Category Archives: Miscellany & Minutiæ

S-Town, Maps, and the Passage of Time

SPOILER ALERT: If you’re considering or are just starting to listen to S-Town, don’t read further unless you’ve listened to at least as far as the very end of the second episode.

I mean it.

OK, here we go.

Like John B. McLemore, the man at the center of the S-Town podcast, I’m obsessed with time. Well, maybe not as obsessed with it as he is. But I’m always thinking about it.

Another obsession I have, that we have not, at least by mid-episode 3, heard is (or, rather, was — there’s the first spoiler) shared by John B., is with maps.

(I’m calling him “John B.” rather than just “John” because that’s what the people who were close to him call him. I’m not sure if he liked that or not, but I’ll assume he was OK with it.)

I had already read enough in a review, not to mention on the S-Town website itself, to know that someone else in the story actually dies, and that this most likely would be revealed at the end of episode 2. And, with the heavy foreshadowing early in that episode, it was not much of a surprise to me when it happened — who, or how. (Yes, even the method, which is revealed early in episode 3. That’s foreshadowed too.)

This is a true story of a real person’s life, so I am not trying to make light of it. I felt a genuine loss, and I’ve only known about this person for a few hours.

But let’s go back in time a bit.

I listened to episode 1, and the first 15 minutes of episode 2, when I was out running. I ended up listening to the rest of episode 2 in bed last night, finishing it well after midnight. But before I listened to that final half hour, I spent at least as long looking at satellite views of Woodstock, Alabama in the Apple Maps app on my iPhone… hunting for John B.’s hedge maze. I knew I was close when I spotted the South 40 trailer park that had been mentioned in episode 1.

I might have saved myself some time by searching on the latitude and longitude coordinates rattled off in episode 1 — curiously specific, I thought, even though producer Brian Reed had edited out the last bit, to respect John B.’s privacy. That struck me as odd right away… and also seemed to be a bit of foreshadowing, that maybe John B.’s privacy didn’t really matter so much now.

As I was saying, I might have saved myself some time, but I didn’t feel like going back and hunting for the exact spot in episode 1 where the coordinates were named. More fun to just explore the satellite images until I spotted a circular hedge maze in the woods.

But that wasn’t the first thing I spotted. First I spotted John B.’s school buses… the ones Brian Reed said he was using to age lumber. There were three now, not two. I panned a bit to the west and saw the house, then north and there it was… the hedge maze.

John B.’s house, school buses and hedge maze, from Apple Maps satellite view.

Excited by my discovery, I took to social media. Then I decided to see if anyone else on Twitter had possibly found the maze as well. Of course they had.

Except… wow. That looks a lot different. At first I was second guessing that maybe @RASEC29 had found the wrong maze… or that I had.

John B.’s property as seen in Google Maps.

I mean… where were the school buses? And the house… it looks… so overgrown.

That’s when I knew.

The satellite images in map apps aren’t dated (although I think that may be changing), so I have no idea exactly when these different images were taken. I don’t know if John B. was still alive in the Apple one, or if it’s just that the buses hadn’t yet been cleared away, the maze abandoned, the yard overgrown. And in the light of day, with a better view on my computer, the land doesn’t seem quite as devastated in the later photo as it did when I saw it at around midnight, on my iPhone screen. It’s a different time of year, and a different time of day. Things are brown instead of green, shadows fall in a different direction.

But clearly, time has passed, things have changed, John B.’s world has decayed, much as he obsessed over.

I have so many more things I would like to say, but… time. Also, I’m not even halfway through the series yet, so there is much I still don’t know that is yet to be revealed. Or not.

So I’ll leave it at this. As the quote on John B.’s astrolabe reads, life is “tedious, and brief.” I’m sorry John B. never made it out of his Shit Town, if that’s what he really wanted to do, but I’m glad he shared his story. And I hope he’s wrong about, you know, everything being doomed.

Update: Several other people have now replied to @RASEC29, including @tifotter, who has posted dated images from Google Earth:

How to win when you lose: unbalanced representation in the U.S. government

I haven’t talked politics here much lately. Frankly it’s all been too demoralizing. I mean, how do you talk about someone who is so patently unqualified, not to mention arguably legally disqualified, not only “winning” an election (courtesy of archaic undemocratic rules), but receiving nearly full-throated support from the cynical opportunists of a political party who only a few months ago were decrying his very presence on the scene?

