If anybody knows where I can get a 750GB IDE hard drive, please let me know. I did some looking around last night and just about everywhere I found was out of stock.

Also, while I am calling on your expertise, does anyone know if SATA drives draw more, less, or the same amount of power as their IDE equivalents?

Farhad Manjoo is critical of Microsoft’s new ad campaign:

But it’s a terrible strategy for the long term. What happens when the economy improves? What happens when young, telegenic people in L.A. can once again spend $1,300 or $1,500 or more for a laptop? What will they do when they hear from Lauren that her $700 machine is grindingly slow and that hauling it around is cramping her acting career? By selling people lots of cheap Windows PCs now, Microsoft risks cementing the idea that PCs are cheap. And in the computer business, “cheap” isn’t an adjective you want to court. Customers may start to think that paying a bit more will get them something better. And when they can afford to pay more, they will.

I really have no idea what he’s basing this on. Dell sells cheap computers and they’re one of the most successful PC producers out there. ThinkPads are good computers and even before the most recent downturn Dell was kicking IBM’s posterior to the point that IBM was losing money and sold the ThinkPad/ThinkCenter line to Lenovo.

Further, let’s look at the fastest-growing component of the laptop market: Netbooks. Netbooks are technologically inferior to laptops in most every way. The processors are weaker and can’t run the latest OSes. The monitors are smaller. The main two advantages are price and convenience, but those seem to be the only advantages that they need. The convenience comes in the form of size and battery life. You can argue that this makes the computer “better”, but I think it’s more likely that the driving factor is price. A television spot pointing out how much cheaper these computers are than their full-blood laptop counterparts would not even remotely be stupid.

The main advantage that PCs have over Mac are… price and convenience. The same as netbooks. And, like netbooks, they’re good enough. Not good enough for me personally, but I am not the average computer user.

Mac people (and Manjoo and McCracken) like to point out that once you count all that’s included with the Macintosh computer, it’s actually not any more expensive than PCs. Sure, but that’s deciding what’s “needed” in a computer based on what the Mac is offering. It’s playing entirely on Apple’s home field. If you need what Mac has to offer, you’re probably better off getting a Mac! But if you don’t need those things, you don’t need to put down the extra money. You don’t need to deal with the inconveniences of using a less commonplace operating system.

Manjoo thinks that Microsoft’s play is that “We’re cheaper” when I think a strong part of that is “We’re all you need and they’re going to take more of your money.” Dell remains successful where Packard Bell and Compaq failed because Dell makes a product that is good enough. Windows, despite its many flaws, does the same. Since the people they’re selling to are people that already own PCs, they know that their audience knows that. Whereas Mac boosters want the computers judged on Apple’s home field, this advertisement plays ball on Microsoft’s. We’re here, we’re fine, and we’re all you need to pay for.

-{Disclaimer: I may or may not be employed by one of the companies mentioned in this article or one of its competitors. Be that as it may, I have no substantial professional stake – even in the shortest of short terms – in the success or failures in the products or companies mentioned}-

Be sure to come by Friday or this weekend. I plan to post the second ever unaltered photograph of myself. I don’t know whether or not it will still be there next week.

Emily Bazelon laments what happened to her younger son when she inadvertently let him watch Star Wars with her slightly older son while he was laid up in injury:

Wrong. Our younger son, Simon, who was not quite 3, couldn’t sleep that night or for many nights over the months that followed. He was obsessed. He talked about the movie to any relative, friend, or baby sitter who would listen and plenty of shopkeepers who wouldn’t. He relived the trash-compactor scene. He worried over Obi-Wan Kenobi’s Jedi sternness and Darth Vader’s glittering malevolence. He sniffed out plot twists in the rest of the endless six-movie saga (who knows how) and tried desperately to work out why Darth Vader could be Anakin Skywalker and Luke’s father—and could also cut off Luke’s hand. Here’s a little girl sweetly summarizing the Star Wars plot. Simon wasn’t sweet. He was feverish. He was short-circuiting. Thanks to our two hours of stupid indulgence, Paul and I concluded, his neurons were melting.

Having no children, I will confess up front that I cannot fully appreciate her description of a child’s neurons melting. Nor can I understand the parental exasperation of watching such a thing unfold. I only barely have a clear idea of what a three year old looks like (under a certain age, they’re all just tots to me). So it’s possible that when I do have a three year old kid whose this overwhelmed by something, I will change my tune remarkably.

