Here's an important educational tool from the United States government to help children process the Indian Ocean disaster:

http://www.fema.gov/kids/games/tsunami/

(as discovered by my friend Jason)
http://jmccargar.blogspot.com/2004/12/red-cross-priorities.html

Beaming like a kid who just met his favorite sports star, Mayor Anthony A. Williams signed legislation Wednesday to bring major league baseball back to the nation's capital.

So Councilwoman Cropp's resistance to the billion dollar tax giveaway to baseball faded in the face of a non-binding promise to try to get private funding for some of it cost. But at least Mayor Williams is happy. Sign me up as one disgusted anti-corporate-subsidy baseball fan.

I have a bunch of science text books without warning labels. I finally found a website with appropriate labels to prevent others from reaching dangerous conclusions from my books.

The original from Cobb County Georgia:
This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.

From Berkeley:
This book does not contain the word evolution, the unifying principle in biology and in important component of the National Science Standards and Scholastic Achievement Test. For an overview of what your class is missing, go to: http://evolution.berkeley.edu

See 8 other stickers in the link. Also see the link to a CafePress t-shirt of these stickers. The t-shirts are not as stylish as the ones Joel is selling through (I think) the same vendor.

The link also points you to scary ID sites from the Discovery Center and the Intelligent Design Network.

I was riding my bicycle last Saturday when I noticed an irregularity in the rear wheel. I took it to bicycle repair shop on my way home, and the mechanic quickly removed and stripped the wheel, noticing in the process that it looked like I needed a new chain and that the gear cassette was also terminally worn, and then diagnosed a broken spoke. (I'd actually noticed that months before as a 'loose spoke' but not bothered to do anything about it.) I concurred that I was experiencing very disconcerting chain jump going up steep hills, and added that I also couldn't go down hills very quickly because my big front chainring, i.e., high gear, is no longer accessible because the derailleur no longer moved far enough. Also my pannier rack has two cracked welds, which doesn't seem to matter except that it rattles a lot. I've had the bike over nine years, at a total expenditure of US$3,835: it's a $500 bicycle, but I paid $858 the day I bought it, including helmet, gloves, lights, tools, bags, etc; later I added clipless pedals and shoes, the pannier rack and panniers, several ill-fated bicycle computers (which is why I can't give a total mileage figure for the bicycle, nor a cost per mile comparison, but we can estimate crudely: cars cost between $.375/mi (IRS) and $.56/mi (AAA) to own, fuel, insure, and operate— let's call it $.5/mi, so I would have had to get 852 miles a year out of my bicycle to save money over a car. Probably I fell short of this.), spandex garments, tuneups, new tubes and tires, a lock, a light to replace the stolen one, and a numbing sequence of ultimately defective rear lights. The mechanic interrupted my reverie to announce that the rear wheel was not just out of alignment but bent and unfixable. He put it back together with the new spoke and said he couldn't charge me anything for the work.

"So I should hurry up and get a new bicycle?" I asked.

He bent over my bicycle and cupped his ear. "What's that? 'Take me off life support'?"

So this morning I test-rode some recumbent bicycles. These are lower, longer, heavier, more expensive, more comfortable, and more aerodynamic than traditional upright bicycles, which are properly called "safety" bicycles because they replaced the "dangerous" penny-farthing designs. After riding three models around the block many times, my initial impressions are:

• I got used to steering very quickly; the key is to remember you are on a bicycle and to maintain balance, rather than to get sloppy like on a tricycle and steer by moving the handlebars. Within a few laps I was able to stick my arm out to signal turns without swerving.
• I sat much higher than I expected to.
• I'll have to use a rear-view mirror, which is probably a good thing
• There are perfectly nice recumbants for $550 to $750, which surprised me.
• The higher pedals of a short-wheel-base bicycle feel much more athletic.

And a purchase? Deferred until January.

Lars turned me on to the benefits of a dual-monitor desktop (and the Kinesis keyboard) in the Collaboraid office, and when I set up my home office I wanted the same. Having wasted more than a few Danish weekends struggling with X driver problems, I determined to do a lot more research. After wasting less than a day or two net, I've been working on my dual-monitor setup for almost a month without any problems, so I am documenting it on the internet for anybody else who was equally frustrated at how hard it was to find out what to buy.

The key features of my setup are:

• Two flat-panel monitors, each with 1600x1200 resolution
• digital connections from the video card to the monitors
• Both monitors driven from the same video card
• the correct video driver for Linux kernel 2.6
• Excellent performance

The hardware that provides this is:

• Dell UltraSharp 2001FP 20" monitor, US$800 each
• PNY Nvidia Quadro NVS 280 AGP video card, US$100
• LFH-60 to dual DVI splitter cable, US$30. The video card comes with a big 60-pin connector and a splitter to two VGA connectors, but the digital picture is noticably sharper.

Software:

• Debian Linux, sid distribution
• NVidia's binary driver, as per the Debian-nVidia HOWTO. There are two main ways to do multiple monitors in Xwindows; one is to use two or more video cards and have X span them, and the other is to let the video card manage the monitors and present X with a single workspace. In my experience, the second approach works much better.
• The relevant parts of my XF86Config-4 file are:

  Section "Device"
  	Identifier	"PNY NVS 280"
          BusID           "PCI:1:0:0"
  	Driver		"nvidia"
  
  	Option 		"TwinView"
  	Option		"SecondMonitorHorizSync" "28-80"
  	Option		"SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "43-76"
  	Option		"MetaModes" "1600x1200, 1600x1200"
  	Option		"TwinViewOrientation" "LeftOf"
  EndSection
  
  Section "Screen"
          Identifier	"Default Screen"
          Device          "PNY NVS 280"
          Monitor	        "Generic Monitor"
          DefaultDepth    24
          SubSection "Display"
  		Depth		24
  		Modes		"1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
          EndSubSection
  EndSection

• For high-resolution screen backgrounds at 3200x1200, PlasmaDesign.co.uk., £7
• The KDE Desktop includes Multiple Monitor support, which ensures that dialog boxes pop up in the middle of a monitor instead of splitting themselves in the middle and lets me maximize windows to just one monitor.

Since I type with the keyboard in my lap, the KellyRest Clamp-on Mouse Platform (US$20) was very helpful in getting the mouse tray close to the keyboard. My desk is an IKEA Ivar shelf unit (US$105 for two sides, five shelves, and a brace), which provides an adjustable monitor shelf, foot rest, and storage shelves above the monitors.

I'm a big fan of baseball, but I'm not a big fan of wealth transfer from tax payers to private corporations via subsidy. So naturally I'm deeply opposed to the deal between Major League Baseball (motto: "slightly less incompetent than the National Hockey League, but we make up for it with nastiness") and the city of Washington, D.C., in which DC would put up all of the money for a new stadium and the baseball team's owners would keep all of the profits. The fig leaf, that the money was coming from a new business tax, isn't worthy of being spit at. Are you telling me that businesses will submit to a tax for a stadium but not for schools?

I was pleased to hear a mainstream news source (NPR) finally mention on air what's been known for over a decade: that stadiums and arenas provide negligable or even negative economic benefits to their neighborhoods, and are therefore terrible ways for governments to spend money. But I'm even more pleased to find that the City Council has rallied behind dissident Councilmembers to defy MLB and their lapdog the mayor (motto: "Making you nostalgic for former mayor and crack addict Marion Barry") and demand at least 1/2 private financing. One half! The audacity. Let's hope this starts a trend of local governments standing up to extortion by sports teams and other companies demanding public funding in exchange for the pleasure of their company.

The Impossibility of God, edited by Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier
A collection of philosophy essays presenting logical proofs that God can't exist. For what they are, many are interesting, but this is not a general-purpose entry in the dialog between theists and atheists. The proofs include such classics as, A) an omnipotent being can do anything. B) God is omnipotent. C) An omnipotent being can move anything. D) An omnipotent being can create a thing which cannot be moved. Since A-D cannot all be true, God does not exist. Woohoo. I'm convinced.

I suppose that the essays fill a niche in the thought process, and help to uncover inconsistencies in how we use god-related words and concepts. Lacking a specific interest in this precise niche, though, I wasn't able to muster more then a series of skimmings.

Closed Chambers, Edward Lazarus
A very detailed story by a former Supreme Court clerk (to Blackmun, 88-89), which sheds a lot of light on the functioning of the Court. In particular, Lazarus explains the legal issues thoroughly, clearly, and readably, and ties them to the actors and to a broader context. Reading this is enough to turn one into a Court junkie. I am skeptical of Lazarus' thesis that the Court worked better "before" and is on a barely reversible slide to dysfuction and to a role indistinguishable from partisan politics. It's not that I don't think that's where the Court is (cf. Bush v Gore), it's that I doubt that there ever was a golden age for the Supreme Court, when all of the justices were brave and smart and judicious. Even the Warren Court, a highlight for many of us liberals, did its work on as shaky legal foundation. Anyway, a great read, both entertaining (in a legal sort of way) and education (same).

The Secret Life of Dust, Hannah Holmes
A complement to The Secret House, but much more specifically focussed on dust. Where it comes from, what it's made of, how it moves around in the atmosphere, what effects it has on the climate and on people, and so forth and so on. Some key points: there's a lot of dust, all the time, everywhere. There has always been a lot of dust, going back millions of years. Some of the dust has become much more poisonous in the last few hundred years. Altogether dust (and, specifically, man-made pollution) are probably a key factor in many or most respiratory deaths and heart-related deaths, and in many other deaths. Cigarette smoke is makes just about everything worse, and just like the cloud of fecal matter/water vapor droplets that hang in the air of your house for hours after each #2 flush, cigarette smoke pervades everywhen even when you can't see it or even smell it.

While reading this book, I had to put it down a few times to remind myself that I wasn't dead or dying, and that human beings do in fact live for many decades despite inhaling a lot of dust. The author seemed to lose sight of that from time to time. Notwithstanding that caveat, and the complaint that there weren't any pictures, it was a good, informative, and readable science book.

[Comedian David Cross] even seemed to have a better handle on the mindset of Osama bin Laden than the Bush administration: "If the terrorists hated freedom, then the Netherlands would be fucking dust." Just a few months later, bin Laden released one of his tapes (not on Sub Pop), saying, "Bush has told you that we do not like freedom. Then why didn't we hit Sweden?" Whoa.

— Josh Modell, Onion AV Club

"Let me, amplifying a hint from Dr Moulton, ask you to imagine a volume including the great books of our own literature all bound together in some such order as this: Paradise Lost, Darwin’s Descent of Man, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Walter Map, Mill On Liberty, Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity, The Annual Register, Froissart, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Domesday Book, Le Morte d’Arthur, Campbell’s Lives of the Lord Chancellors, Boswell’s Johnson, Barbour’s The Bruce, Hakluyt’s Voyages, Clarendon, Macaulay, the plays of Shakespeare, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, The Faerie Queene, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, Bacon’s Essays, Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, FitzGerald’s Omar Khayyàm, Wordsworth, Browning, Sartor Resartus, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Burke’s Letters on a Regicide Peace, Ossian, Piers Plowman, Burke’s Thoughts on the Present Discontents, Quarles, Newman’s Apologia, Donne’s Sermons, Ruskin, Blake, The Deserted Village, Manfred, Blair’s Grave, The Complaint of Deor, Bailey’s Festus, Thompson’s Hound of Heaven.

Will you next imagine that in this volume most of the author’s names are lost; that, of the few that survive, a number have found their way into wrong places; that Ruskin for example is credited with Sartor Resartus; that Laus Veneris and Dolores are ascribed to Queen Elizabeth, The Anatomy of Melancholy to Charles II; and that, as for the titles, these were never invented by the authors, but by a Committee?

Will you still go on to imagine that all the poetry is printed as prose; while all the long paragraphs of prose are broken up into short verses, so that they resemble the little passages set out for parsing or analysis in an examination paper?

[...]

Have we done? By no means. Having effected all this, let us pepper the result over with italics and numerals, print it in double columns, with a marginal gutter on either side, each gutter pouring down an inky flow of references and cross references. Then, and not till then, is the outward disguise complete—so far as you are concerned. It remains only then to appoint it to be read in Churches, and oblige the child to get selected portions of it by heart on Sundays. But you are yet to imagine that the authors themselves have taken a hand in the game: that the later ones suppose all the earlier ones to have been predicting all the time in a nebulous fashion what they themselves have to tell, and indeed to have written mainly with that object: so that Macaulay and Adam Smith, for example constantly interrupt the thread of their discourse to affirm that what they tell us must be right because Walter Map or the author of Piers Plowman foretold it ages before.—Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863–1944), On Reading the Bible (II), Wednesday, April 24, 1918

Here's an interesting argument I hadn't heard before for why it's important to defend the theory of evolution (in addition to the part about it being true):

There happens to be a great deal of disagreement over lines of descent, the development of cellular mechanisms, whether or not protists (which include seaweed and diatoms) should all be grouped into one big family or categorized in anywhere from four to a dozen separate groups, and it just goes on, and on, and on. Yet about the basic idea that life as we know it is all descended from common ancestors over billions of years through the mechanism of natural selection, there is no scientific disagreement. Which is to say that while a few individual scientists may hold alternate beliefs based on their personal ideology, the verifiable scientific evidence points to evolution, and that body of evidence is growing all the time.

If they can portray the scientific community as hopelessly confused on such fundamental issues, it isn't a stretch to assert that 'nobody knows' whether or not global warming is happening or even whether stem cell research could be useful. By creating a story line where any secular investigation of the facts is portrayed as being inconclusive by definition, and the material truth unknowable, the listener might as well pick that version of the story which suits them best at the moment. This has implications beyond whether or not people believe that we're distantly related to other primates.

It seems like every article about gasoline in the last few years says something like, "gas prices hit a new record of X today. However, this is still lower than the peak in 1981, when adjusted for inflation," but no article ever says just how much gas was in 1981, adjusted for inflation or otherwise. So I went googling and found: "the following plot shows how much I paid for each gallon of gas over the past 25 years or so." With the advent of the internet, those anal-retentive records that some of us keep (I kept a gas log while I still had a car, but never actually looked at the data) finally have the broad exposure and high google PageRank that they deserve.

Explain Away evaluates the different explanations for why Kerry lost. My own take is that Kerry lost because Bush got several more percent of the vote nationwide, and that there's certainly no single reason what that happened. But this article debunks some of the more simple theories.

Healing the heartland offers a very well-informed and heartfelt analysis of Democrats' rural issues.

It has to be understood that rural America is hurting, and has been for a couple of decades now. Visit any rural community now and it's palpable: The schools are run down, the roads are falling apart, the former downtowns have been gutted by the destruction of the local economies and their displacement by the new Wal-Mart economy.

People living in rural areas increasingly feel that they have become mere colonies of urban society, treated dismissively and ignored at best, the victims of an evil plot by wealthy liberal elites at worst.

Liberals, largely due to their increasing urban-centric approach to politics, have mostly ignored the problem. And conservatives have been busy exploiting it.

It's important to understand that they have been doing so not by offering any actual solutions. Indeed, Republican "solutions" like the 1995 "Freedom to Farm Act" have actually turned out to be real disasters for the nation's family farmers; the only people who have benefited from it have been in the boardrooms of corporate agribusiness, which of course bellied up first to the big federal trough offered by the law. Even conservatives admit it has been a disaster.

No, conservatives have instead employed a strategy of scapegoating. It isn't bad policy or the conservative captivity to agribusiness interests that has made life miserable in rural America -- it's liberals. Their lack of morals (especially embodied by Bill Clinton), their contempt for real, hard-working Americans, their selfish arrogance -- those are the reasons things are so bad.

These audiences are feeding on a steady diet of hate. And as with all such feedings, they never are sated, but only have their appetites whetted for more. So each day, people come back to get a fresh fill-up of hate.

...

While liberals' chief claim to moral superiority mainly rests on championing the rights and needs of the disenfranchised and downtrodden, one of the most significantly and consistently disenfranchised segments of the American economy of the past 20 years has been the rural sector. If rural dwellers who see their way of life under assault wonder why liberals do not seem to consider their cause a worthy one, they probably cannot be blamed for concluding that they simply live in the wrong place, lead the wrong kind of lifestyle, and are not the right color. It may not be the whole truth, but there is some truth to it.

More to the point, urban liberals should be concerned about what's happening to rural America, because it directly affects their lives as well. The corporatization of agriculture and the accompanying gutting of local rural economies first of all affects urban dwellers' food sources; even as genetically modified foods are being pushed into the food chain, the actual supply of traditional hybrid strains of crops and the genetic diversity they represented has been decreasing dramatically, since many of these resided within the purview of smaller family farms.

Moreover, corporate farms are rapidly becoming a major source of pollution, a problem that affects every locality. Unsurprisingly, the current administration relies on "voluntary compliance" when it comes to regulating this pollution.

...

Cecil Andrus, the longtime Idaho governor, former Interior Secretary and godfather of the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve, tried to warn party leaders against pursuing this course in the 1990s. In 1994, he and a group of Western governors met with President Clinton and his advisers to discuss the party's approach to rural issues, particularly those in the West. Andrus bluntly warned Clinton that, if his administration didn't take rural people's concerns seriously, and continued to send signals of being out of touch with Western issues, they risked becoming a permanent minority party in the West. Democrats' insistence on representing an urban perspective was a real problem, he warned.

At the end of the meeting, Al Gore reportedly took Andrus aside and gave him a chewing-out, telling him: "We think you're the problem."

...

It's hard to overstate the powerful effect a campaign appearance by John Kerry would have had in a place like Idaho -- where he owns a vacation home, but hardly seems to actually visit or have any contact with the residents. It says everything you need to know about the DLC approach to the 2004 campaign that, during one of Kerry's springtime visits to Sun Valley, the Blaine County Democratic Party held a major Kerry fundraiser in Ketchum, raising several hundred thousand dollars -- and Kerry couldn't be bothered to drop in and make even a brief appearance.

...

The larger point, of course, is to shift the focus from supposed cultural differences back to the vast common ground. Rural people, just like urban and suburban folk, value good schools, good jobs, sound infrastructure, social amenities, a vibrant and healthy culture. When we talk to rural Americans, those are kinds of things we should be talking about -- because, for many of them, these are things they have been losing, while the rest of the country seems to be gaining.

There will be inevitable differences. We won't always see eye to eye on some subjects, especially when they are products of differences in religious beliefs: abortion, gay rights, evolution. What has to change is how we react to these differences. Instead of dismissing people as hopeless ignoramuses for disagreeing on these matters, liberals need to operate from a basis of mutual respect for differing but sincerely held beliefs.

Of course, this respect will not always be reciprocated. This will be especially the case for the hard-core right wing that has an entrenched presence in rural America. Those are not the people whose minds can be changed. And in these kinds of cases, liberals should feel no compulsion to be "sensitive." Indeed, failing to stand up to them with appropriate strength is a recipe for getting bulldozed, as liberals have for the past decade.

More apologies. (If you are not American, please do your part to reach out to and support your American friends by buying them a T-shirt.)

A summary of anomolies reported. So far, nothing at all to call into question the national result, but the primary electronic voting products are (still) extremely low-quality software with few safeguards. I think the only fix is a national voting law, and a much better one than 2002's Help America Vote Act. From the summary:

In Broward County FL, in balloting for Amendment 4, ES&S software for tabulating absentee ballots began counting BACKWARDS once a total of 32,767 [2^15 - 1, in a signed 16-bit field] votes had been reached in a precinct. When this was discovered, the corrected totals for the precinct went from 166,000 to 240,000, and actually caused the statewide results to be reversed on this amendment. Apparently the same flaw was detected two years ago in the same software, and remained uncorrected.

I checked my American Apology Shirt storefront and discovered that I've sold about 450 shirts since the election, easily putting me over the 3000 mark. So I've finally put together the design I had in mind a while ago, for a simpler, more legible, and more graphic shirt that can be offered in many languages. Check it out, and if you know something besides English, send a translation my way. Don't forget your Bill of Rights bumper stickers and mugs - they are politically neutral and make great gifts, plus might make good starting points for rebuilding civilization after the apocalypse. (I'm referring, of course, to the inevitable consequence of the Red Sox' winning the World Series.)

I'm not going to leave the country because Bush won. It's my country too. I spent two of Bush's first four years overseas and I find that I like America better. I'm going to stay and promote my values and work to change America to be what I want it to be.

I'm not going to spend the next four years angry.

Democrats don't need to tear everything down and start over. Kerry lost 51-48. He was a good candidate to win, and the other side beat him. The Democratic party is not a perfect institution or a perfect representation of my values, but it's the best political vehicle for me in this country in this system. I will continue to support the party.

Nader is right in many of his criticisms of both parties and of corporate capitalism, but wrong to think his independent candidacy promoted constructive change. We should build alternatives to the two parties, but first we must reform our winner-takes-all systems at the city, county, state, and federal levels, and I will help do this.

Hey amigos, it's been a long time since I wrote a personal update. Since I left Denmark in July, I've been splitting my time between Los Angeles and San Diego. I made a return trip to Northern Europe in September to meet with Greenpeace International in Amsterdam and GP Germany in Hamburg, to wrap up the requirements work I've been doing for them through Collaboraid. The trip had some interesting highlights, including the warehouse of the Greenpeace German Action Team. Those guys have really a lot of Zodiacs. Mostly, though, it confirmed the wisdom of my decision to decamp from Europe. The weather was terrible—cold, rainy, windy, and dark—in every city I visited; Danish continues to not leap off my tongue, though it interferes with what little German I retain from college; and the back-and-forth between familiar Southern California and familiar Southern Copenhagen showed California to be a much more natural setting for me.

I started apartment-hunting in San Diego almost as soon as I got off the plane back. It took almost a month, but I've finally moved into the Imperial Tower, a few blocks up from downtown. I'm only on the fourth floor, but with my south-facing view down the hill it seems much higher. Almost all of my apartments have been very close to water, but for the first time I can actually see water out the window; I can even see a stretch of the Pacific.

