Empirical Methodology vs. Human Nature

Sorry to be naught but a linker this week, but things have been busy...

This New York Times Magazine article, interviewing three female researchers studying female desire, struck me as an interesting example of how scientific methodologies are of limited use in describing the human person. Many of their conclusions and ideas are interesting, and you can see how they reflect lived experience to a limited extent, but the fruits of all this research are also startlingly inadequate in describing something as universally experienced as human love and sexuality. And necessarily so, I would tend to think.

Real Living

This is for Jennifer: a candid snapshot of my girls' bedroom, unretouched.


Note the unmade beds (par), the stuff all over the desk (par for every flat surface in our house), the half-opened drawers, and the near-lack of wall adornment. On the other hand, I made those curtains myself.

Everything Gets Cheaper Except Satisfaction

(Via Ross Douthat) Economist Brad Delong has a fascinating little piece at The Week where he talks about Keynes' idea that goods would one day become so plentiful that people would stop focusing on the need for them:

Nearly eighty years ago, John Maynard Keynes did the math on economic growth and concluded that within a few generations—by the time his peers' great-grandchildren came of age in, say, the 2000's—the persistent economic problem of too-scarce resources and too-few goods would no longer bedevil a substantial portion of humanity. He was right—even in the midst of our current hard times, he is right.
...
Keynes thought that by today we would have reached a realm of plenty where "We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin."

As an example of how cheap goods have become, Delong makes a comparison after my own heart:

Our goods are not only plentiful but cheap. I am a book addict. Yet even I am fighting hard to spend as great a share of my income on books as Adam Smith did in his day. Back on March 9, 1776 Adam Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations went on sale for the price of 1.8 pounds sterling at a time when the median family made perhaps 30 pounds a year. That one book (admittedly a big book and an expensive one) cost six percent of the median family's annual income. In the United States today, median family income is $50,000 a year and Smith's Wealth of Nations costs $7.95 at Amazon (in the Bantam Classics edition). The 18th Century British family could buy 17 copies of the Wealth of Nations out of its annual income. The American family in 2009 can buy 6,000 copies: a multiplication factor of 350.

Personally, I'd probably go dig up a nice hard cover copy more analogous to the original 1.8L edition, but I'd still be able to do so for less than .1% of the median US household income.

I love historical examples that put our current travails in this kind of perspective. Yet what Keynes seems not to have taken into account in his speculation is human nature, which in any situation is able to quickly acclimate itself enough to want more. Delong's estimation strikes me as much more in keeping with fallen humanity:

But no dice. I look around, and all I can say is: not yet, not for a long time to come, and perhaps never. I'm convinced that everyone I know can easily imagine how to spend up to three times their current income usefully and productively. (It is only beyond three times your current spending that people judge others' spending as absurd and wasteful.) And everybody I know finds it very difficult to imagine how people can survive on less than one-third of what they spend—never mind that all of our pre-industrial ancestors did so all the time. There is a point at which we say "enough!" to more oat porridge. But all evidence suggests Keynes was wrong: We are simply not built to ever say "enough!" to stuff in general.

The Troubles of the Rich Man's Woman

It is, of course, terribly wrong to rejoice in the suffering of others. But perhaps it's not entirely in appropriate to be mildly amused by this New York Times article about the travails of the wives, girlfriends and mistresses of Wall Street titans during the recession. To their credit, it sounds like they're a bit amused themselves.

Rerun: The Miss Manners Guide to Junk Movies

I've been reading Miss Manners lately, and it's inspired me to recycle this post from 2006:

Judith Martin, more popularly known to the reading public as Miss Manners, has a long and varied list of accomplishments. One of these was reviewing movies for the Washington Post once upon a time, and one of the movies she reviewed was The Empire Strikes Back.

To call "The Empire Strikes Back" a good junk movie is no insult: There is enough bad junk around. And surely we're getting over the snobbery of pretending that it is undemocratic to recognize any hierarchy of culture, as if both low and high can't be appreciated, often be the same people.

