Morality

Recent list work: #9, #13 (I did it today. Whoo!), #22 (finished!), #39 (work in progress), #69 (Jean seemed inordinately pleased with some chicken and potatoes I brought her while she was on crutches), #69 (Catch 22 is finally done. Also, Fathers and Sons, which I liked), #90.

Time has a very interesting poll about morality at the moment. Please go look at it first; it will take you less than 5 minutes to answer it.

(waiting for you to go answer the poll questions)

(no, really, go do so)

(Please?)

I'd heard about this poll before, but this time I get to see the exact scenarios laid out. My answers, for those who are interested, are: yes, yes, yes, no, no.

In the first scenario, the baby's crying will lead to not only my death, but also to the deaths of others, including itself. Obviously, you try other means to quiet the baby first: give it something to suck on, rock it, change its diaper, whatever. But the scenario states that the baby can't be quieted in any other way. If that baby continues to scream, it's going to die very soon no matter what. Better that it be just the baby that dies, and not take me and the other refugees with it. I'm smothering the baby.

In the second scenario, if someone isn't kicked off the lifeboat we're going to capsize and all die. If one individual is already grievously injured and bound to die soon anyways, and killing him just a little bit sooner preserves my life and those of others, I'm pushing him out of the boat. I've got a strong survival instinct.

In the third scenario, we have a group of 5 idiots on one train track not paying attention to oncoming vehicles, and 1 individual on another doing the same. They're all equally stupid, and none of them are guaranteed to die soon if I don't send the train at them. I therefore bow to the notion that 1 death is better than 5 deaths, and send the train at the lone individual.

In the fourth scenario, we have the same 5 idiots unaware of an oncoming train, but I'm on a bridge over the track with a stranger, and if I push him off the train will stop before it hits the 5 clueless. In this case, the idiots on the track are more culpable than the guy on the bridge with me, who is entirely blameless. I'm not going to make him pay the consequences of the idiots being idiots. I'll yell for them to get out of the way and maybe throw rocks at them if I think I have a chance of getting their attention, but I'm not going to kill an innocent bystander to save them.

In the 5th case, the guy in the catapult is just as innocent as the guy on the bridge. So, I won't kill him to save 5 idiots. I'm assuming he's not been sentenced to sit in the catapult as payment for a crime, nor is he being an idiot and playing in a catapult which has obviously been constructed to fling people at oncoming trains.

Of the people who had responded when I wrote this, 70% agreed with me in the first case, 56% in the second, 79% in the 3rd, 60% in the 4th, and 52% in the 5th. I'm surprised more people are OK with killing the baby than the presumably adult lifeboat passenger, but maybe they care that the baby probably won't really understand its coming death while the lifeboat passenger will.

What are your answers?

Shoe size as a marker for something other than what you might think

In many ways, I'm used to being unusual.

There are the obvious personality aspects here to consider. I'm interested in politics, but am not a member of a political party. I'm a definite nerd, but I play several sports...and yet don't enjoy watching anyone else do so, outside of the Olympics. I'm sarcastic while not being mean about it, wholesome while very libertarian in my views of what's acceptable behavior, and one of those adults who enjoys spending time on a swing. Clearly, these are not all typical traits.

Then there are the physical traits. My eyes change color multiple times each day, an inherited useless mutant power than my mother had as well. My body temperature is unusually low, and combined with what I assume is relatively poor circulation to my extremities, my hands are often perceived by other people to be colder than the air. (My toes are often colder than my fingers, but fewer people come into contact with those). My hearing, perhaps in an effort to make up for my relatively weak eyesight, is off the charts, routinely causing me to flinch from noises others don't react to, and possibly don't hear.

But nothing quite drives home the physical oddity of being me like attempting to buy clothing.

