E is for Every Day

Ahh, resolutions. The problem with them is that when you resolve to do something Every Day, and you miss a day, you've flunked. I've been riding every day this month (even if just the 1-mile round trip to the office and back) but manifestly not posting to the blog. Belated catch-up, this is, then.

But a bit more on self-motivation. I resolved this year to attempt to ride 100 miles a week. Resolve to attempt? sounds week. But it keeps the resolution fresh and renewable; if I miss 100 miles in a week, there's no reason not to come back at it next week. Keeping track of my mileage, I've had a week of 33 miles (just commuting and errands) and a week of 233 miles. Average is a bit under 100/week for the year, but no matter; as summer comes, we'll do more biking out to picnic for dinner.

This Thanksgiving, let's talk about the economy

My fellow Americans [that's how one is supposed to begin these things, no?],

This Thanksgiving, we will gather with our families and give thanks for the many good things that we have. The first thing we always put, with varying (and not necessarily related) levels of piety and sincerity, is each other. Then we enumerate, or mention, or ponder, our stuff. But while we're all here, let's have a talk. There are some folks missing Thanksgiving because they're camped out in public parks and various other public places across the country.

I don't know what to make of them. But I do know that they want us to think. And they want us to act. It's probably fair to say that they don't exactly know what action they want. But if we're to have high-quality action, we've gotta talk. You'll be sitting down at the table with those who love you, despite the fact that you each think that each others' politics are absurd. Now's the time to have a few drinks (we're tipping back the pinot noir with our turkey. Probably some white wine before, and bourbon after) and open up a conversation.

Resolve to bring up the economy. Because it sucks; we can all agree on that. And we can't vote in a new government (regardless of our politics, I'm sure we can all find someone representing us that we'd rather not), so let's start getting out of the gridlock at the grassroots level. Bring up the economy with someone you know disagrees with you.

Get past the frustration, and ponder that the person you're talking to has some rational or emotional reason for the opinions you're hearing. The explanation is not just "they're frickin' nuts." "They want to end the economy as we know it." "They're just jealous." "They're just defending the status quo."

Lefties: recall that it took the modern economy for "dignity of the individual" to have any meaning. Read Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Virtues.

Righties: recall that it takes respect for the dignity of others to make the modern economy work. Read Matt Taibbi's ongoing reportage series. Here's a good spot to begin.

Everyone, be thankful for the things that make this country great. Here's my favorite from the past couple of weeks: a bagel shop in New York, about to go out of business and getting white-knight investorship--from a pair of Pakistani cab drivers..

We come together at Thanksgiving--putting aside our differences is great and all, but how about resolving some of them?

Threat Gap

It's been a while since I complained about the Homeland Security Advisory System, but I just learned today that it is basically copied from the French Vigipirate system.

Now, that doesn't bother me. You never caught me ordering "Freedom Fries," or pouring Champagne into anything but a glass bound for a table. What bothers me is that the French have more threat than we do! Yes, ladies and gentleman, there is a Threat Gap, and the French are winning! As you can see from the helpful graphic here, the French have dispensed with the useless peacenik levels of Green and Blue, but have developed a greater Threat Capacity through the deployment of the the color scarlet. (It's not pink, it's scarlet, y'hear?) "Menace certaine," they say. What threat can we possibly field against such a menace?

In fact, I fear that the epistemological sophistication of the French system (or, as they say, "systeme") allows for development even beyond what our system is capable of deploying without radical readjustment. Our system, as you can observe, while having a significant hue element, is, in fact, based on altitude. Low, general, elevated…The problem is that if we develop another threat level, the only place we can get any higher is in orbit. And, quite frankly, if we put the terrorists in orbit, I'm quite happy to leave them there.

A brief aside: I don’t have the stomach today to confront the appalling knowledge that while we have "threats", the French are armed with "menaces." When I think on such a prima facie difference in fear, I feel like a cop in a blue uniform, when the criminals get to wear black.

