What Orwell overlooked

About making tea, that is. A year or so ago I posted George Orwell’s guide to brewing tea (by way of Hitchens, I notice; peace to his memory), and I’m compelled, on reflection and experience, to suggest that he missed perhaps the most important rule.

Make tea with good water.

Spend some time on the road, brewing tea in strange places, and you’ll find that from time to time your morning cup is nearly undrinkable, and that the only difference is the quality of the local water. What quality? I don’t really know. Search the web for tea scum and you’ll find a collection of theories, the predominant one implicating calcium carbonate, along with a suggestion to neutralize it with lemon.

So, I guess, carry a jug of good water with you, use it when the local water’s bad, and refill it when it’s good. Not, of course, if you have to get the jug past the TSA, but if you’re driving, you’ll find it makes a bigger difference than taking the teapot to the kettle.

Eject!

EjectEject is a little dingus you can keep in your Mac’s Dock. Click it, and it’ll eject all disks except the startup disk, as well as an iPod if iTunes has one connected. It’s just a little AppleScript packaged as an application with a nice ejectish icon. Download this, unzip it, drag it to Applications, and then drag it into your Dock.

I use it to eject external drives (mainly my Time Machine drive) before I pack up my MacBook Pro to take it on the road.

(I could have sworn that I posted this before, but I can’t find it, so… )

Against semantic markup

@siracusa tweeted this a little while ago

Hypercritical #33 correction: <em> and <strong> … not <b> and <i>. Apologies to @gruber and semantic markup sticklers.

(Hypercritical is a podcast he does with Dan Benjamin at 5×5.com; go listen, but there’s nothing in the podcast relevant to what follows here.)

The idea here is that the <b> & <i> tags (bold & italic) are typographical, or display, instructions, and as such should be left up to the page designer. We should supply semantic markup instead to give the designer enough information about what we want displayed that the italic or bold typeface can be chosen as appropriate. For our purposes, those tags are <em> and <strong>, short for “stress emphasis” and “strong importance”. <strong> can be nested to indicate stronger and stronger importance.

This kind of semantic markup is fine in its place, but HTML isn’t the place to enforce it. A sufficient reason is that HTML doesn’t have a rich enough set of tags to do the work. The APA Style Manual lists seven reasons to use italics:

  • Titles of books, periodicals, and microfilm publications
  • Genera, species and varieties
  • Introduction of a new, technical, or key term
  • Emphasis
  • A letter, word, or phrase referred to as such
  • Letters use as statistical symbols or algebraic variables
  • Anchors of a scale

Sure, “emphasis” is on the list…along with six others that HTML has no tag for. And that’s not an exhaustive list.

One of the WordPress themes I use oddly inverts the representation of em/strong from i/b to b/i. It must have seemed like a good idea to someone at some time, but the only way I could use it on my site was to “fix” the CSS, which fortunately I was in a position to do. The thing is, there’s nothing technically wrong with doing that: “emphasis” is nowhere defined as “italics”.

So (except for cases where you’ve already taken care of things via CSS and classes), if you want italics, go ahead and use <i>. Ditto <b> for bold. And don’t apologize for it.

And now for a slight digression. HTML5 adds a bunch of new “semantic tags”, like <header> and <section>. Notice that “semantics” ends up referring to at least two rather distinct categories. The new HTML5 tags describe document structure, a kind of containerization where the container names aren’t all “div”. But the kind of semantic reference we’re talking about in the above list-of-reasons-to-italicize have nothing to do with document structure; they have to do with the connection between the pieces of the document and the great outside world: movie names, species, name-vs-use.

I mention this as an introduction to an oldish essay by John Allsopp, Semantics in HTML5. It’s the kind of thing that’s just as well to keep in the back of your mind when you start creating The Semantic Web.

Oh, the title. I’m not against semantic markup. Really. Just against using em/strong as fancified ways of saying italic/bold and then calling it “semantic markup”.

Time Machine is not version control

If your response to the title is, “Well, duh!”, you may stop reading here.

If you’re wondering, “What’s Time Machine?”, it’s OS X’s built-in automatic backup capability. You can pretend the title is “Periodic backup is not version control”.

If you’re wondering, “What’s version control?”, it’s a mechanism, formal or informal, that preserves copies of earlier versions of a document, with an eye to be able to undo changes if necessary, or at least go back and see the history of changes to a document. Programmers will think of version control systems like Git or Mercurial or Subversion. If you keep backup copies of your important Word documents at various stages in their life, that’s informal version control. OS X 10.7 (Lion) has a form of built-in version control for some applications.