I've been opposed to cell phones for as long as I've been aware of them. This is because I don't like telephones: telephones are disruptive and intrusive. They make loud noises which demand that you pay attention. More fundamentally, they allow direct communication with people who are not physically present. As a fan of place and geography, I find this abhorrent. When I'm here, I want to deal with the space, the features, the smell, the people, of my immediate surroundings. I don't want to deal with there.

And phone companies are evil, just as every other monopoly company is inevitably driven to be evil. With regulation, this evil was at least predictable, but phone companies have been incompetently deregulated for many years. By incompetent I refer both to the removal of regulations and to the enforcement of remaining regulations. Phone companies were supposed to share their physical infrastructure, which is a natural monopoly product, with competitors, to create competition at the service and network level. Obviously the incumbants have strong motivation not to share, despite the law; obviously, they need to be closely watched; obviously, this hasn't happened.

In Seattle last year, I would receive as many as three or four telemarketing calls in one day, some of them the illegal pre-recorded type. In China, I would often answer the phone to hear a recorded spiel in Mandarin. In Denmark, with either more ethical companies or better and better-enforced laws, I received only two or three such calls in nine months (score one for the socialist state). The phone company sold phone numbers to the marketers and then sold "telemarketer blocking" back to consumers for a monthly fee, making good business just like the Swiss armaments industry in World War II.

So a cell phone takes these two factors, the destruction of distance and immoral corporations, and frees them to do business everywhere. The cell phone companies have even succeeding in colluding to present a unified pricing front to consumers, forcing the "calling plan" model on a public which has repeatedly shown preference for metered rates (electricity, water, gas, long distance telephony, food, clothing, hard goods) or fixed rates (local calls, sewage). After 20 years of competition, a few companies have reluctantly started to offer metered calling, but mislabel it to preserve the paradigm: it's "adding minutes automatically as you need them." The invisible hand is powerless against marketers willing to destroy language and civility to make a profit.

So, in order to maintain some sort of business activity while moving from place to place, city to city, and country to country, I finally, reluctantly, and too late to make much difference, got a cell phone. The first one didn't work well at my Los Angeles location, so I returned it the next day. The company I returned it to had just paid out a class-action lawsuit because it had been charging cancellation fees even for plans cancelled within the state-mandated 15-day return period. They didn't charge me their $150 cancellation fee, but since I had been able to make one call, they charged me the $35 activation fee.

The second phone worked better, but cost twice as much per month. After almost two weeks of carrying around a cell phone, it has helped on several occasions, but been unreliable and misleading on others. With an apartment phone due tomorrow, I've just returned the cell phone, with one day to spare in the grace period, and I am much relieved.

In other news, I've gotten around to codifying my embargo list. The following companies are not allowed to do business with me, because they are destructive, dishonest, or otherwise disagreeable. This list omits companies I've forgotten or purged from my memory, but I expect it to grow, and your suggestions are most welcome:

• Burger King, since ca 1984.
• McDonalds, since 1990.
• Starbucks, since 1997
• Walmart, since 1998
• Old Navy, since inception
• Barnes & Noble, since ca 2000
• Borders, since ca 2000
• The automobile industry and related industries, as much as possible, since 2001
• Fry's Electronics, since 2004
• Radio Shack, since 2004

When you add this to the list of my other self-imposed restrictions— don't do drugs (including alcohol and tobacco), don't drink coffee, don't own a television, don't own a car, don't eat meat (defined as, anything that could have escaped)— the wonder isn't that I eat a lot of chocolate, it's that I do anything besides eat chocolate.

The System of the World, Neal Stephenson

As a fictional tour of the real history of London and Northern Europe
in 1666 to 1714, and of Newton, Leibniz, and the other personalities
responsible for the scientific method, very successful. As a
three-thousand-page novel, good but not great.

An hour by hour guide to the most tense election in my lifetime. Example:

CRUNCH TIME: 9PM

431 Electoral Votes in play

Polls close in Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana, New Mexico, New York, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

ANALYSIS: At this point, the election could be over--but only if George W. Bush has won contested states (Arkansas, Florida and Ohio) earlier in the evening. (In theory, Kerry could also wrap up the election at 9PM, but he would need to have won North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia to do it--far less likely.)

A few minutes after 9PM, though, in all likelihood, the result will still be up for grabs. All eyes will then turn to Michigan. If Kerry wins there (as polls suggest he should) attention will shift to Minnesota and New Mexico.

You don't have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.

The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson's Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson's arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle.

The second time was a few years later [...]

—Neal Stephenson

For the whole of 2004, [Drewry Shipping Consultants] estimates that the number of TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units) leaving Asia bound for America’s west coat could top 11m, while the number going the other way may be only 4.9m. — Economist

If you couldn't see the money flowing, what would you make of one part of the world carefully crafting hundreds of millions of artifacts and sending them to another part of the world in an endless stream of ships, and getting back in exchange ... less than half as many things. And repeating this year after year.

My grandfather had a problem with his new HP scanner. Every time his Windows XP desktop starts up, it automatically reinstalls the drivers. Every time he tu rns the scanner on or off, it automatically does some sort of reshuffling or reinstalling. Despite all this, it still worked for scanning and printing. Unti l this week, when it mysteriously stopped responding. It took me an hour just to get the HP drivers and miscellaneous crap removed. I then tried the Windows install to get a newer driver; this failed. I then tried the Windows install with the drivers from the CD-ROM. The system successfully installed the scanne r driver, and then cheerfully announced it had found some new hardware and would I like to install a driver for it?

Thinking there might be a hardware problem with the printer/scanner, we tried again on his XP laptop. Same results.

More out of curiousity than anything else, and since it was already on, I tried my Thinkpad running Debian Linux. I plugged in the printer, and the system log showed it was recognized. A bit of google searching revealed that sane was the standard scanner backend, so I installed it with "apt-get install sane." Then I needed a front-end, so "apt-get install xsane." A minute later I was ready and ran xsane - it said no scanner found. I searched for the model number of the printer and quickly discovered I needed another package with extra drivers; "apt-get install hpoj". I ran xsane, and got a preview, and scanned, and emailed him the picture. Total time: under 10 minutes.

This is perhaps the first time in my personal experience that linux has given me a radically better experience with new hardware than Windows.

Political reporters--outside of partisan outlets like the Murdoch media--do not intend any partisan bias in their character judgments. Historically, the process has been brutally unfair but essentially random, and therefore nonpartisan. Reporters and pundits seize upon isolated and generally meaningless incidents. In 1972, Democratic hopeful Ed Muskie appeared to shed a tear as he defended his wife. In 1992, Dan Quayle read the word "potatoe" from a misspelled cue card. In a 1992 debate, George H.W. Bush checked his watch for his response time. These incidents became proof that Muskie was too weak, Quayle too stupid, and Bush too aloof to be president. The character traits "revealed" by these anecdotes, once rendered and self-fulfillingly repeated, proved impossible to dislodge.

In recent years, however, Republicans have figured out that this process doesn't have to be random. [...]

—Jonathan Chait, New Republic

The core of Derrida's thinking is that every text contains multiple meanings. To read is neither to know nor to understand, but to begin a process of exploration that is essential to comprehend oneself and society. This is, however, the sort of pretentious bullshit language a minister for Europe can only use when speaking French. — Denis MacShane, minister for Europe

(I didn't read any Derrida; I waited for the movie.)

The Language Log analyzes pauses in the first presidential debate:

Jim Lehrer: Do you believe you could do a better job than President Bush in preventing another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States?

John Kerry: [pause 0.278] Yes, I do. [pause 1.268] But before I answer further, let me thank you for moderating. [pause 0.588] I want to thank the University of Miami [pause 0.564] for hosting us. And I know the president will join me [pause 0.831] in ...

[sound file]

Jim Lehrer: Mr. President, you have a ninety-second rebuttal.

George W. Bush: [pause 0.055] uh uh I- [pause 0.165] I, too, thank the University of Miami, and [pause 0.454] and uh [pause 2.116] and say our prayers are with [speeds up] the good people of this state, who've suffered a lot. [pause 1.304] um [pause 1.507] September the eleventh {sigh} [pause 1.212] changed how America must look at the world. ...

[sound file]

When I listen to the two clips Bush sounds better, and Kerry sounds worse, then the text transcription suggests.

The X-Prize has (un-officially) been won. And Richard Branson is already preparing to bring commercial spaceflight to market. The private sector has caught up to NASA circa 1960. Another ten years at this rate and we'll start to have a real space industry.

And, in vaguely related and nearly as good news, the US Air Force executive who pushed sweetheart deals with Boeing, at taxpayer expense, in exchange for jobs for herself and her family, is going to prison for 9 months. Her sentence would have been only 6 months but it turned out she continued to lie about the scope of her crime even after pleading guilty.

In the last few years, California's laws, Native American tribes, gamblers, and new governer all collided, and there are two gambling propositions on the ballot in the fall. (Non-American readers should know that gambling was, with the exception of Nevada and a city in New Jersey, basically illegal in the United states for many decades. The Native American claims to historical land have been consolidated in small, economically worthless "reservations" often quite distant from ancestral lands; Native tribes are technically foreign nations within the United States but their legal rights have been honored more in the breech. However, in the last few decades many Native tribes have taken advantage of an otherwise worthless sovereignty to host casinos on their foreign soil. This is rather brilliant; picture a circle of tribal elders: "We don't have oil, arable land, minerals, or other natural resources." "Our young ones leave the reservation for the cities and abandon their heritage. Our language and culture are going extinct because we have no future to offer our children." "Wait! We do have the right to erect buildings on our reservations, and the white men will come from hundreds of miles away to put their money down in our buildings and then go away." "And what will they get in return?" "Nothing!")

This LA Weekly article explains everything quite lucidly, though I don't have any other data points with which to assign a trust level. The reporter's take:

• There are Good Tribes and Bad Tribes in California. ("Just before the turnoff for Palm Springs, a 23-story skyscraper towers over the desert floor. ... The only building more than a half-dozen or so floors high in the entire Coachella Valley, the hotel tower is the crown jewel ... now being completed by the Morongo Band of Indians. As one enraged Palm Springs community activist pointedly put it: 'So much for the notion that some people are genetically predisposed to be better stewards.'")
• Proposition 68, despite being backed by Larry Flynt, is bad. Vote no.
• Proposition 70, drafted by the Bad Tribes, is much worse. Vote no.
• Arnold has negotiated a pretty fair deal between the tribes and the state.

  The agreement that he struck with the five tribes was an artful compromise that had something for everyone — including labor. The new compacts approved that night by the Legislature would indeed preserve the tribes’ monopoly on casino gambling but would also require them to make a $1 billion up-front payment to the state as well as annual payments of about $175 million. It fell short of the 25 percent levy Schwarzenegger had promised during his campaign by about one-half, but it was, nevertheless, a sea change.

  Signatory tribes could now expand beyond the previous state-imposed limit of 2,000 slot machines each, but would have to pay increasingly more to do so. The tribes also agreed to submit to numerous state environmental, safety and building constraints, thereby waiving some long-held rights of sovereignty (each of the state’s 107 tribes is, at least theoretically, a foreign power exempt from most state and federal regulation). And to the surprise and delight of many, Schwarzenegger held firm in demanding that the tribes agreeing to the new compacts permitting expansion would have to remain neutral in any labor-organizing attempt, effectively kicking the doors open to unionization.

  It wasn't clear to me if this deal is fait accompli, still requires approval, or depends on both of the related Propositions failing. By the way, in case you think my recent spate of pro-Arnold entries suggests I approve of his gubernacy, note that the LA Times reports that "Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's commitment to boost business generally overruled his desire to help the environment and consumers this year." So call this a credit-where-credit-is-due-so-long-as-you-take-the-la-weekly-at-face-value-which-isn't-necessarily-a-smart-thing kind of posting.

Ilium, Dan Simmons
The Iliad recast within a science fiction setting bordering on fantasy, as hyper-technological gods from another dimension recreate the events of the Iliad with a terraformed Mars for a stage and apparently a community of "Eloi" on an otherwise abandoned Earth, while cyborgs from beyond the Asteroid Belt come to investigate the hubbub. Readable as crack, with erratic writing mixing formal prose, smartass grad student humor, and random classical references. Definitely a guilty pleasure, though you'd have to be a blind inmate of the SF gulag to conflate the depth of the source material with the lack of depth of Simmons' work.

Hey Nostradamus!, Douglas Coupland
Coupland goes a bit gentle and the result is marvelous, sincere, and affecting.

Dead Air, Iain Banks
Iain Banks channels a bit of Mil Millington with a story of a verbally profuse intellectual shock jock with a risky romantic life. Just as the protagonist is happy to listen to himself, Banks has shown in this and in his previous, non-fiction book, that he's a bit too happy to watch himself write. The result is engaging and pleasant but ultimately tiresome. It's nice to see Banks do something different twenty fine books into his career, but this direction is not promising, or at least not to my taste.

Papal Sin, Garry Wills
Garry Wills argues thoroughly and convincingly that the institution of the Catholic Pope, through its doctrine of infallibility both formal and informal, is intellectually and temporally dishonest and profoundly corruptive, with horrifyingly destructive consequences for hundreds of millions of people.

A third Johnson bill signed by the governor, SB 1438, requires that any electronic voting system approved by the secretary of state after January 2005 include a printout that voters can use to check the accuracy of their ballot. ...

He also signed AB 384 by Assemblyman Tim Leslie (R-Tahoe City), which prohibits adult and youth prison inmates from smoking.

As I continue the process of relocating to California, what could be more welcome news than progress on fair voting and a further step towards a non-smoking state? (For the record, as a strong supporter both of euthanasia and of personal liberties, I do support the right to smoke, in private, where noone else is harmed.) The entire LA Times article is recommended, because it describes a number of nice laws that Arnold signed. If all he did was not veto the progressive California legislature, he'd be no better or worse a governor than Gray Davis.

The Stages (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance) became the foundation for an entire "Death 'n' Dying" Movement ... while there is no doubt Kübler-Ross made an important contribution to the treatment of dying patients ... she also contributed to a kind of cultlike reverence for the allegedly superior truth-telling wisdom of the dying ....

But then, quietly, in the late '70s, the Queen began to go around the bend, began declaring there was no death, there were only "transitions" from one permeable boundary to another. And often back. So, if one takes her belief seriously, not only have the reports of her death been exaggerated but reports of death itself have been exaggerated. ...

... its popular success was due in large part to the behavior control function of the five stages and its appeal to hospital and hospice caregivers, who all took D 'n' D workshops. It made the five stages into a kind of moral progress: Potentially disruptive and annoying anger would give way to the more quiet stages of "depression" and "acceptance." Easier on the night nurses.

Well. I guess I can get rid of the Five Stages poster with pushpin I used when Piazza was traded to the Marlins.

California air regulators Friday unanimously approved the world's most stringent rules to reduce auto emissions that contribute to global warming ... The industry has threatened to challenge the regulations in court. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has expressed support for the proposals and has pledged to fight any such lawsuits.

Q: You’ve been compared with Trump. Are you a clone?

A: You won’t catch me in a suit, you won’t catch him out of one. His businesses are built on other people’s money and doing deals. My businesses are built on sweat equity and building businesses. He dismisses his casino partners’ problems as not his; I can’t sleep at night if my partners aren’t successful. I play basketball, he plays golf. I go to sports bars, he goes to black-tie dinners.

— Mark Cuban

Moneyball, Michael Lewis

When I got on the internet in 1991, it wasn't the Web. It was the internet. (And men were real men, women were real women, and little green aliens from Alpha Centauri were real little green aliens from Alpha Centauri.) I spent a lot of time in newsgroups (where some of my earlier, stupid posts are still preserved for all time in usenet archives), and in particular rec.sport.baseball. I learned, from convincing arguments with sound statistics and methods, that most common baseball statistics were meaningless. Runs, RBIs, batting average - all nearly worthless for measuring the ability to win games or to predict that ability into the future. This wisdom is shunned by the anti-intellectual, good-old-boys network of baseball and by the media.

Moneyball is the tightly written story of how the right manager for the right team at the right time finally broke the barrier to these ideas in major league baseball, with the result that the Oakland A's have simultaneously been among the top three teams in total games won, and the lowest three teams in total payroll, for five years in a row.

Billy Beane is the iconoclastic manager, prepared for his role by a baseball career that failed even though his althletic style and classic baseball physique made him look like a great ballplayer. The Oakland A's management refused to spend money but supported Billy in every other way. And the baseball establishment continues to undervalue players who don't look right, or who don't have the right (meaningless) statistics.

I highly recommend this book even to all; baseball fans will learn a lot, and people who either know nothing or far too much about baseball will still enjoy a great read from a talented writer.

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics. William Easterly.
Globalization and its Discontents, Joseph E. Stiglitz

Stiglitz and Easterly both talk in depth about the failure of the first-world economic instutions, the World Bank and IMF in particular, to make a positive difference in world poverty. And both take a while to cut to the chase, both draw some blood but also throw some wild punches, and both avoid other obvious conclusions.

Easterly takes half his book to name his main villains, corrupt governments and the financial experts who enable them. But his world still seems populated by earnest men in suits who really would like to see an end to poverty. Stiglitz sinks his fangs to the gums into IMF, Larry Summers, and Robert Rubin, for following rigidly ideological prescriptions with arrogant certainty (low inflation uber alles, high interest rates as needed, and free flow of capital) even after these prescriptions are challenged as ineffective or counterproductive. Stiglitz connects the dots as far as saying that these rich bankers favor their own interests over those of developing countries. Beyond that, his rage seems triggered by a perception that these villains would rather see millions in poverty rather than question their own opinions. The step he doesn't take, though, is to say that they may have reasons for preferring this state of affairs. In other words, he doesn't go all the way to Zinn, Chomsky, and the rest.

• Quality Assurance and Bathing; Why Nobody Loves You
• Politics in QA Management 2; Gas Warfare and Advisory Panels
• Breaking New Ground; 1.0 Projects and Iranian Mineclearing Techniques

At least three or four times since Reagan's death, most recently tonight during radio reporting of the part of the Republican convention in which a commemorative video was shown, I have heard reporters and commentators giving misty-eyed reminiscences about hearing President Reagan say, "Mr Gorbachev, tear this wall down." He said no such thing, not ever. People sometimes say linguists fuss over trivia, but I can't believe anyone could see this point as trivial.

It's so strange that people should misremember, for two reasons. First, the correct original version still phonetically rings in my ears, unforgettably, and I would have thought that would be true for anyone who heard it (which would include even a 30-year-old junior reporter: the speech was in 1987); and second, the way he put it — synonymous, but with with very slightly different syntax — is so much more compelling. The rhythm is better; the parallel with the preceding sentence ("Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate!") is better; and (let me get technical for just a second) the crucial direct object is positioned as last constituent in the verb phrase, not followed by the anticlimax of a particle that belongs with the verb, so the nuclear stress coincides perfectly with the final monosyllable which delivers the pragmatic punch, the key piece of new information conveyed by the final noun. Syntax, prosody and pragmatics in perfect harmony. What President Reagan said, very deliberately — and they say it was audible over on the other side in East Berlin — was: "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
— Geoffrey K. Pullum

That tells you something about the insanity that has gripped the American media. Imagine if the leader of a Canadian political party decided, in the middle of an election campaign, to ignore Peter Mansbridge, Lloyd Robertson and Kevin Newman, and only do an appearance on This Hour Has 22 Minutes.

—John Doyle, Globe and Mail

Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid

Writing credits (WGA)

Hans Bauer	 	(1997 screenplay) and
Jim Cash	 	(1997 screenplay) &
Jack Epps Jr.	 	(1997 screenplay)

Hans Bauer	 	(story) and
Jim Cash	 	(story) &
Jack Epps Jr.	 	(story)

John Claflin	 	(screenplay) &
Daniel Zelman	 	(screenplay) and
Michael Miner	 	(screenplay) &
Edward Neumeier	 	(screenplay) (as Ed Neumeier)

The vast majority of large global companies consume software rather than produce it. ... If the cost of software is driven down by competition from open source, and thus a major cost of doing business is reduced for global industry, will it be a net gain or net loss to the economy?

... Economics is not a zero-sum game. Money can be spent in ways in which its positive impact on the economy is greater or lesser. If a firm spends $25 million developing a software product that never achieves widespread use and never makes much of an impact (and a huge proportion of commercial software projects fall into this category), the only positive impact on the economy will be the transfer of funds from company coffers to general circulation (and taxes) via the salaries of the employees involved.

On the other hand, if a useful piece of software becomes available at little or no cost to many companies, especially to companies that otherwise would not have been able to afford such software, it can give a major boost to that company's productivity. In that case, even if no money was spent, all those companies increased their efficiency and revenues.

— David Adams, Free Can Mean Big Money: The Open Source Economy

Tom Ridge will announce that September is Preparedness Month ... on September 9th. That won't give us much time to prepare, but it will catch the news cycles leading up to the 9/11 weekend. Many have challenged the administration's terror announcements as deliberately manufactured and timed for partisan purposes. The response is, you complained that we didn't alert people and now you complain that we do alert people. What would you have us do? This suggests an obvious response — stop scheduling non-news-driven events in an blatantly partisan manner.

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.

I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spend a number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature was this. Putting details of someone's curriculum vitae into a complex modifiers on proper names and definite descriptions is what you do in a journalistic story about a death; you just don't do it in describing an event in a narrative. So this might be reasonable text for the opening of a newspaper report the next day:

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière died last night in the Louvre at the age of 76.

But Brown packs such details into the first two words of an action sequence — details of not only his protagonist's profession but also his prestige in the field. It doesn't work here. It has the ring of utter ineptitude. The details have no relevance, of course, to what is being narrated (Saunière is fleeing an attacker and pulls down the painting to trigger the alarm system and the security gates). We could have deduced that he would be fairly well known in the museum trade from the fact that he was curating at the Louvre.

