Marked for Dearth

The Missionary Position, Christopher Hitchens’s polemic against Mother Teresa, is a worthwhile one-sitting read. An excerpt that typifies the feel of the book:

The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection. [Mother Teresa] described a person who was in the last agonies of cancer and suffering unbearable pain. With a smile, Mother Teresa told the camera what she told this terminal patient: ‘You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.’ Unconscious of the account to which this irony might be charged, she then told of the sufferer’s reply: ‘Then please tell him to stop kissing me.’

Hitchens reserves a fair amount of his criticism for the public’s devotional attitude toward Mother Teresa and the media’s uncritical treatment of her activities. You’ll find it easy to agree with him here, even if you still have sympathy for Teresa by the time Hitchens finishes his attack.

Of course, this being Chris Hitchens, Latin phrases and unusual adjective/noun pairings (e.g., “grisly triptych”) abound.

Everyone deserves a personal Macromedia Flash intro. If you’re not familiar with this underrated form of ego-stroking, here’s a representative example (caution, Mom: rap music). Tell me you wouldn’t want to have a montage of yourself wearing expensive suits, getting water dumped on your head (?), and holding an American flag in front of a cheering crowd. Your brand demands it - and just because Diddy takes himself so seriously doesn’t mean you’d have to.

In fact, life would be vastly improved, or at least made more entertaining, if these intros were more widespread. Martha Stewart requires one, I hope that much is clear. As does Kim Jong Il. Naturally, both would be set to rap music with boastful lyrics. Consider, too, how much shorter and more interesting political campaign ads would be if they all took on this format.

And what’s in it for you? Well, prospective employers trolling social networks for evidence of binge drinking might instead learn of your esteemed past as a humanitarian, designer, entertainer, CEO - and maybe a painter, spiritual medium, and philosopher-king to boot.

Four months ago, I bought myself a souped up MacBook Pro. I had always been dismissive of Macs - the hermetically sealed hardware, the One True Mouse Button (”mash the keypad with your palm now”), the alleged dearth of good software. But the allure of the MacBook was too great, and finally I gave in.

I held video iChats with my family on the East Coast, barcode-scanned my books into Delicious Library, bought music and movies. When I wanted to run shell commands or build something from source, I could still crack open a terminal and geek out. It quickly became the only computer I used at home. My brother and I soon bought several Intel Macs for ourselves and family members - six in total so far (it’s conceivable that we’re putting some Apple employee’s kid through college). This is where the story was supposed to end. Great success, go team, I’m a convert, and so on.

Last week, the MacBook was lost/stolen during baggage inspection at Logan Airport in Boston. I foolishly checked it inside of a larger suitcase, padded with clothes, because I didn’t intend to use it on the flight. When I got home, it was gone, replaced with a handy notice of baggage inspection. The Logan TSA representative assured me that each inspection was videotaped, that they would investigate, and that I could call back next week to hear the preliminary findings. But I’m not very optimistic. The laptop case was completely untagged. If there are any snags with the videotaping, it will be difficult to prove that I ever packed a laptop. Which, when you think about it, is kind of a silly thing for me to have to prove. Even if there’s evidence of negligence, they probably won’t be able to recover the laptop itself, and a monetary settlement could be six months out. The most frustrating part is that I have to take their word; the “investigation” is completely out of my hands.

It has been correctly pointed out that baggage handlers can get a bit rough in the course of their job. They hate baggage. If valuables aren’t stolen outright, they may very well be damaged by the time you retrieve them at your destination. The obvious lesson: bring whatever you can in a carry-on unless you have a good reason not to. Anything you check can be searched (and seized) by any of several unmotivated, poorly paid government employees with loose morals.

Suddenly, I have an opinion about whether to privatize airport security.

Update: Next time, I’ll consider using LoJack for Macs.

The Genetic Science Research Center at the University of Utah runs a site called Mouse Party that features some really creative Flash work and an odd, overdesigned UI - all in the name of drug awareness. It isn’t very informative beyond what you learned in high school health class, but seeing coked up cartoon mice lounge around together is a reward unto itself.

Here’s the presentation: a fish tank contains seven mice under the influence of various narcotics. The ecstasy addict gyrates his hips, the coke fiend twitches nervously in the corner, and the LSD…well let’s just say fiend again…sits mesmerized by his own little waving mouse hand. So far so good. But to learn about a drug’s effect on the brain, you direct a scientist’s gloved hand to grab a mouse and drop it in a mechanized armchair, which dumps it into a machine that plays the animation. The execution of this drop-a-mouse-into-the-chair metaphor isn’t very precise (especially when you want to, say, drop a mouse from great height). The tried and true click-on-what-you-want metaphor is not in any immediate danger.

Some questions, such as which drugs the web designer was on, remain unanswered.