But when light entertainment is done well, someone is bound to make extravagant and unsupportable claims for its being great art. You will hear that this sequel to "Star Wars" is part of a vast new mythology, as if it were the Oresteia. Its originator, George Lucas, has revealed that the two pictures are actually parts four and five of a nine-part sage, as if audiences will some day receive the total the way devotees now go to Seattle for a week of immersion in Wagner's complete Ring Cycle.

Nonsense. This is no monumental artistic work, but a science-fiction movie done more snappily than most, including its own predecessor. A chocolate bar is a marvelous sweet that does not need to pretend to be a chocolate soufflé; musical comedies are wonderful entertainment without trying to compete with opera; blue jeans are a perfect garment that shouldn't be compared with haute couture. There are times when you would much rather have a really good hot dog than any steak, but you can still recognize that one is junk food and the other isn't.

This is a distinction that is too rarely made when dealing with movies that touch, however peripherally, upon matters of philosophy or theology. I recall when the first Matrix movie came out and friends were encouraging me to see it. "It's deep!" someone exclaimed. "It's really a very Catholic movie, and it deals with the whole question of reality and philosophy. I think it's my new favorite movie!"

Now keep in mind that we are speaking here of The Matrix. This is the movie in which Keanu Reeves ran around looking tousled and dazed and uttering lines that, when analyzed, generally carried a subtext of "Dude!" It was entertaining, and perhaps could serve as a glossary of various popular existential ideas, but it was by no means highbrow or great or even memorable for anything besides the shooting technique bullet time. And even that has lost its novelty, since every action movie since has parroted the style. The Matrix was a junk movie -- entertaining, superior to many other junk movies in style and concept perhaps, but junk. You want a good movie dealing with heavy intellectual discusion, look for Copenhagen. If you you're seeking a movie to assure that perhaps your lousy day job is just an illusion after all, that's where the Matrix comes in handy.

Doesn't Test Well

Last week I hovered anxiously behind my six-year-old as she sat at the computer taking a short reading-assessment test. As she clicked menus and selected answers, it took a Herculanean effort on my part not to "teach" the whole test. ("Are you sure that's the answer? Here, let's look at these words. Do you know what this word means? Now, let's read the whole sentence." Ad nauseam.) She thought she was simply playing a game on the computer; I had to leave the room so she could finish the test in peace.

There's always a danger that parents will get so caught up in their children's lives that they refuse to let them make a wrong choice. I don't think it qualifies as parental smothering to want to use every teachable moment -- after all, that's how I roll most days. When we're reading a story, I explain the new words. When we're working on math problems, I make sure the girls are paying attention to the problem and that their process is correct. So it's an almost irresistable temptation to treat a test just like a regular lesson, and try to "teach" it. *

The problem with that approach, however, is that without letting my daughter work on her own I don't know whether she can do the work on her own. A few months ago, I held myself back and allowed her to completely flame out on a math test. Until then, I hadn't realized that she wasn't grasping some basic concepts. The disastrous results led me to change programs and try a new method that's been very successful.

My father pointed out to me that if it's that hard for me to watch the girls fail at something I could easily have them correct, how hard must it be for God the Father to watch His children make the wrong choices over and over again?

*In fact, I'm at the computer writing this post because my girls are doing a five-minute math drill and I don't want to drive myself nuts by watching them work.

Progressive and Conservative

I attempt a bit of theorizing on when one should be progressive, and when one should be conservative over at The American Catholic.

Looking Back at 2008 Reading

At the beginning of last year I started keeping a list in the sidebar of all the books I'd finished. More than anything else, this was in order to keep some sort of record of what I read, an oddly slippery thing for someone with a lot of books to keep hold of.

One of thing I've come to realize, looking back, is that my memory of how long it's been since I've read various books is rather fluid. Some of these I feel as if I'd read a very long time ago, while other books I feel as if I read very recently and yet judging from this record I must assume it's been more than a year.

I'm not really sure how many books I expected to find that I read during a year, but twenty seems a moderately respectable total. Though as I look over the list, I feel as if I am not quite as weighty a reader as I sometimes fancy myself to be. Below I break them up according to rough genres:

Light Fiction
The Red Pavilion: A Judge Dee Mystery
The Lacquer Screen: A Chinese Detective Story
van Gulik's early books of Judge Dee stories are translated and only slightly adapted from original Chinese stories, but these are van Gulik's own novels, based on the medieval Chinese detective genre.

