2007
198 posts under this date.
The other day dad told me he considered Mexico’s relative economic self-sufficiency—that if we had to, we could, more or less, feed ourselves and scrape some living with only our national resources—one of our greatest strengths. I didn’t buy it. At all. Self-sufficiency seems to me a much overrated, much idealized kind of economic independence.
I’m not self-sufficient, neither is my father, and I’m willing to bet that if you’re reading this, neither are you. Neither is anyone that lives in a city. The only truly self-sufficient people left in Mexico (and in the world)—indians who mostly grow and tend their own food, weave their clothing, and build their huts—live in what we call extreme poverty. Not all poor people are self-sufficient but all self-sufficient people are poor. The more self-sufficient the poorer. The more self-sufficient the more bounded to their own meager abilities, to their own fragile circumstances, to the weather (now when’s the last time you worried about it?).
“Rather than its opposite, competition is cooperation’s complement.”
We, the codependent, have made a different bargain with the world. We betted on specialization and cooperation, and I stand by that decision. It has given us far more wealth and independence than our forebears dreamt of. I don’t think you wake up at night scared of how much the butcher has over you because the only thing you know how to do is sing. Modern cooperation is breathtaking, isn’t it? This MacBook from which I write you, this computer in which you’re reading me—they required the work and talent of thousands of people around the globe.
All this begs the question: Why? What ties these invisible threads of people around the world into building the things you need? Why don’t you fear your butcher will extort you? Why are we all so reckless as to depend on each other for our very sustenance? The answer is trade and competition. Trade is simply the name we’ve given to peaceful cooperation and is the fiber that binds the world. On the other hand, competition, as much as it’s been demonized, is simply the prerequisite of cooperation—rather than being cooperation’s opposite, it is its complement. You don’t fear your butcher because you can always go to another one (or become one!)—it’s as simple as that. Cooperation without competition is indeed the fragile, vulnerable dependence most people rightly fear. Cooperation and competition—free trade, that is—is the resilient, magic codependence to which we owe our wealth and our freedom. (Think about it the next time you hear of a trade barrier of any kind, realize how it ultimately makes you more dependent, more subject to the whims of the special interests pandered.)
So no, I don’t think our relative national self-sufficiency is anything to be particularly proud of. It’s a blessing that we live in such a fertile, bountiful land. If we turn it into an excuse for isolation it’ll be our curse.
What is courage? Courage is what it takes to overcome fearELZR.
By describing how my own failures of courage feel to me, I hope to help you recognize such failures in yourselves. I seek to encourage you. I mean that literally. I seek to extend your courage by making you aware of your need for it and by describing some symptoms of its failure. I will offer some ways to reduce your need for courage, to marshal what courage you can muster, and to husband your store of it.
I don’t even remember how it was that last Thursday morning I ended up reading Sutherland’s classic article. But I’m glad I did. It was exactly what I needed. Thank you Mr Sutherland.
A: There are great, quirky restaurants a plenty in Guadalajara!
B: Fex?
A: Nippondo, La Zanahoria, Los Burritos de Moyagua, Las Corajes, La Fuente, Hotel Victoria, Santuario,...!
The classic example of the Web 2.0 era is the “mash-up”— fex, connecting a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps to create a new, more useful service that automatically shows the location of each rental listing.
With markets becoming saturated and mobile operators’ revenue-growth slowing—there are already 112 mobile devices for every 100 Austrians, fex—providing information about travel patterns could be a lucrative opportunity for telecoms firms.
The day has been, I grieve to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing as, in England fex, the inferior races of animals are still.
Think of the arms races that go on between one or two animals living the same environment. Fex the race between the Amazonian manatee and a particular type of reed that it eats. The more of the reed the manatee eats, the more the reed develops silica in its cells to attack the teeth of the manatee and the more silica in the reed, the more manatee’s teeth get bigger and stronger.
It may only be that my grandfather’s agony has me seeing everything with long-now eyes but these days I’m increasingly aware that I should take precautions in case I die.
I don’t want to die. I don’t shake my head and look away at death, I stand up in defiance. But the fact is our lives are still too fragile and faced with the possibility I would rather think things through.
Which is why I’ve written this short will. I shall edit and refine it as long as I’m living (with the latest version the official one, of course) and so I thought I should start now.
