Slow Blogging

Wife and I are traveling over a long weekend, so blogger will be slow or nonexistent.

Jobs and Proportional Spacing

In his famous commencement speech Steve Jobs took credit for bringing proportional spacing to the personal computer, claiming that Microsoft wouldn't have had the vision to do so.  It's possible his claim was tongue-in-cheek, but Mr. Manjoo at Slate took it seriously in his appraisal of Jobs. " If he hadn’t brought proportional typefaces to the Mac—if the Mac had never existed—it’s difficult to think of anyone else who would have. Microsoft? Dell? No way."

I beg to differ.  Several lines of development came together on the personal computer.  IBM in 1948 announced the IBM Executive Typewriter, which provided a proportionally spaced font.  To the best of my knowledge, such typewriters were always a class symbol, used for "executives". A second line was preparation of copy for photo-offset printing, with the Varityper and later the IBM Selectric Composer.  A third line started with the mainframe with the creation of typesetting.  These separate lines stemmed from the realization that print is just easier to read and prettier to look at if it's proportionally spaced, which then gets you into the details of font design, serifs versus no serifs, etc. etc. It didn't take Steve Jobs for people to realize this.  He didn't create the demand for it from scratch.

My own exposure to the issue came in the early 70's, when we were using IBM mag tape/selectric typewriters for directives. We were looking for replacement systems, which got me looking far afield at the minicomputers of the day.  The monitors on these were limited:; they could form letters with maybe a 6x9 dot matrix.  And their output was limited to the dot matrix or daisy wheel printer.

Another way to discuss this is to focus on the final product, which is "what you see is what you get"--WYSIWYG, both on the monitor and on the output device.  The Executive typewriter, Varityper, Composer all used hardware to provide the output.  WYSIWYG on the monitor required getting enough pixels on the screen to model different type fonts. WYSIWYG on the output device required a device which could vary the output under software control: inkjet, dot-matrix, or laser printers.  And, of course, you needed a software package between the monitor and output device.

What Apple did do by the mid-80's was package the three elements (monitor, software, laser printer) together in a package which could enable desktop publishing.  Once that was in place the doors opened wide and demand rushed in.

When Women Didn't Do Science and Technology

How short a time that was. A post from the winner of the Google Science Fair--all three winners were female, meeting the President.

A Generalization Too Far

I've taken to following the comments at Ta-Nehesi Coates' blog at the Atlantic.  Today he wrote a true sentence:

The disease of presentism, looking up the past from the strict moral, legal, cultural, political and economic context of our time, is a constant problem.

 There's another disease which I often see, which I can't name, except as in the title of this post.  It's generalizing too much, too far.  For example: the status of women. In today's America they have one status; in the America of 1850 they have another--right?  I'd say wrong. Forgetting about the past, the status of women in the Amish culture, the Hasidic Jewish culture, the Hollywood culture, the Mormon culture, the Salvadoran culture of recent immigrants, etc. etc. is very different. There's some continuities, but we always have these different groups in the bigger society. The best we can do, perhaps, is to recognize we're probably making generalizations about middle and upper middle class mainstream American society.

Tell Me What You Really Think (of 9-9-9)

Via Tyler Cowen, Bruce Bartlett assesses Herman Cain's 9-9-9 tax plan rather soberly.  He concludes:

Even allowing for the poorly thought through promises routinely made on the campaign trail, Mr. Cain’s tax plan stands out as exceptionally ill conceived.

I Remember Hitchhiking

Freakonomics explores a couple reasons for the decline in hitchhiking: fear and the rise of women drivers and an associated rise in car ownership and multi-car families.  I'd add a couple: the rise of limited access highways and the diversion of traffic to them--even if hitchhiking is not explicitly prohibited it's harder to stop and pick up person in the midst of 70 mph traffic; the tipping point phenomena--if it's not often done it feels riskier.

I used to hitchhike on my way home from cross-country practice, though mostly I ended up walking all the way.  Modern kids are spoiled.

FSA Progress on Civil Rights

This press release claims progress. This demonstration presumably counters the claim, though the news report doesn't link the two.

What The? Used Cars Increase in Value

VA has a tax on the value of the car(s) you own (don't get me started on it) which means they have to determine the car's value each year, for which they use some standard NADA manual.   The Herndon Patch just has a post forwarding info from Fairfax County--15,000 cars increased in value over last year.

???  I guess it must be times are so tight that people are bidding up the value of used cars rather than buy new?    Strange times.

European Agricultture versus US

Haven't linked to posts at CAP Health Check recently. One subject the Euros are dealing with is whether to move to flat rate payments (paying the same rate per acre hectare regardless of the historical crop grown). For someone steeped in US farm programs that's an astonishing idea--I can't imagine anyone in the US proposing it, much less a realistic possibility of enacting it, but it's seriously on the table across the sea.

Why? I suspect one answer is there's more variation in US agriculture than in Europe, particularly within a country:

•  First of all each country is much smaller than the U.S.
• Second, there's much more climactic variation, consider dryland cotton and irrigated cotton.  Irrigation isn't that important, I don't think, in the EU
• Third, there's a greater diversity of important crops.  Specifically cotton and rice are much more important than in the EU.  And those are the high value crops, meaning thy get the biggest support payments.

Hatch Act Violations and FSA

A Politico piece on proposals to change the Hatch Act says:

Lerner also said the standard penalty dictated by the Hatch Act — termination of employment — is too harsh in most instances and may even encourage agencies not to report violation

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1011/65374.html#ixzz1a89W5TEe

I'm too lazy to research, but if memory serves the ASCS employees in the 1990's were found guilty of violating the Hatch Act and paid $1,000 fines, but didn't lose their jobs.  One of them solicited me for money on the phone during work hours, not that I was ever asked to testify nor did I volunteer the information. Since the Dems were in power and the solicitation was on behalf of a bundling organization giving to Clinton, I doubt the agency reported the violation.  I think we can thank a whistleblower.