Mortality, Irrelevance, and the Deaths of Celebrities

The recent deaths of celebrities from the 1980s are making me re-evaluate my life, but in a very particular way:  I want to know how long I will be relevant to students.  Right now, I can drop references to things in pop culture (well, more precisely, to things in nerd culture), and most students understand the reference.  I can name-drop Buffy episodes, or rant about the Star Wars movies (both the ones that happened and the ones that didn't happen), or talk about how I don't watch Dr Who, but of course I know what it is and have seen a few episodes.  Somehow everyone loves Dr Who; go figure.

Now, I know that eventually I'll fall behind on my pop culture.  I mean, the freshman this year had yet to hit puberty when 9/11 happened; as far as they are concerned, we've had troops in Afghanistan forever, just like I grew up thinking we'd had troops in Germany and Japan forever.  How can I keep up?  Our school just got rid of phone service in the dorm rooms because only 3 students out of 1400 have voice mail boxes.  Everyone has a cell phone these days.  Of course I remember the August ritual back in the day of ordering phone service for your dorm room.  I can joke about these sorts of "back in the day" moments, but

What is terrifying is not that I cannot keep up with the pop culture of the youth these days.  I can try, and Wikipedia, Google, Youtube, and Netflix make it easy to scour the landscape for interesting shows.  We plow through TV shows and books at home anyway, and once we have kids, we'll start acquiring the cultural signposts of the next generation.  I don't think I'll be an old fuddy-duddy who sprays down kids who need to stay the hell off my lawn.

What shocked me is that world I know, and all of the people in it, will die, and the next generation will never know them as anything but history.  It's not that I can't experience the future; it's that my students can never experience the past.

This hit me when MCA died.  The Beastie Boys meant something to me; I had fond memories about them that related to my personal history (riding the bus to and from the accelerated learning class the sent the smart kids to, the soundtrack to a number of college parties, and so on), and they were influential in the music industry in a number of ways.  So long as they were still releasing albums and playing gigs, they would be discussed, remembered, and evaluated.  Even if their heyday was 20 years in the past, like a ghost they could still project their image into the present, and force us to re-tell their story.

For a mainstream public figure like Michael Jackson, for a decade or two there will be opportunities to discuss his legacy, even with him gone.  Every time someone does the moonwalk, or does the Thriller dance, or opens a ridiculous ranch, or burns through millions of dollars in studio time to produce a terrible album (too soon?)...  There are videos and songs and sordid court cases and single-gloved 80s fashion trends based on the Michael Jackson juggernaut.  The young may know know Michael Jackson, but they at least know his caricature, and that is a point of connection.

But for a niche act like the Beastie Boys...  Without them on tour to remind the public about their influence, and to trigger a flood of memories from older fans like myself, what do they become?  How long until they are effectively gone, until there are no more triggers to make people re-tell the story of the Beastie Boys?

Probably because I haven't lost my parents, I haven't really thought about what it's like to carry the full burden of telling someone's story, of keeping them alive in words and spirit and stories when they are fully gone.

To keep the Beastie Boys alive, I would have to re-tell their story, and try to find some way to make relevant to students a niche group that they have never heard of.  The big-picture, broad-stroke personalities like Michael Jackson will be much easier, at least for a while.  But the Beastie Boys are already gone.  To re-tell their story in a compelling way to the 18-year-olds of 2019 is re-tell my own story, because I cannot hope to untangle what happened to the Beastie Boys in 1985 from what happened to me in 1985.  Every gaze backwards is tinged with nostalgia, and the youth of tomorrow won't want to replace their generations' Beastie Boys with my generations' Beastie Boys, any more than I wanted to replace Ad-Rock, MCA and Mike D with their 1959 equivalent (a Skiffle group I've never heard of?)

