Cheat Codes

Almost everyone who was born after the Ford Administration knows what "cheat codes" are. But for my fellow boomers I'll explain that cheat codes are (generally undocumented) special inputs to video games that allow the player to gain an advantage. They usually consist of pressing controller keys in a very exact sequence. They reward the game player with a variety of goodies: special powers and strength for their game avatar, or in "shooter" games, new and more powerful weapons or unlimited amunition.

You can search the internet for game walkthroughs and cheat codes. Whenever a new game comes out, dedicated players try out different obscure combinations of a game controllers keys, trying to find the combination that will give them an advantage in the game.

Game creators are aware of this interest and will make sure that cheat codes are "accidentally" leaked to their most loyal fans. These loyal fans then pass this along to their friends. There is even a market for books detailing the cheat codes of various video games.

My favorite nephew passed this tweet along to me this morning:

I was knocked back on my heels by this bit off tossed-off wisdom.

Proverbs do encode shortcuts to wisdom gathered through hard experience. Proverbs don't substitute for actually thinking the problem through.

Note the many proverbs that seem to contradict each other: "Many hands make light work," vs. "Too many cooks spoil the soup." or : "All things come to him who waits," vs. "Strike while the iron is hot."

But I do love the word image of the tweet, "I think proverbs may actually be cheat codes."

I love the idea that these nuggets of wisdom give us access to advantages put into our lives by the designer; and that if I take advantage of this wisdom I will find myself boosted with new strength, longer life, and unlimited spiritual amunition.

Heh.

Ischemic Attack!

The word is out on the digital street that I was in the E.R. last night, standing in for George Clooney. That's not entirely accurate.

Last Tuesday I felt a tingling sensation in my right leg, as though my leg were asleep. After a couple of hours the feeling passed. Thursday the sensation returned and covered the entire right side of my body. Friday night I checked my blood pressure and it was high. So Mrs. Islander drove me down to the Island Emergency Room.

Checking into the ER when you don't have a broken limb or gaping wound seems a bit false, as though you are malingering. At those prices, though, it's no joke. I could feel the money flying out of my wallet.

Because the issues involved are your own health and life, yet you spend so much time alone in a strange room, time spent in the ER swings from boring to fascinating. Lying in a bed, connected to different monitors, I couldn't get up and walk around, so I had to devise my own entertainment.

The monitors to which the nurses hooked me up are set to sound an alarm if the patient's bpm drop below 50. I have a normally low resting heart rate (49 beats per minute). After responding to the third alarm, the nurse reset the monitor alarm to 45 bpm.

I laid back, relaxed, and slowed my breathing, timing it to my heartbeats. I dropped my heart rate to 44 bpm and triggered the alarm again.

Good times, good times.

I was given a diagnosis of TIA Transient Ischemic Attack (mini-stroke). A CT scan could see no lesions (brain damage), so I'm doing well so far. (No snide remarks from my siblings--I have doctor's proof of no brain damage. Do you?)

Monday morning I report into my own doctor's office and get an ultrasound of my neck and schedule an MRI.

I'll post more as events warrant. You are free to go about your daily lives.

Avatar (No, not that one)

I keep trying out avatars for web use. This was generated by the Mad Men website.

Outgeeked

This Christmastide we had as guests my wife's sister and her husband, Jim. As guys do, we sniffed around a couple of topics to see if we were from the same tribe.

He mentioned that he liked classic Sci-Fi, and I asked him to name a couple of favorite authors. (Think of that scene in The Commitments: "Who are your influences?"

Jim allowed that he used to be a big Piers Anthony fan. I asked him if he liked my favorite Anthony novel, Omnivore.

Without a word he rolled up his shirt sleeve to reveal a tattoo of the fungal carnivore.

I was completely outgeeked.

Dept. of Duh

ABC News: Shoe Style Linked to Foot Pain

Why I'm Rereading: Island in the Sea of Time

I have known several people in my life who never re-read a book. Once they have closed the cover on the last page, they are onto the next thing--book, task, whatever. I also know of people that have a favorite re-read. My friend Alex would re-read Dune every summer. It kind of defined summer to read it, I guess. My former boss Bill would re-read The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever every couple of years.

