These are excerpted from an entry in Charles Stross's blog.  He's a Science Fiction author, has published through Macmillan, and, until very recently, referred readers to Amazon.  These passages are most relevant to what I want to say (emphasis his, in all cases):

Publishing is made out of pipes. Traditionally the supply chain ran: author -> publisher -> wholesaler -> bookstore -> consumer.

Then the internet came along, a communications medium the main effect of which is to disintermediate indirect relationships, for example by collapsing supply chains with lots of middle-men.

From the point of view of the public, to whom they sell, Amazon is a bookstore.

From the point of view of the publishers, from whom they buy, Amazon is a wholesaler.

From the point of view of Jeff Bezos' bank account, Amazon is the entire supply chain and should take that share of the cake that formerly went to both wholesalers and booksellers.

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The agency model Apple proposed -- and that publishers like Macmillan enthusiastically endorse -- collapses the supply chain in a different direction, so it looks like: author -> publisher -> fixed-price distributor -> reader. In this model Amazon is shoved back into the box labelled 'fixed-price distributor' and get to take the retail cut only. Meanwhile: fewer supply chain links mean lower overheads and, ultimately, cheaper books without cutting into the authors or publishers profits.

    The point, in a nutshell, is that Amazon wants to keep the current supply chain.  Amazon does not want to go back to a world in which Amazon is only tail-end-Charlie, the book-seller.
    That's an untenable situation, because in an ebook market, there really isn't anything to "wholesale."  That part of the supply chain is unnecessary.  There's no reason to pay for it.  Obviously, Amazon's not going to shrug and say "Oh, well.  Guess we'll just have to get used to less money."  This fight isn't about what we pay to Amazon, it's about what Amazon pays to Macmillan.  Everybody understands that ebooks will cost less (both to produce, and at the retail counter).  Amazon & Macmillan are trying to decide who has to absorb the loss.
    If that's the case, then why is the fight ostensibly about the consumer price of an ebook?  The short answer is that Amazon uses that "extra" slice-of-the-pie to fund discounted prices for Kindle editions.  Amazon's strategy was to discount Kindle editions, acquiring the same sort of lock on ebooks that Amazon has on paper-books.  Then Apple came along with the iPad/iBookstore.  Apple is the kind of company that can sell enough devices to make iPad an "overnight" competitor to Kindle.  Or make the iBookstore a serious alternative to purchasing ebooks from Amazon.  No lock on the ebook market means Amazon can't dictate terms to Macmillan, et al.  No ability to dictate terms means Amazon eats part/all of the reduced profits in an ebook-future.
    So what does this mean for us, the consumers?  Not much.  Ebooks will be less-expensive than paper-books.  But right now, they account for 1% of book sales (according to the estimate I read today, anyway).  They are a niche, luxury market -- like limited editions.  As they become more mainstream, they'll conform to a pricing model that we all know: they'll be more-expensive when first published, and gradually decrease in price to some floor that reflects the minimum cost of availability.  The initial prices will be something like $15, not $10 (nor $25).  But, remember, Amazon offered that $10 price to serve a purpose.  There is no doubt in my mind that it would have increased, substantially, had Amazon captured control of the ebook market.

Oh, and one more thing, for anyone thinking Amazon doesn't do this sort of thing: http://www.thebookseller.com/news/59533-hachette-clashes-with-amazon.html.

I've been reading about statistics.  I've read that it's a bad idea to compare 2 things, when all you know about the things is percentages.  I've been trying to understand why.
Example:

• Ask 100 people if they own a pet.  50 say "Yes," and 50 say "No."
• Ask 10 people the same question.  5 say "Yes," and 5 say "No."

Clearly, in each case, 50% of each group owns a pet.  But, imagine going one more step, and adding 1 more pet-owning person to each survey.  What happens?

• 51/101 people --  50.5% -- report owning a pet.
• 6/11 people -- 54.5%(!) -- report owning a pet.

Look at that!  One more vote, and the results diverge by quite a bit.  They aren't equally "stable."  The 10-person survey is heavily influenced by the addition of just one more vote.  The 100-person survey isn't.