...

A voice spoke, chillingly close. "Do not move."
On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly.
Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His irises were pink with dark red pupils.

Just count the infelicities here. A voice doesn't speak —a person speaks; a voice is what a person speaks with. "Chillingly close" would be right in your ear, whereas this voice is fifteen feet away behind the thundering gate. The curator (do we really need to be told his profession a third time?) cannot slowly turn his head if he has frozen; freezing (as a voluntary human action) means temporarily ceasing all muscular movements. And crucially, a silhouette does not stare! A silhouette is a shadow. If Saunière can see the man's pale skin, thinning hair, iris color, and red pupils (all at fifteen feet), the man cannot possibly be in silhouette.

Brown's writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad. In some passages scarcely a word or phrase seems to have been carefully selected or compared with alternatives. I slogged through 454 pages of this syntactic swill, and it never gets much better.

—Geoffrey K. Pullum

It was really tough to make the Japanese public perceive me as a serious actor or director. As an actor, one of the first films I worked on was Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence by Nagisa Oshima, back in the early '80s. When it was released in Japan, I sneaked into the theater to see how the audience would react. I thought the film was great and my acting was not bad at all. I anticipated that the audience would be impressed by my performance, which was completely different from my comedy persona on TV shows. However, at the moment I appeared on the screen, every single person in the theater burst out laughing. I was devastated and humiliated by the experience, because the character I played in the film was not the kind of person to be laughed at. I swore then and there that I would stick to the serious and dark characters in any films or TV dramas thereafter, and I did. And it took years of playing dark characters, serial killers, and cult gurus for Beat Takeshi to be perceived as a serious actor.

Masters of Doom, David Kushner
Very readable, if gossipy; life stories of John Carmack and John Romero.

The Secret House, David Bodanis.
A tour through the happens of your house at a mostly microscopic level, from dust to the air pockets in the fat of potato chips to vaporized toilet water particles. In one place where I happened to know a bit of the science it rang wrong, so I'm not 100% confident of the author's breezy summaries of the science and facts involved. Although it is very very engaging and informative, I am reluctant to recommend it to the disquieting effect it's had on me. Two things in particular have dominated too much of my thinking since picking up the book: the bacteria all around us, and the scams of the food manufacturers. While neither was exactly news to me, the depth and vividness of Bodanis' depiction has me shying away from dread moisture and loathing every bite of processed food. The revelation that lower-quality and spoiling ingredients are reserved for chocolate-flavored foods because chocolate hides rancid flavors better was especially disturbing.

Monster, John Gregory Dunne.
This has been sitting on my book to buy list for a long time, and it did not disappoint at all. A great page-turner describing multi-year experience of writing a Hollywood movie.

Nine Layers of Sky, Liz Williams
An engaging alternate universes story, featuring Russian folklore and central Asian settings, but limited by a weak ending and less satisfying overall than expected.

I successfully vacated Denmark. This was not especially difficult, since thanks to the excellent public transportation, I could have taken any of four completely different routes to the airport. The vacation was very nice as well - two weeks in San Diego, Seattle, and Vancouver, including a lovely two days at the Vancouver Folk Festival. The picture on their website makes it look much more frenetic then it really is; last year Ani DiFranco had to mediate a dispute between the sitters and standers.

The trouble is getting back from vacating. In Copenhagen, with few friends, a haze of smoke in even the few good restaurants, an approaching summer that went into retreat in early June, the loudspeakered party room under my apartment, and a harbor view from my corner desk in the office, I didn't have a huge problem doing work. Back in LA, with my reassembled bicycle (about 0.5% of it didn't make it through shipping), good cheap food, old friends, abundant retail opportunities, and my grandmother's garage to help clean, it's been a bit harder to get into the groove. But groove I shall, because I am a seasoned professional. Also I've booked all my tickets to go back to Copenhagen in September to keep the ball rolling with the remaining projects that I'm doing with Collaboraid.

Meanwhile ... meanwhile I think it will be many months before Southern California doesn't feel like vacation, even when I'm working.

On the nascent cable industry, in 1974
“[Cable will become] a huge parasite in the marketplace, feeding and fattening itself off of local television stations and copyright owners of copyrighted material. We do not like it because we think it wrong and unfair.”

On the VCR, 1983

"[Some say] that the VCR is the greatest friend that the American film producer ever had. I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."

On the public domain, 1995

"A public domain work is an orphan. No one is responsible for its life. But everyone exploits its use, until that time certain when it becomes soiled and haggard, barren of its previous virtues. How does the consumer benefit from the steady decline of a film's quality?"

— Jack Valenti

Remember when you were in high school, and you really wanted to go to the prom with a gorgeous girl, but you couldn't ask her because she was really popular and already had served two terms as president of the United States, so you wound up asking John Kerry? That's the situation the Democrats are in now. — Dave Barry

Pictures of protesters confined to crummy, caged pens far from the action. At the Democratic convention. Very not cool. Don't let your reactions to Bush's policies blind you to the fact that the Establishment includes both major parties and the Democratic Party are only the good guys in comparison.

Lots of books read while travelling:

The Wizard Hunters, Martha Wells Enjoyable fantasy with convincingly comfortable characters and some nice dialog, but it petered out towards the end, which isn't a great sign for the first book of a trilogy.

Vitals, Greg Bear
Wobbles between a spooky conspiracy story and in incoherent one. It generally but not completely succeeds in communicating to the reader the fear and uncertainty of the protagonist.

Chasm City, Alastair Reynolds
I'm not sufficiently versed in SF to say with certainty which 60's or 70's novel set the emplate for this sort of story; Samual Delaney comes to mind, as does Iain M. Banks. The protagonist works through a plot, joined midstream, which also showcases a world or universe of the author's creation, and frequently there are unsettling plot revelations about the protagonist's history. Chasm City is more of the same, and readable, but neither the characters nor the story nor the environment are noteworthy or compelling.

Light Raid, Connie Willis and Cynthia Felice
Connie Willis is such a flawlessly confident writer, reading a bad novel with her name on it is like watching Lance Armstrong fall off his bicycle. Painful and eerily attractive. A fairly dreadful novel, with many standard elements from Connie Willis but a claustrophobic scope and amateurish setting.

Someone moving to Denmark this fall asked me for tips, so I've written up a list based on what worked, didn't work, or was starting to work for me in my year in Copenhagen. The key problems I experienced as a foreigner in Denmark were isolation and, to a lesser extent, alienation. I think I could have done a better job of it.

1. Learn Danish. Start as soon as possible. Study on your own. Learn vocabulary.
2. Learn Danish. Don't worry about pronunciation - you'll be completely wrong until you get into school. Try to do the level 1 class at KISS because it focuses on some subtleties of sound creation that you will almost certainly never acquire without instruction.
3. Learn Danish. Go to school as much as you can. It's free if you have a CPR number. Avoid KISS unless you thrive under pressure.
4. Make sure that the first words out of your mouth to any Dane are always Danish.
5. Bring your own stuff. Look around your house - anything you are going to need over there you will probably have to buy, and it will cost more there.
6. Read the newspaper. Use it to learn written Danish before you go. My unawareness of local Danish news contributed to the feeling of living in a vacuum.
7. Watch Danish TV and listen to Danish radio. I didn't do this; the cost of forgoing so many hours of ear training exceeded the savings on the TV tax.
8. Go to expat meetings. Meetup.com is one source. You need to make in-the-flesh friends, and network.
9. Spend some time there in the summer so that you have a positive mental image to hold on to the other eleven months.
10. Learn Danish.

Orwell's Newspeak destroyed language as a means of independent thought by eliminating many words from the vocabulary and strictly limiting the meanings of other words:

As we have already seen in the case of the word free, words which had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable meanings purged out of them. Countless other words such as honour, justice, morality, internationalism, democracy, science, and religion had simply ceased to exist. A few blanket words covered them, and, in covering them, abolished them. All words grouping themselves round the concepts of liberty and equality, for instance, were contained in the single word crimethink, while all words grouping themselves round the concepts of objectivity and rationalism were contained in the single word oldthink. ...

times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify

—Principles of Newspeak

In contrast, motivational speakers and others of their ilk destroy language by less elegant means, including simply bludgeoning words into submission:

The challenge was how to capture this body of knowledge in a unified and dynamic way. So I invited a cross section of people on a retreat where together, we explored the relationship between paradigms, change and leadership.

On balance, I think I prefer Newspeak, because it wastes less of one's time to determine that it's nonsense.

I hate cell phones. This is because they are telephones which you carry around, so that other people can bother you wherever you are. It's also because cell phones enable people to behave like asses in public, and cause even considerate users to withdraw from public interaction. And it's because the devices themselves are ugly and unpleasant. I don't deny the utility of cell phones, and on those occasions where I've (hypocritically?) used somebody else's phone, I've been struck by the poor usability.

The obvious reason is the form factor - many buttons are squeezed onto a small object which must fit smoothly into a pocket. But more subtly, it suffers from computer syndrome—any object, combined with a computer, behaves like a computer. That means it is probably excessively complicated in design and interaction, that is probably crashes, that it is certainly not simple and perfectly suited to the task.

Consider, then, the Siemens GigasetSL1. It's a cell phone posing as a cordless phone. I already hate cordless phones, because they introduce pronounced unreliability and battery limitations for inadequate gain, particularly in an office environment where a cord is a negligable problem. But what makes the GigasetSL1 an astoundingly awful idea is that it carefully husbands all of the limitations and design compromises of cell phones into an application where they are completely unnecessary. Office phones, which don't have to move frequently, can offer large displays, sizeble and well-labelled buttons with dedicated functions, and in general a less computer-like interface. Instead, we get the short end of the stick - all the drawbacks of a cell phone traded off for ... nothing.

The former head a Republican consulting group pleaded guilty yesterday to jamming Democratic telephone lines in several New Hampshire cities during the 2002 general election. ... Raymond plotted with unidentified co-conspirators to jam Democratic Party telephone lines established so voters could call for rides to the polls in Manchester, Nashua, Rochester and Claremont. Manchester firefighters’ union phone lines also were affected.

Josh Marshall adds:

We did our own bit of sleuthing and found out that Raymond was also the Executive Director of the Republican Leadership Council -- an outfit run by a long list of Republican worthies -- and that his company had done phone banking for them on election day too. And Steve Kornacki of PoliticsNJ.com found out that Raymond also seemed to be behind another phone banking scandal in New Jersey.

Justice Scalia filed a dissenting opinion which, to the extent that I understand it, I agree with. It's kind of confusing since you have to know exactly what Hamdi was asking, and I think the plurality opinion is right, as far as it goes—I think they are saying that the decision to make someone an enemy combatant must be subject to review—so I would have thought Scalia could concur with that while dissenting on the bigger point that THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES CAN'T DETAIN PEOPLE INDEFINITELY WITHOUT A CRIMINAL SENTENCE OR CONGRESSIONAL SUSPENSION OF THE WRIT OF HABEAS CORPUS. But I guess Scalia has to dissent with the one step in the right direction that could be part of many more steps back.

... It follows from what I have said that Hamdi is entitled to a habeas decree requiring his release unless (1) criminal proceedings are promptly brought, or (2) Congress has suspended the writ of habeas corpus.

...

Many think it not only inevitable but entirely proper that liberty give way to security in times of national crisis—that, at the extremes of military exigency, inter arma silent leges. Whatever the general merits of the view that war silences law or modulates its voice, that view has no place in the interpretation and application of a Constitution designed precisely to confront war and, in a manner that accords with democratic principles, to accommodate it. Because the Court has proceeded to meet the current emergency in a manner the Constitution does not envision, I respectfully dissent.

—Justice Scalia

Out of all of the words in the Oxford English Dictionary, however, no less than ninety-nine percent were taken from other languages. The relative few that trace back to Old English itself are also sixty-two percent of the words most used. Therefore authentically English roots, such as and, but, father, love, fight, to, will, should, not, and from, are central to speaking English. Yet the vast majority of our vocabulary originated in foreign languages, including not merely the obvious "Latinate" items like adjacent and expedite, but common, mundane forms not processed by us as "continental" in the slightest.

For example, every single word in that last sentence longer than three letters originated outside of English itself ... In fact, it's pretty easy to "cook up" that kind of sentence. What would be harder is to come up with one made up only of words that come from Old English. In fact, that last sentence was one ...

English lost most of its original vocabulary through three main lexical "earthquakes."

Vikings invaded and settled in the northern half of Brittany starting in 787; they spoke Old Norse (ancestor of today's Scandinavian languages) and scattered about a thousand words into English. They were not merely "cultural" terms but staples like both, same, again, get, give, are, skirt, sky, and skin. If I tell you that on a foggy Thursday, a sly, dirty-necked, scowling outlaw skulked into the bank with a knife, ransacked it, and crawled out the window seeming happy, every word came from those Vikings except a, into, the, with, it, and out.

Then, in 1066, French speakers took over England for roughly the next two hundred years. Actually, these "French" people were Vikings again, having taken over northwestern France and switched to French over the generations; their ancestry was why these French were called the Normans—that is, Norsemen. They introduced no fewer than about seventy-five hundred words ... how "French" do words such as air, coast, debt, face, flower, joy, people, river, sign, blue ... or fry feel to us today?

The "Latinate" layer most perceptible to us as a word class apart came after the withdrawal of the French, with the increasing use of English as a language of learning—hence client, legal, scene, intellect, recipe, pulpit, exclude, necessary, tolerance, interest, et alia (including et alia, of course).

The Power of Babel, John McWhorter, pp 95-96.

A truly free, open society would be one in which the following propositions offered by John McMurtry would be widely debated. McMurtry teaches philosophy at the University of Guelph in Canada.
...

3. General Motors, Dupont, IT&T, Standard Oil and Ford Corporations all produced military supplies for the Nazi armed forces during World War II while the United States was at war with Germany.
...
6. The free market means that those without money to buy what they need do not have the right to live.
7. The major player in the international drug trade since the Second World War, using drug enforcement laws to maintain its monopoly, has been the United States government to finance internationally illegal foreign interventions.
...
19. Our major social problems are caused by the profit imperative overriding all other values.
20. The belief that God sanctions our social order or our state at war is a superstition.
...
25. Unions have historically led the struggle for improvements in health care, working conditions and social security for the population as a whole.
...
28. The President and his leading advisors are provable war criminals.
29. Christianity calls for the redistribution of wealth.
30. The mass media are essentially a joint-stock company of profit and advertising for major private corporations.

Originally published in Informal Logic, X,3 Fall 1988.

How to Be Good, Nick Hornby.

Bearable and insightful in ways that A Certain Chemistry very much was not. Alluded to some Big Issues, gently, and with as much depth as you could expect from 245 pages.

Pattern Recognition, William Gibson. Excellent. Set in the present and not overtly a genre novel.

Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett.
This one took a few months to get through. After the first few hundred pages, he helpfully provides a summary of everything he's just told you, which I will reproduce here:

There is no single, definitive "stream of consciousness," because there is no central Headquarters, no Cartesian Theater where "it all comes together" for the perusal of a Central Meaner. Instead of such a single stream (however wide), there are multiple channels in which specialist circuits try, in parallel pandemoniums, to do their various things, creating Multiple Drafts as they go. Most of these fragmentary drafts of "narrative" play short-lived roles in the modulation of current activity but some get promoted to further functional roles, in swift succession, by the activity of a virtual machine in the brain. The seriality of this machine (its "von Neumannesque" character) is not a "hard-wired" design feature, but rather the upshot of a succession of coalitions of these specialists.

The basic specialists are part of our animal heritage. They were not developed to perform peculiarly human actions, such as reading and writing, but ducking, predator-avoiding, face-recognizing, throwing, berry-picking, and other essential tasks. They are often opportunistically enlisted in new roles, for which their native talents more or less suit them. The result is not bedlam only because the trends that are imposed on all this activity are themselves the product of design. Some of this design is innate, and is shared with other animals. But it is augmented, and sometimes even overwhelmed in importance, by microhabits of thought that are developed in the individual, partly idiosyncratic results of self-exploration and partly the predesigned gifts of culture. Thousands of memems, mostly borne by language, but also by wordless "images" and other data structures, take up residence in an individual brain, shaping its tendencies and thereby turning it into a mind.

If all that made sense to you and you don't need to hear arguments and explanation, you can skip to page 254. I didn't need to hear arguments, but I did need a lot of explanation. The rest of the book I'll need to read a second time before I could do a summary justice, but perhaps it boils down to this:

Old Model:
1. a hundred billion brain cells do their things according to chemistry
2. ???
3. Consciousness!!


New Model:
1. a hundred billion brain cells do their things according to chemistry
2. thousands or millions of higher-level "demons" process memes according
   to evolved and emergent rules
3. ??
4. a narrative fiction of Consciousness!!

I think Dennett thinks he eliminated step 3, but I'm still not sure I know how. I kinda understand what he means by 4, and it's convincing, but I can't feel it.

Along the way he does present strong counter-cases against the Cartesian Theater, the Central Meaner (the I or the soul), the Chinese Room, and other such problems. I followed every individual piece of each argument, but the whole of it still escapes me. But it does give me much more hope for immortality through robot bodies. Now I'm wondering, is static electricity more or less of a problem for people with robot bodies?

Visit this site every day through November 2, 2004. You should be crazy by August.

Last year I embarked on Plan C, " to move to Europe ... and work on open-source systems for non-profits and universities." One motivation was the job; another was a desire to live in Scandinavia for a while to see what it's like. A month or two ago, on hiatus from Danish class, I realized that my learning and assimilitation had plateaued. I wasn't going to see much more progress in living here until I really mastered the language. And I had three conclusions based on my observations:

First, I wouldn't be seeing substantial return on psychic investment until I had lived here for two or three years more.

Second, there are three types of expatriates in Denmark - "here for work," "here for a job," and "refugee." Out of all three groups, none seemed to have Danish friends unless they were dating or married to a Dane.

Third, my progress learning Danish was very slow because I didn't need or even want to use Danish. This is because I've never felt like I belong here or want to belong here. I've checked it out and it's not my bag. (Aside: the people here are very nice. One phrase I've seen a lot in travel gossip around the world is "the people are nice." In my experience, most people in most places are nice most of the time, as long as you are interacting individual to individual. Humans are nice. People in China are nice; people in the US are nice; people in Europe are nice.)

Since I have no plans to settle here permanently, all this argued against investing another year of my life just to make the year or two after that nicer. The job is still interesting, and we've got some fun projects for the rest of the year, so I'll keep working for Collaboraid. I still want to live in various strange places, and so I updated my essential criteria for selecting a home. There are three. I gotta have friends or family there already, speak the language fluently, and enjoy the weather. That left southern California, so I'm moving back to my birthplace, Los Angeles, from where I'll work remotely, travel back to Copenhagen for a month or so this fall, and not think about the future until I really have to.

Though I do want to get back to studying Chinese. 1 billion native speakers vs 5 million. Hmm.

An unclassified Air Force report issued in April 2003 categorized 50 attacks from March 19 to April 18 as having been time-sensitive strikes on Iraqi leaders. An up-to-date accounting posted on the Web site of the United States Central Command shows that 43 of the top 55 Iraqi leaders on the most-wanted list have now been taken into custody or killed, but that none were taken into custody until April 13, 2003, and that none were killed by airstrikes.

Yes, but "Senior military officials said ... intelligence agencies were engaged in a hard task." So I guess 0 for 50 is understandable, because in order to actually drop precision bombs on military officers, instead of just random buildings that very probably have innocent civilians, you would have to, you know, have an idea where those evildoers were, and in order to do that you'd have to have, like, spies and stuff. In Baghdad.

... commanders were required to obtain advance approval from Mr. Rumsfeld if any planned airstrike was likely to result in the deaths of 30 more civilians. More than 50 such raids were proposed, and all were approved ...

The trend over the last decade or so has been that the US military is so intensively technologized that our military allies can't really cooperate closely because they just don't have the toys. But since it's turning out that we simply don't have a significant spying capability, maybe they have something to offer after all. Anyway, it's been years since 9/11 - how many Arabic speakers are the CIA, DIA, NSA, ETC, employing? If the number's not in the thousands, can we ask some more officials to resign for personal reasons?

"When you take a large country the size of Iraq, with all those sensors and communications, how do you get the right information to the right person who needs it in a timely manner?" General Cone said.

I guess my hope would have been that the US military would have had the answer to that question before dropping all those bombs. My taxes are paying for this. Your taxes, American readers, are paying for this.

The two got to only first base (kissing), which is about the only base that anyone can agree on anymore. ''I don't understand the base system at all,'' Jesse said, lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling. ''If making out is first base, what's second base?''

''We need to establish an international base system,'' Brian said. ''Because right now, frankly, no one knows what's up with the bases. And that's a problem.''

Jesse nodded in agreement. ''First base is obviously kissing,'' Brian said.

''Obviously,'' Jesse said.

''But here's the twist,'' Brian said. ''Historically, second base was breasts. But I don't think second base is breasts anymore. I think that's just a given part of first base. I mean, how can you make out without copping a feel?''

''True,'' Jesse said. ''And if third base is oral, what's second base?''

''How does this work for girls?'' asked Ashley, the 17-year-old junior. ''I mean, are the bases what's been done to you, or what you've done?''

''If it's what base you've gone to with a girl, you go by whoever had more done,'' Jesse told her.

''But we're girls,'' Ashley said. ''So we've got on bases with guys?''

''Right, but it doesn't matter,'' Jesse said. ''It's not what base you've had done to you, it's what bases you get to.''

Kate shook her head. ''I'm totally lost.''

