I need a paper newspaper in order to be happy eating breakfast. Take that as a given in this problem. I've been getting the New York Times, and aside from a few glitches delivery is very consistent, but pricey at $50/month. But I'm increasingly uncomfortable with the discrepency between the qualities that we all want to see in our "paper of record" and the reality (assorted scandals, cowardly political stance, lack of transparency; the fact that, in any article in which I know any details independently, the Times is often meaningfully incomplete or wrong). The naked elephant is that we are forced by our need to have a "paper of record" to pretend that these problems don't exist.

So I impulsively canceled the Times recently, prompted immediately by disgust over their unexplained one-year delay in printing the NSA spying store, but foundationally by my desire to try other papers.

The Washington Post has had a better record politically— you can read that as matching my personal biases, or as refusing to submit to political pressure and reporting important news as needed on a news bases— but I can't get it on paper here in San Diego. I am doing a free trial of the electronic edition, which is access to a PDF-style image of each page, but it's not satisfactory. Even the biggest size is uncomfortably small, it's slow, and the email announcing it's available usually comes after noon.

The San Diego Union Tribune is a lower-quality regional paper. It runs a lot of wire stories, has shoddy local reporting, a history of incompetent family management, and a strong pro-military, jingoistic bias. It's not an option.

The last option would seem to be the LA Times. But they recently fired Michael Kinsley, who despite a tendency to silliness had a correctly placed heart. To wit, his failed Wiki experiment at least demonstrated his understanding that, in the world of the internet, newspapers will have a role closer to that of trusted arbiter than to news-gatherer. The new guy is a cipher, and they fired a number of long-term quality Op-Ed columnists and brought in some jokers. The A section is usually 30+ pages long, but most of those pages have either one-eight-page bit of editorial content or a full-page ad. Seriously. That's not an exaggeration.

The LA Weekly frequently has better local and statewide journalism than the LA Times, and always has better cultural material, and used to have my favorite movie critic (Mahnola Dargis, who jumped to the LA Times and then to the NY Times, where she is now), but is a weekly, not a daily. The SD Reader is usually two to three pages of halfway readable editorial content and then a few semi-literate features and columnists, reprints, and hundreds of ads for plastic surgery. The only thing I like about it is the reviews of churches, complete with four-star system and breakdown of sermon, liturgy, snacks, architecture, etc.

So I'm stuck. Probably I'll just go crawling back to the NY Times for my dead tree fix, but I won't like it.

Today's good news:

The Senate blocked an attempt to open an Alaska wildlife refuge to oil drilling Wednesday, foiling an attempt by drilling backers to force the measure through Congress as part of a must-have defense spending bill. It was a stinging defeat for Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska ...—AP Wire

Today's good news:

Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District is a major victory for science and a major blow to those who have tried to sneak religion into the classroom by disguising in scientific garb. But it’s more than that. It is a brilliant, insightful, profound decision that reaches to the bottom of ID and finds it empty.—Timothy Sandefur

Today's good news:

The Senate on Friday rejected attempts to reauthorize several provisions of the USA Patriot Act as infringing too much on Americans' privacy, dealing a major defeat to President Bush and Republican leaders.

In a crucial vote Friday morning as Congress raced toward adjournment, the bill's Senate supporters were not able to garner the 60 votes necessary to overcome a threatened filibuster by Sens. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and their allies. The final vote was 52-47.—Associated Press

The joy in these recent small steps away from torture, gulags, and police state powers is tempered, by the horror that our government has been engaging in these very un-American activities in our name, by the fact that so many officials make parody-proof statements like:

The failure to renew the provisions would be "interpreted by our enemies as somehow inviting or even enabling further terrorist attacks on U.S. soil," Sen. Orrin Hatch (news, bio, voting record), R-Utah, said. ... "In the war on terror, we cannot afford to be without these vital tools for a single moment," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said earlier today before the Senate vote.

In the future I'll try to highlight good news that doesn't have such a dark side.

Today's good news:

The Senate is poised to approve a measure that would require the Bush administration to provide Congress with its most specific and extensive accounting about the secret prison system established by the Central Intelligence Agency to house terrorism suspects. —NY Times

In an uncharacteristic burst of non-stupidity, the Department of Homeland Security wants to allow small blades back on airplanes. Naturally, this causes consternation among people who don't understand what security means:

"It's not about scissors, it's about bombs," Mr. Hawley testified. "Sorting through thousands of bags a day at two or three minutes apiece to sort out small scissors and tools does not help security. It hurts it."

Weighing the risk of small scissors and tools against that of bombs, he said, "If you do the analysis, it is not even close."

But the committee chairman, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, said he found that logic "difficult to follow." Mr. Stevens proposed instead that the security agency reduce the number of bags that passengers may carry on board to one from two, giving the screeners fewer items to handle.

You will note two problems with Stevens' response. One is that he finds fairly rudimentary logic—should airplane security spend limited resources on bombs or on scissors?—hard to follow. The second is a more subtle but very common mistake. For a resource to be secure, not only must unauthorized not be able to access it, but authorized people must be able to access it. If it's "secure" even from the person who's supposed to use it, it's not really secure. Denial of service is a security attack. Self-inflicted denial of service is probably the biggest security attack in the world: think about the times you've lost your keys or forgotten your passwords. Stevens' solution allows screeners to check for both scissors and bombs (one of those two checks is worthless), but prevents passengers from having two carryons. Carry-ons are part of the service; fewer carry-ons amounts to a denial of service. Thanks, Ted. Though I guess in his world we are all driving across his bridges rather than flying in planes.

The only other senator at the hearing, Daniel K. Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii, said; "I could understand if some man or woman would want to bring on a knitting needle. I've seen a lot of ladies knitting. But I've yet to see someone cut paper dolls on the plane."

Perhaps Inouye stays in a private curtained booth, and is unfamiliar with the Swiss Army knife and Leatherman. And he probably hasn't seen this.

In other, similarly themed news:

[San Jose] officials said Thursday they were shocked to learn that Emerald Hills Golfland, a three-acre theme park with two miniature golf courses, had been placed on a Homeland Security watch list.

"The moment we realized it was on the list, it was taken off," said San Jose police officer Rubens Dalaison, who handles "critical infrastructure assessment" for the department. "I myself took it off."

But the list remains secret, and even San Jose Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, who is the ranking minority member of a House subcommittee on terrorism risk assessment, said she did not know whether it is still listed. —Associated Press

Lothar Matthaus has denied an Italian television report that he manipulated balls during Friday's World Cup draw. ... The television channel claimed prepared hot and cold balls allowed Matthaus to know who he was picking.

I continue to be very pleased with my Ultimate Ears headphones. Today I was listening to Will Wright talk about game design—very interesting but maddening not to see the slides—and a plane flew about 300 feet overhead on final approach to Lindbergh. I didn't miss a word.

In other news, I passed a thousand miles on the new bicycle I bought in January. Next year's goal is, I guess, two thousand miles.

Today's good news is superficially pretty technical: "Core KDE developer George Staikos recently hosted a meeting of the security developers from the leading web browsers. The aim was to come up with future plans to combat the security risks posed by phishing, ageing encryption ciphers and inconsistent SSL Certificate practise." But this is interesting not just because it may help improve internet security, and not just because it is a bit of much-needed cooperation between competitors, but also because of how open the process is becoming. You can even read a narrative of the event from the Microsoft developer's perspective.

I know that Frank and Gerv from Mozilla, George from Konqueror and Yngve and Carsten from Opera have their own thoughts for an improved certificate standard and how they would handle that in the user experience.

I wish we could promise you that you will see this experience in IE7 and its equivalent in other browsers but there are a lot of details to work out before browsers can differentiate SSL sites based on how well vetted they are. For this to work, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera and Konqueror, amongst others, think there should be some common validation guidelines for rigorous website identification. There is a lot of preliminary agreement but also a lot of work to do. The American Bar Association Information Security Committee is providing a forum to pursue this. You can check back with us and other browsers to see how the process moves along.

—Microsoft developer Rob Franco

It's easy for me to take this in stride, especially since I wasn't paying much attention to commercial software development processes in the seventies and eighties, but the openness and access that the internet is providing is really something out of science fiction.

Baseball has a tradition of rule continuity, and there have not been many substantive changes in the last hundred years. Some of the rules are a bit complicated, like the infield fly rule, and the rulebook isn't particularly well written, but it's pretty straightforward. It's the rules outside the white lines that are tricky:

If a player with at least five years of major-league service is traded in the middle of a multi-year contract, he has the right to demand a trade after the season. If the player so chooses, he can also identify as many as six teams to which he will not accept a trade. Notice of the trade demand must be given within the 15-day period beginning on October 15 (or the day following the last game of the World Series, whichever is later). ...

The player's club has until March 15 to trade him, and if they fail to do so, the remaining years on the player's multi-year contract are voided and he becomes a free agent. Any club signing such a player does so without regard to either the compensation requirement of the CBA (which requires draft pick compensation to clubs that lose Type A, B or C free agents) or the quota provisions (which limits the number of Type A and B free-agent signings allowed to each club in years with few free agents)....

I guess labor negotiations can have that effect.

... a rare defeat for Republican leaders as well as the White House as 22 Republicans teamed up with Democrats on Thursday to kill a major health and education spending measure. The 224-to-209 rejection of the $142.5 billion in spending on an array of social programs was the first time since the early days of the Republican takeover of the House a decade ago that the majority had come out on the losing end of such a vote. ...

In rebelling against the spending measure, Democrats and some Republicans said it fell woefully short of fulfilling federal commitments.

They pointed, for example, to $900 million in health care cuts that took a toll on the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and on rural health care. They opposed the elimination of $8 billion to prepare for a potential flu pandemic. And they pointed to a provision that would strip money from a variety of popular education programs and leave Pell Grants to college students frozen, as part of the first reduction in education spending in a decade.

—New York Times

Note that this is good news because my values are being expressed in Congress, not because "my side" won a fight.

Applying for a promotion in the Reagan administration 20 years ago, Samuel A. Alito Jr. described himself as a thoroughgoing conservative "particularly proud" of contributing to cases arguing "that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion. —New York Times

[Alito] tried to play down the importance of the 1985 job application as he met with senators, including two prominent Democrats on the Judiciary Committee.

"He said first of all it was different then," said one of the two, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California. "He said, 'I was an advocate seeking a job, it was a political job and that was 1985. I'm now a judge. I've been on the circuit court for 15 years, and it's very different. I'm not an advocate; I don't give heed to my personal views. What I do is interpret the law.' "

...

"And so I asked him, 'Why shouldn't we consider the answers that you're giving today an application for another job?' " Mr. Kennedy said.
—New York Times

I've decided to feature one piece of good news every morning. Here's the first installment:

Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed a bill Tuesday meant to provide comprehensive health coverage for every uninsured child in Illinois. —Chicago Tribune

Swiss Seize Russian-Owned Art to Settle an Old Debt

By REUTERS
Published: November 16, 2005

MOSCOW, Nov 16 (Reuters) - Russian authorities alleged on Wednesday priceless artworks from a Moscow museum had been impounded in Switzerland, apparently at the request of a Swiss firm that has long claimed repayment of debts from Russia.

[...]

Noga, a trading company, has in the past caused the temporary seizure of a ship, warplanes and diplomatic property in a series of bids to secure payment of debts linked to deals for the supply of food in exchange for oil in 1991-2. It has demanded immediate payment of $63 million.

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-switzerland-russia.html?hp&ex=1132203600&en=abbcfdc97099a0fa&ei=5094&partner=homepage

After all my complaints about things, I felt I should highlight a success. My Kinesis keyboard started acting funny. Actually, it has a few minor problems: the Escape key doesn't always register, and sometimes it goes into caps-lock mode when I press one of the keys in the vicinity of caps-lock. But this was a new and more serious problem: the r key went wonky. When I pressed it, I got somewhere between zero and about five r's. I cleaned it up and the problem persisted. I started to panic. I emailed their support line and got an answer in less than an hour, to try a hard reset. I did that; it didn't fix the problem, but did force me to figure out how to restore my customizations (this time I wrote it down). So I called, and they asked if it was under warrantee. "Maybe." The serial number was worn off, because I type with the keyboard in my lap, but they were able to look it up based on the purchaser, even though that wasn't me. (Thanks, Lars!) It was about 19 months old, and so still covered, so they sent me a replacement unit for the right keywell free of charge ($35 + shipping otherwise). The next day, the r key mysteriously worked fine, but the arrow keys stopped working. A hard blow to the case made that problem go away, and it's been fine since. The replacement part showed up a few days later, but until more problems crop up I won't disassemble the keyboard to use it. Still, it's a nice security blanket, and great service from Kinesis.

I also picked up some new headphones to replace the uncomfortable and defective iPod earphones. Most of my listening is in one of two situations: on my bicycle, where I listen to books on tape but only with my right ear; or on the train, where I want to drown out the cell phone conversations, redundant announcments, and snoring. I ended up at the bottom end of the in-canal products, the Ultimate Ears Super.fi 3. Ear canal headphones get put inside your ear like an earplug, and block out all of the other sound, like an earplug. The two big brands are Shure and Ultimate Ears. You can spend up to $900 on these, and if you go above $200 you have to get custom molds from an audiologist. The pair I got is $100, and they work exactly as well as I imagined. When I got them, I opened them up, read the instructions to figure out how to get them in my ears, plugged in the iPod, turned the volume way down, went out to the balcony, started the music, and got a big big grin on my face. The sound quality is excellent, both because the earphones are very high-quality and because they block out other sound. I was able to hear for the first time the electrical noise in the iPod circuits, a squealing and hissing when it's on but nothing's playing.

So far, the only problems I've found are inherent in the design:

• They get a bit uncomfortable after 30 minutes or an hour, just like earplugs do. They are more comfortable than the iPod buds, though.
• Even if you stop the music, you can't hear very well unless you remove them from your ears.
• Bumps and scrapes along the cord, such as when you turn your head, get transmitted into your ears.
• If you are walking, especially on pavement, the thud-thud of your tread is very noticable. I suspect this would be much worse for jogging, though on a bicycle they are okay.

In case you missed the diplomatic incident between fictional Kazakhstan reported Borat and the real government of Kazakhstan, and you missed the MTV Europe music awards that ignited the feud, here are some of Borat's comments:

At the press conference
"My 13-year-old son is travelling here by foot, with his two wives and his three childrens." "If he survives the journey I have promised him that he can make penetration with Colombian prostitute Shakira."

In interview with the BBC
"Unfortunately my wife was unable to leave Kazakhstan as she is a woman... this is a good news, she is a boring. High Five!!!"

To finish the show
"To the world, I love you! Apart from Uzbekistan. Assholes."

All eight Dover, Pennsylvania school board members up for re-election have been booted out after introducing intelligent design to the science classroom. In their place are a number of those who campaigned against the policy.

...

Meanwhile in Kansas, the Board of Education has voted to make the teaching of the principles of intelligent design mandatory.

In an internal memorandum, Microsoft employees were told not to use the term Dzongkha in any Microsoft software, language lists or promotional materials since "Doing so implies affiliation with the Dalai Lama, which is not acceptable to the government of China. In this instance, replace "Dzongkha" with 'Tibetan - Bhutan'."—Tibet News

This came as a surprise to Bhutanese officials who expected an official “Dzongkha” support when a UK-based company called the Orient Foundation took up the task in 1998. ... [Orient Foundation president] Mr. Coleman proposed to the then Dzongkha Development Commission that the Orient Foundation would develop the Unicode system for Dzongkha and help incorporate the Unicode into the Windows Vista. ... The government paid US$ 250,000 and, with the Orient Foundation reportedly unable to pay its share, the Swiss Development Corporation contributed US$ 175,000. The Orient Foundation eventually contributed US$ 14,000.

All the funds were paid to the Orient Foundation.

The final cost of the project was billed at about US$ 523,000. Many observers believe that the project was greatly overpriced.

—Kuensel online

So your goverment pays (through a larcenous, mercenary middleman) Microsoft to add support to your language, which will enable you to, well, to pay Microsoft for their product, and then Microsoft disrespects your culture in order to stay on China's good side. This is exactly the kind of thing that keeps me so committed to working in and with free software.