I guess it's something like having 2 fuel tanks in my car, one with a gauge-needle that moves whenever I hit a bump.  They both read "¼" right now.  Maybe that's because I have a ¼-tank of gas.  And maybe it's because I just hit a pot-hole.  Which tank has more gas?  I dunno.  The unstable needle means I can't really compare the measurements.

Just finished reading this: The Omnivore's Delusion:Against the Agri-Intellectuals.  (It's brief, go read it for yourself).  A while back, Nicole & I listened to Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto and thought it worth considering.

I don't like *icides.  I don't want to eat poison, even it minute quantities.  I don't like thinking of pigs, chickens, cows, etc. living in boxes barely larger than their own bodies.  I don't like the idea of thousands of animals corralled into a very small area, eating nearly-indigestible feed and consequent force-fed antibiotics.  I really don't like the manure ponds at such facilities.  I am scared by monoculture, understanding that it can result in a worldwide repeat of the Irish Potato Famine.  I am righteously indignant at the thought of a corporation engineering the genes of a food plant, such that a farmer must purchase seed for every planting (rather than reserve some of the previous crop as seed).  I'm not concerned that an insect-resistance gene will migrate from a corn plant to the surrounding shrubs.  I'm mildly concerned that such a gene might migrate from an engineered apple tree to the local wild apple population.  That could wipe-out an entire food-chain, starving everything preying on apple-eating insects.  For all these reasons, I prefer to purchase organic and free-range foodstuffs.

But . . .  It doesn't take much of a mathematician to multiply average yield per acre (using organic methods) by number of available acres, to get "not nearly enough."  The simple, brutal fact is that primitive methods of food production won't feed all of us.  As far as I can tell, no one has shown that crops grown with modern insecticides, herbicides, and fertilizers are actually harmful to eat.  Someone has shown that organic food is neither more nor less nutritious than conventionally produced food.  I enjoy ham, and eggs, and grilled chicken.  If I'm going to continue eating them often, they need to be produced as efficiently as possible.  That means cages and feed-lots.

I think the idea that we humans must tread lightly on this earth is reasonable.  The more I think about it, the more organic food production strikes me as yet another instance of the myth of the Golden Age.  I.e., that the best way to tread lightly is to "resume" doing things "naturally."  There's nothing "natural" about capturing and domesticating prey animals.  Neither is clearing meadows to sow preferred food plants, "natural."  Humans haven't been "natural" for 10,000 years.  "Natural," for us, is a starving, diseased, parasite-riddled hunter/gather.  I'm coming to think of organic food production as an expensive facade, a way for some of us to convince ourselves we're treading lightly.

If I want meat animals to be treated better (and I'm beginning to wonder if, for example, "free range" is really better than a cage to a chicken), then I should stop eating meat.  When they are an expensive luxury, they'll be treated very well.  If I don't like monoculture, I should be purchasing food from local farmers that don't grow the "standard variants" of commercial crops.  (Why local?  Because one of the biggest impetuses that led to monoculture was the need to grow variants that shipped well.)  If I want food plants that require fewer pesticides & herbicides, I need to support things like genetically engineered disease & pest resistance, perennial-ized food plants, and salt & drought-tolerant crops (irrigation is a slow method of salting your own fields).  Which is not to say I should endorse every endeavor; I can't decide, for example, if terminator genes are good or bad.  Lab-grown, artificial meat also gives me difficulty.  Lastly, I still think Pollan & Co. have some valid points.  Snickers bars, for example, are not food.  Ideally, and this paragraph is very idealistic, I should be buying tomatoes, onions, and garlic to make my own sauce, rather than buying it from Paul Newman.

I was reading about cat diseases, the other day.  Unlike searches for human illnesses, Google generally does not return medicine-maker advertising.  Not every result is useful.  Many are of the "I cured my cat's brain tumor with St. John's Wort, reikki. and a strict Vegan diet."  But most of the rest are general-audience information posted by veterinarians.

Among other things, I wanted to read-up on heartworm in cats.  Cats don't get heartworm as easily as dogs, even if they're bitten by a larva-carrying mosquito.  Indoor cats, being exposed to far fewer mosquitos than other cats, are still less likely to acquire heartworms.  Which is good, because the prognosis for a heartworm-infected cat is grim.  I know the odds because I've done my own reading, and discussed the subject with more than one veterinarian.  More than once, I been told that indoor cats in Michigan are at such a low risk for heartworm that heartworm-preventative is an unnecessary expense.

