Everybody knows, newer is better, right? Well, sometimes. Sometimes not so much. Sometimes newer is worse. Sometimes newer is a lot worse.
Recent versions of Mozilla Firefox, for example, have been getting a great deal worse in a wide variety of ways. In this post I will catalog just a few of the most annoying reasons why they are worse, and why I am steadfastly not upgrading.
However, lest anyone think I am entirely negative all the time, I want to start out by spending a couple of paragraphs pointing out a couple of good things.
In the first place, I want to note that I am only talking about this at all because Firefox is my primary browser, the one I use most. Being a web developer and a geek, I experiment with a wide variety of browsers. Firefox is the best of them. When I first started discovering the problems that the rest of this diatribe will talk about, I considered switching to another browser, but the plain and simple fact is that I was unable to find another one that's as good. There isn't another one that's as good. Firefox is the best.
On top of that, the Firefox dev team have been working, trying to make improvements, and a handful of the improvements they've made have been good ones. They've added support for CSS properties that weren't handled before. One of the ones I personally find useful, not just for aesthetic purposes but in some cases for practical reasons, e.g., improving legibility when there's an image in the background, is text-shadow. That's a very worthwhile thing. Even better is the new support for display: inline-block, which makes whole categories of layouts easy to do that were previously, in a word, not. There have also been some performance improvements, which are quite noticeable on older single-core hardware. So I don't want to imply that the Firefox developers haven't been doing anything good. They have.
But they've also been making mistakes lately, some of which are quite serious.
Here's something that's easy to see: recent versions of Firefox can't seem to display certain images (a LOT of the images on the web) without darkening them considerably. Here are a couple of screenshots (one cropped, the other scaled down, but they're not doctored in any other way) showing the same image in Firefox 3.6 and in Gimp. I want to be clear that this is exactly the same image, bit-for-bit. Notice how much darker it looks in Firefox? It's not supposed to be like that.
The same problem shows up in every build starting around version 3.5. Here's a screenshot of Firefox 4.0.1. Again, this is cropped but otherwise undoctored.
How did Firefox 2.0 handle it? Well, let's see here... Oh, look, Firefox 2.0 displays exactly the same thing as Gimp. The latest versions of other browsers, such as Opera and Chrome and even MSIE, do the same thing as Firefox 2. So does every other image display program I have tested. Recent versions of Firefox are the only software I have found to have the odd darkening effect.
Update: Here it is in an alpha build of Firefox 8:
(Yeah, the desktop there looks different. When testing new versions, I use a separate user account, so as not to mess up the profile -- add-ons and configuration and such -- in my regular account. It's easier than dorking around restoring from backups.)
Okay, so that's purely an aesthetic issue. I mean, it's annoying, but it doesn't cause any real material harm. It's not like the images are totally black and impossible to see, or anything. It's just like you're looking at them through really dark glasses. So, no big deal, really. Sure, it's a bug, and they should fix it, but on the balance if that were the only problem I'd upgrade in a heartbeat.
Here's something more serious: all versions of Firefox starting from the 3.0 dev cycle have a serious dataloss bug that shows up if you use bookmarked tabsets. What happens is this: the first time you choose Open all in tabs
after upgrading, every single website you already had open in a tab vanishes. You panic and just about keel over from a heart attack on the spot, but once you take a few deep breaths you discover, much to your relief, that the back button does work. You have to go through and hit the back button on every tab, but you're able to recover (at least most of) your tabs. Okay. So, now, how to stop that from EVER happening again? You hunt through the prefs and find the option that controls this disastrous never-should-have-been-implemented new behavior, and you turn it the everliving %#$@! off, and you think you've solved the problem.