Time Machine effectively backs up your entire system once an hour. If you mess up a document, it’s possible to go back to a previous version and restore it to its previous state. This capability makes Time Machine temptingly resemble version control. But treating it as such is hazardous (which is not to deny that it can be very handy, even a life saver, when it works). Why?

A secondary reason first. Time Machine does a backup every hour, but it doesn’t save all of those backups. It saves the hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month. So it’s entirely likely that the versions of your document that Time Machine has available are not the ones you’re interested in.

The primary reason is this. A document’s previous versions are themselves documents, and potentially important ones. Important documents need to be backed up, which is to say that you need at least one redundant copy. But if you’re relying on the Time Machine copy (or any backup, for that matter), you have only one copy of the historical version of the document: the one on the backup disk. If that disk fails, you have no backup at all.

So keep using Time Machine as a safety net. But if the thought of all those old versions disappearing completely makes you nervous, start thinking about some other means of version control, one in which the old versions are backed up.

iPhone & iPad vs hotel wifi

Not for the first time, I found myself at a hotel last weekend at which neither my iPhone nor iPad would connect to their wifi, while my MacBook Pro connected just fine. (Why did I have all that gear? I had a reason, not relevant here. Trust me.)

The details: both iDevices were running iOS 4.3.5. The hotel was a Best Western, and the network login page mentioned colubris.com. Colubris is in the network management business, and was acquired a while back by HP. When I’d try to connect, a login page would appear, and when I entered the username and password that worked on my MBP, I got a blank page in return, with no relevant recourse but a Cancel button.

(I’m told that this kind of authentication goes by the term captive portal.)

Anyway. If you find yourself in this situation and really must connect, here’s what worked for me. Go to your devices’s Settings app’s Wi-Fi page. Find the network you’re trying to connect to (in my case it was named SpeedLinks), and tap the blue detail disclosure button. There, along with some other stuff, you’ll see an Auto-Login switch. Turn it off.

Now connect again, and use Safari to browse to some website. You’ll be presented with the login page (which you may have to zoom bigger in order to complete), and this time the login should work.

Update (August 2012): iOS seems to be getting better at this kind of thing. With the current version (5.1.1), I haven’t seen this problem, even at sites that used to cause trouble (though I haven’t been back to the offending Best Western yet).

Update (September 2019): all these years later and this post still appears to be relevant. Captive portals are problematical, it seems, and iOS 12 has had its own issues with them. There appear to be some useful fixes in iOS 13, about to ship as I write this. But considering that I wrote the original post about iOS 4…

Misconceptions about science

Not long ago (29 April) an article titled “AAAS Testing Web Site Probes Students’ Misconceptions About Science” appeared in Science. The website is assessment.aaas.org (free registration required). Science matter

It includes this graphic, with the caption, “The answer is D. Nearly 70% of students tested by Project 2061 answered correctly, but 17% chose answer A. By offering insight on students’ misconceptions, the new assessments Web site can help shape more effective teaching.”

Do you find this question as annoying as I do? I take D to say that all matter is atoms, which is plainly not the case.

The test-wise student will realize that it’s the answer they’re going for, of course, though a case can be made for A (read it like this: “Atoms are not [identical with] matter, but they are contained in [the the set of all] matter”).

Introducing Nearest Contacts

Nearest ContactWell, two apps in one month. This one is Nearest Contacts, a travel-related app for iPhone and iPad.

Nearest Contacts delivers a list of your Address Book contacts, sorted by how near they are to you (or to some other point that you choose).

What’s it good for? First, when you’re on the road, it’s a quick reminder of which of your friends, family and colleagues are nearby. That’s handy.

But Nearest Contacts really shines when you use your Address Book to record your favorite restaurants, hotels, and other points of interest. If you’re like us, this kind of information, if it gets recorded at all, tends to be randomly distributed across notes, calendars and what-not. But your iPhone’s address book works great for this, having space for addresses, phone numbers, URLs, and your own notes.

So get in the habit of using your address book to remember your favorite sites, and then use Nearest Contacts to help you find them when you happen to be in the area.

Visit the App Store and snag a copy.

Any day is a good day to start a journal

Any Day JournalThe aforementioned Any Day Journal (for iPhone) is now up to version 1.1, with a website and everything.

The changes are in the interest of making the user experience more efficient: fewer touches or other actions are needed to get the most common tasks done. I’m quite pleased with the improvements.

An example: in version 1.0, after adding a photo to the journal, you’d add a caption by tapping an Edit button at the top of the screen, then a “disclosure” button to the right of the photo, and finally tapping the text area of the resulting screen to bring up the keyboard.

