The ambient light sensor on the MacBook is fucking awesome, and I love it, and I especially love the backlit keyboard. But I know those little sensors aren’t expensive, which begs the question of why they didn’t put two or fucking three of them in here to more accurately determine when it’s dark, versus when my fingers are blocking the sensor.

Perhaps I type incorrectly, and my fingers aren’t supposed to arch that much. Perhaps there’s a place I can put my computer in these situations that alleviates the problem. Perhaps I just shouldn’t be lazy and should just turn off the auto adjustment in the Display preferences when I’m in these sorts of situations.

But that’s bullshit. I shouldn’t have to do anything… a second sensor would alleviate these issues by recognizing the difference between actual low light conditions and intermittent blockage of the sensor.

Two.

Why the fuck can’t I make playlists out of Podcasts? What makes them so fundamentally distinct from music tracks that creating a customized list of them that I’d like to play is unsupported? For that matter, why can’t I even re-sort my podcasts by title, or reverse the date order? Again, they don’t seem that different from music tracks to me.

The issue stems from a Japanese education podcast to which I subscribe that produces, simultaneously, podcasts for Beginner, Intermediate, and Expert, supplemental podcasts on special topics, video podcasts that are either isolated or are video reviews of the audio podcast of the same title, etc. etc. But the only way iTunes, or my iPhone, can sort or manage these is in strict chronological order. That sucks. I want to watch only beginner ones now, and will want to do the intermediate ones next. I should be able to filter them, at minimum by creating an appropriate playlist for them.

And since I’m on the topic, why can’t I make smart playlists on my iPod, or at least my iPhone, which has a full goddamn keyboard. This sort of shit should be trivial.

Three.

Where’s my copy/paste functionality on my iPhone. For fucks sake.

He was speaking at length on the necessity of saving the US automobile industry by granting their request (to be made formally this afternoon by the CEO of Ford, I believe) for a large taxpayer loan. As I listened, I kept hearing him say that the auto industry must be saved really for two reasons, which were repeated consistently no matter what the initial question.

The first, which I don’t dispute the fundamental truth of, is that the automotive industry is a major employer of middle class workers in the US. This is all well and good, but discussing this bailout (and, loan or not, it is a bailout) as if the industry will disappear completely overnight is extremely misleading. Yes, certainly the industry is in trouble. Companies have been slashing their workforces for years, continually hemorrhage vast amounts of money, and seem incapable of genuinely gaining ground against their foreign competitors. Further contractions of the industry will hurt, yes, but we’re not actually talking about 3 million additional unemployed skilled laborers tomorrow morning if we don’t drop tens of billions of dollars on the Big 5 (or is it 3 now?) today.

The second major presumption of Doyle’s “Save the Automakers” position was that the loss of this industry (again, all of it, immediately, by implication) would represent the catastrophic loss of all the Research and Development work that the industry does and which America needs in order to remain competitive in the global economy.

This point I dispute on a couple of levels. First, and I hope you’ll forgive the snark, if the United States automotive industry’s R&D was really all that, they wouldn’t be requiring tens of billions of dollars of assistance. They are just years, decades maybe, out of touch with the state of the art being developed in Japan and Germany. They’ve moved only reluctantly towards retooling to support hybrids and alternative fuel vehicles and even then had to be dragged, kicking and screaming about their bottom lines and the needs and wants of the American consumer, to that table. Claiming that we need to salvage their vaunted R&D programs at taxpayer expense represents either a clear misunderstanding or a deliberate oversight of the meager reality.

Of course big companies do R&D, and many do it very well, but the foundation of the argument for saving the carmakers because of their R&D wings presupposes that there are no alternatives, and further relies on the belief that market forces represent the most efficient way to allocate resources for this kind of work. The market is a wonderful thing, but if there is one area that arguably is least benefited by reliance upon market economics, it’s basic scientific research.

Let’s face it, the market is a lagging indicator in most cases. It responds only as rapidly as consumers recognize and understand the conditions that affect the market. In a perfect case, the consumers are all well informed about current circumstances as well as the predicted future conditions that will affect the market, and in that case only, the market may (but is not guaranteed to) respond rapidly and ahead of immediate circumstances. In reality, most consumers are not that well informed, either because they aren’t paying attention, don’t exercise reason in tracking through difficult issues, or, commonly, aren’t provided enough genuine facts about what to expect in the future.

This argument underpins most of my response to knee-jerk free-marketeerism — even allowing that a perfect market will best allocate resources, we don’t have perfect markets, and we must be sure to recognize those cases where the imperfect ones that exist in reality actually do provide the superior solution.

To presuppose that the kind of basic scientific and engineering research that will support the future generation of energy efficient cars (not to mention all other devices that will benefit) ought to be performed by the historically deficient auto industry is just absurd. In fact, it’s clear that the market is largely to blame for the very situation we face. The American public demanded big trucks, SUV’s and other inefficient but fun vehicles, and the industry not only made their billions by filling that desire, but actively lobbied in favor of policies (energy and otherwise) that would keep them in the high margin business of selling these types of vehicles, even after the writing was on the wall with respect to our eventual need to reduce consumption drastically.

