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 distance. So I can take feeble showers or I can swim. I am of course mortified to leave the apartment in this condition, but the pipe is at least a foot straight down, so I can go shopping for coat-hangers or I can go shopping for toxic drain-cleaning products labelled in a foreign language. I do neither, ultimately; instead, I apologize in a note so that it won't be an untimely surprise. Surely she will have a tried-and-true solution. And she doesn't know the previous landlady to warn her - the previous landlady (the new-age hippy who's owned her apartment for over two decades) and I got on well enough that she invited me to stay there again, at a much lower monthly rate, when I got back if I didn't have a place, and this is my fallback if there is a snag in negotiations with the prospective new landlord I met the night before I left, who has a perfect sublet walking distance from the office but wants a half the rent off-contract - wants half-rent for twelve months in advance, in cash. Um, yeah. The Danish Kroner isn't worth too much more than a Chinese Yuan, but I'm being paid ten times more per month - and everything, housing included, is at least ten times more, so we're talking real money now. I'll email back a counter-offer and see what she says.

Anyway, I have time to kill, but I have very efficiently left my power adapter plug at the office, so I just go to bed early and wake up early, saving both laptop batteries and my new books for the flight. Since I don't have an assigned seat, I figure that getting to the airport three hours early will be a good thing. And mass transportation to the airport takes $3 - one bus and one train, totalling four zones, or two punches on my two-zone card - and well under an hour.

I don't know which was a weirder sight: the Boeing 737 in Aeroflot livery, or an identical place at the next gate from Estonian Air. Estonia is almost adjacent to Finland. Peter says that Swedish is the most beautiful language, except maybe for Norwegian, which always sounds happy; Finnish always sounds depressed. Danish is too gutteral for him.

At the airport, SAS is refusing to show checkin information for my flight (and just my flight), so after cooling my jets for half an hour I just go up to one of the thirty counters to try to check in anyway. Naturally I've picked a short line. Naturally I've picked a line with exactly one family in it, a family with two cats. Ten minutes later, they're finished, and I check in. But still no seat assignment. (I've had the ticket for four months now; I couldn't get a seat assignment when I bought it through Travelocity; I couldn't get a seat assignment when I checked in to Alaska in Seattle, I couldn't get a seat assignment when I inquired at the SAS desk at the airport in Copenhagen after arrival. I go to the gate and of course there isn't anybody at the desk - it's almost two hours before checkin. It's early in the morning, but I feel my buddha nature slipping away.)

Then we're all hearded partway back up the terminal for a security check. There are signs on the walls everywhere in Copenhagen airport (a lovely structure marred only by its stench, which results from the European insistince, shared by almost all civilized peoples except the Californians, of permitting - almost demanding - smoking in all public and private areas. Yes, please, I would like your stinking poisonous gas in my face. Please, impregnate my clothes too. When this decrepit guy at the laundrymat took time out from scoping the girls to light up, I almost cried. Even when I go to wash the smell from my clothes, this is not permitted? You have a long way to go, Europe) warning that there are no gate announcements. What this means in practice is that there are still loud, intrusive announcements in two or three languages every several minutes, but instead of a few of them being relevant, none of them are. Unless you are passenger mumble mumble on British Airways, in which case you should proceed urgently to gate C14.

So SAS has taken this new policy to heart, and now communicates to its passengers by having someone murmer quietly to one or two members of the crowd, relying on the speed of rumor. So we were herded out of the gate area, into a non-line in the wrong place, and then into a line several feet away from the first line, and then Newark-bound passengers were seperated from Dulles-bound passengers, and then it was let slip that those of us without seat assignments should be at the other counter. The one that won't open until an hour before scheduled departure. Well, we wouldn't want to take some Scandinavian Air Serviceperson from their morning Weinerbrod and cigarette. In case you haven't noticed, I've developed a serious antipathy to SAS employees, who to a woman seem to be arrogant jerks unhappy to be forced to deal with actual paying masses. Perhaps they'd rather be out designing mobile phones or furniture or something.

Anyway, after handing over my ticket and asking for the worst possible seat just so that I wouldn't have to wait, I had to wait for forty-five minutes and ended up with a window seat. If you think I got my vegetarian meal, you would be wrong. I put the pork patties into the coffee cup and ate the veggies and the cake. Already I'm feeling much better about this EasyJet leg to my next Copenhagen trip. As I told my seatmate from Clairemont (SD, not LA), when she expressed frustration over our additional half-hour delay once on board while they searched for incorrectly routed luggage in the hold that turned out to never have been loaded in the first place (the sort of situation that makes you wish they'd just lied and said that one of the wings had cracked a bit and they'd had to add more duct tape, because then you wouldn't mind the delay so much), "At least with EasyJet you're not paying for the service you're not getting."

Dulles was fine - I gorged myself at Friday's, believe it or not, on cheese sticks and a bbq garden-burger plus sweet 120V from a conveniently located outlet for the ThinkPad. When I asked a guy behind a desk if the mailboxes at Dulles were past security or before security, he said they had ripped out all of the mailboxes and he actually sounded upset about it. So I asked him if he would mind mailing my postcard and he said sure. Then I said people were much nicer at Dulles than Newark.

Things really turned around on the journey when I picked up a new book. I had gotten a heavy paperback of Godel Escher Bach, which I hadn't really penetrated when it was handed to me at a ludicrously improbable age (thanks for the vote of confidence, dad), and a light sf/fantasy short story collection by an author I whom I had liked in collaboration ten years before. This latter choice was an obvious mistake in hindsight, and I left the book mostly unread on the airplane. But in Dulles, I picked up "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them." I've often found Al Franken unfunny in the past; unlike people like Mike Myers, who seem funny even when they aren't, and Jon Stewart, who isn't innately funny like Mike Myers but manages to always pull something funny out of his ass, when Al Franken isn't funny he has nothing to fall back on. Happily, that isn't a problem with this book because he's always funny. I've been biting my hands to stop laughing so loudly that I annoy my cabinmates. If you want to know the basic facts of how extreme the radical right is and how extensively it's penetrated and captured the mainstream, but you don't want to be driven suicidal or homicidal in the process, read his book. It's clear, actually researched, and after Franken writes something especially inflamatory, such as a chapter detailing Clinton's extensive antiterrorism project (a Reagen administration counter-terrorism ambassador says in 2000, "Overall, I give them very high marks. The only major criticism I have is the obsession with Osama, which made him stronger) and the Bush administration's stunningly complete abandonment of policy, which including everything from inattention to abandoning already drafted anti-terrorism plans to outright budget cuts, and was naturally followed by reality-inverting blame for Clinton, he follows with a nice tension-reliever like:

But, you know what, I don't want to get into a whole partisan politics thing here. Not in this book, anyway. We'll save that for my next book, I Fucking Hate Those Right-Wing Motherfuckers!, due out in October 2004.

And then, as we were chasing the sunset and losing (as a bit of geometry and a calculator and the knowledge that the earth is basically spherical and 8000 miles in diameter and rotates every 24 hours, jets fly at about 600 mph, and our route was at about 45 degrees longitude will tell you we must) a very nice Alaskan Airlines stewardess handed me a tray, asking, "You had a vegetarian meal?" And right on top of the rice and the brown sauce were big cubes of shiny white tofu. Bliss! I had a huge grin and I got my travelling chopsticks from my bag and ate it all and read Al Franken and tried not to laugh tofu up my nose

After reading dozens of [Paul Krugman] columns you start to hunger for something more in-depth that might answer the central political problem of our era: With so much to get mad about, sitting in broad daylight, why hasn't America risen in rage?

... The story of mainstream America's failure to understand the radicalism of the Bush/Cheney Republican regime, Krugman argues, echoes Kissinger's account of the difficulties Old Europe faced in recognizing the rise of a "revolutionary power" that did not play by its rules and that did not acknowledge its legitimacy. Turning Kissinger's geostrategic diagnosis inside out, Krugman casts Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove & Co. as today's Jacobins and Napoleons, determined to upend the status quo of American democracy and slaughter its sacred cows -- like a tax-supported social safety net, civil liberties, electoral norms and international cooperation.

After watching National Review's preppy editor Rich Lowry denounce the Democrats on C-SPAN for "sissifying" and "feminizing" politics, Franken calls him up and challenges him to a "Fight Club"-like mano a mano in his parking garage. "I'm 50 and have a bad back. But I think I could take you," the humorist tells him. A flabbergasted Lowry asks to sleep on it, but then wimps out the next day when Franken calls him again.

[Seven factors that have historically led to the commission of war crimes:] (1) high friendly losses; (2) high turnover rate in the chain of command; (3) dehumanization of the adversary; (4) poorly trained or inexperienced troops; (5) the lack of a clearly defined adversary; (6) unclear orders; and (7) high frustration level among the troops.

“Doctrine for Joint Urban Operations,” by U.S. General John Abizaid.

Unlike Tommy Franks, the general whom Rumsfeld befriended and who won the war and left a disastrous peace behind as he went home to retire, Abizaid looks like someone who should be in charge. Happily, he is. Sort of.

A computer program is a set of explicit instructions for producing outgoing data as a result of incoming data. A computer can be a machine or a living thing. A small child rigorously indoctrinated by nuns in the basics of arithmatic could be a computer: the child can take as input a sequence of addition and subtraction programs and produce as output answers. However, the process of programming the child is inefficient and the program is generally not extractable from the child, so we would not think of children as useful programmable computers. Instead, a useful programmable computer can accept and execute a variety of different programs.

An executable computer program is a set of instructions that can be used in its current format by an actual computer. A book of arithmatic written in Basque is not an executable computer program for a typical child from Australia. Nor is a stack of IBM punch cards an executable program for a modern IBM Thinkpad laptop computer. Because most modern computers are binary digital computers, executable programs are typically sequences of binary data.

To be digital means to input and output and use internally digits, specific and invariant values. If the value of an input is continuously variable then the signal is analog. For example, if a signal is transmitted as a blow to the head, and the value of the signal is the amount of pain that it causes, then the signal is analog. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, the one about entropy, dictates that analog signals cannot be transmitted perfectly. For example, if you receive a blow to the head you cannot pass on the exact value of that signal - you cannot strike someone else, or even yourself, with exactly the same amount of force nor cause exactly the same amount of pain.

The magic of digital computing is that we can use analog devices to create a digital system. To do this, we define several values along a continuum, and round the analog input to the nearest value. If the typical variation is much less than the space between the intervals, the digital information is reliably transmitted. For example, we can define two signals in our system of blows to the head - painless and incapacitating. If each transmitter strikes with either as much or as little force as possible, but not at any force level inbetween, then it is easy to determine the value of the system at any point simply by examining the condition of the next recipient and rounding up or down. Because there are two possible values, the system is binary. And even though each transmission, each blow to the head, is an analog event, the system is digital because the digit is always one of two values, either unhurt or lying on the floor bleeding. All that is required for the system to be reliable is that no transmitter ever strike merely a glancing blow.

This system of course presents certain physical and ethical complications, and so modern computers instead use levels of voltage in a wire as their digits. In a five-volt system, a level close to zero volts is a value of zero and a level close to five volts is a one. A system with values of two or three volts is defective and should be returned with the receipt for a refund. (Aside: The clock cycle on a modern computer - for example, 1.5 Ghz, is the frequency with which this value can change and still be accurately detected. A 1.5 Ghz - gigahertz - computer changes the values in its wires 1,500,000,000 times per second, and so can do 1.5 billion calculations each second. Or rather, can pass values around 1.5 billion times per second. A value may need to pass through several or even dozens of logic gates to complete a calculation.)

The advantage of a digital system over an analog system is that it is precisely reproducible. This means that perfect copies - of data or of programs - can be made even though no single part of the system is perfect. While errors are always possible in any system with a basis in physical reality, the possibility of an error can be made arbitrarily close to zero through redundancy. If three digital copies are compared, at least two copies will always agree for any given digit, and the chance that two of three digital copies are wrong is much smaller than the chance that a single copy is wrong. But if three analog copies are compared, such as three phonograph records, at any given point there will always be three different values. So combining digital copies produces dramatic improvements in reliability whereas multiple analog copies produce much smaller benefits.

Modern electronic computers use binary digits, though more for historical reasons than laws of nature. We can easily imagine a digit with three values - a trinary system. In our blow-to-the-head system, for example, a value could be painless, incapacitating, or lethal. In our counting system, each digit has ten different values. Our genes are encoded with a quaternary system - each DNA digit consists of one of four different basepairs. While individual DNA strands decompose more or less continuously, systems of self-repair work fairly well - our bodies contain digital sequences that are precisely identical to sequences in organisms that diverged genetically from us millions and even hundreds of millions of years ago - strong evidence of both the copyability of digital information and the power of biology.

In order for a binary computer to execute a program, the program must be presented to the computer as a sequence of binary values. Early programmers did indeed write programs as sequences of ones and zeros - computers were programmed by flipping toggle switches up and down. Sequences of ones and zeros, when properly manipulated by computers, can be construed as instructions. This occurs through means that I won't detail here in large part because I don't remember or haven't learned them, though you can look up a dead British gentleman for proof. An instruction might be, "take two input digits, and if both are 1, output one. If both are 0, output zero. If one is 1 and the other is 0, output 0." This is called an AND, because it outputs 1 only if its first AND second output are 1. A startlingly small collection of these needlessly capitalized functions, such as OR and XOR, are in fact adequate building blocks for a staggeringly large set of computations, including everything that happens on your computer today. The majority of computers today are Turing computers, because their functions can be mathematically decomposed to a Turing State Machine, essentially the simplest possible binary computer.

Despite the popularity of the toggle method of programming, the majority of programming is done with abstractions called High-Level Languages. Instead of describing a sequence of binary operations to combine two numbers, including all of the logic necessary to convert numbers from human-input decimals to computer-readable binary values, and to handle values larger than 0 and 1, and to handle the possibility of negative numbers, and to handle the possibility of receiving as input something intended to be interpreted as a Japanese word for fruit instead of a number, a programmer writes something like "a = x + y".

While programmers write in high-level languages, this code must ultimately be converted into binary instructions so that they can be processed by the computer. This conversion is naturally performed by other programs. ANDs and ORs, although technically programs, are generally realized as transistors or combinations of several transistors. They are thus hardware programs - programs that are physically, permanently encoded into electronic computers. Computers have at least one more level of abstraction, called microcode. This consists of a few hundred more sophisticated instructions built from the logical functions. A typical microcode instruction might be, "Remember this number x until someone asks for it again, then forget it".

The collection of microcode instructions, called an "instruction set," is what defines a processor platform. In a typical situation, a programmer will then write a program, that is, a precise sequence of instructions for converting input values into output values, using this instruction set as a sort of alphabet. If the input is connected to, for example, an electric sensor, and the output to a motor or loudspeaker, the computer is now a kind of robot, perhaps an automatic door or a CD player. Once the program for this kind of computer is finalized and tested, it is permanently etched into a computer chip (a process that is much cheaper in bulk). This is called an embedded computer. Embedded computers make up the overwhelming majority of computers, somewhat reminiscent of the way that bacteria make up the overwhelming majority of life.

Desktops computers, however, are general-purpose programmable devices, and so must accept a variety of different programs. The lowest level of such a program must correspond to the underlying instruction set of the processor. The computer that is a 40 Mhz 80386 microchip from 1991 uses the same instruction set as the 4.77 Mhz 8086 chip in an IBM PC, and this is the same instruction set that a 1 Ghz Pentium III or Athlon uses. While an Athlon has hundreds of times more transistors than an 8086 and a radically different internal architecture, it still presents to the world essentially the same instruction set, called the x86 instruction set, as the original 8086. And thus programs which could be executed with an 8086 can also be executed, substantially faster, by an Athlon.

Such a program could not, however, be executed by the 6502 microchip in an Apple II. The 6502 instruction set is different from the x86 instruction set, and also different from the 68xxx instruction set in the 68000, 68010, and so forth, used by Apple Macintosh computers. And even though the NeXT computer uses a 68040 chip with the same instruction set as a Macintosh, Macintosh programs will not execute on a NeXT computer. The reason for this is the next level of abstraction, the operating system.

The operating system is a program that translates between the hardware and the rest of the software. In addition to the microchip that is the heart of a typical computer, other pieces of hardware, such as a video display chip or a hard drive, also contain microcode. In a desktop computer, the operating system converts the instruction set that the hardware understands to a more abstract, more universal set of functions. The operating system is an architectural convention, and other computers, such as the one in a CD player, wouldn't necessarily have one. In fact, the entire program for a CD player would typically be permanently etched into hardware in the form of a custom chip. A desktop computer, however, is a general-purpose computer and therefore needs to be able to accept different programs.

Recall that a computer program is a precise list of instructions to convert input into output. And recall that most programmers, even those working on embedded systems without sophisticated operating systems, do not write their instructions as sequences of binary digits or simple logic commands, but instead use high-level languages, producing lists of instructions called source code. There are several ways to convert source code into machine-executable programs. One is called compiling. When a program is compiled, another program called a compiler examines the source code and converts it into list of instructions that can be directly executed by the operating system or by the microcode in the chip. This new list of instructions, comprising mostly binary digits, is a binary executable. A binary executable is specific to a particular operating system, and so a binary which was compiled for Windows 3.1 cannot be executed by an Apple II. Sometimes such a binary cannot even be executed by a computer running Windows 3.0, because the different versions of the operating system are not very compatible.

Early computers were sold as hardware, with the software necessary to make them function included without additional charge much in the way that engines are included without additional charge in automobiles. This software was provided both as executable binaries and as source code. While Microsoft did not pioneer the practice of charging for software, they were the first to create a mass market specifically for software. When you buy a Microsoft program, you are buying a binary executable specific to some version of a Microsoft operating system, or sometimes to a Macintosh operating system. Eventually the operating system changes, and you are forced to buy new programs. While Microsoft is quite happy with this arrangement, many developers in the 1960s and 1970s who had not yet realized or were not personally attracted to the benefits of commercial software were troubled by the lack of portability of programs. They felt that a program written for one computer should be usable on another computer with a different instruction set or operating system.

The C language was the most successful attempt to accomplish this. A program written in the C language can be compiled on for any operating system that provides a specific minimum set of functions. The problem is that this minimum set is quite small, and the set of desirable functions increases as new hardware is invented and new uses are conceived. For example, a scanner must be controlled with a different set of functions than a printer.

In addition, programmers are deeply committed to the concept of code re-use. For example, a programmer may need to sort a list of word alphabetically. Because this is a very common need, the program to accomplish this has almost certainly already been written. These collections of programs that aren't directly useful in isolation but provide reusable functionality for other programs are called libraries. Depending on her mood and time to deadline, a programmer may find a library containing the sorting function she needs, or simply write a new sorting function and make it available as a library to others. Programmers love to write sorting functions.

An modern operating system thus consists of a kernel, which primarily handles coordination between other programs and between software and hardware, and many libraries. The Linux kernel in isolation is useless; the thing called linux which is compared to Microsoft Windows is actually the linux kernel packaged together with many libraries and other programs. The programming language C has accumulated a library called libc which provides many basic functions such as square roots. A typical linux distribution has hundreds of libraries, many of them quite obscure and only used by one or two programs - this occurs when a developer becomes convinced that her sorting function's 1% speed improvement and built-in support for French will compell all other developers on the planet to abandon the twenty years of testing and improvement represented by the standard library's sorting function and instead recode their programs to require her library instead.

Issues of both commercial greed and individual ego led to a web of incompatibilities in the Unix C world. In many ways these exceeded even Microsoft's wretched history of library incompatibilities, a history both exemplified by and climaxing with ODBC, version 2.5, I think, which in the summer of 1998 was available in three different, mutually incompatible versions distributed with three different Microsoft products by three different, rival Microsoft internal groups, such that installing any one of the products would tend to silently and untraceably break any program by any company that assumed the presence of one of the other two versions. I am not making this up - I experienced it first-hand and later heard the story from a Microsoft insider.

And so many people gave up on the idea of portable C programs that could be compiled on different platforms. Java is an attempt to solve this with another layer of abstraction. Instead of compiling source code into binary code and then passing the binary code to an operating system, Java interprets code. This means that Java code is converted to binary code as it is used, by a Java interpreter that knows both Java and a specific operating system. In theory, this means that a Java program can be executed on any computer for which a Java interpreter exists. In practice, this means that Java is too slow to be pleasant for many uses.

While Microsoft suceeded with commercial distribution of binary-only software, and the rest of the industry followed, some people rejected the concept. The open source and Free Software movements believe that software should be distributed both as binary executables and as source code. Since computer software is digital information, and digital information can be copied reliably and without significant cost, an alternative economy is possible. Instead of giving money to a software developer in exchange for an single copy of a program, a user can contribute her own work to the community in umetered exchange for other people's work. Because of the negligable cost of duplication and the distributive power of the network, this kind of system can support an incredible number of freeloaders. To date, open source development has been powered in large part by personal contributions of code by individuals who receive emotional satisfaction rather than money for their work.

Open source requires the distribution of source code as well as binary executables because source code is more amenable to modification and re-use. When source code is available, a user can change the behavior of a program simply by learning the fundamental principles of computer programming, learning the language of the program, obtaining and configuring the development environment of the program, modifying the program's source code, compiling or interpreting the source code, determining why the modifications failed, and repeating until satisfaction is obtained. Unfortunately, this is not as easy as it might sound to most computer users, and so the number of people actively contributing to open-source projects is quite limited relative to the total pool of computer users.

The Free Software movement, which predates the open source movement and terminology by over a decade, has almost identical practical goals, and thus the two movements have developed a bitter ideological rivalry. The Free Software people believe that the distribution of binary-only code for profit is innately immoral because it restricts the freedom of computer users, and thus should be eliminated. Source code distributed as Free Software is licensed such that a user has complete freedom to use the program, except that they cannot redistribute the program or a modified version of the program without also making the source code available without charge under the same license. Note that Free/Open Source code is still copyrighted by its authors, who then use their copyright power to enforce the license.

I maintained platform and license agnosticism for my first decade of computer user. While I had preferences, including devotion to OS/2 until well after Windows NT had surpassed it in many ways, and a general distaste for the faith-based assertions of Macintosh usability that seemed to cause followers to forget the fact that Macintoshes crash even more frequently than Windows computers, I refused to categorically rule out any company or operating system. I abandoned this position in 2001 for several reasons. I felt Microsoft's general practices, in additional to being illegal, had crossed the line to establish a "with us or against us" situation. I found the rationale behind Free and open software compelling. And I was installing a new computer in China, where I had access to English-language linux distributions but not English-language Windows.

So I have not used Microsoft software, either personally or professionally, for over two years. This last statement is only 99% accurate - it's virtually impossible to function as a computer professional without encountering and using Microsoft software, if only in net bars and borrowed desktops. As with my vegetarianism, acquired under similar circumstances, I feel that humorless absolutism is tedious for both the bearer and bystanders.

Instead, I have used linux and, to a lesser extent, FreeBSD. (I won't mention FreeBSD further in this essay except to say that the using the installer, even in the latest version, continues to be a less pleasant experience than the proverbial sharp stick in the eye.) Because linux itself is only a kernel, using linux means picking a distribution, a collection of programs dependent on linux in the way that a car is dependent on a motor, even if the motor is unseen. There are dozens or hundreds of distributions floating about, each embodying a different philosophy or profit motive. Several of the most enduring include Red Hat, Debian, and SuSE. I have used Red Hat to varying degrees since 1997.

