French has fewer idioms and less slang. There is generally one way to express any particular phrase, and that way will be used in all situations. For example, I often heard the phrase “Regardez ici” (re-gard-ay ee-see) while traveling. I heard it from tour guides (who were addressing an audience of strangers in a relatively formal setting), from friends addressing each other in conversation, and from little kids calling for their parent’s attention.

Literally translated, this means “Look here.” Although that phrase would be perfectly valid American English, most of us rarely would speak that way, especially among friends. We’d use something more idiomatic, like “Check this out” or “Take a peek at this” or “Didja see this thing?” A foreigner with a very limited grasp of the language would be completely lost trying to follow these phrases. So while “look here” is more practical from a comprehension standpoint, but if you used it, native speakers would think your speech sounded stilted.

“When I read a novel that I really like, I feel as if I am in direct, personal communication with the author. I feel as if the author and I are on the same wavelength mentally, that we have a lot in common with each other, and that we could have an interesting conversation, or even a friendship, if the circumstances permitted it. When the novel comes to an end, I feel a certain letdown, a loss of contact. It is natural to want to recapture that feeling by reading other works by the same author, or by corresponding with him/her directly.

[…]

A novel represents years of hard work distilled into a few hundred pages, with all (or at least most) of the bad ideas cut out and thrown away, and the good ideas polished and refined as much as possible. Interacting with an author in person is nothing like reading his novels. Just about everyone who gets an opportunity to meet with an author in person ends up feeling mildly let down, and in some cases, grievously disappointed.”

From Why I am a Bad Correspondent by Neal Stephenson

“Not only is [Woody Allen’s] latest celluloid psychotherapy session Vicky Cristina Barcelona a phenomenal work of intellectual porn, but it also happens to contain one of the sexiest, most hysterical and poignant portrayals of polyamory to come along in a long, long time. Allen actually gets that those of us who choose to live outside of hetero monogamy are not voracious sex addicts lacking in morality – on the contrary, we simply abide by a different set of desires and ethics than that of the mainstream.”

Some heartwarming stills:

“My creative beast is restless and hungry, and I’ve learned that if I starve it by arbitrarily limiting its routine, it’s not happy. It’s all well and good to cut the fat out of your life to make time for what’s important, but you can take it too far. By turning off the internet, I turned off my source of inspiration. I was trying to write in a vacuum.

From Cooking for the Creative Beast by Matt Wood

I’m totally going to slip “By the cogs!” in my next conversation.

“There is also the question of competitive advantage. Most nations gain their advantage by making things more efficiently, and at lower cost, than their competitors.

To the extent that the French enjoy a natural advantage, it is in their inefficiency: They are the world’s most efficient producers of structured indolence. They are the kept women of the global economy; their status depends, in part, on their practical uselessness.”

Having just gotten back from a week in France, I can wholeheartedly confirm this. The quote is from the extremely enteratining Sarkozy Forces the French to Join the 1980s by Michael Lewis (by way of Megan McArdle).

But like many seemingly black-and-white moral issues, advances in technology reveal gray areas. An age of highly fluid and editable media has produced the phenomenon of the creative remix. Where is the line drawn between creative remixing and plagiarism?

Is Weezer’s video, which is mostly made up of footage from various YouTube videos, a creative remix or plagiarism? How about all those Google Maps mashups, most of which get all their content from Google Maps? What about a DJ, who usually plays nearly 100% music written by other people?

One of my recent posts was copied in its entirety and reposted to what appears to be some sort of accounting-oriented linkspam site. They do provide a link back to the original article, though my name appears nowhere on the page. Is this plagiarism? By most conventional definitions, I’d say yes.

But I’m not upset. My personal feeling is that plagiarism is not the big deal that most people make out of it. I’ve had my creative material copied without being asked my permission or being given attribution on the resulting work a few times in the past, usually music. For some reason it just doesn’t bother me. If anything, I feel flattered that they find my work worthy of copying.