All of that being said, it seems to me that exploding with excitement over something is one of the real jewels of being a kid. Fretting over the details of fictional characters in a fictional universe and the sensory overload that comes with that is something that diminishes with age, experience, and perspective. It’s important to gain that perspective, of course, but there the world is such an exciting place before its arrival. I find her concern over that to be as problematic as the kid’s actual behavior.

She consulted a child psychologist who said that it’s a bad idea to let kids that young watch violent movies. My wife’s background in medicine and psychology broadly concurs. I can’t argue with the experts on this except to suggest that there is a difference between exposure and overload. Letting a kid see Star Wars before they’re really ready for it can’t be the worst of all sins. Letting them watch it and things like it all the time, though, I could see warping perspectives. Letting them watch it once and letting their mind envelope it and letting their imaginations run wild, though, is a different matter. Maybe I say this because I had an imagination that always ran more freely than that of my peers, but I thank God that my parents were never worried or concerned with that.

Nor were they concerned with my interest in pedestrian things, which I can’t help but feel is part of Bazelon’s reaction. Bazelon seems pretty luke-warm on the whole Star Wars concept. Viewing it as a nice little thing and failing to understand the hold that it has on children’s (mostly boys) imaginations across the country and across time. To be honest, I share her appraisal. I’ve never been a big Star Wars guy. I’ve never understood how it became as popular as it did. I enjoy it, sure, but I was never fully engulfed in it. I wonder if part of the reason that this is the case is that by the time I actually saw it, I was too old to fully appreciate. I saw the second one when I was young, but the first time I watched all three was in the re-release during the run-up to Episode 1. I still believe that a lot of the negative reaction to that movie is that a lot of people watched it for the first time with 30-year old eyes rather than five year old eyes.

So maybe part of my reluctance to embrace this article is because, by virtue of luck and my father’s terrible experiences the first time he watched it*, I didn’t get to watch it “before I was ready”. I wasn’t exposed to it when I had the free-ranging lack of perspective that let me fully engross myself in the movie. As such, I feel like I really sort of missed out on something. Maybe I wouldn’t have liked it anyway (I’ve never been a big sci-fi person), but maybe I really would have. Maybe my thirst for more would have lead me to read the accompanying novels (which would have helped my development far, far more than some temporary brain-melting would have hurt it). I’ll never know. Her kids, though, will. If, that is, she ever lets them watch it again and indulges their interest in silly things.

* – My father first watched the movie with a bunch of aerospace engineers. They heckled and complained throughout the entire thing about the inherent inaccuracies of the movie. “There’s no sound in space!” they’d argue.

Will posits the scenario wherein we judge two approaches to prison – a very lenient one and a very harsh one – by the sole metric of their recidivism rate, and posit how much “extra” recidivism people will endure in order to feel that “justice” is being done by harshly treating the criminals.

The post touched off a question I’ve had thought about, and posted in smaller terms on before, which is that I believe our current “one size fits all” system doesn’t adequately address the various types of criminals very well.

There are two subsets of criminals; the rational and irrational actors. A “rational actor”, for purposes of discussion here, is someone who acts according to the normally-accepted models of risk and reward.

In the first category of rational actor, you have criminals who know what they are doing, weigh the risk of being caught and punished against the expected reward for the crime, and decide the risk is worth the reward. The assumption of our criminal justice system, courts, and prisons is based on the assumption that the majority of the prisoner population is from this category, and that criminals in this category can be “reformed” by the threat that they will reenter the harsh prison system should they “screw up” again.

In the second category, you have criminals a lot like the first, but with the added problem that their standard of living is so low (either because of situational factors, physical disability, lack of education, or something else) that our system’s remedies (incarceration and fines) cease to be a punishment. Incarceration provides things they aren’t getting regularly outside (a roof over their bed, three square meals, etc). Fines? Well, they had so little money, the chance of their ever paying is nonexistent to start with. Some opponents of “soft” and “low-security” prisons, prison recreational facilities beyond the minimum, and even of in-prison educational opportunities (not I on the last one) disagree with prison leniency on the idea that the more “fun” it is to be in prison, the more people will cease to see prison as something to be avoided because the bar of “worse than I already know” is raised.

