Moral Concerns That Are .stupid

ICANN, the international non-profit that governs the naming scheme for the internet, has decided to allow “almost any domain suffix,” rather than limiting the options to the familiar .com, .org, .net., etc. This sounds like good news... but why the “almost”?

However, [ICANN chief executive Paul] Twomey told Agence France-Press that the organization will still try to block or reject any domain name that it deems inappropriate for security or moral reasons.

I’m trying to think of any good moral reason to reject any domain suffix. I can’t think of a single word or phrase that might be put in a domain suffix that isn’t already out there in the form of actual domain names or the actual text of web pages. The F-word, for instance, appears on hundreds of millions of web pages, so why not let it be used as a domain suffix?

More importantly, domain suffixes like .sex, .xxx, and dot-any-profanity-you-want will just make automatic content filtering that much easier. So if your moral concern is shielding children from material you consider inappropriate, you should be in favor of having obscene domain suffixes.

The morality police are just too officious for their own good.

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Unintentional Humor

Or is it? Here's an advertisement for the Audi A5:



Okay, I actually chuckled at the whole "you will [verb] one of these three [nouns]..." sequence. But when it got to the three cars, I thought that Audi would be one of them! Seriously, if you were going to add one more car to the sequence, "Mercedes, BMW, Lexus," wouldn't it be Audi? That's hardly breaking the cycle.

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Technology as Modularity

Via Arnold Kling, I found this interview with Drew Endy, a professor of biological engineering at MIT. It’s long, meandering, and sometimes repetitive, but still fascinating reading. The main lesson I extracted from it (and it would be hard to explain how, much less find specific quotations for support) is that technology is useful to the extent that it promotes modularity. Technology makes scientific discoveries portable, thereby allowing them to be used in a countless ways unforeseen by the original discoverer.

The creators of standardized nuts and bolts (to pick one simple example from the interview) couldn’t possibly have predicted all the ways those nuts and bolts would be used, but that’s okay. That’s even the point. Now the inventor of a new furniture design or engine block or medical device doesn’t have to make all the component parts, or even understand exactly how they work. Nuts and bolts harness a few basic physical principles in useful form.

What biological engineering aims to do is to create biological building blocks, or better yet devices for churning out such building blocks, so that subsequent designers don’t have start from scratch. Much as computer programming language works invisibly beneath the surface of a word-processing program, allowing people to use the programming language for innumerable purposes of their own without even understanding it, biological engineering could eventually give people the means of synthesizing useful proteins – or whole organisms – without fully understanding the underlying mechanics of DNA, base pairs, and so on.

In a sense, then, technological modularity is much like the price system – another social device that, as Friedrich Hayek famously observed, allows people to use information without possessing or understanding it, thereby making decentralized economic decision-making possible.

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A Puzzle

What do handguns and soda containers have in common?

Leave answers in the comments section. (Yes, yes... I realize there's an infinite possible number of correct answers -- they're both tangible, they're both products, etc. -- but in keeping with the convention of puzzles like this, you have to find the relatively narrow and interesting category into which both fall. And besides, as it happens, at least one of them has been in my kitchen.)

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Good for Her

Excellent. Maybe this will finally put an end to the stupid (and I think recent) trend of highly public marriage proposals. I feel slightly bad for the guy, but only slightly. Against his pain, you should weigh the distress of all the women ever pressured into a "yes" by one of these stunts.



(Via Megan.)

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High Tech, 2008 vs. 1988

Here is a fantastic article comparing both prices (nominal and inflation-adjusted) and features of technology products now versus twenty years ago. I especially appreciate the features comparison, because even inflation-adjustment can't account for quality improvements. Despite the naysayers, the world just keeps on getting better in many ways.

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That's My Boy

Our cat, Hamlet, died last night. He'd been in poor health for some time, wasting away before our eyes, so his death came as no surprise. Hamlet lived far longer than we had expected, did not seem to suffer a great deal, and remained with us to the end. Dignified, graceful, and well-loved, in life and death alike! A fine cat, our Hamlet.

