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Table of Contents
Off-the-Wall Ideas
Fuzzy Thoughts About
Big Questions
Travel Notes
by Richard Seltzer
Book Notes
Web Notes by Richard Seltzer
Online Education
Last week I chose as the Ebook of the Week, “Other People’s Money by Email Gaboriau, who was a popular mystery writer before the days of Sherlock Holmes. In reading that book, I was struck by the similarities between late 19th century Paris and present-day America. Many of the characters have no conscience, no sense of wrong doing when dealing with “other people’s money”. Along the way, the author describes a Ponzi scheme and also a business that today we would label “trading toxic assets”.
I included that observation in my cover email, and Ian Carter, in the UK, responded: “Some interesting thoughts there, Richard, especially about the similarities between Paris then and America now. How do we identify what’s gone wrong with our countries (or rather, the people in them) and attempt to redress the balance?”
That started me thinking, and I woke up the middle of the night with the following idea, which might grow to become the beginning of a novel. Feedback welcome.
Richard Seltzer seltzer@samizdat.com
“What’s wrong?” boomed the Chairman.
“Madoff.”
“Wall Street.”
“Main Street.”
“The moral fabric of society has been ripped apart.”
“There is no moral fabric left at all.”
“And what good do answers like that do us?” the Chairman boomed again. “They offer no hint of what we could do to fix this mess.”
“Gossip,” came a whisper from the far end of the table.
“What was that? Speak up!”
“Gossip,” she repeated louder. Everyone stared at her in disbelief not
at what she had said, but that she had said anything at all. This was the
first time in over a hundred years that she had spoken at a board
meeting.
“Gossip? What kind of answer is that?” insisted the Chairman.
“The lack of gossip is the problem.”
“Lack of gossip, you say? With all the tabloids and celebrity magazines and television shows? There’s more gossip today than ever in the history of mankind.”
“I don't mean tabloid gossip. And I don't mean nosey busy-body gossip. I mean neighborhood gossip. Talk by ordinary people who are concerned about the doings and feelings of their friends and neighbors. It's how a community holds together and knows who is in trouble and how to help. How the community regulates itself. Today, most people don't know their neighbors enough to talk to them or about them. The lack of that kind of gossip is the problem, and bringing back that kind of gossip is the way to rebuild the moral fabric of society.”
The silence was only broken by the numerous involuntary twitching of wings, dozens of pairs of wings.
“Explain, young lady, whatever your name is.”
“Prudence. My name is Prudence.”
“And your role and rank?”
“Gossip Specialist, First Class.”
“We still have gossip specialists? I thought the advance of technology and the growth of global awareness had eliminated gossip as a major source of trouble.”
“Unintended consequences.”
“What?”
“Reducing gossip to isolated social ponds led to the problem you are talking about. Now the issue is too little gossip, not too much.”
“Gossip! You want to encourage more gossip? What, in the name of Saint … Saint … in the name of Myself, are you talking about?”
The Second Deputy Chairman, sitting at the left hand of the Chairman added, “Gossip is people nosing into one another’s business. Nasty mean-spirited talk.”
“No,” Prudence continued. “Gossip is people discussing standards of behavior and deviations from it. It means looking beyond the surface of what happens and speculating on the real meaning of events and gestures and words. It builds social intuition at the same time as curbing disruptive behavior.”
“It’s the opposite of freedom and independence,” pursued the Second Deputy Chairman.
“Exactly. It’s the slow cumulative process of building a social sense, of valuing social coherence and responsibility.”
“And what of the sacred right of privacy?” objected the Second Deputy Chairman.
“No, she’s right,” added the First Deputy Chairman, sitting at the right hand of the Chairman. “We need balance. We need balance between the rights of the individual and of society.”
The Chairman interrupted, “We don’t need a theoretical debate. We need a plan of action. Prudence, what possible use is this gossip idea of yours?”
“Just let me try.”
“Try what?”
“To restart the web of gossip on a small scale, to prove that it can be done and that it affects people the way I believe it can.”
“Done!” exclaimed the Chairman, with a bang of his gavel.
__________________
The Second Deputy Chairman introduced Prudence to her assignment. "Silver Street, South Roxbury, a Boston suburb. McSweeney, Smith, Mirijanian, Maxwell, Darby, Dwight, Kazantzakis, Lopez, O'Leary, Donahue, Mason, Rodriguez... There's the complete list. Twenty families in all. These are all two-story clapboard, single-family homes, built between 1920 and 1940. Those that were appraised two years ago, for refinancing, came in at between $400,000 and $500,000. Half the families have young children and have lived on this street for less than ten years. The others have grown children who have moved away. Those have lived here for more than 30 years.