I name Chemie, my sister, as my executor
If I die, I
wish a 1-night wake with
Yann Tiersen’s discography as background soundtrack
no prayers or religious services of any kind
Eliezer Yudkowsky’s letter
read in English & Spanish at the wake
printed and given to everyone at departure
to be buried
wish my grave be marked by a white granite slab embedded on the ground (recumbent desk style)
on the slab, I wish this text (and nothing else) engraved verbatim:
eliazar parra cardenas
“I was so happy!”
elzr.com
wish for a pink Primavera tree seed to be planted behind my headstone so that one day its shadow may cover it
wish to donate all my organs
wish to donate all my books to the ITESM Campus Guadalajara’s library, except those that friends or family want to keep
wish anything I’ve written, coded, designed, or in any other way produced, to be released to the public domain
wish to give Jane (my desktop computer) to Chemie and Wu (my macbook) to Chefi
wish any other material possession of mine to be donated to charity, except those that friends or family want to keep
wish elzr.com be kept online, fully-enabled, forever
wish this to be posted as soon as possible
title: I was so happy!
body: I died.
salmon-of-doubt-ly, I wish that my entire harddrive be made available online (through elzr.com) to anyone for free, as technology permits (they’re 500gb after all)
particularly my “life-inside-one-big-text-file” text file and MyDocuments folder
wish that my gmail account be made available online (through elzr.com) to anyone for free
correspondents, however, may ask for any of their emails to be concealed and that wish shall be respected, as long as they live
If I were to fall into a likely irreversible comma, I
wish to be kept alive as long as it’s economically possible
wish to undergo any recovery treatment as soon as it has more than a 1% chance of success
wish that all the above death provisions be carried out, except of course the burying part and the organ donating one
Last Updated: 2007-02-15
Here 2 examples—a graph and a paragraph—from a typical article (about the paper industry’s dire prospects, of all things) in this week’s edition of The Economist.
Restructuring in the paper industry is proceeding at a furious pace. The first thing some paper companies have jettisoned is ownership of forests. International Paper (IP), one of the world’s biggest pulp-and-paper companies which is based in Tennessee, used to be the largest private landowner in America. A year ago the company sold 5.7m acres, or 90%, of its forestland—an area larger than Massachusetts. The $6.6 billion sale was “probably the hardest decision that I’ve had to make since I became CEO,” says John Faraci, IP’s boss since 2003. Most buyers were financial investors, but 5% of the land went to conservation groups.
Starting with the graph: it’s a 16-year window to worldwide newsprint production that drives home the article’s main point with eloquence: North America’s newsprint production (a fifth, you will notice, of the world’s; used to be a fourth) is slowly but decisively dwindling; production in the rest of the world, on the other hand, is increasing, albeit not in a hurry.
It’s full of conventions too, but they’re so well thought that you never need to be consciously aware of them as a reader: Take the upper-left red patch, a gentle way to guide your eyes to the graph’s title and instructions. The source always goes at the bottom, smaller-typed, and the y-axis is always labeled at the right, which I find more natural than the common left convention (it makes you look at the graph first, notice its pattern). The x-axis is usually the time axis, its gridlines usually obviated for clarity’s sake, and its labels, usually years, presented in a simple format that marks millennia only when needed. And graphs are always in this blue scheme—a convention to avoid color misinformation that still allows for meaningful distinctions between color shades: darker blue for the main variable under discussion, the foreground; lighter, fading blue(s) for the background variable(s).
As for the paragraph, it’s brimming with fascinating facts about the world. Did you know who the world’ biggest pulp-an-paper company was and that it was located in Tennessee (WP)—of all places? Did you know it also happened to be the largest private landowner in America? (A paper company! The largest private landowner in America!) Did you know it recently sold, because of restructuring, 90% of its forestland, 5.7m acres—an area larger than Massachusetts? Did you know it sold them for $6.6 billions? (Surprisingly cheap, considering it’s an area big enough for many a country.) Did you know most buyers were financial investors but 5% were conservation groups? (A wonderful example of how trade allocates resources, peacefully and quietly, to those who care about them.) Now you know.
With only one recently acquired cellphone (that gets some ten phone calls per month) I probably should have heeded David Pogue’s advice and skipped his NYT’s article introducing a new phone service (not available, of course, here in Mexico) that consolidates all your phone numbers into one (new) number. Geekiness prevailed and I carried on. Happily, for it is indeed a “rather brilliant melding of cellphone and the Internet.” Number consolidation is only the beginning, there are some quite intriguing (and yet so simple!) services on top and along.
..Anyone who spends some time contemplating GrandCentral’s possibilities will soon see the bigger picture: this service removes your location as a consideration in phone calling, much the same way that the TiVo makes a TV show’s broadcast time unimportant. In other words, GrandCentral has rewritten the rules in the game of telephone.
