Elias K. Mangosteen

A popular argument in discussing the dangerousness of cars vs. firearms goes something like this:

"When a drunk driver kills someone with a car, we blame the driver, but when there's a mass shooting using a firearm, we blame the firearm. That doesn't make any sense."

And you know? That's a good point. It's certainly worth looking at it a little more, because on its face that argument is a fair one; two seemingly equivalent circumstances have completely different patterns of blame.

So, let's poke at it. I'm going to propose a couple of different lenses through which to look at the argument, and we'll see where it goes.

Lens 1: Differences If two things are called the same name (e.g. "apple" and "apple"), but the description of how they're the same is different (e.g. "That apple is a fruit in a bowl in front of me." and "That is a picture of an apple.), then they're actually two different things, regardless of the name. Aristotle totally nailed that one.

Lens 2: Primary use: The primary use of an object is what we'd expect the object to be used for, in general. In the case of a car, that's transportation. In the case of a firearm, that's projecting force at a distance.

Lens 3: Proper use: The proper use of an object is when a user uses the object for its primary use. For example, a driver using a car to transport themselves (and possibly passengers), or a person using a firearm to project force at a distance.

So let's take the argument at the top again, and view it through those lenses.

"When a drunk driver kills someone with a car, we blame the driver."
Object: car
Primary use: transportation
Use in this case: propelling the car into a person
The use in this case does not match up with the primary use, so it fails the "proper use" test for the object.

"When there's a mass shooting using a gun, we blame the gun."
Object: firearm
Primary use: projecting force at a distance
Use in this case: projecting force at a distance
The use in this case does match up, so it passes the "proper use" test for the object.

Remember what I said before: If two objects are called the same name, but the description of how they're the same is different, then they're two different things.

A person who uses a car to kill innocent people was not using a car properly; killing someone is not the same as transport; the primary purpose of the tool.

A person who uses a firearm to kill innocent people was using a firearm properly; they successfully projected force at a distance; the primary purpose of the tool.

...and therein lies the difference.

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If the proper use of a tool doesn't result in killing people, then misuse that results in killing someone innocent ends with blaming the operator.

If the proper use of a tool does result in killing people, then misuse that results in killing someone innocent ends with blaming the tool.

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Therefore, treating them differently and placing the blame in different places makes complete sense, because they're different.

Achievement Unlocked: "A Fountain Pen Nerd is You": Completely strip, repair, and re-assemble a fountain pen, with appropriate tools. (10 points)

So, it's funny. At home, I have a workspace with the standard "set of small drawers for random small things" hanging on the wall behind my desk, but for a long time, it was basically aspirational. I figured I'd be using it for all sorts of electronic things, and never did.

Over the past 4 days, a significant chunk of the drawers are now filled with fountain pen paraphernalia: Ink, eyedroppers, cheap pens that can be eyedropper-converted, ink cartridges, cartridge converters, a 20x loupe, o-rings, silicone grease, etc.

How did that happen? Good question!

For the longest longest time, I've had this utter dread about taking things apart to fix/repair/understand them... because there was no guarantee that I would be able to put them back together, and then I would just be Breaking My Toys and Destroying Value, and that would not do. I'll take apart thought constructs all day and pin their teleological carcasses to the wall, just to reconstruct them and send them on their way after dinner... but physical objects? Nuh-uh. No way. Scary.

On Wednesday I acquired a new fountain pen (The Moonman M2, extra fine point). On Sunday, I dropped it, and the writing was.... off. The ink flow was much less than before, and even though it wrote just fine, it was clearly Not Quite Right. So I looked online, found videos of how to diagnose/repair common fountain pen problems, and bought a 20x loupe so I could see what I was doing. Short form: The nib was in fine shape, but it got knocked out of alignment with the ink feeder. Only thing to do is to take it apart, and re-insert the nib.

When the pen you're working with fills only with an eyedropper (gigantic capacity, but no cartridges), "taking apart" is a more complicated proposition than normal:

First, remove all the ink from the pen. Wipe out the sink when you're done.
Then unscrew various parts from other parts.
Make sure the O-rings are on a contrasting material where you can see them later.
[SO MANY small O-rings (well, okay, three. but they were REALLY small).]
Get a good grip on the nib and yank it out.
Marvel at the fact that you have fully dismembered the pen.
Stare through the loupe as you re-align the nib with the ink feeder (putting the "micro" in "micro-motor skills").
Put the O-rings back in the O-ring places (Are my hands too big for this? No, but it was a near thing.)
Finally, screw all the various parts back together, except for where you're going to put in the ink.
Refill with ink (you have your eyedropper, right?), shake a bit to get the ink into the feeder, et voila! A repaired pen.

