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Week of December 24, 2001
[Note: Some now-dead links have been removed from archived items.]

SCRATCHY LABELS: Today's Wall Street Journal brings a classic piece (online via MSNBC.com) examining why garment labels are so incredibly scratchy. I thought it was just those of us with superhypersensitive skin—my father, my nephew, and me (before Thanksgiving, I thought it was just me)—who go crazy from the tags stabbing at our necks. But apparently people everywhere are complaining. It's one of those unfortunate situations where nobody makes a purchase decision based on label scratchiness, so manufacturers just use the cheapest technology available. That process creates vicious label edges. Government label regulations are making the situation worse (though even I won't say they're causing it).

One thing I wondered about Barbara Carton's reporting: Haven't any of her sources heard of a seam ripper? You don't have to destroy your sweaters by digging into them with scissors. You just need care and a seam ripper. And a good memory for laundry instructions. [Posted 12/27.]

INDEFENSIBLE LANGUAGE: My friend Michael Lorton writes in about Alan Dershowitz's faux pas, noting that lingua franca is not Latin, as I supposed. It is, says Michael, "medieval Italian, but to defend the often indefensible Dershowitz, in Latin it would mean something like "The French Language"—which might mislead someone with a stronger grasp of Latin than of English to think that a magazine named "Lingua Franca" was about, and possibly in, French." I guess a five-second Google search, much less a trip to the newsstand, is too much to expect from a busy lawyer-professor. (Here's the dictionary definition of the term. But the magazine's website supplies the information relevant to Dershowitz's tiff.) [Posted 12/27.]

LIGHT PROGRESS: Thanks to the many readers who sent notes about trends in Christmas lighting. The answers were all useful and interesting, and several readers sent cyberclippings from their local newspapers, which I greatly appreciate.

Many people noted the post-9/11 trend, toward both more patriotic displays and more displays in general. "The whole subdivision where I live is united in a blur of shimmering light, encouraging folks to drive around just to see it all. Clearly, people want to end this dark and difficult year in a spirit of celebration and community," wrote my friend Britton Manasco in an article he sent from the technology newsletter Velocity.

Shawn Levasseur, writing from Rockland, Maine, noted that "This trend is beginning to invade other holidays as well. A few months ago I noticed a house that was fully covered with what appeared to be, at first glance, Christmas lights. The lights were actually orange, and other items arranged to show that it was a Halloween display, more appropriate for the October month."

My favorite reply, because it contained so much concrete information and hit some of my perennial themes, came from David VanderMolen, who wrote:

There is definitely a trend towards more numerous and more elaborate Christmas light displays. I believe it is a direct function of the decorating materials being MUCH cheaper and much more varied than they were even five years ago. It is easy and inexpensive to put up a tasteful display, and not much more cost of effort to try and humiliate your weak-willed neighbors.

For example, as a kid in the mid 80's, my parents gave me $10 with which to decorate the house with lights. This would buy two 35-light strings at KMart for $3.99 each. Each string was about 20 feet. One year I was able to buy some 35 light strings on clearance for $2.00 each, but they were only about 15 feet long and the quality was poor. After a few years, we had the most elaborate house in the neighborhood, with 350 individual miniature lightbulbs (when they all worked).

Now, a 47 foot 100 light set costs $2.44 at Wal-Mart. The now ubiquitous "icicle" lights put 350 lights in 17 feet for $6.74. There are chasing lights, "garland" lights that put 350 lights in the same length as the 100 light set, tube lights, spotlights, projection lights, the old-fashioned C7 and C9 ceramic bulbs. You can get plastic Santa, outlined reindeer, or anything else you want. I had a wooden star that I had made and wrapped with two 35-light strings that people commented on for years. There are great, cheap accessories for hanging the lights: gutter clips, ground stakes, shingle clips, suction cups, et cetera. I wasn't allowed to pound nails through the siding or shingles, so I had to try and wedge the lights into the siding or wrap it around nails wedged under the shingles. Doing this in typical wet and cold December weather doesn't appeal to many adults. The quality of the lights was abyssmal as well. They might last for three seasons, but probably not, and they didn't do well in the rain.

The stuff now is so well made that you can put it up in November before it gets too cold or wet, and leave it up until a January thaw, and it doesn't all fall apart. Even if it did fall apart, it's so cheap you can look at it as a disposable product for $30.