''See how complicated this is?'' Brian said. ''Now if someone asks you, 'So, how far did you get with her?' you have to say, 'Well, how do your bases go?' ''

What is the world coming to, when the base system loses definition? Is it going to take an ISO standard to clear things up?

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About. Mil Millington.
I've been reading the web site for a year or so, and I finally snapped up his two novels. It's very funny, but seems devoid of the warmth of the web site. The humor gets blacker and blacker and I didn't find it an especially pleasant read.

A Certain Chemistry. Mil Millington.
While frequently funny, the plot is basically everything going to hell, people being jerks, people hurting people. None of the characters, least of all the narrator, is at all sympathetic. It reminded me a lot of Murial's Wedding, alleged to be a comedy but in fact just a psychic mugging. I think it's safe to say I'll be steering clear of Millington's fiction in the future.

Red Thunder. John Varley.
I was very excited to find a new Varley novel, and then increasingly disappointed to discover that it's basically a juvenille; the plot, characters, and narrator's voice are one-dimensional and naive, and so while it's pleasant enough it leaves little trace and seems marooned in the wrong decade. Key evidence for that theory would be the unexpected and unwelcome Chinese-baiting.

``Like the Second World War, our present conflict began with a ruthless surprise attack on the United States. We will not forget that treachery and we will accept nothing less than victory over the enemy...'' President George W. Bush, Wednesday June 2 2004.

Where to begin...

I have two comments.

1) I hope I'm not the only person who did a double-take upon hearing this. A good many countries were heavily embroiled in World War II long before Pearl Harbor was attacked. The United States entered World War II when it declared war on Japan December 8 1941--the day after the tragedy in Hawaii. I hope Bush meant to say, "like our involvement in the Second World War..." but somehow I doubt it.

2) On tonight's "The National" (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's evening television news program), anchor Peter Mansbridge referred to the "so-called war on terrorism." The mention occurs about 21 minutes into the broadcast (air date June 2 2004) in a piece reporting on the aforementioned speech given by Bush in Colorado Springs. (Streaming video is available at http://www.cbc.ca/national ) Historical revisionism begets skeptical and dare-I-say hardball news terminology...

Thursday night I stopped by the grocery store in the evening to get supplies for enchiladas. This was exciting, because I haven't gotten around to much cooking lately. Also, my previous attempts at refried beans have been so disastrous that I thought I would actually look up a recipe and find out how one is supposed to make that fetching brown paste.

So the lady rang up my 200 crowns of food, and I was bagging groceries in my bike bag (you bag your own groceries in Denmark, and you buy or bring grocery bags, too), and my Dankort debit card was denied. Invalid card. I had 40 crowns on me, so I ended up having to abandon my purchase, with a long line of people staring at me. It was a lot of fun.

A few weeks ago, I upgraded my Dankort from Privat (just a debit card) to a regular Visa. I kept my old card while waiting for a new card with the Visa symbol to arrive in the mail. The PIN showed up first, so I looked at it and did one of three things. Either I memorized it and threw it out, or I realized that I would be completely incapable of remembering something that way so I created a mnemonic and then threw it out, or I put the piece of paper somewhere. When the new card showed up, I couldn't remember which I'd done, and I couldn't remember the new PIN, so when I called to activate it the lady said that she couldn't even reset the PIN - she'd have to send a new card. It should not suprise you to learn that the next day I found the letter with the PIN.

So what happened is that, when the new card was finally mailed Wednesday, my Dankort was invalidated. I didn't expect this because it hadn't happened the first time a Visa was mailed. After the nice lady at the bank finished the forensic work, she suggested that I get a little cash while waiting for the new card. I got a thousand crowns, and last night I paid cash for enchilada fixings and tonight I will feast on Enchiladas. But first I have to go in search of tofu. The store I tried in Amager closed at 4:30 pm weekdays - hopefully it will at least be open today.

That's a big contradiction in Denmark: it was early in adopting real women's lib and having adult members of both sexes in the workplace, but retains by law the shop schedule that only works when each household has a homemaker. The only things you can reliably buy outside of the window of M-F 10-5, Sat 11-2 are snack foods, restaurant meals, and alcohol.

The Dark Side of Camelot. Seymour Hersh.
Hersh is back in the news because his New Yorker article was a big factor in breaking the Iraqi prison abuse story. Perhaps because of this, his 1997 book about Kennedy was on display in the Schipol airport so I grabbed a copy. Those who decry liberal media bias(1) will certainly enjoy all the dirt Hersh digs on one of the most famous Democrats. After reading the book I had to do some research to find out that Hersh is generally considered to have discredited himself with this book, making extreme claims on flimsy evidence in his drive to find the dirtiest truth possible. I think that overstates the case; at a minimum, he has plenty of people on record describing how extreme Kennedy's sex addiction was and (ok, here he starts stretching) how it may have impacted policy. More meaningful and damning were the description of Kennedy's mob ties, out-bribing of Stevenson in the West Virginia primary, and out-dirty-tricking Nixon in Chicago among other places.

An example of a weaker claim is

1. In 1962 Kennedy's defense secretary Robert McNamara awarded the TFX contract to General Dynamics over Boeing, even though Boeing's entry had won all four rounds of competition.
2. The FBI reported that the two sons of the head of security at General Dynamics broke into an LA woman's home and may have planted bugs
3. The LA woman was Kennedy's mistress

Hersh suggests that General Dynamics blackmailed Kennedy to select them. An alternate, simpler suggestion is that Kennedy was just giving pork to Texas.

In any event, it's a very entertaining and readable book and it gives a lot of perspective to mid-20th century American politics.

The Piano Tuner. Daniel Mason.
I thought about putting it down in the first few pages because the writing is a bit precious, but the voicing grew on me. Usually. To the extent there was a plot, I liked it. The fawning over Burma got to be a bit much.

1. As we all know, it's actually a bias towards making a profit and serving corporate masters.

An oft-noted feature of language is that it affords the routine creation of unique, never-before-uttered sentences. For instance. Today was mostly sunny, breezy, and not so cold, and so after heading down to the new mall (formerly advertised as the biggest in Scandinavia, a claim revised to biggest in Denmark after some belated fact-checking), I returned to my neighborhood and, after a mediocre sandwich and very good cookie, climbed the spiral steeple of Our Savior's Church with, for no particular reason, the chorus to "I Spent my Last Ten Dollars on Birth Control and Beer" stuck in my head. While I was presumably alone in my selection, I did squeeze past other musically entraced folk wending through the maze of wooden staircases, crossbeams, and ladders below the spire.
Tourist one: "Who waaaaaaants .... to liiiiiiiivve .... foREVarrrr ...."
Tourist two: "? ... Highlandah!"
Tourist one: "Qveen!"

The view was spectacular and acrophobic.

In other news, I'm on a month-long hiatus from Danish class due to scheduling conflicts. I watched the last seven episodes of Angel thanks to the magic of BitTorrent, and found the series finale far more satisfying than Buffy's. Unlike Buffy, which was consistently better than television until its often dreary deathmarch of a final season, Angel flirted with elements of mediocrity, especially in its fourth season, when its creative genius, Joss Whedon, split himself between three different television shows and his wife had a new baby. And where the show suffered most, I learned, wasn't in fact that Joss had less time to doctor the scripts. It was that his megalomania, combined with his overcommittment, meant that the production staff were unable to perform such basic duties as scouting locations and scheduling actors. This supports my working theory that most project (tv show; business; etc) fail bacause they get the easy things wrong, more often than because they get the hard things wrong.

Anyway, by the time I tuned back into Angel late in the last season, Joss was apparently back in full force, and I think the pressure of unexpected cancellation pushed him to write a better resolution than he might otherwise have indulged in.

In other other news, I now prefer milk chocolate to dark chocolate. No word on how long this phase will last.

Lakoff: Also, within traditional liberalism you have a history of rational thought that was born out of the Enlightenment: all meanings should be literal, and everything should follow logically. So if you just tell people the facts, that should be enough — the truth shall set you free. All people are fully rational, so if you tell them the truth, they should reach the right conclusions. That, of course, has been a disaster.

Q: Meaning, for example, that if you tell people that the tax cuts are overwhelmingly benefiting the richest 1 percent of Americans at the expense of a balanced budget, liberals think people will naturally revolt against the measure.

Lakoff: Exactly. It never works. And liberals don't know why. They don't understand that there's another frame involved. Here's another example: I've been working with a lot of nongovernmental organizations and advocacy groups of various kinds, including an environmental health group researching what they called the "body burden."

Q: The what?

Lakoff: The body burden — you have to hear it twice, right? It refers to the amount of toxic chemicals you have in your body. This group did a study with the Centers for Disease Control and found that there are vast numbers of toxic chemicals in our bodies, and in the bodies of newborn babies, in mothers' milk, and so on. I asked them how they were going to frame this. They said, "What do you mean? We're just going to put out a report with all the statistics, and they'll be so shocking that everything will change." So they did: a few papers ran it on page 17, some papers ran it a little but more. The next day it was done.

Q: But is that a failure of framing, or a failure of infrastructure, as in no public relations team, no properly prepared talk-show guests on staff?

Lakoff: It's a failure of the whole thing: not taking communication seriously and not taking conceptualization seriously. Anyway, they came back to me a couple of months later and asked how they should run a campaign on it. I said, "It's very simple. You call your campaign Be Poison-Free."

Why use the word "poison"? Because the framing of poison has a poisoner. It makes you look at who is doing the poisoning. Everyone knows what poison is — it kills you. Everybody knows that. Now of course you then have to run a serious campaign and have the money to do that and have the public relations support, which is harder, but the first step is understanding how to frame it.

Even though I've been using ACS and then OpenACS to run my website since 1999, and managing releases for about a year, I've never been able to keep up with upgrades on my personal site. I'm happy to say, however, that this weekend I got fully upgraded to the latest version. Probably the most visible change is internationalization. You can now browse this site in about eight languages, with more to come. The content is pretty much all in English, and likely to stay that way, but you can get a lot of the interface in other languages. I've also started to internationalize the little apps I've built myself. If you would like to translate some of the text on the site, let me know. I can give you access to the very nice web interface. You don't need to write code or upload files or anything - just type translations on the pages.

The other thing I've done lately is repair and update The Quiz. It now correctly recognizes you if you log in, so you can work at a sustainable pace, such as ten questions per day, until you finish them all. By which time I'll have typed in dozens more. Give it a try, and remember: all of the answers have been verified by professionals, so no arguments.

The Girl Who Played Go, Shan Sa.
If you are looking for a well-written, poetic, brief novel about love, sex, death, and the Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s, you will probably be very happy with this book.

Bangkok 8. John Burdett.
A very enjoyable and lurid crime novel from the point of view of an uncorrupted Buddhist cop in Bangkok.

Rush Limbaugh asserts that the reported torture Iraqi captives by US soldiers and mercenaries is "is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?"

There are a number of superbly executed fallacies here. The first is in the phrase "what happens at a Skull and Bones initiation;" eight words does all of this:

1. hide the reported rapes, sexual abuse, deaths in custody, and other crimes by focusing on a narrow set of reported crimes
2. gloss over the contextual difference: the difference between
   • physical and psychological abuse by cultural peers, with a known duration, within a known social order in which death is rare
   • physical and psychological abuse by foreign soldiers conducted in a prison on indefinitely jailed prisoners without due process or clear legal protections, in the context of an active war where death is frequent
3. link the Iraqi prisonors with Skull and Bones alumni, including George Bush and John Kerry, which:
   • diminishes the extremity of the victims' situation by associating them with free, safe people
   • hints at blaming the victims, because it's just an initiation, not prison torture

I won't go on. If you are still listening to and deriving enjoyment from this radio entertainer, I have to ask you: why? Do you like him because his smooth lies help you dissociate yourself from any lingering liberal/pinko/pc guilt? I can see how his version of the world is much more comfortable for Americans to live in, but it's not the real world. I don't claim a monopoly on truth, but surely this is beyond the pale.

...excerpts from Heather Mallick's column in The Globe and Mail, Saturday May 1, 2004.

My Fox trot with Bill O'Reilly

By HEATHER MALLICK

[...] I appeared on The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News Tuesday night to discuss a column I wrote welcoming the presence of American deserters in Canada.

[...]

I always say yes to American TV because how else are Americans going to hear about radical notions like feeding the poor and sheltering the gentle, or letting black people vote in Florida?

So I asked [...] for a car and driver and a makeup person to lacquer my face into immobility, and I did one of those remote-studio things where the host can see you but you can't see him and he asks you questions through an ear mike. And that's when the trouble started.

Mr. O'Reilly is not a smart man. He's like one of those old guys you see on the street ringing a bell and shouting about eternal damnation. He talks to his trousers. You know the type. They let wasps nest in their hair so they can lure weasels, trap 'em and eat 'em slow over the summer.

We were supposed to be discussing American deserters fleeing to Canada; instead, he went off on some wild thing about the mayor of Vancouver injecting people with heroin and unless Canada shapes up, "we" will boycott you and destroy your economy, just like "we" did to France.

I said France seemed to be doing fine. He implied that France now looked like Dresden in 1945. I hadn't heard that.

I said the United States couldn't boycott Canadian goods because it would be mutually damaging. "We're your biggest trading partner."

"No, you're not." (We are.) Naturally, I wanted to reply, "Yes, we are," so that he could say "No, we're not," and then I'd say, "Everything you say bounces off me and reflects back on you, so there," but I couldn't regress that far. [...]

And then he asked me if I was a socialist, and I said, "Certainly," and it was as if I'd said I like donkey semen in my latte instead of milk. He then went into a mad rant about lefties [...] and how I was a typical Globe columnist. I said, no, truthfully, I think I'm regarded as "idiosyncratic" (the first six-syllable word ever spoken on the O'Reilly show), and he erupted again.

It was like talking to a manic child who had eaten 800 cherry Pop Tarts for breakfast. He kept interrupting, so that no point could be made that could win a reply, much less a reasoned response -- not so much a gabble of sound bites as a howling from Bedlam.

Overnight, I received hundreds of e-mail messages from American men who think my private parts have gone communist, if you grasp my meaning. The saddest thing was the e-mail from kind Americans, apologizing for their "idiot," quivering with humiliation and praising me for having remained calm and composed under fire, not realizing that I was simply frozen with disbelief. I have replied to each one of the nice ones.

The whole degraded debacle and everyone's reaction to it, including mine, reminded me that Americans now have to cope with a new surrealism in public life. In the 1936 Spanish Civil War entries in a diary I read long ago, by someone who may well have been Stephen Spender, the writer describes an O'Reilly-esque scene. "A man squats and defecates in the street, without comment." Re-reading these diaries decades later, Spender writes, "What on earth did I expect him to say? Olé?"

"Only by intermittently exposing large numbers of male bodies to the risk of violent mutilation and destruction, can true masculinity and the health of society at large be adequately displayed and preserved."

On a completely unrelated note, we had F-16 flyovers today in Copenhagen, the beginning of a period of celebration leading to the Crown Prince's marriage next week Friday.

Ophelia's Revenge, Rebecca Reisert.

A fictional universe is still real, in a sense. If you ask what Spiderman's name is, there's a right answer. The original author may carry some extra weight in her universe, but she isn't god. A great film can create a second, related universe - Blade Runner, or the English Patient. And in some cases, such as Gregory Maguire's Wicked, the later author alters fictional reality. Maguire presents a more convincing, more real Oz than Baum did, and now the original books and the movie are the secondary materials, glossing over or hiding the embarrassing, grittier realities of social strife, racism, and alienation behind the Glenda, the Wicked Witch, and the rest.

Ophelia's Revenge, which is the story of Hamlet told by Ophelia, is more in the mold of "Rosencrantz and Guilderstern are Dead," taking the original material as a departure point but very careful never to contradict anything in the source, instead presenting new history, revealing angles, and showing what happens after scenes end and the curtain comes down. It's quick-paced, makes real humans out of the characters, well written enough, but ultimately too respectful of the source to make enough space for its own story.

Reefer Madness, Eric Schlosser.

Disappointing compared to his previous masterpiece, Fast Food Nation. That book set up a powerfully convincing argument one piece at a time, backed by years of dedicated reporting and research. Reefer Madness has the reporting, and even more footnotes, but does not satisfy at its goal: the exploration of the underground economy in the US. In part this is because it's too short relative to its huge subject, and in part it simply is too weak on actual economics, as opposed to statistics. Educational, a good read, but I wanted a lot more.

A Cook's Tour, Anthony Bourdain.

Another book that fails to live up to its excellent predecessor. Bourdain tours the world and eats lots of weird food. The writing, and the thinking behind it, shows promise but never quite delivers any deep thoughts. Frequently very depressing, which I respect. The bad meals - the pet iguana, the poorly prepared sheep's face - are more memorable than the good ones, and sadder.

Bruce Schneier: So I am very much in favor of those sorts of things: hiring linguists at the FBI, getting investigative teams in place, tracking terrorist funding, interdicting communications, that stuff also works.

And then I also advocate stuff at the back end, emergency response, first response, whether it is police, fire, medical, spending money there helps us, again, regardless of what the terrorist plans are.

We can never anticipate the terrorist plans. Inasmuch as we do, they will change them, so by definition you can’t anticipate them. We can’t all say, “My God! They’re are going to attack the rail system! Let’s secure the rail system,” because then they’ll decide to attack something else.

Doug Kaye: So what are some of the examples of the expenditures that the United States is now making that you think aren’t well justified?

Bruce Schneier: You know, generally all of the big budget IT systems. CAPS II, the airline profiling system, is a complete waste of money. I think fingerprinting foreigners at the border, if you actually sit down and think about it, makes absolutely zero sense.

The following is Marine Lieutenant Colonel Strobl's account of escorting the remains of Lance Corporal Chance Phelps.

(...excerpts from Heather Mallick's column in The Globe and Mail, Saturday April 10 2004. I first read this whilst high as a kite; I revisited it sober and it still blows me away.)

Home is the place where they have to take you in, Robert Frost wrote. In the case of the American army deserters now arriving in Canada, home is the place where they want to give you a lethal injection. So all they're asking of Canada, their new home, is a bed in the spare room of a Quaker family, and all we ask of them is that they never complain they can't see the puck. That remark makes Canadians crazy.

These young men--there have been at least two so far, and probably women to come --are different from the Vietnam lot in that they weren't drafted. The United States itself is different in that it's worse. Such is the huge divide between rich and poor that these young people signed up so they could afford to go to college. They thought that National Guard duty meant, say, guarding supermarkets against looters during the next Mississippi flood. Then they were in Iraq with American soldiers and mercenaries and some pissed-off troops from Poland and Italy.

Little did they know that the man who stole the 2000 election would boast with that unnerving, uncertain grin that he was "a wartime president." Osbert Sitwell once wrote a poem about Junior's very situation: "I think, myself,/That my new war/Is one of the nicest we've had;/It is not war really,/It is only a training for the next one/Besides, we have not declared war;/We are merely restoring order." Trouble is, Mr. Sitwell wrote this in 1919. How embarrassing for Mr. Bush, a Chihuahua chewing the pant leg of history.

Read economist Paul Krugman's The Great Unravelling about how Dick Cheney's army of the radical right has given the rich tax breaks the way you pump food down the throat of a fat goose until they flap their wings to signal they're full, thanks, and you keep squeezing the bulb. The poor and middle class got comparatively nothing to such an extent that for the first time in history, Americans on average are becoming shorter than their European counterparts, who are raising ceilings and lengthening beds. Americans, through the 19th and 20th centuries, were two inches taller than the peasanty Brits; now they're half an inch shorter, the result of bad food and no health care for the poor.

I'm not saying the deserters signed up as part of a long-term plan to avoid having short children, but that's how it worked out. You may think the United States won't execute them if Canada sends them back. But the U.S. Army no longer even recognizes shell shock (a soldier who had anxiety attacks after seeing an Iraqi sliced in half was recently charged with cowardice, which means a firing squad). Even Bill Clinton, in 1992, upheld the death sentence of a man so profoundly brain-damaged that when he was given his last meal, he said he would save his pecan pie for later.

(...)

You must now believe in peace, order and good government. Don't pursue happiness; let it find you.

(...)

If you want to understand politics, grab the whole range of American politics and move it left. Our current Liberals are conservative Democrats, our New Democrats are Naderites, except younger, cooler and not getting Democratic death threats; our Conservatives, who used to be Reform, are Radical Right Republicans on Nyquil. They don't like immigrants; I'd vote NDP if I were you.

Religion: If you have one, don't mention it at parties. The subject does not arise here. Army deserter Jeremy Hinzman is a Buddhist; you can talk about that, Jeremy, because people think it's yoga. Jeremy's a nice name. None of the deserters so far have been called Billy Ray. If you are, change it to Jeremy-- there's a good Canadian.

Learn the name of our PM. Then tell us, because we forget. Don't refer to breasts as hooters, headlights or a great rack. Just call them breasts.

(...)

Recycle like you mean it. Read Fire and Ice by pollster Michael Adams about how Canadians are growing ever more different from Americans. Then read Margaret Atwood and Doug Coupland, shop at Roots, stop in at Tim Hortons for a pile of Timbits (...). Arrive in a Prius or a Smart Car, which shouts, "I care about the environment," and you, short Buddhist, are a shoo-in for citizenship.

Finally, a bit of justice is served in the Boeing 767 Air Force scandal. This history of this thing was so extreme, that it looks like not only is somebody going to jail, but the somebody is the Air Force official who signed the checks on the terrible deal in exchange for a cushy Boeing job after she retired. They had to put the squeeze on her also-guilty daughter to get a confession, but maybe they can get the Boeing guy who offered her the deal. Then they could get all the Boeing execs who must have known the illegal details but went along with it because it's how business is done, and then they could court-martial all the Pentagon folks that have been doing this for years, and the civilians (civilian = Pentagon official who has retired in order to cash out her connections in the defense sector) they could just kidnap to Guantanamo. And then maybe everybody in Washington who profits from selling machines for killing people to international murderers would be in prison, and the US would not be the world's biggest arms dealer any more.