In the third category, you have people whose lifestyle is based around criminal activity. These people skew the system’s idea the other way – it’s not the “punishment” of prison that is off, because they do try to avoid it, but rather that the rewards of their chosen crime (often violent crime, extortion rackets, drug smuggling/sales, etc) are so great that they will reenter their groups and keep doing it after release on that basis. Once in, their social networks also begin to revolve around this behavior. Once the social network revolves around criminal behavior it’s almost impossible to get them out, since the opportunities to participate in it will come up almost immediately after release unless drastic measures (such as a prohibition on returning to “old haunts” or contact with former friends) are taken as a condition of parole.

These first three categories are all what we would call rational actors. The “preventive” idea/goal of a harsh prison system is to try to skew the calculation for the rational actors, such that as many as possible decide the crime isn’t worth the potential punishment.

The other subset of criminals is the irrational actors, many of whom also have mental deficiencies of some sort or another.

Some irrational actors have a learning disorder that prevents them from properly connecting cause with effect. A 5-year-old kid who shoplifts because he doesn’t know any better is a “rational actor” acting on insufficient data – but when the same condition applies to people who are “full adults” as far as the system is concerned, and their mental development has simply left them unable to weigh any other calculation than the very-immediate “see something, want something, lack resources to legitimately acquire it”, the person becomes an issue for society. If you want a medical analysis of how it works, there’s a good start over here discussing research on toddlers’ mental states. Add in an inability to correctly recall (or weigh) the impact of past memories of being caught, and you can have a person with real problems.

Some people have a verifiable compulsion toward their particular criminal behavior. These people may not be aware of the crime until just before they commit it, or in the case of small “tic”-like behaviors (such as kleptomaniacs whose compulsion focuses on things like paper clips or pencils) perhaps not consciously aware at all.

Some people are simply sociopaths. They know the calculation very well. They know the punishment, they know the risk of being caught. They may not even gain any “reward” for their acts, in a normal profit motive sense, but the emotional reward of their behavior is such that they are perfectly willing to commit their crime of choice over and over again. These people are compulsive and “incurable”, in the sense that their mental wiring simply will not change. Again, a societal problem because the behavior either needs to be controlled by medication or by semi-isolation from society, into a watched environment where they can be caught before they harm others.

Then you have the so-called “crimes of passion” – a man who kills someone he believes raped his family member, or when tempers flare too high in an argument and a fight results, or a wife/lover involved in a newly discovered affair. As these are wholly irrational (but not “habitual”), very little can be done. In the words of the Joker, “All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That’s how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day.” The good news (at least as far as recidivism rates are concerned) is that normal people who have this “one bad day” aren’t as likely to repeat their crimes as those from other groups, though in-prison or during-probation mental treatment would definitely help decrease the rate even further.

The final group are those who may not intend harm to others, but simply have a poor decision-making process that causes them to do things that hurt others. A good example of persons in this category would be habitual drunk drivers – not that they intend to harm others (or themselves), not that they intend to even be drunk, but simply that they commit to the first step of the decision chain (deciding to open the bottle or go to the bar) and everything goes downhill from there. It’s not necessarily alcoholism, obviously – you could take habitually rowdy/violent parents at Little League games and make the same analysis. These are people who have a “trigger” situation whereby they lose what we would normally consider “common sense” control of their actions, but can’t seem to avoid the trigger or regularly recognize the dangers in time to pull themselves out of the dangerous situation.

Part of the problem for the so-called “criminal justice” system is that it treats all criminals (nominally at least) the same. We make rudimentary efforts to deal with the “so poor that prison isn’t punishment” group with in-prison education opportunities, and these do help reduce recidivism for the people from that category, and perhaps also for people from the first category who lose their jobs and risk slipping into the second category. For the “rational actors” in the first two groups – who understand the risks and believe that the reward is worth it – a harsher system may make sense in that it may be able to prevent recidivism or initial criminal activity out of fear.

For the third group, we are probably too lenient. This is especially true when it comes to young people in gangs, because research has shown that savvy gangs tend to use their youngest members for violent acts, knowing that the criminal system punishes them far less harshly. Moreover, the justice system fails by allowing these people to easily reconnect with their fellow gang members or “friends” after release.

