Today's good news:

President-elect Rafael Correa appointed seven women to his Cabinet on Wednesday, including Ecuador's first female defense minister, saying he wanted to promote gender equality in his South American nation.

Used Aeron chairs seem like a pretty good bargain. I found one for $550. It has a cast iron (I think) base and seat frame, so it's pretty sturdy. The lumbar support is intrusive; maybe the mesh has a bit more give now than it used to. But the lumbar bar can be removed completely, and the mesh is still pretty strong around the lumbar region. One problem is the arms, which are non-adjustable. Even if they were adjustable, I type with my keyboard in my lap, so I don't want arms at all. Here's how to take them off:

1. using a 3/16" hex head (in retrospect, it's a bit wobbly at 3/16", so it's probably the next bigger metric size), remove the four screws that hold the back of the chair to the seat
2. Using a T-27 star drive head and a bit of WD-40, remove the two screws, one per arm, that hold the arms on.
3. Put the back back on with the four hex screws

Seattle has been riven with controversy over whether the Seattle viaduct, a nasty concrete structure that separates downtown Seattle from the waterfront and is scheduled to collapse in the next non-trivial earthquake, should be replaced by a tunnel or by a new viaduct. For assorted political reasons whose details can presumably be summarized as "money", the governor has a big say in this. Here, on page 32 of a 57-page document labeled "Findings and Conclusions", are the first sentences of her findings:

Therefore, here is my recommended path forward:

Let's ask the voters of Seattle. I will accept their vote and ask legislative and City leaders to do the same.

1. Will it be a cut and cover tunnel or an elevated structure?
2. Are the Seattle voter's willing to accept the additional cost of the tunnel?
3. The public discourse and educational value associated with a public vote is a powerful tool to help City residents lead us all past the stalemate. Ultimately [blah blah blah]

Are the Seattle voter's what? willing to accept the additional cost? And which Seattle voter are we talking about? I thought there were hundreds of thousands.

So the Governor's findings are, don't ask me, let's ask the voters. And nobody proofread the findings so they have a misplaced apostrophe in a key sentence. For this we elect officials and pay their salaries?

In case you care, my own preference is to remove the current viaduct and put in a park. The tens of thousands of daily drivers can find other routes. Give them enough warning and they'll find other jobs and other housing that don't require driving through downtown each way for their daily commute. And you know what would have helped? A friggin' monorail over the same route, which even after the cost overruns that led to its cancellation, was still only half as expensive as the (pre-overrun pricetag for the) cheaper viaduct replacement option.

(This post's title originally bungled pluralization, by reading "Governer of Washington ('s staff) bungle punctuation". It has been corrected since publication)

(A year later, noticing this page was surprisingly high in google results for "Governer of Washington, I realized that governor was mis-spelled. People in glass houses ... need a lot of transparent spackle.)

Today's good news:

Sen. Robert Byrd has built a reputation in Congress and in West Virginia using special interest funding to bring federal jobs and money home, but the king of pork said he's willing to give up his projects for 2007 to find a way out of the "fiscal chaos" left by the outgoing Republican-led Congress. —Gannett News Service

Between this and not giving an impeached judge a committee chairmanship, this batch of Democrats is failing to completely suck. This is very disorienting.

In case reality isn't bleak enough, you can read about the Endor Holocaust, in which the Ewok race was destroyed along with Endor's ecosystem, following the end of Return of the Jedi, as an inevitable result of the destruction of the second Death Star in close orbit. But if you thought Trekkies had no lives, Star Wars fans include Endor Holocaust Deniers.

Baseball fans focus on championships, but the best way to judge a team's management is by its economic efficiency: how well did it turn payroll into wins? Prompted by the announcement that Joe Girardi won the NL Manager of the Year award for the Florida Marlins, who finished with a losing record but had by far the lowest payroll and an almost all-rookie lineup, I've graphed some data. Here is a chart showing number of wins in the 2006 regular season against opening day payroll:

In general more payroll does mean more wins. You can see a few outliers - the Yankees, the Red Sox, the Cubs, and the Marlins in particular. Teams above the line are overpaying for wins; below the line, getting a bargain.

But to get to the real meat, you need serious analysis. Baseball Prospetus modifies the wins and payroll down to account for the "Marginal" concept - the idea that there is an effectively unlimited pool of low-quality talent at minimum cost (where minimum = $327,000/season). Now you can really see which teams made the most and least of their money:

All data is from Baseball Prospectus.

Girardi, by the way, was rewarded for his efforts (note, though, that the actual credit should be shared between Girardi, the general manager who actually negotiates contracts and makes trades, and the Marlins scouts who selected the rookies) with a big "you're fired" sandwich. Moral of the story: results matter less than sucking up to the boss.

If a female dog is spayed before her first heat cycle, her risk of developing breast cancer is only 0.05%. If she is spayed after having only one heat cycle, her risk of breast cancer jumps to 8%. If she is spayed after her second heat cycle, that risk becomes 26% [...] Spaying a dog after her third heat cycle may reduce the risk of mammary carcinoma (breast cancer) but not appreciably. [...] Ogilvie, Moore. Managing the Veterinary Cancer Patient: a practice manual. 1995 (source)

Adnan Khashoggi is connected to every shocking event that has occurred since 1960, usually by no more than one or two degrees. A partial list would include Iran-Contra, Wedtech, BCCI, the Marcos Philippine kleptocracy, the Synfuels fiasco, and the discovery of buried mustard gas in the pricy Spring Valley neighborhood of Washington, D.C. To these we must now add the tragic events of Sept. 11.

As always, Chatterbox emphasizes that Khashoggi's proximity to these events does not demonstrate criminality on his part. But it does illustrate Khashoggi's "Where's Waldo?"-like ubiquity in the noir environment where shocking events tend to take place. Khashoggi is what the journalist Malcolm Gladwell has termed a "connector," that is, a person who stands at the intersection of many social networks. —Slate, 14 Nov 2001

The latest:

In a recent sitdown, celeb interviewer Daphne Barak asks Adnan Khashoggi point-blank, "Was Heather Mills paid for sex -- or wasn't she?" Khashoggi answers "Who cares?" and reaches out to Barak for a high-five. He later says, "How does she know names, places, if she wasn't one of the girls?" referring to the fact Mills has admitted meeting him at one of his events. —NY Post by way of Salon

Here are a few pictures of my new home office in Seattle:

the productivity pod, and

the view out the window.

On page B4, in a review of a book on Andrew Carnegie, John Steele Gordon writes:

Highly readable despite it's length...

This comes on the same day that they announce increases in home subscription costs. Obligatory: Let's hope they'll use the extra money to hire some copy editors.

From Wired Magazine:

We'll be brief: Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn.") and is said to have called it his best work. So we asked sci-fi, fantasy, and horror writers from the realms of books, TV, movies, and games to take a shot themselves.

