Pre-Primary Tab Dump

by Doctor Science

I'm a pollworker tomorrow, so I have to go to bed at 10 tonight and get up at 4:30am, to be at the polling place by 5:15. Here are my tabs, in lieu of an actual post:

• Wasting Time Is New Divide in Digital Era | Matt Richel, New York Times: part of the Times' ongoing series, Kids These Days and That Music They Play on My Lawn. Summary: oh noez! Now poor and/or non-white kids have computers, they mostly use them to waste time! It's the fault of their shiftless parents.
• Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds: the 2010 report which is the only source of actual data cited in the NYT article. It found:
  • race and economic status actually made no difference to the amount of time teens spent using the Internet for homework.
  • the big difference is that black and Hispanic kids watch (or watched -- data are from 2009, which is the Pleistocene in Internet terms) YouTube a lot more, and listen(ed) to music more
  • no information about how much time teens "waste" online reading or writing. It's my observation that, compared to my youth, Kids These Days read and write a *lot* more on average, because so much of their entertainment comes embedded in text and so many of their social interactions are text-based.
• What Filesharing Studies Really Say - Conclusions and Links; by Drew Wilson at ZeroPaid. Wilson did an exhaustive, exhausting look at scientific research on file-sharing:

  Based on all the scientific reasoning, scientific predictions and models and a whole lot more that we got from this series, we shouldn’t even be anywhere near the kinds of debates we are having now with respect to copyright enforcement (yes, not even close). Instead, we should, at minimum, be seriously considering things like an ISP levy or creating a framework for legal file-sharing or trying to think of services that imitate the file-sharing structure to help artists and the industry make money. It’s like we’ve shunned all science and economics and headed down the road of trying to constrain, restrict and, in some ways, shut down the Internet instead. It really puts into perspective just how shocking idea’s like the “graduated response” or three strikes laws and censoring websites really are.

• Marriage Compromise and a Counteroffer They're doing it again: driving up my blood pressure by saying, as Bob Hyatt does,

  The State needs to get out of the “marriage” business. It should recognize that as long as it uses that term, and continues to privilege certain types of relationships over others this issue is going to divide us as a nation, and is only going to become more and more contentious. We need to move towards the system used in many European countries where the State issues nothing but civil unions to anyone who wants them, and then those who desire it may seek a marriage from the Church.

  vorjack at Unreasonable Faith comes around to noticing the problem:

  exactly what claim does Hyatt think Christianity has over a civil institution that predates the religion, and which the religion resisted for centuries? So here’s a counteroffer for Hyatt: let’s leave "marriage" as a civil institution. It has an extremely long history of being a civil institution, and for most of its history the Christian church was happy to leave it as such. Perhaps the Church could use a more theologically loaded word like "covenant," since that already has some legitimacy among conservatives.

• Paul Krugman on Newsnight, 30 May 2012 - YouTube: from Krugman's UK tour. A particularly clear demonstration of what the K-Man is up against, because we can see people, more coherent than most of their US counterparts and not carrying the baggage of US political familiarity, stating clearly what they believe: that the government throwing people out of work will give business "confidence", which will lead to more hiring. Because virtue (which is money) must be rewarded, and vice (which is debt and poverty) punished.

  

  The fact that he doesn't do this is one of the things I most respect about The Shrill One. At Digg; I don't know the original source.
• It turns out that newspapers are still good for something, and here are two shining, Pulitzer-worthy examples:
  • Stand your ground law, Trayvon Martin and a shocking legacy | Tampa Bay Times:

    Florida's "stand your ground" law is being used in ways never imagined — to free gang members involved in shootouts, drug dealers beefing with clients and people who shot their victims in the back.

    Defendants have invoked the law to excuse all manner of mischief, from minor fistfights to drug possession to killing an endangered species.

    And who goes free can sometimes depend as much on where a case is heard as its merits.

    Includes a *searchable database* of cases, so you can check their work or take it further.
  • Louisianna Incarcerated: How We Built the World's Prison Capital by Cindy Chang, Scott Threlkeld, and Ryan Smith at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, linked from Charles Blow.

    A prison system that leased its convicts as plantation labor in the 1800s has come full circle and is again a nexus for profit.
    ...
    Locking up as many people as possible for as long as possible has enriched a few while making everyone else poorer. Public safety comes second to profits.



• While at Princeton Reunions, I nipped into the Art Museum and saw the Constable Exhibit. Among the great things:

  

  Elm trees in Old Hall Park, East Bergholt.

  I had never before appreciated how great a draughtsman Constable was.

  The plaque surprised me, because it mentioned that the man is in the picture to give an idea of the trees' "enormous size". I measured, and if the man (including top hat) is 6 feet tall, then the largest tree is about 60 feet: large, true, but not what I'd call *enormous*.

  Just outside the museum, for instance, was a scene rather like this:

  

  By Joe Shlabotnik, on Flickr

  The building is Nassau Hall, and it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 110 feet tall to the top of the spire. Some of the White Ash trees are as tall or taller than the spire; they were probably planted around 1825 -- which is pretty old for America, but not a big deal in England. I guess I expected planted English trees to be taller -- but maybe they aren't planted as close to each other as American trees often are, so that they force each other to be tall and thin.