Brother Odd
I'd been meaning to try one of Dean Koontz's Odd books for quite some time, though by accident I picked up the third one at the library.

Comrade Don Camillo
Giovanni Guareschi's Don Camillo books are so good that when I picked this up to read one or two of the chapters (which were written as sequential but essentially stand-alone stories) I found myself reading the whole thing in the course of a day or two.

The Foreign Correspondent: A Novel
One of the most recent of Alan Furst's series of espionage novels set in the early years of World War II, this story of Italian anti-fascists in pre-invasion France is enjoyable but not Furst's best. I'm eager to try his more recent The Spies of Warsaw which reviewers have said has him back at his best.

The Horse and His Boy
The Silver Chair
We've been working through the Narnia books with the girls -- our six-year-old being the primary audience -- but between parent hand-offs I tend not to get the whole book unless I go off and read the whole thing on my own, which I did with these two, which are among my favorites.

Quality Fiction
The History Of Our World Beyond The Wave
This was a second or third pass through this peculiar, yet beautiful, novel about the aftermath of a giant wave that cleanses the globe of civilization and most of its people. Anyone expecting a realistic science fiction novel would be deeply disappointed, but for anyone with a love of books and prose style this book is hauntingly evocative.

China Court
JulieD got me started on this Rumer Godden novel through her podcast read alouds, but I found myself so involved in it that I had to go finish reading it the old fashioned way: in print.

A Soldier of the Great War
I continue to owe Kyle an in-depth review of Mark Helprin's novel, but for now I'll just that I strongly recommend it for its evocative imagery and it's prose style, but there were elements of it which I also found mildly frustrating.

History
One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
Nathaniel Fick's account of Marine training and fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq is fascinating, and of an even-handedness to interest all but the most ideological on both sides of the war debate.

The Great Pyramid: Ancient Egypt Revisited
Romer's book is the first really serious study of the Great Pyramid to come out in a number of years, and its a fascinating read, covering the history of Egyptian pyramid building, with its culmination in the Great Pyramid, the history of the Great Pyramids surveying and excavation by various teams of archeologists, and a fascinating discussion of what the physical remains at the site tell us about the survey and construction methods. Technical, but very interesting.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
I considered creating a "popular science" category for this, as I didn't really come out considering it serious history, but it was an interesting read for what it was. I enjoyed it enoug to try Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed but I found that much of what had annoyed me about the intrusions of Diamond's opinions and worldview into Guns, Germs, and Steel was present in even greater quantities in his editorializing on collapsed societies of the past and how they might be similar to our own, and it eventually got returned to the library unfinished.

The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice
A fascinating group biography of Company A, a national guard unit turned army during WW2 and assigned to the first wave on Omaha beach on D-Day.

A Soldier From the Wars Returning
Written by a veteran who fought in the British army in both the Great War and WW2, this account of the Great War and life as a junior officer in it is a fascinating first hand account, and also a somewhat revisionist one as compared to the sometimes overplayed stereotypes built up through the poetry and writings of authors like Sassoon and Graves.

Five Days in London: May 1940
Lukacs' incredibly up-close history covers the first days of Churchill's prime ministership, in which the question of whether Britain would remain in the war or follow France's lead in seeking terms with Germany (and whether the British would have any army left to stay in the war with) remained in question.

Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945
Catherine Merridale's book is as much a social history of the Red Army as a military and political history of the Eastern Front, and both elements are fascinating for anyone with a serious interest in World War II.

Hobby
Designing the New Kitchen Garden: An American Potager Handbook
Hobby Farm
It's a Long Road to a Tomato
This family being what it is, setting up a household vegetable garden could not be done without extensive reading -- though as it happens most of the reading took place after the plants were safely in the ground. The Potager Handbook was interesting for its attempt to come up with an aesthetic approach to vegetable gardening which produced a garden that was beautiful to look at throughout the year (rather than just your farm-style rows of like pants) while also being timed to produce food for the table during as much of the year as possible. You can tell, however, that this was based on the author's grad school thesis. Long Road to a Tomato was an enjoyable set of essays by a New Yorker who deciced to abandon city life to make his living off an upstate organic farm and the New York City farmers market. Every so often, however, one would be hit with very jarring cultural references that reminded me how far apart the author and I were on nearly very conceivable topic.

