Isegoria

Canned Truth explains how the pineapple used to be “the ultimate in inaccessible luxury fruit”:

Meanwhile, the pineapple itself began to be used as an ornament at the dinner table. Especially prized were English pineapples, grown with absurd labours in a hothouse “pinery”, an accessory to a country estate which, says Beauman, “every self-respecting aristocrat” aspired to possess. Beauman calculates that once all the costs of a pinery are considered — a stock of costly pineapple plants and pots and a glasshouse to contain them, a 40-foot stove to heat the glasshouse, a garden boy to tend the stove full-time — the expense of a single English-raised pineapple in the second half of the eighteenth century was about ?80, or ?5,000 in today’s money. No wonder a single pineapple was often “made to last for some time, passed on from party to party until it began to rot so much it smelt out the whole household”. By Victorian times, one horticulturalist claimed he had heard of a “single pineapple going the round of west-end dinner parties for some weeks”. Beauman does not mention a similar assertion which I have come across elsewhere, that poorer middle-class families would even take to hiring pineapples for occasions when they wished to entertain, in order to appear grand, praying that no one would actually attempt to cut a slice.

I’ve seen some crazy parkour in my time, but this Russian Parkour video is pretty wild.

(It starts out slow, but it definitely gets going.)

Of OpenOffice, Andrew Brown asks, If this suite’s a success, why is it so buggy?:

Of all the myths that have grown up around open source software, perhaps the most pervasive is Eric Raymond’s aphorism that ‘Many eyes make bugs shallow’, suggesting that if lots of people can view a program’s source code, they will find and fix its errors more quickly than commercial products whose code is jealously guarded. The only problem with this is that it’s not true — certainly not in one of the flagship projects of open source, OpenOffice.

[...]

The myth of open source rests on two improbable assumptions. The first is that a significant proportion of users can fix bugs. That is true at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the concept of open source was first formalised in the 1980s by Richard Stallman and others, and it is true in some of the geekier corners of the internet. But on programs intended for use by the non-programming public, it’s a very different story.

This is important because of the second crucial false assumption: that even if not all users can fix a bug, they can help find them. They can’t. Most users just think: “The computer isn’t doing what I want.”

[...]

More than 50,000 bugs have been reported. And how many have been fixed by open source’s uniquely efficient processes? According to the (public) bugs database, at last count, there were more than 6,000 unfixed bugs, and more than 5,000 feature requests. While the number of bugs discovered seems to rise with the number of users, the number of fixes doesn’t, and the number of fixers certainly doesn’t. Only about 500 people have signed the legalese that would enable them to submit code to the project; since you need to do this even to make changes to the website, that will translate to far fewer than 500 volunteers submitting real code. A reasonable guess would be 50, or even five.

NPR interviews Stephen Colbert about his Colbert Report. Some background on the man:

Colbert began his comedy career with Second City in Chicago. He helped create the HBO sketch comedy series Exit 57 — which won five Cable ACE awards in 1995 — and he also wrote and performed sketches on The Dana Carvey Show. Colbert is also the voice of Ace on the Saturday Night Live animated skits Ace & Gary: The Ambiguously Gay Duo.

But you already knew all that, because you get it; you’re one of the heroes who watch the show.

Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick’s speech to the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations emphasized that “we need to urge China to become a responsible stakeholder” in the international system. Unfortunately, there’s no word in Chinese for stakeholder — or many other words used in negotiations, as Untranslatable Word In U.S. Aide’s Speech Leaves Beijing Baffled explains:

The dustup in China over ‘stakeholder’ recalls the consternation that followed President Bill Clinton’s proposal of a U.S. ‘engagement’ with China amid a rough patch between the two sides in 1995. Chinese who spoke English were befuddled by a word that could mean ‘both an exchange of fire and a marriage proposal,’ notes Yan Xuetong, director of the Institute of International Studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

The phrase ‘win-win’ was an enigma to many Chinese officials before negotiations in 1999 over the country’s accession to the World Trade Organization. Now the phrase, whose Chinese translation is closer to ‘twin win,’ is ubiquitous in official Chinese speeches.

Then came talk in Washington over the past couple of years of ‘hedging’ against the risks of China’s economic and military rise. ‘That one wasn’t too tough,’ says Bonnie Glaser, a China scholar who often advises the Pentagon and State Department. ‘China is a great gambling culture, so the Chinese gave it four characters that mean ‘betting on both sides.’

China’s choice of translation is sometimes tailor-made for political aims. In a 1982 joint communiqu?, one of three key documents that form the foundation of modern U.S.-China relations, the U.S. ‘acknowledged the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China’ — at least according to the agreed-upon English version. But official Chinese translations use a word whose meaning is more like ‘recognized,’ which carries greater weight in diplomatic parlance.

In 2001, a U.S. spy plane collided in midair with a Chinese fighter, sending the Chinese pilot to his death and forcing the Americans to make an emergency landing. After tense negotiations, the U.S. issued a statement in English expressing ‘regret’ over the incident. Both sides agreed China could issue its own translation. The statement in Chinese used a word that means ‘apology.’

A Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs official says there is no official Chinese translation yet of ‘stakeholder.’

‘Neutral’ Rate Can’t Be Known With Certainty, Greenspan Says — and the yield curve isn’t much use either:

Mr. Greenspan reiterated his previously stated doubts about the predictive power of the yield curve. ‘Although the slope of the yield curve remains an important financial indicator, it needs to be interpreted carefully,’ Mr. Greenspan told Mr. Saxton. ‘In particular, a flattening of the yield curve is not a foolproof indicator of future economic weakness. For example, the yield curve narrowed sharply over the period 1992-1994 even as the economy was entering the longest sustained expansion of the postwar period,’ he said.

Many factors can affect the slope of the yield curve and these factors ‘do not all have the same implications for future output growth,’ Mr. Greenspan said. ‘In judging the indicator value of any particular change in the slope of the yield curve, it is critical to understand the underlying forces that may be affecting the yield curve at that moment,’ he said.

As the period between 1992 to 1994 illustrates, simply relying on an average statistical relationship estimated over a very long sample ‘can be quite misleading,’ Mr. Greenspan said.

Tim Worstall uses the government provision of potable water to demonstrate The Greater of Two Evils — and to explain conservative ideology:

One of the main problems rightwing nutjobs like myself face is that we’ve never quite managed to get across a fundamental point about our mistrust of government action. People assume we just have a naïve faith that markets left untouched will magically make the world a better place in each and every case. People assume that our distaste for the jumped up little vote-stealers so eager to spend our money is some sort of mental aberration. Such is probably true of me, but there are quite a few thoughtful free market voices out there. Even among those as rabid as myself, none believes there ever has been or ever will be a totally free market. Markets have always been limited by laws, regulations and even by certain societal standards. Indeed, we would insist that markets and rules go hand in hand. Otherwise, without general agreement as to what property is and general rules for its ownership and transference, how could a market even exist?
[...]
When you describe a problem, I’m all ears. When you tell me how the world can be made a better place, I’m fascinated. And when you tell me about your desire for such improvements, I am right with you. But I do insist that your program be rather more developed than: “we’ll let the Government do it.” Because as we have seen time and again, such approaches can prove to be far worse than the one offered by the money-grubbing capitalists.

Alright. So I’ll admit to being rabidly ideological, which brings me to that fundamental point I’ve always wanted to get across. With respect to the provision of any good or service: whether or not you agree with my standard “public provision is almost always a worse solution,” surely you can accept “public provision is sometimes a worse solution.” If you can’t accept that, you’re not living in the real world.