My friends have many different opinions, and they all like to share them with me. I have atheist friends and devoutly religious friends. I have athletic friends and sedentary friends. I have conservative friends and liberal friends. I’m even — say it isn’t so — friends with both road runners and trail runners! But usually we all get along pretty well.

One of the friends I’ve had the hardest time handling over the years is a vegan. Now, I don’t have anything against vegans, but I’m not personally a practicing vegan.

That said, I’ve always found that many vegans are admirable because of their moral consistency. I find it hard to dispute that a vegan lifestyle, everything else being equal, causes less suffering than a non-vegan lifestyle. I’m impressed with folks who stick with their convictions even when confronted with a delicious double cheeseburger, a melt-in-your-mouth peach cobbler smothered in ice cream, or an expertly-prepared fish stew.

So when my friend posted photo after photo of horrifying conditions in meat-processing plants or images of abused animals that I really didn’t want to see while I was eating my breakfast, I tolerated it. As a meat eater, if I can’t handle knowing the consequences of eating meat, I probably shouldn’t be doing it. Sure, it made me uncomfortable, but I had to admit, my friend did have a point.

In the end, I don’t find the arguments of vegans convincing enough to change my ways, primarily because I believe that the concerns of humans generally trump those of animals. I would hope that, all else being equal, a vegan would agree with me — or at least acknowledge that it is just as bad to harm a human as it is to harm an animal.

So I was surprised this afternoon when my friend posted an unflattering image of a morbidly obese woman on Facebook. In the photo, she was seemingly unaware that her dress left her stomach and legs exposed, and that her stomach covered the rest of her body to such an extent that it appeared she was not wearing underwear. There was a disparaging caption on the photo, which my friend seemed to think was funny. It was decidedly not funny. It was sad to see him mocking another human being in this way.

And it made me think: Does this “friend” actually care less about humans than he does about other animals?

It made me wonder what the real motivation behind all those images of factory farms was. Was it to sway opinions and make the world a better place through the rhetorical device of making people uncomfortable? Or did my friend just get off on making people uncomfortable?

Suddenly his veganism didn’t seem so admirable. If you’re only a vegan because you like to belittle and humiliate people, that’s not nearly as impressive as being a vegan because you have a well-defined set of ethical principles.

More importantly, if you are a vegan activist and you want to sway people to your side by asking them to care about how we as a society treat other animals, then you should probably start with the understanding that you should treat your fellow human beings with dignity and respect as well.

Needless to say, my “friend” is now a former friend. Don’t worry, I still have plenty of ethically consistent vegan / vegetarian friends, and I continue to admire them.

A man runs up to you: “Help me, help me! A bomb just exploded and I left my phone in there! I can’t call my wife to tell her I’m all right! Can you let me borrow your phone?”

What do you do?

Most of us would probably let the man borrow the phone.

But maybe you should do something different. Maybe you should run towards the bombing area and try to help the people who were actually injured by the bomb. Don’t they need your help more?

That’s what you decide to do. You arrive and see a woman sobbing on the curb. “Help me, help me!” she says. “I think my leg is broken.”

Most of us would probably try to help.

But maybe you should do something different. Maybe there are folks closer to the blast area who need more immediate attention.

You run closer to the blast site. You see limbs scattered on the ground. You see a familiar face — someone from your hometown. She is bleeding profusely from her arm, screaming. Paramedics are on the scene, but they are helping the man next to her, trying to staunch even more dramatic bleeding from his left leg, which is dangling from his knee by just a few sinews. You decide to help the woman you know. You rip the sleeve off your shirt and use it as a makeshift pressure pad to stop the bleeding. Blood continues to soak through it. You remove your belt and make it into a tourniquet, forcefully strapping the arm above the elbow. You elevate the arm, and sit with the woman, trying to comfort her.

You accompany her to the hospital, and as she lapses in and out of consciousness, you do what you can to find her family. She’s not a friend; she’s more of an acquaintance, but by searching your Facebook and Twitter connections, you are able to locate her family, and they thank you and tell you that you’re a hero. You sleep well that night, knowing you did something positive in a world ridden by evil.

But by the next day, you’re not sleeping so well again. You helped your acquaintance, to be sure, but you’ve now heard that ten people died in the bombing and that several more are still unaccounted for, perhaps buried in the rubble. Maybe you should have moved on and helped others after the first victim you helped was stable. Maybe you shouldn’t have stopped for her at all — there were obviously others in greater need of help.

On the other hand, you also would have been perfectly justified in going about your business or simply lending that first man your phone, then moving on to the activities you had planned for the day. Hundreds of people were already on the scene of the bombing, and it’s possible that by rushing in to help you could have made matters worse. You’re not a doctor, after all.

It’s a struggle and a balance we all face, at all levels of our lives. You can selflessly devote your life to serving others, but if everyone did that, we might miss out on many of the great things that were created for some motivation other than altruism. The beautiful New York City skyline wasn’t built for the benefit of the people who enjoy looking at it. Each building was created primarily for selfish purposes, but the net effect is something that benefits others.

I doubt many great works of art and literature were created out of altruism. I suspect that Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, my favorite novel and one that has educated millions about the harm of racist beliefs, was written primarily to earn Twain fame and money. Twain believed that he and his heirs should retain copyright to his works indefinitely, failing to see any reason why his works should ever be free to the public, even centuries after his death. I don’t have a problem with that, because I love the book (though I’m glad his views on copyright have, at least to some extent, been mitigated) and I think it’s a net benefit to society.