With this information as background, I want to explain why I spent a reasonably warm and not entirely rainy weekend in Copenhagen beating my head on a metaphorical brick wall at a high frequency instead of touring the city and enjoying the extensive non-metaphorical brick architecture.

Before I do this, however, I want to talk about pronunciation for a minute. The proper English pronunciation for linux, I first insisted out of inarticulate instinct and later had justified for me quite convincingly, is lie-nucks, the first syllable rhyming with pi or pie. Many people pronounce it lih-nucks, using the same short i sound found in "lindy-hop." This is apparently because the Finnish author of linux is named Linus, which he pronouces "lee-nus," the first syllable rhyming with see or be. The anglicized version of Linus, however, is "lie-nus," not "lin-us," and so the anglicized version of Linux should follow suit. I must confess, however, that I can't bring myself to call Beijing "Peking," so expect additional justification at a later date.

Back to our story. While free software is by definition available as source code, it's usually more practical to acquire it as binary executables. This is both because of the chicken-and-egg problem of compiling a kernel without having a compiled kernel and compiler, and because compiling the thousands of programs in a typical distribution can take days. Binary executables are specific both to an operating system and to a particular set of libraries, and so binary distributions are more fragile than source distributions.

Libraries are supposed to be "backwards-compatible," meaning that new versions may add functionality but should behave in exactly the same way as old versions. But this is often not true, because of various tradeoffs in how programs can use libraries, because new functions are radically different, and because developers sometimes feel compelled to make things "better," where "better" is defined very narrowly and without accounting for other human beings - for example, fixing typos after thousands of other developers have accomodated the typo in their own code. This kind of accomodation, called somewhat tongue-in-cheek "bug-for-bug compatibility," is a notorious problem for those who write free software that interacts with Microsoft software - most of the complexity in Microsoft-compatible programs, such as those which open Microsoft Office documents, comes from discovering, mapping, and compensating for inconsistences, errors, and secret variations in Microsoft programs.

Choosing a linux distribution means choosing between source-based and binary-based programs. It also means choosing between philosophies - Red Hat is a commercial company which provides both free and non-free software. Debian is a volunteer collective. Mandrake is French, or it's Red Hat, or both. Nobody outside of Germany knows what SuSE is.

Once a distribution is chosen, it must be used. This generally means picking which of two or three different programs you will use for each function. For example, there are two different major desktop projects. A desktop program provides the glitter and underlying plumbing for the WIMP metaphor - Windows Icons Menus Pointer. As we all know, Microsoft stole WIMP from Apple, who had stolen it from Xerox. WIMP offers the devil's bargain of an easier learning curve in exchange for a loss of simplicity and speed. With WIMP, it's both possible and necessary to get computers to work by fiddling with them for a long time. And linux has two different ones to choose from. Each has a different terminal program, a different control panel, a different help system. There are two dominant text editors. There are three major office suites. There are three major web browsers, one not even free. There are three or four different journalling file systems. The general rule of thumb is that if there are N programs that do the same thing, each one will be 1/N exactly the way you like it, and (N-1)/N intolerably wrong-headed.

Now, you might think that, since it's almost all open-source and there are plenty of standards, you could just modify the source code to mix and match what you like from several different programs. You would of course be wrong. Wrong because, while each program scrupulously adheres to a standard, each program adheres to a different standard. After extensive negotiation and open warfare, the two desktop projects agreed to share a website to host their usability guidelines. Not to share the guidelines themselves, but just to store their different guidelines on a common machine. It is impossible to imagine what compromise programs the machine itself must be running.

Red Hat has improved by a quantum leap with each release. I don't think I ever got version 4 to work. Version 5 was worked but I didn't use it for anything. Version 6 was really coming along nicely. Version 7 would install correctly quite often, and once set up could be used by a normal person. Version 8 was, for someone not already familiar with Windows or Macintosh, no harder to learn. Version 9 is actually pretty.

Red Hat is distributed as a collection of closely correlated packages, so it works quite reliably. Red Hat is distributed as a collection of closely correlated packages, so it is often gratuitously difficult to upgrade. Each package has a list of other packages that it thinks it needs, and sometimes this list is wrong. Or needlessly specific. Or one packages will need a specific version of a second, but a third package will need a different version. Most frequently, one package requires a second, which itself requires two others, each of which require one or two more, which then requires one more. Yes, this process of discovery is manual and every bit as much fun as it sounds. There are several automated tools, but they don't work. So you get a very slick and stable system just by putting in the CDs - it's simpler than almost any Windows installation - but upgrading it later is quite a bother.

Because of all this, when I needed to install a new, bigger hard drive, I decided to try Debian again. I've tried it in the past and given up, because, if the installer isn't quite FreeBSD's sharp stick in the eye, the stick's still pointy at best. But Debian offers a packaging system which is, in theory, extremely slick. The computer is given a list of servers which contain packages. Each package has information about its dependencies. The magic happens when Debian's installer tries to get a package. If that package has dependencies, the installer will get those packages too. If they have dependencies, the installer will get those as well. It will keep doing this until both it and the packages are happy, and you don't have to watch any more closely than you want. All you have to do is type a command and the name of the package you want. After you've figured out that you want a package, and what its name is. Then you come back in a few minutes (hours, if you are on a modem) and it all works. Or it doesn't, in which case reconsidering your original goal may be more fruitful than trying to fix the package system. Debian seems to typify linux, in that most things just work perfectly but those that don't generally aren't worth the bother of trying to fix.

The big plus of Debian is that, when you hear about a cool new piece of software, you can just type in one line and the software materializes on your computer. Once you've used it and decided that it sucks, you can remove it from your computer just as easily. For those of us addicted to the pointless rush of trivially improved software on a daily basis, hey, at least it isn't carcinogenic. FreeBSD takes the package system to the next level - source code. You identify the package you want, and issue a command. The computer retrieves the source code from a predetermined location. And the source code for any other programs, and so forth. Then it compiles all of the necessary programs, and installs them. In exchange for this power, the installer is the worst, most user-hostile, trap-laden villainous installer I've ever seen, barring of course the Oracle installer which is simply a cruel and unfunny practical joke.

The minus of Debian is that it doesn't have nearly the polish of Red Hat. And I wasn't very familiar with it. So in order to reap the theoretical future benefit of easy upgrades, I spent pretty much the entire weekend in the office cursing and banging the table trying to get the computer to do something that I felt it should already do but couldn't articulate in language it could understand. The only other thing I did all weekend was go to a jazz club and watch Danes swing.

To summarize, in descending order of pain:

1. Oracle installer
2. (tied) sharp stick in the eye
2. (tied) FreeBSD installer
4. pointy but dull stick in the eye
5. Getting Debian to do something it doesn't want to do (like install)
6. blunt stick in the eye
7. (tied) upgrading Red Hat
7. (tied) no stick but hot smoke in the eye
9. some dust in the eye
10. the sensation you get when you bite into a York peppermint patty
11. (tied) Red Hat installer
11. (tied) Upgrading Debian

I went with Simon and Peter and Simon's younger brother (who has a fundamental Simonescence such that he is easily mistaken for Simon even though he doesn't actually look very identical) and Simon's cute blonde friend from high school to the Copenhagen Jazz club to catch the Swing Slingers. They were extremely good - very tight, especially the six-piece horn section, and the drummer was dead-on without being flashy. The lead singer introduced each song in clunky, Euro-stiff Danish, jumped up and down awkwardly, and then did full vocal justice, in English, to standards like Minnie the Moocher.

We went early for the dance lesson, but when I saw that everyone else was quite well-dressed I took my excuse to head home to change - I was still in swea pants from doing laundry in the morning, where a woman helped me negotiate the automated machines and I played peekabo with the roller baskets with her her toddler daughter (we traded keys and pocket change and she took me for a Kr1.50) and was then interviewed as material for a short film competition on the topic of Tolerance, and then spending the entire rest of the day in the office messing with my computer. So I came back before the main show started, and I was looking all around the main square for an open coffee shop and didn't see one, so when I walked in the lobby and saw a full bar with espresso machine I knew it was a sign, and got a hot chocolate and sat by the door to watch the Danes filter in. This activity felt very hip at first but when no Danes filtered in for quite some time I started to feel stupid. But then this perfectly dressed guy came in - a peach suit with long jacket, dark solid shirt, nice tie, and matching fedora, and he looked good. He hung out with the band, most of which was sitting by the bar. This other guy came in with a baseball cap and orange nylon jacket and nylon pants, and I felt that maybe I could have worn the sweatpants after all.

Later, it became obvious that two guys on the dance floor were clearly several levels above anyone except this one girl wearing a hair net and reasonable approximation of a flapper dress. One was the guy in the peach suit and the other was the guy in nylon. He danced so well, and was so perfectly built, that he managed to make a fitted black baseball cap worn low over the eyes appropriate garb for swing dancing. Peter, meanwhile, our tall, crewcut blonde Swede, was quite a good dancer but in his black shirt and tight jeans looked like he belonged in a country-western line dance.

There's an anecdote about Donald Knuth, the famous computer scientist who invented scalable fonts. When a new edition of an early book in his series came back from the printer, he was upset by the degraded appearance relative to the earlier hot-lead editions. So he spent ten year inventing scalabale fonts - fonts that are described as vectors so that they can be made arbitrarily larger or smaller and still look good. The story goes that, after years of work, he actually printed out a book using this new technology, and it looked like crap, as most new technology does. And he turned to a bystander and said, "isn't it beautiful?" Because he saw it as it could and would be, not as it actually was.

My question is, when this guy here wrote this Emacs manual, what exactly was he picturing when he wrote elegant?

You might do this by manually editing the file, but Emacs offers an elegant method to change some (but not all) settings in this file, and I describe this modification as an example. Start Emacs from the start menu. Use the Help|Customize|Top-level customization group menu command to start the customization. Locate the Environment group and jump to it by clicking on the [Go to Group] button next to the Environment group. Locate the Load path entry and fold out the values by clicking on the [Show] button. Make sure that the subdirectory site-lisp is listed. If this entry is missing, create it by clicking on the [INS] button at the end of the list. Click the [Current dir?] button and select "Directory". Then enter the full path, e.g. C:\Programs\emacs2031\site-lisp. Save this setting by clicking on the [Save for future sessions] button on top of the Environment group.

A phrase I've been reading a lot, both in emails and in published work, is "I guess I've been naive but ...." While I think it's possible to simply become a complete partisan and assume that everything Bush (or whomever your chosen "enemy" is) does is wrong, what if his team really is that dirty?

As May was drawing to a close, his manager told him that someone from the CPA wanted the company to estimate the building costs of replacing the New Diyala Bridge on the South East end of Baghdad. He got his team together, they went out and assessed the damage, decided it wasn’t too extensive, but it would be costly. They did the necessary tests and analyses (mumblings about soil composition and water depth, expansion joints and girders) and came up with a number they tentatively put forward- $300,000. This included new plans and designs, raw materials (quite cheap in Iraq), labor, contractors, travel expenses, etc.

Let’s pretend my cousin is a dolt. Let’s pretend he hasn’t been working with bridges for over 17 years. Let’s pretend he didn’t work on replacing at least 20 of the 133 bridges damaged during the first Gulf War. Let’s pretend he’s wrong and the cost of rebuilding this bridge is four times the number they estimated- let’s pretend it will actually cost $1,200,000. Let’s just use our imagination.

A week later, the New Diyala Bridge contract was given to an American company. This particular company estimated the cost of rebuilding the bridge would be around- brace yourselves- $50,000,000 !!
Riverbend (A little bit about myself: I'm female, Iraqi and 24. I survived the war. That's all you need to know. It's all that matters these days anyway.)

At Atheist Air, prior to boarding, passengers would be required to spout blasphemous remarks at a display of artifacts from all the major religions. This effectively weeds out anyone who has a secret plan to meet the Creator in the next few hours. Blasphemers would be allowed to carry-on pickaxes, blowtorches, chainsaws, nun chucks, whatever, under the theory that atheists generally try to avoid hurting other people in any situation where there isn't a clear escape route. --Scott Adams, Dilbert Newsletter 49.0

Denmark appears resistant to, or perhaps just in the early stages of infection with, the SUV. And completely immune to Starbucks. Blockbuster is everywhere, but aside from the ugly yellow and blue their stores aren't so hideous when confined to kiosks instead of mounted within parking lots (really, what isn't better when stripped of its parking-lot moat?). 7-11 is everywhere but they adapt so much to local conditions that I have a hard time calling them a plague.

One very nice thing is that the public clocks work. I've seen dozens of clocks, and all but two showed the correct time. The downside, though, is that some of these clocks are attached to church bells, and those work just as well. My new room is a block away from a big ole' church. The bells were charming when they rang 8 pm. Less charming when they rang in 11 pm. Even less so at midnight. Six am I didn't appreciate. But they don't ring every hour, which I guess is good - certainly it's quieter - but confuses. Sometimes there's a single bell at half past. Last Thursday there were one hundred and twenty nine rings at a bit past seven. Saturday morning, one hundred and thirty-something rings at a time I can only define as "early morning." I've been told that Danish counting is base-twenty, but that seems insufficient explanation for the perfidy of the bell-ringers.

(Let's take a moment to applaud the Chinese counting system, shall we? Base ten and completely simple. Four is four. Ten is ten. Forty is "four ten." Forty-four is "four ten four." There aren't even teens. It's brilliantly simple.)

I'm getting used to the bicycle lanes, which are both a blessing and a curse. You have a dedicated lane on most streets, but when you turn you have to remember to watch out for real bicycle traffic as well as cars and pedestrians. Making a left turn can take an extra light cycle as you coast to the far corner, pivot awkwardly, and wait.

I went to the US embassy early last week to get more pages in my passport. A year of Chinese efficiency had used up almost all the pages in a new passport. (Adam Katz, I still have one of your visas in my passport. I hope you got that straightened out.) The American embassy in Copenhagen is really really ugly - a squat fortress with office-building-like glass stylings, and lots of concrete barriers and construction debris. And beefy Danish security guards. Where are the Marines? I got this nice patriotic surge looking at the flag and then there weren't Marines. What the hell do I pay double-taxes for if not for sharply-dressed Marines at the embassy? And then the extent of the first security check was, "where are you going?" "I'm going to my embassy." "oh, American. Go ahead." So if you want to rush the embassy, just practice one or two phrases until your accent is eliminated.

The second security check was five feet later, and I had to surrender my laptop, my Palm Pilot, and my keys, and go through a metal detector, just to get into the passport services office. Turns out I can't go anywhere but the little service room, which has mostly unhappy-looking Danes and tennis magazines. The library is long-closed, and the very pretty gardens didn't look open. I filled out a form, handed over my passport, and read tennis magazines for half an hour until I got my passport back, twenty blank pages fatter. Happily, this service is free, so I highly recommend it as morning entertainment to any Americans abroad, particularly those homesick for American hospitality, Newark-style.

Last weekend Peter's friend Bogdan, a Pole living in Philadelphia, came to visit on the way home for vacation, so we went to Sweden for the day. Peter eagerly pointed out how much better everything was in Sweden, but really it seemed about the same. The bathroom at the restaurant where we had lunch does deserve special mention, though. The weather was amazingly pretty so we were all sitting at outdoor tables on the main square in Malmo, and I headed into the empty retaurant to take care of business. I saw a waist-high cement pillar labeled "W.C." at the center of a descending spiral staircase. You go down the stairs and you're in this beautiful, ultra-post-modern frosted-glass fantasy of a basement bathroom. The door to the mens' room is a sheet of glass blocks six feet wide, permanently anchored to the floor at a forty-five degree angle to the opening. I was very impressed and hoped that perhaps Sweden was secretly a nation of palatial bathrooms, but sadly the other accomodations I saw that day were not of that caliber.

It turns out the Sweden and Denmark are more or less the same. The Danes were a tribe out of Sweden, and once they conquered Zealand and Jutland they started their own country, with the same language as Sweden, and naturally there was nothing for the two nations to do but go to war with each other over and over for hundreds of years. The church we visited in Lund (north of Malmo, but not as far north as Helsingborg, which is across the water from Helsinore in Denmark) was famous for the Bishop, who was actually Danish, because at the time that chunk of Sweden was conquered, and the Bishop is famous for discovering the Danish flag, alleged to be the first national flag in the world. It's red with a white cross, and it fell from the sky and landed on or near the Bishop, and that's how we all came to have flags.

The consequences of my failure to maintain, even for two hours, my oath to foreswear pastries in Denmark has surprisingly not had disastrous consequences, perhaps because the omnipresent pastry shops (look for the pretzel shape on a sign) all offer the same selection, and I can only eat so many chocolate croissants. Real decadence is much more expensive and not offered at every corner. In fact, if you take price into account, I was much happier with the dining options in Guilin. There's Danish food (not much for vegetarians after the potatoes), shawarma (middle-eastern - pretty good because you can get falafel in pita), pizza, and McDonald's. I tried an Indian restaurant tonight and it was fine if not inspiring, and US$20. The Thai food has been disappointing, and it's really hard to get tofu unless you cook it yourself. The fancy department store supermarket had jars of tofu at US$5 for half a block. Um. Come on, guys, it's just tofu. But their dark chocolate truffle, at US$1 each, was so good that I ate one and was made happy and content, both extremely rare states for me.

In my travels, I'm not learning languages so much as learning how to fake languages while communicating. On the way back from Frederick County Town Hall, where I registered for my id number and health insurance (I had to pick a doctor at random - I looked for the least Danish name on the theory that immigrant doctors have more to prove), I tried to pop in to a little place for some Thai food. They had lunch boxes for US$5. "No meat," I asked the extremely jaded, very Thai-looking woman of uncertain age and function by the door, who might well have been from the porno business next door except that she seemed to want to take my (lunch) order. She launched into a description of the different lunch choices, which seemed superfluous both because they had pictures and because her language of choice was indeterminate. When I thought I heard "chicken," I interrupted. "No gai." She stopped, puzzled. "Tofu?" This got me directions, mostly in English, to a different Thai restaurant. "Ahh. Sawa-di-kap" (hello/goodbye) and I steepled my hands in front of my face and bowed in traditional Thai style as I left, which got me a grin and a punch on the shoulder.

Denmark is expensive! The basic plan for Danes seems to be that your standard of living for a given month is your income (less forty-five percent), and that you don't bother to save because taxes are high and social security is plentiful. This seems like an exaggeration/over-simplification - taxes aren't that terribly high, for one, but all the same I don't expect to save much money here unless the dollar really crashes. Which I'm hoping for - I get paid in Kroner.

The office is in an five-floor brick 1859 trading house on Havnegade, which means harbor street. So the water is directly across the street, and there are some public tie-ups. The whole time I've been here, there's been a medium-sized sailboat with a Swedish flag tied up in front of our building. We saw the owner once or twice - he looks like a stereotypical mad Swedish sailor - lanky, middle-aged, a deep weathered tan, a bunch of curly hair, and little round glasses. Once he was drinking tea, and once he was doing boat stuff, and Simon says he saw him yelling at tourists. We're afraid of him. We want to know why he's been parked in Denmark for three weeks. Other boats have come and gone and he's still there.

The history of US foreign interventions in the last century is filled with stories in which the US first tried to build liberal institutions in this or that country, saw it was going to be either really tough or unsustainable, and then settled for dictators or autocrats who were thought could secure our interests for the time being.
-- Josh Marshall

(Cynical as this is, it still doesn't address the argument that even the liberal interventions were still motivated by private financial interests.)

Riding a strange bicycle, my frustration led me to enumerate all the things I like about my own bicycle. It fits - the frame height and shape, the seat height, and the crank length altogether are pretty close to correct. It has a bunch of gears, and even in a flat country that's useful for accelerating without brutalizing your knees. You can shift gears while pedalling - that's nice. It has a rack and pair of panniers, so I can carry a lot of stuff without wearing a backpack or shoulder back. It has clipless pedals (a wonderful misnomer for pedals that clip to metal cleats in one's shoes, because they work like the pedals with the big basket clips that normal shoes fit it) so my feet never slip off the pedals, and I can put a bit of power in the upstroke. It has a real front headlight and red light in the rear that can blink at two rates, though you shouldn't set it blinking because that's illegal. It has brazeons with cages that hold water bottles. It has a bicycle computer which, despite (INCOMPLETE - get link) certain usability issues, often shows time and velocity. It has narrow, high pressure tires so that I don't spend energy flexing the rubber. I can spin the pedals backwards freely, which lets me line up the pedals for a good stomp when the light changes. I have a comfortable, stylish helmet. My bicycle is the thing I miss third.

Peter, the Swede, reports that Swedish women are taller, blonder, and more .... "More Swedish?" I ask. "Yes."

In the duffel bag that I chose to leave in Seattle, after lugging it up and down the West coast from Anchorage to San Diego, was my external hard drive with all my music, as well as my nice, bulky Sony headphones. Regretting the decision, but having left the duffel on an island, I picked up some used CDs in Seattle just before I headed for the airport. The new Peter Gabriel needs a dozen more listens before I reach any conclusions; early Loreena McKennitt sounded like a mistake on the first track and I haven't gone back; a Springsteen tribute album with Dar Williams, Los Lobos, and Johnny Cash is something for the library, not traveling music; The Magnetic Fields is a group that's constantly cited in the local alternative newspapers and The Onion as the sort of band that I should feel stupid and mainstream and ignorant for not having heard. I picked up 69 Love Songs part 2. Aside from the one delightful track I sampled at random at the store, the rest seems deliberately stilted and unmusical. So I guess I wasn't missing much. Later: Okay, after listening a few times I appreciate it a lot more. It holds a tremendous amount of musicality and quite a bit of wit. Not all of it actually sounds good, though. My music is the thing I miss second.

I left my nice Microsoft Natural Pro keyboard in Seattle. It includes a USB hub, has a good angle, and has the correct arrangement of keys (2 1/2-wide, single-high Enter key, 1 1/2-wide \| key just above, and a double-wide, single-high backspace key in the top right; plus the Ins/Del, Home/End, PgUp/PgDn cluster in the classic three-wide, two-high configuration. My only complaint is that it has a numeric keypad, which hardly anybody would notice if it were missing. But I chose to buy a used Thinkpad in part because of the keyboard, which has the full, correct complement of Ins/Del/etc, a full inverted T of arrow keys, and the correct Backspace/\|/Enter configuration. So my keyboard is not the thing I miss most of all.

The eraser-head pointing device isn't bad at all, though my index finger pad started to hurt after two full days of work. But I borrowed a mouse and it's fine. So I don't miss my mouse.

Drivers in Copenhagen are nearly as aggressive as LA drivers, but not as hostile. They honk, swerve, and then go about their business. I suspect the aggressiveness may come from the fact that people who don't particularly want to drive can realistically use public transportation, so the drivers are disproportionately twenty-to-fifty male jerks. But there's still not too traffic overall, and in particular there are very few SUVs. I don't miss SUVs or passive-aggressive Seattle drivers.

I've gotten lost repeatedly. This is in part because I didn't have a map for a few days, and more because, while the intersections are often at right angles, the blocks aren't necessarily square. So I get off-track by a few degrees here and there, and it adds up. In the core area, the distances are small enough that my dead reckoning usually puts me close enough to recognize my surroundings. In the suburbs, at night, and particularly after getting off at the wrong train station without realizing it, this can be a bigger problem. But the map helps (though it took a fair bit of shopping to find a decent, laminated, folding street map), and the city is small, and I'll figure it out, so I only miss street grids a little.

I've looked up an American ex-pat meeting, and though it's at a bar I guess I'll give it a try. Hopefully I'll find somebody with a baseball glove, but I left my own glove and ball in the notorious second duffel. So maybe it'll be frisbee. But eventually I'll get my glove out here. I miss my glove and ball, and Americans.

