30 days of biking

Not to be totally outdone—but indeed to be mostly outdone, like, 99% outdone, which still, is less than being 100% outdone—by Bobbylite (pronounced: BOB-ee-LEET or Bob Elite, a.k.a. Bobby and the Presidents, a.k.a. Bobby et al.) and his ongoing running streak that nears the half-year mark of consecutive days of him having run at least 1.2 miles each day (but usually many more than 1.2 miles, like, one day he ran 20 freakin' miles, which is more than one-and-a-half half-marathons, and he wasn't even training for a race—give me a freakin' break!), which I find especially remarkable of an achievement—which is why I'm remarking about it right now, because it's so remarkable—because I myself am too fragile, too prone to injury to ever have the remotest of remote possibilities of ever running that many days in row—indeed, my feet are so bruised from the LMI (Laura Matera Invitation, a.k.a. North Mountain Challenge, a.k.a. the cause of half a dozen West Valley Runners now hating Laura for making them run up North Mountain this past Sunday—) trail run that I haven't been able to walk, yet alone run, 1.2 miles yet this week (and that's cumulative for the whole week so far—I happen to be 1.2 miles short), which is pretty much par for the course for me—so instead I'm going to do my own streak—and Laura of the LMI who's a.k.a. Laurawesome to some and my girlfriend to me, tells me it's spelled streak and not steak, as in: Against Laura I have a two-game Ticket to Ride winning streak, not winning steak, which is fine cuz I'm not so big on eating beef unless we're talking an occasional hamburger or some sausage…—which also will happen to entail (1) posting photos on my blog and (2) participating without criticism in a massive online social trend (and by massive I mean more than 2,000 people are so far signed up to do it), and both of these two, paired entailings are pretty unusual for me separately on their own but with both happening at the same time I may as well be struck by lightning while sitting on some fusilli, but sometimes unusual things do happen, otherwise they would be impossible or never-to-happen and not unusual, and that's to say that I'm going to ride my bike everyday this coming April and photo-blog the results. Woo.

On the other hand

The government has a hand in everybody's business and another in every person's pocket. By limiting such governmental pickpocketing, we can limit its incursions on our freedom.

—an example of a reification fallacy

Mr. Skeptic: Why don't governments have hands?

Mr. Normal: Duh. Can't you see they don't have hands? Look around. You won't see an actual hand attached to any government.

Mr. Skeptic: Sure, but I'm told most people have hands, and yet I've seen and will see only a small percentage of the fourteen billion or so hands in the world. So I'm unsure that saying I won't see it is a sufficient reason for my believing it doesn't exist.

Mr. Normal: Oh, come on, stop being pedantic. The difference between the hand of government and the hands of a person you've never met is that you could see the person's hands, presumably by meeting that person and asking them to take their gloves off if they're wearing them. Whereas, governments don't have a physical body and therefore don't have a physical hand.

Mr. Skeptic: Sure, I agree governments don't have physical hands, but that doesn't answer my question as to why they don't have hands. Maybe it's more evocative to ask the compliment question: Why do people have hands?

Mr. Normal: Because they're born with them, obviously.

Mr. Skeptic: OK. What about people who lost a hand and now have a prosthetic hook instead? Do hooks count as hands?

Mr. Normal: No, hooks are definitely not hands.

Mr. Skeptic: So some people are missing a hand?

Mr. Normal: Yes, some people are missing a hand.

Mr. Skeptic: What about people who lost their hand and have successfully undergone hand transplant surgery? Do transplanted hands count as hands?

Mr. Normal: Yes, of course, just as transplanted livers count as livers.

Mr. Skeptic: OK, then what about Luke Skywalker? Is his prosthetic hand a real hand? Or is it just a hand-like thing? I mean, it's a lot more hand-like than a hook, but it's a lot less hand-like than a transplanted hand, too.

Mr. Normal: I think Luke Skywalker's prosthetic hand counts as a real hand.