Joel's favorites:

Failed SAT. Lost scholarship. Invented rocket.
- William Shatner

Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time
- Alan Moore

The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly.
- Orson Scott Card

Nevertheless, he tried a third time.
- James P. Blaylock

Dinosaurs return. Want their oil back.
- David Brin

Dorothy: "Fuck it, I'll stay here."
- Steven Meretzky

Leia: "Baby's yours." Luke: "Bad news…"
- Steven Meretzky


Researchers in Niger have found that farmers have rehabilitated three million hectares of severely degraded land by their own initiative.

"The scale and speed of this phenomenon is surprising," says Chris Reij, of Vrije University in the Netherlands. "Where few trees could be found in the mid-1980s, one now finds 20 to 150 trees per hectare." —SciDev.Net

Sportswriter Lee Jenkins writes in Friday's Times:

How the A’s keep shedding million-dollar salaries and collecting division titles remains baseball’s ultimate mystery. —New York Times

Well, I guess that if you never read Moneyball, the detailed account by Michael Lewis of how the A's, under general manager Billy Beane and his protégés, have sought undervalued talent by using statistics and critical thinking to measure players more accurately than traditional baseball techniques, which rely on appearances, rules of thumb, and "the way it's always been done", then yes, that would remain an ultimate mystery.

Moneyball was published in 2003, and both it and the backlash against it has been one of, probably, the top five stories in baseball since then. The biggest baseball story since 2003 was the Red Sox winning the World Series in 2004 (for the first time in 86 years), and their general manager was Theo Epstein, who worked for Beane in Oakland, was the source of some of Beane's unconventional strategies, and was mentioned repeatedly in the book.

So it's unlikely Jenkins has never heard of Moneyball, sabermetrics, on-base-percentage, or other new-fangled notions. The obvious conclusion is that he read Moneyball (or a summary of it), rejected its contents out of hand, and will remain mystified until the end of his days. Very sad, but deliberate, willful ignorance does seem to be a prerequisite for sportswriters.

New York Times columnist John Tierney (center-right, pro-Establishment) is usually somewhere between pointless and wrong, but he had a very nice uptick recently. Excerts from two recent columns:

"We're on the offense against the terrorists on every battlefront," Bush said last week, "and we'll accept nothing less than complete victory."

When you define victory that way, when you treat one attack from a disorganized band of fanatics as a menace to civilization, you've doomed yourself to defeat and caused more damage than they could. You can't completely stop terrorism, but you can scare people into giving up liberties, wasting huge sums of money and sacrificing more lives than would be lost in a terrorist attack.

Take it from bin Laden, who bragged in 2004 that it was "easy to provoke and bait this administration."

"All that we have to do," he said, "is to send two mujahedeen to the farthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written Al Qaeda, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses." And then Al Qaeda, no matter what losses it has suffered, will come off once again looking like the strong horse.

(12 Sep 2006)

and

Compared with past threats -- like Communist sociopaths with nuclear arsenals -- Al Qaeda's terrorists are a minor problem. They certainly don't justify the hyperbolic warnings that America's ''existence'' or ''way of life'' is in jeopardy, or that America must transform the Middle East in order to survive.

There undoubtedly will be more terrorist attacks, either from Al Qaeda or others, just as there were before 2001. Terrorists might strike Monday. There will always be homicidal zealots like Mohamed Atta or Timothy McVeigh, and some of them will succeed, terribly. But this is not a new era. The terrorist threat is still small. It's the terrorism industry that got big.

(9 Sep 2006)

Unfortunately he seemed to run out of ideas after that burst, and so followed up with "ripped-from-the-headlines" (or, more likely, "based-on-a-press-release") columns about for-profit philanthropy and a mathematical equation to predict how long celebrity couples will stay married. Here's my advice: just keep writing more columns spelling out, in your somber but serviceable prose, with a bit of detail and a few quotes per column, that the emperor has no clothes. You won't run out of material for years.

Here are a few facts that don't seem to be well-publicized on the internet. Had I known these facts three days ago, before I started trying to upgrade someone's Macintosh, I would have saved myself a number of hours.

First: If you see in the documentation for OS X Tiger (that's Mactinosh operating system number 10.4) that there is a disc that comes with Tiger that includes the old System 9, you are being lied to. Such a disc may well have come with Leopard and Panther (10.3 and 10.2), but I can attest that there is no such disk in the Tiger DVD retail box. You will need your old System 9 cds if you plan to use any System 9 programs.

Second: if you install System 9.1 within Tiger as instructed, and try to start Classic mode, it will hang forever (tested for values of forever <= 1 hr) at the part where it says "Welcome to Mac OS". What you need to do is upgrade it to System 9.2.1 or 9.2.2 and you can download the upgrade files from Apple (if you want 9.2.2, you must first upgrade to 9.2.1, then upgrade again to 9.2.2). However, the upgrade files are themselves System 9 programs, which of course you can't run if you have a DOA (dead on arrival) System 9.1 inside of OS X. The solution is to set the whole thing up as dual boot, boot into 9, upgrade, then boot back into X. From that point, you can run some System 9 programs in OS X (but not Final Cut Pro).

Third: if you partition a drive using the OS X tools, you must use the "IncludeOS9Drivers" option or else the entire hard drive will be invisible to any System 9 tools (like the install CD), even though OS X tools will see it fine. This item actually is documented in the fine print, and I saw it, but forgot to do it the first time.

So, if you have a Mac that didn't come with OS X, and you want to put OS X on it, here is one method that works:

• Buy an external hard drive. Firewire is good.
• Copy everything to that hard drive
• Reboot with the OS X DVD in the drive (hold down C during boot to force it to boot from the disc)
• Start Terminal from the boot disc, and use this command line to repartition the hard drive:

  disktool partitionDisk disc0 2 OS9Drivers HFS+ "System 9 Partition" 5G "Journaled HFS+" "OS X Partition" 20G

  This will give you a 5G System 9 partition and an OS X partition that will take up the rest of the hard drive. It will wipe everything on the disk.
• Proceed to install OS X in its designated partition.
• When complete (including reboots, etc), put in the System 9 disk and reboot to that (with the "C" trick)
• Install System 9 in its partition.
• Take out the disc and reboot back to System 9. To do that, hold down "D" immediately after the startup sound. This will make it boot to the first partition, which is the System 9 partition.
• Upgrade System 9 to 9.2.2
• Boot back into OS X (every time you boot, it will automatically go to X unless you hold down "D" for System 9 or "C" for the disc).
• Classic will now work normally.

(David Pogue's "Mac OS X Tiger Missing Manual" was very helpful for the rebooting part above, and seems generally to offer a "good pages of useful info"/dollar paid ratio.)

After the years I put in as Release Manager for OpenACS, a predominantly volunteer effort, I experience no small amount of schadenfreude to see such a fancy, polished Design Legend as Apple make such rudimentary mistakes as updating the 10.3 documentation to 10.4 by changing the numbers without re-checking the content, and producing upgrades that must be run one at a time, in sequence.

The tagline of PMI's magazine, PM Network, is "Making project management indispensible for business results.®". Let's leave off the meaningless "business results" verbiage and focus on the really egregious part of this: "making project management indispensible."

