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 sh