"The kids, with few exceptions, go to different schools -- half to private and half bussed to other parts of the city. In the summer, the kids go to camp -- half to day camp and half overnight. With few exceptions, the wives as well as the husbands work. On summer weekends, if the weather is good, the young families leave town to relax and have fun elsewhere. The older couples stay inside with their air conditioners on. Aside from the occasional lawnmower, the street is quiet.
"The average resident can name no more than three other families on the block, and might not recognize any of their neighbors if they chanced on them in a different context.
"At Halloween, half the kids go to parties in other neighborhoods. The other half trick-or-treat at the houses of neighbors who probably wouldn't recognize them even if they didn't wear masks.
"A realtor would describe this as a quiet friendly neighborhood. Stable. Racially and culturally mixed. An ideal 21st century community.
"And you want to transform this modern Eden into a hotbed of gossip, with all the neighbors meddling in one another's business? I sincerely doubt that you can do that."
"Thanks for the vote of confidence, sir."
"You have just five days, and everything you do must appear both natural and legal, from a human perspective."
"Of course, sir."
"So what do you propose to do?"
"I'll move in."
"What?"
"I'll take the empty house on the corner.
"The one that's foreclosed and up for auction today?"
"Yes."
"And what?"
"That's all. Human nature will do the rest."
_______________
The original owners had moved back to Indiana to live with family and prepare for a fresh start. Two speculators had planned to go to the auction. One had severe stomach pains -- probably a virus or maybe it was the peppers in his mother-in-law's spaghetti sauce. The other was stuck on Route 128, with an over-heated radiator. He had been warned it should be replaced, but had put off the work because money was tight. The bank representative, who was supposed to establish the minimum bid, was immersed in family squabbles, trying to save his marriage. The auction slipped his mind.
Prudence was the only buyer who showed up for the auction. She bid and paid $100.
A few minutes later, a moving van pulled up with her furniture. The van's gears ground with a penetrating shriek, and it maneuvered into a parking space by the curb, with loud beeping backup noises.
Neighbors came to their doors; and, within seconds, word had spread from one stranger-neighbor to another -- $100, just $100."
"Well, she certainly is one lucky lady," said Mrs. Darby. "That's like winning the lottery."
"That's way beyond luck," said Mr. Mason. "She must have connections upstairs."
"Upstairs?"
"Like way upstairs. Miracle upstairs."
"Somebody must have screwed up royally," said Mr. O'Leary, who worked for a bank. "Things like that don't just happen every day. The bank should have set a minimum bid, say $200,000. Enough to cover their investment. What an unthinkable mistake!"
"That's great for her, sure. But for us..." Mr. Rodriguez began.
"We're screwed," confirmed Mrs. McSweeney.
"What were the last two sales on this block?" asked Mr. Mason.
"The Dowlings for $430,000 and last year the James's for $420,000," answered Mrs. Mirijanian.
By now at least one adult from each house on the block was standing in the street, watching the movers in action.
"$137,000," concluded Mrs. Lopez, who worked part-time as a realtor. "That's what this sale just cost each of us. $137,000."
"What?" asked Mr. Donahue.
"She's right. $137,000," confirmed Mr. O'Leary, who worked for a bank. "When you want to buy or take out a home equity loan or refinance, banks depend on appraisals to establish the market value of homes. That market value is based on an average of three recent 'comparable sales' in the neighborhood. for us, that average just dropped from about $420,000 to $283,000."
"That's what I said," repeated Mrs. McSweeney. "We're screwed."
Prudence interrupted the financial speculation, shaking hands, introducing herself and inviting everyone to a spaghetti dinner that night at her new house. She had a new recipe she wanted to try.
_____________
All of the couples showed up for the dinner, but they left their children at home. At first, aside from formalities, all the conversation was between husband and wife, quietly, cautiously -- smiling at their neighbors, but reluctant to initiate real talk, embarrassed to have lived so near them for so long and never have gotten to know them.
They walked around, with drinks and food, checking out this house they had never been in before. Structurally, it was very similar to their own homes. None of them had known, except by name, the people who had lived here for more than 20 years. No one had suspected that they had had financial problems.
