leads to the totally flummoxing situation where I have two choices when washing my hands; nearly-glacial cold water, or water so hot I cannot hold my hands under it (seriously, without hyperbole, the taps in the men's room in my office building dispense water so hot it steams). How is this useful? Who uses the hot one and where did they get the sub-dermal asbestos? But more importantly, is it really that tricky to get a tap which has an adjustable temperature?

See the rest of my "What's with the British..." series.

What's with the British... an intro

So, I've periodically ranted about some weird eccentricity or idiosyncrasy about British culture, mores or norms. However, I've never really done so in a cohesive manner. That's about to change. Whenever I notice something that annoys, befuddles or perplexes me, I'll post it here, and tag it with "What's with the British". This page will serve as both an intro to this series, and an index. I expected that each post will be pretty short, as it's essentially just my ramblings about something confusing I've noticed since moving here.

• What's with the British... taps?
• What's with the British... deodorant?
• What's with the British... traffic lights?
• What's with the British... baked beans?
  
• What's with the British... street signs?
• What's with the British... case of the missing top sheet?
• What's with the British... screenless windows?

Caving to the latest facebook meme

So, I was just going to ignore this latest facebook trend of "Post 25 random and largely irrelevant facts about yourself. But I've now been tagged in four such notes and read one from my friend Su who inexplicably didn't tag me (no love? Already thinks she knows everything about me? Who knows?). So here it is, 25 random facts about Dan:

1. I have two middle names; Wendell and Izatt. Izatt is my mom's maiden name; I'm not sure where Wendell comes from exactly.
2. I hate my birthday and since moving overseas and meeting new people have strictly limited the number of people who know when it is (mostly to girls I've dated). I don't like getting older, and I don't like a fuss and hate that everyone feels the need to argue this.
3. I'm in my fourth year of a three-year Ph.D. and haven't enjoyed a single day in the office in about two years.
4. One of my life goals is to watch all 250 movies in the IMDB top 250. I have yet to decide if I want to fix the list as it stands now, and watch those 250, or amend the list as new films get added.
5. For the first few days of my life, I was unnamed. My parents had thought of calling me "Jesse" but decided Jesse James sounded like a tribute to a bank robber. They thought of naming me Matthew but the nurse talked them out of it, saying that half the male babies born that year had been named Matthew. So until I became "Daniel", I was referred to simply as "Wrinkles".
6. I used to play Dungeons and Dragons frequently. My favourite character was a nearly-omnipotent level 25 fighter-mage who eventually became a demi-god and ruled over a large swath of land from on high. After that, the game kind of lost its challenge.
7. I periodically contemplate buying a motorcycle, but have so far refrained because my mother would fly to England and knee-cap me. Plus, I am concerned that I would look like a douchebag poseur. A seriously dorky one.
8. Due to hitting the gym and losing weight, I now own a suit jacket that is large enough to fit myself and my girlfriend in it simultaneously. I think it may be time to donate this to Oxfam.
9. I hoard many things, but amongst them are: padded envelopes, boxes of any kind and plastic shopping bags. I blame my parents and grandparents for this as my family owns such things as Christmas wrapping paper older than me, and three complete dining room tables.
10. I grew up in the same house for the first twenty years of my life, and have lived in 13 places since then. I went two years moving every 4 months, and this is the first time since 2000 that I have lived in the same location for more than 1 year at a time.
11. My first computer was a Macintosh 128K I inherited from my father. My current one is a MacBook Pro 2.33GHz 3GB Ram/320GB Hard drive. In the intervening time, I have had a Mac Plus, a Mac LC 475, a Powerbook 180, Powerbook Duo 280 and 2300c, a Powerbook 3400, A PowerMac G4, and a PowerMac G5.
12. When I moved to the UK in 2005, I brought two bags weighing 30kg each and a bicycle with me. I also shipped my 25kg computer (the G5 from above) and monitor over, and a box weighing about 15kg. I do not travel light, it turns out.
13. Despite being an electrical engineer, I am both somewhat frightened of electricity (having nearly electrocuted myself once or twice) and fairly incompetent. In undergrad labs, I blew up a CPU, two banks of NOT gates, three LEDs, two servo motors, an op-amp or two and probably a few other things I'm forgetting. The lab tech would become visibly worried whenever I would approach his office and once asked me "what did you break now?"
14. When my appendix was removed, in 1993, in Cuba, it was three times too long and in the wrong place, which made diagnosis difficult initially. As a result, it was only discovered by exploratory surgery lsating three hours and giving me a 6-inch, 22-stitch scar. A litre of pus was sucked out of my abdominal cavity, and the estimate of the surgeon was that my appendix had ruptured almost three days prior and had I waited as few as three more hours, I would've been septic, likely fatally. Coming on the first days of my holiday, the surgery and hospital stay ruined the entirety of my vacation. On the other hand, unlike when my friend Adam got sick on a camping trip with me, no helicopter-based evacuation was necessary.
    
