Walk into any store-front Chinese restaurant and order a fried rice variant, be it shrimp, chicken, pork, or combination, and you’ll get almost exactly the same thing, regardless of where you are. Rice, cubed carrots, peas, some onion perhaps, soy sauce, and the meat of your choice. Oh, and soy sauce for color and flavor. The portion will be sufficiently large to fill you and then some, for less than $10. Probably less than half that at lunchtime.
McDonald’s has made an industry out of serving you the same tasteless meal regardless of which of the billions and billions of franchises you visit. Consistency makes them popular; there’s none of the “I don’t know what to get” angst at McDonald’s. Fried rice is the quiet consistency meal at budget Chinese restaurants. For that matter, most of the menu is consistent from one Chinese restaurant to the next.
What sets the Chinese consistency apart, to my way of thinking, from McDonald’s or any of the national fast food chain marquees, is that they are universally independent. They tend to be family run affairs rather than an organized collection of locations leveraging economies of scale.
They are an example of emergent behavior, of bottom up organization. Somehow the word went out that Americans expect rice, carrot, peas, onion, soy sauce, and a bit of chicken, shrimp, or pork in their fried rice. Which leaves me with this question: did the Chinese restauranteurs shape our expectation of fried rice, or did we shape their menu offering through demand?
All of us have heard of the “six degrees of separation” theory, which implies that you can get from any person on the planet to any other person on the planet with only six intervening connections. For example, I know my father, whose best friend, in turn, is a former Washington DC lobbyist, and has met with former President Bush. Therefore I’m only four degrees of separation away any number of world leaders. That and $5 will get you a tall coffee at Starbuck’s.
The professional networking site, LinkedIn, capitalizes on geometric growth of connections by letting you leverage the connections your connection’s connections have. At only three degrees of separation my network had approximately 1,839,200 links. My contacts included fifty-nine people. The aggregate of their connections was roughly 11,700 more people. Those second-generation connections in turn produced the final one point eight million number. Somewhat staggering to conceive.
I tell you all of this because I pruned my connections on LinkedIn today. There were three old connections that I was always a little uneasy about, which I removed. They were all technology recruiters with whom I’d had some contact while looking for new consulting engagements 3 years ago. Since I had never met them, and since the relationship hadn’t borne any fruit (i.e., no job), I dropped the link we shared. Each of the three had the “500+” designation behind their names in my contact list; meaning they each had more that 500 links.
It would stand to reason then that my second-generation pool would shrink by at least 1500 people. In actuality it shrunk more than 83%, from 11,700+ to 1,900+. The third-generation drop was almost exactly the same percentage. There I went from 1,839,200+ connections to 283,500+ connections, a change of 84%.
In the book Linked, the author, Albert-László Barabási, introduces the idea of a power curve. Unlike a Bell curve, where the majority of the population has the same, or nearly the same, value, a power curve represents the situation where a very few have all the value, and most have almost no value at all. There are a handful of web sites (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft) that garner the most visits, while the vast majority (Zanshin included) collect only a trickle of visitors
It seems that human networks operate on the same principles as the Internet. Three people out of fifty-nine is only 5%, and yet they accounted for 84% of the total links available to me. Barabási explores both the six degrees of separation idea, and the fact that some people are nexus or collection points for connections while others aren’t. I, apparently, am not a collection point for connections, which makes me wonder how much the 2nd, and 3rd generation counts dropped for those people who have me as a contact as a result of my pruning today.
Every year for the past twenty-four years I have prepared my own taxes. For many years my income and filing status allowed me to use the 1040-EZ form, eventually I graduated to the infamous 1040 Long Form. In 2000, after going into business for myself I was introduced to self employment tax, Schedule C and other forms I care not to remember now. For the past several years I have lived in one state while working in another, and for much of that time I had an employer who only withheld tax for the state where he was located, not where I was actually working.
This year, like every year before it, I set out to prepare my taxes once again. With a copy of Turbo Tax downloaded and installed, along with the state editions for Kansas and Missouri I ran through the entire interview, even the sections I knew wouldn’t apply. The results were far better than last years, but still not quite what I had expected.
After letting it sit for a day I sat down again last night and started over fresh in a new return. After completing the interview I had different results. Worse than now not knowing which set of returns was correct, I had no idea what answers I had changed or what had changed the results.
