On the Fence episode 12: A Warm and Pleasant Dinner
On The Fence Episode 12: A Warm and Pleasant Dinner, in which we suffer through some of the worst audio tribulations yet to talk about the Republican race and the State of the Union. On the plus side, it’s only 45 minutes.
You can subscribe in iTunes here. And please drop us a rating while you’re there.
Posted: Thursday January 26, 2012 by Alesh Houdek · Permalink · Comment
On the Fence episode 11: Goat Brains
On The Fence Episode 11: Goat Brains, in which we talk about Facebook, timeline, Google Plus, and Andrew Sullivan’s Newsweek article about Barack Obama’s performance in office and legacy.
If you haven’t already, you should subscribe in iTunes here. And give us a rating.
Posted: Wednesday January 18, 2012 by Alesh Houdek · Permalink · Comment
On the Fence episode 10: 22.8 percent
On The Fence Episode 10: 22.8 percent, in which we talk about the New Hampshire primary, Ron Paul, $7.77 trillion, and whether prison inmates should have the right to masturbate.
If you haven’t already, you should subscribe in iTunes here. And give us a rating.
Posted: Wednesday January 11, 2012 by Alesh Houdek · Permalink · Comment
I was slow to post it, but I got a response to my email to Oxford Press and Handmark regarding the Oxford American Dictionary app almost right away.
Libertarianism, slightly deconstructed
This is the old libertarian saw, stated by P.J. O’Rourke like this (only longer, better, and funnier): If your grandmother doesn’t pay her taxes, she’ll be fined. If she doesn’t pay her fine, she’ll eventually be put in jail. If she tries to escape from jail, she’ll be shot. So!: Anything that you agree the government should do, you should be willing to put a gun to your grandmother’s head and threaten to shoot her for. Something like that.
This is a pretty old libertarian saw (contrary to the folks who posted the video above, libertarianism doesn’t argue for a completely stateless society, just for a minimal state): the government should do the minimum amount necessary to keep a society functioning, and no more. This means enforcing minimal laws against harming others, and a small national defense system. Everything else, the argument goes, is better privatized. I’ve been a registered Libertarian since the day I registered to vote, so I’ve given these arguments some thought.
One day the libertarians may go off and create their dream society, maybe on a floating island. In the meantime, we have Somalia, which has been without a central government since 1991.
So here’s the solution, and it has more than a little to do with game theory. Stuff that the government does is not like forcing some one individual to contribute to something. There’s a whole range of things that, if we weren’t all contributing, it wouldn’t make sense for an individual to give any money towards. Let’s start with the Libertarian’s example of national defense. It makes sense to have a national defense system only if everyone contributes. But it ends up that there are lots of things that directly or indirectly help everyone in a society. And while there are ways that a lot of these things could be accomplished by groups of private individuals, it makes sense for the government to do them. Would you shoot your grandmother for the interstate highway system? Probably not. But the highways unquestionably help our society in ways that a privatly-funded and tolled highway system would not.
The welfare system, public education, food safety inspections, drone strikes in foreign countries, eviction of protesters from public spaces, public healthcare, air traffic control. You probably agree that some of these things are good, and that some are bad. That’s not the point, though. The point is that they’re all things that a central government is in a unique position to provide, and that arguments exist that they are a net benefit. Once we’ve agreed to create the structure of the government, we’re all in it together, and we all need to decide together what we think are appropriate roles for that government.
It’s not that we need a system to make George help Oliver. It’s that we’re all better off if there’s a system that helps all those that need help, not just those that can find someone willing to help them.
Posted: Tuesday December 27, 2011 by Alesh Houdek · Permalink · Comment [2]
Václav Havel: a casual rememberence
“Tidy yourself up! We might be Czechs, but we don’t have to let the rest of the world know.” This is apparently one of the lingeringly popular jokes from The Good Soldier Švejk, one of the resounding classics of Czech literature. The fact that I don’t find it any funnier than you will tell you what you need to know about my embarrassingly sparse connection to Czech literature (if the fact that I had to Google it didn’t tip you off). With that serving as a pre-emptive appology, let me tell you as best as I can why Václav Havel was important (without any more Googling, I promise).
At the end of World War II, Roosevelt and Churchill sold my people out to Stalin at Yalta, and the big ‘ol Iron Curtain fell on us. And while it was a light-sneeze version of the Stalinist/Totalitarian sort of thing that they’re, for example, still living up in North Korea to this day, it was still a very different lifestyle from ordinary poverty. There’s an extremely real paranoia that exists, because even if you’ve never gone before the officials on charges that were made against you buy anonymous spies, you know that it happens all the time. Also, this: you can join “The Communist Party” or not. YOUR CHOICE. If you don’t join, the government and others in positions of power won’t trust you. You’ll be denied perks, career advancement, and safety. If you do join, you’ll loose the respect and trust of all your friends. Unless they’re all Party members too. But those are the people with sticks up their ass, right? You either sacrifice your integrity or you sacrifice your prosperity and comfort.