What frightens me, of course, has nothing to do with music.  It's that someday I will lose my parents, and then the task of keeping my parents' stories and memories alive will fall to me.  I will tell their stories, and almost by definition, it will be irrelevant to my children, who are looking to the future.  Every special memory, every family story, every experience with my parents from my past that to me is not a moment, but a moment, will be no easier to explain to my (future) children than explaining the significance of the Beastie Boys to an 18 year old in 2019.  There are stories and expressions we have that will not be easy to translate.  My parents are both rock stars, and so I assume it will be like talking about Michael Jackson to people born in 1991, which is easier.  But even with the King of Pop, there are moments that don't translate,  just as there will be bits of my history with my parents that I can never fully explain.

It's not that I can't stay relevant to the next generation; it's that they cannot be relevant to me.  For some reason I didn't figure that out until MCA died.  I could probably understand what matters to my students, but they can't understand what mattered to me.  Because the things I know are just ghosts that I can see but the students cannot, and I would have to tell the stories of all of these ghosts.  But then I'd just be telling my own story.  And that's what old fuddy-duddies do, which I was trying to avoid in the first place!

The US Tax Code should be written more like software!

After wasting our 2nd straight weekend working on our taxes, I've come to two conclusions:

1)  The US Tax code is too complex, but I don't think it will ever be greatly simplified since it gives people with money ways to pay less in taxes

2)  If the US Tax code needs to so complex, it should be written more like software and less like a legal code.

Think about it:  All of the rules are basically an algorithm.  In fact, a lot of the rules say things like "Subtract line 34 from line 30 and write the result in line 35".  That's not even sophisticated enough to be called an algorithm!  It's just describing a basic spreadsheet operation.

Many states, as well the IRS, provide PDFs with editable cells.  But, these editable PDF cells don't update one another like a spreadsheet (i.e. if Line 7 is an input into a calculation that produces Line 10, changing Line 7 doesn't affect Line 10; you have to re-do the math yourself).  And there's no way for these PDFs to reference one another.  So, if the state tax code requires the adjusted gross income (AGI) from the federal 1040, there's no way to tell the state income tax PDF, "go get Line 37 from the federal 1040".

I really think that we need a richer format for PDFs that the IRS and the states should use to write their tax forms.  This format (Tax-PDF?  ePDF?  tPDF?  TDF?) should have the following properties:

1. It's basically a spreadsheet with a bunch of text next to each line, so that it can carry its logic around very easily
2. Each Line can be named (Line 37, Line 4, etc) and lines can be exposed for export into other forms
3. You can import Lines from other documents, i.e. "import Line37 from US-1040-2011-v1;" or something like that
4. Each cell knows if it's been imported from another document, entered into this form but could have been imported, calculated based on other values in this document, or entered into the current form because it cannot be imported from elsewhere.
5. There can be a standard "interface" of lines to be exported can be used by brokerage houses and banks for 1099-INT and 1099-DIV forms to make importing these forms into other documents very easy
6. If you put a bunch of these files into one folder, you can weave them together to get them to import information from each other
7. As many common situations as possible are encoded in these documents as sub-modules.  There should be a set of standard situations (marriage, divorce, birth, death, moving between states, etc) that all state documents are required to implement, and they have to document them in the same order, using the same FAQ.  It should be clear where a state's formulas deviate from the standards of other states.
8. The format should be "patchable", so that bugs can be fixed by having a new version of the document update or patch a faulty older version.
9. Any box should serve up useful meta-information if you ask it, such as what other boxes contributed to it, and what situations that box is relevant for (i.e. does it matter if you're married filing separately?  is it relevant if you were a part-time resident?  What if you were in the military?)
10. All of the worksheets (Schedule A, Schedule D, etc) can also be written in this format, and then imported by the 1040. 
11. You can convert the document into a web form (javascript or whatever)

Basically, this would be a different way to write tax documents.  Instead of writing the tax code as words and then sticking boxes at the end of the words, you write the code like it's a spreadsheet, and then label the cells of the spreadsheet.  If you're careful it can still be printed out and used by hand, but it doesn't have to be.

