I’m frequently reminded of a wisecrack of Fred Allen’s: a committee is a group of people who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done. It’s certainly convenient. I think it was Aristotle who described human beings as rational animals. Maybe “rationalizing animals” probably would have been closer to the mark.

There’s an interesting article at the WP’s Wonkblog, presenting one informed technician’s thoughts on the problems being encountered by users trying to access the PPACA’s portal, healthcare.gov. He makes a number of interesting observations but the two I found most interesting were this:

SK: The Obama administration has said that all these problems are happening because of overwhelming traffic. How good of an explanation is that?

JB: That seems like not a very good excuse to me. In sites like these there’s a very standard approach to capacity planning. You start with some basic math. Like, in this case, you look at all the federal states and how many uninsured people they have. Out of those you think, maybe 10 percent would log in in the first day. But you model for the worst case, and that’s how you come up with your peak of how many people could try to do the same thing at the same time.

and this:

SK: What would you be doing right now if you were running healthcare.gov?

JB: First I would put some really good instrumentation in place. The problem is if you’re fighting a fire, and it’s dark, you don’t know what’s going on. In other words, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. So first I would put something in place so you can measure what’s happening.

The second thing I’d do is I’d start building a very good load testing environment, so everything could be simulated in a load test, and move faster. Really everything is about speed right now, how quickly can you find problems and fix them. Ninety percent of the effort is really finding what to fix. Making the coding changes is only about 10 percent.

Neither of those two observations is particularly profound. Just ordinary good practice.

They’d better hope that the problems can be solved by throwing additional hardware at the site. That’s an easy solution and inexpensive to implement both in elapsed time and labor. Changing the architecture at this point could be disastrous. It’s probably out of the question.

My experience is that software developers are strongly predisposed to continue doing what they’re accustomed to doing. Getting someone from the outside to audit the code is probably a good idea but it will take time.

Frequent commenter Andy drew my attention to this WP article on the roots of the shutdown. It touched on a number of topics near and dear to my heart. For example:

Today, there is almost no overlap between the voting behavior of the most conservative Democrats in the House and the most liberal Republicans. That’s in part because there are few moderate-to-conservative Democrats and ­moderate-to-liberal Republicans left in the chamber.

It also is a reflection of the fact that members from districts that are more evenly balanced ideologically now vote the way their colleagues from highly ideological districts vote. In other words, there is a big difference in the way Republicans and Democrats represent relatively neutral districts.

Today the Congress is more polarized than it has ever been. More polarized than during Reconstruction.

And here:

The absence of a center in today’s politics significantly complicates coalition building. “How do you build a coalition from the center out when there’s no one in the middle?” Abramowitz asked. “Reaching across the aisle means reaching pretty far.”

I think there’s a possibility on which more reflection is due: that today’s federal government shutdown was “baked in” when the Pelosi-Reid Congress enacted the PPACA. Major social programs have historically been enacted with bipartisan support. The metaphor frequently used is that the parties join hands and jump. That is extremely difficult in today’s highly polarized climate.

But it’s not impossible. Wyden-Bennett had bipartisan support. It wasn’t rejected by Republicans; it was dismissed by the Democratic leadership. Why? I think it’s because the “Healthy Americans Act” didn’t satisfy enough of the items on their checklist and they felt they deserved a victory and they wanted to continue to be able to run on the issue. They didn’t want to “join hands” with the Republicans to construct a plan with bipartisan support.

Pointing to the adoption in the PPACA of an approach that was first proposed more than a decade previously is begging the question. Today’s Republican Party is on the “all politics all the time” path that New Gingrich put them on. It’s not that Republican Party. The approach selected doesn’t suggest they were looking for Republican support; it just points out how the conversation has changed over the years. And the notion that Democrats were trying to gain bipartisan support by courting Olympia Snowe is even more outlandish. As voted Olympia Snowe so voted Olympia Snowe. She was the last holdout of a cadre of Northeastern Republican moderates. For good or ille she had practically no influence in today’s Republican Party.

I agree with the president. The name of DC’s professional football team is offensive and should be changed. They should change their name to the “Landover Redskins”.

A new theory is emerging that Albert Einstein’s extraordinary intelligence was due to a highly developed corpus callosum, the “interface” between the brain’s hemisphere’s:

A new analysis technique that compared Albert Einstein’s brain to others of the period shows the left and right cerebral hemispheres of the famous scientist’s brain were unusually well connected to each other. This connectivity may have contributed to his brilliance, according to Florida State University evolutionary anthropologist Dean Falk.

Falk was part of a research team that investigated Einstein’s corpus callosum, the large bundle of fibers that connects the two cerebral hemispheres and facilitates interhemispheric communication in the brain. The findings appear, appropriately, in the journal Brain.

