Why do Unions like Pensions?

I understand why people like pensions.  You work for a while, then you get to retire, and you don't have to worry.

But there's also lock-in.  You only get the pension if you stay with a company.  Through good times, and bad.  maybe it's not a fun place to work anymore.  Maybe it's downright horrid.  But if you stay for another four years, you get your pension, so you stay.

Why is that good for employees?  Wouldn't it be better to have fluidity (on the part of the workers) so that they can apply not just short-term pressure (strikes) but long-term pressure (retention)?

Or is this a situation where the structure of a union has incentives not aligned with the rank-and-file workers?  (Because if you leave the company, you might fall under a different union representative, or a different union)

Vista and Silverlight: two tastes that really ought to not be forced together

I'm kind of interested in the Mojave Experiment.  Microsoft went out and showed people "Mojave" and how much better it was than Vista, their never-got-off-the-ground-acceptance-wise OS.  And then, "surprise", Mojave is Vista, Soylent Green is People, and Bob is Your Uncle.

A friend was looking for a computer and asking about Vista and with how much vigor she ought avoid it.  My understanding is that much of the backlash is because it's hard to get things working with Vista if you upgrade, but if you get it on a computer you'll be fine.  I was hoping to give her some ciation towards this, and so went to http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/ .

And it requires Silverlight.  Microsoft's other latest technology.  If you're trying to convince slow adopters, why would you use a different early adopter technology?

It's such a great idea, with such a head-in-the-sand implementation.

[These views are my own and not my employer's; though I hope they become yours.  Because I'm right.]

Words' Resurgence

I'm reading George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London.  It's a (slightly fictionalized, it turns out) telling of his time being poor in... Paris and London.  Good book, and even though I sometimes disagree with Orwell I never regret the time I spent reading him.

Two big thoughts have struck me:

1) I could make a lot of money compiling a guide to English funny currency.  What the hell is a bob?  And a crown?  What's five and sixpence mean?  And a quid?  (In fact, I know the answers to most of these).  But a Creative Commons-licensed (non-commercial) essay describing the universe and lexicon, along with a per-decade commentary on economics (so you can know how much 4 pounds is in each time period, say) would be awesome.  I imagine that, written well enough, and licensed cheaply enough, you could allow editors to include it in editions of... basically any English Literature book ever.

2) I got to this passage:  "And instantly [] the tramps began to misbehave[]. All round the gallery men lolled in their pews, laughed, chattered..."  Loll is a verb, meaning to lounge around, but in that context it seemed so much to presage "lol" as in "omfg lol" that I wondered if I hadn't gotten a copy of the book remixed a la Laugh-Out-Loud Cats.  It just all worked so well:  a book about tramps that was in the context of laughing by a writer who thought so much about language (yes, 1984, but also its underappreciated precursor "Politics and the English Language".

So, George (nee Eric), tell me, is newspeak really a foreshadowing of teenage girl speak?  My hat, as ever, is off to you.

Q&A with Chris Onstad

Recently, Chris Onstad, author of Achewood (the best webcomic ever) stopped by the New York office.  I was fortunate enough to be given the chance to ask him dumb questions, and watch him turn them into amazingly intelligent and literate answers.  Check it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2ZOSZZTIiE

Why I Support Universal Healthcare

It's basically a three-step logical process.

1. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
2. When people get really sick, we (as a society) will have to pay for the cure.
3. So we might as well pay for the prevention.

So, if you disagree with Universal Health Care, and I know there are a lot of you out there who do, which of these three do you disagree with?

Evil Audubon Society

You should check out The Evil Audubon Society, sometimes misspelled as The Evil Autobahn Society.

Top Gun Analogies, taken too far

The Kentucky Derby is rife with potential for comparison to the 1987 cinematic coup de grace "Top Gun".

"I feel the need. The need for speed." Straightforward resemblance to the sport of ponies.

So perhaps it is no surprise that jockey Kent Desormeaux, riding the back of Big Brown (the favorite who went on to win it), chose to commentate a replay of the race by comparing his run to Tom Cruise in that fateful film. Quoth the short, fast man: "I'm locked on now. [] And all I've got to do is pull the trigger."

Eight Belles, the filly who took second place, broke both of her front ankles was immediately put down after two equine ambulances pulled out onto Churchill Downs's track.