Well, enough on that. Others are fighting that fight better than I ever could, so I’m going to move into the realm where I flourish: geeky data analysis.

Specifically, I want to look at three ways in which the U.S. government — Congress and the presidency — are inherently imbalanced, plus one additional way that they’re being made more so through the shameful tactics of one party whose power depends on exploiting those imbalances to their fullest extent. (Take a guess which one I’m talking about.)

The three ways are: 1) House district apportionment (specifically, “Gerrymandering”), 2) the two-per-state structure of the U.S. Senate, and 3) the Electoral College. Full disclosure: I am not a history scholar. I’m relying mostly on things I actually — gasp — remember learning in public schools in the 1980s.

I’m going to just jump to my thesis here, since the perspective it provides is going to come up in a few places in the rest of the post: In the present day, the values of most Democratic voters favor living in more densely populated areas, whereas the values of most Republican voters favor living in more sparsely populated areas. And since these three aspects of the American electoral process were specifically designed to benefit less-populous states (to get them to go along with the Revolution in the first place), the Republicans today are in a position of power far beyond their actual support amongst the electorate as a whole.

Whew. OK, let’s begin.

Gerrymandering in House seat apportionment

Ah, Elbridge Gerry. Over 200 years later, his name is still applied to the sadly still too common practice of redrawing congressional districts in absurd shapes to deliver the maximum number of House seats to a favored political party. Both parties have been guilty of doing this, but as the Republicans have been in a position of outsized influence at the state level (see my main thesis), the majority of questionable district apportionments in modern times have been to the benefit of the Republican Party.

Beyond the unscrupulous tactics of Gerrymandering, there is still an inherent imbalance in the House, which becomes even greater when we talk about the Senate: because the total number of seats in the House is fixed at 435 (due to the Reapportionment Act of 1929), and because each state has to have at least one representative, low-population states have much higher per-resident representation than larger ones.

But don’t take my word for it. Let’s look at the numbers. Here’s a table (source: Wikipedia) that breaks down state populations and representation both in the House and Electoral College.

Rank State Population House
Seats		 Elect.
Votes		 Pop. per
House
Seat		 Pop. per
Elect.
Vote		 Pop. per
Senate
Seat
1 California 38,802,500 53 55 717,763 691,662 19,401,250
2 Texas 26,956,958 36 38 723,867 685,769 13,478,479
3 Florida 19,893,297 27 29 715,465 666,123 9,946,649
4 New York 19,746,227 27 29 724,824 674,837 9,873,114
5 Illinois 12,880,580 18 20 715,292 643,763 6,440,290
6 Pennsylvania 12,787,209 18 20 709,085 638,177 6,393,605
7 Ohio 11,594,163 16 18 721,514 641,346 5,797,082
8 Georgia 10,097,343 14 16 708,568 619,997 5,048,672
9 North Carolina 9,943,964 13 15 750,159 650,138 4,971,982
10 Michigan 9,909,877 14 16 705,954 617,710 4,954,939
11 New Jersey 8,938,175 12 14 738,716 633,185 4,469,088
12 Virginia 8,326,289 11 13 744,170 629,682 4,163,145
13 Washington 7,061,530 10 12 689,701 574,751 3,530,765
14 Massachusetts 6,745,408 9 11 738,460 604,195 3,372,704
15 Arizona 6,731,484 9 11 728,139 595,750 3,365,742
16 Indiana 6,596,855 9 11 726,370 594,303 3,298,428
17 Tennessee 6,549,352 9 11 717,360 586,931 3,274,676
18 Missouri 6,063,589 8 10 752,749 602,199 3,031,795
19 Maryland 5,976,407 8 10 735,570 588,456 2,988,204
20 Wisconsin 5,757,564 8 10 715,800 572,640 2,878,782
21 Minnesota 5,457,173 8 10 672,392 537,914 2,728,587
22 Colorado 5,355,856 7 9 741,083 576,398 2,677,928
23 Alabama 4,849,377 7 9 688,860 535,780 2,424,689
24 South Carolina 4,832,482 7 9 674,818 524,858 2,416,241
25 Louisiana 4,649,676 6 8 766,982 575,237 2,324,838
26 Kentucky 4,413,457 6 8 730,069 547,552 2,206,729
27 Oregon 3,970,239 5 7 779,871 557,050 1,985,120
28 Oklahoma 3,878,051 5 7 762,964 544,974 1,939,026
29 Connecticut 3,596,677 5 7 718,059 512,907 1,798,339
30 Iowa 3,107,126 4 6 768,547 513,364 1,553,563
31 Arkansas 2,994,079 4 6 737,283 491,522 1,497,040
32 Mississippi 2,984,926 4 6 746,232 497,488 1,492,463
33 Utah 2,942,902 4 6 713,822 475,881 1,471,451
34 Kansas 2,904,021 4 6 721,476 480,984 1,452,011
35 Nevada 2,839,099 4 6 689,733 459,822 1,419,550
36 New Mexico 2,085,572 3 5 695,179 417,108 1,042,786
37 Nebraska 1,881,503 3 5 618,508 371,105 940,752
38 West Virginia 1,850,326 3 5 618,471 371,083 925,163
39 Idaho 1,634,464 2 4 797,864 398,932 817,232
40 Hawaii 1,419,561 2 4 696,157 348,078 709,781
41 Maine 1,330,089 2 4 664,596 332,298 665,045
42 New Hampshire 1,326,813 2 4 660,359 330,180 663,407
43 Rhode Island 1,055,173 2 4 525,146 262,273 527,587
44 Montana 1,023,579 1 3 1,005,141 335,047 511,790
45 Delaware 935,614 1 3 917,092 305,697 467,807
46 South Dakota 853,175 1 3 833,354 277,785 426,588
47 North Dakota 739,482 1 3 699,628 233,209 369,741
48 Alaska 737,732 1 3 736,732 243,816 368,866
49 Vermont 626,011 1 3 626,562 208,670 313,006
50 Wyoming 584,153 1 3 576,412 192,137 292,077