But as you think about how to allocate your time, your resources, in a way that might help others, I invite you to consider what my brother Mark, who I’ve written about extensively, has to say about the problem.

“The people who scream loudest are usually not the ones who really need help. There are always people who are unable to scream at all.”

It’s all the fun of crosswords without needing a pen and eraser. Our game has great features such as: easy navigation, game pause, show or hide clue bubbles and online help, which are not available in your traditional print crossword puzzles. Each right letter is worth 10 points. Each wrong letter is worth 0 points. So sit back, put on your thinking cap and enjoy our online crossword game.

This text, ostensibly written for people who like words, causes me no end of consternation, especially because I often end up staring at it for 30 seconds or more while waiting for the puzzle to load. Let’s see if we can parse this correctly.

“It’s all the fun of crosswords without needing a pen and eraser.” Right. Because no self-respecting crossword fan would start a puzzle without both a pen and eraser. It’s the ultimate in self-flagellation, the confidence to complete a puzzle in ink, but hedged with a completely useless backup plan.

“Our game has great features such as: easy navigation, game pause, show or hide clue bubbles and online help, which are not available in your traditional print crossword puzzles.” Here in a single sentence we have an illustration of not one but two principles of mechanics. First, it’s a horrendous abuse of the colon. Next, we have a series that cries for an Oxford comma. It’s all capped off with a wonderfully colloquial use of a possessive that seems to be trying just bit too hard to be friendly.

“Each right letter is worth 10 points. Each wrong letter is worth 0 points.” It is true, some letters are just wrong. Like most of the ones used in this short, short paragraph. Fortunately we now know how to score them.

“So sit back, put on your thinking cap and enjoy our online crossword game.” Make sure you use plenty of cliches, and you too can write descriptive text worthy of the finickiest wordsmiths!

In the spirit of William Strunk, Jr., I humbly offer this revision of the instructions. I hereby offer the Washington Post the unrestricted use of the following words, if only to make my moments waiting for the puzzle slightly less annoying:

Please enjoy today’s crossword puzzle. Unlike printed puzzles, this puzzle allows you to easily navigate, pause, show and hide clues, and get online help. Each correct letter is worth 10 points.

Or even better:

Crossword puzzle. Go!

Dear Overweight Helicopter:
If you think I decided to do another installment of Ask Mr. Cranky Pants because you asked me to, I’d like to introduce you to a song I used to listen to a lot back in the 1970s. I’m sure Carly Simon sang it just for you.

By the way, back then we didn’t have those newfangled “Music Videos.” We put a record on a record player and we looked at the album cover while we played it. If it had liner notes with song lyrics, we called ourselves lucky. This video actually does a pretty good job of simulating what it was like to listen to a record back in the 1970s.

Also, we didn’t have “awesomesauce” in my day. Apple sauce, maybe. But who wanted apple sauce when you could have, oh, I don’t know…ANY OTHER FOOD? —Mr. Cranky Pants

Dear Mr. Cranky Pants:
What do you think of the antivaccination movement? Do you agree that we shouldn’t be forced to put poisons into our children’s bodies? —Wondering in Wichita

Dear Idiot:
In my day nobody gave “permission” for their child to be vaccinated. We went to school, lined up, and got poked with MMR, polio, and who knows what other vaccines. If we complained to our parents about it, they told us about their sisters and cousins who got measles or mumps. It wasn’t rare at all to know someone who had a baby that had nearly died from measles.

We also learned about vaccines in school. You know, irrelevant details like the MILLIONS of people who died of smallpox before there were vaccines, the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of Americans paralyzed by polio. We learned that the folks who developed vaccines were brilliant scientists who saved millions of lives, and we were glad to be spared uncomfortable illness or death.

These days antivaxxers have “parties” where they try to infect their children with chicken pox instead of having their kids get a vaccine. I would have gladly gotten a dozen or more shots to be spared the agony of chicken pox as a kid. So would my cousin Mike, who nearly died from the disease. News flash: from an immunization perspective, getting a vaccine is exactly the same thing as infecting your child with a disease, except when they get the vaccine THEY DON’T GET SICK. So you can give your child a “poison” like active chicken pox, which will make them sick, or you can give your child a weakened form of the disease — a deactivated poison, which won’t make them sick and will prevent them and others from getting sick.

And you wonder why people like me get cranky when they hear from people like you. Yeesh. —Mr. Cranky Pants

Dear Mr. Cranky Pants
What do you think of the whole Hostess thing? I mean, isn’t it a tragedy that we can’t buy Twinkies any more? —Nostalgic in North Dakota

Dear North Pole:
I’m absolutely rent asunder by the lack of available high-calorie foods in the modern convenience store. I mean, really, after making my way past the six aisles of candy bars, the hot dog machines, the pizza warmers, the racks and racks of fried snacks, the cookies, the instant macaroni and cheese*, the latte machine, the soda dispenser, the ice-cream cooler, the six refrigerators full of sugary beverages, and the Little Debbie Devil Squares, I’m horrified to see that there is not also a rusted-out rack of Hostess Ding Dongs, Ho-Hos, and Twinkies.

