Closer to the Heart

מִזְמוֹר לְתוֹדָה: הָרִיעוּ לַיהוָה, כָּל-הָאָרֶץ
עִבְדוּ אֶת-יְהוָה בְּשִׂמְחָה; בֹּאוּ לְפָנָיו, בִּרְנָנָה.
דְּעוּ– כִּי יְהוָה, הוּא אֱלֹהִים:
הוּא-עָשָׂנוּ, ולא אֲנַחְנוּ– עַמּוֹ, וְצֹאן מַרְעִיתוֹ.
בֹּאוּ שְׁעָרָיו, בְּתוֹדָה–חֲצֵרֹתָיו בִּתְהִלָּה; הוֹדוּ-לוֹ, בָּרְכוּ שְׁמוֹ.
כִּי-טוֹב יְהוָה, לְעוֹלָם חַסְדּוֹ; וְעַד-דֹּר וָדֹר, אֱמוּנָתוֹ.
–Psalm 100, “A psalm of thanksgiving,”

Yesterday, Sarah and I went to CFA for a 6-week sonogram. This is the point we hadn’t gotten to in the past – that is, in both of the prior pregnancies, it was a sonogram at about this point which determined that the foetus had died.

This time was different. Dr. Sacks was extremely blasé about it – “oh, here’s the baby, and there’s the heartbeat.” They didn’t give me a digital image, but it looks like this*:

I started crying right away – and only came back to the present when he said “let’s hear it,” and played a staticy audio – it was clear (at 112bpm).

I am grateful to have been brought to this place now, and like the psalm says, I will serve the LORD in joy.

I’ll try to stay in today, but daydreaming has a way of getting the better of me, and this sure sounds like the coolest thing ever.

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* Given the whole discussion about ultrasound and abortion in Virginia recently, the audibility of a heartbeat at 6 weeks throws the positions of the partisans into sharp relief.

Cheesecake or Cheesy-cake?

I recently read Kelly Thompson’s excellent essay regarding sexism in comic art, and I think there is more here. Thompson limits her critique to superhero comics (thus, no “despair of the endless” as a monstrous woman), and it seems that the relatively small number of exceptions prove her point- Kate Spencer as Manhunter (which totally sounds like a porn star name) is covered head to toe, and her physique is less pornified than others, but even so she has a more buxom than average (as opposed to more athletic than average) build, at least when drawn by Javier Piña or creator Jae Lee- Michael Gaydos’ style gives her a more realistic build.

But that’s an example of one of the good ones.

Now, as for me, I tremendously prefer the less-objectified comics: give me an 80′s Suicide Squad (Amanda Waller is hardly a porn star, at ~350 lbs), the Sienkiewicz-era New Mutants (who looked like terrified, but realistic teenagers [no muscle tone on any of them]), or the John Byrne through Paul Smith X-men (a little cheesecakeyness, but not all-porn-all-the-time) any day.

I do think that there are some in-book explanations for a few of the items Thompson calls out- Storm’s classic swimsuit (which she did ditch during the mohawk phase) made some sense in that she could have wanted to feel the elements she was controlling, and while she and Phoenix were portrayed without any muscle tone, neither of them were muscular heroines: ranged powers meant they didn’t brawl much. I also think that that period was more balanced: Storm showed a lot of skin, but so did Colossus, and all of the new mutants wore the same duds.

So how did we go from a period where the cheesecake was an element to now, where it’s all the time? My theory is two words:

Art Adams.

I loved his stuff when I was a kid- Longshot, Excalibur, and the assorted other things he drew were such a treasure! But now as I look back on them, one thing I do notice is that his stuff was the first place where I really noticed the brokeback-style hip thrust. I o remember thinking that that was an unrealistic pose (when I was 14!), but I glossed over it at the time. His style made everyone look like Ziggy Stardust- absolutely fabulous in a mega-mullet way.

So, when he did it, I worked, and wasn’t problematic- possibly because he did this to men and women, and possibly because his style was extremely distinctive.

So where’s the problem? Well, copies are never as good as the original, and Adams was big shortly before the “Image explosion”- Lee, McFarlane, Liefeld, Portacio, and many others completely took over the comics world, and blew away the generally accepted bias toward realistic anatomy in favor of dynamic action scenes. While more artistic freedom and leeway might sound like a recipe for more creativity, it instead served as a removal of the restraint imposed by reality.

Sadly, the trajectory here is familiar to any junkie- as GnR said, “I used to do a little but a little wouldn’t do it so the little got more and more”. Without the realistic restraint, there was nothing to tell artists when enough was enough, and the resulting work bears no small resemblance to Claremont’s take on Tom Corsica and Sharon Friedlander after their possession by Empath: the sensations quickly paled, and the search for more left them hollow and empty.

And that’s one reason I buy very few modern Superhero comics (Fablesand Girl Genius are not superheroes, and Freefall is not for sale).

If you don’t get it, you really don’t get it

The wapo shows a bunch of people who read the Bible, but not closely enough. It’s worth it, when making Biblical allusions, to reread the relevant passages to double-check the imagery.