The New Rules of Lifting
Big Tex recommended this book and it's companion volume for women to MrsDarwin and me, and thus far its been highly useful, though grueling. If you're serious about getting into shape, it's not a bad way to go.

The Age of Data

As someone who earns his daily bread and crumpets by doing data analysis, yet has a deep affection for the worldviews of times past, it has struck me more and more of late that "data" has become a term granted incredible reverence in our modern world. Constantly I hear people who are educated and move within educated circles, but who have no particular understanding of data itself, insist that they must be "shown the data" to believe something.

Some little while ago I asserted in conversation about youthful sexual morality that it was entirely possible for a young person to, should he or she so choose, remain chaste until marriage. "The data doesn't support that," I was told. When I responded that data on the topic merely showed that many people do not so choose, but that it was nonetheless entirely possible to pursue this course (and mentioned my own experiences and those of a few friends by way of example) I was informed tendentiously that, "The plural of anecdote is not data."

Others address problems which might rightly be addressed via data, but have no understanding of what data means. "It's shocking that in this day and age half our students are still below average in reading ability," I was once told. I'm afraid I laughed.

Or slightly more less obviously foolish, "The bottom 20% of earners don't make any more, after you adjust for inflation, then they did twenty years ago." This is true in a certain statistical sense, but it fails to account for the fact that individual people move through these classifications quite fluidly. The nineteen-year-old who was in the bottom 20% ten years ago is by no means necessarily still there now.

From my vantage point as a producer of data, it strikes me that the illusion under which far too many people labor is that data itself tells you something, and that it tells you this clearly and with authority.

Data is a highly modern phenomenon. When William the Conqueror commissioned the Domesday book in 1085, it took a year to complete and the feat of cataloging with relative accuracy all the people and their property in England was so remarkable that it is remembered to this day. The project required sending people out on horseback throughout the kingdom to interview people and write down the results over the course of a year, and no one attempted anything of similar scale again in England for several hundred years.

Today computers and telephones not only make it easy to collect census and survey data, but all manor of transactions (performed on computers) pour out fast quantities of data as a sort of golden waste product. In a modern corporation such as the one I work for, it is impossible to sell people things and ship them out without in the process producing so much data about who bought what, when, and for how much, that we "data monkeys" are challenged to drink in half the available insights from the firehose stream of information turned upon us.

Data sits out there in tables: thousands or millions of records of individual facts or events which those of us who access them can sum and average and graph and flip this way and that in pivot tables. Sitting at my computer I can take millions of rows of data which are the by product of a week's worth of consumer electronics orders and in an hour or two's worth of work in Access and Excel tell you how often certain products were bought together, what people think is a good price for a 42" TV, or whether a glossy insert in the weekend newspaper sells more digital cameras than our website. The sorts of functions I can run against a data set in moments represents levels of analysis that would almost certainly have been impossible more than fifty years ago. In the days when people really did wear green eye shades and sharpen pencils, it would simply not have been possible to gather and casually experiment with hundreds of thousands of rows of data in the way that I so casually do every day.

The fact that there is simply so much data around in the modern world allows us to investigate all sorts of interesting questions using data. But what must be realized is that "data" is simply the collection of lots of individual records about individual events. It may not be the plural of anecdote, but the it is the plural of event. And data does not itself have obvious meaning. One must seek to find some sort of pattern in it, and that pattern may not be right, in the sense that it may well not accurately describe the experiences or motivations of most or any of the people who were involved in the individual events whose descriptions are now "data".

And this is what people need to understand about data. Data is not the deeper essence of the universe, the real world of which mere events are but an imperfect instantiations. Rather, data represents the partial leavings of reality. Traces of past events. Footprints and shadows. Clues left behind by the real events, which can only at times be accurately deduced from them.

