Gongol.com Archives: June 2025
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June 1, 2025
Today's weather, yesterday's graphics
A computer developer has produced a website to almost perfectly recreate the analog-era Weather Channel "Weather on the 8s" screen, using the current conditions for wherever the user happens to be. Like the people who recreate classic teletext services and reverse-engineer old split-flap displays, the people who revive familiar old electronic services like the classic Weather on the 8s are good at finding small but deep cuts into the nostalgia centers of the brain. ■ But to give credit where it is due, it's not just nostalgia that makes those services appealing. A current-generation iPhone has a display rendering an area measuring 2,556 by 1,179 pixels, and there are designers who seem compelled to make something happen inside each and every one. The basic weather app is rich with statistics and color, but it does impose upon the user the burden of selection: "Am I here to see the current UV index, the 'feels-like' temperature, or the current wind map?" It takes some executive function -- just a little bit, but still some -- just to stay on task. ■ Stripped-down, "retro" user interfaces don't require the same amount of self-control. Analog, standard-definition television in the US was produced at 720 by 480 pixels -- not enough room to get fancy. Due to limited real estate on the screen, the information contained in "Weather on the 8s" rotated through a series of screens instead. Each item had its turn, and the viewer had to take what was served. ■ That's not necessarily a bad model, even if it's possible to share much more on a modern screen. It's not just attention that is finite -- so is self-control. The craving for a today's best available information, but delivered in yesterday's formats, makes an unexpectedly large amount of sense once we begin to account for the amount of mental commitment required to navigate daily life. Sometimes it might just be more pleasant to let someone else do the data scrolling for us. Art is found in the constraints.
June 4, 2025
The principled reason for the United States to furnish support to Ukraine -- generously, not stingily -- is that Ukraine is a fledgling democracy still emerging from the dark history of its 20th Century subjugation by a powerful neighbor. If Russia can storm in and take Ukrainian territory and people by force and attack civilians at will, that should offend anyone who believes that people have an inherent right to self-determination and a right to pursue their own development interests in peace. ■ The legalistic reason for the United States to support Ukraine is that the US agreed in writing that a post-Soviet Ukraine was guaranteed independence and sovereignty in exchange for surrendering its nuclear weapons. Any such agreement either has to be sustained in perpetuity, or it and any other agreement like it is worth nothing more than the personal honor of the individuals who signed it. ■ The purely self-interested reason for the United States to support Ukraine is that skilled allies are a tremendous resource, and Ukraine's audacious attack on Russia's bomber fleet shows that its military is among the most ambitious in the world. The combination of complexity and innovation involved in the attacks is notable -- not to mention potentially destabilizing. If alliances like NATO required tryouts, this one would have been a clear success.
June 5, 2025
In pursuit of her cinematic career, Malia Obama did something unusual: She omitted her famous last name from the credits of a film. It isn't as though people couldn't have worked out her connection to the project, but the names cited in credits have always mattered a great deal. ■ Benjamin Franklin once advised, "'Tis a shame that your family is an honor to you! You ought to be an honor to your family." The language may seem quaint, but the sentiment is as fresh as ever. ■ We don't count on family names quite as much as our ancestors probably did: In the days before credit ratings, for instance, your parents' creditworthiness with the local store probably stood in quite a lot for your own. Today, we have Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. ■ Notwithstanding that modernization, it should still be each person's individual goal to leave their family name better than it was bestowed on them. "Better" doesn't have to mean "more famous" or "more accomplished". It really only has to mean that a person put more into the world than they took out. ■ Being the young child of a President has taxed more than a few of the people who have grown up inside the White House, so it wouldn't have been a travesty for Malia Obama to have used her birth name in the movie credits; she could make a defensible case that what she lost in privacy and family time was owed back to her with a gentle head start toward notoriety. But it's more honorable that she avoided the recognition.
June 6, 2025
If any blame or fault attaches...