The story of Er and Onan, among others, with Lego illustrations. Warning: contains Lego nudity.

Analyzing a game like last night's really gives me a sense of the outer boundaries of performance analysis. We can look at players' performance records and approximate their talent levels and get a sense of what to expect over a given time frame. On a single night in October, though, the analysis breaks down and you're left with 50 guys playing a game of baseball. There's no tool in our box that's going to tell you what will happen.

... [Was] I was surprised that Roy Oswalt was so ineffective last night ... The answer is, "no." I know, and the people who do this kind of analysis know, that players aren't "stat-generating robots," .... Just because Oswalt had an ERA of 2.94 doesn't mean he'll allow two runs in 6 2/3 innings each time out. Just because he'd been very good in his last three starts doesn't mean he'll be good in his next one. Player performances oscillate around a mean, that mean being their performance record, and some nights are going to be much worse than others.

What is grating is for people like me to know this, and for Phil Garner to act as if he doesn't. Oswalt scuffled from the start last night, lacking the movement on his fastball and the location on his breaking ball that he'd shown in three previous postseason starts. That he didn't allow any runs in the first four innings was misleading at best, dangerous at worst; Garner may have been lulled into a false sense of confidence based on the zeroes on the scoreboard--the stats--rather than what was obvious to anyone with two eyes.

So when the White Sox started beating Oswalt like a pinata in the fifth, Garner should have been prepared. [...] Instead, he let the Sox pile up six hits, a walk, a hit batsman and five runs without ever making a switch.

Then Oswalt went back out for the sixth, and I officially gave up on Phil Garner. Forget that Oswalt got through the inning unscathed; Garner didn't do his job last night, which is to give his team the best chance to win the game. In the fifth, Oswalt wasn't the best pitcher available, and Garner needed to recognize that and make a move. A label of "ace" doesn't actually get guys out, and Oswalt doesn't get to throw his strikeout rate and groundball/flyball ratio at hitters. Garner was looking for a stat line last night, and what he got was a human being.

[...]

The one guy I would hope doesn't come in for too much criticism is Ezequiel Astacio, who officially took the loss. I submit that using him in the 14th inning of a tied World Series game violates his warranty pretty thoroughly, given that his career consists of 81 innings with a 5.67 ERA and 23 home runs allowed. —Joe Sheehan, Baseball Prospectus

By and large, I am happy with my iPod Shuffle. But I do want to mention the following annoying problems:

• After the Shuffle is turned on, it takes about four seconds before it responds to any buttons.
• It's hard to slide the off/on/shuffle button to on without slipping past to shuffle.
• The earphones that came with mine have developed buzzing noises. First it was only the left, which was not too bad because I usually listen on my bicycle, with only the right earbud in. But now it's both.
• If you turn it off, it loses your place within a track.
• When you add new files, it loses your place.
• If you leave it on for a long time, it sometimes becomes unresponsive and must be turned off and back on. This operation usually makes it lose your place.
• The battery condition light sometimes doesn't respond. When it does, the green looks yellow to me.
• It's not suitable for listening to long tracks. The fast-forward is slow, and if your finger slips you can easily lose your place and have to start over.
• Rewind stops at the beginning of a track, so you cannot rewind to something late in the previous track.

I listen to Harry Shearer's Sunday morning radio program Le Show religiously, albeit by podcast on Monday or Wednesday. I've subjected many people to the episode of "Dick Cheney Confidential" from this July 2005 show, and as the Plame investigation proceeds, it remains both astoundingly funny and astoundingly prescient.

Cheney: If Fitzgerald can collar Judy, maybe nobody's safe, below, you know, a certain level. Maybe nobody can resist the pressure to crack. Maybe nobody can stick to the agreed upon testimony already given to the grand jury. Under oath. Under penalty—

Libby: Sir, I-I really don't need to come three dozen feet underground to get a lecture on the disadvantages of a felony perjury conviction. Obviously my representatives and I crafted some wiggle room into my testimony; otherwise I'd have, well, less leverage than Salman Rushdie in Mecca.

Cheney: Leverage? With the prosecutor? Scooter, why would a person want leverage if said person weren't planning at some point to attempt to ... leverage it?

Libby: Look, if everybody's still on the same page, you can rest assured that I'm going to be on the same page too, right there with them. On that page.

Cheney: No, if you're talking about the "who told Judy Miller, who told Karl Rove, who told Matt Cooper" page, that's a very good page to be on. That's a page that doesn't mention any constitutional officers, and speaking as someone who took an oath to uphold that constitution, I'd say that's a page you definitely want to be on.

Libby: Well—

Cheney: —and if anybody tried to pressure to get off that page, to get on some other page—

Libby: Sir, sir, straight ahead?

Cheney: Mmm-hmm.

Libby: Working for you, I, I face more pressure every day.

Cheney: I appreciate that.

Libby: But now, on the other hand, if other people in that equation decide to visit their testimony, or lack thereofe, that's obviously when old man leverage may have to roll up his sleeves—

Cheney: Oh, Scooter, spare me the homespun metaphors. I get enough of those from the Bush lad. Here's the deal, and by that I don't mean to imply that there'll be any dealing. Director of Central Intelligence has taken a bullet for us. I don't think you can do any less. Being convicted of a felony hasn't hurt Ollie North's career any. And doing five years of soft time may have helped G. Gordon Liddy's later prospects.

Libby: I-I-I-I won't be in as nice a facility as Judy Miller.

Cheney: You'll be in a fine faciility

Libby: There won't be women in it.

Cheney: We've done harder things, my friend. Don't forget, we brought democracy to the middle east. That ain't bean-bagging.

Libby: No, I-I-I

Cheney: I'm telling you something you already know. You go the other direction, that way lies Paul O'Neil country, only after it's been nuked. Karl's already signed off on that, and it's just a matter of time before the president is brought into the discussion.

Libby: Mister Vice President, I'm uh, I'm a little taken aback, uh, I don't think in all the time I've worked for you, you've ever come remotely close to uh, to threatening me.

Cheney: No, you're correct. First time I've had to. You can let yourself out. Of the residence.

If you have trouble with the Real Media stream, ask me for the podcast mp3. (As far as I'm concerned, the popularity of podcasts is due solely about the convenience of the downloadable, unencumbered mp3 format, as compared to the awful, incompatible, limited streams in Real or Windows Media formats. We should have had podcasting in the last 1990s, and the only reason we didn't was the fear and loathing of the content providers. When regular people started to become content providers en masse, and they were willing to make their content available simply and freely, what a surprise - it took off! Downloads rule, streams suck.)

A lawyer for the defense is cross-examining witness Barbara Forrest, who has testified about the history of intelligent design.

Q. You're also a member of the Americans United for Separation of Church and State, are you not?

A. I am.

[...]

Q. And how long have you been a dues paying member?

A. [...] I can't remember. I've been on the National Advisory Council for several years, although, maybe since 2001.

Q. You've been on the National Advisory Council since 2001?

A. That's about right.

Q. What does the National Advisory Council do?

A. As far as I've been on it, we haven't done anything.

Q. Good.

We are ... engaged in a vast, shambling and tragic occupation of Iraq, the nominal aim of which is to create a secular, rule-of-law-based democracy which would end the cycle of repression, fanaticism and violence which spilled onto America's shores four years ago.

At the same time, President Bush argues for Miers' confirmation neither on the basis of her 'judicial temperament' nor her judicial philosophy or ideology but because she is a staunch evangelical Christian.

The fact that many of the president's more theocratic supporters don't seem to believe him just adds a level of irony or entertainment for those of us still holding out for the Enlightenment tradition. —Josh Marshall

In this transcript from the Dover evolution trial, the plaintiffs' witness is a scientist testifying about the definition and meaning of intelligent design. Mr. Walczak is an attorney for the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs are the parents suing to block the addition of intelligent design to the school curriculum. "THE COURT" refers to the judge.

[Witness]: Now the prediction that is made by Dr. Behe in his book is extremely straight forward, which is, since this was an irreducibly complex machine, and we've taken away most of its parts, what's left behind should be non-functional because, you remember, he wrote, any pre-cursor to an irreducibly complex machine that is missing a part is, by definition, non-functional. This [diagram of a flagellum] is missing 30 parts.

Next slide. Well, it turns out that what is actually left behind when we take those parts away is a little structure with those 10 parts, which is known to microbiologists as the type III secretory system. And I can see, Mr. Walczak, you're saying, why, of course, it's the type III secretory system.

THE COURT: That certainly was on my mind.

—Sep 26 afternoon session, p. 18 of the transcript

What if our fiscally clueless president really does keep spending at a rate that far exceeds what our government can take in at these low tax rates? What happens if the president's acolytes and the Pollyannas in Treasury keep believing that we can grow our way, fairy-tale-like, out of this jam? You can bet that when you cash out your nest egg of nice U.S.-based mutual funds and solid common stocks, your dollars will fit nicely into a wheelbarrow designed specifically to cart worthless currency to the bank.

Or you can take matters into your own hands and build a portfolio around these five imminent-Bush-disaster stocks. Be the first on your block to immunize yourself against what may turn out to be the most financially reckless president in history with these anti-inflation equities designed to profit from our president's unbelievably foolish Panglossian profligacy.

—New York magazine

Sir Richard Mottram ... is to take on the key job of the prime minister's top security and intelligence adviser. ...

He was permanent secretary at the Department of Transport when, on September 11 2001, Jo Moore, an aide to Stephen Byers, then secretary of state, told officials in an email that it would be "a very good day" to "get out anything we want to bury" ...

Mr Byers, who did later resign, gave a confusing account in the Commons about what had gone on. Sir Richard put it more succinctly. He is said to have told a colleague: "We're all fucked. I'm fucked. You're fucked. The whole department's fucked. It's been the biggest cock-up ever and we're all completely fucked."

—The Guardian

But what I really want to know is: Why is it always three strikes and you're out? Why isn't it ever two or four? Does it really make sense to base a whole law-enforcement philosophy on the rules of an athletic contest?

In 1887 baseball experimented with requiring four strikes for a strikeout. What if that had stuck? First of all, that song would be harder to sing -- "for it's one, two-three, four strikes you're out ..."

But more important, would law-and-order types be a third more lenient toward repeat offenders? Would our national sense of the proper blend of punishment and second chances be governed by the saying "four strikes and you're out"?

What if track were the national pastime? Would states be passing "two false starts and you're disqualified" laws that locked up second offenders for life? Or if football had developed earlier and become the American game a century before it did, would legislatures have debated "four downs and you're punted" bills?—King Kaufman, Salon

This is the blog post about John Roberts' confirmation hearing, and because it is the blog post about John Roberts' confirmation hearing, it will be devoid of content, it will not have any links to anything concrete, it will be circular in logic because it is the blog post about John Roberts' confirmation hearing ...
—--The Rude Pundit

I've been trying to take a Chinese class for a while. This spring I noticed a language school downtown, less than a mile from my apartment, so I called and found out that, while they don't usually have Mandarin classes (mostly they teach English), they had a recent burst of interest and I might be the necessary fourth person in a new class.

Three months of intermittently returned phone calls later, as fall classes loomed at the local schools, I started looking around. San Diego State University and UC San Diego offer Chinese classes daily. SDSU's runs from noon to 12:50. Either involves at least an hour of bicycling each way; neither route is especially appealing, nor is the idea of travelling over two hours a day for less than one hour of class. Mesa College, a community college, is only 7 miles away and offers twice-a-week classes from 6:30 pm to 8:50 pm.

I almost rejected the idea, not wanting to spend hours a week on my bicycle going to and from class. Then I realized that the concept of rejected the commuting and class time in order to keep my schedule clear was incompatible with my key goals for this year: learning Chinese and exercising more. So I rode over to the college to drop off a signed enrollment form and try out the ride. Mesa College, oddly enough, is on a mesa. The problem is that I live on a different mesa. So it's uphill both ways, but still only a 35 minute ride, reasonably free of nasty traffic.

I ended up having to do some faxing as part of my enrollment. I don't have a FAX machine, and I didn't feel like running over to Kinko's, so I signed up for an online fax program. I actually did this months ago; first I tried to get Yahoo's fax service, but after a deranged amount of trouble trying to recover my secure password I gave up and went with eFax because they were at the top of the search results. I never actually used it that time, and forgot to cancel, and so they made off with $13/month for two months of nothing.

This time I looked at a longer list, and tried Innoport. After signing up, I got an email saying that it would take between a few minutes and a day to verify my information and open my account. I waited half an hour and, when nothing happened, wrote an email back asking them to cancel the signup. Then I signed up with efax, which took about a minute, uploaded a document, and faxed it. No problem.

When I got a fax back the next day, problems started. After flailing around for a few minutes, I figured out how to download the fax. As a .efx file, which is apparently a proprietary format of eFax. Which requires a Windows-only program to decode. Not cool. I was in a rush, so I fired up the Windows partition on my laptop, installed the software, and managed to extract my fax.

The next day, I was done with my faxing needs for the time being, so I went to cancel my eFax account. This is when it got ugly. There are no links to cancel from the eFax pages; I had to search for "cancel" to discover that you have to have an online chat with a customer service drone in order to cancel. This is when I remembered going through this the first time and started hitting myself on the head. Excerpts from the chat:

jaufrec: Hello. I would like to cancel my eFax account ...
Dennis Godair: Thank you for the information. I am sorry to hear that you wish to cancel. May I ask why you are cancelling your fax account?
jaufrec: because you require a windows client to view faxes
jaufrec: and because your cancel process is unnecessarily difficult
Dennis Godair: we have an exclusive offer for you. If you wish to keep this account, then you can avail a one time offer on this account. You can keep this account at a nominal non refundable rate of $6.95 for the next 90 days instead of paying $12.95 every month, as such saving $31.89 over a period of 90 days.
jaufrec: please cancel my account
Dennis Godair: I surely understand your decision to cancel, but, this is a very good offer and you will be paying around only $2.31 per month as monthly fee during this period. You will need to contact us just once by the end of this period to let us know whether you wish to continue or not. There is certainly no obligation to stay back after this period if you do not wish to.
jaufrec: please cancel my account
jaufrec: is there actually a human being present?
Dennis Godair: Okay. I will cancel your account with immediate effect.
Dennis Godair: I'm sorry that you are leaving eFax. At eFax, we are continuously improving our products and services. Please do consider us if your faxing needs should change in the future.

So much for eFax. Meanwhile, a full eight days after I aborted my signup for Innoport, I got this email:

After further review, we have determined that we will have to decline activation for this innoport account with the billing information provided during the sign up process. Please be advised that the credit card entered has not been charged. [...]

So, obviously, a big thumbs down and avoid-at-all-costs warning for both eFax and Innoport. Innoport in particular was so bad and weird that I am keeping an eye on my bank statement in case they are just a front for identify theft or something. eFax I'm thinking is just maliciously greedy and stupid.

The CBC television network is showing Canadian Football League games without announcers.

It's not some bold experiment, the way a similar move by NBC was 25 years ago. It's the CBC reacting to a bad situation it created itself when it locked out 5,500 camera operators, directors and announcers who are members of the Canadian Media Guild.

Still, a good idea is a good idea, even if it happens by accident.

... make no mistake: We'll never have the chance to get used to such a thing. Announcers aren't there to provide insight and analysis or to identify players and describe action. They're required to do all those things, and we judge them on how well they do them.

But their primary purpose is to read promos. The networks and sponsors aren't giving that up. We're stuck with announcers for as long as we're stuck with money.—King Kaufmann, Salon

August 18th, 2005 - a milestone in the history of the State of Israel.

This was the day on which the settlement enterprise in this country went into reverse for the first time.

...

At the beginning of the settlement activity, during one of my clashes with Golda Meir in the Knesset, I told her: "Every settlement is a land-mine on the road to peace. In due course you will have to remove these mines. And let me tell you, Ma'am, as a former soldier, that the removal of mines is a very unpleasant job indeed."

If I am angry, profoundly sad and frustrated today, it is because of the price we all have paid for this monstrous "enterprise". The thousands killed because of it, Israelis and Palestinians. The hundreds of billions of Shekels poured down the drain. The moral decline of our state, the creeping brutalization, the postponement of peace for dozens of years. Anger with the demagogues of all stripes that started and continued this March of Folly, out of stupidity, blindness, greed, intoxication with power or sheer cynicism. Anger over the suffering and destruction wrought on the Palestinians, whose land and water were stolen, whose houses were destroyed and whose trees were uprooted - all for the "security" of these settlements.