But you have not solved the problem by changing the preference. You've just made the problem more subtle, so that each time it happens it can go unnoticed until it's too late to retrieve what was lost. What happens now, each time you click Open all in tabs
, is that one of your existing tabs is replaced. If you don't notice this, you make the mistake of hitting close-tab like you normally would when you're done with a page that you've opened, and now you're now short one of the pages that you had open, probably one you weren't done with, possibly something important that you needed to remember to deal with. This happens every single time you click Open all in tabs
, until over the course of a few hours or days of regular browser use you eventually figure out what's happening. It took me about three days. I knew I was losing tabs, some of which were kind of important, and I was very much in a lather about it, but I didn't understand out how or why it was happening. Undo Close Tab only showed me pages I didn't need any more, and I couldn't find the ones I'd lost. It was like returning to the bad old days before sessionstore, when a plugin crash or power outage meant things you'd had open were just gone. (Update: this one will be fixed in version 8, but the fact that such a serious bug persisted across no fewer than six releases before finally being eliminated is very telling. Somebody was a little too concerned about dorking with the toolbar layout and just completely forgot about checking to see if there were any dataloss bugs that should be fixed before release -- several times in a row.)
Firefox 3 also crashes significantly more often than Firefox 2. (I don't rightly know how crashy Firefox 4 is or isn't. I haven't used it very much, on account of the fact that it hasn't addressed the above problems.) Firefox 2 never crashes, unless you try to open completely insane numbers of tabs at once. Firefox 3 crashes more than any previously released version of Firefox since clear back when it was called Phoenix.
I haven't even talked about insane new behaviors and UI (*cough* tabs on top *cough*) that can be configured away by changing some settings, because hey, if changing some settings is all I have to do to get things working right, I can handle that. End users might feel differently, but I'm a network administrator. If I can handle tracking down dependencies and compiling things from source, I think I can manage changing a couple of settings. I could write another whole post explaining why e.g. Tabs on Top is stupid and why the arguments in its favor are nonsense (maybe I will write that post later, if I have time), but ultimately it's not important, because I can just turn it off anyway with a pref, so who cares?
But I do want to say one general thing about the UI changes in recent versions: starting with Firefox 3.0, every single UI change, without exception, is something so undesirable that I have difficulty imagining anyone would ever actually want it. Not a single one of them is useful, even potentially. As long as I can turn them all off with preferences I don't really care, but when there are big outstanding bugs, including dataloss bugs, persisting over *multiple* versions (and I'm not talking about a couple of point releases), maybe it's time to stop needlessly fiddling around so much with the UI for a while and concentrate on basic stuff like stability and correctness. IMO, if the Firefox team spent the next entire release cycle just fixing bugs and not introducing any other changes at all, that would be a good thing.
So that's why I'm not upgrading to recent versions of Firefox. I've got 2.0.0.20 both at home and at work now, and I'm sticking with that as my primary browser for the forseeable future.
What would have to happen for me to change my mind? Someone would have to release a browser that's better than Firefox 2.0.0.20. That is all.
Firefox: Why I Refuse to Upgrade
The Unemployed... and Unemployable
Normally, the term "unemployed" means that you are between jobs, that (by choice or by circumstance or occasionally by fiat) you have completed your work at one employer and are ready to move on to another employer. I've been unemployed. Most of us have, at one point or another. No big deal.
Increasingly, however, I am running into people who are a different sort of unemployed: people who are NOT ready to move on to another employer, because they have been unwilling, for at least two decades, to ever learn a new job skill. No wonder they are unemployed!
Let me be a little more specific. I'm not talking about people who for some reason have missed some particular new technology and are otherwise generally able to function in society. "Oh, man, I haven't learned ZYML yet, and I'd kind of like to apply for this job, but it requires ZYML. What can I do?"
No, those people can either find another job, or pick up the new skill, or both. They're not the ones I'm talking about.
I'm talking about people who are unwilling to function in the twenty-first century at all.
They want to apply for white-collar jobs, but they don't have, and don't want, an email address. The job application requires an email address, of course (duh), so they ask, "Can I use yours?" Umm, no. *I* already have a job. The prospective employer wants to contact the prospective employee, which would be you. Are you going to give them my name and phone number as well? What do you use your head for, just holding down your shoulders? You're going to need an email account. There are a number of websites that offer them for free. I'd be happy to recommend one. But you're going to have to actually start checking your mail, if you want to, you know, hear from anyone who might be trying to contact you, such as a prospective employer.