Good hiring practices are a challenge for almost every institution. It's hard to know whether someone is a good fit without a real battery of tests and a dry run of some sort. But it isn't all that hard to see what ought to be important everywhere. ■ Warren Buffett has long advocated for the trinity of intelligence, energy, and integrity -- with integrity being the keystone: "If you hire somebody without it, you really want them to be dumb and lazy." ■ The thing about energy and intelligence is that they tend to be self-rewarding. Go-getters will almost always find a way to make their spunk pay off. Smart people typically start with a leg up in school and can navigate life and its adversity with the advantage of cleverness. Integrity is the only one of those three characteristics that is guaranteed to cost the person who has it. ■ Energy alone isn't a virtue (or else certain forms of drug addiction would be praised). Intelligence alone isn't either (or else we wouldn't have the phrase "evil genius"). But integrity is always a virtue, and it is fully independent of the other two. It is learned by the individual, but its importance is only realized and sustained when institutions celebrate it. ■ On D-Day in 1944, Dwight Eisenhower had a message ready to go in case the assault failed. It read: "Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone." ■ "Any blame or fault...is mine alone". The successful invasion was result of sacrifices by thousands. But Eisenhower was prepared to accept sole responsibility, had things turned out wrong. There may not be a better singular example of integrity from a modern leader. ■ And there is every reason for us to call attention to it even now, 81 years later, because energy and intelligence will almost always find a way to thrive -- but integrity is the necessary virtue that needs our aid and promotion in every generation. Anyone without it should be kept miles away from even the shadow of power.
June 7, 2025
The way artificial intelligence work has been treated like a gold rush shouldn't go unexamined. There is reporting to suggest that major technology companies could spend more than $300 billion on hardware alone, just in this calendar year. Everyone involved seems to be haunted by the possibility that someone else will achieve some kind of insurmountable dominance first. ■ The high-stakes approach has also led to a lot of disregard for the nature of the data being collected to "train" the artificial intelligence models. It has gone so far that in one (pre-publication) report, the US Copyright Office notes, "making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries." ■ Into this melee enters an effort called "Common Pile", which seeks to train an artificial intelligence model exclusively on text that is either in the public domain or licensed for open use. Philosophically, the team behind it makes the case that "One of the core tenets of the open source movement is that people should have the right to understand how the technologies they use -- and are subject to -- function and why. Training data disclosure is a key component of this." ■ In an encouraging note, the Common Pile team reports that their model "performs comparably to leading models trained in the same regime on unlicensed data". If it's possible to demonstrate that work can be done in this hot field without violating long-established principles of intellectual property protection, then Common Pile may provide a highly valuable proof of concept that good work can be done within the bounds of the rules.
June 9, 2025
Worry about those who believe in nothing
A teenager from Oregon was arrested late last month after the FBI received a tip that he was planning a terrorist attack against the people inside a mall nearby in Washington. The FBI noted that the suspect -- someone not even old enough to vote -- "shared nihilistic violent extremist ideology and the plans in online chats." ■ It has always been the case that parents (and society generally) have to give young people something affirmative to believe in, helping to guide them towards a healthy understanding of their place in the world with others. Whether it takes a religious, philosophical, or secular-ethical form, there needs to be some form of input. ■ It doesn't have to be monomaniacal or oppressive -- indeed, it expressly should not be -- but there has to be some kind of engagement with a framework that says something in the world is worth shaping into a personal code of belief. As long as it adheres in some general way to a Golden Rule and is generally benign, the exact shape of the belief isn't all that material. ■ Though this has always been so, what's new to us today is that the consequences are magnified when that process fails. The evidence is strong that there have always been nihilists; history gives us many examples of people who rose to notoriety through destruction that doesn't make sense to rational people. That's what people might do if they think that nothing really matters. ■ But for "nihilistic violent extremist ideology" to take hold of a child -- someone still too young to rent a car or enter a bar after dark -- requires exposure and compounding by something else. The suspect didn't get lost in a dark corner of the public library. There were online chats, presumably with and among people sharing the same dark view and perhaps even offering suggestions about how to do evil things. ■ That's the danger: Someone, convinced they believe in nothing and possessing too little impulse control, found the resources to turn a sinister worldview into a way to harm others. And they were only stopped by some fortunate intervention. ■ For the most part, the adolescent mind is already geared toward skepticism and rebellion against conformity. That should give even-keeled adults some comfort; even if we don't agree with what our neighbors might be teaching their children about belief, whether religious or secular, there's a good chance it won't be passed along unaltered anyway. What we should worry about instead is the hazard that some young people are being left to believe in nothing at all.
