Kevin's diary is updated sporadically and includes a recurring cast of characters. If you have any comments, send mail to kdrum@home.com, but be forewarned that I probably won't answer….

Monday, March 31, 1997

Did you know that a septillionth of a second is called a yoctosecond?

Rick asked today if the word judgment used to be more commonly spelled judgement. Answer: according to my dictionary, judgment is the correct spelling but judgement is an acceptable alternative spelling. No historical information was given, but the oldest English book on my reference shelf is a copy of the King James Bible, which uses the word repeatedly (as you can undoubtedly imagine) and spells it judgment throughout. So, since God and the Microsoft Word spell checker agree, I think we'll stick with the spelling judgment here at DrumNet....

Sunday, March 30, 1997

A few years ago I bought a book called Chung Kuo, by David Wingrove. It turned out to be a great selection, and for its first 300 pages it was just the kind of enthralling, can't-put-it-down science fiction epic that I live for. But then, halfway through, I began to notice something disturbing: it was moving along a little...um, slowly. There was no way it could finish up in the next 300 pages, could it?

Well, no. In fact, it turned out to be the first of a seven-part series (a heptology?), so I put it down and decided to wait for all seven volumes to come out. Yesterday I bought White Moon, Red Dragon, the sixth book in the series, which means the conclusion can't be far off, and I'm looking forward to this with both lust and loathing: it's going to be a great read, but it's also going to be about 4000 pages long and will probably suck up my entire reading bandwidth for a good couple of months or so. It's hard to believe that Wingrove really needed three times the length of War and Peace to properly tell his story....

Tennis magazine ran a pretty interesting article this month about whether the new, bigger rackets were ruining the game. They gave an old wood racket, a normal modern racket, and an extra-long 32" racket to Mark Philippoussis and had him hit a bunch of serves. It turned out that he was able to serve about as well with all three.

However, the article also included a passing comment about how Philippoussis' serve would have been illegal 20 years ago because the foot fault rules were different. Apparently you weren't allowed to jump, or else you weren't allowed to cross the imaginary plane of the baseline during the service motion, or something like that (I couldn't find out anywhere exactly what the rule change was). With all the recent talk about big serves ruining the men's game, this brings to mind an interesting solution: instead of making new and artificial rules governing technology, why not just bring back the old foot fault rules?

Lost to Dvorman 2-6, 2-6 (year-to-date record 2-17). I was jello-man on the court today, just flopping around without any control over my poor, tired limbs. My forehand was good, though, although I sure was hitting the tape a lot.

Dave and I talked about Java after we played, and he has become a serious convert. I'm still not convinced. The arguments pro and con seem to be these:

Dave thinks that everyone is jumping on the Java bandwagon and that before long every app is going to be written in Java. I doubt that very much, since rewriting your codebase in Java takes a lot of time and has virtually no benefit to your customers. If you have a choice of spending a year rewriting your app in Java or spending a year adding features that your customers are asking for, the choice for most developers is going to be pretty easy. Dave concedes that it's probably not feasible for everyone to rewrite their existing code in Java but thinks that it's clearly the best platform for writing new applications.

There's also the problem with development tools. Most large applications rely on toolkits of various kinds, and you can't rewrite your app in Java unless all the toolkits you use also support Java. For example, we could not rewrite Ascent Capture in Java unless both Softbridge and ImageControls supported Java development, and we would also have to figure out some way to help our customers convert all their VB release scripts to work under Java. Likewise, if we ported ImageControls to Java we would have to continue to support the ActiveX version until all our ImageControls developers ported their apps to Java, which means supporting two separate sets of code until Java becomes ubiquitous. Heck, it's taking a long time just to get everyone to move from 16-bit to 32-bit, let alone from C to Java. This is a very large problem that's never mentioned in the popular press, and it works very strongly against a fast and widespread adoption of Java.

Still and all, it's going to be interesting to see how the whole Java thing plays out and how Microsoft reacts to it. I think it's interesting that the original hype about Java was related to the Internet and how you could download little Java applets in real time, while now it's talked about more as a development platform for large scale applications of all types.

