Michael Feathers

As much as I'm irritated by Creationism and Intelligent Design, I do think that I appreciate the depth of feeling behind them.  If the notion that humans are special to the degree that the universe is centered around them is part of your world-view, then evolution is quite a blow once you understand it.  It's much more of a blow than the notion that the Earth rotates around the Sun rather than the other way around. 

Knowledge moves in fits and starts.  We're okay with Copernicus's insights today and I think that it's because a Sun-centric model of the solar system is fairly easy to grasp.  Evolution, on the other hand, is a tough one.  The time scales are huge and the notion that life can spring from non-life just isn't intuitive for most people.  Fortunately, though, it can be.

One of my favorite little books is Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams. It's a book with an agenda. It seeks to make de-centralized behavior intuitive.  One of the examples in the book is a flock of birds.  We look at a flock and we see the lead bird and we kind of assume the flock will go wherever that bird leads it.  The truth is much more interesting.  It turns out that you can accurately model the actual behavior of a flock (the swooping and swirling) with a set of simple rules which each bird applies independently, sensing only the birds in its immediate vicinity.  And, in fact, this is how special effects designers create computer-generated flocks in the movies today.

The lesson of the book is that many of the patterns we see are the result of forces which are much more decentralized than we expect, but we have a cognitive bias against that point of view, so we don't see it.  We can, however, gain an accurate view of the "workings" of the world through simulations.  They can help us develop intuitions which make the truth a bit more plausible.

When I was a kid, I was very curious about the world.  I'm a bit less curious now, but not much.  For me, the notion that life could spring from inanimate matter seemed theoretically possible, I understood randomness and I understood the timescales, but I had trouble with the "shape" of the living behavior.  Birth, growth, and death are not the sorts of things that you see rocks doing.  Life is different somehow.  How could it be an extension of mechanics and physics?  

The thing which made it click for me is a simple simulation called Conway's Life. It's a simulation which plays out in a grid.  Each cell in the grid can be "on" or "off."  You start from an initial configuration, a set of "on" cells close to each other and then let it run.  The simulation  applies the same four simple rules over and over again.  New cells turn on and off and the net effect is that grid fills with extremely organic looking patterns which seem to have been generated out of thin air.

You can try it out Conway's Life here. Create a set of five or ten "on" cells close to each other (possibly touching, but not densely packed), then press start. Sometimes the cells will disappear quickly but sometimes they will balloon out into a web of activity.

If I could do one thing in today in the educational system it would be to get this simulation into the hands of children in elementary school.  The rules behind it are simple to explain and it provides a path toward understanding how life can be a consequence of the way the world is. That's as handy to know as the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun, regardless of whether you are religious or not.

One of the nice things about blogging is that you get feedback.  You take an idea and you throw it out there.  If there’s a better way of seeing things, someone is bound to tell you.

With that introduction, I turn to the topic of the day: pessimistic personal finance.  These are scary times.  We’ve all seen the stock market plunge, but really the stock market is the least of our worries.  Unless credit frees up, we’re going to see economic disaster over the course of the next year.  We already know it’s going to be bad, but no one knows how bad.

I live by the motto that pessimists are rarely disappointed and often pleasantly surprised, so with that in mind, I looked at our family finances and calculated three metrics that I call fuses.  What is a fuse?  A fuse is a duration of time until  a bad thing.

The first fuse is what I call the normal fuse.  Assume some set of catastrophes knocks out all of your income.  How long can you and your family live on what you have now, without changing your spending at all?  You can calculate this fuse by taking your cash (pretty much anything liquid and not at the mercy of the market) and dividing it by your monthly spending.  The number you get is a duration in months.  That’s your normal fuse.

The second fuse is the ‘bunker’ fuse. Assume the same set of catastrophes and calculate your fuse, but this time divide your cash by your monthly spending in ‘hunker down’ mode.  In ‘hunker down’ mode, you’re spending only what you need to for rent/mortgage, insurance, and groceries.  You jettison all non-essential spending.  Again, don’t factor in things that can evaporate in the stock market.

The third fuse is the big one: the Armaggedon fuse.  Take the total of all of your assets, your retirement, your house, your investments, and any money on hand, and divide that by your essential monthly expenses.   Then, factor in the inflation rate, and you get your fuse. 

There you go.  Even if you aren’t a pessimist, I think these are good numbers to know.  If you know them, you can rest at night knowing exactly how you’d fare during a personal tragedy, an economic meltdown, or even a zombie attack.  Although for the latter two scenarios, guns and canned soups might be better than cash.

And, now a question: I can’t be the first one to have thought of these fuses.  Are these concepts floating around under different names?

A month ago, I was at a conference in the U.K. I always enjoy going over because I get a chance to catch up with people I’ve known for a while, but this time, it wasn’t very pleasant. I met up with a friend who I’d seen at conferences on and off for years and I asked him how he was doing. He told me that he was fine now, but recently he’d been deported from the US. There was some kind of a problem with his paperwork when he arrived from the U.K. so he was invasively searched, handcuffed, placed in a cell overnight, and deported the next day. According to his lawyer, he may never visit the US again.

This friend of mine isn’t alone. I’ve been reading a number of stories recently about people who’ve been treated like criminals by US Immigration for rather minor issues. 

We’re supposed to be better than that.

The thing I want to know is: what makes this sort of culture of severity happen?  It's easy to blame it all on 9/11, or claim that it is solely the result of the current administration's policies, but I think that there is more to it than that.  It seems that this sort of severity is very close to the idea of zero tolerance, the idea that if you crack down on the minor infractions, people will fall in line.  It seems to work to some degree, but it also tends to make us somewhat less than what we were.

The big question is: why?  The Zero Tolerance explanation is appealing but I don't think it's the whole answer.  The whole thing feels much less calculated than that.