There are amazing insights that can be gained from data analysis, not only about present day events, but about the past. (Some fascinating historical research I've read lately has been based on analysis of data built off the centuries of data recorded in parish registries from throughout Europe, now entered into databases by historians.) But these insights are only good to the extent that a good analyst is able to correctly identify patterns which reflect reality.

I'm glad that we live in the age of data. All other things aside, I find it fascinating to play with, and it gives me a good living. But given the modern obsession with data as a defining source of truth, people need to see through the hype and recognize what data actually is and isn't. Data is simply the collection of a set of records which tell you "someone did this" or "this person had this characteristic". By looking at the frequency with which people did some given thing or possessed some given trait, we can learn some very interesting things. But data can never answer qualitative questions for us, though it may provide us with the inputs to make qualitative judgments.

Data cannot tell you what people are capable of or what they should do, but it can tell you what people often do do. Data cannot tell you what the best health care system is, but it can tell you the life expectancies of people with various illnesses in different countries, the average cost of treatments, or the average wait times for procedures. Data cannot tell you what marriage is or what culture has a desirable family structure, but it can tell you who gets divorced and how frequently. And data cannot tell you how accurately data answers all the worlds problems -- though there is data on how much more data we produce very year. Indeed if the data I've seen on that point is accurate, the age of data is just beginning.

Bush: Truman or Nixon

One hears rather often that George W. Bush has ended his presidency with record low approval ratings. Some articles I've read have said (apparently incorrectly) that they are the lowest ever.



The above was sent to me yesterday, and it provides an interesting comparison. Two presidents left office with approvals as low as Bush's: Truman, who faced a struggling post-war economy and a increasingly difficult situation in the Korean War; and Nixon, who was in the middle of being impeached when he resigned.

History has been far kinder to Truman, overall, than Nixon. Indeed, I suspect that few people know that Truman ended his presidency as unpopular as Nixon and Bush. Certainly, I hadn't realized it. It remains to be seen whether, in 50 years time, Bush will be seen as more like the former or the latter.

Road Trip

The Darwins just returned yesterday from a weekend trip. You guys, I used to think I was a fairly competent driver. Not all that much phases me, and audio books make the time flow easily for the kids. (I'm not so sanguine about overly-frequent bathroom stops, but this too shall pass.)

But I've discovered my driving Waterloo: a perfect storm situation consisting of a high-construction area, a semi in the right lane, and a concrete barrier that's right up on the white line of the left lane. I really don't like driving next to concrete barriers at the best of times (though Darwin points out that unlike a car, a concrete barrier isn't going to move at you). But at night, wedged next to a semi, at 60 MPH? My shoulders and knuckles still ache from being tensed.

Let's go to the movies!

It's been a long time since I've been to a movie theater, and I've had the yen to sit in a seat with cupholders and eat high-cholesterol popcorn in the glow of the screen. What to see, what to see? I'd been thinking about Doubt or Slumdog Millionaire, but maybe I should wait for some of 2009's stunning line-up, as previewed by Iowahawk:

Dark Spinach: Brooding, conflicted superhero sailor man (Matt Damon) must face his own inner demons and canned vegetable addiction to save his anorexic lover (Gwyneth Paltrow) in the violent screen adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel. Featuring Mickey Rourke as Bluto.

The Royal Fluffers: Lovable band of misfit stoners with Jew-fros trick Queen Elizabeth into filming a porno in this sweet coming-of-age teen fart bong sex comedy from Judd Apatow. Starring Jonah Sethberg, Seth Justinstein, Jay Justin Jonahbluth, Ron Jeremy, and Helen Mirren. (British release titled “On Her Majesty’s Secret Cervix”)

Angel Soft This: In a shocking and sometimes humorous indictment of the toilet paper industry, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock documents the ravages he suffers after 30 straight days of non-stop butt-wiping.

Fearful Deadly Fear: Blacklisted 1950’s screenwriter Damon Runyan (Tim Robbins) writes a secret screenplay about the the McCarthy-era blacklists, in this 1950’s blacklist drama set against the background of the McCarthy era blacklists.