At any rate, I think it may be time for me to find out for myself. Perhaps KConfig needs to be rewritten Java....

Friday, March 28, 1997

Rick Murphy has found an unusual solution to the problem of bifocals. He buys disposable contacts and changes them daily so they don't irritate his eyes, but he buys two separate prescriptions. In one eye he wears a contact for distance vision and in the other eye he wears one for close-up work. He claims that the brain adjusts to this very quickly and allows you to see perfectly at all times with no effort. Charlene does the same thing: she only needs glasses for reading, so she wears a contact in one eye and leaves the other free.

I'll have to tell Dave Thiessen about this....

Thursday, March 27, 1997

The cover of Time last week asked "Does Heaven Exist?" This week, the cover of Newsweek concerned itself with "The Mystery of Prayer: Does God Play Favorites?" and TV Guide featured a cover story titled "God and Television." Quite a resurgence in religious sensitivity among our national news media, no?

And now, as promised last Sunday, here's some further economic research from the nonpartisan gnomes here at DrumNet. I talked to Dean today about the time lag I should use for this analysis, and he surprised me by opting for six years. Seems like a long time, but it's no problem to rejigger the spreadsheets for any given time lag, so I went ahead and calculated GDP growth, inflation rate, and unemployment rate for time lags of 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 years. I'm going to leave out the detail this time and get straight to the results:

I still don't know if this proves anything, but the results are amazingly consistent: no matter what time lag you pick, the Democrats produce higher GDP growth and lower unemployment, and with time lags of 4, 5, and 6 years they produce lower average inflation as well.

Political analysis of these results is left as an exercise for the reader....

Wednesday, March 26, 1997

Russ, Rick Murphy, and I went to Boise today to see HP. For lunch, they wheeled in a big tray full of baked potatoes and fixins.

No, this isn't a joke. It really happened.

Sunday, March 23, 1997

Kevin's advice for the day: Never read a magazine that contains ads for collectible plates, statues, medals, dolls, or other bric-a-brac that can be purchased on installment.

We held Melinda's birthday brunch today, and the topics of conversation at our end of the table were: Xena the Warrior Princess (Rick thinks the show is a kick), the poor state of tomatoes these day (everyone, but everyone, seems to agree about this), the questionable state of strawberries these days (apparently, a new variety is now on the market and David recommends buying strawberries from the stand on the corner of Jeffrey and Walnut, where they still grow the Chandler variety), Kathy's roommate who only lasted for a week (she got arrested for shoplifting and then sentenced fairly harshly because it was her third strike), the Thiessens' new 56K modem (David so far hasn't been able to verify that it actually works at 56K), and how long it takes to get from Pennsylvania to Hong Kong (my guess is upwards of 17 hours or so).

And now for today's main event, a report on recent U.S. economic performance by the dedicated team of politico-financial analysts here at DrumNet....

Rick made a comment on Friday night that went like this: "Over the last hundred years, government spending has averaged 16% under Republicans and 18% under Democrats, which goes to show that there's not much difference between them." Or something like that (apologies to Rick for my vague recollection of what he said).

This got me to thinking: in general, does the economy perform better under Democrats or Republicans? My guess is that the answer is "about the same," but I figured this ought to be testable (in a crude way at least), so I set about to do it. First, I made the following assumptions:

• I would use real GDP growth as a measure of economic healthiness. There are plenty of other measures that are important, but if you had to pick one, this would probably be it.
  
  
• I would measure only postwar performance. I had three reasons for this:
  
  
  • The economy was significantly different before World War II, so comparisons with today's economy are pretty problematic.
  • Before World War II, the federal government didn't really even have economic policies as we understand them today. It wasn't until after the war that the idea that government could (and should) try to manage the economy really took hold.
  • I couldn't find much data for years prior to 1947.
    
    
• I would use a time lag of three years. Obviously, a president inherits an economy from his predecessor and should not be held responsible for its performance until his policies have had a chance to have an effect. My reasoning for picking three years goes like this: Eisenhower (for example) takes office in 1953, spends his first year formulating policies and submitting his first budget, the new policies become law in 1954, and they begin affecting the economy two years later, in 1956.

