Tyler's Turn Blog

The Powerblogs website, which hosts this blog, is going out of business as of November 30th. So, I'm moving to blogger.

For the time being, I'm double posting everything, but soon you'll only be able to read my blog here.

I recently had a reason to go through my old poetry, and I found this poem, which I wrote in 2001. It had potential but wasn't quite working. So I took some time and revised it, and I'm finally happy with it (well, as happy as any writer can be with his own work).

for one who feels he has the voice of an ant

I have seen ants
marching
in columns
across a road
in Africa
where a war raged —
these men against those men,
those men against these —
but every man
stepping aside
for the steady line of army ants
unaware of tanks
or guns
or men with rifles.

And after,
I have looked
to see
the bones of a snake,
overcome by the slow
garrison
moving in unison —
each too small
to matter —
together
swallowing the serpent.

Last Saturday, during the day, Rob and I took the Second Class bus from Oaxaca, where we were vacationing, to Teotitlan del Valle, an artist community about twenty miles outside the city. In Teotitlan, we had a very expensive lunch -- touted by friends as the best in the valley -- and after we got back, we spent the afternoon walking through the huge, real market that surrounds the second-class bus station (as opposed to the less-real-seeming markets in Oaxaca City, which appear to be mostly for tourists and wealthier Oaxacans). The contrast between our lunch in solidly middle-class Teotitlan, and the cramped alleys of Mercado Abastos couldn't have been starker.

When we got back to our five-star hotel, we saw that the "movie star" was back from her day as well, because her body guards stalked the lobby in baggy shirts and earpieces. In the splendidly manicured courtyards, two brides in hundred-thousand-peso dresses were getting their pictures taken in the perfect late-afternoon light. And that night, as I lay in bed surrounded by the rooms of a former convent now filled with wealthy Mexicans and Europeans, I thought a lot about the extreme contrasts in Mexico between the rich and the poor. I also admit I despaired a little at the enormity of the problem of poverty -- and felt guilty at my participation in it -- even as I prayed for for the welfare of the people I'd literally bumped into that day at the market.

Then this afternoon, as I caught up on email, I discovered that many other people were meditating on world poverty that night. October 16th to 18th was designated by the United Nations as a time for "a global call to action against poverty" called STAND UP and TAKE ACTION. A friend belongs to a religious society that had committed to pray at 9pm on Saturday night in every time zone "for the wellness of all impoverished," and she emailed me an invitation to join in the prayers.

I'm still overwhelmed by the poverty I witnessed in Oaxaca, but I also believe in the power of prayer (especially if its part of a plan that includes further action). And I'm glad I was able to participate in my friend's prayers, even if I did it inadvertently.

To my godson, who is three

Dear boy, dancing in your room
in socks and nothing else,
while your mother downstairs reads the news,
would that I could keep you
from eating of the tree
of knowledge.

Would that you remain
innocent of disease,
perpetually ignorant of your own creeping death,
happy as a clam
in socks and nothing else.

Not that I won't rejoice
at your dissertations and degrees,
your first crush on a classmate,
your wedding in the rain.
Not that I don't dream
of long talks about religion, and philosophy, and literature.
I cherish already the confidences we'll keep
when your anger at your mother boils over
and your Uncle Tyler is there to listen.

I only dread the day you eat
and know your death,
the embarrassment on your face at twelve
when you read this poem, and think of little you
dancing
in your socks and nothing else.

This morning in the shower, I was thinking about a letter I wanted to write to President Obama. (I write a lot of letters to my representatives in government.) Then I reprimanded myself, "He's not your president yet. You already have a president." However, in that moment, I realized this is the most important change for me this week. After seven years of non-representative government, I finally have a president again.

Early on in his administration, George W. Bush made it clear that those who did not stand with him on policy were dead to him. "You're either for us, or you're against us." Peace activists and liberals were beneath his concern. Those he deemed terrorists were below subhuman and not covered by human rights conventions. Those in same-sex marriages, of course, needed to be written out of the constitution.

When we learned of the secret torture prisons and the wire tapping, my Republican friends couldn't understand why I was so upset. Those measures are only for bad guys. But this president didn't believe he was president of all of us -- and I knew I was one of the non-constituents.

Under the Bush administration, I could easily imagine a future in which homosexuals or peace activists or any number of un-Americans were rounded up. With Bush it wasn't really much of a leap, particularly since it was clear he didn't think he was my president. "You're either with us, or you're against us."

That's why Obama's acceptance speech brought tears to my eyes. He seems to really believe that the President of the United States of America represents all of the states. I know I'll disagree with him on policy, but I also know he'll be my President, and not just president of the "real Americans." Compare Bush's assertion that you're either with us or against us to this paragraph from Obama's acceptance speech on November 4th:

It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled -- Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.

Come January 9th, for the first time in eight years, we will all have a president again.

