News of the weird, part 4 (of four)

Well, this isn't exactly news, and I guess you'll have to judge for yourself whether it's weird or not.

But I thought both of these were pretty interesting.

• How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind

  There's this universal shorthand that epic adventure movies use to tell the good guys from the bad. The good guys are simple folk from the countryside ...

  ... while the bad guys are decadent assholes who live in the city and wear stupid clothes.

  The theme expresses itself in several ways -- primitive vs. advanced, tough vs. delicate, masculine vs. feminine, poor vs. rich, pure vs. decadent, traditional vs. weird. All of it is code for rural vs. urban. That tense divide between the two doesn't exist because of these movies, obviously. These movies used it as shorthand because the divide already existed.

• I Spent 5 Years With Some of Trump’s Biggest Fans. Here’s What They Won’t Tell You.

  Pervasive among the people I talked to was a sense of detachment from a distant elite with whom they had ever less contact and less in common.

  ...

  Trump has put on his blue-collar cap, pumped his fist in the air, and left mainstream Republicans helpless. Not only does he speak to the white working class’ grievances; as they see it, he has finally stopped their story from being politically suppressed. We may never know if Trump has done this intentionally or instinctively, but in any case he’s created a movement much like the anti-immigrant but pro-welfare-state right-wing populism on the rise in Europe. For these are all based on variations of the same Deep Story of personal protectionism.

News of the weird, part 3

This one, for a change of pace, does not come out of the pages of Wired.

But it's just as weird.

So let's turn the microphone over to the great chess blogger Dana Mackenzie: Scandal Ruins World Cup’s Best Day

everybody is talking about the stupid dispute that caused the Canadian player, Anton Kovalyov, to forfeit his game and withdraw from the tournament — all over a pair of shorts.

Probably most of my readers are already familiar with the sad details, but for those who haven’t heard yet, these seem to be the facts:

• Kovalyov showed up for his game against Maxim Rodshtein wearing a pair of shorts. He had worn the same shorts for his previous four games. Yes, apparently he only packed this one pair of shorts for a potentially month-long chess tournament. Cue jokes about chess players’ dressing habits.
• The chief arbiter spoke to him and told him that the players’ dress code (which is in a legal contract they sign before the tournament) requires more dignified wear. He told him to go back to his room and change.
• Kovalyov went back to his room but never reappeared. His opponent played one move (1. d4) and won by forfeit.

Even from these facts, it seems to me that the FIDE approach was very heavy-handed. From a legal point of view it seems to me that they have greatly weakened their case by allowing Kovalyov to play four games (!) in the offending garment. The arbiter said that nobody noticed earlier. Come on! If it’s a rule, then enforce it from the beginning. If it’s not enforced, then it’s not really a rule.

Kovalyov is actually Ukrainian, playing as a Canadian citizen, but living in Brownsville, Texas, where he studies computer science and got a chess scholarship!.

Kovalyov later wrote about this on his Facebook page, then tried to delete what he wrote, then tried to close his Facebook account, then re-opened his Facebook account, then wrote about it some more.

More at The Guardian, where we find that the REAL issue may have involved an ethnic slur:

Azmaiparashvili refused to back down, said Kovalyov. “At this point I was really angry but tried not to do anything stupid, and asked him why he was so rude to me, and he said because I’m a gypsy,” he said.

He continued: “So imagine this, the round is about to start, I’m being bullied by the organiser of the tournament, being assured that I will be punished by FIDE, yelled at and racially insulted. What would you do in my situation? I think many people would have punched this person in the face or at least insulted him. I decided to leave.”

Assuming that is what actually happened, it's a shame, but clearly he made the right decision.

The internets took to calling this "shortsgate" for a little while.

But it has now passed from public interest.

News of the weird, part 2

There are a lot of strange, disturbing, bizarre aspects to this long book excerpt that ran on the Wired website: Meet the CamperForce, Amazon's Nomadic Retiree Army.

The article is an excerpt from an upcoming book, by the way, it's not intended to be a stand-alone article on Wired.

Still.