After a bit of searching, HotBot returned a page that had exactly the yearly GDP figures that I needed, and I fed these into an Excel spreadsheet. Without further ado, here are the results:

From here it's just simple arithmetic to come up with our final answer:

So, perhaps surprisingly, the Democratic administrations win by quite a wide margin, 3.41% to 3.0%. And since spreadsheets are such wonderful, malleable things, I even changed the time lag to see if that would make a difference. It did, but the Democrats still won every time. With a lag of two years it's 3.28% to 3.09%, with a lag of four years it's 3.64% to 2.80%, and with no lag it's a stunning 4.15% to 2.41% difference.

So what does it all mean? Beats me, but of course all this begs the question of why (or if) this matters. After all, it's policies that make a difference, not parties, and despite the rhetoric I'd be hard pressed to come up with very much in the way of economic policies that are genuinely different between the parties. So, even assuming this analysis is reasonable, it leaves us without any underlying reasons for why Democratic administrations perform better than Republican ones.

Coming soon: I'll perform the same kind of postwar time-lag analysis on inflation rates and unemployment rates. Fun, fun, fun!

Saturday, March 22, 1997

Lost to Dvorman today 4-6, 4-6 (year-to-date record: 2-15). My only consolation was a picture perfect topspin backhand passing shot in the second set.

Friday, March 21, 1997

Unbelievably grim bridge night: I barely even had a responding hand all night and managed to score zero in two consecutive rubbers. Final score:

David has clearly leapt into a commanding lead in bridge....

Thursday, March 20, 1997

Germans have been in the news lately, thanks to their ban on Scientology coupled with the recent publication of a couple of books about the complicity of ordinary Germans in the Holocaust. The question seems to be: Is there something rotten at the core of German culture? Did the Holocaust prove that Germans are more bigoted, more amoral, and more murderous than other nationalities?

Let's consider the evidence. First, let's take a look, just off the top of my head, at instances of genocide in the 20th century alone:

And this doesn't even count Mao's Cultural Revolution, the Ugandan massacres of the 70s, or the "ethnic cleansings" in the former Yugoslavia a few years ago.

So was the Holocaust truly different? Well, yes, it was, and not just because the number of victims was so large. There really was something more chilling about its character: highly planned, technologically executed, widely participated in, and more cold-blooded than any of the others mentioned above. And yet, consider:

• The Germans tried to make amends afterward. If this seems like a pathetically inadequate apologia, note that not a single one of the perpetrators in the list above ever even admitted that the killings took place, let alone showed the tiniest contrition.
  
  
• It wasn't just the Germans. Many Poles, for example, actively aided the Holocaust, and very few other countries made any effort to help the Jews. France stood aside, as did Switzerland, Austria, and others, and both the United States and the Vatican remained largely silent even after the evidence about what was happening became insurmountable.
  
  
• The Holocaust is only the most recent of centuries of persecution of Jews. Jewish pogroms were a common feature of European history from at least the 13th century onward, in virtually every country on the continent. Germany had no special lock on anti-Semitism.

The Germans bear a considerable burden of guilt for their actions during the Holocaust. However, I think that those who try to blame something special in the German character are protesting too much. The all too transparent corollary is that they themselves (or their country or their religion or their ethnic group) simply couldn't ever follow in Nazi footsteps. But let's face it: vicious and evil acts of mass murder are a distinctive characteristic of Homo sapiens, not of Germans, and the fact that the Holocaust was so thoroughly carried out is more a reflection of German efficiency and modern technology than anything else.

In the 19th century the U.S. government sponsored a brutal policy of repression that resulted in the massacre of millions of Native Americans. In the first half of the 20th century our goverment turned a blind eye to the semi-organized lynching of upwards of a thousand African Americans. Yet today, less than 50 years after blacks were first allowed to serve alongside whites in the military and sit alongside whites at lunch counters, we are busily dismantling the programs that have constituted our only official acts of penitence for this mistreatment. It would be sophistry of the worst kind to pretend that any of this matches the malignancy of the Holocaust, but the seeds are there, and they are probably closer to the surface than most of us would like to admit.

