grass is greener 2

A network engineer would say this was a situation of "same bandwidth, lower latency" and then probably launch into a story about how the post office, mailing millions of DVDs (and a few letters) around the world every day, has the highest bandwidth of any network on earth, with far greater capacity than the biggest fiber-optic backbone, but with high latency -- so you wouldn't want to use it for, say, telephony. And this would be extremely hilarious to the network engineer. That's the kind of joke they tell.

Joel Spolsky on (what else?) Starbucks, at Inc.com

the grass is always greener

In a world where $100,000 buys you a not-amazing painting by a developing artist, there are many. That same $100,000 can be used directly, as patronage: as price inflation for paintings continues to rise, the economics of disintermediating the dealer makes a lot of sense for both artists and collectors. Here's Thompson:

For a mainstream gallery, and for an oil painting on canvas by an artist with no gallery history, £3,000 to £6,000 ($5,400 to $10,800) is about right. This is high enough to convey the status of the gallery and not cast doubt on the work or the artist, but low enough that, if the work is promising, it will sell.
If the first show sells out quickly, the dealer will say the pricing was correct. The artist may be underwhelmed, because even selling out one show a year at new-artist prices means she is still living below the poverty line.

Below the poverty line? If you sell a dozen paintings at $8,000 apiece, and the gallery takes half, that leaves you with an annual income of $48,000. The poverty line, by contrast, is $10,400.

But to give you an idea of the inflation going on here, check out the great Dave Hickey, writing in 1997:

When I was an art dealer, any biggish work of art was worth five hundred dollars. Any littlish work of art was worth two hundred. Today, a biggish work is worth a thousand dollars and a littlish work is worth three hundred.

Now, it seems, a biggish work is worth $10,000 and a littlish work is worth $5,000. This changes things for both artists and collectors enormously. For one thing, that new artist really can live on the proceeds of her work, where there's no way she would have been able to do so ten years ago.

More to the point, an investor with $50,000 to spend on one artist has a choice: she can either buy a middling work from a middling artist at a middling dealer, or she can directly support an artist outside the gallery system entirely, buying pieces as necessary, maybe giving her a couple of thousand dollars to live on now and then, possibly helping out with studio space, that sort of thing. That kind of relationship is generally far more rewarding for the benefactor, and might well enable the artist to stay outside the gallery system for long enough that she has the time to develop a real artistic voice before being thrust blinking into the art-world spotlight. For the collector, the non-financial returns are much higher, while the financial returns can be equally large: what's not to like?

Back in the days when the cost of a middling work from a middling artist at a middling dealer was an order of magnitude lower than it is today, this kind of math didn't make much sense: it was much more expensive to support an artist directly than it was to simply buy their work at retail. But now things have changed, and serious artists who want to concentrate on their work more than they want to become the next branded megastar can support themselves by selling directly to a handful of devoted collectors, who might well consider themselves to be getting work on the cheap.

Felix Salmon on Paradoxes of the Contemporary Art Market, at portfolio.com

Spoiler

A reader has worked out the puzzles in Your Name Here. Cheat sheet here.

...of the return

Woke up yesterday at 4.30am. Decided to go to the gym. I got a new bike the other day off Craigslist, which I've been keeping inside to prevent theft. Took it downstairs, set off for the gym, got to the gym, realised I had left the bike lock behind. Always a danger when a bike is not being actively protected from theft by its lock between times of active use.

Back to the apartment. It was a glorious day. Why not go for a bike ride? But first, why not clear the kitchen counter so it would be clear when I got back? And why not make the bed and clear the bedroom floor of boxes so it would be clear when I got back? (It's only 5.30am, after all.)

And while we're at it, why not check e-mails?

Big mistake.

In my Inbox was an e-mail from Rafe Donahue with a link to the PDF of a 102-page handout, Fundamental Statistical Concepts in Presenting Data: Principles for Constructing Better Graphics.

Needless to say, instead of going for a bike ride first and reading Principles for Constructing Better Graphics later, I'm unable to refrain from downloading and opening the document.

Big mistake.

Before I know it I'm up to page 48 and laughing out loud. I'm deep in an account of work done for a pharmaceutical company which wanted to know how many on the sales force were actually reading various monthly reports sent out to them, with a view to seeing whether the reports were improving sales. I read:

The May data month data appear to have been released on the Tuesday after
the 4th of July holiday break. With the 4th landing on a Sunday, the following
Monday was an off day. The May data month data are pushed to 50% cumula-
tive utilization in about a week as well, with no individual day have more than
the typical 20% usage.