Prudence smiled at each of them as she served the spaghetti. She knew their foibles, their weaknesses, their ambitions. She saw the way Mr. McSweeney's eyes wandered to Mrs. Lopez, and that other couples noticed that and commented. She saw Mr. Kazantzakis and Mrs. Dwight at the back window, admiring the garden they had never seen before. She saw the Masons and the Maxwells take out and share pictures of their children who went to different schools and different summer camps. She saw Mr. Rodriguez in a Red Sox cap scowling across the room at Mr. Darby in a Yankees cap. It wouldn't take much for these strangers to become friends and rivals, for small incidents in their lives to be magnified and transformed in the conversations of their neighbors, for them to become aware of and concerned about what their neighbors might think and say of them. Her purchase and her spaghetti were just catalysts. These strangers living near one another by chance could and would become a community.
"What a mess. What a stinking rotten mess," Mrs. McSweeney muttered outloud to herself She was too upset to eat. "This Pru may well be a fine person and a social neighbor. But the fact remains, her windfall is our downfall. The way I figure it -- $137,000 times 20 houses -- we have collectively lost over $2,700,000 today."
"But that's collectively," Mr. Lopez corrected her, after a few inspiring forks full of spaghetti. "We're not alone. And as long as we're not alone, we're not helpless."
"Meaning?"
"Well, the fact that this house sold for cheap has dropped property values. But if this same house sold again for its old value, we'd be right back where were yesterday."
"And who is going to buy it for such a price in today's market?"
"Why not us?" Mr. Lopez suggested.
"Sure, mister. We've got $400,000 sitting around. Or some bank is likely to lend us that on a house that just sold for $100."
"Well, there are twenty of us -- twenty families. If we could each come up with $20,000..."
"I don't know about you and the others, but to me $20,000 is more than pocket change. How am I supposed to come up with that kind of money?"
"Well, you only need to commit that money for a few weeks. Then you'll get it back."
"You mean you expect to resell this house at full value in just a few weeks? It's people like you who made Madoff rich."
"We've all got a stake in this. And if we pull together..."
Mrs. McSweeney paused to reflect, ate some spaghetti, ate some more, then smiled broadly. "Come to think of it, you're right. If each one of us could come up with the short-term cash, one way or another, we could do it. We could buy this place out-right. That would prop up the market value of our houses and this house as well. We could then mortgage this place and use the proceeds to pay off our $20,000 investments."
"But how would we pay the monthly mortgage bills?" asked Mr. Mirijanian, who had overheard this interchange.
"Divide that mortgage payment by twenty and it becomes manageable,"
Mrs. McSweeney answered. "At today's rates on a $400,000 mortgage, that's
probably less than $150 per month per family. And when the economy
turns around, we can sell and pay off the mortgage."
______________
Prudence returned to the board room, triumphant.
The Second Deputy Chairman humbly congratulated her. "Not only did she do all this in less than five days, but her efforts will yield a profit of $400,000, which could finance some very important charity work."
"Well, not quite. There is, of course, the matter of income tax -- state and federal."
"Yes," he admitted, "that could be substantial. It's unfortunate you couldn't have used the money to buy another house and so avoid the tax."
"Or I could have given the money back to the people who paid it to me."
"But that would have negated the effect of the second sale on the market value, and it could have led to some nasty legal problems."
"Yes. Instead, I bought another nearby foreclosed house."
"You didn't spend all the money, did you?"
"Not on that one. That would have been foolish since I could buy it for a fraction of its former market value -- though higher than the first one because, of course, the bank and the local speculators had learned from the first experience."
"So you now own another house?"
"Actually, three more houses. The first one sold for so much less than $400,000 that there was plenty of money left, and since I wasn't going to be able to make the tax problem go away, I had to factor that cost into the project."
"But if this approach worked for one neighborhood, it could work for another and another. The neighbors of those other houses will band together to buy back these other three houses from you and that could give you enough money to buy nine or ten more houses. And the money from that... Why in a few months you could buy every foreclosed house in the city. And then you could expand to other cities, then other countries. Why this is like Madoff in reverse. You're creating value and the benefits snowball."
"No. Everything you do has consequences you can't foresee. People knowing this happened before will get in the way of it happening again. But this little experiment could have a lasting effect."
"How?"
"The story spread on the news -- print, broadcast, and online. And it seems likely that legislation at least at the state and maybe at the federal level will change how homes are valued for mortgage loans. Foreclosures won't be counted, and now they'll average 30 instead of just 3 recent sales, making the values much more stable, without any need for federal funds.
By doubling each generation, counting backwards, 1000 years ago, about 36 generations ago, you had nearly 69 billion ancestors (that’s 2 to the power of 36). At that time, there were only about 50 million people alive in Europe. So along the way, there was lots of intermarriage, and, basically, everyone of European descent alive today is a cousin of everyone else, and probably in multiple ways.
That means that there were people alive in Europe a thousand years ago who were the ancestors of everyone of European descent who is alive today. In fact, there were probably hundreds, no thousands, tens of thousands, even millions of people alive a thousand years ago who became the ancestors of everyone of European descent alive today.