Lotta Splainin: Javier Bardem plays a verbally abusive Cuban bandleader and Cate Blanchett a neglected woman with a secret Vita-meata-vegamin addiction in this beautifully filmed marital drama set in the repressive 1950s. With Larry the Cable Guy and Kate Winslett as Fred and Ethel.

Lunch Lady: poignant story of school cook turned playground serial strangler has generated advanced Oscar buzz for star Scarlett Johannson, who reportedly gained 400 pounds, facial tattoos and gum disease for the role.

There's lots more where these came from.

Intimations of Mortality

We all know it, of course, but lately I've been confronted with the fact that life may end suddenly, at any stage. This past week, an old friend dropped dead of a heart attack at age 30. And yesterday, my 15-year-old brother was walking to the bus from school when some guy came out of a parking lot, pulled a gun on him, and demanded his backpack. Fortunately my brother was unharmed and the most important thing that was lost was his American History textbook (he had his cell phone, his iPod, and his wallet in his pockets), but WHAT THE HECK? This crazy person might have killed my brother over a bag of schoolbooks. A brother, a son, a friend, and an all-around good guy might have been lost to the world for the sake of the few items someone thought a schoolkid would carry.

My brother is taking it all in good stride, though he was understandably shaken. I'm full of gratitude today that the people I love are alive and unharmed, which seems a bit less certain than it did yesterday morning.

How to Get a Job

One of the things that's been keeping me busy lately has been hiring. Contrary to the overall economic environment, the particular segment of Large Corp. Inc. that I work for has been growing rapidly, and the team that I work on has been hiring for five slots over the last couple months. So much of my time has been spent looking at resumes, doing phone interviews, in-person interviews, and discussing who fits what role.

I hope none of our readers will find themselves involuntarily in the job market over the coming months, but on the off-chance that you do find yourself writing a resume in the near future, a few thoughts from someone who's just finished reading a lot:

- Keep it short. I've received resumes of up to six pages, and in no case has there actually been enough valuable information there that it needed to be more than two. Try as hard as you can to stick to two pages or less.

- Bullet. Like many others who love prose, I weep for the powerpoint-ization of modern communication. However, think of the poor soul sitting reading a stack of resumes and trying to grasp them quickly while keeping up with his other work. 3-4 well written bullets for each past position (plus bulleted sections on your skills and your highlights) makes for much easier reading than big block paragraphs.

- Pick one or two themes for your overall resume and focus everything you say around them. One good friend of mine who recently landed a job told me he was writing his resume with an eye to emphasizing "resourceful" as his primary quality. When I ran the finished product by my boss, literally the first words out of his mouth were, "He certainly sounds like a resourceful problem solver."

- Don't "google bomb" your resume. As at many large companies, we get submissions through an online interface. One person who was "resourceful" in the wrong ways took a dozen keywords and phrases out of a job description we posted and simply included the phrases as bullets at the top of the resume as "core competencies".

- Sound good, but don't lie. If you say that you were "responsible for a project which saved the company $15 million in annual expenses" and in an initial interview it becomes clear that you were a minor player on the team that achieved this and can't even describe the project all that clearly, you end up looking rather bad.

- Don't get too cute. Use a normal, readable font for your resume. Don't print on funky colored paper or put it in a special binder. Don't include letters of introduction or samples of your work (especially lots and lots) unless you're asked to.

- Personality can help. If there's something genuinely fascinating about your history which can be stated briefly, that will sometimes provide the hook which gets a second read or lands you in the interview pile. "Spent one semester in Rome where all classes were taken in Italian." "Hobbies: I am an expert cook, play the drums, and have five children." "Spent a year as a one room schoolteacher in an African tribal village." It won't get you hired if you're not qualified, but if there are a lot of basically qualified resumes it may get you brought in simply because you sound like an interesting person to meet.

When interviewing:

- Try to be as concise and linear as possible in answering questions.

And yet at the same time:

- Make an effort to explain clearly in terms that your audience will understand what your past positions involved and why they were important to the company. If you simply say something along the lines of, "A lot of it was insurance industry stuff, it's pretty different from what you do." the interviewers will take away from this the impression that you either didn't understand what you were doing very well or didn't care about it very much. We can't understand every detail of another industry, but being able to explain things in broad terms (especially if you can explain how it might be similar to what we do) is much more impressive than not trying.