This time around, the reference is to the single biggest sin committed by the Israelites- the making of a golden calf. There’s just one flaw: the response of those loyal to God was to kill the makers of the calf (Aaron excepted) and strenuously punish everyone involved.

Seriously: if you want to say that Wall Street is bowing to Mammon, why precisely are you the one making the idol?

The Price of Beauty, or, Unintentionally Mixed Messages

I saw some pictures of the national Christmas tree, and it is quite pretty. The use of LEDs is a welcome improvement, and that suits my conservationist tendencies just fine (hopefully they can be reused year after year).

But I do have a lingering feeling which isn’t so positive: cutting down a century-old tree and shipping it across the country for one month of display sure seems like consumption of a relatively conspicuous kind- the fuel footprint and use of difficult-to-replace resources (century-old trees aren’t quite so abundant anymore) seem incongruous for an administration which styles itself as being against the lavish lifestyles of the wealthy.

It isn’t always easy to make choices which are values-driven; I’d be curious to know whether this disconnect between words and deeds is an accident.

Incentives

There have been several articles in the last few months written about how the dc metro (WMATA) employees have been working a bunch of 16-hour days with no breaks in-between. This is said to contribute to mistakes, bidget overruns, and dangerous safety problems.

In a statement in today’s examiner WMATA representatives said that they will phase in a maximum 14-hour day in 2014 (!)

I think that there may be an easier, quicker way to fix this problem. Currently, WMATA employee pensions are based on the 3 highest gross earning years. Given that the employees are hourly, and this overtime boosts their gross earnings, that tremendously increases the pension burden which WMATA has.

I think that this problem with overtime is pretty predictable with these incentives: work like a sled dog for three years and your pension payouts for the rest of your life increase dramatically. I know that •I• would do that.

So here’s a thought for the negotiations next time: make pensions based on the 3-years highest •salary• rather than the gross. This would reduce some of the financial incentive and burden of overtime, while still giving OT pay to the people working it in a given year. It would also mean (and this is the salient point) that a surprise need for OT work (say, repairing after an earthquake) would only hurt the immediate year’s budget, rather than incentivizing the managers to externalize the cost onto future years. Finally, it would mean that WMATA would find itself forced to hire more employees, which is good for the agency (in terms of shared knowledge and experience), good for the union (more members), and good for the area (more jobs).

So given that this both tastes great and is less filling, what’s the over/under on this approach being considered, let alone selected?

Complexity lishmah

I have seen several styles of queueing in practice recently.

Trader Joe’s in dc has a long snaking line feeding a whole bunch of register in a strictly FIFO manner. An employee stands between the registers and directs customers to the next open register.

Safeway has a traditional grocery store model, where there are lots of independent queues, with a few express lines as well.

CVS has almost entirely switched over to a small number of self-checkout kiosks. There is no real concept of queueing- people gather in a bunch and self-organize who’s next. This reminds me of “lines” that I saw in Israel.

Costco has a bunch of independent queues, but has no express lanes (besides, who goes to Costco for fewer than 10 items anyway?)

So these are over the place – it should be obvious that FIFO will on be the best strategy (i.e. have the shortest average wait time) while Safeway offers the highest throughput priority queue (which it achieves by reducing the number of queues available to non-priority customers, and thereby both increasing the average wait and increasing the speed differential between the priority and regular queues).

The CVS approach is a random lottery: there’s no way to predict all of the possible situations, and the efficiency loss is a greater than linear function of the number of people present (think CSMA/CD in a half-duplex environment).

And of course the Costco approach is the most familiar: its average wait will be a little bit better than Safeway, but the range of wait times will be larger than that of the non-priority queue at Safeway.

And now I’ve seen something new: the new Whole Foods in Foggy Bottom has a queueing strategy I’ve never seen in a store before. There are a variable number of lanes which are drained in a not-quite round-robin fashion, and they are drained to a common pool of tellers. The draining process causes a fair amount of confusion as people are sent to registers variable distances from the queueing line. The confusion increases when multiple lanes are drained at the same time.

My gut reaction to it is that it’s needlessly complex- it’s esoteric for it’s own sake, like much modern art and architecture. I prefer simple to complex as a general rule, which is part of why I am skeptical of technocratic social engineering and the like. Gears and other simple machines let you move power from one place to another, but even the best machines lose work to friction.

Anyway, given that the WF approach does not differentiate between the lanes, I’ve had a hard time understanding why they wouldn’t be better off with a strict FIFO line. I still don’t understand it, but my theory is that the WF designers thought that the psychological problem of equal queues (I always get the slow line) was better than the psychological effect of the snaking FIFO line. I’ve heard a tremendous number of people complain about the length of the TJ’s line, even though they’ll get through it faster than any other type, so perhaps WF has a point.

As for me, I’d take FIFO any day- it’s a truly fair approach to queueing, and is a maximally efficient use of resources, and that appeals to my conservationist (née hippy) side.

Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night

Megan McArdle writes pointedly about the future possibilities for the survival of the USPS. I’ve had some more ideologically strong-willed friends complain about why it’s permitted for the Federal Government to do this (ignoring those constitutional mentions, I guess).

But for me, the real reason that USPS is headed down the drain is this:

We received a notice of an envelope mailed to Sarah (presumably regarding her father’s estate, for which she is the executrix) which required a signature when we came back into the country (more on that shortly). Today, I went to the Georgetown post office, in the rain to retrieve this. The relatively surly clerk looked at the form, and then we had the following exchange:

Her: I’ll need your ID.
(I gave her my driver’s license)
Her: Who’s Sarah?
Me: My wife.
(she gives me an incredulous look)
Me: Our last names are the same, and the address on my driver’s license matches that of the delivery.
Her: I can’t release this to you. If you had been home, you could have signed for it, but now that it’s here, you’ll need to have her write a statement and sign it over to you.
Me: So I could have signed for it without presenting ID at home, but can’t sign for it, with ID, here?
Her: Yes.

This is an example of precisely why the USPS sucks: completely boneheaded policy which is enforced by clerks whose attitude is “how can I be inconvenienced by you today?” So I’ve now (along with other interactions) been incentivized to avoid working with them if I can help it. When they eventually collapse, I will be completely unsurprised, and I hope that it doesn’t cost taxpayers too much to either spin them off or wind them down.

First impressions

Slutwalks have been getting a lot of publicity lately, and I must say I totally don’t get it. How one dresses conveys a lot of information to the person who does not know you as an individual. If I see a woman in a ḥijāb, I can reasonably assume that she is a Muslim. If I see a man wearing a turban, I can reasonably assume that he is a Sikh. A man in a suit conveys a different set of assumptions than a man in baggy-pants with boxers visible.

So what I don’t get is this: what exactly is the message the slutwalkers are trying to convey? Sure, dress however you want – it’s a free country – but what are the impressions you want others to draw from your attire? Last I checked, “slut” wasn’t considered a complimentary term. I can’t quite see someone bragging that their spouse was a huge slut, for instance, and I also can’t imagine that this would be a term one would want applied to one’s daughter. Certainly what comes to my mind are adjectives like “easy” and “of loose morals.”

Yes, rape is bad. Rapists are criminals, and should be punished severely.

How does self-denigration do anything to improve the situation one way or another?

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On a related note, I saw a sign held by a slutwalk demonstrator: it read “Things that cause rape: () revealing clothes () alcohol (x) rapists”

That is absolutely true. However, it misses a big point. Consider this thought experiment: if a mid-to-large size university, perhaps Georgetown, or maybe UMCP, were to (a) ban alcohol on campus, and (b) strictly enforce minor-in-possession/contributing-to-delinquincy-of-a-minor laws (i.e. one ticket is academic probation, two is expulsion), do you think that the incidence of rape on or around that campus would increase, stay the same, or decrease? I know where I’d put my money.

So there is a pretty obvious thing which should be a policy priority, if you’re actually interested in the incidence of rape decreasing. Why aren’t more of the slutwalkers calling for this?

Nothing to see here

It is unfortunate that our political leadership (on both sides) seems to have been a product of the US educational system, and thus are unable to perform simple mathematical calculations. I noted before that defense and discretionary spending could be entirely zeroed out, and we still would be spending more than we are taking in.

Clearly, we will need to raise taxes. But even more clearly, the spending rate needs to be cut far more drastically. The Senate has not managed to pass a budget in years, and the rest of the leadership is wholly feckless.

Here’s an idea: let’s start with the 2007 budget, balance it, and then let folks argue for their favorite interests starting from balance.

We have met the enemy and he is us

Walt Kelly, who famously said the title of this post, did not live to see a specific case of this phenomenon. I just learned about the new FDA guidelines for doctors regarding opiate medications, and I’m not pleased with what I’m learning. As background, both my wife and my mother are disabled and suffer from chronic pain which can be pretty debilitating. I’m in the midst of a significant pain episode – possibly due to Herxheimer reactions caused be one of the 20 pills I took this morning (or maybe one of the 16 I took tonight – who knows?) – so as would be easy to imagine, making it more difficult for doctors to prescribe cheap, effective painkillers is not something which gives me a warm fuzzy.

I know about the abuses: about the so-called “doctors’ offices” which are the size of a closet, where “patients” are bused in from all over the country; I know about the straw purchasers and about how some of those meds can be crushed and snorted to significant effect; and I even have a family friend who is wrestling with the demon of addiction to opiate painkillers. All of these cases speak to a significant question: why are we doing this? Who, precisely, benefits? What is the harm we are trying to prevent?

When I’ve asked that question of multiple very smart people today, the answer I was given was “it’s a big problem if people take morphine and drive” – which of course has nothing whatsoever to do with whether they took it legally.

So I come back around to a more pointed phrasing of the question: given that many of the societal problems we are experiencing are the direct and indirect consequence of the prohibition regarding an individual’s use of these substances, is the cure worse than the disease? It sure looks that way to me.