How could America have failed to notice that we were no longer buying enough Hostess treats to make this a viable business? You’d think if a person could scarf down an 800-calorie panini at Panera and top it off with a 570-calorie frozen mocha and a 450-calorie chocolate chipper cookie, they could certainly find room in their gullet for a coupla Hostess Cupcakes, which chalk in at a measly 160 calories each.

Well, I guess that’s about enough for this time. Tune in again, whenever I get around to it!

__
* Seriously? Instant macaroni and cheese? For people too lazy to add three ingredients to their pasta? What’s next — intravenous mac & cheese? (By the way, if you think I.V. Mac & Cheese is a good business concept, remember that I thought of it first. Have your people call my people)

About a month ago, I finished a draft of a memoir about my bout with melanoma last year, and while I think it’s kind of interesting, I don’t expect that it is going to be very interesting to many other people.

So now, today, I’m starting work on a new writing project. The project has several requirements, and I think I’ve come up with an idea that fulfills all of them. Here are the requirements:

• It must be the sort of thing that I would be interested in reading.
• It must be something that others will also be interested in.
• It must be highly creative (as opposed to only informative: The form of the work, not just the substance, should be one motivation to read it).
• It must be in my wheelhouse as a writer. I’m not a natural comedy writer, I’m not great with complex plots, I’m not a master of nuance. What I think I’m good at is clear description, thoughtful analysis, and the occasional artful turn of phrase.
• The core of the work must be based on factual material.
• It must be book-length.

The only way for me to finish a large project like this is to commit to a certain amount of work each day. I finished my memoir by writing 600 words a weekday, and I think when I get to the actual writing phase, that’s about what I will need to commit to this project. I’d like to finish this project in about a year. If I wrote every weekday for a year that would be a pretty long book — 156,000 words — but at the outset I will need to do some planning, and I will be taking some time off for vacations, and of course, I’ll need some time at the end for revisions. A better goal is probably around 100,000 words, total. It’s still a long-ish book but I don’t think that’s so long as to be impractical. (For what it’s worth, here’s an interesting post on word-lengths of famous books.)

So there, it’s decided: Over the next year I’m going to be writing a book of about 100,000 words. I want to either write 600 words a day or do two solid hours of planning or revision. That may seem slow, but I’ve found much more than that ends up being too taxing. Obviously if I’m on a roll on a given day, I’m not going to stop myself; the key is to never allow myself to fall short of that goal.

I’m not planning on giving a blow-by-blow of the progress, or to announce much publicly about the substance of the work until it’s finished. But I do want to make this public statement about my intentions as a way of holding myself accountable for the plan. Wish me luck!

Dear Dog:
In my day, just walking down the street was like navigating a mine field. Every third step you’d have to readjust your path to avoid a steaming pile of doggy-doo. It was a miracle if I made it to school without fecal matter on my shoes. And don’t get me started about the biting. Any self-respecting kid needed to know how to keep all the loose dogs at bay and avoid getting nipped on the ankles. The little dogs were the worst, I’ll tell ya! They bit anything that moved.

Nowadays you have to be more careful about the dog-owners than the dogs. As soon as their dog stops to smell a fire-hydrant, they’ll bend over to try and capture the output. I’ve hurdled more people in the past month than OJ Simpson ever did back before he was the poster child for hiring fat-cat lawyers to dodge a murder rap. And watch out when two or three dog-owners get together. You’ll be lucky to escape the small-talk, let alone tangle of leashes.

Now, what was the question again? —Mr. Cranky Pants

Dear Mr. Cranky Pants:
These days people line up for for four days in the snow just to register their kids for kindergarten. Isn’t that unfair to people who have jobs? Or small children to watch? —Wondering in West Philly

Dear Boy Wonder:
Parents these days are all mixed up. Don’t they realize that kindergarten is just play-time? In my day, you only signed up for kindergarten if you had a job. Otherwise, you’d let your kids play out on the street while you sat inside watching Days of our Lives. That way you didn’t have to worry about your kids getting dog poop all over your carpet after their mile-long walk home from school.

And don’t get me started on those boulders they put out in front of schoolhouses. The boulders are supposed to be there so the kids don’t spray graffiti on the school—it’s “okay” spray-paint the rock. Talk about spoiling the fun of a healthy activity like graffiti. Now the only people who use the rock are parents who buy 15 cans of spray-paint to wish Bratster McSpoiled-Rotten a happy 11-and-a-halfth birthday. They don’t even let kids buy spray paint these days anyways, because of the danger of “huffing.” Back in my day, we called that “improving the gene pool.” —Mr. Cranky Pants

Dear Mr. Cranky Pants:
Aren’t heated car seats an abomination? Talk about wasting resources! —Concerned in California

Dear I already forgot your name:
They make heated car seats? If I didn’t live in the South, where we have about 6 days a year when we shut off the AC, I’d think that was a fantastic idea. But why stop there? They should have heated steering wheels and gear shifts, too. That is, if they bothered to make cars with manual transmissions any more.

What really bothers me are those silly stick-figure “family” stickers that suburban families put on the back of whatever they’re driving these days in the suburbs instead of a “Suburban.” If you didn’t have impenetrable black tinting on the windows of your monstrous SUV that’s never seen a gravel road longer than the driveway at the local soccer complex, I could easily see that you have two kids, a dog, a latte, and a cell phone glued to your ear. I don’t need a sticker to tell me that. —Mr. Cranky Pants

Well, that’s it for this installment of Ask Mr. Cranky Pants. Tune in for another episode next week, next month, or whenever I get around to it. You think Mr. Cranky Pants is going to stick to a schedule?