Posted: Monday December 19, 2011 by Alesh Houdek · Permalink · Comment [1]
Ain't no such thing: the Higgs Boson particle
You know, I love advanced physics. It’s given us satellite navigation, GPS, and fancy medical imaging, and that’s just the theory of relativity, which when Einstein cooked it up seemed like the height of quasi-fictional abstraction. Physicists study the most basic level of reality, the stuff that’s a whole conceptual level below chemistry, so they’re the closest to understanding what the hell reality actually is. Great for them, great for us.
But I’m not sure about where they’ve been going for the last couple of decades. If you talk to a theoretical physicist today, almost any one of them will tell you with almost absolute certainty that existence has exactly eleven dimensions. And the thing is, most of us will never understand why they think it’s so, however many NOVA specials we watch, because when physicists talk to one another they talk almost completely in math. 99% of the physics information is controlled by 1%, etc.
So, they just awarded the Nobel Prize to some physicists who discovered—over a decade ago—that the universe’s expansion is accelerating. They were sure that the expansion was slowing, and were trying to measure the rate, when they discovered the opposite. They measure the rate, by the way, by looking for redshift — a little bit of a red haze that’s caused by light traveling over millions of light years through space. The amount of redshift indicates how fast something is moving away from us. When you look at the redshift for everything we can measure, you get that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. So, that’s pretty indirect, but I’m willing to go along with it.
The problem is that they’ve got no way to explain why the universe is expanding. It doesn’t make sense according to the currently otherwise perfectly functioning laws of physics. The best explanation that physicists have come up with (and again, they did this by plugging the results into mathematical equations, not by sitting around philosopher-like thinking about it) is dark matter: STUFF that exists but cannot be measured by any device or process known to science. And here’s my favorite part: this dark matter makes up roughly 70% of all the matter in the universe. That’s right: you, me, our planet, it’s sun, our galaxy, and all the other galaxies … it all accounts for only 30% or so of everything that exists.
At this point you’ve got to ask: IS IT POSSIBLE THERE’S A MISTAKE IN THE MATH GUYS?????? Well, you’ll not get a good answer. Well, a few years ago they built the Large Hadron Collider, an $8 billion device(!) that was supposed to prove the existence of the Higgs bison particle, which is the stuff this dark matter is made up of. Now, the Large Hadron Collider is near and dear to my heart, because it was built around the time I started this blog, and some of the first posts here, back around 2008, were about it. Cool thing! But here’s the problem: they haven’t found shit. They haven’t found the Higgs Bison! Oh sure, there are tantalizing signs that it’s there, but so far — over three years later — no proof. Ouch, man. Ouch.
Posted: Thursday December 15, 2011 by Alesh Houdek · Permalink · Comment [2]
Art Basel: the obligatory 'winners and losers' post
You should go look at my photos at The Atlantic first, but here are some more, and with snippier commentary.
Let me tell you: I am BURNED OUT on basel. Y’all saw the Lindemann article, right? He’s been getting hate from all over, including Jerry Saltz and Saatchi. But I sort of agree with the guy. It’s all too much. Anyway, read on.
Posted: Thursday December 8, 2011 by Alesh Houdek · Permalink · Comment [3]
On the Fence episode 9: My Pants They're Tight
On The Fence Episode 9: My Pants They’re Tight, in which we talk about many things, but mainly the Miami Art Museum renaming, pertaining to which Steve just sent me a link to this NYTimes article, of which the most important bit is the ending:
Though it’s not uncommon for a smaller art museum to take on the identity of a major benefactor, it is less common with larger institutions, said Maxwell L. Anderson, who in January will become director of the Dallas Museum of Art. “No one has ever seen this happen at a museum that aspires to be a major metropolitan museum,” he said.
Mary E. Frank, a former president of the Miami museum, not only resigned from the board in protest but also took out a full-page newspaper advertisement with her husband, Howard, the chief operating officer of Carnival Corporation. She said the ad’s opposition to the name change had drawn nearly 300 e-mails of support and that she and her husband would not fulfill the remaining half of a $500,000 pledge they had made.
Mr. Rodríguez, another trustee who resigned, said his company, Carnival Cruise Lines, is now debating whether to come through on the balance of a $5 million endowment gift, of which $1.5 million had already been awarded.