It's not just about email. It's much more general than that. They want me to "help them" fill out online job applications (where "help" is often vanishingly close to "please just do it for me"), because they've never used a computer before, and now their job has evaporated. Of course it has evaporated. Any white-collar job that does not require using a computer was destined to evaporate sooner or later. Frankly most blue-collar jobs that don't require using a computer have evaporated at this point. Is this a surprise to anyone? Anyone? Anyone with a brain, I mean? Come on.
But they don't want to see it that way. They want me to basically fill out the online job applications for them, so they can avoid ever using a computer. Learn? What does that mean? You don't think your new employer will notice that you can't or won't learn to do anything you've not done before? I picked up on it in thirty seconds flat, so I'm guessing the employer will probably notice sooner or later.
Has it occurred to these people that if the job application is online, the job itself probably requires using a computer? If the employer assumes that prospective employees will be able to fill out an online application, it probably means their employees use computers as a matter of course. (After all, who doesn't? Neanderthals?) Similarly, if they insist on an email address from all applicants so they can contact prospective employees by email, it's probably a sign they use email within the organization. Duh. Not only does your prospective employer use email within the organization, they probably takes it for granted. You might have some difficulty functioning on the job if you don't know how to do these things. You'll probably have to (shock, horror) learn.
Can you even think of a job, in the developed world, that doesn't require using computers or electronics in some way or at some point? What kind of employment do these people think they want, migrant berry picking? Even the old saw "would you like fries with that" may be out at this point, since most cash registers are computerized these days.
I wouldn't be surprised if even janitors use computers for something or another. Why not? It's the easiest way to do some kinds of things. I mean, you probably don't need a computer to sweep the floor, but I bet it might be the easiest way to order replacement light bulbs, and it might be pretty handy for tracking how many of them you use, too...
The thing is, this is not some new sudden revelation. We've known since the eighties, maybe even since the seventies, that more and more of society was running on computers and that learning to operate them was going to become an increasingly necessary life skill. That was *decades* ago, PLENTY of time for even the slowest learners to pick up at least the basics. I can see putting it off until the nineties (because, until then, even used computers could be fairly expensive to obtain), but now?
Now, granted, the Amish (well, the conservative ones) don't use computers. But the Amish nonetheless manage to maintain useful skills and contribute things that have value to society. Granted, their job options are limited, but how many of them are unemployed? No, the Amish are industrious. They find *useful* things to do with their time, things for which people are willing to pay money.
That brings up an important point: there ARE non-computer jobs out there. But they're hard work. You want to do a job that doesn't involve computers these days, you're going to break a sweat. There's no magical fairy-tale job where you can sit at a desk in the air conditioning all day and talk on the phone and NOT use computers and somehow get paid for it. No, if you want a job where you don't have to use computers, you're going to have to bail hay or pour concrete or something. Are you willing to do that? Would you rather work that hard than ever learn anything new? Because that's what it's gonna take.
Society does not owe you a job unless you are willing to cough up something society can use. That's what a job is, when it comes down to brass tacks: something you do that seems useful to the rest of society and provides enough value to motivate others to do stuff for you in return. In a modern economy, that means something people are willing to pay money for.
But the people I'm talking about are chronically unemployed because they apparently either don't know how to do or aren't willing to do anything that society as a whole values enough to add up to a steady paycheck.
So they are unemployable. I don't mean just "unemployable by a few bleeding-edge employers who insist on embracing all the new technology as soon as it's available". We're at least a quarter of a century past that point. A quarter of a century, by the way, is generally at least half of one person's career, often more. What kind of worker spends half his career not learning any new job skills? A worker no competent boss wants working under him.
Employers willing to even look at applications from these people are dropping like flies, and for good reasons. Quite aside from the fact that a computer-free work environment is a good deal less efficient and means paying for significantly more labor per unit of work accomplished, there's also this other small matter: how on earth can a business compete against its competitors if its employees are unwilling to ever learn anything? How could you hope to deal with *any* change in circumstance, if that's the mindset of your workforce?
Today it's the internet. In another decade or two it'll be something else. The point is, you have to be willing to learn new job skills if you want to stay employable. Any employer who claims to offer you job security without requiring you to learn new skills is either lying through their teeth or doomed eventually to go out of business and take your supposedly secure job along with them.
A Treatise on the Length of Handles
I am not a particularly tall man, as men go.