For one, I am somewhat counter to the standard American trend of trying to achieve seal-like proportions. While I have managed to gain almost 25 pounds in 2 years, I'm technically still underweight. For part of this year's Halloween costume, I bought a children's large t shirt, and had to actively work at shrinking it to make it fit. This is somewhat disturbing as a roughly 6 foot tall guy. I typically have to buy my belt in the children's department, as there aren't small enough ones in the men's department. One of these times, I'm going to just give up and buy a cloth Batman belt. Nothing says grown up professional quite like superheroes holding up your pants.

In theory, we guys have it much easier when it comes to buying clothing than women do. Women's clothing comes in sizes which bear little relationship to anything physical. As best as I can tell, they are primarily even integers, but sometimes include 0 or 00 (and if 0 and 00 are different from each other, one of them has to not fit the category of even integers). Clearly, those aren't capable of being physical realities, and may be related to the lumber industry's conception of a 2 by 4, which doesn't measure 2 of anything by 4 of the same thing. One of my high school friends had her prom dress taken into a size 0, and it was still loose enough that she had to wrap herself in double sided tape to not end up doing a stripper impersonation. She may have been thin, but she definitely had a positive mass.

Men, on the hand, have clothing measurements for many things based on inches (at least for those of us resisting the metric system. The US and Libya, partners in solidarity for the Imperial measurement system). Pants come with numbers representing circumference of waist and length of inseam. Dress shirts are measured in circumference of neck and length of sleeve. Under this system, all a guy would need to do is find out those 4 measurements, and he would be able to tell if a piece of clothing would fit.

Of course, that's not how it works. I blame the Baby Boomers, and not just because I like blaming things on my parents' generation.

The general explanation here is that the Baby Boomers are economically powerful, aging, and somewhat vain. They don't really want to admit that they aren't the same size that they were in high school or their 20s. Therefore, clothing companies have catered to their vanity, first with "relaxed fit" sizes, and then just by blatantly lying on the alleged dimension. This, in turn, has eroded the previous pressure to conform to market standards, so now not only the waist is mismarked, so is the inseam. In jeans these days, I can vary from a 29 to a 32 in the waist, and a 30 to a 34 in the inseam. I presume I don't fluctuate over a range of 4 inches in height in the several minutes it takes to walk to the next store and try on a pair, so blatant lying in the packaging seems a more likely culprit.

However, despite all my physical oddities, I always was able to take comfort in one speck of normalness: my feet. My feet are the average and also modal size of feet of the adult man in this country (10.5 shoe size), so there are virtually always shoes available in my size. This helps a lot in the rented footwear industry (a largely unrecognized affiliation of pastime activities, including but not limited to bowling and ice skating), as well as in actually purchasing shoes, as the market will demand that most styles be produced in my size.

My confidence in my normal feet, however, has been severely damaged lately.

I bought a pair of new sneakers yesterday, all the better go about sneaking. I'm not quite a ninja, but I'm working on that whole stealthiness thing. Also, it's nice to have shoes with shock absorption properties. I found a nice pair of shoes, and tried one of them on. It seemed quite comfortable, and the price was right, so I bought it. Also, I bought its mate, without trying it on.

Apparently, this was a mistake.

I discovered today that the left shoe does indeed fit perfectly. The right shoe, on the other hand, is too small. Even worse, it's also too small on the the right foot.

I have come up with several explanations for this. For one, the right shoe could have been mismarked. This seems implausible, as it seems to be the same length as the left one, but it's possible. Another is that I have a previously undiscovered physical freakishness. Alternately, evil gnomes could have caused my right foot to swell today for no discernible reason, and thus feel too big for the shoe. And, of course, there is the possibility that since it was obtained from an outlet store, the shoe may have been defective.

In any event, I plan on returning to the scene of the crime, to see if I can find a version of that shoe which actually fits my right foot. Hopefully, I shall be able to convince the store people to allow me to exchange either the right shoe or the entire pair for one that fits. Otherwise, I shall have to look up the website I've heard about allowing people with mismatched feet to trade shoes with similarly mismatched individuals. And, if so, I'll have to join their ranks with yet another unusual feature.

And, hey, if nothing else, potentially yet another useless mutant power.