I assume that turbotax already does a lot of this, but turbotax is constantly faced with converting a textual tax code into fancy spreadsheets.  I want the tax code itself to be written as a spreadsheet first, using a flexible standard that states, banks, and brokerages can all use.  The spreadsheet can still look like a PDF, but the entire logic of the tax code is inside it.

In fact, it might be possible to write a fancy PDF parser that converts a lot of the tax code into a spreadsheet.

Winter is coming!

I have always loved the simplicity of winter.  Naked trees and cleanly intersecting lines of branches against the grey-white sky are so easy to understand.  Monotonous amounts of snow makes every street look the same street in a snow-globe.  Even the cold is simple because it drives me indoors, to where I probably want to be anyway.  Winter's cold is such a clear and unambiguous antagonist.  All of the subtlety and variety in life, whether through food or company or television, takes center stage in winter because there's such a limited color palette outside.  Winter is dinner party weather; spring and summer are cookout weather, but their delicate interplay between mosquitoes and darkness and heat and rain inevitably complicate the process.  In winter, it's cold and snowing, so the focus is inside.  We do indoor things, and we don't have to rake leaves or paint the steps.  Spring and summer make me feel bad when I'm not outside enjoying the weather; in winter I can enjoy the entertainment inside and be glad that I'm not outside.  In fact I like to be outside in the winter, just so that I can then come back inside.

Who is the marginal student in 2011?

Listened to another great podcast from EconTalk at the gym tonight.  Russ Roberts interviewed Tyler Cowen about Tyler’s new book, “The Great Stagnation”.

The major theme that stuck out was one of Cowen’s three potential causes of our current economic stagnation, namely the difficulty in educating the marginal student.  In the 1950s when college enrollments in the US shot up, it wasn’t that hard to educate the marginal student.  Because college enrollments were so much lower, there were plenty of talented potential students who could be easily educated.

However, now that college enrollments are fairly high, the marginal student has changed.  How difficult would it be for me to turn my C students into A students?  Much harder than turning my C students from high school graduates who are not attending college to C students in college.  One challenge in education may be that we've actually done a good job finding potentially talented students and gotten them into college, so it's now harder to find that hidden talent, or to get contemporary high school students with no plans for college into college.

This is a spin on education I hadn’t really thought about, and it makes sense that it would be more difficult to improve the educational experience of the marginal student today than 60 years ago.  In a way, it means that we did a good job in the mid-20th century, but it certainly implies that additional gains from education will be tougher to come by in the future.  As usual, more food for thought from econtalk.

Hair Salons, Economics and Software Engineering

Last night I listened to another outstanding econtalk podcast that featured host Russ Roberts interviewing Wafaya Abdallah, a small business owner who runs a hair salon in Maryland.

Abdallah’s hair salon is unique in a number of clever and insightful ways: To foster teamwork, the employees are paid a salary instead of per appointment; everyone gets a bonus if the salon hits target numbers for the month; stylists with an empty chair work on promotions or decorating or other tasks; during downtime at work they read books like The Alchemist and The Five Dysfunctions of the Team for knowledge, inspiration and conversation topics with clients; two to three stylists interview prospective employees rather than just Abdallah herself, and so on. It sounds like an incredibly well-run and sucessful business that operates with a different incentive structure than many other hair salons.

One thing stuck out for me as a software engineer. Check out this exchange around the 15-minute mark of the podcast:

Roberts: Do you have weekly sessions where you talk things out?


Abdallah: It's informal. But we do have daily huddles, which are kind of pre-day meetings, inspiration, rah rah, cheerleading, here's our goal, how are we going to get there, here's what everyone needs to know; and then we have monthly meetings.


Roberts: How long does the daily meeting last?


Abdallah: Maybe 5 minutes? So that's basically where you are, trying to inspire them a little bit.


These quick, informal daily huddles are very similar to the daily status meetings used by agile/extreme development teams! Glad to see that the rest of the world is catching up to software engineering! Or more likely, that software engineering finally adopted the effective practices of other successful businesses...