So, in my reading, I was surprised to see a statement that one study showed 1/3 of indoor cats actually had heartworms.  That was followed by a recommendation to administer heartworm-preventative, and an endorsement of a specific product.  I realized I had strayed from education to advertising.  It was jarring.

I have a Degree, in Physics.  I obtained it by the thinnest possible margin.  I was not a good Mathematics student, especially before I went to college.  I remember being distinctly unimpressed by the rote-memorization of formulas, employed to teach things like statistics and economics (in my experience, it was practically a math class) and chemistry.  I remember some (certainly not all!) of my teachers "phoning it in."  They knew we didn't care, weren't learning, and weren't going to learn the material -- and they couldn't care anymore, either.  So I memorized enough formulas that I didn't understand to pass, and then promptly disgorged them.  Lacking an understanding of where & how to apply them, they were useless and confusing to me.  I assume most of my classmates did the same, only moreso.  After all, most of them didn't go on to college.  That would seem to imply that they "got" still less than I did.

I have to wonder, given those experiences, if large numbers of Americans assume that college is simply more of the same.  That is -- climatologists, geologists, epidemiologists, evolutionary biologists, etc. are just people who went on to memorize greater amounts of meaningless crap that they don't really understand, can't actually employ, and use to bamboozle the rest of the public.  It would explain a lot.

For example, if a climatologist's education is meaningless, then my opinion about whether or not the world's getting warmer is just as valid as his.  I have an outside thermometer feeding a high-tech digital display in my living room.  I can check the temperature just as easily as he.  If epidemiology is just a bunch of buzzwords tossed around by people who work for the medical & pharmaceutical industry, then it's much-easier for me to accept the emotional appeals of mothers with autistic children.  Look at all the money those doctors make by forcing every parent to needlessly vaccinate their children!  And those moms gain nothing by testifying.  Clearly, those troubled parents and their unfairly burdened children are the more credible witnesses.

I don't know Rev. Thew-Forrester. I don't know anything about changing the liturgy, or reading from the Quran, or the literal existence of Satan. I know even less about electoral procedures for selecting a bishop.  But I have spent a good deal of time reading & thinking about Zen, and Buddhism, and the Episcopal church in which I was raised.  I'm not an expert.  I'm not a practitioner.  But I've think I know enough to offer 2 cents worth.

Zen isn't a religion. It's a practice. Firstly, it's a way of stilling yourself -- physically, mentally, and emotionally. Practice enough, and one can get one's conscious mind to quit yammering, if only briefly. Why bother?  So you can devote the time and effort that was going to yammering, into something useful.  Maybe what you devote it to is prayer.  Maybe it's self-examination.  Maybe it's playing saxophone, or raking gravel, or scrubbing toilets.  Doesn't matter, because you're doing it with your full attention.  If you play music, and practice enough, you might have had the experience of performing something and being completely subsumed in it.  You weren't consciously playing your instrument, or thinking about the music -- you just played, and music emerged.  Zen meditation is like that.  Instead of practicing an instrument so that it no longer "gets in the way of making music," you practice stilling yourself so that you no longer "get in the way" of whatever you're doing.

Secondly, (and this is mostly my personal opinion, but I think it reasonably accurate) Zen is a way of gaining access to alternate means of apprehension.  Humans, unlike any (other) animal, have that constantly yammering forebrain.  It's normal for us.  In fact, it's so deeply normal that we don't question it anymore than we think about not having fingers that curl in both directions.  It just is.  So, to get to a point where you can still the yammering, you have to learn to think in a radically different manner.  In fact, I suspect "think" is the wrong word.  Regardless, you can't get there without challenging assumptions that are fundamental to our common understanding of how humans work.  Lacking a Vulcan Mind-Meld, your teacher can't just tell you how to think in this radically different manner.  All he can do is give you problems that are designed to constrain your "normal" thinking, to put your understanding into a place where it doesn't work, forcing your unconscious assumptions into view.  You have to actually recognize that your understanding doesn't work, then notice the subtle shadows cast by your assumptions, recognize your assumptions, then overcome them.  If you do that, then you will immediately apprehend that the lessons your teacher gave you were "false" (that is, constructed to disagree with your normal worldview in such a way to encourage you to examine that worldview).  But, you didn't go to your teacher to learn the "false" lesson.  He couldn't give you a "true" lesson, so he gave you the means to construct the "true" lesson for yourself.  You gained the thing you sought from your teacher, without him ever communicating it to you directly.  You now have access to the alternate means of apprehension.  You can now act from that apprehension.

