Kona has several well-defined enemies:

• the cover monster, who lurks under comforters, behind blankets, and within pillows, and who must be repeatedly defeated via combinations of leaping, worrying with the teeth, and biting until dry cotton-mouth overwhelms.
• the vacuum monster, and her cousin the mobile vacuum monster aka the Roomba. Surprisingly, also found lurking in air mattresses. Confront by stalking leading to a determined pounce, and concluded with hasty, triumphant retreat, a bit of plastic grill proudly held in the jaw.
• other dogs, to be bullied or avoided as relative size, apparent fierceness, and number and size of humans in her pack dictate.

  

I wonder if she is happy with her enemies, or if she would willingly trade with me, getting in exchange "the perpetual difficulty of communication between people", "the improbability of accurate software schedule estimation", and Caltrain.

PMI is the Project Management Institute, the biggest and oldest institution in my profession. I'm voting for the Board of Directors. There are nine candidates, three women and six men, and I can vote for up to five. Here are some quotes from candidate statements:

My vision of PMI is to be globally recognized as the de facto advocate for project management, and the key transformation agent through its innovative products, services, programs and partnerships.

PMI's position as the global thought leader in project, program and portfolio management and the authoritative source for all aspects of project management knowledge has been reinforced to me as I have worked with project managers from around the globe.

Second, remain the "Thought Leader" in project management by continuing to be the "go-to" organization for practitioners and corporations looking for project management information.

Finally, PMI must remain a forum for thought leadership in the project management profession

PMI has made significant progress to establish increased membership and presence in various regions, but a stronger focus on a large part of the African region is strategically needed.

As a Board member, I would advocate for PMI's thought leadership in bringing together diverse stakeholders (e.g., academia, corporations, vendors) and professional associations (e.g., engineering, IT, other project management associations) to promote compelling messaging around the value of the profession, and common approaches to its practice.

Slim pickings, you can see, although one of those quotes is markedly different from the rest. Most of the statements are fairly pure bullshit, of both the ב₀ and ב₁ varieties. None of these people seem likely to address what I think is the fundamental weakness of the profession and the institute: the pressures to stop dealing with reality and start dealing with an artificial world instead, a world in which "thought leadership" is a meaningful phrase.

It's barely past noon but I heard something at lunch that I'm confident will be the most important thing I learned today. If a killer robot is chasing you, throw unbalanced things with weird moments of inertia at it, like frying pans and cats. Robot motion controllers can't handle stuff like that, so if it catches a gyroscope you threw at, it may get confused long enough for you to escape. For now.

Two senses of wrong. 2+2=5 wrong. For example, the Sonny Bono act which extended existing and future copyrights 20 years. Extending existing copyrights clearly does not serve the public policy purpose of copyright, which is to incent people to create works. Another example: the US sugar industry lobbied the US Senate to change the World Health Organization to say at most 25% of your caloric intake should come from added sugar, rather than 10% as the WHO drafted it.

Global warming is another example of this kind of wrong. Over a period when 0% of peer-reviewed articles called into question the consensus around global warming (that it's real, important, human-created, important to stop, and possible to stop), 53% of media articles called it into question, and Congress delayed action.

Second sense of wrong. "That's just wrong" wrong. Example: Fannie Mae's "socialized risk, privatized benefits." Crony capitalism. Steven Paine, who was caught on tape soliciting donations to the Bush 43 library in exchange for access. The administration said this is "completely ordinary". Third example: Congressman Rangel soliticed donations to the Charlie B Rangel Center for Public Service from the people he regulates. Launched an inquiry into himself to prove there was no conflict of interest according to the standards of Washington. Wrong because corrupt.

Wrongs of the second kind lead to wrongs of the first kind.

Framers were obsessed circa 1785 with independence. Incredible corruption in Federated US driven by lack of independence among representatives. The US Constitution, however, failed to achieve this. Bribery was not criminalized in Congress until 1853. The 20th century is much better than the 19th century in this sense, but a new form of corruption arrives. Abramof and Cunningham's kind of corruption is the exception; the real problem is the need for constant attention to money to retain tenure in Congress. Incumbent re-election rates have reached almost 100%.

The costs to our society from this dependency. In 1994, Al Gore proposed to deregulate telecommunications; Congress refused because this would undermine the ability of Congresspeople to raise money from the industry. Most importantly, this dependency destroys trust.

Between March and June 2008, 94 Congressional Democrats changed from voting no to voting yes on telecom immunity. Those who had changed their vote had received twice the donations that other members had.