... the settlers had lost the crucial battle for public opinion when their real purpose was revealed: to impose by force a faith-based, messianic, racist, violent, xenophobic regime, with its back to the world at large.

But most importantly, this was the day when a new chance was born for achieving peace in this tortured land.

A great opportunity. Because the Israeli democracy has won a resounding victory. Because it has been proven that settlements can be dismantled without the sky falling. Because the Palestinians have a leadership that wants peace. Because it has been proven that even the radical Palestinian organizations hold their fire when Palestinian public opinion demands it. —Uri Avnery

Eric Berkowitz provides over 7000 words about the history of mass transit in Los Angeles. I trim it down to 1300 for you:

In this saga of missed opportunities and conscious denial, some of the most progressive faces in local politics have hindered, rather than led, the charge for traffic relief. To placate his wealthy constituents' fears of "those people" riding trains into their neighborhoods, powerful Westside Congressman Henry Waxman stopped the subway at Western Avenue, blaming his lack of support for a Wilshire Boulevard subway on fears of another methane fire.

...In the aftermath of the Watts riots in 1965, the governor's commission pinned some of the blame on the area’s poor public transportation, which it said "had a major influence in creating a sense of isolation, with its resultant frustrations."

Inadequate transportation would be both a cause and an effect of the riots. One of the chief byproducts of the unrest was the embrace by the wealthy and white middle class of the city's de facto segregation. Whether it's called NIMBYism, racism or neighborhood preservation, a lot of people were in no mood after the riots to make it easy to come to the Westside from East and South L.A.

... It would take 12 years of rising gas prices and increasing congestion before voters would sign on to regional mass transit, and a much more modest plan. ... With Hahn’s passionate support, Proposition A passed in 1980, setting a half-cent sales tax to help pay for a regional transit system. The plan that accompanied the initiative showed 10 transit corridors, with the Wilshire subway line the "cornerstone" ... Nevertheless, Hahn made sure his district got the first dollars for a light-rail line on the old Long Beach Red Car route. It "was my baby," he said. "I said that line has to go first because I wrote Prop. A." The Blue Line, as it is called, is now the most heavily used light-rail line in the country, carrying more than 75,000 riders a day.

... A 1985 city task force on the explosion marked 400 square blocks straddling Wilshire in [Waxman's] district as a "methane zone." The task force didn’t address tunneling safety or the fact that much of L.A. is also a methane zone. But Waxman didn’t fuss with such details. He had enough to stop the subway, or at least keep it from coming west. ... No matter that diverting the subway meant trashing $150 million in plans and years of delay, or that the detoured subway would still run into underground gas, or that a straight shot down Wilshire made the most sense. Waxman had kept alien invasions out of his district. In what became known as the Waxman-Dixon compromise, federal funding remains barred if the subway crosses the methane zone.

... With all the traffic, the Wilshire "Rapid" bus generally goes a pathetic 14 mph, which is still such an improvement over the local that bus ridership has gone up 40 percent. Considering that half of the area's other major bus lines cross Wilshire (generating about 60,000 daily transfers), there is a huge demand for fast, high-capacity rail transit that’s being ignored.

In 1993, the public learned that more than 2,000 feet of subway tunnel wall, built by well-connected contractor Tutor-Saliba Perini, was about half the required thickness. At the same time, government investigations into construction fraud and bribery were getting a lot of public attention. So was the agency's practice of paying contractors millions of dollars to fix their own screwups, and additional millions to the consultants who oversaw the faulty work. ... Just as the mismanagement of subway construction came into stark relief, the reconstituted MTA moved into a new downtown headquarters building — nicknamed the Taj Mahal — that was so plush and overbuilt it looked like a pile of graft. Bitter rancor among MTA board members, and the giving of contracts to friends of MTA officials, didn't help the agency’s image.

If it were just a question of mismanagement or corruption, the subway wouldn't differ from any other sleazy government project. But a small group of activists calling itself the Bus Riders Union re-introduced racial politics into the transit debate in the mid-1990s. ... the BRU [was] the brainchild of '60s veteran Eric Mann — an activist who knew a lot more about Maoist theory than traffic patterns. Though the BRU's stated goal was to create a more equitable transit system that would favor lower-class bus riders over more middle-class train commuters, its founder saw the fight over transit as little more than a skirmish in his grander vision of socialist revolution.

"Few of us would do all this work . . . if the struggle was only about buses," Mann wrote when he formed the BRU, in 1993. "We quickly became excited about the positive 'objective conditions' that buses provided for organizing," Mann wrote. "Public transport is one of the few remaining public spaces over which there can be effective contestation."

When the MTA announced a bus-fare increase in 1994, the BRU filed a federal civil rights lawsuit charging that the entire transit system was racist and demanding that more resources go to buses instead of rail projects.

After two years of bruising litigation and $7 million in attorneys' fees (some to Riordan's old law firm, which represented the MTA), Riordan capitulated to the BRU and signed a 10-year consent decree committing the MTA to improve bus service and reduce overcrowding.

... While the special master has ordered a one-third increase in the size of the bus fleet, "the actual number of people we carry on the bus has remained flat," said MTA CEO Roger Snoble.

Patsaouras was blunt: "Riordan is an ignoramus. Riordan fucked it up with the consent decree."

... From 2002 to 2004, Mann and his wife, Lian Hurst Mann, a project director with the Labor/Community Strategy Center, were paid an average combined salary and deferred compensation of $204,500 a year. Half of the Metro Rail riders — the ones Mann says are too well-heeled to deserve transit dollars — have family incomes of less than $25,000.

... The Red Line’s extension to the Valley was completed in 2000. Jagged as a gerrymandered congressional district, and carrying a milelong spur from Vermont to Western, the $4.7 billion line is the most expensive 17 miles of subway ever built.

Since then, the MTA has opened the light-rail Gold Line from downtown to Pasadena and is at work on a "Gold Line Extension" to East L.A. Another extension, from Pasadena out to Montclair, is being discussed. In the fall, a 14-mile “guided busway,” called the Orange Line, will start to run from the North Hollywood subway station to Woodland Hills. The MTA also recently announced the first leg of a light-rail "Expo Line" to Robertson and Venice.

The MTA also has put Rapid buses into service that are equipped with gizmos that keep traffic lights green when they approach. The service is generally considered a success, and the buses run faster as long as they don’t get stuck in the city's perennial traffic miasma.

Blame abounds for the city's sorry transit system, and the absence of a subway on Wilshire is far from the system’s only gap. Were it not for the various prohibitions that walled off the Westside, there would be a subway to Fairfax by now, and most likely also a train reaching the 405. During the campaign, Antonio Villaraigosa played to the city’s frustrations by promising large-scale traffic solutions. He’s even promised to take the subway once in a while. Now he needs to give the subway more places to go. "It can happen," the mayor says. "Everywhere I go, whenever I talk about the subway to the ocean, people start clapping."

Those Who Walk in Darkness, John Ridley
Ridley's prose still falters in places, and some action scenes are better that others, but his demented vision shines very clearly. ... is trashy pulp, but with a concept so logically, cynically warped that it creeps into your brain and takes up residence. (Spoilers follow). The book is set in an alternate modern day, where superheroes showed up decades ago, and supervillains soon after. But when a super-fight ended up destroying San Francisco, the United States banned all metanormals under penalty of death, and now they either flee to Europe or live in hiding. Our protagonist is a cop who hunts down and, generally, kills metanormals, and bears an unrelenting, unreasoning hatred for them. The book puts us firmly in her court but simultaneously, in a very down-market take on Ishiguru, makes it clear that she's not playing with a whole deck— in fact, she's a genocidal murderer.

World of Ptavvs, Larry Niven
A slight but fun effort 1966 effort from Larry Niven, in which an alien from a mind-controlling master race suffers mechanical problems and ends up marooned on Earth two billion years after the extinction of his people, and sets to work with the slave resources at hand. However, he has a rival—himself, as channeled by a human telepath who was at the wrong end of a mind copy.

According to the computers at Baseball Prospectus, the Dodgers have only a 4.3% chance of making it to the postseason. The Cardinals have a 99.9% chance. How do they come up with these numbers?

... the post-season odds report was compiled by running a Monte Carlo simulation of the rest of the season one million times ... Expected winning percentages (EWP) for each team starts with their W3 and L3 from the Adjusted Standings. A regression is applied to derive the EWP for the rest of the season, which is going to be between the current winning percentage and .500. To allow for uncertainty in the EWP, a normal distribution centered on the EWP is randomly sampled, and that value is used for the remainder of the season in that iteration. To simulate the normal 4% home-field advantage, the home team gets a .020 point bonus, while the visitors take a 0.020 penalty. The likelihood of winning each game is determined by the log5 method.

The Battle for Alaska Statehood, Ernest Gruening
I skimmed this work, a political chronicle padded with many reproduced speeches and statements. It was interesting for showing who was opposed to Alaskan statehood. For much of its existence as a nearly uninhabited American territory, statehood was simply premature. Later, absentee interests who exploited Alaskan resources were the key opposition. In the endgame, Eisenhower's Republicans blocked statehood for much of a decade based on the fear that Alaska's elected officials would be Democrats. The reverse situation occurred for Hawaii, where Democrats blocked what they assumed would be Republican representation. Now, of course, Hawaii is a solid blue state and Alaska has been 100% red at the federal level since before my family moved there in the late 1970s. If Johnson's championship of civil rights and Nixon's appeal to racism resulted in the two parties swapping constituencies, then does that imply that the partisanship in the two westernmost states was reversed by political strategy in the southeast?

The Starfollowers of Coramonde, Brian Daley
The sequel, of course, to The Doomfarers of Coramonde. Daley's second pulp novel offers smoother plotting, an entertaining but disposable fantasy world, and his usual engaging prose.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling
Exceptionally readable, not so much fast-paced as breakneck. Coasts on the merits of the other books as re: setting, atmosphere, motivation, minor characters, and pretty much everything besides plot and Voldemort's history. So far, book 4 remains the high-water mark and the series as a whole is a great read but not good literature.

A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market, John Allen Paulos
A general survey of the math and concepts behind the stock market, with mediocre writing and an exceedingly annoying conceit: Paulos frames his text with the self-pitying story of his irrational and ultimately disastrous investment in Worldcom stock. His efforts to explain math are undermined by his determination to use prose narrative form, numbers and signs and all, instead of diagrams illustrating well-laid out equations. The existence of at least one glaring mistake further devalues the work.

Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke
(audiobook, abridged) Clarke reads his own book about his experience as the chief counter-terrorism official in the Clinton and second Bush administrations. The short form is that he saw the Clinton team taking terrorism very seriously and reasonably effectively, though far from his satisfaction; and that he saw the Bush team turn everything into grist for an ideological agenda. He emphatically rejects the Al Quida/Iraq connection, believes that missile strikes on Iraq and Iran ended both countries' active anti-US terror programs; and thinks that Homeland security is more of a political stunt then an effective program. Familiarity with this book is essential to informed discussion on the topics, and the book is quite well-written and full of engaging anecdotes, so reading it far from a chore. Clarke's reading of his own text was very good but I was disappointed to learn it was abridged.

It struck me that Clarke is perfect for the job. There is a valid fundamental debate about tradeoffs. Not the asinine and false trade of freedom for security as found in the bad provisions of the PATRIOT act, but cost/risk/benefit tradeoffs. How much money should go to securing flights vs securing trains? Or chemical weapons plants? Is the goal to maximize the lives saved per dollar spent? Should the goal be to prevent the most extreme terrorist actions? To spend money in basic disaster preparedness that is a good investment even if there is never another terrorist attack?

Since it's impossible to gather statistics on all the terrorist attacks that didn't happen, it's also impossible to make an well-informed tradeoff by many measures. (Note, however, that over sixty terrorist plots have reportedly been thwarted by police work in the US in the last 10 years. If that comes as a surprise to you, it may be because the attempted terrorists are "antigovernment militia groups, racist skinhead organizations, and Ku Klux Klan members" and not brown-skinned Islamic radicals, and so these plots haven't fit into the standard media storylines and so have been under-reported.)

Clarke's greatest value is that he doesn't seem to care about this tradeoff and assumes that prevention of terror should be the top priority of the entire United States. I don't agree, but that's exactly the attitude I would want in the chief of counter-terrorism. His job is to do all he can to stop terror; his boss's job is to allocate resources across many other priorities based on ... well, politics. To think that resources should be allocated according to rational debate is to start heading towards authoritarianism and communism. The lousy and corrupt system we have of balancing government priorities based on satisfying voting and lobbying constituencies and personal ambitions is awful, unacceptable, and better than any known alternative. To that end, perhaps Clarke's worst flaw was that he was too much the dedicated and competent civil servent and not enough the politician.

Bad Boy Brawly Brown, Walter Mosley
(audiobook) A very satisfying story, in which Easy Rawlins tries to help a friend whose son is mixed up with a bad element - radical black revolutionaries in Los Angeles in the early sixties. The murder mystery itself is a bit of a shaggy dog story, spelled out in excess detail at the very end like an Agatha Christie story, but the real point is the trip along the way, the subtle delivery of extraordinarily rich detail about being black in America at a particular place and time. This reader is technically better than the last one, but somehow shallower as well, and not as good with kids' and womens' voices.

Olympos, Dan Simmons
A giant, sprawling "soft sci-fi" epic with an exceptionally convoluted story involving a reproduction of the Trojan war created and manipulated by Greek Gods living on Olympus Mons on Mars, who are actually ultra-high-technology post-humans; the gods and humans are then observed by a different group of humans who live in idle luxury on a depopulated Earth in the thirty-fifth century or so; meanwhile many robotic cyborgs from Jupiter and the other outer planets, descendents of explorers from Earth fourteen-hundred years ago, send a mission to investigate.

All this was set up in the first book, and here in an equally long book Simmons concludes everything. While the story is goofy and over the top, that's part of the point, and so the puns and gleeful convolutions and absurd juxtapositions (many characters quote classic poetry; Haephestus uses the word "fuck" in almost every sentence; reconstructed 21st century scholar and protagonist Thomas Hockenberry has an affair with Helen of Troy) are not just forgivable but integral. And a lot of times it works, though occasional technical errors and editing errors ("the the" appears twice) mar the glossy finish. The real problem with Olympos is that Simmons is quite uncapable of ever providing a satisfactory ending; had he not even tried, this book would be just as good as the first. If you're in to that sort of thing.

One of the sites I read every morning is The Daily WTF, which highlights very bad code reported to be in use in production systems. Just as FuckedCompany reveals some of the rot and deception behind the shiny lies, The Daily WTF is more informative and useful for a working programmer (or technical manager) than many sites about how to do it the right way. I mention this because today's post was a bit special. Here's an excerpt. Note that the lines beginning with apostrophes are comments allegedly made by the original programmer himself.

' This code will calculate order total, mask it, and send it to
' the ThankYou.asp page, where it will then be unmasked to reveal
' its true beauty, just like the poor Phantom of the Opera.
Randomize
amount = oTotal
maskerLeft = Int((999999 - 100000 + 1) * Rnd + 100000)
maskerRight = Int((999999 - 100000 + 1) * Rnd + 100000)

A large part of the value of the Daily WTF is the commentary on the awful code by other people. This excerpt and comment is choice:

' takes order total and jumbles it mathematically
maskerAmount = ((((oTotal + 22) * 7 )) - 12) * 620

The power of mathematics compels you!
The power of mathematics compels you!

*** projectile vomit pea soup ***

The discussion about What's the Matter With Kansas? interested me because it brought up a new wrinkle. Executive summary:

Premisses:  Red-state voters are concerned about family values.
            Budgets express values by funding or defunding programs.
            Bush Administration budgets cut funding for many programs
              valuable to red-state voters.

Hypothesis: Red-state voters will not support the Bush administration 
            on the basis of values.

Evidence:   Red-state voters do support the Bush administration on the
            basis of values.

Conclusion: Does not compute!