My objection isn't the indispensible part. I wholly believe that management, like politics, is a basic element of all human endeavors. And in fact, management is even more pervasive than politics: you can escape politics if you are a team of one, but you'll still have management needs. It's true that many projects don't have project managers, and still succeed, but that doesn't mean they didn't have management. If you are going to get groceries, you will (in America) go to your car, drive to the store, collect groceries, pay for the groceries, come home, and put the groceries away. If you do those tasks out of order, you will have problems. Even in the routine task of getting groceries, de facto project management is occurring.

My point is that project management already is indispensible. A tagline of "pointing out that project management is indispensible and that employing a qualified project manager is, in many circumstances, going to help you out a lot" would be (if only it fit on the maganize) a great tagline. But to state that we have to make our skills indispensible is awful for two reasons:

First, it suggests that project management is not already indispensible.

Second, and far worse, it says that Project Managers are people who, even though you don't need them right now, are damned well going to make you need them whether you like it or not. It's a marketing tagline in the worst way - it's about creating demand for our services, regardless of whether that demand is genuine or not. Yuck and double-yuck.

To the Editor:

"At 2-Year Colleges, Students Eager but Unprepared" (front page, Sept. 2) could have been written about me. I hope that those struggling students take some heart from my experience.

I graduated from high school with a combined verbal and math SAT score of less than 800. Enrolling in junior college, I had to enroll in arithmetic and to relearn addition, subtraction and fractions. Although I took college-level English courses, I still had to go to the study skills center to keep up with the class.

Ultimately, I got through calculus with a grade of B and a tutor. I went on to complete two master’s degrees, and have held a well-paying job with the Florida Legislature for the last 20 years.

My advice to those students is to take heart and keep trying. Junior colleges work!

Linda Vaughn

Tallahassee, Fla., Sept. 6, 2006

—New York Times Letters to the Editor

Here is a short list of computer programs that think they are operating systems, but would better serve all concerned if they knocked it off:

• Oracle
• Java
• emacs

... the bottom line is that there are three and a half platforms (C#, Java, PHP, and a half Python) that are all equally likely to make you successful, an infinity of platforms where you're pretty much guaranteed to fail spectacularly when it's too late to change anything (Lisp, ISAPI DLLs written in C, Perl), and a handful of platforms where The Jury Is Not In, So Why Take The Risk When Your Job Is On The Line? (Ruby on Rails). —Joel Spolsky

Spolsky's advice exactly matches my experience. The platform I've spent the most time in over the last five years, OpenACS, falls somewhere between "guaranteed to fail spectacularly when it's too late to change anything" and also-ran. I tried Ruby on Rails, and my personal jury is in: it's an arrogant language by arrogant people: the opening music for the Ruby on Rails podcast is Building a Religion; David Heinemeier Hannson's response to Spolsky's post is a defensive broadside rather than a serious reply. Spolsky writes with a forcefulness that can come off as arrogance, but I don't think it actually is. Consider this piece on marketing:

We have lots of FogBugz customers who have high-priced Remedy, Rational, or Mercury products sitting on the shelves after investments of well over $100,000, because that software isn't good enough to actually use. Then they buy a couple of thousand dollars worth of FogBugz and that's the product they really use. The Rational salesperson is laughing at me, because I have $2000 in the bank and he has $100,000. But I have far more customers than he does, and they're all using my product, and evangelizing it, and spreading it, while Rational customers either (a) don't use it or (b) use it and can't stand it. But he's still laughing at me from his 40 foot yacht while I play with rubber duckies in the bathtub.

...

The more you learn about pricing, the less you seem to know.

I've been nattering on about this topic for well over 5000 words and I don't really feel like we're getting anywhere, you and I.

Some days it seems like it would be easier to be a taxi driver, with prices set by law. Or to be selling sugar. Plain ol' sugar. Yep. That would be sweet.

Take my advice, offered about 20 pages back: charge $0.05 for your software. Unless it does bug tracking, in which case the correct price is $30,000,000. Thank you for your time, and I apologize for leaving you even less able to price software than you were when you started reading this.

Many programmers exhibit tribalism: they identify with the specific technologies that they use, and criticism of the technology becomes a personal attack, which is therefore Manichaean, and therefore completely wrong, and therefore deserving of retaliation in kind. These instincts are seductively comfortable, but they do the industry a disservice. Spolsky puts his arguments forward strongly, but he doesn't seem to wear Manichaean blinders. DHH, and Ruby on Rails and its followers, do seem more partisan and more close-minded.

"I'm really excited about Dungeon Siege, the Uwe Boll movie you're in."

Several years ago, as I was coming up on ten years of experience in project management, I decided to obtain professional certification. My reasons included a desire for professional growth, to interact with peers, to receive and in turn transmit knowledge, building contacts, and of course the cynical potential of personal gain. A bit of research confirmed that the Project Management Institute, which I'd heard of before, remained the 800 pound gorilla of the field. They offer the "Project Management Professional" credential, or PMP, which requires a college degree, 4500 hours and 36 months of project management experience, 35 hours of classroom training, and passing an exam.

In a series of upcoming posts, I will describe my experience with the PMP in detail. I will try to answer questions such as, Is the PMP helpful for employers? Is the PMP helpful for project managers? How practical is the knowledge covered in the PMP exam? How hard is the PMP exam? How well does the PMP satisfy its goal to "advance the project management profession and to recognize the achievements of individuals"? How well does PMI "promote a unifying influence in the advancement of Project Management"?

To start things off here in part 1, I'll summarize the controversy I saw surrounding the new exam released in 2005 with the Third Edition of the Project Management Body of Knowledge guide, or PMBOK.

---

I started thinking about getting a PMP in late 2004, but didn't do much research until early 2005. I discovered that a new version of the exam would be rolled out in September 2005. But before you can take the exam, you have to have 35 classroom hours. One option was to take a class at one of the local universities. San Diego State University and University of California San Diego both offer PMP programs, which are one or two-year affairs with a total cost in the range of $5,000 to $10,000. However, you can take a single class and pay in the neighborhood of a thousand dollars. But, it turns out that the San Diego Chapter of PMI offers specific Exam Prep classes that provide the required number of hours. And, because they are taught by volunteers who are themselves PMPs (seeking the 60 Professional Development Units, or PDUs, that PMPs must accumulate every three years to maintain certification), the classes cost only about $400.

The summer classes coincided with my annual July Vancouver vacation, which ended the chance of taking the old version of the exam. So I signed up for the fall class, six full-day Saturdays in a row, and after completing the classes registered to take the new exam in early 2006. During the class, many students were quite nervous about the new exam, and I found out why: The previous exam required 141 correct out of 200 questions, or 70%. The new exam still had 200 questions, and still required 141 correct, but 25 of the questions would be present solely for "testing the test", and would not count towards correct answers. So, on October 1, 2005, not only did all the questions change from "second edition" to "third edition", but the passing score rose from 70% to 81%.

Rumors passed around class included that the summer classes had forty or fifty people (we had about 12 regulars), that all available test slots in the San Diego area had been booked for months before the cutoff date, and that some students had flown to Nebraska and other underpopulated mid-West states solely to be able to take the old exam before the cutoff. The instructors said that this was part of an effort by PMI to "raise the bar" for new PMPs and make sure the credential didn't get diluted. As the class continued into OCtober, I heard more rumors, both from within class and without, that the percentage of test-takers passing the test on the first try was plummeting from 70%+ to 40% or even lower. (The test costs $405 (for members of PMI, itself a $119/yr cost, plus $10 for application and $30 for the local chapter), and $275 for re-takes.)