If you study the numbers carefully, you see it’s a bit of a mixed bag at the House level. Wyoming, the least populous state, carries more weight per seat than California, the most populous, but in between there are variations. Conservative Montana, the most populous state with only one seat, is under-represented compared to liberal Rhode Island, the least populous state with two seats. But one thing that this table doesn’t show is the representation by party for each of those 435 house seats. If we factor that in, and look at the aggregate, we see that the Republican majority in the House doesn’t come close to representing a majority of the American public at large:

Shut off and lock down comments on your WordPress site with 5 lines of SQL

Comments are kind of passé. Well, OK, they’re still everywhere, but they’re almost universally garbage. Meaningful discussion happens on social media these days, even if it’s prompted by a blog post. And if you’re using WordPress as a general-purpose CMS rather than just as a blogging tool, then you probably have no use for comments whatsoever.

Yet, they’re built in, and they’re a spam magnet. Even if your templates aren’t actually showing comments anywhere, the default WordPress settings allow comments to come in, cluttering up your database and nagging you with a disconcertingly large number in a bright red circle in the WordPress admin bar.

Yuck.

Fortunately, if you have direct database access and the fortitude to run a few simple lines of SQL, you can quickly accomplish the following:

  1. Purge all queued spam and pending comments (while safely retaining any old, approved comments for archival purposes
  2. Prevent any new comments from appearing on any of your existing posts/pages
  3. Prevent comments from ever being accepted on future posts/pages

The last of those is a simple setting. In WP admin, you can go to Settings > Discussion and uncheck the second and third boxes under Default article settings at the top of the page. Actually, uncheck all three of those. If you’re going to turn off incoming pings, you should turn off pingbacks. But my SQL code below doesn’t.

screen-shot-2016-09-09-at-12-22-19-pm

If you’re just starting a brand new WordPress site and you don’t ever intend to allow comments, just go and uncheck those boxes and you’re done. But if you’re trying to rescue a long-suffering WordPress site from drowning in spam, read on.