Public approval of Congress is down to 9%, the lowest level ever measured. This is a bankrupt institution. As Congress fails, power shifts to the president and to the courts.

The Change Congress organization, founded by Lessig and Joe Trippi, intends to coordinate and intensify existing efforts to reform. Layer 1 gets people to pledge to one of four complementary platforms of reform. Layer 2 intends to publicize the contrast between actual and pledged support by members of congress. Layer 3 is to steer support in the way that Emily's List does.

Dependency may not be the most important political problem, but it's the first problem that must be addressed because it undermines any other solutions.

Q: How does this dependency affect academics? A: The best academics simply avoid public policy issues.

Q: What about term limits? A:I used to support them, but now, because of California's experience, I oppose them. Lobbyists know more than politicians about how government actually works, so term limits shift power to lobbyists. We need more dedicated, career legislators.

Q: How can the movement you've described take advantage of the presidential candidates' rhetoric of change? A: I'm conflicted. I'm a strong supporter of Barack Obama. I was disappointed when he decided not to take public funding. There are two public funding problems, one around the president and the other around Congress. We won't be able to fund local elections through online contributions in the next ten years even if presidential candidates can.

Q: Can you comment on the decision that corporations are persons and can therefore ... free speech ... campaign contributions? A: This is a hard question for Constitutional law scholars. The Supreme court never actually acknowledged that corporations are people; instead a court reporter added that notion, which then became lore. The Supreme Court is not going to change in any interesting way in the next 25 years. We should therefore focus on what we can do; pass laws that would be upheld by the Supreme Court.

Q: Is there a resource someone can go to to see who companies contribute to? A: That's a softball question, it must come from someone from Maplight.

Q: How do you mass-market this idea to the American people? A: That's too hard. The only way you're allowed to talk about public policy such that the media will cover it is to run for something. But to run for something, you have to become part of the problem. We want to show people how whatever specific concerns they have have been mistreated by Congress because of the dependency problem. We're in a long-term strategy; we expect the Pledge campaign to take three or four cycles. We expect some campaigns to take 10 or 20 years to run.

Q: comprehensive energy policy in context of corruption? A: All evidence is no.

Q: What about eliminating riders and earmarks? A: Our Congress originally had very strong germaneness requirements. But it's better for everybody in Congress if bills are compromise bills instead of single-issue bills. (Joel's note: i.e., an institutional design flaw in Congress allows members of Congress to serve their own political needs at the expense of their intended function.)

Q: You suggested the 19th century had worse corruption, but more damage is being done today. Is this because modern government has more power. A: The 19th century Congress is full of genuinely bad people. The modern Congress is full of good people in an awful system and not taking responsibility for fixing that awful system. If they were personally corrupt, it might be better because their personal bribe needs would be much smaller than re-election costs. Increasingly Congress is just the farm league for K street, where the real money is. This is the same model as my law students: work as an associate and become a partner, somewhat the same pay structure, but I don't want my students running the government.

Q: This seems to be a big jump from your career as a lawyer. What prompted it? A: I started as a constitutional law professor. This is constitutional law; this is our government failing to function. I want to see parties actively content; the constitutional framework within which parties contest must be one we can trust, and this one isn't.

Q: What kind of organization is Change Congress? A: We are a c(3), which is a non-profit; a c(4), which is a interest group organization, and a PAC.

Q: How do you keep lobbyists from infiltrating Change Congress? A: I think lobbyists are an important part of change. But there's the same line as with lawyers in front of the Supreme Court. Note that Members can pay for lots of personal luxuries with campaign funds. That's the line we need to draw.

Q: Twenty years from now, having a conversation with your adult son, what change would you like Change Congress to have achieved. A: Judge Scalia has a line that every generation takes certain things for granted. We look back and can't believe how people were so racist, increasingly sexual orientation is like that. I want my son to say, "how could anyone has thought it would be okay for people to influence congress in the way they did? How could you have wasted your time on that when you could have been playing with me?"

I've added a category for brain stuff, so you can click below where it says "Brain" to read previous posts. Most recently, I mentioned the theory from the Red Queen, that human brains evolved via the battle of the sexes. Here's some fresh information on the issue, this time from the perspective of cooking.

Highlights:

• Human brains got bigger 2 million years ago, but there's no archaeological evidence of smarter humans until 150,000 years ago.
• "In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, Khaitovich explained, thereby freeing up calories for our brains."

The battle between brain and gut for energy budget has been pointed to before; interesting to see it pop up again.