Let’s flip that concept and take into account that people are much more
mobile today than they were a thousand years ago. Let’s look ahead a thousand
years. In the year 3000, every human being alive on Earth (if the human
race survives that long) will be a descendant of people who are alive today,
and not just of one person alive today. No, odds are they will be descendants
of hundreds, thousands, even millions of people who are alive today. In
other words, if you are a parent or could become one, there’s a reasonable
chance that everyone alive a thousand years from now will have genes that
passed through you. That is an awesome responsibility. Be careful. Be proud.
The future of the human race depends on you.
Currently the appraised value of a house depends largely on recent sales of similar homes in the neighborhood. When one house sells at a ridiculously low price due to foreclosure, the appraised values of all similar houses in the neighborhood fall, meaning many more people have mortgages greater than the market value of their homes, and hence are at greater risk of foreclosure. And the dominoes keep falling.
But this appraised market value has little or nothing to do with the house itself. It is an artifact of regulations and industry practices.
If the values that mortgage lenders and others used were based only on normal sales in the neighborhood, and did not include foreclosure sales, then those values would be far more stable, mmitigating or even helping to end the current housing crisis.
Simple government regulation could enforce such a change, at no cost to the government and no cost to the public.
Please forward this message to anyone you know who might be in a position
to help make this happen.
The wild swings in stock prices are depressing us all. A surge one day and a drop the next builds our hopes and dashes them over and over again.
It’s easy to imagine speculators and day traders with a knack for predicting these swings profiting again and again from this volatility that is so painful to the rest of us. And the damage is tangible to us through pension and retirement funds, and school endowments, and the declinging market value of even fundamentally sound companies. Such factors combine to lower confidence in the world’s economic future, which means less buying, which means loss of jobs. Expectations of doom and gloom become self-fulfilling.
To try to straighten this mess out, government needs to provide incentives that reduce the daily swings, that make financial markets less volatile. Profits from the buying and selling of stocks, bonds, commodities, etc. need to be taxed differently from ordinary income. This may or may not be the same as “capital gains” — I believe that term applies to the profit from buying and selling anything. I believe we need a more targeted definition than that. When someone makes a profit from buying and selling stock etc., the tax should be very high — penalty-level high — if they held the asset for a short period of time; it should be treated the same as ordinary income if held for a reasonable period of time (e.g. a month or a few months); and it should be taxed at less than the normal rate if held for an extended period of time (say a year or more).
I’m not an expert in these matters. I don’t know the optimum definitions
and lengths of time and tax rates. But I sense that this is the direction
that government must go — using penalties, incentives and regulation to
channel individual greed in directions that promote the general good. We
need to adjust the rules of the capitalist game so when clever people seek
what is best for them, their acts promote the good of the many.
My mother, who is 88, has Alzheimer’s, and the disease has advanced to the point that last week she had to be moved into the Alzheimer’s wing of a nearby nursing home. Then last night I saw the movie “Away from Her”, in which Julie Christie, 66, plays the role of someone rapidly deteriorating from Alzheimer’s. I’m 62.
This morning I woke up thinking that many of us have assigned plots. I wouldn’t say “fate” or “destiny” because that implies a supernatural source and gives an aura of dignity. No, it’s a plot, a storyline, perhaps randomly assigned following some statistical pattern known to insurance professionals and public health officials. Our plot is part of our lives for many years — perhaps from the very beginning of our lives — but only toward the end do we find out what it is.
Statistically speaking, there are a limited number of possibilities. Sure there are exceptions, but for the mass of us the possibilities are few: the quick (accident, suicide, stroke, or heart failure) and the long (diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s, or failure of the immune system). It’s the long that have the plots. There are more of them than I have listed. I’m not a statistician. The point isn’t what they are, but that they are.
In most cases, we go 50, 60, 70, 80 years or even more before we find out which plot is ours. Advances in science are are making it possible to determine earlier which plot is likely to be ours and are enabling us to postpone the onset of such conditions and to slow heir progress. But the plots remain the same.
Yes, for millennia, death and taxes have been certain. Now we are progressing to the point where, for many of us, the type of death will be close to certain and known well in advance.
The certainty and fear of death prompted the formation of religions. Now will the knowledge of which kind of endgame is likely to lie ahead for each of us lead to new kinds of beliefs and behavior?
Would or should you live your life differently in the early stages if you knew that at the end you would face decades of Alzheimer’s or cancer therapy or diabetic deterioration?
