I have always had a romantic attraction to the "could have been"s, the aesthetics that die early or fail to become popular but feel like in an alternate universe just next door they could have been wildly successful. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has always struck me like this; even as the Classical music period gave way into the Romantic period and harmonies get ever wilder until they run entirely off the rails in the twentieth century, it always felt to me like the Ninth could have been the foundation of a different aesthetic than the one we actually got. (A matter of opinion, of course.) It's a fully-formed masterpiece from the could-have-been.

I like to watch the "How the Movie Was Made" documentaries for movies from the Star Wars era up to the late ninties, because I love to see all the dead special effects techniques; the wonderful models, the animatronics, all the clever tricks they play, all interesting in exactly the same way that watching the documentaries for a 2010 movie are very uninteresting, seeing as how they all boil down to "And then we used a computer". I wonder what movies we'd be seeing if somehow computers were impractical for special effects and these techniques continued to be refined and honed.

And there's a smattering of other such things I enjoy. In the movie domain, many of them end up becoming what we call "cult classics", movies that may be awesome or may be fundamentally terrible but are above all else different. Buckaroo Bonzai, the David Lynch version of Dune, and, as telegraphed by my title, Tron.

A little hobby of mine has been quickly scanning over the spam that gets past my filter for random names that coincidentally managed to be someone I recognize. Sometimes I even scan the spam folder itself. I've read many thousands of names over the past few months, but today I have what may be my first hit: Sgt. George Lucas is in desperate need of assistance during his Iraq deployment, presumably something that involves large sums of money being transferred out of my bank account.

Every decade around this time, we get pedants who point out that since there was no Year 0, decades/centuries/millenniums start on 1. I observe that the Gregorian Calendar we use started in 1582, so not only was there no year 0, there was no year 1, year 2, year 3, ..., or year 1581. Therefore, true pendants should be insisting that decades start on twos, and centuries start on 82s, and millennia start on 582s!

Dear Democratic Supporters of the health care bills: You do realize you're supporting putting Republicans in charge of health care, right? Oh, sure, not this year or next. But it's only a matter of time until Republicans can pass bills again. Whether 2011, 2013, or 2017 or beyond, sooner or later it's going to be the Republicans in control of at least one house, the Presidency, and in pretty good shape in the other house.

I'm calling it: This is the year that Christmas officially enveloped Thanksgiving. With less than a week to go to Thanksgiving, the only channel I'm hearing more about Thanksgiving than Christmas is my family communications channels as we work out the plan for next week. Next envelopment to watch out for: The Presidential campaign enveloping the mid-term elections. The 2008 Presidential campaign effectively started mere days after the 2006 midterms.

This story about climate engineering reminded me: I strongly support climate engineering if properly analyzed, but I think that proper analysis is unlikely to be possible with most approaches. I strongly favor the development of space mirrors, because they are one of the few techniques that are both highly controllable and they also swing both ways. If it turns out some intervention is not working as we expect, we can actually stop intervening.

I've recently been enjoying Price Theory, an online textbook of economics. It hasn't stunned me yet, but it's nice to see it all laid out in a textbook style.

I was reading a rant about sci-fi physics (or the lack thereof), and it mentioned how Star Trek had a problem with the transporter being too powerful, requiring a series of increasingly-implausible reasons why it couldn't save the day today. I say "increasingly-implausible" not because it didn't make sense that the transporter would be disrupted by, well, everything, since in some sense that's exactly why they are totally impossible, but because by the end of the run of Star Trek, it is completely implausible that anybody would ever trust their lives to one of these disasters!

I got tired of politically-loaded summaries of what is in HR 1, the stimulus bill as it passed in the House. Everyone knows they "ought" to read it, but few seem willing to actually do it. (The best version unfortunately resists permalinking: Go here, select "House Bills 1-100", then the first house bill.)

Let me help you out. I still have not read the whole thing, and at 800+KB of text I don't feel too bad. But I did spend four hours last night on the bill.

I will stay non-political in this post, until ofter the end. I ask that you bear with me through some political observation, because after spending four hours with legalese I feel I'm entitled to a bit of commentary.

The bill is organized into two Divisions. Division A seems to primarily be about appropriations, and consists of approximately one third of the bill by textual volume, and by my unskilled calculation, about one third of the reported cost. Division B appears to be a massive rewrite of the tax code. Both sections of the bill contain significant modifications to other law, and I have not had the time to follow the (numerous) references through, but it is clear just looking at some of them that they are major changes. Nobody is understating how big this bill is; I daresay everybody is understating it, because a straight description sounds hyperbolic.

I have broken the appropriations into a spreadsheet, which is available as an HTML table in the main body of this post, or as an Open Office Calc file or a Comma Separated Values file. (In both cases you may have to right-click and "Save Link As..." to save it.) The table below is in the same order it appears in the bill; with a spreadsheet you can reorder it, of course.

I haven't even begun to analyze the tax code because I am not competent to analyze tax implications. Also, unlike the appropriations which are mostly either new law, or simply increases in funding for old law (though not entirely), the tax section primarily consists of significant rewrites of older law, making the exact implications difficult to tease apart even if you were intimately familiar with existing tax code and who pays what taxes. I've considered trying to write a summary, but I don't think I can even do that, whereas I might be able to pull it off with reasonable accuracy for Division A.

It's unusual for me to repost something I left as a comment on another site, but I thought this was worth sharing here, even stripped of its context. Tweaked for posting here.

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One of the great dangers of brain research today is that as we find the "explanation" for things, we will conclude they are just illusions and not real.

Well, the thing is, we're pretty sure at this point then that everything is "an illusion" by this standard. Religious experience, love, red, pain, it's all just an illusion brought on by neurons firing in certain patterns, right? Moving into the computer realm, the text box I am typing this into is an illusion brought on by clever programming, as is the browser. It's not an isolated series of claims of illusoriness, you need to consider the whole of them at once, including not just the politically popular ones (religion), but everything that argument makes sense for (red, mathematics, scary).

I submit to you that this view, while popular, is silly.