The other problem with our system is that it tends to fail to identify – or deal with – the irrational actors well. Irrational actors with a compulsion may, in the structured environment of prison, never get triggered. Sociopaths are well known for being able to “game” the system, convincing the people responsible for turning them loose on society that they are “rehabilitated”, regurgitating what it is the system’s maintainers want to hear, when nothing could be further from the truth. Except for the cases where someone is guilty of serial violent crimes (rape, murder) where the punishments are already set to be incredibly harsh, the system resembles a revolving door. One example I know of who frequents the Southern Tech University campus (among others) fits either into the “too poor” or the “learning disability” category. I’m not sure which, but I do know that every time he is released from prison, we get warnings posted over campus.

The problem with this guy is, he commits minor theft rather than grand theft (laptop bags, backpacks, the occasional projection/computer equipment). He compounds this by pleading guilty and knowing what to say to the judge and how to behave in prison, such that even before his sentencing, he’s usually already a “trustee” with all sorts of extra privileges in the jail. Since his crimes are “minor” and he is never violent, he then spends a few months in a low-security jail with a warm bed, 3 square meals a day, rec center, free cable tv, no rent, extra trustee privileges… and then he returns to the SoTech neighborhood and repeats the process all over again, visiting local schools and stealing things to sell to pawnshops.

Again, I don’t know him well enough to definitively place which category he’s in – I do not know him personally, just from the police reports we get and from discussions of his case with some of the officers who went around to warn us of his last release. It’s quite possible he is a “rational actor” from the slums next to SoTech who has decided that the jail system just doesn’t qualify as a punishment. It’s also possible he has some other mental problems. It’s still quite probable that some form of a supervised release – as opposed to simply turning him out to the streets or dumping him back in his old neighborhood, as they currently do – would probably do better than the simple “serial recidivist” behavior we get out of him currently. I also have to wonder; in a county where you had a Joe Arpaio-style jail rather than what he gets in Colosse, would the risk/reward analysis of his crime make him less likely to behave as he does? That alone might help to determine whether he is a rational actor or not.

I love the cafeteria at work. It’s not only convenient, but the food is good and not too terrible for me while saving me from much greater sins elsewhere. They also have a nice variety of foods and weekly specials, so I end up eating more different meals than I otherwise would. Well, “different” usually within the context of a bun or tortilla (or occasionally a crust).

The biggest complaint I have is that they put certain foods where they don’t belong. Case and point they put green peas in rice. I don’t like rice much to begin with, but I hate green peas. There is no vegetable I hate more. There aren’t many ingredients where I practically refuse to eat anything with it in there, but green peas are right there with raisins.

You can imagine my surprise when I got a beef taco a few weeks back only to discover these little green bulbs inside of it. Having already ordered it and seeing that there weren’t many, I closed my eyes and ate the thing. I picked out the ones that were convenient, but I know one or two got through. Lesson learned. The next several times I got some other meat only to see that they didn’t put the green peas in there anywhere.

Then one day I get a burrito and I know that they’re going to put rice in there. I tell the woman to put only a little bit of rice. I do that with burritos anyway, but it was particularly important this time around. If there were only a couple I could pick them out. So I breathed a sigh of relief. Little did I see that this time they had put the green peas in the darn chicken this time.

I don’t get it. If a burrito factory offered to put beans inside their burritos, I doubt one in ten customers would ask for it. Why in the world defile glorious meat with such ugly nutrition? I understand the need for filler, but green peas are not uncontroversial. Not only would few ask for it, but I suspect a larger number would specifically want its exclusion. When I get something meaty and some potatoes were thrown in the hash, I do get the vague sensation that there are potatoes where meat ought to be and that sucks. Sort of like how they fill up your cup with glass cause that’s cheaper with cola. But it’s nothing to get excited about. Yeah, a little less meat and a little more potato, but I know few people that would actively object.

Green peas? Different story. I’m sure there are people out there that are excited about them, but there are also a lot of people that hate them. Including my wife, who is much more a veggie person than I am. I dislike carrots a good deal, too, but I understand that fewer people have the distaste for them that I do. I accept that I am alone or near alone or aligned with people of the caliber that make me wish I was alone on a lot of foods.

But green peas ain’t one of them.