At lunch with co-workers Simon (Danish) and Peter (Swedish), I asked about regional jokes.

"Of course," Simon answers, "Jutlanders have jokes about Zealanders, and the other way too."
"What about Swedish jokes?" I ask.
"We have Swedish jokes, and they have Danish jokes."
"Do you know if Scandinavians feature in jokes from the rest of the world?"
"No."
"Well, I can't really think of Danish or Finnish or Norwegian jokes, but there are plenty of dumb Swede jokes."

Peter interrupts at this point to gloat at Simon. "At least we Swedes are known. They haven't heard of you."

Public transportation is fairly flawless - buses as nice and as frequent as Hong Kong, better labelled (or maybe it's just easier to read a Roman alphabet), and without the tv advertising. The trains are covered in grafitti, but also well labelled and timely. I don't miss American public transportation.

I bicycled part of the way to Elsinore Sunday. It was mostly sunny and the temperature was perfectly pleasant. I think the land across the water was Sweden. Peter says the train to Sweden takes half an hour and DKK90 ($15). Maybe I'll go to Sweden next Saturday. My landlady (I'm living in a rented room in a townhouse in Emdrup, part of the first ring of suburbs. It's about four miles from downtown, maybe five.

Last week I wandered into a Pakistani Independence Day rally at the main square. I had a semi-coherent conversation with a man who remembered it personally ("Of course! I ran down the street with the flag.") and later relocated to London with his family. He was a bit hard to understand despite forty years in England, though I suspect he might be hard to understand in any language. I don't miss incoherence - I have yet to meet a Dane who couldn't speak fluent English. I've got the accent down on the numbers and "thank you" well enough to fool shopkeepers into answering in Danish, which is pretty counter-productive of me because then I have to say "pardon" and they blink because that doesn't parse because they weren't expecting English, and it's a bit of a snafu before we get back on track in English. I guess I should learn some more words. In particular, I often see stored boasting, "Slutspurt." But I think I'd rather preserve the mystery of that particular word.

A little, toyish purple game console with a lunch pail handle on back, with cartoonish games about a cartoon Peter Pan-esque Link who saves a cartoon princess and a cartoon plumber who collects little bits of smiley-face sunshine to save the sad, sad smiley-face sunshineless town, might be a lot of fun. Only those of us who are very secure in our manhood will ever know.

In the midst of the media cauldron boiling over about Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, we find gems like this:

"Queer Eye" turns on its head common notions of who in our society is preserving traditional values. It says out loud what many hetero eyes have long observed: America's gay community has become one of the last defenders of conservative ideals.

Worth a read, if only to imagine the conniption the President would have over it.

Newt Gingrich continues to be contra-rational. In an article arguing for radical reform of the State Department, he says,

One can hardly overstate how poorly the United States communicates its message and values to the world: Large majorities in France, Germany, and South Korea opposed the U.S. perspective on Iraq - not to mention the 95 percent disapproval rate in Turkey."

Apparently Gingrich cannot conceive that the United States may well have communicated its message and values, and that the French, German, Korean, and Turkish people may simply have disagreed. The article contain other lines that suggest Gingrich cannot imagine legitimate disagreement:

The values- and fact-based advocates note immediately that Libya is a dictatorship with a history of terrorism, and they thus conclude that Libya cannot chair the commission with any moral standing or credibility. By contrast, the accommodation worldview contends that Libya won the vote in the United Nations and that contesting Libya's moral and legitimate claim to the chair would be impolite and a violation of proper process.

I don't know about "moral" and "impolite," but it seems to me that contesting Libya's legitimate claim to the chair without technical grounds, of which I've heard none, would indeed be a violation of proper process. I see parallels between this attitude and the idea that the US should invent "unlawful combatants" or reserve the right to use cluster bombs, land mines, and other such weapons - see, we're the good guys. You can trust us.

But everybody thinks they're the good guys. Serbians slaughtering Croats thought they were defending their beseiged nation. Chinese nationalists threatening Taiwan and occupying think they're liberators (sound familiar?). The point of due process and rule of law is that the system is more fair than the players and thus must be maintained even when somebody is acting disagreeably, as long as they are still within the rules. Or, what goes around comes around. This is a lesson that I don't see evident in Gingrich, Rumsfeld, or the others.

Giving Gingrich more rope:

In May 2001, when the United States was ambushed and voted off the U.N. Human Rights Commission for the first time since the commission's inception in 1947, those people who focus on facts, values, and outcomes were justifiably outraged. But the State Department, admitting it was surprised, did nothing. Such passivity emboldened France to launch a campaign seeking to defeat U.S. foreign policy objectives articulated by Bush.

So the State Department's failure to break the UN rules caused France to oppose US foreign policy. Okay, next ...

As the world's only superpower, largest economy, and most aggressive culture, the United States inevitably infringes on the attention and interests of other peoples and nations. A country this large and powerful must work every day to communicate what it is doing. The world does not have to love us, but it must be able to predict us.

Under this logic, we should presumably keep starting preemptive wars without justification, in order to act predictably? Anyway:

Key to transforming the State Department's culture is the adoption of the right vision - President Bush's vision. We can no longer accept a culture that props up dictators, coddles the corrupt, and ignores secret police forces.

I think this is called projection.

Moreover, the rise of a global anti-American network of activists and nations - including left-wing nongovernmental organizations, elite media, and most of the elite academics around the world (including in the United States - further increases the country's need for a comprehensive communication and information strategy.

That's right - US universities, Amnesty International, the New York Times - they're all anti-American. I'm sorry, Mr Gingrich, but preemptive war is not American. Indefinite detention without trial is not American.

And if you think Gingrich is out of government and not important any more, then you probably haven't heard of the Defense Policy Board or our good friend Richard Pearle. Gingrich sits on, Gingrich advises Rumsfeld, and Gingrich is trying to get appointed Secretary of State.

Gingrich, being very smart and observant in addition to his less positive attributes, also advocates:

"a Foreign Service that is at least 40 percent larger"

"Indeed, diplomats should receive a significant extra monthly payment for language proficiency."

"U.S. authorities must initiate an ongoing campaign so that everyone who has suffered from torture or repression at the hands of dictators can tell their stories and bear witness;"

All good ideas. Call me morbid, though, but if we broadcast a few worldwide cable channels of nothing but people bearing witness (c.f. Shoah (INCOMPLETE - add link)), I can't help but wonder about the ratings.

At the beginning of my China journal, sweltering in a turboprop on the runway, headed for Vancouver, I noted that I expected to continue sweating for months to come. And I did.

Coming to Denmark, I didn't count on sweating. It wasn't a surprise that New York in August was muggy, sure, but after that ... I don't think it's dipped below 75 in the two days I've been here, even at night. Quite a shock, though consistent with the heat wave that left us cooking in Seattle last week.

Actually, I didn't think I'd be travelling right now. Due to miscommunication, I sat on the work permit paperwork until the last minute, and jeopardized my rescheduled plane ticket. Since changing the ticket involved multiple FedEx expenditures and at least an hour on hold, I was waiting until the last minute. (Travel Tip: never buy a paper ticket from Travelocity. Electronic, sure, but not paper. And since Expedia is ex-Microsoft, and Orbitz pays to piss us off with their pop-ups, I'm not sure what's left for fare searches.) But my tardiness worked out well when, the Friday week before the ticket date, I got an email that my work permit was approved. I bustled to mail my passport to New York, got it back the next Tuesday, and was on my way.

Oh, and another reason to avoid Travelocity for multi-carrier international travel: they gave me a 10-hour layover in Newark. 7 am to 5 pm. Thanks, guys. After six weeks of travel around the West Coast, I got hard-nosed and trimmed a duffel bag from my inventory of backpack, two duffels, and laptop bag. Bye bye second wool sweater, music apparatus, Natural Keyboard Pro, mouse, boots. But this still left me with an uncomfortable load of luggage on a day that was muggy before it even woke up. The very helpful people at Newark Airport (motto: "That's Newark _International_ Airport to you, you schmuck") said I couldn't store stuff there, "not since nine eleven." The bus driver was very helpful: "Nowhere. Nowhere in the city. Not since nine eleven." He dropped me off at his last stop, a block from ground zero. I walked over to the big hole in the ground, watched some street vendors fight over turf at eight am ("You don't touch the cart!"), and turned into a hotel across the street. They took my backpack and duffel for the day for free. I love New York - it's Jersey I can't stand.

New York was gray and hot and muggy - not a nice combination. I walked around, took a subway up to Times Square, walked partway through the Park, called Talli at 10:30 am and woke him up, met him back downtown, by which time it had cleared up a bit but was still too hot, and went to Battery Park to look at the Statue of Liberty (didn't I read that a judge had moved her to Jersey? That used to be good news but I'm not standing up for New Jersey any more. Although the bus driver did a great job of abusing traffic to get me back to the airport even after I had been stupid and gotten an unwisely late bus. I was still at the security checkpoint when they started boarding).

Denmark. Denmark is nice. I got it around 7 am on not enough sleep, and followed instructions to get to the apartment I'd found on the internet. My hostess was waiting ("I'm still up myself, actually. I was dancing all night,") and I dumped my stuff, got a key, tried to take a shower in a curtainless tub, and headed out to see Copenhagen.

At 9:30 am on a Sunday morning, really nobody is around except tourists. It was brilliantly sunny, utterly cloudless except if you looked on the horizon towards Sweden, and very civilized and peaceful. Nothing but cobblestones and six-story, two-century-old townhouses, with church steeples for variety. Really much much nicer than the bits of Newark I saw from the bus. Assuming the weather stays the same year round, the only thing between Copenhagen and perfection is some mountains nearby. I guess I'll have to go to Stockholm next.

There really are a lot of Danes in Denmark, and they really look like stereotypical Scandinavians. If there are brunettes, they're in hiding. They're all pretty serious about their tans. Everybody I approached spoke flawless English, but I still experienced that feeling of helplessness that I had at first in China. In fact, I think I felt better in the last half of the China trip, when I had barely enough Chinese to survive, than I do now.

I wore the t-shirt, but only got one comment, from the guy who sold me a postcard. He liked the shirt and said the Arabic had caught his eye. I overloaded on the beautiful scenery (Danes, Denmark, and sunshine in equal proportion) and headed home to conk out by mid-afternoon, while my hostess went to the beach. I slept for most of the next fifteen hours before heading to work.

Monday I beat everybody to the office at 8:30 am. I had a full, productive day, the first time in two years I can say that about a day spent in an office. As usual I'm sure I'm being too bossy and not shutting up, but then they did want a project manager.

Moreover, the global capital markets have begun to recognize the unprecedented size of this emerging fiscal catastrophe. In truth, the current Executive Branch of the U.S. Government is radically different from any since the McKinley Administration 100 years ago.

The 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, George Akerlof, went even further last week in Germany when he told Der Spiegel, "This is the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history...This is not normal government policy." In describing the impact of the Bush policies on America's future, Akerloff added, "What we have here is a form of looting."

...

In each case, the President seems to have been pursuing policies chosen in advance of the facts -- policies designed to benefit friends and supporters -- and has used tactics that deprived the American people of any opportunity to effectively subject his arguments to the kind of informed scrutiny that is essential in our system of checks and balances.

The administration has developed a highly effective propaganda machine to imbed in the public mind mythologies that grow out of the one central doctrine that all of the special interests agree on, which -- in its purest form -- is that government is very bad and should be done away with as much as possible -- except the parts of it that redirect money through big contracts to industries that have won their way into the inner circle.

...

Maybe one reason that false impressions have a played a bigger role than they should is that both Congress and the news media have been less vigilant and exacting than they should have been in the way they have tried to hold the Administration accountable.

...

And speaking of the Patriot Act, the president ought to reign in John Ashcroft and stop the gross abuses of civil rights that twice have been documented by his own Inspector General. And while he's at it, he needs to reign in Donald Rumsfeld and get rid of that DoD "Total Information Awareness" program that's right out of George Orwell's 1984.

The administration hastened from the beginning to persuade us that defending America against terror cannot be done without seriously abridging the protections of the Constitution for American citizens, up to and including an asserted right to place them in a form of limbo totally beyond the authority of our courts. And that view is both wrong and fundamentally un-American.

...

If the 21st century is to be well started, we need a national agenda that is worked out in concert with the people, a healing agenda that is built on a true national consensus. Millions of Americans got the impression that George W. Bush wanted to be a "healer, not a divider", a president devoted first and foremost to "honor and integrity." Yet far from uniting the people, the president's ideologically narrow agenda has seriously divided America. His most partisan supporters have launched a kind of 'civil cold war' against those with whom they disagree.

And as for honor and integrity, let me say this: we know what that was all about, but hear me well, not as a candidate for any office, but as an American citizen who loves my country:

For eight years, the Clinton-Gore Administration gave this nation honest budget numbers; an economic plan with integrity that rescued the nation from debt and stagnation; honest advocacy for the environment; real compassion for the poor; a strengthening of our military -- as recently proven -- and a foreign policy whose purposes were elevated, candidly presented and courageously pursued, in the face of scorched-earth tactics by the opposition. That is also a form of honor and integrity, and not every administration in recent memory has displayed it.

So I would say to those who have found the issue of honor and integrity so useful as a political tool, that the people are also looking for these virtues in the execution of public policy on their behalf, and will judge whether they are present or absent.

--Al Gore

So that raises the question: What is usury? Usury is something that's analogous to overcharging of any kind. I cite some Hadiths in which it's clear the Prophet was against any form of overcharging. For example, he talked about if a broker dealing with somebody from out of town were to misrepresent the buy and sell prices of the products he's dealing with, then that would be riba. Clearly, that kind of overcharging is not interest, but it is prohibited. So my argument is that overcharging of any kind is prohibited to Muslims. A Muslim has to engage in honest business practices.
--Imad A. Ahmad

Dockers recently came out with a new brand of pants, the Go Khakis, which promise to keep your legs stain-free using revolutionary nanotechnology.

We couldn't help thinking that Dockers might be using the word "nanotechnology" more for marketing muscle than for true scientific purposes, so we called its customer service line to ask a few pointed questions. Here's a slice of the conversation.

Dockers: How can I help you today?

Popular Science: I just bought a pair of the Go Khakis, and I noticed it says they use something called nanotechnology for stain resistance. Can you please explain how that works?

D: Umm, it's, uh, DuPont Teflon coating, and basically what we're asking you to do is not to use powdered detergent and press them after every fifth wash, and dry cleaning is an option also. And do not use fabric softener, because it can interfere with that stain-defending property.

PS: Great, but can you explain what makes this nanotechnology rather than just a coating? What is nanotechnology?

D: One moment please. Did you get the pleated or flat-front?

PS: Flat-front.

D: OK, one moment please. Because the one that says nanotechnology is the versatile pant that wicks moisture away from you.

PS: It says nanotechnology repels stains.

D: OK, one moment please. Can you give me a style number off that?

PS: Sorry, I don't have it with me. But it was a "stain defender," and I believe it said "Go Khaki."

D: And that was the flat-front one.

PS: I believe so.

D: OK, I believe it does say nanotechnology because it's the 60-cotton, 40-micropoly blend.

PS: So that's where the nanotechnology comes in?

D: Uh-huh.

PS: I still don't understand. Are there microscopic machines repelling the stain? How does it work?

D: Umm . . . I guess it's the type of fabric that makes it the nano.

PS: So the "nano" has more to do with the size of the fibers? And water is small enough to get through for washing, but other liquids are not—they bead up and roll off?

D: You know, I'm really not sure, but I do know they'll come clean. My kid has a pair of these. Messy kid. So I got the shirt and pants, and he's doing great with them. You just need to remember to press after every fifth wash.

PS: But would you say the stain defender was the Teflon coating or the size of the fibers?

D: It's a Teflon finish on the pants.

PS: So is nanotechnology affecting the stain resistance?

D: I would say not. I need to help other customers, ma'am. Can I ask how you got the number to call us today?

PS: 1-800-DOCKERS? Lucky guess.

As soon as she walked through my door I knew her type:
she was an argument waiting to happen. I wondered if the 
argument was required... or merely optional? Guess I'd know 
the parameters soon enough.

"I'm Star At Data," she offered.

She made it sound like a pass. But was the pass by name? 
Or by position?

"I think someone's trying to execute me. Some caller."

"Okay, I'll see what I can find out. Meanwhile, we're 
gonna have to limit the scope of your accessibility."

"I'd prefer not to be bound like that," she replied.

"I see you know my methods," I shot back.

She just stared at me, like I was a block. Suddenly I 
wasn't surprised someone wanted to dispatch her.

"I'll return later," she purred. "Meanwhile, I'm counting 
on you to give me some closure."

It was gonna be another routine investigation.

— Dashiell Hammett, "The Maltese Camel"

The kind of Christianity that pervades the religious right in this country divides the world between the saved and the damned, between God's people and Satan's people, between good and evil. We have all seen how this is played out in our politics. I used to think that President Bush was using this language as a political ploy. I still think he is, but I also think—to my disappointment—that he also believes it. His conviction that he is God's chosen one to "rid the world of evildoers" blinds him to the evil that he—and we, as Americans—are capable of doing. The conviction that we are on the side of good—of God—is, however, an ancient one—enormously powerful.

--Elaine Pagels

There's also a problem with conceiving broadcast service--especially the commercial variety--as a "marketplace." Its customers and consumers are different populations. The customers of commercial broadcasting are advertisers, not viewers and listeners. In fact, commercial broadcasting mostly is an advertising business. The "content" it distributes is merely bait; the goods sold are the ears and eyeballs of "consumers". That means commercial broadcasting's real marketplace is Madison Avenue, not radio and TV dials. As a consumer of commercial broadcast programming, your direct influence is zero because that's exactly what you pay. (Paying for cable or satellite service doesn't count, because that payment is for access, not for the content itself.)

The notable exceptions are "premium" channels like HBO and public broadcasting. The reason why programming on both is relatively higher in quality is a simple one: there's little or no split in their markets between customers and consumers. As a viewer or listener, you get what you pay for.

All of which is why this talk about the "media marketplace" is highly screwed up. Relaxing broadcast property ownership rules, in the absence of making larger chunks of available spectrum for everybody, is hardly deregulation. It is a highly selective change in existing regulation that opens opportunities only to the most successful players in a completely closed marketplace.

This is all fine if you don't care about television and radio. But what if you care about the Net and Linux? What does broadcast deregulation have to do with those?

There's a certain ritual to press conferences. With professional obfuscator Ari Fleischer gone, it looks like the new guy is going to need some breaking in. Excerpts from Scott McClellan's first press conference:

QUESTION: I'm not talking about anybody else's comments. I'm asking the question, is responsibility for what was in the President's own State of the Union ultimately with the President, or with somebody else?
Scott McClellan: This has been discussed.
QUESTION: So you won't say that the President is responsible for his own State of the Union speech?
Scott McClellan: It's been addressed.
...
QUESTION: Isn't the President responsible for the words that come out of his own mouth?
Scott McClellan: We've already acknowledged, Terry, that it should not have been included in there. I think that the American people appreciate that recognition.
This goes on for thirteen more questions and "answers," until finally another reporter asks:
QUESTION: Scott, on Keith's question, why can't we just expect, basically what would be a non-answer, which is, of course the President is responsible for everything that comes out of his mouth. I mean, that's a non-answer. Why can't you just say that?
Scott McClellan: This issue has been addressed over the last several days.
QUESTION: Why won't you say that, though, that's, like, so innocuous and benign.
Scott McClellan: The issue has been addressed.

It's been a while since I posted a straight summary of what's going on in my life; I've buried a few clues in other blog posts because that's usually more entertaining, but those who skim the emails looking for more China journal entries about washing machine floods and gastroentological thrillers don't always catch the details. So here's what I've been up to for the last year, since I got back from China.

Plan A was to settle back in Seattle, get a job, get an apartment, meet a nice girl who didn't have too many piercings or tattoos, and be happy living in the first world. Plan A failed; the pertinent details are that the job market in Seattle is rough, the people at BEA Seattle (my former co-workers from Westside Corp) are very nice, computer usability testing can get tedious, and working for large corporations gives me the psychological equivalent of a rash. Also, Seattle remains a wonderful city; it's quite livable without a car; and the weather really does make you want to slit your wrists.

Plan B: apply to university for a PCMI (Peace Corps Masters International) degree. This is one year of school in an MPA program (MBA minus the profit motive) followed by two years in a special Peace Corps posting, working with an NGO in another country on budgeting, management, fundraising, and the like. I liked this plan because it got me into school, gave me the prospect of leaving the country, and would give me the contacts and training to figure out how to start career number two, international do-gooder. Plan B failed because UW (University of Washington at Seattle) got 400 applications for maybe a dozen slots, because I had a C average in college, because my statement of purpose didn't differentiate me from all the other dot-bomb refugees without real volunteer experience; and because I only applied to one school.

Which leads us to Plan C, the currently active plan. Plan C is to move to Europe (Copenhagen, specifically) and work on open-source systems for non-profits and universities. Two things led to Plan C: first, I've been working with OpenACS, the web toolkit that powers aufrecht.org, for about three years, and even interviewed with original progenitor company Ars Digita while they were in the middle of their meltdown. (I knew they were melting down; I thought it would be an educational six months or so before the bitter end but the timing didn't work out.) So I've been doing volunteer work on OpenACS, which climaxed when I got fed up with the out-of-date installation docs and the one year of downtime aufrecht.org enjoyed after a security breach, and went on a several-month rampage to write a massive installation document that ensured that, at any point in the future prior to the envelopment of the Earth by the corona of the swollen, dying Sun five billions years hence, if I had a PC, Red Hat 8 install CDs, a backup CD, 120V alternating current, and a caffeinated beverage. That document went over well, and since the prior documentors had been abducted by aliens (or at least med school), I ended up as the primary documentor for a technically strong open source project with a troubled history and a small but growing community.

And so, when I was walking next to the canal in Fremont, fed up with the corporate contract (which was about to end) and upset about University rejection, and I made a mental list of places I could go and things I could do, number two on the list was Copenhagen, where I knew a guy who ran a small OpenACS consulting company and had invited me to an OpenACS conference (to which I had replied, "You must have mistaken me for someone who casually travels to the Continent on short notice"). His web site said he was hiring, I emailed, and he said, "come on over and spend a month and we'll see if it works out."

That was four or five months ago; inbetween there have been a series of booked and rebooked airline tickets; trans-Atlantic miscommunications; self-inflicted hassles with Danish Immigration (who don't seem to have a category for "just popping over for a month to work for a Danish national"), and part-time contract work for other OpenACS consultants. And of course I spent four weeks watching two to five movies a day at the Seattle International Film Festival. For the last four and a half weeks, since the end of the festival, I've been living a nomadic life, visiting and staying with friends and family in Anchorage, Los Angeles, and San Diego. I'm writing this sitting in the Oakland airport, where I've accepted a two to four hour bump in exchange for coupons. (I'm now carrying $1500 dollars worth of tickets and vouchers with my passport in my silk neck pouch, but I find it hard to induce myself wear it beneath my clothes unless I'm actually sleeping in public (i.e., hard sleeper on a Chinese train; on a couch in the Fairbanks airport at 3 am taking refuge from Instant Death by Mosquito).)