But, there is always a moment of disorientation and slight discomfort when I stumble across it. It’s like looking at a distorted image that looks strangely familiar, and moments later realizing that it is your own face being reflected back from a funhouse mirror. I can see how some, in that moment, might escalate that feeling into hurt, betrayal, and anger.

Merlinn Man tackles the topic:

“Ours is a culture based on the idea that whenever you run out of space, you should just pull up stakes and move five miles west. Then you can be happy. Is it any wonder that we seek organization rather than deletion as the solution to an overwhelming problem?”

Three cheers for deletion.

Paul Graham weighs in:

“Humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what’s around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting.”

Three cheers for minimalist decor - and closets and drawers, for hiding away the clutter.

“From basketball tickets to waterfowl-hunting rights to classic albums, once someone owns something, he places a higher value on it than he did when he acquired it - an observation first called “the endowment effect”. […]

The endowment effect has been seen in hundreds of experiments, the most famous of which found that students were surprisingly reluctant to trade a coffee mug they had been given for a bar of chocolate, even though they did not prefer coffee mugs to chocolate when given a straight choice between the two.”

From It’s mine, I tell you

Perhaps this, more than any other factor, explains the rapid adoption of the internet. It’s a channel for people with unusual interests - interests too diffuse in the general population for them to find each other in fixed geographic area - to meet and congregate.

Or as Megan McArdle more bluntly puts it: “The internet is the Freak Liberation Front.”

When we look at the neatly drawn diagrams of the solar system showing the planetary orbits, or play with one of those mechanical models of the same, it’s easy to feel like the solar system is made up of discrete and well-defined units. In fact, it’s a big cloud of rocks ranging in size from tiny grains of sand up to Jovian monstrosities that are all orbiting the sun, each other, and the galactic core in a dance too complex for us to ever fully track.

Normally I show my dissatisfaction with a bad system via a simple, quiet, and effective manner: non-participation. I vote with my feet, as the saying goes. Unfortunately, going without health insurance is a very bad idea, so in this particular case that option is closed.

But there’s an option that, while not a complete panacea, has the potential to go a long way to improve things. That option is called health savings accounts, or HSAs. An HSA is exactly like a normal bank account, except that it’s designated only for use on medical expenses, and the money you put into it is not taxed.

To use an HSA, you need an HSA-compatible insurance plan. The rules for what qualifies a plan have to do with high deductables, but you don’t need to understand that: most insurance companies have a few HSA plans, so you can just pick one labeled as such.

The high deductible (typically $1000+) means that you cover the cost of routine care yourself. But in case of a catastrophic situation like a serious accident or illness, you won’t be financially ruined. This is what insurance is supposed to be: a way to share risk of unlikely camality, not a way to obfuscate the payment process for routine care.

Because of the high deductible, the insurance is much cheaper. So whereas you might have gotten a plan that costs $150/mo before, you get an HSA plan for, say, $80/mo. Then you can take the difference, $70/mo, and put it away in your HSA. When it comes time to pay for a doctor’s visit or for some medication, you just whip out the debit card for your HSA and use the cash you’ve saved.

Since this money is pre-tax, you can treat that $70 as costing you more like $40, depending on your tax bracket.

There are two parts to the HSA: an HSA-compatible insurance plan, and the health savings account itself. You don’t get these from the same place. The insurance plan comes from a regular insurance company (Blue Cross, Health Net, etc); the account comes from a bank, like one of these. (If you’re not sure how to find an HSA-compatible health plan, this place has a pretty decent search interface.)

I strongly recommend you choose an HSA provider who gives you the option to invest your savings in mutual funds. If you get an HSA early in life, this means you’re getting even more value out of your money: putting away tax-free money when you’re young and healthy, which will earn 8% or so per year. Then when you’re older and need to access it, you’ll be sitting on a nice big pile of dough.