UPDATE: The exchange was successful, though they didn't have any size 11 in stock. I tried on a size 11.5, and they seemed to work, so now I have one pair of slightly larger shoes than my others. My range of useless mutant powers has not yet expanded in ways that I know about.

Halloween

Recent list work: 9, 13, 22, 47, 68 (possibly), 70.

The real purpose of this post is that I went to a pair of Halloween parties last night, and I wanted to post pictures of the two stages of the costume. I was not creative this year, and completely ripped off a television character's Halloween costume from last year. I was Clark Kent. Overall, not a very uncomfortable costume. I managed to shrink a Superman t shirt through repeated high heat dryer cycles, despite the fact that the shirt was allegedly a children's large (I just couldn't bring myself to try on the children's medium), so it was tight enough without being uncomfortably so. Dress pants and shoes, and an unbuttoned shirt and untied tie aren't too bad. The least comfortable part of the whole costume was the pair of pure red briefs which I had poking up from my waistband--to get them to poke up that high without being loose at the waist, I ended up having to buy smaller underwear than I normally wear and pulling them up as high as they would go, which was less than fun by the end of the evening. Anyway, pictures:

Indignation from a lack of understanding economics

As I often do, I'm reacting to a NYTimes piece about education. Here's the link. Basically, a student organization known as the Students for Free Culture are pretty much opposed to all intellectual property right law. They believe that music, art, and books should be freely available, all software should be open source (though the reporter never uses that term, that's what's meant), drug patents shouldn't be enforced, etc. Some members are upset at being fined for illegally downloading music, but others are protesting what they see as too high of prices of powerful medicines, etc.

I can see why they'd be upset. The fines for illegally downloading music strike me as disproportionately high. And it can be hard to think that companies should be able to profit from the illness of others. But the students interviewed in this article demonstrate a striking lack of understanding of basic economic principles.

Let's start with the medicines. Drug development is hugely expensive. Most drugs never make it to market, and many which do are never widely prescribed. To pay for all the costs of developing a drug--the huge number of man-hours of design, testing, revision, FDA approval, and all the failed attempts--the profit per successful drug needs to be very high, or else the companies wouldn't be financially viable. Also important to note is that the company is not benefiting from the illness; the company is economically benefiting from the treatment of that illness. If we remove patent protection from medicines, it will no longer be profitable to develop new drugs (the margins of producing a generic drug are not high enough to fund R&D), and we will get no better at treating any illness than we already are. How does that sound to you?

The same can be said to some extent about music. Popular songs can be accessed for free by your radio only because you become a target audience that advertisers are willing to gain access to. mp3s, coming as they do without advertisement revenues, will therefore require some economic benefit to their producers or else they won't be produced. At least, not anything like they are now. Garage bands and amateur groups would still probably make recordings, but studio recordings would be a thing of the past.

The same goes for visual artwork. Museums have to pay their curators, their utilities, maintenance and repair costs, etc. Some people will obviously contribute to them as charities, but either you need to have some sort of admission price, or substantial tax revenue allocated to them. If you rely on taxes, then you are charging everyone for a service only some are choosing to avail themselves of. That's not necessarily a bad things -- I'm highly in favor of public funding for libraries, for instance -- but it's something you need to be aware of.

At the end of the day, one of the students interviewed expressed the view that college is supposed to be separate from the rest of the world, and for the sharing and reusing of culture. The sharing of culture is certainly a part of college, but it's not the sole purpose by any means. One of the primary missions of higher education is supposed to be the development of critical thinking. I feel the students quotes in this article could use a bit more of that before they continue with their sharing and reusing of culture.

In which Mike goes to a party

I realize that for the most part I don't really have regular readers. That's fine. This whole posting thing is more for me to vent my various weirdnesses than to entertain a specific following. But, to the extent that I do have readers, I figure the least I can do is entertain you.

OK, so the least I can do is actually to completely ignore you, but that's less fun.

