Guns as public goods

My local police department has a handout on safeguarding your house, and owning a gun isn't on the list. In fact it's discouraged. Maybe because, as the Brady campaign argues fairly convincingly, your gun's most likely victim is you. And I'd add to that my doubts that an amateur could get the better of a well-trained criminal, in a shoot-out.

On the other hand,

The 34-year-old mother of two grabbed a shotgun that had been pointed at her face early Wednesday, starting a struggle that ended with one intruder killed with his own weapon and another in the hospital.

I'm grateful to all the people who do keep guns in their homes -- 50% of homes have guns, so they say -- for acting as a deterrent, providing that small but definitely non-negligible and fatal occupational risk all burglars run. I suspect that in the absence of that deterrent, there would be many more burglaries.

Same-old same-old

Hard to see why this is news:

Syria's leader said Thursday he offered a proposal for peace with Israel but also refused to break off ties with Hezbollah and militant Palestinians

We see this "peace plan" recycled over and over: hand over what we failed to take when we attacked you in 1973, and by the way we plan to keep supporting the terrorists who want to destroy you utterly.

The techie gap

Why are there so few (and fewer than once) American-born computer programmers and, in college, computer science majors? In How our Culture Keeps Students out of Science, Peter Wood (starting from a story about Bill Gates lobbying for H1B visas to feed his need for programmers, but then broadening his scope to all science) argues that it's a combination of sloth, misplaced priorities and maleducation. That's the conservative view, of course. Others will say we'd produce more Einsteins (or Richard Stallmans?) if we gave every public school student a laptop and their teachers a "reduced class size".

I don't happen to think this "shortage" (alone) is a social problem worth worrying about, but as long as people are going to talk about it, I'll propose a theory inspired by the economics of international trade: People are sorting themselves into professions in a way that reflects comparative advantage. In international trade, the idea is (oversimplifying greatly) that if an acre of English land can produce 10 tons of wool or 10 tons of milk, and an acre of Portuguese land can produce 5 tons of wool or 8 tons of milk, England will raise mostly sheep and export wool to Portugal while importing milk from Portugal, even though England could, if it really wanted to, produce milk even more efficiently than Portugal can. Turning, then, to the market for skilled labor: bright college-age Americans can become computer programmers but they can also cash in on their American language and social skills to become lawyers, bankers, journalists, politicians, clinical psychologists etc. Meanwhile a bright college-age resident of India or China, looking to emigrate to the USA, enjoys a comparative (even if not absolute) advantage in those fields that don't require native-level English language and American social skills.

The old days, when the engineers looked just like the lawyers and the bankers (except for the pocket protectors and other fashion faux pas), reflected a period of labor market autarky.

Haim B. Rosen, Textbook of Israeli Hebrew

This is an interesting book but it's not so much a beginner's language course as it is a reference grammar of modern Hebrew. Moreover, the grammar is presented in a way that will strike almost everyone who *has* studied Hebrew grammar (in school, or from every other book I've ever seen) as idiosyncratic.

For example, the classification of verbs into seven "binyanim" -- what could be called the cornerstone of most other college-level Hebrew textbooks -- is scarcely to be found at all. In its place you find "strong verbs" and "weak verbs". The strong verbs correspond to the traditional "qal" and "nif'al". The rest of the binyanim are subsumed under the "weak verbs", which Rosen further breaks down into three classes -- class 1 for pi'el and pu'al, class 2 for hitpael, and class 3 for hif'il and huf'al. But you have to read to chapter 41 to learn about that three-part taxonomy. In the mean time, Rosen has introduced most of the verb rules piecemeal. Gone are the familiar tables -- regular verbs, verbs that start with a guttural letter, or end in aleph, or have a yod in the middle, etc. I doubt I could have learned Hebrew verbs the way Rosen presents them, unless I collected all of his scattered rules and wrote my own conjugation tables.

There is another peculiarity which I think is even worse: the Hebrew is spelled without vowels ("points")! When vocabulary is introduced, it's shown in (unpointed) Hebrew alongside a phonetic transliteration in Latin letters. So whenever you see that Hebrew word -- then and there, or later -- you'll see it without vowels. To be sure, there's method, and not just madness, here; most road signs and virtually all restaurant menus, shop windows, newspapers and hand-written notes you see in Israel are like that -- no vowels. On the other hand, students with less than perfect memories will find themselves having to refer back to the transliterations when, instead, they could have been keeping their eyes a little longer on Hebrew letters and, in the process, building some skill at decoding the unfamiliar alphabet. And it gets even worse: there are entire pages with no Hebrew letters on them at all; Rosen will throw in a section on idiomatic expressions, and present them only in Latin letters. At that point, I think even the most diligent student would be hard-pressed to readily recognize those expressions if he were to see them in Hebrew, much less be able to write them out in correctly-spelled Hebrew.

The author, Haim Rosen, was a prominent Israeli academic linguist who popularized the idea of Israeli Hebrew as a distinct new language, whose many deviations from classical norms were to be taken not as mistakes or "substandard usage" but as the legitimate objects of serious study. That serious study was his career, and this book must be how, after much thought and rethinking Hebrew grammar forward and backward, he concluded Hebrew should be taught to beginners.

You might be able to make a go of it if your motivation is rock-solid, and you have patience for a lot of abstractly described grammatical terminology. The natural audience for this book, though, is probably not students at all but rather people who already know Hebrew, and who are interested in seeing what they already know presented in an innovative, often interesting, way.

(amazon.com: "63 people found this helpful")

Stanley Williams, Life in Prison

The intended audience of this book is young men who admire prison convicts and aspire to put a prison experience on their own resumes. If you are such a person, yes, by all means do read this book.

But this is a good book even for those of us who are, at best, minimum-security material. The most impressive part, for me, was what Tookie has to say about loneliness, isolation, lack of privacy, lack of control over one's schedule, and the gradual disappearance of personal connections to people outside the big house.
 

(amazon.com: "49 people found this helpful")

Gary V. Vaughn, Gnu Autoconf, Automake and Libtool

As a guide to Gnu autoconf, automake and libtool, this book is quite useless. It is utterly and totally disorganized, and much essential information is just not there at all. There is amazingly little in the way of examples. So don't bother with it if you want to learn about any of those subjects. The book is not entirely without merit, however. Its redeeming features are scattered sensible comments about software portability and software architecture.

The authors are obviously very knowledgable and experienced about software. I encourage them to "throw this one away" and try a rewrite from scratch. Short of that, they could provide a road map through their book; first read this chapter, then skip to the second half of that one, etc.

The sad news is that there may not be any good guide to autoconf etc anywhere yet. Like the DNA in your body, all autoconf files are very likely descended by an evolutionary process from a few original viable specimens.

(amazon.com: 18 people found this helpful)

Thomas Sowell Inside American Education