The article winds through a long and close examination of what it's like to chase jobs in Amazon distribution centers around the country, camping out in your R.V. at night, getting up at 4:00 A.M. to get to work on time, taking advantage of the "the free generic pain relievers on offer in the warehouse".

You won't be surprised to hear that this is No Fun At All:

Chuck was a picker. His job was to take items down from warehouse shelves as customers ordered them, scanning each product with a handheld barcode reader. The warehouse was so immense that he and his fellow workers used the names of states to navigate its vast interior. The western half was “Nevada,” and the eastern half was “Utah.” Chuck ended up walking about 13 miles a day. He told himself it was good exercise. Besides, he’d met another picker who was 80 years old—if that guy could do it, surely he could.

Barb was a stower. That meant scanning incoming merchandise and shelving it. Stowers didn’t have to walk as far as pickers did, though Barb’s muscles still ached from the lifting, squatting, reaching, and twisting motions that her job required. Much of the strain was mental. With the holiday season nearing, the warehouse’s shelves were crammed, and one day she wandered around the warehouse for 45 minutes—she timed it—looking for a place to stow a single oversized book. Barb murmured, “Breathe, breathe,” to herself to stay calm.

On days off, many of Barb and Chuck’s coworkers were too exhausted to do anything but sleep, eat, and catch up on laundry.

Much of this article won't be a surprise, as this part of America has been documented for decades (see, e.g., More retirees keep one foot in workforce for pay and play and More Help Wanted: Older Workers Please Apply and Older Workers Survey, Working Longer, Younger Employees, Dear Abby).

And, though CNBC rather sunnily quotes an expert on "Aging & Work" as saying that

"We're in a new era of retirement, and we're not going back."

He added that "most people assume that seniors keep working due to financial necessity, and some do, but the majority do it to keep active and stay alert."

the reality, clearly, is much closer the converse of that viewpoint, as bluntly explained by the AARP, or by the Times, which observes that

The recruitment efforts for the elderly are reaching a willing audience, as more older people seek work because they need extra cash and health benefits and sometimes because they miss having a 9-to-5 routine with other workers.

I mean: duh. I DO know some people who are, perhaps, deferring retirement because they really enjoy their current job and don't (yet) have enough saved up to be able to retire as they choose.

But, really?

"They don't want to go fishing; they want to stay sharp," said Jeanne Benoit, principal director of human resources at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, a military research contractor in Cambridge, Mass., that creates prototypes for aerospace projects.

Wrong.

They want to go fishing.

And they don't appreciate you telling them that they aren't sharp, you young whippersnapper.

Anyway, back to the Wired article.

One of the things that drives me crazy about this whole situation, and which seems vastly under-reported, is how people got into these situations in the first place.

And the Wired article provides some fascinating detail in this area.

For instance:

Chuck still remembers the call from Wells Fargo that brought the 2008 financial crisis crashing down on his head. He had invested his $250,000 nest egg in a fund that supposedly guaranteed him $4,000 a month to live on. “You have no more money,” he recalls his banker saying flatly. “What do you want us to do?”

And,

Bob worked as an accountant for a timber products firm, and Anita was an interior decorator and part-time caregiver. They thought they would retire aboard a sailboat, funding that dream with equity from their three­ bedroom house. But then the housing bubble burst and their home’s value tumbled. Neither could imagine spending the rest of their lives servicing a loan worth more than their house. So they bought the trailer and drove away. “We just walked,” Anita says. “We told ourselves, ‘We’re not playing this game anymore.’”

Bob blamed Wall Street. When he spoke about his decision to abandon the house, he’d rush to add that, before that moment, he’d always paid the bills on time.

I mean yes, finances are complicated!

But it doesn't take much more than elementary school mathematics to be able to look at a $250,000 "nest egg" and realize that, if you withdraw $50,000 a year, it will only last (wait for it...): 5 years.

Nor should it take much more sophistication to understand that, if your entire plan for retirement is to depend on your house doubling in value so that you can sell it and buy a sailboat, well, you're gambling. You were a professional ACCOUNTANT? And you blamed "Wall Street"?