June 10, 2025
Vandalism has nearly always been the refuge of the hopelessly outnumbered and the pathologically insecure. It takes effort to build, to maintain, to fix, or to reform, but it also takes a certain amount of moral clarity: At least enough to say, "I think that things can be better, and that the work of humanity is worth salvaging." ■ Mere vandals don't take that step. They break rather than repair because repair comes with commitment -- to fail sometimes (but with honor), to face resistance (but to meet it with gentle persuasion), and to persist in hard work without tiring. It takes steadiness to be worthy of taking custody of something good, whether it's a place, an institution, or an idea. ■ Every generation is challenged by vandals in one form or another. It's important to recognize them, no matter how they're dressed, what resources they possess, or what stations they occupy. Vandals can come in street clothes, but they can come in uniforms, too. Some are anarchists, and some occupy the power of the state. ■ A vandal is one who breaks what belongs to others or what belongs to the public. And vandalism is forever unfaithful to the idea that either humanity is a constructive and cooperative enterprise, or we are no better than the wildest beasts. It would be hard to improve upon the words of Booker T. Washington: "When one takes a broad survey of the country, he will find that the most useful and influential people in it are those who take the deepest interest in institutions that exist for the purpose of making the world better."
Technology from an alternate timeline
Someone has hacked together a miniature computer running on a Raspberry Pi processor and a Sony Watchman screen. The creator says, "And yes it is the stupidest thing I've created, but it has a hell of a lot of charm and I adore it." As well they should. Technology should be frivolous, playful, and joyful sometimes.
The best introduction to Menards you'll ever read
"Like Home Depot?" "Well sort of, but you can get everything you need to build a house. Oh and groceries."
A sage observation from Sasho Todorov: "The underlying issue is that, post Kosygin and Deng, being a marxist leninist is being an obvious adherent to a secular utopian religion." ■ One minor addendum: Not just a religion, but one so awful it doesn't even produce good music.
June 12, 2025
As a rationale for entrusting the President with the power of the executive pardon, Federalist Paper No. 74 argues that a swift and decisive pardon may be the best available tool for ending an insurrection. In the word of "Publius" (Alexander Hamilton), "[I]n seasons of insurrection or rebellion, there are often critical moments, when a welltimed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth; and which, if suffered to pass unimproved, it may never be possible afterwards to recall. The dilatory process of convening the legislature, or one of its branches, for the purpose of obtaining its sanction to the measure, would frequently be the occasion of letting slip the golden opportunity. The loss of a week, a day, an hour, may sometimes be fatal." ■ The utility of this power depends upon its exigency: It is not a power of reconciliation or healing, merely one that can usefully help to end an armed rebellion faster than other tools. It isn't a power to be used tomorrow; it's a power to be used when the alternative is that there may not be a tomorrow without it. ■ Robert E. Lee applied unsuccessfully for a pardon after the Civil War. He was one of a tiny handful of individuals not to be pardoned. He was, however, paroled and signed an oath reinstating his allegiance to the Constitution. The logic is plain: It was safer for a fragile nation to bring a tactically skilled military leader back into the fold of loyalty to the Constitution than to have him available for hire on the outside. ■ But it was a practical act, not a principled one. Lee not only took up arms against the country of his birth, he did so with the skills taught to him at West Point and cultivated in his long career with the US Army. It wasn't just rebellion; it was betrayal of the people alongside of whom he had learned his profession. ■ So, too, of the other officers who rebelled beside him. And to the extent they were recipients of a blanket pardon by Andrew Johnson, we should only see that today as a necessary act in a fragile moment. It should not absolve them of their betrayal of country and Constitution. ■ They are all dead now. It no longer serves any useful purpose to forgive them. That was for the generation who lived through the Civil War, not for those who see it in retrospect today. Forgiving -- or, worse, celebrating -- those who betrayed their country would be an act of madness.