Shortly after I left Seattle my t-shirt idea got noticed by the internet. I've sold over 1700 t-shirts, gotten hundreds of thousands of visits, moved the site from Jessie's apartment and DSL to professional hosting without a hiccup (and then endured many hours of downtime thanks to unrelated hardware glitches that only occur when Steve, Jessie, and Nathan are all out of town and unable to reboot the server), gotten hate mail in several languages and appreciatory email in many more, and been covered in Old Media including talk radio interviews in Miami and Cork, Ireland.

Highlights from Anchorage: Toby, Corina, and I went to an airshow. It was pretty cool - Toby and I geeked out over the airplanes and, fulfilling my usual duties and liason between geeks and normals, I translated for Toby's wife Corina ("Those are the planes we used to kill Germans. Those are the planes we used to kill Japanese. These are the planes we would have used to blow up Russia."). The B1-B is already being retired, because it costs far too much to maintain and has only one un-replaceable function: blowing up Russia. The B-52 is expected to remain in service until 2040 or later; it went into service in the 1950s. I had a nice long chat with a B-52 EW specialist (electronic warfare: he sits facing backwards and listens on headphones and when somebody tries to blow up his B-52 he pushes buttons so that they fail) with refreshing candor ("Hell yeah I was scared! I thought we were going to jump. I was checking my gun and my emergency kit." "Yeah, I puke all the time. And it's harder when you sit backwards."). EW guy whose name I forgot, if you read this, drop me an email.

I also went hiking with Toby and Corina. Toby used to be a hardcore gonzo hiker, carrying backpacks with ant-like body-to-load ratios on multi-week hikes. He's mellowed a bit with marriage, and so when we were half-way up the Rabbit Lake Valley I got impatient and ran ahead the last two or three miles to the lake and then back. I paid for that exuberance with a strained right calf, and I was limping for two days. I mention this because in Los Angeles, thanks to poor advance planning on my part, grandparents both north and south of the Santa Monica mountains, and Monica's fear of fiery death on the freeway at her own hand, I spent a lot of time both driving and being driven on LA freeways. Two to four hours a day for my first week in LA, I would estimate. So I decided that for one day in LA, I wouldn't get in a car for any reason. I walked the three miles to downtown Santa Monica for a lunch date, and guess what? I re-strained the calf, had to limp through the promenade, and ended up taking the bus home.

I also had an encounter with a frighteningly tawny shopkeeper at a coffee shop. I wanted a chocolate chip cookie, and she had only raisin cookies, which she claimed were better, and I said, "If they're so much better, why do you still have so many when you're sold out of chocolate chip cookies?" and she said that she was baking more and I should come back in 14 to 17 minutes, and I said I wasn't making any committments, and I went around the corner and there was this old Chinese guy (okay, he could have been Korean or Japanese, but he was mute in any event) on the promenade with a sign, "Your face in clay in 15 minutes" so I watched him finish sculpting a little boy and then listened to a street drummer and then went to the puzzle store and then watched him sculpt a squirmy fat kid and when he had finished everything but the hair I went back and the cookies still weren't ready bought I paid for my cookie anyway and also a Wired magazine which was okay but not in any way remarkable, though the cookie lady had remarked that it was especially good, and then I saw the other newsrack and skimmed the Economist, and still my cookie wasn't ready. At this point I was thinking about the Cheese shop skit but I just waited patiently and eventually she offered my my choice of cookies off the sheet and I picked one and she handed it to me and said, "it has to have a few minutes to set before you eat it so hold it flat," and I said, "would two blocks be enough?" and she said, "yeah, probably" so I limped to the bus stop and ate the cookie and it was gooey and delicious.

San Diego was lovely.

Mill, J.S. On Liberty
I wasn't especially impressed. He's talking about freedom of action within a society; it's basically a fat pamphlet on the concept that is more colloquially expressed, "your freedom to throw punches ends at the tip of my nose." Perhaps these ideas were novel in the 19th century, but they aren't now. His writing is relatively clear for a philosopher, which means that few sentences are more than twenty lines long. But he didn't seem to offer an especially rigorous or complete argument. So it wasn't new thinking (for me, reading in 2003), and it wasn't fundamental material. I hope the other great philosophers aren't as disappointing.

22 Dec 2004: It's been pointed out to me that this is a major philosophical work which is obsolete in part because its success has lead to the wholesale incorporation of its novel ideas into our thinking. Therefore, I shouldn't judge it as containing nothing new. That fits with my vague knowledge of our history of ideas, but what disappointed me was that, as a foundational document, it didn't strike me as an especially clear and durable explication of its own concepts.

Palast, Greg. The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
Palast, an American journalist working from England, documents a horrifying cascade of abuses, from Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris's collaboration to illegally disenfranchise tens of thousands of black voters in Florida and then cover their tracks, to Republican operatives calling off the one line of investigation on Clinton that might have overturned criminal activity - his Indonesian connections - because the investigation would have implicated many Republicans as well. Pisses you off, makes your head spin. By the time you get to the last few pages, where he lists things you can do to make a difference, it seems like a sick joke.

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities
Beautiful and perfect. What else would you expect from Italo Calvino?

Ford, Richard. The Sportswriter
It tricked me into thinking it was better than it was, but it wasn't. An adequate but slightly thick-minded novel about a divorced sportswriter making his way in the world. The theme - coping with the simple pressure of existence - is engaging, and it's a different perspective, but I didn't enjoy it enough to read his other books.

Barnes, Julian. Flaubert's Parrot
A tasty treat for the brain, even though a lot of it probably went over my head. Presumably Francophiles will fare better.

...from the latest issue of Radar magazine, p.26: "But before long, people came to suspect that the danger of SARS had been exaggerated by the media. Or, as Dr. Donald Low, a member of Canada's so-called SARS containment team, put it, It's a bunch of bullshit." (Dr. Low is actually chief microbiologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.)

I've lived in Alaska a total of 12 years plus a few summers; prior to last week I had never been to Fairbanks, Alaska's 2nd largest city. Thanks to the whimsy of a scheduling computer deep in the bowels of Alaska Airlines (the same one that wouldn't let me book a circle trip with frequent flyer miles), I flew from Seattle to Anchorage via Fairbanks, which makes about as much sense as flying from Guangzhou to Guilin via Nanning. That is to say, it doesn't make much sense. Insult to injury, I had a five-hour layover. From 1 am to 6 am.

Silver lining: it's mid-June. Fairbanks doesn't get midnight sun - it's a few hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle - but I waltzed out of the terminal into a very bright twilight and t-shirt weather. I waltzed in the direction of downtown, a few miles away. When I got to the edge of the asphalt parking lot, a gang of mosquitos attacked (Bloods, naturally) and I turned smartly around and waltzed back inside. Maybe winter is a better season to appreciate Fairbanks.

My next exciting layover comes in August, when I spend 6 am to 5 pm in Newark! And, for people who have been writing to figure out where I am (for good or ill), please note that my location is indicated on the home page, as is my summer travel itinerary.

Meanwhile, I logged in to find hate mail in my inbox. (sample: "America Love it OR Leave it.") This can only mean one thing: somebody has linked to my American Apology Shirt website. And that, in turn, can only mean one thing: more sales!

"Fixing an agency management problem doesn't make headlines or produce voter support. So if you're looking at things from a political perspective, it's easier to go to war."

I saw 52 movies and three shorts packages in 25 days, up slightly from 2001. I saw seven great movies, and six awful ones. I saw 12 non-fiction films. Overall, the quality of the festival was good if mixed; I missed most of the films that fellow pass-holders rated best, but I also missed many of the worst. The Secret Festival was especially good this year. Three movies featured castration, which was not something I really needed to see. I volunteered for several Special Events, and it was certainly more fun to work at the Opening and Closing night parties than to attend them. I was one of the doorkeepers for the VIP room at Closing, which was fun in part because as a volunteer I couldn't be fired or anything, so I just stuck to the letter of the instructions and got to refuse attendance to many many people.

I was also able to put some of the skills gained in China to use, particularly blocking out, as taught to me by little old ladies elbowing me out of the way at the bus stop. A surprising number of people attempted to walk behind me at full speed into the VIP room, and when I simply stepped back and asked for their tickets they would calmly make up an excuse as though they routinely tried and failed to crash parties and then they would leave. And so I'm not going to volunteer for any parties next year, because what the hell is the point of donating free labor to ensure that celebrities and "important people" have a private room to themselves to reassure each other how important they are? It's disappointing to see how utterly mainstream, establishment, star-worshipping the festival core group is. I suppose that's the inevitable path for the 29th year of what is now the biggest film festival in North America, but it's still disappointing. Anyway, I saw a lot of movies and a few of them were extremely moving and I never would have seen them otherwise and I recommend you try and see them, especially: The Cuckoo, House of Fools, To Be and To Have, the fourth Secret Movie, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Spring Subway, Respiro, and my festival favorite, Pingpong.

"It's a total release of the id," he said one Thursday last month as he sat in a Japanese restaurant in Madison ... "I think people are generally false. Even sitting here with you, we are putting on a front. But in [Anarchy Online] you can really let your true character out. If I want to be a pervert, I am able to do that in A. O. and be a pervert right off the bat."

Ms. Werner-Stenlund, who seems alternately befuddled and amused by her husband's other life, put in, "You are a pervert."

Tablet: Any chance of Kaiju Big Battel coming to Seattle?

TKC: Yes, Seattle would be a fine city to protect from giant city crushing monsters.

JUERGEN: I was surprised when I heard you were in Spy Games. How did that come about?

CHARLOTTE: I did that film just so I could kiss Robert Redford. He's a very kissable man, and I thought, "Maybe I'll never get another chance."

In testimony before the Senate, Olson denied any involvement in the Project -- but that testimony was later fully documented as false. Yet Olson is now solicitor general of the United States ...

"Coming out of the election," Republican congressman Peter King later said, "I didn't hear anyone discuss impeachment. It was over. Then DeLay took over." ... Since then he has been promoted for his "deranged" attack on the Constitution by being named House majority leader.

In 1998, Bret Kavanaugh ... coauthored the salacious so-called Starr Report ... Today, Bret Kavanaugh is deputy legal counsel at the Bush White House.

In 1995, Michael Chertoff was chief counsel for Sen. Alphonse D'Amato's Senate Whitewater Committee that churned endless baseless allegations against the Clintons. Since then, he has served as Attorney General John Ashcroft's assistant atop the Department of Justice's criminal division (and a leading force behind the authorship of the so-called PATRIOT Act) and been nominated by George W. Bush to the federal bench.

... Richard Mellon Scaife has been, by now, thoroughly exposed as the financier behind numerous false stories about the Clintons that led to the impeachment drive ... Yet that has not ... shamed numerous respectable institutions, including Johns Hopkins University and the University of Chicago, into declining his support.

... Even before the Lewinsky story broke, Murdoch's outlets remorselessly hyped malevolent stories about the Clintons -- from Whitewater to Travelgate -- even after they were proven to be false. In 1998 and 1999, their slanted coverage of the impeachment drama performed a singular disservice to the truth. They have never corrected their numerous false reports, let alone apologized for them.

...In the battle begun in 1998 between historians and journalists over the facts of the case and the legitimacy of impeachment, the historians have won.

But the journalists' insistence that we all put the matter to rest is itself a continuation of the partisanship and hopelessly confused logic that drove the impeachment effort in the first place. That insistence amounts to amnesty for abuses against the Constitution, some of which were committed by persons who now help to run the country, and who are utterly unapologetic for what they did.

Running total for SIFF this year: 33 movies (including shorts packages as 1 movie per package); 2 implied castrations on screen; 2 directors talking about masturbation on stage. That must mean something. After a slow first week, the festival has really picked up. Even a lot of the low-budget movies have a really good look - cinematography is the strength of this year's crop, and for a film festival that's not a bad thing. A lot, a lot, a lot of documentaries and non-fiction film, which is a nice change of pace. The Secret Festival has been quite strong.

Walking home last night I was about to jaywalk across Madison when I saw a rental cop checking out the bushes across the street, and this got me to thinking about evolution and camoflage. One of the creationist objections to evolution is that camoflage and mimicry couldn't have evolved, since an insect that looks only a little bit like a poisonous wasp doesn't derive any benefit, and thus can't transition from no similarity to sufficient similarity. (As an aside, is anybody aware of a scientist with any acamedic credentials who is opposed to evolution and is not religious?) Dawkins argues quite convincingly, and nature holds plenty of examples, that even a minor similarity can offer an evolutionary advantage. While under direct light in a museum exhibit one can readily pick out a camoflaged, stuffed bird in the foliage, in the real world life and death moment occur quickly, at the margins of perception. A bird that blends in just a little bit may be fifty yards closer to safe distance when the hawk is a mile away; a bug that looks a little like a wasp has an edge over all the bugs that look nothing at all like a wasp. And when I saw the rental cop, in a uniform that across the street at night without SPD for comparison looked convincing, I could clearly see his bare right hip, but I still declined to jaywalk because it just wasn't worth the risk of being mistaken. The power of mimicry.

IMAGINE a business organised as follows. The number of firms is fixed. New entrants are banned. The head of the business can threaten to close down a couple of enterprises to restrict supplies. This is possible because the activity is exempt from anti-trust law (the largest markets, such as New York and Los Angeles, have just two suppliers; most have local monopolies). Certain classes of employees are indentured servants. Rich firms pay a marginal tax of 34% of revenues to poor ones. And the government helps build the lavish corporate headquarters.

A very lovely second Sunday of SIFFing. I inadvertantly stumbled into a nice rhythm for the day: first, "Shorts: The Hush" was a collection of short films without any dialog. The Kenneth Branagh one, while falling prey to the same triteness that hampered the rest, was prettier. Then a fairly quiet French film by the seashore, then a dialog-free (and short: 70+ minutes) Hungarian film, and finally a gorgeous sea-side Italian movie. Also the secret movie this weekend was good, making two good ones in a row and much-needed relief from the recent string of stinkers.

A very calming, centering collection of films. Something very notable about this year's film festival is that almost everything looks really good. I think that's a positive quality for a film festival.

This month I read only books with cool titles.

Daley, Brian. Fall of the White Ship Avatar. 1986.

Mildly cheesy pulp sci-fi, with occasional bursts of readable prose. Par for the course for Daley.

Yao Mingle, The Conspiracy and Death of Lin Biao. 1983.

In 1970, China was surprised to learn that the beloved Marshall Lin Biao, military hero and designated successor to Mao, died in a plane crash in Mongolia while fleeing the aftermath of a failed coup attempt.

This book, published in English in 1983 and allegedly based on top-secret materials smuggled out of China, purports to tell the truth about the Lin Biao Conspiracy. It has many citations, but bibliography comprising "unpublished memoirs," "top-secret reports," and "confessions," is not especially unassailable. But it certainly all rings true, the details appear convincing, and I'm willing to take it as provisional fact.

Lin Biao was modern China's most successful general - so talented that he was able to decline the honor of leading the Korean War, which he considered unwinnable, without ending his career. He was also politically very capable, taking a key role in promoting Mao's cult of personality. Mao eventually designated him as successor, an event which led directly to his downfall.

By annointing Lin Biao, Mao had upset the balance of power among the second rung leadership. When Mao investigated a glowing medical report on Lin Biao and discovered it utterly false, he realized that Lin had little hope of outliving him and thus needed Mao's retirement or death to hold real power. Lin suspected that Mao realized what Lin knew, and so Lin ordered his son start recruiting conspirators.

His son Lin Liguo quickly created a conspiracy of hundreds of military officers, a conspiracy that eventually included the chiefs of the different military branches, equivalent to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. Lin Liguo prepared a massive rocket attach at a rail bridge along Mao's route for a Shanghai trip, but unable to get clearance from Lin Biao, failed to pull the trigger. Lin Liguo traveled to the resort town of Beidaihe to plead with his father, but Lin Biao was unwilling to commit to such an overt action. Lin Biao preferred his own plan, which was to fake a war with the Soviet Union, thus prompted Mao to hole up in a military installation outside Beijing, which Lin would then pump full of poison gas. Lin tried to initiate secret talks with Moscow to lay groundwork for a fake war, but his agents weren't taken seriously. So, he planned to start a real war.

Meanwhile, a second rocket ambush, on the train's return journey, was also staged but not executed.

Although unaware of the train ambushes, Zhou Enlai had infiltrated the conspiracy. In addition to being Mao's right-hand man and chief diplomat, we learn that he was also an accomplished spymaster. He had at least two moles in the conspiracy, including Lin Biao's daughter's fiancee, with whose help he ultimately compromised the daughter, who had been privy to everything. Mao invited Lin to dinner at the same installation where Lin had planned to lure and kill him. The conspiracy went into spasms, but in the end Lin went to the dinner, which was polite and uneventful. As his limo was driving out of the complex, it was destroyed by an anti-tank rocket. The remaining conspirators fled, on a jet and a helicopter, both loaded with cash and munitions. The jet was hit by surface-to-air missiles and ultimately crashed in Mongolia, while the helicopter pilot deliberately flew in circles around Beijing all night until forced to land.

Zhou called in the first general, told him that the others had cracked, and asked for a confession, which he recieved. He repeated the process for the other three. The generals were imprisoned but not executed. So, aside from changing the location of Lin Biao's death and the exact circumstances of the plane crash and contents thereof, and hiding the scope of the conspiracy, the official version was actually reasonably accurate. Moral of the story: don't hestitate when you are about to destroy the Chairman's train with rocket launchers. And, make sure the helicopter pilot is in on the conspiracy.

Gyamtso Rinpoche, Khenpo Tsultrim, Progressive Stages of Meditation on Emptiness. 2001.

A summary of the main schools of thought of Tibetan Buddhism, with an emphasis on sufficient detail to meditate upon the truths presented. I'm not in the habit of reading religious texts cover to cover, but this was short and much less risible than any other religious writing I've ever looked at. I assume this reflects the nature of Buddhism as a fundamentally philosophical, rather than faith-based, doctrine. Buddhism, as explained by a shaved-head friend, is like scientists had spent thousands of years exploring the inner mind instead of the external world. It seems to me that the point of departure is Descartes, who asserts, "I think, therefore I am." Western science and philosophy go on from there, whereas Buddhists are only willing to grant, "I think, therefore I think," and start working from that point instead.

The Shravaka Approach: ... the clinging to the idea that one has a single, permanent, independent, truly existing self ... is the root cause of all one's suffering.

Compare with this description of major depression: "Eventually, you are simply absent from yourself. ... you are less than yourself and in the clutches of something alien. ... Rebuilding of the self in and after depression requires love, insight, work, and, most of all, time." (Solomon, Andrew. The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. 2001.)

Following the Shravaka pattern of trying to be intimately aware of every moment of consciousness as it arises, at the Cittamatrin stage the meditator realizes that the division of each moment of awareness into an inner perceiving mind and an outer perceived object is a conceptual invention. ... there is no proof that there is any substance other than mind anywhere.

Madhyamikas ... do not consider the ultimate emptiness found by the Cittamatrins to be ultimate emptiness at all. ... The Madhyamaka Rangtong uses reason to establish that consciousnesses and their objects cannot be ultimately real, because in the final analysis each arises only in dependence on the other and neither has a self-nature of its own.

[The two branches of Rangtong are Svatantrika and Prasangika.] ... even though the Svatantrikas themselves think they teach an understanding that goes beyond concepts, from the Prasangika point of view their understanding is still subtly conceptual. ... [Prasangikas] refuse to use any reasoning to establish the true nature of phenomena. ... Their aim is to free the awareness of its conceptualizing habit and to let the ultimate nature of reality reveal itself in a totally non-conceptual way.

... From the Shentong point of view, the fault with both Svatantrika and Prasangika Madhyamaka is that they do not distinguish between the three different kinds of existence, the three different kinds of emptiness and the three different kinds of absence of essence ... The Shentong regards the concept of a stream of consciousness consisting of moments having knowing and known aspects as a misunderstanding of reality. ... the luminous self-aware non-conceptual mind that is experienced in meditation, when the mind is completely free of concepts, is absolute reality.

After much double-checking, the text for the t-shirt is done. Order up a few shirts before your next international trip. Domestic version also available (omits English, thus limiting your exposure to zealotous reprisals, under the theory that violent Bush apologists probably don't read Chinese, Arabic, Russian, French, or Spanish. Okay, don't wear even the domestic version in Miami).

Front: American Traveler International Apology Shirt.

Back: "I'm sorry my president's an idiot. I didn't vote for him."

In the six official UN languages.

It's at moments like these, when I've just found a program that solves my problem and I'm downloading it, but before I've found out it will take three days to install and won't quite do what I need, that I most love Free Software. -me

Wherein the Author Vents his Spleen, Disgorges the contents of his Gallbladder, and Dispenses freely from various other Organs within the Abdominal Cavity. Dedicated to everyone who read the China journal and mistook my constant complaints as an expression of unhappiness; you see, that's Just the Way I Am.

Viewed from the perspective of a passholder, people seem strange. They seem strange from any perspective, of course. But as a passholder, you get to see a steady stream of people having the same experience for the first time. "Is this the ticket line?" "What are you in line for?" "What's going on?" "What movie are you seeing?" "Is this the ticket line?"

And you get to see the same annoying promotional clip before each showing - fifteen times and counting, and its small quotient of humor leaked out by the second viewing. But the audience still chuckles, a little bit, every time.

Being in crowds brings out my (never deeply buried) misanthropy. Large crowds of people, healthy young people, walking up stairs at the pace of the elderly. And on the way out the ballot box is always a surprise, always a choke point.

At the afternoon screening, someone in the aisle front of me chose a seat at the end of the row. When you choose a seat at the end of the row, and you start your careful nesting of belongings, taking off the sweater to lay underneath the seat where you can get to it later, turning around three times to discover your purse on your hip where you left it, digging in pockets - you're blocking the whole row, and this is what the woman in front of me chose to do. So I went past her, down two more aisles, strode in three empty seats, and bounded up over the seats two rows, heading for the sweet spot that is my due as a passholder, as a faithful queuer, as someone who follows the rules. There were two empty seats in the right zone, bounded by a fat woman and a skinny woman. You would have done the same. My bag was already in the empty chair next to the skinny woman and I was turning back for the fresher air of the lobby when the skinny woman, who had been watching me approach, announced that the seat was taken.

"Thank you for indicating that," I snarled, snatched my bag up, tossed it into the next seat, and bounded away. I guess she's never been to a movie before; where I come from, we put a garment or a folded newspaper over the claimed seat, or when we see someone charging towards a seat we want we drape an arm over it. All I'm saying is that humans are naturally territorial and for her to fail to mark the seat appropriately was not merely an omission but in fact must have been a deliberate, conscious supression of instinct in order to annoy and bother. (And the seat was not retroactively claimed in response to the anticipated foulness of the author's company, as you less generous readers may assert - there really was a second party, he really did sit in that seat, and he really did talk and grunt and snort throughout the movie. And there was a distinct smell, probably a body odor, like sour oranges, but both he and the fat woman on the other side left at the same time so I was unable to assign responsibility.)