Comments

[Anarch]

I think we may have mentioned this in the past, but fellow Princeton alum here (P '98). What year were you again?

[Slartibartfast]

I still have no idea what SYG and the Trayvon Martin shooting have to do with each other. Can anyone fill me in? Last I heard, SYG was not any part at all of George Zimmerman's defense.

But I have tuned out the day-to-day fabulosity of the case, and (as usual) may be completely wrong.

[Matt McIrvin]

Perhaps the Church could use a more theologically loaded word like "covenant," since that already has some legitimacy among conservatives.

This once again makes me think of Michael Bolton in Office Space: "Why should I change my name? He's the one who sucks."

[Matt McIrvin]

Slartibartfast: My understanding was that Stand Your Ground was the reason Zimmermann wasn't arrested, during the considerable period when he had not been arrested. Its direct relevance to the case may have passed, if his defense isn't actually using it.

I've seen an unsourced newspaper photo caption claiming he's invoking it, a Reason article saying he's not, and a whole lot of speculation.

[c]

The trees are much closer than the steeple and consequently appear higher. It is difficult to tell and meaningless to assert that they are higher. Likewise, without knowing the species of the UK and US trees being compared it is impossible to guess whether the assert difference is size is attributable to cultivation or genetics.

[nous]

Kids These Days are writing a lot, but the sort of writing that they do on a regular basis is qualitatively different than what Non-Kids These Days used to do. Digital text and print text are different media because the speed and ubiquity of digital communication creates a different model of interaction.

But, yeah, poor reading of that study. I blame Web 2.0 for that reporter's reading skills.

[sapient]

"continues to privilege certain types of relationships over others"

As to the marriage issue, that's the point, which doesn't have anything to do with Christianity, or Roman law (since when do we care about that?), or anything else. The fact is, the state doesn't really have a legitimate interest in preferring some types of voluntary domestic arrangements over others. End of story. (Doctor Science earlier insisted that the whole point of marriage is to create in-law relationships, which I'm pretty sure doesn't cross most people's minds as the "legitimate state interest" in regulating domestic relationships. If it is the "legitimate state interest," I wish someone would please defend that. If it's not, what is the "legitimate state interest"? Inquiring minds want to know.)

[dr ngo]

If I were to improvise (after midnight here) an answer to sapient's question, I would probably start with the following propositions:

1) Virtually all human societies depend in some form or other on "families" (however defined) to undertake some tasks essential for the survival of that society, chiefly the care, protection, and socialization / early education of the very young. Few societies have tried to operate without families in this role; none, to my knowledge, have succeeded for long.

2) It is therefore in the interest of the state - this or any other - to foster "families" in a general sense, by, e.g., preventing spouses from being forced to testify each other, granting considerable latitude to "domestic" arrangements (you can do things to/with your own spouse and children you couldn't do to/with strangers), providing economic incentives to "families" to stay together, etc. In our society, the fundamental relationship within such "families" has traditionally and conventionally been marriage.

3) However, problems arise when the traditional and conventional no longer hold as they once did. There are more and more "voluntary domestic arrangements" that don't fit within the template of marriage-and-family, so we (= the state, here) have to decide whether to (A) hold fast to the rules and try to weather the social storm; (B) modify the rules so as to include alternative "families" (e.g., gay couples); or (C) give up on the whole thing, which is what sapient's question implicitly suggests.

I honestly don't know how I feel about this (except that A looks like a losing cause). I lean toward B, because I still think it's in the interest of all of us (society, state) to foster stable "families" of some sort that will undertake the otherwise thankless task of raising and socializing the next generation, facilitating the perpetuation of (this) human society. But I'm not sure whether we can fine-tune any attempted modification well enough to do any good in this endeavor, so C is not out of the question for me.

Anyway, I'd probably think more coherently during the day, but I've got other things to do then . . .

[Turbulence]

I'm trying to imagine Sapient's ideal world without marriage. So, no civil marriage. When my wife gets sick, do I get to visit her in the hospital? Make decisions for her if she's incapacitated? Well, we're not "married" since that's a thing that doesn't exist, so we must have drawn up some legal documents that formalize our contractual relationship in which she gives me the right to visit her in the hospital and make decisions for her if she's incapacitated.

OK, so I have to draw up this contract...sounds easy if you're a lawyer. And I guess I have to keep this contract with me at all times, and she has to as well. After all, if she collapses at work and the EMTs take her to the hospital and I show up, the hospital can't just presume that I have the right to be with her. Of course, the hospital is going to need some more attorneys on staff: everyone has their own unique and special not-marriage contracts and their legal staff will have to closely scrutinize them to see what rights I've been given.

That is, they'll have to closely scrutinize them if they're OK with our not-marriage; if we're an interracial couple or fail to meet all the strictures of the catholic church (it is a catholic hospital you see), well, then it will take the lawyers a bit longer to work through the paperwork. Maybe a few months. And they might find a technicality and decide that no, I don't get to be with her because interracial couples are just wrong that's why. Of course I can fight the giant hospital in court (whee! more money for lawyers!) but that will obviously take a long time and you can't really fault professional counsel for finding some tiny technicality that just happens to stop them from recognizing the rights of interracial couples, so even if I "win", nothing will really change.