June 13, 2025
One of the reasons that markets work is that they offer people an unending stream of opportunities to put their knowledge to work, and to wager on the quality of their own judgment. Think interest rates are going to rise? You might act on taking out a loan sooner rather than later. Think you've discovered a breakout artist? Buy the paintings while they're cheap and flying under the radar. Think the produce department at one grocery store has an unusually good eye for quality? Make a special trip there to stock up on tomatoes and bananas. ■ Sometimes the call will be right, and sometimes it will be wrong. But when lots of people make intersecting choices, prices start to send signals. ■ The same goes for alliances in the world. One of the reasons it's better to engage with allies than to go it alone is that different allies will obtain information and process it differently. Some will then signal important judgments like their confidence in the seriousness of a threat by their actions. Seeing the same information filtered through different lenses helps to sort which threats and circumstances should be taken seriously. How much is "bet" in terms of real resources (like troops or munitions or diplomatic intensity) can reveal a lot. ■ The foreign minister of Latvia has recently published a column in The Economist, arguing, "The Kremlin is also stepping up its non-conventional attacks against European countries [...] We in the Baltics did warn about taking them seriously. Now we all see the consequences of not pushing back." The Baltic republics are (literally) in a place where their judgment on this subject is more significant than most. ■ The forthrightness about the alarm emanating from these small countries isn't enough on its own to make them right. But their commitment to spending a very noteworthy 5% of GDP on defense represents a considerable wager that their analysis is right. It would be foolish to ignore or downplay the market-like signal they are sending.
June 15, 2025
One of the hazards of living in a time marked by notable disruptive events in social, technological, and economic conditions is that some people who might otherwise be thoughtful or creative problem-solvers find themselves surrendering to hopelessness, despair, or anger. It's often called doomerism. It shows up in 4,000-word screeds and in 47-word social media posts. One example proclaims that we are at the mercy of "central planners" working at large investment firms who are no less powerful than the bureaucrats who tried to centrally plan the Soviet economy. ■ The problem is that the doom-saying narrative edges out constructive discussions about how to reform existing institutions and build better ones. Doomerism is, fundamentally, an ethos of helplessness. ■ The antidote isn't to merely dismiss the sense that something is wrong. Benjamin Franklin offered the advice that "One mend-fault is worth two find-faults, but one find-fault is better than two make-faults." Fixing what's wrong is a just endeavor. ■ What's needed is more of the honorable innovative spirit that drove Jack Bogle to start Vanguard, the investment firm. Bogle was compelled by the belief that ordinary people would benefit from participating in the investment sector through low-cost mutual funds, particularly index funds. And he didn't just conceive of the idea, he brought it to fruition. Bogle effectively created a cooperative arrangement. It was an honorable pursuit -- and it should be a model much more often, in many more fields, than it is right now. ■ Truly mutualized ownership, cooperatives, and employee-owned firms can offer answers to a lot of thorny problems. They should be easy to form (even for novices) and ordinary people should be given encouragement (and even inducements) to join them. It's good for a complex society to have a variety of firm structures well-represented in the economy, and it's vital for ordinary people to feel invested, both literally and figuratively, in the ownership of both problems and solutions. Whatever spurs more people to be "mend-faults" is worth a second or third look.
June 16, 2025
Someone with too much time on their hands and access to video production tools created a version of Smash Mouth's "All Star" that auto-tunes the phrase "and they don't stop coming" for ten straight hours. The sheer relentlessness of the loop is impressive in its own right, even if being subjected to ten straight hours of the song would be a form of psychological torture. ■ Reflecting on World War II, Dwight Eisenhower wrote, "There was no sight in the war that so impressed me with the industrial might of America as the wreckage on the landing beaches. To any other nation the disaster would have been almost decisive; but so great was America's productive capacity that the great storm occasioned little more than a ripple in the development of our build-up." Allied victory in that war was the result of many factors, but one of the most significant was the ability of the United States to ignite an industrial machine that couldn't be matched, with outputs like 2,711 Liberty Ships -- a production rate of more than one a day. Like the Smash Mouth gag video, they just didn't stop coming. ■ That historical knowledge is already widely-held, so it's marginally surprising that it has taken so long for modern militaries to re-engage with that old knowledge. Denmark, though, has launched its first "uncrewed robotic sailboats" for a trial in the North Sea -- and, probably more crucially, in the Baltic Sea. The drone-like sailboats will be used to conduct surveillance where it's been hard to do so up until now. ■ There will always be a place for big, powerful tools in combat. But it's unwise to dismiss the knowledge that producing low-cost tools in massive quantities may well be not just the key to victory in the past, but in the present and future as well. There will likely always be some things that only an advanced fighter (like an F-35) or an aircraft carrier can do. ■ But whether you're in a strategic position like Denmark, or maintaining a presence across a third of the Earth's surface like the Pacific Command, thinking in terms of relentless volumes of small tools is probably one of the chief ways forward. If managed well with good technological results, Denmark's four sailboat drones ought to be only an extremely modest start to a much more ambitious effort.
