So I am going to, every now and then, write a blog post just to share some links I found on the web recently which happened to catch my eye.

Through the tvtropes site, which is a great place to go if you’ve got a few weeks of time to kill, I stumbled upon the webcomic Fleep. It’s a fairly short story, but it is one of the more intelligent and touching works of fiction I have read — in any medium. The protagonist wakes up locked inside a phone booth encased in concrete, with no memory of how he got there. Using only the things he has in his pockets, in addition to his intelligence and math skills, he  manages to figure out what’s going on and form a plan to escape. There’s a chilling twist and a bitter-sweet conclusion.

Here is a matter-of-fact look at the differences between men and women, and why their different roles in society are as they are. Although amusingly politically incorrect, the author’s message is basically positive for both genders, and he brings up a lot of interesting facts and arguments which are worth thinking about whether or not you like the conclusion they lead to.

Speaking of politically incorrect, Paul Graham is my favourite on-line essayist, and his #1 work in my eyes is “What you can’t say”. Rather than bringing up any specific uncomfortable topics, he gives some perceptive general insights on taboos and censorship and how to deal with them. He then leaves it up to the reader to apply these lessons to concrete topics.

David Friedman, who tops my list of authors whose writings have influenced the way I think about the world around me, has recently webbed his book “The Machinery of Freedom”. It is a series of perceptive essays about the ways in which well-intentioned government intervention often backfires, and a set of ideas for organising a society with little or no government interference. I’m quite sure I don’t buy his arguments all the way through, but the book has certainly added some valuable items to my mental toolbox.

His best book in my eyes is “Hidden Order”, which explains a lot of important economics concepts in an easy-to-follow way, and applies them to topics which would not initially seem to fall within the purview of economics. (If that reminds you of Freakonomics, you’re thinking in the right direction, but Freakonomics is a bag of snacks where Hidden Order is a solid meal.) An earlier book of his, “Price Theory”, has been webbed completely; it has the same structure and covers the same subjects, is perhaps even a bit more thorough in a few places, although the writing is slightly less polished.

A couple of pictures, made by Jeroen or at least with his camera:

Getting good photographs of the actual climbing is surprisingly tricky, as it turns out. When taking photos from below, you mostly get a lot of ass in the picture. Ideally, you want the photographer to be level with the climber, which generally means that he needs to climb another route first and then stay there while the ‘model’ is doing the climb next to him. Rather tricky to accomplish when there’s only three of you, and of course a lot of the time we were simply having too much fun climbing to think of getting out the camera!

Most of our time was spent doing single-pitch sports climbing on the many great rocks around Arco. (Tip: if you have a car, go to Croz de le Niere, just outside the village of Preore at a bit less than 40km from Arco — great climbing on rock which isn’t too “climbed out” yet, and not too crowded, at least on the day we were there.) We also did a 100m multi-pitch route at Baone, which got interesting when we missed a relais and had to do some improvisation in order to reach the next one, which was more than half the lenght of our 70m rope away.

Apart from sports climbing, we did a via ferrata, or klettersteig as it’s called in Austria and Germany. And of course we spent an afternoon sunbathing at Lake Garda, which is only about 5km from Arco.

Good restaurants in Arco: Pace and Alla Lega, both on the village’s main street, are excellent, and Al Fiume on the other side of the bridge is quite good also. We were less impressed with Cantina Marchetti, on a side street from the main square, although to be fair we went there on what may well be the busiest day of the year from them (the Friday of the Ascension Day week-end, when apparently every climber in Germany goes to Arco) so we probably didn’t get to experience them at their best.

When I was just starting out as a programmer, most of the trainings I took were of course purely technical: how to operate a particular database system, how to write software for a particular operating system. The last time I received such a training was long ago, but I remember being generally treated as an adult. The trainer’s communication style would presuppose a certain amount of intelligence and common sense from the students, and we were assumed to be already familiar with the basics of software development until we demonstrated otherwise. Some trainers were better than others of course, but in general they were efficient and useful.

At some point, however, the technical instruction started to make way for the dreaded “social skills” trainings, to be followed even later by “management skills”. The style of instruction used for these is quite different from a programming course. And it needs to be, of course: in order to improve your communication style or become a better manager, it’s not enough to memorize a list of facts — you need to internalize the things you’re taught, so that you will eventually start to apply them subconsciously. Hence, those trainers spend a lot of effort on using all kinds of creative examples and little games to get their point across.

