Just a quick note to the web designers out there: like many people, I hate link underlining, so I disable it in my browser. This means that if you’re going to make the color of your links the same as the color of the surrounding text (or nearly so), you should use CSS to force link underlining. Sure, I could enable underlining, but that’s not my job. If your design requires underlined links, it’s up to you to make it happen. Luckily, it’s not hard:

 a { text-decoration: underline; }

added to your site stylesheet does the trick.

Quite a few sites fall into the rely-on-the-browser-underlining trap. Notable members of this dubious club include the otherwise excellent Economist website and, ironically, the “design and usability blog” Signal vs. Noise. I love Rails, but I curse those 37signals guys every time I have to enable link underlining just to read their damn blog.

Remember those ubiquitous “under construction” signs people put on their websites back in the ’90s? Man, those were stupid—newsflash! websites take time to build!—and annoying, especially when they were animated, which seemed inevitably to be the case. Thankfully, they went the way of the dodo, but their spirit lives on in a slightly different niche, the automated telephone menu. To wit: “Please listen to all options, as our menu items have changed.”

Who could this possibly be for? Presumably this warning is meant to prevent people from calling in, pressing “3” thinking that they’re getting, say, technical support, but actually getting sales. Oh, the horror! We’d better warn unsuspecting callers that our menu items have changed! But if you haven’t called their system in a while, there is almost no way you remember which number does what, so you’ll have to listen to the menu options anyway to find out. On the other hand, often you just listened to the menu and had to call back right away (usually because you got cut off by their incompetent system), in which case the menu has most assuredly not changed—their warning is then demonstrably false.

The beauty part is that many systems won’t register the number you press until their warning message has played, so you have to sit through it whether you like it or not. In these cases I often find myself swearing at the robotic voice (usually because I just got cut off by their incompetent system)—“Please listen to all options, as our menu items [no they haven’t you stupid fuckwad, I just called but got cut off by your incompetent system] have changed.”

In summary: much of the time the menu hasn’t changed, and when it has you don’t remember, so you don’t care. Dude, WTF?

Humans have a peculiar penchant for eschatology, and I just realized that I haven’t yet sounded off on the doomsday scenario du jour, global warming. With one notable exception—namely, the risk of nuclear war—all previous eschatological angst has proven to be misplaced. So, is global warming another exception? In other words, are we all going to die?

I’ll end the suspense right now: the answer is no. But what about all the science? What about the conspiracy by conservative closet-homosexual Republican pedophiles to suppress the truth about global warming, as helpfully reported recently in Newsweek? (Perhaps I exaggerate a little.) And what about Al Gore? Please, for the love of God, what about Al Gore?

Part of the problem is that “global warming” is used in at least three distinct senses:

1. global warming: Earth is getting hotter.
2. global warming: Earth is getting hotter because of human activity.
3. global warming: Earth is getting hotter because of human activity, and we’re all going to die.

Here’s the deal: #1 is indisputable. #2 is probably true, but that’s irrelevant as long as #3 is false, which it almost certainly is.

Unfortunately, these three usages often get conflated. Those who doubt #3 are accused of doubting #1, which makes them look like idiots. Furthermore, those who fret about #2 often implicitly assume #3, and treat those who doubt #3 as immoral assholes, because goddamn it, it’s our fault, so it’s up to us to do something about it! And here I’m looking squarely at Al Gore when I say: if global warming represents a calamity for humanity, it doesn’t fucking matter whose fault it is. When we discover a world-destroying asteroid on a collision course with Earth, nobody’s going to say “well, we didn’t put the asteroid there, and it’s not our fault, so we don’t have to do anything about it.” I’ve long admired Al Gore, and I wish he were President instead of W. too, but on this issue he is the biggest, most self-righteous, most sanctimonious sack of shit that I’ve ever seen in my life.

So, in the end, we should only be worried if “we’re all going to die”—i.e., if global warming is actually a looming disaster. Is it? It’s possible, of course, though even the consensus IPCC report hardly looks like Armageddon. But what about all those scary pictures of Manhattan under water in “An Inconvenient Truth”, you say? Go and watch it again and see for yourself: Al Gore never talks about how likely the scenarios are, nor how long they will take. These are crucial omissions, and it’s no coincidence, because as far as I can tell no reputable simulations show effects on that scale on any reasonable (say, less than two-century) timeline. Moreover, even the worst-case scenarios are based on delicate, complicated computer models, and anybody who has any experience with such models knows not to trust them any further than they can throw them (which is, coincidentally, usually the distance to the nearest journal willing to publish them). (Anyone so good at writing computer models that they can actually believe the results is probably making millions of dollars on Wall Street right now anyway. Why worry about global warming when you can just buy a yacht and sail around while the little people drown?)

Finally, climate simulations typically ignore the effects of technology—technology that will be vigorously pursued if the consequences of unchecked global warming prove dire. Even at current technological levels, we could probably swing something. Moreover, our technological capabilities are increasing exponentially; when people worry about the sea level rising a few feet by 2070, I think Jesus, there might be superintelligent robots by then! In this context, it’s hard to imagine how our posthuman civilization would have much trouble with a few melting ice caps.