According to Uncle John's Monumental Bathroom Reader (a book that my sister purchased for us to keep in the bathroom because, you know, you've got to have reading material in there, and Reader's Digest these days most emphatically ain't what it used to be), 25% of American men are over six feet tall. Even if the precision of this statistic is in doubt, the general principle is undeniable: there are a lot of men out there who are taller than, you know, the short people.
Well, 25% of American men may be over six feet tall, but I'm not. I don't know my exact height, but my father, who is significantly taller than I am, is still a couple of inches shy of six feet. So presumably more than 25% of American men are taller than my father, and I can tell you for certain that a good deal more than 25% (perhaps as many as 50%) of American men are taller than I am. I'm not shrimpy short, but I'm not especially tall either.
Which brings me around to my main topic of snow shovels, and specifically, the length of snow shovel handles. Apparently the entire snow shovel industry is run by eight-year-old children and/or four-foot-tall women, because it is difficult to buy a snow shovel with a handle that comes anywhere near shoulder height on me (let alone on a tall man). Waist height is more typical. (Okay, so my waist is a little higher than average for a man my height. Still.) By the time you angle the shovel at the thirty-five degrees (from horizontal) or so that you need in order to get next to the sidewalk and separate the snow from it, this means the handle is at, approximately, knee height. (Okay, so my knees are a little higher than average for a man my height, and maybe you could make a shovel work at forty degrees, forty-five if it's got a well-angled edge in good condition. Still.) Even if we assume that twice as many women shovel snow as men (which seems unlikely to me), and that 100% of women are shorter than I am (which is definitely not true), that still means a double-digit percentage of the snow-shoveling population is WAY too tall to use the shovels that are commonly available.
WHY should I have to bend over (or, worse, kneel) until my head is barely above the level of my waist? Is there a good reason for this? (Hint: No, there is not.) I'm not yet forty years old, so I can do that for a couple of minutes, but if I have to shovel any _significant_ amount of area, the bending over gets old. Fast. My back and waist and knees get tired *way* before my arms do, even if it's heavy snow. And my arms are not exactly what you'd call the athletic sort, as anyone who knows me can attest.
And heaven forfend I should want to shovel my way *down* the stairs, starting from the top, from inside the house. (Apparently, it doesn't ever snow at night in Snow Shovel Design Land, or something.) In that case I would have to be enough of a gymnast to bend over until my elbows are level with my ankles. Haha. While that would admittedly make an amusing cartoon short, I am in practice not nearly that flexible, so I generally have to step on the snow I'm about to shovel (which, if it's the kind of warm wet snow we tend to get most of the time around here (albeit, not today), makes it rather harder to shovel afterward) to get to the bottom and work my way back up.
I can sort of understand why shovel handles, when measured from the tip of the blade, might only come to three and a half or four feet, if you were only concerned about selling the blessed things in Japan, where the idea that a man might be six feet tall is simultaneously silly and yet also somewhat terrifying. But in the Western world, where it's *common* for a man to be six feet tall or more, and we have entire chains of clothing stores that cater exclusively to men who are over six and a half feet all, why does nobody sell a snow shovel with a longer handle? I'd buy one. I bet a lot of other guys would too.
Incidentally, there are other things I'd like to have with a longer handle as well. Garden implements, leaf rakes, brooms, mops... one could imagine an entire product line based around this simple concept. But the top of the list, as far as I'm concerned, is the snow shovel.
A Word About Standardization
If you pay any attention at all to what people in technical circles (especially programmers) are saying, you will be familiar with the concept of standardization: everyone agrees to adhere to a particular standard, or the standards published by a particular body, and as a result everybody's stuff works together. To hear some of the zealots talk, virtually everything about computers, and especially software, should be standardized.
But that's not really necessary, or even a good idea.
What should be standardized in computers and software is exactly analogous to what should be standardized in the physical world. Specifically, it is not the things themselves that need to be standardized, but the connections and interactions between the things. This is equally true whether the things in question are kitchen appliances, part of your household plumbing, audio equipment, or computer applications.