Mr. Skeptic: So if Luke Skywalker and I met, and we greeted in the custom of modern Western Civilization, you would say we were shaking hands, not shaking one hand and one hand-like prosthetic?

Mr. Normal: Well, you could say either, though it would be more polite and to the point to call it shaking hands.

Mr. Skeptic: So exactly how hand-like must a prosthetic be before it counts as a real hand? How unlike a hand may it be before it stops counting as a real hand?

Mr. Normal: Look, stop trying to make this into a problem of demarcation by forcing me to arbitrate the definition of the word hand. People have hands; governments don't. In order for a person to have a hand, their arm must terminate in a sufficiently hand-like thing. Presumably that means the thing has a palm and some fingers and is able to do hand-like actions with it, like grasping objects and shaking hands with other people. Maybe the exact definition of hand wiggles a bit, but I'm not going to make this a matter of arbitrary definition.

Mr. Skeptic: Hmm… I'm unclear about these other words you use: arm, palm, and finger. Can you define them for me?

Mr. Normal: You're missing the point. Hands must be tangible, physical things. They must attach to an arm and be sufficiently hand-like. That's it. It's not rocket science.

Mr. Skeptic: Sure, but the hand of government is hand-like insofar as it's used to—or so I'm told—pickpocket people. Why doesn't that count? And as for tangible physicality, one hand of the U.S. government may be presumed to be the IRS, which is a real, physical thing—or at least, they've got a lot of brick-and-mortar locations and they're made up, among other things, of real hands, which you yourself admit are real. As for the arm of government, we could say that's the Department of the Treasury. So it seems the hand of government meets your criteria for being a real hand.

Mr. Normal: What is wrong with you? Only by loose metaphor does a government have hands and arms. Whereas people have real, non-metaphorical hands.

Mr. Skeptic: Except for Luke Skywalker, of course.

Mr. Normal: No, we agreed that Luke Skywalker's prosthetic is sufficiently hand-like. There's no loose metaphor going on there.

Mr. Skeptic: But what makes Luke Skywalker's prosthetic sufficiently hand-like and the hand of government insufficiently hand-like?

Mr. Normal: Look, Luke Skywalker's prosthetic is like a real, natural human hand. It looks like a human hand, and it functions like a human hand. The metaphor that allows us to say the prosthetic is indeed a hand is a tight metaphor. You wouldn't know Luke's hand was a prosthetic without seeing the original hand lightsabered off or the prosthetic being attached. Whereas, the hand of government is a loose metaphor. That hand functions as a hand only symbolically.

Mr. Skeptic: So it's the tightness of the metaphor that counts?

Mr. Normal: Yes, exactly.

Mr. Skeptic: So then how tight does the metaphor need to be? And how do we measure the tightness of a metaphor?

Mr. Normal: Gaah! You measure it by seeing how similar the presumed hand is to an actual, real human hand.

Mr. Skeptic: And by real human hand you mean the kind of hand a person is born with.

Mr. Normal: Exactly. Finally, you're getting it.

Mr. Skeptic: No, I'm not getting it. It sounds like you're saying people have hands and governments don't have hands because people are born with hands and governments aren't born with hands. That's just shifting one arbitrary definition to another, from the hands we have now to the hands we were born with. It's begging the question. Why then is it appropriate to call the arm termini that humans are born with hands but not the arm termini that governments are born with?

Mr. Normal: Look, it is arbitrary. The word hand is just a label we apply to something, and it's something that (most) humans are born with—two of them, in fact—and that governments don't have. The end. We could have picked different words to use, like say humans are born not with hands but instead with flands, and tax-collecting agencies in government are hands. And instead of pickpocketing, what thieves do is called blickblocketing and pickpocketing is what governments do when they collect taxes. What's the big deal what we call these things? The important thing is that people, like you and me, have these things that by convention we call hands. And some people pickpocket with their hands. But despite whatever differences there are in the size, shape, color, and ability of people's hands, those hands are all very similar, and it makes sense to lump them into a single category, which we call hands. Any hand of government will be sufficiently dissimilar to human hands to warrant not being in that category. The end.