We might now glance down to the cumulative row and note the dramatic spikes
when new data were released and the within-week declines and the dismal week-
ends, although Sunday does seem to trump Saturday.

We might also glance to the top and notice the curious case of the March data
month data still being used by at least someone after the April data month data
had been released, and after the May data month data, and so on. Someone was
still using the March data month data in early October, after five updated ver-
sions of this report had been issued! Why?

Looking at the May data month, the eagle-eye might notice some curiosities in
the May data month utilization before the May data were released. Note the
very, very small tick on approximately 19 May, and again on (approximately)
14, 23, 24, and 30 April: the May data month data had been viewed nearly two
months before they were released!?! Furthermore, now note with some horror
that all of the cumulative lines are red and show some utilization prior to the
reports actually being issued!

This glaring error must certainly point to faulty programming on the author’s
part, right? On the contrary, an investigation into the utilization database, sort-
ing and then displaying the raw data based on date of report usage, revealed that
hidden within the hundreds of thousands of raw data records were some reports
that were accessed prior to the Pilgrims arriving at Plymouth Rock in 1620!
How could such a thing be so?

[As I think I've said, I've been trying to get the LRB to let me write about hysterical realism and information design. James Wood is agin the type of novelist who wants to show how the world works instead of the inner life - but it seems to me that Principles for Constructing Better Graphics not only shows us something about how the world works and how to find out about it, but in the process shows us the inner life of (surprise!) a statistician who is interested in the graphical presentation of data. We read on, agog:]

The answer is that I lied when I told you that the database held a record of the
date and time each report was accessed. I told you that because that is what I
had been told. The truth is that the database held a record of the date and time
that was present on the field agent’s laptop each time the report was accessed.

[It's hard not to love this. ]

Some of the field agents’ laptops, therefore, held incorrect date and time values.
Viewing all the atomic-level data reveals this anomaly. Simply accounting the
number of impulses in a certain time interval does nothing to reveal this issue
with data.

But I know that it is not possible for those usages to take place before the reports
were released, so why not just delete all the records that have dates prior to the
release date, since they must be wrong? True, deleting all the records prior to
the release would eliminate that problem, but such a solution is akin to turning
up the car radio to mask the sounds of engine trouble. The relevant analysis
question that has been exposed by actually looking at the data is why are these
records pre-dated?

We see variation in the data; we need to understand these sources of variation.
We have already exposed day-of-the-week, weekday/weekend, and data-month
variation. What is the source of the early dates? Are the field agents resetting
the calendars in their computers? Why would they do that? Is there a rogue
group of field agents who are trying to game the system? Is there some reward
they are perceiving for altering the calendar? Is there a time-zone issue going
on? Are the reports released early very early in the morning on the east coast,
when it is still the day before on the west coast? And, most vitally, how do we
know that the data that appear to be correct, actually are correct???

I was, naturally, unable to tear myself away. By the time I'd finished reading the weather had changed, it was cloudy and dull. Bad, bad, very bad.

Is it too late to change careers and be a statistician? Say it ain't so, Rafe, say it ain't so.

The full report here.

return of the return

A reader has explained what goes on when one clicks to leave a secure page. His view was that buyers of Your Name Here should be directed straight to the download page by PayPal. So I have followed his advice and restored the original BUY NOW.

There is a review of Your Name Here on American Crawl. Jenny Turner is writing a review for the London Review of Books.

sabbatical, interrupted

There is one fascinating counterfactual to emerge from Prezza. It concerns the incident when he punched an egg-throwing protester in Wales during the 2001 general election. He includes a photo of the punch, a solid left jab right on the man’s chin. There was a furore, which Prescott survived because the public (not the papers, not at first) were largely on his side. But Prescott was an amateur boxer in his youth, and on page 118-19 there is a photo of him landing what looks like a knockout punch on an opponent. He is right-handed, and the knockout punch was a right. Here is the counter-factual: if 16-stone Prescott had hit the egg-thrower with his right, he would have knocked him out, and quite likely have broken his jaw. If either of those things had happened – if the man had ended up in hospital – Prescott would have had to resign. Whoever Blair appointed as his new deputy prime minister would have had much less pull with the party, because no one had as much pull with the party as Prescott. So when the crucial vote on the Iraq war came, Blair wouldn’t have had a deputy able to bring the party onside in the way that Prescott did. Instead of 139 Labour MPs voting against the war, a majority of them would have voted against, Blair would (as he said in private) have had to resign, and we wouldn’t have gone to war. And all because, for once, a New Labour figure didn’t lean to the right.