Clearly I just needed to find something I wanted to understand enough to take apart, and then care enough about to put back together.

Context: What follows is a thought that I need to develop more, but the nucleus was worth posting.

1. Facebook as a company constantly talks about making connections between people; but it can't, and it doesn't. Rather, Facebook makes connections between identities, because that's the most immediate thing it has access to: relationships (e.g. who you friend, who friends you, who you block/mute/etc.), and affinities in the forms of likes, shares, and postings.

2a. Facebook's problem is an interesting one: Identities don't click on ads and buy products. People do. To wit, someone who creates a Facebook account as a way to express one particular aspect of their personality will give a very skewed view of their ad preferences, and likely won't see relevant ads. Conversely, the more aspects of a person's personality are expressed in their postings on Facebook, the more relevant the ads are going to be.

2b. Since advertising is a numbers game, you as an individual aren't interesting, but "everyone like you" very much is. Ergo, a collection of interlinked people is a very potent engine to create the most valuable thing for advertisers... the largest pool possible of likely customers.

3. Facebook's goal is therefore to make people and identities as much of a one-to-one mapping as possible. One global person = one global identity = a stable target for ads.

4. Okay, so how do you do you make "identity" and "personhood" converge, given that humans don't really do "being the same person to everyone" very well? Well, we can look at what Facebook has already done to see how they are solving it: Facebook Login, Facebook Pixels on websites, The "Real Name" policy, making it more difficult than necessary to limit information, etc... but that all feels like begging the question a bit.

5a. To do this from first principles, the better question to ask first is "How are people and identities different?".

5b. The next question is "Who is identity convergence useful enough to, to pay real money for the service?", because that shapes the resources available.*

That's where I am right now.

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* This is also the reason that Facebook is free for users. A user couldn't/wouldn't pay enough to make up for their potential lost revenue, presuming that making people pay will shrink the pool of users. See: advertising is a numbers game.

The best way I've found to write anything at all is to stop trying to write everything at once, so here I am.

The writing I want to write about is the writing I've been writing lately, albeit not in this particular venue. Rather, the inscriptions have been inscribed in a book; one made of paper, thread and probably some glue. In specific, a notebook with lovely paper that is just smooth enough to allow the ink to flow, and rough enough to know that the ink is indelibly marking a surface that's meant to be marked.

This journal in which I journal sits upon a desk made of the finest IKEAlite that money can buy. The lighting is directed indirectly, multiply-sourced, diode-emitted, and as pleasing as one could imagine for the task of putting pen to paper in the pursuit of conveying words to a medium where they can't move around as much.

Setting the scene above, I can tell you the tale of what brought me to care about any of the things in that brobdingnagian boulliabaise of a tableau.

Enter the fountain pen. The pen, for purposes of this discussion is a Pilot Metropolitan in Classic Black, with a fine point nib. You'll find yourself with change out of a twenty US Dollar banknote, were you to purchase a new one.

A bit of background: Charitably speaking, I have a broad assortment of inexpensive ball-point pens. If one were less charitable, one could reasonably note that after throwing out roughly seventy no-longer-working and/or empty and/or exploded pens, the only accurate phrase would be "a good start."

More background: My handwriting is neat, stylized, and compact. Anything broader than a fine-point pen is certain to cause frustration. To complicate things, physics conspires against me in a most obvious way, inasmuch that a science can conspire. The finer the point on the paper, the more friction there will be against the surface, as a ball-point pen requires a small amount of bearing down in order to move the bearing. The more downward pressure, the more fatigue, the less written. By contrast, a fountain pen releases ink by way of pressure on the nib, of which the weight of the pen itself typically suffices.

Ergo, when one has handwriting that does not suffer insufficient writing utensils, it's somewhat surprising that I never ventured into the realm of fountain pens previously. One possible explanation is that your humble narrator was put off by the pen snobbery that went hand-in-hand with the pen geekery, much in the way that it's possible to look askance at someone who insists on calling their wristwatch a "timepiece". Self-knowledge dictates that my purchase of a fountain pen costing multiple hectadollars would only lead to regret, coniciding with the first time I uttered a question involving the words "my other pants." This may shed a small amount of light on how I assembled a veritable dragon's hoard of plastic, ink, and tiny tungsten ball bearings.

With all that written, I now write more. I have filled notebooks at home, and I have found a small and significant delight in bringing a notebook into meetings at my workplace. I often talk about "increasing the resolution of my world"; being disciplined enough to learn a discipline enough to see some part of the world on a finer scale, where the invisible parts are not so visible to be obtrusive, but laid plain enough to be seen at all. I can safely say that in the past approximately seven months I have acquired a much greater appreciation for paper, ink, and the quiet capillary action of a fountain pen.

So.... someone wondered what a rabbinic discussion of pinball would look like. Here we go....