Electrical and electronic equipment varies tremendously in terms of how it works inside and what it accomplishes, but it all interacts with other systems -- specifically, the power grid -- in pretty much exactly the same way. Setting aside for the moment what happens when you travel overseas, and heavy industrial equipment that runs off weird stuff like three-phase, normal stuff all runs off the same voltage (err, one of two voltages) and the same cycle of alternating current and plugs into one of a very small number of outlet styles. (Most things in the US plug into the same one style of outlet, but there are additional special styles for electric stoves, clothes dryers, and certain kinds of lighting. Other countries may have different exceptions. But even the exceptions are standardized: all clothes dryers in the US, for instance, plug into the same kind of receptacle.) If a device needs something different, the manufacturer includes (either inside the thing or along with it) a power supply or plug-pack that effectively makes the differences go away, or it runs off standard-form-factor batteries that can be recharged in a standard charger that plugs into a standard outlet. You can go to any store and buy any electric device for any purpose by any manufacturer, and it may do all kinds of weird stuff on the inside, who knows, but its interface with the power grid will be the same as for every other device. It doesn't matter if it's a computer, a blender, or an electric nose cleaner. You buy it, you take it home, you plug it in, and it Just Works.
Which brings me around to software.
Some things are pretty well standardized already. Network connectivity, for instance, is pretty much locked into TCP/IP. IPv6 has been coming for ten years, but at this point I am not convinced it will EVER replace IPv4, and there are no other contenders at all. There are some new application-layer protocols (e.g., BitTorrent), but these mostly are related to kinds of applications that were never standardized in the past. As far as things that have been around for a while are concerned (e.g., email), the standards are firmly entrenched. (The idea of an email-sending program that doesn't use SMTP has been tossed around in theory on a number of occasions, but trying to get anybody to use one is like trying to sell a life preserver that doesn't float.) The last time I can think of that established protocols were ditched in favor of new ones was when telnet and rcp gave way to ssh and scp. Even there, technically, telnet is still in use as a platform that other protocols (such as http and smtp) stand on top of.
Another place where things need to connect has to do with data. Internally, when a program is working with data, it can use whatever data structure it wants, whatever makes the programmer's job easiest. Nobody cares what structure the program uses internally, except for the people who maintain the program itself. But when the program goes to export the data and store it somewhere (in a file, in a database, wherever), now you have to consider the possibility that the user might also want to work with this data using other programs, and so you need a standard file format.
Programs that don't consider this possibility can end up creating data that the user can't ever do anything else with, and that severely limits their usefulness. There are lots of examples, but I'm going to pick on Microsoft Publisher in particular. Everything I say about it, of course, also applies to any other software that doesn't support any standard formats or other mechanisms for data interchange.
If Publisher could export its publications to a widely-supported format like PDF (or Word document format, or anything else that's widely supported), then people who wanted to send their flier or poster or whatever by email would have a way to do so. Better still, if it just used a standard format in the first place, then the user wouldn't have to go through the extra step of exporting: they could just attach the thing and send it. But Publisher can't do that. It only saves in one format: Publisher format. Nothing can open its files except Publisher. So if a user creates something in Publisher and asks me, "How do I send this to [someone]", there's only one answer I can give them: "Well, first, instead of Publisher, you have to create it in a program that supports a standard file format." Users do not like this answer, because it means the work they've already done has to be thrown away, but there's nothing to be done about that: Publisher simply does not provide for data interchange. (Copy and paste can be used to extract limited portions of a Publisher document, mostly the text, but that is usually not what the user put the most work into and is most eager to preserve.)
I call software like this Dead End Software, because there's no outlet: any data you put into it is trapped there, and there's no way to get it out. I strongly recommend against using such software for anything other than quick one-off work. (By "one-off" I mean something you're never going to need to refer to later, e.g., a Wet Paint sign. Even there you want to be careful, because a lot of times you think you won't need to refer to something later and then it turns out that you do.) It's a black hole, a final resting place for your data. Avoid, avoid, avoid.
Hepburn Must Stop
People who know me generally are aware of the fact that I am interested in language. The topic has always fascinated me, even since I got my dad to explain parts of speech to me when I was three or four years old. (Actually, come to think of it, I already was familiar with three writing systems at that point, as well.) So it should come as no surprise that I've been looking at assorted language-related stuff in my spare time ever since I left college.