Ah, I may have gotten carried away somewhere in that last paragraph. Anyway, to focus on the actual positive, one highly placed criminal has confessed. It's a start, I hope.

Friday I got to class a few minutes early, as I usually do, so I could go across the street and get a hot dog before class. There's a halal hot dog vendor on the other side of Norbrogade from the school, and he has vegetarian hot dogs. It's a very high-traffic street, even though it's only one lane each way plus one bike lane each way, so a lot of the time I get trapped waiting for traffic and it takes more time than if I'd walked to the light at the corner. But that didn't matter Friday, because even as I was turning in to school something odd and something's police escort were brewing up the street. By the time I locked up my bike in the courtyard and went back to the street, it was full of a few thousand Muslims chanting, "Allahu akbar" and "Down with USA." Of course I support an immediate end to the US occupation of Iraq, but as an atheist Jew and supporter of the ideals behind the US, I wasn't ready to join in the march. And more importantly - I won't join any march where the men are segregated from and placed in front of the women. I eventually got across and ended up talking to a Palestinian guy next to the hot dog stand for quite a while ("we welcome the Jews to Palestine, as guests. But then they make us get out of our homes. Is this how a guest behaves?") but never got my hot dog.

Level 2 is going better the second time around. I think half of the improvement is that I understand enough vocabulary to be able to focus on grammar, pronunciation, and the rest. The other half is that the teacher is a nice guy instead of an abusive martinet. He has yet to issue any instructions on when we may or may not go to the bathroom or on how to take off our coat first if entering the classroom late. And when you make a mistake, he makes a slight grimace and says, "næste," (I think), which means, almost (I think). And then you try again. This is much more pleasant that the shouting and fist-banging that accompanied mistakes in the last class.

Assorted quotes and tidbits from class:

I have in my notes that "if you put [pronounce] an l on that, Germans in black coats, raincoats, will come for you in a black car on a rainy Monday" and take you away, but I don't have in my notes any reference to which word he was talking about.

I've found one word in Danish that shares an obvious root with the English but is simpler: neighbor is nabo.

The Estonian girl whose name I thought was Xena (as in the warrior princess) is actually Signe. In Estonian the gn is pronounced as in English, "zeen-yah," but apparently Danes can't manage that so it's just "zee-nah" here. So now I've learned how to pronounce Signe and Solveig. Who says travel is useless?

During a grammar exercise I added a clause in the wrong place (Jeg bor i Danmark meget længe nu, or Jeg bor meget længe i Danmark nu). The teacher thought about it for a while and decided that that word order sounded as if the speaker were on acid. Lars looked at the sentence and declared that there was no problem with that word order. Draw your own conclusions.

Under pressure during a listen-and-repeat exercise, one student mis-repeated thusly: "Jeg sidder og tænker på, hvad jeg skal tænker på." I'm thinking about what I will think about.

There's a rumor that the Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, was caught in women's clothing. A rumor I'm happy to repeat here.

But my primary objection isn't the totalitarian potential of national IDs, nor the likelihood that they'll create a whole immense new class of social and economic dislocations. Nor is it the opportunities they will create for colossal boondoggles by government contractors. My objection to the national ID card, at least for the purposes of this essay, is much simpler.

It won't work. It won't make us more secure.

In fact, everything I've learned about security over the last 20 years tells me that once it is put in place, a national ID card program will actually make us less secure.

(many potential problems described)

Proponents of national ID cards want us to assume all these problems, and the tens of billions of dollars such a system would cost -- for what? For the promise of being able to identify someone?

What good would it have been to know the names of Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, or the DC snipers before they were arrested? Palestinian suicide bombers generally have no history of terrorism. The goal is here is to know someone's intentions, and their identity has very little to do with that.

Finally some good holistic advice on how to actually go about the process of writing:

When you wake up, come back to the computer. Sit and stare at the screen. Do the "sitting up at the computer" posture: Sit straight in your chair and place your hands on the keyboard. Make sure the computer is turned on. Make the "opening a word-processing program" motion with your hands. Then stare at the screen. Make sure your back is straight and your hands are on the keyboard. If you start typing, don't worry. It's just your fingers moving over the keyboard. Pay attention to the screen. Did some words appear there? Good. That means you are writing. Don't worry what the words mean. Just keep making them appear on the screen. If you find yourself slumping over, tense your abdominal muscles to keep yourself sitting up straight. If your legs become uncomfortable, place one ankle under the opposite thigh on the chair. Alternate ankles. Breathe. Let the tension go out of your shoulders. Keep moving your fingers over the keyboard, making words appear on the screen.

The LA Weekly has a delightful set of articles and interviews with some grand master studio musicians.

[Drummer Hal Blaine] recalls the amazement in a music supervisor’s voice when the Wrecking Crew — as Blaine dubbed the top session players — ripped through the cues for a Love Bug session at Disney, having patiently endured a patronizing lecture on the fundamentals of film scoring.

"He says, 'We're going to slowly play a click track. Now, a click track is just something that keeps you - ' like we didn't know. And as soon as we heard eight clicks - boppadoppadoppadoppadang! - we played the whole thing, 10 or 12 bars, something like that. And he says, 'My god, I wish we'd have taken that! That was perfect. How did you guys do that?' And Tommy Tedesco, may he rest in peace, one of the most famous lines in Hollywood, he said, 'Well, sir, we practice a lot during the day.'"

The closing titles for Two for the Road are very short, and I was seated near the door, and the audience was all film lovers and mostly old people, so they tended to stay for the credits, and so, by rare happenstance, I was almost the first out of the theater. Walking to the door, the one lady in front of my commented, and if she was speaking English she was saying something about the times in the movie.
"Hvad?" I replied, instintively.
She said something that was almost certainly in Danish.
I said something indistinct, even to me, which I think might have contained the word "Engelsk."
She said something and I had no idea what language it was.
I said "what?"
She said, "never mind," which I understood quite clearly although I couldn't tell you what language she said it in.

The weather this morning was so perfect that I had no choice (after breakfast and a few chapters of reading in bed) but to put on the new, almost unworn running shoes that I bought after I decided not to enroll at the kung fu school on the next island and go for a jog to the giant, centuries-old timber loading crane at the end of Christianshavn in what can only be described as perfect jogging weather - brisk but dry and sunny, about 10 C, with air so clear that the buildings across the harbor could have been on the next block, although perhaps professional marathon runners prefer a bit of haze to the direct sun, but those people scare me so I haven't approached one to ask, and look at the old track-mounted cannons just past the crane at the end of the island, pointed north towards where seaborne invaders from the Atlantic without the wits to take a different route might come, and in fact there's so much low-slung littoral industrial plant on multi-kilometer jettys that open water is not actually visible anymore from from the cannons' hillock, and after the jog, which was short but enough to leave my legs leaden, I headed into town on the Metro on what I am pleased to report was a successful, albeit tardy, excursion to take advantage of Saturday's retail opportunities in my continuing - some might say, neverending - quest to assemble a quiet music server in my home; tardy because Thursday and Friday were holidays, during which (surprise!) almost everything is closed and I spent most of my time on client crises on two continents anyway.

Speaking of my home, I have to move out in July because my landlady wants it back. She gave me three months notice, as required by law, but was also kind enough to let me stay an extra 10 days until my vacation starts. So now I have to start apartment-hunting, which is not fun but on the bright side, I'll be able to get a new route to work and a new neighborhood to explore, and I can get away from the grubby hippie trash that swarm around Christiania.

Apropos of nothing but the fact that I'm dumping my accumulated notes into a belated blog entry, I want to tell you about my ordbog. A month ago I bought a big red cloth-bound book, "Danske ordbog," or Danish Dictionary, which despite the 500 crown price (USD 80) was a pleasing purchase because it featured full phonetic spellings of all the words and represented a recommittment to learning Danish despite my Danish teacher at the time and was a handsome tome which looked forward to referring to for many years. Only days later did I notice the spine of the book, which featured this symbology: "2 E-H". I had in fact purchased one sixth of a danske ordbog. After retrieving the receipt from the garbage, I was eventually able to return to the bookstore and exchange the book for "Dankse udtale" - just the phonetic spellings, but for all the words, and the new Neal Stephenson, in paperback but still heavy enough to represent an ergonomic challenge in the reading.

The Iliad, Homer, E.V. Rieu I've read a lot fewer of the classics than I feel I should have, and the main reason is probably that I don't like reading classics. I forced my way through the Divine Comedy - I liked Inferno plenty but experienced diminishing returns - and I've been stalled halfway through Paradise Lost for a year. My reading habits, I suspect, are ill-suited to epic poetry and I'm not one to welcome change. But I would still like access to and familiarity with source material. So the second edition of Rieu's translation of the Iliad was a particularly pleasing find - Homer, translated into extremely readable English by E.V. Rieu last century. With this edition, Peter Jones adjusted the language to restore some idiosyncracies of the original text, which was basically a transcript of an oral text, without hurting the readability. So you get the best of both worlds; it's a page-turner that makes you feel like you're getting the real thing. It contains the only lengthy introduction that I've read in its entirety and referred back to repeatedly. My only regret is that, after the Odyssey, I don't know where I'll find more classics like this.

The Power of Babel, John McWhorter McWhorter lays out a series of interesting points, sometimes a bit repetatively, through an array of examples that gives the impression that he has mastered the vocabulary and grammar of every language on Earth. I learned, or was convinced, that:

• Languages from lower-technology cultures, such as the Native American languages currently expiring, are usually incredibly complicated. I guess all that brainpower not being used by the complications of modern life went into language.
• Normal behavior for a language is to change substantially with each generation. Stasis due to the influence of writing is the exception.
• Languages exhibit continuous variation over time and space, to the extent that it is more accurate to think solely in terms of clusters of closely related dialects than of core languages with peripheral variants.
• Most people in the world are exposed to at least two dialects from a very early age. The majority of monolingual Americans are a stark exception. This should be our excuse for not learning other languages well - we were shortchanged at birth.
• Written language is innately different from speech to the point that it should (in my opinion - I don't think the author argues this in these words) be considered a dialect as well.
• Whatever is considered the "good" version of a language is whatever random dialect the last region/class to sieze power happened to be speaking at the time.
• Massive language death is an inevitable consequence of modern politics and economics; if we are to preserve any of the dying languages it must be by inventing stable new roles for languages, probably as secondary, ceremonial, cultural languages instead of as mother tongues.

Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie Big and messy. I put it down for a few months partway through, but later felt the urge not just to finish it but to read it for its own sake, so I did. But I like The Ground Beneath Her Feet more.

Previously posted at http://joel.westside.com/wsContentPublisher/story.view?RowId=7

A report from Day One of the CHI 2001 conference (Computer-Human Interface, pronounced kie, rhymes with pie), in Seattle. Some general comments: apparently, SIGs (Special Interest Groups, essentially 50-150 hands-on professionals discussing topics, led by a small panel) are seriously second-class; presentation of papers is the big thing. Some of the SIGs got bumped to smaller rooms after people couldn't get into the rooms where they were presenting papers and were screaming and pounding the walls. Go figure. I'm skipping the papers because most look pretty dull and how can you tell in advance if the authors can actually present or if they're just going to recap the paper?

I saw IBM's 200-pixel-per-inch, 3840x2400 flat-panel monitor. It's gorgeous! The demo cycled between x-rays, high-altitude photography, and similar stuff. It looked as sharp as, or sharper than, high-quality printed paper. I asked to see some text, and the guy brought up a full page in a three-inch-high window. It was completely legible! Amazing! $30,000!

Keynote:

Chairman Bill was the keynote speaker; I showed up early and got a good seat. I've never seen him speak in person before; he has an eerie, Buddha-like calm which is totally at odds with all the descriptions of his persona. Has he always been this way on stage? Most of his time was taken up by other people's demos (Reader; Priority manager; Tablet). He did acknowledge the irony of Bill Gates keynoting a conference on usability and computer interfaces ("Microsoft has had its share of failures ... the paperclip ...").

First session: Tips and Tricks for a Better Usability Test

Very well run. Covered three areas, about half of the 90 minutes was taken by people in the audience asking questions and making generally useful comments. Pretty much as well-done a SIG (Special Interest Group) as I could imagine.

International testing

• At a minimum, a native, living in the target country, should review the product/site.
• When you do usability testing for another country, that testing must be done in the target country, with natives of that country, in that country's language (even if the product is in English). Also check references for whomever you contract to do testing.
• Date formats: only formats in which the month is in letters, not numbers, are safe.
• 25% of usability issues are different across different countries (example was a user quitting after getting a useless error message when they tried to buy 2 kg of coffee from a site that wanted "Quantity ____ lb")
• To make a business case for I18N testing, simply translate your web site to that language and back and present the results to management.

Testing with experienced users

• They can help build usability specifications (no idea what these are; will follow up)
• Have experienced users watch novices do usability tests; the experienced users will make plenty of great comments/suggestions
• Test with data sets that are as big as your users typically use
• Differentiate between domain expert and product expert; try to get people who are both
• granting access to developers can be a better incentive than cash for getting experienced users to participate
• Differentiate between ease of use and ease of learning

Test Results

• Put a fridge with beer in the observation room to attract developers
• Use the KJ method to analyze results (collaborative method) Developers who observe just a few usability tests will be much less likely to create new usability problems
• Someone should observe the developers who are observing the test
• SIG presenters have stopped using questionnaires - not getting useful data and marketing kept abusing the data. Exception: interview the user while they are filling out the questionnaire; then burn it once they're gone
• Open issue: store usability results with bugs or separately.
• What severity scale to use?

Second session: Current Issues in Assessing And Improving Information Usability

Run by two academics, who do this SIG every year. Promising start - we shouted out possible topics to add to the list they proposed, then voted as a room on what four topics we were going to talk about, for 20 minutes each. Topics I voted for included "Does incremental usability improvement work?" and "Migrating Windows applications to the web." Unfortunately, neither made the cut. We spent a lot of time on stuff I wasn't very interested in. I heard a lot about card sorts, which are apparently a pretty common IA technique: write down lots of subjects on index cards, shuffle them, and then give them to users to organize into groups. Variations include: using category names; using blank category cards ("separate these 50 cards into groups, then name the groups"); having content owners and IAs do separate card sorts and then comparing the results; including actual content on the cards; doing heterogeneous card sets. infodesign.com is supposed to have good one-page instructions.

Book title "Minimalism since the Nuremburg Funnel"

In short, this session was borderline useful. Oh yeah, and we spent about an hour on (or rather, wandering off from) the second topic and didn't really get to the third or fourth. Annoying.

Third session: Practicing information architecture

Run by two consultants and an IA from CapitolOne. Pretty close to a total waste of time in terms of learning anything about the details of information architecture. Fairly informative (in the last 30 min) about the politics and nature of IA. What I got out of it was: Information Architecture is essentially a fancy version of library science: how to arrange and index information so that it can be found and retrieved. Extending the label past that, to include navigation, usability, interaction architecture, and other closely related disciplines renders IA a meaningless label. This SIG set the trend that anything having to do with IA included a half-hour argument about what IA is. Book title: Paco Underhill: Science of Shopping

Show of hands: who's working on a web application, not a web site? 90% from a room of ~100.

Also cruised the poster room and saw some interesting stuff: PARC survey of what people use the web for; Wichita State study of where on the screen 304 participants expected to find titles, links, ads, etc; Graphical User Profiles. will summarize later.

Zinn: I'm much more suspicious of Frodo than you are. I've always viewed him as one of the most malevolent actors in this drama, precisely because of how he abets people like Gandalf. He uses a fake name, Mr. Underhill, just as Gandalf goes by several names: Mithrandir, the Grey Pilgrim, the White Rider. Strider is also Aragorn, is also Estel, is also Elessar, is also Dunadan. He has all these identities.

Chomsky: We call those aliases today.

Zinn: But is Sauron ever anything but Sauron? Is Saruman ever anything but Saruman?

Chomsky: And now, with Frodo in the midst of a hallucinogenic, paranoid state, we meet Strider.

Zinn: Note that the first thing he starts talking about is the ring. "That is no trinket you carry." A very telling irony, that. It is the kind of irony that Shakespeare would use. It is something Iago might say. And did you hear that? "Sauron the Deceiver." That is what Strider, the ranger with multiple names, calls Sauron. A ranger. I believe today we call them serial killers.

Chomsky: Or drug smugglers.

It's too bad it's just a parody. The real thing might look a bit like David Brin's article J.R.R. Tolkien -- enemy of progress, where he argues

Now ponder something that comes through even the party-line demonization of a crushed enemy -- this clear-cut and undeniable fact: Sauron's army was the one that included every species and race on Middle Earth, including all the despised colors of humanity, and all the lower classes.

Hmm. Did they all leave their homes and march to war thinking, "Oh, goody, let's go serve an evil Dark Lord"?

Or might they instead have thought they were the "good guys," with a justifiable grievance worth fighting for, rebelling against an ancient, rigid, pyramid-shaped, feudal hierarchy topped by invader-alien elfs and their Numenorean-colonialist human lackeys?

Picture, for a moment, Sauron the Eternal Rebel, relentlessly maligned by the victors of the War of the Ring -- the royalists who control the bards and scribes (and moviemakers). Sauron, champion of the common Middle Earthling! Vanquished but still revered by the innumerable poor and oppressed who sit in their squalid huts, wary of the royal secret police with their magical spy-eyes, yet continuing to whisper stories, secretly dreaming and hoping that someday he will return ... bringing more rings.

"Then would you read a Sustaining Book that would help comfort a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness?"

Pooh, quoted in "Abridged Too Far," a Salon article about the evils of poorly abridged children's books.

Even after being imprisoned for stealing motorcars, even after having escaped prison, and even after having spent a bitterly cold night in a hollow tree, incorrigible Toad is capable of the most delicious grandiosity. Now, the adapted version simply says, "Shaking the dry leaves out of his hair, [Toad] crept out of the hollow and marched off, confident and hopeful, though a little hungry."

Grahame, on the other hand, treats us to Toad's view of his situation:

"He was warm from end to end as he thought of the jolly world outside, waiting eagerly for him to make his triumphal entrance, ready to serve him and play up to him, anxious to help him and to keep him company, as it always had been in the days of old before misfortune fell upon him ... the green fields that succeeded the trees were his own to do as he liked with; the road itself, when he reached it ... seemed, like a stray dog, to be looking anxiously for company.

Roxie Campanella, widow of (Brooklyn!) Dodgers Hall of Fame catcher Roy, died last week at age 77. An excerpt from the LA Times article by Bill Plaschke:

Several years ago, while visiting with Roxie, I wondered whether there was any part of her that was relieved that Roy had left for a world where surely he could stand and run again.

She began crying.

"Of course not," she said. "I miss him. I miss him every day. He was never a burden, never once. How can someone you love ever be a burden?"

Soon, I, too, was crying, mourning my pathetic ignorance.

The old saw is that people can remember seven things, plus or minus two. The original research paper doesn't quite say that. It says, " the span of absolute judgment and the span of immediate memory impose severe limitations on the amount of information that we are able to receive, process, and remember." It's not that we can only remember seven things, it's more that we can only (barely) process seven random things. You can remember all fifty US states if you work at it, but if I read you a list of rural Chinese townships you (if you are in the 5/6 majority of the world) will be a bit pressed to remember the sounds of even seven, much less reproduce, spell, or locate them. To get past the seven barrier, we use all sorts of memory tricks, usually unconsciously. Entire phrases can count as one - you can remember "noon," "9 am," "next Tuesday," and "July 4, 1776" about equally well - each one in a single chunk.

I spend a lot of time in class surfing the boundary between adequate and inadequate chunking. When I understand all, or all but one of the words in a sentence, I can rattle it off, modify it, reply to it, recognize it, no problem. When I memorize sentences, at first I'm completely off but eventually I hit a threshold and my mistakes change from complete missing clauses and incomprehension to putting "min venner" (my friend) when the actual sentence is "han" (him), because I am recalling the meaning of the sentence (easy), not a sequence of marks on paper (hard). I'm really bad at picking up vocabulary; often I can feel a word slipping right through my head and I know it won't, it can't stick. It took me over a year - I wasn't even in China any more - before I could remember that bus is "qiche." I've eaten my own height, if not weight, in "double snail's toe" pastries from the corner bakery (not the one across the street, it sucks; the one three blocks away in Christians Torv) and I ask them what it's called every time and you could take away all my chocolate and I still couldn't tell you what it's called in Danish.

So about half the time I do okay in class and the other half I just fail, hard, over and over, and when I fail it's usually because I don't know all the words and so I simply cannot do the substitution drills or the grammar exercises. Yes, I understand that verb has to be duplicated when changing the sentence into a "Først ... og så ..." (First ... and then ...) structure. I just don't know which, out of three words I don't recognize, is the verb. And each time the teacher hums the theme from Jaws (I'm not making this up) one more word that I knew at home disappears from my working vocabulary. (I gather that some people work well under pressure. I've never claimed to be one of them; maybe that's because I plan a lot or maybe that's why I plan a lot.)

The point of this ramble is that Wednesday, the entire class collectively failed to prepare adequately and so the substitution drill was a miserable failure and had to be aborted, and our class was out half an hour early. At least, that's how the teacher saw it. I found that conclusion unlikely. I know I studied about my usual amount, and if that's inadequate to complete these exercises in class then I'll just repeat every level and refuse to apologize for it. I would like to offer up this comparison. The way these drills work is that the teacher reads and we all repeat the full sentence, and then the teacher reads one word or clause to a student and the student repeats the entire sentence, substituting the new word(s) where appropriate. This is one from lesson 5:

Det er præcis    det samme som personummer.

       næsten

       ikke helt

       slet ikke

(That is [precisely | nearly | not quite | not at all] the same as a person-number.) The teacher says, "slet ikke," and you say, "det er slet ikke det samme som personnummer." And here's one from lesson 8:

Det er svært at koncentrere sig, efter at man har set en god film.