IMO this study leans too heavily on the “hardware” of the brain, its morphology, and too little on the “software” of the brain, the connections that develop over time. In my view in all likelihood intelligence is a consequence of a compicated interplay between hardware and software. The old “nature vs. nurture” discussion although I’d phrase it a bit differently. I suspect that extremely high intelligence will be very hard to nail down.

However, there’s no need to speculate. If Einstein’s brilliance was a consequence of the congenital structure of his brain, then genetic testing should be able to shed light on the discussion. I strongly suspect it’s a line of inquiry that will not bear fruit.

Writing at The New Republic Nate Cohn challenges the common wisdom that gerrymnandering has lead to more and more conservative Republican districts than would otherwise be the case:

But the fact that gerrymandering boosted the total number of House Republicans does not mean that gerrymandering made the GOP more likely to support extreme positions or shutdown the government. In fact, partisan gerrymandering usually reduces the number of extremely red districts. Why? Because the point of partisan gerrymandering isn’t to try and maximize the number of safe districts. The goal is to maximize the number of districts that are merely safe enough by packing as many of your opponents’ voters as you can into a small number of extremely partisan districts while safely distributing the rest throughout your own districts. In this way, gerrymandering may actually increase the number of moderate Republicans.

I think that even this formulation over-simplifies what gerrymandering does somewhat. As I see it gerrymandering has two purposes. It is used to protect incumbents and to concentrate the strength of minorities in a relatively small number of districts. The minorities can be racial minorities, ethnic minorities, or political minorities.

Here in Illinois the 4th Congressional District is enormously gerrymandered. That’s Luis Guitierrez’s district and without it it’s quite unlikely he would have been elected to the House, indeed, Chicago might still be waiting for its first Hispanic Congressman since Hispanic voting strength is relatively dilute in the city.

Rep. Guitierrez has been the House’s Democratic point man on “comprehensive immigration reform”. In his absence would the parameters of the discussion been different?

I don’t believe that eliminating gerrymandering is enough to make the House more democratic. For that I believe we’d need to greatly increase the number of districts. Extremely large Congressional districts of the sort we have now have a purpose similar to gerrymandering: they preserve the power of incumbents.

I find the incident that took place in Washington, DC yesterday that culminated in a young woman being shot dead by Capitol police very disturbing. I sincerely hope it’s completely and fairly investigated.

Here are a couple of sample references on the use of deadly force by the police:

New Jersey Attorney General’s policy on the use of force
Report on Police Use of Force Statutes from the Center of Research in Criminology, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

There’s a lot of discussion in the blogosphere of the shutdown, John Boehner, and the “Hastert Rule”, the idea that a speaker is imprudent to bring something to the floor for which a majority of his caucus won’t vote. I honestly don’t know where to put the quotation marks on that phrase—on “Hastert” (since it’s not unique to Denny Hastert), on “Rule” since it’s just a rule of thumb, or on the whole shebang.

I have a question. There are lots of people who want John Boehner to fall on his sword. Why should he? If you’re arguing that it’s for the good of the country, there are a lot of things that would be good for the country. Many Republicans, for example, think that delaying the “individual mandate” in the PPACA would be good for the country. Most Democrats disagree. In other words, there’s a difference of opinion about what’s good for the country and you don’t need to introduce imputations of malicious intent into the discussion at all. There’s a difference of opinion. Is John Boehner the only person in the country who has an obligation to sacrifice or compromise?

If you wonder why I don’t come back immediately in some discussions, one of the reasons is that I don’t feel comfortable defending Republicans even implicitly and when I don’t feel comfortable doing something I tend not to do it. I don’t have a consuming interest in Republicans. My Alderman is a Democrat, my state senator is a Democrat, my state representative is a Democrat, my Congressional representative is a Democrat, the mayor of the city in which I live is a Democrat, the Chicago City Council consists entirely of Democrats. All of those are likely to remain the case for the foreseeable future. The governor of Illinois is a Democrat and there’s a slim chance that might change. In other words, Republicans have practically no relevance to my daily life.

Many fields have what has been determined to be “best practice”, the accumulated wisdom on what is most effective. Physicians employ what is called the “standard of care”. Laboratories, manufacturing, and agriculture all have what are thought of as good operating practices.

Web pages are computer programs. They are software. In software development for many years best practice has been to subject developments to beta testing in limited release prior to general release.

Whether you support the PPACA or oppose it, I think we need to agree that best practice was not followed in the rollout of the federal government’s entry point to the healthcare insurance exchanges, healthcare.gov. As was expected, there were some “glitches”.

I have a question and the goodness or badness of the PPACA or of healthcare.gov are, in the final analysis, irrelevant to it. Is it impossible for the federal government to follow best practice in software development projects? I believe it is both for political and budgetary reasons (among others) but I’d be interested in hearing differing opinion on the subject.