Originally posted on Tue, 12/04/2012

As of today, I have biked to work at least one day in every month of 2012. In Minnesota. What’s more, during the summer I biked to work far more often than I drove. I’d like to say that I’m now officially one of those crazy bike commuters who will bike in all kinds of weather, but that’s not true. I never rode in icy or dangerous conditions, and I only got wet a few times.

The weather was exceptionally warm and dry last winter, with frequent highs in the 40s during January and February. May was the only tricky month, since it was rainy, but then we entered into a drought that is still going on.

Originally posted on Wed, 11/07/2012

Yesterday I put my Terminator 2 Blu-Ray into the player, and it said “SkyNet has detected that you have accessed this disk before.”
30 seconds later: “SkyNet is loading…”
30 seconds later, a map of the Earth, with a bunch of stuff which might have been disabled menu options, or just fake menu options.  It might have said, “SkyNet cannot determine your location.”  Oh, and a “continue” option.
For the next 15 seconds: “SkyNet has detected an Internet connection…”
“Downloading high-resolution media…”

SkyNet did not know where I had stopped playing the day before.  It did not know which version of the movie I preferred.  Out of my 20 minute treadmill routine, 4 minutes were spent just getting back to the right scene.

If only Skynet were a little smarter and a little faster.

Originally posted on Tue, 11/06/2012

I’ve been seeing (and commenting on) a lot of suggestions about how to improve our democracy. It’s been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. Winston Churchill is most famous for saying that (“it’s been said” and all), but we’ve over half a century with lots of advances in game theory and psychology, so perhaps it’s time to revisit this assertion.

First we must decide what the purpose of government is. It’s not strictly to enforce the will of the people, for several reasons. Even in a democracy of one person– or a dictatorship– a leader might not know what he wants or be wrong, by later judgement. With more people, there’s even less agreement. What’s more, it’s important for people to have certain rights, regardless of the will of the people.

For the purpose of argument, I’d say that the purpose of government is twofold:

1. To ensure an equitable distribution of power. At a minimum, to keep tyrants, corrupt officials, invaders, thugs, bullies, and thieves from taking over. Taken to an extreme, this may mean heavy-handed wealth redistribution. There’s a lot of room for interpretation in between, depending on what you consider equitable. My own take is that, in each generation, every person should have a fighting chance to rise to the top of society, and nobody should become completely disenfranchised. (Note that this is aspirational: I don’t know of any government that always succeeds at either.)
2. To facilitate cooperation, as necessary. That is, to make sure that services that can’t or shouldn’t be provided individually are taken care of, either by providing them directly or indirectly through laws, regulations, and policies. That’s really more of a means than an end, so I’ll append: …in order to sustain the best of human values, for the present and future generations.

That being the case, is democracy the best choice? Many of the biggest problems that face our world are environmental or economic, where experts have a far more nuanced (and often completely different) view than the population at large. Government is most successful when people are intimately involved in measuring outcomes, but don’t necessarily care about implementation details. Sanitation, for example. People don’t know (or care) where the trash goes, so long as they don’t have to care, but will complain immediately if it doesn’t get picked up. Or schooling. School works best when parents complain immediately when things go wrong, and taxpayers are willing to pay to make things go better. But global warming? That takes decades to measure, and few have the expertise to measure it.

Economics is similar. The biggest factors that effect the economy, in my opinion, take 10-20 years to have an effect. Education. Investments in roads and other infrastructure. Cultivating a business community that makes long range plans. And preserving free-market enterprise. (“Business friendly” policies tend to be pro-existing-business, and therefore anti-free-market.)

The biggest advantage of democracy is that it is extremely good at distributing power. Power tends to consolidate. The wealthy and powerful– whether individuals, associations, or corporations– use their influence to gain more influence. It’s a corrosive effect that seeps through the cracks in every society. And once it becomes overwhelming, the disenfranchised try to take back power.

This is not unique to democracy. If anything, democracy works to protect the bullies– by keeping them from getting so powerful that they are overthrown violently. I see society as like a car going down a road. Ideally, the driver keeps the car in the middle of the lane, but at a minimum tries to keep it out of the ditch. The driver, in a democracy, is lazy. People have better things to do than to pay attention to politics. So it’s like a car with a sleepy driver, who wakes up when the car drifts too far, gets back into the lane, and dozes off again. That’s a whole lot better than monarchy and other dictatorships, which is like a bus where the driver doesn’t have to care about staying in the lane. It occasionally crashes, people die, the bus gets repaired, and someone else becomes the new driver. (Or you have a parliament which tries to replace reckless drivers, when the parliament itself isn’t reckless.)

