In The Red Queen, Matt Ridley popularized the theory that human intelligence is the byproduct of an evolutionary arms race of sexual selection. It goes something like this:

• fact: human brains are proportionately much larger than almost any other species, including any other primate
• fact: one proven catalyst for extreme evolutionary change is an arms race, where two sets of genes compete with all other things more or less equal. For example, a predator and its prey each get faster and faster, but relative to each other they stay competitive. This continues until all other things are no longer equal; e.g., the cost to be so fast can no longer be paid. For example, it is argued that humans and other primates pay for all of that metabolically expensive brain tissue with smaller digestive tracts, an tradeoff that clearly has limits.
• fact: sexual selection occurs, in which a trait which is not otherwise critical to fitness becomes attractive for purposes of attracting mates, leading to extreme exaggeration of that trait. Example: peacock tails.
• Theory: at some point displays of intelligence became important for proto-human males to attract females, and conversely female intelligence was required to select good male mates. This turned into an arms race, leading to dramatic increases in brain size, a byproduct of which was modern human intelligence.

This is not the only explanation for human brain size; social cooperation and language are also factors. Here's a more recent study which posits something similar: "... the balance of evidence now clearly favors the suggestion that it was the computational demands of living in large, complex societies that selected for large brains. However, recent analyses suggest that it may have been the particular demands of the more intense forms of pairbonding that was the critical factor."

Today's New York Times has an article about the search for genetic causes of schizophrenia, which is taking longer than expected because none of the big obvious causes pan out. Instead, it seems likely that "the genetic component of the disease is due to a large number of variants, each of which is very rare, rather than to a handful of common variants." What this means is that evolution has done a very good job of eliminating the big causes of (some kinds of) mental illness, leaving only lots of little things that aren't as simply selected for deletion. In other words, there is evolutionary pressure to have good brains. This is surprising to a lead researcher because "I would have thought the brain was a luxury organ when it comes to reproductive success."

I guess he's not current on the Red Queen and human sexual selection for brains. Chalk up a supporting point for Ridley's theory.

Although, an alternate explanation does occur to me. Perhaps we are being bred by brain-eating zombies for taste and flavor.

Since upgrading to Ubuntu 7.10 last year, I've had problems getting the microphone to work in Skype. It sounds fine in the headphones; you can clearly hear yourself and everything else in the room, but it doesn't go through to Skype. Googling found plenty of people with problems with Ubuntu and Skype and microphones. It seems like there are a lot of reasons this can go wrong. The specific fix for me (Kubuntu 8.04 on a Thinkpad X61 (HDA Intel audio with Analog Devices AD1984 chip), external headset and microphone, the kind with separate headphone and mic plugs, not USB) turns out to be this:

• Open KMix
• Go to the Input tab
• Turn on "capture" by clicking the little radio button at the base of the scale. It should turn from black to red when it turns on
• Also for "capture", move the slider to the top of the scale. Note that there are two "capture" things; I adjusted only the first and left the second at off/zero.

Then the Skype test call worked fine.

After almost exactly a year, I was headed back to the United States. Most airlines will sell you one-year tickets but will only book you nine months into the future. So a few months ago I had to nail down the return leg of my ticket from Seattle, although I didn't have any firm plans for what would happen after arriving at SEATAC. A bit later I made up my mind to go to San Francisco because I've never lived in the Bay Area and it seemed like it might be time. So naturally I checked airlines for dog rules (no dogs on Southwest) and booked a one-way to San Francisco. So Kona and I had a three-leg trip, SIN to NRT to SEA to SFO, starting at 7:15 am in Singapore and ending at 2:30 pm the same day in San Francisco.

When the taxi driver asked if I wanted terminal 1 or 2, at about 3:50 am and after two hours of sleep, I tried to remember where I had come in and had met people coming from the US on the same flight, and said Terminal 1. This turned out to be correct, in that the flight had departed from Terminal 1. But it was moved to the new Terminal 3, and I decided to try and walk to the other terminal so Kona could get some exercise and potty time before the trip. Once I realized that I should completely ignore the advice of the taxi drivers, we made good time crossing the 500 or so meters between terminals. While it's beautifully landscaped, there are no sidewalks for most of the trip, so I was pushing a loaded cart and trailing a corgi while walking on the edge of curving on and off-ramps and splits and joins that were almost, but not completely, devoid of speeding taxis.