I broke the news to the kids soon after they woke, making for a rough start to the day. After we had worked through our first bout of bawling, Kai started asking questions. He already knew that people and animals died when their brains stopped working, so he asked me what had happened to Hamlet's brain. I explained that the nerve cells in it had stopped sending electrical signals to each other.

"I have an idea!" Kai announced. "I can take some of his brains cells and rub them against my pajamas' top. It shocks me when I put it on, so I know it has electricity. Then Hamlet's brain cells will have electricity, again!"

I praised Kai for his ingenuity, but explained that Hamlet's brain had stopped working because his body had fallen ill. (A slow-growing mass in Hamlet's intestines had caused his digestive system to gradually fail.) Kai thought that through a while and came up with yet another solution: "We could go to Mars, take the alien's ray gun, shrink a submarine, go into Hamlet's body, and fix it!"

Just for the record, Kai has not seen any movies about Frankenstein's monster or "The Incredible Voyage." He has probably picked up some cultural clues from cartoons, granted--Spongebob Squarepants, in particular. Still, it heartens me to think that my little guy might someday bring his fierce intelligence to bear on the problem of kicking death's butt. It won't be too long, alas, before I, too, will need some nano-subs cruising my bloodstream, patching up my creaky cells. Coming out of cryonic suspension, and back to more than life, would prove all the sweeter if I woke to see the face of my son, Dr. Kai, smiling in triumph.

In the meantime, we continue to pay death's toll as best we can. To help the healing, I tonight took the kids to Fired Up, our local paint-your-own-ceramics store. Together, we decorated a little box shaped like a cat, adding little messages like, "We miss you, Hamlet." We plan to put his ashes in it, perhaps with a photo nearby, so that can in some measure continue to enjoy Hamlet's company.

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George MacDonald Fraser, R.I.P.

One of my very favorite authors is dead at the age of 82. I guess I will never know how Harry Flashman came to serve on both sides of the U.S. Civil War.

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Google Thinks I Live in Spain

Anyone know how to fix this? I already checked to make sure English is selected in my preferences.

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New Year's Reaffirmations, One-Shots, and Coordinations

In general, I don’t advocate New Year’s resolutions. I think most resolutions worth making are worth making any time of year, not just at the beginning. Moreover, your ability to make and keep a resolution is a function of your will power, preferences, and circumstances. If none of those have changed just because of the calendar date, then resolutions that failed in the last year will likely fail in the next.

I do, however, admit three exceptions:

1. New Year’s Reaffirmations. If there’s a resolution that you’ve already succeeded in keeping in the past, the New Year can be a good time to reaffirm your commitment. This is especially true when the holiday season has interrupted an otherwise reliable habit. For instance, this year I’m reaffirming my commitment to exercising three times a week. I’m not resolving to up it to four, because I’ve tried and failed to do that in the past. But I know three is doable, despite my having lapsed a bit during the last couple of weeks.

2. New Year’s One-Shots. There are some things that you need to do, but they can be done any time, so there’s never a time when you must do them right now. Examples include “take my old clothes to goodwill” and “organize my files.” Since these resolutions are worth making any time of year, my earlier objection might seem to apply. But the difference is that one-shots don’t require any ongoing effort. Given that these tasks can be done any time, the New Year provides a nice Schelling point to make sure they do get done instead of always falling to the bottom of the priority list.

3. New Year’s Coordinations. Some resolutions require multiple people to affirm them simultaneously. Without an agreed-upon time for committing, they might never get made because no one can make the commitment unilaterally. An example of is my Wednesday-night-drinking-group’s recent decision to find a new bar/restaurant to visit every other week, instead of constantly revisiting the same old haunts. Given that we would all prefer to visit more places, the New Year provides a useful Schelling point for agreeing to do so.

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The Problem with Magazine Subscriptions

Exactly. This is a perpetual issue for me.

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Two Turing Tests

Santa failed, but the sexbot passed... oddly, for similar reasons. Context is everything.

