The Danish claim (brag?) that their language is especially difficult for outsiders to master. This may simply be an expression of xenophobia, or of pre-emptively/perversely claiming a weakness as a strength (c.f. deaf culture and unix users). Or it may be true. I had my first Danish class tonight, so I'll certainly keep you posted. Meanwhile, here's a factoid to help you reach a premature conclusion.

Take the sentence "Hvem er det?" If you've studied anything besides English which uses the Latin alphabet, you will already be familiar with the notion that this might not be pronounced "huh-vem errr deht?" And if in addition you have any experience with the International Phonetic Alphabet, you are probably already sympathetic to the notion of replacing the Latin alphabet with IPA. As for me, the first language I studied and forgot was Russian. But Cyrillic is almost perfectly phonetic, and the second language I failed to learn was German, which as a root of English doesn't seem all that quirky. Thus Chinese pinyin (e.g. "cu zuo zai nar?", pronounced just like it's spelled) threw me for loop, but I'm better now, and I can sound out pinyin correctly if they bother to put in tonal markings (even the Chinese usually don't, which makes Pinyin worthless for most uses). So I'm over that now, and I'm ready to tackle Danish, which when you read alound with American English pronunciations puts you about as far from native spoken Danish as would the same exercise with Pinyin.

Back to "hvem er det," character by character. The H is both silent and ineffective, a legacy presumably of the Viking era, which shows up in modern Danish life only when they drive. (The Swedes, we are told, already omit the H, having moved further from their marauder roots and into the furniture business.)

The "v" is as you would expect, a voiced consonant with the upper teeth over the lower lip. The e is a fairly neutral, central e, if I remember correctly, not too far from our friend the schwa.

The e does hold our first real Danish trick, though: Kissinger Speak. If the word "hvem," which means who, is a stressed word, and we determine stress the same way as in English - stressed words are those which are most important to the meaning of the sentence in context, so that when you ask "who are you," you stress "who" if you want to draw attention to the fact that you want identity information that perhaps the other person seems to think you already have, and you stress "you" if you want to direct the question to a new person you suddenly switched focus towards - then you must remember that the Danish language, like the Danish land, is very flat, so that stress is expressed horizontally, in pauses and timing, rather than vertically, with pitch, and so you slow the delivery of the word "hvem," and you then note that the "e" in its stressed form is pronounced loosely and weakly, in the throat, as if Nixon were asking his lieutenant how to deal with the witnesses: "make (h)ve.e.e.e.e.m di.i.isssapea.a.a.r."

The "m" is like a Steven Seagal film: "Silent but Marked." "Marked" is a linguist's word meaning "pronounced deceptively." So the correct way to pronounce "hvem er" (and I will end the suspense of the rest of the sentence by revealing that "er" is simply "er," same schwa, normal arr, and the "t" at the end of "det" is either silent or possibly a very gently, almost inaudible "d") is, put your upper teeth over your lower lip, make a gutteral clicking sound with schwa modulation for as long as you like, and then come to a glottal stop. Then, after you have stopped emitting any air, move your lips to the "m" configuration, pressed together and slightly forward. This is the "marking."

This is like follow-through in a baseball swing. Although you won't actually make an "emmm" sound, your pronunciation of the vowel is in theory altered by the foreknowledge of the consonent to come. And this is supposed to happen even if you know the trick.

You then make the "er" normally, but since you have left your lips in an "emmm" position from the last word (you have left your lips in an "emm" position, haven't you?), it will come out "mer." However, and the fact that the school I am attending teaching this distinction is the cause of the three-month waiting list of whose top I just passed, there is a difference between marking the "m" as followthrough on the first word's vowel versus choosing to start the second word with your lips in an "m" position. It is a difference performed unconsciously by every Dane, learned in childhood and as inexplicable by an untrained Dane as grammar is to an untrained ... to most of us, really. It's a difference that had a student fuming in the hallway, "Seven years I live here. The Danes they do not say this thing. It is 'veh mer de.'" But every Dane can hear this subtle difference. And Danes, having some of the same "face-saving" issues as the Chinese, will if you fail to pronounce your sounds properly to this level subconsiously flag everything you say as suspect and refuse to take any action based upon it, because there exists a minute possibility that you didn't say what you (in context almost certainly) did say, and the risk of losing face by doing the wrong thing in response to spoken Danish is unacceptable, and therefore you must not have spoken Danish.

So for the next three weeks of class we are learning to speak, letter by letter, consciously and deliberately making all of the critical mental gyrations which will eventually because automatic and which will produce Proper Danish. Which sounds like Henry Kissinger gargling.

It's really hard to get good orange juice in Copenhagen. It's not that it's rare, it's just that there's lots of really awful orange juice and the packaging is very similar.

I bought a small white-board for my bathroom. It's something I've been thinking about for a long time, since I do much of my best thinking there. I suspect it's because of the relative sensory deprivation in a bathroom - there's just a lot less to distract the brain. So I got a white-board to mount on the wall to take notes. It paid off the very same day.

I was walking home with my new purchase and I had a great idea for the premise of a movie. I didn't have anywhere to write it down and although I was only five minutes from home, I knew that once I got in the door I would get distracted by the mail and dinner and probably lose all of my great ideas. Then I remembered I was carrying a whiteboard. I sat down on the bench under the next streetlight, unwrapped the board, and filled it completely with mad scribbling.

The next morning, I transcribed my notes to a computer and they seemed pretty stupid. Also, it turns out that whiteboards don't work in moist environments.

---

They refinished the staircase at work. The building's almost a hundred and fifty years old, the staircase runs up six stories, and a very small elevator has been squeezed into what must have been a tidy little shaft around which the staircase climbs. For two weeks we had to take the back stairs or use the elevator. The elevator claims to hold three people, and technically three people can fit in it, but they can't all be tops.

I had a nice Thanksgiving, thank you. I inviting almost everybody I know in Copenhagen and their friends, which turned out to be almost a dozen people, and made about half of Tony's menu. The home-made tofurky was surprisingly simple to make and surprisingly tasty; three kilos of tofu and a marinade including miso and shitake. What sold it as good food, if not as turkey, was the gravy, which was superb. I don't really know how I made it because I was ad-libbing, but it did contain a ground-up pan-fried parnsnip. Who knew? Also, it was impossible to get any gourds other than zucchini, so I went ahead with a butternut squash soup recipe and, lo and behold, aside from being pale green instead of yellow, it tasted good in much the same way.

We (the company) went to Hamburg for two days for a coding bash to fix bugs in the open-source product we are working on. People came from as far as Munich and Berlin. I had a nice time because there were genuine nerds (Peter and Lars, despite being professional programmers, are not nerds, and they refuse even to feel bad about not being nerds). Timo noticed my totally cool Buffy hat sitting on a table (totally cool because it's cast-and-crew schwag I got via a Connection, not store-bought merchandise), which nobody ever does and so I often break down and point it out, which is stupid because if the other person didn't already notice it then they certainly won't care, and inquired of the room, "who hass de buhffy haht?" "Es ist mein Buffy hat!" I cheerfully replied.

And it was nice to be in Germany, where I'm at least 1% capable in the native language. On that note, Danish classes start next Monday, three hours each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and it's just in the nick of time. I've been in hermit mode, recovering from an overactively social summer and revelling in my first no-roommate, all-mine, more-than-three-months home in several years, but my ongoing laziness has made it a less productive hermitage than I had hoped. Relaxing, though.

Followup on the story I linked previously, about the Air Force/Boeing joint venture to swindle the American public. The summary of that story is that the Boeing, facing the closure of the 767 production line from lack of orders, asked for and received a massive handout from the Air Force, which bent over backwards to break the rules. You may not be surprised to learn that the primary mover in the Air Force for this project started a new job at Boeing last year. And, while I can't report that the deal has been cancelled and American taxpayers saved billions of dollars (the deal included over-payment of perhaps $5B out of $20B total, and that's without examining the assumption that the United States should maintain the infrastructure for complete air superiority of indefinite duration anywhere in the world), at least a few of the responsible parties got fired as Boeing executed evasive maneuver Charlie Yankee Alpha One:

The chief financial officer, Michael Sears, was fired for discussing a job with the Pentagon official, Darleen Druyun, while she was representing the government in talks with the company over a multibillion-dollar contract to supply aerial refueling tankers.

An internal inquiry found that Mr. Sears, once considered a candidate for Boeing's top job, and Ms. Druyun, who was also fired, tried to cover up their discussions, the company said.

[Kennedy's] larger goal after that was to settle the Cold War, without either victory or defeat—a strategic vision laid out in JFK’s commencement speech at American University on June 10, 1963.