If you’ve ever opened one of the millions of different “how to become a better manager” books, you’ve seen that trick picture in which some people see a young woman and some people see an old crone — the young woman’s chin is the old woman’s nose, etc. And if you’ve ever taken part in any kind of social skills training, you have probably spent a lot of time with your fellow students staring at the same picture.

Quick, answer fast: what was the lesson again you were supposed to take home from that exercise? Three, two, one, time is up! Uh.. Oh yeah, that you shouldn’t assume other people look at a situation the same way as you do, and you should make an effort to see things from their point of view. Now, be honest: did you actually internalize that lesson from the example given, or do you mostly remember the clever way in which the artist made the old woman’s mouth double as the young lady’s necklace? As a way to get the students to pay attention, it can work great. But when, in a single training, the teacher brings out half a dozen visual illusions based on the same principle, I think they’re missing the point.

Yesterday, I had a training which was particularly bad. It was about a specific aspect of the yearly performance appraisal process and there was only three hours reserved for it, so you would expect some effort towards efficiency. Instead, it seems as if the trainer spent most of that time making us do a whole set of children’s games: throwing balls at each other, inflating balloons until they popped, etc. Part of the training involved the well-known concept of SMART goals (Specific, Measurable etc), so we all received a box of Smarties candy — which would have been appreciated, if by that time I was not already getting seriously frustrated about being treated like a small child by the trainer. Heck, in high school we would have never accepted a teacher treating us like that. As a result, the actually useful and interesting parts of the training, such as a group discussion in which we got to discuss and criticize each other’s performance goals, had to be rushed through in far too little time.

To be clear: I do not have a problem in general with “activating instruction”, as it’s called in trainer’s lingo. When done right, they can be useful to get a point across, and they can even have value just to break the ice between the students or to get people back to attention. When you want your trainees to learn a list of items in the right order, you don’t put the list on a Powerpoint and drone it up — that may be fast, but they will have forgotten the whole list before lunch break, if they have not fallen asleep halfway during the presentation. Instead, you cut the list into pieces, ask the students to put them in the proper order, and then check their result against the correct answer. Takes a bit longer, but it greatly improves the chance that they will have retained some of the information two weeks afterwards.

But when a bad trainer gets too eneamoured with playing these childish games instead of actually teaching, there is a risk that those little games and puzzles become a goal in themselves and everybody including the trainer forgets the point they are supposed to make. The idea of the “blowing up a balloon” thing was to make some point on setting stretch goals — finding the optimal point between not challenging enough and unfairly difficult, or somesuch. But the difference between inflating a balloon and setting targets for adult professional software developers is so great that I’m having very big trouble figuring out how I am supposed to apply that lesson. Unfortunately, the trainer did not go into detail on that, so I was left with little pieces of balloon in my hair but no wiser than I went in.

Now, most likely we just had a bad trainer, or maybe I was in a particularly intolerant mood that day. Still, I wonder if this trend continues as you go even higher up the corporate ladder? I still have most of my career in front of me — suppose I make it into upper management one day, and decide to take a course on how to become a more effective Vice President (I’m assuming Vice Presidents get to make such decisions for themselves, but I’m not sure — maybe there’s a strict training program which they just have to follow). Will my trainings then consist of stacking brightly-colored blocks on top of each other and molding aesthetically pleasing shapes out of my own poop? While a sweet lady who was fired from kindergarten teaching because the kids complained about not being taken seriously, makes encouraging noises whenever I manage to shape a particularly lifelike rabbit?

Or will sanity have prevailed at that level and are the students treated like mature adults again? I promise that if I ever get to find out, I will tell my secretary to post about it on this blog.

(Update: it now turns out that after the escape, Mr. Davidson killed his wife and one of his children, and then committed suicide. This blog post, intended as a light-hearted tongue-in-cheek piece, was written before I learned of this. Kind of throws the whole thing in a different light.. Kids, please don’t become spammers — it really isn’t worth it.)

One obvious observation that can be made here is that, unless he is very certain that he will be able to evade justice for the remainder of his life, this was a pretty stupid thing to do: the punishment for escaping from prison is likely to be a lot harsher than the 21 months in minimum-security he received for his original crime.

Another question that came up in the /. comments is whether 21 months in minimum-security prison is an appropriate punishment for a spammer. Many people made the point that, although obnoxious, spamming is a non-violent crime and should therefore be treated less seriously than, say, murder.

I disagree.

