Joel

My amazingly sweet, formerly homicidal cat Annie ran out of time today. She'd been sick for a while. About a month ago I found out she had cancer, with multiple solid tumors in her lung, abdomen and under her skin. We've had a pretty good month, but she started to decline this past weekend and had a really bad night last night. Earlier in the week I'd made an appointment for her out at AVets in Monroeville. We went out to the appointment, and it was decided that she was out of time.

Obviously I knew this was coming. It was really good to have that last month with her, though. I'd originally taken her out to AVets on my usual vet's advice when the usual why-is-my-cat-losing-weight things didn't solve her problems. They have a very nice animal internist out there. A lot of pretty sophisticated care was applied, and we figured out how bad the situation was. We never did figure out exactly what *kind* of cancer we were dealing with, but it wouldn't have made much difference.

The big thing they did was to give Annie a percutaneous endo-gastric feeding tube. I fretted over this decision for a while, but I have to say, it worked out really well. Annie was just totally oblivious to the tube. I hadn't expected that, but apparently it's the same way with humans who have PEG tubes. The tubes are not uncomfortable, and they just totally solve any feeding problem. The tube also saved us both from my having to shove meds down her throat several times a day. That alone was worth it. The fact that I got an extra month of her sleeping on my chest was fantastic.

Annie was my sister's cat, and I'm sure I'm mentally conflating Annie's illness with my sister's. But what the heck. I got to care for Annie, and I feel satisfied that I did everything right; the cat at least got really good care. When I first got her she was very aggressive. She drove both my other cats out of the second floor and claimed it for her own, and wounded me pretty solidly on several occasions. Typical calico behavior, I guess. The past year or two, though, she was amazingly affectionate and friendly. She and I got along really well, and I shall miss her. Farewell and safe journeys, Annie.

Well, if you know physics, it's pretty funny.

Behold! I have Today I have passed through the doorway which was sealed and hidden in my father's father's time!

Which is to say, I broke through the walled-up doorway between my foyer and living room. The living room... is not ready for human habitation. But I'm glad to have the doorway actually open. This is the view from my stairway.

Down in Oakland, on Craig Street, there has for the past dozen years been a place called Kiva Han. It was a coffee shop, but also a lunch place and a place to read a newspaper and hide from work for a little while. It was far from perfect, but it was friendly and unique. I've eaten a disturbing amount of veggie curry there over the years.

They closed today. I went down to get one last curry for lunch, but they were doing their Sunday brunch menu, so I ended up with a nice panini. The last curry was some day earlier this week, I guess. The place was mobbed today.

It was busy most days, actually. It didn't die because of the Great Recession or because they ran out of money or because the health inspector got them. It died because Pittsburgh Bagel Factory rented their location out from under them. Kiva Han was doing all right, but they just couldn't come up with as much money as PBF, a much larger company. So Pittsburgh loses something I think was unique, 10 or so people lose their jobs, a lot of cheerful Goth-types lose a place to hang out and work, and Pittsburgh gets Yet Another Bagel Shop.

Theoretically, I should be happy about this. The Great Engine of Commerce marches forward, and after a few months or years PBF will probably generate more dollars per square foot than Kiva Han did. Somewhere, some Job Creator is... doing whatever the heck they do. Somehow, though, I'm not feeling it. Unique things and unique places have a value beyond their revenue-per-square-foot, and I think this is a loss for a lot of Pittsburghers and for the city as a whole. It's more than just the curry. But I'll miss the curry too.

You know, I'm going to say it. We just should not be in the same country as Iowa. Any state that seems to think that Santorum would make a good President, presumably because the greatest threat to the United States is ravening hoards of homosexuals, does not live in the same reality as I do. They do not live in the same reality as anyone I know.

The US is having a really hard time acting like a nation right now, and I have come to believe it is because we aren't a nation. We very much need to be two nations. Someone should seriously suggest just getting divorced.

I made a shelter for 'my' two feral cats. They're kittens of the litter that was born under my back hedge some years ago; they're spayed but still mostly feral, and of course I worry about them in weather like this. The shelter was made pretty much according to the design here, with minor modifications because I'm the kind of guy who just can't leave well enough alone. Annie and Nim seem to like it, so hopefully it will be of some use to the ferals. The only part still lacking is straw to put inside; I'm not sure where to find that bit.

The whole thing was $20 worth of tote boxes plus random stuff I had around the house. It turns out that a rotary saw like a RotoZip is ideal for cutting the boxes.

I was reading an opinion piece on CNN, and it put me in mind of something I've been wondering about for a while- are we moving into an era where there is just no economic motivation to employ additional people? The individual productivity of employed people has been rising pretty steadily for a long time. It seems reasonable that it would eventually reach a point where it takes fewer than 100% of the employable population to satisfy the typical demand for the whole population. The standard theory is that people's standard of living just rises as their productivity rises, and thus their consumption rises, so there is always a market for that increased productivity. I know *my* consumption doesn't rise indefinitely, though. A lot of the financial 'productivity' at the moment rests in the hands of the very rich, and they surely can't consume fast enough to match that productivity. As more people become unemployed their ability to consume actually drops, making those who are still employed even more over-productive.

