Orcinus nails/informs my view on the hot topic of the day:

You know, it's possible to make a case that immigration is an important problem that needs addressing without resorting to racist rhetoric and scapegoating -- though, Lord knows the nativist right hasn't figured that out yet.

But I think you can also make the case that, in reality, it isn't that big a problem, especially placed in the perspective of the life-and-death issues at stake in the fight against terrorism, or the looming threat of global warming, which strikes at our very survival as a species.

What strikes me in any event as far more significant than immigration is the way the nativists piling onto the issue have resurrected the racist right in America. —Orcinus

I am using host X. I have ssh access to host Y. Host Y has ssh access to host Z. I want to check out a CVS directory from Z onto X. Here's how:

1. On Y, create a custom ssh certificate (with ssh-keygen) that doesn't have a passphrase. Be careful not to overwrite your normal certificate; e.g., save it to Y:~/.ssh/id_dsa_z.
2. Copy the contents of the public part of the cert (the .pub file) to Z:~/.ssh/authorized_keys2.
3. Create the file X:~/z-ssh:

   #!/bin/sh
   exec ssh y ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_dsa_z $*

4. Make sure that ~/ is in your path.
5. Set the environment variable CVS_RSH=z-ssh on X.

With all that in place, you can now do a normal ssh checkout:

cvs -d :ext:z:/var/lib/cvs co foobar

Thanks to Guan Yang for the hard parts.

The phone companies all provide lousy service, and pay hundreds of millions of dollars in protection racket money to federal government to preserve their legal right to make money at the expense of fair competition, and generally do everything possible to put the customer last. There's not much we can do about it, since they're all in it together. Skype and other voice-over-IP technology is part of the solution (my last ten overseas phone calls have been either free or 2 euro-cents per minute, depending on if I was calling another skype user or a regular phone). I get my phone service from the cable company, but the service isn't any better, and it's really just trading one evil for another.

So I am very happy to see that one of the phone companies has differentiated themselves in a positive way:

The telecommunications company Qwest turned down requests by the National Security Agency for private telephone records because it concluded that doing so would violate federal privacy laws...

The Reality Dysfunction Part 2: Expansion, Peter Hamilton
I had previously abandoned part 1 half-way through because of the utterly mediocre writing. I picked up part 2 five years later in a used bookstore because of lingering curiousity about the story and a desire for mindless, low-risk reading. I can confirm that I scanned almost all of the lines of text in the book, that I was mildly entertained, and that I was quite diverted from my mundane life. Beyond that, there is little to recommend and much to criticize. Most of the ideas, characters, and plot lines are trite at best. The prose is the florid production of a tin ear for text; if Robert Heinlein set the gold standard for effortless integration of futuristic technology into fiction writing, with the canonical example being "The door irised open," Peter Hamilton sets the carbotanium standard. No, I don't know what carbotanium is, but despite his having invented it, I suspect neither does Peter Hamilton. After all of that, the repetitive grammatical errors and the occasional gross mistake in physics are hardly worth mentioning.

The difference between a guilty pleasure and Peter Hamilton is that, when I realized that I would have to read three more books to get to the end of the story, I didn't for one second consider doing so. Also, I threw the book in the recycle bin when I was finished. But I will concede that I finished it.

Everything and More, David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace writes non-fiction with such skill and confidence, and is so grippingly able to evidence deep understanding of complex subjects, that it takes conscious effort to remember, while reading his work, that he is capable as anyone else of jumping to conclusions and ignoring a shaky foundation, and that he has in fact been caught out on factual correctness in the past. That notwithstanding, this is a great read, a great introduction to infinity, and a great source of grief that he started teaching at my alma mater a decade after I left. When Wallace is on target, he's more than capable of expressing in full effect thoughts you only suspected you had:

