Archimedes’ Hot Tub

I spent the last couple of weeks of 2009 offline. I surprised myself by not missing it (sorry, World Wide Web. Did you miss me?).

My main interactivity came while engaged with family. I sledded, bowled, played cards, even got bored once in a while. Imagine that!

I spent time in other media, like books.
Bonnie Jo Campbell’s American Salvage contains some of the most vividly drawn and unique characters I’ve seen in years. I told my wife to read these stories because she’ll know more about me. I ‘know’ some of these people, know the places they go. Maybe it’s because I grew up in Michigan, not so far from where Campbell sets most of her stories. I shared one of the stories with my brother-in-law, because I knew it described something he’s familiar with, in ways neither he nor I could articulate. I had two wishes for Campbell.  We only see the main characters once, which made me wish that she’d pull them together in some way, as with Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, or Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. And very few of the stories yield even a hint of a happy ending, adding to the enduring notion that small towns lead inevitably to desperation. Since Campbell didn’t win the 2009 National Book Award (I’ll guess that factors included these being short stories, and about people you wouldn’t see at a New York literary party), I’ll have to go read Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, which did. It must be stupendous.

I finished Telling True Stories, edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy McCall. I think I should read something from it every week. It offers so much wisdom, inspiration and practical ideas for writers and editors.

John Coats’ new book Original Sinners, meanwhile, puts Genesis into modern context. I enjoyed much of it, including the fun yarns Coats includes from his life. Fundamentalists of all stripes will hate it, unless they can accept it as the literary work it was written as, and not a book on religion.

I went audio, too, mostly audio books for the long drive to and from Michigan. We listened to a Dave Barry collection,  who wasn’t as funny as I remembered him being (only one had us howling with laughter). We started listening to Water for Elephants, only to decide that it was best not to have it on when the kids might hear. It became the first book I bought on the Kindle I got for Christmas.

I also watched some true crime shows on television. Not bad — it’s like a video game that unfolds once a week. Given the way I binge game, the TV model probably is healthier for me.

This NYT piece went on about why those mean banks aren’t refinancing many loans. The writer finds several people who would like to refinance, and whose home loans seem generally to be higher than the value of their homes. Even with Federal bail-out money earmarked for such a purpose, the loans aren’t happening. Even if people might avoid foreclosure, or even if they have diligently paid their loans and would obviously do so with lower payments, the loans aren’t being refinanced. Unstated is what would seem the real reason for banks reluctance to refinance: to do so will revalue the house. In this market, that will probably lower its value. Making that easy to do will probably create a clamor of other folks wanting to do the same.

Take me.  I would certainly like to refinance at historically low rates. But when I looked into it, I found that the value of my home had dropped to the point where I would need to pay for private mortgage insurance. My current fixed-rate mortgage was at the bottom of the market at the time, so when you add in PMI, my savings aren’t worth the hassle.
There are probably a lot of people like me. When you get right down to it, nobody involved in real estate wants to make it easy to mark homes to their actual market value. I’m surprised no one would say this to the reporter.

This post, are we better off without religion? delves more deeply into Gregory Paul’s Successful Societies Scale (and its shoddy presentation) than did mine. (Some of the comments are also interesting.)

One thing that surprises me is that Paul ignores or brushes aside other potential correlates. While the U.S. is clearly more racially diverse than the other nations on his scale, with less than 80 percent of the U.S. being white, vs. more than 90 percent of the populations of countries like Britain, or Germany, he chooses to deal with diversity by looking at foreign-born populations. The U.S.’s white population is also far more diverse than that of any of the countries he examines. Paul also brushes aside the U.S.’s status as a nation with significant slave population in its relatively recent history, saying that was one more sign of its dysfunction due to religiosity. For that matter, he doesn’t seem to note that the U.S. is the only nation without nationalized healthcare. Perhaps that, and not religion, is the factor that matters most for many of the well-being statistics he presents.

If racial diversity is not just a correlate but a cause, I expect we’ll see a  steady decline over time in performance of European nations. For instance, Andrew Brown’s book Fishing in Utopia argues that Sweden has failed to establish itself as the enlightened socialist democracy it envisioned becoming. The book documents some of the discrimination faced by immigrants to this supposedly enlightened country. Racial upheaval in Germany and France also come to mind. The biggest unanswered question in his paper is why the U.S. is both tops in religious belief and per capita income. That simply shouldn’t happen. I hope his paper drives more studies. And that they avoid some of the needless errors that plague his paper.

The latest installation of the Jail Diary finds our anti-hero hungering.

The Atlantic offers short stories for $3.99 a pop on Kindle.  That’s less than some movies on-demand, so maybe it’s the right price. But short stories typically don’t sell well in collection form. Will they sell as singles? We’ll see how this experiment goes (poorly, if the Atlantic continues to make them hard to find).

A fun list of the next little things. I pitched one of these to a magazine back in January, before it was public. The magazine ignored me ignored me ignored me and then punted on the idea. Such is the freelance life.

Future Treasury secretaries? They can live without credit cards, an experience we need. I bet they pay their taxes, too. One of them walked away from his debt, a hardline approach that probably rules him out.