Eventually, I received an PMI email—not from PMI, but forwarded from an early test-taker:

...Before offering the new examination, PMI assembled a group of volunteers to help establish the passing score. Using a method known as the "Modified Angoff Technique" (a proven exam development method), a group of global PMPs in the summer of 2005 assessed each test question and independently evaluated the questions to determine their difficulty level. Their responses were then sent to PMI's psychometric (exam development) experts and averaged. From that information, PMI?s psychometricians recommended that PMI adopt a passing point of 81 percent (141 correct questions).

... After performing a statistical analysis of [actual test results], PMI and its independent psychometricians were able to make conclusions about the performance of questions as well as candidate performance ... PMI revised the passing score for the exam to 61 percent (106 correct questions). PMI then applied the new passing score to all examinations taken since 30 September 2005 by candidates who sat for the new exam. PMI is in the process of updating the candidates' records.

While we remain extremely sensitive to candidate and trainer concerns about such a change in the passing score, these considerations must be weighed in context of the overall purpose of the exam: to provide a consistent global standard that all practitioners must meet to ensure the credential is awarded to qualified individuals. ...

PMI understands that the changes to the exam and its passing score raise
numerous questions. ...

—forwarded email from Drew Ihlenfeld, PMI

It's hard to see such a drastic rescoring of the exam as anything other than a major failure of the exam development process. Of course, the retroactive rescoring effectively corrects the problem, but that's after-the-fact quality control, and it means that their before-the-fact quality assurance failed. And it doesn't address the wear and tear on PMP applicants, both those that were temporary failures and all of us in the months before and after the transition that had to make decisions in an atmosphere of uncertainty. For example, the email was dated 30 November, but it was weeks later before anything about it was posted on the website.

In the event, my classmates and I were very relieved to learn of the change in scoring, and I finally took and passed the exam on April 1, 2006 with a score in the high 70s. Nonetheless, I was somewhat bemused to recently read PMI's version of the fiasco in the 2005 annual report:

As part of best practices for exam development, PMI proactively reviewed data collected on the revised Project Management Professional (PMP) certification examination.

Driven by a role delineation study identifying volunteer-credentialed practitioner recommendations on how the skill sets for a PMP had evolved, PMI conducted this evaluation and revision based on the Institute's desire to accurately provide a consistent global standard that ensures the credential is awarded to qualified individuals, and meets the needs of PMI's stakeholders. Specifically, the attributes to "lead" and "direct" were identified as key elements of a more mature PMP.

PMI utilized proven examination development methods in revising the PMP examination, and conducted all appropriate due diligence to assess the applicability and difficulty of each test question as determine the overall percentage passing point.

Quality control measures implemented prior to and following the exam launch data indicate the exam is functioning as designed, including the fact that no inaccuracies in scoring and no malfunctions in the test's administration or its translations have occurred.

—PMI 2005 Annual report, p 23-24

Harper's Magazine is famous for its index, a list of numbers about the world. Like the game show Jeopardy's "answer in the form a question", this gimmick is rarely especially effective. For example,

Year that a signboard tallying the U.S. national debt was erected near Times Square: 1989 [Douglas Durst (N.Y.C.)]

Year in which it is expected to run out of digits: 2007

—Harper's

is pretty awkward way to deliver this factoid.

Talking Points Memo presents a few numbers today which are better suited to the Harper's Index format:

Number of Technorati mentions of Ned Lamont (CT): 26,578
                           of Sherrod Brown (OH):  6,764
                                of Jim Webb (VA):  4,516
                          of Bob Casey, Jr. (PA):  3,157
                              of Jon Tester (MT):  2,325
                             of Jack Carter (NV):  2,077
                        of Claire McCaskill (MO):  1,976
—Talking Points Memo

Who are all of those people who aren't Ned Lamont? They are Democratic challengers to incumbent, vulnerable Republican senators. And they're being ignored by the netroots (and the netroots' wallets) who are distracted by a fight between a Democrat and an independent with a track record of voting strongly Democrating who has pledged to caucus with the Democrats. Karl Rove is laughing all the way to the End Times. (For the record: I've never liked Lieberman. I think he's the political equivalent of an empty .300 hitter (a baseball player whose superficial statistics are good but whose fundamentals are bad), and I hope he loses. But if I contribute money, it won't be to help Lamont.)

And the second Harper's figure from this morning:

Number of reporters contributing to Friday's front page New York Times story on the JonBenet Ramsey case: 13

Number of reporters contributing to Friday's front page New York Times story on the federal court ruling that the NSA warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional: 2

—Talking Points Memo

I read the Becker-Posner blog because they are both extremely smart, extremely opinionated, very articulate, and often spectacularly wrong in the very special way that only utterly, arrogantly brilliant people can be.

In the middle of a discussion of airplane security, Becker had this gem:

Although civil libertarians criticize "profiling" of travelers and others, and government officials deny they engage in it, profiling is a necessary part of any reasonably effective security system. Groups that should be scrutinized carefully differ over time and among region of the world. [...] Young Muslim males of Pakistani and Arab background have been responsible for the vast majority of recent terrorist activities in America, Britain, and continental European countries. [...] . Therefore, young males from these groups should receive especially close scrutiny at airports and other public places. [...] To limit the discomfort and anger caused by profiling, members of the profiled groups should be treated politely and with dignity. They should also be reminded that they too are being protected from terrorist activities by a small fringe.

Those objecting to profiling potential terrorists usually want to subject everyone to the same detailed examination and inquiry. However, when potential terrorists are part of a group that constitutes only a small fraction of the population, searching everyone with the same detailed care at airports or at other venues would be needlessly costly and time consuming. This would slow down and thereby reduce air travel and other vulnerable group activities. It would also lead to loud complaints by those affected after the fear of terrorism had abated.

I don't want to address the arguments for or against racial profiling. I just want to point out that Becker is making two contradictory arguments:

• young Muslim males of Pakistani and Arab backgrounds should be profiled closely, over their own objections if any
• One reason not to profile everybody equally is that people would complain

It's hard for me to see any interpretation other than that the complaints of young Muslims count for less than the complaints of others. I suppose Becker would say that their complaints are valued equally but they have to suck it up for the team, basically. To which I say that a fundamental characteristic of pluralist, democratic cultures must be that nobody is asked to bear more than their fair share of a burden based on attributes that are out of their control. I think the word for that is discrimination.

It may be empirically true that young Muslim males of Pakistani and Arab background are a greater threat to, say, US security than any other group defined by age, ethnicity, gender, and religion. I am skeptical of that claim for several reasons: several other profiles, such as white supremacists and Christian anti-abortion terrorists, compete hard in the rankings; and successful Muslim terrorist groups already include, and are actively recruiting more, people out of that profile.