I think it's this second point that gets Rev. Thew-Forrester in difficulty.  A Buddhist might call that moment of apprehension, "Enlightenment."  Or, "recognition of the buddha-nature in the self."  A Christian might call it "Communion."  Or, "recognizing the unity of God and receiving unity with God."  A "Zen Episcopalian," then, isn't someone trying to think "What Would Jesus Do?"  He isn't even someone trying to know what Jesus would do.  He's trying to become someone who simply does what Jesus would do.  Becoming that someone forces him, or anyone, to treat the lessons he receives from his teachers as deeply (I want to say "deep, before the Dawn of Time" in an Aslan voice) questionable.  That's going to make people uncomfortable.  I not an Episcopalian, so I can't say if his path to God is acceptable for a priest or bishop under Episcopalian rules.  But I thought I might be able to contribute a perspective that would allow Episcopalians a better-informed conversation about that decision.

If I understand correctly, a Securitized Debt Instrument (the evil engine of the economic meltdown) is similar to a stock mutual fund.  Mutual fund buys stock from companies A, B, and C.  I buy a portion of the fund.  The idea is that, while Company A may be down, B & C probably aren't.  That means I lose less money than if I had purchased stock from A, directly.  Buying into the fund, rather than buying stock directly, dilutes my losses.

An SDI then, is something like a mutual fund that buys I.O.U.s (mortgages, for example) rather than stock.  But it's the same idea, otherwise.  If Homeowner A defaults on a mortgage, B & C probably haven't.  I lose less money than if I had sold the mortgage to A, directly.  Buying into the SDI, rather than selling a mortgage directly to A, dilutes my losses.

That makes sense.  Clearly, I reduced my losses in both examples.  So what-the-hell-happened in the real world?  I have a couple of ideas:

• It only works if the risk of default is correctly assessed.  The idea is to mix loans with different risks.  Assume the guy who set-up the SDI chose A for high risk of default, B for moderate, and C for low risk of default.  If B is actually a high risk for default, then buying into the SDI doesn't dilute my risk.
  
• Diluting the risk makes more people eligible for loans; specifically, people who wouldn't have been eligible without the SDI.  This is (probably) good -- it allows people just outside the envelope of home-ownership to purchase a house, with the social benefits that entails.
• There are always more high-risk-loan opportunities than moderate & low-risk ones.  That creates pressure to reclassify moderate as safe, high as moderate, and "bad idea" as low-risk.  Picking-up new sales at the bad-idea/low-risk boundary increases the pressure still more.
  
• SDI-guy didn't sell the mortgages.  Banks did.  And the banks did it fully expecting to sell those loans to SDI-guy very quickly.  Banks, then, had reason to sell as many loans as possible, largely without caring about default.

So what happened?  Well, I Am Not A Finance-Guy but here's my take: SDIs (and other financial techniques) expanded the loan market by diluting the risk associated with making a loan.  That maybe created a bubble, or contributed to it.  In a bubble, everything's great -- right up until it isn't.  That makes the SDIs look safer than they are, and the "risk reclassification" seem legitimate ("That expired bologna-loaf hasn't made us sick so far, so it must still be good!").  The mix that SDI-guy called high/med/low was actually more like oh-God-NO/bad-idea/low.    Enough of those defaulted, that everybody called in his markers.  At which point even more loans defaulted, and banks started refusing to issue new loans (aka "credit") in order to cover their own markers (as they are legally required to do), and here we are now.

The thing is, in the beginning, SDIs worked really well.  It's just, as usual with us humans, we had to push it too far.