A Letter to the Apocalypse

Via Ross Douthat, I ran into this Slate article about the Letter of Last Resort:

At this very moment, miles beneath the surface of the ocean, there is a British nuclear submarine carrying powerful ICBMs (nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles). In the control room of the sub, the Daily Mail reports, "there is a safe attached to a control room floor. Inside that, there is an inner safe. And inside that sits a letter. It is addressed to the submarine commander and it is from the Prime Minister. In that letter, Gordon Brown conveys the most awesome decision of his political career ... and none of us is ever likely to know what he decided."

The decision? Whether or not to fire the sub's missiles, capable of causing genocidal devastation in retaliation for an attack that would—should the safe and the letter need to be opened—have already visited nuclear destruction on Great Britain. The letter containing the prime minister's posthumous decision (assuming he would have been vaporized by the initial attack on the homeland) is known as the Last Resort Letter....

According to the reporters for BBC Radio 4, the safe containing the safe containing the Letter of Last Resort is to be opened only in the event of a nuclear attack on Britain that kills both Prime Minister Gordon Brown and a second, not identified person—the person he's designated as his alternate nuclear decision-maker in case of his death.

Slate author Ron Rosenbaum's reaction to this situation is not positive:

With all due respect to our British cousins, this seems, well, insane. Or it highlights the fact that the insanity of Mutually Assured Destruction—insanity that was obtained during the Cold War and that we thought we'd left behind—still exists as real policy, however deeply problematic it remains in this and many other respects. (The fact that British defense officialdom allowed the reporters to know about the Last Resort Letter suggests that they're proud of this system, evidence that a kind of group madness grips Her Majesty's Royal Navy.)

The old-fashioned, pen-and-ink-on-paper quality of it all (quill pen, perhaps?) somehow makes the system seem like it emanated from a 19th-century madhouse out of Wilkie Collins. Which makes it even more profoundly shocking that the system is still in place.

Perhaps it all has to do with how one deals with the idea of worldly authority and with one's approach towards human history, but I don't at all share Rosenbaum's hysterical reaction. That within the first weeks in office a PM is called on to set aside the jubilation of party dominance and plans for consolidating new-won power and sober himself to write by hand five copies of a letter to the end of the world (or at least, his world) strikes me has having a certain tragic grandeur, and providing a valuable reminder of the incredible temporal responsibilities that rest on our modern world leaders.

I suspect that the US approach to these things is less evocative, but frankly I'd be encouraged to know that our president-elect would be pulled away from the cheering crowds for a few hours during his first weeks in office and told to think a little bit more soberly than the "Yes we can!" Bob-the-Builder slogan which swept him into office while penning a letter that would shape a world in which the US no longer existed.

Your Daily Dose of Laughter

It's high past time I added Dr. Boli's Celebrated Magazine to the blogroll. Along with Wondermark, it's my daily dose of absurdist Victoriana humor.

Guided story writing

Seems like when Darwin and I were in grade school, there was a craze to teach poetry by having youngsters jump write in and write a poem, regardless of the fact that the youngsters had been taught nothing about what a poem is or how to write one. ("It rhymes!") To my mind, the first step in learning to write is to listen to poems and stories in order to develop a taste for the mental flavor of prose and poetry. The next step is guided writing.

A child develops a skill first by watching someone perform a task, then by doing the task with help (while imitating what they've observed). Once the child has practiced the task with help and correction, he's ready to try it on his own. We're at the helping stage here. I have the girls narrate a story and provide plot elements, and then I write it down as a narrative, explaining how I'm crafting the ideas and dialogue into structured sentences, and developing the flow. For example, here is this morning's project, with our work in parentheses.

Rose Beauty

("What's the name of your character? Where does she live? What did her parents do?")

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Rose Beauty, because she was a beautiful as a rose. She lived in a house painted with blue and red and orange squigglezags. Her father died when she was eleven ("When did her father die," I asked. "When she was born?" "When she was eleven, " said Eleanor firmly.), and her mother was a scrubwoman.

One day she met an old witch woman. (We debated on how to describe this character -- a sorceress? An old hag? "Witch woman" was the preferred descriptor.)