But even if that were empirically true, any stance by the rest of us other than demanding equal inconvenience and suspicion for all is unacceptable and un-democratic. Saying "sorry, brown guy, but you have to stand in line and get dirty looks and just maybe go into secret detention for a few years and get shipped to Romania for outsourced torture sessions" is the exact opposite spirit of Danish King Christian's classic response to the Nazi invasion: "We'll all have to wear yellow stars." (Of course, he never actually said that. I'm not sure if it qualifies as truthy; regardless, Denmark did indeed have an excellent record of protecting its Jews during the Holocaust.)

When I got back from a trip to Vancouver and Seattle, I booted up my desktop, put my Palm Pilot in the dock and synced. Something about the port configuration that the rebooting machine put together didn't satisfy the Palm, and it crashed. Hard. Soft reset did nothing. Hard reset did nothing.

This happened once before, a few months ago, and at the time it occured to me to let the battery run down and see if it would really reset itself. It has a remarkably long-lasting, built in lithium battery, and it took a day or so before it occured to me to take it out of the charging cradle; from that point, it was over a week before it wound down. In fact, I happened to check it when it was down to maybe 5% battery, and it had awoken from its mystery crash in order to announce that it was almost out of battery power. I promptly put it back in the cradle and all was fine.

So, if I didn't want to lose the notes I had taken on the trip, I would have to set it aside, but check it regularly, and hope to spot the window after the battery was low enough to trigger the warning that uncrashes it, but before it actually ran out of energy and erased itself. And hope that that was the problem, not something more serious.

In the meantime, I was going crazy without my Palm, so I got the cheapest new model, the Z22. It does everything that the Vx does, costs $100 new (my original V was about $300 in 1999; after I lost it 2001, I replaced it with a Vx that I bought used in Hong Kong for US$130), and has 32 Mb instead of 8, a color screen, and USB instead of serial. I considered the other, more expensive Palms, but they are all bigger and heavier, and do things I don't want my Palm to do, like take phone calls (no thanks), connect to the internet over wireless (too, too tempting), or play music (got a Shuffle for that).

After a few days, I reached my conclusion: I don't care for the Z22. The color screen is too bright in the dark and too dim in direct sunlight. There's no cover, so when you put it in your pocket it likes to wake itself up; keylock is a pain in the ass. Palm lost a lawsuit over Graffiti, and the new Graffiti 2 sucks in comparison. I followed some instructions to hack the old Graffiti on, and I like how it shows your strokes when you write in the main area, but it crashed whenever I wrote anything in the special writing area. The battery seemed to run down a lot faster than the Vx, as well. The Vx's screen is perfectly readable in direct sunlight and the Indiglo mode is sexy in the dark. Dropping the Vx into the cradle is much more satisfying than putting the Z22 on the desktop and plugging in a loose cable. And the Vx's thin, shiny aluminum shell is simply far more attractive than the Z22's mundane glossy plastic.

A week later, I put the Vx in the cradle for a few minutes, and it came back to life. I lost a few days of data from the trip, but I had my lovely machine back. The Z22 went back to Best Buy, unlamented.

Bruce Schneier on the new airport rules:

And a long-term prohibition against liquid carry-ons won't make us safer, either. It's not just that there are ways around the rules, it's that focusing on tactics is a losing proposition.

It's easy to defend against what the terrorists planned last time, but it's shortsighted. If we spend billions fielding liquid-analysis machines in airports and the terrorists use solid explosives, we've wasted our money. If they target shopping malls, we've wasted our money. Focusing on tactics simply forces the terrorists to make a minor modification in their plans. There are too many targets -- stadiums, schools, theaters, churches, the long line of densely packed people before airport security -- and too many ways to kill people.

Security measures that require us to guess correctly don't work, because invariably we will guess wrong. It's not security, it's security theater: measures designed to make us feel safer but not actually safer.

Airport security is the last line of defense, and not a very good one at that. Sure, it'll catch the sloppy and the stupid -- and that's a good enough reason not to do away with it entirely -- but it won't catch a well-planned plot. We can't keep weapons out of prisons; we can't possibly keep them off airplanes. —Schneier

And a cartoon

Today's good news, a twofer of adjacent articles in the Times. First, PepsiCo corporation selected an Indian-born woman as CEO. Second, parts of India are banning Coke and Pepsi. Unfortunately, they're banning them because they think they have pesticides, not because they are unhealthy sugar water that shouldn't be sold in schools. But I guess that's now Ms. Nooyi's problem.

Mammoth, John Varley.
Another competent, pedestrian science fiction novel from former sf god John Varley.

Pretender, C.J. Cherryh
"The second book of the third FOREIGNER sequence." That would make it book eight in this series about the politics of various factions of humans and aliens on planet far from Earth. The cover art still sucks; the prose is as good as ever if you like her thing, which I do.

I love my Thinkpad. My first was a used A20 (which got brain-transplanted into somebody else's disused A21 when the A20's screen went wonky). Last year I bought a new X40, and demoted the A21 the dining nook for reading while snacking. (Its battery life is below 30 minutes anyway.) The X40 is a superb laptop; small, light, good screen, great keyboard, hardware which is adequately supported on linux. (There's even a linux module to read the hard drive impact sensor, so you can tap signals on the case to run commands.)

When I heard a few months ago that " Lenovo will not install or support the Linux operating system on any of its PCs ... Lenovo is positioning itself as an exclusive partner of Microsoft..." (), I was very dismayed at the thought that my third laptop would have to be something else, although maybe in a few years wearables will be cheap and standard. Happily, Lenovo later disavowed that marketing position.

Anyway, the subject of this post is the docking station. I used to think that laptops and docking stations were silly, until I got more nomadic a few years ago. I still do most of my work in the productivity pod, but I take the laptop on trains and to client sites and to coffee shops and up to the top floor lounge in my apartment building. The laptop came with Windows, and I decided to leave it on (after installing Linux and a dual-boot setup) for games. When I want to play Civ IV on the big monitors, I have to unplug and replug the keyboard and laptop, plug in the external DVD drive, unpack the power cable and plug it in (both ends), etc. I'll readily admit that it's less onerous than walking miles every day to collect drinking water, but after a year of this I finally got a USB KVM switch and, after a month of hunting, a used docking station that included the power adapter.

And they work (the Belkin KVM switch is, astonishingly, working as advertised, making it far and away the least defective piece of Belkin equipment I have ever used). But I do want to complain about one detail of the docking station, which is the docking. (And undocking). To undock it, you tug a lever, which feels both stiff and flimsy, as if it might break off at any moment, and this causes the laptop to disengage and hop up a few millimeters. It also makes a loud beep.

To put the laptop into the docking station, you line it up and push down. It has a very mushy feel, so you push down some more. It never actually clicks or in any other way provides tactile feedback that the electronics are engages, but the screen does brighten when it goes back on AC. Of course, you can't see that because you've closed the lid in order to push. Even after it's fully seated, there is still some wiggle and wobble room between the Thinkpad and the dock.

So obviously an ergonomic improvement would be the best fix - a nice smooth push into place with gradually increasing but still mild resistance, terminated with a solid click. But failing that, it would be nice if the beep was used to tell you that the machine is now seated, rather than telling you the machine that was seated is now unseated. I can generally tell that it's unseated by the fact that it's in my hands and I'm walking away from the dock, thank you very much.