The new wrinkle (to me) is this proposed explanation: By family values, red-state voters mean, primarily, a sexual code of conduct. "People are frantic about homosexuality, abortion/easy sex, kinky Teletubbies, and the whole nine yards. The lack of interest in money makes sense in this context. People tend to be willing to sacrifice and die for what they believe in, and, let's face it, what they believe is that sex can destroy everything they care about. ... There is no point talking money to people who fear losing their way of life. We need to address the issues they care about."

I'm looking for an OLAP VAR for a client. (OnLine Analytic Processing Value-Added Resellers.) In English, that's a consulting company which sells you an OLAP software program and sets it up for you. OLAP software program lets you do lots of fancy reports on your data. That is to say, OLAP programs should be really good at handling databases and letting you do things like make a pretty pie chart of how many candy bars you are selling in Western Idaho on weekends, and which stores do the best business relative to the per-capita income of the surrounding census tracts. Given that data handling is their "core competency", it's disconcerting to use their website to search for VARs in California and find some in New Jersey.

After Dodger rookie D.J. Houlton kept pace with Roger Clemens for seven innings, I was inspired to a frenzy of data analysis and some wrestling with the OpenOffice graphing system. I now have some pictures to show, which should clear things up.

Comparing pitchers directly is very difficult. Numbers like wins and losses are very easily shown to have little intrinsic value, since they are strongly dependent on how a pitcher's team performs. Earned Run Average is more useful, but favors pitchers with short, excellent careers, and also varies somewhat year to year, most notably in the 1960s when pitchers became so dominant that the height of pitchers' mounds was dropped from 15" to 10" to restore balance. For my comparison I used one of the newfangled nerd stats, WARP-3. It measures how many wins a particular player is responsible for based on their performance, compared to a hypothetical "replacement-level" player, taking into consideration the quality of opponents and the bias of the home and away parks, balanced over all seasons since 1890 including adjustments for different season lengths, and quite possibly incorporating the phases of the moon and ladies' skirt lengths.

This all means that WARP-3, or "wins" as I'll call it, has many nice properties. It's directly comparable across different decades or centuries; it's cumulative, so that a pitcher with 15 wins is better than one with 10. It's relative to a baseline, so that a pitcher hanging on past their prime will accumulate fewer and fewer wins even in full seasons, and can actually lose points if they perform badly enough. And it has a clear intrinsic meaning: if pitcher X had a WARP-3 of 10 this year, then his team won 10 more games than it would have with a generic replacement (eg, a journeyman or unremarkable rookie who is barely able to compete at the major league level).

With all that in mind, let's look at the first chart. It shows the career performances of the best currently active pitchers in baseball, Roger Clemens, Greg Maddux, Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, and Curt Schilling. I added the best major league pitcher ever, Walter Johnson, for comparison. (The "Big Train" pitched for the Washington Senators from 1907 to 1927 and is consistently considered one of the top five pitchers ever. By WARP-3, he's the best.)

First, we can see that Clemens is on the verge of overtaking Walter Johnson as the best pitcher ever. Second, we can that Maddux and Clemens have traded the lead a few times (Clemens is a few years older than Maddux; this chart lines them up by age, so Maddux is shown four years behind Clemens even though both are still pitching), but Maddux has been falling behind for several years. Maddux last had the lead at age 35; Maddux's 2002 season brought his total to 144.2 wins, Clemens was 35 in 1999 and his total was then 143.6. Since then, Clemens has rebounded while Maddux has declined.

Meanwhile, Pedro Martinez is only slightly behind either of them at age 33, but he'll have to maintain his current plateau for another six or eight years to reach their level. The Big Unit (Randy Johnson) and Curt Schilling are well behind by age, but Johnson has been able to log good years up through age 42, whereas Schilling has already lost most of 2005 to injury and is unlikely to catch Johnson, much less the others. Still, everyone but Schilling is certainly headed for the Hall of Fame, and Schilling is knocking on the door.

How do they look in the context of the best pitchers in history?

Clemens is in second place for all time. Maddux is in fourth, but unlikely to move up. Martinez will have to stay healthy and motivated for years to break into the top 20. Walter Johnson really stands out. Bob Feller had an even better start, but that flat line from age 23 to 26 (when he was serving in World War II) cuts him down brutally. He roared back in 1946 with the fourth-best season ever, but was ineffective by age 33. Randy Johnson's late bloom is the only thing keeping him in the second tier. Nolan Ryan, many people's pick for best, was good but not great for a very long time, but still doesn't break into the top ten. Phil Niekro started later than anybody else but played until age 48.

One name commonly found in this company but missing on this chart is Sandy Koufax. Although he was utterly dominant for four years, his peak coincided with Dodger Stadium (which strongly benefits pitchers) and with the pitcher-dominant 1960s. His career was short, and his peak, though anecdotally awesome, was less impressive in context. By WARP-3, Walter Johnson's 1912-1915 stands above all others, with Pedro's 1997-2000 and Maddux's 1992-1995 tied for distant second. (Looking at relative ERA, gives similar results.)

And that Dodger game where the Dodgers' rookie pitcher matched Clemens for seven innings? The Astros won 3-2 in the ninth. The National League Western Division is the weakest in the majors, and the Dodgers are sinking towards last in it. The Dodgers disabled list has claimed their entire starting outfield, half of the starting infield, the closer, and a big fraction of the rotation. If they could field the DL instead of the healthy players, they could easily win the division. Or at least tie with Barry Bonds solo.

A Leap in the Dark, John Ferling

A very readable account of the American revolution, from the mid-18th century to Jefferson's inauguration. Although six or seven hundred pages long, it is very well balanced: readable but not too chatterful, fairly wide in scope but deep in parts, with detailed accounts where appropriate, liberal quoting from primary sources, and summaries of events elsewhere. It provides a good sense of the character of the main American players, though it's short on the British, French, and Spanish sides. Ferling mostly avoids cheerleading, at least until the last few pages, and does not whitewash the players. Economic interests are among the key motivators for most of the Founding Fathers most of the time. For example, Washington's political interest in nationalism and western expansion, not to mention his pre-revolutionary military career, align conveniently with his frontier land speculation. And concern for his image is integral to many of his second-term actions.

It might be a leap for anyone completely unfamiliar with the time period, and it's too clearly one person's interpretation of current scholarship to be taken completely at face value, but I found it perfectly well suited to moving my understanding forward a few notches. In particular, Ferling shows clearly and comprehensively that partisanship was endemic to the system even as soon as Washington's first administration, and Washington himself was the first and last nonpartisan candidate. I had had a notion that there was always dirty politicing in American history, but this book spells out with plenty of examples the depth of vitriol in the newspapers and the rumor campaigns. People like Karl Rove have invented new varieties of filth, but they're just variations on a theme and nothing new even in depth or shamelessness. I was a bit surprised to find the extent to which democracy was a dirty word for most of the aristocrats involved.

All in all, an excellent book and a good read.

I've fallen behind about a year in concert reviews. Briefly:

Ani DiFranco. Saw her at a concert hall downtown. The audience was predominantly swooning adolescent girls, who were so self-absorbed in their rapture that it wasn't much fun to be in the audience but not on their trip. Perhaps Ani felt the same, because she ended a very tight, pleasent set in about 70 minutes, including the brief encore. Opening act Andrew Bird was entrancing but hard to hear over the hubbub.

David Byrne. At Humpries, an out-door venue in the San Diego Bay. Both intimate and cramped, with a criminal shortage of bathrooms. The opening act was lousy and featured a spastic dancer on stage; they were deservedly ignored. Later, doing something with a catchy latin beat and Spanish lyrics, Bryne had the whole audience eating out of his palm with the slightest of shimmys and rump twists. He is a truly incandescent musician, and at his best sings about life's bitterness with optimism shining through the cracks.

On the minus side, the second half of the show was very heavy on Talking Heads hits, and the guest Extra Action Marching Band, though as engaging and talented a bunch of degenerate San Francisco street musicians as you could hope to find, was more a distraction than an enhancement, especially as they played to the end and then did the encore in lieu of Byrne.

Indigo Girls, at Humpries. A perfectly nice retrospective show, mostly stripped down to the two of them with guitars or banjos and still producing, especially in numbers like Chickenman, plenty of racket. A few songs from almost every album, going way back, and a mix of warhorses and less common songs. Each did one solo performance, and these really highlighted Emily's unfortunate tendency to put words into the lyrics and bend them to the melody and rhythm without any regard for their natural meter, and in contrast Amy's sharp-as-a-tack knack for the beat. I could easily go a decade without hearing Galileo or Closer to Fine again live, but then this was my nth IG show.

Steve Earle at the Belly Up, a club in Solana Beach. He looks old and shrunken and pained, plays as hard as ever (I would guess, never having seen him play while young and coked up), sounds ragged yet tuneful, and flirted discomfitingly with the saucy young opening singer. His fervent political and social positions, though well-aligned with mine, were hard to swallon in the fresh despair of January 2005. He's been around long enough and faced enough hardship that I would have preferred some more comforting elder wisdom about hanging in there in dark times instead of a song with the hollow chorus, "the revolution starts now" when it very obviously doesn't. I was glad to finally see him play in person, and enjoyed it, but it was an uncomfortable show.

Gomez at the Belly Up. Saw them twice. Musically excellent, but their songs are mismashes that with jarring stylistic jumps every few bars. Whenever they start to build a groove, they abandon it for something less promising. Live, they still manage to pull it off with drunken charisma. The patrons of the Belly Up, however, are drunken but devoid of charisma, and if you aren't there early enough to get a seat, it's a bad place to catch a show sober.

Sports journalism is traditionaly the weakest branch of journalism in the US, and it's not like the average journalist is a genius, but this article features some of the dumbest writing I've ever seen. Sports Illustrated writer John Donovan:

No regular starter in baseball over the past 17 years has been as consistently successful ... as Greg Maddux. ... Maddux -- there's no sugarcoating this -- is getting hit these days, maybe harder than he ever has in his career.

...

His ERA, the mark that once set him apart, climbed to a galling 5.02.

The dart-throwers out there will insist that the 39-year-old Maddux is finished, that his stuff has stopped moving, that hitters are finally on to him ... The problem with that assessment is that, despite getting hit on occasion, Maddux still wins. Sometimes it's hard to figure out how he does it. But he does.

Maddux (who, before Tuesday's game, enjoyed the fifth-best run support in the National League at more than six runs a start) is clearly no longer the pitcher who won four straight Cy Young awards (1992-95). Still, he is the only pitcher in history to win 15 or more games in 17 straight seasons (1988-2004). During that run, he boasted a 2.83 ERA.

He is 7-6 -- that's more wins than anyone on that decimated Cubs' staff, and more losses, too -- even with his embarrassingly large 5.02 ERA. ... But even with that ballooning ERA, Maddux has proven his worth. ...Somehow, still, he keeps baffling.

Let me get this straight, John. Maddux is giving up an average of five runs per game, which is much worse than his career average of about three. But because he has a seven win, six loss record this season, he isn't actually a worse pitcher; he just has a mysterious ability to keep winning. Oh, and paranthetically, he's had the good fortune that his team is scoring, on average, over six runs each time he starts.

I know that serious mathematical analysis of baseball is only slowly penetrating the inside circles of baseball, but I feel confident that even my readers without any knowledge of baseball will be able to uncover the mystery of Maddux's winning record.

The Joss Whedon tv show Firefly had many winning attributes. One of the most charming was that the characters frequently spoke in Chinese, usually to swear. Firefly is a western space opera. The episodes of the first reason run through many basic Western plots, but with a spaceship. It's notable for the excellent writing and frequently superior acting. The science is deliberately vague, and the overall tone is pretty much anti-Star Trek. The characters often interject in Chinese in a way that, based on my observations of how people in other countries include English in their speech, is quite typical in reaction to a foreign, dominant language. The original pitch, I'm given to understand, included a racial element in that the Han Chinese were the dominant culture and language. The captain was on the losing side of a war and presumably in the original context he would have been on the losing cultural side as well; the authorities on many planets would have been Han; the two upper-class fugitives who join the crew would have been Han; etc. All that remains of this very cool background idea is some mis-pronounced Chinese dialog and big Chinese characters stenciled onto the sets. The show was cancelled in the first year, though a medium-budget movie is due for theatrical release this year.

Meanwhile, this site with translations should be an invaluable companion to the DVDs.

Serenity, Part 1

Ta1ma1 de5!

他媽的！・他妈的！
Ta ma duh!
"F*** me blind!"
—Mal, on learning of approaching Alliance cruiser

• ta1ma1 de5
: [vulgar] Damn (it)!, F***!; ta1ma1 [literally] his ma (ta1 he; [understood de5 possessive marker]; ma1 ma); de5 possessive marker

This is one of the few bits I already know, and I question the translation. Ta ma duh is literally "his mother's", so I would think that a more ideomatic translation would be simply "motherf***er". I would certainly welcome more input on this point.

I went to an afternoon baseball game Thursday. The temperature was 72 degrees and the sky was cloudless. But despite looking like a giant mall from the outside, the ballpark has surprisingly few entrances so there's a lot of walking in crowds to get in. I suppose it's not much worse than Dodger Stadium, but since that's built into a hillside it's less obvious there. Once I got inside, the sightlines were lousy because the seat angle is too shallow. You have to crane to see the plate, and the staircase railings are intrusive (although they do use glass to minimize it, that's a bandaid after the fact).

So I was grumpy, despite all the suntan lotion seeping into my pores, and the only Dodger paraphanalia I had was my pencil, which needed sharpening. I was pretty much in a funk from the third inning to about the eighth inning, when my mood, very surprisingly, lifted considerably, and from then on I had a lovely time. (Correlating this information with the box score is left as an exercise to the reader.)

How did the new scorecard do? See for yourself: Front side, back.

Success

• The light background lines work really well. They are visible as guides but still keep the pencil marks most prominent.
• The pitch count area is a good graphical representation; the difference between pitchers is very obvious. Lawrence was on cruise control into the 8th inning, and was pulled at 83 pitches and 7+ IP only because the manager got nervous. (By rule of thumb, 100 pitches is when you start to think about pulling a pitcher, and 120+ is a danger zone for injury. For fragile pitchers, such as Pedro Martinez, the numbers are 80 and 100, but fragile, excellent pitchers can throw 9 innings in under a hundred pitches, so that doesn't reduce Pedro's value much.) Dessens was the opposite, throwing 93 pitches! in four innings. Dessens is a righty, the Padres lineup was heavy with lefties, and he appears afraid to throw inside to them. So he kept aiming for a magical spot six inches off the plate where nobody could possibly hit the ball, but only Tom Glavine gets strikes called there, so it was pretty brutal to watch. I'm stunned that Dessens only gave out four walks, and only had a single full count in twenty batters.
• The out counts in shaded, unbordered discs are nicer than the previous little circles with black borders.

Failure

• My previous scorecards had player # after player name, and position in a little box. For some reason I reversed it, and it screwed me up. I will change it back.
• Since I've stopped trying to mimic newspaper box scores, the only purpose of the player stats columns on the right is to show, at a glance, who had a good night. Having five columns, two of which are derivative, isn't helping that. I could replace OBP and SLG with OPS, but then I have to figure out an easy way to calculate that.
• I started by keeping the pitch counts on the same side as the pitchers' teams, but that's the opposite side as the batters, so after two innings I switched to the other way, which is much easier since you can just count on top and draw lines on the bottom. I think I'm going to put the pitcher stats on the same page, which means that each page will show one team's batting and the other team's pitching. But I guess that makes sense.
• The pitch count boxes can be much smaller. I went with four boxes across because I wanted to use shading to show at a glance whether or not the pitcher is staying at the magic ~12 pitches an inning for a complete game. You can see that pretty well in the first seven innings of the front side. But I ended up with a checkerboard pattern and a lot of base-twelve math. It should be easy just by looking at the lines to see the pitch count. I think I'll make it five or maybe 10 pitches across, add counters, and shade in a stairstep pattern.