“We feel we made a pledge to the Miami Art Museum,” he said. “Not to the Jorge Pérez Museum.”
But Craig Robins, a member of the board who is a developer and prominent collector, suggested that those opposed to the renaming should collectively match Mr. Pérez’s contribution and try to retain the name. “It’s not fair to be critical unless you’re willing to do something about it,” he said.
He said he was sure Mr. Pérez “would gladly relinquish it,” adding: “He’s being the generous one. He’s the only one stepping up to the plate.”
As per always, you should subscribe in iTunes here. And while you’re there, why not throw the show a rating or write a review?
Posted: Wednesday December 7, 2011 by Alesh Houdek · Permalink · Comment [1]
Photos from Art Basel (part 1)
My first batch of photos from Basel Etcetera is up at The Atlantic along with a saucy 350 words about the fair. Coming soon: a second batch, here, of some of my favorite art. Tay stooned…
Posted: Tuesday December 6, 2011 by Alesh Houdek · Permalink · Comment
A subdued Art Basel opens
Art Basel opened with a whimper yesterday. After walking around the fair for over an hour I suddenly realized that I had seen no art of any particular outlandishness, it suddenly hit me—everything about the fair this year is subdued. The infrastructure of the fair, including the highly-stylized viewing pods in the vide lounge and the tote bags distributed with catalogs, were the same as last year, the first time in the fair’s ten years. (The Oceanfront looked like its lowest-budget incarnation ever. NO Art loves Music performance.) The mood in the air was boisterous, but toned down several notches even from last year. And the art, by Art Basel standards, was downright conservative.
Heading out this morning to catch Gabriel Orozco at Art Conversations, then off to the satellite fairs.
Posted: Thursday December 1, 2011 by Alesh Houdek · Permalink · Comment [3]
On the Fence episode 8: Lectures on Ethics
Posted yesterday and linked today: episode 8 of On the Fence, wherein Steve and I talk about how congress seems to be going out of its mind (the police state bill passed the senate as we were recording), Newt Gingrich’s lasting legacy, and Moral Relativism.
As per always, you should subscribe in iTunes here. And while you’re there, why not throw the show a rating or write a review?
Posted: Thursday December 1, 2011 by Alesh Houdek · Permalink · Comment
Scenes from the Miami Book Fair 2011
Chuck Palahniuk takes the stage in a well-tailored pink striped shirt and tan leather pants, the headline act of Saturday night at the Miami Book Fair International, and the crowd is in a Beatlemaniaesque frenzy. He quickly relates a story told to him by an oncologist he sat across the table from at a dinner party. The oncologist was on a long flight, seated next to a particularly chatty lady. She talked about this and that, and eventually got around to the subject of wine. She could no longer drink it, she said, because it caused a small burning pain in the base of her neck. “I tried beer, and it caused the same burning sensation,” she told him. “I tried liquor, and still the burning. So I figured it was just the lord telling me I shouldn’t drink anymore. But it’s the wine I miss the most.” “That’s not the lord telling you anything,” replied the doctor. “I’m an oncologist, and what you’ve got is stage-4 lymphoma. You’ll be dead by the end of the summer.” The lady was much less chatty for the rest of the flight. And when she got back home she went to see her own doctor, who called the oncologist and said, “You were right: it’s cancer and she’s got 90 days to live. But you could have been less of a dick about telling her.”
“And that,” Palahniuk tell us, “is how every good story works. It changes us. Because now, every time you have a glass of wine, you’ll be looking for that little pain in the base of your neck.” Then he proceeds to throw dozens of large inflatable kidney-shaped brains into the audience, offering prizes to the few people who inflate theirs the fastest. In case you’re like me and you’ve never heard of Palahniuk, he’s written several novels that either have been or currently are being adapted into movies, including Fight Club. They’re sometimes called “transgressive” novels, and indeed the movies leave out the most startling sections of the books. He goes on to read two stories. The first includes a scene of a woman on a bus who reaches into her jeans, pulls out a bloody tampon, and begins swinging it around at the people around her, hitting them in the head with it. Pretty gross, but nothing remotely approaching the second story — two thirds of the way through which there’s a loud crashing sound in the back of the hall. It turns out to be somebody who fainted. This is actually not surprising — I was beginnint go get queesy and light-headed myself. The fainter is helped out of the room, and a few dozen others take advantage of the opportunity to escape, mostly from the reserved VIP seats at the front of the room, all replaced immediately by motley college-aged people from one of the standby lines outside. When the commotion dies down Palahniuk says, “at this point it’s protocol to ask whether it’s okay for me to keep reading,” which is met with plenty of approving cheers. The story is Guts, and the phenomena of people passing out during its reading is apparently well documented.