In version 1.1, you simply touch the space to the right of the photo (which is where the caption appears) and start typing. That’s one touch instead of three, but the real difference is at once more subtle and more important: you directly touch the thing you want to change (the caption area) rather than touching a sequence of control buttons. That’s an essential aspect of the iPhone’s touch interface, and it’s not just fewer touches, but more intuitive ones.

Been thinking of starting a journal? Today is a good day for it.

Is NPR Unable to Get Access to Data on Health Care Costs?

I was fairly sure when I heard this piece on NPR that Dean Baker would get around to commenting on it. Sure enough.

Is NPR Unable to Get Access to Data on Health Care Costs?

It seems that NPR is unable to get access to data from the OECD or even the Center for Medicare and Medicaid services. If it were, it would not have so badly misinformed listeners about Medicare costs yesterday.

NPR told listeners that Medicare’s costs are unsustainable and that the reason is that patients do not see the cost of their treatment. Actually, private sector health care costs have risen as rapidly on an age-adjusted basis as Medicare. Furthermore, health care costs in the United States average more than twice as much per person as costs in countries like the United Kingdom and the Netherlands where patients see a much smaller share of their costs than they do under the Medicare system. If the United States paid the same amount per person for health care as these or any other wealthy country it would be looking at huge budget surpluses in the long-term, not deficits. 

The article also mentioned Representative Ryan’s plan without pointing out that the Congressional Budget Office’s projections show that it would hugely raise the cost of providing care to retirees. The CBO projections imply that the Ryan plan, which was passed by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives last month, would raise the cost of buying Medicare equivalent insurance policies by $34 trillion over Medicare’s 75-year planning period. This is almost 7 times the size of the projected Social Security shortfall.

In this context it is probably worth mentioning that the Republicans in Congress have targeted NPR for budget cuts.

via Beat the Press

Abouttime

Via HuffPost:

The Associated Press decided to remove the hyphen from “e-mail” in its Stylebook—the bible for many media outlets—on Friday.

The AP announced the changes at the annual conference of the American Copy Editors Society in Phoenix. The use of “e-mail” was seen as a relic of an earlier age, when the Internet was new to most people and the idea of “electronic mail” was confusing.

The change mimicked a similar one that the AP put in place in 2010, when it decided that “Web site” could now be called “website.”

The AP also announced that it is changing “cell phone” and “smart phone” to “cellphone” and “smartphone.”

The organization also announced the move on Twitter, writing, “language evolves.”

The changes go into effect on Saturday. Copy editors, take note.

Orwell on tea: 11 golden rules

This indirectly via Christopher Hitchens. Somewhat idiosyncratic, as any good guide to teamaking must be; you won’t go badly wrong following Orwell’s advice.

A Nice Cup of Tea

By George Orwell

Evening Standard, 12 January 1946.

If you look up ‘tea’ in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points.

This is curious, not only because tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country, as well as in Eire, Australia and New Zealand, but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.

When I look through my own recipe for the perfect cup of tea, I find no fewer than eleven outstanding points. On perhaps two of them there would be pretty general agreement, but at least four others are acutely controversial. Here are my own eleven rules, every one of which I regard as golden:

  • First of all, one should use Indian or Ceylonese tea. China tea has virtues which are not to be despised nowadays — it is economical, and one can drink it without milk — but there is not much stimulation in it. One does not feel wiser, braver or more optimistic after drinking it. Anyone who has used that comforting phrase ‘a nice cup of tea’ invariably means Indian tea.
  • Secondly, tea should be made in small quantities — that is, in a teapot. Tea out of an urn is always tasteless, while army tea, made in a cauldron, tastes of grease and whitewash. The teapot should be made of china or earthenware. Silver or Britanniaware teapots produce inferior tea and enamel pots are worse; though curiously enough a pewter teapot (a rarity nowadays) is not so bad.
  • Thirdly, the pot should be warmed beforehand. This is better done by placing it on the hob than by the usual method of swilling it out with hot water.
  • Fourthly, the tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right. In a time of rationing, this is not an idea that can be realized on every day of the week, but I maintain that one strong cup of tea is better than twenty weak ones. All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes — a fact which is recognized in the extra ration issued to old-age pensioners.
  • Fifthly, the tea should be put straight into the pot. No strainers, muslin bags or other devices to imprison the tea. In some countries teapots are fitted with little dangling baskets under the spout to catch the stray leaves, which are supposed to be harmful. Actually one can swallow tea-leaves in considerable quantities without ill effect, and if the tea is not loose in the pot it never infuses properly.
  • Sixthly, one should take the teapot to the kettle and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours. Some people add that one should only use water that has been freshly brought to the boil, but I have never noticed that it makes any difference.
  • Seventhly, after making the tea, one should stir it, or better, give the pot a good shake, afterwards allowing the leaves to settle.
  • Eighthly, one should drink out of a good breakfast cup — that is, the cylindrical type of cup, not the flat, shallow type. The breakfast cup holds more, and with the other kind one’s tea is always half cold before one has well started on it.
  • Ninthly, one should pour the cream off the milk before using it for tea. Milk that is too creamy always gives tea a sickly taste.
  • Tenthly, one should pour tea into the cup first. This is one of the most controversial points of all; indeed in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject. The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round.
  • Lastly, tea — unless one is drinking it in the Russian style — should be drunk without sugar. I know very well that I am in a minority here. But still, how can you call yourself a true tealover if you destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar in it? It would be equally reasonable to put in pepper or salt. Tea is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter. If you sweeten it, you are no longer tasting the tea, you are merely tasting the sugar; you could make a very similar drink by dissolving sugar in plain hot water.