Or would you simply hope and believe in a cure — a miracle of science that could radically change your plot and make human life in your generation far different than it was in previous generations?
From knowing what a person is likely to die of, techniques might be developed to change the “programming” so the end that was most likely becomes far less likely. That could mean that people live longer and remain healthy and active longer — not that they would live for ever, but that they would die of a far greater variety of causes and with less fore-knowledge of the particular end.
Yes, we of the baby-boomer generation are now beginning to learn which plots we have and are beginning to have to cope not just with that medical condition, but also with the fore-knowledge, in a way that previous generations never did. And the next generation or the generation after that may be able to live out plotless lives, with far less constraint and far greater variability at the end.
Yes, we, and in many cases, our parents are the ones with the plots — the pre-assigned long-drawn-out medical soap operas. But this may not be the “human condition”, but rather our condition. And it is our challenge to find ways to make sense of it or derive meaning from it.
In a good novel, what matters isn’t so much what happens from scene
to scene, but what it means; not just what the characters do and say, but
what that signifies; and the significance might vary through multiple perspectives.
The plot itself is nothing. What matters is what you can derive from it,
in the resonance from one life story to another, cascading insights and
revelations into human relationships and into who we can become.
This delightful yarn, centered around the publication of Dickens’ last, unfinished novel, puts you in the mood to read 19th century authors — Dickens, Thackeray, De Quincey, even William Goodwin. If you read Pearl’s “The Dante Club” already, this is a return timeptravel excursion to Boston just after the Civil War, with a side trip to Dickens’ England. Since we tend to read literature book-by-book or author-by-author and history country-by-country and separate from literature, it’s a delightful surprise to get a sense of contemporaneity — to encounter this historical personage and that and realize that they were linked in the real world. And as the mystery unforlds, you have the joy of speculating waht is based on fact and what is the author’s invention, and what of the author’s invetions are based on facts and inventions of Dickens. And like a nineteenthy century author, Pearl unravels it all at the nd — sorting out how much of this concoction of improbable events and outlandish characters derives from meticulous research.
A meta-novel like this enriches a long neglected classic by placing it in a tangible and lively realworld context, with many possible outcomes and interpretations.
Take some nanotech scifi, a gaggle of gangsters, and a dash of trashy sex. Throw in some humor, quirky personality traits, and unexpected plot twists. You wind up with a very readable, enjoyable novel named “Tiny Little Troubles.”
I’d have been happy if the author had stuck to the scifi, with nanobots let loose on an unsuspecting world. That’s the part of the book that’s most plausible and compelling. I can believe in robots so small that they are invisible, being programmable to push molecules around and make just about anything out of anything. But a wife with a newborn daughter who forgives her husband for regularly paying a variety of prostitutes for kinky sex, including shenanigans with a male goat; and who after watching lurid videos of said acts then wants to try some of them (but at least not the goat) with her husband — now that is stretching the limits of credibility. Enclosing an entire galaxy in a cat ornament, as in Men in Black, is far more plausible.
But the story flows. The whacked out characters don’t grow, but they are memorable, and humorous in the mode of some very popular and very tasteless movies.
It both intrigued me and disgusted me, and I read it through non-stop when I had important work I should have been doing.
That’s entertainment…
I just finished reading “The Russia Hand” by Strobe Talbott. That’s a memoir about Talbott’s experiences in Russian diplomacy, mainly under Clinton. Talbott was a classmate of mine at Yale (a “big guy on campus” who I would have recognized from a distance, but never spoke to). He was a Russian major and scholar of the house. He got a Rhodes Scholarship the same year Clinton did and was Clinton’s roommate at Oxford. After 3 years at Oxford, he got a job with Time Magazine, and almost immediately was assigned the task of translating Khrushchev’s memoirs. Under Clinton, he was a deputy secretary of state, and focused on the countries of the former Soviet Union.
The book’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. It reads like “The Red Badge of Courage” of diplomacy — a first-person, front-line account of day-to-day diplomatic action. It’s vivid and engaging. It gives you sense of what it might be like to be a diplomat dealing with US relations with Russia, at a crucial period of Russia’s history. But at the same time it does not provide a context, doesn’t give a sense of the overall meaning of what is happening.
Since the subject is Russia, I can’t help but think of Tolstoy’s criticism, in “War and Peace”, of personality-focused history books. He found it absurd that historians write as if what Napoleon had for breakfast one day or the fact that he had a cold on another made a major difference in the outcome of battles and the destiny of nations. He took the extreme position that individuals have no significant effect on history, and that we should focus our attention instead on the broader picture — for instance that millions of men marched from one end of Europe to another and back again.