I also found this site with lots of baseball scorecards. Some are intended for youth games or other participatory stuff like coaching, and I did pick up the cool idea of putting everything on one side of one (extra-large) sheet of paper. But the real problem with all of them is that they are ugly. They would all benefit from a hefty sprinkling of Tufte; specifically, they have terrible data-ink ratios. That is, they have a lot of heavy black lines and grids for a small amount of writing, especially given that the writing may be in pencil. The Mk 2 Scorecard was also guilty of this, but I believe I have corrected the problem with the Mk 3 and, after I add the refinements outlined above, will try submitting it to the aforementioned site.

Conveniently timed for my review of Wild Blue Yonder, a 1988 book about the B-1B bomber's history and the military-industrial complex (published in 1988), is this fresh news:

Controversy continued to swirl Monday over U.S. Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham's sale of his Del Mar home to a Nevada company which then resold the home at a $700,000 loss.

Mitchell J. Wade is a corporate officer for the Nevada company that bought the home, records with the Nevada Secretary of State show.

The real estate deal has raised ethical questions because Wade is also president of a Washington D.C.-based contracting firm that has benefited from millions of dollars in defense contracts, some of which were approved by a committee on which Cunningham is a member.—WILLIAM FINN BENNETT - Staff Writer, North County Times.

George Bush ... addressed his visitor as "President Abbas", and not accidentally. The use of this appellation was a deliberate choice.

...

During the negotiations which led to the 1993 Oslo agreement, there was much controversy about the title appropriate for Yasser Arafat. The Palestinians demanded that he be called "President", the Israelis agreed only to refer to him as "Chairman".

Why? Well, "president" sounds like a head of state. States have presidents. Ordinary institutions normally have chairpersons. The Israeli negotiators did not agree at all that the Palestinian Authority, which was set up by the agreement, should have the attributes of a state.

... Arabic ... uses the same word for president and chairman. Both are called Ra'is (from Ras, head). Therefore the agreement says, in all its three versions (English, Hebrew and Arabic) that the chief of the Palestinian Authority will bear the title of "Ra'is".

Since then, all the Israeli media, as well as all Israeli politicians and diplomats, insisted on calling Arafat "Chairman of the Palestinian Authority". Nowadays, they stick this label on Abu-Mazen.

Therefore, when Bush calls his guest "President Abbas", it is a slap in the face for Israeli diplomacy and an intentional boost for the prestige of the Palestinian leader.—Uri Avnery

In his latest column, Avnery explains some of the linguistic and technical subtleties in Israel/Palestine struggle. Points accrue to Bush for doing something constructive.

1. It's a criminal affair with no significant implications, and so it's none of our business
2. It's celebrity gossip and so it's none of our business

The San Diego Union-Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times all had Jackson headlines above the fold. Only the Wall Street Journal had a respectable front page.

Wild Blue Yonder, Nick Kotz

One of my favorite non-fiction genres: the journalistic reporting at book length. Nick Kotz reports on the history of the B-1 bomber, from precursor concepts in the 1950s up to 1988, shortly after it entered production. Essentially, the B-1 bomber is designed to blow up the Soviet Union, a mission which is now obsolete and for which the B-1 was never a good choice. And politics is mostly to blame.

Most interesting for me, from a hard news standpoint, were the well-footnoted descriptions of how the Air Force and other services play politics. They maintain voting scorecards on all members of Congress, use strategic military decisions as bargaining decisions such as trading base locations for funding votes, and generally place narrow service-specific goals above the national defense and the national welfare. (Some of this behavior is illegal, but the only prosecution I can remember is the Boeing tanker case, which was about the revolving door between industry and the Air Force, but not about illegal lobbying of Congress.) Manipulation is also standard in presidential politics; in 1960 Eisenhower restored a bomber development program, against his own military judgment, solely to put money into California to help his VP, Nixon, against Kennedy. That's only the first example; each president since has shameful decisions to answer for.

Kotz goes overboard ascribing positive motives to the guilty parties, and asserts repeatedly that they are surely all very concerned to make sure that America remains well defended. I think that's almost completely BS. The evidence shows that even well-meaning individuals are quickly forced to adopt the party line. The basic political system we use to fund military procurement inevitably leads the services to ask for impossible things, the companies to promise to provide them, and everybody involved to cover up the inevitable failures and cost overruns and pretend that everything's perfect.

Kotz doesn't offer any solutions, but it seems to me that the root of the problem is peacetime procurement. The maintenance of fully staffed, war-ready standing armies with continuously upgraded equipment is a Cold War innovation, and it's a bad idea. Wartime profiteering, ugly as it is, may be less egregious than what people are getting away with in peacetime. Especially at a time when the United States faces no significant military threat, maintaining arms spending equal to the sum of the rest of the world combined clearly shows a confusion of problem and solution. Even if you believe that terrorism wants a military solution, surely the B-1 bomber, Crusader Artillery, and other machismo-oriented weapons systems are not part of it. But because these projects offer prestige and promotion to military officers, money to contractors, and re-election credits for politicians, we're going to pay for them for the forseeable future.

The Great Unraveling, Paul Krugman

Audio book, read by the author.

Of course the catalog of self-serving Administration lies is upsetting, and going back even four years reveals that the predictions continue to underestimate the will of the Bush partisans. But that's practically background noise by now. The new upset I got from listening to this collection of Krugman columns is that he keeps straying away from the economic issues that he illustrates so well. Instead, he reports and analyzes political misdeeds, and here he's adequate but not markedly better than any of the myriad sources for same. Please focus on the economics, Mr Krugman; it's where your real value-add lies.

The Holocaust Industry, Norman Finkelstein.

A classic example of how to lose an argument even while proving your points. Finkelstein's thesis is that there exists a Holocaust Industry of Jews who profit financially and morally from exploitation of the Nazi Holocaust, and in doing so live up to the the most revolting anti-Semitic stereotypes. Although Finkelstein presents strong evidence and I believe the basics of his argument, his perpetual venom and contempt, and the way his prose assumes you share these feelings, even before he has started making his case, are very off-putting.

The bulk of the book illustrates how several international Jewish agencies collaborated with American politicians to blackmail the Swiss banks, who had profited from Jews fleeing the Nazis. Under international and American pressure, the Swiss Banks agreed to pay for a US$500 million external audit and $1.25 billion non-refundable advance payment to Holocaust survivors. The audit has since turned up only a few tens of millions of dollars, and additional audits, even with extremely lenient parameters, are unlikely to uncover substantially more accounts.

Finkelstein charges that the Holocaust Industry estimates of numbers of survivors go up when it is expedient to get money, and go down when it comes time to disburse money to the survivors themselves. Another charge is that the Holocaust Industry professionals, the officials of these organizations and museums and the like, frequently offer themselves high six-figure salaries, hire friends and family, take junkets, and generally live high on the hog on money that was theoretically earmarked for survivors.

Finkelstein points out that the United States had at least as bad a record in refusing refugees and confiscating bank accounts as Switerland, but that the Holocaust Industry has not pursuing these claims with any vigor because that would be a harder political fight.

Finkelstein also makes the intriguing argument that, by insisting on the uniqueness of the Jewish holocaust and marginalizing all other Nazi victims, as well as other victims of genocide,

Perhaps the strongest argument in support of Finkelstein's attacks is simply this: if "never again" is the justification for the Holocaust Industry, where is their leadership in intervening in possible or real genocides around the world, such as Rwanda and now Sudan?

On Monday morning, after six months of Republican posturing that an evil liberal cabal in King County had stolen the gubernatorial election, stubborn GOP candidate Dino Rossi got his comeuppance. Let's not mince words: Chelan County Superior Court Judge John Bridges methodically destroyed the Republican case in his hour-long recitation from the bench, unraveling months of spin and dismissing as meritless the wild charges of fraud from Rossi lawyers. By the time Bridges finished, Rossi's hopes of overturning the election were over. His defeat was so total that at a Monday evening press conference, despite previous promises to appeal an unfavorable ruling to the state supreme court, Rossi threw in the towel.—The Stranger

After many mistakes and dead ends, I have finally completed the newest version of the baseball scorecard. I made a serious error in my approach which led to many problems: I mistook a high-quality picture on screen for my end product, which was actually a high-quality printout. I had a nice SVG file to look at six weeks ago, but getting it on paper was a great trial. First I tried using the Adobe SVG plug-in in Windows, but that produced a cut-off, distorted page. Then I tried converting it to a bitmap using the batik java tools, but Kinko's choked on the large 600dpi .tif files.

Next I bought a new Samsung Scx-4100 laser printer, which is pleasingly less-than-catastrophic linux support. However, linux printing remains nightmarish to the point where I consider any successful print job, even of a spreadsheet or web page, a blessed event, and the idea (or reality) of printing high-resolution bitmap graphics from linux would require entirely too many dark rituals.

So, I rebooted my laptop to Windows and plugged in the printer. First I tried printing the SVG directly, but the Adobe plugin and two other SVG tools each producing charmingly different, charmingly wrong output. One changed the fonts, one ignored the circles and diamonds, one just shrunk everything. Next, I tried printing the high-quality, 10mb bitmap from Paint, to no avail. Finally I found a free graphics viewer/printer called Brava! which could load and print 600dpi pages acceptably well.

So the process to create my scorecard is:

1. Edit the source SVG files in emacs and preview with batik squiggle.
2. Run this batch script to change them to tif files:

   #!/bin/sh
   for file in baseball_scorecard baseball_scorecard_back
     do
     java -Xmx800m -jar /usr/local/batik-1.6/batik-rasterizer.jar -dpi 600 -m image
   /tiff $file.svg
     convert -compress rle $file.tif $file.tif
   done
   

3. Transfer files to windows
4. Load files in Brava!
5. Print one side
6. Reload the paper upside-down and backwards
7. Print the other side

As a result of this, I had to use the mark 2 scorecard to record Rickey Henderson's debut with the independent Class A San Diego Surf Dawgs (sic). At age 46, Ricky didn't get invited to any major-league training camps this spring, probably because of a batting average barely above the Mendoza line. Thanks to his ability to walk, his on-base percentage is still a perfectly competitive .320 to .360, so I think he's not as washed up as traditional stats make him appear, but he's certainly not a player for the future. Still, he sold out the (San Diego State University) ballpark, drew a walk, hit a towering double to deep center, and stole a base, so no complaints from me.

Now that I have the new model, I'm eager to get to another game and try it out. But probably not a Dawgs' game.

I'm all for the EU constitution, because I'm all for the EU, because I'm all for mind-numbing bureaucracy instead of continuous warfare with industrial technology. But the charge that there's something fishy about any document which begins, "HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF THE BELGIANS" is hard to refute.

Skim past the preamble, though, and it only gets better.

Article I-1: Establishment of the Union

1. Reflecting the will of the citizens and States of Europe to build a common future, this Constitution establishes the European Union, on which the Member States confer competences to attain objectives they have in common. The Union shall coordinate the policies by which the Member States aim to achieve these objectives, and shall exercise in the Community way the competences they confer on it.

Still and all, I think the US constitution holds up pretty well:

Article. I. Section 1. All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Larry McVoy is a software developer who has had a mixed relationship with the open-source world. Here he's interviewed by Forbes magazine, and the fallacies are fast and furious. What's especially amusing is that it's hard to differentiate McVoy's fallacies from Forbes'. Which of these two statements is a quote from McVoy, and which is prose by journalist Daniel Lyons?

One problem with the services model is that it is based on the idea that you are giving customers crap--because if you give them software that works, what is the point of service?

Open source products typically are distributed free, since it's pretty much impossible to charge money for something that anyone can copy.

The first fallacy in the first quote is that the only role of software service is to compensate for quality flaws in the original product. This ignores, primarily, customization, but also training, installation, upgrading, and other services. The second fallacy is to imply that good software should not require any service; in other words, it should be completely bug-free, not have any security errors, not rely on any other software that may in turn have bugs or security flaws, be automatically and risklessly upgradeable, be so usable as to not require any training, etc etc.

The first fallacy in the second quote is that open source software is distributed free because it's impossible to charge for it. In my experience in a number of OS projects, the software is open-sourced because the authors want to give it away for free. This is precisely opposite causality to the quote. The second fallacy is that it's impossible to charge money for open source. Even though you can get exactly the same code for free, Red Hat still sold US$151 million worth of free software in 2004. That's distinct from the $45 million in services revenue for the same year.

The first quote is McVoy, the second is the article's author. It surely doesn't reflect well on Forbes that I can read financial statements better than they can.

In 2004, London was easily the world's commercial passenger capital. New York, Tokyo, and Chicago tied for second.

• Heathrow + Gatwick + Stansted + Luton + London: 125,555,483
• O'Hare + Midway: 95,254,359
• Kennedy + Newark + LaGuardia: 93,644,909
• Narita + Hanneda: 93,427,232

Los Angeles, with five different commercial jet airports, has a mere 84 million passengers per year.

The Apology t-shirt appears in this week's East Bay Express. See 2003 in:
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/art/media/2005-05-04/2.pdf

-Jon

So they've gone and killed "Star Trek." And it's about time.

They tried it before, remember. ...

So out of the ashes the series rose again. Here's the question: Why?

The original "Star Trek," created by Gene Roddenberry, was, with a few exceptions, bad in every way that a science fiction television show could be bad.

...

As science fiction, the series was trapped in the 1930s — a throwback to spaceship adventure stories with little regard for science or deeper ideas. ...

The later spinoffs were much better performed, but the content continued to be stuck in Roddenberry's rut. So why did the Trekkies throw themselves into this poorly imagined, weakly written, badly acted television series with such commitment and dedication? Why did it last so long?

Here's what I think: Most people weren't reading all that brilliant science fiction. Most people weren't reading at all. So when they saw "Star Trek," primitive as it was, it was their first glimpse of science fiction. It was grade school for those who had let the whole science fiction revolution pass them by. Now we finally have first-rate science fiction film and television that are every bit as good as anything going on in print. "Being John Malkovich" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." ... "Lost," the finest television science fiction series of all time … so far. ... series like Joss Whedon's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and Alfred Gough's and Miles Millar's "Smallville" have raised our expectations of what episodic sci-fi and fantasy ought to be. Whedon's "Firefly" showed us that even 1930s sci-fi can be well acted and tell a compelling long-term story.

Screen sci-fi has finally caught up with written science fiction. We're in college now. High school is over. There's just no need for "Star Trek" anymore.

—Orson Scott Card

In case you read the previous post about baseball scorecards and were eagerly awaiting the Mark 3, I am pleased to announce that it is ready to begin trials. In addition to recreating the basic form from the Mark 1 and Mark 2 in a more open file format, SVG, I have made several other changes, predicated on two ideas: implementing Tufte, and changing from traditional to modern measurement statistics:

• Eliminated some wasted space from the header
• moved the summary block down
• Changed the pitch count grid from an inning by inning count and total per pitcher to a grid. This is an experiment, and it's probably easier to print the scorecard, go to a game, fill it out, scan it, and upload it than to explain how it should work. The idea is that 1) the marks are the data; 2) it's easier to do totals inning to inning; 3) you can see at a glance how many pitches a pitcher is throwing per inning relative to a complete-game rate (12/inning).
• Changed some of the stats from traditional (At bats, hits, runs, strikeouts) to modern (On-base percentage, slugging, and what I think are the necessary raw ingredients - plate appearances, outs, and total bases). So when Jeff Kent (I still can't believe he's a Dodger. Or that he's hitting so well at 37.) draws three walks and makes two outs, his line OBP/SLG is .600/.000, which is more useful than his batting average, which would be 0-2 or .000. When J.D. Drew hits two singles, a double, and a homer, and grounds out to first, his line is .800/1.600, instead of just .800.
• Dropped the convention of recording RBIs, though this change is not visible on the blank scorecard
• Cosmetic changes to the at-bat box; removed the pitch count circle.
• Followed Tufte's ideas and made most of the lines gray, instead of black, so that data, which is recorded in pencil anyway, is more visible than the grid lines.

300dpi PNG, ready for printing: Mk3 Scorecard Front, Back.

Get the SVG source files.

The strategy of the Chinese government is to change the subject.
When complaints are lodged about the imprisoning of dissidents, the Chinese do not forthrightly proclaim “Indeed, we do put them in prison. We are justified in doing so. They are a threat to our security.” Instead they change the subject to “No country should interfere in the internal affairs of another country.” When America attacks China’s human rights record, the Chinese do not say “You are mistaken about our human rights problem, and here’s why.” Rather, they change the subject: “What about your human rights problem?”