And that was, partly, a question of atomic survival—a subject that can only be said to have obsessed America’s civilian leadership in those days, and for very good reason. The Soviet Union, which had at that time only four intercontinental rockets capable of hitting the U.S. mainland, was not the danger that rational men most feared. The United States held an overwhelming nuclear advantage in late 1963. Accordingly, our nuclear plans were not actually about deterrence. Rather, then as evidently again now, they envisioned preventive war fought over a pretext.

Beginning July 1, 2005, [California] counties will not be able to purchase any machine that does not produce a paper trail. As of July 2006, all machines, no matter when they were purchased, must offer a voter-verifiable paper audit trail.

Dark Sun. Richard Rhodes.

The definitive history of the making of the thermonuclear bomb. Also a sequel to The Making of the Atomic Bomb, among the greatest of historical non-fiction thrillers. A lot of the physics from the first book is gone, replaced mostly by Soviet espionage. There's really only one big breakthrough to go from the A-bomb to the H-bomb, and it's not Edward Teller's.

Edward Teller is of course the man known as "The Father of the H-bomb," a devoted fan and promoter of weapons of mass destruction (he would call it, defending freedom from the evils of communism), and the father of "Star Wars," the result of a short conversation with Ronald Reagan. Teller died a few days apart from Leni Riefenstahl, and neither ought be missed. (Caveat - I'm not up on my Riefenstahl yet. When I feel like diving into the art vs life of the artist thing I'll keep you all posted.) Teller gets a lot of ink in Dark Sun, and it's generally not positive.

Other villians: Curtis LeMay tried to start World War III singlehandedly - more than once - under the theory that the US should start and win the first nuclear war before mutually assured destruction came into effect and prevented the use of nuclear weapons. Oppenheimer seems innocent of charges that he was a Soviet spy. I.I. Rabi testifies in his defense, "We have an A-bomb and a whole series of it ... and what more do you want, mermaids?"

However, Oppenheimer's famous quote, "physicists have known sin," is put in much-needed context: he said it to President Truman, the person who had actually made the decision to use the A-bomb in war, and it comes off more as whining than conscience.

In general, a great book. Read it and learn how polystyrene is a key component of H-bombs.

Live From New York. Tom Shales & James Andrew Miller.

Pure crack cocaine entertainment. A complete history of Saturday Night Live told through spliced together interviews with every living participant but Eddie Murphy. Goes down so easy, you keep flipping pages until you realize it's 3 am and Chris Farley's dead.

The one failing of the book is that it isn't in an integrated multimedia package so that you can watch a skit in real video on one page and then read about the politics and drugs and sex going on backstage on the next page. Very noteworthy is the way that drugs and sex are present and integrated into the narrative in detail without prurience. Also, Chevy Chase and Robert Blake come off as unredeemable; Bill Murray, Phil Hartman, and Will Farrell are standouts. Janeane Garofalo takes a beating, including plenty of self-inflicted wounds. (Ben Stiller has a much shorter but equally negative appearance.)

The Second Coming of Steve Jobs. Alan Deutschman.

Jobs is either clinically insane or else willing to be pathologically hurtful on a daily basis for thirty years for personal gain. The book is entertaining and reveals that Pixar is successful solely due to John Lasseter; Next was always doomed; and a drunk Bill Gates was once induced to leave a message on Jobs' answering machine: "Zeez eeez Feee-LEEEEEP Kahn! Zeee Macintosh sucks!"

The Scar. China Miéville.

Completely captivating multi-genre escapism. I am very happy to have found another writer who works in science fiction but writes adult prose with convincing characters.

I mailed three boxes of my own stuff from Seattle to Copenhagen. Two arrived in a timely fashion; the third was delayed a week or so because it had customs due. Which I thought was odd, since I was transporting my own goods. A conversation with the USPS's local contractor revealed that, if I agreed to pay the tariff, I could get my stuff the next day. So now I have a bill, in Danish, for a sum of money due German customs (because that particular box was shipped through Germany) and an accompanying form, also in Danish, that I am supposed to send in parallel to get them to refund my money. I've been sitting on this particular task for a while, but today something strengthened my resolve.

I order some samples of my new Bill of Rights merchandise, mugs and bumper stickers. The mug got clipped a bit, so that the first four amendments are unnumbered, I, II, and V respectively, but in general it looks pretty good. The annoying thing, though, was that before the post office (motto: open 10 am to 5:30 pm for our convenience) would give me my own stuff, they took out a DKK78 tariff for each of the two sets of samples. The wholesale cost of a mug and bumper sticker is listed as US 15 on the package, so that's DKK 95. Lars explained the charges: 23DKK for VAT (25%), 44DKK fee for charging VAT, and 11DKK VAT on the fee for charging VAT. So I had to pay an 82% tariff to get my own merchandise samples through customs. Look, I'm sorry if the US has imposed illegal steel subsidies against Europe, insulting the global free trade movement and putting the lie to the Bush administration's ideology - and cutting maybe 30,000 US jobs from steel consuming US companies in order to save a few steel jobs in electoral swing states. There's not much I can do about. But I'll tell you what, I'm going to take that other tariff bill, which I still haven't paid, and I'm going to ignore until they come to deport me.

"In my opinion, it makes no more sense to launch an assault on our civil liberties as the best way to get at terrorists than it did to launch an invasion of Iraq as the best way to get at Osama bin Laden," Gore said.

I've been skimming Bruce Schneier's book, Secrets and Lies, and finding it a bit disappointing. He's such a good, clear, thorough writer in his online column that the book represents a bit of a step down. It's a basic primer in security, especially computer security. It's still written in his smooth, readable style, but I'm confused by the level of detail. It doesn't offer much new to someone like me, a computer person who more or less keeps up on computer security. It does offer a general overview on a lot of topics, but sometimes he seems to surf over the complexity instead of diving into it and explaining it, which makes me suspect that people who don't already understand the details may not get them. I might be wrong - he covers a lot of basic topics better and shorter than I've seen anywhere else - but it kinda seems like sometimes he introduces a topic, decides he doesn't want to dive into the necessary depth, and then glosses over it, all in the name of being thorough.

My other complaint is that he spends plenty of time talking about users and how they're easily fooled, but very little time talking about how security professionals have failed socially. The single biggest failing of institutional security I've seen is that security people (and network people) are often bullying jerks, and hence get ignored as soon as they're out of sight. If security people understood the day-to-day hassles of their proctectees, and were more often seen as allies and educators instead of unhelpful authorities with only negative powers, it seems like a lot of vulnerabilities would close up.

Tejada seems the most likely to get the biggest deal, what with his May 25, 1976 birth date courtesy of the Dominican Republic, where, as I'm sure you're all aware, means there's a significant chance that not only is Tejada not actually 27 today, but there is a fair chance that he doesn't even bat right-handed ...

Early prediction: park-adjusted, Matsui [Kazuo] will be the fifth-most-valuable shortstop next year or thereabouts, all facets of his game considered, and will spark another silly round of discussion on why, exactly, first-year players shouldn't count as first-year players if they're Japanese (incidentally, if it's racist to consider Japanese players rookies despite their being rookies, I'd like to know how it was racist for former Negro Leaguers to win Rookie of the Year awards, and how, exactly, we should regard the RoY being named for one of these players--is it really the greatest racist insult baseball's perpetrated in 50 years?).

President Bush is scheduled this Saturday to make his second trip in seven weeks to Mississippi. New York City's former mayor Rudolph Giuliani is scheduled to come to the state this week. The former Senate majority leader, Bob Dole; Senator Elizabeth Dole; the former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer; Florida's Governor Jeb Bush; Education Secretary Rod Paige; and former Oklahoma congressman J.C. Watts have all been there.

[Republican candidate for governor Haley] Barbour has blatantly appealed to the most racist elements in Mississippi by defiantly refusing to ask the Council of Conservative Citizens to remove his photograph from its website home page. The photo shows Barbour at a CCC-sponsored barbecue with five other men, including CCC field director Bill Lord.

... When he ran for the Senate in 1982, a New York Times report said:

"The racial sensitivity at Barbour headquarters was suggested by an exchange between the candidate and an aide who complained that there would be `coons' at a campaign stop at the state fair. Embarrassed that a reporter heard this, Mr. Barbour warned that if the aide persisted in racist remarks, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks."

Orcinus writes:

Indeed, Bush is touring there today, and his remarks were interesting:

"I'm proud to stand with this man ... He's proud of this state, and that's the kind of governor you need — somebody who relates to people from all walks of life."

This frankly seems like a coded reference to Barbour's wink-and-nudge refusal to take have his picture removed from the CofCC's Web site.