Now, part of this shame does indeed belong to the bankers and real-estate professionals and others who sold everyone a pipe dream back in the early 2000's.

They were con artists, and a lot of pain was caused by all that speculation, lying, pyramid schemes, and "financial engineering."

But, really, part of this shame is simpler to understand; it seems undeniable that, as a country, we are clearly failing our people.

We should be teaching basic "financial sense" in elementary school.

We should be making retirement savings accounts MANDATORY.

We should be providing universal health care to all. Yes, even if you're not working. Medicare for all.

And otherwise legitimate media organizations like CNBC and The New York Times should be flat-out ashamed of themselves to publish rot about "staying alert" or "pay and play" or "staying sharp" or "missing that 9-to-5 routine."

Call it what it is: elder abuse.

News of the weird, part 1

I read a pair of (unrelated) stories on the Wired website recently that have stuck with me, for probably the wrong reasons.

Warning, ahead of time: these are weird stories. Odd, strange, disturbing, uncomfortable.

But, I think, not incorrect. Nor are they misdirected or misleading. I think this is just an honest assessment of Our Strange Times.

So, forthwith:

A Weird MIT Dorm Dies, and a Crisis Blooms at Colleges

This starts out being a story about how things at MIT are a little odd, which isn't, really, that much of a surprise.

MIT, after all, is the home of the Smoot, a measurement unit for bridge lengths, and is the home of nearly legendary student pranks

But, something about Senior House is not quite right.

This was Senior House, the oldest dormitory on campus, built in 1916 by the architect William Welles Bosworth. For 101 years it welcomed freshman and returning students. Since the ’60s it was a proudly anarchic community of creative misfits and self-described outcasts—the special kind of brilliant oddballs who couldn’t or didn’t want to fit in with the mainstream eggheads at MIT.

If it was just brilliant oddballs, there wouldn't be an issue. Something else happened, and the question that Wired wants to discuss is: is this MIT? Or is this America, changing?

The demise of Senior House is emblematic of a larger shift on campuses across the US. Last year my own alma mater, Wesleyan University, closed down its countercultural house Eclectic, which had existed for a century. A few years ago Caltech kicked students out of its countercultural dorm Ricketts.

And what, exactly, happened at Senior House? It seems it's rather a mystery

the administration refused to disclose what precisely had happened, but Barnhart told the student newspaper The Tech that “we received highly credible reports of unsafe and illegal behavior in Senior House.”

Unsafe and illegal behavior? I am shocked!

Wired suggests that this is all due to risk-adverse administrators:

college tuition has skyrocketed and with it the competition for students who can afford it. Parents footing the bill are paying a lot more attention. The world has become more litigious and more corporate. All of this has led to an atmosphere in which university administrations have little margin for error when it comes to student safety or even bad publicity.

Money. And lawyers. And lawyers, worried about money.

or is it, rather, that you can't legislate weirdness?

groups like Senior House, which define themselves by being different, also run the risk of becoming highly conformist, Packer says. The punk rock movement is a particularly vivid example of this phenomenon. “They self-describe as being different, but from the outside they all look the same,” he says.

I'd hate to think that the weird is gone from college: discard the weird and you discard so much of what is important about school. And Wired seem to feel that way too, forecasting a rather glum future:

When school ends, they’ll head out into the big wide world, where building a nurturing community sometimes feels hard. Maybe the invisible threads of the internet will help bind them. Maybe Senior House alums will meet up in different cities to drink beer and trade stories of Steer Roasts past or find themselves across from each other at tech company boardroom tables, the memory of that shared place a secret tie between them.

One of my correspondents suggested a close parallel between the crackdown on Senior House, and the Ghost Ship backlash.

I think she makes a great point. Yes, these brilliant oddballs make us uncomfortable, and yes, they live on the edge.

But what do we sacrifice when we legislate their conformity?

I'm not betting that the invisible threads of the internet will solve this problem.

All the Wild That Remains: a very short review

We're hoping to make a trip to southern Utah sometime later this year.

It's been on my list for a long time; the last time I was in those parts was 1972, and I don't remember much.