Two thirds of the way into the season, each of the five teams in the NL West (baseball) has been in both first place and last place. With 106 games played, the total distance between first and last is 4.5 games. Last year the Padres won the division with a record of 82 and 80, the worst winning record for any team in the history of baseball. This year, maybe the whole division can finish three or four games over .500, in a five-way tie. Then we can go to goal differential to determine the winner.

Kant in 90 Minutes, Plato in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern.
(audiobook). The "Philosopher X" in 90 minutes series is lovely, especially on audiobook, because each narrative is mildly informative about the philosopher's life and ideas, and snarky enough to be entertainingy, well-read in a snooty British accent, and short. What I learned (true or not) is that Kant lived and taught in a podunk town in Germany, didn't have much interaction with other humans, was upset by Hume's assertion that skepticism was more powerful than any other idea, wrote in wretched prose, and built a huge castle of logic around the ideas of categories of things and logic and reason and all of that on a shaky foundation. Dunno how accurate that is, but it was a fun 90 minutes. Whatever I learned about Plato, I already forgot.

The Riverworld series, Philip Jose Farmer.
A horrifying warning tale of what science fiction can be without editorial judgement. The first book, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, is a minor classic with a great premise: everyone who has ever died wakes up, young and healthy and with their daily needs provided for, along the banks of a tremendously long river. Obvious directions for the story to go include presenting the daily mechanics of life in this setup; speculating on how people would react and how civilizations would spontaneously form; discovering the purpose of the "Riverworld"; and introducing historical figures and seeing them act, reflect on their pasts, learn about their legacies, and interact with one another. Book one hints at all of this and, with writing ability more or less adequate to the task, is a great thought provocation and a good read.

As the series develops along four more books, any hint of writing skill rapidly evaporates. With limited exceptions, the characters' dialog, thoughts, styles, and motivations are interchangable. Stupefyingly, dimensions in the third book (and only the third book) are presented in both metric and imperial, woven into the prose: "Burton spared a glance at the tower. It was only a little over 400 feet or 122 meters away." By the fourth book, the arresting ideas have given over to painfully pointless metaphysics in which the aliens who created Riverworld also created machines that make souls, which they buried underground on Earth thousands of years ago, and there's something about how you have to be properly Ethical in order to advance in some fashion, and ultimately it's about as sophisticated as L. Ron Hubbard, but not as much fun.

(Although, in the interests of fairness, I must say that even at his worst, Farmer's prose is still far, far more tolerable than Hubbard's.)

I would cautiously recommend book one, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, but absolutely nothing after that.

Hollywood Animal, Joe Eszterhaus (audiobook) Joe Eszterhaus's memoir of his career as record-breakingly highly paid Hollywood writer is voiced, perfectly, by Eric Bogosian. Eszterhaus has plenty of dirt to dish, and although he cops to plenty of his own mistakes, his narrative is still much to suggestively self-serving to be taken at face value. The book is very entertaining nonetheless, although his return to religion after facing cancer is disappointing from such a vivid and independent mind.

Another Day, Another Dungeon and One Quest, Hold the Dragon, Greg Costikyan.
In a standard Dungeons and Dragons scenario, one cloned by many a successor, the heros form an adventuring party, go down into the dungeons, fight orcs and dragons, and return with treasure. But did you ever wonder how the orcs feel about this? Or how the orcs and dragons and treasure got there in the first place? Or how the heroes can convert their rare and precious treasure, often highly recognizable and with prior owners, into liquid cash? Greg Costikyan gives us two books, with more hopefully to come, delving into all of this via a story line that can only be called revisionist. The priest is a drunk, the magician a pyromaniac, the thieves ex-lovers, the dwarf and the barbarian warrior carved from the purest stereotype. Blissfully funny.

First Contract, Greg Costikyan.
Suppose aliens came, and they had great and advanced technology, and they treated Earth about as well as European explorers treated, say, Micronesians. What exactly would happen to Earth's economy? Another lovely little satire from Costikyan.

The Wave, Walter Mosley
Mosley takes what ought to be hackneyed science fiction cliches and breathes new life into them with his sincerity and his mastery of character. Recommended.

Camoflague, Joe Haldeman
Good, entertaining, enjoyable if mildly undifferentiated characters; a breezy ending.

Dead Solid Perfect, Dan Jenkins
Features at least one shaggy dog story (the source of the title) which is superb; the rest is servicable golf comedy. I imagine it could be turned into a great movie by the right person, and I note that a movie has indeed been made, but I have no idea if it's any good.

1634: The Galileo Affair, Eric Flint, Andrew Dennis
Part of Eric Flint's "Ring of Fire" storyline, which is a wonderful premise that has me hooked even when the writing is merely adequate. An entire West Virginia mining town, everything in a six-mile circle, is transported back to Germany in 1632, smack in the middle of civil wars and religious strife. From that point history rapidly diverges from what we know, as the Americans spread their technology, their influence, and their knowledge (for example, kings read copies of the history books and start promoting and beheading people based on what they are described as having done in the history books).

I like these books because the idea of exposing the past to modernity is fascinating; probably it's mostly as a self-serving mirror for us, but it's still fun. Flint's key innovation, bringing an entire town back instead of just a few heroic figures, reflects his commitment to "salt of the earth" characters, as represented here by the union miners. He's a great optimist, and the books are very upbeat and safe. While I think this raises the bar he would have to meet to produce literature (fairly or not), it does introduce a nice comfort zone.

Ships of Air, The Gate of Gods, Martha Wells
Sequels to The Wizard Hunters, these accomplished science fiction/fantasy novels move at a blistering pace, have engaging characters and scary villains, and the same strong sense of place as Philip Pullman's stories. Wells continues to develop beyond pulp or formulaic genre work.

The Howling Stones, Alan Dean Foster
Light-duty science fiction about a cross-species negotiator dealing with a recalcitrant tribe of primitive aliens who turn out to be backed by mysterious high technology. Easy enough, and a few glimpses of interesting ideas in the ending, but oddly sanctimonious and ultimately not very special.

A Dirty Job, Christopher Moore.
A very funny, moderately moving story about a nebbish whose wife dies shortly after childbirth, leaving him to raise their daughter while also apparently laden with supernatural powers (and enemies) as a deputy of Death.

When I get audiobooks for my ipod, it's a bit of work. I usually get books on CD from the library and rip them, and counting all the overhead and what my time is worth it's probably not that much cheaper than buying a paperback. Nonetheless, I'm more than willing to abandon a bad audiobook, whereas I'm more likely to keepgoing with a physical book. In the last year or so I've started and abandoned several books. Here is my accounting:

The Man in My Basement, Walter Mosley.
(audiobook). I think I've overdosed on Mosley lately. It started well, but when it was explained that the main character has mortgaged the house he inherited from five or six generations of ancestors, and suggested that his need to earn money to redeem his prodigal error will be a pivot point in the plot, I turned it off. That kind of pathos I don't need.