...

"Identity politics," though it was not called that then, was an invention of 19th-century white supremacists who, along with their acolytes, continued to employ such divisions with abandon through most of the first half of the last century. Their heirs continue to do so, but in less nakedly racial terms.

Now we have attacks on affirmative action, the "welfare state," hate-crimes legislation, and various aspects of civil-rights law, all under the umbrella of combating "identity politics." And consistently, there has been one primary source for this resurgence of white supremacy camouflaged as "normal" politics: the conservative movement generally, and the Republican Party specifically.

Black leaders often criticize the Democratic Party for its abysmal lack of leadership at times like these, pointing to such failures as indicative of the party's tendency to take black voters for granted. Certainly, there's little doubt that Democratic silence on these issues not only empowers the bigots, it also saps the energy from the party's base.

Democrats really need to ask themselves whether they want to be courting the votes of people inspired by the Confederate flag, or the same minorities for whom that flag is a symbol of oppression and intimidation. And if the latter, it is well past time for them to speak up about what is happening in Mississippi.

Washington Post commentary on the ongoing war on Iraq:

... a fundamental truth that seems too often to have eluded American political leaders since World War II: It's not the winner who typically decides when victory in a war has been achieved. It's the loser.

... Very few wars have ended in the loser's annihilation. Most end instead with his acceptance of defeat, aware that no amount of courage, stamina or self-sacrifice can reverse the outcome. The challenge is to bring that condition about as quickly and inexpensively as possible.

But history repeatedly has demonstrated that fighting a war quickly and cheaply doesn't guarantee winning it quickly and cheaply. ...

-- Richard Hart Sinnreich, Winning Badly, Washington Post Monday, October 27, 2003

and a Slashdot discussion on the PATRIOT act, winding over to 2nd Amendment rehash:

Now before everyone begins to quote Ben Franklin, please consider that he lived in a very different era where the ability of a very few to cause significant harm was simply not available. He was saying, don't let the gov't take my gun because I may need it to protect myself from intruders or even the gov't.

However, such an argument fails precisely because a gun couldn't have stopped two airplanes from flying into the WTC. All the privately held guns in the US couldn't stop a military attack by the federal government, if the government really were so inclined to attack its own citizens.

-- Deconstructing the Patriot Act PR Campaign, My take, Dancin_Santa (Score:2, Insightful)

and

"The ACLU takes this odd position on the 2nd Amendment for two primary reasons, along with a fall back stance. First, they have decided that the term "the people" that is contained in the 2nd Amendment does not apply to "the people" as it does in all of the other rights contained in the Bill of Rights. Instead, they take the position that this is a collective right and can only be assigned to a militia group, such as the National Guard, which means that Congress can limit or remove gun ownership as they see fit. Secondly, they cite the 1939 Supreme Court case of US. vs. Miller, as proof that the Supreme Court agrees with their beliefs. And finally, they take the fall back position that even if their first two reasons do not hold water, the 2nd is now outdated because the founding fathers could not have envisioned the type of arms that are currently available and the dangers of a few using firearms in criminal activity outweigh the value of this right to society.." The Hypocrisy of the ACLU, Jeremy D. Blanks

and

All the privately held guns in the US couldn't stop a military attack by the federal government, if the government really were so inclined to attack its own citizens.

Shrug. The privately-held guns in Iraq seem to be doing a reasonable job.

--Deconstructing the Patriot Act, Re:My take, Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)

• A replacement set of votes was uploaded on the Diebold machines (then called Global Election Systems) in Volusia County about one hour after the original votes.
• The original votes were on “copy 0” of the memory card containing the vote database. The replacement votes were tagged to a “copy 3.” (Card 3 held negative 16,000 Gore votes.)
• According to an internal memo written by Diebold Election Systems Sr. V.P. of Research and Development Talbot Iredale, the second set of votes should not have been done and may have been “unauthorized.”
• In the replacement vote set, totals for all races were correct except for the presidential race.
• According to CBS documents, the erroneous 20,000 votes in Volusia was directly responsible for calling the election for Bush.
• Brevard County, Florida also used Global Election Systems (now Diebold) voting machines. Brevard omitted 4,000 votes for Gore from its tally, which contributed to the decision by the networks to call for Bush.
• The two erroneous county totals came directly from the central tabulating system for the county. The GEMS program is Diebold’s central tabulation software.

Read the emails yourself - look in the thread "RE: Memory card checksum errors (was: 2000 November Election)," and in particular Lana Hires ("I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 when it was uploaded. Will someone please explain this so that I have the information to give the auditor instead of standing here 'looking dumb'"), Talbot Iredale ("If this problem is to be properly answered we need to determine where the 'second' memory card is or whether it even exists. I do know that there were two uploads from two different memory cards (copy 0 (master) and copy 3)."), two from John McLaurin the paranoid ("Sophia and Tab may be able to shed some light here, keeping in mind that the boogie man may me reading our mail." and "One concern I’ve had all along is “if” we are getting the full story from Lana."), and lead developer Ken Clark ("About the only constructive suggestion I have is to insert a line in the AV upload code to check that candvotes + undervotes = votefor*timescounted. If it happens, punt. That would have at least prevented the embarrassment of negative votes, which is really what this is all about. Then John can go to Lana and tell her it has never happened before and that it will never happen again.")

If it is true that someone reprogrammed a voting card and adjusted the total count so that Bush won, do you think that person still laughing their ass off or are they terrified?

To focus on the positive, at least we have evidence that something fishy happened. Last time. We won't in 2004, because the new voting machines don't have any paper trail, just electronic data programmed in Microsoft Access and stored on machines exposed to the internet without passwords.

After plenty of bashing on Big Media for wretched reporting, I am happy to point to this fantastic article excoriating the Boeing tanker deal as pure pork in excruciating detail. When Republicans talk about all of the money they will save cutting waste from the bureaucracy, why does corporate welfare get a free pass?

The idea of converting 767s into tankers surfaced formally in February 2001, when Boeing proposed to convert 36 planes and sell them to the Air Force for $124.5 million each. The unsolicited bid was undercut by an Air Force study the same month -- drafted by a consulting arm of Boeing -- concluding that existing Air Force KC-135 tankers would be "viable through the year 2040" and that no new planes need be bought until after 2010.

... After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacksf Airlines had deferred commercial orders for 767s, and Boeing laid off thousands of employees at plants in Everett, Wash. But the Air Force had not even listed tankers among its "unfunded priorities" in 2001 ... The Air Force had no money to buy the tankers, so on Sept. 25, 2001, the company's top executives met with Darleen A. Druyun, then a senior Air Force acquisitions officer, at the Pentagon to work out a lease deal instead. ...

Under the contract, Boeing would produce 100 refueling tankers based on its 767-model airliner, a deal Dicks predicts would be expanded and eventually bring the giant weapons manufacturer $100 billion.

...

In December 2001, language authorizing the deal -- but providing no money -- emerged in legislation in what Hill veterans refer to as a "virgin birth," meaning it was inserted into the defense appropriations bill after the bill had passed the House and Senate ... Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), a longtime supporter of expanding federal leasing, has claimed credit for inserting the language. One month before he did so, he received $21,900 in campaign contributions from 31 Boeing executives at a fundraiser in Seattle, where Boeing has many employees.

Thirty of those contributors -- including executives from the Boeing division that makes 767s -- had not contributed to Stevens in the previous decade ... About 55 percent of the company's expected revenue of $49 billion this year will come from the federal treasury ...

"the Air Force appeared not so much to negotiate with Boeing as to advocate for it, to the point of" giving Boeing unusual control over pricing, and other terms and conditions.

In November 2001, the Air Force drafted a document spelling out what capabilities the new tankers must have. Col. Mark Donohue, an official in the air mobility office, promptly sent it to Boeing for private comment, and the company sought, and received, concessions so the requirements matched what the 767 could do. The Air Force agreed to drop a demand that the new tankers match or exceed the capabilities of the old ones.

... Boeing then strove to "prevent an AOA [analysis of alternatives] from being conducted," according to a Boeing briefing chart presented to top executives in late 2001 and other e-mails. This, too, surprised Coyle. An AOA "is done virtually every time"

... An Air Force financial consultant told Boeing at one point that it was good that attention was focused on Enron instead of "your illogical accounting posture," according to a Boeing e-mail.

... Moreover, the Institute for Defense Analyses, an independent think tank, told the Pentagon after a detailed study that the Air Force was overpaying by at least $21 million per plane and that the lease violated federal accounting rules.

... Critics of the deal have continued to complain about Air Force decisions to award Boeing a $5 billion sole-source maintenance contract for the new tankers and to permit the company to earn a 15 percent profit on the deal, or more than double what Boeing makes from commercial aircraft orders.

