Marked for Dearth

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.”