15. Despite having debated at a university level for nine years, and achieving a modicum of success, I have never been to a Worlds competition. I have also never read the entirety of a single Economist, though I poked through a few articles in one issue around Christmas 2006.
16. No matter how drunk I am, I can almost always find my way home and take my contacts out. Even in a new city, I have never failed to make it home, and have only woken up with contacts in about twice.
17. I hate lab demonstrating (TAing), but have done so for two years running, and have grudgingly agreed to do it again this term, because I'm broke. However, I am refusing to mark anything this time (an activity I hate more than being completely broke). In the past, your mark would directly depend on how high you were in my pile. Near the top, I was less annoyed and frustrated, and thus more lenient.
18. I have one tattoo, on the back of my shoulder (a red maple leaf). I am contemplating getting a second, on my left upper arm, if I ever finish my degree. It will be (seriously) the schematic diagram of an N-channel enhancement-mode MOSFET transistor, surrounded by the words "Deus Ex Machina" (Latin for "A God From The Machine"). I think chicks will dig it.
19. I recently passed two workout goals: being able to bench more than my body weight (I can now do about 100kg) and do partial squats of more than double my body weight (I can now do about 200kg).
20. One of the most profound things anyone has ever said to me came from my brother, a guy not known for such profundity. He told me I'd waited too long in my life to start having fun. This is very true.
21. Although I want to travel around basically everywhere in the world, I get hesitant of places with an excess of poisonous snakes, bugs or jellyfish (which terrify me if I see them). That being said, I still want to go to Australia, which seems to have the highest concentration of all three. Oh yeah, machete-wielding rebels or machine-gun wielding drug lords also give me pause.
22. I am an unrepentant Triscuit addict. Anyone I know who goes back to North America does so with explicit instructions to bring me back some of these salty, wonderful crackers, as they aren't sold in the UK. The Black Pepper and Olive Oil ones are the best.
23. I do a mean version of Eminem's Without Me on karaoke. I will need to be moderately intoxicated to be convinced to do it, but not so much that I forget the words.
24. I'm convinced that everyone, even fairly "normal" people, have what I call "pockets of OCD"-little areas of life that must be certain ways, etc. I know I do: maps and menus must be folded correctly, socks must match completely, and so forth. Oh, and when I'm swimming, I'll often count the laps I've swum by finding significance in the number (i.e. 14 is the product of two primes, 15 is the house number I used to live in before my current place, etc.)
25. I have owned a total of six iPods, plus two replacement hard drives, two replacement batteries, a replacement motherboard and daughtercard and a second casing, including the buttons and electronic interface (that came with one of the second-hand, earlier iPods). Two are currently active (an iPod Touch and an iPod Shuffle), one was killed by getting rained on, one was run over by a bus, one was retired for a newer model, which was in turn left on a train when I was very, very tired.
    

My Internet Quiz Mosaic

On one of my scheduled breaks from reading boring papers (I find the only way I can focus at all on this boring-ass work is to allow myself scheduled breaks throughout the day), I came across another one of those random internet quiz things that so often gets passed around like a 2-litre bottle of cheap cider in a flophouse. This one, however, intrigued me, because it isn't just a simple question-and-answer affair. The instructions, instead, are as follows:
* Type your answers to each of the following questions below into Flickr Search
* Using only the first page, pick an image
* Copy and paste each of the URLs into the mosaic maker