Mr. Skeptic: But who decides how similar two things need to be in order for them to count as being in a group, and how dissimilar two things need to be for them not to count as being in a group?

Mr. Normal: Convention decides it.

The Wason Test

Last week Grubby again won the prize of recognition for having genius puzzle-solving skills—this time without giving any of the other readers a chance to buzz-in first. Rachel claimed to have gotten the right answer too, and Bobby et al. winked-winked a hint that the puzzle wasn't as hard as the one from two weeks ago. Though we're not dealing with scientifically suitable sample sizes here, what we have is confirmation of the Wason Test.

Many of you may have noticed that those two puzzles were, in the abstract, the same. Here's the mapping:

1st puzzle	2nd puzzle
if one side of a card shows a vowel	if a person is drinking alcohol
then the card's other side must show an even number	then the person must be 21 or older
card showing E	person with face-down ID drinking beer
card showing K	person with face-down ID drinking water
card showing 4	21-or-older person drinking unknown drink
card showing 7	underage person drinking unknown drink

But also as many of you may have noticed, the first puzzle feels harder than the second. But it doesn't just feel harder: it is harder, being as how most people get it wrong. I got it wrong. My excuse is I rushed my answer and failed to think it through, but that's the point: the first puzzle is deceptively hard. You've got to slow down and think it through or else you're likely to make a mistake. Whereas, with the second puzzle it's easy to figure out you need only check the people who may be underage and drinking alcohol. There's nothing deceptive about it.

The curiousness of the Wason Test is why one puzzle is hard while the other is easy. If both puzzles are identical mathematically then it seems they ought to have identical difficulty. But these puzzles are night-and-day different in difficulty. What causes the discrepancy?

Perhaps that question is the hardest puzzle of all.

Has anyone seen my phone?

Lost: cheap, stupid Sanyo phone. Last seen Friday, probably while at work but maybe while at home. Hasn't responded to calls since becoming lost. Disappearance unusual and baffling.

No reward for capture—owner now contemplating whether a phone is really all that necessary.

Another logic puzzle

Three readers responded with answers to last week's puzzle, with only the last response—coming from either my dad or someone else going by the name Grubby—getting it right. The answer was: you needed to flip only the E and 7 cards.

Today we have another puzzle, again courtesy of Keith Devlin and his book The Math Gene. For this puzzle the same rule goes: the first one to post the correct answer gets recognition as a genius puzzle-solver.

So here it is:

You are in charge of a party where there are young people. Some are drinking alcohol, others soft drinks. Some are old enough to drink alcohol legally, others are under age. You, as the organizer, are responsible for ensuring that the drinking laws are not broken, so you have asked each person to put his or her photo ID on the table. At one table are four young people who may or may not be over the legal drinking age. One person has a beer, another a Coke, but their IDs happen to be face down so you can't see their ages. You can, however, see the IDs of the other two people. One is under the drinking age, the other is above it. Unfortunately, you are not sure if they are drinking 7-Up or vodka and tonic. Which IDs and/or drinks do you need to check to make sure that no one is breaking the law?

Don't be bashful, y'all.

Reification

In my parents' house there's an old Rand McNally book of state road maps published in the 1980s. A few years ago, after having moved to Phoenix and while visiting my parents, I found the book lying on the coffee table, and I opened it to the map of Arizona. The map had an inset for the Phoenix metropolitan area, and the inset showed only three freeways traversing the city: the I-10, I-17, and U-60. I laughed. In the time since that map's publication, the Phoenix area has added five freeways.

If you were to use that old map to navigate Phoenix today, you would see firsthand the general rule that the model doesn't always match reality. In the last few decades, in addition to adding new freeways, Phoenix has added and widened thousands of miles of roads. Some of those roads were unpaved back then but have since become major thoroughfares wider than a football field. Other roads have been decommissioned, closed off, or redirected. Whole new extensions to the city now exist where the map shows a blank emptiness. In short: a real road changes though a printed map does not.