In New Mexico, poor families (those earning less than $13,000) pay 12.1 percent of their total income in state and local taxes compared to the richest residents (average incomes of $610,900) who pay 8.7 percent -- and only 6.3 percent after accounting for the tax savings from federal itemized deductions.

The most regressive state, according to the institute, was Washington, where poor families pay 17.6 percent of their total income in state and local taxes.

... Only eight [states] tax their wealthiest residents at rates as high as the poorest are required to pay.

You know what would help? Tax cuts for the rich.

Gerd Gigerenzer discusses risk and its applications in daily life, with examples from medicine, the O.J. Simpson trial and DNA testing in general, wife battering, AIDS counseling, and other fun avenues of life.

Executive Summary

The human brain has evolved several mechanisms that helped us survive in the African veldt but now hinder us from understanding our world. Our brains see in terms of certainties instead of chances - we round "unlikely" to never and "likely" to now. I can observe my own brain working this way, but the evolutionary benefit is not obvious to me and I would like to read more. We see patterns when there is noise. This could be a direct result of evolution: a bias towards false positives prevents catastrophe at the cost of paranoia, which is a perfectly good tradeoff for hominids who usually die by age twenty but is not so good for, say, rational stock trading. Or, this could be a side-effect of simply having powerful pattern-recognition mechanisms. We see cause and effect when it doesn't exist. And we think in terms of natural numbers, not percentages.

Two examples of our evolutionarily triggered false conclusions: (this part is not from the book). I read a true story (in another book about risk and math, I think) in which the narrator asked a bunch of senior military leaders how many generals were "great." They conferred and said, about five percent. He then asked, how many battles does one have to win in a row to be a great general. They answered, "five in a row." If the chance of winning a battle is 50%, then the chance of winning five in a row is 1/2^5, or 1 / (2*2*2*2*2), or 1 / 32, or about 3%. In other words, there's no reason to think the typical "great" general is anything other than lucky, at least not until they rack up a bigger lead over random chance. The other example was similar, and applied to sports. The chance that purely random performance - shooting baskets, getting hits - will read to streaks during the course of a season is easily calculated, and it turns out that many or even most streaks in most sports are as frequent as you would predict from random chance. In other words, most streaks are just random chance. Since our brains are geared to recognize patterns and attribute cause to effect, we falsely see that someone is performing especially well, probably because they ate their lucky pasta before the game.

Gigerenzer outlines a number of common statistical mistakes, and I'll repeat the interesting ones here, skipping boring ones like confusing a 50% chance of rain tomorrow with the expectation of 12 hours of rain.

Risks expressed as probabilities are less understandable than risks expressed as frequencies. Compare:

  The probability that an asymptomatic woman aged 40-50 in region X
  has breast cancer is 0.8 percent.  If a woman has breast cancer, the
  probably is 90 percent that she will have a positive mammogram.  If
  a woman does not have breast cancer, the probability is 7 percent
  that she will still have a postive mammogram.  Imagine a woman who
  has a positive mammogram.  What is the probability that she actually
  has breast cancer?

Write down your answer before proceeding to try the second question.

  Eight of every thousand women [aged 40-50 etc] have breast cancer.
  Of these eight with breast cancer, seven will have a positive
  mammogram.  Of the remaining 992 without breast cancer, about 70
  will have a (false) positive mammogram.  Imagine a sample of women
  with positive mammograms.  How many actually have breast cancer?

The correct answers are .008 / ((.008 * .9) + (.992 * .07)) = 0.104, and 8 / (7 + 70) = about one in ten.

It is the same problem expressed in two ways, and the second way is easier for most people. One thing that did confuse me in the book, though, is why Gigerenzer argues for physicians to use the second method instead of a third method:

  For every ten women with a positive mammogram, typically one
  actually has breast cancer.

It is then even easier to answer the question, "If you have a positive mammogram, what is the chance you actually have breast cancer?"

Expression of relative risks without a base rate. Example: Mammography screening starting at age 40 reduces the risk of death by breast cancer by 25%. This seems like a convincing case for screening. However, the overall chance of dying from breast cancer is actually quite low; screening reduces the risk of death from breast cancer in the next 10 years from 0.4% to 0.3%. Once the consequences of the high rate of false positives, from stress to unnecessary surgery, is accounted for, the case for mammography screening is slim, especially if the effort put into mammography screening could instead be put into finding the real killers (i.e., smoking, poor nutrition, and lack of exercise).

Prosecutor's fallacy, confusing the chance of a match with the chance that, given a match, the defendent is not guilty. This also involves ignoring the base rate: If your DNA matches DNA found at the scene with a one in a million chance of a false match, this does not mean that the chance that you are the real killer is 999,999 in a million. If the only evidence differentiating you from the other 10 million Los Angelenos is the DNA, then there are nine other people in LA who will match, and thus only a one in ten chance that you are the right match. (And this assumes that the other links in the chain are not broken - ie, no lab error, no planted evidence, no possibility that you were at the scene and left DNA before or after the crime, or during a crime you didn't commit.)

Given a Monty Hall situation, you should switch doors.

Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he "didn't want to see any stories" quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used.

I am providing a mirror of the Diebold memos, internal email from Diebold revealing flaws and possible felonies in their electronic voting machines currently being used in 37 United States. I am also making women's and men's t-shirts with excerpts from the memos.

San Francisco - Defending the right to link to controversial information about flaws in electronic voting systems, EFF announced today it will defend an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and a news website publisher against claims of indirect copyright infringement from the electronic voting machines' manufacturer.

On October 10, 2003, electronic voting company Diebold, Inc., sent a cease-and-desist letter to the nonprofit Online Policy Group (OPG) ISP demanding that OPG remove a page of links published on an Independent Media Center (IndyMedia) website located on a computer server hosted by OPG.

Diebold sent out dozens of similar notices to ISPs hosting IndyMedia and other websites linking to or publishing copies of Diebold internal memos. OPG is the only ISP so far to resist the takedown demand from Diebold.

...

-- Electronic Frontier Foundation press release

I've also added some nice Bill of Rights mugs and bumper stickers to the store.

A nice thing about Scandinavia: pictures and even advertisements of designed objects, such as furniture, feature the designer's name. An observation: if Plato and the other Greek philosophers had been Scandinavian, their ideal shape would not have been a sphere but instead a cylinder, machined from metal, about a centimeter in diameter and an inch long in its purest expression.

A less nice thing about Scandinavia, or at least a not-nice thing about Copenhagen the party town: public urination is fairly common. Not just late at night, but all hours of the day. And public urinators are always surly, and are always looking around as if trying to make eye contact simply in order to glare at you for looking at them while they are publicly urinating. (While bagging on Scandinavia and Denmark in particular: everybody smokes, and parents are careful to smoke in close proximity to their infant children (possibly why Denmark has the highest health care expenditures but second-lowest life expectancy in the EU smoking; a serious lack of vegetarian options (also a health care factor?); sky-high prices, including for food (come on, get some illegal immigrant labor already); terrible retail opportunities.)

On a related note, at the corporate relay race in the park back in September, I noticed an innovative new form of porta-potty. It consists of four quadrants around a central shaft. Each quadrant is big enough for one person, has a teeny bit of divider on each side, and has a groin-sized hole at waist level. (23 Oct 2003: Roger Lai has a picture of one in London.) Its use consists of a man standing right against the central pillar, unzipping, and taking care of business. While it does provide the service of obscuring direct view of skin, it expresses what I find to be a deeply alien interpretation of the bodily function taboo.

Almost all bodily emissions are publicly taboo - it's easier to list the exceptions. Only a few are at all permissable in public - sneezing, coughing, crying, bleeding. The first two aren't inherently private, but carry the stigma of infection and so are rude, at least, when conducted in proximity to others. Crying is cause for embarrasement, and bleeding for alarm, and both are acceptable perhaps only to the extent that they are involuntary.

And it's not the actual excreta that is the focus of the taboo. It's the idea that the entire person is engaged in a private activity, one that is not shared with others. So there's not a zone or region on the body, like "the upper half" or "everything within a meter of the hole in question," that must be shielded from view. The whole body must be invisible - not just blurred like a mob fugitive on a talk show, but made indistinct in form and action. There must not be any definite indicator, in sight or sound or, to the extent possible, in smell, of the person's exact action. This, to me, is the essence of the bodily function taboo, and while I abhore certain other of my inculcated cultural inhibitions I'm quite comfortable leaving this one unchallenged. So the quad-unit huddle-and-pee unit, while smaller and more efficient than the traditional enclosure, remains bewildering to me.