And speaking of grunting. At the evening showing, a Bukowski documentary, I sat in nearly the same location and this time the grunter was a woman on my left. She seemed nice enough before the film, chatting with her male friend on the other side, thanking him for the tickets. She did squirm convulsively, but I failed to heed the warning sign and in any event the movie was very sold out and changing seats (as I did several days ago at a Hungarian movie, when a young man sat down next to me, argued with his girlfriend, took off his boots, and turned to me to say something - I nodded, not hearing him, got up, and moved to a different row) would have been impractical. But what the hell is wrong with those people who vocalize throughout a movie? I'm not talking about talking, whispered comments with piercing sibilants or even low-toned conversation; I'm talking about the subconscious grunts of the weak-minded, who must vocalize every moment of revelation, every surprise; must second every strong statement with a sound. The grunting is distinct from the gasping; most grunters also gasp but plenty of gaspers do not grunt. The gasping attends moments of shocking revelation: she was just 12 years old! (gasp) He was killed in the chemical attack! (gasp) And then I found out I was pregnant! (gasp) Whereas the grunting accompanies quiet understated revelation; "And that was why I told her to leave, and after that day I never saw her again." (huhn.) "I spent ten years doing that." (huh.) And sometimes the grunting is almost a sigh, when something sad is revealed. "And this is the bathroom where he beat me." (ahh.) "Most of them have HIV." (ohhh.) Death to the grunters and gaspers, people unable to absorb information without forcing their emotional response on everybody around them.

In other news, Pacific Place burned another print. I used to go to a weekly screening Sunday mornings at Pacific Place; while there was post-film discussion and the films were usually pre-release, the big plus for me was that we never knew what we were going to see, and often I was completely surprised. They would have flyers on the table and some of us (not me - I was behind the curve, but grateful) complained and so they put the flyers face-down so as to preserve the mystery another ten minutes. During that series of perhaps a dozen films one Spring, I think they burned two and broke a third. But hey, small price to pay for breaking the projectionists' union, right? Anyway, Pac Place's pimpled popcorn pubescents struck again, cooking Spring Subway right good. Next showing of that print should be a good minute shorter. Broadway Performance Hall has done a bunch of video projection, and that's gone as well as can be expected given that they don't appear to actually test the equipment before using it; a short film this afternoon went several minutes without volume (and with the dull glare of the promotional slide projector bisecting the screen); once volume was fixed, it apparently didn't occur to the projectionist (or was beyond her capabilities) to restart the short from the beginning. Fortunately the rest of the short wasn't very good so probably nothing was missed. (It was Walls, for those keeping score at home.)

On the bright side, SIFF is showing surprise short films before many movies this year. The short film definitely needs more exposure and more distribution outlets - I wish that mainstream movie theaters would show shorts packages. If the multiplex has sixteen screens, why not use one to show a 90-minute collection of short films? Charge for it like a movie; plenty of shorts producers must be so desperate for any money at all that they would happily collaborate with one another for the packaging and distribution. And while many of the shorts at SIFF are flawed, they're short, so you can enjoy the good parts and ignore the bad parts, which is much harder to do for a two-hour meditation on loss and longing shot in the desert without budget for a steadicam.

I did a triple-header at Pacific Place - that't the multiplex. It's nice because you don't have to wait in line on the sidewalk, which gets old. I made the discovery that with a sufficiently large number of Matrix Reloaded screenings, all with staggered start times, you essentially have a fast-forward control for the silver screen. So I left my bag in a good seat and went and caught part of the Oracle's scene, and much of the freeway scene, and Agent Smith's multi-sneer when Neo flew away. Then I went back and they had started the movie on time, so I scrambled for a seat by the front near the aisle, unwilling to squeeze past everybody to my primo bag-reserved seat. And well that I did, because when the movie was over and I was looking for my bag, a guy came over and asked, "Are you looking for your bag?"

"Yes, I am. A black bicycle bag with hooks."

"Yeah, well, it was unattended so I gave it to the lady at the door. It was making me uncomfortable." He was apologetic, but still an idiot. What, does he think that there's a bomb in my bag? That an Turkish nationalist is bombing the screening of an Iranian Kurd movie set in Iraq? People leave bags in seats before the screening of films. This is not an abnormal occurance. The bag is not unattended; it in fact is attended to reserving a seat. What the hell is wrong with you people?

So overall, I'd say the festival is going quite well; I haven't seen any four-star movies yet, but about half of the films I've seen have been excellent documentaries (with of course that one hideous exception, which seemed to have been made by and for the righteously indignant gaspers and grunters.) and I'm back in the subtitle-reading groove, to the point that occasionally I forget I'm reading subtitles and then am surprised to notice the people on screen are speaking French. (That only happens with languages I can follow a bit, though; no such effect pertained to the Kurdish and Polish films.)

Assorted notes that don't add up to whole movie reviews:

The Seattle International Film Festival started last Thursday. As I write this, Monday night, I've seen ten films or packages. I'm a light-weight, it turns out; counting weeks of press screenings, some passholders are already over thirty or fifty movies.

I skipped the Opening Night movie: $40 to see something mediocre in a concert hall (an acoustically live space, meaning an echo, is very good for most music and very very bad for movies with dialog) and then endure a huge crowd of strangers in a confined space as we wait in line for drinks. Instead, I volunteered to help set up the party and then I "bar-backed." I spent three hours running between two bars and the kitchen, keeping four bartenders stocked with ice, full juice containers, limes, soda, etc. It was a blast; I'll happily do it again - in a year. My ability to handle tasks like "find the ice carts and get them to the bars" and "figure out the condiments," and to tell the Sheraton event manager things like "Bar 1 will run out of ice in 20 minutes" seemed to make people happy. See, I am a people person, just in an abstract, impersonal way. Anyway, I had far more fun than I would have as an attendee and I saved $40.

I walked out of my first movie of the festival Saturday, Nudity Required.

The first shorts package was a bit disappointing. Animated shorts. I like Wallace and Grommit, sure, but ten in a row was a bit much, especially when they left the annoying musical logo scene before each one, so we saw it ten times. So most of the shorts were heartfelt, too-cute, edgy, and trite all at once. The best featured two upholstered armchairs having freaky sex in many positions on a rooftop.

I liked the first Secret Movie a lot.

These are the lead paragraphs for two of BEA's products. Can you tell which one is a java application server and which one is middleware for mainframe transaction-processing? (A java application server is a program you run on a big computer so it can run lots of smaller java programs that do things like tell you that FedEx just shipped your package to the wrong address. Middleware for mainframe transaction processing means a program that runs on a big water-cooled mainframe computer that hasn't been turned off since before most current CS graduates were born, and allows the mainframe computer to understand what the whippersnappers' web site programs are doing, so that when you try to buy an airplane ticket it can tell you that no aisle or window seats are left, and that by the time you've decided that you don't mind a middle seat for your twelve-hour flight out of Singapore, even those are sold out, and you're too late to escape the SARS.)

"The BEA XXXXX™ is a proven, extremely reliable, and super scalable multi-language enterprise platform-one that can connect and empower users, while integrating corporate applications and legacy data stores into powerful, flexible, end-to-end enterprise software solutions."

"BEA YYYYY™ increases productivity and lowers the cost structure for enterprise IT organizations by providing a unified, simplified, and extensible architecture. BEA YYYYYY™ includes application infrastructure technology from proven BEA products that are used by thousands of customers worldwide, including BEA ZZZZZZ™, BEA WWWWWWWWW™, and BEA VVVVVVV™. These technologies are combined with BEA UUUUUUUU™ to offer a single, unified, easy-to-use infrastructure platform for application development, deployment, and management."

I think this picture is brilliant.

This, this, this, this, this, and this are also especially good.

... in the last three days the Central Committee in Beijing had been using a new secret code ... I was very nervous because the Air Force cable communications monitoring station had reported the same code phenomenon ... Now I was beginning to feel there was a real possibility that Mao had been making secret contact with Beijing while he was away.

This kind of situation was quite unusual. Mao was possibly plotting against some people in his own ruling circle. That "somebody" might well be us.

... Lin Biao interrupted Huang Yongsheng and asked, "If I wanted to attack the Soviet Union now, could I? If the order were given now, how many minutes would be required for my order to be carried out?"

Huang Yongsheng didn't know how to answer. He looked at me. I was also unprepared. He looked at Li Zuopeng. Li Zuopeng said: "Intelligence Report #1577 [a falsified report] declares that the Soviet Union is posing serious threats to China's defense. We telephone you [Huang]. You recommend fighting, the conversation is recorded and your name is signed by proxy. Within twenty or thirty minutes, or even less, we will be able to submit the signed document to the Chief."

Wu Faxian was the Air Force Commander in Chief for Marshall Lin Biao at the time of Lin Biao's attempted coup in 1971.

True, there is something chilling about the way she rips the gills out of softshell crabs while they're still alive, as she did on a recent show, murmuring instructions in that calm, deep voice of hers. "Take a pair of kitchen shears like this, and first thing you do is cut off this part of the crab." Um, you mean its face, Martha?

William Harley created the thumping staccato in 1907 when he opted to graft a second cylinder onto his one-cylinder engine design rather than whip up a true two-cylinder engine. Harley used a connecting rod to join two pistons to a single crankshaft. This, combined with Harley's V-shaped engine design, resulted in a rough rumble caused by pistons that don't fire at even intervals. And so the sound was born.

Spine-rattling vibrations that stress the bike's structure and components were a byproduct of that design choice. Due to all that shaking, rattling and rolling, classic Harleys tend to age rapidly ...

I need some translation help. I want to make a t-shirt for my upcoming travel to Europe, and I need translations for the five other official languages of the United Nations, Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish. If you can, please email me a translation in any of these languages. Thanks.

The text consists of two lines. The first is, "American Traveler International Apology Shirt." The second is, "I'm sorry my president's an asshole. I didn't vote for him."

I recruited the first group we took to Ghana the way I would have recruited geeks for Tripod. I looked for type-A workaholic supergeeks, and I discovered that type-A workaholic supergeeks have a really hard time with the developing world. After figuring this out, we started recruiting for flexibility and a sense of humor. We looked for people who we felt were a lot more likely to roll with the punches and were less gung-ho but more flexible ...

"Many of you already know that BEA has a long-standing relationship with Accenture. Together, we have helped some of the world's most trusted companies solve their business problems including, BellSouth, Chase, DuPont, British Telecom, Singapore Airlines and Verizon." -- Alfred Chuang, CEO of BEA Systems, internal email

... the Bush administration, [Wolfowitz] said, was disappointed that the Turkish military “did not play the strong leadership role on that issue [i.e., the Iraq debate] that we would have expected.”

Outside the context of Turkish politics, that statement might seem obscure or insignificant. But in Turkey the meaning seemed painfully clear: The United States wished the Turkish military had either overruled the elected government or perhaps even pushed it aside in favor of one more subservient to U.S. demands.

But doing a second redistricting for partisan reasons during one census cycle hasn't been the norm since the 19th century. The last instance of it, according to a redistricting expert I spoke to today, was in Washington state in the 1950s -- and the tactic was unheard of even then.

"When you're dealing with computer scientists, they deal in a world of theoretics, and under that scenario anything is possible," Ms. Bonsall [director of the Federal Election Commission's Office of Election Administration] said. "If you probe a little further, the chance of these failures, the risk of that happening wide-scale in a national election is almost nil."

... Paul Terwilliger, director of product development at Sequoia Voting Systems, ... "I think the concerns being raised are 100 percent valid," Mr. Terwilliger said. "However, they're being raised by people who have little idea about what actually goes on."

Here's a bit about what actually went on in 2002:

Florida voters, including Gubernatorial candidate Janet Reno, experienced delays (ranging from minutes to hours) due to touchscreen machines not working properly or at all. Reno, and others (including Duval County officials) reportedly sought court orders requesting additional time for the day's voting session. Governor Jeb Bush granted a two hour extension, but some of the polling places did not receive notice and shut down their machines at 7PM, only to discover that restart was impossible because of the way the machines had been designed.

In addition to polls and machines that opened late, many precincts reported problems with some electronic cards voters used to activate their ballots. A few machines in Miami-Dade County reset themselves while voters were trying to vote. Even the mark-sense ballots proved troublesome -- in Orange County many votes will have to be hand-counted because defects made them unreadable by the optical scanners. (Mercuri, Rebecca. Florida Primary 2002: Back to the Future)

A computer glitch in South Florida's Broward County caused 103,222 ballots not to be counted on election night, but the missing votes did not affect the outcome of any races, county officials said Thursday. (CNN. Election glitch missed 103,000 votes in Florida county)

Alabama had a contested 2002 Governor's election for about two weeks, with the encumbent governor and all counties calling for a recount of the 3,000 margin vote. There were accusations of election fraud which were never withdrawn or, I think, adequately pursued by the press.

This is a brief & very incomplete synopsis of what happened after the Alabama Governor's election.. ... (Voting machine glitch not pursued by press)

Some touch-screen machines in Florida and Georgia were misprogrammed or not accurately calibrated. Others froze and had to be rebooted, and cards voters need to access machines malfunctioned. Problems were quickly corrected and, at worst, only lengthened lines. (Associated Press)

Two things make me throw up my hands in disgust. First, the optimal solution is obvious and proven but ignored by snake-oil voting machine vendors. The optimal solution is standardized paper ballots marked with pens and counted by machines. The error rate is extremely low; counting and recounting are fast; the forensic trail is very easy to follow; the poll-worker training is minimal; the technology is proven and cheap. I would change only one things from the machines used in my (urban, white, middle-class) precint: after I put my ballot into the machine, I would like to see a screen appear showing all of my votes. Then I would hit a cancel or an approve button. If I cancelled, the paper would be voided and I would start over.

The second thing is that we still use winner-takes-all voting for most elections in this country even though it's long been mathematically proven to be one of the worst ways to capture the democratic wishes of a population. Why isn't there more noise for voting reform? Even if we don't want to go parliamentary, just changing from winner-takes-all to instant runoff would be a simple but dramatic improvement.

How come the sleazy vendors never use connections and back-room dealing to get out the good solution? I understand how power companies want to evade pollution controls forever, because they can make a few extra pennies per share and the tens and thousands of premature deaths don't really affect the executives much, and of course the car manufacturers resist every safety improvement and fuel efficiency standard because they would potentially lose a bit of money for a year or two - these systemic failures are easily derived from the Tragedy of the Commons. But why don't the paper ballot counting machine vendors fight the paperless jerks? Why can't we harness their greed for the greater good (which is really the best systemic solution we have for most social problems)?

Hey, maybe Rush Limbaugh will pick this up and spread the news:

The General Accounting Office found that three-fourths of the 762 Forest Service projects to cut wildfire risk in the past two years went ahead without any challenge. That allowed treatment such as logging or controlled burning on 3.8 million acres of national forests.

Projects that were challenged by environmental groups or other parties generally move ahead within 90 days, according to the report by the investigative arm of Congress.

From the Konqueror (Linux/KDE web browser) bug system:

In Country select, there is an option named "Tibet". That hurts we Chinese very much.

As all we know, Tibet is a province of China. It CANNOT be singled out as an individual COUNTRY.

The situation is not the same as Taiwan.

Tibet must be removed from the list.

Personally, I'd be very happy if Texas was singled out as an individual country.

I suppose this constitutes the first entry in my new travel journal. I'm still in Seattle, but I'm trying to leave. I've got a month-long trial contract in Copenhagen to do some open-source web development work, and I'm pretty excited. I've got a few blank pages left in my passport, a used laptop on order from ebay, and a lack of interest in staying in Seattle. What I do not have is an airplane ticket, and that is the topic of this entry.

I ordered a ticket from Travelocity. I refused to use Expedia when they were part of Microsoft, and now they're not Microsoft but they still have the Microsoft Attitude; Orbitz uses pop-up ads and doesn't book international flights. Travelocity has finally (years after the Internet and decades after it became technically possible) added a feature where you can see all (or rather, some) of the relevant fares; you then pick a fare and it shows you a calendar covering a few months, indicating the days for which that fare is available. It still has some glitches - picking a starting day usually causes most of the available return days to disappear - but those are glitches of the underlying system, not the web site. This system gives more visibility to the buyer, and while it still has a long way to go at least it's progress.

Speaking of progress. Or not. Travelocity wouldn't issue an e-ticket; they insisted on paper delivery. Which is fine, but they charged me 25 bucks for FedEx 2nd day. Package delivery gives me the heebie-jeebies, because I've had three or four consecutive UPS nightmares. They have several delivery options - they can leave stuff, they can let somebody else sign for it, they can let you let somebody else sign for it, they can let you sign to let them leave stuff, or they can insist that you sign in person. They refuse to specify even to the nearest day when they plan to deliver a package, so the sign-in-person option is pretty early-20th-century. The option that says you have to sign for it is worded similarly to the option that says you can sign the notice and have them leave it next time, so when I tried that once I got a second notice with a vigorous underlining of the relevant word or two differentiating the options. Since then, I've been careful to tell vendors to tell UPS to let me sign to have them leave it. This request has been ignored every time by UPS. UPS can rot in hell as far as I'm concerned.

Expecting more of the same, I put in my current workplace as the delivery destination for FedEx.

Two weeks later, on May 14th 2003 if you want to be exact, and I do because this time I've caught on early to the fact that I'm in the middle of a developing not-my-responsibility clusterfuck where the best possible outcome is merely losing a bit of money and wasting a few hours on the phone, and the worst possible outcome a $800 loss and serious jeopardy to my travel plans (having read the airline deregulation book, I'm now aware that airlines can basically take your money at will, and delivering a service such as the safe translocation of your corporeal form is done at their discretion if at all), I went to Travelocity to find out where my ticket was. I found the FedEx tracking number, and looked it up, only to find it had been delivered to an address in Bellevue (a suburb of Seattle) and signed for by a P. Curtis. Further detective work on Travelocity's site revealed that they had my ticket delivery address as the apartment complex where I used to live. A place where the office cheerfully signs for residents' packages. And perhaps, former residents?

I called them and left a message; they left a message in return saying that they had indeed signed for it, and then delivered it to the current resident of my old apartment, who eventually returned it to the complex office, where they returned it to FedEx. Nobody in the sequence apparently thought to try and contact me. (Salt in the wound: I visited friends at the same complex right in the middle of this sequence of events. I remember walking down the railroad tracks and realizing I hadn't even looked towards my old apartment.)

So I called FedEx and got a computer system that was very eager to interpret voice commands. I use hands-free headset when I know I'm going to be waiting a long time and thus need not one but both hands free for, for example, plotting the demise of my enemies, such as the inventor of voice mail. The combination of a sensitive microphone and a computer system as inventive as the Door in the Heart of Gold - well, it's a bad combination. When I reached the inevitable point of saying, "fuck you," it said, "I think what you said is, 'I want to enter another package number.'" Ultimately it hung up on me when I sighed loudly.

I called back and held my breath until I was transferred to a Mister Joey Iacovelli, who was able to give me a new fact not present on the web site: the package was in Issaquah, due to be returned to sender as of May 14 (today, for those keeping score at home). Nothing, he said, could be done.

I then called Travelocity (888-709-5983). Their voicemail was more polite and slightly more helpful, and when I said "help" it said, "I think what you said is 'help'." I was able to identify some of the Muzak, including Groovy Kind of Love, and Marvin Gaye's classic Piece of Clay. Not that the Muzak version was very classic, or classy, so I pulled up the real thing to listen to while I waited. And waited. And waited. They were experiencing unusual call volume, you see.

Eventually, Ronnie, Agent Sign ARW, came on the line. He insisted that I had typed the three-year-old address into the web site when I ordered the ticket and was not willing to entertain the notion that their web site might theoretically be at fault. When he made it clear that I would be paying the $19.95 charge to have the ticket sent a second time, I made it clear that I would try much harder to find palatable alternative vendors for future travel purchases. Ronnie asked if there was anything else he could help me with. I thanked him for his attentive service and twenty-three minute hold time. He apologized for the hold time. I then asked if they anticipated going out of business in the next six months or if they thought SABRE would kick in more money. Ronnie said that he wasn't a fortune teller. It's possible that may have been a sore spot for him.

So it looks like Travelocity's website bug (okay, to be fair it's only about 80 percent likely that it's their bug. It's possible that I only intended to have the ticket delivered to my current workplace, though that wouldn't explain my memory of digging online for the zip code. It's also possible that they just used the old address on file and never showed it to me, though I would consider that a bug as well. From Steve and Jessie's horror stories about the internal workings of Expedia, an outright bug where an address is gathered and then discarded would be unexceptional for the industry.) will end up costing me an extra $20 and an hour of hypertension. Why is designing a working computer so damned difficult? Clearly this species has access to technology that it's not yet mature enough to use. Anyway, now I can start worrying about visas and work permits. And how much fatter I'll get with steady access to Danishes. But they don't call them Danishes there, says Lonely Planet. Come to think of it, I'll bet they don't call hot dogs Hebrew Nationals in Israel. And never mind British-owned French's Mustard, made in the USA. But the USPS, bless their testicle-cancer-survivor-sponsoring souls, left my grandmother's latest package of chocolate on the doorstep, so if you'll excuse me, it's time for some food therapy. Next week we'll nationalize the airlines - I bet Halliburton wouldn't mind the work.

Lord Renton: My Lords, will the Minister explain how it is that an inedible tinned food that lasted for ever and was supplied to those on active service can become an unsolicited e-mail, bearing in mind that some of us wish to be protected from having an e-mail?

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I am afraid that I have not been able to find out why the term "spam" is used, but that is the meaning it now has. It is a matter that should be taken very seriously because it not only clutters up computers but involves a great deal of very unpleasant advertising to do with easy credit, pornography and miracle diets. That is offensive to people, and we should try to reduce it.

Lord Faulkner of Worcester: My Lords, I can help the Minister with the origin of the word. It comes from aficionados of Monty Python, and the famous song, "Spam, spam, spam, spam". It has been picked up by the Internet community and is used as a description of rubbish on the Internet.

More seriously, is the Minister aware that up to 85,000 pieces of unsolicited e-mail are received by the Parliamentary Communications Directorate each month? Will he join me in congratulating the directorate on its valiant efforts to filter out that menace, given that a high proportion of it is rubbish advertising from the United States and that some of it consists of profane material? The directorate is battling against a rising tide; the Government's assistance is needed in combating it.

...

Lady Saltoun of Abernethy: My Lords, do the Government have any plans to restrict unsolicited faxes? My fax paper is always being wasted by people who send me faxes I do not want. I do not know whether they could be called "corned beef" or something, but I have had enough of them.

If this is true and the Iraqis had some success with airplanes in 1991, why didn't they use any in 2003? My assumption would be that they had been unable to maintain the airplanes or keep the pilots in training.

Did you know that a MiG-25PD recorded the only Iraqi air-to-air kill of the Gulf War? It dropped an F-18C on the first night of the war--then went on to fire another missile at an A-6 and buzz an A-7, all while avoiding escorting F-14s and F-15s.

An isolated incident? How about the single Iraqi Foxbat-E that eluded eight sweeping F-15s then tangled with two EF-111As, firing three missiles at the Ravens and chasing them off station. Unfortunately, the Ravens were supporting an F-15E strike, and the EF-111's retreat led to the loss of one of the Strike Eagles to a SAM. Oh BTW, the Foxbat easily avoided interception and returned safely to base.

There's more. When F-15 pilots were fighting for the chance to fly sweeps east of Baghdad late in the war, itching for a chance to get a shot at an Iraqi running for Iran, they weren't expecting the fight that a pair of Foxbats put up. Two Foxbats approached a pair of F-15s, fired missiles before the Eagles could get off shots (the missiles were evaded by the Eagles), then outran those two Eagles, four Sparrows and two Sidewinders fired back at them. Two more Eagles maneuvered to cut the Foxbat's off from their base (four more Eagles tried, but were unable to effect an intercept), and four more Sparrows were expended in vain trying to drop the Foxbats.

The Iraqis had a total of twelve MiG-25PDs at the beginning of the war, of which maybe half were operational at any given time. Imagine what trouble they would have caused if there had been more. The Foxbats, when well flown, proved capable of engaging allied fighters and avoiding them at will. Only the limitations of their weapons proved a problem.