It's not often that Iowans are under a single severe thunderstorm watch that stretches from Des Moines all the way west into Colorado.
Internet Archive updates a giant collection of vintage .gif files
It is going to be extraordinarily hard to explain to future generations growing up with augmented reality on their phones just how innocently charming it was to stumble upon the Ham[p]ster Dance for the very first time, back when the public Internet was new.
June 17, 2025
If you had a friend, an acquaintance or a co-worker who were for some reason utterly without shame, it might be entertaining for a while. There's a reason why "No Shame Theater" spread from the University of Iowa to twenty other college campuses: Sometimes lifting the constraints of ordinary propriety and social niceties gives room for amusing, entertaining, and sometimes even significant ideas to break through. To be literally shameless can be liberating -- for a time. ■ But after a while, living in the shameless friend's orbit would lose its luster, because a real lack of shame causes people to make decisions that can be consequential for others -- sometimes in a painful way. Someone living and acting without fear of consequences and conscious of no shame about the harm they bring upon others could quickly morph into being a verifiable sociopath. ■ We should probably apply the very same lessons to artificial intelligence before we go too far down the road we are presently traveling. It has become a gold rush in every sense, and otherwise serious people are starting to believe that large language models have something equal to real spontaneous cognition, comparable to what we experience as carbon-based life forms. ■ They don't, and we can know that because there is no way to make a computer capable of shame. And this is dangerous because, if the computer is incapable of shame, it won't feel bad about making a mistake or, worse, misleading the user. Instead, we get confidently wrong outputs, because that's what predictive language modeling creates. ■ Shame can be taken much too far within human institutions, but when appropriately moderated, it acts as a social preservative. Acting honorably matters if we wish to gain and maintain others' esteem. For artificial intelligence, this lack of shame will be consequential in ways that we can't really imagine right now. ■ Those consequences will be wholly troublesome if we haven't anticipated them and built rules, regulations, and safeguards into our own human processes to protect ourselves from shamelessly wrong answers. It's bad enough to have humans in powerful roles who never apologize, never back down, and never express shame -- those people are dangerous to us all. But to have computers masquerading as human-like actors doing the same thing? The consequences could be devastating.
June 18, 2025
With the New York City mayoral primary election just around the corner, it's interesting to watch how people respond to the incentives and triangulations that go into a method like ranked-choice voting. This is only the second time a ranked-choice ballot will be used in New York, so there's still a lot of fresh strategizing underway. ■ Any time something other than a conventional first-past-the-post, winner-take-all election gets underway, a predictable cadre of people get worked up about how this or that method of counting votes is the One True Way. They are right that there are shortcomings to whatever the incumbent system might have been; they are wrong to believe that theirs is ideal. The reality is that no method of vote-counting satisfies everyone completely. ■ That's the essence of the democratic deal: We enter it knowing that it's imperfect and that nothing is going to completely satisfy everyone. The key is to broadly distribute the dissatisfaction -- better that 100% of us get 60% of what we want than an outcome wherein 60% of the people get everything and the rest get nothing. Compromise is factored into the system by design. ■ There are both good and bad in alternate methods of vote-counting. But we shouldn't imagine that the "how" of vote counting is the only thing that matters. So does the "who" -- the basic allocation of votes. ■ We mostly decide representation by defined geographical spaces: Wards, precincts, Congressional districts and the like. But there would be nothing inherently undemocratic about divvying up representation by, say, occupation. If seats in a legislature were still allocated proportionally to population, but drawn by job types rather than geographical borders, outcomes would probably be different. ■ The outcomes of that different approach might be better or worse than what we get from allocating by geography. But if the representation were still truly proportional to population (with retirees voting for one set of seats, students another, service-sector workers in another, and so on), then the process would still be democratic in nature. Some outcomes would probably improve, some would probably become worse. ■ In theory, the more diverse the methods of allocating representation going into different legislative houses, the greater should be the ability of that legislative system to filter out really bad ideas. ■ For some of us, at least, that property would be appealing -- in the words of Calvin Coolidge, "It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones." Above all, though, knowing and acknowledging that democracy is designed to leave people less than fully satisfied -- that it really cannot work any other way -- is the first step towards avoiding the fantasy that any one way of counting (or allocating) votes is the only "right" way.