1. What is your first name?
   
2. What is your favorite food?
   
3. What high school did you go to?
   
4. What is your favorite colour?
   
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
   
6. Dream vacation?
   
7. Favourite drink?
   
8. Favourite dessert?
9. What do you want to be when you grow up?
   
10. What do you love most in life?
    
11. One word to describe you.
    
12. Your Flickr name.
    

Yeah, it's cheesy and silly, but there are some truly impressive shots on Flickr, and I have always been somewhat fascinated by photography, so I gave it a whirl. This is my result (click for full size):

Here are my answers (can you guess each one?):

1. Dan
2. Steak
3. Parkside
4. Blue
5. Claire Danes
6. Road Trip Across Asia
7. Single-Malt Scotch
8. Chocolate Fudge Cake
9. Successful
10. Sex
11. Kickass
12. Prometheus-Titan

Some thoughts on it:

• Who has a favourite colour once they pass the age of 8? I went with blue just to be totally unoriginal, but I honestly couldn't tell you what my favourite colour is.
• It's interesting to me to see how little correlation there is between my search term and some of the returned results. Specifically: steak giving my someone's leg, the road trip one giving me a snake, sex showing me a bridge in New York and "successful" giving me a shot of a locomotive. I didn't really explore why, but I am somewhat curious where these came from. Flickr tags? Titles? Comments?
• Some of the photos are absolutely brilliant. I've recently stumbled upon the idea of HDR photography. The locomotive is definitely HDR and I suspect the leg, New York (edit: yes it is, just checked the photo name) and city-at-night shots are as well.
• I think this really shows some of the promise of the massively over-hyped Web 2.0, the interactive, user-generated content iteration of the web. There's an amazing breadth and depth of photography on Flickr, all there for the searching and enjoyment of the users, all free. And with that comes the chance to create derivative works-to remix and redisplay the content in other ways that are artistic, or meaningful or whatever. I'm over-analysing it obviously, but I do think this is a microcosm for this trend of the participatory internet.

Anyway, here's the credits for the artists whose photos appeared in my mosaic. I'd love to see what any of you who read this might come up with.

1. Dan, 2. 365.114 I don't give a damn about my reputation., 3. Parkside, 4. When Waves Collide, 5. Claire Danes, 6. Rear.. Fanged ......!!!, 7. Day 126 | 365 : Success!!, 8. Chocolate is a Girl's Best Friend!, 9. Covered Wagon Train, 10. Brooklyn Bridge I | HDR, 11. Vegas Slow Hand, 12. Prometheus Titan Guide

Democracy=capitalism=evolution part 3: The Bad

"We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot have both. "

-Louis Brandeis

This is part three of a series of posts on capitalism, democracy and evolution. Please make sure you have read parts 1 and 2 first.

Addmittedly, this post has gotten much easier recently. Ever since the worldwide financial markets melted down, massive goverment bailouts were floated and financial institutions collapsed under the crushing weight of their own poor choices, it has become much easier to note and explain the flaws in capitalism. But I want to conclude this blog post series by looking at the issue from the same specific vantage point as the others in this series: a comparison between the forces that drive democracy, evolution and capitalism, and the parallels between them. Because there are perils inherent in these forces, and we would do well to heed and mitigate those perils, as much as we can.

Perhaps the single greatest mover in evolution is species extinction. Species extinction is required for the continual pace of evolution. We exist on this planet and thrive largely because of the billions of species who have been wiped off. Whether they were exterminated by a meteor impact, as were all species of dinosaur, or by being out-competed (as were the Neanderthals who once co-existed with our ancient acenstors), countless species no longer inhabit the earth. Extinction is required for new species to thrive because of the limited nature of resources. If a given species no longer competes for food, habitable land or other commodities, it opens up a niche in which a new species can emerge. So extinction is often the instigator of evolution. Further, it can also be the product of evolution. A new species better able to compete for a limited resource will often push another to extinction simply because they are better evolved to harness that resource. Nature is a harsh mistress, and we would all do well to remember that we exist merely as a result of the billions of species who died out to make way for us.

The problem is, when we extend this concept to capitalism, we can see it destroy people's lives. The clearest example of this is the current trend of outsourcing manufacturing to China. This has resulted not only in a raised standard of living for China, but for ourselves, as well (from a consumer products point of view). The massive drop in the prices of consumer goods has allowed us to explore new products to an extent we never would have otherwise. This isn't just pointless consumerist crap theory either. Everything from clothing to housing materials, from computers to telecommunications has been affected by this; it has allowed new ways of doing business and has drastically affected our ways of lives. But at what cost?