I am a person that rereads. I do so for several reasons. First of all, I reread for pure pleasure, re-experiencing the best of what I have read. Secondly, I re-read because books don't change, but I have changed since the last time I read a book. Thirdly, I re-read becuase The book was so challenging the first time that I want to get more from it on subsequent readings.

I am currently re-reading S.M. Stirling's alternate-history Island in the Sea of Time, which I first read back in the late 1990s.

Why?

I recently finished Sword of the Lady, the 6th book in his "Emberverse" series which is loosely connected to the "Island" series and I wanted to refresh my memory of the first events in the series before I arrive at the conclusion, "High King in Montival," next year.

My Sweety recently read the book at the urging of my Daughter and enjoyed it very much. (She's not much of an SF reader.)

And I have changed in the last 15 years. I have spent several years studying Japanese sword (Kenjutsu) and I am ranked Shodan-ni in Seiki-ryu Kentutsu/Jodo. So now reading the weapon-work of Captain Marion Alston is accompanied by better-informed mental images of what she is doing.

What would Milton Friedman do?

There are a lot of people exercised over the fear of government intervention into the US economy and I am one of them.

So why did I support (writing to my congresspeople) the TARP I bailout?

Thankfully, Kevin Williamson answers that question for me:

There are those conservatives who ask themselves, “What would Jesus do?” There are those who ask, “What would Ronald Reagan do?” There are even a few who ask, “What would Russell Kirk do, other than pour himself a scotch and shake his head sadly before writing another 1,000 pages?” I ask myself, “What would Milton Friedman do?”

Milton Friedman would have supported a bank bailout.

Or it seems he would have, given that a bank bailout is more or less what he prescribed for the last great financial crisis, the one leading up to the Great Depression, which he dwells upon at some length in his Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960. The vulgarized version of Friedman: The Federal Reserve helped turn a routine if severe recession into the Great Depression by tightening the supply of money and credit. But as economists as different as Paul Krugman and Tyler Cowen have pointed out, the more accurate version is this: The Fed helped cause the Great Depression by allowing the supply of money and credit to tighten. The distinction is important. How did they allow it? By declining to bail out the failing banks...

Free-marketeers tend to think of our orientation not only as an economic position but also as a virtue. (It is.) But there is a danger in letting that belief congeal into dogma and, in consequence, allowing abstractions to obscure realities. It is true that the root evil here was government intervention in the economy: The Fed’s over-loose money after Dot-Bomb and 9/11, combined with tax incentives and the market-distorting actions of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, helped create the housing bubble; various government policies then helped turn that bubble into a global disaster. The subprime meltdown was not a failure of what is so often mischaracterized as “unbridled capitalism.” It was as much a failure of regulatory excess as of Scrooge McDuck, literally-rolling-in-it excess.

But it is not necessarily wise to start practicing austerities at the moment of crisis. Those who opposed the bailouts were, I think, seeking to restore the virtues of the free market — at precisely the wrong time. It is as though we had been diagnosed with lung cancer and responded merely by swearing off cigarettes. What about radiation therapy? What, are you crazy? Radiation gives you cancer! And people get sick in hospitals! ....

I suspect that many of us who opposed the bailouts did so based on unjustified optimism. Surely, we thought, the citizens of this commercial republic will have learned their lesson and will hasten to enact reforms that are consistent with their experience and liberal values. Those of us who believed that must somehow have missed the contemporaneous ascent of Barack Obama, whose election as president does not suggest that the nation is ready for a heaping helping of Adam Smith. Professor Cowen demands:

If you are a libertarian, is not our current course more favorable for liberty than would have been a repeat of 1929–1931? If not, I would be curious to hear your counterfactual version of how matters would have proceeded, without the financial bailouts. Is it that you think the regional banks would have raised the financing to pick up the entire bag and keep the banking system afloat? Or is it that natural market forces would have somehow avoided a wrenching surprise deflation? Or do you think the authorities for some reason would have not nationalized the major banks? . . . If we had not done the bailouts we did, we would, within a few months’ or weeks’ time, have received a much worse and costlier bailout run by Congress and Nancy Pelosi. How does that sound?

Sounds like hell on earth, professor.