---

Somehow, without really thinking about it, I realize each Friday around sundown that I'm lighting candles. No prayers or anything, I just think it would be cool to have candles and then I buy some and I get some holders and one night I get home late and another very late but one night I get home right at dusk and light the candles and that night just happens, by chance, to be Friday night. Three weeks in a row. Also by coincidence, after seeing some more cool cheap candles at IKEA, I now have one huge candle in the middle and four smaller ones to either side, each in their own candle stand.

---

I spent last Saturday like I spend every Saturday, going out to IKEA to furnish my new apartment. This time I bicycled, detouring up the coast a bit, through Hellerup, which is growing on me as a sort of smaller, colder, more expensive Venice Beach Main Street, from Abbot Kinney to about the Gehry studio, and without the street life, and then back inland and around almost in circles, because my Cartesian navigation sense continues to betray me in triangle-based cities. I get lost routinely in San Diego as well. China was so chaotic that it was never an issue. In any event, I picked up the last few things for my apartment, including a tall, narrow little kitchen table thing for breakfast, a stool that's too tall for the table even at its lowest setting, a rug and chandelier for the multipurpose room, and a Bright Light HF 3305. Since this wouldn't all go on my bicycle, I shelled out 230 crowns for a ride back in a van. On the approach to my street, the driver explained what the people sitting at the entrance to Christiania all the time as if waiting to meet people are doing - they are full-time police watchouts. Great. With the exception of two metal washers to permanently mount the shower head unit, I believe I have finished my nesting. My new apartment, with one-year lease, is the most permanent residence I've had since the day in August 2001 when I woke up, showered, packed my bedding into a cardboard box, called Steve, packed up the phone, carried out the box, a backpack, and two duffels to the lobby, handed in my keys, and headed to the airport and thence to Beijing to start Phase Two of my adult life. It's nice to have a home again.

The Bright Light HF 3005 is a curved plastic thing, about two feet high and a foot wide, as bright as an overcast sky. The idea behind the Bright Light is that you stare into it, or at least put it in your peripheral vision, for half an hour (less than a foot away) to two hours (a yard away) every morning. If you are suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder, this fixes your brain. After barely surviving the end of last winter in Seattle, I figured I should get a head start on these things, and also avoid the leaky-roof problem: when it's sunny, I don't need it, and when it's gloomy, I'm too depressed to go spend that much money. So, while at about US$300 for some light bulbs in a sturdy plastic case it's clearly priced to transfer wealth from the insured to Philips rather than as a consumer product, I still think it's a good purchase. After two days I'm still grumpy as ever, but it does say "two weeks" to have an effect, so I'll keep you posted.

Meanwhile I have posted some photos from my binge with Lars' digital camera, include one of the wiring problem (thanks for the tips! For now I've given up on the overhead switch per se and have rigged a wire from a switched outlet adjacent to the useless overhead switch (not to be confused with the switched outlet on the opposite wall that concerns wires C and D)).

The situation is made worse since there's so little effective mentoring in the industry from old-salts who are good at making a religion of the K.I.S.S. principle and making fun of the wealth of bloated, crappy, yet slow-to-fail stall-ware projects that dominate so much of the landscape. If you ask me, explosive growth during the dot-com bubble really blunted the technology edges of the free software movement and our industry generally. It left us collectively struggling to do things the hard way, svn being just one small example.

The first thing I had to sell was a service from US West. See, they had sold us thousands of unlisted numbers, and they wanted to sell these people a service that kept telemarketers from getting their number. The customers were often incoherent with rage ....

The Unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguru
Deeply disturbing - I had to put the book down and do a sort of Jon Stewart "whaaa?" at least every chapter. By sticking so closely to a standard "literature" tone and form, his surrealism is far more effective than, say, Mark Leyner's. Plus his writing is literature-grade.

Crow Road - Iain Banks
I haven't caught up on all of Banks' non-sf material, but this is the most normal of those I've read. And (probably consequentially) the least special or memorable, if far from the worst. (Neither Whit and The Business did much for me at all.) Very good writing but by the end you might as well have read John Irving or something.

Quicksilver - Neal Stephenson
Stephenson continues to cement his title of Pynchon Lite. If you want historical fiction set in pre-Revolutionary New England and post-Interregnum Old England, with Newton and Leibniz as major supporting characters, dramatizing and personalizing the revolution in world-view that the scientific method represents, and you want in thousands of pages of prose by a didactic sf writer, littered with random historical in-jokes, this is probably your book.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - J.K. Rowling
Maybe a touch off the peak of book four? Maybe not. If she can finish out the series at this level she'll have earned the praise that she's already gotten. The plot elements that sounded tedious when people described them to me as I bounded across the room to physically prevent them from spoiling the books happen so quickly and in such deftly unexpected ways that all of the characters remain engaging and sympathetic (except of course for that frog-faced lady).

A Fire Upon the Deep - Vernor Vinge
The first half is the exciting, page-turning infected-universe story that Peter Hamilton could never tell because his words get in the way. Vernor Vinge measures out the precise quantity of verbiage needed and uses it all to perfection. Sadly, his plot can't keep up the pace for all seven hundred pages, and the characters get stuck at halfway to interesting.

The bedroom in my apartment, which is in a hundred-year-old building, has some wiring issues. There's a switch by the door to turn on the overhead light. Because the wires go in conduits on the surface of the walls rather than inside the walls, the overhead light switch actually leads to a box at the top middle of one of the walls. The idea is that a cable then extends from that box to the hook in the middle of the wall, and then down to your chandelier. The conduit extends past this box to a power outlet on the far wall. Since the box in my bedroom has no such wire emerging from its hole, I opened it. After brushing away the cracked ceramic pieces and dust, I found four wires.

• Wire A comes out from the switch side and ends in a metal loop.
• Wire B comes out from the switch side and ends in a metal loop.
• Wire C comes out from the far, outlet side and ends in a metal loop.
• Wire D runs unbroken from one side to the other.

The question, then, is how I should connect these wires, along with two new wires to the new overhead lamp, so that the switch controls the lamp and the far outlet always works. Through trial and error, I have determined the following:

1. If wire A is connected to wire C, then the outlet works but is controlled by the switch
2. If wire B is connected to wire C, then the outlet always works.
3. If wire A is connected to wire B, then the outlet does not work.
4. If wire A is connected to a lead for the overhead lamp, and the other lead is connected to wire B, and wire B is connected to wire C, then the outlet always works and the lamp never works and the switch does nothing.
5. If wire A is connected to the a lead for the overhead lamp, and the other lead is connected to wire C, neither the outlet nor the bulb works if the switch is off. If the switch is turned on, the bulb in the overhead lamp lights up for less than a second, then fades, and then the outlet works. The bulb in the overhead lamp is not burned out.

At the moment I have it wired so that the outlet always works and the lamp never works and the switch is useless. How should I wire it so that the switch controls the lamp and the outlet always works?

Since Fram's flight was an hour before mine, my parents dropped us off at SEA-TAC airport very early by my schedule. This turned out for the best, because the line to go through security into Terminal 2 ran the length of the central hall of the airport and then snaked halfway back the other side. At which point was a bookstore, and where I stumbled across Neal Stephenson's new book by accident. Thus fortified, I got into line. Forty-five minutes (it's a hardcover, so it takes me about 80 seconds per page, so I was around page 35) I finally made it to the front. I was of course in the suspected terrorist line, since I had a one-way ticket. The story I heard was that Delta's computers crashed such that they had to re-ticket all of their passengers. And just to be on the safe side, Delta ticketed them _all_ as suspected terrorists. Fortunately Delta doesn't have gates in other terminals so I assume Fram made his flight. I made mine but without much margin. Thanks, Delta!

The book was a bit disappointing at first - Stephenson's verbosity is much more jumbled than usual, as he tries to incorporate seventeenth-century spellings and phrasings. But either he smoothes out or I got used to it or I just read better on airplanes than in security lines, because the next time I looked up it was page 135. Stephenson continues to cement his title of Pynchon Lite. If you want historical fiction set in pre-Revolutionary New England and post-Interregnum Old England, with Newton and Leibniz as major supporting characters, dramatizing and personalizing the revolution in world-view that the scientific method represents, and you want in thousands of pages of prose by a didactic sf writer, littered with random historical in-jokes, this is probably your book.

I spent 10 days in Los Angeles and San Diego. Since I was bringing my bicycle to Copenhagen as part of the trip, I hauled it up to Los Angeles on the Surfliner when I visited my grandparents. Why does Amtrak, which has lousy and overpriced service with minimal coverage, have the coolest train names? They do let you take bicycles for free, and San Diego's Union Station has free wireless, though Los Angeles' does not. I was able to do a bit of war-training (derivation: war-dialing, not training for war), and can report that at least one beach house somewhere between San Juan Capistrano and Oceanside has an open WAP.