How much human life does a typical murderer take? Of course, some people kill more than one victim, but many murderers probably get caught after the first offense, and anyway most modern societies seem to have decided that taking a single life is already worth the highest punishment which that society is willing to hand out. So if we assume a single victim, and if we furthermore assume that your average murder victim is 25 years old and would have otherwise lived to the age of 75, then our hypothetical murderer has taken away 50 years of another person’s life. Clearly, this deserves harsh punishment.

How does “Eddie” Davidson compare to that? Well, to the best of my knowledge he never killed anybody with his own hands, and it is difficult to imagine a scenario where any single one of his e-mails directly led to another person’s death. Maybe some of the pharmaceutical products he peddled were unsafe, but in that case the appropriate thing to do would be to prosecute him separately for that.

Nonetheless, it is a proven fact that Mr. Davidson sent out hundreds of thousands of unwanted e-mails, over a period of more than four years according to the Wikipedia article. I wouldn’t be surprised if “hundreds of thousands” is actually a low-end estimate; based on the amount and the indiscriminate nature of the spam I find in my own mailbox, I suspect that a prolific spammer sends out millions of e-mails in a single spam run. Of course, many of those addresses will be invalid and a large percentage of the spam will be filtered before reaching the recipient. So let’s assume that for each spam run he did, 200,000 mails ended up in the inboxes of actual humans, where they cost on average about a second of each person’s life to recognize the mail as spam and to delete it. Furthermore, let’s assume that during his career, he was responsible for 10,000 spam runs.

That would mean that, in total, he took away 2,000,000,000 seconds out of those people’s lives without their consent. That is more than 63 years! So although he may not have caused as much disruption in any single person’s life as a murderer would, if we look at the sum total of how much life he has taken away from other people, he caused more damage than if he had gone out and killed one person.

Furthermore, the odds of actually being caught and convicted for spamming are probably a lot lower than for murder. As David Friedman explains in his excellent book Law’s Order, with a low chance of being caught should go a correspondingly higher punishment, because otherwise rational criminals will do the math and decide that the rewards of the crime are worth the risk. Hence, the obvious conclusion is that the punishment of a prolific spammer should be roughly equal to that of a serial killer who took several dozen lives.

(Yes, I am being slightly facetious here.)

The jump was a birthday present for my father, who has always been very interested in everything related to planes. But of course, when we gave him the gift certificate, it went without saying that me and my brother would jump as well.

And it was COOL! All three of us loved it.

Of course, it was a tandem jump — an experienced parachuteer does all the work, and you’re just along for the trip. Nonetheless, since the experienced guy needs to be on top for obvious reasons, that means that once the door opens, you get to do the honours of swinging your legs over the side and pushing off. After that, there is 30 seconds of free fall, which is really wild — imagine sticking your head out of the window of a car doing 200kmh, and you have a fair idea of what it feels like. The jump starts at a height of 3000m, and in those 30 seconds you cover roughly half that distance. Then there’s a brief shock as the parachute opens — and the next second you’re just hanging there, seemingly not moving at all, and it’s so quiet that the two of you can hold a conversation without raising your voice.

The view is incredible — you’re still high enough to see for miles around, and there’s nothing between you and the scenery. After a while however, you notice that you’re not completely motionless, and in fact the objects on the ground are getting larger quite rapidly. Moments later, the landing point comes into view. The landing was surprisingly soft; if it wasn’t for the inconvenience of being two people strapped together, it would be more like stepping off an escalator than jumping down from a height.

It was definitely exciting, but not quite as scary as I expected it to be. I felt some nerves as the airplane door opened, but then as I looked out, there was never really a feeling of “I’m three kilometers above the ground and if anything goes wrong I will die.” Rather, looking from the plane it seemed as if everything was weightless — as if, even without a parachute, I could just step out of the plane and float around a little. After that, there was too much to do to be scared: step out, grab harness with both hands, push off, hold head backwards, arc body, wait for a tap on the shoulder, move arms into the stabilizing position — and then the ‘chute opens and you’re seemingly weightless again. There’s just no time to be scared.

On the other hand, some of the other people doing tandem jumps on the same day, weren’t quite so stoic about it — some of our fellow jumpers seemed about to pass out beforehand, and the couple who were scheduled after us were still debating whether or not to go through with it, when we left them.

So, would I do it again? Definitely! Although, at 200 euros for four minutes of fun, it’s not something you do every week. But I have already been looking into the options for taking solo jumping lessons..