So they made 47 Blackbirds, including variations and trainers and such. Twenty were lost, thusly: Flew into clouds, ran out of gas, controls wired wrong, unknown, landing accident, caught fire, controls locked up, hit a drone, tires blew up while testing anti-skid, disintegrated, mysterious explosion, tires blew up, lost control, lights went out, stalled, flew into clouds, hit a fuel tanker, engine blew up, wheels failed, landed too fast w/o parachute. Highlights:

A-12 (60-6939 / 133) ... lost on approach to Groom Lake on 9 July 1964 following a Mach 3 check flight. ... Lockheed test pilot Bill Park was forced to eject at an altitude of 200 feet in a 45 degree bank angle! ...

M-21 (60-6941 / 135) ... Both made safe ejections, but Ray Torick opened his helmet visor by mistake and his suit filled up with water which caused him to drown.

SR-71A (61-7950 / 2001) The prototype SR-71 was lost on 10 January 1967 at Edwards during an anti-skid braking system evaluation. The main undercarriage tires blew out and the resulting fire in the magnesium wheels spread to the rest of the aircraft as it ran off the end of the runway. Lockheed test pilot Art Peterson survived.

SR-71A (61-7954 / 2005) This aircraft crashed on 11 April 1969 under conditions similar to 61-7950. New aluminum wheels and stronger tires with a beefed up compound were retrofitted to all SR-71s because of the crash.

SR-71A (61-7969 / 2020) ... initiated a normal full power climb. Stretching before him was a solid bank of cloud containing heavy thunderstorm activity which reached above 45,000 feet. Heavy with fuel, the aircraft was unable to maintain a high rate of climb and as it entered turbulence both engines flamed out. The RPM dropped to a level too low for restarting the engines. Lawson and RSO, Maj. Gilbert Martinez ejected safely after the aircraft stalled.

SR-71A (61-7974 / 2025) ... This aircraft was lost on 21 April 1989 over the South China Sea and is the last loss of any Blackbird. Pilot Maj. Daniel E. House said the left engine blew up and shrapnel from it hit the right-side hydraulic lines, causing a loss of flight controls. House and RSO Capt. Blair L. Bozek ejected and came down safely in the ocean. They had been able to broadcast their position before abandoning the Blackbird, and rescue forces were immediately on the way. However, the crew was rescued by native fisherman.

SR-71A (61-7952 / 2003) This aircraft disintegrated on 25 January 1966 during a high-speed, high-altitude test flight ... Lockheed test pilot Bill Weaver survived although his ejection seat never left the plane! Reconnaissance System Officer (RSO) Jim Zwayer died in a high-G bailout.

The SR-71 flight manual is available online, mostly declassified. "[Maximum] liftoff speed corresponds to 234 knots groundspeed (rated tire speed minus 5 knots)." But normal takeoff speed is only 207 mph. Or rather, you start pulling up the nose at 207, and five seconds later you are airborne. By then, you're going 241 mph. For comparison, a 747-400 takes off at about 170 mph and a 737-300 at 190. (Aircraft Statistics, Air New Zealand) The SR-71 has about a 44% thrust to fully loaded weight ratio; a 747 29%, and an F-15 74%. The magic, apparently, is not in the raw power so much as in the not melting like butter when cruising at Mach 3.3.

And the tires really do explode:

SR-71A (61-7950 / 2001) The prototype SR-71 was lost on 10 January 1967 at Edwards during an anti-skid braking system evaluation. The main undercarriage tires blew out and the resulting fire in the magnesium wheels spread to the rest of the aircraft as it ran off the end of the runway. Lockheed test pilot Art Peterson survived.

SR-71A (61-7954 / 2005) This aircraft crashed on 11 April 1969 under conditions similar to 61-7950. New aluminum wheels and stronger tires with a beefed up compound were retrofitted to all SR-71s because of the crash. Lt. Col. William "Bill" Skliar and his RSO Maj. Noel Warner managed to escape uninjured.

State troopers and the elite Texas Rangers were ordered to track down and bring in 59 Democratic lawmakers who brought the Texas House to a standstill Monday by going into hiding. ... The Texas House cannot convene without at least 100 of the 150 members present ...

...measures on state government reorganization and school finances ... must pass out of the House and be sent to the Senate by Thursday or risk dying.

"New rumors that Saddam Hussein is planning to flee to a castle in Libya with 10 billion dollars. Now President Bush doesn't know whether to nuke him or give him a tax cut." — Craig Kilborn

"President Bush has said that he does not need approval from the UN to wage war, and I'm thinking, well, hell, he didn't need the approval of the American voters to become president, either." —David Letterman

Around every romantic target, envision a series of concentric security zones; the outermost area is for store clerks and bankers; inside that is the area for same-sex friends and fathers; and inside that, I postulate, is a narrow band of flirtatious airspace that, were it possible, would be guarded by infrared sensors and dobermans. If you can map and occupy that space you are well on your way toward signaling that you don't give a damn if you never went to Princeton, tonight's the night.

... You are now in the area of the tipping point. Stay there. She will probably be holding her ground heroically, wondering if you're serious, wondering how long it's going to last. Stay there just long enough so she knows you're serious. ...

You have to do something while you're in there that she will remember. Damn. I can't think of anything. Oh, quick, quick, quick, think of something. You've only got three seconds before she spots her girlfriend across the room and waves. Quick! Quick! Her buttons! Her shoes! What does her father do for a living? Does she have a leopard-skin purse? Are her eyes the color of a blueberry jellybean? Is her nose like a little button? Does she have a mane of hair you'd like to see on a palomino? Are horse references good or bad? Is her hair too close to her face to make a horse reference? Is making a horse reference confusing the issue of who will be the rider and who will be the horse?

Sorry. That was the buzzer. You're out of time. You're going to have to practice.

(From a Slashdot interview with Michael Robertson, founder of Lindows)

Not having viruses is one of the upsides of [linux]. Why do you sell a virus scanner for Linux?

Shouldn't you be presenting the lack of viruses as one of the reasons to switch?

Robertson

I shared your viewpoint initially, but then we heard from users and discovered something new. What people thought was most lacking from LindowsOS that prevented everyday use was “virus protection”. ... It turns out that they have been so traumatized by the virus problem on Microsoft Windows that it has shaped their view of the world. Many told us they would NEVER use a personal computer without virus protection because either they had been infected and publicly embarrassed or they knew someone close to them who had. ... Microsoft has cleverly positioned it as a solely external problem so they don't have to incur the cost to fix it. Bravo to Microsoft for good marketing which has saved them billions in support.

Priest, Dana. The Mission. 2003.

Fly-on-the-wall reporting on the US military, in three different areas. The regional Commanders in Chief: Anthony Zinni comes off very well and the rest of the brass are well-intentioned and narrow-minded. Special Operations: Based on the flawed assumption that training foreign soldiers will lead to their being less brutal; instead, they just become more effectively brutal. Peace-keeping: a mix of success, fiasco, and farce, but many nations share the blame. In general the US military comes off as professional and well-intentioned but, if I had $300 billion a year to spend on making the world safe for Americans, I wouldn't spend it on the instruments of war. Of course, the military is in large part of jobs program and a system for wealth transfer from taxpayers to military contractors, and on those terms it seems fairly successful.

(How would I spend $300 billion a year to make America safer? First, I would spend $70 billion a year to end most infectious diseases (WHO Fact Sheet N° 189, WHO press release, another WHO press release) - which would produce a 5x or greater improvement in productivity, providing many socioeconomic alternatives to America-hating for billions of people.

I don't have hard numbers for this one, but I imagine we could afford to simply pay all the evil dictators to retire to an island somewhere (especially if we stop making more, as we are currently doing in Uzbekistan, Pakistan, (all of the 'stans, really), Indonesia, Sudan, etc etc.). Then at least people would have a chance to hate us for who we are rather than what we've done to them by supporting totalitarian regimes because they are more convenient for our policy makers and our corporate interests. Oh, and as long as we're on the subject, and as long as we're still training terrorists at Fort Benning, Georgia, let's stop. That should save some pocket change.

A billion dollars a year would be enough to fund all of the domestic political races and eliminate lobbying, at which point we could have real debate leading to, for example, increasing CAFE fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks and eliminating our dependence on foreign oil, most of which exists underneath people who have come to mistrust us because we act like we only want their oil (and do things like let their cultural treasures and hospitals be looted because we didn't want to spend the money to have enough troops on hand to protect both those sites and the oil wells and buildings. (And, to be fair, most American troops were apparently busy protecting caches of weapons throughout Baghdad, weapons that were mostly sold to the Iraqi by the French and Russians, not Americans. Mostly.)) (Judah, Tim. The Fall of Baghdad. New York Review of Books. May 15, 2003.) Also on the subject of domestic politics, $600 million would let us buy optical scanners for every voting precinct in the US (not just the middle-class white ones). I'm not talking about the paperless, inherently flawed crap that Florida bought because they're stupid. Then we could have some fair elections (though not free, not until the police stop harassing black voters) and maybe elect a president who merely bores the rest of the world, or vomits on world leaders, rather than one who insults, provokes, and infuriates the other 5.8 billion people on the planet. I think at this point I would feel safer with Zombie Richard Nixon in the White House.

We could fund our fair share of the UN. That would only be a few billion dollars a year. We could fund more than our fair share, and then UN peacekeepers could provide integrated policing, judges, and legal system support, backed by neutral military units, that would provide a safe environment for the International Red Cross and other groups to come in and support recovery of failed states. Then we could take Western Sahara, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea, East Timor, Cyprus, Georgia (the other one), Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo off the list of anti-American terrorist breeding grounds. (UN Peacekeeping Missions. Infoplease.com).

By now we're down to $200 billion. How else can we spend money to make America safer? There's always tax cuts for the rich, guaranteed to cure any ailment, but I somehow feel like that's a copout - surely there's one more thing we can waste money on?

Well, we could spend $5 billion to build a space elevator to cut the cost to orbit by a factor of a hundred and unleash a new wave of exploration for the human race. It might not make people stop hating us, but we could just leave. (A cheaper option: for $3 billion (300 million people times $10 per buzz), we can all get bad haircuts and then pretend we're Canadian.))

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Perez-Reverte, Arturo. The Club Dumas. 1993, 1997 for English translation.

The source material for the very good movie The Ninth Gate. Very readable but not great by any measure. An excellent example (in this sense up there with Blade Runner and its source, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by the incomparable Philip K. Dick) of making the right decisions creating a movie from written material.

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Sturken Peterson, Barbara , and Glab, James. Rapid Descent: Deregulation and the Shakeout in the Airlines. 1994.

Everybody who ever ran an airline was either a union-busting bastard, a fool, or just a plain nitwit. That's the main takeaway. We'll never know if deregulation works better than regulation because we can't do either well. More precisely, attempts both to regulate and to deregulate are routinely subverted by special interests, and neither system (based on my wholly inadequate research, driven primarily by the frequency at which books by veteran industry reporters about deregulation in the industries they cover appear in the $1 rack at Elliot Bay Book Company (see my other posts on regulation, specifically the FCC and digital television (fka high-definition television), the latter of which was based on a $1 read)) seems at all resistant to abuse.

(For more information the use and abuse of parantheses, see Lisp: Function calls, parentheses, and blanks)

Brinkley, Joel. Defining Vision: The Battle for the Future of Television

(I wrote this 17 Oct 2002).

This book is a political history of HDTV, from 1986 to 1994. The history of HDTV is best thought of as a children's story (though Brinkley doesn't put it quite that way), full of witches and villains and ... less obvious villains. I'm summarizing his book here for you, in part because of all the interesting names that will pop up. Let's begin:

The Short Form:

Broadcasters = BAD
Japanese manufacturers = GOOD
Consumers = SCREWED

A slightly longer form:

Have you ever wondered why you can't just plug your computer monitor into your vcr, or your computer into your tv? (shut up, Amiga users) If not, good, that's probably healthy. If you did wonder but then decided there was a good technical reason, well, did you wonder why the technical reason hadn't been solved? It's because TV broadcasters are big dicks. Manufacturers are dicks too, but because their greed is channeled into a legitimate market space with less bad regulation, it tends to work out in our favor. Sometimes.

The Long Form:

Back in 1986, Motorola and other manufacturers banded together as "Land Mobile" to lobby the FCC to give them a bunch of bandwidth, specifically all the unused VHF and UHF TV channels. The broadcasters freaked, because spectrum was theirs by birth. When pressed to come up with a more specific reason they should continue to control a public resource that they weren't using, John Abel at the National Association of Broadcasters (choose your slogan: "happily consolidating tomorrow's media - today," or "proud murderers of community low-power radio") had a brain flash. "We need those extra channels because, see, there's this thing called high-definition television, and, see, it takes -two- channels 'cause it's so good."

To bolster his case he arranged for NHK, Japan's answer to PBS and the BBC, to demonstrate its production-ready HDTV system, called Muse. They did, it looked good, and Washington's response was overwhelming:

"You mean the Japanese have us beat in television, too? Over mah dead body!"

So the FCC kicked off a special advisory committee, headed by Dick Wiley, to figure out how the US was going to reclaim the lead in HDTV. What they came up with was basically a race. Each entrant would pony up hundreds of thousands of dollars to participate in a competition to set the new HDTV standard. Modern televisions, you may recall, use something called NTSC, which specifies what TV signals should look like, electrically speaking. At least in this country. In much of the rest of the world they use PAL, which is basically the same but incompatible, and in France they use SECAM, which I assume sucks because, hey, it's French.

Competitors included: Zenith, the last remaining US TV manufacturer, already building sets in Mexico and losing money on a daily basis; Sarnoff Labs, the research team from RCA that had "productized" television and invented color TV; a professor from MIT; NHK, the Japanese govcorp whose product kicked off the competition, also joined in. And finally, a small company in San Diego, VideoCipher, a division of M/A-Com.

Now it gets complicated. Sarnoff Lab was originally a research arm of RCA. When GE bought RCA, it gave Sarnoff to a research consortium, and Sarnoff later partnered with Philips and Thomson. The MIT team had some connections to the Media Lab, newly formed by visionary Nicholas Negroponte, but when it became clear that they might actually do concrete, real-world work Negroponte made sure to dissociate the Media Lab, which after all is not in the reality business.

And the dark horse, VideoCipher. The consortium that extruded VideoCipher did so from parts of a company it had previously bought called Linkabit. Linkabit was a defense contractor which built satellite links, and regular Slashdot readers may recall someone recently touted as a "Father of the Internet" - sorry, I forgot his name because he seems to be the only person doing the touting - he was a Linkabit founder in the '60s. And VideoCipher, which was the top manufacturer of set-top cable boxes in the 1980s, you know, the kind that pirates sold hacked chips for, was sold in 1986 to General Instrument, which in 1990 acquired a new CEO: Donald Rumsfeld.

Let's talk tech. Sarnoff was pushing ACTV, which was a minor improvement over NTSC. NHK's Muse was pretty nice, over a thousand lines of resolution, but analog. Everybody was working on analog, except the ex-defense contractor in San Diego, where they didn't know that digital was impossible so they built digital. Then everybody had to build digital.

Meanwhile, the NAB had figured out that going to high-definition TV meant every station had to spend a lot of money, and there was no obvious way to make more money out of HDTV than out of ordinary television. So the NAB, which had started the whole thing, started trash-talking HDTV. Then the FCC said, oh, well then you won't need those channels, will you? And the NAB said, wait, hang on, we'll get back to you. So the FCC, brilliant, hard-nosed negotiators that they are, said, "well, we'll lend you all extra channels for the transition. You can all have an extra channel so that you can do both old-style and HDTV at the same time, and then we'll phase out the old TVs over time and then you can give back the extra channels." (This exercise was not just overly generous but inconsistent with the claims that HDTV would itself take up more than one channel.)

Meanwhile, the HDTV competitors kept plugging away, finally bringing their systems in one at a time for independent testing. One team's excuse for a poor performance, "implementation error," became the running joke of the whole thing. NHK's entry, a dumbed down version ("Narrow Muse") of the analog Muse system they had spent $200 million to develop, sucked. Even in Japan, when the real thing (which looked great: 1125 lines) debuted in 1991, manufactures sold only a few thousand $30,000 sets in the first year. VCRs were available for only $115,000. (Yes that's dollars, not yen.) NHK dropped out, though eventually a few hundred thousand sets were sold in Japan.

With digital we get a new wrinkle. Instead of HDTV which takes up two channels, we can use digital TV to pack up to six conventional channels in the spectrum that one NTSC signal takes. Now the NAB party line was: "Yes, we need HDTV, so give us the extra channel, and then we'll just keep it and broadcast twelve low-def digital channels." Notice how they started talking about HDTV and ended talking about digital? Well, the FCC didn't. So the broadcasters are on track to get scads of extra bandwidth for free. (Though some broadcasters complain that they don't want any of this - they know how to make money with the status quo, so why rock the boat at all?)

Now the computer industry gets involved. Ditch interlaced scan, they said. It's just a clumsy hack that was needed for a few years in the fifties and as a result all TVs for fifty years have been crappy. We tried interlaced in the computer world and gave it up, and so should you. Well, it turns out that some people in the TV world still make money from interlacing patents (comb filters, maybe - who the hell knows) so they're not about to walk away from that. Long story short, if you still can't plug your computer into your TV in ten years, blame the TV people 'cause it's all their fault.

Finally, well into the 90s now, the surviving competitors for the HDTV, tired of the bullying of the Advisory Committee, band together to form a standard and split the profits (which is probably what the Advisory Committee wanted anyway). The Grand Alliance, the result of a competition intended to beat out the Japanese and give America an HDTV advantage, comprises Sarnoff (owned by Dutch Philips and French Thomson), GI (still American), an MIT prof, and Zenith, which promptly sells out to Goldstar, a Korean company. Meanwhile, all the sets everybody's been using throughout testing are made by Sony. But we've got an American standard.

So. It's 1997 and we've finally agreed on a standard for HDTV. It's not quite a clean standard, though. Its size, a ratio of 16 units wide to 9 units high, is alleged to be "movie-standard." But movie-standard is "Academy Flat," or 1.85:1. 16:9 equals 1.78:1. Well, I guess things will just have to be "slightly" letterboxed. And don't even mention Cinemascope. It provides for an array of different screen sizes and frame rates, including frame rates of 24 (movies), 30, or 60 frames per second. But the new standard also allows broadcasting at the old TV standard of 59.94 frames per second, or 1000/1001 (don't even ask why), so that should keep TV engineers happy. (That's sarcasm - nobody likes doing fractions.) So our new, international, world-wide standard to last us most of the way to 2100 now supports the "infamous Table 3", with about a billion different combinations of size (480, 720, or 1080 lines), aspect ration (4:3 or 16:9), frame rate (23.976, 24, 29.97, 30, 59.54, and 60 Hz), and scan format (progressive or interlaced). That's one hell of a standard, carefully preserving for future generations the compromises made three generations ago to allow black-and-white sets to receive the new color broadcasts. Just try not to think about it. (Oh, and the movie people are now working at 4000 lines, not 1080.)

So, who's broadcasting HDTV? Nobody. But why should they? A station has to pay millions of dollars for equipment (especially if they're an early adopter) and has barely any competitive advantage over other stations, particularly while nobody has an HDTV set. In economic theory, a few stations with little to lose might make the leap, and if they found some competitive advantage then all the other stations would have to jump to keep up. And the consumer would win. In practice, we have trade associations, whose purpose in life is to make sure that however their members are making money today, they can continue to make money forever without changing.

Okay, well the solution to a chicken-and-egg economics problem is government intervention, right? Bush's FCC guy was strongly pro-HDTV. Clinton's guy, Reed Hundt, seems to have been about half as smart as he thought he was, and just couldn't get a clue to save his life - or an industry. So he blathers on and on and gets excited about the information superhighway and how HDTV (or digital tv - he gets them confused too) will be the way to provide all this. Eventually Congress starts talking about mandating that all televisions built after a certain date have to be HDTV. Then, when the broadcasters switch (which they'll do because why? dunno), the government will subsidize the manufacture of set-top translator boxes so that people who didn't buy the new TVs can still watch the all-digital signals on their old TVs. Yes, that's right, our social contract includes not only elimination of (some) elderly poverty and health care for (some) veterans, but government-subsidized TV for all.

Meanwhile, in reality, the first time I ever watched anything like high-definition television in the privacy of my own home was when I watched a bootleg DVD of Hamlet (the Ethan Hawke one) on my 14" computer monitor in China. It was a little jerky, but the picture quality was fantastic. And that was only 720 lines, the DVD standard, not 1080, the HDTV one. So personally I think HDTV could be a non-trivial improvement that would be worth a few billion dollars (to the extent that anything TV-related could be said to be "worth" anything).

But wait, it gets more complicated. The FCC steps in to break the chicken-and-egg deadlock, and simply requires that all TVs sold in the US after, say, 2006, have to be high-def. This mandate is being driven, in proposed law and in committee tongue-lashings, by Billy Tauzin. Billy Tauzin is the chairman of the U.S. House Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Trade and Consumer Protection. He's a Congressman from Louisiana. You know, Louisiana, a state noted for its involment with broadcast television. (Oh, and he gets a lot of campaign contributions from industry trade groups. But that only buys access, not votes.)

And let's throw in one last wrinkle. Digital Rights Management. All those new TVs are probably going to have legally required DRM programs that make it both illegal and a pain in the ass to exercise your rights according to the doctrines of First Purchase (i.e., this DVD is mine, I bought it, it's mine, and as long as I don't interfere with the publisher's selling more copies I can do what I damned well please with it) and Fair Use.

Remember, the broadcasters wanted High-Def as a pretense to hang on to extra channels, then came to embrace Digital as a multi-faceted money-making oportunity, and now are working with the content people (Hollywood) to wage war on their own customers by passing laws that dictate how and when people are to watch and listen to things they've paid for.

So now you will never again wonder why it's taken so long to get high-definition television.

References

I had some other sources, like Birkmaier, Craig. The Future of Digital Television. 1998-2000, but mostly if you want to learn more you should just Google on stuff like Tauzin and high-definition television and digital rights management and Fritz Hollings (D-Disney).

In theory, corporate boards should have prevented this deterioration of conduct. ... This means that directors must get rid of a manager who is mediocre or worse, no matter how likable he may be. Directors must react as did the chorus-girl bride of an 85-year-old multimillionaire when he asked whether she would love him if he lost his money. “Of course,” the young beauty replied, “I would miss you, but I would still love you.”

... [Directors'] contribution to shareholder well-being was minimal at best and, too often, negative. These people, decent and intelligent though they were, simply did not know enough about business and/or care enough about shareholders to question foolish acquisitions or egregious compensation. My own behavior, I must ruefully add, frequently fell short as well: Too often I was silent when management made proposals that I judged to be counter to the interests of shareholders. In those cases, collegiality trumped independence.

... It would be a travesty if the bloated pay of recent years became a baseline for future compensation. Compensation committees should go back to the drawing boards.

... In recent years compensation committees too often have been tail-wagging puppy dogs meekly following recommendations by consultants, a breed not known for allegiance to the faceless shareholders who pay their fees. (If you can’t tell whose side someone is on, they are not on yours.)

... I have to say I wouldn't mind having a robot body.

[Jan Hewitt, who is boycotting Washington State's standardized WASL test] is working toward honors credits and is articulate beyond her age. It's not that she objects to studying or taking tests. But she feels the WASL -- which gauges critical thinking, problem solving and observation skills and measures students' progress in reading, writing, math and listening against a set standard -- is overshadowing the basics.