I bicycled from North Hollywood to Santa Monica via Sepulveda Pass during morning rush hour. Why? Because it's there! Aside from a head-on collision with a Porsche, it was without incident. And that was mostly harmless - at Ventura and Sepulveda I went through an intersection on a green light while it was still filled with gridlock, and while I was threading through the cars an oncoming Porsche from far back in the line of stuck cars whipped around a truck and right at me. I hopped a bit to one side and took my weight off the bicycle. The Porsche braked to a halt, with the bumper ultimately contacting my front tire and pushing the bicycle backwards from under me about an inch and a half. I remounted and bicycled around him, calling into his open window: "You have a nice day, Mister!" He hid his face and mumbled something that could have been "sorry."

Have you noticed that checking ID has become the 21st century equivalent of bleeding a patient? Like bleeding a patient to balance her humors, checking ID is believed to have remedial powers, and is widely used even when inappropriate, even though in most cases there is no apparent improvement in condition, obvious detrimental effect, and no theoretical reason for it to work. Checking an ID card by comparing the face on the ID to the face of the bearer proves that the bearer of the card looks similar to someone that was able to get a desk clerk to issue a card to them with a particular name, age, and address. Unless the card was forged. That's all it does.

Checking ID isn't authentication - it doesn't prove that the bearer should be granted any particular power. (Except, in many circumstances, the power to drive a car, but that's just because we happen to use our identity cards for that purpose as well, and it's not even relevant to most uses of the drivers' license as ID.) To authenticate a bearer with a power, the name on the card then has to matched to a list of empowered names. Which still doesn't authenticate the bearer, it just indicates that the bearer can reasonably claim to have a name that is the same as the name on the list. And when the name does match, that is only as legitimate as the process by which the name was assembled.

Even when a bearer is matched to a name that means something in context - ie, identified, that doesn't mean that the bearer is safe. To prove that the bearer is not a threat, you must have a list of all people who are, or who might become, a threat. We probably don't want a comprehensive list of all people who are threats, because that is a substantial concentration of power and all concentrations of power are subject to abuse. (See also Dong, Mao Z, and Steel, Joe. Think I'm making an unwarranted slippery-slope argument? Ask the hundreds or thousands of people who are being partially denied their freedom of movement because they have the same name, or a similar name, to a person that some analyst someone thought was or might be a threat and decided, better safe than sorry, and thus put on a do-not-fly list that is obeyed without question or accountability.) And we can't have a list of potential threats for reasons clearly explained by Tom Cruise et al in their reasonably adequate dramatization of Philip K. Dick's story Minority Report. Remember that most of the 9/11 terrorists had legitimate IDs and were both identified and authenticated as safe passengers.

Recently I went to the premiere of a short film. Because it was on a studio set, I had to show ID. Wait, no - why did I have to show ID? To prove I was on the guest list? No, there was no guest list. I just signed my name. To make me accountable after the fact in case there was an incident? Sure, if 1) there was a way to correlate something that happened somewhere on a multi-acre lot with a name on a list and 2) if the guard compared the names on the list with the names on the IDs, which he couldn't do because the list was outside the security booth. To prove that I wasn't on a list of people who were barred entry? Sure, if the guard had the list memorized, and I didn't have a fake ID. To prove that I was authorized to drive a motor vehicle should the need arise? No, because I said (truthfully) that my ID was in a car on the far side of the studio, and was just waved in without an ID check. Entrants were asked to show ID simply because someone decided, without factual basis, that doing that procedure would make things better in some ill-understood way, even though it actually caused demonstrable problems. Just like the doctors and their leeches. It took medicine about 2000 years to progress beyond that kind of superstition, so don't hold your breath.

And by the way, why do airlines, who've fought so hard against any change to the system that might cost them a penny ... oh, wait a minute. Checking IDs doesn't make anybody safer in the airport or in the air, but it does make it harder to sell your airplane ticket to somebody else. And airlines, who are leaders in that noxious practice of variable pricing, find that an unquestioning public loyalty to checking ID plays right into their hands. (See Bruce Schneier for step-by-step instructions on subverting this ploy.)

Happily, I've discovered a few objects I thought lost. I'm on my third key-chain miniature Swiss Army Knife, and for a while I thought I would have to get a fourth. The second was caught by SEA-TAC security while I was flying to Denmark the first time - I had gone through airport security maybe six times in the previous two months and gotten it through fine each time, so I was no longer worrying about it. I was escorted back to the concourse by the brave TSA officer, and then left it at the Alaska Airlines desk for retrieval a month later. At which time ... it was nowhere to be found. Anyway, I got a new one, and remembered to throw it in with my luggage instead of putting it back on my keychain. But when I unpacked in San Diego, it wasn't where I expected. I finally found it when I unpacked again in Denmark, in a different bag. I also found my Leatherman, which is (naturally) the third one I have owned, and which I had also briefly feared lost. And I discovered in my travel bathroom kit a new toothbrush bristle cap, replacing the plastic Chinese ziploc cannister that I didn't lose but simply left with the grandparents in North Hollywood, from whence I fully intend to retrieve it in three months' time. It's these little joys, along with the comforting inevitability of death, that keep one going on a rainy day.

The Swede is gone. Not Peter, the guy in the boat. It was still there when I returned, meaning he'd been tied up in downtown Copenhagen for at least seven weeks. And Lars actually saw him walking around, so he didn't just leave the boat parked there the whole time. But I came in Saturday morning and he was gone. Farewell, crazy Swede in a sailboat.

I've settled into my new apartment in Christianshavn, across the harbor from work. It's maybe 400 meters away by line of sight, but a full kilometer by the bicycle odometer, thanks to inconveniently placed bridges. While I don't blame the Danes for the bridges, I do want to complain about the tremendous amount of construction going on, which I completely failed to anticipate in the core of a thousand-year-old city. On my ride to work I can expect to pass within a few feet of: a jackhammer, a cement saw, a diesel backhoe, a diesel overhead crane, and a pneumatic sand pounder, strung along different construction sites just in that one kilometer commute. Get a bunch of Chinese migrant workers in here and you'll finish the job next week, I'm telling you. Those gals and guys really scale up linearly. Between Beijing and Shanghai China is probably building a Copenhagen worth of housing every year, or even faster. And while I'm complaining about the Old World: sure the old buildings are pretty, but everything built in the last fifty years is just as ugly as anything in New York. And while the advertising is reasonably limited, the typography in most of the shop signs is hideous, all shouting bold sans-serif fonts. Which brings me to the lack of exciting retail opportunities, but I'll talk about that after I do more research. I only found the mall yesterday.

Anyway, my apartment is a one-bedroom on the first floor (which means the second floor in Europe) of a hundred-year-old cement apartment building that takes up an entire block, albeit hollow with a big courtyard. The interior is nice - wood floors, possibly original, and whitewashed walls. The rear staircase looks unchanged for the last century - that is, I suspect it picked up a patina of age and a hundred years of wear in its first year, and has looked the same ever since. The far end of the courtyard has trees but I just have a view of the storage shed. It has a reasonably nice vibe and isn't too loud, even though it's only a block from the entrance to Christiania, the anarchist collective from the Seventies where you can buy hash openly at wholesale prices. And also live independently of federal law in an experimental society, but the hash is mostly what people talk about.