Here then in all of its glory is the magic SQL you’ve been looking for:

DELETE FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_approved` != 1;
DELETE FROM `wp_commentmeta` WHERE `comment_id` NOT IN (SELECT `comment_ID` FROM `wp_comments`);
UPDATE `wp_posts` SET `comment_status` = 'closed', `ping_status` = 'closed';
UPDATE `wp_options` SET `option_value` = 'closed' WHERE option_name = 'default_comment_status';
UPDATE `wp_options` SET `option_value` = 'closed' WHERE option_name = 'default_ping_status';

Want to dissect what each of these lines is doing? Sure…

Line 1

DELETE FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_approved` != 1;

This is going to delete all “pending” and “spam” comments. It leaves approved comments untouched. Note: you may have spam comments that are approved; one site I was just working on had thousands that were “approved” because the settings were a little too generous. I can’t give a catch-all SQL statement to address that problem, unfortunately. It requires analyzing the content of the comments to some extent.

You’d think maybe `comment_approved` = 0 would be better, but I found as I poked around that the possible values aren’t just 0 or 1. It may also be spam. It may be something else. (I haven’t researched all of the possibilities.)

Line 2

DELETE FROM `wp_commentmeta` WHERE `comment_id` NOT IN (SELECT `comment_ID` FROM `wp_comments`);

There’s a separate table that stores miscellaneous meta data about comments. There’s a good chance there’s nothing in here, but you may as well delete any meta data corresponding to the comments you just deleted, so here you go.

Line 3

UPDATE `wp_posts` SET `comment_status` = 'closed', `ping_status` = 'closed';

This is going through all of the existing posts — which don’t include just “posts”… “pages” are posts, “attachments” are posts… anything in WordPress is a post, really — and setting them to no longer accept comments or pingbacks. This doesn’t delete any comments on the posts that were already approved; it just prevents any new ones.

screen-shot-2016-09-09-at-12-21-58-pm

It’s the equivalent of going into every single post and unchecking the two boxes in the screenshot above. But it only takes a couple of seconds. FEEL THE AWESOME POWER OF SQL!!!

Line 4

UPDATE `wp_options` SET `option_value` = 'closed' WHERE option_name = 'default_comment_status';

Remember that screenshot near the beginning of this post, showing the three checkboxes under Settings > Discussion? Well this is the equivalent of unchecking the third one.

Line 5

UPDATE `wp_options` SET `option_value` = 'closed' WHERE option_name = 'default_ping_status';

And this is the equivalent of unchecking the second one.

So there you have it. No more comments, no more spam, no need for an Akismet account.

Rules, Rules, Rules

I think a lot about rules. I’m not a rigid stickler for rules. I believe a lot in taking rules in context. There are times rules matter, and times they really don’t. But I do think it’s important to understand the rules. There are two things to understand about rules: 1) that they exist to keep things running smoothly, and 2) that there is (or at least should be) a reason behind any good rule. Rules that have no clear, broadly agreeable purpose or that are difficult to follow should be reconsidered.

But a lot of rules are pretty simple. Like the rules of the road. And I think a lot about rules of the road, because I’m on the road a lot, in various ways — in a car, on a bike, or on foot.

The rules of the road are simple, but they don’t seem quite as simple to me living in Minneapolis in the 2010s as they did when I was a kid growing up in a small town in the 1980s. Back then, roads were for cars. The only people who biked were kids and adults who had lost their licenses for DUI. And you biked on the sidewalk.

People only walked with their dogs, and generally only in a 2-block radius of their house, the lone exception being the one Vietnam vet with untreated PTSD who refused to wear shoes or use the sidewalk. He could always be seen around town with his dreadlocks, blanket and bare feet, shuffling along in the boulevard grass. I hope things got better for him.

But I digress. That was the 1980s. In contemporary Minneapolis, everyone uses the roads for just about everything. And sometimes it gets messy. There are many places in the park areas of the city where there are three parallel strips of asphalt: a pedestrian path, a bike path, and the road. All clearly marked for their intended purpose. In most of these places, the road is very narrow — two lanes with no shoulder or parking lanes. But you get pedestrians on the bike path (why? who the hell knows?) and bikes on the road (why? to get away from the dumbass pedestrians! or because they think they’re in the Tour de France!) and things get tangled up.

Even when you’re on regular city streets, biking can be a hazardous endeavor. The rule (whether it’s codified as a city ordinance or just a gentle encouragement on road signs) is “SHARE THE ROAD”. But there are cars that nearly run bikers onto the curb, just as there are bikers who ride side-by-side at such a leisurely speed that I wonder how they keep their balance, backing up car traffic for blocks. SHARE THE ROAD goes both ways.