    Some people would answer that they don’t like tea in itself, that they only drink it in order to be warmed and stimulated, and they need sugar to take the taste away. To those misguided people I would say: Try drinking tea without sugar for, say, a fortnight and it is very unlikely that you will ever want to ruin your tea by sweetening it again.

These are not the only controversial points to arise in connexion with tea drinking, but they are sufficient to show how subtilized the whole business has become. There is also the mysterious social etiquette surrounding the teapot (why is it considered vulgar to drink out of your saucer, for instance?) and much might be written about the subsidiary uses of tealeaves, such as telling fortunes, predicting the arrival of visitors, feeding rabbits, healing burns and sweeping the carpet. It is worth paying attention to such details as warming the pot and using water that is really boiling, so as to make quite sure of wringing out of one’s ration the twenty good, strong cups of that two ounces, properly handled, ought to represent.

(taken from The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 3, 1943-45, Penguin ISBN, 0-14-00-3153-7)

Mark Twain on autobiography, memory

Mark Liberman quoted these two passages from Mark Twain’s autobiography last month. Twain’s writing, especially in this mood, inspires in me a pang of fondness that finds an echo in my response to some of Vonnegut. Not so strange, I guess.

From Mark Twain’s autobiography

Like half of the U.S., I’ve been reading the first volume of Mark Twain’s recently-published autobiography. I’m sure that there’s some sociolinguistics in it somewhere, but for now you’ll have to be content with this rumination about discourse structure, which I present to you just in case you’re in the half that hasn’t bought the book yet:

Finally, in Florence in 1904, I hit upon the right way to do an Autobiography: start it at no particular time of your life; talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale, and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your mind meantime.

Also, make the narrative a combined Diary and Autobiography. In this way you have the vivid things of the present to make a contrast with memories of like things in the past, and these contrasts have a charm which is all their own. No talent is required to make a combined Diary and Autobiography interesting.

And so, I have found the right plan. It makes my labor amusement — mere amusement, play, pastime, and wholly effortless. It is the first time in history that the right plan has been hit upon.

This is also the right plan for successful blogging, in my experience.

OK, one more quotation:

For many years I believed that I remembered helping my grandfather drink his whisky toddy when I was six weeks old, but I do not tell about that any more, now; I am grown old, and my memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying, now, and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the latter. It is sad to go to pieces like this, but we all have to do it.

Tax cuts in perspective

The tax-cut extension for incomes over $250K would cost $60 billion a year. Is that a lot? Here’s David Leonhardt’s list of alternatives.

  • As much deficit reduction as the elimination of earmarks, President Obama’s proposed federal pay freeze, a 10 percent cut in the federal work force and a 50 percent cut in foreign aid — combined.
  • A tripling of federal funding for medical research.
  • Universal preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds, with relatively small class sizes.
  • A much larger troop surge in Afghanistan, raising spending by 60 percent from current levels.
  • A national infrastructure program to repair and upgrade roads, bridges, mass transit, water systems and levees.
  • A 15 percent cut in corporate taxes.
  • Twice as much money for clean-energy research as suggested by a recent bipartisan plan.
  • Free college, including room and board, for about half of all full-time students, at both four- and two-year colleges.
  • A $500 tax cut for all households.

Americans Want to Live in Sweden

James Kwak.

