Whimsley

Winding Down Whimsley

Blogging has been non-existent for the last few weeks. I also have several emails from blog contacts that I have failed to reply to -- sorry Henry, Aaron and others. I've been diverted by non-digital politics (Ontario Elections), home life, and trying to do my day job.

I started the blog, as the top of the page says, mainly in an attempt to promote No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart. Well that came out 16 months ago, so anything I could do along those lines is done.

I have a few more pieces I want to post here, and then I'll take an indefinite blogbreak and try to do some longer-form writing.

After all, in the words of the Talking Heads; "Say something once, why say it again?"

Design change

I've just changed the design at my nonblog web site.

Why? Well, because it was pretty hideous before, and also because I recently put together a web site for my better half, and I thought my own place deserved a bit of spit and polish. I'm not really sure about the colour scheme, but I'll give it a week or so and see how it looks after that time.

Update: I just made a few more changes so it looks better in Internet Explorer. It still looks best in Firefox, but the differences are now pretty minor.

For anyone who cares about such things, the colour scheme was inspired by the Dark Rose design by Rose Fu at the css Zen Garden, which has lots of great ideas for anyone looking to design a site.

Update 2: I added fancier scrolling behaviour, for Firefox only, so that only the main column moves as you scroll the page (you have to look at one of the longer pages to see it, or have your browser in a small window). There are workarounds that let you simulate this CSS position:fixed behaviour in IE, but that seems like too much work.

Five Things I Don't Believe...

1. That global warming is a big deal. It's because of listening to the radio in the mid '70's and hearing all those stories from experts about how there wouldn't be any oil in 1990. They made sense at the time, global warming makes sense now. But I don't really believe it.
2. That open source software is new and different. What puts me off is the hype about the whole Cathedral and Bazaar, Coase's Penguin, Sand Pile & Power Laws, Economics of Networks, and Long Tail thing. It's all what I think of as "Wired Thinking" (after the magazine) -- it's not entirely without merit, and it's not completely stupid, but it has no sense of history and so it's not nearly as smart or original or new as it thinks it is. Speaking of which....
3. That quantum computing will ever amount to anything. Anything that features the word "entanglement" so prominently is more new age than physics. The EPR thought experiments were dreamed up 70 years ago. Nothing interesting came out of them in the first 60, so why should anything interesting come out of them now? This is a field driven by its cool-sounding name (remember "quantum chaos" anyone?), and it's just possible enough that it could be important, complicated enough that it can be portrayed as cutting edge to likely patrons and smart-but-impressionable graduate students, and far enough out to be not easily disproved.  Speaking of which...
4. That nanotechnology is new. Come on people, it's just chemistry and engineering. All that talk of "self-assembly" is just a new word for "chemical reaction" but it sounds oh-so-edgy. Get over it.
5. That the world is flat (in the Thomas Friedman sense of the world). This one really should not need saying. It's clearly a case of what Daniel Davies calls "globollocks" but it seems to be taken as obviously true by a big section of the business community. 'Nuff said.
6. (Because no one expects the Spanish Inquisition). That whole idea of memes. Yes, I enjoyed Dawkin's Selfish Gene, Dennett's Consciousness Explained and Blackmore's Consciousness, An Introduction. But I just don't see what the idea of a meme adds to any discussion about anything at all. Really.

Why do I think I'm entering the "grumpy old bastard" phase of my life? Anyone else got any things they don't believe?

A "Thank You", battling my worse nature

It's never pleasant to find out bad things about yourself, and I just did.

I occasionally go over to Marginal Revolution, a weblog run by Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen. They are very pro-free-market economics  lecturers and the  weblog attracts a lot of libertarian capitalist types: obviously I disagree with them on just about everything.  I post the odd comment -- usually just a short dig at something they say -- and then I go again.

So yesterday morning, just before going to work, I took a look, and Alex Tabarrok had just posted a piece on Le problème du pain, asking "why bread isn't nearly as good in the United States as in Paris". It's a problem a little bit like why beer was bad in Britain for so long, which is something I recently wrote about. The piece I wrote is called Learning By Drinking, and its point of view is pretty much the opposite of most of those at Marginal Revolution, including Alex T. I was one of the early commenters in the thread, and I put a link to my own piece in my comment. No big deal.