Warren Buffett pledged the lion’s share of his recent philanthropy to the Gates Foundation, which mainly caters to immunization, AIDS prevention, and minority scholarship. These are noble causes, to be sure, but they are only a few of the many that are targeted by millions of conscientious people around the world: poverty, disease prevention, education, climate change, social justice. And let’s not forget your alma mater’s fat endowment. How are you supposed to choose where to spend your charitable dollars? And how do you do it rationally when many of the problems seem inescapably emotional?

A few days ago, I started thinking more carefully - which is to say, at all - about how to prioritize world needs. Luckily, I didn’t wallow in this idealism for too long before discovering that someone smarter and better educated had done it for me:

Eight of the world’s top economists…were asked to evaluate the world’s problems, think of the costs and efficiencies attached to solving each, and then produce a prioritized list of those most deserving of money…While the economists were from varying political stripes, they largely agreed. The numbers were just so compelling: $1 spent preventing HIV/AIDS would result in about $40 of social benefits, so the economists put it at the top of the list (followed by malnutrition, free trade and malaria). In contrast, $1 spent to abate global warming would result in only about two cents to 25 cents worth of good.

The findings of the Copenhagen Consensus project mentioned in the article are described in Global Crises, Global Solutions and the abridged, less pedantic-sounding, How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place.

Or, just skip to the good part.

While directing a friend to a paper on Sawzall, I discovered a blog post that casts engineers who create such broadly applicable tools as “major force multipliers”. This reminded me of my own everyday-life reuse of military planning lingo: “force projection“, which I take to mean, one’s ability to persuade and influence others remotely, over telephone or e-mail. A person who does this effectively can be said to have good force projection.

In small doses, I find military-speak to be fairly satisfying, although I’m not quite sure why. Apart from clown college, any enterprise that needs to be taken seriously eventually develops a sterile, professional vocabulary. But for war, it helps for the lingo to have a euphemistic flavor. For one thing, this sort of language helps distance war planners and combatants from the sometimes grim reality on the ground. Framing combat as a professional activity helps to emotionally detach participants from what actually transpires. Killing enemies is a weighty task, but surely neutralizing them can’t be all that bad. We even do that to heartburn in the off season.

In a signature routine on euphemisms, comedian George Carlin laments how the term shell shock has undergone many changes in the war lexicon over the years - first to battle fatigue, then operational exhaustion, and finally to post-traumatic stress disorder. “Still eight syllables,” he remarks defensively, “but we’ve added a hyphen.”

Most families pass around certain lore about their longest lived or longest departed members. I’ve always been fascinated by these stories: how the chronology of a life becomes entertaining narrative, how some details are recalled and others forgotten, how apocryphal flourishes are injected here and there. And of course, what it all implies about that innocent-looking character in the sepia-tone family photos.

My paternal grandfather was fond of carrying out simul chess demonstrations (a talent I have plainly not inherited). After one such event in his twenties, he was apprehended by the secret police, ushered to a holding cell, and given a written confession to sign. The charge: spying for Japan. It was, like so many accusations leveled during Stalin’s purges, a fabrication (though I’d take pride in knowing that my grandfather had actually been a spy). A coin collection uncovered during a search of his apartment only reinforced his presumed guilt to the authorities.

Refusing to sign the death warrant confession, he prepared for the worst but was fortunately spared any coercion. Instead, after a quick secret trial, my grandfather was sentenced to ten years in a Siberian labor camp. He had earlier completed engineering work optimizing the bulk freight transport of petroleum and other industrial materials; once it had been recognized, his sentence was commuted to four years, which he then served. His health never fully recovered after his release, and he died many years before his time and long before my birth.

I was reminded of this story last week when my maternal grandfather passed away under very different circumstances at the age of 99. I didn’t know him very well - he was nearly 90 when he arrived in the States - but Phil wrote him a nice little memento.

Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is well done. The pages flew by, owing more to a slowly building feeling of discomfort than to the sheer strangeness of the plot. I hadn’t read fiction in a while, and this was a nice way to break the fast.

Plus, according to Amazon, you get over 23,000 words per dollar. What more do you need to know?

I’ve just returned from a week-long stay in beautiful Maui. When you think of a Hawaiian vacation, you might imagine carefree days spent sipping mai tais on the beach. However, given how sedentary the rest of my life is, I decided to go a different route: hiking.

We trekked to the Olowalu Petroglyphs and climbed to the rim of Mount Haleakala’s crater (I managed to gain five pounds; go figure.) Also, we toured the island’s only commercial winery, which specializes in pineapple wine appropriately enough, and rounded out the trip with some whale watching.

Thanks to Dealnews, I snagged a Dell 2001FP monitor for $564 plus shipping. This was a no brainer. It took me a while to realize that Dell’s hardware prices are highly dependent on the coupon code you dig up, the current phase of the moon, and your general temperament at the time of purchase.

This type of promotion always struck me as kind of random: reward people who spend a long time hunting around for the best deals. They don’t have to buy additional accessories, mail in rebates, or recommend the manufacturer’s products to their friends - only spend the requisite amount of time looking for the secret alphanumeric passphrase that lowers the price. Speak friend and enter.