Author Archives: Jake Seliger

Links: How America is going haywire, high-heel heaven, where are the trains?, and more!

August 14, 2017 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* “How America Went Haywire,” the most important piece in this batch.

* “High-heel heaven,” one of the funniest pieces I’ve read recently.

* “The Most Common Error in Media Coverage of the Google Memo.” Basically, no one is actually reading the memo, and almost everyone is instead loading up their pre-programmed, mood-affiliated responses. See also Ross Douthat for another orthogonal response. One short summary might be, “Think bigger and longer term,” which we are not so good at doing right now. Or maybe ever.

* Not directly related to the above, but: Men Are Better At Maps Until Women Take This Spatial Visualization Course: A bit of education can erase a definitive cognitive gap between men and women.

* Transit projects left undone in New Jersey, 2000 – 2020. The phrase “wasted opportunity” comes to mind.

* The not-so-secret trick to cutting solo car commutes: Charge for parking by the day.”

* “2016 Was Hot, Weird, and Unprecedented.” Also, “Super-heatwaves of 55°C (131°F) to emerge if global warming continues.” Prediction: when it happens, loads of people shout, “No one warned us!!!”

* “First large-scale deep-sea floating offshore wind farm.” There is lots of good news out there, but rage incites more viewing than the good news.

* The death of the internal combustion engine.

* “Here’s the Memo That Blew Up the NSC: Fired White House staffer argued ‘deep state’ attacked Trump administration because the president represents a threat to cultural Marxist memes, globalists, and bankers.” To call this “insane” is an insult to the insane. If I’d read an SF novel about the sequence of events of the past year two years ago, I’d have called it unrealistic and unbelievable. Yet here we all are.

* “Liberals should reject the divisive, zero-sum politics of identity and find their way back to a unifying vision of the common good.” Yes. Interesting venue for this piece, too.

* The next moon landing may be near.

* “Why are police officers more dangerous than airplanes?”

Statistical analyses of literature: let’s see what happens

August 11, 2017 By in Books, Culture, Fiction, Reading Tags: , Leave a comment

I got some pushback to the link on what heretical things statistics can tell us about fiction, and I’ve read pushback like it before: the objections tend to say that great literature can’t be reduced to statistics; big data will never replicate the reading experience; a novel is more than the sum of the words chosen. That sort of thing. All of which is likely true, but the more interesting question is, “What kinds of things is nobody doing in the study of fiction?” (Or words, or sentences, of writers’ oeuvres). Lots and lots of people, including me, closely study individual works and connect them to a smallish body of other works and ideas.

Over centuries, if not longer, thousands, if not millions, of people have engaged this practice. Not very many people have attempted to systematically examine thousands if not millions of works simultaneously. So that may tell us something the usual methods haven’t. It’s worth exploring that domain. And just because that domain is being explored, the more usual paths via close reading aren’t closed off.

In other words, don’t think that an argument along the lines of “x is interesting” means “we should always and only do x.”

At the moment, we also appear to be at the very start of the field. Maybe it’ll become extremely important and maybe it won’t. The potential is there. People have (arguably) been doing some form of close reading and analysis, even if the practice didn’t use those specific words, for millennia. Certainly for centuries. So I’d be pretty surprised to see statistical analyses produce whatever good material they’re likely to produce in just a decade or two.

Part of what art and analysis should do is be novel. Another part is “be interesting.” We’re looking for the intersection of those two zones.

Brief Priority Classic Plus bike review

August 9, 2017 By in Briefly Noted, Reviews Tags: , , , Leave a comment

I’ve been riding a Priority Classic Plus bike and it’s been great, especially for the money. The most important part of the Classic Plus is the belt drive, which replaces the typical chain used to transfer power from pedaling to wheel with a carbon fiber belt. I can’t remember where I first heard about the company, but it may have been from “How Priority Bicycles Made a ‘Maintenance Free’ Bike For Under $400.” Priority’s bikes are meant for urban riders and they naturally compete with inexpensive single-speed bikes like those from State.

There isn’t much to write about because the bike is fun to ride, light (the frame is made of aluminum), and quiet. The largest frame size may still be a bit small for me, but I’m out on the right side of the bell curve distribution for height so that may not be too surprising. The front stem and seat post are highly adjustable, so I didn’t need to add a stem extender. I ordered a rack, which dramatically improves cargo capacity. Now I’m looking at panniers, which may prove to be a cost that’s sizable compared to the overall bike.

The bike retails for $469, but by the time I got add-ons, tax, and assembly, it was a little over $600. The next-least-expensive carbon-fiber drive bike I’ve seen is over $1,000, so the the Classic Plus is still a substantial improvement. At $469, it’s also in the same price ballpark as many hybrid city bikes. For a belt-driven bike, that’s impressive.

The Classic Plus is not a single-speed model and if this bike were made as a single-speed I’d have picked it. While I don’t know this for sure, I’d guess that the three-speed version adds minimal weight and cost, so choosing it may make more sense for the company and for riders.

There is no chainguard, or rather belt guard, and that may be a problem in lousy weather; I’ll report back on whether this actually matters in challenging weather. My last bike had one, but I don’t know if it needed one or if it the guard was only there for psychological prophylactic purposes.

It’s hard to understand why belt-driven bikes are more fun to ride without riding one, so I’ll suggest finding a bike shop and trying. You’ll likely notice that peddling feels smoother. Over time, chains also tend to work themselves out of whack and become noisy; belts should remain very quiet for the life of the belt. Maintenance time and costs should also be lower. Belt-drive bikes are supposedly more popular in Europe, where more people commute via bike.