(What? I was only 11! And, how much do you remember from 45 years ago?)

Anyway, as a bit of a warm up, I came across David Gessner's All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West.

Oh, this is a wonderful book!

Gessner, a literature professor and writer himself, tries, and mostly succeeds, to tie together two of the great writers of the west: Abbey and Stegner.

It turns out, that, in a bit of a coincidence, that we're approaching the 50th anniversary of Abbey's Desert Solitaire, and the 75th anniversary of Stegner's The Big Rock Candy Mountain.

So it's a wonderful occasion to spend some time thinking about Abbey and Stegner.

But Gessner manages to do more than that; his interests are broad and before we are done he has discussed water rights, the Wilderness Act of 1964, fracking, the Dust Bowl, forest fires, whether the Russian Olive or the Green Tamarisk is the less "native" plant, and many other topics.

Oh, and pronghorn.

Gessner loves pronghorn, and rightly so. Here he is, driving through the west with his daughter:

Hadley and I thanked him and pushed off for points north and west, driving out of Colorado and into Wyoming. We spent hours crossing southern Wyoming. In late afternoon we saw a herd of pronghorn antelopes gliding across the prairie. Pronghorns are the fastest land animals in the West, and the truth is it isn't even close. I told Hadley a fact I had learned from a friend: the reason pronghorns run so fast, much faster than any predator of theirs, is that they are outrunning a ghost -- the long-extinct American cheetah, which centuries ago chased them across these grasslands.

To see a pronghorn run is to want to run yourself. A more graceful animal is hard to imagine. Delicate and gorgeously bedecked with rich brown-and-white patterns, with small horns and snow-white fur on their stomachs, they glide across the land. As we drove I was worried about all the barbed-wire fences that blocked their way as they roamed, at least until I saw one pronghorn fawn jump a fence like it was nothing, flowing over it like water.

It's marvelous fun to follow along with Gessner as he revisits the lands of Abbey and Stegner, kayaking and rafting the rivers they rode, hiking the trails they followed, looking out from the summits they climbed.

But that's just the icing. The hard work of Gessner's book involves a serious consideration of whether Abbey and Stegner have staying power, whether they deserve to be read and studied and considered, even now after so much time has passed.

It's rather easier to answer this question for Stegner, whose life and work is so obviously important: winner of Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, original member of the University of Iowa Writer's Program, founder of the Stanford Creative Writing Program, author of the Wilderness Letter, inspiration for the Wilderness Act, savior of Dinosaur National Park, oh the list just goes on and on.

But Abbey? Troublemaker, rebel, outlaw, misogynist, curmudgeon? Should we still be reading and studying Abbey, as well?

Gessner's answer is an unqualified "yes":

So is Abbey passe, as dated as bad '70's hair? Obviously I wouldn't be out here tracking his spoor if I thought so. But it is difficult, at least at first, to see how his spirit might be adapted to fit our times. For instance, isn't monkeywrenching dead, not just in an FBI agent's eyes, but as a legitimate possibility for the environmental movement? I must admit that in my own grown-up life as a professor and father I don't blow a lot of things up. For most of us who care about the environment, Stegner provides a much more sensible model.

But I don't want to be so quick to toss Abbey on the scrap heap. Looked at in a different way, Abbey's ideas about freedom are exactly what is needed today. If the times have changed, the essence of what he offered has in some ways never been more relevant. Many of the things that he foresaw have come to pass: we currently live in an age of unprecedented surveillance, where the government regularly reads our letters (now called e-mails) and monitors our movements. Abbey offers resistance to this. Resistance to the worst of our times, the constant encroaching on freedom and wildness. He says to us: Question them, question their authority. Don't be so quick to give up the things you know are vital, no matter what others say.

Biography is usually not my thing; I often find it dry and dated.

But Gessner's treatment of Abbey and Stegner is warm, spirited, and refreshing.

Even though I came to it with a fondness for both writers, and for the region they both loved so well, I still found All the Wild That Remains a vivid, compelling, and lively treatment of people and topics that are just as crucial today as they were nearly a century ago.