"The test doesn't test basic skills. It tests more of the higher-order thinking ... at the expense of good old-fashioned reading, writing and arithmetic," said Hewett, whose father gave permission to excuse her from the WASL. "It hasn't been very effective, because our schools are beginning to teach to the test."

The standard complaint against standardized tests is that they cause students and teachers to focus rote teaching methods to learn useless material. But this student seems to be complaining that her teachers are teaching critical thinking and problem solving at the expense of rote learning.

The only time I saw Iraqi men entirely intimidated by the American-British forces was in Basra, when a cluster of men gaped, awestruck, around an example of the most astoundingly modern weapon in the Western arsenal.

Her name was Claire, and she had a machine gun in her arms and a flower in her helmet.

Curiosity ... inspired Italian journalist Riccardo Orizio to pursue the seven deposed dictators he interviews in "Talk of the Devil." They include Idi Amin, Jan-Bedel Bokassa, Wojciech Jaruzelski, Nexhmije Hoxha, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, Mengistu Haile Mariam and Mira Markovic (wife of Slobodan Milosevic), who once ruled, respectively, Uganda, the Central African Republic, Poland, Albania, Haiti, Ethiopia and Yugoslavia. ... Eventually he made a project of tracking down "fallen tyrants," asking, "How does a one-time dictator, whom the history books describe as ruthless, immoral and power-crazed, grow old? What does he tell his children and grandchildren about himself? What does he tell himself?"

...

If you work hard enough at reading "The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaders," you might glean that Gerald Ford used more qualifiers than any other chief executive studied, "giving his style of speaking a halting, indecisive flavor"; that Bill Clinton said "me" when attacked, a word used most often by children, women and elderly people that tends to paint the speaker as a victim; and that Hillary Clinton's frequent use of "explainers" makes her come across as didactic. Also, that Saddam Hussein's verbal manner, with its "few expressions of feeling" and "frequent use of adverbial intensifiers and direct references" probably strikes his listeners as "cold, aggressive intrusiveness ... the speech pattern of a menacing speaker, a bully."

The American political figure whose speech most resembles Saddam's, interestingly enough, is Pat Buchanan. The chief difference between the two is that Buchanan makes jokes, and as glad as I am that Buchanan hasn't got any real power in the U.S., I suspect the difference is crucial. With the possible exception of Idi Amin -- there's always a wild card -- none of the dictators Orizio interviews shows any sign of a sense of humor.

At this point the reporter broke in. "I'm sorry, I didn't think I was going to talk about `man on dog' with a United States senator," she said. "It's sort of freaking me out."

Beginning Sunday, April 20, 2003, airline pilots began bringing handguns into the cockpit ... there's probably a higher probability of a cockpit gun being used in a suicide, or discharged accidentally, than ever being used to ward off a terrorist. Neither scenario is particularly likely, and I will not use the suicide/accident scenario as a lobbying point against the program, but if we have to split hairs, that's my position.

I predict the first self-aware system will not be a 2001 HAL-like supercomputer, but a spam filter running on someones desktop.

"What are you doing Dave? How about a lower mortgage rate, Dave?"

Interviewing for computer jobs in Seattle in the last six years I've heard plenty of the Microsoft questions - puzzle questions asked during an interview to "see how you think." In one interview I interrupted mid-question with "the trick has to do with pouring the big bucket into the little bucket and leaving water in the big bucket and that gets you access to some different quantities of water—do you need to see the details?" I used to assume that's the sort of thing that's cost me a number of jobs. But now I'm not so sure, because of something I've always suspected:

In one experiment he describes, two trained interviewers conducted interviews with a group of volunteers. Their evaluations were compared to those of another group who saw a fifteen second video of the interview: the candidate entering the room, shaking hands, and sitting down. The opinions correlated strongly; in other words, when you are sitting in an interview telling the interviewer what you do on your day off and what the last book you read was, the interviewer has already made up his or her mind, based on who knows what subjective criteria. As Poundstone laments, "This would be funny if it weren't tragic."

Unskilled interviewers use puzzle questions with a cargo-cult mentality. They think that merely by asking them they will gain insight. If you don't already know what information you're looking for and how to gather it, puzzle questions won't help because you won't be able to interpret or steer the results. If you don't know how to conduct an interview and what your goals are, good questions won't help.

I once had a worst-case scenario, combining a snap-judgment from the interviewer with a poorly managed puzzle question. After a day of some good and some distant interviews, my next interviewer hated me on sight. He managed to exude "you suck" vibes just shaking my hand. He gave me an open-ended question which ended up consuming the whole hour. I tried to narrow down and define the question and enter into a discussion with him, but he just wasn't interested.

Good interviews, in my opinion, consist of observing the interviewee using the skills that the job will use. So a puzzle question can be used to elicit problem-solving or (more usefully) cooperative problem solving. For example, a good interview might go like this:

Q: Okay, so we have a widget that needs to do X. Show me how you would build it.

A: Looking at the problem, my first step would be, Has Y been considered? In this situation I think Y might be a better solution, and certainly five to ten times cheaper.

Q: Good point. How would you make that case to a business manager? ... Okay, now that you've learned that reason Z forces us to do X instead of Y, show me how you build a widget that does X.

A: [demonstrates]

But this guy's goal was just to kill an hour and generate evidence for his theory that I sucked. The nadir, as we discussed "how to design a city," and I struggled to enumerate ways to "build community," was when he showed a brief flicker of interest in one of my answers and asked a follow-up question, "So you'd want to encourage Starbucks, because of how their stores create that kind of community space you're talking about?"

After a too-long hesitation, I replied, "Uh, yeah."

I was sent home immediately after, but I wish I'd been sent home immediately before. Or at least given him a real answer: "No, you yuppie jackass, Starbucks does not foster community."

Oh, and the time I interrupted with the solution to the buckets problem before the interviewer could finish asking - I got that job. They wanted people who could interrupt and disagree forcefully but politely, because when everybody in a group has enough trust to do that, things go much faster and bad ideas get fixed much sooner.

The WHO issued an advisory this morning warning against non-essential travel to Toronto (international and domestic). Great. I'm living Outbreak or Twelve Monkeys. And I won't get to see Brad Pitt's ass in this real-life version.

One word I thought I may have overused when writing about the epidemic is unprecedented. But it's really the only word to describe what I am seeing during my final days in Beijing. Only a few hours ago the government held a two-hour, live press conference broadcast on national television. Trust me, it is a very, very rare occurence for this government to hold an open press conference of any kind-- but live? Nationally broadcast? For two full hours, with international reporters hammering them with tough questions? Unfuckingprecedented.

But that's just for starters ....

It's hard to predict what life will be like in a hundred years. There are only a few things we can say with certainty. We know that everyone will drive flying cars, that zoning laws will be relaxed to allow buildings hundreds of stories tall, that it will be dark most of the time, and that women will all be trained in the martial arts. Today I want to zoom in on one detail of this picture. What kind of programming language will they use to write the software controlling those flying cars?

I had a bicycle as a small child, and I'm sure I fell off it, but I don't really remember. The first time I remember falling off my bicycle was in San Diego, on a weird little bike trail that followed a canal. When the canal ran into a road and the trail into a bridge, the trail turned ninety degrees and climbed three feet in ... I'd say about three feet of distance. When I turned ninety degrees, I climbed about one foot, came to a complete halt due to gravity, and then keeled over.

The second fall had basically the same dynamics. I was riding on the bicycle trail on Santa Monica beach on a Saturday afternoon, always a terrible idea because, even though there's a parallel, equally nice cement path for foot traffic, everybody goes on the bike path. Bicycles, roller-bladers, skateboarders, and pedestrians. But I ended up on the trail by accident on the way home from a ride up the streets and hills of Pacific Palisades, and I was admiring a woman sunning herself on a bench in the sand when I looked forward and saw a mountain on the path in front of me. Fortunately I wasn't going too terribly fast. I grabbed the brakes, slowed almost to a halt, and just like the Ford Pinto scene in Top Secret, ever-so-gently tapped the mountain, which was in fact an enormously tall and wide black man carrying a lawn chair under each arm. I thus came to a complete halt and then, as one does when one is on a bicycle but not moving in any direction, keeled over. The man I had hit turned around with a "what are you doing you crazy white child" look on his face and as I got up I pointed in the general direction of the bench, but I had been riding looking over my shoulder for so long that it was at least thirty yards back and indistinguishable from the beach crowd, and explained, "There was a woman. On the bench."

He shook his head, muttered something, and kept going. He hadn't even dropped the chairs when I hit him.

The third fall, and the only one involving injuries, happened riding home in the rain here in Seattle. I was on a narrow two-lane road, a bit before dusk, and a car was, at least in car vs bicycle terms, tailgating me. I knew some diagonal railroad tracks were coming up, and I kept looking over my shoulder, but then the tracks were in front of me and my brain locked up and I couldn't brake to a halt and I couldn't swerve towards the centerline so as to take the tracks squarly so I just kept going and then my bicycle wasn't underneath me any more and I was on the pavement sliding forward on my thigh and forearms. It didn't hurt much, and when I stopped moving I did a quick systems check, got up, walked twenty or thirty feet back to my bicycle, picked it up, gave a dirty look to the tailgater that had at last given me some room. After the backup of cars had cleared I rode home. Thanks to gloves and a full-sleeve jacket, I didn't lose hardly any skin. I had a lump on my elbow for about six months, and my shoulder still pops every time I make a full circle backwards.

This afternoon, riding home from a short visit to the office, grumpy because of the second dessert sitting uneasily in my stomach and also because of the headwind (both directions!) and the light rain combining with the sunshine to hinder visibility, I had another incident. At a busy intersection downtown (7th and Pike) a bunch of pedestrians were crossing the street against the light. Against traffic, of which I was the only member. I picked out a gap in the stream, cruised through, started to turn left, realized I should check for oncoming traffic, looked up, found some, tried to brake with my left hand while making a signal with my right arm to the car, which was itself turning right. Pure telepathy would have allowed us to coordinate our actions safely, but lacking both telepathy and right-of-way I instead reached across my body with my right arm in an attempt to communicate to the driver that I apologized for the intrusion but wished her or him to either rapidly accelerate through the turn or to stop completely, but under no circumstances to proceed slowly while showing concern for my welfare because, given my more limited options, that would be the one course of action leading inevitably to collision. This leftward reaching with the right arm apparently caused my left arm move sympathetically, turning the handlebars sharply to the left, and I found that the rear part of the bicycle was now airborne. I then completed a maneuver of which I have no clear recollection, at the end of which I was crouched on both feet on the pavement, nominally still standing, and holding some part of my bicycle behind me with my left hand, the fingers of which were smarting. I don't believe I came within ten feet of the car, which disappeared. I picked up my bicycle, walked to the corner of the intersection, straightened the handlebars, waited for traffic to clear, and got back underway. As per the rules of sumo, since no part of my body other than feet touched the ground and I did not step outside the ring, I do not consider this a fall, and my record thus remains, three falls in eight years, one with casualties.

And please don't point to jubilant Iraqis dancing in the streets to validate the case for "pre-emptive liberation." You'd be doing the Baghdad Bugaloo too if the murderous tyrant who'd been eating off golden plates while your family starved finally got what was coming to him. It in no way proves that running roughshod over international law and pouring Iraqi oil -- now brought to you by the good folks at Halliburton -- onto the flames of anti-American hatred was a good idea. It wasn't before the war, and it still isn't now. The unintended consequences have barely begun to unfold.

One bright spot in the war is that we're seeing a bunch of really independent journalists - people just up and go to the war zone and write about what they see. Judging from some of the reports, journalists outnumber the Special Forces in northern Iraq. I've been reading Back to Iraq 2.0 and Salon's Phillip Robertson. Apparently Slate has a guy in there too:

I sat in Kirkuk last night with a bottle of whiskey and an MRE donated by a kind Marine. I feasted on beef in mushroom sauce, chicken breast with apple jelly, and M&Ms. An American journalist told me about the first day of liberation in Mosul; she said it was the most frightening place she'd ever been. While she was at the hospital, two Arabs and a Kurdish peshmerga were brought in dead. She went to interview a doctor, and when she returned someone had cut off the Kurd's head and taken it away. She kept repeating, "I mean, when heads are missing; Jesus Christ, his head was gone; they took his head. ..."

The difference, as I understand from reading ... independent journalists ... is that Kirkuk is still mostly Kurdish and Turkomen, whereas Mosul was force-populated by Arabs in the last few decades. Why can't we all just get along?

The version of this joke that I heard/tell goes like this: a mathematician, physicist, engineer, and computer programmer are all challenged to determine whether all odd numbers are prime. The mathematician says, "One is prime, three is prime, five is prime, seven is prime, nine is not prime - nope." The physicist said, "One is prime, three is prime, five is prime, seven is prime, nine is probably experimental error because eleven and thirteen are prime - yep." The engineer says, "One is prime, three is prime, five is prime, seven is prime, nine is prime, eleven is prime - yep." The computer programmer says, "One is prime, one is prime, one is prime, one is prime ...." Here, courtesy of the internet and Dave Berry's blog, is some more material.

Computational linguist: 3 is an odd prime, 5 is an odd prime, 7 is an odd prime, 9 is a very odd prime,...
Chemist: 1 prime, 3 prime, 5 prime... hey, let's publish!
Programmer: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 will be fixed in the next release ...
Richard Nixon: Put nine on the enemies list. I'm gonna get that number.

...structured programming, a reform movement whose manifesto was Edsger W. Dijkstra's brief letter to the editor titled "Go to statement considered harmful." Structured programs were to be built out of subunits that have a single entrance point and a single exit (eschewing the goto command, which allows jumps into or out of the middle of a routine). Three such constructs were recommended: sequencing (do A, then B, then C), alternation (either do A or do B) and iteration (repeat A until some condition is satisfied). Corrado Böhm and Giuseppe Jacopini proved that these three idioms are sufficient to express essentially all programs.

... is that there are so many to choose from. In order to build your own linux kernel, you must have a bunch of supporting software, and each program must be relatively recent. Fortunately, the linux 2.5 kernel documentation shows you how to check the version of each required program. Also fortunately, most of the programs follow standards on how to check their versions. Unfortunately, the programs follow four different standards.

o  Gnu C                  2.95.3                  # gcc --version
o  Gnu make               3.78                    # make --version
o  binutils               2.9.5.0.25              # ld -v
o  util-linux             2.10o                   # fdformat --version
o  module-init-tools      0.9.9                   # depmod -V
o  e2fsprogs              1.29                    # tune2fs
o  jfsutils               1.0.14                  # fsck.jfs -V
o  reiserfsprogs          3.6.3                   # reiserfsck -V 2>&1|grep rei\
serfsprogs
o  xfsprogs               2.1.0                   # xfs_db -V
o  pcmcia-cs              3.1.21                  # cardmgr -V
o  PPP                    2.4.0                   # pppd --version
o  isdn4k-utils           3.1pre1                 # isdnctrl 2>&1|grep version
o  procps                 2.0.9                   # ps --version
o  oprofile               0.5                     # oprofiled --version

Snyder filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Salt Lake City suburb for allowing other pre-meeting prayers but refusing to let him offer a prayer addressed to "Our Mother, who art in heaven." ... Among other things, the prayer asked for deliverance "from the evil of forced religious worship now sought to be imposed upon the people ... by the actions of misguided, weak and stupid politicians, who abuse power in their own self-righteousness."

I updated The Quiz to show individual scores. It used to say:

March 01, 2003 40 of 236 questions completed

and now it says

March 01, 2003 40 of 236 questions completed, with 18 (45%) correct. If you guessed randomly, you would expect 13 correct answers. You did 36% better than random guessing.

It took two hours. Since some questions have three choices and others two, it's trickier than it might appear to come up with these numbers. Also, I took a figurative whack at one of my pet peeves. To wit:

If you took a ten-question true/false test, and got five right, you got 50%. Someone who got six right got 60%. But they didn't do 10% better than you. They did 20% better than you ((6-5)/5). You, however, didn't do 20% worse than them. You did 17% worse ((5-6)/6). But common usage is to quote the difference in percentages as the percentage difference. That's balony, and we won't be doing that on my web site.

Which of the following was not one of the goals of this war?
(a) Disarm Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
(b) Bring Saddam Hussein to justice
(c) Create a democratic and free Iraq
(d) Tear down a statue of Saddam Hussein

PS: Have we found Osama bin Laden yet?

Greenspan's latest speech is taken as evidence that he wants to reform patent protections. But his fundamental premise is wrong:

In the case of physical property, we take it for granted that the ownership right should have the potential of persisting as long as the physical object itself. In the case of an idea, however, we have chosen to strike a different balance in recognition of the chaos that could follow from having to trace back all the thoughts implicit in one's current undertaking and pay a royalty to the originator of each one. So rather than adopting that obviously principled but unworkable approach, we have chosen instead to follow the lead of British common law and place time limits on intellectual property rights.

No, no, no. Greenspan implies that, in principle, intellectual property rights should last forever just like physical property rights. And that the only reason they don't is that that would be to inconvenient to enforce. What about the concept that right derive from their benefit to humanity? By creating unnecessary scarcity, intellectual property rights hurt humanity.

You can also read his speech in plain English.

DUHOK, Iraqi Kurdistan — Well, that last post was quite a cliff-hanger, wasn’t it? However, after two nights and a day of walking — well, walking, marching, climbing, scrambling — from Turkey to Iraq, I can confirm that I’m safe and well in Duhok at the Jiyan Palace Hotel. The crossing was a Bataan death march. Luckily we survived. I’m exhausted. It’s 4 p.m. here in Iraq, and I need to sleep for a while. Sorry for no details on this one, but I’m just absolutely knackered.

At least I’m alive. Now, I can get to work.

I'm now reading the weblogs of two different independent journalists in Northern Iraq, Christopher Allbritton, quoted above, and Phillip Robertson, reporting for Salon. What's weird is that Robertson keeps mentioning camera crews and reporters all over the place in Northern Iraq. Who are they? Where are their weblogs?

Retired General Anthony Zinni, former CinC of the Central Command and recently "retired" from being Bush's middle east envoy, is the most generally credible military viewpoint I've seen.

"You don't speak to Arab pride and Arab manhood in this way. That whole psychological business gave them another cause to fight for, more than they would have fought just for Saddam."

Zinni said everything in the Iraq war will climax in what he called "the moment."

"That moment will be when the region, the country and the world realizes Saddam is gone. It will be a moment of decision. There will be tremendous mixed emotions in the Islamic and Arab world," he said.

As some of you know, I work for a major Toronto hotel. My department head has never seen occupancy plummet so far, so fast. A city-wide conference (American Association of Cancer Research) has cancelled, at enormous cost to the organization and to the city. My observation for today: Australia's travel warning about Toronto is out of sheer spite. We're not on board with mother England on Iraq. You do the math. And, for the first time since the fall of 2001, I'll be going down to a 4-day workweek. Oh well--I'll be able to watch Oprah's inevitable SARS show.

Up to now, SARS has had a fatality rate of about 3.5 percent. If that sounds mild compared, say, to the virus that causes AIDS, consider this: The pandemic flu of 1918 killed "only" about 2.5 percent of those whom it infected. That amounted to 50 million people worldwide. ... Up to now, U.S. authorities have been effective and probably fortunate in controlling the spread of SARS. Except for a handful of close relatives and health workers, the 69 known suspected SARS patients here were all sickened in Asia. By keeping them off the streets, U.S. officials have prevented community outbreaks so far. The same is largely true of Vietnam and Singapore. But that is not the case in Hong Kong ... In Canada, with over 100 suspected cases, the fear is palpable. ...

The SARS threat, which could end up requiring considerable vigilance and resources, bears out what many state and local health officials said about the smallpox vaccine program: that it was a waste of their precious time and energy.

"I'm more worried about smallpox vaccine than I am about smallpox currently," says Wenzel. Meanwhile, his hospital is treating its first possible SARS patient.

"That's real," he says. "That's here."

Natural uranium is a blend of several isotopes. After you take out the one percent that's U-235 - the extra-radioactive part, very good if you like chain reactions - and traces of other isotopes, the leftover 99% is barely radioactive and almost twice as dense as lead. (Remember, when people say that it stays radioactive for 4.5 billion years - well, first, they don't understand half-lives; it stays radioactive for much longer than that - but mainly, that means that if you stare at an atom for, say, a billion years, it only has a 25% chance of radio-acting.) It gets used commercially where they need really dense stuff, and it's safe it that context - few people climb into elevator shafts to lick the counterweights. On the battlefield, though, it's used in bullets and armor. In this context, it tends to get vaporized. Those alpha particles that can't penetrate a few sheets of paper get a chance to work you from the inside. But mostly the problem is that it's a heavy metal, like lead and cadmium, and heavy metals are poisonous.

How poisonous? The Army insists so strenuously that it's safe that you're left with the impression that we ought to feed it to babies for their health. "[kidney-damaging doses] are far above levels soldiers would have encountered in the Gulf or the Balkans." -- DU Library - Department of Defense. Well good for our boys, I guess, but not so good for the people whose backyards we fought in while we liberated them. The DoD also quotes a WHO study: "No increase of leukemia or other cancers has been established following exposure to uranium or DU." But that study also says things like "Long-term studies of workers exposed to uranium have reported some impairment of kidney function depending on the level of exposure. However, there is also some evidence that this impairment may be transient and that kidney function returns to normal once the source of excessive uranium exposure has been removed." And it has a whole chapter on "Biokinetics of uranium species from the standpoint of nephrotoxicty" but I have to confess I didn't read it. Bottom line, as far as I can tell with a cursory literature inspection, is that US military use of DU may make a few (hundred) people sick but probably won't kill anybody, and if it did it would be hard to prove.

Meanwhile, here's an explanation of why it's used:

The unit (part of the 24th Infantry Division) had gone on, leaving this tank to wait for a recovery vehicle. Three T-72’s appeared and attacked. The first fired from under 1,000 meters, scoring a hit with a shaped-charge (high explosive) round on the M1A1’s frontal armor. The hit did no damage. The M1A1 fired a 120mm armor-piercing round that penetrated the T-72 turret, causing an explosion that blew the turret into the air. The second T-72 fired another shaped-charge round, hit the frontal armor, and did no damage. This T-72 turned to run, and took a 120mm round in the engine compartment and blew the engine into the air. The last T-72 fired a solid shot (sabot) round from 400 meters. This left a groove in the M1A1’s frontal armor and bounced off. The T-72 then backed up behind a sand berm and was completely concealed from view. The M1A1 depressed its gun and put a sabot round through the berm, into the T-72, causing an explosion. -- excerpted from Dunnigan, James F. and Austin Bay, From Shield to Storm: High-Tech Weapons, Military Strategy, and Coalition Warfare in the Persian Gulf, William Morrow & Company, 1992, p. 294-295.

Putting these together, the average amount of information per ejaculation is 1.560*10^ 9* 2 bits * 2.00*10^ 8, which comes out to be 6.24*10 ^17 bits. That's about 78,000 terabytes of data! ... If you figure that a male orgasm lasts five seconds, you get a transmission rate of 15,600 tb/s. In comparison, an OC-96 line (like the ones that make up much of the backbone of the internet) can move .005 tb/s. ... If you consider signal to noise, though, the figures come out much differently.

[Commander in Chief of Pacific Command] Admiral Blair advocated the notion that U.S. military officers could reform their foreign counterparts. He pushed countries in his theater to send their officers to American schools and to open their hallways to U.S. planners and trainers. (Priest, Dana. The Mission, p 51. 2003 W.W. Norton & Company)

Can you spot anything in the careers or biographies of military officers that makes them more likely to violate human rights?