This is the sort of price drop—and, even more important, quality improvement—that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has a hard time properly accounting for in its inflation figures. They're trying to do better, as Jolie Solomon reported in the NYT on Sunday, but it's a nearly impossible task. (For another example of this difficulty, see my NYT column on tracking the growth in product variety.) It seems likely that most Americans' standard of living has increased a lot more in the past 20 years than the official statistics indicate.

BOO TO THE LIGHTS: Proving you can't please everyone, reader Evan McElravy sent the following:

I can't really say if lighting displays have gotten any more elaborate recently since around here—northwestern Pennsylvania—they have always been pretty over-the-top. There have been a few innovations, perhaps - like the icicles about four years ago - but the total effect is about the same. This year, there have been more red, white, and blue displays around than before, which clash a bit with the traditional red and green. Nice effect though. There are several houses around here--I wish I had a digital camera, words won't do them justice--that really do it up, with armies of plywood cut outs of Christmas characters, robots, sound, etc. One house near my grandmother's home is particularly notorious and was actually featured in the newspaper last year (I saved the article for a while and then threw it out). Apparently, last year they had to have a second electrical line brought to their mobile home to support their display.

There are—but of course—snobbish curmudgeons even around here. Here is a letter from Monday, the 17th in our local Warren Times Observer (p. A-4), that you might find interesting (he deals with a few ideas, such as women in makeup, that you have written on before I believe):

Editor:

The town continues to travel the course of trendline trash; architecture once built as a picturesque community is now lost with the cobbling together of materials which don't match, colors which don't blend, lines that don't belong, size not proportionate to lot and landscape, property not kept,...it does on.

Now with the holiday season setting in, what is already destroyed in appearance is made even worse with lack of decorum in "decorating." Ninety percent of outdoor lighting should be eliminated, starting with 100 percent of icicles; that alone would take it down at least 65 percent!

Otherwise, what appears is clutter, like a woman with too much make-up — a French whore: pushy, cheeky, ribald (vulgar), tasteless and tacky. What is missing is elegance in simplicity.

The old saying is, "If you can't do it right, then don't do it at all." Think how much improved this burgh [sic] would be if those people would just quit building, but start removing!

Sincerely,
John L. Erickson
Residential Builder

(Keep in mind that Warren is a grimy, ugly industrial town with a few incredibly charming Victorian remnants, like 100s of other American towns. Nothing even remotely pretentious here.)

[Posted 12/26.]

NOW WE ARE 1: Today marks the first anniversary of The Scene. You can see the first week's postings here. Having skipped the election meshugaas, except as a spectator, I thought I was in for a calm year of commentary, focusing mostly on themes from TFAIE. Thanks for your support. [Posted 12/26.]

KASS WATCH: Nicholas Wade of the NYT has an interesting report on a conference in which "biologists tried to explore how the study of genomes might develop over the next 20 years and what tools might be needed." Among the conference's discussions, Wade reports:

Dr. Richard Lifton of Yale predicted that in 20 years researchers would be "able to identify the genes and pathways predisposing to every human disease." A panel of biologists led by Dr. Michael Snyder, also of Yale, said that in two decades they would like to know the effects on the organism of the smallest possible change in the genetic programming, the switch of a single unit of DNA.

Other problems the panel said it would like to see solved included those of how a cell is built, how an organism develops from an egg, how organisms interact with one another, and the biological basis of intelligence and cognition.

Such advances would be speeded by cheaper ways of decoding the human genome. The cost of preparing the draft human genome has been about $300 million. What if in 20 years new technology and economies of scale could bring the cost down to $1,000 per genome, making it feasible to sequence an individual's genome for medical or research purposes? The $1,000 human genome "simultaneously solves and creates all problems associated with human genetic testing," said Dr. David Page of the Whitehead Institute, who led a panel on cheaper genomics.

With such easy access to genomic data, it would be possible to link diseases with particular genetic patterns, and use the information to forecast a person's health from his or her genome sequence, Dr. Page said.

