Airs – Ian Lance Taylor

There is no chance that Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare.

That said, I found the movie Anonymous to be reasonably watchable, although I thought many of Vanessa Redgrave’s scenes as the older Queen Elizabeth were ridiculous. But since the movie claims (perhaps as a joke) to be seriously advocating the position that Oxford wrote the plays, I was surprised that they did such a poor job of supporting the theory.

Oxford was shown as being tutored at length on topics other than poetry. He traveled abroad, he intrigued at court. When would he have had time to write the plays and the sonnets? The movie essentially presents Oxford as being mysterious gifted by the ability to write; he speaks of continual voices in his head. That could happen to anybody, and perhaps describes the real Shakespeare–if anybody could have written Shakespeare’s plays, then why not Shakespeare himself?

Oxford is shown as using the plays to support his court intrigues. Is it possible to imagine Shakespeare, with his clear vision of humanity, thinking that he could achieve such ends through his plays? One of the strongest examples of that in the movie was the suggestion that it was odd that Shakespeare portrayed Richard III as a hunchback, but even I know that Richard III was popularly (and probably falsely) considered to be a hunchback long before Shakespeare’s time.

Of course it’s conceivable if unlikely that somebody else wrote Shakepeare’s plays. But the undercurrent of the Oxford theory has always been that a member of the nobility would be more likely as the playwright than a commoner. But this reverses reality. The nobility were highly trained from birth in their roles in society. They were busy people with lots to do. It was far less likely that an earl could write the plays than a member of the middle class. As far as I know only one member of the English nobility ever achieved any note as an author: Lord Dunsany, who lived much later.

The movie did have a couple of nice (non-Shakespearean) lines, one of which, by the Ben Jonson character, was simply the truth: the only reason future ages remember the people who lived then was because they were alive when Shakespeare was writing.

In an ordinary employer-employee relationship with a large company, the employer has most of the power. When any individual employee seeks a higher wage, he or she has no leverage; for a large company to lose a single employee makes little difference. In the U.S., unions have been a way for employees to get more leverage. The large company can not ignore the effect of many employees working together.

However, many people dislike unions, because unions are only effective when the union members work together. Many people feel that this takes away individual rights, as indeed it does.

It recently occurred to me that there is a different way to look at the issue. Think of the union as a company itself, a special sort of company which operates as a monopsony. When you join the employer, you are actually joining two companies: the employer and the company which provides employees to the employer. The union company and the regular company have a tight relationship, but this is no different from an ordinary monopsony supplier situation, such as is widely found in, e.g., the automotive business. Union companies tend to be more democratic than most companies, but this is not a fundamental difference.

One can of course have multiple union companies providing labor to the parent company. However, it is perfectly reasonable for the parent company to negotiate only with union companies for labor, rather than with individuals. After all, only in exceptional situations would a company purchase non-labor supplies from an individual. Why should labor be any different? Thus the “closed shop” has a clear support: it’s a matter of efficiency for the parent company.

This perspective may remove some of the traditional complaints against unions. They are replaced by a different issue, which is that every employee has two loyalties. However, in reality we all have multiple loyalties in our lives—to our families, our sports teams, etc.

Try thinking of the matter this way the next time you feel angry about unions. They are just doing what regular companies do.

I was recently thinking about my college studies of nuclear warfare. At the time it seemed like a relevant topic, and I took two courses on it. Like everything, the more you look into it the more complex it gets. The depth of the thinking in nuclear warfare planning was both impressive and appalling.

One of the more interesting cases was driven by the fear of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. In retrospect we know there was never a danger of that, but at the time it was a real concern. The western strategists feared that in a conventional war, the Soviet tanks would rapidly rout the smaller European armies. The use of nuclear weapons, or at least their potential use, was an obvious way to counter this threat.

However, most of the nuclear weapons were in the U.S. It was clear that no U.S. president would launch nuclear weapons at the Soviet Union in order to forestall an invasion of Europe. The U.S. promised to support Europe, but if the war actually started, a nuclear attack on the U.S.S.R. could only end in a nuclear counter-attack on the U.S. That would never happen. England and France had a few nuclear weapons, but would their leaders really launch them, knowing that they would face certain death in the overwhelming nuclear counter-attack? A bold and calculating leader of the Soviet Union might be willing to risk that nobody would take the nuclear option, and be willing to gamble that they would win a conventional war (again, this was the fear of the U.S. and Europe, the Soviet Union knew perfectly well that they could not win such a war). How could the U.S. and Europe use nuclear weapons as a credible deterrent to a conventional invasion?

The answer was, as I said, both impressive and appalling. NATO distributed low-yield nuclear weapons throughout Europe (they even had nuclear landmines). In the event of an invasion, complete control over the weapons was handed over to local commanders. The decision to use nuclear weapons would not be in the hands of an elected leader far from the war zone. It would be in the hands of a local colonel facing the immediate loss of his command. The Soviet Union might gamble (so the thinking went) on the reactions of a few political leaders they could study closely. They would never gamble on the reactions of several hundred local military commanders. Although the weapons were relatively low-yield, the expectation was that once a war went nuclear, the only thing that would stop it from escalating would be a quick complete cessation of hostilities.

This is a nice example of achieving your goal by explicitly giving up your ability to act rationally.

I’ve been playing Sudoku on Google+. i’ve more or less mastered the easy and medium levels, but it takes me about 30 minutes to do a hard level, and I haven’t tried expert yet. Sudoku is a fairly dumb game in some ways; as a colleague of mine pointed out, it’s trivial to write a computer program which will win every time. But I find the game somewhat interesting because it mirrors, in reverse, the way I think about programming.

You can write a computer program more or less any way you like. So I tend to think of a program in terms of constraints. Typical constraints are: the desired behaviour; the available runtime; the algorithmic complexity; the available libraries; the language; maintainability; who is going to review the code and what they will accept. Write a program is a matter of finding the simplest solution which meets the constraints. Difficult programming problems are ones where the constraints come into conflict, and it’s hard to see your way through.

Sudoku works the same way, only in reverse. In programming you are allowed to write any code that meets the constraints. In Sudoku you know that there is only one solution, so you have to look for moves that are forced by the constraints. Solving a Sudoku puzzle is a matter of looking deeper and deeper into the problem until you have eliminated all moves but one.

My hope is that practice in this area will subconsciously encourage me to look deeper for constraints when writing code, which will save time in the long run because I will have to throw away less code. I doubt this will actually work, but it seems worth a try.

Also Sudoku is a good way to exercise short term memory, as I’m avoiding writing anything down while solving the puzzle. I used to play cards regularly (bridge, whist) and I was able to remember the location of many of the cards in other people’s hands. I noticed that I lost that facility as I’ve failed to practice it. As i write this I realize that short term memory is not too important in today’s world, but at least it makes me feel smarter.

New plan: let’s let people pay to vote. Everybody gets one vote free, just like today. You can also pay, say, $1000 for another vote, then $2000 for the next one, $3000 for the one after that, etc. Also, you can sell your vote, so a cheaper way to get more votes is to pay a bunch of people $500.

Advantage: it’s no longer necessary to give candidates money so that they can advertise for votes. Currently politicians spend at least half their time asking for money. This would let them spend all their time on their actual job.

Advantage: money paid for votes goes straight to the treasury, rather than to television stations.

Advantage: Many fewer horrible political ads.

Disadvantage: politicians do what rich people want them to do. But wait, that is already the case. So this isn’t a disadvantage at all.

The U.S. is already a plutocracy. Making it explicit is more efficient all around.