As John Connor's son, I was a little taken aback by the RFP from the Pentagon titled "Multi-Robot Pursuit System." According to this document, the government is looking for someone to "develop a software and sensor package to enable a team of robots to search for and detect human presence in an indoor environment."

They want packs of robots designed "to search for and detect a non-cooperative human subject." Yes, you read that right!

I'm calling Dad. He needs to get on this.

The worst thing about John McCain's silly idea to suspend his campaign until an economic package is hammered out is that it's adding to the panic. Remember the story of Chicken Little? In that story, Foxy Loxy uses the panic generated by Chicken Little to get everyone into his den for dinner. And in a crisis, McCain is proving to be another Chicken Little (or maybe George W. Bush), running willy-nilly right into Foxy's den.

As Rep. Mike Pence (R-Indiana) said, "I must tell you, there are those in the public debate who have said that we must act now. The last time I heard that, I was on a used-car lot."

Or, what about Reason Magazine: "If we're talking about restructuring the next couple of decades worth of financial rules, the discussion probably ought to take as long as, I don't know, all the good conversation that went into passage of The PATRIOT Act or something."

Incidentally, Reason is 40 years old this year, and well worth a subscription.

Those who prefer a well-regulated, European-style economy are gloating these days about the meltdown on Wall Street. It would be easy to assume that the events of the last few weeks are proof-positive that capitalism simply doesn't work.

However, the current debacle reminds me of GK Chesterton, who said, "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried." Same could be said for capitalism.

The basis of capitalism is that it taps personal greed as a means to achieving the ends of proper distribution of goods and services. Capitalism works because most people are ultimately selfish. However, for the system to work, the selfish capitalists must face the consequences of bad decisions. Risk, not the Fed, is the proper regulator of a free market.

The problem with the United States is that the government always steps in and takes away the risk. Everyone knows this, so there's no reason not to overextend. The same is true of the way we distribute land. Build wherever you want! Spend however you want! The government will rebuild your house if a hurricane washes it away, and buy off your bad debt when the NINJAs can't pay.

This is not a free market. It's a free lunch. And, someday, someone will have to pay for it. Looks like someday soon.

I found this article on the dangers of email quite interesting. I turned off my auto-download feature a long time ago, so I'm not worried about wasting "8 1/2 hours a week figuring out what [I was] doing moments before" my email chime went off.

However, I did find this paragraph eerily true:

Tom Stafford, a lecturer at the University of Sheffield, England, and co-author of the book Mind Hacks, believes that the same fundamental learning mechanisms that drive gambling addicts are also at work in email users. "Both slot machines and email follow something called a 'variable interval reinforcement schedule' which has been established as the way to train in the strongest habits," he says.

Basically, we check our email like frantic, trained chickens, because every once in a while, in between the junk mail and the ads for enhancing our sex lives, we get a good reward like a funny story from a good friend. The slot machine keeps us coming back, and drains our time bank in the process.

Today, like every good Northern European in Silver City, I made my annual visit to the skin doctor to have my moles checked. I had a rash on my upper lip that concerned me, so I asked him to look at it. He got out his magnifying glass, took a look, and said, "That's eczema. It's common in people who also have migraines, allergies, asthma, irritable bowel, and precognition."

Yes, he said precognition.

He went on to tell me that this cluster of conditions appeared in "all the Christian mystics. Santa Teresa, John of the Cross, San Francisco. Also, the dark night of the soul. Do you know that term?" I said I did, and I've had some experience with it. I also have the migraines and allergies, and I've had experiences that seemed psychic, and some mystical ones too. So, who knows?

Later, when talking about the moles on my legs -- which could very easily turn cancerous, and need to be watched -- he said, "If you ever have an intuition that one of them has turned bad, even if I don't think medically that it has, we'll take it off." He said this more than once.

I love Silver City, where the skin doctor tells you that the rash on your lip could be sign of psychic abilities, and that he trusts your intuition about your body over his medical knowledge.

from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

i got this from the Astronomy Picture of the Day Web site, where you can see it larger. They say, "Happiness and dancing transcend political boundaries and occur in practically every human society. . . . Happiness is frequently contagious -- few people are able to watch the above video without smiling." I certainly couldn't.

And to think I once believed dancing was evil.

For what it's worth: According to an article written by Joce Berg, et al, and published in the International Journal of Forecasting (there's a journal for everything), prediction markets, like Intrade, are 74% more accurate for long time horizons -- 100 days out -- than polls. The conclusion is that you're better off at this stage in the race to read the prediction markets than the polling data.

The closer we get to election day, the less differentiation there is between polling accuracy and prediction market accuracy (although prediction markets remain slightly more accurate).

Download a pdf of the article here.

When I was in Junior High, I read the Asimov Robot and Foundation series, and became enamored with the Cities. These were mostly underground complexes that stretched over vast swaths of land. People could live in the Cities and never go outside. I know. I know. My Junior High paradise is most people's hell, but I loved the idea.