Never before have there been so many gaping chasms between what the world seems to be and what science tells us it is. 'Us' meaning laymen. It's like a million Copernican Revolutions all happening at the same time. As in for instance we 'know', as high-school graduates and readers of Newsweek, that time is relative, that quantum particles can be both there and not, that space is curved, that colors do not inhere in objects themselves, that our love for our children is evolutionarily preprogrammed, that there is a blind spot in the center of our vision that our brains automatically fill in. That our thoughts and feelings are really just chemical transfers in 2.8 pounds of electrified pate. That we are mostly water, and water is mostly hydrogen, and hydrogen is flammable, and yet we are not flammable. We 'know' a near-infinity of truths that contradict our immediate commonsense experience of the world. And yet we have to live and function in the world. (Everything and More, David Foster Wallace, p22)

The History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell
Exactly what I wanted—a reasonably comprehensive survey of philosophy (though I missed the Eastern stuff), in very readable and personable prose, written by someone who understands everything being discussed, in under a thousand pages. While it must certainly be colored by Russell's particular comprehension, such bias is very consistent and thus easy to compensate for; or at least it will be once I find a point on which I differ substantially from Russell, which apparently hasn't happened yet. His snark livens things up without cheapening them too much. It did take about a year to make it through, and I fell asleep a lot, but I think that's mostly because it's about philosophy, and reading it seriously takes a lot of thought, which consumes glycogen stores in the brain and produces sleep.

Reaching the home stretch—ideas less than six hundred years old—and having read a few biographical notes, I found increasing kinship with Russell. A common complaint of atheism is that it takes away the comforting certainty of a personal yet omnipotent God, and forces non-believers to live alone with their thoughts in the universe. This train of thought, with or without other philosophical brain traps, can certainly lead to nihilism and existential despair of the sort attributed to beret-wearing Frenchmen smoking cigarettes and dressing in black, and it seems silly, but it has a real bite. If you think too hard about the universe and your role in it, and about death, and what the lack of an afterlife means; or even if you just keep asking "why" as hard as you can, you can really freak yourself out and get stuck in a dark and lonely place. The fact that I think belief in God is ultimately untenable doesn't preclude being jealous of it. Russell apparently lived with depression on and off throughout his life, maybe from thinking about living in a material world, more likely mostly from other sources. Reading this book, at times I felt, in a secular and materialist way, spiritually connected to the author. I may be alone in the universe, but I'm not the only one. So to speak.

Air, Geoff Ryman
A spectacular combination of Maureen McHugh's deep humanity and sympathy for her characters with Connie Willis' deadpan comedy of manners, plus a dash of Douglas Coupland's invention. The story of the last village in the world to get something like the internet, except that it's called Air, and it runs inside your brain, and it has metaphysical aspects, and there's a glitch in the first trial. Reading this book filled me with a double sense of happiness; its so good that I enjoyed how much I was enjoying it.

My nomination for the emacs key binding that most seems pointless yet gets used surprisingly frequently: C-x t, for transposing a character and its immediate predecessor

"We're all trying to get on the same page ... Well, I guess we've been on the same page. We've all been sucking. We want to get on a different page."

—Royals outfielder Emil Brown, on the team's struggles (Kansas City Star)

I don't know exactly what it is. I don't know where I'd put it. But I want one.

Two points of background for today's good news. First, if you want a society to change, you have to change most people in the society. That Johnson ordered troops to escort black students to school was fantastic and a necessary step, but only when it became socially unthinkable to specificy exclude blacks or jews or women from any part of society had Johnson realized a victory. (A partial victory, but let's not get into that now.) If the fear of lawsuits prevents companies from dumping toxic chemicals into drinking water, that's good; if any middle manager who proposes doing so is shamed by everybody else in the room, that's better. My point is, if you think your ideas are right and good for society, it's important to look for support among people you don't consider "on your side."

Second: The point of governments is to do what other groupings of citizens cannot do. Large-scale basic research is a good example. The return on society's investment in science is enormous, especially if the results are widely disseminated. When private entities siphon off the results of research, such as by partnering with publically funded universities but patenting the results of research, they are worse than thieves. They are not only stealing the original investment from society, they are also destroying the multiplier effect of publishing results and thus preventing government from serving one of its essential functions.