The French, on the other hand, have merely to develop NEW COLORS, because their system is based on ACTUAL METHOD. Yes, six years ago, it seemed that political expedience was a serious threat to our freedoms (I recall that right, right?), but, as Donald Rumsfeld knew quite well, the upper limit to what you can know is the facts at hand; the French acknowledge this with their first level, "No indications of threat." When they get to yellow, it is an "imprecise threat"--the dawning knowledge that we're not sure what we know. Red is a "probable threat"--the point at which, scarily, we know what we don't know. And red is "Certain threat"--when we know what we know, and it ain't pretty.

What you may not realize is that this leaves French Threat Engineers only at the mercy of their painters in developing at least two more threat levels: The point at which a threat is being actualized for one, and the point at which an actualized thread is being analyzed. And, I'm realizing with horror that the French academy has already been enlisted as a skunkworks for yet another level: the point at which discourse analyzing an actualized menace is in turn analyzed! It is possible that certain scientists from institutions such as The University of Chicago may be ready to confront this future level of Threat, but who knows if we can close the Threat Gap by that point?

Call your congressman today! We demand a Scarlet Menace, and won't feel properly unsafe until we have it!

Sale or license? (with a dash of California vs. New York!)

That nice boy from the midwest, Marshall Mathers, just won his case, F.B.T. Productions v. Aftermath Records in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. This is, for lack of a better term, a pretty Big Effing Deal for electronic publishing in any medium. Here's why.

When authors or musicians (and other kinds of talented and creative individuals) sign a contract with a publisher, it's usually structured in the following way. Every time the publisher sells a copy of the work, the author (I'm going to say author, though the artist here is a musician) gets a cut, anywhere from, oh, four percent up to maybe twenty or twenty-five percent. (The more copies that the publisher thinks will sell, the bigger a percentage they'll pay to the author, since fixed costs for the work—editing, design, mastering, preparation of "plates" [digital or metal], and the like—become a smaller percentage over a bigger print run.)

However, if the publisher licenses subsidiary rights in the work to someone else, then the author and publisher usually split the proceeds fifty-fifty. This is because the publisher is doing work to negotiate these deals—they wouldn't happen without the publisher making them happen in most cases—but not, usually, investing much, if anything, in these subsidiary-rights ventures. What sorts of things are we talking about? Translations, abridged editions, adaptations into another medium (movie versions of books! comic book versions of movies!), licensed merchandise and apparel, coursepacks, magazine excerpts... you get the idea.

Now, here's why I think that the Ninth Circuit made a good decision: The [music] publishers were trying to have it both ways. They were claiming, when it came to their talent, that they were selling copies of the works to distributors, who were in turn selling copies to their customers. They were therefore accounting for any money that came in on these deals as Sales, and paying the authors a Royalty on these sales, as their authors were due in their contracts, maybe 5, 10, 15, 20 percent. However, the publishers were turning around and treating their "distributors" on these deals very much as licensees: the publishers made them all sign license agreements, which were only in force for limited times; the publishers retained the right—and the material/electronic capacity—to withdraw access to the work; the publishers only allowed very specific in short, they called it a license, they structured it like a license, and it quacked like a license.

The court said, "Nuh uh uh! You want this to be a license because you want to keep lots of control over the work itself. You can't go paying the author like you've sold copies of the work and don't have any control over where they go from here." Calling BS on any entity trying to own both sides of an argument is a good thing in my book.

Where will things go from here? Well, the article I kicked off with does a pretty good job of summarizing things: Fretting and complaining from publishers of all stripes, then someone will take a position "for the author" and "against the industry" and bang, higher royalties for authors on electronic editions (succumbing to what will surely be an increasingly loud plaint from authors and agents for such a raise). The ways that these institutions respond is quite familiar.

To give a little background for what's going on in the last paragraphs of the article: First, there is a broad sense that the Ninth Circuit is "more liberal" than the Supreme Court (see Newdow), but that may be more of an image than the substance warrants (I do have a day job, or I'd check stats for Supreme Court reversals of 9th Circuit decisions), and this isn't a straightforward liberal/conservative issue anyhow. Within the realm of publishing, things get even more complicated; while the Ninth circuit encompasses California, and, within it, a whole squadron of film and music companies, the biggest players in the publishing of words are located in New York, in the Second Circuit, and the Second Circuit has never felt the need to bow to Ninth Circuit precedent (I suspect that the Second and Ninth Circuits might even take a tiny breath of pleasure in taking a contrary position to what the other has staked out).

