Erdos Had The Number First

I paint a little, watercolors, and I’m not that good.

Until yesterday, I’ve stuck to pans. Mostly because
they are cheaper, but yesterday I splurged. All I have
to say is “holy shit”.

I never knew. About a month ago I’d gone to a little watercolor seminar. The woman teaching the seminar made
an offhand comment about how you should never really use pans because the color qualitiy is poor. I’ve always had trouble getting the amount of color that I’d want, especially in washes. I thought it was just poor style on my part (which is part of it). But I need a specific color the other day to finish a painting and I thought, hey, I’m a big spender, I’ll buy a tube.

It was amazing. It’s the first time I’ve had a wash that I didn’t have to struggle to get pigmented enough. The problem is the tubes are just too expensive. I was looking at one (Cobalt blue, looked awesome, a bold blue) and it was 20 bucks. I didn’t buy it because, quite frankly, I’m not that good of a painter. So I got some cheaper tubes.

If you want to start painting with watercolors, do yourself a favor: buy tubes.

The OC is this show on FOX, if you’ve never heard of it. They ran a pretty
serious add campaign for it for a while, the problem is that the show is
_SO_ much better than the ads make it out to be.

It’s a really good show. You should watch it. You should watch it because
it funny,sad,sexy, and all that crap that all melodrama’s are.
More often than not, the characters do what you would want to do if you were
in their shoes.

The main mother/father relationship is covers a lot of ground for
normal people. They both work, they don’t have enough time for each
other and that puts stress on their relationship.

It’s funny, because even though it’s set in some super upscale part of
california, there isn’t much of the darker side of that life. This
isn’t about Paris Hilton, it’s about nice sets for teen drama.

Makeing several of the main players high school students eliminates one of the
big problems of showing adults who might as well be high school students: They
don’t have jobs. They don’t need jobs,they’re in high school.

Sandy Cohen is my hero, I wish I were a surfing lawyer always fighting for the
little guy before returning home to my fantastic home overlooking the sea.
Which is probably why I like the show so much.

As a liberal, I think I need to out myself on this topic: I believe in market
solutions.

I don’t really think the “Invisible Hand” is either invisable or a
hand, but I do find that competitive markets act, like my ecologic systems,
as a very efficient filter for good and bad ideas.

Part of the problem is that the phrase “Market Solutions” has become
equated with privitization and (more importantly) corporatitization. Neither
of those two things are a requirement for markets to work.

The other day (or was it last night), our government passed a bad bill
that was supposed to make getting prescription drugs easier to get
for old people. It’s really just a gravy train for big pharma.

More Insurance is not the way to solve the health insurance problem in
America. So, I’ve got a proposal: health care markets.

If we comoditize health care, at least drugs and basic services, we
can create a futures market where providers (doctors and hospitals)
can sell future services for a fixed price. This allows the health
care providers to work out what there costs can be in order to
maintain profitability. This would work with drugs too, health care
providers would buy and sell futures for services that they might
need.

This would encourage consolidation, which is bad, but it is no less
pressure than exists now.

Indemnity is the final issue that would be addressed by a Health Care
Exchange. Since there is no contract between provider and client,
there is not facility for which a health care provider can limit their
liability and no way for the client to gauge their tolerance for
liability. If services futures were traded, the liability limitations
could be priced into the contract. In this way providers could limit
their own liability and lower costs allowing purchasers to choose
their costs based on their tolerance for liability.

Controlling indemnification does not open the flood gates for abuse.
There are already laws covering the legalities of practice and the
limits of safety for nearly all aspects of health care. Market forces
and simple existing law enforcement, combined with Exchange rules
governing behavior would be sufficient to contain abuse. Current
commodity exchanges are very effective in limiting abuse, and these
tactics would translate well into the services future industry.

No longer will master/slave be used.

Machines on a network are no longer hosts, they are participants. the Control part of Transmission Control Protocol is
odious, all participants will their own mode of transmission.

Participants are no longer networked, rather they engage in a relationship. particpants may choose to
enter or leave this relationship at will. Bind is also problematic, and names will
no longer be centrally controlled and rationed. Particpants will choose their own names, and
can choose to inform other participants if they wish.

Domain Controllers will transition to being called Relationship Facilitators, since controlling relationships is demeaning.
Severs will not longer be demeaned and will now be called Providers, since that is what they do. Also, elections for Relationship
Facilitators will be more transparent, and all machines will get to be Facilitator at some point.

Ethernet is too constrictive, and will be replace with a token ring relationship, where the token is passed
by each according to their ability.

I am a late twenties, Tech, Middle Manager. While I may, to some, be more than my job I am my job too. My job is hard.
Everybody says that, though, and I tend to believe most people when they say it. I believe it because they do, and when
you’re talking feelings its what they believe that is important (at least when your talking about their feelings).

I’m waiting for this to get easier, but I don’t know it’s going to. Sure, there are good days and bad days. And the good days do outnumber the bad. Writing about good days is quite a bit less interesting than writing about bad days, mostly because I don’t feel like writing then (that’s why I’m blogging, after all, to get back into the habit of every day writing).

One of the main problems that I have as a manager is that some days it’s much harder for me to be nice to people I think are being ridiculous. This is a big problem, since I am not all that good at making those distinctions. You can probably already see why this might be a problem.