With that in mind, I'm happy to see that Joseph Lieberman and John Cornyn, two senators I rarely agree with, are sponsoring a bill that "would require 11 government agencies to publish online any articles that contained research financed with federal grants." Bravo.

The Times obligingly prints the predictable arguments from the journal publishers: that it would weaken the connection between the journals and their readers, hurt ad revenue, and lead to dangerously incorrect results being published. But the Times misses or avoids the real story: the recent revolution in scientific publishing caused by the internet. Many scientists are rebelling against the petty empires of the publishers, who use volunteer scientists to do the hard work of peer review, and collect monopoly rents for their services as typesetters.

These scientists have started their own cheap or free peer-reviewed journals online, and are competing directly with the journals. For example, "[o]n December 31, 2003 the entire editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms resigned due to pricing policies of Elsevier Press. ... On January 21, 2004 the ACM Publications Board approved a proposal for a new journal dedicated to Algorithms ... [its] editorial board is the editorial board that resigned from Journal of Algorithms." (Resignation letter, and see Knuth's excellent letter for, as you would expect from Knuth, a far more comprehensive and detailed exposition then you can quite comprehend).

So let's hope Lieberman and Cornyn's bill passes, and let's applaud them for taking a progressive position.

When I was teaching English in China, I often wondered what portion of the difficulty I had was attributable to my incompetence, lack of training, and inexperience, and what portion to the students' ennui and burnout, the consequence enduring a rigid, authoritarian education only to end up at a small technical college out in the boonies. Now that I'm studying Chinese at a community college here in San Diego, I'm have the mirror question: what proportion of classroom dysfunction is attributable to the Chinese teacher's lack of teaching skill, and what proportion to the student body's immaturity and rudeness?

Clarification: the students in my class are all genuinely interested in learning Chinese. Sadly, they are less interested in supporting a learning environment in class, treating the teacher with respect, or doing homework.

In case you missed it, the surprise resignation of CIA director Porter Goss is probably related to the Duke Cunningham bribery scandal.

My theory of baseball and life:
*Life consists, in large part, of random or semi-random events
*Humans are very bad at understanding randomness, and so frequently misunderstand life
*Baseball consists, in large part, of random or semi-random events in a controlled environment
*Understanding baseball is thus a useful step towards understanding life

Today's good news (okay, so this feature isn't exactly coming out daily...)

After seven days of deliberation, the nine men and three women rebuffed the government's appeal for death for [Zacarias Moussaoui]

I upgraded my shredder, from an entry-level model that was a gift to a slightly sturdier Staples model that does cross-cutting, with a nominal 8-sheet capacity and a credit card slot. Its ability to chew through junkmail is not only gratifying, but provides a sense of power that overwhelms the futile anger junkmail had previously caused. In the big picture, junkmail is still an example of the tragedy of the commons, and a net destroyer of wealth, and a (misdemeanor) crime against humanity, but each envelope bugs me less than before.

If you're not a big internet/blogosphere reader, and don't watch C-SPAN, then you probably missed Daily Show spinoff star Stephen Colbert's phenomenal performance at the White House Correspondent's dinner last Saturday. Four days later, the print edition of the New York Times remains silent (Elisabeth Bumiller, notorious for scrupulously respecting the Bush administration's talking points, covered the whole thing without mentioning Colbert), although an online-only (correction: it's on page A19) mentions the issue. You can download a high-resolution copy of the whole event with bittorrent or watch it on YouTube.

The obvious comments are all out there and you can probably guess what I think, so I will just quote one comment about a minor point:

But when the camera pans to Scalia, it shows him laughing hysterically: not just a polite ha-ha to show that he got the joke and is being a good sport about it, but deep, out-of-control, impossible-to-fake belly-laughs. He is obviously enjoying — really enjoying — a joke at his own expense. No, that doesn't make up for Bush v. Gore. But it does make Scalia, in this one respect, a better human being than most of us.