Third, no one wants to take this to the Supremes, since a broad decision is an awful big gamble and this court isn't knee-jerk predictable on these issues. So we're unlikely to get a firm, nation-wide binding system to establish the lines between sales and licenses, but we are likely to see more clarity about such things in contracts.

And last, the prospect of more direct-from-publisher-to-consumer sales of electronic editions is growing. In selling such editions, publishers can maintain the control they would have to use a license to maintain in an environment of distributors and retailers.

“Justice?—you get justice in the next world, in this world, you have the law.”—Wm. Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own

An open letter to Google

Please, feel free to cut, paste, and send this message to the Googleplex from as many directions as you see fit.--Dingbat

Dear Google,

Please cease and desist from claiming "Map Data (c) 2010 Google" in the lower edge of the maps you present at your lovely and helpful web page, http://maps.google.com. As any legal hack can tell you, data cannot be copyrighted. You are, at best, embarrassing yourself, and, at worst, stealing from the public, by claiming ownership over something that is our common property, the public domain. That's pretty evil, in my book, and I think your corporate charter says something about that.

With thanks,

Dingbat

PS: When you give transit directions to MDW airport (e.g.), you don't need to send folks to the MDW transit center, and then back out again on the 63W bus so that they can go in the "front door" on 63rd Street. It's probably a good guess that they want to go to the terminal, and probably a good guess, too, that the Transit Center is there so people can get from PT to the terminal. Cheers!

Weather.com needs an editor.

See that big blob of rain, bearing down on my softball game? No problem, I'll just click "TURN OFF WEATHER." And just to make sure things clear up in time, "RIGHT NOW."

Oh, and unless I'm sorely mistaken, the Future is either always or never new; in either case, the labeling of it as such can be stricken.

(If there's a larger point to this post, it's that editors are responsible for looking out the window. And seeing obvious metaphysical irregularities.)

A Proposal

I had the rare pleasure of teaching two classes last week, one-shot deals during orientation to discuss the themes of democracy, inequality, and education. It was a great experience—reading three excellent texts (not that I didn’t have my quibbles with them), and spending a couple of hours preparing for a good discussion, and then having a good discussion—two of them in fact.

The thrill of closely reading arguments about the place of education in society, filled with hope—and, yes, criticism (though Martha Nussbaum’s critique of education outside of her model of the liberal arts is misplaced, and Geoffrey Stone’s fears about political correctness have been revealed to be somewhat overstated)—was overwhelming! I could have taught a three-quarter sequence based on these essays.

The most striking thing about these essays was they way in which they each recalled Robert Maynard Hutchins’ belief that education was for freedom. The forces restricting freedom which worried Hutchins were Fascism and Communism, but any of these writers would have to agree that Hutchins arguments stand equally strong when the enemy is ineducation—unequal education, that is—in the form of unequal opportunity and the violence it breeds, as well as the anti-intellectualism rampant even on college campuses.

Both the experience and the material—Danielle Allen’s piece in particular—inspired a revolutionary thought. As an institution, the College should require undergraduates and graduate students to teach or assist teachers in either the University’s Charter Schools or through the Neighborhood Schools program. “A university seeks to advance the reach of knowledge through open intellectual inquiry and exchange,” Allen writes, “but presently this university presents itself to its neighbors armed and in uniform rather than carrying books and ideas.”

We believe, as a University, that teaching and research are complementary. We require faculty to teach, and specifically to teach in the Core. Why not require teaching of our students?

I can imagine some of the objections: The students might say: “Oh, that would interfere with my own studies!” I’d suggest that they start by talking to their own professors and see whether they view teaching as an unalloyed betterment to their own research. A betterment, yes, but truly a suck of one’s mental energy. No, it’s an investment with hard-to define returns.

The admissions office may say, “But this will scare off high school seniors!” I have two responses. First, do we want more applicants or better applicants? Yes, this will discourage the selfish and the cowardly. It is the job of the admissions office to make students (and their parents) aware of the fact that this is a feature, not a bug. Second, the programs I’m proposing expanding are not a matter of throwing a 19-year-old into a room with a bunch of fourth (eighth/first/tenth) graders. There is (and must continue to be) training and support for student teachers. Yes, this will cost money.