It's with a deep understanding of how bad a person I am that I imagine all of the ways I could recast Iceman (played memorably by Val Kilmer)'s line of:

"The plaque for second place is in the women's bathroom."

Going Conventional: A March Madness Case Study

I was talking with friends the other day about sports. All of my friends like sports either significantly more than I do, or significantly less. Thus I was basically talking to myself and wondering how likely conventional wisdom was to be wise.

I know there are all sorts of bookies who know exactly what seeds mean what, but I was more interested in the exception cases. Specifically, what is the largest sub-tree of an NCAA bracket that has had no upsets.

I was positive that 2 team subtrees had this property: that's simply the higher-seeded team winning a game. I would have bet a lot of money at long odds that 4 teams had done it (that is, 1 beats 4 and 2 beats 3 and then 1 beats 2. Of course, in a 16-team seeding, that really means 1 beats 16 and 8 beats 9 and 1 beats 8). But 8 games... I thought happened. And 16 I thought maybe hadn't.

Turns out, 8 teams has happened. As recently as 2007. #2 Georgetown is triumphant over 7 other, lower-seeded teams.

16 teams has happened too. If my scan is correct (though it's late, so I'm open to other examples), in the 1985 tournament. The East region was won by #1 seed Georgetown, who beat seed 16, seed 8 (who beat seed 9), seed 4 (who beat seed 13 and seed 5 (who beat seed 12)), and seed 2 (who beat seed 15, seed 7 (who beat seed 10), and seed 3 (who beat seed 14 and seed 6 (who beat seed 11))).

But before that, I had found that it has also happened to 12 teams. Back in 1982, with a 48-team field, the West region was won by... Georgetown.

I guess the moral of the story is: if you find yourself seeded in a sub-bracket with Georgetown seeded higher than you, you're in for a not-very-upsetting time.

P.S. As a side note, I checked out Georgetown. In 10 out of 17 tournaments I looked at, they won exactly when they were the higher-seeded team. In 4 they lost as a higher seed, and in 3 they won as a lower seed. Thus, in the future, you should expect Georgetown to win exactly those games as they are expected to. They're rather dependable.

Why can't Juries ask questions?

I'm watching 12 Angry Men.

The Jurors bring up among themselves all these questions. Arguments then ensue.

Why should Jurors not be allowed to address their questions/concerns to people who could answer them? In what ways would this harm the process?

I think we're really hesitant to do Jury Reform, and for good reason. But how many hundreds of years, with how much progress in understanding how it is that 1) people come to decisions (cognitive) and 2) how groups of people come to decisions (social psych)? And how much more complex are the methods that Jurors have to understand? And the laws?

So much has changed since last we changed. Maybe it's time to start asking these questions.

I sincerely hope someone responds, in comments or email, "we don't allow Jurors to do this because *VALID REASON HERE*."

Can you tell I watched Lost in Translation recently?

For relaxing dirt, make it... Suntory Dirt.

So, which NBC exec went to Stanford?

I just watched the Knight Rider made-for-tv movie. In it, the comely daughter of the dead scientist teaches at Stanford. And the fly-over shots are accurate, but that's stock videography. The exterior shots of when she leads the library are not Stanford, which makes sense: if you're filming in LA, you aren't going to pack up to film Stanford.

But they got some stuff weirdly right. The sign in the library said, "Go Cardinal, the AXE is ours!" Which correctly gets the pluralization of our mascot correct (it's singular), and refers to the object of our rivalry. Touches like these are the hallmark of alma mater affinity.

But another show debuting on NBC this fall, Chuck, features a protagonist that failed out of Stanford. In the few flashbacks, again, large details are out of whack: the frat house doesn't look like any Stanford frat house. But again, no tv dorm room ever looks like a dorm room. But the little touches. They show Chuck's college ID card, and it's a well formatted SUID card, instantly recognizable to any Stanford student.

So, why? I'm thinking there's an NBC exec that went to Stanford, and so toady little show runners are telling their staffs (staves?) that they need to set things at Stanford, and get the details right!

I imagine tens of fact checkers scouring through Wikipedia articles and Facebook Wall Postings and USNews College Board Discussions for the hints of veracity that'll make this mythic benefactor smile with remembrance of his heady college days.