How about some vegetable innovation?
A meme circulating on social media cracks, "Potatoes give us French fries, chips, and vodka. It's like the other vegetables aren't even trying." Funny, yes -- and it's well worth acknowledging that the potato punches far above its weight, nutritionally, when it isn't drowned in oil or buried in salt. ■ But the truth revealed by the wisecrack is that we really haven't done enough to crack the code to making vegetables more widely appealing. If we are to trust the "My Plate" messaging that replaced the traditional "food pyramid", then vegetables should occupy more than a quarter of the normal person's diet, at least by volume. ■ For most people, loads of steamed broccoli just aren't going to do the trick. So what is the answer? To some extent, the simple availability (or lack thereof) of quality fresh vegetables will bias the outcomes of routine eating. Food deserts are real, and there may be policy choices that could help relieve them. ■ Some of the answer also belongs to the research done to make existing vegetables either marginally more appealing or to find new methods of preparation and delivery. Aside from Popeye, not many people are racing to put more canned spinach down their gullets -- at least not without masking it with so much sour cream as to render it nearly undetectable. ■ But if Brussels sprouts can be bred to make them much tastier than they were a generation ago, certainly other vegetables can be improved through science, too. New vegetables could even be invented and varieties diversified. Of all the forms of "innovation" that seem to have captured the world's attention, maybe some of that energy should be directed at our foodstuffs. ■ These kinds of steps require research that may not always have obvious private-sector payoffs, even though the social benefits can be considerable. If outcomes like reducing meat consumption are desirable goals, then some worthy investments could stand to be made less in browbeating people about their current choices and more in inducing more demand for the alternatives taking up real estate on the plate.
TV stations on the chopping block
After reversing course on a phenomenally stupid plan to lay off the local meteorology team and parting ways with an anchor who had been a station fixture for 51 years, the owners of KWWL-TV in Waterloo, Iowa, have given up and put the "For Sale" sign on the station. ■ Allen Media Group has only held the station for four years, but the plans to sell are being spun as a means "to significantly reduce our debt". KWWL was one of seven stations in a $380 million sale at that time, and it's part of a 25-station clearance sale this time, so it's not clear exactly how the station is individually valued. ■ But for a station in a top-100 US market with a population somewhere between 750,000 and 1,000,000, it seems like a lot of unproductive turmoil. The on-air shakeups earlier in the year, followed now by a station sale, gives the impression that perhaps the future is even unsteadier than it is already perceived. ■ America stitches together a patchwork of media markets, in which local ownership was quasi-mandated because large group ownership was prohibited not that long ago. It's not clear that the kinds of disruptions going on at KWWL and elsewhere would be any better if local ownership were more prevalent. But it also isn't clear that large-group ownership has been of any real use to the quality of the broadcast product. ■ Metaphorically, at least, broadcast and print news outlets are the campfires around which a community gathers to tell the stories of the day. And if some serious effort doesn't go into finding an economically sustainable way of continuing to "gather" in old or newer ways, the extent of the trouble is going to be much more than just a few local celebrities who find themselves ousted.