After ducking in through car ramp exit, we glided through a nearly empty parking lot, accompanied by surreal muzak.

Terminal 3 is, of course, a giant monument to Singapore's capabilities. While many recent mega-terminals, such as Bangkok's, Heathrow's T5, and going back a few years Denver's new airport had widely publicized disasters, Changi T3 apparently opened very smoothly. It's certainly big and pretty.

We arrived more than three hours before flight time, and everything was going smoothly, as I presented Kona's inch-thick stack of papers, her approved kennel with ball-tip water bottle full of ice, etc. Until the lady asked for an export certificate. Here's her health certificate, I just got it Monday from the vet. No, you need an export license from AVA (the Agri-food and Veterinary Authority). I called United several months ago and they didn't say anything about AVA. Well ...

Kona and I walked around the check-in area for a while; ran back and forth on the sidewalk outside; hung out with the very nice staff (although dogs are supposed to stay in their kennels in the terminal, nobody gave us any trouble).

People started to show up, and we were moved off to the side as various staff spent quality time on the phone. The problem, it turned out, was that the staff believed (from a checklist, I think) that you need the AVA license. They were pretty sure that without the US would put her in quarantine in Seattle at worst, and certainly not send her back, but they weren't sure if the airline might get fined. AVA was closed, naturally, and they had trouble getting anyone from the airline with authority. This went on for over an hour, while we made nice with the other passengers and screwed around in the check-in area.

Finally we were waved to proceed, and I arrived at the gate as it was flashing "last call", which turned out to a bit of hype. And off we went, fleeing the rising sun into the day.

Tokyo Narita features an extra, internal security screen applied after getting off a United flight from Singapore and before getting onto another United flight in the very same concourse. Yay for security theater. Mind dazed from the flight, the lack of sleep, and the stress at Changi, I still managed to reach a realization, aided by the profusion of United 777s at Narita and the announcements for the flight to San Francisco. I could have tried to chang the United return leg to NRT-SFO, skipping the SEA-SFO leg on United(which ended up costing about $300, including $150 for the kennel and $25 for a second piece of luggage. Every time I come back to the United States from a year abroad, air travel has reached a new quantum of suckiness. I asked someone in the security line at SEATAC if we were still doing the shoes thing. "That's never going away.").

Finally, Seattle. Immigration: no problem. Health Department: here's my paperwork. Thank you very much, here's your stamp. Off you go. Baggage. Wait, where's my dog? You'll get her at the main baggage claim. After customs? Yes. Customs: please step this way, sir, for additional inspection. You've been randomly selected.

So we go through my vacuum-packed bags, and they confiscate all of the dog food (which was manufactured in the US, possibly from ingredients made in China, and shipped to Singapore for me to buy it; if I wasn't going to get to eat organic foods, at least Kona, who is not a vegetarian, could. Somehow those variables balance out in my subconscious). But she's going to be hungry! The customs guy is very nice and apologetic, and yes I could have taped some food to the outside of the kennel and it probably would have gone through, but there are no workarounds at this point, and would I like to keep the scoop?

Finally I repack, put my cleared bags on another belt (because it's so much fun to wait for your bags to crash down the carousel slide, you'll want to watch it twice), and head to the main terminal, where I orbit between carousels 1 and 8 watching for the kennel (false alarm, same kennel different dog) and my luggage, having paid three dollars to rent a cart for the occasion. Eventually everything shows up, and Kona is fine. Most of the water bottle has leaked out, predictably, but the absorbent pad lining the kennel has done its duty and the blanket and used t-shirts (for the reassuring odor) are fairly dry, as is Kona. She doesn't get to eat in Seattle, but she does get to do her business, both barrels, in a glorious, sunny Seattle summer noon tainted only slightly by cigarette smoke and diesel fumes. And then it's back into the kennel and back into the airport.