Palahniuk has the headline Saturday night slot of the book fair, and he plays the rockstar role, but my favorite bit of the above — his opening story — is exactly like thousands of moments that happen over the course of the week. Most are smaller-scaled but no less profound for it.
I should back up and say that in the past I’ve been a book fair skeptic. A fair about books is way closer to dancing about architecture than writing about music is, right? The process of selecting a book to read ought to be a slow and deliberate one, and having millions of books, plus crowds, is an anathema to the process, right? And the fact that the Miami Book Fair is the biggest in the nation, sprawling over six city blocks, several buildings of Miami Dade College, and a few ready-built tent pavilions, would seem to only make those matters worse. But this is my realization: It’s about moments. You can be changed by much smaller ephipanies than that a pain at the base of the neck can signal impending demise.
Earlier in the day: “In the basement the bag of fresh-picked garlic dries out, infusing the room with the pure rush of half sweat, half sex, half earth. That’s three halves, but anything pure consists of multitudes. Right, dude?” Jim Ray Daniels is reading from his entry in Tigertail’s South Florida Annual, a slim little volume with 54 pieces each limited to 305 words. Tigertail is a legendary local performing arts organization that also dabbles in poetry, and this, their ninth annual publication, is the first to branch out to prose writing. Daniels is going on in great detail about his love of garlic and his teenage sons: “They wrinkle their noses up at me like garlic is the looser in the back of class that stinks and everybody makes fun of.” And then he drops this one: “I’d trade all this garlic for a kind remark today.”
I have no idea how that reads on a computer screen to you, but in the room, for me, it was pretty striking. Sometimes, you realize how much you appreciate something only at the moment when you find yourself willing to give it up in exchange for something else.
Did I mention “sprawling”? The grid for Saturday’s events has nine time slots and twelve areas, and almost all the cells are filled with single-author or panel events. Sunday is a similar situation, and the preceding week has events every evening. There are something like 250 events.
And there’s the street fair: six city blocks around the university buildings that house the author events lined with tents of booksellers. One is dedicated to antiquarian booksellers. There’s a row of author tents, mostly folks with self-published books they’re promoting. There are tents dedicated to comic books, socially aware books, children’s books, and all sorts of special interests. There are religious tents (last year I got a free Quran at one). There are several tents with the name “Los Libros Mas Pequeños del Mundo” which carry delightfully small spanish-language books on all subjects. Books & Books, Miami’s famous independent bookstore, has a sprawling tent. McSweeny’s has a tent with their exquisite books and book-like objects. And there are many many tents selling used books, each with a different level of quality, organization, and attention to pricing. (The best time to buy books is at the end of the day on Sunday. The vendors, facing the prospect of packing up their unsold books, are in the mood to make a deal. And you won’t have to carry your haul around all day.)
There’s a big children’s area with rides, story readings, face-painting, and the like. There are food tents like you’d find at any fair. There’s a large stage set up at one end of the street fair with a revolving roster of bands playing all day. And there’s the China pavilion with booksellers, calligraphy, and performances. (Every year the book fair focuses on one country and brings in vendors, authors, and performers) When I stopped by, there was a 10-piece ensemble playing traditional Chinese music, with an encore of Jingle Bells.
My favorite speaker is Colson Whitehead. A minor literary star who decided for reasons not made entirely clear to write a zombie novel, he appears on a panel with a couple of other highbrow genre novelists, except that as soon as he takes the podium to deliver his opening remarks he owns the room. African-American, Whitehead begins his remarks with the opening lines from The Jerk, and goes on to point out that while he’s been publishing books regularly, he hasn’t been invited to the Miami Book Fair since 2003. “I usually spend my Saturday afternoon at home, weeping over my regrets, so this is a welcome change,” and he launches into the story of how he became a writer, in turns holding up his hands to show his “long delicate fingers and thin feminine wrists” to explain why he wasn’t fit for a life of labor and playing the disco hit MacArthur Park from his iPad into the podium microphone. The song’s lyrics would only make sense to him decades later when rejection slips for his first novel began to come in. (And yes, there is a line-by-line explanation of this, but it alas defeated my note-taking abilities.) He explains that his family watched a lot of TV when he was growing up, and that he saw A Clockwork Orange at age 10: “Mommy, what are they doing to that lady?” “It’s a comment on society.”