All governments—all human beings—are guilty of this move, which in American parlance is called “spin”. But in China the technique has been reflexively applied for so long, it is now simply the default official approach to any awkward information whatsoever.—Ann Condi

How much longer until this is the norm in the United States? Or have we already passed that threshold? How do we measure? I think that even though the Administration is either there or headed there, that's not a direct comparison. I believe the change the subject syndrome applies to all levels and branches of the Chinese government, whereas I would still expect to get straightforward (or at least not deliberately misleading or obfuscating) answers from, say local governments or branches of federal agencies or judges or a district attorney. Not from politicians, but from bureaucrats. If this changes in the US, will "terrorism" be the excuse?

I've made several custom baseball scorecards, since the ones that come in programs are quite inadequate. Unfortunately, I made them in Coreldraw and Visio, so I couldn't use them on my linux computer even if I hadn't misplaced the original files. I decided to use SVG (Scalable vector Graphics) to create version 3. This is a standard XML file format which allows you to "draw" shapes by describing them in text. Instead of using the mouse to lay out shapes, I can just type in the dimensions I want. It looks like this:

<rect x=".16" y=".16"
        width="0.18" height="0.18"
        transform="rotate(45 .25 .25)"
        fill="white"
        stroke="#cccccc"
        stroke-width="0.01"
        stroke-dasharray="0.02,0.02"/>

That code creates a diamond bordered with a gray dashed line.

I have run into two main problems with this project. The first is that the SVG specs on relative and absolute coordinates for reused components are clear as mud and devoid of helpful examples. This means in effect that I'm doing a lot of stuff the Wrong Way, using offsets and other tricks which just make it harder to move stuff around and correct mistakes. I got to a certain point where I probably should have backed up, created a simple trial document, and mastered viewport coordinate system, effect of the viewBox attribute on sibling attributes, Nested transformations, and the tangled relationship between patternUnits = "userSpaceOnUse | objectBoundingBox", patternContentUnits = "userSpaceOnUse | objectBoundingBox", and viewBox. Instead, I just bulled on ahead to finish the darn thing.

The second problem is that, although SVG has been around for a few years, support for it is mixed. I tried four different programs and got four different outputs, wrong on four different ways. GIMP's SVG module botches the text utterly, putting it in the wrong place and orders of magnitude too big. GIMP also gets most of the lines wrong, though that may only be an artifact of going to a print-ready resolution and then shrinking back down for display. KSVG in Konqueror looks much better, but the text is still destroyed: it seems to round all text block locations to the nearest inch or so, so that the headings for innings 1 and 2 are superposed, as are 3-4, etc. Sodipodi does the text fine and the lines look good, but the diamonds which are the most crucial element of the whole thing are not rotated. Finally, squiggle, a java program which is part of Batik, whatever that is, seems to get everything right except that the text seems to alternate being a pixel too high and a pixel too low. Still, if I can cajole print-quality raster files from squiggle, that will probably be the solution. But a one-afternoon project is now, stretching out into its fourth session of work. Bah.

As a result, I had to use fresh xeroxes of my old scorecard for the Dodgers-Padres game last week. The Padres' stadium, (commercial naming sponsor) Park, is reasonably nice. If you come on the trolley, you have to walk around most of the back side, which looks like a blank mall exterior, to get to a gate, but once inside it's pretty. The commercial signage is a notch past excessive, but at least the players don't wear any advertising (aside from little logos that are practically invisible). The game happened to fall on Military night, and the Padres were wearing camouflage jerseys—grounds for protest if ever there were any. Aside from lots of froo-frah before the game, there was a very very cool parachuting demonstration, with an eight-man Navy parachuting team jumping into the stadium. The first one put his foot down directly on the target in the outfield. Others did tricks with smoke, joined up in pairs, and/or did this thing where they plummet towards the ground at 60 mph until well below the tops of the nosebleed seats before pulling up and abruptly not dying. Useful when being shot at, no doubt, but I'd hate to practice that much. Most importantly, the Dodgers won, although it was the last victory of an improbable 8-game winning streak.

The Ancestor's Tale, Richard Dawkins

A magnificent book. Dawkins adopts the narrative structure of The Canterbury Tales to a reverse chronological trip from modern humans to the origin of life on Earth. The book is a series of rendezvous with "Most Recent Common Ancestors;" at each rendezvous, species which are joining the pilgrimage tell their Tales. For example, at rendezvous 22, at about 530 million years ago (mya), we encounter 41 species of lamprey and 43 species of hagfish (lampreys and hagfish diverged around 480 mya, so the rendezvous, like all rendezvous, is with the trunk of a lineage). That means that, somewhere on Earth, our "240-million-greats-grandparent," some sort of jawless swimming creature with a notochord but probably not a real backbone, gave birth to children, and the siblings diverged (through geography, like swimming off in different directions, or maybe just through having an argument about inheritance and never speaking again, and one child is an ancestor to all vertebrates, and another is an ancestor to all lampreys and hagfish.

Literally an ancestor; they laid eggs that grew into more proto-vertebrates, and so on, with gradual genetic change over many generations, until there was another speciation split (proto-sharks vs other vertebrates), and so on. For any given period, such as 500 or 2000 years, almost certainly any creature at the young end, given a time machine and some breath spray, could mate with any appropriately gendered creature at the old end of the span and produce a fertile child, but as the years pile up, the chances of that child being fertile decrease, until eventually there's a certainly that it would be sterile (e.g., mules, ligers), and then a chance, and then a certainly, that they can't reproduce at all. And so we have a chain of creatures, about 240 million long, leading from our parents back to a proto-vertebrate that swam in the sea and had no jaw and not much of a spine.

(Clarifications: this doesn't mean that literally one animal is the sole parent of all vertebrates. As the proto-vertebrate species splits into two other species over a period of many generations, lots of different animals in that species can claim ancestorship on both sides of the split. But there must necessarily be one last ancestor who spans both sides. It can then be shown (buy the book) that almost all of those ancestors are shared among all descendents; if you look over a long enough time scale, such as 20 or 50 generations, the combined family trees of all survivors merge into a sort of braid. For example, most humans of European descent probably have some genes from King Richard I, just as they probably have some genes from almost every person alive 1000 years ago who has a descendent chain to the present.)

Each rendezvous presents some Ancestor's tales, and rendezvous 22 gives us the Lamprey's Tale, which turns out to be about hemoglobin. Human hemoglobin has four different types of globin proteins. Two are closely related "alpha" globins, and come from chromosome 11. Two are closely related "beta" globins from chromosome 16. The split between alpha and beta reflects a point in the past where, in one ancestor (literally a single creature), there was a transcription error somewhere in the germ line (e.g., in a cell that makes sperm or eggs, or maybe in an actual sperm or egg, or maybe in a very young embryo?) and a creature was born with two sets of genes for globins.

This creature survived, and bred, and eventually this mutation spread to all survivors of its species. (That spread, by the way, is inevitable in any gene pool given enough time, even for survival-neutral mutations. That is, if the creature was actually stronger or faster as a result of the mutation, then it had a good chance to spread that gene on its merits. But, even if extra hemoglobin genes don't provide any benefit, they will either become standard or disappear. Reason: Imagine a graph showing how many members of the species have that gene. At the top of the graph is 100%, and at the bottom, 0%. For a gene invisible to natural selection, the percentage of the species with that gene will move up and down randomly. If a creature with that gene has a lucky childhood, grows up big and strong, and gets a big harem, the percentage will go up. If a whole family group with the gene have a nice habitat near a volcano which erupts, the percentage goes down. It would wobble between the two extremes as long as the species survived, except: if it ever actually hits 0% or 100%, it can never come back. If ever all members of the species have a mutation, breeding along won't ever lead to a member of the species without it, so the mutation is now permanent. Conversely, if the last creature with the mutation dies, breeding along won't bring it back, so the mutation is gone. A similar or even identical mutation may pop up in the future, but the first one is gone forever. When you run the clock over geologic time, the chance that random perturbations nudges the percentage to either 0% or 100% at least once rapidly goes to certainty. Thus, any mutation either becomes standard or disappears. The only time two versions of one gene remain viable in the population over time is when they have comparative advantages; e.g., type A blood and type B blood each confer immunity to a different parasite or bacteria. Interestingly enough, the type A gene in other mammals is closer to the type A gene in humans than the human A is to the human B. So if you share a blood type with a chimpanzee, for that part of the genome you are more closely related to her than to any human with a different blood type, even a sibling.)

At some point, after the mutation become standard, the two copies of the alpha globin gene diverged, and moved to different chromosomes, and diverged again (there are actually "seven [alpha] globin genes. Four of these are pseudogenes — disabled versions of alpha with faults in their sequence, never translated into protein. Two are true alpha globins, used in the adult. The final one is called zeta, and it is used only in embryos.") When the dust settled, all members of the species had seven alpha globin genes and six beta globin genes, some of each disabled and others active.

The reason this is the Lamprey's Tale is that "Given that the split between the alpha cluster and the beta cluster took place half a billion years ago, it will of course not be just our human genomes that show the split, and possess both alpha genes and beta genes in different parts of our genomes. We should see the same within-individual split if we look at the genomes of any other mammals, at birds, reptiles, amphibians, or bony fish — for our common ancestor with all of them lived less than 500 million years ago. Wherever it has been investigated, this expectation has proved correct. Our greatest hope of finding a vertebrate that does not share with us the ancient alpha/beta split would be a jawless fish like a lamprey or a hagfish, for they are our most remote cousins among surviving vertebrates. They are the only surviving vertebrates whose common ancestor with the rest is is sufficiently ancient that it could have predated the alpha/beta split. Sure enough, these jawless fish are the only known vertebrates that lack the alpha/beta divide. Rendenvous 22 is so ancient, in other words, that it predated the split between alpha and beta globin."

I picked that Rendezvous and Tale at random; they are all deep and cool just like that. A lot of popular science books about biology and evolution tend to be collections of cool stories, but the power of The Ancestor's Tale is that it places all of the stories within a huge, sweeping narrative, so that the sense of drama and suspense (who will we rendezvous with next?) builds and builds. I won't spoil the ending (beginning), but suffice to say, it's not much like Genesis.

My one complaint is that, in a few places, Dawkins' conversational tone devolves to bitchiness about creationists. It's not hard to see how he could be tired with the fight: any sentence he writes which mentions any problem with any aspect of the entire theory and data of evolution is liable to be quoted as proof that all of evolution is bunk and even the scientists admit it. Beyond that, reading the book and seeing the astounding depth and complexity and the interrelated nature of evolution, fossils, molecular genetics, information science, plate tectonics, etc, I get the feeling that a creationist trying to argue with a working biologist is like a flat-earther interrupting 747 pilots chatting about the best route to take over Iceland en route to Malaysia.

Certainly this book moves up to my favorite Dawkins book (over Blind Watchmaker) and favorite book on evolution.

... the scientists wanted me to do my bit to help fix the terrible little statistic they keep hearing about, the one indicating that many more Americans believe in angels, devils, and poltergeists than in evolution. According to recent polls, about 82 percent are convinced of the reality of heaven (and 63 percent think they're headed there after death); 51 percent believe in ghosts; but only 28 percent are swayed by the theory of evolution.

Scientists think this is terrible—the public's bizarre underappreciation of one of science's great and unshakable discoveries, how we and all we see came to be—and they're right. Yet I can't help feeling tetchy about the limits most of them put on their complaints. You see, they want to augment this particular figure—the number of people who believe in evolution—without bothering to confront a few other salient statistics that pollsters have revealed about America's religious cosmogony. Few scientists, for example, worry about the 77 percent of Americans who insist that Jesus was born to a virgin, an act of parthenogenesis that defies everything we know about mammalian genetics and reproduction. Nor do the researchers wring their hands over the 80 percent who believe in the resurrection of Jesus, the laws of thermodynamics be damned.

No, most scientists are not interested in taking on any of the mighty cornerstones of Christianity. They complain about irrational thinking, they despise creationist "science," they roll their eyes over America's infatuation with astrology, telekinesis, spoon bending, reincarnation, and UFOs, but toward the bulk of the magic acts that have won the imprimatur of inclusion in the Bible, they are tolerant, respectful, big of tent.

...

According to a 1998 survey published in Nature, only 7 percent of members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences professed a belief in a "personal God." ... Yet only a flaskful of the faithless have put their nonbelief on record or publicly criticized religion, the notable and voluble exceptions being Richard Dawkins of Oxford University and Daniel Dennett of Tufts University. Nor have Dawkins and Dennett earned much good will among their colleagues for their anticlerical views; one astronomer I spoke with said of Dawkins, "He's a really fine parish preacher of the fire-and-brimstone school, isn't he?"

So, what keeps most scientists quiet about religion? It's probably something close to that trusty old limbic reflex called "an instinct for self-preservation."

—Natalie Angier, Free Inquiry Magazine

[Cubs shortstop] Nomar Garciaparra took two steps out of the batters' box, then collapsed in pain.

...

``I've strained my groin before but I've never felt anything like this before,'' Garciaparra said. ``It's kind of a freak thing.''

...

``It's not good, it's a bad groin,'' manager Dusty Baker said. — AP Sports

Gus adds, "What's really interesting is that the letters in the name Nomar Garciaparra can be rearranged to spell,"

ram... groin... crap... aaar!!

Wow. Cardinal Ratzinger becomes Pope Benedict XVI. I know he was spoken of frequently as a possible, even one of the most likely successors to John Paul II. But I'm still a bit stunned to see it.—Josh Marshall

"NOBODY expects the German Inquisition!"[1] [2]

[1]: "Ratzinger's stern leadership of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the modern successor to the Inquisition, delighted conservative Catholics ..." — Reuters

[2]: "NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again." — Monty Python

"Over the last 20 years, inflation of recommendations has paralleled the inflation of grades," says Stuart Rojstaczer, an associate professor of hydrology at Duke University. "Someone to whom you might have given a good recommendation 20 years ago, you now say is very good. Very good is excellent, and excellent is outstanding. And if someone truly is outstanding," he says, his voice trailing off, "well, I don't know what you say."

He once made the mistake of pumping up the volume in a letter sent to a university in Britain, where hyperbole is not the norm. The student was excellent; he called her "outstanding." The next thing he knew, he was the one getting called -- by the search committee. They wanted to know if the letter had been forged. "It was so hyperbolic in their eyes that they couldn't believe it," Mr. Rojstaczer says.

Mr. Leiter, the Texas philosopher, explains: "An English philosopher might write, 'So-and-so has done very fine work.' If that were coming out of Harvard, it would mean this person barely has a three-digit I.Q. Coming out of Oxford, it could well mean this person is one of the top three people coming out of the U.K."

— ALISON SCHNEIDER, The Chronicle of Higher Education

I recently spent a week outside Amsterdam running a training session for Greenpeace's various regional webmasters. In addition to spending time with so many bright, shiny world-changers, my trip offered a few highlights. One, I was able to meet my grandfather's cousin, Heinz Aufrecht, whose family fled from Berlin to the Netherlands in 1934 or 1936, shortly after my grandfather Werner Aufrecht fled to the US. I also caught an Einsturzende Neubauten concert at the Paradiso, very cool former church which is now a nearly perfect music club: great acoustics and two big wraparound balconies providing plenty of seating for those (like me) who would rather not stand jammed in a crowd for hours, peering around tall Dutch (Paradiso) or having drunk people lurch into them (Belly Up in San Diego). Also very cool was that the band started very close to the printed time on the ticket, which essentially never happens in my experience. In fact, what they did was even cooler: around starting time, the lights dimmed partway and roadies came out and turned on the two air compressors on stage. The conversations then competed with the chugging compressors until first one and then the other coughed and stopped, leaving silence and darkness as the band came out on stage ....