The plumber came this week and, while he hasn't yet fixed the stove, he did install a new shower head and rig up a mount so that the tiny room with a tile floor and toilet is that much closer to being a Proper Bathroom. Meanwhile I've installed or replaced almost all of the lighting in the place, made a pilgrimage to IKEA for reasonably priced bedding (I'm experimenting with surprisingly comfortable canvas-like sheets), and am debating leaving the living room unfurnished so that I can have a dry place for tai chi. Since I'm lazy, I instead just sit in the middle of an empty square room on a folding chair with my laptop. A posture which will be slightly more effective once I get my wireless DSL connection. Anyway, y'all are welcome to come and visit me, because now I have room, a real kitchen, a passable bathroom, and a one-year lease. Get here as follows:

1. fly to Copenhagen International Airport (aka Kastrup)
2. exit international customs into terminal 3, coming out the crust side of a pie-slice-shaped room with a super-high ceiling. Go straight down the pie slice to the train ticket booth, and buy a ticket to Norreport (DKK 30, or about US$5. They take foreign currency).
3. Go downstairs and wait for a train in the right direction. If it says Malmo, you're on the wrong side of the tracks. If you get on a Malmo train, you'll get off in Sweden. And you won't even be able to tell the difference.
4. Get on the train.
5. Get off at Norreport. That's two stops after the central train station. It would be three stops if they hadn't closed the old central train station and turned it into a movie theater.
6. Staying within Norreport station, go downstairs to the Metro.
7. Take any train going to Vestamager or Lergravsparken. If it says Frederiksburg, you're going the wrong way, but you'll still be in Denmark. You won't pass through any turnstiles, and your train ticket gives you legitimate passage on the Metro for up to an hour.
8. Get off the Metro at the second stop, Christianshavn. Exit the station. Sorry about the construction.
9. Cross the street and identify Princessegade. Travel east (away from the station) down Princessegade until it forks. Before the fork you will see the Christiania entrance on the right, with hippie losers lurking about. Don't make eye contact or pass on the downwind side.
10. Take the left fork, which is Burmeistergade. Proceed a hundred meters down to 1C, on the left. Ring the bell which within a few days will have my name on it. If it's a weekday, either wait until the weekend, because I go to and from work through the sally port on the west side so you won't see me if you are waiting at the front door, or climb up the wall to the first window above and to the left of the entryway, smash it, and climb in.

PHYSICS: Jack Harvey, John Culvenor, Warren Payne, Steve Cowley, Michael Lawrance, David Stuart, and Robyn Williams of Australia, for their irresistible report "An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces."

PEACE: Lal Bihari, of Uttar Pradesh, India, for "his campaign to prove he is alive" (BBC wording)

BIOLOGY C.W. Moeliker, of Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for documenting the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck.

My address for at least the next year:

Joel Aufrecht
Burmeistergade 1C 1.tv
1429 Kobenhavn K
Danmark

I'll write more once my sleeping schedule is realigned with the rotation of the earth.

In the mid-1990s, the National Science Foundation privatized the internet. Various telecomunnications companies took over the actual moving of data, and by and large that's gone well at the backbone level. (If you don't have unmetered high-speed internet in your home for under US$40 a month, blame the US telephone companies, because that's what the rest of the first world has.) In addition to moving bytes, though, the internet also depends on some bookkeeping. Our computers use Domain Name Service to translate names like google.com into numbers like 216.239.53.99. This implies a registration scheme for keeping track of all of the names and numbers, and big computers to let everybody on the internet look up names. The NSF handed a monopoly on this function to Network Solutions, later acquired by Verisign. NetSol/Verisign has unsatisfactory rating from the BBB and a legal injunction against fraudulent advertising. They're scum, basically. And they're the people who maintain the DNS system.

Before last week, when you typed in a name that didn't exist, you got an error. Unless you used MSN or one of the other seach engines that shows you advertising instead. But the underlying internet mechanism sent back an error for non-existent domains. People who design internet applications depend on this behavior, just as they depend on many other standard behaviors of the internet, as determined by a set of rules called Requests For Comment. These are the blueprints for the internet, and each document can take several years of design, testing, and argument before it is approved.

Last week Verisign decided to unilaterally change the behavior of the internet. Because they can, and because they profit from it. When you look for a non-existent domain, you now get a Verisign advertisement instead of an error. This is bad for two reasons. First, it breaks a lot of things, such as spam tests that detect bogus domains in the source address. Second, it ignores and undermines the very successful design process of the entire internet.

The internet's first response was to treat this as a bug and people started changing their software to ignore Verisign's change. Finally, under intense pressure, including from ICANN, the semi-legitimate governing body of the internet, Verisign announced:

"Without so much as a hearing, ICANN today formally asked us to shut down the Site Finder service," Russell Lewis, executive vice president of VeriSign's Naming and Directory Services Group, said in a statement. "We will accede to the request while we explore all of our options." As of 3:30 p.m. PDT Friday, the site was still up.

Hearing? Why the hell should you get a hearing? You ignored decades of procedure to commit an action of private gain and now you want a hearing before giving it up?

Meanwhile, on a seemingly unrelated topic, the telemarketers are upset about all the phone calls they're getting since Dave Barry published their phone number:

''The ATA received no warning about the article from Barry or anyone connected with him,'' Searcy said. ``. . . the Barry column has had harmful consequences for the ATA. An ATA staffer has spent about five hours a day for the past six days monitoring the voice mail and clearing out messages.''

That's correct: The ATA received NO WARNING that it was going to get unwanted calls! Not only that, but these unwanted calls were an INCONVENIENCE for the ATA, and WASTED THE ATA'S TIME!

My question is, when these people steal from or harrass others (respectively) and then complain about the consequences, do they honestly feel aggrieved, or are they putting on a show? Do they really not understand the origins and legitimacy of the backlash?

ESPN Page 2 article on the Raider Nation

Here's an excerpt.

Rich Moore, a Bay Area tax attorney, showed us his "Stadium Pal." Before I met Rich, I thought a "Stadium Pal" was a friend you brought to a game. Silly me. When Rich pulled up his sweatpants and showed us the bag of urine that was taped to his leg so he wouldn't have to get up in the middle of the game to pee, I was sorry I asked. Before he could drop his pants and illustrate the "Stadium Pal" concept further, our friend Annie wisely offered us a beer.

Hit the link for the full article, including a picture of Dick Moore showing off his pal.

The best part about this is that I know this guy fairly well. I've been drinking with him maybe a dozen times. Now I know why he never gets up to pee.

David Sedaris has also written about the Stadium Pal: http://www.esquire.com/humor/sedaris/articles/020301_mds_tie_3.html

Rush just resigned from ESPN as a football commentator because of comments about Donovan McNabb. In essence, he said McNabb is not as good a quarterback as his backup, Coy Detmer. He said that people support McNabb because he is black and that the NFL wants black players to succeed at skill positions. Three days after his comments he resigned with this apology.

"All this has become the tempest that it is because I must have been right about something," Limbaugh said. "If I wasn't right, there wouldn't be this cacophony of outrage that has sprung up in the sports writer community."

In general, Detmer only plays when McNabb is hurt, or at the end of games when there is a blow out. McNabb is better than Detmer statistically in just about every way. Here are their main career stats.

McNabb Detmer

completion % 56.4 52

yards per pass 5.9 5.8

yards per run 6.9 1.8

TD passes vs. interceptions 71/41 10/9

QB rating (an integrated stat) 78 68

Maybe the Fox Sports network is hiring.

QUESTION: Has the President either asked
Karl Rove to assure him that he had nothing to 
do with this; or did Karl Rove go to the 
President to assure him that he --

McCLELLAN: I don't think he needs that. I think 
I've -- and I've spoken clearly to this publicly 
that -- but it's -- yes, I've just said it's -- 
there's no truth to it.

A mere two weeks after a bizarre column about our enemy France, where I couldn't tell if he was writing parody or straight prose, Friedman makes a very valid point with stunning clarity:

The U.S. war on terrorism suffered a huge blow last week — not in Baghdad or Kabul, but on the beaches of Cancún.

Cancún was the site of the latest world trade talks, which fell apart largely because the U.S., the E.U. and Japan refused to give up the lavish subsidies they bestow on their farmers, making the prices of their cotton and agriculture so cheap that developing countries can't compete. This is a disaster because exporting food and textiles is the only way for most developing countries to grow. The Economist quoted a World Bank study that said a Cancún agreement, reducing tariffs and agrisubsidies, could have raised global income by $500 billion a year by 2015 — over 60 percent of which would go to poor countries and pull 144 million people out of poverty.

Sure, poverty doesn't cause terrorism — no one is killing for a raise. But poverty is great for the terrorism business because poverty creates humiliation and stifled aspirations and forces many people to leave their traditional farms to join the alienated urban poor in the cities — all conditions that spawn terrorists.

So I was enjoying a pleasant ferry ride: a reasonable number of people in the cabin, enough that it didn't feel deserted, but not so many as to have trouble finding an empty table to spread out my breakfast and newspaper. People were quiet but not subdued, the weather was promising if not actually nice, and I generally felt at peace despite the many transitions in my life at the moment.

Like an idiot, I read the newspaper. These two quotes in particular, both found on page A11 of the 17 Sep 2003 Seattle Post-Intelligencer, I feel compelled to share with you. First, Senator Lindsey Graham, R-SC, opines:

The idea of being able to use a redesigned nuclear weapon to keep a terrorist from hitting us with a nuclear weapon is something we've got to come to grips with because it's part of the war on terrorism."

Let's think about this, shall we? Someone should, because Graham apparently didn't.

