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.