My friend John Pollock died yesterday. I’ll leave it to others to write up his many contributions to philosophy and computer science. I wanted to take a moment to remember him as the hard-charging mountain biker he was. He introduced me to biking shortly after I moved to Tucson, and he spent a lot of time driving me and many others all over Southern Arizona to ride on desert singletrack. Despite being almost twice my age he (and several others even older) would routinely leave me behind on the trail, cranking up hills or blasting down them. Eventually I started to be able to keep up better, but that was partly because John sold me his beautiful Ellsworth Truth, pictured above, at a knock-down price. It’s a great bike. Too good for me, really. I’ll miss you, John.

Laurie in the process of getting her third degree TKD black belt this weekend. These skills come in handy with the stroppier sort of commenter or more patronizing variety of audience question at the Eastern APA.

But I quickly learned I am quite unable to compete on this front:

Somewhat more substantively, the conference, on norms and values, was attended by a bunch of interesting philosophers and political science types of a generally soft rat-choice disposition. As it happens, this week Aaron Swartz is writing about Jon Elster’s recent book, Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. Aaron likes the book a lot. I haven’t read it, but now I’m curious to do so. Elster’s early work laid out an ambitious agenda for social science and its critical edge did a lot to kill off some styles of social explanation that were prevalent at the time. But then the prospects for achieving the more positive side of the research program seemed to recede in the face of efforts to achieve it, to the point where Elster became highly critical of work that might well have been inspired by Ulysses and the Sirens or Sour Grapes. The most recent book seems to be a comprehensive expression of late-Elsterian pessimism about the possibility of a general science of social explanation.

For those of you who don’t know, I live in Tucson. Given how little water we have falling out of the sky around here, it disturbs me that anything so ugly could grow quite so big, quite so fast. (I feel the same way about Phoenix.) My question to the more horticulturally informed amongst you is, What the hell is it? And when the answer is, inevitably, “Giganticus Weedus Noxiensis,” tell me what combination of axe, chemicals and Wagner will be required to get rid of it.

Onward to sibling rivalry, I suppose.

Watching the first couple of episodes, apart from the obvious lack of retakes, the main thing that strikes you is the writing. It’s an odd mix. E.g.,

Dr Astro: I am … Doctor Astro!

O’Brien: Doctor who?

Dr Astro: No, Doctor Astro. Doctor Who is BBC, Doctor Astro is RTE.

Later:

Godmother (to Oisín): When did you last see your father?

And:

Oisín: Don’t follow too close behind, and don’t make me wobble, because if I fall off this bicycle, we’re all banjaxed.

Music:

O’Brien: [Singing about Oisín] He’s Oisín from Tir na n-Óg, and he never grows old …
Judge: He does ballet and go-go, and all different styyyyles …
Mr Crow: He told me himself he does two minute miles …
O’Brien: And he’s good at karate and breaks tons of tiles.

Bonus subtext:

O’Brien: Look, you can have Judge’s bunk, and Judge can share my bunk with me. Can’t you Judge?
Judge: Of course, O’Brien. It won’t be the first time.

And:

Dr Astro [miniaturized]: I may be small, but I’m perfectly formed.

In other news, it turns out that if you write a book called Last Best Gifts then the website for it gets a big surge in hits from Google searches in the weeks before Christmas, but not because people are suddenly interested in the topic.

It’s clear that after a quiet start things rapidly got out of control, reaching a frankly unsustainable level of more than two posts per day in the first half of 2003. What caused the radical drop from more than 40 posts a month to less than half of that in June and July of 2003? You’re looking at it: Crooked Timber launched then, and so I got to share the responsibility of sustaining an audience with a bunch of other people. Clearly it took the pressure off. After that came about two years of gradual decline (in every sense, I’m sure), getting down to less than ten posts a month in mid-2005. Things may have picked up again a little recently.

A common pattern is for posts to decline in frequency but increase in length. I think something like this may have happened, but I haven’t been able to extract monthly word-counts from WordPress in a convenient way (I don’t know enough PHP). Word counts vary quite a bit depending on which plugins you use, but the most conservative estimate is that I’ve written 289,324 words, for an average of about 311 words per post in 928 posts over the past four years. (The upper-range estimate was 335,053 words, or just shy of the median Tim Burke post.)

For academic bloggers, there is a pessimistic and an optimistic theory of the relationship between writing, blogging and academic productivity. The optimistic version says that writing is like a physical capacity, and if you practice you get better at it—so regularly writing in your blog means you’re in the habit of getting stuff down on paper, and will find it easier to write other things. The pessimistic version says that you have n words in you per day (for some low value of n), and you can either write them in your blog or write them somewhere more useful. These data don’t strongly support either theory. The slow but consistent decline in posting frequency is quite marked (especially if you decompose the time series, which I haven’t shown here). So I may not be doing this in four years time if present trends continue. Or perhaps I’m circling a stable equilibrium of verbiage, and becoming very good at punching out 300 to a thousand words, without it amounting to all that much.

Update: Thanks to some helpful SQL from Norman David Gerre at CT, I can now calculate the average length of posts each month over the time period. It looks like this:

This offers some support to the less-frequent/more-verbose hypothesis outlined above. I think some of the spikes are a consequence of us doing Book Seminars. If we run the post frequency and average post length time series through a standard decomposition and look at the trend components of each, we get the following. (Average Post Length is divided by 100 to make the trends comparable on a single graph.)

So post frequency rises sharply and then declines sharply in the first 18 months, and continues to decline slowly or perhaps level out. Meanwhile the average length of posts climbs consistently over the period, growing more rapidly in 2005 and then falling off again. Maybe I’m entering another pithy period.

There is still a fair amount of innovation. It’s just difficult to get it incorporated into standard plans for homes. Tucson has many examples of solar-powered or otherwise energy efficient homes, including one of the few zero-energy homes in the country. The ZEH is net zero energy, of course: it’s designed to produce what it needs via solar panels, and its overall energy consumption is very low. An “ordinary” solar home is not a ZEH, but if its built right it’s very cheap to run. If things go according to plan, I’ll be living in one come November.

Now that I’m back on the right side of the apartment door (the child is still alive, by the way), I can see just how this will play out in the upcoming film version of my life. The director cuts back and forth. The baby has discovered where the dumpsters are and is making a beeline for the abandoned washing machine. The audience at the workshop chats sagely to one another about the domestic division of labor. The actor playing me picks an apartment door at random and knocks, hoping someone is at home. He gets ready to brandish the baby, in order to simultaneously signal his non-threatening nature and his desperate need for aid.