                                 efter at man har været i biografen.

                                 efter at man har været på kursus i 3 timer.

                                 efter at man har været ude i universet.

(It is difficult to concentrate, [after one has seen a good film | after one has been to the movies | etc]). Yeah, must have been the students' fault. We're all lazy no-goodniks who, aside from showing up for 3.5 hours of class three nights a week and doing 2-3 hours of homework and prep three other nights, really don't put any effort into learning Danish and probably don't deserve to speak it. The problem certainly couldn't lie in teaching materials that ask students to simultaneously master substantial amounts of new vocabulary, new pronunciation, and new grammar each and every lesson, could it?

The reality, of course, is that we get overloaded with new items, and our chunking breaks down. These sentences have thirteen words. At least two or three have tricky pronunciation. The fact that the "at" is pronounced here, whereas it is silent when it comes directly after a comma, is an item, as is the fact that the "at" is pronounced "uh." I think "har været" is past perfect tense of "er" (be), but I had to scan the vocab pages of six previous lessons before finding it to confirm, and that was after I saw it in written from. "Koncentrere" (concentrate) is a reflexive verb, hence the "sig," which is a reflexive pronoun but I don't remember which one; maybe it's "myself." Don't forget that it's pronounced "sai" (like the English word sigh - hey, new mnemonic!) because the g causes the i to drop three levels to an a, and then becomes an "i" sound itself, as long as the word is emphasized. If it's not emphasized, then I think it becomes just "suh."

So there could easily be 15 items to remember in this sentence, and I don't see how even a good student is going to have more than half of them down pat, so you're still left with 7 items - right at the threshold. Now please do ten of these in a row without making a mistake. Of course, if you are a fluent Danish speaker then you can probably chunk the entire first clause as one item, and chunk a bunch of the helping verbs and prepositions, and you are down to a very manageable 3 or 4 chunks per sentence, and you wonder why nobody can repeat it back to you.

In fact, I don't mind the insanely aggressive lessons. I'd rather get pushed, fail to master it all, and repeat, then breeze through simpler stuff and learn less. What I do resent is the attitude that I feel just below the surface (and emerging from time to time) of four of the five teachers I've had so far, that because we aren't speaking fluent Danish already we are somehow weak or stupid or immature, and should be browbeaten and cajoled. I guess this is a professional hazard in language teaching, and I know from my own teaching and from interactions with people who don't speak fluent English that it's really hard to separate fluency and perceived intelligence. But it's disappointing that the top language school in as competent a country as Denmark can't manage to train their teachers past this point. On the other hand, we also got a handout about new class fees (most of us pay nothing, as class is subsidized by the state - though I'm a taxpayer so it's not exactly free) which said, among other things, "please remember that your attendance rate and absence rate is recorded and may be used by the authorities if you apply for permanent residence permit or Danish citizenship," and if that doesn't make American readers want to go out and hold the line against the wave of "English-only" legislation and xenophobia, then nothing will and we have little to be proud about.

What could we have done in class? We could have done more of them as a group, to give us time to repeat and memorize the clauses in class and without individual pressure. We could have interrupted the sequence of public failures before they became contagious and even the best students were completely helpless. We could have opened our books so that we could read along. But no, it was a failure of will and ability and preparation on our part, and there was nothing to be done but to move on.

I'm really learning a lot that will help me the next time I do a teaching stint.

Going to a fast-paced language school like KISS, you get to have a lot of different teachers in a short time. I've had five in three months, although two were just for one class each. And if you pay attention, you can learn a lot about teaching. (All of the teachers are infinitely better than I was in China, but all of the teachers at KISS have professional qualifications and months of training.) I try to avoid jumping to conclusions about people, and I usually fail. And often I'm wrong - I was in despair after the first day of the phonetics class but Bent has turned out to be my favorite KISS teacher so far.

Anyway, when you're in a language class and paying attention, there's a lot of different things you could or should be paying attention to.

• Mentally converting written Danish words to the correct pronunciation
• Including glottal stops and gutteral vowel sounds
• Emphasizing the appropriate words
• Listening to your own pronunciation
• Listening to the teacher's pronunciation
• Knowing the correct positioning of your lips, tongue, and mouth.
• Knowing the actual position of your lips, tongue, and mouth.
• Remembering memorized sentences
• Remembering the meaning of words
• Remembering rules of grammar
• Applying rules of grammar
• Knowing your turn in the class sequence
• Knowing the current class modality (is the teaching echoing what we say or echoing only words we did wrong)
• Determining whether the word the teacher just said to you was a correction of your pronunciation in the last sentence or your prompt for the next sentence.

In order to function in class, you need to be doing at least four or five of these things at once, and in order to excel you need to be doing almost all of them. It's impossible to do them all consciously, so you have to prepare as much as possible so as to automate many of these things and then just think about one or two current problems plus whatever the teacher directs your attention towards. On a good night, on material I've prepared well for, I can just about pull it off - keeping three or four threads active semi-consciously and focusing on one at a time. If you are doing all of this and you make a mistake, you usually have the correct answer somewhere in your head, and to retrieve it you simply need to be nudged in the right direction - given a hook or a clue that your subconscious can use to focus your thinking mind in the right direction. And sometimes our current teacher does this. Unfortunately, her first reaction to mistakes is usually one or more of: gasps and dirty looks, banging her fist on the table, feigned shock, or "criminal!" or "do you want to make your teacher cry?" The effect of any of these, and especially of the fist-banging, is simply to trigger the fight-or-flight response. Since humans didn't evolve in an environment where pronuciation and grammar were immediate life-and-death concerns, the human brain doesn't typically retain this information when reverting to fight-or-flight. It flushes everything that doesn't pertain to possible incoming sharp teeth or claws, escape routes, or physical counter-attack. I'm amazed when any student ever gets anything right on the second try - I'm usually only able to by saying things that I know are wrong - which triggers a fist that I can ignore because my act of choosing to say something wrong grants me a bit of control - while working my way back to the correct answer. It's probably not the best way to pass the class, but it's the best I can do to perform the learning act in this environment.

So, despite my efforts not to jump to conclusions, as of week three in this latest class I'm willing to say that I don't care for the teacher.

Today, Sunday, the temperature is over 10 C and the sun is shining through a bit of haze and very scattered clouds. It's a week early (it's not even the Ides of March yet) but it feels like spring. Yesterday, it was right at freezing all day, the sky was almost featureless gray, and a mid-afternoon rain developed into mid-afternoon wet snow.

Guess which day Peter and Branimir and I went to the beach and to the royal park at Klampenborg?

"The year before, I was walking on the street, nobody recognized me at all. Nobody. I was Mr. Nothing," [Pavarotti] said. "But the day after the performance on the television, everybody stopped me and everybody applauded me. And then I understand the power of television, and I realized what means television, and I began to make love to television, to have television on my side, to devote myself to television."

After the electrocution in New York, Con Ed tested about 260,000 underground structures, manholes, metal plates and service boxes and found less than 1 percent of them had stray voltage, company spokesman Joe Petta said. Still, two more dogs were shocked in New York this week.

Note the fallacy that Con Ed puts forth - they imply that things are okay because less than one percent of the New York electical plant has stray voltage. The AP reporter, by using the word "still," perpetuates the fallacy. Do the math: up to 2,600 manholes, etc, have stray voltage - why is it then surprising that two dogs were shocked in a week?

Of course, if you want to get a better idea of how many dogs we would expect to get shocked, you would have to guess or measure how many dogs there are, how frequently they get walked, how many potentially (electicity pun - hah!) dangerous objects that contact per walk, how many objects with stray voltage have lethal current, how many dog owners notice, how many who notice report the incident, etc. Still, if there are a few thousand objects in New York that may kill by touch, two zapped dogs a week isn't surprising.

Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 13:04:22 -0400 (AST)
From: Nathan <nathan>
To: Joel Aufrecht <joel>
Subject: Re: Greetings

On Wed, 10 Mar 2004, Joel Aufrecht wrote:
>
> My question is: (ask the buddhist) someone stole the bicycle light
> from my bicycle, which I discovered this morning.  How do I stop
> feeling pissed off and violated?

There are certainly a number of ways of going about this.

You are a very intellegent person, so perhaps you want to take this as
a great opportunity to see how your mind works and explore this
feeling. Some questiosn you might ask yourself, is "if this feeling is
a real thing, then it should have a color, a shape, a location, or
other identifying marks, what are these? Is this feeling a single
feeling or does it have parts, and if it has parts what are they?"
Actually try to answer the question, and watch what your mind does.

Another method is comparison.
-If one was following the news, one might have noted that in the fall
of 2000 the election was stolen in the United States, losing a bike
light is nothing to be upset about compared to having your rightful
leader cheated out of office.
-Or how about the massive theft of taxes from the American taxpayer,
to finance a campaign of demoralizing, bombing, beating, raping,
killing, and stealing from the Iraqui people. Losing a bike light is
nothing compared to losing 79-Billion dollars, or your life, liberty,
and/or pursiut of happiness.

Contemplation of impermanence.
-At one point or another, you will lose everything that you have ever
owned. This is true of all people. Your life is short, and precious.
You will die, why waste your precious life away wishing harm on others
who will also die in due course?
-Nothing lasts forever. Even the greatest mountains are slowly ground
into sand by the weather, leaving nothing in their place. That bike
light too will break, buying a new one means that it'll be longer
before you have to replace your bike light again.

Compassion.
-If someone was willing to steal a bike light things must be quite bad
for them. Usually if someone could afford it they'd just buy one
right? So if someone stole your bike light, perhaps they are already
suffering more than you are.

If you were the type of person who was interested in faith, devotion,
or perhaps just turning the tables on your habitual patterns you might
recite the "four immeasurables", with this loss in your mind.
{
  May all beings enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.
  May we be free from suffering and the root of suffering.
  May we never be separated from the great happiness devoid of
      suffering.
  May we dwell in the great equanimity, free from passion, aggression
      and prejudice.
}
You could even replace the "all beings" and "we" with "the person who
stole my bike light". And watch what happens after you say that about
a dozen times slowly. (repeat as needed ;)

There are lots more I'm sure.

> I was thinking of putting the recharger (without which the light
> won't last long) outside near the bicycle, with a note and some
> money.  I feel like this is going through the motions of not being
> possessive but really I'm still pissed.
>
I wouldn't put out the recharger or money, I think that's just rubbing
it in. If you wanted to write a note, I would suggest politely
explaining that you can not find your bike light, and ask if anyone
can help you find it. Be sure not to accuse anyone of stealing, that
just makes things harder to sort out. Keep it simple, don't get
dramatic. Be happy and thankful if someone returns it.


How's that for an answer?

-Nathan

===

Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 22:17:36 +0100
From: Joel Aufrecht <joel>
To: Nathan <nathan>
Subject: Re: Greetings

> How's that for an answer?

It exceeded all expectations.  Would you do me the honor of posting it
on my blog to share?  I will endeavor to do as many steps as I can.

>
> -Nathan
>

... One major problem appears to be that the government wrote this EUR 156M/month anticipated revenue into its budget already. That is why those road-building projects are on hold and those 70,000 jobs are "endangered". Yes, that's right. Someone let a contract for a complex, highly-distributed system, of a sort which did not exist anywhere before, with a non-trusted, indeed partially non-trustworthy, user group numbering in the millions, that would cost of the order of a billion euros and ~450 technical-person-years to develop, which was to be in full revenue service inside a calendar year from development start date. And then apparently allowed the whole [German] road-construction industry to become dependent on that anticipated revenue, as well as part of the railways.

What Congress did in 1954, in an attempt to stimulate investment in manufacturing, was to “accelerate” the depreciation process for new construction. ... In the first few years after a shopping center was built, the depreciation deductions were so large that the mall was almost certainly losing money, at least on paper—which brought with it enormous tax benefits ....

Suddenly it was possible to make much more money investing in things like shopping centers than buying stocks, so money poured into real-estate investment companies.

My advice is simple. Death to Flash. If a consultant recommends that you use Flash in a website, run for the door. If you can trample him or her on the way out, consider that a bonus.

I'm typing the Danish numbers, cardinal and ordinal up to twenty plus every tenth up to a hundred (hundrede), into my language machine (you can play along at home - follow the link in the title, add some words to your personal list, and take a test), and I recognized a pattern. We have a test tomorrow on the numbers, in addition to the standard memorize-fifteen-sentences test, and when the test was announced and then the announcement repeated during the course of last week, I experienced and witness a sequence of reactions. First, denial of meaning - she said there would be a test and we filed that away but pretended that it didn't matter yet. Then anger - why are these numbers so stupid? (They're not much more irregular than English numbers, where eleven, twelve, thirteen, twenty, and thirty are nothing to brag about.) Then despair: I'll never make it; I'll never pass the test, I'll never learn the language. Then numbness - you just do it, and do it over and over. Acceptance may come next, but I've not gotten that far.

See the pattern? That's right, language learning is emotionally identical to grieving.

... Plus, the specific Dutch institution that oversaw Manhattan was not religious but mercantile—insofar as the East India Company noticed New Amsterdam at all (the place was by far its shabbiest outpost), it didn’t care what people there thought about God. It cared about beavers. It cared very, very passionately about beavers. If you didn’t get in the way of the beaver-pelt trade with Europe, you were an honorary New Netherlander.

I've finally finished the remedial phonetics stuff and am back on the main (fast) track at Danish school, meaning Monday/Wednesday/Friday, 5:15 pm to 8:45 pm. I ran into somebody who was in my original class; he's now in level four. I'm starting level 2. He said most of that class did not pass, so I feel a bit better. In my heart I still believe that missing that connection at SFO by a few minutes (the plane was still at the gate!) cost me six weeks. Anyway, the new class is fine. I actually grew fond of the people in my phonetics class, but I don't see them any more because they are all on the Tuesday/Thursday track. My friend Qin Xia changed to M/W/F for level two but she got put into the other level 2 class, so we only see each other in the hallway.

With level 2, lession 3, we are finally starting to count above fifteen. If you know anything about Danish and you have been following this story, you are probably eager to hear what I have to say about Danish counting. I vaguely remember the psychotic American helicopter pilot we met in Malmö ranting about Danish numbers, but he was the ranting sort.

Anyway, all I'm going to say is this. In Danish, 75 is pronounced with the syllables: "fem-o-ha-fears." This is written femoghalvfjerds, and has the meaning, 'five, plus half of a twenty less than four twenties'. That's all I have to say about Danish numbers.

In my opinion, a best-of-breed language would use Chinese numbering, which is strictly regular, strictly base ten, and comprises almost exclusively monosyllablic components (not counting a few dipthongs).

A traditional programmer's joke says that, if a problem must be solved in four hours, a real programmer will spend three hours and fifty-five minutes writing a program that can solve the problem in five minutes. We had a vacation from Danish class last week, and I spent most evenings working on my vocabulary training tool. I finished it last night at 11:30 pm and put in some sample data from lesson 8 - I may or may not have a test on lessons 8 and 9 tonight.

As any mathematician can tell you, now that I've demonstrated that a solution for learning Danish exists, the problem is solved and I can stop work. At least, that's what I'll say if I fail the next test.

"'Gabe Heaven' consists of a barren world, devoid of life, populated by yourself and an army of robots whose behavior you control. Is that about right?"

The second surprise was that the brain areas active in love are different from the areas activated in other emotional states, such as fear and anger. Parts of the brain that are love-bitten include the one responsible for gut feelings, and the ones which generate the euphoria induced by drugs such as cocaine. So the brains of people deeply in love do not look like those of people experiencing strong emotions, but instead like those of people snorting coke. Love, in other words, uses the neural mechanisms that are activated during the process of addiction. “We are literally addicted to love,” Dr Young observes. Like the prairie voles.

We got back from the Berlin OpenACS Bash (pic) and spent Monday morning moving from our office space near the door to the front end of the building, facing the harbor. If you look at this picture, we moved from partway down on the right to the far end. If you look at this picture, I'm looking at you from the top-left-corner window. We can see water, and the Havnebus (the coolest artefact in Copenhagen), and lots of government buildings, and a few nice church spires. Quite an improvement for us.

Smoking is forbidden in our building, so smokers congregate on the pavement by the rear door, and the real stairwell always reeks of cigarette smoke. But this is an intolerable distance for some schmuck on our floor, who has been taking cigarette breaks in the bathroom every afternoon. Today there is a nasty note in Danish in the bathroom - nice to see somebody else doesn't care for drug addicts getting their fixes and leaving their messes in shared office space.

Also, I now know what U2 was talking about re: Zoo Station on Achtung Baby. Downtown Berlin is basically one big railway station after another. When the main train station was caught behind the Berlin Wall, the pretty little Bahnhof by Zoologische Garten got promoted into being the main station for West Berlin. It's called Zoobahnhof, or Zoo Station, and both the intra-city and long-haul trains share one big platform. They're finishing up a new cross-shaped central station so that the long-distance and international trains will have a platform of their own. Counting the former eastern stations, there are four major urban-center train stations in a row in downtown Berlin.

A couple of months after the war ended the US army started blowing up UXO’s (unexploded ordinance – it took me forever to figure out what those three letters meant). They issued a warning saying that explosions on the top or half hour were controlled explosions. Just so that we wouldn’t freak out. Almost half a year later I still look at my watch every time I hear an explosion. I noticed my cousin does the same thing.

In 1900, a mathematician named David Hilbert addressed the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris and delivered what was to become history's most influential speech about mathematics. Hilbert outlined 23 major problems to be studied in the coming century. In doing so he expressed optimism about the field, sharing his feeling that unsolved problems were a sign of vitality, encouraging more people to do more research.
...

By putting forth our own "Hilbert problems" for baseball analysts of the future, Baseball Prospectus is outlining our philosophy for how and why this kind of work ought to be done--our attempt to provide inspiration and guidance to the baseball community at large.

Hilbert Problem in Math	"Hilbert Problem" in baseball
3. The equality of two volumes of two tetrahedra of equal bases and equal altitudes. In two letters to Gerling, Gauss5 expresses his regret that certain theorems of solid geometry depend upon the method of exhaustion, i. e., in modern phraseology, upon the axiom of continuity (or upon the axiom of Archimedes). Gauss mentions in particular the theorem of Euclid, that triangular pyramids of equal altitudes are to each other as their bases. Now the analogous problem in the plane has been solved.6 Gerling also succeeded in proving the equality of volume of symmetrical polyhedra by dividing them into congruent parts. Nevertheless, it seems to me probable that a general proof of this kind for the theorem of Euclid just mentioned is impossible, and it should be our task to give a rigorous proof of its impossibility.	3) Measuring the catcher's role in run prevention. In Baseball Prospectus 1999, Keith Woolner presented a compelling case that catchers do not have a noticeable effect on a pitcher's performance. If there is no "game-calling" effect, what impact does a catcher have? Is it primarily controlling the running game? If so, how much of that is attributable to the pitching staff? Is it in preventing wild pitches and passed balls, thus giving the pitcher more confidence to keep the ball low? What about reading a pitcher's physical state and helping to keep his pitch count low?
10. Determination of the solvability of a diophantine equation Given a diophantine equation with any number of unknown quantities and with rational integral numerical coefficients: to devise a process according to which it can be determined by a finite number of operations whether the equation is solvable in rational integers.	10) Projecting minor league pitchers accurately. One of the holy grails of sabermetrics is creating useful projections of major league pitcher performance based on minor league performance. While strikeout-to-walk ratios and other means of assessment can give us rough guides to good and bad young pitchers, we're nowhere near the level of certainty we want to achieve. ...
17. Expression of definite forms by squares A rational integral function or form in any number of variables with real coefficient such that it becomes negative for no real values of these variables, is said to be definite. The system of all definite forms is invariant with respect to the operations of addition and multiplication, but the quotient of two definite forms—in case it should be an integral function of the variables—is also a definite form. The square of any form is evidently always a definite form. But since, as I have shown,37 not every definite form can be compounded by addition from squares of forms, the question arises—which I have answered affirmatively for ternary forms38—whether every definite form may not be expressed as a quotient of sums of squares of forms....	17) Determining the value of draft picks, Rule 5 picks, player-to-be-named-later arrangements, and other non-specific forms of compensation in transactions. The more esoteric forms of compensation in trades are usually ignored, but they must have some real value if teams continue to exchange talent for them. What does a team give up when it signs a Type A free agent? How much is that draft pick worth? Is a typical Rule 5 pick worth the $50,000 and the roster spot? Are teams taking full advantage of the Rule 5 draft? What kinds of PTBNL deals make sense for both teams?

Selected Hilbert problems from Mathematical Problems, Lecture delivered before the International Congress of Mathematicians at Paris in 1900. By Professor David Hilbert

I've added a new feature to the site, a compendium of songs (mostly pop, jazz, and country) which are not in 4/4 time. Please use this list for those purposes which you see fit.

David Brooks recently claimed in the New York Times that only "full-mooners" believe that neoconservative institutions like the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) have any influence on Bush Administration policy because PNAC "has a staff of five and issues memos on foreign policy." But PNAC disseminates the views not of its paid staffers, receptionists and interns, but of powerful Administration insiders like Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld,

...

Unfortunately for [neoconservatives], a political ideology can fail in the real world only so many times before being completely discredited. For at least two decades, in foreign policy the neocons have been wrong about everything. When the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse, the hawks of Team B and the Committee on the Present Danger declared that it was on the verge of world domination. In the 1990s they exaggerated the power and threat of China, once again putting ideology ahead of the sober analysis of career military and intelligence experts. The neocons were so obsessed with Saddam Hussein and Yasir Arafat that they missed the growing threat of Al Qaeda. After 9/11 they pushed the irrelevant panaceas of preventive war and missile defense as solutions to the problems of hijackers and suicide bombers.