The super stooper. I’m not sure $45k a year would be enough for me to stand in front of a machine 10 hours a day. But I liked reading about this guy.

How reality TV is destroying our society.  A fun read, if not exactly an original idea. I will continue to avoid reality TV, the Biggest Loser excepted.

2010 will be a long year for Tigers fans. Sigh. Jill Lepore’s concise look at the century-long effort to create a public health insurance program in the U.S., Preexisting condition, was an excellent reminder that failed healthcare plans are something of a time-honored tradition in this country. One odd note: she says Irving Fisher is best-remembered for helping to found econometrics. That’s what he’d be remembered for in an ideal world. In truth, we remember him for saying, in 1929, stocks had reached a “permanently high plateau.” The US has been a sound-bite nation for a long, long time. Auden’s ode to Christmas in consumerist times, For the Time Being.

…the time is noon:
When the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing
Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
That God’s Will will be done, That, in spite of her prayers,
God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.

On Monday, I appeared on public radio’s Word of Mouth program to talk about my article “Satan, the great motivator.” As part of my preparation, I was asked to look at a study arguing that religion actually depresses economic activity in the developed world. Here is a discussion of a counter-argument from an independent researcher, Gregory S. Paul. It boils down to an argument about statistical correlation and actual causation. His actual paper develops what he calls the Successful Societies Scale.

My initial reaction was that Paul’s argument told us what we already expected: religion may catalyze economic growth, but as societies succeed economically, they secularize and become less religious. In fact, Paul thinks religion doesn’t help economies at all.

In writing my piece, I talked with several critics of the statistics used to justify the assertion about afterlife beliefs and economics. None of them thought the underlying premise was wrong, at least for developing countries. Paul does, though he says you can’t apply his scale to developing nations, in part because they don’t keep good statistics.
Perhaps his scale will hold up, but I doubt it. His paper was peer-reviewed yet rife with minor errors, starting with this one in the abstract: “The nonuniversality of strong religious devotion, and the ease with [sic] large populations abandon serious theism when conditions are sufficiently benign….”He repeatedly refers to the sociologist Robert Putnam as “Putman.” At one point, he cites religion as the cause of death for 50 billion children, a statistical impossibility.

Missing words, errors of grammar and blatant typos do not by themselves discredit his scale, though they raise obvious questions about the quality of the journal that published him, Evolutionary Psychology.

My bigger concern stems from his approach. He drops academic phrases ad nauseam, but does not write with academic distance. He often makes loaded comments, like referring to conservative religious practices as pathological. It is no surprise when his Successful Societies Scale shows the U.S. ranks dead last among developed nations in a number of categories. He blames this on America’s status as the only developed nation with significant levels of religious practice. Perhaps he is correct. But he sounds like a man with an ax to grind, which makes his scale look like a whetting stone.

If she’s been a veteran, a woman may have no place to call home, according to this poignant article by Susan Kaplan. That the percentage of homeless female veterans exceeds that of homeless male veterans has caught the military by surprise. We think of institutions like the military as training its soldiers both for war and giving them the discipline for life afterwards (my mother still aspires to make a bed as well as her ex-soldier uncle). But this article suggests that just leaving the safe routine of the military can disrupt some people, especially if they’re leaving the military because trauma has rendered them no longer mentally fit to serve. You get the odd sense that soldiers are like freed prisoners.

Ken Auletta’s new book “Googled” defines the present of the company and its impact on media and other things. But it cannot define the future, though Auletta seems to fear for us all. My review, Google’s Earth, tells why.

On a personal note, I found much of this book pleasurable, a rare thing for a business book. The one answer I personally didn’t get about Google was whether its venture capitalist backers tried to sell it when it was a very young company. A prominent VC in Silicon Valley once told me this, and I can see from his book that the VCs got so frustrated with the company one can imagine them shopping it around. But Auletta doesn’t mention it.

I ate breakfast this morning with some folks from BitDefender, a Romanian anti-virus company. Part of the conversation was the potential for personalized spam that appears to come from friends, not in email, but on Facebook, Twitter or other online social networks. It hasn’t happened yet, that they’re aware of, but they expect it will. Then CNET highlighted a possible problem with Facebook’s groups. If the problem is described accurately, it would be easy enough for spammers to take over an inactive Facebook group and create personalized spam notes from it.

Facebook appears to have responded, not to the writer, but in the comments. That’s an interesting way for a company to get its message out without being filtered by the press. But it’s counting on people reading the comments and also on  them believing that a comment is genuine. On the Internet, nobody knows if you’re really just a dog.

Not exactly, looking at this piece on great writers and how they write. These novelists — Richard Powers, Nicholson Baker, Junot Diaz, Margaret Atwood, Anne Rice and 12 others   — all have different methods. Some procrastinate, some don’t (none of them seem to always get it right the first time). Some write things out longhand, some type on the computer. We humans take so many paths to self-expression! My favorite comment was from Michael Ondaatje, who said “Some writers know what the last sentence is going to be before they begin—I don’t even know what the second sentence is going to be.”

Even though I’m a non-fiction writer living in an age when the novel supposedly has run its course, I enjoyed a focus on these great storytellers.