Sibylle, being self-employed, has an accountant who prepares her tax returns. She compiles in a couple of hours (due to good record keeping throughout the year) a summary of her expenses and income and Gary does the rest. We dropped her information off on Saturday morning and Thursday afternoon she picked up the completed forms. This was my first encounter with accountant prepared taxes, and I must say I liked what I saw; I liked the lack of stress and worry.
So last evening after fumbling around in depths of two state returns, multiple sources of income, and questions that I have no frame of reference to understand, much less answer accurately, I threw in the towel. Today we are making an appointment to submit the necessary financial information to Gary so that he can compile my taxes. I had originally dismissed this idea as I didn’t want to spend the money on preparation costs. However I am now seeing the cost as buying far more than the preparation. It buys peace of mind and a sense of relief.
Taxes don’t need to be emotionally draining, and physically upsetting. When I owned a home I had an electrician, and heating/cooling contractor, and a plumber I called when I needed work done. I know how to do those household maintenance chores but I preferred to pay an expert. It’s time to start paying an expert to manage the mandatory annual reconciliation with the federal government.
Ever since switching my site’s back end over to Wordpress in late December I’ve had to use Camino or Firefox to edit or produce new postings to my site, as there was a bug in the TinyMCE implementation that Wordpress was using. Any entry edited via Safari had all of its <p> tags stripped out leaving the posting as one large, uninterrupted block of text.
I am happy to report that, having upgraded to Wordpress 2.5, I am able to use Safari to post and edit entries on my site. The formatting works. I don’t have anything against Camino or Firefox, but Safari is my primary browser on OS X, and I am much happier now that I can do all my web related activities inside of one browser.
For nearly nine years, beginning in 1990, I was very active as a martial artist. At the end of my active participation I had achieved the rank of nedan, or second degree black belt. I competed at local, state, and national levels. At my peak I placed third in the Men’s 35+ Black Belt division at the 1997 National Championships. Along the way I suffered two broken fingers, a broken nose, and a torn medial collateral ligament. I share this information to establish my familarity with the idea of training and competing in a martial sport.
This past evening I attended the Golden Gloves boxing championships here in Kansas City. This is the third time I’ve attended, going with a friend from work. My friend’s father has attended every Kansas City championship for the last 40 years, and I’ve been included with a largish group that goes every year.
My perspective has changed between last year and this, I found myself looking at the event, and what it signifies, with new eyes tonight. My fiancée, Sibylle, made a comment regarding the event this week, that stuck with me and gave me this new perspective. She said,
Observing others I saw cheers and jeers as one fighter or another dominated the ring, and his opponent. No one was serious injured while I was there, although several of the fighters were bloodied in their bout. One fighter was knocked out cold. This brought a large response from the crowd. All of them, at least at some level, were reacting to this man being completely dominated, and defeated, by the other fighter. The highlight films of an automobile race always show the crashes, the “best of reel” for boxing shows the knockouts, and people slow on the highway to gape at an accident scene.
I don’t think we are all blood-thirsty savages, but I do see a bit of the old Roman Colosseum in our past times and sports. Whether it is a “there but for the grace of God go I” thing, or just schadenfreude, I do not know. What I do know is that I appreciate the distinction between “improving ones self” and “hurting others” to win.
There were two articles yesterday about anonymity online, and the potential good or bad that can result. Paul Stamatiou, a computational media senior at Georgia Tech, talked about the perils of anonymous users in social networks. He lists a couple of pros and cons:
Ars Technica provided coverage of the increased scrutiny and legal attention the college-aimed JuicyCampus website is garnering. In JuicyCampus champions free speech, AGs claim it’s a fraud, Ars Technia reports,
Anonymity breeds an environment which allows people to be bullies with no consequence. School-yard bullies are careful to not terrorize others when the teacher is nearby; anonymity online allows people to say things they wouldn’t repeat in front of authority, or even their peers.
As with any form of bullying, education is perhaps the key to unlocking the problem and eliminating it from our society. Not education in terms of reading, writing, and arithmetic, but education in terms of recognizing other people, their boundaries, emotions, culture, and norms. American society and culture seems to delight in protecting abusive or malicious behavior saying that it is protected by free speech. While I certainly don’t want my ability to read, write, say, or listen to the thoughts of others curtailed, I do feel that we aren’t approaching the problem correctly.
An enlightend, educated society, which practiced tolerance and acceptance, probably wouldn’t participate in lowest common denominator behavior like JuicyCampus, making the need to defend it moot. Unfortunately, for those of us who live in the United States, lowest common denominator behavior and expectations seem to be the rule of the day, rather than the exception.