Of course, no such hopeful and serious discussions can take place without the requisite vaguely worded warnings from Leon Kass, who since he became a public official sometimes seems to have lost his ability to say what he means. Wade reports Kass's comments as part of a panel of ethicists. (The report does not mention who the other participants were or what they said):

One of the leaders of the ethicists' panel, Dr. Leon R. Kass of the University of Chicago, told the biologists, "There are other goals and goods beyond gaining knowledge and promoting health, important as they are."

Dr. Kass, who is chairman of President Bush's new Council on Bioethics, said some larger questions about the human genome project might have been inadequately addressed up to now, including "the meaning of genomic knowledge for human self understanding and the understanding of families, genealogy and race."

The pursuit of knowledge is a great good, "but there are other goods, and there is often a price for pursuing goods in a monomaniacal way," Dr. Kass said.

What's interesting about Kass's vague platitudes is that they aren't actually as vague or platitudinous as they first appear. He is not voicing opposition merely to certain applications of scientific knowledge, say, to extend life too long or permit "unnatural" reproduction. He's certainly not merely opposing particular research techniques, like embroyonic stem cell research or therapeutic cloning, which disturb some critics on humanitarian, usually religious, grounds.

No, Leon Kass is opposing knowledge itself. Knowing the truth about human biology, he is saying, is something to be avoided. Facts that could upset the way we understand ourselves are facts that should stay unknown. Ignorance is good.

As I've said before, Kass is a pre-Enlightenment figure. His argument is not with Michael West or James Watson. It is with Vesalius and Bacon. The president could not have chosen a less appropriate adviser. [Posted 12/25.]

KASS P.S.: Kass's fear of facts demonstrates something neither his critics nor his supporters want to acknowledge: There is nothing religious about his arguments, at least not in a traditionalsense. Although they may declare certain uses off limits, religious believers do not generally fear the revelation of facts about God's creation. [Posted 12/25.]

OOPS: If not for Steve, who called it to my attention, I might have missed the best part of Sunday's NYT Book Review—the letter from Alan Dershowitz, complaining about a recent review of his book (emphasis added):

To the Editor:

If the Book Review had selected a young lawyer rather than a middle-aged former editor of a French magazine to review "Letters to a Young Lawyer" (Dec. 9), perhaps he might have shared the enthusiasm many young lawyers have been expressing about my book. Alexander Star reviews my career, of which he apparently disapproves, rather than my book, which was not written for him.

Let me just add a word of advice for young lawyers: decide for yourselves whether my book is helpful.

Alan Dershowitz
Cambridge, Mass.

Alexander Star replies:

My discussion of "Letters to a Young Lawyer" focused almost entirely on Alan Dershowitz's short book and not his long career. As for my own career, I would like to assure Dershowitz that the magazine I used to edit, Lingua Franca, was written in English (and counted many law professors and lawyers among its loyal readers).

Besides, "lingua franca" was Latin last time I checked. [Posted 12/25.]

BULK COPIES: Readers who would be interested in purchasing 10 or more copies of The Future and Its Enemies in hardcover, at a substantial discount, please email me by January 7. [Posted 12/24.]

SUVS AND PLANES: Reader Jean Pierre LeBlanc adds a pilot's view to the SUV debate:

I read with interest the article on the behaviour of SUV drivers. While I'm not a fan of big government, perhaps the motor vehicle wonks should take a look at how it's done for those of us who do our driving away from the ground:

1. First licence restricts us to single-engine light aircraft in daylight.

2. 15 hours training to fly at night.

3. 2 hour check flight whenever we fly a make & model we've never flown before.

4. Extra training for heavier aircraft.

5. Extra training for faster aircraft.

6. Extra training for high-powered aircraft.

7. Full check flight if one has gone six months (three months in the US) without flying.

The point is that nobody would consider taking a pilot whose experience is confined to two-seaters and handing him the keys to a 747, yet we think nothing of letting a guy who learned to drive in a Geo take an SUV without instruction. I wouldn't advocate forced training for every vehicle change, but they could use more smarts in the weight classes. Taking some instruction in the bigger stuff just makes good sense. We could even bypass the bureaucracy in doing so—there is nothing to stop individuals from going for such training on their own, so if the insurers began to recognise the value of such training in the form of premium discounts the problem would solve itself. This is certainly true in the aviation world; most operators exceed federal requirements because the real standards are set by the insurance companies.

[Posted 12/24.]