Earlier this evening, I was thinking about how to win an election in the United States.  Longer-term, on the scale of parties rather than individual candidates, I think the method is pretty simple to understand:

1. Exclude as many voters as possible.  Race/gender/religion-excluding laws are historically effective.  So is convincing voters the result is a foregone conclusion (think daily "horse-race" reports of political polls, or election-night exit poll reports).  Frequently implying fraud or tampering is effective -- who would bother to vote if they knew their vote would be stolen or ignored?  Making it difficult to vote is important, as well (e.g., holding an election in the middle of a work day).
   
2. Motivate your "base."  "Base" is defined, as seems reasonable to me, as "those people who will vote for you, regardless."  That is, these are the people who will vote despite the measures taken in step 1, and who will reliably vote for you.
3. Moderate your statements to the general public just enough to persuade just enough of those voters not dissuaded by the measures taken in step 1, but who are also not members of your base, to win their votes.  N.B., if steps 1 & 2 are executed well enough, step 3 is unnecessary.

I was thinking about this, because I was thinking about the political media.  It's common to think of O'Reilly/Olberman as someone who stimulates his party's base, and castigates the opposition's.  But what if you turn that on its head?  What I'm getting at here, is that a person used to be a conservative because he held conservative values.  That is, he valued not-endangering the stable status quo over possibly improving society by engaging in experiment.  A "liberal" held opposite views.  What I'm wondering is if that's still the case.  Turn the media relationship on its head -- is a "conservative" still someone who holds conservative values?  Or is a "conservative" someone who listens to Rush Limbaugh?  And might "liberal" be a word meaning "listens to NPR?"  And -- if that is the case -- have we reached the point where we politically self-identify that way?

Why think about this?  Because, if the chain-of-supposition holds, and we are really politically self-identifying with media outlets, then we (as a society) are over.  O'Reilly/Olberman is paid to attack the other side -- whoever that is.  We can't work with the opposition, understand them, possibly learn from them, find ways to accomodate our differences while still accomplishing what needs to be done if we fundamentally define our own position in terms of how wrong the other guys are.  Agreement becomes literally unthinkable, because agreement would destroy our political identity.

My house has a classic, wood-burning fireplace.  No fans, no nothin' to push warm air back into the house.  As a result, it makes the area immediately in front of the fireplace a cat-magnet, the remainder of the living room pleasant, and drops the temperature of the rest of the house by a few degrees (3°F, if you believe Mythbusters).  All that heat leaving my house annoyed me.

I started thinking about to recover it.  I had a brilliant insight!  The chimney is basically a metal pipe running inside the masonry.  Why not wrap the chimney in a water-jacket, or pipe, and send the heated water through a radiator?

Turns-out I'm not the first to think of this.  Also turns-out it doesn't work.  The interweb says that (1) there isn't enough heat in the chimney to be usefully extracted; (2) if I pull heat from the chimney, I'm reducing the energy that is propelling combustion products out of the building -- which is another way of saying that I'm increasing the soot & smoke in my living room, and raising the probability of a chimney fire.  <sigh>  Yet another brilliant theory undone by physical reality.

On the other hand, I did accidentally learn about firebacks.  These are either big, heavy cast-iron plates that sit in the back of the fireplace and re-radiate absorbed heat, or lighter, stainless-steel sheets that reflect heat back into the room.

I finally finished (up to the current novel, anyway) Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books.  One of the things he has Thursday contemplate is the "bookworld's" lack of detail relative to reality.  More recently, I've been listening to Philip K. Dick's Minority Report and Other Stories.  Most of the stories in that set are about people lacking complete data about the world around them.  At the moment, I'm listening to Oliver Sacks's Musicophilia.  As usual with his books, the stories are about patients with neurological conditions and how those conditions affect their interaction with the world.

It came to me, as I thought about all these books, that the teleological argument for the existence of a Deity can be thought of as "The world is a narrative; humans are incapable of creating a narrative as richly-detailed as the world; therefore the world must be created by an author who is greater than any human."  Thinking about this, I realized the fundamental assumption is not the existence of a Deity.  It is the assumption that life is a narrative.  I wonder about that.  I wonder about what it means for the human mind.