So who was to blame for the Holocaust? Christians? Germans? Whites? The only honest answer is: human beings, that's who.

Saturday, March 15, 1997

Split sets with Dvorman today 6-3, 1-6 to take my 1997 record against him to 2-13. I was about ready to collapse after the end of the first set; I hope this wasn't a sign that it was a mistake to play.

(I've always had a vague feeling that hard exercise is good for a cold. I checked this out with Staz once and he confirmed that moderate exercise was fine and that the "get plenty of rest" advice just meant that you should get a full night's sleep. However, I'm not sure if what I did this morning counts as "moderate" or if maybe I overdid it.)

I saw the re-release of Return of the Jedi today, and I still think it was the best of the three Star Wars movies. A real elemental battle, that, and the showdown between Luke and the emperor is one of the most visually arresting cinematic sequences ever. I didn't even mind the Ewoks much this time around. The film did leave me with a few questions, though:

• How did the emperor learn the force? From Yoda? (I guess not. According to the Star Wars web site, "Nobody knows how the Emperor gained mastery of the dark side of the Force." Sheesh.)
• What's the deal with the two Russian-y looking escorts that the emperor converses with for a few moments right before Luke is brought up? We never see them again after that.
• How come the emperor doesn't show up at the end smiling down at Luke from force-heaven? I guess maybe he didn't manage to repent before he got blown up...?
• Is there a force-hell? Is that where the emperor went?
• Both Luke and Darth Vader seem able to levitate themselves. How come the emperor couldn't do that when Vader tossed him into the power core?
• What's an open power core doing in the emperor's throne room anyway?
• If Leia is Luke's sister, how did she become a princess? And what is she princess of, anyway?

I wonder if these questions will be answered in the new Star Wars trilogy Lucas is making? I imagine that the Russian-y escorts will forever remain a mystery, but maybe a few of the others will get resolved.

Friday, March 14, 1997

Maybe I don't have a cold, after all. It's still hanging around, I'm tired as hell, my head is congested (but not my nose, really), and I have a mildly upset stomach. I canceled my Optika trip, for fear of getting yet another ear infection on the airplane, which didn't make David any too happy, and I don't seem to be getting any better. I've had an awfully hard time paying attention to people at work this week, and I'm mostly just sort of floating tiredly through each day. This better go away soon.

I finally finished Infinite Jest last night. Great book, but it sure was l-o-o-o-o-o-ng.

Tuesday, March 11, 1997

This cold is a killer. It just seems to keep hanging in and in and in. It better be gone by Sunday, when I have to fly to Optika.

I got a "2nd and final notice" from IDT today about the $39.90 that they claim was outstanding when I cancelled my account with them. I was just in the middle of scrawling a nasty note on it and sending it back, when I checked January's diary and found that I signed up with Concentric in early January, which means I must have signed up with Netcom in mid-December, which might very well mean that I didn't cancel IDT until after January 1. So maybe I really do owe them money for January....

The whole thing still torques me, though. IDT's service was horrifically bad: busy signals about half the time and incredibly slow connections when I did manage to get on. They are as sorry an excuse for an ISP as I've ever encountered.

Saturday, March 8, 1997

Lost to Dvorman today 2-6, 1-6. My cold made me pretty sluggish on court, but it actually seemed to affect my concentration more than my physical stamina. It's hard to believe, but it seemed like I was watching the ball even less than usual.

And speaking of stamina, I guess I really should go see Staz about my breathing. For the last six months or so I've felt as if I have a sort of permanent, mild athsma that gets me winded on court way faster than I used to get. I can't serve and volley at all anymore because after about three games of rushing the net I'm too exhausted to keep it up. (This is no great loss to my game, mind you, but it is a fun thing to do as well as a good mix-it-up weapon to have in my arsenal.)

Friday, March 7, 1997

No bridge tonight. I'm coming down with a cold and Dave, brave man that he is, didn't want to risk sitting across the table from me.

Thursday, March 6, 1997

Annoying thing #843: People who don't know how stop signs work.