Mahatma Gandhi was asked once, what he thought of Western Civilization. He answered that it, “would be a good idea.” His words are truer every day.
The company I work for has two buildings in downtown Kansas City. The primary location has its own underground garage with two levels of parking for those associates who work there. The garage isn’t large enough to accommodate everyone, so some associates are given a leased space in the public garage across the street. The company pays for the parking in the city lot, which is very nice.
The secondary location has an attached garage, which is again, not sufficient to house everyone. When I was transfered to this building last month I was in the overflow lot two blocks down the hill. The so-called “Cliff” lot was once part of a downtown hotel that has long since been torn down. The lot was in marginal shape and was incredibly tight and cramped in the two covered levels. Large cement pillars separate every pair of spaces, and the overheads were low enough to make parking the Jimmy there and exercise in faith.
To add insult to injury, the ceiling leaked when there was snow melt or rain. And the leakage included enough cement to mar the surface of your car, should you park under a drip. Once I discovered the drip problem I started parking on the upper, or exposed, level.
Yesterday I was sent an email from the company informing me that I had been granted a space in the attached lot based on my company tenure. This morning I exchanged my parking placard for an electronic transponder, and now I get to park next to the building. The building lot has three levels, each with their own transponder. I’m allowed to use the upper, or exposed to the sky level, any time day or night. There are some awnings over the spaces so the car won’t be entirely exposed to inclement weather or the sun. I’ve parked outside the majority of my working career, so not being covered isn’t an issue.
I was surprisingly pleased to get the new parking perk. The published waiting list (which obviously isn’t updated) had me as #31 for a space in the building lot. I suppose that means there are 30 other people who are happily adjusting their commute destination today.
My daily commute is twenty-two miles, each way. Except for several hundred yards downtown, between the exit ramp and the parking garage, and about a mile of surface streets in our neighborhood, all of that distance is done on Interstate highway. The first five or six miles are two-lane, and the rest is at least three-lane.
What fascinates me are the dynamics of traffic ebb and flow; watching the cars around me as the jockey for “the best lane.” I’m not immune to changing lanes in order to gain an perceived advantage, but on those days when I don’t change lanes I am always struck by the idea that I get home or to work just as quickly.
Take yesterday afternoon for example. Just a mile or two into the drive traffic came to an abrupt halt. First the far left lane slowed and stopped, while the center and right-hand lanes continued moving. The center lane came to a halt a few seconds later, and the right-hand lane a few seconds after that. Before the slow down occurred I was being overtaking by a red two-door Grand Prix. When I put my brakes on, along with every car in front of me, the driver of the Grand Prix instantly swerved into the center lane. She was able to advance perhaps two or three car lengths past me before that lane stopped as well.
Again she slalomed in to the still moving right-hand lane, this time causing a semi to sound his air horn in anger. Not knowing what the cause of the traffic jamb was, I decided to stay in the left lane and creep ahead with everyone else. Eventually, about two miles down the road, traffic resumed its normal pace. There was no visible wreck or traffic stop, just one of those cases where something bunched traffic and caused a ripple a couple of miles deep.
When traffic started moving again I was only about two car lengths behind the red Grand Prix, which was again slam-dancing its way from the center lane to the right-hand lane - which promptly came to a halt in front of her. After a couple of minutes, when we were all back up to speed, I saw the red Grand Prix in my review mirror once again. The driver was visibly upset, shouting at me, swerving around in lane, wanting to go faster.
Being a nerd I have spent some of the hours I spend in traffic each week calculating the traffic density around me. I use a length of 25 feet for each car, 50 for trucks and semis. Normal traffic, heavy but still moving seems to be about 50 cars per mile of pavement. That leaves roughly a car length of space between each vehicle. Stop-and-go traffic is anything above that density, maybe 100 cars per mile of pavement. After the jamb cleared yesterday afternoon, when the impatient driver was once again behind me, traffic was perhaps 25 cars per mile. There were places where a two-car length gap existed, but for the most part there was no way to go any faster.
And yet this one driver was utterly beside herself to not being going faster. Eventually she did move into the center lane and pass me. I kept seeing her four or five cars ahead of me, often on her brakes, frequently changing lanes. She exited the highway before I did, and I was once again even with her.
Except to merge onto the highway, and move over to the left lane, I never changed lanes the entire twenty miles home. The hugely aggressive driver behind me changed lanes a dozen times or more that I saw, at least one time dangerously close to a huge truck. And I was dead even with her when she exited the highway.