Because you see, nothing is really produced in the West any more. GM and Ford are struggling and relying on government handouts to stay afloat. Technology and textile companies have either closed up shop or moved overseas (even Levis, long a bastion of American production, no longer make any jeans in the United States). The American, Canadian and British manufacturing sectors are dying. And this trend will only continue: consumers pick less-expensive products, so nearly any company that chooses to produce locally will be out-competed by those who take advantage of the cheaper labour overseas; companies that produce in America will be rewarded with their own extinction. Many people feel that we are shopping ourselves into unemployment.

Of course, the market will correct for this. We will develop new avenues of revenue, new ways of doing business, and new areas of specialisation. If the global free market is about only one thing, that's it: specialisation. China has been able to leverage its huge population and lack of employment and safety standards to create a cheap, disposable workforce capable of churning out discount shoes by the cargo shipload. We blithely look the other way on human rights issues and the health and safety concerns, because who wants to pay double prices for their Nikes? Our specialisation has gone the other way: we focus on innovation and finance, service and ideas. These are the specialisations where our comparatively-highly-educated workforce can thrive. And in time, it will all balance out. As more and more of china's labour market is put to work, internal competition for jobs will increase and prices will rise. Eventually, the massive advantage they enjoy will dissipate. Simply put, the rising standard of living in China is a double-edged sword for them: soon there will be so much internal wage competition that it will be too expensive to hire them. This has already started to happen in India, where rising salaries have made offshoring less desireable than it used to be.

But the catch to these forces is time. Are we willing to watch the American economy spiral into depression in order to wait for Chinese labour to get more expensive? What if it takes 25 years? Evolution is amoral-it's a natural process and bears no thought to what we think of as right and wrong; if a species is ill-adapted, it will die, and that's just the way it is. But we as a people do care about right and wrong. Are the cheap televisions and shoes worth seeing average working people in our nations suffer for decades? Is it worth losing (possibly forever) control over our own production? There's a balance to be struck, when weighing up such options, and far too little thought has yet been paid to that.

The second danger that emerges from the evolution-capitalism parallel is that of short-sightedness, and it is this danger which has so recently and dramatically reared its ugly head. Because both forces (and political evolution too) are short-term reactionary processes. Species don't evolve according to what the conditions will be like, they evolve to what the conditions are now. People vote based on the current issues and political climes, not what they predict the world will need in some years' time. And stockholders make decisions for the direction of their companies based on short-term projections and market conditions. Often to their detriment.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the current "credit crunch", which was sparked by the failure in the US sub-prime lending market. A lack of regulation allowed (and almost required in many cases) banks to lend money to people who realistically were never going to be able to pay back the loans. And the thing was, from a typical capitalist point of view, this totally made sense. There was intense competition for new loan customers, and the US and UK were in the middle of a huge housing boom. Surely the money wold come back somehow. And further more, all those competitive forces, so shrewdly modelled after evolution? They would have crushed banks that didn't do it. The shareholders would have seen a dwindling of market share and revolted, and any potential customers would see that bank as small and less-capable. Further, the short-term loss of revenue would have made the banks less competitive. So from a pure market standpoint, in the short-term, the banks had to give these stupid loans. Because the market tends to ignore the long-term in favour of the short.

Similarly, many companies, when faced with slowing profits or a soured economy, will dump employees left and right, trying to cut costs. However, this is often a terrible strategy in the long-term. Apple is as successful as it is today largely because it bit the bullet and kept on its employees in the early 2000s, after the dot-com bubble burst and the tech industry took a pounding. They poured money into research and development, and were able to innovate their way to success. IBM did a similar thing, with equally successful results. On the other hand, Gateway divested itself of thousands of employees, and eventually tanked, selling off parts of itself to a variety of different countries; Motorola similarly laid off a staggering 50,000 employees, and is now struggling to find its place in the market. In both cases, short-term decisions were made that hurt the companies in the long haul.