Most recently, I've been looking at Japanese. Yeah, I know, it's a weird one to pick (especially since it seems almost all of the English-speaking people with any interest in it are obsessed with anime and manga, which don't interest me at all), but hey, I've seldom been accused of being excessively typical.
Anyway, in the course of reading (mostly on the internet) about Japanese, one of the things I've run into is the Hepburn Romanization. This is a system whereby Japanese text is transliterated into Latin characters. Transliteration is seldom without problems, and studying a foreign language from a text that transliterates everything is generally inadvisable (unless all you want to learn is how to say "Does anyone speak English? Does this airplane go back to the United States? How much is a ticket?"), but it seems to me that Hepburn is particularly obnoxious, especially for English speakers.
In the first place, learning to correctly pronounce the Romanized Japanese is at least as hard as learning Hiragana, maybe worse, because of the need to unlearn long-ingrained habits associated with English use of the same characters (e.g., it's difficult to learn to pronounce "ou" as a held long o rather than as it would be pronounced in English). This is compounded by the fact that Hepburn uses Latin vowel pronunciations, so e is a and i is e and u is oo and so forth, like in Spanish. The Latin vowel mappings by themselves, if they were the only major issue, would be no big deal at all, but in Spanish you don't have combinations that would be dipthongs in English showing up every other syllable to screw with your mind.
Hepburn doesn't even have the good graces to be easy to type on a US-English keyboard, because it uses a diacritical mark (which for added bonus points is not even a mark that's particularly common in European character sets) on vowels when they are held for an extra mora. Since this is untypeable on most keyboards, most of the time in practice you usually either simply don't see any indication that the vowel is held (which is extremely bad, because it makes non-identical words identical, and the absolutely *last* thing Japanese needs is twice as many homonyms) or else a second vowel character is used, which aggravates the aforementioned vowel pronunciation issue for English speakers. Using a punctuation mark to indicate a held vowel should have been an extremely obvious approach, since after all that is what katakana does, but no.
The letter y is even worse than the vowels, because you have to unlearn the notion that it could ever under any circumstances be a vowel, even when it directly follows a stop consonant. Did you know that "Tokyo" is two syllables? Also "Kyoto". This shows up in approximately seven out of every ten Japanese words and is *hard* for an English speaker to get used to reading correctly. When you see the corresponding hiragana, you don't have this problem, because each symbol stands for exactly one syllable (or "mora" or whatever they call them), so it's very obvious where the syllable divisions go. This is fairly important in Japanese, and the Romanization obscures it.
Just in case the y issue didn't do enough to obscure the syllable boundaries (which, it bears repeating, are important in Japanese), Romanization also obscures the syllable divisions in other areas, though I think a certain amount of that would be fundamentally unavoidable in any system that transliterates a syllabary into a true alphabet. (Alphabets are inherently suited for writing languages with a more freeform syllable structure allowing for closed syllables and arbitrary blends; the only closed syllables you have in Japanese are with the sokuon, and the only blends you have are the aforementioned yoon.) The only thing worse than transliterating a syllabary into a true alphabet is trying to go the other direction and write a language like English in something like katakana, which is just wholly altogether unworkable (not that that stops the Japanese from doing it, of course).
The most egregious offense I want to talk about, though, is the letter r. Hepburn uses the r to represent an alveolar flap, a sound we don't have in English at all. Now, the idea of using a letter that wouldn't otherwise be used to represent a sound that wouldn't otherwise be represented makes a certain amount of sense, but r is a particularly unfortunate choice here, at least for English speakers, because of the various bizarre properties of the r sound that English speakers take for granted and do without thinking. (For native speakers of Romance languages, I suppose Hepburn is maybe not so bad, but in practice how many people are there who speak Spanish and Japanese but not English?) There are other letters that could have been used, not least l, which is somewhat closer to the sound anyhow, but no, Hepburn uses the r. Problem is, if you pronounce it as r, or anything even vaguely like r, you're in for all manner of trouble, because r has all sorts of phonemic consequences. It colors every letter it sits next to, either before or after, especially vowels. It's also completely impossible to form certain very-common Japanese blends (most notably ryo and ryu, which it should be noted are one syllable each, see the previous paragraph about y) if you pronounce this r as the English r.