Me? I’m too scared as a biker to ride on major thoroughfares if I can possibly avoid it. I usually stick to those dedicated bike paths when I can. Otherwise, I try to ride on low-traffic residential streets, generally a block or two over from the major thoroughfare. It just seems much, much safer.

But you do encounter clueless drivers. Drivers who will stop for you at an intersection when they don’t have a stop sign and you (the biker) do, and are clearly coming to a stop. Or, drivers who will breeze right through their own stop signs even when you (the biker) have the right-of-way, either because they didn’t see you or because they live a block away and always breeze through that stop sign.

Yes… you may have guessed that I am not just speaking hypothetically here. Both of those situations in the previous paragraph have happened to me. In fact, they happened on the same street, one block apart. Obviously the latter situation (which happened last year) is far more dangerous, and it led to me braking so abruptly I nearly flipped my bike, followed by a loud string of profanity hurled in the semi-apologetic driver’s direction.

The former situation happened to me just this morning, and prompted today’s rant. I was approaching a stop sign, and slowing to a stop. To my left, a white SUV also came to a stop, even though they didn’t have a stop sign. Presumably they didn’t trust that I was going to stop, even though I was vigorously waving them on with my left arm as I braked with my right. Even though I came to a complete stop, got off my bike, and even more vigorously waved them on. Finally they did go and I got the satisfaction of having successfully enforced the rules. (Sort of. I mean, I didn’t actually give the universal “stop” hand signal. Yes, I broke a rule. But I figured my vigorous waving-on covered it.)

But that got me thinking about the rules themselves. You have the official rules of the road, which tell you that you stop at a stop sign and don’t stop when you don’t have one. Bikes are supposed to follow the same road rules as cars, with (as I recently learned) a few exceptions designed to facilitate faster movement, most notable being that it’s OK for a biker to run a red light, if they have first come to a complete stop and verified that there is no other traffic (cross traffic or oncoming left turns, for example). But I doubt a lot of drivers know this rule, and when they see bikers doing it, probably assume (like I would have before) that it’s one more biker breaking the rules.

Which gets me to the second kind of rules — the unwritten, unspoken rules that grow naturally from collective experience. There are so many bikers who completely ignore all of the rules of the road that many drivers either a) assume the worst out of any biker they encounter and exert excessive caution or b) hit the bikers. (Or, as happened last year, they lose their fucking minds and drive around hurling cinder blocks out their car windows.)

I feel like the situation I ran into today was due to the second type of rule. The driver of the white SUV has encountered enough unpredictable bikers — who are best known for their peculiarly selective blindness to red octagons — that they weren’t going to take any chances with me. So the fact that I did follow the rules and stop for a stop sign actually caused a problem. A minor problem, to be sure, but still enough that it lingered with me all morning. (I wonder what that driver is thinking about right now. Almost certainly not me. This is my affliction.)

So, we are living in a society where we have two types of rules: the official rules, and the unspoken ones. Often in direct conflict. Which rules take precedence? Sadly, as much as I want to live in a world where the official rules are logical, reasonable, fair to all, and easy to follow, I fear that we really live in a world where the official rules are so often inconsistent, incomprehensible, unjust or just simply a burden — not to mention out of touch with the realities of human behavior — that the unspoken rules become the ones that people actually follow.

So then what? Should I just give up on the official rules? Should I breeze through stop signs on my bike because “everyone else is doing it”? Should I stubbornly adhere to my way of doing things and get my dander up every time I have to frantically gesture at someone else to get them to accept their own right-of-way?

Or, should I just lighten the hell up?

In that spirit, I come to the third type of rules. The Rules.

The Rules is a tongue-in-cheek book of… rules… written by a former coworker and bandmate who is obsessed with cycling to a level I will never be. I ride a secondhand bike to get around town. I have become quite a fan of watching the Tour de France every July, in part just because there’s an app for it that I feel really does 21st century sportscasting right and I wish every sport were covered this way. But mostly because I enjoy seeing the French countryside, admiring the intensity and endurance of the riders, and, occasionally, moments like riders punching morons on the sidelines.

Anyway… forget about city ordinances or social norms. The real rules of cycling are another matter entirely. And far more entertaining than my rants will ever be.