They said Saddam had WMDs. He didn't. They said he was in league with Osama bin Laden. He wasn't. They predicted that no major postwar insurgency in Iraq would occur. It did. They said there would be a wave of pro-Americanism in the Middle East and the world if the United States acted boldly and unilaterally. Instead, there was a regional and global wave of anti-Americanism.

Jackie (from Pomona) made it to the final stage of the Fulbright application process this year... almost. UC Berkeley was supposed to mail her application to the State Department, but FedEx never picked up UC Berkeley's applications due to a 'software error'. Usually, half of the students from Berkeley who make it to this stage end up with Fulbrights. The State department chose to not consider the 30 applications from Berkeley and has been exceedingly unsympathetic towards the students and undiplomatic with UC Berkeley. The Fulbright board has wanted to consider the students, but the State department has refused to change its position--until today. Now it seems they will let the Berkeley applications go through, as long as Berkeley pays for the awards. I think everything will work out for Jackie and the rest of the applicants, but this episode highlights two repeating themes of my existence: the mean spiritedness of the Bush admin towards California, and the incompetence of UC Berkeley’s administration. I’m contributing to Kerry’s campaign, and I’m going to graduate as soon as possible.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2004/02/10/state2150EST0165.DTL

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/02/05/BAGJE4PFAM1.DTL

One must hope that American soldiers leave behind a functioning democracy in Iraq--rather than the dysfunctional autocracies and kleptocracies that were the legacy of US military occupations in the Philippines, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Mexico.

In the United States, we spend more than $250 billion each year on IT application development of approximately 175,000 projects. The average cost of a development project for a large company is $2,322,000; for a medium company, it is $1,331,000; and for a small company, it is $434,000. A great many of these projects will fail. Software development projects are in chaos, and we can no longer imitate the three monkeys -- hear no failures, see no failures, speak no failures.

The Standish Group research shows a staggering 31.1% of projects will be canceled before they ever get completed.

Here's Standish Group's table on the build vs buy decision. Build seems to be the winner.

Developed from scratch using traditional languages and methods	33%
Purchased application & modified	15
Developed from scratch using an object model	13
Developed some components & purchased others	13
Purchased application & modified extensively	12
Purchased components & assembled the application	9
Purchased application & performed no modifications	5

But it was only the fifth most important factor in project success rates.

Each factor has been weighted according to its
influence on a project's success. The more points, the lower the project risk.

Executive Support	18
User Involvement	16
Experienced Project Manager	14
Clear Business Objectives	12
Minimized Scope	10
Standard Software Infrastructure	8
Firm Basic Requirements	6
Formal Methodology	6
Reliable Estimates	5
Other	5

The active participation of the bosses, the users, and the manager are much more important than anything else to making a software project succeed. The reason, I'm guessing, is that with those parties involved, any other problem can be overcome, but the inverse is not true.

Denmark's creation myth includes the flag's origin story: it fell from the sky on June 15th, 1219, landing on or near the king, who was busy liberating Estonia (from the Estonians, presumably.) English speakers learning Danish tend to invent similar creation myths for the language. My own theory is that Danish is the result of Vikings spending a few too many seasons in Albion, learning Old English while drunk, and bringing the result back. The most recent piece of evidence is this sentence from Lesson 9:

OK, så send mig en e-mail.

An alternate theory is that there is no such thing as Danish: They all speak English and they just fake this stuff to seem more exotic to British/American/Australian tourists' daughters.

Dawkins has spent much of his career defending a particular view of Darwinism. This so-called selfish gene view grew out of work in the 1960s by George Williams and William Hamilton. While Darwin argued that evolution involves a kind of survival of the fittest, Hamilton, Williams, and their heirs argued that it's the fittest gene that matters, not the fittest organism. To see what this means, consider an example. When a small bird spots a hawk overhead it will often issue an alarm call, warning its flock-mates of the predator's presence. The odd thing is that this behavior—which we'll assume is instinctive, that is, genetically based—is "altruistic." By sounding the alarm, a bird may well save its flock-mates but it simultaneously calls attention to itself, increasing the odds that it will be attacked by the hawk. How could such a behavior evolve?

If you think of Darwinism in traditional terms—as competition among different organisms—the answer isn't obvious. A bird who sounds a call (and so perhaps gets eaten) is unlikely to have more offspring than a bird who keeps quiet (and so probably avoids getting eaten). And having more offspring is what Darwinism was supposed to be all about. But if you think of Darwinism in selfish gene terms— as competition among different genes —the answer is clearer. A gene that makes a bird emit an alarm may decrease the odds that the calling bird survives but it can increase the odds that the gene for alarm-calling survives. The reason is that the flock-mates who are saved by the alarm are, like all flock-mates, likely to be related to the caller; and relatives, by definition, tend to carry the same genes, including the gene for sounding the alarm. In effect, then, the alarm-call gene is warning—and saving— copies of itself. Those copies just happen to reside in other organisms. The counterintuitive conclusion is that a gene that sometimes causes an organism to sacrifice itself can increase its frequency by natural selection. The alternative kind of gene—one for not emitting an alarm call—can decrease in frequency, since such genes are on average less likely to be passed on to the next generation.[1]

To Dawkins and other advocates of the selfish gene view, such examples reveal something deep about Darwinism: natural selection acts at the level of competing genes, not competing organisms

But, when the first flood of orders started coming in for the Expedition, the factory was entirely given over to S.U.V.s. ... By the late nineteen-nineties, it had become the most profitable factory of any industry in the world. In 1998, the Michigan Truck Plant grossed eleven billion dollars, almost as much as McDonald's made that year. Profits were $3.7 billion.

... Bradsher brilliantly captures the mixture of bafflement and contempt that many auto executives feel toward the customers who buy their S.U.V.s. ... internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills.

... In a thirty-five-m.p.h. crash test, for instance, the driver of a Cadillac Escalade--the G.M. counterpart to the Lincoln Navigator--has a sixteen-per-cent chance of a life-threatening head injury, a twenty-per-cent chance of a life-threatening chest injury, and a thirty-five-per-cent chance of a leg injury. The same numbers in a Ford Windstar minivan--a vehicle engineered from the ground up, as opposed to simply being bolted onto a pickup-truck frame--are, respectively, two per cent, four per cent, and one per cent.

... "Then there's this notion that you need to be up high. That's a contradiction, because the people who buy these S.U.V.s know at the cortex level that if you are high there is more chance of a rollover. But at the reptilian level they think that if I am bigger and taller I'm safer. You feel secure because you are higher and dominate and look down. That you can look down is psychologically a very powerful notion. And what was the key element of safety when you were a child? It was that your mother fed you, and there was warm liquid. That's why cupholders are absolutely crucial for safety. If there is a car that has no cupholder, it is not safe. If I can put my coffee there, if I can have my food, if everything is round, if it's soft, and if I'm high, then I feel safe. It's amazing that intelligent, educated women will look at a car and the first thing they will look at is how many cupholders it has." During the design of Chrysler's PT Cruiser, one of the things Rapaille learned was that car buyers felt unsafe when they thought that an outsider could easily see inside their vehicles. So Chrysler made the back window of the PT Cruiser smaller. Of course, making windows smaller--and thereby reducing visibility--makes driving more dangerous, not less so. But that's the puzzle of what has happened to the automobile world: feeling safe has become more important than actually being safe.

I'm digging through bits of SCORM. The first 18 pages of a 57-page document are the typical waste you can expect from DoD-related projects, but by page 19 there are some words that suggest what SCORM might actually be:

The speed with which different individuals can progress through instruction varies by factors of three to seven ­ even in classes of carefully selected students [8].

On average, a student in classroom instruction asks about 0.1 questions an hour
[9].

In individual tutoring, providing increased opportunities for direct student-to-instructor communication, students may ask or answer as many as 120 questions per hour [9].

The achievement of individually tutored students may exceed that of classroom
students by as much as two standard deviations - an improvement that is roughly
equivalent to raising the performance of 50th percentile students to that of 98th
percentile students [10].

SCORM is a framework for storing educational data, like tests and lessons. Or it's a framework for a framework. Or a standard for a mechanism that might potentially exchange frameworks that might implement an environment containing content that could conceivably be relevant to education. I swear they must have used Java just to write the spec document, it's got so many buzzwords. Anyway, I'll see if I can figure it out.

Not sure if this makes any sense as I am currently drunk in Xiamen China..

Our usual Danish teacher, Bent, was sick today, so we were split into half and merged with regular level 1 classes. Apparently there are two level 1 classes on the same schedule as our phonetics class, so I wasn't just recycled to phonetics out of convenience, I was explicitly placed in phonetics before I can proceed to level 2. Anyway, the teacher in the new class was more confident than Bent and at first it was a nice change (not that Bent isn't confident, but his body language sometimes undermines his authority) but later it seemed like this guy had a bit more of an edge whereas Bent is invariably polite and exceptional at responding to negative student reactions with more positive teaching. It did mean that the semi-lame 2 minute presentation I prepared as homework was moot, and I'll have all weekend to master the new vocabulary Lars gave me so I can use it in a more extemporaneous presentation instead of a memorized speech.

One student in the class, Tordi, I thought introduced himself as French, presumably a Turkish immigrant since he doesn't look especially Gallic or speak English with a French accent. He is older, in his fifties or maybe sixties, and often struggles in class. In particular his English is very weak, so he doesn't always understand instructions. He was speaking Russian with Andrei the Russian at the second break so I chatted, mostly in English and a little Danish since my high school Russian seems to have been flushed completely by the succeeding three or four new languages I've failed to learn, and Andrei translated when necessary. Turns out Tordi left Afghanistan as a refugee in 1997 and is waiting for things to stabilize enough to go back. He is an ethnic Uzbek, from the north of Afghanistan, got his PhD in cosmology in Leningrad, and taught at Kabul University. He speaks Uzbek, Russian, Turkish, and Farsi, and if I understood correctly also Pashtun, Tadjik, and maybe German, and broken English. Quite possibly he's the smartest guy in the room. Still has trouble with the glottal stops, though. I suggested he had trouble with Danish because his head is simply full, and when Andrei laughed and translated Tordi agreed.

I draw in a sharp breath - I'm about to counter-attack. I'm about to rage, 'Gah! Do you want to stand here and make me promise not to sleep with *every* attractive actress and singer and novelist in the world one-by-one?!' Fortunately, a sudden, swooping gust of prescience brings me Margret's certain reply to this rhetorical question. I keep my idiot mouth shut. That's it then - it's checkmate in two; may as well knock the king over now and salvage a little dignity.

'OK,' I say. Quietly. My gaze weighted down feetwards.

'What?'

'OK.'

'Say it all.'

I look up into her eyes, hoping to see a tiny spark of mercy. There's nothing.

'OK. I promise I will not sleep with Alyson Hannigan.'

The words come out, and, somewhere deep inside me, a light is turned off, forever.

(From Mil Millington)

More than half a year after leaving Seattle, I finally dragged my lazy behind to Amager Kung Fu Skole, a few kilometers south of downtown Copenhagen. Everybody spoke perfect English, but only when they were talking to me, so I understood about zero percent of the group instructions, and just followed along as best I could. Which was moderately well, except for pushups and situps which led in embarrasingly short order to outright muscle failure. But the rest was all familiar - foot position on front kicks is different, hands chamber at the ribs instead of the waist - but it's very much the same art.

The people were very nice. The class was a bit loose, which is disappointing because I've gotten used to a rigorous, formal environment with well-known rules and find it a welcome change from daily reality, but the nice thing about being in a disciplined environment, whether it's martial arts or software development, is that you internalize the discipline and from then on it's always available to you, from inside. So I've been very fortunate to work with some serious ... disciples, I guess, of both martial arts and software development.

Towards the end of class, one of the black-belts was fooling around with a rubber knife at the other end of the room while the instructor kept us in a high horse stance with arms outstreched long enough that my hands fell asleep. And the guy dropped the rubber knife on the floor, and immediately dropped and started doing pushups. This is a rule I'm familiar with: weapons are respected, and clumsiness or carelessness with weapons is punished - and if nobody is watching, you'd better punish yourself if you have any self-respect. When I saw the guy drop for pushups, I had a deep smile and a comforting sense of home.

Okay, I went to class both times this week and it was fine. If I do more homework on the weekend I won't fall out of student mode and have such bad Mondays. The teacher is really nice, and he's done a much better job this week of keeping things moving. The only real killer is when he spends ten minutes helping a single student with a pronunciation problem. Sometimes I can hear the problems - like the Russians, who don't aspirate their plosives - and sometimes I can't. But most of us have different problems, so if he let us split into pairs, where the partner's job is just to listen and indicate right/wrong/close.

My own bugaboo is that I'm completely incapable of distinguishing between the i pronounced as an [i], such as in spis (same vowel as in speak) and the i pronounced as an [e], such as in sikkert (same vowel as in pick). It sounds easy when it's in English, peek/pick, but in Danish they are even closer, only a difference of a few millimeters gap between tongue and roof of mouth, and they can be short or long and I just can't hear it. On the tests, I get nine out of ten wrong, so the next time I try to hear the same way and switch my answers, and I still get nine of ten wrong.

The thing that makes Danish especially tricky to learn is that fast spoken Danish and carefully spoken Danish are almost two different dialects, and when you ask a Dane to repeat something they do it slowly and carefully, adding in new sounds so that you can hear the difference. Thanks, but no thanks - if you don't repeat the original sound, I'll never learn it.

And while slow spoken Danish in informed by about 75% of the written letters, conversational Danish ignores fully half and skimps on the rest. Example: Jeg er, which means "I am," is pronounced [Jai er] if each word is enunciated - that's the Yi with dipthong from Yikes and then the English word err. But in a sentence, such as Jeg er hjemme nu, I am home now, Jeg er is one syllable: [Ja:], like the English word yaw.

The temperature has been bobbling around zero (C), mostly under, since I got back from vacation. Between that and the throat stress from this language, my three-week old cough is likely to persist until summer. Which is quite lovely hereabouts.

Mr Kahneman's work points to three types of over-confidence. First, people tend to exaggerate their own skill and prowess; in polls, far fewer than half the respondents admit to having below-average skills in, say, love-making or driving. Second, they overestimate the amount of control they have over the future, forgetting about luck and chalking up success solely to skill. And third, in competitive pursuits such as betting on shares, they forget that they have to judge their skills against those of the competition.

I release managed OpenACS 5.0 and all I got was this lousy t-shirt blog entry, which I had to make post myself.

From a mail that went 'round the office today:

Speaking of Chinese airlines I’ve never been able to confirm my favorite air safety anecdote...

After a Chinese carrier’s jet slammed into the ground in near zero visibility the last thing on the cockpit voice recorder was the anti-collision system saying, "Pull up Pull up..." and the co-pilot asking the pilot (in Chinese), "What is the meaning of 'Pull up. Pull up.'?"

I found this in an article on user interface design talking about advanced control & warning systems in aircraft and their predominant use of English in the voice warning systems.

Kentis: That was key to the movie to me. Everything today is done in CG [animation], and personally, I don't get the same sense of danger that I do with movies from the '70s and '80s, when you saw stuntmen doing things, and you'd say, "Oh my god, someone was in that car when it wrecked!" So, it was important to work with real sharks, the way their tails flop around like big rats in the water…

Ryan: Yeah, we've all seen sharks cruising by on "Shark Week" but you don't realize how erratic and jerky they can be in the water.

Travis: In movies, there's one shark in the water, that's the one that's going to attack you, as opposed to a group that just hangs out and circles in and waits.

This might sound like empty campaign rhetoric but, in reality, Dean's Internet platform contains the key elements and catch phrases of a more sophisticated master plan for cyberspace concocted by a group of academics and public officials who advocate a "commons" vision of collective Internet governance. Their agenda consists of a three-pronged strategy: (1) Infrastructure: They want telecom, cable, and broadband high-speed networks subject to collective rule via a heavy dose of open access regulation, structural separation or even outright public ownership. And they want the Internet to be treated as a collective asset subject to "democratic rule" through a variety of "nondiscrimination" mandates and other regulatory controls. (2) Spectrum: They want most of the electromagnetic wireless spectrum to be treated as one big commons with very limited exclusive property rights. (3) Intellectual property: They want to water down IP rights and greatly expand fair use rights and the public domain.

I'm sure Mr Thierer meant that as a withering critique. I find it very encouraging. Judge for yourself: Principles for an Internet Policy.

I'm sad to report that my Danish learning process has taken a turn for the worse. After holiday travel caused me to miss a few classes of my Level 1 Danish class, I was rescheduled into a phonetics class, with the idea that, if I can pass it, I can proceed to level 2. However, there are several changes from my prior class that are making me realize how good the earlier class was. First, the original instructor, Steen, was the headmaster of the school. He has decades of experience, is quite unflappable, and seems to be the author of the special technique for teaching pronunciation that makes K.I.S.S. the top DSL (Danish as a Second Language - I think I just made that up) school in Copenhagen. The new guy is very nice, very enthusiastic, a trained linguist, and reminds me a lot of me as a teacher. In other words, he's one big long rookie mistake. Please allow me to enumerate the deficiencies in the new class:

• We meet from 5:15 pm to 9 pm Tuesday and Thursday, compared to 5:30 pm to 8:30 pm M/W/F. This is just too long.
• The old class had a strictly graded test at the end of each day. The new teacher explained his theory that the stress of preparing for the test was using up cognitive resources that could be better spent. Well, speaking for myself, a primary reason for going to a class instead of just sitting at home with a Danish workbook is that I need the external structure and pressure. With the old class, the pressure was to memorize written Danish sentences, certainly a good step in learning a language.
• The teacher subconsciously cheats his pronunciation when he is trying to emphasize points. Some students thought that the difference between the [e] and [i] vowels, which are my personal bugaboo because they are nearly identical, was that the [e] is long and the [i] is short. They thought this because the teacher pronounced them that way for three hours. He wasn't intending to, and he didn't realize he was doing it; he thought he was just speaking clearly for us.
• The old class had a set routine. This is critical in making the time pass quickly. The new teacher has no firm plan and so we spend all of those freed up cognitive resources wondering what we're going to do next.
• The class is too large. The instructor said he wanted only 9, but we have between ten and twelve. The last class had about 13 and felt smaller. I heard that of 18 students in the last T/Th level 1 class, only three passed. So maybe if I stick it out class will shrink.
• Many of the students are sullen. They have completed two or three full three-week courses and then been told they need to take a phonetics class, perceived as remedial. They speak enough Danish that much of the classroom instruction is in Danish. This makes me feel stupid for not knowing enough Danish, which is silly because I've had two weeks of class and some of them have had nine weeks.
• With the M/W/F format and constant preparation for tests, learning Danish becomes a constant part of your life. You're stressed, but it's a productive stress. With T/Th classes and no clear homework or testing, I have four-day weekends from learning; all of Monday, and Tuesday morning and afternoon, are filled with Sunday-night-style "end of the weekend" dread.
• The new class is four and a half weeks long, instead of 3 weeks. So I have three and a half more weeks of this to look forward to. That which does not kill you, makes you resent Danmark.

More things you wouldn't guess about spoken Danish by reading it: os, meaning us, and også, meaning also, are pronouced identically in fast spoken Danish. They share a vowel with the o in kop (cup) and the er in cykler (a bicycle).

Gulvet is pronouced something like ghoul and means, a floor. Køkkenet means kitchen, not coconut, and is pronounced kook-nuh. Hundrede does mean 100, but only half of the letters (hun and either of the es, take your pick) are even implied by the pronunciation.

I live a few blocks away from Christiania, which is a sort of hippie commune founded about thirty years ago when some, well, hippies, occupied an abandoned naval installation and declared independence from the EU, or EEC I guess, or Denmark, or something. It's not like I research this stuff. I've only been in there once. Anyway, it's most notorious for Pusher Street, where you can buy hash from a whole row of stands, like a farmer's market or swap meet. You used to be able to buy narcotics and things as well, but they haven't been openly sold in some time, thanks I gather to internal pressure. There are big signs saying, "No Cameras" and "Just Say No to Hard Drugs." The police raid all the time, but with a right-wing government in office the existence of Christiania as a whole is more tentative than usual. There was apparently a bigger raid than usual the other day, and Pusher Street's days are numbered. The point of this post is, if you are wondering what governmental drug policy looks like when it's part of a serious and cooperative attempt to build a better society, rather than posturing, moralism, hypocracy, denial, and lies, it looks like this:

'I'm duly impressed that Christiania's residents have, once again, demonstrated their ability to address the problem on their own. But the real challenge remains to bring about a state-controlled hash trade. There are plenty of places where hash is not sold under controlled conditions - and not distinguished from harder narcotics,' said [Unity List justice policy spokeswoman Line] Barfod.

If you don't count the whole space travel and humans on the moon stuff, does US federal spending on space represent a profitable research project?

But the fact that the total NASA investment of $55 billion yielded a paltry $5 billion in true spinoffs, creating entirely new products or industries, suggests a very poor return of ten cents on the dollar. Again, this should not be surprising, given the highly specialized nature of much of the engineering and development work conducted by NASA.

So rather than being an unusually good investment paying 7:1 or 22:1 for each dollar invested, NASA has an astoundingly bad 1:10 payoff -- about a factor of 100 worse than the commercial economy as a whole. (Federation of American Scientists)

Here's a counter-point:

A survey of forty-one companies that reported prior commercial success in transforming NASA R&D investments in the life sciences into marketable goods and services was conducted in late 1997 by the Space Policy Institute, George Washington University. Fifteen of these firms provided useful data for this study. These firms alone have cumulatively contributed over $1.5 billion in value added to the economy over the past twenty-five years. The cumulative NASA R&D investment in the technologies represented by the products of these firms was approximately $64 million. An additional $200 million in private R&D from those companies was stimulated by the NASA investment. This additional R&D was necessary for the production, development, and marketing of the com-mercial products and represents the positive leverage of NASA life sciences investments.