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Anyone who has used an old road map knows this. The map is an example of a leaky abstraction—a type of problem whereby a simplifying model fails to fully capture the complexity of the real thing. A map of Phoenix is an abstraction that's simpler than Phoenix itself. That's why the map is useful. It's easier to plan a route by seeing Phoenix's roads at a glance using a map than it is to try to see them at a glance in actuality—even from a bird's eye view atop Camelback Mountain.

But the price of an abstraction's simplicity is inaccuracy, such as when a map becomes outdated and possibly worse than useless. Simplicity succeeds by leaving out details, and it fails by leaving out details.

Joel Spolsky coined the term leaky abstraction when he lamented this pattern of failure as it happens in software development. In the software world, leaky abstractions abound. But they also abound outside the software world, too, and it's a shame Spolsky's audience didn't extend beyond computer geeks because the rest of the world is missing out on a great term for a common problem.

Though, there is almost another term. A leaky abstraction is an informal analog to what in formal logic is called a reification fallacy. That's the logician's name for the error of mistaking a model for the real thing. But the spell checker in the text editor I'm using to write this blog doesn't recognize either the words reification or reify, and neither does Firefox's spell checker recognize those words, so I presume that logicians' reach isn't much greater than Spolsky's.

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In its most literal interpretation, an example of a reification fallacy is trying to drive your real car on a real printed road map, treating the map as though it is the actual roads. But this is hard to do because those solid red, black, or gray lines on a map denoting roads are tricky narrow—and never mind trying to drive on dashed lines.

A fuzzier and more likely example of a reification fallacy is conflating the information on an old, out-of-date road map with the state of the roads today. This would be the case if I used my parents' map of 1980s Phoenix to find my way around this city in 2012.

Reification fallacies, a.k.a. leaky abstractions, abound in the real world. You can't read a newspaper or news magazine that doesn't sneak in at least a dozen of them—sometimes per page. As an example, keep in mind that nearly anytime you read or hear the phrase the economy in today's parlance, you're being entreated to slip into fallacious thinking. The phrase the economy is shorthand that refers to a complex, worldwide system of innumerable material exchanges involving billions of people that defies the understanding of any one person. But more often we hear simplifying expressions like, The economy is recovering, and, So-and-so's tax policy won't fix the economy. These reifications treat that complex system of exchanges as a simple, singular entity that—even worse—is to be judged on a linear scale ranging from fixed to broken. This is as dangerous as trying to drive your car on a printed road map. The reality is that some people do well for themselves in recessions and some people do poorly during economic expansions, and the notion of an economy is a loose generalization. We'd be more honest if we substituted the status quo for the economy in most cases.

There are countless other reifications in common speech—equality, justice, rights, freedom, good, evil, power, culture, the people, the government, the corporations, the environment, beauty, the relationship, happiness, them, us, and so on. All are ways of simplifying the real world to allow us to talk about things that would otherwise be too complex to talk about. All are sly ways of simplifying away real details. Reification is double-edged.

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So much for explaining what a reification fallacy is. Next week I aim to explain what this has to do with the problem of personal identity.

A logic puzzle

Recently I finished reading The Math Gene, by Keith Devlin. Here's a logic puzzle from the book.

Enjoy.

Imagine I lay four cards on a table in front of you. I tell you each card has a number on one side and a letter on the other. On the uppermost faces of the cards you see the four symbols:

E  K  4  7

I then tell you that the cards are printed according to the rule: If a card has a vowel on one side, it has an even number on the other side.

Your task: which cards do you have to turn over to be sure that all four cards satisfy this rule?

First one to post the correct answer gets a prize recognition.

The demarcation of personal identity

Any way you define what a person is is fraught with problems. These are problems of demarcation, of deciding where a person's identity begins and where that identity ends. In my three previous Monday posts, I described three of these problems: resurrection, duplication, and replacement. Those are abstract, science-fiction-like problems we don't encounter in the real world, but some problems with personal identity are practical. If you want a reminder of one of these real-world problems, try loudly proclaiming in a large group of mixed company your opinions about abortion. Even if that group has only a few outspoken people who disagree with you, you'll soon remember which of your beloved assumptions regarding personal identity are not shared by everyone. In particular: when does life begin?