“It is a compelling message saying we need to pay the bills that we’ve racked up. But it misses the whole point,” [Ohio Senator Rob] Portman told Fox News.

The Ohio lawmaker went on to compare the $16.4 trillion debt ceiling to credit card debt, equating Obama’s stated unwillingness to bargain over an extension to a free-spending teenager.

“Think about it in terms of a credit card,” Portman said. “If you have a son or daughter who exceeds the limits, what do you do? The first thing you do is probably rip up the card. The second thing you do is say, ‘We need to change our spending habits.’ This is what the president won’t do.”

Benen patiently explains why the U.S. government works completely differently from a parent doling out allowance to a teenager, but to my mind doesn’t dwell on exactly how wrong-headed the analogy is.

• In the first place, if “ripping up the card” would destroy the global economy, you probably wouldn’t do that, would you?
• Or, staying with the analogy, if the teenager needed to use the card to pay for transportation to work, which is the only way she could pay off the debt, you probably wouldn’t tear up the card in that case either.

More to the point, the debt limit is not like a credit-card limit. A credit-card limit is imposed by lenders. If you try to buy something using the card and it’s over the limit, the card won’t work. That’s not true about the US government, which can readily borrow more money. The only thing stopping it is an arbitrary, self-imposed limit.

The more you try to connect the analogy to the real-world situation, the less sense it makes. It’s almost as if the senator is deliberately deceiving us instead of explaining the real reason he doesn’t want to increase the debt limit.

Let me rephrase that. Almost certainly, senator is deliberately trying to deceive us rather than explain the real reason he is making such a fuss over the debt limit.

The real reason, of course, is that his party doesn’t control the government. Since the Senate and White House are controlled by Democrats, Republicans have few opportunities to do what they want. Since the debt ceiling is a bass-ackward law that requires Congress to authorize spending they’ve already authorized, then it gives them a chance to re-negotiate past agreements. Anyone who doesn’t like the current spending / taxation policies has a little bit of leverage in the negotiations because they can threaten to block a debt ceiling increase, which in turn would destroy the US credit rating and bring down the global economy.

It’s a bit like a teenager agreeing that the family should donate to the local homeless shelter, then later threatening to burn down the house if her parents don’t stop donating to the local homeless shelter.

In this scenario, what should sensible parents do? The Republican argument is that they should stop donating to the shelter, right? Otherwise, the house burns down! Screw the homeless.

But all this just illustrates how silly the parent-teenager analogy is. Parents have near-complete autonomy and are able to impose their will on children. The US government is a republic, with representatives who are given specific, limited powers. When you use the parent-teenager analogy all you have to do to make your side of the analogy seem “true” is turn the opponent’s position into the “teenager,” but that doesn’t mean that the US government works like a family, any more than the federal debt works like a credit card.

Fortunately it looks like the American public is finally starting to get wise to this tactic. They now realize that Republicans are giving us a false choice between exceeding some arbitrary “debt ceiling” and cutting popular programs like Social Security and Medicare. The so-called debt crisis is simply an opportunity for Republicans to try to shove their unpopular agenda down America’s throat, and it appears that in this case, sanity will, briefly, prevail.

Sometimes I wonder if the stupid analogies aren’t actually what helps push popular opinion past the tipping point: When people see that the analogies are irrelevant, they start to take a look at the actual policy implications of Republican rhetoric, and they don’t like what they see.

The general gist of the comments in Facebookistan is that no one “really” makes the kind of money these people make. In one sense it’s true: Just a tiny portion of the US makes that kind of money. What portion? The sort of people who subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. According to their Rate Card, the average household income of a WSJ subscriber is $261,000 per year. That’s a little lower than the $330K average of the families on the info-graphic, but not much lower!

Given the WSJ’s US circulation of about 1.5 million, that’s a lot of people. It’s just not many people compared to the total US population of 312 million.

Is it realistic for a single mom to make $260,000 per year? It is if she is an investment banker on Wall Street. According to this site, a third-year associate investment banker with an MBA typically has a total compensation package north of $300K per year.

But what about those exorbitant investment incomes? Could a family of 6 really have $180K in investment income a year? If they’re making a 5% return,  that would require a net worth of $3.6 million. Unheard of? Not among WSJ subscribers, whose net worth averages $2.6 million. Granted, these income and investment figures are probably skewed by the ultra-rich. One billionaire can increase the “average” net worth of a thousand millionaires by $1 million.

Is this graphic horrifying? Absolutely. But not because it’s inaccurate. Rather, it’s horrifying because of the obscene amount of money still being made by the very sector of our economy that nearly bankrupted us all.

The 230,000-km-radius circle that the asteroid passed through actually spans an area 1,300 times bigger than the earth. So chances were very slim that we’d actually get hit.

What are the chances that you personally would be affected? Even slimmer. Space.com estimates that the asteroid would have damaged about 2,000 square kilometers. The Earth’s surface is about 510,000,000 square kilometers, so even if the asteroid had hit the Earth, there would be only about a 1 in 250,000 probability of you personally being harmed. Combine the two probabilities, and you’d have a better shot at winning the lottery than getting harmed by that asteroid.