As most people who know me have picked up by now, I'm something of a story teller at heart. I view my life as largely consisting of a string of amusing anecdotes. I'm not positive if more sitcom moments actually happen in my life than in most peoples', or if I'm merely more aware of them when they do. But the fact remains that I tend to end up with lots of random stories. So I'm now going to try writing up at least one of them a month (hopefully more frequently than that, but let's start with baseline goals), though admittedly in a less-than-polished form because it's just a blog entry. We'll see how long this experiment lasts.

************

Parties have always somewhat mystified me. I know the standard view of college is lots of people partying pretty much whenever they aren't pulling desperate all-nighters, but that wasn't my experience. My friends and I did play a lot of party games in college, though. By this, I mean Trivial Pursuit, Taboo, that sort of thing. We weren't much into "drink till I puke" or "sleep with random strangers", games which I hear tell were quite popular in other social circles. Our "parties" also rarely even involved food or drink, unless they were potlucks. My view of parties might be a bit off because of this.

Nonetheless, I was randomly invited to a party last weekend by a guy I hardly know. I was told to bring a bottle of wine if I could, and since I had one on hand that I had no plans to drink myself, I figured what the heck. I even showed up an hour late, fighting against my normal compulsion to be places five minute early. Although the house number was not clearly visible from the street, I correctly surmised that the brightly lit house surrounded by a horde of 20- and 30-somethings was probably my destination.

As has already been mentioned, my view of parties may be somewhat off. But I do think this may have been the strangest party yet discovered by modern science.

For starters, there was the aspect of the spread. A first glance of the table indicated that it was pretty much a wine and cheese sort of party--crackers, cheese, bread, grapes, even shrimp on the table; various bottles of wine along the window sill. Eventually, though, my eye was drawn to the silver platter of...Hostess cupcakes. I doubt even Martha Stewart knows what fork to use to serve those.

Before arriving, I only knew my host. I thought this would be awkward. I soon learned, however, that basically no one knew more than a handful of other people before walking in. The guest list was a relatively random assortment of various people the host had met. Or not. While most seemed to be former dates, roommates, coworkers, friends, and relatives (including parents), there were also not only the dates of these people, but random other friends of theirs who had some free time. Or their siblings.

The lack of awkwardness in not knowing people was dutifully compensated for in the awkwardness of the people who did do the talking, however. I learned more than I ever intended to about online sites catering to May-December gay romances from a man clearly planning to be in the December category. I would have admired the self confidence involved in leaving his shirt unbuttoned to the navel more if he wasn't standing so close to me that I could make a good guess how long ago he had showered.

The party included live performance, in the guise of a band. The band set up in the third floor bedroom, which had apparently been recently reincarnated from a former life as an attic and was still getting its karma squared away. A projector was throwing images of seemingly random black-and-white stock footage onto the back wall and the fronts of the musicians--none of whom lived in the same city as each other, nor the city where the party was. The band consisted of:

~ Lead singer, on electric guitar
~ Backup singer, on electric banjo
~ Drummer
~ Guy who started out on the musical saw, later branching to accordion and trumpet

They took the tried-and-true method of making up for skill deficits with abundance of volume. Vast quantities of music spurted from their amplifiers, causing the floor to shake with each note struck. This did have the interesting effect of making the projected people dance even while they were doing things like climbing out fire escapes. I was glad at least someone was dancing to the music, as the room was way too small for us three dimensional types to try it.

Once my ears threatened to bleed, I made my escape from the band's room and retreated back to the first floor, where I attacked the cheese while listening to people discuss local politics. This was more what I imagined a wine and cheese party to be. Eventually, though, I realized that the two people discussing local politics were totally unaware anyone else was in the room. This may or may not have had something to do with the Jell-O shots sitting in front of them. After two hours at the party, I made my escape.

Lessons learned:

The primary activity at a traditional party is drinking. This is followed by making awkward small talk with strangers, and feeling music through your feet because your ears are so horrified by the volume that they quit alerting you to it.