On my way to work this morning I stopped at an intersection at the same time as a red Taurus. A few seconds later a pickup truck pulled up alongside the Taurus. As the pickup truck stopped, the Taurus (which had the right of way) pulled into the intersection, and then, a few seconds later, the pickup pulled out too, cutting me off.

Has this ever happened to you too? It's sure happened to me a few hundred times. Apparently, a lot of people think the operative law governing stop signs is that you can pull out whenever you feel like you've waited too long.

Yeah, I'm whining. So sue me.

Wednesday, March 5, 1997

Can somebody please explain to me why, after several weeks, there's still such a fuss about Bill Clinton letting big campaign contributors spend the night at the White House? Or having little coffee klatches with them? Or with Al Gore using White House telephones (with the bills paid by the DNC, mind you) to solicit contributions? I'll grant that the Asian donor thing seems kinda smelly, but the rest of this "scandal" is just surreal. The core problem seems to be the possibility that these donors might have gotten special access to the President, and Republicans are shocked, just shocked, by this.

Give me a break. Does anyone seriously think that large contributors to any campaign don't get special access to the candidate? I mean, isn't that what it's all about? Am I the only one who thinks it's a little hard to get very exercised about this?

(As an aside, the really amazing thing about all this isn't that Clinton was willing to let people sleep in the Lincoln bedroom in return for $100,000 donations, but that he was able to get the donations so cheap. Why, back when men were men and giants roamed the earth, you would have had to promise a lucrative tax break or at least a little help with a government contract to get a hundred grand, but Clinton seems to have gotten off a whole lot cheaper. There's an amazing talent of some sort at work there, that's for sure.)

And while we're on the subject of Clinton, can anyone explain the sheer hatred he engenders among so many conservatives? There's certainly no reason for them to like him, but they mostly treat him as if he were the antichrist, despite a pretty middle-of-the-road record. He's moderately liberal (somewhere between Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson), moderately honest (better than Nixon and Johnson, worse than Carter and Bush), and moderately wishy washy (probably better than Bush and Carter, worse than Nixon and Reagan). I can't say that I'm a big fan of his, but what has he done that's so bad that a significant portion of the country apparently believes that he personally had Vince Foster shot and then ordered the Secret Service to dump his body in Arlington Cemetery? Hell, Nixon was about as unhinged a president as we've ever had, and even he never got accused of ordering a mob hit....

Tuesday, March 4, 1997

Slogan for the software industry (sighted at Web Pages That Suck): "Quality is Job 1.1"

Sunday, March 2, 1997

This business about talking in theaters is getting out of hand. The last five movies I've been to have had talkers in them, even Hamlet for chrissake, and I'm getting tired of it. Anybody up for trying to pass a law (with draconian penalties of course) against talking during movies?

I'm still plowing through Infinite Jest, which is by far the densest piece of fiction I've ever tackled. After three weeks I've gotten through about 400 pages, and it's a very weird experience: I can't put it down, but I also can't ingest more than about 30 or 40 pages at a sitting. Infinite Jest is the only piece of fiction I've ever read that has footnotes, and after checking out the Web last night I discovered that in the original 1700 page manuscript, 400 of the pages were footnotes. However, due to careful editing (honest!) the published book is only 1079 pages long, 100 of them footnotes. The author, David Foster Wallace, is a 34 year old English professor at the University of Illinois. I wonder if he'll get tenure? I wonder if he cares?

Saturday, March 1, 1997

No tennis today. Dave's birthday is this weekend and Karen has taken him out of town to celebrate.

I have been noticing the different ways that people argue recently, and a particular style that's intruded on my consciousness lately is one that I'll call (for lack of a better term) the let's pretend we're arguing against a straw man method. In other words, pretend that your opponent has taken a much more radical position than he really has, and then find a counterexample. It goes something like this:

Of course, Person A in our little melodrama didn't say that all basketball players are tall, but often it seems that even when a statement is carefully hedged and qualified, we automatically assume it's more sweeping than it is and try to pick holes in it. It's an astonishingly common reaction, and completely destructive to interesting discourse as well. I wonder what causes it?

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