A wave of technologists is leaving us
With the passing of Bill Atkinson, the Apple Computer technologist whose credits include the popular application of the hyperlink, the number of surviving technologists who can fairly be said to have witnessed the personal computer revolution first-hand has dwindled yet again. ■ There is a time in the history of every technology when important pioneers are still to be found -- until it is over, often with little fanfare. There was a time when pioneers of aviation were still around -- Orville Wright lived to see the invention of jet engines, and Charles Lindbergh saw a man land on the Moon. But then they were around no more. ■ Considering the profound consequences and inescapable extent of the spread of personal computing devices, society should be conscious of trying to capture the stories and the explanations of the people who launched the digital world. Some have written down their tales in autobiographies with names like "Idea Man" and "Source Code". These are good to have around, but autobiographies are often much better at myth-building than at giving readers durable advice. ■ Before they are all gone, it would be very good to capture more of the technology pioneers' explanations about how they made their choices along the way. Books about "how" and "why", more than just "who" and "when", give us context about the hastily-constructed digital universe we now occupy. But we are running out of time to get those written down. While there may be future David McCulloughs waiting to retrace their steps and reconstruct those decision trees, we ought not to wait for them and should instead nudge the surviving pioneers to document their work now, while they can still be found.
We should show more love for accounting
It is to our debit that we do not.
June 19, 2025
Even without anyone prominently second-guessing him, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell has an unenviable job: In the midst of high uncertainty about everything from the Federal budget to trade and tax policy to geopolitical uncertainty, he's charged with figuring out how to gently maneuver the world's most important money supply through the twin goalposts of low inflation and high employment. ■ Because the Federal Reserve mainly depends upon managing interest rates as its tool for action, caution and predictability are the keys. The business sector likes certainty -- but so do families and individuals and all the other actors in the economy. If a church, for example, is fundraising to build a new sanctuary, its leaders will want to have a fairly good forecast of the available interest rates for when they borrow. ■ It does not make Powell's difficult job any easier when he is second-guessed from the bully pulpit and heckled for not cutting interest rates by 2.5 percentage points. Every rate change comes with unanticipated and second-order consequences, but a change of 2.5% (ten times the size of a more conventional quarter-point move) would not only forcibly reorder much of the investing universe, it would also introduce lasting and punitive uncertainty into perceptions of the economy overall. ■ The outbreak of the first serious pandemic in a century was cause for swift and dramatic rate-cutting -- it was the boldness of the reaction in a moment of extraordinary crisis that gave confidence to a panicky world. Today's circumstances are in many ways the opposite: Government policies are creating much of the meaningful uncertainty, and if the Federal Reserve were to start counter-programming against government policies, the result would be chaos, topped with a heavy layer of angry polemic against unelected Federal Reserve bankers. For now, slow and steady is the only way.
There is no human perfection, only a direction
In an apparent outburst of frustration, an individual blasted out a message to hundreds of thousands of social-media followers, lamenting that they "don't care anymore if this country destroys itself and burns down to the ground". The language is sufficiently inflammatory that the post itself was deleted, though Google confirms it once existed. If cooler thinking prevailed, then so much the better. ■ The radicalism of the outburst, though, highlights a gravely misguided principle for which everyone must keep perpetual watch in themselves and in others. It is the belief, conscious or not, that a utopia exists and can be reached. ■ Nothing is so exhausting as the perpetual fight against the utopian mindset. There is no perfect end state, nor will there ever be. Every social or political system built on the utopian fantasy has ended in tears or terror. Just within modern history, the Soviet Union never became a workers' paradise -- but it managed to murder hundreds of thousands directly at the hands of the state and millions more through systemic failure. ■ There is no "cleansing fire" to be had from burning down imperfect but aspirational institutions (like America's Constitutional form of government). There is only ever the slow, hard work of building, reforming, and caretaking along the way. Our greatest victories are often celebrated over the eradication of our own worst shortcomings. That is the very point of commemorating Juneteenth: The evil of slavery was overcome, much later and much harder than it should have been, and ultimately those too long denied their liberty were finally emancipated. ■ Something better is always possible, but to fantasize over something perfect is a path to terminal frustration. The Constitution correctly promises only a "more perfect union". Not an end state, but a striving towards better. It's a lesson everyone has to internalize, both now and in the future.