Finally, the weakness in the market is where the evolutionary comparison falls down. That is the issue of collusion. Because we don't work solely on our instincts or what is best individually. Cartels such as DeBeers will actively work to counter market forces, one of the few times that the long-term is actually examined thoroughly. Companies will create artificial product differentiation, mislead consumers or spread FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) about a competitor to try and trick people into buying a specific product. All of these work against the idea of a natural selection.

That fault, however, can actually be our salvation. Because humankind is unique on this planet in our ability harness foresight. We are not slaves to our instincts, nor are we incapable of thoughtful reactions. We can plan, scheme and werigh up different alternatives. And to my mind, this can be our greatest strength. Clearly the market forces are powerful. Also, as I stated in earlier posts, there are significant benefits to the market; I would never espouse a fully socialist/communist agenda, as such a concept has been shown time and again to be inefficient and a poor methodology for giving people what they want and need. However, equally crazy is an unfettered, unregulated free market. As the former employees of the Lehman Brothers about the perils of letting the market rule your every whim.

Only the craziest of free marketeers would ever espouse a total lack of regulation. Without regulation, companies would pollute the land, slaughter innocents and consume every resource they could lay hands on, all if it would attract a single new customer. They would lie, cheat and steal their way to profit, the only motivator that would matter. So clearly we need regulation to some degree. This article from Yahoo shows how thoughtful, well-planned regulation can be used; the Canadian banks have remained largely strong during this economic storm, due largely to legislation that prevented them from wantonly giving loans to everyone with a pulse.

Government has a role to play in all of this. I am not a bleeding-heart socialist, but neither am I a total libertarian. Government can use a light touch to mitigate the failings of the free market system in a ways that the businesses themselves never will. Whether that's limiting trade with China, or applying conditions that make them adhere to basic working standards, or whether it's preventing greedy, short-sighted financial institutions from running amok with the public's money, governmental regulation has a role to play in the market. But it's difficult for them to do, because they are open to extinction as well, from a short-sighted public; a group of people who want prosperity and splendour, but lack the motivation and training to truly evaluate long-term consequences (good and bad) of policy. So sometimes the government has to make choices that are unpopular. It might mean you can't afford to buy a house right now, but if you couldn't truly make the payments anyway, that's a sacrifice that might have to be made to prevent another depression.

Our role in this is as the evolutionary force behind the political wing. We can push our politicians to do better. Reward those who make the difficult but correct decisions. It might mean your next TV costs more, it might mean that your line of work is made obsolete and you need to re-train. But try to evaluate the politics and the economy for what it is: a fragile balance between the immediate future and the generations to come. We are more than merely a collection of instincts honed by millennia of evolution: we can plan for the future in a way nothing else we've known can. Let's flex those muscles and demand a better world.

Sidebar: VHS vs. Beta This is a small note to respond to a comment that came in the facebook note of my first posting in this series. The assertion that was made in that comment was that the VHS vs. Beta format war of the 1980s was an example of collusion-that JVC and co. basically paid the movie industry to side with them, and Beta-a better technology-was killed off. THis has repeated itself to a degree with BluRay vs HD-DVD.

What I would say to this is yes, collusion between companies to subvert market forces played a significant role. However, the "Beta is better" claim is one of the assertions I hear all the time, and I wanted to clear one thing up: Beta was not better in every way. Picture quality was better, and the tapes lasted longer. True. However, at the time VHS was released, Beta could only hold one hour of video. This made it unsuitable for taping movies off the TV, as well as for containing an entire feature-length film from the studio. This, it turns out, was a major failing for the format. Sony had gambled that picture quality was more important to the public, and they were wrong. YouTube shows that people prize convenience over image quality in many cases.

So I think that Beta died quite rightly. By the time Sony released a version with an extended playback time, it was too late. VHS had become the format of choice (it was also much cheaper, incidentally) and Beta eventually faded to obsolescence, witht he exception of its professional counterpart, BetaCam, which was a different format and was used for decades in professional recording. In this case, though collusion was present and counter-acted the market forces, it was the market that decided: Sony had created a format well-adapted to some things, but not those things which the market prized. They were poorly adapted for feature-film recordings, and were thus made extinct by the comet of VHS.

"Having created the conditions that make markets possible, democracy must do all the things that markets undo or cannot do."

-Benjamin Barber