So the qualities that make for a good government are (1) measurable progress toward goals (call it transparency), and (2) responsiveness, which is an antidote to corruption. There are plenty of organizations that do well in this regard that aren’t democratic. Successful, customer-focused companies (such as Apple) make it easy for people to judge them, and people do. They are held to a higher standard, which they don’t always meet. Apple, for example, delights its customers with high-quality products, and is also more transparent than any other electronics company when it comes to fair labor practices in their factories. The irony is that people associate Apple with poor labor practices, because we know more about them. You can be sure that Dell and HP don’t have better practices. Similarly in government, it appears the most corrupt when you hear about every little whiff of potential corruption, which is in fact when it’s the least corrupt.

So is democracy the best? For exposing and fixing corruption, you need activism to come from all corners. That doesn’t necessarily mean everyone voting in the way we think of it. Our election cycle is too infrequent to deal with immediate problems, yet too frequent to provide long-term leadership. And yet, because power tends to collect, we can’t afford to have politicians who persist for too long, lest they become too powerful.

Here are a few things I’d like to see for good governance, whether it’s in a democracy as we know it, or not:

• A democratic process that engages people at the appropriate level. Not asking them to make decisions about technical issues they can’t be expected to become experts in, nor asking them to choose several Soil And Water District Supervisors, and over dozen judges (as I do). But to give them an opportunity to choose a few leaders, whose qualities they can be expected to research and judge.
• A selection process which promotes consensus builders. So you aren’t choosing between the far left and the far right. Nor are you necessarily choosing the “safest,” most center-of-the-road candidate. I think multiple-choice voting (e.g. instant run-off) would be far better than our current system in this regard. That is, the winner would have to be acceptable to a majority of voters, not simply get more votes than the alternative. But you also need a system for choosing the candidates that’s more flexible than the current party system, where a radical group can overtake the nomination process.
• A culture of engagement, where corruption is not acceptable. Where diverse opinions are discussed, but lies and distortions are not tolerated. In some ways, the echo chamber of the Internet is a step back from the old days when most people got their news from a few authoritative sources.
• Resilience against power grabs. Small groups that can take over a nomination process, for one. But also organizations that lobby for tax loopholes that aren’t a big deal individually, but add up to a lot of corruption over time. I’m not sure what the cure for the latter is, except perhaps to limit the complexity of certain kinds of laws. (Referenda aren’t the answer: deceptive advertising influences voters even more than lobbyists influence politicians.)

If you were to design a system from scratch based on these principals, you’d end up with something unlike democracy as we practice it today. But it’s not impossible to get there from within our own system. Like so many things, the theoretical properties (how many legislators, how many parties, electoral or direct elections, etc.) aren’t as important as how well it is implemented. And that implies constant vigilance.

Originally posted on Tue, 10/23/2012

I’ve been a Bruce Schneier fan for years. I read his blog often enough that I don’t feel the need to read his books. But then he offered a discount on a signed edition of his latest book– with the one stipulation that I write a review of it. So here’s the review.

A lot of brilliant thinkers tend to get stuck in their own perspective. There are plenty of mathematical geniuses who can’t contemplate the implications of their ideas. Plenty of programmers who can’t understand why users don’t recognize the brilliance of their user interfaces. Bruce Schneier isn’t one of them. His rose to fame with Applied Cryptography, a book of algorithms. But because great encryption doesn’t help when it’s part of weak security, he’s written written with increasing breadth about security. After 9/11, he wrote Beyond Fear about how we individually and as a society make poor security trade-offs. Now he’s written Liars & Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive. This takes an even wider view, as he asks: how is it that people can trust each other at all? For example, a man gets into a taxi in a foreign city. The man and the driver will never see each other again. The taxi driver could easily rob him and get away, or he could ride without paying. And yet every day all over the world, drivers and passengers can trust each other.

When I got this book, my first thought was it’s too thick. After all, Schneier has said he wants this to be read by all sorts of decision makers. I’ve heard that if you want to be read by busy people, make your book just long enough to be read in a single long plane trip. Then again, I’m not a best-selling author. But it turns out this isn’t such a long read, it’s 250 pages, plus another 100 pages of notes and references. (This book-to-notes ratio is up there with Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation, which has a remarkable amount of overlap with Liars & Outliers.) It’s really two books in one: a quicker, drier, less technical read without endnotes, or a more colorful read with endnotes. I kept one bookmark in the endnotes at all times.

Liars & Outliers is an overview of trust and cooperation. It draws primarily from sociology, economics, and psychology with a big helping of evolutionary biology, game theory, and security. Philosophy and theology also show up, to add a bit of color. It’s about the different strategies for enforcing conformity in a group, and when they do and don’t work. This is practical stuff for anyone who needs to manage a large group, whether it’s an online discussion group, a corporation, or a country of taxpayers. The book takes pains to discuss this from a neutral perspective: the forces are the same whether it’s a just society versus murderers or a murderous society against saints. To this end, Schneier uses the rather awkward term “defector” to refer to rule breakers.