Mikhail Osipov

OMG! Mischa is just unbelievably cute.

(You know who Anatoly Karpov is, right?)

More on Mischa here.

That and that for 9/9

We're entering that beautiful time in Northern California: September and October are the reason we all want to live in the Bay Area.

Meanwhile, on those occasional off moments that you find yourself in front of a computer, here are some things you could read.

• CS176: Multiprocessor Synchronization and CSCI 1760 - FALL 2012

  The performance part of the course will revisit many of the issues first raised in the foundations section, but in a more realistic model that exposes those aspects of the underlying architecture that most influence performance. The course then goes through a sequence of fundamental data structures, the concurrent analogs of the data structures found in any undergraduate data structures course, and a few coordination structures that are unique to the world of multithreaded computation. These data structures are introduced in an incremental way, each one extending the techniques developed for its predecessors. Each of these data structures is useful in and of itself as a reference. Moreover, by the end, the student will have built up a solid understanding of the fundamentals of concurrent data structure design, and should be well-prepared to design and implement his or her own concurrent data structures.

• Time Series Database Lectures

  we are bringing back another season of database technical talks at Carnegie Mellon University in Fall 2017. The "Time Series Database Lectures" is a semester-long seminar series featuring speakers from the leading developers of time series and streaming data management systems. Each speaker will present the implementation details of their respective systems and examples of the technical challenges that they faced when working with real-world customers.

• Moving Java Forward Faster

  The two-year train model was appealing in theory, but proved unworkable in practice. We took an additional eight months for Java 8 in order to address critical security issues and finish Project Lambda, which was preferable to delaying Lambda by two years. We initially planned Java 9 as a two-and-a-half year release in order to include Project Jigsaw, which was preferable to delaying Jigsaw by an additional eighteen months, yet in the end we wound up taking an additional year and so Java 9 will ship this month, three and a half years after Java 8.

  A two-year release cadence is, in retrospect, simply too slow. To achieve a constant cadence we must ship feature releases at a more rapid rate. Deferring a feature from one release to the next should be a tactical decision with minor inconveniences rather than a strategic decision with major consequences.

• More Than 100 Exceptional Works of Journalism

  This is my annual attempt to bring roughly 100 of those stories that stood the test of time to a wider audience. I could not read or note every worthy article published in the past few years, and I haven't included any paywalled articles or anything published at The Atlantic. But everything that follows is worthy of wider attention and engagement. I hope it provides fodder for reflection and inspiration for future writing.

• Solaris to Linux Migration 2017

  Switching from Solaris to Linux has become much easier in the last two years, with Linux developments in ZFS, Zones, and DTrace. I've been contributing (out of necessity), including porting my DTraceToolkit tools to Linux, which also work on BSD. What follows are topics that may be of interest to anyone looking to migrate their systems and skillset: scan these to find topics that interest you.

• Demon-Haunted World

  Wannacry was a precursor to a new kind of cheating: cheating the in­dependent investigator, rather than the government. Imagine that the next Dieselgate doesn’t attempt to trick the almighty pollution regulator (who has the power to visit billions in fines upon the cheater): instead, it tries to trick the reviewers, attempting to determine if it’s landed on a Car and Driver test-lot, and then switching into a high-pollution, high-fuel-efficiency mode. The rest of the time, it switches back to its default state: polluting less, burning more diesel.

  ...

  That’s how alchemists came to believe that the world was haunted, that God, or the Devil, didn’t want them to understand the world. That the world actually rearranged itself when they weren’t looking to hide its workings from them. Angels punished them for trying to fly to the Sun. Devils tricked them when they tried to know the glory of God – indeed, Marcelo Rinesi from The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies called modern computer science ‘‘applied demonology.’’

  In the 21st century, we have come full circle. Non-human life forms – limited liability corpo­rations – are infecting the underpinnings of our ‘‘smart’’ homes and cities with devices that obey a different physics depending on who is using them and what they believe to be true about their surroundings.