You, gentle reader, can rest assured that I am trying to be a better communicator. It’s the 21st century, I’m a 21st century guy, but sometimes.

Sometimes I want to be a 17th Century guy. A romantisized 17th Century guy in a romantisized 17th Century world where
disputes are settled by sabres and I don’t have to suffer the tyranny of fools. I know I could be the Prince and in that fictional 17th Century world I would not feel guilty about it.

Because it’s easy to sit here and think about how free they were and to foget that they strove to have a fraction what I do today.

I’ll just end up quoting from Suzanne Vega:

Last year’s troubles are so old fashioned
the robber on the highway the pirate on the seas
maybe it’s the clothing that’s so entertaining
the earrings and swashbuckling blouses that please

here we have heroes of times that have passed now
but nobody these days has that kind of chin
over there the petticoats of ladies of virtue
you can hardly tell them from the petticoats of sin

look at all the waifs of Dickensian England
why is it their suffering is more picturesque?
must be cause their rags are so very Victorian
the ones here at home just don’t give it their best

last years troubles they shine up so pretty
they gleam with a luster they don’t have today
here it’s just dirty and violent and troubling

but trouble is still trouble and evil still evil
sometimes we wonder; is there more now, or less?
if we had a tool or could tally the handfuls
measure for measure it’s the same would be my guess

It’s imposing to look at, as it sits there on my shelf. It’s like
1000 pages, 300 of which are footnotes [1]

I saw some guy on the train reading it today. I wanted to ask him
what he thought, but I’m timid and it was morning on the el and nobody
talks to each other and who am I to buck that trend.

But Wallace is a gifted writer. And that doesn’t matter one god damn bit.
This book was great, it’s just the ending that sucked.

If I can digress a little bit here and wonder why is that endings so
often suck? Endings are hard, but so are beginings. But people focus so much on the beginings of things, and try to to think about their endings.

Birth Death
Marriage Divorce
Hire Fire

Like college students thinking it’s love because they’re too young to tell
the difference between the passion of passionate passion and hormones and
capital L Love.[3]

But back to the book, the first 100 pages are tough. Strange characters are introduced, situations are set up, Canadian politics are discussed, time is spent
in Alston [4]

And then, the story begins to form. That formation is gripping, the
people involved are compelling. I will also say that if Mr. Wallace
is not one of Bill’s friends, then he’s at least met him once or twice.
His depictions of addiction are terrifyingly accurate. So few stories of addicts
touch of the real[5] horror of addiction, and that is life after
substance. Wallace does. He covers it in detail, all the little crap
about dancing and cooking and how when you get clean you might have to
deal with the reason that you started with your substance in the first
place and how that (the dealing with the You in all of this) is not
easy or fun or anything else besides hard. And who am I to even say
what it is.

And there is tennis. Lots of tennis. And bugs. It’s a great book
really, it is. You should read it. Just be prepared. And be prepared
to get pissed off.

I’m not sure why I’m so mad about this book,especially as I read what
I’ve written. I did like it. But the ending Dear God! The Ending!

The Horror. The Horror.

Partly, it’s probably because I basically read the book twice. And
partly because as I lay in bed trying not to get thrown to the floor
in the North Atlantic, I read this book. I slogged through this book and
carried it with me across two continents. And this book, this book with
such promise and a middle section like Britney Spears, let me down, like an
album by Britney Spears.[6]

Footnotes:
[1] Some of those are wildly funny,inaccurate, astute and could be
fashioned into a free-standing book themselves.

[4] Which is the 8th ring of hell

[5] as far as I’m concerned

[3] Look at me, I’m some kind of old foggy talking about hormone crazed kids.

[6] Did I really end with a reference to Britney Spears’ body?

So, I guess I’m a blogger now.

Here’s the thing, I’ve made fun of bloggers for a while now. I never
bought into the hype, I never bought into the ‘this changes
everything’ mentality that seemed to characterize the entire blogging
movement. This is partly because I think groups of people are stupid.

Not stupid in a ‘Why can’t Johnny read’ way, but stupid in a
‘regression toward the mean’ kind of way.

Maybe that’s not bad.

But anyway, now I’ve got a blog and I’m trying to figure out if I
should apologize to all the people I argued with who told me that
it’s not a movement, who told me it’s not anything other than the
journal reformed.

I’ve never liked the thought of journaling. Which is bad, because if
I want to write, I should be keeping a journal. I argued with my
writing profs in school, I’ve argued with anyone who would argue that
journaling is not a prerequisite of writing. But it probably is.

Perhaps not the formal journaling of a historian, but some way to put
down the thought fragments that occur and are so often lost. How many
times on the el in the morning have the great ideas of the age been
lost to ‘I’ll write that down as soon as I get to work’.

This extended sort of digression is the one argument that I still have
against blogs. This whole thing, assuming you’ve read this far, is
really just a stream of consciousness with very little editing. How
can that help anyone?

This is the first post. It’s easy to get first post in your own weblog, but hey,
low hanging fruit is sometimes the sweetest.

Erdos was a mathematician. He was brialliant, did a lot of work with network theory. One could say he invented modern network theory. Anyway, he’s the guy who had the first 6 degrees game named after him. Mathematitians are still counting their ‘Erdos’ number. which is the number that seperates them from studying under the man himself. Eat your heart out Kevin Bacon.