Aside from the blends, and the weird and unfortunate mess it makes out of adjascent vowels, r isn't even a stop ("plosive") consonant. It's a liquid. Japanese doesn't have liquids, unless you count the syllabic nasal (which is altogether another topic, and believe it or not Hepburn Romanization manages to make that one harder to read easily as well).
So anyway, all of that is to say, every time I run into Japanese language-learning materials that make extensive use of Romanization (which is *annoyingly* common), I cringe and go looking for something else. I suppose the writers of these materials believe that transliterating everything will make it "easier" for English speakers by removing the need to learn kana, but honestly, anybody who is even *slightly* serious about learning a language can certainly handle picking up at least hiragana, and everything thereafter will be *much* easier than with the Romanization.
It's not like hiragana is anywhere close to being even the tip of the iceberg for what characters you've got to learn if you actually ever want to be able to read any actual Japanese. I mean, you can't even look up words you don't know in a dictionary without learning two or three hundred radicals (and their lexical order) just to get started, so 46 hiragana characters is really no big deal.
The economy: near death, or cuts and scrapes?
Last night somebody told me that the stock market has lost trillions of dollars (he said how many trillion, but I don't remember) in a few days. Okay. My immediate response was, "What's that as a percentage?" I mean, yeah, trillions of dollars sounds like a lot, but the US economy is bigger than most people realize. It can afford to lose a few dollars here or there, from time to time.
As it turns out, the overall percentage of loss, since the last major peak (in 2007) is around 30%, depending on which index you look at. That sounds like a lot, and for a short-term drop it is a pretty good-sized chunk, but it's hardly the end of the world as we know it. There are peaks and bubbles (the fruits of periodic irrational exuberance), and then there are corrections back down to a more sane, gradual, and sustainable growth rate. 30% is a pretty large correction, but it's not out of line with what we've seen in the past.
So I went to a website that does stock charts. There are a number of sites out there that do basically the same thing, but in this instance I happened to select MSN Money, because it came up first in the search results. I went to the financial site, and I asked for charts of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, because that's a well-known index. It's not the only index we could look at, but it's a common choice, and, I believe, an instructive one.
I'm going to show two different charts here. The first represents the short-term view, on a linear scale.
Okay, yeah, that looks pretty bad. Actually, it looks worse than it should, because they've left off the bottom portion of the chart, starting the linear scale with eight thousand at the x axis. When you have to leave off more than half the numbers at the bottom of the scale in order to show the interesting part without making the chart too big, it usually means you should have used a logarithmic scale.
Now, let's step back and look at the larger picture. This second chart is on a logarithmic picture. (Otherwise the first three quarters of it would sort of resemble a flat line across the bottom.) Take a look:
What a difference! The black lines are original. I've taken the liberty of putting a red circle around the current economic crisis. On the one hand, yes, that's one of the biggest drops on the chart. On the other hand, it's clearly nothing very far out of the ordinary. If anything, that weird bulge around the (most recent) turn of the century is more unusual. The big dip at the left, of course, corresponds with the Great Depression.
I said I was going to show two charts, but here's an extra bonus image of the second chart, this time with a trend line drawn in, in green:
On the one hand, we're not seeing the steep growth of the eighties and nineties, but on the other hand this crisis has got to go some to look anything like the sharp drop of the early thirties.
That flat section across the seventies is called "stagflation", and in some ways that was worse than the current crisis, because it just went on and on and on, and then it went on and on and on some more, some twelve or thirteen years before things really started to pick up in the early eighties.
Of course, I don't know the future, and it's conceivable that things could keep going down until the current crisis turns into a second Great Depression. But there's no reason to assume that's what's going to happen. What we've seen so far is part of the normal up and down motion that happens all the time.
I don't want to be accused of being an unbridled optimist, so I'll say now that just because the economy hasn't completely collapsed doesn't mean our society isn't headed for a peck of trouble in other ways. All I'm saying is, some people are blowing the current economic crisis out of proportion. It's not really our gravest concern. There are, indeed, much more worrisome things to be upset about. (The condition of the public education system, just for instance, is outright terrifying. But that's a topic for another day.)