June 21, 2025
A striking display of atmospheric energy
Merging storm fronts and a derecho all in one amazing radar loop
June 24, 2025
Remarkable rainfall in Southern Iowa
A 6.16" storm total was recorded at Ellston, Iowa
June 25, 2025
Who's to stop summer learning loss?
Around this stage of summer each year, parents, teachers, and school administrators tend to engage in a complex dance wherein each group frets about summer "learning loss". None among them really has a meaningful plan to prevent it, nor even a clear understanding of which losses really matter. We seem to know little, other than that standardized test scores slide backwards during summer break. ■ Teachers can point at parents and say they should impose discipline around learning habits and practices at home during vacation. Parents can question whether school-year learning was as effective as it should have been if just a couple of months off can do so much damage. Administration, meanwhile, may well worry that every day off equals lower standardized test scores. ■ We're very poor at framing what aspects of learning really matter. Do the facts matter more, or do the habits? Does ability to follow instruction matter more, or does intrinsic motivation to learn? ■ Virtually all learning is about scaffolding, of course: Connecting old learning to new concepts is what most progress is all about. So to some extent, retaining old facts matters. But perhaps even more, it matters whether the child develops some state of curiosity that allows them to build their own scaffolding. ■ For one kid, the subject may be dinosaurs; for others, it could be horses or graphic design or space exploration. Enough "Why?" and "How?" questions related to a topic of interest, and invariably a broadening of applicable academic tools become useful in order to learn more. ■ There's a lot of research yet to be done, but it seems likely that parents can worry less about the exact details and facts that their children learn and pay more attention to encouraging kids to find something they can sustain a high degree of interest in learning. Real intrinsic enthusiasm for a subject (even when it's not part of a bigger curriculum) is a great source of motivation to learn academic topics.
June 27, 2025
Ordinary language reveals a certain set of prejudices that shine a lot of favor upon raw intelligence: Everyone knows what it's like to be outsmarted. Along with that comes a sort of two-fold assumption: To be outsmarted requires that the other person not only possess more intelligence, but also that they use it to their own advantage. ■ It's fairly obvious why a society would respect and admire intelligence, since intelligence is often the best tool for solving the problems that nature throws at us. Within the classic models of narrative conflict, we usually need intelligence to solve "man versus nature", "man versus man", and "man versus the gods". ■ It remains telling and instructive that we don't have a similar word for when two individuals are unevenly matched for character. We simply don't say that someone "outcharactered" another. Perhaps that's because one of the essential elements of good character is that one wouldn't use it to gain personal advantage. ■ But perhaps it's also because we don't sufficiently appreciate the role that decision-making in social and interpersonal affairs draws not on intelligence, but rather on "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind". If you're fighting the stormy sea, there's a good chance you need engineering skills. If you're navigating human issues, though, you need to draw on characteristics that aren't easily taught from a textbook. ■ In times when technological marvels are not only streaming forth in a torrent, but also enriching certain smart people in seemingly unreal ways, we have to be careful not to conclude that intelligence is the only character trait worthy of respect. ■ Warren Buffett is renowned for offering variations on a piece of advice that says leaders should recruit for intelligence, drive, and character, but that the last one is essential since a person with intelligence and drive but low moral character is destined to cause disaster. That's some worthy all-purpose advice, not just for hiring managers, but for us all.
June 30, 2025
Defense Department and NOAA to break data sharing
At least on the surface, this seems like a taxpayer-hostile development with no evident gain
The suggestion arises that academics ought to disclose whether or not they used artificial intelligence in their work. Especially in cases where academic integrity is an issue, some kind of disclosure should probably emerge as a norm, since it's often unclear and non-transparent (even to the user) on which data sets the artificial intelligence was trained.
There's truth in this observation from Bellingcat's Eliot Higgins: "The danger isn't just that people believe lies. It's that entire communities become locked into belief systems that can't be challenged, where loyalty replaces evidence, and disagreement feels like betrayal. That doesn't just distort truth, it breaks trust."