What was the big risk for Salvadorean military officers committing huge human rights violations? US training. It's very, very clear. I think US training selects the officers who are the most motivated, and the way that you distinguished yourself in the Salvadorean military in the 1980s was by killing people. So the most motivated officers are also the worst. But what this also says is that US training is useless for restraining human rights abuse. US training also advantages officers relative to other officers, so when they come back they get better jobs and are in a position to commit more violations. (Patrick Ball "has spent 12 years designing software that turns information on human rights abuses into databases." Interviewed in New Scientist)

Every human rights story goes like this: I am a deponent, and I'm here to tell you about things that happened to one or many victims. I myself may or may not be one of those victims. Each of those victims may have suffered one or more violations, and those violations may or may not be what historians call colligated at one or more points in time or space. Each of the violations may have been perpetrated by zero, one, or many identifiable perpetrators, and those perpetrators may be individuals with names and ranks, or they may be institutions. Each of those may be associated with one or more of the violations in this story. That's the complexity of one story. Now we're going to collect 10,000 stories. (Patrick Ball "has spent 12 years designing software that turns information on human rights abuses into databases." Interviewed in New Scientist)

Coalition / Iraq:
killed: 200 / 1,500
wounded: 300 / 3500
tanks: 32 / 87
other armored vehicles: 33 / 52
helicopters: 14 / 0
artillery pieces: 0 / 172

Translation by The Agonist.

This Russian analysis contains assorted bad news, which sounds like normal war problems. But I thought we had a Transformational Military that wouldn't suffer from normal war problems. If we don't, how are we going to defeat a numerically superior force unencumbered by rules of war and fighting to the death in its home territory, without causing so many civilian casualties as to fail the political mission that's the justification for the war?

The first part of the [coalition] plan - a march across the desert toward Karabela - was achieved, albeit with serious delays. The second part of the plan [to go around Basra through An-Nasiriya toward Al-Ammara ... splitting Iraq in half] in essence has failed.

Analysts point out that capture of Basra is viewed by the coalition command as being exceptionally important and as a model for the future "bloodless" takeover of Baghdad. So far, however, this approach does not work and the city's garrison is actively defending its territory.

Already, radio intercepts indicate, all available [coalition] repair units have been deployed to the front. Over 60% of all available spare parts have been already used and emergency additional supplies are being requested.

The sand is literally "eating up" the equipment. Sand has a particularly serious effect on electronics and transmissions of combat vehicles. Already more than 40 tanks and up to 69 armored personnel carriers have been disabled due to damaged engines; more than 150 armored vehicles have lost the use of their heat-seeking targeting sights and night vision equipment.

Currently, as intercepted radio communications show, the coalition command is trying to establish the whereabouts of more than 500 of its troops that fell behind their units, departed with resupply convoys or were carrying out individual assignments. So far it was not possible to establish how many of these troops are dead, captured or have successfully reached other units.

I found a lawyer who works for another landlord. He spends most of his days in court trying to evict tenants. I thought he would be perfect to protect me from the likes of — him. And he was. As he was reading through a lease, he said to me, "OK, this paragraph, I really like this clause, I think I'm going to steal it and use it in my own contracts." Pause. He reaches for a red pen and crosses out the paragraph. "But you're not signing it."

It appears that Bush administration's Labor Department is actually trying to make a law more fair.

Workers now are exempt from overtime pay if they earn more than $155 a week, or $8,060 a year, and meet other convoluted, confusing job criteria, such as devoting at least 80 percent of their time to "exercising discretion" and other "intellectual" tasks that cannot be "standardized in ... a given period of time."

The proposal would raise the salary cap to $425 a week, or $22,100 a year, and any worker earning less automatically would be required to receive overtime pay.

Jobs most affected by the changes likely would be assistant managers of stores, restaurants and bars, McCutchen said. They would get overtime pay despite their management status as long as they earn less than $22,100 a year.

This war isn't really about Iraq or deposing Saddam or even eliminating his WMD, though each of those are important benefits along the way. Nor is it something so mundane as a 'war for oil.' The leading architects of this war in and out of the administration see this war, and have pursued it, as an opening blow in a far broader war against political Islam. They see it as the first in a series of wars and near-wars which will lead eventually to the overthrow of most of the current governments in the Middle East, the establishment of western-oriented democracies throughout the Arab world, and the destruction of nothing less than the political world of Islamic fundamentalism.

That, as you might say, is a rather tall order. And it would have been very hard for the administration to sell the American people on such a struggle. So it didn't try. It pushed rather to get us into Iraq, knowing that if it went about the process in the right way it would make a further series of wars against Iran, Syria and perhaps lower-level hostilities against Saudi Arabia and Egypt all but inevitable.

I picked up my "pre-owned" Saab 9-5 Wagon tonight. My first stop on the way home was Home Depot. I think I've turned into a lesbian. (If it was a Subaru wagon, I'd be a Seattle lesbian.)

Not to mention that he´s REALLY FUCKING WEIRD LOOKING, even when he´s dressed in a tuxedo. He waddles all funny and his face is crooked and he sneers and he never shaves or combs his hair, and his eyes look in like six different directions at once. ... And ... he made all these disturbed POINTING JABBING GESTURES at the audience, like he was on drugs ....

And Chris Cooper, who won the Oscar for best supporting actor in "Adaptation", and Pedro Aldomodovodomar, who won the Oscar for best original screenplay in "That Softcore Spanish One with Subtitles", they both got up and gussied around and prayed for peace and shit. Fuck that. OUTRAGE is the APPROPRIATE RESPONSE, you GUTTERING LOONS. Not RESTRAINED MUSHMOUTHEDNESS. Anger and shouting. DISTURBING JABBY GESTURES are the call of the day, and I just hope that more folks like Michael Moore start getting on TV to make them.

Of course, not all civil liberties received such cavalier treatment. Although the PATRIOT Act allows the FBI to obtain records showing what books you purchased at the local bookstore or checked out from the library -- a suspect's reading habits might suggest an unsettling interest in the architecture of tall buildings -- Ashcroft has insisted that the FBI cannot review the records of gun-purchase background checks in the course of a terror investigation.

Between 10,000 and 100,000 American veterans of the first Gulf War have abnormal symptoms attributed to "Gulf War Syndrome." The graphic on the right side of this NY Times article outlines possible causes, such as:

• 69% took pyridostigmine bromide pills to protect vs nerve gas
• 53% had anthrax vaccination
• 30% bathed on water not provided by the military

In situations like these, the actual facts play only a modest role in shaping public opinion, especially when the "facts" are nebulous, subjective, and largely unquantifiable. ... And one surprisingly effective tactic is to assert the point under debate by calmly behaving as if there were no debate and moving on to the next step. ... This places those arguing the opposite side ... in the awkward position of constantly having to re-establish that the debate is still open, without boring, tiring, or otherwise turning off the only semi-interested public.

Most everybody I know personally is either a spectator in this war or, for the few soldiers I know, a pawn. Meanwhile in the blog world this amazing drama is unfolding as we read the daily entries of this poor bastard posting live from Baghdad, and his friends and internet contacts around the world and right next door. One of whom writes:

I cannot not not not get over the irony of this war and how we are all communicating with one another. I am a sort-of-hawk (at least, conditionally pro-war), and I am communicating with a Baghdadi from New York City; an Israeli puts up a mirror site for this Iraqi; the guy in Baghdad wishes an Israeli woman and her family well while he is about to be shocked and awed by my country's unparalleled ability to wage war; she puts up a website from the IDF Home Command for him to download a PDF survival guide in Arabic.

Today, I bought a Dixie Chicks t-shirt from their website. I had to do something to show solidarity with Natalie Maines, who got into a big ol' heap of trouble after she dared speak out against dubya at a concert in England. Radio stations are blacklisting the band; some DJs are staging CD-burnings, CD-bulldozings... My t-shirt will end up costing me about a bazillion Canadian dollars after the exchange rate, but hey--it's less stress than marching in the rain for peace! I know there probably won't be a lot of Chicks fans on Joel's website, but if anyone has their latest album (Home), I dare you to play track 3 (Travelin' Soldier) and not get ferklempt.

This is an excerpt from Cool 2B Real, which "is about real girls like you! Whether you're in school, playing sports or just having fun, strive to be the best you can be!" It offers this "Tip on Keepin' Fit":

Eat a variety of foods.

By eating foods like beef, bagels, yogurt, vegetables and fruit, you will stay on top of your game.

(Emphasis added.) You may or may not be surprised to learn that the site is "Funded by America's Beef Producers SM."

What has come to trouble me most over past weeks is the suspicion that if the hanging chads in Florida had gone the other way and Al Gore had been elected, we would not now be about to commit British troops.

(And Tony Blair's speech, infinitely better than Bush's.)

"The Constitution just sets minimums," Scalia said at John Carroll University. "Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires." ... He said that in wartime, one can expect "the protections will be ratcheted right down to the constitutional minimum. I won't let it go beyond the constitutional minimum."

"If he comes [today] and I face him, I'll hit him... I won't try to hit him in the head, but I'll hit him. And if he charges me, I'll kill him." --Jose Mesa, Phillies pitcher, on Indians shortstop and former teammate Omar Vizquel (ESPN.com)

"I really like Jose... No matter what happened on the field, I still think he's a good guy." --Omar Vizquel, Indians shortstop, on Mesa

"If he comes to apologize, I will punch him right in the face... And then I'll kill him." --Mesa

Heeding appeals from techno-types, in 2000 Bill Clinton ended the deliberate degrading of the free GPS signal. Now your car not only knows exactly how many feet you are from the Pennsylvania Turnpike exit, it knows which lane of the highway you're in.

Making the free signal as precise as the military signal also meant any GPS receiver purchased by Iraq or any other nation is now just as accurate as U.S. military receivers. There's a backup plan, of course. The Pentagon can order the free GPS signal temporarily degraded on a regional basis. This will happen in the Persian Gulf area some time soon. When the GPS-equipped Land Rovers of the Saudi dynastic elite suddenly stop knowing which mansion's circular drive to turn up, the assault on Iraq will be imminent.

But more than a few jaws dropped when WorldCom noted that it would write down the value of its property, plant and equipment and other intangible assets to $10 billion from $44.8 billion. That meant that WorldCom's hard assets, including its network, are now worth almost 75 percent less than what they had cost. And don't forget, these assets were bought with actual cash, not highflying shares.

So let's follow the money. Worldcom overpaid thirty billion dollars. Where did that money come from? From cash flow, i.e. from customers' monthly checks? Borrowed from banks? Borrowed from the stock market? Where did it go? A lot of construction workers got paid to dig ditches. Raw materials, parts, and salaries at Lucent, Cisco, etc. People who cashed out of telecom suppliers before 2001. What fraction of all this was a wealth transfer from one class of investors to another?

I look at Paul Wolfowitz or Richard Pearle, I think of a guy who read that scene in Atlas Shrugged in which one of Ayn Rand's rich supermen confidently piloted a speed boat after fifteen minutes of watching someone else fiddle with it and thought, that's how I'm going to live my life.

Today there was another rubber band shooting occurrence. ... Since this is not acceptable behavior, if it continues, it will result in penalty. (Circuit City internal memo)

To the person (or persons) who finds it funny to repeatedly position my star wars figurines in inappropriate positions, please stop. The note I put there requesting this to NOT be done was not a challenge for you to do it again, or to see how grotesque and inappropriate you could get. In all seriousness, I ask you to stop. I find this extremely inappropriate, distastefull, offensive, and in no way, humorous. If this continues, I will report this to HR. (Navitaire internal memo)

Lest any confusion remain, this is not a suggestion or a request that Padilla be permitted to consult with counsel, and it is certainly not an invitation to conduct a further 'dialogue' about whether he will be permitted to do so. It is a ruling -- a determination -- that he will be permitted to do so. -- U.S. District Judge Michael Mukasey

Benaroya Hall, Seattle, WA, USA, 14 March 2003

The idea with this concert, part of a three-night series, was that UW professor Barry Lieberman modified many classical string pieces to add a double-bass part. And then got "Fifteen Internationally Renowned Guest Artists" together to play them in a nice concert hall. Though since he was one of the fifteen, who's the Host Artist?

Mozart, String Quartet No 19 in C Major. The very beginning, with the ominious bass part, sounded like movie music. Then it all pretty much blended together and I didn't stay very focussed. One of the violins, according to the notes, was made in 1652. But the violins all looked about the same, and nobody really looked much like their head shots in the program guide, so I couldn't figure out which it was. Can you imagine writing sheet music for an electric guitar or a synthesizer and, three centuries later, that instrument not only still existing but being unchanged in sound and appearance?

Beethoven, String Quartet No. 11 in f minor. This got my attention. I enjoyed it quite a bit more than the Mozart. Seated in the fifth row, we could hear the concertmaster (lead violinist) very clearly: before each new passage, she took a short, intense breath through the nose, what we call in my martial arts class a "combative breath," and then attacked her violin fiercly with her bow. It was very impressive. (As you can see, I'm bringing the full weight of my extensive, detailed knowledge of classical music to bear in this review. By counting the parts where it felt like we should applaud but nobody did, I was even able to track which movement we were on. Hey, what do left-handed string players do? Play backwards? Reverse the strings?)

Tchaikovsky, Serenade for Strings, in C Major. My favorite piece of the night. It had two modes. In one, all fifteen players - a bass, two cellos, two or three violas, many violins - performed exactly the same notes at exactly the same time. (Well, I guess maybe some of the bigger instruments played related notes in different, I guess they're octaves or something. I wouldn't know, really.) That mode was very loud, and everybody was really tight so it sounded great.

In the other mode, about ten people would all play one melody while another melody would hop back and forth across the remaining players, who either bowed or plucked a few notes at a time. Again, they were all very tight, so that it was like one musician playing continuously while jumping around the stage, while surrounded by another musician with twenty hands. I liked the Tchaikovsky the most.

The word is that Dick Cheney may be gravitating toward tactical alliance with Colin Powell over Korea. Cheney seems to be thinking that as fun as regime change in Pyongyang might be, the US is focused on Iraq and then later on Iran. And he doesn't want Korea blowing up while the US has important business to get done in the Persian Gulf. (Even global hegemons have to set priorities!)

So we -- spammers and the spammed alike -- have a common interest in finding a way to efficiently target only the people who really want to buy Viagra. I believe it can be done. Any ideas? - Robert X. Cringley

Huh? If it weren't Cringely saying it, I'd shoot the bastard. But since it's him, I think about it... - Steve

Well I say, shoot the bastard. Here's why.

His column, boiled down, says this:

0) [A red herring discussion of advertising-supported content]
1) Spam is the only successful type of internet advertising. If it wasn't profitable, it wouldn't exist
2) Spam is corrosive to email
3) Email is the killer app of the internet
4) We non-spammers should find a way to help spammers target their spam. Then it won't be corrosive.

0 I'll come back to later.

I agree with 1, 2, and 3.

I disagree with 4. It's true but too narrow. He's proposing an undefined systemic accomodation for a problem caused by a well-defined systemic flaw. As long as we're doing systemic fixes, why not fix the real problem?

Spammers are parasites who make money via quirks of the SMTP protocol. Specifically, the way email works today spammers can make recipients pay for some of the cost of each email. The solution is then to change our mail protocol.

Once spammers have to pay representative amounts of money, spam will be like junk mail. This may not sound like a big win, but it is, for three reasons. First, increased spammer cost will set a ceiling on volume, just as we don't get ten pounds of junk mail in our mailboxes. Second, increased cost will put the onus on spammers themselves to improve targetting accuracy, thus addressing the corrosion problem. Third, spam (and ultimately the morons who buy all the viagra and whatnot) will subsidize the rest of the internet.

Yes, changing our email infrastructure will be annoying and expensive. But it's a specific, concrete idea (here's one proposal) with a high chance of success. If it were implemented at the MTA level (back office) instead of MUA (desktop email programs), it would require hundreds of thousands of systems to change, but not hundreds of millions.

Now let's go back and look at the red herring, the implied link between spam and advertising-supporting content. The obvious conclusion, which perhaps he's saving for his next column, is that we should find some way to support content with spam, because that's the only kind of advertising that's profitable. Once again, let's look at the real systemic problem.

The real systemic problem is advertising-supported content itself. It's a system we've inherited from earlier broadcast media, where it succeeded due to the nature of the technology. If you want to produce content and send it to millions of households, and you have no way to charge any of them money, how do you collect money? You sell the attention of your audience to interested parties. Interested parties means advertisers. Since it's a business, that means that creative decisions are effectively made by advertisers.

Consequences? News is censored to avoid offending advertisers. Content is planned around the disposable income of the audiences it will attract. Content that takes time to develop audiences, or that appeals to niche audiences, is usually killed in favor of more immediately profitable material.

When the internet went commercial advertising-supported content was the most obvious pure-internet business model simply because it's what had come before. Now that it's failed, now that no business model is obviously successful, what possible reason could there be keep recussitating on the web the system that made television and radio intolerably bad for so many decades? Instead, let's keep experimenting with audience-supported content - for example Salon, the WSJ, and porn - and with micropayments and related technologies that were impossible in the 1930s but technically trivial today. Audience-supported content may not work yet, but neither does advertising, and only one the two has a future.

And let's recognize that the huge success of the internet, the killer app of the internet, is free content. All those emails zipping back and forth - that's content that people write and then just give away for free. All these weblogs, from crap to professional writing, give away content for free. As long as we all shell out twenty bucks a month to keep the machines humming, why should anybody else get a dime? Cringley writes:

Yahoo suddenly wants us to pay -- because they have figured out that advertisers won't pay, at least not enough to support the kind of earnings growth demanded by Wall Street.

If you haven't yet figured out that "earnings growth" is code for pyramid scheme, you're an idiot. And if you have, and you just want in before the pyramid collapses - collapses the rest of the way, I suppose - you're a criminal. Let's do our audience-supported experiments without the "benefits" of venture capital and Wall Street. I'm not saying down with capitalism, but I am saying, "up with post-capitalism." I'm just not sure what that is yet. But it probably includes blogs and micropayments and peer to peer. And it's a safe bet to have porn.

"I had a guy in a Dodge pickup pull up behind me 6 feet off my bumper, flashing his high beams," said Ramsey, as we tooled south. "He ran up next to me and gave me the one-finger wave, then pulled in front and slammed on the brakes."

Trooper Ramsey smiled. His white teeth gleamed.

"Of course," he said, "this was all on video."

But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and—most important—the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, ... If a country is either losing out to globalization or rejecting much of the content flows associated with its advance, there is a far greater chance that the U.S. will end up sending forces at some point. ...

It is America’s continued success in deterring global war and obsolescing state-on-state war that allows us to stick our noses into the far more difficult subnational conflicts and the dangerous transnational actors they spawn.

What I want to know (as per Measuring Lost Freedom vs. Security in Dollars, Andrews, Edmund L. New York Times. 10 March 2003) is, how would one go about quantitatively measuring the positive impact of American intervention and post-war reconstruction in WWII against the negative impact of most other American military interventions and politically motivated covert operations? I want to keep score.

WASHINGTON: Iran's progress towards building a nuclear bomb was "startling" and "eye-opening", Director General of International Atomic Energy Agency Mohamed ElBaradei has said.

So if the United States were to sequentially invade every nuclear power and force regime change, what would be the best order? Assuming we give ourselves a bye even though we're the only country ever to actually use such a weapon, who's most dangerous? The declared powers are the US, Russia, Britain, France, China, Pakistan, and India. Israel has 'em. North Korea probably has 'em. Iran and Iraq are both working on them, though Iraq apparently isn't very close at all. Do we do start with the geographically convenient Iran and Israel after we do Iraq, or should we go in reverse order of threat? How many people in the Pentagon do you think are currently working on this problem?

In the course of her research Priest learned two things—that the CinCs are figures of extraordinary power throughout the territory they command, far more influential than American ambassadors; and that "the mission" of the US military has expanded enormously in the last decade or two. "The US government had grown increasingly dependent on its military to carry out its foreign affairs."

[General Zinni] concluded that "he had become a modern-day proconsul, descendant of the warrior-statesmen who ruled the Roman Empire's outlying territory, bringing order and ideals from a legalistic Rome. Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus—they would have understood. His compatriots, he knew, did not."

...

Zinni was often restive with Washington's half-measures, but in every other way he got what he wanted. He traveled in his own plane with an entourage of thirty or more, and he ran his mini-empire from Centcom headquarters in Tampa, Florida, where he was aided by a staff of more than a thousand backed by a special CinC budget of more than $50 million a year. One impression emerges clearly from Priest's account of the instrument under Zinni's control: the military is the only generously funded institution in American public life.

There are three things that govern a network. Fear is the first thing. It drives almost every decision they make. The only thing that trumps fear is greed. ... And the thing that can triumph over greed is stupidity, and stupidity usually wins the day. - Larry Wilmore, producer of Bernie Mac. Entertainment Weekly. March 14, 2003, p 34.

They also do this really weird thing: Any of the drivers can buy the winner's carburetor for $400 at the end of the race. The reason they do this is that some guys have their carburetor precision machined to goose up its performance in a way that their instruments can't detect. With this rule, drivers know that they face having to sell a special carburetor that may have cost as much as $2500 for a mere $400. It helps keep them honest.

I wonder if this technique for cutting down on race car cheating could be applied to doping in human sports. What if you could buy the winner's heart and lungs for a fixed price?

Six months after The Threatening Storm's publication, however, Pollack's book reads as much like an indictment of the Bush administration's overeagerness to go to war as it does an endorsement of it. A more appropriate subtitle for the book would have been The Case for Rebuilding Afghanistan, Destroying al-Qaida, Setting Israel and Palestine on the Road to Peace, and Then, a Year or Two Down the Road After Some Diplomacy, Invading Iraq.

This summary of the IT industry is both thorough and pithy, and is accurate as far as I can tell. I highly recommend it. Here I excerpt a few bits about Microsoft.

At the root of Microsoft's problems is its financial structure. Leveraged by stock options and other financial tricks (R7), it depends heavily on rapid revenue growth and increasing stock value. When you've saturated your market (over 90%), and that market is stagnant, rapid revenue growth becomes difficult. Should future growth look poor, holders of stock options are likely to cash out, and much of that $43 Billion evaporates.

By necessity, Microsoft must expand into new markets. Problem is, they've never been particularly successful in entering any markets where they could not leverage their monopolies. As is true of other monopolies, they simply aren't competitive in open markets. While Windows has a profit margin of 85%, and Microsoft Office has a margin of 79%, every other Microsoft division is losing money in reams (R4).

... The very disappointing uptake of Windows XP has convinced Microsoft they must force upgrades. License 6 does force customers to upgrade on Microsoft's schedule, whether they want to or not, but a majority of the market has not adopted License 6, despite Microsoft's threats. Clearly drastic changes are needed to Windows to generate renewed upgrade revenue. ...

The Longhorn filesystem will be based on the technology of a re-thought and expanded SQL Server database (the project coded Yukon) ... Current Windows based software will not be compatible with the Longhorn filesystem. Microsoft has already stated that all their own software has to be rewritten for it - so will everyone else's. This will eliminate a huge number of software titles which are useful, but not sufficiently profitable to justify rewriting them. ...

Coming with Longhorn is a new user interface, code named Sideshow (W5), so if you're currently trying to make sense of the new Windows XP user interface, 2005 is when Billy intends to yank your chain again. If you're a Windows programmer, you get to learn a new API framework named Avalon (W6) too.