HSAs are a great option for taking control of your own healthcare. With standard health insurance, you’re always under the thumb of the insurance company. It’s easy to be constantly afraid thath they might refuse to cover some procedure that you need (check out Sicko for numerous anecdotes on the topic). With an HSA, a portion of the money you put toward your health insurance each month stays within your control. You can spend it on whatever you believe is necessary for your health. That could be something as mundane as new glasses, something elective like laser eye surgery or breast implants, or something of life-or-death importance like chemotherapy or heart surgery.

Take control of your healthcare and get more out of your dollar; and at the same time, improve the healthcare system for everyone by introducing patient choice and making costs more transparent. I did.

• “so to speak”
• “in a sense”
• “at the end of the day”
• “to be honest”
• “for all intents and purposes”
• “without further ado”
• “at this point in time”
• “if you will”

None of these phrases really mean anything. How can you tell? By cutting them out of a sentence, the meaning of the sentence doesn’t change:

“The garden out back was, in a sense, Jane’s sanctuary from the world.” → “The garden out back was Jane’s sanctuary from the world.”

“Without further ado, I’m pleased to present tonight’s speaker, John Smith.” → “I’m pleased to present tonight’s speaker, John Smith.”

“We don’t have any more tickets to give away at this point in time.” → “We don’t have any more tickets to give away.”

As always, omitting needless words makes your message more forceful.

“…if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done — I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul- crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.

Everyone knows that something is wrong. The politicians say, “we need higher standards.” The schools say, “we need more money and equipment.” Educators say one thing, and teachers say another. They are all wrong. The only people who understand what is going on are the ones most often blamed and least often heard: the students. They say, “math class is stupid and boring,” and they are right.”

From A Mathematician’s Lament, by way of BetterExplained

“If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

[…]

I was being interviewed by a TV producer [who asked about Wikipedia]. ‘Where do people find the time?’ That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, ‘No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.’”

From Gin, Television, and Social Surplus by Clay Shirky

One of his key points is that “we’re moving from a knowledge economy to a search economy.” This is a pithy and less threatening way of stating the hard truth: that values held dear by traditional education are no longer useful. This is going to be very hard for people to let go of. Expect a lot of bitterness and fighting from those with their identities, lives, and possibly paychecks intimately tied to the industry and culture of traditional education.

But I for one couldn’t be happier to see scholastic institutions fade away. I didn’t get a lick of value from my time spent in school, other than social side-effects like learning how to deal with the schoolyard bully or how to pass notes in class undetected. Only once school ended was my time freed up to spend on actual learning. I can only imagine how much further along I would be in life now if I could have started learning 20 years earlier.

Cringely’s article has two subsequent followups that expand on his ideas, and all three are also available as podcasts. Highly recommended.

Since coming to SF, I’ve stopped using my horn altogether, as a backlash to what to me seems to be massively gratuitous use.

The use of honking here seems similar to my former purpose: alerting someone to an obstacle that they are causing. But the thing is, streets here are a veritable obstacle course nearly all of the time. Taxis pulling over to pick up fares. Riders on bikes and motorcycles. Lots of pedestrians, and rarely do they pay much attention to traffic signals. People looking for parking, or trying to parallel park in a space that’s just a tad too small (and they all are). Delivery trucks pulled over with their hazards on, because there’s no place to park them while making the delivery. Muni buses, tour buses, cable cars, and trains. And here and there, a newbie to driving in the city, who finds themselves constantly confused by the labyrinthine tangle of one-way streets and no-turn intersections. (e.g., me about eight months ago.)

In this environment, honking rarely serves a useful purpose. There’s cars and people and buses and bikes everywhere you look, all weaving in and out between one another; so when someone honks, it’s pretty much impossible to tell what they are honking about, if it is directed at you, and if so what you should do. It just adds more distractions to the chaotic mess. Which leads me to believe that in fact it isn’t about obstruction alerts anymore, but is just a way for people to vent.

This city has many charms, but this little bit of the local culture is really quite unpleasant.