No, Your Child is Not at the Library
Earth to parents:
No. If you have to call the library and ask if your child is here, the answer is no. I know your child probably told you he'd be at the library, but what that really means is he didn't want to tell you where he was going to be, either because he hadn't decided yet, or because he just doesn't want you to know. This is true for children of all ages, but of course it goes double for teenagers. The library is the number one leading lie American children tell their parents about where they are going to be. This was true even before the Spiderman movie a couple of years ago gave the idea to the other 7% of kids who hadn't already come up with it on their own or picked it up from a friend.
Almost all kids who come to the library come with their parents. If you aren't here, then your kids almost certainly aren't here either.
Yes, we do have kids in the library all the time who are not accompanied by their parents, but it's the same two or three dozen kids all the time. (Some of them are here almost as much as they're in school.) If your child were one of them, you would know.
Let me reiterate that: if your child were one of the ones who comes to the library, you would know. If you have to ask, then he's not here. Please stop calling the library and asking if your child is here. Your child is not here.
Most Abused Scripture Passages: Ephesians 5
I have for some time intended to document my frustration with the carelessness and disregard with which some people treat the scriptures and, in particular, certain famous passages. In his Mother's Day sermon, Pastor Simpson used Ephesians 5. He handled it correctly (our church is fortunate), but I was reminded of some of the ways I've seen the passage handled in the past, and of my intention to write about this subject.
Marriage too has been on my mind of late, primarily since this May-July this year see me attending three wedding ceremonies in as many months (which is rather unusually many for me).
Note first of all that this passage (and the entire book of Ephesians, really) is primarily talking about the church. The passage certainly does speak to marriage, but people who ignore the larger context often get confused about what it says about marriage. The worst offenders quote just verses 22-24:
Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
These three verses, out of context, have been used to prooftext all manner of dire heresy. I will not dignify most of it with specific responses, except to say that anyone who quotes just these three verses in isolation from the rest of the context is invariably up to no good.
The bare minimum you can quote at one go and have a reasonable chance of doing the passage anything resembling justice is verses 21-33:
Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church— for we are members of his body. "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
You can see there the mutual nature of the relationship. It's not entirely symetrical, but it is very much cooperative on both sides. And yes, I have looked at verse 21 in the Greek, and it says the same thing as the English translation I quoted. If there is a word there that someone could reasonably take issue with it is "reverence", which could also be rendered "fear". Doing a detailed study on fearing the Lord would take us far off track, and in any case it would not change the basic meaning of this passage. People have been known to take issue with the word "submit", but again any wording that can reasonably be chosen (e.g., place yourselves under one another) would not change the basic meaning of this passage. "One another" is the part of this verse that we cannot get around, and it is borne out in any case by the verses that follow.
Now with that said, the wording and emphasis are quite different on the two sides of the relationship, because the man fills one role in the family and the woman another. And it is true that the man is to be the head of the household (and this is even more clear in other passages). Yet the relationship is very much reciprocal in nature, and if a man is treating his wife as some kind of servant or lesser partner, he is absolutely missing the mark.
It is worth mentioning too that the very closeness of relationship herein implied is fundamentally alien to popular culture's concept of marriage, wherein a much greater separation and individuality is retained.
But we still have not touched upon the main point of the passage. Paul explicitely states in verse 32 what should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention to the general flow of the whole letter: he is talking about the church. A proper treatment of this passage really should look at 5:21 — 6:9 as a unit. 5:21, in particular, is a concise statement of the whole passage, which is expanded then in three main parts: 5:22-33 (wives and husbands), 6:1-4 (children and parents), and 6:5-9 (slaves and masters) — all of which is talking primarily about proper relationships among believers within the church, and all of which also ties back into what was said in chapter 4.
So if you see a man use Ephesians 5:22 as an excuse to live his live selfishly, making decisions without consulting with his wife, expecting her to work a side job in addition to doing all the cooking and laundry and whatnot while he sits in a chair, and generally treating her badly, tell him to go back and read it again.
Wow, it feels good to vent. There are plenty of other frequently abused passages in scripture. Perhaps I should write up a few more in the coming months.