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 And finally, they take the fall back position that even if their first two reasons do not hold water, the 2nd is now outdated because the founding fathers could not have envisioned the type of arms that are currently available and the dangers of a few using firearms in criminal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.