We’re well-positioned to revolutionize higher education. It’s a great leap from complimenting ourselves on 19 graduates earning spots in Teach for America (out of 1,200) to requiring a few years of part-time teaching in the classroom, but this is a University known for having, and acting on, important ideas about education in the past. As Hutchins himself wrote:

The attitude of the University is experimental because it is willing to try some things when success is not guaranteed. It is willing to change if change seems, on reflection, to be desirable. But it is not striking out blindly in the effort to do something new merely because it is new. I might say in passing that almost everything in education is experimental, for we can seldom prove that anything we do is conclusively better than something else we might do, or indeed, than nothing at all.

Nice fenders...

Here's a little project for y'all. Get your hands on some SKS fenders (the P45s are good if you're running wider tires, up to about 35 mm; the P35s if you're going a little smaller). They come in boring black or a pretty spiffy silver, with black and clear stripes.

The SKSs have nice mounting hardware: double struts and a pop-out mounting so that if road detritus gets stuck between your fender and tire you don't come to a screeching, ass-over-teakettle halt.

But you want your fenders to be a little different; you want to add some color to a black and silver bike. So you get your hands on a can of Krylon plastic spray paint and some masking tape, et voila. Oh, note that we masked the inside of the fenders when we sprayed so that the clear stayed clear. Come to think of it, it's possible that if you didn't mask the inside you'd get a very subtle stripe of color through the clear stripes, and if you wanted to be really really subtle you could leave the outside silver and just paint the inside

They're going on my Dad's black Raleigh and I think they'll look sharp.

I'm just sayin'

Amazon.com has a "Universal Wish List Button" you can add to your browser; it will allow you to add items from non-Amazon sites to your wish list.

Pretty cool.

Team Fat Cyclist: Win Susan!

Does the full-zip jersey make me look fat? I hope so.

I've mentioned Elden Nelson, the Fat Cyclist before, but now's the time to talk a little more about what he's done for me and the rest of the world, and what I'm trying to give back to him, by giving back to the rest of the world. And what you can do to help.

The Fat Cyclist is one of the best blogs on the internet, hands down. Yes, it's a little more personal if you like bicycling, or if you have some sort of capacity for human emotion, but even if not, you'll laugh your coffee out your nose at "An Open Letter to Assos" and its follow-up, "The Wit and Wisdom of Dr. Michael Lämmler". If the screamingly funny posts don't get you, then he gives away some really cool bike stuff in contests and drawings every now and then and you're hooked. And if you follow the posts, you'll cry as I did when you read that Susan, Elden's wife, has had a relapse of her breast cancer, and it has metastasized to her brain, with thousands of tiny tumors like dandelion seeds in her brain.

I've commented occasionally that TV shows are for people who don't have interesting, or attractive, or funny friends, but the thing about the internet is that you can actually get to be friends with interesting, funny, smart, attractive, hard working, wonderful people. And I consider Elden to be my friend (it says we are, right there on Facebook!). He's the sort of friend you want to be more like; not perfect (we all have our moments. And jeez, he serves brats with no beer.) but when I read his writing, he makes me want to be a better person, a better dad, a better husband. Like another big brother. Because, after all, it doesn't really matter what kind of a cyclist you are.

So we (the internet) try to 'be there' for Susan and Elden and the kids, and those of us who are in Utah can come over with dinner, and help clean the house and the like. But when Elden says, "This is helpful," and it's something we can do--we jump. Seriously, he could say, "I really need you all to send me your toenail clippings," and he'd be able to open a glue factory in a week. And so he's put together a fundraising team for the Lance Armstrong Foundation (did I mention Elden's a bicyclist?), and he asked for team members to create the largest, most successful fundraising team in the history of the event. I jumped. And jumped in for the Seattle ride, on June 21--it seemed only appropriate, in that the other person I look up to like him is my brother, that I go ride in his town. (By the way, brother Wombat, can I sleep on your sofa?)