I’m also reminded of the Emperor in the Star Wars movies. He doesn’t fret over day-to-day events. He doesn’t even seem concerned about which side wins which battle. Destabilization of any kind will help create the conditions necessary to make the Republic obsolete and to put him in control.
And, of course, I’m reminded of Asimov’s early Foundation novels, where Hari Seldon and his psychohistory focus on broad changes, not just on a single planet, but throughout the galaxy, and over the course of thousands of years.
Take the case of the US invasion of Iraq (which happened after what is described in “Russia Hand”). To try to determine the “cause” and the possible “meaning” of events, you could focus on the personalities and ambitions of Saddam Hussein and Bush and Putin and Tony Blair. Or you could focus on the effect of actions in the Middle East on the price of oil, and the profits of the companies involved in the “rebuilding”. Or you could step back still further and see that the main results were 1) destabilization of the Middle East, creating a situation in which divisions between countries and within countries were intensified and in which coordinated action became unimaginable for a generation or even longer; 2) Europe, which had been on the brink of full union, became divided, with a new emphasis on differing national interests, postponing full union for at least a decade, and perhaps much longer. If there were an “Emperor” or a Hari Seldon in the background, those are the kinds of developments that would matter. And regardless of the immediate “causes”, you’d want to sort out who benefits from such developments and how.
As it stands today, “Russia Hand” is a very good book that illuminates
events you read and heard about as they unfolded. But Talbott could elevate
this work to a classic by adding a final chapter that puts the events he
describes so well into a much broader context and considers the long-term
trends and consequences, and weighs if and how the actions of individuals,
like himself, can matter.
On Saturday, March 29, for a couple of hours I couldn’t get to dozens of popular sites, despite the fact that my Internet connection was functioning and there was nothing wrong with my computer. The sites were all reachable/ping-able, but the Web pages kept timing out before they could load.
I called support at my ISP (a cable company) and at my Web host (becasue I couldn’t get to my own site), and nobody seemed to know what was going on.
Then I noticed at the bottom of my browser screen that in all cases the pages stopped loading while trying to get pieces from Google. Then it occurred to me that all my pages have at least three Google scripts — ads from Adsense, a search box, and a tracking code from Google Analytics. And millions of other sites also have Google scripts on all their pages.
It turned out that Google didn’t go down that day. Rather my cable provider had a problem with “dirty” signals on my block, which they fixed the next morning.
When I heard that, I realized that the pages that had timed out were cached (saved) on my computer. Those were the pages that I go to most often, so my browser saves them to speed loading. But when those pages have scripts calling for pieces from Google or other sites that are slow or unreachable the loading stalls.
This experience made me wonder how Google has structured their servers. If a cached page won’t load when Google is unreachable because my Internet connection is down, then pages from many of the most popular and useful sites on the Web wouldn’t load if Google went down.
Please keep in mind that I am non-technical. I’m a writer, not an engineer.
But it’s common knowledge that the US Army through DARPA originally designed the Internet to be disaster-proof, making it so there was no central point of control. Much of what I appreciate most in the Internet culture derives from its basic anarchic design. If one part fails, signals pass around that point and business continues pretty much as normal.
And I have a sinking feeling that our increasing dependence on Google creates a risk that that initial design was meant to guard against.
I would certainly hope that for its search functions Google has redundant servers situated geographically remote from one another, so if an earthquake or other disaster hit headquarters, business could continue with very little disruption. (Not just remote backup, and the remote ability to continue to operate normally). That would seem to make obvious business sense, though I have no knowledge that it is in fact the case.
What most concerns me is the other services and applications of Google, like advertising, which require Web site owners to put Google scripts on all their pages, and which mean that in loading an ordinary Web page, pieces from Google need to load as well.
I suspect and fear that those scripts are all calling on servers at a single physical site and that if disaster struck that site, much of the Web could suddenly become unreachable.
Does anyone know if Google has redundant capacity at other physical sites so business for their Web-site partners could continue uninterrupted? From my experience on Saturday I am concerned that much of the Web that we now take for granted and depend upon could be at serious risk.
Of course, the simplest solution would be for Google to include in its scripts a piece of time-out code — that if the Google servers don’t respond within 15 or 30 seconds, the script stops and the page loads normally without that Google-provided piece of information.
I believe that Google should reassure the Internet community that this concern of mine is without merit, or that they have already dealt with that problem, or that they plan to have a solution in place soon.
If you know people who work on the engineering team at Google, could
you please forward this message to them?
Reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and the sequel, Catriona, I remembered that a couple of the Scottish family names that were prominent in those novels — Campbell and Drummond — appeared the book that covers my mother’s family tree “The Cary-Estes Genealogy”. Reading an intriguing but confusing passage there led me to double-check with Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/) And in a matter of minutes I was surfing rapidly through biographies of ancestors. Then I went back and covered the same ground slowly and carefully putting together Web pages that focused on particular lines, with links to the relevant Wikipedia entries.
Making a break-through like that in tracing my ancestry on the Web reminded me of the experience of Paul Atreus (”Muad-Dib”) in the novel “Dune.” Thanks to the effects of the “spice” and of his special genes, he suddenly senses the presence both individually and collectively of all his ancestors back for thousands of years.
If you are curious, please check http://www.samizdat.com/ancestorsurfing.html
You can get to the various lines from there.
Even if you have no connection to the Estes family, you might want
to check to see if you’d like to do something similar for your family.
Here’s the explanation I sent to relatives:
Following clues from pp. 83-86 of the Cary-Estes Genealogy book and using Wikipedia , I was able to trace the family ancestry back as far as 50 generations (to about 550 AD). The crucial piece of the puzzle is Charles Fleming, believed to be the son of John Fleming who owned 493 acres in New Kent County, Virginia, and died in 1686. As the book notes, it is believed that John was son of the probable immigrant to America, Sir Thomas Fleming, the second son of Lord John Fleming and his wife Lilias Graham. The line from Lord John Fleming leads back to James I (Stewart or Stuart) King of Scotland (1394-1437). With political marriages among the royal families of Europe (as part of political alliances), that piece of information leads to ancestors who were kings of England and France, Holy Roman Emperors, Emperors of the Byzantine Empire, princes of Kiev/Muscovy, and Viking chieftains. The ancestors include William the Conqueror and Charlemagne, King John (of Robin Hood and Magna Carta fame) and King Duncan I of Scotland (who was murdered by Macbeth), half a dozen saints, as well as the House of Este in Italy (by a very different route than family tradition — by way of the Cary family, rather than the Estes family) For many generations, both the father and mother are not only known, but also have entries in Wikipedia, which links to their parents.
Keep in mind that, except in cases of people who are related to one another marrying each other, the number of your ancestors doubles with each generation. That would mean that you could have as many as a quadrillion ancestors in 550 AD. But there were only about two hundred million people alive at that time. You might conclude that just about everybody alive today is descended from just about everybody who was alive back then. But just a few hundred years ago, most people lived in rural areas, with little travel and little contact with people in other towns, much less other countries. It was common for a family to stay in the same small geographic area for many generations (except when driven away by catastrophe, such as war, plague, and famine). That meant lots of inter-marriage, with everybody in a town being cousins to one another. (From a biological viewpoint, war, plague, and famine may have been “necessary” to change/expand the gene pool and increase the likelihood that mankind would survive). In any case, very few people can trace their ancestry back four or five generations, much less 50.
I have followed a few of the lines of descent as far back as I could trace. But literally thousands of other lines are possible. You can surf through those others by using the Wikipedia links in the following documents. At the very least, this should give you a new and personal appreciation for history.
My starting point for numbering generations is Adela (my first grandchild). If you are a relative of mine, check your generation number (I’m in generation 3). Then, as far as we can determine with available information, you are a direct descendant of (have the genes of) everyone in these lists with a higher generation number than yours.
* Adela to Adela, 31 generations — line back to Adela
of Champagne (1140-1206), Queen of France, wife of Louis VII, King of France
* Adela to Kings of France, 41 generations — line
back to about 800, including most of the rulers of the Capet dynasty, such
as Louis IX (Saint Louis, for whom the city was named) of the Crusades
* Adela to Viking Kings and Kings of England (House
of Plantagenet), 49 generations — line back to the heroes of the Norse
Sagas, including all the kings of England for hundreds of years, back to
William the Conqueror
* Adela to Kings of Scotland (Houses of Alpin and
Dunkeld), 50 generations — line back to the 6th century, including Duncan
I, who was murdered by Macbeth
* Adela to Charlemagne and Beyond, 51 generations
* Adela to Byzantine Emperors, 36 generations
* Adela to the House of Este, 38 generations
Other lines I hope to find, explore, and add here:
* Princes of Kiev
* Kings of Scotland (House of Stewart or Stuart)
* Kings of England before the Norman Conquest
* Kings of Wales (hopefully leading to some legendary
connection with King Arthur)
* Kings of France from the Merovingian Dynasty (purported
descendants of Mary Magdalene in the novel The Da Vinci Code)
* Any line (such as Byzantine Emperors) that can
lead back to ancient Rome
Ebay just sent out an email to all their sellers announcing loudly that they just “reduced listing fees”. If you took the time to look at the details, they reduced the insertion fee by five cents for items with sale prices from $1 to $24.99. A drop from $.40 to $.35 for items $1 to 9.99. They also made “gallery” free. That’s a picture appearing beside your listing in Ebay search results. They used to charge 35 cents for that. From my selling experience, it wasn’t worth anything.Â
What they failed to mention in the email, but that you could discover by following the links and reading the small print, is that raised the “final value fee” — a percentage of the sales price. For items that sell for $.01 to $25, that went up from 10% to 12% — a very hefty fee. For a $25 item that’s a fee increase of $.45.Â
So the net effect for a seller of a $25 item is 5 cents less for the insertion and 45 cents more for the final value fee, or an increase of 40 cents.