The Myth of Solid Ground, David L. Ulin.
I usually like non-fiction by journalists, and the LA Weekly is packed with good journalists. The notion that earthquakes cause emotional discomfort by disrupting the comforting "myth of solid ground" seems like a great starting point for abook-length report on the state of earthquake prediction in California. But the effort founders on lousy writing and sloppy thinking. After trolling through a few turgid chapters for a meager harvest of new ideas, I gave it up.

Faster, James Gleick.
(audiobook) I listened for a few chapters and didn't learn anything and got tired of the facile tone so I gave up. I like Gleick in general, so maybe it was just the fault of the abridgment.

Clash of the Titans, Richard Hack.
I made it perhaps 30 minutes into this audio book about battles between Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner before coming to the conclusion that, no matter how well written and read the book was, I didn't want to spend 19 hours listening to stories about these two jerks.

I'm sure I'm not the first to point this out, but the USA, not Germany, is the third-best football team in the world. My reasoning? Italy won, so they are #1. Only two teams scored any goals against Italy: France in the final, and Italy with an own goal against the US. So France is second best. Only one team did not lose against Italy: the USA tied in the first round. So the USA is #3! We're number three! wooooo!

If you are following the story of Dzongkha localization in Bhutan (as previously mentioned here; the short form is that Bhutan paid $500k to get a version of Windows in their native language, but the effort was complicated by a suspect vendor and, apparently, an effort (based on incorrect linguistic assumptions) by Microsoft to be sensitive to Chinese suppression of Tibetan culture), then you may be pleased to learn that Bhutan last month released a localized version of Debian Linux.

Jim Baen, publisher of the extraordinary science fiction line Baen Books, has passed away. I loved Baen for his radically sensible approach to electronic publishing: give away electronic editions of books and people will treat them as advertisements to buy more print books. —David Drake

I've been working through the 1634 series via a combination of used paperbacks, free electronic books, and paid electronic books. Baen has been a pioneer of electronic distribution the right way—giving away material unencumbered by proprietary formats or digital rights management—and proving that in doing so he can make more money, not less. By experimenting openly, sharing usually secret sales figures, and advocating his own approach, Baen made the world better in his niche and, hopefully, his legacy will spread.

"A constitutional amendment to ban flag desecration died in a Senate cliffhanger Tuesday ..." Those of us who hate America's ideals (or who hate that some Americans try to use America's constitution to ban acts of political speech which they find repugnant) can breath a sigh of relief.

Some context: I've watched almost every US World Cup match since 1990. I played soccer in grade school. I read the book Fever Pitch. I don't care for American football and would rather that here in the U.S., football meant international football. That said, here are my thoughts to date:

Against the Czech Republic, the US team played very poorly. Whenever an American had the ball, he avoided Czech players as if afraid they would take the ball from him. They did. When the Czechs had the ball, they dribbled past and through the Americans and took shots at will. Nonetheless, international football is such an inherently low-scoring game that the Czechs still only managed to score their goals through either defensive ineptness and superbly lucky kicking. None of the Czech goals resulting from pure skill and planning, and the Czechs went on to lose their two other games and crash out of the tournament.

Against Italy, the US players played at a far higher level. For large stretches of the game, they were several quanta above the Italians in demonstrated passing and dribbling; they made a number of breathtaking moves of the sort where one or two or three players or limbs or heads go in many directions with great quickness while the ball is directly with alacrity in another direction (the proper jargon for such things exceeds my vocabulary but I believe "drop pass" merely hints at the marvels on display) and somehow the American players and their body parts and the ball all regroup on the other side of the defends and continue at great speed towards the goal. It was the sort of thing that I thought only Brazilians did, but the Americans did it many times throughout this game.

Against Ghana, I was horrified to see two things: the return of the Americans to their poor normal form, and the poor gamesmanship of the Ghanians. They dove as if taking lessons from the Italians. The rest of the world seems to agree with blogger Matthew Baldwin when he says "my favorite aspect of the World Cup is the theatrics. ... any two players that pass within 70 ft. of one another will immediately drop to the ground, clutch their right knee, and writhe around in unbearable agony—and then, five seconds later, and completely irrespective of whether the official calls a foul or not, leap back to their feet and charge back into the action. There is more dramatics in a 90 minute soccer game than an entire season of your local repertoire theater." I'm with King Kaufman, who says "I've learned in this World Cup that we Americans are more offended by the diving than the rest of the world is. It's actually seen as a weakness of the American team -- a team with no shortage of weaknesses -- that it refuses to take part in the injury faking ... I understand why we don't like the diving and don't know enough about enough of the rest of the world to understand why it doesn't bother them as much. But no matter ... the diving has got to go."

I've watched parts of other games. Since I have no TV, I watch in the rec room of the building at 7 am, and I often enjoy the company of the Hispanic building maintenance crew. When a Mexican player whacked a penalty kick over the crossbars, one guy jumped up in despair and moaned (in English), "stupid Mexican! Stupid Mexican!" I guess we are all influenced by our surroundings.

After watching a few of the games heavily altered by penalties, I think the real problem is not the refereeing, it's the moral hazard. Its accepted in baseball and tennis and many other sports occasional bad calls are part of the game. But in most cases the players have very limited power either to generate situations which require calls or to influence the outcome of a call. A baseball player trying to touch a base before a fielder catches a ball can't do anything other than run as fast as possible, and if the call is blown it's usually by milliseconds, so viewers don't blame the umpire excessively. Probably the American sport that comes closest to soccer in the moral hazard area is basketball, where referees have to make complex and arbitrary judgements about high-speed mid-air collisions of many players. But even in basketball, there aren't too many dives. Why? Six foot ten inch 280 pound men don't like to go face-first into solid wood floors at 15 mph from three feet in the air. Implication for soccer: play on asphalt and you'll cut down a lot on dives.

Here's a little logic puzzle for you.

Four football teams form a set. Each team plays the other three teams once each. The two top teams advance to the next round. A victory is worth three points, a tie one, a loss none. Should two or more teams be tied on points, the winner by the first applicable method from this list (p17):

1. greater number of points obtained in the group matches between the teams concerned;
2. goal difference resulting from the group matches between the teams concerned;
3. greater number of goals scored in the group matches between the teams concerned;
4. goal difference in all the group matches;
5. greater number of goals scored in all the group matches;
6. drawing lots by the Organising Committee for the FIFA World Cup™.

For convenience, let's call the teams Italy, Ghana, the Czech Republic, and the United States. And let's say, for the sake of the logic puzzle, that each team has played twice, with the following results:

• Czech 3, US 0
• Italy 2, Ghana 0
• US 1, Italy 1
• Ghana 2, Czech 0

Under what conditions will the US team advance?

Answer: The US team will advance if it beats Ghana and one of the following is true:

• Italy beats the Czech Republic
• Czech beats Italy, and the US and Czech win by a combined six or more goals
• Czech beats Italy by one goal, and the US wins by four goals.
• Czech beats Italy by two goals, and the US wins by three goals, and Ghana score two or more goals more than Italy.
• Czech beats Italy by two goals, and the US beats Ghana by three goals, and Ghana scores one more goal than Italy, and the "Organising Committee for the FIFA World Cup™" randomly draws the US instead of Italy.