So here’s my alternative proposal… let’s not loan billions of dollars to a set of organizations whose credibility in performing basic scientific research is nil, and whose management has been self destructive or brain dead for 25 years. Rather, make that money available to organizations who can and will make good use of it. Direct those funds to the National Science Foundation and other funding mechanisms for academia, whose ability to perform basic science is part and parcel of their mandate. Set aside 200-300 million dollars towards establishing a series of X-Prizes for advances in the materials science and engineering disciplines necessary to advance the state of the art in this country. Provide incentive for American entrepreneurs and researchers to do this kind of work for the auto makers, whose market incentives were never before, and will never be, sufficient to make them forward looking and responsible stewards of the huge power they hold over the economic, environmental and energy policies of this country. Perhaps even found a national laboratory with a mandate for performing work on modern energy and automotive technology, much as the Sandia, Los Alamos and Oak Ridge labs did for Nuclear research and as the NIH does for much basic public health research.

By all means, salvage what can be salvaged of the auto makers in the interests of job retention and maintaining an industrial and manufacturing base in the US. But please don’t foist this ridiculous notion of automaker funded R&D on the public. It’s wrong, and while it may be politically sensible to speak well of companies that employ your constituents, in this case doing so is to spread misunderstanding and inaccuracy. Basic science will almost never be performed best — and by best I mean best for the world at large… by this metric, even the drug companies largely fail — by organizations responding to market forces, because by it’s very nature, basic research may or may not be economically rewarding and will always have to be initiated well in advance of the day the resulting technologies are needed. At best, todays markets provide incentive just as new ideas need to be available, and at worst, lag until they’ve been needed for some time already. It’s time to wake up to this reality and stop throwing good money, money that could be made to serve this nation in countless ways, at companies that provably, unequivocally, do not deserve to be trusted with it.

I think this battle is common…

In my continuation with the theme that a true democracy is a battle of ideas, I hope that we can begin to win this battle with binary thinking as a society. It will be important that in these troubled times that we do not think about problems as Democrats v. Republicans, left v. right, or free market v. socialism. We are going to have to look for more than just two options. We are going to have to hope that there are more than two options.

It is the responsibility of the President to lead the people, to persuade the people, to eduacate the people, and to inspire the people through tough times. I hope that the new President will take this responsibility seriously, not falling into the trap of this is what I decided to do…end of story.

I hope when making decisions, the President will win the battle against binary thinking and consider and weigh all options…not just through the lens of political positions that parties or he himself have built up through the years in different situations that may not apply here.

I hope that when the decisions are made and explained to us that we will listen and be critical of these decisions while seeing the gray areas that exist in real life.

I mention this because as liberals we think we are more open minded than conservatives. This may or may not be the case (was that binary?), but there are too many examples of liberals not being open minded to make me comfortable enough to stop challenging ourselves. One example that came out in the news recently, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, the lone true Republican on ABC’s “The View”, is said to receive far more death threats than any one else on the show. Seriously, death threats. I find her frustrating too, but death threats?

The challenge of a democracy is freedom of speech and freedom of ideas. This is difficult. It is also an opportunity. When someone says something that we do not agree with, let us win the battle of binary thinking by truly listening, being critical, being willing to adapt and improve our positions, and use the opportunity to truly understand where this person is coming from, their values, and incorporate these values into our own arguments to stregthen the overall battle of ideas.

Do you agree? Yes or No…Only two options I guess!

Lake Tahoe is away somewhere to the south of us and I’ve always wanted to make a skiers tour of northern California, so I guess I may make it back to this neat little town someday, be it authentic or otherwise.

Meeting people is half the joy of the train I think (well, maybe a third of it… the creature comforts of legroom and the scenic lounge are worth an awful lot). I had dinner (a decent though overpriced affair, save for the company) with a couple from outside of Little Rock — whose daughter had gone to Vanderbilt as an undergrad in 1999, while I was still there, and who stayed for medical school — and a young woman originally from Alaska, who was on her way out to visit family in Omaha. A few seats behind mine I talked with a woman from Sacramento who recently lost her job and moved to Vermont on a promise of work, and while between jobs is taking her opportunity — much as myself — to sightsee and visit her family back in California.

I met a pastor’s wife from Golden, CO who was bringing a sizable group of teens and tweens to a youth conference on the other side of the mountains, and an elderly couple who told me they ride the train up from Denver and then back the next day, just for the view, every so often.

Most people on the trains have been nothing but friendly and the sort of casualness and openness of the environment make conversation happen organically. To purposefully and deliberately beat a dead horse, in every single way besides efficiency, the train is superior to air travel.

I hope I got a few good photos this morning of sunrise over the low hills in northern Nevada. Before long, the light revealed a pretty bleak desert landscape, miles of not much besides scrub brush and dirt between hills that not so very long ago drew so many people west during the gold rush. Some, Marco proves, continue to produce wealth for some and jobs for others, and some that had ceased being profitable long aog have apparently been reopened to take advantage of the surge in gold prices over the past couple of years. Still, it’s not a place I think I’d like to live.