Who would have thought? What with the iPhoneELZR, Samsung’s touch-screen that mimics the feeling of pressing a mechanical button, Dodgeball, mobile phone maps, and now this, the dowdy “tele”-phone is interesting again.
Never had read anything by Larry WallWP before. I’m dazzled, through and through. Don’t walk, run out to read his Perl, the first postmodern computer language speech. It’s an important rambling, with a scope far beyond that of programming.
While I was digesting this, and thinking about how it applied to computer science, [My daughter] went on, “Well, it’s like, you know, we have this saying at school, when somebody gets uptight about something, we say: ’Tsall good. If someone is depressed, we say: ‘Tsall good.’’’
“But you don’t actually think everything is good, do you?”
“No, of course not.”
“Are you saying that everything has good elements in it?”
”No, Dad, I think when we say that, we’re saying that, overall, things are good. Like, look at the big picture, don’t just focus in on the two or three bad things that are happening to you right now.”
I report this conversation to you not just because I think my kids are cute and smart, but also because I think it’s important that we know where our culture is going, and because it’s our kids that will shape our culture in the future. I don’t think I could have defined postmodernism better than Heidi. Look at the big picture. Don’t focus in on two or three things to the exclusion of other things. Keep everything in context. Don’t go out of your way to justify stuff that’s obviously cool. Don’t ridicule ideas merely because they’re not the latest and greatest. Pick your own fashions. Don’t let someone else tell you what you should like. ’Tsall good.
That’s all well and good, but I ask you, if it’s all good, why, in every other breath, does my daughter say “That sucks.”?
A ”Jew” car plate (they’re assigned sequentially here in Guadalajara so there’ve been a lot of Jews lately):
A rather machista ad for pickups:
And, well, the bizarre machitoWP:
My first (self-)published joke. They should lock me.
All three of them long (9,000 words average), all three of them remarkable. Favorite to least-favorite-but-still-remarkable,
Unhappy Meals
By Michael Pollan
January 28, 2007
What should we eat?
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
..A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat “food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.
Darwin’s God
By Robin Marantz Henig
March 4, 2007
How can we explain belief in God?
Stephen Jay Gould, the famed evolutionary biologist at Harvard who died in 2002, and his colleague Richard Lewontin proposed “spandrel” to describe a trait that has no adaptive value of its own. They borrowed the term from architecture, where it originally referred to the V-shaped structure formed between two rounded arches. The structure is not there for any purpose; it is there because that is what happens when arches align.
In architecture, a spandrel can be neutral or it can be made functional. Building a staircase, for instance, creates a space underneath that is innocuous, just a blank sort of triangle. But if you put a closet there, the under-stairs space takes on a function, unrelated to the staircase’s but useful nonetheless. Either way, functional or nonfunctional, the space under the stairs is a spandrel, an unintended byproduct.
“Natural selection made the human brain big,” Gould wrote, “but most of our mental properties and potentials may be spandrels—that is, nonadaptive side consequences of building a device with such structural complexity.”
The possibility that God could be a spandrel offered Atran a new way of understanding the evolution of religion. But a spandrel of what, exactly?
Hardships of early human life favored the evolution of certain cognitive tools, among them the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm, to come up with causal narratives for natural events and to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions. Psychologists call these tools, respectively, agent detection, causal reasoning and theory of mind.
From 0 to 60 to World Domination
By Jon Gertner
February 18, 2007
A look at Toyota.
By any measure, Toyota’s performance last year, in a tepid market for car sales, was so striking, so outsize, that there seem to be few analogs, at least in the manufacturing world. A baseball team that wins 150 out of 162 games? Maybe. By late December, Toyota’s global projections for 2007 — the production of 9.34 million cars and trucks — indicated that it would soon pass G.M. as the world’s largest car company. For auto analysts, one of the more useful measures of consumer appeal is the “retail turn rate” — that is, the number of days a car sits on a dealer’s lot before it is turned over to a customer. As of November 2006, according to the Power Information Network, a division of J.D. Power & Associates that tracks such sales data, Toyota’s cars in the U.S. (including its Lexus and Scion brands) had an average turn rate of 27 days. BMW was second at 31; Honda was third at 32. Ford was at 82 and G.M. at 83. And Daimler-Chrysler was at 107. The financial markets reflected these contrasts. By year’s end, Toyota would record an annual net profit of $11.6 billion, and its market capitalization (the value of all its shares) would reach nearly $240 billion — greater than that of G.M., Ford, Daimler-Chrysler, Honda and Nissan combined.
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