Sometimes, when I read libertarian writing, I glimpse a vision of the world where contracts are frictionless: every interpersonal interaction is mediated through a formal legal contract that completely specifies everything of interest. In that world, there are no transaction costs because SHUT UP and so the fact that everyone needs to be an attorney and that legal dispute resolution is mind bogglingly expensive on such a massive scale doesn't matter because SHUT UP. I think there's a similar sort of naivete at work here.

[Turbulence]

Of course, this ignores the fun that happens when your family arrangements involve more than two adults: network effects square! I can't wait to read the contract that specifies how child custody gets divided among a family consisting of five adults when two want to split. I imagine that contract will be very simple and that everyone involved will have a clear understanding of its terms before they form their family unit. And if they don't bother with the contract, well, the state can just settle this minor custody dispute using, um, something or other as the resolution protocol. I'm sure judges can work that out on the fly; the state certainly has no interest in restricting the nature of family arrangements that people will bring before its courts to untangle. No, we should be able to construct family units of arbitrary complexity and then demand that the state figure out to partition them on the fly, one judge at a time, because that result is likely to maximize fairness and will probably cost very little.

[joel hanes]

anent tree height :

England is substantially north of Princeton.

London latitude 51 d 30 m N

Princeton latitude 40 d 21 m N

ten degrees of latitude is 1/36 the Earth's circumference, or about 690 statute miles;
over a thousand kilometers.

Doesn't seem possible, does it ?

[Brett Bellmore]

"Slartibartfast: My understanding was that Stand Your Ground was the reason Zimmermann wasn't arrested, during the considerable period when he had not been arrested."

It's my understanding that they didn't arrest him at the time because all of the evidence they had at the time agreed or was at least consistent with his claim of self defense. And that situation hasn't really changed, unless you're prepared to make a case that he so savagely attacked Martin's knuckles that he broke his nose.

IOW, he wasn't arrested for law enforcement reasons, he was arrested for political reasons, and that's why it took so long to happen.

[Slartibartfast]

I think it was in one of the Great Courses lectures that I heard that the first groups of settlers coming to America from England imagined they were moving to a warmer climate, which turned out to be a mistake.

[hairshirthedonist]

Being from NJ and of partly Spanish descent, I found it amusing as a kid to find that, if you could move the Garden State due east far enough, you could place it in the middle of Spain, with no change in latitude.

[dr ngo]

Europe is so far "up" on the map that Venice is north of Vladivostok, as I recall.

[Slartibartfast]

Venice is latitude 45.5 degrees North, or close enough; Vladivostok; a bit above 43 degrees.

I ran into this effect when I was in Sweden several years ago; the latitude of Stockholm (the city I flew into) is a bit over 59 degrees North, which compares with the middle of Hudson Bay on this side of the ocean. Juneau, Alaska is south of Stockholm by a few dozen miles.

It was quite nice there, but it was also August, or perhaps September. It (rural Sweden) reminded me of the part of Michigan that I was born in, in the upper peninsula. Except that the northernmost part of the UP is maybe 850 miles further south than is Stockholm. Extend a line of latitude through Stockholm and across Canada, and you'll find maybe a couple of hundred thousand Canadians living North of that line. And, sure: several hundred thousand Alaskans.

[Turbulence]

Latitude is relevant for sunlight, but I expect that mean temperatures depend a lot on the presence of the gulf stream.

[hairshirthedonist]

Perceptions of latitude are skewed even on this continent (meaning North America) as you go east to west. Seattle is north of Montreal. The northern border of California is just about even with Chicago and Connecticut. The East Coast is generally more south than it seems without busting out a map and checking (or so it seems to me that it seems that way to people generally).

[Slartibartfast]

I knew a lot of that stuff, but still got thrown off by this: my great-aunt (and her daughter, and granddaughter, and great-granddaughter) all live up on Cape Breton Island, near a place called Margaree Harbor. Cape Breton Island is the northeastern tip of Nova Scotia, so of course it's way the hell up there, right? They live about halfway between the near end of the island and the remotest tip (Cape North).

There are places in Maine that are north of where they live, it turns out. There's a good degree of latitude that Maine extends north of where they live.

[Phil]

My colleague in our London office is always amazed by the differences in our weather until I remind her that, despite its location on Lake Erie, Cleveland is still 10 degrees of latitude farther south than London is.

[Countme-In]

Regarding Krugman and European "austerity".

I think he sees the big cautionary picture of who the eventual winners will be:

http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entries/video-greek-political-debate-turns-violent?ref=fpblg

[Hartmut]

Iceland lies completely South of the Arctic circle (which cuts Norway in half). The Southern tip of Greenland is about the latitude of Stockholm. The Eastern and Western coast of Greenland have a very different climate and it is the European side (which one would expect to be warmer) that is uninhabitable while almost all settlements are on the American side (which one would expect to be colder).
Now try to explain this to people who have difficulty to even understand that there is a latitude-temperature connection in the first place.