Presumable he's speaking of the money the White House and Pentagon want to develop new "bunker-buster nukes." These are small nuclear warheads that can be put on earth-penetrating weapons in order to destroy underground facilities. There are several drawbacks to this research.First, we continue to undermine our position on global disarmament if we spend more money on our own nuclear weapons. Some may argue that "evil" countries like Iran and North Korea won't stop just because we stop, and that is probably true, but it's probably also true that when we build more nukes, they feel threatened and build more nukes. The disparity in our responses to Iraq (no nukes, no threat, easy victory, hence we invaded) and North Korea (nukes, real threat, no prospect of genuine victory, hence we try to pay them off while pretending not to be paying them off, even though that's really the best strategy for the world to pursue, because that was Clinton's strategy and therefore inherently evil and wrong) make it pretty clear to everybody in the world that the only hard deterrent to a US invasion of your country is to possess nuclear weapons.

Notwithstanding the "evil" countries, plenty of other countries, such as the Ukraine, have foregone nuclear weapons, probably because most Ukranians aren't insane. If we want to be safe in this world, we need for most people to be not insane and not provoked to do insane things. US nuclear weapons development provokes people, and could make not-directly-threatening countries continue to develop things, which can then get stolen, sold, or re-purposed after a revolution.

Notwithstanding this political arguments against renewed nuclear research, there's the slight problem that "bunker-buster" nukes can't actually work, as proven by the laws of physics. In brief, a bunker-buster is meant to kill people who are hundreds of feet underground, where any other method of attack would amount to doing an excavation project while under fire from hard cover- ie, many dead people on both sides. First, you drop a bomb on the enemy's dirt or concrete roof. Powered by gravity and being pointy and dense, the bomb digs though the earth. Then a small nuclear warhead detonates, making a crater. The current research involves making better bombs and making warheads that can endure the trip and still detonate.

First problem: radioactive waste. Proponents argue that there won't be any outside the bunker, because the warhead detonates underground. Setting aside groundwater contamination issues, there's the slight problem of the hole that the bomb made, a tunnel which points right up to the air and out which a fair amount of exploded radioactive stuff will presumably jet. You can poke a straw in a water balloon if you want to see how a pressurized fluid reacts to escape hatches.

Second problem: Getting depth. Since earth is big and heavy and dense, explosions tend to go sideways, not down - path of least resistance. (See previous water balloon experiment.) So craters tend to be much wider than they are deep. This means that nuclear warheads don't actually make deep craters. And it turns out that small warheads, the kind that fit on earth-penetrating bombs, the kind that don't trigger Chernobyl-style fallout disasters, don't make craters deeper than a hundred feet or so. Even when detonated underground, so that there is pressure from above, they mostly explode sideways and up. We know this experimentally - there is a section of the US Southwest with an awful lot of shallow craters, surrounded by fences and mutant plants.

So if the explosion isn't going to get you much depth, you need the bomb to burrow a lot. Unfortunately, the physics of pointy things going into big flat hard things ends up putting a limit of a hundred feet or so on depth. Even if you put a rocket on the back of the bomb, it just won't go much deeper. And while not going much deeper, it will pulverize itself, which is bad for delicate machinery like nuclear warheads.

So with all this together, a bunker-buster nuke, which will provoke hostile governments to build more nukes, encourage neutral ones to develop more, discourage non-proliferation forces, and make it more likely for nuclear weapons to be actually used, thus making it more likely for bigger nuclear weapons to actually be used, will destroy enemy bunkers down to 200 feet or so. This is the power that Graham thinks will somehow keep a terrorist from hitting us with a nuclear weapon. That's right: they won't nuke us, because we'll be able to blow up their shallower caves, if we can find them.

And also I am starting to wonder, how many more years will it be before people will stop ending sentences with "... part of the war on terrorism?" It took a decade or more for people to abandon the war on alcohol, but that may not be a useful data point because my question is linguistic: the 18th Amendment doesn't actually say "war on alcohol"; you don't really hear about the war on poverty any more; we're still talking about the "war on (other) drugs" decades after it became an obvious failure. I'm guessing we get to play "war on terror" for ... 20 more years?

(Look up Ted Postol if you want to read more on bunker busters and why they can't work.)

The second quote I want to share with you needs no analysis; it stands quite well on its own as a statement of monumental idiocy:

I think the real problem is politics. We can manage our forests and we must manage our forests. The truth is, some in the opposition think the forests can take care of themselves (and to) just let them be. -- G.W. Bush

First, a random observation: If you want to know what life would be like in a world with unchallenged vampires, try borrowing a bicycle without running lights and then being told that the fine for being out at night without proper lights is DKK500 (about US$70). Suddenly the exact timing of dusk and sunset become important factors in your evening plans.

The job offer in Copenhagen was always a one-month trial, so I had a one-month ticket. It was obvious within the first week that we had a good fit, but I still had a relatively unchangable return ticket, and also a lot of unfinished business in Seattle. When I left, I was overseeing renovation of my parent's island cabin, which had a rotten bathroom floor from the Eisenhower administration. (No, really. They used a lot of newspaper for insulation, and one headline wrapped around the shower drain pipe said something about Ike sending ships to Indochina to help the French.) And the bathroom was part of the new wing of the cabin.

Scandinavia, charming as it is, can wear thin after a while. There seem only to be about four basic Danish faces, and while a year of China has simply made me hunger to hear Mandarin - especially I love to eavesdrop, even though I can only understand about ten percent, so I if I were reporting back to the CIA my transcipts would read,
A: No, I don't ... ... ...
B: Do you ... ... ... food?
A: Today ... ... ... ...
B: ... ... ... bathroom.

- but a month of Danish and I'm already filing it in the lower half of the beautiful-languages league table. Anyway, although I'm in a groove at work and making minor progress apartment-hunting, I want to take care of stuff at home. Now that the contractors have finished the floor and put in the new water heater, I can wrap up the easy stuff like painting and flooring, and find a new rentor who might pay enough to cover the taxes. And collect my bicycle and music hard drive. Though I fear I've already set my self up for another ordeal: Round trip from the West Coast to Copenhagen for Oct-Dec is US$2500. If I go for one month, it's $600, but that doesn't help me. But, it turns out, I can go to London for 3 months for $600. So I have a round-trip ticket from San Diego to London Heathrow, and a one-way ticket from London Stamsted to Copenhagen for 30 pounds. Of course, Heathrow and Stamsted are something like fifty miles apart, and the shuttle bus web site actually says something semantically equivelent to, "Our shedules (so to sic) are a total joke, you silly wanker" so I've alloted six hours to that leg of the trip. And I'll have my bicycle as emergency fallback. Oh, yeah, so now I'm looking up the bicycle policies for Southwest, United, and easyJet. But it will all be worth it, I keep telling myself, when I casually pass not only the commuter Danes, but also the hard-core spandex-clad messengers on real bikes with real derailleurs. I've been bicycle-commuting in Seattle, and they live in a flat country. (In reality, I frequently get overtaken by little old (blonde) ladies on pseudo-Schwinns. But, thanks to China training, I now give elbow as good as I get against all ages and infirmities when boarding buses and trains. But the Danish messengers don't look like much compared to Seattle's tattooed downtown bicycle messenger corps. I bet hardly any of the Danish riders even have social diseases.)

The first big wrinkle in my plans was the email from the contractor cheerfully announcing that not only were they over budget (not technically true, I guess, because I screwed up and didn't set a ceiling) but were an entire (expletive inserted by me and then deleted) month late because we needed a custom shower stall. Well, no, we had a shower stall, the old one, and it was profoundly dirty and probably easier to replace than clean - unless it turned out to be a custom size!! I would think that a month delay and unknown dollar increase would at least prompt a heads-up email, but then again I'm in the software business, where we perpetrate far worse every day. But then again again, commercial software development is a few decades old, whereas we've been building houses for profit for maybe a bit longer?

So, because the shower stall wasn't there, they didn't finish the electrical and can't do the floor. Since they can't do the floor, they can't paint yet. Since they can't paint yet, they can't put the toilet back yet. (I guess we'll get to find out how much a month of Honey Bucket rental costs.) So I'll be reverse-commuting from friends' apartments in Capitol Hill out to the cabin for a day at a time until it's liveable, at which point I'll have to go back to Denmark. And I'll be trying to work part-time during this, over a modem.

So this has set my mood for the flight back. Then I find out that the flight I remember as a 10 am departure is actually noon, so I've got extra time to kill in the apartment, my third in a month. This one I have all to myself, which is good because it's a small apartment; the owner has gone to Bulgaria for a week. Meanwhile I've managed to partially clog the shower drain, which upon inspection is a hole in the floor leading to a pipe that goes straight down for an undetermined d