"Good day, old granny," Rose greeted the woman. (At first Rose just said hello, but I suggested some alternate greetings, and Julia wanted the witch called "Granny" rather than "old mother". And instead of just writing "said Rose", I added the greeting.)

"Please give me a drink of water, my dear. If you don't, I will cast a spell on you."

"Here you are, granny," said Rose, fetching a cup of water.

"Now my must wash my dishes, or else I will cast a spell on you." (Julia liked the spell formulation.)

"Yes, granny," said Rose, and scrubbed the dishes clean.

"Now you must sweep the floor," said the witch, "or else I will eat you." (Eleanor got tired of the spells.)

"I'll make it shine, granny," said Rose, and she swept the floor clean. (I suggested this as a way of pepping up the usual "Yes, granny".)

"You're a good girl, Rose, and you deserve a reward," Granny told the girl. "If you go to the stable, you'll find a surprise."

In the stable, Rose found a red horse with wings.

"You're so beautiful!" exclaimed Rose. "I'll call you Scarlet." The horse nuzzled her hand. (Julia wanted to name the horse Black Beauty at first, but I pointed out that it was an odd name for a red horse, and suggested Scarlet.)

They flew off to seek their fortune. On a beach ("Where did they go?") they discovered a chest that was fastened with huge brass locks. (Description of the chest built up through discussion.) Next to the chest there was a hill of sand with a shovel stuck in it. Rose began to dig. Two feet down she found a rind of heavy golden keys. (The girls were all for the keys being buried, so I asked them how Rose would know the keys were buried. Eleanor liked the shovel, and Julia wanted two feet down.) The keys fit perfectly in the locks. Inside the chest were heaps of coins, precious jewels, and beautiful dresses. On top of everything sat a note on yellowing paper that read:

My dear, I give these riches to you because you have a kind heart. Be sure to use these riches to help the poor.

(Julia came up with the idea that the old witch had left the chest for Rose.)

Rose married a prince and they were always kind to the poor. They lived happily ever after.

THE END

Some of the story was direct transcription, but much of the final form was me crafting suggestions aloud as I wrote them down. The girls get a sense of the different ways a basic formula can be developed and structured. When they get older I'll let them write stories on their own and then edit them for grammar and flow. Hopefully by then they'll have had enough exposure to the way a writer can use the tools of the craft that any flaws in their writing will stem from exuberance, not ignorance.

Conspicuous Compassion

I'm always taken with a good turn of phrase, and so I very much enjoyed Blackadder's post on Conspicuous Compassion.

Culture Clash

It was as the priest was incensing the altar (after the presentation of the gifts and before moving into the main text of the Eucharistic rite) and the choir was giving its all to a rendition of Flow River Flow that it occured to me: One of these things does not belong with the other.

What Makes a Job "Best" or "Worst"

The Wall Street Journal published the results of an annual ranking of Best And Worst Jobs.

There are some interesting picks in there. The #1 best job is Mathematician and #12 is Philosopher, coming in right behind #11: Economist. Academic jobs overall did well (#4 Biologist, #7 Historian, #20 Astronomer) though other high skills office jobs ranked as well: #2 Actuary, #3 Statistician, #5 Software Engineer, #9 Industrial Designer, #10 Accountant.

One thing that struck me was that nearly every job in the top twenty involved sitting at a desk and thining a lot (with the biggest exception being #14 Parole Officer.) Of the bottom 20 we have: #181 Firefighter, #182 Child Care Worker, #187 Auto Mechanic, #196 EMT, #199 Dairy Farmer, and #200 Lumberjack.

Looking at the methodology from Career Cast, working outdoors, physical labor, and struss/urgency were all considered to be negative factors in rating careers. I can see why many people might have these preferences -- especially if they are college educated analysts sitting at desks over at Career Cast -- but that makes it a bit more of a "careers like mine" ranking more than a "best" ranking.

I wonder what would happen if you specifically rated based on the satisfaction of workers with their own jobs, how highly they rate their expectations continuing in that career, how much they would recommend their career to others, and how satisfied they are with their current income and future income potential.