John Lanchester on Prezza in the LRB

White Read

Interview of Rachel Whiteread by John Tusa on BBC3 from a while back, here.

But basically do you like getting involved with the physical side of sculpture?

Completely yeah, yeah, no it's very much my, you know in the more, more recently I've had to sort of stand back a little bit from that. I, I organise an awful lot of the making these days on, on the larger works rather than physically doing it, but

I make all of the decisions,

all of the decisions of how it's going to finally look, but I have a great kind of team of people that I work with, not all the time by any means but they come in and work on specific projects with me.


pp on sabbatical for a while

tough love

Arnold Zwicky tells off errant commenters on Language Log:

[in the Comments section] you will find the instruction

Be relevant. As bloggers, we write about whatever we want to. As a commenter, you should comment on the contents of the post you're commenting on. If you want to write about something else, do it on your own blog.

Commenters have violated this injunction again and again (for reasons I think I understand). The comments policy goes on to say

Comments that violate these guidelines will be deleted. Repeat offenders may be banned.

but in fact we've been extraordinarily tolerant of errant comments, even allowing comments that explicitly introduce topics that have nothing to do with the topic of the original posting. These are the most flagrant violations, but there are more subtle ones.

The flagrant violations begin with something like "This is off topic, but…", sometimes adding that the writer didn't know where to post this observation. (The short answer is: NOT HERE.)

...

What goes wrong? Our comments policy was designed to keep focus on a particular topic, but Language Log is treated like any blog that allows comments, unmoderated mailing list, or unmoderated newsgroup: everything is open space. So discussion wanders all over the place. That's the way the net works, and there's probably not anything we can do about it. Asking commenters to be brief, relevant, informed, and polite (as our comments policy does) is asking them to behave in what is now an unnatural way on the net.

(Yes, some commenters are scrupulous about adhering to our comments policy; I'm not saying that all commenters behave badly, but a surprising number do.)

over there

(I was invited to write a guest post for LL a couple of months ago, which gave me the chance to stop overstocking the drafts folder on pp and start building up a virtual drafts folder for Language Log instead - bad, bad, very bad. And one includes quotations from L. D. Reynolds' introduction to his OCT edition of Sallust, something readers are sure to enjoy and unlikely to see anywhere else, so something must be done (but not, needless to say, today).)

against chocofeminism

'There has always been resistance to feminism - the backlash that Susan Faludi chronicled in her 1991 book of the same name. But there is also the satisfaction of arguments won, rights enshrined, respect ensured, the sense that the central feminist project - the fight for women to be treated as human beings, no more, no less - is inching along. In fact, reading a recent piece by US feminist writer, Katha Pollitt, headlined Backlash Spectacular and charting the ways in which North American culture is regressing on women's rights, I felt smug. Thank God that's not happening here, I thought, sinking into my seat and reaching for another chocolate.' (Kira Cochrane in today's Guardian)

What is it with the f*&%ing chocolate? Do you think it's cute? Suggestive of a slightly naughty non-po-faced feminism of the most modern kind? Does chocolate constitute your very identity? If you could choose between chocolate and, say, the right to vote, how long would it take you to make up your mind?

I noticed with a kind of resigned horror a new line of chocolates the other day. The following three images sum up the ideology of chocolate in the most obscene way:

(obscene images over on Infinite Thought's Cinestatics)

[I think Mithridates is right, in comments, not sure IT caught the way the irony was meant to work (but made me laugh). So blog in haste, repent at leisure - I liked KC's piece (which didn't make me laugh).

socialist sci fi

Via Nasty Brutalist and Short, China Mieville's list of 50 fantasy & science fiction works that socialists should read.

includes

Emma Bull & Steven Brust—Freedom & Necessity (1997)

Bull is a left-liberal and Brust is a Trotskyist fantasy writer. F&N is set in the 19th Century of the Chartists and class turmoil. It’s been described as “the first Marxist steampunk” or “a fantasy for Young Hegelians.”

Stefan Grabiński—The Dark Domain (1918–22; trans. and collected 1993)

Brilliant horror by this Polish writer. Unusually locates the uncanny and threatening within the very symbols of a modernizing industrialism in Poland: trains, electricity, etc. This awareness of the instability of the everyday marks him out from traditional, “nostalgic” ghost story writers.

M. John Harrison—Viriconium Nights (1984)

A stunning writer, who expresses the alienation of the modern everyday with terrible force. Fantasy that mercilessly uncovers the alienated nature of the longing for fantastic escape, and show how that fantasy will always remain out of reach. Punishes his readers and characters for their involvement with fantasy. See also The Course of the Heart.