Some things come easier than others. I've always had a hard time with simple arithmetic than goes between single and double digits. I'm probably better at estimated square roots of numbers under 100 than I am adding two numbers between six and nine quickly and confidently. Don't ask me why, just a hole in the brain. For calculating any time zones outside of the US, I've learned to absolutely, no matter what, re-check my calculations with a special tool like the World Clock Meeting Planner. And analog clocks with hands always slow me down just a bit. It almost always takes me a few seconds to sort out which is the big hand and which is the little hand, and while I know the hours, I usually end up working out the minutes under my breath just to be sure.

Fortunately, linux offers a plethora of clocks. Here are just a few:

To change subjects for a moment, let's talk about desktop environments. A desktop environment is the code that provides the borders around all of your programs, the maximize and minimize buttons, the system menus and settings, the glue for all of the other things you look at and poke with. It's like The Force for your computer screen. It is part of the "operating system", but technically distinct from the inner guts of the operating system. If your computer were a car, the file system and kernel and such would be under the hood; the desktop environment would be the upholstery and dashboard and indeed the hood; and your programs would be the places you drove to, I guess.

If you use Windows, then all of this is smushed together; Windows XP is your kernel and your desktop and your catechism and everything else. This used to be true of Macs as well. But with OS X, Apple brought in industrial-strength Unix guts, and put a glossy desktop environment on top, and proved that you can put lipstick on a pig. Actually that's unfair to the Unix guts (BSD); it's more like proving that you can make safe and friendly consumer products with nuclear turbine engines carefully hidden inside. Neal Stephenson's 1999 essay In the Beginning was the Command Line, by the way, remains required reading if you are interested in the subject of user interfaces and operating systems.

In the Linux universe, things are more wide-open. While the industrial-strength guts are more or less standard, a much broader range of choice remains at the desktop environment level. The two main options are KDE and Gnome. KDE has a reputation as the more flexible, configurable one, while Gnome has gone aggressively in the direction of simplicity. Since I'm not a new user and I'm stubborn about how I do things, I tend to prefer KDE—more on that later. I just want to mention a single feature that comes standard with the KDE bundle, a killer feature whose absences from Gnome is sufficient to guarantee I'll stick with KDE for the duration: the fuzzy clock. It's an option within the Panel Clock (Configure -> Appearance -> Clock Type: Fuzzy). It looks like this:

At minimum fuzz, it says "twenty five to eleven". If you turn up the fuzziness, it will say "twelve o'clock", and then "Night", and then, at High Fuzziness, "Weekend!" I keep it at minimum fuzz because I do want to know what time it is; I just don't want to know to the minute, or watch the seconds and minutes ticking away. I like my doses of mortality just a bit vague. And until Gnome offers the fuzzy clock, I'll never switch.

I've published the airplane recognition poster on Cafe Press, where you can buy it as a 20" x 14" poster. Enjoy!

I just gave up on the last of the three Foundation prequels, written by the Killer Bs (Brin, Benford, and Bear). The ideas were vaguely interesting, but the characters and plot were so wretchedly thin, serving merely as didactic mouthpieces for a not-especially-sophisticated set of arguments about destiny and chaos and humanity and whatnot. The last straw for me was this passage, after the aged Hari Seldon fears he's had a stroke:

Hari yearned for a return to unconscious oblivion, rather than discover that another portion of his brain had died. He did not want to face the aftermath—another harsh setback on the long slide toward personal extinction.

All the talk about the Laws of Robotics made me realize that this may be a suitable framework for contemplating what King Kaufman calls "The Complicated Calculus of Teams I Root for". For me, the calculus goes like this:

1. Thou shalt always cheer for the Dodgers, whoever is playing the Yankees, the Nets, the US national womens' and men's football teams, Arsenal, whoever is playing the Blues, and the Mighty Ducks (but not the non-Mighty 2006 and later Anaheim Ducks).
   1. Thou shalt always cheer for whoever is playing the Giants, except when the Giants are playing the Yankees
   2. Thou shalt always cheer for whoever is playing the Cardinals, unless the Cardinals are playing the Yankees, or the Giants while the Giants are in contention for the NL West or NL wild card
2. Thou shalt always cheer for the A's, the Red Sox, the Mets, whoever is playing the Cowboys, whoever is playing the Patriots, and whoever is playing Manchester United, except when such a team is playing a team defined in the First Rule.
3. Thou shalt never cheer for or against Tiger Woods or Roger Federer or Herman Maier, except inasmuch as one may cheer for a force of nature, such as a sunset or rainbow.