What we don’t know is how common these near-misses are. Perhaps they happen every few years, and astronomers have only just now gotten good enough to start detecting them. If that’s the case, we would expect an earth impact about once every 400 years — still not very likely, and even less likely to affect any given person.

But the headline on an article that’s been climbing the charts on Slate for the past day or so has really been rankling me: “Out of Touch: E-reading isn’t reading.” Really? That would suggest that if you’ve read an e-book, you haven’t really “read” it—you know, the way you would have if you had read the “real” book.

Now, Slate articles tend to have lots of different headlines. I imagine the headline-writers are experimenting, trying to figure out what will best catch the reader’s eye. The headline on Slate’s “Most Read” sidebar is a little different: “Reading on a Kindle is not the same as reading a book.” That’s a rather different proposition, and a fairly obvious one. It’s the difference between saying “Riding a motorcycle is not transportation” and “Riding a motorcycle is not the same as riding in a car.”

I’ve read the article, and I’d say neither headline actually captures what the article is about. If I was trying to write an honest (if rather dull) headline for the article, I’d write something like this: “The way we physically interact with narrative texts has changed over the centuries, and Kindles are a dramatically different way of interacting with narrative texts.”

The article’s author, Andrew Piper, is also attempting to make a slightly larger, subtle point that the physical experience of a text is an essential part of reading, but he doesn’t provide much evidence of how different reading technologies affect the meaning of what we are reading.

Piper talks a lot about the difference between pressing a button to turn a page and physically turning a page, and how both of those things are different from using a touch-screen to turn the page, but I have a hard time understanding how these differences affect the meaning of a printed text.

On the other hand, something that Piper doesn’t talk about at all really can have a significant impact on how we understand the meaning of a text. Let me give a concrete example, from a hilarious item that appeared two days ago in the New York Times. It’s the much-linked review of Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar in Times Square:

When I first read the review, for a while I missed something that contributed significantly to the meaning of the article. It’s written as a letter to the restaurant’s proprietor, Guy Fieri. I missed it because of a typographical convention: Starting the first few words of an article in ALL CAPS. I mistook the “Guy Fieri” for a subhead, instead of a part of the first sentence of the article. Instead of seeing that the questions were directed to Fieri, I thought they were directed at me, the reader—which seemed a little odd, since most readers tend to read reviews before they decide to visit a restaurant. When I finally got it, I could see that the review was very funny, but for me the typography obscured the meaning of the article.

The Kindle faces a tougher typographical challenge. It’s designed to let the reader select the size of the type, and in many cases, even the typeface itself. All books must be shoehorned into its tiny, low-resolution screen, whether they are image-rich history texts or cheap romance novels. Though the device is now five years old, the basic model has changed very little. The screen is still the same size and resolution, and its e-ink is still limited to black and white (in fact, black and gray).

But the big problem with the Kindle platform is that by presenting readers with such a flexible means of displaying text, it’s impossible for the publisher to present readers with a satisfying typographical experience. Take a look at this page from the book I’m reading now, Joan Druett’s Island of the Lost: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World:

As you can see (and unlike many Kindle books), there’s actually an attempt to make the book look attractive. There’s some ornament around the chapter number, the font is different from the standard Kindle sans-serif type, and there’s even a fancy initial cap to start off the chapter. But then it all goes wrong. The initial cap isn’t lined up with the baseline of the text, there are huge gaps between many of the words, and an extra hyphen has been left in the middle of “bring- ing” for no apparent reason.

The huge spaces are there because Kindle is absolutely horrible at creating readable justified text. It’s not an easy problem to create a straight right margin without destroying the continuity of the text, which is why most online texts don’t even try (consider this blog, for example, or the New York Times article above). But apparently someone at Amazon decided that e-books should be e-justified, and we’re still living with that horrible decision five years later. There used to be an option on a Kindle to remove the justification, but it usually didn’t work (perhaps the publisher overrode this option?), and I’m not seeing the option at all on my current model.

Why Amazon allows you to make body text the size of a headline, but still won’t allow readers to control justification is beyond me, but it makes for terribly distracted reading. The problem is even worse when you attempt to read a Kindle book on a smaller screen, like an iPhone. And while justification is a somewhat complicated problem, it’s not impossible to do well. QuarkXpress did it quite quickly on a mid-1990s Mac, including (for the most part) proper hyphenation. The only time I’ve seen any sort of hyphenation on a Kindle is when a stray hyphen made its way into the e-version by accident, as in my example above.

Even worse is the way Kindle handles illustrations. Most graphics on the Kindle are too tiny to be of any use. You can blow them up, but only to the size of the (tiny) Kindle display. The Kindle is, in fact, a small computer. Why can’t we zoom in to the image and see it in more detail, if need be? Again, I could do this on my 1995 Mac. I could do it on my 1985 Mac. Surely I should be able to do it on a modern computing device.

So a Kindle is a trade-off. We buy Kindle books instead of physical books because, despite their problems, they are more portable, more searchable, and more convenient. We can get [most] of the same meaning out of an e-book as a physical e-book, but we could be getting much more. And that is the real problem with the Kindle.

Kevin Drum doesn’t like loyalty cards. I agree, I don’t either. Obviously the only reason stores want you to have loyalty cards is so they can track your purchases and figure out additional ways to make money off of you.