Per 2 Blowhards I found a familiar religious quiz. I take this quiz every few years and the results are generally pretty constant despite whatever it is I believe that I believe at any given point. Bahai is always at top. The Judaisms are usually not far behind (though Liberal Quaker used to be right there with them). It used to be that Unitarianism was higher up there. I’m not sure where Sikhism or Islam came from.

Anyway, it’s kind of a silly quiz, but a fun enough way to pass the time.

1. Baha’i Faith (100%)
2. Reform Judaism (100%)
3. Orthodox Judaism (98%)
4. Sikhism (96%)
5. Islam (94%)
6. Liberal Quakers (79%)
7. Jainism (79%)
8. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (75%)
9. Unitarian Universalism (75%)
10. Hinduism (60%)
11. Mahayana Buddhism (60%)
12. Neo-Pagan (54%)
13. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (52%)
14. New Age (51%)
15. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (51%)
16. Orthodox Quaker (50%)
17. Theravada Buddhism (50%)
18. New Thought (49%)
19. Eastern Orthodox (48%)
20. Roman Catholic (48%)
21. Seventh Day Adventist (44%)
22. Scientology (43%)
23. Secular Humanism (41%)
24. Jehovah’s Witness (40%)
25. Taoism (40%)
26. Nontheist (36%)
27. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (33%)

It’s funny how some people bring out very specific instinctual reactions in us. The whole phenomenon of “love at first site” can be attributed to this. Whether one truly considers it “love” or not, it’s undeniable that certain people bring out very particular reactions well before we have enough information to justify them. Obviously, some “love at first site” cases are just an attempt to add depth to the observation of “Hey, he/she is not”. But I think that it goes beyond that. There have been cases where I have been immediately taken by someone that was not objectively any more or less attractive than people that did not elicit the same reaction.

But what I’ve found since I’ve gotten married and off the market and all that, which is that these sort of instantaneous reactions are everywhere in all sorts of directions.

For example, my personnel manager at work – my contact with the contracting agency I work with – makes me want to hug her. I have no idea why. She would be too old to be a partner if I were single but too young to be an obvious motherly figure. But whenever I talk to her, I want to hug her goodbye. All I can guess is that she unconsciously reminds me of somebody that I used to hug hello and goodbye to. She doesn’t look like anybody in any obvious manner. But subconciously or unconsciously or something, I get some sort of reaction.

A guy that I am sometimes in the smoker’s area with, on the other hand, brings out the exact opposite in me. Wherever he is, I want to be somewhere else. There is something about the guy that I just don’t like. I wondered if it was the fact that he’s a real metrosexual sort, but there are people like that who don’t bother me. Even the transvestite/transsexual (I know the difference, but don’t know which she is) doesn’t send up as many flags. Maybe he sets off some sort of gaydar and I’m not as comfortable around homosexuals as I think I am (I don’t get a whole lot of practice)… but I have no particular reason to think that he’s gay other than how he dresses. It’s just this weird sort of thing where he’s dripping with Trumwill-repellent. Again, I wonder if there’s somebody that he reminds me of.

That all makes me wonder if the whole Love at First Site is really mental shorthand for “You outwardly remind me in some way of somebody that I once developed feelings for”. Love at First Site when you’re young is often shorthand for “Hey, you’re hot”, but when you get older, I wonder if it’s just not an association of sorts with someone that you know and like very much. Maybe not even someone in real life. Maybe a TV character that you became really taken with or something.

I remember a girl in high school that made me think of Gadget from Chip’n’Dale’s Rescue Rangers. I’m not saying that I was taken with her because of that resemblance (cartoon anthropomorphic mice aren’t what I’m into), but maybe the familiarity alone was enough to make me give her a second or third look to notice how attractive she was. I choose that one because it’s by far the most trivial. It’s not just physical resemblance (the girl did not look like a mouse!). It could be posture or some mannerism so subtle that the conscious mind never quite isolates it.

What I find is that these instincts are very, very rarely wrong. Obviously, if I hugged my handler at work I would be sued for sexual harassment, but I would be surprised if she were not a hugger of some sort. Few people that I take an immediate “irrational” dislike for do I end up saying “Oh, hey, she’s okay!” There are cases where I am sorta neutral on someone and later really like them or that I sorta like only to find out that they’re a bad person, but for someone whose gut instincts on all sorts of things lead him awry, that’s one area where it rarely seems to happen.