• This Tiny Country Feeds the World

  Almost two decades ago, the Dutch made a national commitment to sustainable agriculture under the rallying cry “Twice as much food using half as many resources.” Since 2000, van den Borne and many of his fellow farmers have reduced dependence on water for key crops by as much as 90 percent. They’ve almost completely eliminated the use of chemical pesticides on plants in greenhouses, and since 2009 Dutch poultry and livestock producers have cut their use of antibiotics by as much as 60 percent.

• Wind Energy Is One of the Cheapest Sources of Electricity, and It's Getting Cheaper

  Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) released the latest iteration of its annual Wind Technologies Market Report, which pulls together a wealth of data to track trends in the cost, performance, and growth of wind energy.

  The report found that U.S. wind energy will continue to be one of the lowest cost electricity generation technologies available, with the long-term wind electricity price available through a power purchase agreement coming in at about half the expected cost of just running a natural gas power plant.

• Is the open office layout dead?

  Perhaps the most powerful and popular trend in the move away from open offices is an increased number of small private spaces. These include soundproof glass rooms, which provide quiet refuges, while keeping the airy feel of an open office layout, as well as so-called “phone booths,” closet-sized spaces for focused solo work and confidential meetings between two people.

• Six Charts To Help Americans Understand The Upcoming German Election

  You may have heard rumblings about a populist party poised to gain power in Germany’s election on Sept. 24 — or maybe you just heard that there’s an election coming up. To better prepare you for the news coming out of Deutschland over the next few weeks, we’re offering some answers to a few basic questions about the election.

• We found the photographer who took these dramatic pictures of golfers in front of a hill on fire in Oregon

  "Around the corner was this golf course ," she said, "and you could see the fire."

  So she started snapping pictures.

  "It's a real photo," she confirmed, of the picture of people golfing as the fire roars. She did lighten it a little bit, but other than that, the photo captures the moment.

  The owners of Beacon Rock Golf Course, as well as one of the golfers pictured, confirmed Wednesday that the pictures were real and from Beacon Rock Golf Course

• Delta Goes Big, Then Goes Home

  In the face of a category 5 hurricane, Delta Air Lines meteorologists, dispatchers, pilots, cabin crew, and ground crew accomplished an incredible feat on Wednesday. As Hurricane Irma bore down San Juan, Puerto Rico, Delta sent one last flight to help evacuate a few hundred people from San Juan just before the airport closed.

• San Franciscans are obsessed with this colorful Instagram paradise — we went inside

  If you live in San Francisco, your Instagram has undoubtedly lit up in Technicolor in recent days. The city is going wild for a new pop-up museum, The Color Factory.

  The candy-coated exhibit includes 15 interactive "experiences" — each centered on a different color — spread across two stories and 12,000 square feet. It runs through September, but good luck getting tickets. The Color Factory has sold out for the month of August, and scalpers on Craigslist are selling tickets, originally priced at $32, for as much as $175 a pop.

• 1886 Tall Ship Balclutha To Be Overhauled In Alameda

  “The Balclutha is truly a gem of American history. It is a rare day that you are able to see one of these grand old ladies high and dry in dock,” said Richard Maguire, Business Development Manager, Bay Ship & Yacht. “Upon her undocking, the ship will remain at the yard pier side, where we will remove her foremast, mainmast and mizzenmast yard arms for needed repairs and paint preservation. Her presence there is reminiscent of the days of old when many fine sailing ships like the Balclutha lined the estuary representing cargo companies such as the Alaskan Packers and Red Star.

  “Bay Ship and Yacht has a deep understanding of these great historic sailing ships, and the yard still works with and maintains many of the original tools required to perform proper maintenance on these older vessels,” Maguire continued. “We will use these tools to repair and replace the poop decking with caulking, irons, oakum and pitch.”

And, since it's on my mind, like it's on everyone else's mind:

Category 4 winds:

Catastrophic damage will occur: Well-built framed homes can sustain severe damage with loss of most of the roof structure and/or some exterior walls. Most trees will be snapped or uprooted and power poles downed. Fallen trees and power poles will isolate residential areas. Power outages will last weeks to possibly months. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months.