Instruments played included: PVC pipes, played with compressed air sprayed into ends or beaten like xylophone keys; spoked metal wheels in conical shapes, struck; kettle drum, drummed; electric guitar and bass, played normally or, once, with a golden vibrating dildo to the strings; synthesizer keyboard and Powerbook; big metal plate, drummed; power drill, applied to metal plate; 10 gallon tin can, e.g. an olive oil can, drummed; five ten-gallon cans, tied together like a cat-o-nine-tails, dragged across the stage and flung overhead; wrenches or tools, rattled and tapped; giant slinky, strummed; metal brick, drgged along metal plate; throat singing; chains and sand, moved around on steel bench; electric grinding tool, applied to steel plate; space blanket, shaken gently; long plastic pipe, blown like a horn; transistor radio, played (possibly a prop); spinning cellopane/plate/cup contraption, function and sound hard to discern; plastic jerrycans, beaten; face and mouth, sprayed with compressed air; pvc pipe, about (10cm x 2m), curved and strung, string beaten to produce tenor-like tone; stage, drummed; metal pipes, arrayed on the stage on bumpers and played by seated band members to produce a hex on a previous manager and record company; various sound control boxes, played with bare feet and used, among other things, to produce loops of previously played sound.

Baseball Prospectus breaks down the 47 free agent contracts signed over the 2004-2005 winter. The math is too complicated to explain without quoting most of the (subscription-only) article; basically they estimated how good the players in the free agent class of 2004-2005 were, and counted how much money they were paid, and then figured out which of those players were underpaid or overpaid, relative to the group. Other adjustments included discounting multi-year contracts by 5% per year and comparing the players to "replacement level" (the quality of player you can get by paying the minimum $316,000/yr salary) instead of to zero.

The three best deals:

1. Guzman, Cristian, signed a 4 yr/$15mil contract. Projected to win 14.7 games. By BP's estimates, underpaid by $17 million.
2. Drew, J.D., 5 years/$40 mil. Worth 29.1 wins, and underpaid by $14mil.
3. Eckstein, David, 3 years/$9 mil. Worth 10.2 wins, so underpaid by $13mil.

The worst deal:

1. Ordonez, Magglio, 5 years/$67 mil. Worth 16.4 wins; overpaid $32 mil.

Dodger fans will be interested to learn that Drew is projected to win more games than Beltre in the next five years, and at a substantial discount. (29.1 wins vs 28.2; $40mil vs $57mil). Overall, the Dodgers were the second most efficient spender in the market (Drew and Kent were both very good deals; Lowe and Perez were both mildly bad deals). The Mariners, Diamondbacks, and especially Tigers overpaid the worst.

Also interesting is that this market put the value of a projected win at $2.14 million, which is double the current estimated value of a win. That is, looking at the revenue and records of the different baseball teams, BP statheads have determined that winning one extra baseball game is worth (other things being equal) a million dollars in gate revenue, TV contracts, etc. Therefore, paying a player up to a million dollars per projected win is good economics. By that measure, almost all of this years free agents were overpaid. Which is not unexpected; baseball players are indentured servents for the first six years of their major-league careers, during which period they are severely underpaid relative to the money they generate for their employers. By limiting free agency to veterans, the owners have ensured that free agents are almost always overpaid.

As a senator, I worried every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems to be the other way around. — John C. Danforth

I am posting my working notes on how to set up a computer.

... informal guides to what the French or the English really mean, when they are speaking their mother tongues, have been drawn up by other nationalities.

The guide also points out helpfully that when a Briton says “by the way/incidentally”, he is usually understood by foreigners as meaning “this is not very important”, whereas in fact he means, “The primary purpose of our discussion is...” On the other hand, the phrase “I'll bear it in mind” means “I'll do nothing about it”; while “Correct me if I'm wrong” means “I'm right, please don't contradict me.”

...

No less obvious is the fact that ideas about plain speaking do not travel easily across the Channel. As the Brits see things, a Frenchman who says “je serai clair”(which literally means “I will be clear”) should be understood as meaning: “I will be rude”. Also evident is the Anglo-Saxons' contempt for spectacular gestures à la française. The phrase “Il faut la visibilité Européenne”(“We need European visibility”) is rendered as: “The EU must indulge in some pointless, annoying and, with luck, damaging international grand-standing.” The British also suggest that the sentence “Il faut trouver une solution pragmatique” (literal translation: “We must find a pragmatic solution”) should be understood as meaning: “Warning: I am about to propose a highly complex, theoretical, legalistic and unworkable way forward.”

—Economist

The Little Yellow Dog. Walter Mosley.
(audiobook).
It took me about four months to finish this book on tape. The narrator has a pleasing voice and, at his best, does all of the characters' voices well. But the production seemed sloppy; many hesitations and misplaced accents and a few head-slapping mis-pronunciations slipped through. (Foilage for foliage, La see-en-gah for La Cienega, twice each, among others). That notwithstanding, the words and atmosphere were excellent, although I still can't remember which of Holland and Roman was Idabell Turner's husband and which was the brother-in-law.

...In America you can have either a flimsy box banged together out of two by fours and drywall, or a McMansion-- a flimsy box banged together out of two by fours and drywall, but larger, more dramatic-looking, and full of expensive fittings. Rich people don't get better design or craftsmanship; they just get a larger, more conspicuous version of the standard house.

...

Where the just-do-it model fails most dramatically is in our cities-- or rather, exurbs. If real estate developers operated on a large enough scale, if they built whole towns, market forces would compel them to build towns that didn't suck. But they only build a couple office buildings or suburban streets at a time, and the result is so depressing that the inhabitants consider it a great treat to fly to Europe and spend a couple weeks living what is, for people there, just everyday life.—Paul Graham

I received a flyer for the St. Patrick's Day parade. This is a downside of living across the street from the park: the parade goes right by, and streets are closed in a rectangle two blocks wide and fourteen blocks long. After the parade there is "a huge free festival" and a "children's ride and entertainment center." I plan to spend the day elsewhere. I mentioned the festivities to an Irishman, who said, "the coming of Christianity to Ireland should be a reason to mourn rather than celebrate."

Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Robert Bork.
Robert Bork explains that Western civilization is disintegrating and the liberals are to blame:

I use the phrase ["modern liberalism"] merely to mean the latest stage of the liberalism that has been growing in the West for at least two and a half centuries, and probably longer. Nor does this suggest that I think liberalism was always a bad idea. So long as it was tempered by opposing authorities and traditions, it was a splendid idea. It is the collapse of those tempering forces that has brought us to a triumphant modern liberalism with all the cultural and social degradation that follows in its wake. If you do not think "modern liberalism" an appropriate name, substitute "radical liberalism" or "sentimental liberalism" or even, save us, "post-modern liberalism." Whatever name is used, most readers will recognize the species.

Bork on modern musical trends:

The difference between the music produced by Tin Pan Alley and rap is so stark that it is misleading to call them both music. Rock and rap are utterly impoverished by comparison with swing or jazz or any pre-World War II music, impoverished emotionally, aesthetically, and intellectually. Rap is simply unable to express tenderness, gentleness, or love. Neither rock nor rap can begin to approach the complicated melodies of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, or Cole Porter. Nor do their lyrics display any of the wit of Ira Gershwin, Porter, Fats Waller, or Johnny Mercer. The bands that play this music lack even a trace of the musicianship of the bands led by Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and many others of that era.

He has similarly extreme and ignorant things to say about abortion, homosexuality, freedom of speech (Chapter 8 is "The Case for Censorship"), the rights of the accused, feminism, and other topics. I confess that I only skimmed the book, and surely overlooked some thought-provoking arguments. But I didn't have the stomach to sift through his hate and fear to get to them.

This kind of language coming from a shock-jock or person paid to to incite people and provoke false controversy would not be surprising. But I am extremely happy that his nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States was rejected. If he had written this book before then, perhaps the debate about his nomination would have been more honest and productive.

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, Duncan J. Watts
A good introduction to network science, with the chatty (and incongruously hunky—the cover photo does not look like a scientist) narrator giving glimpses along the way into how and why research happens. Covers basic taxonomies of networks (e.g., small world networks, scale-free networks) and then moves into dynamics (propagation, cascades, etc). The most important insight, for me, was a mathematical argument that successful cascades (when a thing, such as a disease or new song or the desire to purchase a product, suddenly and unpredictably moves from one small corner of a network to take over the whole thing) have more to do with the network than with the thing itself. It's not exactly a refutation of the "great men" theory of history, in which the characteristics of individuals are taken to have necessarily shaped the course of history. A direct refutation, I think, would say that, for instance, the end of slavery in the US was inevitable around the 1860s, and if Lincoln hadn't been the specific person to lead the change, someone else would have popped up. Cascade theory doesn't say that. It says that there are a number of different systemic changes that could have happened, and the characteristics that made Lincoln great were necessary but not sufficient for Lincoln to be a towering historical figure. But his career, and the end of slavery, appear inevitable in hindsight but were probably nothing but—other outcomes were equally or more possible.

Or, more mundanely, there are dozens of new consumer products hitting the market every year and while some can be accurately judged failures ahead of time because of their faults, many products are candidates for breakout success but random chance will determine that, say, the iPod will be the one. Anyway, it was a good book.

Stealing the Elf-King's Roses, Diane Duane
Starts out as an intriguing genre-bender: sci-fi/fantasy/detective story. But as it progresses it turns into a generic Diane Duane novel with familiar characters and a huge, cosmological, touchy-feely ending that feels stamped from the same template as, say, any of her early Star Trek novels. Much as I like elements of her writing, she seems to produce much stronger novels when co-writing. Even as escapist pulp, this was a bit disappointing.

Doomfarers of Coramonde, Brian Daley
The first novel of a very talented hack (and I mean that as a compliment here), it shows many rough edges in pacing, artlessly shifting points of view, and a desperately deus ex machina ending. Most of the elements of solid genre fiction are already in place, however, and it's not out of place in Daley's bibliography of entertaining, well-written, human stories.

Brian Daley is probably most famous for writing the Star Wars Trilogy radio adaptations, or for being half of the Jack McKinney pseudonym which wrote the Robotech novels. He died of cancer in the mid-nineties. Anthony Daniels' tribute, including the script of a tape the radio drama cast recorded for him but which was completed days or hours too late for Daley to hear, is certainly enough to water the eyes.

After vehemently disagreeing with just about everything I've read on Instapundit, typically because it was disingenuous partisan material, I was very happily suprised to be pointed (from the leftist Talking Points Memo's Special Bankruptcy Bill Edition) to an Instapundit post I completely agree with:

I assume that the Bush Administration is supporting this legislation, but I really don't see it as consistent with "compassionate conservatism." I see it, in fact, as consistent with the worst stereotypes about corporate-friendly Republicanism.

—Instapundit

He further quotes approvingly:

"If the blogosphere could mount an effective campaign for people to write to their senators, it would mark its emergence as a genuinely independent force in US politics." — Jim Bennett (Instapundit)

So one force that can unite the left and the right in American online political commentary is the aggressively greedy credit card companies. Well, if it starts here, and continues through opposition to other un-partisan villains (let me propose cable companies, spammers, virus writers, and possibly insurance companies, HMOs, and pharmaceuticals), maybe we can narrow the partisan gap a bit. Too bad the bankruptcy bill already passed all substantive hurdles.

Don't put your iPod shuffle in shuffle mode when listening to murder mysteries.

Mar 2, 2005
11:50 P.M.: CN, BILLING INFORMATION RECEIVED
10:14 P.M.: SHANGHAI, CN, DEPARTURE SCAN
2:54 P.M.: SHANGHAI, CN, EXPORT SCAN
12:37 P.M.: ANCHORAGE, AK, US, ARRIVAL SCAN
9:48 A.M.: SHANGHAI, CN, ORIGIN SCAN

I just ordered a new IBM laptop. I did this because my old IBM laptop is slow and heavy. It was a year old when I bought it used, two years ago. Actually, it's not even the same laptop. The screen on my Thinkpad A20m was glitchy, and it finally went almost full-time on the fritz last year in Copenhagen. I swapped its hard drive with Lars' unused Thinkpad A21m, so it's only the same laptop in spirit, not in fact. It works generally pretty well, but has a few problems: hibernate has never really worked; startup takes about 5 minutes, including KDE, and starting new applications can take quite a while. Once an application is running, however, it's perfectly responsive, so the irritation is intermittent, not constant. Battery life is poor, so it's more of a portable computer than a mobile computer. Continued dismay with this state of affairs, plus the realization that my travelling bicycle load (clothes, computer, a book, a lock) is 35 pounds, and an upcoming international trip, led me to finally promote the new laptop from the wishlist to the reality list.

I got a Thinkpad before because of the reputedly excellent linux support. In practice, it's not awful, but it's not excellent either. The quality of the machine was generally good, except for the video screen that went on the fritz, but I did buy used over eBay. IBM's eraserhead pointers are excellent, and I cannot stand the touchpads. So I settled on a new X40 fairly quickly, and it is at this point that our mini-saga begins.

Ordering over the internet on a Sunday went fine, but I didn't get an email receipt. I called Monday, was on hold for maybe five minutes, and then talked to a very nice person who explained that the machine was back-ordered 10 business days, and the wireless card I had specified 20. When I explained that I had only picked that wireless card out of the four choices (three, because two choices had identical text) because it was the only one with a model number, allowing me to verify linux compatibility. "Intel Wireless Card" is not helpful to a linux user. He got a nice technician on the line, who said that he had exactly what I wanted already in stock ("except - you sound like a savvy guy. Can you - " "yes, throw the extra memory in the box and I can install it myself."). I mentioned that I never got an email, and that the order number I had retrieved out of my browser cache didn't work. He set me up with a correct order number, and made sure I got an email.

And the next day, Tuesday, I got another email. With a shipping date of April 5, over a month in the future. So I called again, waited 5 minutes again, and talked to a very nice lady who said that I should ignore that date, and that my computer would ship in five to seven business days. I said, "I noticed an offer on the web site to ship a computer the same day, if I order by 3 pm. It includes exactly the computer I want. Can I cancel this order and do that instead?" "No, sir. The shipping label was printed yesterday, so you cannot cancel your order. And that would not ship for one to three days anyway." "So where it says 'ships same day,' that's simply not true?" "Correct."

Great. I did read the fine print, and it says that IBM will ship the same day the order is completed, and completing an order includes, in their definition, processing the credit card, which takes one to three business days.

Then I got a few more emails, and a UPS tracking number, with which I have been eagerly following the progress of my new hardware. (It's mine, I figure, because my credit card was charged Tuesday.) Today my RAM arrived, and some shipping information for the rest materialized on UPS's website. As you can see above, UPS isn't especially careful with time zones or date lines.

So this seems to be pretty much the inverse of Dell. The product is, I assume, excellent, but the ordering process is third-rate. Specifically:

• The order status page uses more warehouse language than user language. My order is for a "** EXP X40 INTEL PENTIUM M LV 1.4 12" XGA 256 40 802 BG" and "RECYCLE FEE FOR PRODUCT WITH 4 TO 14 INCH DISPLAY". There is no link to show any more information about the product I ordered; I would have to go back to the ordering screens and try to match the part number. I didn't even realize that the laptop doesn't have a DVD drive (it's only 2.9 pounds, so I guess they cut these things at that price range. Hopefully I'll be able to install linux from a USB device. And you know, I was just thinking yesterday that after putting a whole audiobook (The Little Yellow Dog, Walter Mosley), three CDs, and a bunch of Salon member-only downloads onto my new iPod Shuffle, I still had 100 mb or more to spare. Fortune smiles, I guess.
• Every date estimate I've gotten has been wrong one way or the other. Better that the reality is early instead of late, but accuracy would be nice.
• It was never clear when I would actually be charged.

Aside from that, it's going smoothly and I'm excited.

I've taken my new bicycle out for two rides now, both out to the beach. The first was to Ocean Beach, 17 miles round trip. The second, last Sunday morning when there was hardly any traffic, was also past Lindburgh field but then I turned into Mission Bay and chased some of the crew teams around. (Since Mission Bay is a bunch of peninsulas, islands, bridges, and public and private parks and resorts, a few hundred yards on the water can be four miles on a road.) I went a total of 27 miles, in about 2.5 hours of rolling time (with a fair amount of slow cruising). Planetbike sent a new bicycle computer to replace the one that fell into an elevator shaft, and it works very well. My butt and back started to get a bit stiff by the end of the trip, but I was afraid to slide the seat around until I get a grease pencil to mark its position so I can return to positions that I liked. I still have a tendency to wobble, especially at higher speeds where I have to pedal harder, but it's certainly a fast bicycle.