None of this is to say that global warming isn’t a problem. It probably is. It may cost billions or trillions of dollars to avert its worst effects, though decisions about whether it’s worth making any particular change need to be based on a rational cost-benefit analysis (and the negative effects have to be considered against the positives, such as opening up Arctic shipping lanes and exposing billions of dollars worth of oil and natural gas under the Arctic seafloor). But, as far as I can tell, the idea that global warming represents an existential threat to humanity’s global technological civilization is utter bullshit, totally unsupported by the evidence. I’m a scientist; I could be convinced otherwise. But if the best you can do is show a graph with CO₂ levels going off the chart and a few slickly produced movies of the World Trade Center Ground Zero underwater, it’s hard to take you seriously.

Global warming? Yes. Anthropogenic global warming? Probably. Global calamity? Show me the evidence, or, seriously, STFU(AG).

I recently moved into a new apartment in Los Angeles, and like many apartments in the area it doesn’t have air conditioning. Because it’s nicely shaded, I was hopeful that I might be able to get by without A/C, and indeed the apartment is habitable well into the 80s. Unfortunately, the current heat wave (the daytime high today is 95°) has burst my bubble of optimism, and I’m now in the market for a portable air-conditioning unit. Today I went looking for one, and, predictably, all the area stores are sold out. The reason is that they refuse to engage in price gouging, and that really sucks.

The vilification of price gouging comes from a more general misunderstanding of price. People seem to think that either buyers or sellers set prices, though which one depends on the circumstances and their political leanings. Evil corporations such as Wal-Mart lose either way, since in the popular imagination they set both the price of the labor they buy and the price of the merchandise they sell. Of course, what they really set is either the bid price (the price they’re willing to pay) or the offer price (the price they’re willing to be paid); whether the transaction goes through depends entirely on whether there is a seller or buyer willing to meet the price.

Ultimately, price is set not by buyers or sellers acting in isolation, but rather by the interactions between buyers and sellers. This mechanism operates at a higher level of abstraction than individual agents, which evidently makes it much more difficult to understand, and makes the consequences more difficult to accept. Consider: Wal-Mart doesn’t set the price of labor, and hence can’t be blamed for the low wages of its employees. (Chew on that one, and try not to choke.)

In the case of price gouging, people’s intuition tells him that there is such a thing as a “fair” price, and anything greatly in excess of that price constitutes gouging. But price is a real thing, and you can’t hide from it. Charge more than the real price and you’ll end up with a surplus; charge less, and you’ll end up with a shortage. Evidently, the local stores are charging too little, because they’ve run out of air conditioners. The reason this sucks for me is because I am willing to pay more than most other people. In other words, I want to be gouged.

Setting the wrong price also leads to a misallocation of resources. This sort of misallocation is particularly severe in exactly the situations most likely to spawn accusations of price gouging, namely, emergencies. People may decry high water prices in the aftermath of a hurricane, but such prices create a critical financial incentive to use potable water only for drinking, rather than for less important uses such as cooking, cleaning, or bathing. (Of course, high prices also give an incentive to get more water there, and fast.) In my case, I want a cool room so that I can better get work done, but I’m sure some people who did manage to acquire air conditioners just want to sit around and watch TV, which seems to me a less important use—and I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is.

There remains an interesting question: why don’t Costco, Home Depot, and the other stores I visited engage in price gouging? I’m not sure what the answer is. Perhaps it’s just too much trouble to change prices dynamically based on demand, but it’s more likely that they fear alienating their customers, who might be offended by price gouging, or maybe they fear government regulation, since politicians are elected by voters who might be offended by price gouging. In either case, it looks as if I may be the victim of economic ignorance. Please, somebody gouge me!

Damn, it’s hot in here.

Tonight, the movie “Air Force One” was on TNT, and I watched a little as I ate dinner. In addition to confirming my recollection that the script was formulaic and manipulative, the few minutes I watched included the one scene I actually remembered from seeing it in the theater, in which the vice president (played by Glenn Close) asks “all the American people” to pray for the safety of the president and the other people on board the hijacked Air Force One.

The sort of plea—which seems, alas, quite realistic—brings up a question that has always confused me: what is the deal with intercessory prayer? Even if you do believe in God, what makes you think that praying will influence God’s actions? It seems to be at best a psychological crutch—since you can’t do anything, you might as well pray. And yet, implicit in the practice is the belief that it does at least some good. But what sort of bizarre God would alter the course of events based on a straw poll of believers? It just doesn’t make any sense.

Even if I did believe in God, I find it hard to imagine that I could ever believe in prayer. Clearly, prayer can be valuable to the person praying, in the same way that meditation can benefit the meditator. But, as far as I can tell, the hypothesis that prayer affects the external universe in any way has scant evidentiary support; indeed, it seems overwhelmingly contradicted by the evidence. Why, then, is belief in the power of prayer so common? And why are belief in God and belief in prayer so often conflated?