Not knowing people is not an impediment when they don't know each other, and many of them are drunk anyway.

Being on the young side in a room full of somewhat tipsy gay men will make lots of people talk to you.

Escaping while things are completely chaotic does not make the host angry with you.

All in all, I'm glad I went. Still, it's not something I envision myself doing regularly. That is, until I find myself craving the twang of horsehair scraped against carpentry tools.

Ridiculousness rewarded

It's been a long time since I've posted, but things like this just make me really annoyed, and I have enough time to post a quick reaction.

In this NYTimes piece, a teacher has been assigning homework to his high school students' parents. The parents are required to read various items the children have been studying--poems, short stories, excerpts from speeches, etc.--and provide written commentary on them. This is done in the belief that it will increase the parental involvement in the educational process. Parents are warned that if they do not complete these assignments, the student's grades may suffer. The teacher is being lauded for his innovative approach, he receives a relatively uncritical write up in a prominent newspaper, and other educators are looking into using these methods.

I call this absurd. I would have objected to such insanity as a student, and I would continue to do so as an adult.

As a student, my grade is rightly dependent on my work. I am the one being evaluated, not my parent. I am the one who is both to put in the work and receive the reward. It is unreasonable to hold my grade hostage to the efforts of my parents.

Beyond that, the teacher is drastically overreaching his authority. The parents are not his students; he therefore has no right to compel specific actions from them.

Having parents involved in a child's education can be a wonderful thing. I'm happy my own cared about my academic progress. I did not, however, ever have them check my answers, or get their input on literature or historical events or whatnot. Nor should I have ever been required to, except possibly having them as interview subjects for something like a family history project or a poll to determine the level of knowledge about a given subject outside of my classroom. Just because this teacher has noble aspirations does not mean that his methods are acceptable. If this article is indeed an accurate reflection of how such assignments play out in his classroom, I wish more parents would be willing to tell him directly that this is an unacceptable assignment which he has no business requiring. Nor, for that matter, would the situation be better if he merely offered extra credit to those whose parents did fill out such commentaries. Placing the burden of a child's success so directly on another party is a stupid idea in a culture that is already so quick to blame others for any shortcoming. There needs to still be a role of personal responsibility in education.

The coach's son

Recent list work: 4, 94.

This article from Slate is a bit old, but I came across it today and it got me thinking. For those who don't want to follow the link, it's about how the coach's son often gets to monopolize time in the game in youth sports, play the coveted positions, and get onto travel teams, regardless of skill level. I've seen various examples of the coach's son in my own athletic experiences, and I think this stance is an oversimplification.

For one, I was a coach's son for a while. My Dad coached my softball team in the summer for a few years when I was a small kid--part of that me being from a 1950s sitcom thing. My Dad was worried about people thinking that I'd get perks for being the coach's son, so in reality...I played fewer innings than anyone else who showed up to every game, and got to play the positions I enjoyed less often than the other players on the team got to for the first few games, until a few of the other players spoke up and said it wasn't fair that I wasn't playing as much.

A similar but rather opposite experience took place a few summers later, on a different team. That coach kept putting his son in as the starting pitcher. His son, while a highly skilled baseball and softball player, was not a softball pitcher. he was on our high school's baseball team, but I think he was short stop. He finally snapped at one point and yelled at his dad that our team had the top two pitchers in the league, he wasn't one of them, and he wasn't going to pitch in another game even if that meant he had to sit on the bench. These two incidents illustrate my point that I think sometimes adults tend to forget that many kids have a definite sense of fair play, and even unwritten rules are typically enforced rather equitably.

These softball teams I was on weren't competitive ones. There were no playoffs, nothing special for being the best team in the league, none of that. Even so, most of the players both wanted to play fair and wanted to win. I imagine on more competitive teams, the desire to win increases substantially, so the coach faces a potential problem from overplaying his son: the rest of the team being resentful not because the coach's son gets to play more than they do, but because the coach's son gets to play more often than players he's worse than. That can lead to a pretty bad backlash.