But then Alex Tabarrok added a comment to the thread, and said this [emphasis added]:

... Combined with Tom's comments about well-informed consumes and the lemons problem (do read his longer post) I think this could get us somewhere ...

And with that, all kinds of people came over to my site looking at the piece in question. As  I mentioned just the other day, this is a quiet corner of the Internets, getting a handful of visitors each day. But all of a sudden I got 100 visitors yesterday and another 100 or so today, all thanks to Alex Tabarrok. And traffic, where weblogs are concerned, is a Good Thing.

Now I like to think I'm more open minded than these pro-market types, but here is Alex T. sending people my way from his far more popular site to read a piece that he probably disagrees with. And I would not have thought to send people his way without a little dig at whatever it was they wrote. So it begins to look as if he is more open minded and generous than I am. Which obviously can't be the case because he is on the other side of the political fence from me.

I guess I have to face it. I owe Alex T. a thank you. Come on, you can do it....

"Thank you Alex Tabarrok for recommending people to my web site."

There. Not too bad. Now off to eat some humble pie.

Not a Blogger

I started this weblog because of the book, thinking that now it is going to be published I might as well do it right, and that means creating a little extra material around it if I can. It (the weblog) has now hobbling along for four months, with a post or two a week (mainly on weekends).

I've learned that I am not a natural blogger, which is why I changed the title text to emphasize that this is "an occasional weblog...". I simply don't have that much to say, and even though I would not call myself busy by many people's standards, I don't always have the time to post something when I do think of something to say, or to find the article that prompted my thought again. There are plenty of weblogs out there which are updated multiple times a day.  Such people are some combination of (a) well organized, (b) brilliant, or (c) egotistical. Let's just say there's a mix, and leave it at that.

There is a mismatch between blogging and other kinds of writing anyway. I wrote a book because it is a quiet occupation that suits me. It is a way of arguing without be ingdistracted by other people -- and other people, let's face it, usually just get in the way of a well-thought out argument. Plus, it is a way of avoiding the hurly-burly of actual debate where you have to think on your feet and assert positions you are uncertain of. While blogging is not exactly like real life, it is a bit closer to it than the book thing: if you aim to gain an audience you have to pick up on what other bloggers are writing about and respond within hours. So really, blogging just isn't my thing. The arguments go nowehere, no one changes their mind, and the signal/noise ratio is very low. The blogging world is a world built for quick-typing extroverts who don't go in too much for second thoughts.

And there is more to my agblosticism. With a book, you have to get a stamp of approval before inflicting your thoughts on readers (in the form of a publishing contract), so there is something un-egotistical about a book: "I'm not the one claiming that my scribblings are worth reading, someone else thinks they are too". But with a blog, or other intermediary-free publishing mechanism, there is something about the effort -- "Here Are My Thoughts, Listen To Them!" -- that is presumptious, almost distasteful. I've decided, though, that (with some exceptions) this impression of presumptiousness is wrong. I am not claiming that I have Thoughts You Should Know, I'm just keeping some writing here in this little corner where few people will look and using it as a place to keep my stuff. And if I end up wasting a few minutes of your time because you googled a combination of words that led you here instead of somewhere more useful, well I'm sorry, but perhaps you should try a library instead of Google anyway.

So, to go back a couple of paragraphs, I have learned that I am not a natural blogger. Nevertheless, I'll carry on with this effort. There are benefits, even without an audience (although hello there EAS, JC, and JAS, if you are still around). It is a useful place to keep some notes. It is a useful discipline to occasionally try to articulate thoughts that otherwise would remain even more foggy. I've heard from two people that I had lost touch with (hello PJM and MC) [which reminds me, I owe you both an e-mail]. And I still hope it will help to accumulate some additional material that may be of use to readers of my book, which is what this is all about.

But my advice to readers of this weblog is "don't expect anything and you won't be too disappointed".