Icosian Reflections

…a tendency to systematize and a keen sense

that we live in a broken world.

IN  WHICH Ross Rheingans-Yoo—a sometime quantitative trader, economist, expat, EA, artist, educator, and game developer—writes on topics of int­erest.

Cultivated Publicy
publicy

Publicy is a term coined (or at least signal-boosted to me) by Jeff Kaufman in a series of posts (beginning with JeffTK | Giving Up on Privacy, JeffTK | Publicy and Notification, and JeffTK | A Right to Publicy) that I think is pretty great, because it's intuition-bending in a way that's reflective of the way the digital world is shaping up to be different from the physical one. (See also: Wiki | Sousveillance.)

Tyler Cowen (of MR) recently pointed to an article by the NYT about an interesting non-privacy which seems somehow related (NYT | Ratings Now Cut Both Ways, so Don't Sass Your Uber Driver):

"Highly specific pools of reputation information will become more useful in aggregate," said Mr. Fertik, co-author with David C. Thompson of "The Reputation Economy," a guide to optimizing digital footprints. "If you're a really good Uber passenger, that may be useful information for Amtrak or American Airlines. But if you add in your reputation from Airbnb plus OpenTable plus eBay, it starts to get useful globally." (...)

(1)

I'd like to have publicy (note: not publicity) as a reasonably responsible, nice person who can be trusted with things, from cash which isn't mine (because I'm not going to steal it) to charity in discourse (because I'm really trying to make a good-faith effort to understand things when I discuss them), to people's time an attention (because I have things to say which they might want to hear). I mean, basically everyone would like publicy as [good thing] for most values of [good thing], deserved or not, so what I really mean is, "I believe I am [X], and would benefit from having

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http://dev/null
internet, echo chambers

content warning: rampant cynicism, tongue-in-cheek metaphor

Today, I was going through my morning newspaper feedreader[1], saw a few links I liked, socked some away for Friday's linkwrap, dropped some others in my blog's reading feed, on the off-chance that I -- or someone else trawling the archives of Faults -- would want to revisit them later. Another one was an annoying article on Bloomberg about how the FCC's Title II reclassification of Internet Service Providers will raise rates by $X and thus price Internet access out of the reach of Y million households.

And I closed it, and didn't show it to anyone, and hoped that that would mean that fewer people would look at it. Yes, I could have pointed at it for the purposes of dissent, but I've got a post about vaccines to write, and blogging confrontationally makes me sad, so I decided that it was easier to flush it down the memory hole that is ctrl-W[2] instead.

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four occasionally seems like one of those books that missed slightly in meme-space and fifty years temporally, but nevertheless was disturbingly prescient. Of course we've all ported ourselves off paper and nothing's truly lost forever on the Internet, but all the same...the real question is becoming less "is the record around" and more "does anyone remember it?"

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last

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February 6 Links: Photographs and a Cactus Doctor
links, photography, books, libraries, givewell
0

On Thursday, I wrote a post, the first in a series of "not everyone doing harm is evil", and a reader commented on Facebook with an NPR interview that I hadn't actually read, but which definitely fits right with the main thrust of my post:

You know, David, when my child has a nightmare, I don't come to her in the middle of the night and say, look, you're a moron for believing there's a monster under your bed. I acknowledge that the fear might be real, even if there's no monster under the bed. And we -- I sort of help her deal with the fear. (...)

Anyway, more at Thursday's post, and now back to your regularly-tardy linkwrap...

1

I'm a sucker for clean designs, and these re-imagined Harry Potter volumes are awesome:

Book covers -- minmal, laser-cut designs

Same covers, glowing blue in the dark

Illustrations on inside pages

...by Kinsco Nagy, a graphic-design student in Hungary.

Along the same vein, some nonzero percentage of my readers may be interested in the Bibliotheca project, a similarly-beautiful of the most-printed book of all time.

2

But of course, books spend a lot more time being stored than being read, and sometimes, that storage ends up being really cool, too:

That's a trailer for Cold Storage, a documentary about the Harvard Depository, which warehouses the bulk of Harvard's second-largest-in-the-nation library collection. Related: UChicago's Mansueto library, where books are retrieved for your reading pleasure by robots:

3

Elsewhere in "things being moved by cranes", ever wonder where New York subway cars go to die?

A car hits the water, after being thrown from a ship into the ocean by a crane

More evocative images from Next Stop: Atlantic, by photographer Stephen Mallon. Apparently, the practice is pro-ecological and not pollutative -- the nooks and crannies of the cars (which are stripped down

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Anti-vaxxers
better conversations, evil, vaccines, changing minds

If you personally believe that it is the correct moral choice to elect[1] not to have the people you are responsible for vaccinated, this post will not make you very happy. I'm being a lot more charitable to you than most are, but I still end up being condescending and rude. I'm sorry -- I'd like to have a civil conversation sometime to try and change your mind without resorting to condescension -- but this article wasn't written for you; it was written about you, for people who already agree with me.