The following flyer, laid at the front door of my and every other apartment in the building, is the latest and most extreme in a series:

Attention Residents!

Shopping Carts

The Imperial Tower Apartments owns a total of 14 shopping carts for all residents to share and use. NO one should be storing these carts in their units for their own personal use.

If we do not see a chance in our current situation, we will be giving notice to ALL residents for an inspection of units for shopping carts.

We will be giving a 3 Day Notice of Conevant or Breech to those that are found with a shopping cart in their unit. This may result in your lease being terminated.

Please return the shopping carts immediately!

Thank you! Imperial Towers Management

In the four months I've lived here, I've never seen more than 5 shopping carts at once at their garage-level corral by the back elevator. The most intriguing question, to me, is whether we have many different cart hoarders, or a single fiend.

Reading the newspaper, it's hard not to get the impression that the main change civilization brings over barbarism is that , while people still act solely out of greedy self-interest, the object of that self-interest is more abstract. When Eric Rabe, the vice president of public relations for Verizon criticizes Philadelphia's plan to set up wireless broadband, "Government doesn't do service well," (NY Times) of course his statement is ridiculous on the face of it. Call Verizon and try to get good service. Verizon, Cox, the phone companies who have changed their names because so many people hated them that they had negative brand value, they all provide terrible service, constrained only by the law (somewhat) and the free market (not really - they just tacitly collude to all uniformly bad service); in contrast my encounters with government services are varied but frequently quite satisfactory. Rabe makes this obviously questionable assertion because he has a job with a company that has a greater profit opportunity if Philadelphia does not provide a particular service. So many quotes in stories are completely predictable in tone simply by knowing the financial interests of the speaker. This may not be an especially brilliant or original observation, but I just had to vent. On the bright side, at least he's just lying to reporter James Dao instead of bashing him over the head and taking his woman and land. Civilization is only a bust compared to our ideals. On a related note, as I'm sure I've written before, the European Union must be considered one of the greatest successes in the history of civilization if only for getting people to argue about regulations in conference rooms Brussels instead of shooting each other in trenches in northern France.

On an even brighter side, An Indiana state bill that would have made it hard for cities to build their own broadband networks was killed on Wednesday. Municipalities are perfectly suited to provide city-wide natural monopolies such as broadband, and they are accountable to their citizens, whereas corporations are accountable to managers and other corporations who stand to make more money by devising convoluted voice mail systems to make you hang up in despair before ever getting your problem fixed.

This article contains SPOILERS for the movie In Good Company.

I got a free online subscription to The New Republic when I renewed my Salon subscription. The New Republic annoys me. One reason is the gratuitously contrarian article summaries. These examples are all from the last week:

• Hosni Mubarak is a nasty dictator who has stymied liberalism in Egypt. But it's precisely for the sake of liberalism in Egypt that he should be allowed to reelect himself one more time.
• The U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal is not really a scandal. It worked exactly as expected. And that's the problem.
• Bush's record on global warming is better than you think.
• Why North Korea's announcement that it has nuclear weapons could prove to be a good thing.
• Holland thought it was a model for Muslim integration into Europe. Unfortunately, it might be.

Yeeahhhhh. Anyway, what I really want to complain about is Stanley Kauffmann. He reviews movies for TNR, and he regularly provides evidence that big chunks of plot and meaning fly right over his head. And I don't mean deep Kurosawa or Renoir subtext. I mean basic plot elements. A recent review provides an example. He writes of In Good Company:

Dan Foreman is an advertising salesman of fifty-one, working for a company that is part of a global conglomerate. A high-level merger shakes the organization of his office, and Carter Duryea, who is twenty-six, becomes his boss. Quite separately (the twist!), with no connection to the office situation, Carter and Alex, Dan's eighteen-year-old daughter, become acquainted and are soon pleasantly involved. The affair blossoms until Dan accidentally discovers it--and Carter discovers that Alex's father is Dan while Alex discovers that Carter is her father's boss. Dan is outraged, fallaciously believing that Carter is exploiting his power over him to make out with his daughter and that Alex is obliging in order to protect her father.

In the version I saw, the first extended conversation between Carter and Alex occurs over foosball in Dan's garage, after Carter has invited himself over for dinner, and many scenes before the affair starts. I could understand forgetting a small detail, just as I'm not 100% sure if Carter already knew Alex was Dan's daughter and Alex knew Carter was Dan's boss before the dinner (they had already met in an elevator), or if they only realized who each other was at the dinner. (I think the latter is true.) But in order to botch things as badly as Kaufmann did in that paragraph, you would have to have forgotten the lengthy dinner scene, and then missed all of the moments when Carter and Alex are afraid of discovery. You would probably have been a bit bewildered by the scene in the office the morning after Carter and Alex first sleep together, and Carter is freakishly nervous around Dan. This isn't deep textual analysis, it's an obvious and overt plot point. After Dan discovers them (he sees them holding hands in the driveway at his birthday party, and later follows her to a restaurant date, where he confronts both of them), there's nothing to suggest that he thinks Alex is "obliging in order to protect her father". The film has made it quite clear that that's not the case, and while it passed through my head that it probably passed through Dan's head, he is furious with both of them, very disturbed simply from the shock and dismay, and never does or says anything to suggest that he invests any credence in that theory, which is never mentioned outright.

Kauffmann misses the point so regularly that, basically, you shouldn't trust him to get even facts right, much less meaning.

I just had to get that off my chest. I'll keep an eye out for his reviews and share with you other gems I see. On a more positive note, his co-reviewer Christopher Orr's review, The director's cut of Donnie Darko explains too much, is well-argued, meshes with other things I've read, and is enough to convince me to avoid the director's cut of this fine movie, which I saw on a bootleg vcd of a bootleg screener tape with iffy tracking on a crummy little PC with tinny speakers, and which deeply entranced and moved me.

... The Social Security Administration doesn't release its official figures until Spring '05. So what are hundreds of media outlets reporting on?

A Babycenter.com press release.

Give credit to the clever folks at Babycenter.com, a parenting web site owned by Johnson & Johnson. They looked at their many users, ready to answer polls and post birth announcements, and created an annual "BabyCenter Baby Names List." Then they sent out a press release announcing their top names.

... The problem is the press, large and small, happily reported these lists as "the most popular baby names in America in 2004." Despite the clear-cut, in-your-face evidence that Babycenter's lists are not a snapshot of America's babies. Listen up, reporters:

There are no Spanish names on the list.

In 2003, America's real top 100 boys' names included:
Alejandro, Antonio, Carlos, Diego, Jesus, José, Juan, Luis, and Miguel.
Not a one made Babycenter's list, in 2003 or 2004.

Whatever Babycenter is reporting on, it isn't America's babies.

—Laura, Baby Name Wizard

I run pretty much pure debian linux—on my desktop, on my home server, on my laptop, and since last week on my internet server. Every linux distribution must address the issue of how to package and distribute programs, and there seem to be basically three solutions: debian packages, Red Hat packages, and Other. So every linux distribution can be put into one of these categories. It's probably not the overall best way to sort out distributions, but on the other hand maybe it is, and here's why:

"Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics." (The quickest citation is Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC (Commandant of the Marine Corps) noted in 1980, but the axiom is probably much older.) Similarly, users think about features, but professionals study upgrades. Many program and most operating system upgrades suck, but those on debian usually suck less. Distributions may add polish, testing, configuration, and so forth over and above the basics, but upgrades are constrained by the architecture. Any upgrade system includes both the technology itself, and the quality of the process and people maintaining the repository of programs. Debian's repository and team are both huge and both very well polished. (To digress, Debian-based distributions you may have heard of include Linspire, Knoppix, Ubuntu, and Xandros. Red Hat, of course, uses Red Hat rpms, and SuSE also uses rpms, I believe. The Other category includes those built from source, with gentoo being the one I've heard most of, and stuff like Slackware which I know has a cadre of adherents but I've never encountered it.) (To further digress, some other famous repositories that I've heard of include CPAN, for perl, with which I've had mostly bad experiences; Windows Update; and bsd ports, which is superb.)

One limitation of Debian's repository, or strength if you drink the koolaid, is that it has very strict licensing requirements, and only limited means to work around them. I'm currently deviating from the pure path on my desktop machine in three ways: I run a proprietary binary kernel module from NVidia to get proper performance from my video card (not for games, but to run my wide screen and let me switch workspaces quickly; I use qmail for email, more because of my invested time in understanding its quirks then because it is still the best, and djb's restrictive source license means that installing qmail requires jumping a few extra hoops for no discernable valid reason (the key trick, sadly, I have forgotten to document three times in a row now, but it involves extra flags forcing the qmail.deb installation without de-installing exim and its dependents); and java, for which these instructions are as a rosetta stone. My point, though, is the site which the title of this posting links to is such a sublime way to present large quantities of data that it's worth installing java to see and feel it.

After I brought my new bicycle home, nothing really happened for a week. It was rainy or cloudy all week ("If we continued at that rate for the rest of the season, we'd get 26.17 inches, which would be the most ever in San Diego. The record is 25.97, set in 1883-84." - Rob Krier), so I didn't want to go for a ride. After a week of staring at the thing, and using my old bike for grocery runs in the rain, I finally took it across the street to the park on Sunday. I felt like everybody was staring at me as I went through the crowds, but that could be because I was wearing shorts but no spandex underneath, an ill-considered combination for the necessary riding posture. Cruising through less crowded park streets, I stumbled upon the Administration building's very nicely landscaped courtyards, with several fountains, and spent half an hour practicing starting, stopping, starting into a left turn, starting into a right turn, tight circles, and so forth, with lots of looking over my shoulder and signalling. I learned that, in tight turns, I really do need to pedal with only the outside foot, holding the inside foot away from the front wheel overlap. In panic stops, if I obey my instinct to sit forward, the rear wheel comes up and then everything pivots around the steering column and stopped front wheel and I am forced standing and almost over. If I instead sit back in the chair while panic-stopping, I swerve but both wheels stay grounded. At least, it seemed like that would happen but I didn't test very hard after realizing that I might be screwing up my tires. Good lessons to learn at low speed.

I also picked up a new set of tire levers, a 650c-sized tube, a cheap pump on sale, a patch kit, and more water bottles. Given my history of losing water bottles, I hesitate to call them purchases; leases, perhaps. And, happily, I have already received a new Bike Planet Protege 8 computer, with a stiffer mount so that hopefully it won't fall into the elevator shaft.

Last weekend I went up to Los Angeles to pick up my new bicycle. I'm very excited about it, but getting it home was a bit frustrating.

The bicycle I settled on is a red RANS Force 5 LE. I like it because it has large wheels (more efficient, cooler) and a very supine riding position, with the feet almost at eye level. I added clipless pedals, a pannier rack, a rear light, a mirror, a computer, and a water bottle cage. The total weight is now 30.2 pounds, or just about the same as my old bike, which has the same stuff. I rode it about 10 miles through the Valley, and it was mildly scary. I could turn my head fine, but if I lifted a hand from the handlebar, or pushed too hard to get my shoe into the pedal, or otherwise didn't just sit still, I wobbled severly.

Bringing it home to San Diego was also uncomfortable. The panniers sit over and almost behind the rear wheel, and this moves the balance point to an area of the frame where there's no good way to grip it. In contrast to my old bike, which I can hoist up on a shoulder fairly well-balanced, even when it totals 50 pounds with my stuff, the F5 is almost unmanageable with a load. I got it down the subway stairs by reaching through the seat to grab a bit of frame, but soon resorted to using elevators (which, being terribly macho, I never do with my old bike). I also felt very weird and obvious, like everybody was looking at me. And when you take public transportation in Los Angeles outside of rush hour, and you are an Anglo, you are usually the only Anglo.

The myth that recumbants are harder to take up hills seemed true enough to me going up Banker's Hill in San Diego. I can climb almost anything on my old bike, or could until the spokes and chain wore down too much to take the load of steep hills, but I couldn't imagine going up some hills on this thing.

It all came together after I turned up Fifth avenue to go home. In the far left lane of a three-lane, one-way, high-speed street, I decided to take advantage of a lull in traffic to merge to the right side. I couldn't use the left-mounted mirror to check the street, so I was craning my neck but trying to keep my body perfectly still, except for pedalling up the hill. Just as I had decided to change direction, a bum shouted, "Hey!" I looked. "Don't fall asleep on that." I was so stressed from a fear of either falling down or being hit by a car I couldn't see that this distraction right as I was changing lanes made me furious, and if I had been able to control my direction I might have committed an act of violence. In retrospect, it shows pretty clearly how uncomfortable I am on the thing that one person shouting something inane could destabilize me so badly.

When I did manage to get home, huffing and puffing, one elevator was not working. The other one took forever, and even came to my floor and left without opening the door. With more button-pushing (and in the garage, you have to turn a key just to push the button), it came back. I waited for somebody to get off, but before I could wrestle the bike around to enter the elevator, the doors closed. When I punched them in frustration, I had my keys in my hand so now I have a some sort of bloody gouge under the skin of my palm. When I dragged the bicycle onto the elevator, there was a bump and something plastic skittered through the gap and down the shaft. Eventually I figured out that this was the bicycle computer. This tendency of the Protege 8 to fall off into elevator shafts compensates for the fact that, in every other way, it is far more usable than my current, much-hated bicycle computer.

Monday, of course, it rained.

So, I'm going to keep riding my old bicycle in town. I'm completely comfortable in traffic on it, and it still works, albeit with assorted weird noises. Some time this week when the weather improves, I'll take the new bicycle on a longer ride, out to the beach. Hopefully its advantages, the better streamlining and the more comfortable seat, will kick in.

I just saw an amazing competition. The best Rubic's Cube solvers in the world were at the Exploratorium today. I was there as usual as a volunteering making toys with kids. Throughout the afternoon bigger crowds gathered around the Rubic's Cube area. The ways it worked was that each competitor would give their cube to the staff who would set each cube to the same random configuration. Then each competitor would solve their cube as fast as possible. The fastest guy, Macky, could finish in ~15 seconds. He always wears a blue hat bearing his name. This 15-year old teen just moved from Japan to Pasedena to be near the Rubic's Mecca--Cal Tech. The slowest solvers took thirty seconds. Macky easily won the 3x3x3 glamour event, but other participants could compete with him at the 4x4x4 (80sec), 5x5x5 (160sec), blind, a fewest moves events. I don't understand how they could solve it blind. Macky, like all but one of the others, uses Jessica Fridrich's solving method, which focuses on rows. Jessica was fast, but twice her cube broke during competition. The crowd gasped each time, just like when a figure skater falls. Lars Petrus's corner method requires fewer turns, but it also requires more thought, and is thus slower (20-30 seconds). When finished, they spiked the solved cube on the table like they had just scored a touchdown. It was better than TV!

Along with long tail and the broader thing called disintermediation, one of the biggest qualitative differences between physical retailing and internet retail is the ability to directly measure the effectiveness of advertising. With Google ads for my own commercial site, I can tell exactly how much advertising money each sale has cost me. Jeff Bezos describes the same thing on a bigger scale:

About three years ago [Amazon.com] stopped doing television advertising. We did a 15-month-long test of TV advertising in two markets - Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis - to see how much it drove our sales. And it worked, but not as much as the kind of price elasticity we knew we could get from taking those ad dollars and giving them back to consumers. So we put all that money into lower product prices and free shipping. That has significantly accelerated the growth of our business.

The one thing that may eventually kill that revolting thing called the television commercial is hard evidence that it is not cost-effective. We can only hope that time comes before our civilization is gone.

CNN Will Cancel 'Crossfire' and Cut Ties to Commentator
By BILL CARTER

Published: January 6, 2005

CNN has ended its relationship with the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson and will shortly cancel its long-running daily political discussion program, "Crossfire," the new president of CNN, Jonathan Klein, said last night.

[...]

Mr. Klein specifically cited the criticism that the comedian Jon Stewart leveled at "Crossfire" when he was a guest on the program during the presidential campaign. Mr. Stewart said that ranting partisan political shows on cable were "hurting America."

Mr. Klein said last night, "I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart's overall premise." He said he believed that especially after the terror attacks on 9/11, viewers are interested in information, not opinion.

[...]