The book is summed up quite well in the first chapter. In fact, if you’re in a hurry you could just read the first two and the last chapter. Occasionally the book starts to read like a taxonomy, as Schneier explains the breadth of, for example, security techniques. This is an academic book trying– and usually succeeding– in being a general-audience book. While it does drag a little at times, there are plenty of popular just-for-fun nonfiction books that drag more. (I’ll admit, though I read a lot, I’m not much of a book reader.) And with the whole history of deceit and treachery to draw upon, he has plenty of colorful examples.

I feel like I’ve said a lot about the book without saying much about the contents of the book. As someone who not only reads Schneier’s blog, but reads many of the same sources he draws upon, there weren’t many ah-ha moments for me. Perhaps the biggest one is this: trust is rare in nature. It’s hard to establish and easy to break, but once established it yields huge benefits. And humans are the most cooperative and trusting species on Earth. Why? In part because we have the greatest capacity to evaluate reputations, so we know when not to trust. In part because of a sense of morality which leads us to punish rule breakers.

I hear plenty of people argue that corporations are inherently inhuman and inhumane. While Schneier doesn’t say that exactly, he spells out each of the pressures society uses to enforce conformity to social norms, and how corporations respond to only two (reputational and institutional [legal.])

The overarching message of the book is that there are different ways of establishing a trusting relationship, and they work on different scales. Neighbors directly evaluate each other. People who know each other only by reputation can go by that. Less intimate groups use morals and institutions to maintain group norms. And when all else fails, security mechanisms can make non-compliance difficult. None of these completely eliminate non-conformity, which is good because even good rules can have bad consequences. The trick is using the right tools– and the right amount of pressure– under the right circumstances. It’s depressing to consider all the ways that things go wrong– from suicide bombers to self-destructive investment banks to a lack of a global response to global warming. But at the same time, humans are amazing creatures in that we even have a cooperative arrangement as abstract as the United Nations or a coalition of corporations.

Originally posted on Wed, 10/17/2012

Yesterday I posted the following query to my friends:

Okay, everyone, here’s a quick homework assignment:

While you’re commuting tonight and tomorrow morning, look at the “go” stop lights. What color are they, REALLY? Yes, I know they are supposed to be green. But are they, really? And are different ones different colors? How many do you see that match the following colors:

1. Yellow-green
2. Pure green
3. Turquoise
4. Blue

No fair looking at photos of traffic lights, either. This is about color perception with your eyes.

(BTW, I’m partially color blind.)

So here’s what that’s all about. I’m red/green color blind, and green traffic lights have a blueish tint so that people like me can tell green from red. And yet people think of green lights as being a pure green. If you do a Google image search for green traffic light you get a mix of photographs– with blue-green lights– and clip art with pure green. Clearly illustrators aren’t looking at real lights.

This makes a difference to me because I see lots of user interfaces where they use red/green or red/amber/green to display key information: from traffic maps to MacOS window widgets. They never seem to use official traffic light colors. The worst, though, is red/green LEDs on appliances such as battery chargers. There’s absolutely no other context that can be used to indicate the status, since the brightness is identical.

Now, color perception is a tricky thing. It took me years to realize that I really am color blind, because I can nearly always figure out the color from context. (If that sounds weird, consider that you usually don’t notice your disabled color perception when you enter a low-light or colored light environment.) And color itself isn’t in nature– it’s a product of human perception. Consider that an apple looks to be the same color whether you see it under the cool light of noontime sun or the yellow cast of sunset. The light rays that hit your eyes are completely different, but your brain uses the background to compensate in order to construct a stable notion of color. That’s why I specified no photos– the background makes a big difference.

So the results? One person said yucca green, which she described as bluish. (Oddly, that swatch has slightly more red than blue.) Another said there’s variation, and the bluish ones are weird. And another said mostly pure green, with some yellow-green.

Oddly, I’d put the “yellow-green” option in just as a ringer; I never expected anyone to choose it. However, if the background is a bright blue sky, green will look more yellow.

So are green lights turquoise? I don’t trust my color vision enough to say. But you can compare. Blue-green traffic light, turquoise (equal parts blue and green light.)

Here are more details, for the pedantic.

Below is a picture of the official luminance ranges for traffic signals. Modern green traffic signals are allowed to be in the range from this:          to this:         . That’s assuming you’re looking at my color swaths on a pure white background. The ITE standard specifies colors relative to the range of human perception (in CIE 1931 color space)– that fingernail shape in the graph below. Computer displays, which shine only three colored lights, display a more limited, triangular color range with red, green, and blue corners. And you can’t get any of the legal traffic light colors from a computer screen!

BTW, I got my CIE 1931 to RGB conversions here. You probably won’t find a better source, because any serious color expert would point out that you can’t accurately convert CIE 1931 to RGB.

And here’s a mind-blowing example of how language affects color perception.