Now, architects in Dubai are proposing an entire city housed in one massive skyscraper, called the Ziggurat. My favorite part of the plan is the transportation provided through "an integrated 360 degree network (horizontally and vertically) so cars would be redundant." Cool!

If anyone ever builds it -- and I wouldn't put it past those oil-rich Dubai nuts -- I definitely want to visit. Although, I'm not sure I'd want to live in a City any more. Where would I walk the dogs without a Boston Hill?

As a believer in free markets, one of my favorite prediction tools is Intrade. The idea of Intrade is that people are allowed to buy and trade shares in things like the likelihood that Al Gore will be the next president, who will win Best Supporting Actor at the Emmies, whether Russian troops will enter Tblisi, etc.

People can make or lose real money on these trades, so they're more likely to seriously consider before making a choice. Looking at the Presidential election, one of the surprising facts is that Hillary Clinton is still trading in the $3.50 range. Barack Obama has recently dropped from a high of $68 to $60, and he continues to drop this week despite the so-called "convention polling bump." However, John McCain continues to hold steady, just under $40, which isn't hopeful for him.

I haven't done a study to see how accurate Intrade is at making election predictions (or invasion predictions for that matter), but I enjoy watching the markets.

As the name of Joe Biden was bandied about in the past few weeks, and then when he became the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate, I kept getting him confused in my mind with Richard Lugar. Lugar was my Senator in Indiana, and is one of the most well-reasoned voices regarding foreign policy in the federal government. So, it took me a while to figure out why I was confusing one of my favorite Republicans with Biden, the Democratic Senator from Delaware.

Then it dawned on me.

Biden and Lugar have been the chairs of the Foreign Relations Committee for years -- sometimes one is the chair, and sometimes the other, depending on which party is ascendant. During the past eight years, their committee has often been the only sane voice coming out of Washington (particularly regarding Iraq), and the two chairs have worked hard to make it a truly bipartisan committee. In the build up to the war, they were the ones asking the question the Bush Administration continually ignored: "Do we have a plan for what we'll do after the invasion?"

I could think of worse people to be advising Barack Obama on foreign policy than Richard Lugar's bipartisan partner, Joe Biden.

I'm a crazy cameraphone picture taker. I love the immediacy of being able to capture anything that strikes my fancy, and I do it more often than I probably should.

So, I've decided to post a picture every day. I'm sure no one will be interested except my friends. But, if you want to know what I've been noticing lately, then go here.

One pattern I've noticed (particularly in the pics that don't make the cut): I'm endlessly fascinated by New Mexico skies.

There's now a Web site that rates any address for walkability. It's fun to put in addresses of people you know and see how they're property rates. My parents' house rated higher than I expected. One of my friends really, really needs to keep her car.

I knew our town's downtown was good, but I was surprised how high The Kumquat's location rated:

One of the things I love about hiking in the southwest is the use of cairns. Cairns are piles of rocks that help mark the trails, and in this rocky terrain they're often the only way to know you're on the right path. I can't count the number of times I've stood at a cairn, straining to see the next one, or taken tentative steps forward hoping to see a cairn up ahead.

For me, cairns make trail hiking in the southwest more like real life than following easy, well-worn trails in other parts of the country. Most of the time, my life is one of looking for the next marker that I'm on the right path, and trusting that future markers will be there.

Cairns are also a chance to add a rock (and a prayer if you wish) of your own. That way, you can signal the people behind you that they're on the right path too.

What do you do with the plastic American Flag handed to you by a sincere little Boy Scout at the July 4th Parade?

When he offered it, you couldn't very well say, "No, thank you." But, now that the festivities are over, you don't want that cheap thing collecting dust in your house. You can't burn it, because it's plastic. So . . . you toss it in the landfill.

Boy did that feel patriotic.

We've recently had two incidents in our community that are reminders of why it's not good to feed predators.

First, there was the outbreak of rabies in the fox population on Boston Hill, our in-town open space. I talked to the Animal Control officer one day, and he said the outbreak was particularly bad because the fox population is so dense on Boston Hill. "The people who live around Boston have been feeding the foxes for years," he said. Luckily, only one person got bit, and none of the dogs who are walked on Boston regularly (including mine) had to be put down because of contact. The rabies did thin out the overpopulation.

The second incident was much worse: A local man, who lived on the edge of the Gila Wilderness, was killed by a mountain lion. The lion had to be hunted down and killed, along with another lioness who had become too familiar with humans. The reason for all this was that someone had been feeding the lions, so he could get good pictures of them. Needless to say, he's being charged with manslaughter for his negligent behavior. One man killed, one man in trouble with the law, and two mountain lions killed, because someone thought it would be a good idea to feed predators.

Update: I don't read the paper, and rely on my spouse to read it and tell me what's going on. He says no one has actually been charged with manslaughter, but the paper said that was a likely outcome.