In the early days, I used to consider the Ebay final value fee as the equivalent/substitute of sales tax. It was annoying, but it wasn’t high enough to interfere with business. Now it has reached a level that hurts. I’m seriously considering whether it makes sense for me to do business at Ebay.
Does anyone know of a serious competitor to Ebay? Maybe I’ve been asleep at the wheel and have missed it. Please clue me in.Â
If there isn’t one, I certainly hope one emerges soon to challenge Ebay’s monopolistic position.
If you have a Windows PC and read your books on your computer screen,
you should download the free Mobipocket Reader and give it a try. This
is software designed for portable gadgets like Blackberry and Palm and
those that use Windows Mobile. But there’s a version that works great on
Windows PCs, presenting the text on your screen in a very easy to read
format. Just go to http://www.mobipocket.com/en/DownloadSoft/ProductDetailsReader.asp
 and click the red download button in the right column. After you’ve
installed it, try moving some of your plain text books (like the ones I
email you). Just open the reader software, click on Import (from the selections
at the top of the screen), then in the drop-down menu that appears click
on Text document, then navigate to select the file you want. In a few seconds,
the software creates a copy in its special format (.prc) and puts that
copy in a new folder (My Ebooks, under My Documents). The book appears
on your screen ready to read, in a format that lets you flip pages (left
to right), rather than scroll down. (Thanks to David Green in Idaho for
pointing this out to me).
A reader asked:
I am teacher in VA. I am currently reading an article on hypertext design. I was fascinated by the following difference between hypertext and print pages: “Print design is typically linear and continuous in nature (where each page provides information aiding in the comprehension of future pages) whereas hypertext design is generally non-linear and requires that each page be independent in terms of its content (in that the viewer may enter the site through any number of pages within the web).
It is quite interesting to know that hypertext is non-linear in nature. I was wondering… what are the advantages of non-linear instructional design in student-centered, constructivist learning? Any disadvantages?
I appreciate your thoughts and ideas.
__________________________
My answer:
It is not non-linear. Rather it is multi-linear or rather multi-path (since it has nothing to do with lines).
You do not go to pages in isolation.
Rather you go from one page to another by multiple paths, defined by the designer, like one of those old branching adventure stories.
At any page, you have a number of choices.
If you are designing those pages as a teacher, you would probably want to organize those choices by difficulty and interest.
You would also want to make it easy for the student to navigate back to major decision points and follow another path.
Think of it like multi-universe theory.
Or like your life.
Every decision you make, changes your perspective and puts you in a position to make other decisions (some new, some modified).
That’s much more life-like than reading a single book page-by-page from start to finish.
It would be far more difficult to describe the experience of reading just from one page to the next to someone who had never deal with a traditional book before, than it would be to describe navigating through a hyperlinked environment.
To be complete, I should add something about search [both site-specific and covering the whole Web] as an alternate means of navigation. And for more advanced students, who aren’t as likely to wander aimlessly as beginners, you also should consider links to off-site resources, for instance to Wikipedia. In that case there is no link back. The student has to use the back button instead. The risk of wandering would be a major disadvantage for beginners and for students who are easily distracted. For experienced and motivated students, the additional resources are an enormous advantage, and even when they get lost they can learn a great deal.
So if I were doing the design, I’d have at least three different learning environment. The one for beginnings would be completely closed (perhaps not connected to the Internet), with all navigation by way of links. The second environment would add search, but limited to the school’s Web site. The third environment would include links to major off-site resources (like Wikipedia) as well as the ability to search the entire Web.
Students could advance from the one environment to the next by demonstrating their ability and motivation. I don’t mean by passing tests, but rather by producing high quality creative work.
I hope that helps.
A
library for the price of a book.
Published by Samizdat Express, 213 Deerfield Lane, West Roxbury, MA 02132. (203) 553-9925. seltzer@samizdat.com
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