If you personally believe that electing to have the people you are responsible for (including yourself) vaccinated is the right thing to do, welcome! We agree on this point! If you think I'm writing an apologia excusing the anti-vax movement, I promise you that that's not my intention.

Ross Douthat (no relation) has a great piece in the New York Times yesterday, profiling (and stereotyping, yes) the three kinds of anti-vaxxers you meet (if, y'know, you're the sort of person who meets lots of anti-vaxxers):

So the philosophical issues are tangled: Just as the anti-vaxx idea cuts across the partisan divide, so do the reasons for its flourishing cut across ideological visions of how best to organize society, how people should relate to the local, the national, the corporate, what kinds of dissent are healthy and what forms we should prefer dissent to take. This is good news, in a way, because (to return to where I began) it makes the issue very unlikely to ever polarize along partisan lines. But it also makes it a hard phenomenon to wrestle into submission, because however misguided it’s

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Godspeed
space

A countdown clock that continued to increase past 00:00; a security guard whose face turned ghostly-white in an instant; a lack of response from the Columbia crew to repeated calls from Capcom/Astronaut Charlie Hobaugh; and the words of "Get ready," uttered quietly from the lips of Steve Lindsey, told me that it was time - time to be strong in the face of true adversity.

It was the most difficult day of my life; even harder than when my father died, as that was what we were expecting. I do my best to describe the day's events in my book, but suffice it to say I felt a huge emptiness inside and it is a burden I still carry today. That day changed me inside; it made me much more emotional than I can ever remember being. It tested my faith and it still tests me.

But it never dulled my dream to fly in space. It only strengthened my resolve. We (NASA) would figure this out. We would make it safer than before. That's what we do. That's "how we roll."

Spaceflight is dangerous. Spaceflight is hard. We must keep that in mind as we move forward into the era of commercial spaceflight endeavors, lest we forget the lessons of our past.

Godspeed Challenger; Godspeed Columbia.

This from Clayton Anderson's answer to What was it like to watch either the Challenger or Columbia space shuttle disasters live? on Quora.

Today, of course, is the twelfth anniversary of the Columbia disaster, and earlier this week marked the twenty-ninth of Challenger.

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Class Notes
class notes

Classes started yesterday (though my median class wasn't until 11:30 today), and, on a lark, I decided to take my notes, not on paper (as I have for the first five semesters of my college career), nor in \(\LaTeX\) (like a reasonable person), but here, on my blog site. This has the benefits of (1) being easier to share with other people and (2) lowering the activation energy for me looking them up come finals-time.

It has the problems of it being really annoying to write MathJax-compatible Markdown. (For other people facing this problem, Ore Babarinsa / Ben Kuhn suggest Madoko.) But I'm getting better at it, and I'm already at the rate where I can live-write these things, so it's not so bad.

Anyway, without further ado:

Maybe if I build up some momentum, I'll finally have enough motivation to stop skipping cl--OH WAIT MY MOM READS THIS BLOG NEVER MIND THAT.

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Culpable Priors
seeking truth, lessons from ballroom

A recurring series of posts in which Ross hears something in Ballroom class, and decides to blog about how it's actually general life advice. This is the first.

Today, in Harvard Ballroom's Wintersession series, the advanced class was doing Waltz. The only thing you need to know about Waltz to read this post is that steps come in repeating sets of three:

  1. drive (forward)
  2. swing/rise/shape
  3. float/lower/prepare

Our instructor had this to say about what to fix when things go wrong:

...And here's the thing: Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Some people have strong drive, but problems with float. Others have problems with swing. But remember this: If a step feels bad, the problem is with the previous step.

If you have problems with float, it's probably because your swing left you off balance. If you can't drive, it's probably because you didn't lower out of your float in time...

And I think that there's a bit of this that makes good sense in general, in a pattern I'll dub the Law of the Culpable Prior: If you see a problem in a thing, look for the real problem in the thing that came before it:

  • If there's a financial crisis...look at the economic policies that were instituted three-to-five years ago.

  • If Millenials are whiny, fragile, entitled, and unmotivated...look at the Millenials-parents generation. (I'd link to an appropriate editorial, but, like everything else including the word "Millenial", you can pretty much extrapolate the entire text from the title and your imagination.)

  • If a student -- or a discrete subset of students -- is doing poorly at grade level [N]...look at their educational

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