Michael Swanwick—The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993)

Great work that completely destroys the sentimental aspects of genre fantasy. From within the genre—fairies, elves, and all—Swanwick examines the industrial revolution, the Vietnam War, racism and sexism, and the escapist dreams of genre fantasy. A truly great anti-fantasy.

Mugabe only teasing, Home Office reveals

Attempts by Gordon Brown to use a meeting of G8 leaders this week to campaign for tougher action against Zimbabwe are in danger of being undermined by claims that Britain is forcing as many as 11,000 Zimbabweans seeking refuge here to make a stark choice between destitution or returning home to possible torture or death. Letters obtained by The Observer show that the Home Office continues to order failed Zimbabwean asylum seekers to return home in the face of mounting violence.

A removal letter, sent at the end of May to an exiled London-based member of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, states: 'The support that you have been provided with is to be discontinued ... You should note that there is no right to appeal against this decision ... You must now leave the United Kingdom.'

in today's Observer

McMafia

It’s usually assumed that organised crime is a network of unqualified evil: murderous, recklessly greedy, the enemy of all human values and all hopes for better lives. Glenny’s book is a warning against such a simple view. No, big gangsters are not nice people: they get what they want through the threat or ultimate use of violence and blackmail. And it’s obvious that their operations can wreck the lives of millions through addiction or – as in the Balkans or Colombia – through the equipping and financing of local wars. But are the mobs and mafias really Public Enemy Number One? It would be shrewder to call them Government Enemy Number One: they are formations that deprive a state of revenue, of the monopoly of violence and law enforcement, and sometimes of international respect. The public, by contrast, may find them less dreadful – often, in fact, less dreadful than the governments that are supposed to be serving and protecting their citizens.

Neal Ascherson reviews Misha Glenny's McMafia: Crime without Frontiers in the LRB with characteristic acumen.

don't mention fried ants

(More from T W Körner, The Pleasures of Counting - a passage which makes the end of the book, on which a post currently waits in the drafts folder, all the more inexplicable)

The study of algorithms is part of the constant search for better ways of doing things just like the search for ways of preventing cholera or submarines. But the task does not end there. Having found a better way you must persuade others to adopt it. Learning how to do this can only come from long and painful experience. ... Until the reader has experienced the shock of having her well thought-out and carefully argued proposal thrown out for the most fatuous of reasons, she will not understand why I write this section or why, before any difficult committee meeting, it is important to recite the two phrases: 'You can only resign once' and 'Those who fight too long with dragons become dragons themselves.'

When a government committee was set up in 1978 to consider mathematics teaching in English and Welsh schools, their first step was to set up a survey to find out the opinions and mathematical needs of a representative sample of adults. However, the survey ran into an unexpected difficulty when many of those approached refused to be interviewed.

Both direct and indirect approaches were tried, the word 'mathematics' was replaced by 'arithmetic' or 'everyday use of numbers', but it was clear that the refusal for people's refusal to be interviewed was simply that the subject was mathematics.... Several personal contacts pursued by the enquiry officer were also adamant in their refusals. Evidently there were some painful associations which they feared might be uncovered. This apparently widespread perception amongst adults of mathematics as a daunting subject pervaded a great deal of the sample selection; half of the people approached as being appropriate for inclusion in the sample declined to take part.

Even among those who agreed to take part,

The extent to which the need to undertake even an apparently simple and straightforward piece of mathematics could induce feelings of anxiety, helplessness, fear and even guilt in some of those interviewed was, perhaps, the most striking feature of the study.

There did not appear to be any connection between mathematical competence and occupation group. However,

The feelings of guilt to which we referred earlier appeared to be especially marked among those whose academic qualifications were high and who, in consequence of this, felt they ought to have a confident understanding of mathematics, even though this was not the case.

In view of this, it is clear that mathematicians should not refer to mathematics in advocating a given course of action. By itself this is not a great disadvantage. Darwin's On the Origin of Species is a marvellous example of sustained book-length argument without any recourse to mathematics. Unfortunately, most people are also unwilling to follow sustained argument.

Springer sale

Springer Verlag is having a sale on mathematics books through the end of July, offering "many essential mathematical titles" for half price. So you can snap up Alpay and Vinikov's Operator Theory, Systems Theory and Scattering Theory: Multidimensional Generalizations for a mere 64,90€ instead of the normal price of 129,00€, thereby achieving a saving of 64,10€, or 49.69%. Also many other great and somewhat more affordable items, all here.