Americans Want to Live in Sweden

The chart below is from a short paper by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely (author of Predictably Irrational) (hat tip Huffington Post). The top line is the actual U.S.wealth distribution. The second is what Americans think the wealth distribution is. The bottom line is what Americans think the wealth distribution should be.

US wealth distribution

The Hijacked Commission

More on the “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform”, this time from Paul Krugman.

The Hijacked Commission

… Actually, though, what the co-chairmen are proposing is a mixture of tax cuts and tax increases — tax cuts for the wealthy, tax increases for the middle class. They suggest eliminating tax breaks that, whatever you think of them, matter a lot to middle-class Americans — the deductibility of health benefits and mortgage interest — and using much of the revenue gained thereby, not to reduce the deficit, but to allow sharp reductions in both the top marginal tax rate and in the corporate tax rate.

It will take time to crunch the numbers here, but this proposal clearly represents a major transfer of income upward, from the middle class to a small minority of wealthy Americans. And what does any of this have to do with deficit reduction?

… Still, can’t we say that for all its flaws, the Bowles-Simpson proposal is a serious effort to tackle the nation’s long-run fiscal problem? No, we can’t.

It’s true that the PowerPoint contains nice-looking charts showing deficits falling and debt levels stabilizing. But it becomes clear, once you spend a little time trying to figure out what’s going on, that the main driver of those pretty charts is the assumption that the rate of growth in health-care costs will slow dramatically. And how is this to be achieved? By “establishing a process to regularly evaluate cost growth” and taking “additional steps as needed.” What does that mean? I have no idea.

It’s no mystery what has happened on the deficit commission: as so often happens in modern Washington, a process meant to deal with real problems has been hijacked on behalf of an ideological agenda. Under the guise of facing our fiscal problems, Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson are trying to smuggle in the same old, same old — tax cuts for the rich and erosion of the social safety net.

Can anything be salvaged from this wreck? I doubt it. The deficit commission should be told to fold its tents and go away.

Erskine Bowles, Morgan Stanley, and the Deficit Commission

Dean Baker.

Erskine Bowles, Morgan Stanley, and the Deficit Commission

The deficit report put out by the commission’s co-chairs, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, had one striking omission. It does not includes plans for a Wall Street speculation tax or any other tax on the financial industry.

This omission is striking because the co-chairs made a big point of saying that they looked everywhere to save money and/or raise revenue. As Senator Simpson said: “We have harpooned every whale in the ocean — and some minnows.” Wall Street is one whale that appears to have dodged the harpoon.

This omission is made more striking by the fact that at least one member of the commission, Andy Stern, has long been an advocate of such taxes. Presumably he raised this issue in the commission meetings and the co-chairs chose to ignore him.

The co-chairs apparently also chose to ignore the I.M.F.. Noting the waste and extraordinary economic rents in the sector, the I.M.F. has explicitly recommended a substantial increase in taxes on the financial industry. It is even more striking that the co-chairs apparently never considered a speculation tax since Wall Street’s reckless greed is at the center of the current economic crisis.

In this context, it is worth noting that one of the co-chairs, Erskine Bowles, is literally on Wall Street’s payroll. He earned $335,000 last year for his role as a member of Morgan Stanley’s (one of the bailed out banks) board of directors. Morgan Stanley would likely see a large hit to its profits from a financial speculation tax.

It would have been appropriate for the reporters covering the report to ask about a financial speculation tax. It would also be appropriate to explore the connection between Mr. Bowles role as a Morgan Stanley director and the absence of any financial taxes in this far-reaching report.

via Beat the Press

How much math do we really need?

G.V. Ramanathan, professor emeritus of mathematics, statistics and computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago:

How much math do we really need?

… How much math do you really need in everyday life? Ask yourself that — and also the next 10 people you meet, say, your plumber, your lawyer, your grocer, your mechanic, your physician or even a math teacher.

Unlike literature, history, politics and music, math has little relevance to everyday life. That courses such as “Quantitative Reasoning” improve critical thinking is an unsubstantiated myth. All the mathematics one needs in real life can be learned in early years without much fuss. Most adults have no contact with math at work, nor do they curl up with an algebra book for relaxation. …

True Grit, reloaded

I shiver with antici…pation.

TRUE GRIT The brothers Joel and Ethan Coen offer an alternate reading of the Charles Portis novel that was filmed by Henry Hathaway in 1969. Jeff Bridges steps into the role that won John Wayne his Oscar, as a broken-down United States Marshal hired by a plucky 14-year-old (Hailee Steinfeld) to avenge the murder of her father. With Matt Damon, Josh Brolin and Barry Pepper.