In our family we know something about cancer from a couple of different sides: Dr. Fledermaus's family tree has a terrifying streak running through it (thankfully, late-arriving, slow-moving, and excisable), and Dr. Fledermaus herself has a Ph.D. studying the disease. One thing I'm learning too well is that I'm now at the age when my cohort of friends is starting to develop cancer. Three good friends, all with kids, have been diagnosed in the past two years, with varying prognoses. But one thing I didn't know was the range of things that the Armstrong Foundation does. Yes, they support research (amen!) and treatment, but they also provide a huge range of services to cancer patients and their families. They provide personal guidance, counseling, really, in a way that all the books and brochures and even doctors can't.

All of which is to say, I'm asking now, and I'll probably ask again sometime before June, for you to chip in a few bucks by clicking here. In return, I'll ride a hundred miles with your names on my back, and if any of you can come to Seattle, too, I'll grill brats for you according to Elden's recipe (ok, I use the same recipe). We'll have a send-off grill in Chicago, too (where we know a thing or two about bratwurst).

And if I win anything, I'll share like Bat Jr., and try to gloat humorously.

Cyclocross update.....

I know what you're thinking--"why no race reports? You have been racing, right, Dingbat?"

Well, I missed two weeks, one due to travel and one due to ill-health but the other reason is simpler. I've been terrible. Slow. Feeling like someone's adding glue to my tires when I'm not looking. Looking back a lap or two in to make sure I didn't somehow forget to unhitch the trailer. That is, when I'm not looking back to see who's blowing by me this time.

And extra-frustrated when Nemesis (the quy who outsprinted me in JP, and whom I beat in Hawthorne Woods) is third place overall in the series.

I think, though, I can boil it down to two factors: One, umm, cardio fitness. I'm just not riding enough. Two: I'm not eating enough on race day. Breakfast followed by fruit and fruit juices is not enough fuel in the tank, which is why I'm able to go go go for a lap and a half and then--bonk. On the grass, it's not as dramatic as on pavement, so it took me a little while to figure out.

Anyhow, I had fun in Lansing yesterday; there was a sandpit and I had a blast sprinting to catch a guy at the finish line. I wasn't until I'd gasped my way around the course that I realized that I hadn't caught him so much as lapped him at the line. But I held off the guy who was on my lap, which is a satisfaction. The important thing is that I got excited to train again after putting my finger on the big factors in declining performance.

Read Joe's race report for something a little more inspiring. Or Michael Barry's fun (if perhaps occasionally overwrought) recent article in the Times.

Update: I'm in the money!

Just found out that prizes for Hawthorn Park ran 10 deep; I won something!

Public Service Announcement: Anti-dooring.org

Hey everybody (yes, all six of you).

Doorings (that's what cyclists call it when someone inside a car opens a door in front of you) can be fatal. After Clint Micelli was killed this summer leaving work (in downtown Chicago), the Chicago cycling community got together and designed stickers, which we're aiming to place on all 31,000 parking meters in the city of Chicago, and as many light posts as possible. The stickers are a reminder; there's a web site at www.anti-dooring.org which offers more information and the chance to sign a "I'll look before opening" pledge.

If you'd like to help, we're looking to make another print run of 10,000 stickers, and need to raise money to do so. Chip in here.


Edit/a note on the stickers. This design with the blue and red and white picks up the colors of the Chicago city flag. If you're elsewhere, there's another design, too. Both are free to use under a creative commons license.

The state of the stacks (first in a series)

Fat Cyclist keeps us informed as to his weight, a public self-shaming into positive progress. I hereby tell you, with the same goal, the total height of all the stacks of crap paper on my desk.

147 cm

Wisdom from Dr. Fledermaus: Drip Dry

I'm a fan of--or should I say, "easily captivated by"--the Big Plan. My current Big Plan is to go carless over the next five years or so. We're making fine progress toward that goal, driving rarely enough that the car has started to pick up spider webs from disuse. But this post is about rather a simple, small way to consume less resources.

Drip dry your hands. Dr. F started boycotting hand dryers (the hot-air kind) a long time ago, due to the beastly temperature they create in a bathroom, especially one already packed with people--one shouldn't come away from washing one's hands feeling sweaty everywhere else.

Once you get used to drip-drying instead of hot air, it's a simple matter to drip dry instead of using up paper towels. Bang--if you're washing your hands as often as your mother would like, a half-pound of paper out of the waste stream.