...

NASA's life sciences total expenditures over the past 40 years has amounted to approximately $3.7 billion (which includes many mission related projects that have made it possible for NASA to engage in manned space flight and for which there have been with no expected commercial benefits).

On the basis of these conservative estimates taken with mission success of the life sciences effort and ample evidence of other social benefits from the descriptions provided by the users of many specific life sciences spinoff applications, it can be concluded that NASA Life Sciences investments have more than "paid for themselves." (Space Policy Institute, George Washington University)

Note, though, that this report summary only claims that fifteen companies, which produced a total of $1.5 billion of wealth, received $64 million from NASA. It doesn't say that all $1.5 billion was generated from directly from the $64M, and in fact is does say that doesn't actually say that the $64 million NASA spent during the period studied resulted in the $1.5 billion. It actually implies that $264M in investment led to $1.5B, for a roughly 6:1 return.

Bottom line: after 15 minutes of Googling, I found plenty of NASA bragging and contradictory partial answers (though FAS, which had the negative report, is more neutral and plausible than a space program at a university). To learn more, I would actually have to read stuff and think, which I don't have time for today.

During 1990 and 1991, some 696,778 individuals served in the Persian Gulf as elements of Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. Of these, 148 were killed in battle, 467 were wounded in action, and 145 were killed in accidents, producing a total of 760 casualties, quite a low number given the scale of the operations. As of May 2002, however, the Veterans Administration reported that an additional 8,306 soldiers had died and 159,705 were injured or ill as a result of service-connected "exposures" suffered during the war. Even more alarmingly, the V.A. revealed that 206,861 veterans, almost a third of General Norman Schwarzkopf's entire army, had filed claims for medical care, compensation and pension benefits based on injuries and illnesses caused by combat in 1991. After reviewing the cases, the agency has classified 168,011 applicants as "disabled veterans." In light of these deaths and disabilities, the casualty rate for the first Gulf War may actually be a staggering 29.3 percent.

executive director of the National Fenestration Rating Council

Lots of good airplane books this time. When you are spending many hours, often sick, in planes and trains and stations, and carrying a large bag of books accumulated city by city, you tend to set aside the more challenging reads for later. Books that got set aside quickly included: Metternich's Europe (a collection of early 19th century political and social essays from many sources), A Free Nation Deep in Debt (a history of the world from the perspective of governments and finance, but so far a disastrous failure at actually explaining instead of just describing), Political Control of the Economy (Edward Tufte from before he figured out how to visually present data).

Banks, Iain. Raw Spirit. 2003.

A book in which Scottish author Iain Banks drives around Scotland to visit different Scotch distilleries sounds good on paper, but the result is perhaps quarter-hearted and arguably worth missing even for rabid Banks fans. Skim the introductory pages, in which he tells you how wonderful his cars are and describes in detail the mundane process by which he came to write the book, read the first episode, in which the roads are all delightful swooping "Great Wee Roads" with glorious scenery, the distellery and the people are very nice, and the scotch is complex, probably peaty, and either deservedly famous or undiscovered treasure, and you needn't read any further.

Vinge, Vernor. A Deepness in the Sky; A Fire in the Deep; Across Realtime (includes The Peace War and Marooned in Real Time)

Top-grade science fiction, with well-earned Hugos and Nebulas to prove it. The ideas are amazing (either brain-poppingly original or, even more amazing, brain-poppingly original in 1981 or 1986 and already mundane today); the characters are much better than typical SF. My only complaint is that the writing isn't good enough to merit the title "literature," because everything else is and these books deserve to be read outside the genre.

Swofford, Anthony. Jarhead. 2003.

All of the good things you may have read about this book are true. It's messy, informative, occasionally over-reaching, and something easy and rewarding to read cover-to-cover.

McKinley, Robin. Sunshine

One of my favorite authors, Robin McKinley writes "fantasy" and "children's stories" which are pure joy in every respect. Recently she's been watching a lot of Buffy, and the resulting book (not a Buffy book, but a modern, wise-cracking, serious, scary, profane vampire novel) makes me think that if she'd written one episode for Joss every season, the TV show would have had a seven-year lock on the Emmys.

Cherryh, C.J. Explorer

Cherryh is sort of the Steven King of SF; she keeps churning it out, it all blurs together, it's all very good. Skimming online book reviews, it looks like I skipped book five in this series, but that really didn't matter much. The stories and characters are all very dense; what's most exciting about her writing is how she makes peoples' (and aliens') motivations and hidden agendas not just plot elements but essential narrative elements as well.

I'm working through Peter Singer's collection of his own writing, in part because it's interesting and in part because I'm trying to slowly self-educate myself on the basics of philosophy. I formed the opinion several years ago that the discipline of philosophy was in some sense a failure because, after thousands of years of work, philosophers haven't reported back to the rest of us yet. My evidence for this assertion was the fact that I made it through sixteen years of education, including four years at a liberal arts college which included a diverse set of required classes, without a clue as to the principles and tenets of philosophy. I have been accumulating rebuttals since, including:

• I didn't take any philo classes
• If we define philosophy to be the study of everything in human thought, except the things that have their own disciplines, then philosophy's success is evident in the fact that its domain has shrunk so much as it's "solved" problems and spun them into specialized branches to work out the details (we call these biology, economics, etc), and the remaining issues are necessarily the hardest
• Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism and Confucianism, have reported back early and often, as evidenced by their deep influence on many Asian societies.

Singer's work in Ethics is particularly accessible, in part because ethics are less abstract and in part because his writing is very clear:

It would be possible to bring medical practice into line with the current definition of death in terms of the irreversible cessation of all brain function. [...] From the perspective of an adherent of the sanctity of life ethic, of course, the gain is that we are no longer killing people by cutting out their hearts while they are still alive. (Singer, Peter. Writings on an Ethical Life. p175)

It takes people between eight and ten seconds to process and produce a lasting emotional response to a scene. Camera movement or different camera angles of the same scene can engage people through their orienting responses while providing enough time for them to process the scene.

To get home (Copenhagen) from vacation (the west coast of the United States), I took a train from San Diego to Los Angeles, stayed with my grandmother in LA, and then went to LAX to catch a flight to San Francisco to connect to a London/Heathrow-bound flight, all on United Airlines, before tranferring by bus to London/Stansted for an easyJet flight home, a tedious trick that can save US$1000 in airfare at the expense of a few hours on a bus.

When I checked in at LAX, the flight was already expected to be 20 minutes late, so the automatic check-in machine told me to pick up the phone, where I talked to a lady who told me that I would probably miss my connection, but that she couldn't actually do anything about it, like reschedule me, until the missed connection became reality.

Since I had dutifully arrived at the airport 2 hours in advance, I wasn't keen on sitting in a lovely LAX departure lounge waiting, and waiting some more, for a probably missed connection. I contemplated going across the airport to Southwest in case they had an immediate flight to SF that I could catch on the spot, but ultimately decided not to bother.

We landed in SF over an hour late. The London flight was a few minutes late departing, but by the time I and five Manchester skateboard pseudo-punks (they basically looked like the Partridge family with wheels) had negotiated the terminal, waited for the shuttle bus, waited for the shuttle bus to make a four-point turn to go under the airport to the adjacent terminal that we could have walked to faster if, waited for the elevator up two floors because there weren't stairs, and dashed down the international terminal to the gate, the doors were closed (though the plane was still sitting at the gate).

Next followed a fairly tedious forty minutes at the United counter, where they rescheduled me on a British Airways flight to London at 6 pm the following day. Out of Seattle. And kindly booked me on United to Seattle the following day, and provided a hotel voucher.

I questioned the logic of leaving only two hours for the connection in Seattle, but ultimately shrugged, called Fram, and spent the night in Oakland. (Not technically Oakland, because Fram has moved from one hippie grad student group house south of Berkeley to another north of Berkeley, and now lives in one of the many enclaves in the Bay area named after a city in a different state or country (e.g., Dublin, Pittsburg) whose name I can't be bothered to recall, thought it might have shared phonemes with "Atherton".

As I prepared to decamp from the United counter, I asked if I could retrieve my backpack from the checked-luggage aether. The Customer Service Agent blanched. It was subtle, and a customer who was not being as thoroughly service as I was, or who on fewer medications, might have missed it as she launched into a passive-aggressive explanation of how that might or might not be possible or a good idea. But I saw the signals. I knew it was a Bad Idea.

And since the backpack contained only dirty clothes (hallmark of a precisely planned vacation, I submit) and I had anticipated luggage misfortune by transferring all essentials (especially my toiletry bag, now overstuffed with over-the-counter cold drugs) to the carry-on book bag, I smiled and said, no problem. I don't need it tonight. I just wore my increasingly ripe Apology Shirt for two days, doing my bit for world peace.

My stay in Oakland featured slightly chilly but sparklingly sunny weather, the lovely BART system (trains every 20 minutes. My combined wait time for two trips: 36 minutes), whose motto should be, "as good as European mass transit at twice the price," tasty Tibetan food with a trio of graduate student scientists-to-be (more on the subject of scientificism in a later posting), and, as I did roughly every other day for the last week of the trip, waking up in a state similar to death because my body had not received essential chemicals (pseudoephedrine, naproxen, ibuprofen, chocolate) since the previous night.

Re-drugged and further fortified by a bagel and cream cheese, I was returned to a BART station by the trustworthy Fram and his new Prius (like the Honda Civic Hybrid but with a dashboard map display so distracting you have to click a don't-sue-Toyota-when-you-crash license every time you turn it on.).

Boarding at SF was unproblematic, if you don't count the 45-minute wait to check in - going ticketless doesn't help if they make you miss your connection and then give you a paper ticket - or the minor incident in which I left a green Time magazine nylon bag at one end of the line, so I wouldn't have to kick it forward every few seconds. By the time I though better of the idea (did I mention the chewable anti-emetic that Jon introduced to my pharmaceutical collection I introduced to my internal chemistry that morning? Apparently the sum total of three different "non-drowsy" medications may in fact be drowsiness) and went back the 50 feet to get it, they were about to call the cops.

(Fans of the literary technique known as foreshadowing may be interested to know that I did make discreet inquiries at the San Francisco counter regarding my luggage, and recieved equally discreet assurances. And that I did the same, with similar effect, at the British Airways gate counter in Seattle.)

I would also like to mention that I watched several scenes of Moulin Rouge on the plane - it's still fantastic, engrossing, and affecting even when muffled and squeezed.

Oh, and this would probably also be the place to mention that the BA 747 out of Seattle sat at the gate for an hour and forty five minutes after they closed the door because a cargo door was stuck in the cold. (It was slightly below freezing.) It seems to be that, with four hundred people waiting in the plane, they could have had the factory up the street send down a guy with some WD-40 or something. It was amusing but not surprising to see that the British configuration for a 747 has no fewer than five distinct classes of service. I identified myself as traveling in Peon class whenever asked. I don't know exactly why but I strongly resent the formal fee-based division by class in public services. I hate the idea of toll express lanes, of First Class, luxury suites at the ballpark, and so on.

Everything went smoothly in London. It only took a few minutes to report my lost backpack at the British Airways desk. I was slightly confused when the bus ticket lady said I would "have to hurry" to catch the 3 pm bus to Stansted airport, since it was 2:50 pm and the bus stop was fifty yards away, but, unencumbered by my backpack, I was able to make the distance in the allotted time.

And so, after a lovely two-hour trip through the farm belt around London, watching the truck drivers drive their trucks down the wrong side of the road from the wrong side of their cabins, I reached Stansted, London-area hub of easyJet.

Since United has no agreements with easyJet, I had had to reschedule my easyJet connection to Copenhagen at my own expense: about US$80, and it's a close call in my opinion: whether it's less painful to reschedule via a web site where I can see all of my options but have to pay, from my laptop while sitting in a comfortable chair under the watchful eye of a kitty-cat, using Fram's wireless network, or to get rescheduled for free in a forty-minute standing session at a service desk with a harried woman who plans my itinerary in a phone conversation with an unheard cohort in which my actual existence is the least critical factor in the process.

easyJet enforces a 5kg limit for cabin carry-ons, so I had to check in my green nylon bag with 11 kilos of books, pausing only to remove critical items like housekeys, the water from the water bottle (the nozzle of which pops open in an underpressurized environment, much as, to my tremendous relief, my deafeningly plugged ears painlessly did as well), and a few select chemical supplements for my wellbeing.

(For the benefit of new readers: "chemical supplements for my wellbeing" can be parsed as "chocolate.")

And from that point, everything was according to plan. I was briefly concerned because I had only a few hundred pages left in my pulpy SF book for a one-hour flight and an hour or more of waiting, and I wondered if I should have snagged a backup book from the checked bag, but in the event I mostly snoozed anyway. I took a bus from the Copenhagen airport to my apartment. It didn't even start snowing in Copenhagen until the next day.

In summary: after a two-week vacation with friends and family in Portland, Los Angeles, and San Diego perfect in every way except for a bad cold and an excess of travel, I managed to visit Seattle and San Francisco as well. I was 30 hours late returning to Copenhagen and so missed the Monday Danish class and thus failed the Danish test (for which I studied almost daily - I have witnesses, much to their dismay), and combined with failing a test the first week and missing a test before the vacation since I was already in London, I have failed/missed enough tests that I have to retake the three-week Level 1 class. But I'm not alone: apparently enough other people failed that they are immediately scheduling a new three-week Level 1 evening class just for the repeat students, starting next week. I hope I get the same teacher.

And the backpack was delivered to the office only two days after I got home.

To get home (Copenhagen) from vacation (the west coast of the United States), I took a train from San Diego to Los Angeles, stayed with my grandmother in LA, and then went to LAX to catch a flight to San Francisco to connect to a London/Heathrow-bound flight, all on United Airlines, before tranferring by bus to London/Stansted for an easyJet flight home, a tedious trick that can save US$1000 in airfare at the expense of a few hours on a bus.

When I checked in at LAX, the flight was already expected to be 20 minutes late, so the automatic check-in machine told me to pick up the phone, where I talked to a lady who told me that I would probably miss my connection, but that she couldn't actually do anything about it, like reschedule me, until the missed connection became reality.

Since I had dutifully arrived at the airport 2 hours in advance, I wasn't keen on sitting in a lovely LAX departure lounge waiting, and waiting some more, for a probably missed connection. I contemplated going across the airport to Southwest in case they had an immediate flight to SF that I could catch on the spot, but ultimately decided not to bother.

We landed in SF over an hour late. The London flight was a few minutes late departing, but by the time I and five Manchester skateboard pseudo-punks (they basically looked like the Partridge family with wheels) had negotiated the terminal, waited for the shuttle bus, waited for the shuttle bus to make a four-point turn to go under the airport to the adjacent terminal that we could have walked to faster if, waited for the elevator up two floors because there weren't stairs, and dashed down the international terminal to the gate, the doors were closed (though the plane was still sitting at the gate).

Next followed a fairly tedious forty minutes at the United counter, where they rescheduled me on a British Airways flight to London at 6 pm the following day. Out of Seattle. And kindly booked me on United to Seattle the following day, and provided a hotel voucher.

I questioned the logic of leaving only two hours for the connection in Seattle, but ultimately shrugged, called Fram, and spent the night in Oakland. (Not technically Oakland, because Fram has moved from one hippie grad student group house south of Berkeley to another north of Berkeley, and now lives in one of the many enclaves in the Bay area named after a city in a different state or country (e.g., Dublin, Pittsburg) whose name I can't be bothered to recall, thought it might have shared phonemes with "Atherton".

As I prepared to decamp from the United counter, I asked if I could retrieve my backpack from the checked-luggage aether. The Customer Service Agent blanched. It was subtle, and a customer who was not being as thoroughly service as I was, or who on fewer medications, might have missed it as she launched into a passive-aggressive explanation of how that might or might not be possible or a good idea. But I saw the signals. I knew it was a Bad Idea.

And since the backpack contained only dirty clothes (hallmark of a precisely planned vacation, I submit) and I had anticipated luggage misfortune by transferring all essentials (especially my toiletry bag, now overstuffed with over-the-counter cold drugs) to the carry-on book bag, I smiled and said, no problem. I don't need it tonight. I just wore my increasingly ripe Apology Shirt for two days, doing my bit for world peace.

My stay in Oakland featured slightly chilly but sparklingly sunny weather, the lovely BART system (trains every 20 minutes. My combined wait time for two trips: 36 minutes), whose motto should be, "as good as European mass transit at twice the price," tasty Tibetan food with a trio of graduate student scientists-to-be (more on the subject of scientificism in a later posting), and, as I did roughly every other day for the last week of the trip, waking up in a state similar to death because my body had not received essential chemicals (pseudoephedrine, naproxen, ibuprofen, chocolate) since the previous night.

Re-drugged and further fortified by a bagel and cream cheese, I was returned to a BART station by the trustworthy Fram and his new Prius (like the Honda Civic Hybrid but with a dashboard map display so distracting you have to click a don't-sue-Toyota-when-you-crash license every time you turn it on.).

Boarding at SF was unproblematic, if you don't count the 45-minute wait to check in - going ticketless doesn't help if they make you miss your connection and then give you a paper ticket - or the minor incident in which I left a green Time magazine nylon bag at one end of the line, so I wouldn't have to kick it forward every few seconds. By the time I though better of the idea (did I mention the chewable anti-emetic that Jon introduced to my pharmaceutical collection I introduced to my internal chemistry that morning? Apparently the sum total of three different "non-drowsy" medications may in fact be drowsiness) and went back the 50 feet to get it, they were about to call the cops.

(Fans of the literary technique known as foreshadowing may be interested to know that I did make discreet inquiries at the San Francisco counter regarding my luggage, and recieved equally discreet assurances. And that I did the same, with similar effect, at the British Airways gate counter in Seattle.)

I would also like to mention that I watched several scenes of Moulin Rouge on the plane - it's still fantastic, engrossing, and affecting even when muffled and squeezed.

Oh, and this would probably also be the place to mention that the BA 747 out of Seattle sat at the gate for an hour and forty five minutes after they closed the door because a cargo door was stuck in the cold. (It was slightly below freezing.) It seems to be that, with four hundred people waiting in the plane, they could have had the factory up the street send down a guy with some WD-40 or something. It was amusing but not surprising to see that the British configuration for a 747 has no fewer than five distinct classes of service. I identified myself as traveling in Peon class whenever asked. I don't know exactly why but I strongly resent the formal fee-based division by class in public services. I hate the idea of toll express lanes, of First Class, luxury suites at the ballpark, and so on.

Everything went smoothly in London. It only took a few minutes to report my lost backpack at the British Airways desk. I was slightly confused when the bus ticket lady said I would "have to hurry" to catch the 3 pm bus to Stansted airport, since it was 2:50 pm and the bus stop was fifty yards away, but, unencumbered by my backpack, I was able to make the distance in the allotted time.

And so, after a lovely two-hour trip through the farm belt around London, watching the truck drivers drive their trucks down the wrong side of the road from the wrong side of their cabins, I reached Stansted, London-area hub of easyJet.

Since United has no agreements with easyJet, I had had to reschedule my easyJet connection to Copenhagen at my own expense: about US$80, and it's a close call in my opinion: whether it's less painful to reschedule via a web site where I can see all of my options but have to pay, from my laptop while sitting in a comfortable chair under the watchful eye of a kitty-cat, using Fram's wireless network, or to get rescheduled for free in a forty-minute standing session at a service desk with a harried woman who plans my itinerary in a phone conversation with an unheard cohort in which my actual existence is the least critical factor in the process.

easyJet enforces a 5kg limit for cabin carry-ons, so I had to check in my green nylon bag with 11 kilos of books, pausing only to remove critical items like housekeys, the water from the water bottle (the nozzle of which pops open in an underpressurized environment, much as, to my tremendous relief, my deafeningly plugged ears painlessly did as well), and a few select chemical supplements for my wellbeing.

(For the benefit of new readers: "chemical supplements for my wellbeing" can be parsed as "chocolate")

And from that point, everything was according to plan. I was briefly concerned because I had only a few hundred pages left in my pulpy SF book for a one-hour flight and an hour or more of waiting, and I wondered if I should have snagged a backup book from the checked bag, but in the event I mostly snoozed anyway. I took a bus from the Copenhagen airport to my apartment. It didn't even start snowing in Copenhagen until the next day.

In summary: after a two-week vacation with friends and family in Portland, Los Angeles, and San Diego perfect in every way except for a bad cold and an excess of travel, I managed to visit Seattle and San Francisco as well. I was 30 hours late returning to Copenhagen and so missed the Monday Danish class and thus failed the Danish test (for which I studied almost daily - I have witnesses, much to their dismay), and combined with failing a test the first week and missing a test before the vacation since I was already in London, I have failed/missed enough tests that I have to retake the three-week Level 1 class. But I'm not alone: apparently enough other people failed that they are immediately scheduling a new three-week Level 1 evening class just for the repeat students, starting next week. I hope I get the same teacher.

And the backpack was delivered to the office only two days after I got home.

They're both painfully aware that Danish bands have a reputation for sucking royally, but they're both proud of putting Denmark on the musical map. They're especially touchy about Sweden, the country that has been kicking Denmark's ass in the Scandinavian-rock game since Abba. "Swedes have a lot of self-confidence," Foo says. "In Denmark, there's a lack of self-confidence. Nobody's supposed to be better than anybody else. There's a saying: 'Don't rise above the noise.' That's why every Dane who's ever successful has to leave." So who do the Danes really hate? "The Germans," Foo says. "They invaded us in the Forties, so everybody still hates them. It sucks for the Germans, but you know, they fucked up."

"The French are assholes," Wagner adds.

"Every single one of them," Foo agrees. "Except Serge Gainsbourg. And Brigitte Bardot."