But Drum wants to argue that unlike other sorts of price discrimination, retail loyalty cards disproportionately harm poor people:

I earn enough that I can decline to use loyalty cards just because it bugs me to think that anyone with money can buy a detailed history of everything I buy. But you know who can’t afford to do that? Poor people. In practice, they don’t have the same choice I do. Even if they don’t like having their purchases tracked, they simply can’t afford to pay the artificially jacked-up prices that supermarkets charge anyone without a loyalty card. (What? You think supermarkets just lower the loyalty price and leave it at that? They don’t. Non-loyalty prices go up to compensate.) So they’re basically forced to share vast amounts of personal data even if they don’t want to.

What’s weird to me about this is that Drum thinks that college tuition price discrimination is okay: Rich people pay full price, middle-class folks get loans, and poor people get grants based on income. But isn’t the price for these benefits the same? To get financial aid, you have to give colleges vast amounts of personal information, including tax returns, information about the value of home, and so on. You have to give them way more information than you give the grocery store when you get a loyalty card. If it’s not okay to give personal information to get grocery store discounts, why is it okay to give personal information to get tuition breaks?

Don’t get me wrong, I agree with Drum that loyalty cards suck. I agree that it sucks that we have to give lots of personal information out in order to save money. But poor people have to do this in pretty much all aspects of their lives: to qualify for food stamps, or Medicaid, or Social Security Disability, or housing assistance, or energy assistance. You name it, poor people have to give that information away. Rich people don’t.

cf: Mitt Romney.

Surgery cost: $36,000
Discount negotiated by my insurance company: $31,000
Net cost to me (or, rather, my insurance company): $5,000
Portion of that cost covered by my insurance company: $4,200
Portion of that cost covered by me: $800

So if I hadn’t had insurance, I would have had no opportunity to negotiate a discount with the hospital, and I would have been billed the full $36,000. The average uninsured person, I would submit, would have a hard time coming up with $36K on short notice, but $5K would probably within the realm of possibility. Unfortunately they never get that option and instead face a choice between not getting the procedure and financial ruin.

So those least able to afford health care get charged the most. I think most people are aware of this dynamic, but I think it’s important to see exactly the scale of the difference we are talking about. In this real example, the uninsured are charged 7 times more than the insured. Supposing they can somehow manage to pay, they end up paying 40 times more out of pocket than the insured. The uninsured pay 8.5 times more than the insurance companies do for the same care.

How do you become uninsured? You lose your job, you have a pre-existing condition, you work for hourly wages, you work as an “independent contractor,” or dozens of other means.

This is just one reason why the health care system in America is broken.

The Unabomber believes in global warming. Therefore, since the Unabomber is a bad person, the theory of global warming must be false.

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Lots of other fun facts follow from this line of reasoning. For example, did you know that God does not exist? After all, Hitler believed in God.

Also, God does exist, because Stalin did not believe in God.

Mussolini supported the idea of capitalism, so capitalism is a bankrupt philosophy.

It is a known fact that mass-murderer Jeffrey Dahmer believed that birds could fly. Therefore, birds cannot fly.

Also, reason is dead, because even stupid people can see that the logic in the Heartland Institute’s billboard is woefully flawed.

But over the years, Word Munger has slowed down. Facebook and Twitter seem more alluring, offering more instant feedback from readers. I’ve started a new business, and I’m actively involved in a major web project. Oh yeah, and I’ve become obsessed with running.

Sometimes I wonder whether there’s any point in maintaining Word Munger any more. Today before I wrote this post I went through and deleted some spam comments, and accidentally took out a couple legitimate ones. I didn’t feel any compunction to try and undo my act of negligence. Recent posts on WordMunger have gotten one, two comments at the most. I can get dozens of comments from a one-off on Twitter or Facebook.

Still, a blog is a great place to offer more-extended discussion than is possible through the normal social media channels. A running blog I contribute to has actually disabled comments; we keep the blog going, but we expect any commenting that occurs to happen on Facebook. I’ve thought about doing that here, but I like have the comments associated with the blog post itself (curator error aside).

I will probably keep WordMunger going for the foreseeable future. I need to keep a webhost for other reasons, and I never know when I will want to write up something for general consumption. I can’t guarantee I’ll post often. When I do, you’ll probably hear about it — on Facebook or Twitter, that is.

Over on Slate, a debate is raging about whether the “What if I’d never been born?” argument is a valid line of reasoning in the abortion debate.

I understand the argument: I value my life, and if my Mom had had an abortion back in 1967, I would never have existed. This is a bad thing, therefore abortion is bad and should be outlawed.

Here’s the problem with the argument: I could equally argue the following: “I value my life, and if my Mom had not been a Catholic, she would have had an abortion. Therefore all women should be forcibly converted to Catholicism.”

Or “I value my life, and if my Mom and Dad hadn’t started dating in 1965, I would never have been conceived, therefore all women should be forced to date my Dad.” Or something.

The case for abortion does not hinge on whether a given person, living today, should have been denied the right to be born X years ago. Indeed, it is not about whether it is ever appropriate to have laws that could lead to human deaths.

Otherwise what would the justification for war be — if all human life is sacred, then should we ever sanction something that might result in a loss of life? Shouldn’t we refuse to engage in any military conflict, regardless of its potential merits? Wouldn’t there be a moral imperative to provide free health care for all? Shouldn’t we ban motorcycles, and firearms, and any object that might become lodged in some unsuspecting toddler’s throat? Shouldn’t the universal speed limit be set at 5 miles per hour? Once we acknowledge that it is acceptable to have a policy that will result in a loss of human life, then we are living in a world of relativism, not a world of absolutes.