3.04 am

At 1 am it was cool and fresh, the perfect time to go the gym. I am about 90% sure that my bike has been stolen (if I were to find I had left it locked up somewhere in the neighbourhood I would not be surprised, exactly, but I'm pretty sure it's gone) so this means walking. I go. I get back and check e-mails, as one does. Suddenly remember that a commenter on the blog suggested XeTeX. I go over to the XeTeX site and find:

"Ven. Pandita", Sun, Jan 27, 2008 03:54 (CST)
hyphenation

Hi!

I am a Buddhist monk who uses Lyx (1.5.3) and XeTex (part of TexLive 2007) on Ubuntu Linux (7.10) to type Pali, Sanskrit, phonetic symbols and English together in the same document.

The problem is that XeLatex would produce PDF files with seemingly random hyphenation in the middle of lines instead of at linebreaks. So I change the language setting of Lyx to Welsh, of which there is no language file on my system; my purpose is to force manual hyphenation. But that random mid-line hyphenation still appears.

What should I do to remedy it?

Changing the language setting of Lyx to Welsh, of which there is no file on the system, as a way of forcing manual hyphenation - how like life.

(The opening line of this letter reminds me somehow of Anne Tyler's Morgan's Passing. An unimprovable way of introducing oneself, which one would naturally love to try.)

Voter registration Berlin

US Voter Registration at the Bookshop
This Friday in honor of 4th of July
If you are an American and have not yet registered to vote or have friends that have not done so, this Friday is your chance, all the forms will be here along with someone to help you find where you need to send them and answer any questions you have.
Let´s make every Vote count this time.

At Another Country, Riemannstraße 7, just around the corner from Gneisenaustraße U-Bahn.

slightly mollified

I've just been to Julien Kwan, whose Apple outlet in Grosßbeerenstraße is moving on to pastures new on Thursday. Mission: to upgrade the old Powerbook G4 to 1 gigabyte of RAM so's to run CS3 on Tiger, given as how InDesign (now on the new MacBook) crashes in Leopard every time I try to open it. So the mood is aggrieved. Apple! Adobe! Get your act together! Guys (polite for "incompetent techno-wankers")!

And yet... what can I say? Apple is like the psychosociopathic boyfriend whose role model was Skarp Hedin of Njals Saga. Just when you've decided, for the hundredth time in as many hours, to get out of this abusive relationship and move ON, you're charmed, disarmed...

I was trying to enlarge the image of a desk at Ikea in Firefox, which obligingly opened in a new window and announced DONE to the tune of a blank screen. So I nip over to Safari, as one does, and the Apple website comes up. And what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a tip for merging PDFs in Preview!!!!!!! A tip which also enables one to move pages around at will in Preview!!!!!!!

All is NOT forgiven, Steve Jobs. But this is unbelievably great. And we have many, many Mac users on this blog:


So for those of you have a Mac and want to know how to merge PDFs by drag-and-dropping in Preview, the link is here.

While Julien was upgrading the PowerBook I improved the shining hour by reading an article on Quark 8.0 in MacWorld's German brother. The news was that saving palettes in Quark 8.0 is a big deal because you have something like 27 palettes. The verdict was that Quark was closing in on InDesign.

I think Quark's being a bit silly. It should look at one of the clever things Apple did to outflank Windows - waaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyy back in the 90s. Back in the dawn of time Apple sold separate language kits for Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and so on (in a reluctant stroll down memory lane I have, as it happens, just retrieved from storage an untouched set of 3.5-in floppies for the Arabic Language Kit). When they brought out OS 9 (which in itself shows you that this was a loooooooooooong time ago) they did something that was both magical and maddening (if you had just spend 300 quid on assorted language kits) - they included ALL language kits with the operating system. This generosity went slightly awonk with OS X - they went right on a generous helping of languages, without bothering to provide documentation explaining how they worked in OS X. Still, fact is, with a Mac you could produce texts in a wide variety of scripts with a simple Command-Spacebar toggle. (And Leopard, whatever its other shortcomings, provides the documentation that has been lacking lo these many years.)

So Quark, anyway, has apparently tried to fight InDesign on its own ground. It has made its UI cooler; it has multiplied palettes. If you want to typeset Arabic or Japanese in Quark you STILL have to buy an extension. If they had had the cunning of Apple, though, they would have done something quite different: they would have made ALL those other extensions native to vanilla Quark. And they would have wiped the floor with the competition. But they didn't, so they're just closing the Abstand.