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Rabbi Yonatan of Tverya saw a pinball machine with a credit on it, but no one nearby.

Having a desire to play pinball, he then used the credit, and played a game good enough that he got an extra credit on the machine when he was done. Not having time to play another game, he walked away.

Later that day, he talked with Rabbi Shmuel of Tafron, and mentioned what happened. Rabbi Shmuel was taken aback, asking how Rabbi Yonatan could have taken another person's game away. Surely that's stealing!

Rabbi Yonatan retorted that there was no one around when he saw the credit, and therefore it was unclaimed. It was found as if it were a _talit_ on the ground.

"However," Rabbi Shmuel said, "someone put that credit on the machine, and that person may have come back to the machine later, and found the credit gone."

"Ah ha! " R. Yonatan said, "You see, I got an extra credit. I left the machine in the same state as when I found it. One credit. They wouldn't have known."

"And yet, what if they came when you were there? And also, what if you broke the machine? It's a mechanical object. It's impossible to leave it in the same state."

At which point, R. Yonatan said, "Shmulik, bubbeleh, they just installed a new DDR game at the arcade. I'm buying. Let's go."

Things I say non-ironically: “I’m used to occupying a weird spot in the corporate realpolitik orgchart… the big open spot in right-center field where the outfielders aren’t because someone read the play wrong.”

More on that later, but I wanted to get the thought out.

I've been doing Tae Kwon Do for about 14 months now. There are a ton of rabbit holes to go down in talking about this, but right now I'm going to focus on approximately one thing, because that's how any of this will get written at all.

For decades, as I had slipped into a more and more sedentary lifestyle, I gradually limited my range of motion to avoid injury. One of the first things to go was the ability/desire to jump; as in "two feet on the ground, spring up, catch air, land". My glutes and hamstrings weren't strong enough to keep me upright under extraordinary load, so I landed straight-legged, jamming my knees. That lesson quickly learned, I stopped jumping except when it was unavoidable, and even then it was more of a controlled stumble.

Fast forward to roughly now. TKD has been going really well, I've been re-learning how to move in my body, and the next belt test requires moves that, well, they'll go a lot better if I can actually jump. Undaunted, your narrator forges ahead with (re)learning how to jump. Supporting my weight through my muscles, fighting the urge to land on my joints, and generally (re)learning how to move.

One of the other steps on the my long journey to physical fitness is general cardio conditioning. Straight-up endurance and not having muscles that go into debt faster than a college kid with their first credit card.*

You know what's a good cardio exercise which requires minimal equipment, minimal space, and varied choosable intensity? Jumping rope. I shouldn't be surprised at how much effort goes into jumping over a rope a couple of times a second, but yet there I was, huffing and puffing and trying to stay vertical after jumping over a rope a dozen or so times.

Well, jumping over something. It wasn't exactly a rope. It was a plastic-coated steel cable, with set-screws to control the length of the cable, and ball-bearings embedded in the handles for your wrist-flicking pleasure. Technology has advanced a bit, evidently. Curious about this phenomenon, I go to Amazon and search for "speed rope cross".**

Go ahead. Do it. I'll wait.

What you'll find very quickly is that there are dozens offered that differ only in two real ways:
a) The type of ball bearing in the handle, of which there are two primary styles
b) The brand name printed on the handles... and there are dozens of different brand names

It didn't take long to figure out what happened. Everyone sources from the same two (probably Chinese) manufacturers, there's a couple of different variations, they buy at least 200 of them to fulfill the minimum order, and then they drop-ship them to Amazon (i.e. "Fulfilled By Amazon") for further sale. I must admit, I'm rather tempted to try this stunt myself, complete with Crossfit-compatible hyper-macho brand name***, if there's a positive margin at all, just for humor value.

So, yes. Jumping rope. Good for you, and mass-customized.

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* ...and the free frisbee that came with it.
** I recalled 'cross' being somewhere in the brand name of the one that I borrowed.
*** Just not too many numbers... that's more of a Tactical Flashlight thing.

Given the changes in the Terms of Service for LJ, it's time to pack up.
This will take time, but it will happen.

Same name over at Dreamwidth. See you over there!

I'm sensing a pattern:

In 1999, a dealer out-negotiated me on a car, so I learned a bunch about negotiation, and now occasionally help friends get better deals on cars by aggressively bargaining with car dealers.

In 2003, our wedding photographer was absolutely horrible, and so I teamed up with a friend and started a wedding photography business so that people wouldn't have the same experience I did.

Just now, in 2016, Comcast raised my rates, and so I'm researching the laws (specifically the Massachusetts Open Wiring Statutes) around getting more Cable TV competition in the condo building.

Right now, I'm going with "constructive vengeance."