Priority also makes a bike called the Continuum Onyx, which comes with a wider gearing range, disc brakes, fenders, a built-in light that recharges from peddling (a very cool feature) and possibly some other stuff I missed. Fully configured it would likely still be about $500 more than the bike I have, and the cheaper one will be less painful to lose via theft, if theft happens.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Classic Plus become the go-to, default urban bike. It’s got a lot of advantages and few disadvantages compared to chain-driven models. I don’t know how the company managed to get belt-drive bikes down to such a low price, but I’m glad it did.

 

Links: Short books, free thought, unfree devices, male contraception, Google’s politically correct monoculture, and more!

August 8, 2017 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* “In praise of short books.” No argument here. I’d rather write, “In praise of books that are the right length for their material,” which may be short (Rapture is short) or long (Cryptonomicon is long).

* Math journal editors resign to start rival journal that will be free to read.

* “Apple and other tech companies are fighting to keep devices hard to repair.” It’s not hard to understand why.

* Ninni Holmqvist’s novel The Unit imagines a dystopia for the childless.

* “Why We Can’t Have the Male Pill: A condom alternative could be worth billions. What’s taking so long?”

* “Why I left Academia: Part I.” This is an impressively brazen and horrible story and maybe the worst I’ve heard. One of the (many) reasons not to go to grad school in the humanities is that a single person can so easily halt or retard your progress. That’s rarely if ever true in the rest of the working world.

* “Trump’s Fledgling Presidency Has Already Collapsed.” Seems overly optimistic to me.

* “Modern American elites have come to favour inconspicuous consumption.” Seems like conspicuous precision is an improvement on conspicuous consumption.

* Google promotes and enforces politically correct monoculture, although the headline is different. Or maybe no one comes out looking good. It’s disappointing to read so few sentences like, “I think it’s really important to discuss this topic scientifically, keeping an open mind and using informed skepticism when evaluating claims about evidence,” even if I’m not sure the evidence is as strong as claimed at the link.

Briefly noted: “The Little Hours,” the movie

August 6, 2017 By in movies Tags: , Leave a comment

The Little Hours is charming and I laughed; the trailer is worth watching because it gives the flavor of the movie without ruining the narrative or many of the jokes. The best moment of the trailer is a quote from the Catholic League, “It was trash. Pure trash.” I was ready to walk out if it was dumb (a good strategy for all movies) but instead was happy to stay and to leave refreshed. It’s hard to define what a “taut” movie is, but I know one when I see it, and this one is taut. Too many indie movies, as well as some studio movies) have 40 minutes of material in a 120-minute movie. This one has 90 minutes of material in a 90-minute movie, and if anything I wouldn’t have minded it being longer.

Transposing modern concerns, tone, and language into a medieval setting works for me but some of you may hate that. In some ways you can think of this as Monty Python but with a more forward sex plot and more female rivalry (too rarely depicted in film). I don’t know The Decameron well enough to get callbacks to it.

All the actors are just right.

Sounds weirdly like modern politics, no?

August 4, 2017 By in Life, Politics Tags: , Leave a comment

“When we feel like victims, all our actions and beliefs are legitimized, however questionable they may be. Our opponents or simply our neighbors, stop sharing common ground with us and become our enemies. We stop being aggressors and become defenders. The envy, greed, or resentment that motivates us becomes sanctified, because we tell ourselves we’re acting in self defense. . . . The first step for believing passionately is fear. Fear of losing our identity, our life, our status, or our beliefs.”

That’s a speech given by Andreas Corelli in The Angel’s Game (a great novel, and its English translation came out in 2009).

Oh, and he’s the devil. So we probably ought to be wary of what he says.

Reading such passages is a reminder of why politics in the post-literacy era may not be going so well. It would be hard for a high-literacy person—like most of the “founding fathers” were—to have made some of the recent political choices that voters have made.

 

Links: The boring sense of the “party,” reading, pigs, college, and more!

August 4, 2017 By in Links Tags: 1 Comment

* “My Party Is in Denial About Donald Trump: We created him, and now we’re rationalizing him. When will it stop?” A fantastic question.

* Want Teenage Boys to Read? Easy. Give Them Books About Sex. By Lemony Snicket. Seems pretty obvious, no? See also my long-ago post, “Reading: Wheaties, marijuana, or boring? You decide.”

* “14 Years After Decriminalizing Drugs, Portugal’s Bold Risk Paid Off.” Except I’d call it an “obvious policy” rather than a “bold risk.”

* Tesla Model 3 first drive review. Or here is another variant, from The Verge instead of Motortrend. And: “Driving Tesla’s Model 3 changes everything.”

* 34 criminal cases tossed after body cam footage shows cop planting drugs.

* Pigs are smart and sensitive, yet we continue to justify killing them for food.

* “The Heretical Things Statistics Tell Us About Fiction.”

* “Colleges say they could lower tuition — if only they could talk to each other about it.” I’m not convinced this is true, but it is intersting, and certainly the current approach has not yielded good outcomes for many people. See e.g.:

On the other hand, said Scherer, “it’s just possible that collusion in tuition-setting could be reflected on the cost side by an above-average increase” in the price. “If you relaxed the pressure even more, where would it go? To a general reduction of tuition or to higher educational spending generally on the facilities and staff side? I, frankly, am skeptical.”

* U.S. Nuclear Comeback Stalls as Two Reactors Are Abandoned. Ill news.

* Have smartphone destroyed a generation? Yes, it’s almost pure clickbait, but isn’t it delicious clickbait? Maybe you’ll read the headline and first paragraph on your phone.

* Cars and generational shift.

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