There are little towns, or settlements anyway — some consisting of less than 5 structures and a single incongruous tree — along Interstate 80 (which we parallel most of the time), incontrovertible evidence of the variety of human experience and interest, that people would choose to live in such a place. Marco, who has spent most of his life in Nevada, found the depictions he saw of New York City on television shocking, the density and rapidity of life there, the avenues of midtown Manhattan filled with men and women in suits (the latter of which he laughingly told me was the sexiest thing on the nightly news), and the complete absence of children. I hadn’t thought of that before… a New York built from the images you can see on the news is an even stranger place than New York already is.

I’ve been typing now for long enough that we’ve passed out of Nevada and into California, into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, and soon to head over and through them. Suddenly there are trees again, mostly evergreens, and it makes me realize that rich or poor, I could never live in a place without trees. When I’m without them, I feel an anxiousness, a fear that should my world go completely bad, I might end up poor and in a place like that, with nothing to do, and little to hope for. In other words, I get depressed. Here, I just feel different, and wonder if it’s because it feels like home in at least some small way. I think, despite the fact that most modern families live in their own sort of diaspora, everyone takes the place they grew up along with them, and is comforted when they find themselves in similar surroundings.

As the sun falls lower behind the enclosing hills, it alternately casts long shadows and brightly illuminates the already ruddy cliffs, occasionally becoming visible as a burst of light over a low saddle or through a wind-etched hollow. When we finally leave the valley and depart the river, the sun is well below the horizon, and casts its goodbyes into a sunset that stretches in a grand arch from one side of the world to the other, which would be a god to rainbows, if rainbows had gods. The reds and flame oranges limn white and gray stratus clouds before fading into the blues and blacks of night behind us.

Soon enough it’s fully dark, and we’re in Utah. By the time the light returns, we’ll likely be all the way through the other side, having made the most of the flat and empty land by night.

Here the rocks are clay red or gray, the trees little more than bushes, and the valleys a bit more expansive than they have been. It’s a softer, less extreme feeling area, though I expect that in the dead of winter the dirt roads are impassable and the power and phone lines unreliable. So, maybe not so very soft after all.

Fraser looks like most ski towns I’ve seen, albeit a pretty big one.. Once a mining village where they pulled gold and other valuables out of the rocks, it still looks like a place with plenty of money, only now it’s made on the tops of the mountains rather than inside of them. I look forward to skiing here someday… there are ever so many places I’ve yet to try. My next major train trip will be a ski train, perhaps, and I’ll spend a few weeks poking along from slope to slope through these passes.

This really is gorgeous country — my kind of country, anyway — evergreens and brown grass and snow, hills that surround wide open, gently rolling plateaus, or long curving lakes, soft peaks broken occasionally by promontories of bare rock that hint at the mountains to come. In a little valley, surprisingly anachronistic, even up here, stands an old fashioned one room school house, peeling bright yellow paint beneath a white bell tower. Gusting wind raises up plumes of snow from the little hills and sends it curling through a stand of 4 or 5 foot tall pale reed-like bushes that terminate in a profusion of reds, oranges and rich browns.

In places here the tracks run along a sheer drop only inches away, and 150 feet below a starved and lazy stream trickles along its stony course. There are dozens of tunnels up here (42, the conductor will later tell us) to deal with places a train couldn’t climb or go around. The girls in the lounge car, middle schoolers I guess, attempt to hold their breath each time we enter one, while also trying to make each other laugh, and thereby lose the game. Like all good childhood diversions, they end with everyone laughing and no single winner.

Shortly we enter the longest tunnel of the line, 6.2 miles, passing beneath the Continental Divide, and are admonished not to change cars during the 10 minutes within in order to minimize introduction of the coal dust and diesel fume that permeates the tunnel all the time now despite efforts to clear it. It’s impossible to avoid some fume though, and I find my diesel headache coming on almost immediately…

The ventilation system clears the air quickly once we’re out, and my sick feeling recedes as rapidly as it came on, thankfully.

The snowfall strengthens as we get closer, confining the visible world further. Near by, we pass clusters of dilapidated, slant roofed structures, not much more than shanties, with small horses fenced in behind and beside. There’s still some empty space out here, if not much of it, and the muted colors are broken only by the occasional splash of blood red scrub brush. A cemetery fills the view on the right and it’s even more ghostly in the dim early morning and snow than it’d be in the middle of a clear night. Nearest the track are rows and rows of small, identical white markers with little American flags stuck into the ground next to them — a miniature echo at Arlington.

Denver itself comes out of nowhere, or, i guess, out of increasingly dense clusters of cattle yards and small factories until we’re rolling past the Rockies’ baseball stadium, then rolling backwards into the platform. The train empties a good deal, and while a large number of people get back on, not nearly as many, and no one at all sits in our now very quiet car. Early though it is, I hope I’ll get back the double seat I lost in Omaha to a whiny kid and his worn down mother last night.