Hypothetically speaking.

Addendum: both Yahoo Sports and ABC TV indicate that the US could advance if Italy ties Czech and the US beats Ghana by enough goals. They must be looking at some different rules than I saw. If Czech ties Italy, the US and Czech are tied for second in the group with four points each. Then it goes to "greater number of points obtained in the group matches between the teams concerned." In the only group match between the US and Czech, Czech got three points and the US zero. Goal differential doesn't even come into play. End of story.

Further Addendum 20 June: It turns out that there are indeed two different sets of rules up on the FIFA website. This page, which is labelled "Preliminaries", has Regulations 2006 FIFA World Cup Germany™, which were ratified in March 2003. But this page, labelled "Tournament" but otherwise identical in appearance, has Regulations 2006 FIFA World Cup Germany™, ratified in December 2005. The tie-breaking rules were changed between the two versions. The apparent reason is that "having b) as the first tie-breaking criterion avoids the absurd situation [...] in group G, where even if France wins 10-0 against Togo, if Switzerland and Korea draw 2-2, Switzerland and Korea make it through. [...] It is the same situation that saw Italy off in euro 2004, when Sweden and Denmark needed a 2-2 to go through and they did. Their supporters came to the game with “2-2″ banners and it was just ridiculous...." —Mircia, commenter, New York Times World Cup Blog. The analysis above is correct for the 2003 rules, but the rules now in effect are:

The ranking of each team in each group will be determined as follows:
a) greatest number of points obtained in all group matches;
b) goal difference in all group matches;
c) greatest number of goals scored in all group matches.

If two or more teams are equal on the basis of the above three criteria, their rankings will be determined as follows:

d) greatest number of points obtained in the group matches between the teams concerned;
e) goal difference resulting from the group matches between the teams concerned;
f) greater number of goals scored in all group matches between the teams concerned;
g) drawing of lots by the Organising Committee for the FIFA World Cup™.

Under these rules, the US can advance even if Italy and Czech tie; see this comment for an updated analysis.

Today's good news:

A campaign to reduce lethal errors and unnecessary deaths in the nation's hospitals has saved an estimated 122,300 lives in the last 18 months, the campaign's leader said Wednesday. —AP

A reminder that most of the things that make a difference in most peoples' lives aren't newsworthy (though they should be).

Woody Harrelson had to say today about the birth of his third daughter: "In this crazy patriarchal world we live in, we are doing our part to balance the energy. We are proud to announce the completion of our goddess trilogy with the birth of our third daughter, Makani Ravello."

Shine on, you crazy diamond.

The national Do Not Call Registry in the US has been, in my experience, fairly successful. In conjunction with caller ID, it reduces spam phone calls to at most a few per month. I now propose a national "Do Not Preach" registry, which would work as follows:

1. You can register yourself and any dependents on the list by name and address
2. All religious proslytizers must update their copies of the list every month
3. If someone preaches to you, and you've been on the list more than a month, you can file a complaint, which is routed to the appropriate authorities.
4. Five complaints triggers a hearing on revocation of tax-exempt status for the responsible organization.
5. If the person preaching is independent of any registered religious group, their federal tax rate is increased 1% per 5 complaints.

I've been a long-time holdout from cell phones. This is partly because I don't like phones in general. I don't like being bugged by other people, especially if they have been hired to sell me something, and doubly especially if they have been trained to lie about whether or not they are trying to sell me something, and therefore I don't see much benefit in greatly broadening the scope in which other people can bug me.

And the other part of my resistance is that cell phone companies are demonstrably evil. Certainly, this is only low-grade, petty larcency species of evil, more like a meth addict than a murderer, but I harbor a superstition that if I sign a contract and thereby enter into a "relationship" with a cell phone company, I'll probably wake up one day to find my stereo missing. (And in fact, in my last, abortive foray into cell phone territory, I paid $35 to learn that one carrier didn't work well where I lived, and over a hundred dollars for a few hours' call time on a phone that I returned within the grace period. I think I still have a balance of a few dollars with them, but without an open account I can't log in to pay it or dispute it.)

Cell phone companies, and the people who work at them, are evil in the banal way of Oracle salespeople, or Sony's Electronics division President Ken Kutaragi: they think that you should simply give them all of your money, and when you object, they honestly can't understand why.

So I tend to be incommunicado when I'm out and about, and that suits me well: when I'm not sitting at my desk, I generally don't want to call or be called anyway. And although I favor email over phones for many purposes and reasons, I also don't want a Blackberry; when I'm eating out, or riding my bicycle to the beach, or walking around the park, or seeing a movie, I just don't want to be in contact.

But I'm not so divorced from reality as to deny the utility of cell phones. When you're waiting for someone at the wrong restaurant, or contemplating a bent bicycle wheel on an isolated stretch of road, or wondering which movie theater to go to, a little remote contact isn't such a bad thing. And the other day, I had a conference call scheduled to begin at the same time I would be switching trains.

With several trips planned this summer, I decided to make a concession to convenience. I bought a "Virgin Mobile" prepaid cell phone. I picked it from three competing models because the service plans all seemed equally bad but Virgin had a cheaper phone ($30).

What I learned trying to activate the phone with the $20 prepaid card I also bought is that cell phone companies are pathologically averse to letting you use their precious networks without a close, personal relationship between their billing system and your bank account. When you activate the phone on their web site, you get a big, cluttered page about how to sign up with your credit card, and an itty bitty link to proceed if you have a prepaid minutes card. When the web site crashed and I had to call to finish activation, I had to twice decline to provide my credit card number, and the lady got fairly terse with me before we were done. And the terms of service are that you must add twenty dollars every three months (not maintain a $20 balance) or the phone goes inactive. Two months after that, all prepaid minutes expire and you must pay to reactivate it.

So I have a phone that costs twenty-five cents a minute (dropping to ten after ten minutes), presumably charges the same to receive phone calls, appears to round up seconds to the next minute, charges to access voicemail, and blackmails you to keep adding money. Great.

So my plan to use a cell phone without being infected by its evils:

1. Spend ten minutes to go through all of the menus (twice) and turn off every feature that may possibly make ring or otherwise make noise. Even so, it still chirps, loudly, if turned on or off while charging.
2. Pay an extra $2/mo to my regular phone company to redirect my home phone to the cell phone while I am travelling, so that I don't have to participate in cell phone culture to the extent of distributing a "mobile number."
3. When I'm not travelling, I'll remove the battery, throw the devil machine into a dark hole, and perform the appropriate cleansing rituals, such as waving a dead tofurky over my head and donating money to the EFF.

If my next entry is sent in from my phone, you'll know my plan failed and all is lost.

James F. Conway Sr., an entrepreneur whose Mister Softee ice cream trucks brought frozen treats to millions of customers over the company's 50-year history, has died. He was 78.

...

Even more memorable than the company's soft ice cream is its jingle, played on a music box and broadcast through a loudspeaker atop each truck.Once heard, the song is not soon forgotten. For some listeners, it heralds summer. F