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I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing that most members of Congress don't have much direct interaction with the tax system. They've got accountants to do it, and they look it over and sign the forms. Probably with a “man, I'm glad I didn't have to do that” sigh of relief. Then they're on to talking to the next lobbyist or something.

Near as I can tell, the biggest problem with the income tax system in the U.S. isn't whether it's progressive, or flat, or whether the rates or too high or too low. No, the problem is that it's too complicated. I'm not even sure that full-time experts (i.e., those accountants) actually understand it. TurboTax is magic in terms of making it possible for consumers to do the taxes, but even it bails out on the fine points of the AMT.

The complication causes two problems (aside from enabling a large business sector that derives its income from helping people and corporations pay less tax). The first is that the richer you are, the more you can avoid paying. The second is that you don't actually know if you're doing it right, and there's probably something you did wrong that they can hunt you down for, if they decided to do so.

Therefore, we present a modest proposal for how members of Congress should prepare their taxes.

All members of Congress shall be required to submit their taxes on time, without extensions. In preparing their taxes they may use:

1. Pencil, paper, and a pen for signing their their forms and checks.
2. A four-function calculator.
3. A telephone to call the IRS help line, using the regular hold queues, with no indication that they are members of Congress.
4. Their paper copies of records and receipts.
5. They must complete the AMT calculations for the record, whether or not it appears that the AMT will apply to them.
6. For each tax benefit, they must write out, in legible longhand, “The XXX tax deduction/credit does not (does) apply to me.”

I imagine that if these rules were adopted, the tax code would be rather simpler in short order. In the current economic climate, I also imagine that this would be denounced as a job-killing proposal because of its effects on the employment of accountants.

For years, even decades, there's an idea floating around that Emacs is hard to learn. I've always been a bit puzzled by this, because the basics don't really seem that different from most other text editors. The commands and keys to use are a little different, but they're not any more arbitrary than any other editor. The focus on keyboard commands is different from what one sees today, but special keys like arrows all work. So why does it seem hard?

I suspect there are two main reasons for this. First, there's never any end of learning in sight. There is always something more to learn about what Emacs (or an add-on package) can do, and so you never feel like you have learned it all. Second, there's always someone who will tell you, probably in an unfortunately condescending way, that there's some magic keystroke or M-x command that will do something fancy for you.

Which is a shame, because being able to do more with text, quickly and efficiently, is real power. It's not that Emacs has a steep learning curve. Emacs has a practically infinite curve with no asymptotic limit. And that's something we should value in software.

(Of course, XKCD has weighed in on this.)

If you use, or have heard of, the diagramming program OmniGraffle on the Mac, you might have wondered "What the
heck does graffle mean?"

Googling around, I found that the usual story is that it's a cool sounding nonsense word chosen to contrast with "Visio". The Wikipedia article on OmniGraffle quotes the former president of the company as saying as much.

The other day, I came across an idea that may explain why the name works so well.

I was listening to a Teaching Company lecture by John McWhorter about the changes in language. He happened to mention that "le", as in "dribble" was once a suffix denoting repeated action. For example, "drip+le" in Middle English, more or less, meant "repeated dripping"–or "dribbling". You can find a bit more about this online.

Which, of course, means that "graffle" would mean "repeated graphing". A perfect name.

I don't doubt that the word was made up as described, but I've always thought the name was better just a nonsense word. So maybe the linguistic construct just resonates with the scraps of language we have rattling around in our subconscious. Or maybe I'm just making it up.