American’s are indoctrinated with the idea that winners are good and losers are bad, and that everything is a contest. Driving isn’t a contest. You can’t win. There will always be another red light, there will always be a car on the road ahead of you. I commute twenty-two miles in roughly 30-minutes twice a day, five days a week. Even if I could go faster (i.e., no cars on the highway) I couldn’t shorten the time by more than a minute or three. The real savings is that my blood pressure lower, and I don’t have unfocused anger against strangers.
Twice in recent months, Sibylle and I have discovered that prescriptions aren’t forever. Our oldest cat, Nekko, has diabetes and consequently gets insulin twice daily. The original prescription was labeled “99 refills,” which at roughly three months per fill, would last for more than 24 years.
Imagine my surprise to have a refill denied because it had expired. It turns out that prescriptions are only good for one year, regardless of the number of refills indicated. I suppose it is reasonable to require an annual visit to the issuing doctor to reevaluate the need, the medication, and the dosage, but it would have been nice to have some advanced warning.
Last week Sibylle’s supply of Midrin was nearing its end, so we went by the pharmacy to get a refill. We had already run into a problem transferring this prescription since it is for a narcotic, so we shouldn’t have been too surprised to learn that prescriptions for narcotics don’t even last a year - they expire at six months.
In Nekko’s case we were able to call the vet’s office and get a new prescription phoned in without a doctor’s visit. However, Sibylle is going to be forced to wait two weeks until she can see her doctor to get a new prescription for her migraine medication. Insulin is given on a schedule in set amounts, so it is easy to predict when a refill will be needed. We can schedule it on the calendar, and make sure to have a doctor visit prior to the annual renewal requirement.
Migraines do not occur on a schedule. Sibylle might go weeks without needing her Midrin and then need it several times in just a few days. In order to prevent her from running out in the future she now has to schedule twice-yearly doctor visits just to get a new prescription in case she needs it. That her current supply of Midrin last well past the six month date (and that there was still and unused refill on the prescription) is a testament to the unpredictable nature of Migraines.
In A Boy The Bullies Love to Beat Up, Repeatedly, on the New York Times web site, the story of Billy Wolfe is told. As I read through the story my own emotions were in turmoil. As a child all through out grade school, junior high, and the first couple years of high school I lived in terror of the bullies. My experiences forever colored my view of that subset of men who seem to have but one emotion: anger.
My experiences, in light of what happens in the article and in other incidents I have read, seem pale by comparison, but the constant knot of tension, the equating of school with pain, the sense of helplessness that pervaded my days in school, was no less damaging.
That we have created, and allowed to exist, an environment where people are singled out and attacked again and again is utterly appalling. Well meaning organizations have emasculated the school’s ability to control students by removing any real punishment or incentive to behave. The bully exists solely because the system allows him (or her) to exist. Placing the onus on the target of the attacks, and their families, only further victimizes them.
Bullies are cowards themselves, and they mask their fear and cowardice by picking on those they feel are weaker and unable to defend themselves. Corporeal punishment would only serve to convince the bully that they were justified in lashing out at others. Embarrassing the bully through public censure and exposure, while perhaps gratifying to think about, is only its own form of bullying. In order to end this problem I feel there are several things that must happen.
We need an atmosphere of zero tolerance from day one in school. I know that there are zero-tolerance policies in place already, and that there are many stories of children wrongly or absurdly punished through these programs. In order to make such a policy work you must sit down with all participants in the system and explain each action and its consequence. Merely having a policy and invoking it after the fact won’t work. Obviously, the policy would mature as the age of the participants matures. It might even be possible to involve more civically active students in the creation and maintenance of these policies by the time they are in high school. All of this would be an excellent exercise in citizenship and participatory government.
Counseling needs to be in place for everyone involved in a bullying incident. Not just the person attacked but the person or person doing the attacking. Drawing a parallel between this type of violence and domestic violence, programs where both sides are mandated into a counseling program are the most effective. Only addressing one side of the equation creates an imbalance that will result in escalation of the underlying causes, and will result in more violence.
Finally, society as a whole needs to step up and say that violence in the form of bullying, taunting, and teasing are not part of growing up. They are aberrant behaviors that, left unchecked in extreme cases, result in catastrophic violence; how many American schools have been the sites of shooting rampages? If we create a cauldron of angry emotions, clamp a lid on it, and ignore it, then we can’t be shocked or act innocent when it blows up and people are hurt or killed.