(Explanation of the Turing test here. Links via Radley Balko and Alex Tabarrok, respectively.)

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Sign of the Times

I remember when this toy had a rotary-phone dial on it. No longer. I guess that's a motor skill kids just don't need any more.

My question is when the toy makers will start adding some new functions to the panel, like a mouse scroll wheel, pinch-open icon, or thumbprint scanner. What motor skills do kids need now that they didn't need in the past?

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Anti-Network Externalities

Given the existence of network externalities in social networking sites – that is, the more other people who use a given site, the more useful it becomes – we might expect a single networking site to obtain a dominant position and become “locked in.” Yet for some reason, the equilibrium keeps shifting: first Friendster, then MySpace, and now apparently Facebook. I’ve puzzled about this problem before; now I think Cory Doctorow has solved the mystery. “Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance,” he says, and goes on to explain:

For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there's a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I'd cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, "Am I your friend?" yes or no, this instant, please.

... It's socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list -- but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites...

Doctorow makes a number of other valid complaints against social networking sites. Here’s the one that irks me most: the tendency of MySpace, et al., to inject explicitness into things usually left comfortably vague. I’d really rather not say who my eight best friends are, thank you, but on MySpace I have no choice. (Some people will even assume a rank ordering within your Top 8.) Embarking on a new romantic relationship? Well, the two of you better agree on the precise moment when you’ve officially transitioned from “Single” to “In a Relationship,” lest you have an embarrassing period in which one of you is officially single and the other officially not. I know some people who now regard MySpace “In a Relationship” status as the defining marker for whether a couple is exclusive. Has your income gone up (or down)? You might want to update your “Income” box. Confused about your sexual identity? Well, when you figure it out, let us all know in the “Sexual Orientation” box.

Fortunately, MySpace does permit you not to post an answer in some (though not all) of these categories, but even the choice to remain silent is an explicit one. MySpace demands rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty! (Points for the first nerd commenter to identify the source of that quote.) I’m especially amused by the work-arounds people have developed to create uncertainty where MySpace allows none. Actresses who don’t want to disclose their ages, for instance, commonly show up as “99 years old” in the profiles.

Link via Tim Harford.

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Kids These Days

Overhead on the playground at my son's Montessori School: "Let's destroy the world!"

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Gmail Spell-check

Gmail recently added a spell-check feature. Now questionable words get underlined with red dots as you compose your outgoing messages. (And as I write this blog post, I notice Blogger has the very same feature -- so I surmise this is a Google thing, since Google owns both.) I don't really mind, but I do think it's odd how small its dictionary must be -- it doesn't even recognize okay as a legitimate English word. But my mind was truly boggled when I found the Gmail spell-check doesn't recognize the word... Gmail.

UPDATE: Mystery solved! As two commenters have pointed out, the red-dot-underling is Firefox's spell-checker, not Gmail's. Of course, that doesn't explain why even the most paltry of dictionaries wouldn't include okay.

As long as my commenters are solving small mysteries for me, riddle me this: Why do men's button-down shirts now often have a horizontal buttonhole for the bottom button? I've only noticed this over the last couple of years.

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Top 100 Academic Blogs

Agoraphilia now appears in CurrencyTrading.net's list of the Top 100 Academic Blogs Every Professional Investor Should Read (previously, Agoraphilia was named in their Top 100 Economics Blogs). Of course, if you're really keeping up with 100 blogs, you won't have much time left for investing. So if you have to choose, make sure you pick the blog where you can learn about toilet seat norms and restroom hand dryers.

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Why I Hate Video Blogs

1. They're almost impossible to skim, so I can't easily jump to the interesting parts.

2. Most people are better writers than they are speakers. Writing can be edited. Speech cannot, unless the speaker is reading from a prepared script -- which is boring.

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Definition of a Great Group Photo

One that I look good in, irrespective of how anyone looks.

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Pirate Talk Tutorial

In honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day, here's a video lesson in pirate pronunciation, vocabulary, and syntax.

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