Sorry, I know this doesn't make much sense, and it doesn't involve any cute pictures of cats. I just got to thinking about it in the midst of this 'where are all the jobs' business.

Two of the big threads of political discussion right now are the budget deficit and the rapid rise in anonymous campaign money; it's stuck me that there is an easy way to use one to solve the other. Since all that anonymous money is basically being used to buy votes, wouldn't it make more sense to just buy the votes directly? The idea is that a political body would set a price for a vote in its election, so that City Council could set a price for local elections and Congress would set a price for Federal elections. The votes that rich folks and companies purchased would get added in to the vote tallies, and the money would be added in to the general revenue fund.

As long as they set a price below the cost of buying a vote by traditional means (frightening old people, for example), one would expect a lot of the campaign money to flow into the government's coffers. There is a nice free market feedback mechanism, because if the price is set too high the buyers of votes will just go back to the way they are buying them now.

My Libertarian friends should find a lot to like about this proposal, in that it allocates more social influence to people with more money, and since income is a measure of one's value to society that seems like a reasonable thing to do. It creates an explicit market for political power, so those people and companies interested in buying political power can make better informed and thus more efficient decisions about how to allocate their vote-buying dollars. Businesses interested in particular issues, like minimizing resistance to fracking of Marcellus shale, can better plan their business operations knowing how many and which local governments they can effectively control. And all of this new money will flow into the coffers of government at many levels, allowing taxes to drop and stimulating the economy. It's remarkable to me that all these salutary effects can be brought about in a way which is so uniquely American.

The one possible objection to this plan is that it goes against the one-person-one-vote model, but that idea has been a fiction for a very long time. Individuals have very different voting power depending on gerrymandering and on how the Electoral Collage numbers shake out. People have been buying other people's votes for a very long time, and since the Supreme Court wiped out all political campaign finance laws a couple of years ago the number of dollars available for vote buying has been rising exponentially. The amount of money to be spent in the 2012 election year is *huge*, and under the current rules all of it will be given to advertising agencies to put incorrect ideas into the heads of stupid people. All of those incorrect ideas may cause some problems of their own, and the whole process is certainly inefficient.

So, what do you think? I think the big money will certainly back this proposal, so it's sure to become law eventually. If we do it cleanly and quickly, it could go a long way to reducing the Federal deficit.

Today I got my 25 Year Service award from CMU. That's a long time, and even though it has nothing to do with the Baronial Election or the death of Bin Laden, I feel moved to comment.

It's actually been more like 26 years, and that corresponds exactly to the lifetime of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. The Center just had its own 25 year celebration, marking the anniversary of the day the grant actually came through. There are a surprising number of people from the early days still working at the PSC, which I think demonstrates that it really is a fairly nice place to work. Since I was the first employee I was asked to write a few comments about the Center's history; an edited version was included in our web page. For posterity, the full text is below, behind a cut.

One of the least pleasant things about working at the PSC is also one of the most predictable and repetitive- periodically we have to come up with proposals for new supercomputers. These are high stress situations; Centers have died for failure to win a proposal, and the PSC was very nearly among the fallen a few years ago. I fortunately am responsible for only tiny bits of proposal, but even so I get pretty stressy. The folks who do the real work get a lot more stress. A couple of months ago, we were part of a team that together and submitted Yet Another Proposal. I'm pretty much a workaholic, so I take a secret pleasure in these high-pressure times. And I'm not alone.

Which brings me to an old friend and boss of mine, Phil Andrews. At the time we were all working on our proposal up here, Phil was down at the National Institute for Computational Sciences working on their proposal, under circumstances which were apparently pretty stressful. NICS is the place that won the supercomputing grant that I ranted about in the notorious blog post that got me mentioned in the NY Times. (Four years later I hope everyone will be calm enough that I can safely un-hide it). Phil was hired as project director for NICS. He did a great job, and yes, NICS continues to be a productive supercomputing resource for the NSF, my rant notwithstanding.

So Phil was working on this proposal late into the night. He was planning a move back out to California to rejoin his family, but he never got to make it- eventually he went to sleep, and somewhere in the night he had a heart attack and died.

I feel very bad for Phil. He died a long way from his family, trying to finish just one more chunk of work. I feel very bad because it's taken me so long to write this, but of course, every evening I've been trying to finish just one more chunk of work. Phil was only a couple of years older than me; it's a reminder that I should slow down a bit.

Anyway, I've been thinking about this post since Phil died. He was a remarkable, impressive, very nice guy, and I am one of the many people who will miss him.

( Some Comments on HistoryCollapse )

I found this blog entry very informative- tongodeon provides some context for Jefferson's famous quote about watering the tree of liberty with blood. I would have expected it to make Jefferson look more reasonable, but nooooo.