At this point it becomes reasonable to weigh the harm of forcing a woman to bear an unwanted pregnancy against the harm of aborting a fetus or embryo. Heart-wrenching as it may be for the woman making the choice, it’s not a difficult decision as a matter of policy. The woman is a grown person, with friends, family, loved ones, and the capacity to love and think. The fetus is not. Pregnancy and childbirth is dangerous, even sometimes life-threatening. The fetus, which might technically be termed “living” and “human,” has less cognitive capacity than a rodent, which most humans would have no qualms about killing (or perhaps hiring someone else to kill) if it was encroaching on their lives in even the most benign way. Clearly it’s acceptable to kill a being like a rodent in order to spare a woman 9 months of illness and discomfort and even distortion of her body, followed by ten to twenty-four hours or more of appalling pain that under any other circumstance would be considered gruesome torture, followed by weeks of recovery and often permanent disfigurement.

If the anti-abortion forces weren’t so dogmatic, I would even be willing to accept a compromise, setting some point in a pregnancy where abortions were illegal, perhaps after 4 months or so, in exchange for removing all restrictions on abortion prior to that point and ensuring it was available to all women.

But clearly this isn’t the sort of foe pro-choicers face. Larimore, who makes every effort to appear reasonable, clearly wouldn’t accept such a compromise. While she seems to acknowledge the point that 90 percent of abortions take place before the 12th week, when the embryo is anything but human-like, she later dismisses it, saying “it’s barbaric to kill 1 million babies a year.” Remember, we’re talking about a thumbnail-sized blob that in Larimore’s words looks more like a “space alien” than a human.

And of course Larimore completely leaves women out of her “barbarity” equation. Is it not barbaric to torture and disfigure 1 million women a year by forcing them to undergo pregnancy and childbirth?

But as I’ve said, this argument won’t convince anyone, because anti-choicers have already taken Larimore’s logical leap from embryo to fetus to baby. My comparison of an fetus to a “rodent” would strike them as offensive, because they believe a fetus, an embryo, even a zygote is a baby, and babies are wonderful!

But pro-lifers might argue “What is the difference between a baby and a fetus? Isn’t the fetus just a baby that hasn’t been born yet?” In some senses, yes, but once the baby is born, then killing it doesn’t save the mother from pregnancy and childbirth. There is no justification for killing the baby because its existence doesn’t depend on the physical pain and disfigurement of a woman.

Pro-lifers then counter with their trump card: The woman deserves to be pregnant because she chose to have sex.

To which I respond: Is that all you got? Why aren’t you banning sex, then? If sex (or sex out of wedlock, or sex without the intention of producing kids, or whatever the hell you think is “sinful”) is what really bothers you, then why not try to stop that? Good luck at it.

Before we went to Steamboat, we thought we’d visit Rocky Mountain National Park. I had never been there, so it was a great chance to see a new place. Plus, we’d be able to drive through the park and take an interesting route to Steamboat, where we needed to be that evening.

When we arrived at the park, we found out that the road through the park was closed! We’d have to take a three-hour detour to get to Steamboat, returning almost the same way we had come. Oops!

But we still had time for a short hike, and fortunately Nora took pictures, because for some reason Greta and I didn’t take many.

Rocky Mountain NP is beautiful in the spring, but there’s too much snow at the higher elevations for a casual day hike. Fortunately we were able to find a route with just a couple of patches here and there. Much of the time we were strolling through glades of aspen, like this:

But we also got to walk through open meadows, with the taller, snow-capped peaks looming above:

We stopped for lunch at a lake, where one of the local waterfowl was not at all shy about begging for food:

Across the valley was a spectacular waterfall:

Nora spent some time trying to capture the motion of the small springs at the side of the trail. I think she did a particularly good job with this photo.

Then we descended to a raging creek. Colorado had had tons of snow this past year, and now it was all melting. Indeed, many of the rivers we would see later were above flood stage. I don’t think this creek typically had this much water:

If you have QuickTime installed on your computer, you can click on the picture to watch a short movie I made showing just how much water was flowing through this small gorge.

We hiked a little farther than we had planned, and it was getting late, so I ended up running to the car and driving a mile back up the road to pick Greta and Nora up. When we finally got to Steamboat, it was past 10 pm. A long day, but also a beautiful one!

First up is our fourth hike, because I’m waiting on some pictures of the other hikes from Nora and Greta. At this point, Nora and I had dropped Greta off in Denver so we could do some “more extreme” hiking in Utah.

The first hike was based out of Escalante, a tiny town that’s off the beaten path of major national parks in Utah — Zion, Bryce, Arches, Canyonland — but in an area that’s no less spectacular. After a drive down a knife-edge ridge to get to the town, we checked in to a local motel, and awoke at the crack of dawn for our hike.

Even getting to the trailhead was a bit of an adventure, involving 45 miles on a gravel road, through a herd of cattle (driven by genuine cowboys riding genuine horses and shouting genuine cowboy orders to the cows, like “hyah” and “git along”).