If you've ever debated the ethics of abortion, you've run into this question. And you discovered—hopefully quickly and without losing friends—that no matter what you believe about when life begins, there's no fact that irrefutably backs up what you're saying. There are some facts, and they each give some credit to various claims, but there's no ace of spades that trumps all other facts. Ultimately the question "When does life begin?" is decided by the arbitrariness of choosing a definition—Life begins at X. Given such a definition, the best you can do is to be consistent with how you apply that definition to your other beliefs.

There's also the practical problem of when life ends. Just as with determining when life begins, there's no irrefutable fact that forces one answer to this question. And if you doubt the importance of determining life's terminus regarding real-world scenarios, try returning to that large group of mixed company and loudly proclaiming your opinions about euthanasia.

So personal identity suffers from problems of demarcation, of identifying an exact boundary around what at first glance seems obvious. We're all in agreement that healthy thirty-year-olds are alive—the middle cases are easy. It's the border cases that give way to differing beliefs and attitudes and fail to satisfy all our intuitions.

These problems of demarcation are symptoms of a greater problem. They suggest that personal identity is a leaky abstraction.

Do I hate bike lanes?

Sometimes I'm asked if I hate bike lanes. This question may surprise some people, for not everyone is aware that bike lanes are controversial amongst urban cyclists. But indeed some cyclists hate bike lanes, and sometimes I'm asked if I'm one of them.

My answer is no, I don't hate bike lanes, but I don't always favor them either. Sometimes bike lanes help. And sometimes bike lanes are a cheap way for a city to claim credit for bike friendliness while failing to address actual bike safety.

A common objection to bike lanes is that they take away the cyclist's right—whether legally in fact or as perceived by motorists—to ride in the middle of the lane, with traffic, so as to maintain visibility and physically prevent unsafe passes from behind by motorists. For example, there's an unsafe moment to pass a cyclist from behind when approaching an intersection that isn't made safe by having a white strip of paint separating the cyclist from the passing vehicle. This moment occurs when the cyclist, who is on the far right side of the road, gets passed on the left while an oncoming car waits to turn left across the intersection. During this moment the oncoming motorist can't see the cyclist because the passing car occludes the cyclist from view. The oncoming motorist, unaware of the cyclist, waits only for the passing car to clear the intersection before beginning their turn—just as the cyclist enters the intersection. Right-of-way is a fiction here; the motorist must see the cyclist and react quickly to avoid a collision. Usually the motorist does so, but it's a scary moment for any cyclist. Bike lanes cause more of these scary moments by preventing the cyclist from physically blocking the would-be passing car and thus remaining visible to the oncoming motorist waiting to make a left turn.

But opposing bike lanes because of this one objection is extreme. This is a fault with bike lane design, not bike lanes in general. Indeed, here in Phoenix most bike lanes avoid this problem. Many of the half-mile roads are roomy two-lane roads with a bike lane on each side that, near intersections, become four lanes and lose the bike lanes. This is a good compromise between motorists and cyclists: the right lane is a de facto turn lane that keeps fast-moving traffic in the left lane and allows the cyclist the option of taking the whole of the right lane to stay visible to oncoming traffic.

My chief complaint against bike lanes is something different: they add more paint to the road. Bike-route roads need less paint, not more. Painted lines have a way of making motorists—and cyclists—feel at ease and encouraging them to feel entitled to their strip of pavement—and to pay more attention to the paint in front of them than to the cars, bikes, and pedestrians around them. My observation is that motorists drive faster and more aggressively when a road is divided into lanes than when a road requires each driver to negotiate and share with others. This is why, given the choice between biking on a road with a center stripe and bike lanes and biking on a road with no center stripe and no bike lanes—all else held equal—I will choose the road without bike lanes.

So it's not so much as I don't like bike lanes as I don't like car lanes.