Just as funny if less charismatic is Andy Borowitz, who’s at the fair on the pretense of having edited a book of the “50 funniest American writers” and uses the opportunity essentially to deliver a stand-up monologue about the Republican primary race. “If you watch cable news because you want to be better informed,” he quips, “that’s like going to the Olive Garden because you want to live in Italy.” Much better political jokes come from the cartoon artist Mr. Fish, who’s razor sharp barbs spare nobody (he received death threats for his criticism of President Obama early in his administration), but who is touchingly accommodating of the Occupy Wall Street’s movement’s lack of an expressed agenda: “It’s like asking a group of starving people to agree on a menu before you’ll listen to them.”
I’m still not sure why the Miami Book Fair charges admission. The high-profile author events with limited seating, yes. But the street fair, a hundred or so tents of books large and small, famous and obscure, expensive and nearly free (or completely free, as in the case of a Quran I received last year) — why charge? In any case, it’s been so for years, and it doesn’t keep the visitors at bay. By noon the street fair is a throng, and the more popular author events fill Miami-Dade College’s Chapman conference hall with long standby lines to spare.
Even with Michael Moore closing out the last day of the Book Fair, this year’s line-up couldn’t match 2010’s star-studed roster, which included Jonathan Franzen, John Waters, and Patti Smith. But it turns out to be even more wonderful that way. The revelatory moments the book fair always brings are that much more special when they’re unexpected.
Posted: Wednesday November 30, 2011 by Alesh Houdek · Permalink · Comment [4]
An open letter to Oxford Dictionaries and Handmark software on the state of the Oxford iOS apps
[My apologies if this has reached you in error. Writing to large corporations can feel like yelling in the wind, so I’m cc’ing a number of emails in hopes that one may reach a sympathetic ear. Please consider forwarding this to someone who can do something about it.]
Dear Gents:
I’ve purchased several of your iPhone and iPad apps, including the New Oxford American Dictionary. I’m a big fan of the dictionary’s actual definitions, but not a big fan of the app itself. Most frustrating is how many taps it takes from launching the app to getting to look up a word. It’s (1) launch, (2) wait for the search command to appear, (3) tap search (a TINY button?!), (4) tap inside the search box, and (5) tap to delete the previous word looked up.
Un-reasonable, especially for a $29.99 app. If I were making suggestions to you, I’d recommend the app to automatically look up a word if one is in the device’s clipboard, and offer a blinking cursor in a search field upon launch otherwise.
Recently I was looking for a thesaurus app, and noticed your Writer’s Thesaurus. As much as I’d like to own this app ($24.99), I cannot buy it after reading some of the reviews. There’s content missing from the app that exists in the book? There are mini-essays throughout the app that can only be found by stumbling on them? And, most devastatingly, the search is no better than the dictionary app? Sorry, I’ll have to stick to the web browser for word discovery.
I hope you’ll invest some time and energy into improving these (expensive!) apps, so that the user interface is as useful and engaging as the content. And I hope you’ll write me back with your plans in this regard, so I can either begin to wait in anticipation, or put my hopes to rest.
Yours truly,
Alesh Houdek
Update: I actually received a response from Park Jacobs at Handmark (the software partner that produces Oxford University Press’ apps) almost immediately, but haven’t gotten a chance to respond to him or post it until now. Shame on me. Here it is:
Hi Alesh,
My Name is Jacob Park and I am the product manager at Handmark responsible for the Oxford dictionaries on mobile clients. I’d like to thank you for your feedback. We’re always looking to improve the user experience and your feedback is critical.
Your suggestion for automatically searching for text in the clipboard is great and a feature that has been added to the to-do list. The loading time you are seeing while waiting for the search command to appear on launch is a result of some libraries being loaded that are required for the ‘fuzzy’ search functionality. I am looking into what we can do to speed that up to reduce the time from launch to search. The search process you describe below seems to reflect the user experience of the iPad app functioning in portrait mode. Is that correct? I think there may be some relatively easy fixes we can get in that would improve the search functionality, particularly on the iPad, like assuming the user wants to execute a new search when the app is brought to the foreground – clearing out the previous text and displaying the search popover automatically with the search field active. I’ll put these in the feature list for the next point release of the application.
Again, thanks for the feedback. It really is appreciated.
Regards,
Jacob
Posted: Monday November 28, 2011 by Alesh Houdek · Permalink · Comment
On the Fence episode 7: Edgewater
Also just posted: episode 7 of On The Fence, my podcast with Steve. This week: Thanksgiving special! After sorting out a couple of Steve’s myriad computer issues, he and Alesh talk about what they’re grateful for, Edgewater, transvestites, the budget super committee, and Grover Norquist.
As per always, you should subscribe in iTunes here.
Posted: Wednesday November 23, 2011 by Alesh Houdek · Permalink · Comment
