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

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.

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™.

• 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.

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™.

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.

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.

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.

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. For others, it recalls childhood. For still others, it constitutes a form of torture.

Written in E-flat major in jaunty 6/8 time, the jingle was created by an advertising agency in 1960 for the company's early radio campaigns. Though the trucks play only an instrumental version, the tune does have words:

The CREAM-i-est DREAM-i-est SOFT ice CREAM

you GET from MIS-ter SOF-tee.

FOR a re-FRESH-ing de-LIGHT su-PREME

LOOK for MIS-ter SOF-tee....

—New York Times obituary, 31 May 2006

Just now, OpenOffice crashed (although thanks to the recovery system, I only lost a minute of work), and I had a big gray darkly translucent rectangle several inches wide on my screen. I was thinking I would have to restart X or something to get rid of it, when the business card I had been using to eyeball distances fell off the face of the monitor.

D'oh!

• Use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer
• Use OpenOffice instead of MS Office or Corel Office
• Use evolution/thunderbird instead of Outlook
• Use GAIM instead of AIM or Yahoo IM or MSN ...
• Use a pre-installed Open Source desktop and operating system instead of Windows
• Replace your mail/file server with a linux server