Madden 2011

Madden 2011: I’ve played Madden 2011 for a couple of hours last night, and there are already four things that annoy the hell out of me.

• Instant Replay: I’m obsessive about using instant re-play; I re-watch about two-thirds of my offensive plays, especially passing plays where I may the wrong read. This feature worked flawlessly the last time I played Madden in 2004 or 2005, but in the most recent Madden, if you hit the start button too soon and go to where the “instant replay” option should be, you end up calling timeout. So you either blow a timeout by mistake, or you catch yourself, but then you have to exit out of the menu, wait an extra second, and then hit start again to get to instant replay. There is absolutely NO REASON why this should happen. If I can call a timeout, then the play is over enough to go to instant replay. And once you get into the instant replay mode, zooming out is very slow, and if you’re inside your own 25, the goal posts get in the way of your instant replay.
• Camera angles: I would really like to use the wide-angle camera lens on offense (so I can see the outside receivers), and the standard or zoomed in camera lens for defense (so I can find a path to the ball). So far as I know, this feature has never existed in Madden, and I think it should be there for the future.
• The play-clock: I always have to rush to call the first play after a change of possession, and I’m not quite sure why the playclock runs down like that. Also, the play clock doesn’t automatically wind down when the other team is in a clock-killing situation, so I have to sit there for 30 seconds while the play-clocks winds down from 35 to 2 seconds when they snap the ball. There’s no reason for this, the last Madden I played would wind down the playclock automatically. I might be able to change some settings, but I don’t know which ones.
• Play-calling: The “Ask Madden” feature that gives you three plays is nice, but I prefer to cycle through formations and find my own plays. So far the play-calling seems a little clunkier than in earlier versions. However, apparently there are ways to set up favorites or recently used or something, though I haven’t figured it out yet.

No other complaints so far, and the graphics of course are really good.

Two great podcasts

Two great podcasts I've been listening to lately:

Black Jack Justice

I cannot say enough good things about Decoder Ring Theater's presentations of Black Jack Justice.  It's a golden-age-of-radio-esque presentation about two private detectives, Jack Justice and Trixie Dixon, girl detective.  The stories have dialogue and sound effects that recall programs from the 1940s, as well as nicely crafted internal monologues both from Jack and Trixie's perspectives.  Each program is about 25 mins long and are all well-written by Greg Taylor.

I'm pretty sure that Black Jack Justice counts as a romance novel because it's character-driven and because of the constant banter between Jack and Trixie.  Because the plotlines need to be wrapped up in 25 mins, some of the episodes end a little too quickly and too cleanly.  But the characters are funny, rich and vivid, the detectives confront a variety of interesting and controversial issues such as domestic violence, and the dialogue is very good.

The highest compliment I can pay to Decoder Ring Theater is that I have been "rationing" the episodes because I don't want it to end.

The BS Report

I've been a fan of Bill Simmons since before he moved to ESPN, and I regularly listen to the BS Report, his podcast.

I'm intrigued at how Bill Simmons has evolved from a sports-writer into an excellent interviewer and conversationalist through his podcasts.  He routinely scores interviews with stand-up comedians such as Jeff Ross and Patton Oswald, writers such as Chuck Klosterman, writers and producers for SNL, fairly high-profile actors such as Jon Ham, and of course sports figures such as Steve Nash, Mark Cuban and even the legendary Jerry West.  I think one of the most appealing aspects to Simmons' podcasts is that they aren't interviews so much as they are discussions about a variety of topics.  He lets sports figures talk about movies and TV shows, and talks sports with the actors.  He also interjects his own ideas into the conversations, which makes it less of an interrogation and more of a free-flowing discussion.  And best of all, he's funny.

I want to give a particular plug to Chuck Klosterman's most recent podcast (part 1 and part 2).  Simmons and Klosterman are both funny and smart and their discussions are always fascinating.  I had never heard of Klosterman until the BS Report but I will be buying his latest book of essays to read between the semesters.