The hike was supposed to be a 11-mile loop involving two cars parked at two separate trailheads, but since we only had one car, we stopped at the second trailhead (where we’d be exiting) and started to walk 2 miles down the road to the first trailhead. Amazingly, within about a minute a truck driven by a very friendly scoutmaster came by and offered us a ride to the first trailhead. After a hilarious incident involving Mormon crickets (which will have to wait told some other time), we were dropped off and started on our way. At first we were walking along the open desert, which was beautiful in itself:

Then we hit the side of Escalante Canyon, and it wasn’t immediately apparent how to get down. Fortunately our guidebook showed us how to do it — it involved descending a crack that was just wide enough for me to squeeze through, after removing my backpack. Here’s Nora scaling the entry:

And here’s a picture that shows how close to the edge of the canyon this gap is:

After plunging down to the bottom of the canyon and wading around a bit in the Escalante, we began our hike back up Coyote Gulch. There was a little creek running through the whole gulch, and most of the time, the easiest hiking was just walking in the water.

All along the way were fantastic rock formations:

As we wound our way up the canyon, we saw three separate arches, which were cool, but not quite as photogenic as the ones in Arches National Park.

It was a hot day, but because the gulch was so narrow, we were usually able to find some shade along the way.

Finally we reached the point where our guidebook said we’d be able to clamber out of the canyon. The book suggested bringing a rope for hauling up your backpacks, but I was hoping that since I just had a small day-pack, I’d be fine. There were a couple hairy moments, but we ended up making it out without incident. Here’s a shot of Nora making her way up the final stretch of the climb.

I tracked our entire route using GPS — not so much because I thought it would help us navigate, but just to get a sense of where we had gone. Indeed, the satellite view of the route is pretty neat:

Here’s the entire GPS record of the hike.

South Carolina: After a couple hours at it, you’re ready to stare down the newbs
Hawaii: Unless you were born here, you are a newb.

South Carolina: After 45 minutes, you still haven’t managed to find a decent wave
Hawaii: After 45 minutes, 5 or 6 “perfect waves” in a row nearly break you in half, and you’re ready to call it a day.

[testing, sorry]
Consonni R., Cagliani L.R. & Cogliati C. (2012). NMR based geographical characterization of roasted coffee, Talanta, 88 426. DOI: 10.1016/j.talanta.2011.11.010

We spent the afternoon touring one of our nation’s best-loved monuments, Arches National Park. But as we encountered arch after spectacular arch, it occurred to us that the National Park Service is probably underselling Arches. Who wants to travel thousands of miles and endure stifling heat to see something called “Delicate Arch”? Sure, it’s so beautiful that Utah put it on its license plate, but that makes it even more critical to market the arch in a way that makes folks actually want to visit–after all, you see the arch on the plates every day.

We’ve decided to rename the most prominent monuments in Arches in ways that should attract more visitors.

One of the first things visitors see as they enter the park is a spectacular wall with unique stone formations. The official map of Arches calls it The Great Wall, but China’s already got one of those, am I right? What China doesn’t have is something called The Blobular Wall, which also happens to be a more accurate description of what the wall looks like:

In a short while, visitors drive by Rock Chimneys. Since nearly every park in the known universe has a “chimney rock,” this isn’t exactly playing to Arches’ strengths. Again, we think Blobby Chimneys is a name that reflects the true uniqueness of these formations.

A mile or so up the road is another incredible formation with the devastatingly boring moniker of Balanced Rock. We’ve renamed it The Precarious Orb, a much better way to describe its haunting, otherwordly presence.

Next visitors arrive at a viewing area surrounded by more than eight different arches. We’ve renamed the Windows in a way that’s much more descriptive and enticing: The Eyebrows.

Similarly, Turret Arch is named after a word which few potential visitors will recognize. We’ve gone with a name that’s part of four of the highest-grossing motion pictures in history: Pirate Arch.

Across the way from these arches is one of the most famous and most boringly-named formations in the entire park: Double Arch. These arches are so massive that it’s almost hard to mentally process. And even if one of them fell down (as is likely to occur eventually due to natural forces), there’s another, equally grand one ready to take its place. Thus, we’ve renamed them Epic Arch and Insurance Arch.

A few miles down the main road in Arches takes you to Devil’s Gardens. A few decades ago, this might have titillated a few park visitors, but nowadays the Devil rarely strikes fear in anyone. Yet there is one person in America that strikes fear in the heart of nearly everyone who visits him/her: The Dentist. Combine that with the fact that these formations look like really bad teeth, and it’ll be clear why we renamed them The Dentist’s Delight.

Hike about a mile up the trail through The Dentist’s Delight, and you’ll arrive at the largest arch in the park, though you wouldn’t know it from it’s yawn-inducing name, Landscape Arch. In 1991, tons of rock fell from the arch to the valley floor, illustrating that all the arches in the park are indeed precarious. But what sells better than death? Van Gogh couldn’t make a dime off his work, but now his paintings are priceless. Thus, we renamed it Dying Arch. Who won’t want to see this arch before it’s gone forever?

The name of the crowning glory of Arches National Park, Delicate Arch, practically begs us to ignore it. Sure, the arch does appear to be delicate, its fragile form precariously perched over the edge of an immense cliff, but that doesn’t mean we can’t sell the darned thing a bit better. Henceforth, it should be known as The Rootin’ Tootin’ Humongo Arch. Add Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz, and who wouldn’t want to go see that?

Race Report: The Big Sur International Marathon