Finally, hours later, with a minimum of anxious waiting, we are re-united, Gus picks us up, and after a stop at In-n-Out we head to Whole Foods in Palo Alto for dog food, and soon we are all relaxing at home.

I'm fairly used to returning to the US after time abroad, so the culture shock list this time around is fairly short:

• We walk on the right side of the sidewalk here
• The sun is liable to rise or set at any moment, not just at 7 am and 7 pm.
• If a car is coming towards you on the wrong side of the road, it's probably a drunk driver.
• It's possible to walk for blocks without breaking a sweat.
• The sidewalks are desolate
• There are ugly utility poles and wires overhead everywhere
• I can afford organic vegetables
• I can't reserve my seat at the movie theater

And a confession: much as Singlish was getting on my nerves the last few months, I was gone less than 24 hours before I first missed it.

Warning: nothing but materialism in this post.

At the beginning of the second semester, after relocating to an apartment about two miles from school, I tried to work out a plan for walking to school instead of taking the bus. The second week that I tried this, tragedy struck. First, my backpack fell off the couch, as it had done many times before. Inside was a Brain Cell, which in turn held my laptop. But I'd dropped this whole combination many times before so I just got back to putting music on my iPod Shuffle (which itself was a second generation Shuffle that I overpaid for at Mustafa Center here in Singapore, replacing the first generation Shuffle that died a natural (so to speak) death thanks to Apple's tradition of shiny but short-lifespan products). I'd been using Ultimate Ears headphones, which fit in the ear canal, sealing off outside sounds, sounding very good, and letting you listen at a lower, healthier volume, even in traffic. Well, healthier as long as you don't get hit by the traffic. Unfortunately, one UE headphone was slowly disintegrating due to a crack in the shell, and the sound tended to come and go. Plus the original plug broke long ago and had to be replaced with an ugly one that eventually stripped the plastic cover.

Part way through my walk, I went for my sweating cold water bottle and managed to launch the iPod to the pavement, where it suffered fatal internal injuries. Then, when I got to school I discovered that my laptop screen backlight was mortally wounded.

Long story short, I replaced the iPod with a Sandisk Sansa Clip (which a kind American friend bought and sent over, it being unavailable in Singapore and Amazon being unwilling to ship it directly). It's about half as expensive as the Shuffle, at US$40, for the same capacity. It's twice as bulky and heavy, but at that still weighs only an ounce and is small enough to hang from the earphone jack (don't try that at home; see above re: falling). It has an adequate display, a microphone, and a radio, all of which the iPod Shuffle lack. Also, it doesn't require any special software like iTunes or linux hacks of iTunes; you can just copy mp3 files over and it catalogs them.

The only minuses are lots of little annoyances in the software. After a few seconds the display goes out, and the first button click wakes it up but does nothing else. Which means that, in normal use, you usually have to hit buttons twice, and then sometimes you hit a button twice when you shouldn't and you lose your place or something. When you unplug the headphones, it doesn't pause; that was a nice trick on the Shuffle. It doesn't queue up clicks very well, so if you want to skip ahead ten songs, you have to click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click. (yes, that's eleven clicks. See above.) It has a ring-shaped four-way button, a middle button, and an offset "home" button. Which allows for a straightforward up/down/left/right, but then to "go" you sometimes go "right" and other times go "middle button", and to stop or pause or go back you might need any of the "left" button, the "middle" button", or the offset "home" button. Mostly what you want to do is either play or pause, but then you get trapped in the menu system way too often so the meaning of the buttons shifts and it gets annoying. It's not a disaster by any means; it's just ... annoying.

Meanwhile the headphones were still decaying, but I solved that problem by losing both them and the Sansa Clip. Which brings me to the moral of my story, I guess: don't buy expensive electronics. You (I) will lose them or break them or they will become obsolete. I try not to buy anything much over US$100.

By this point the Sansa clip had hit local stores, so I bought a new one. I replaced the Ultimate Ears with a rival product, the Shure SCL2. This has been obsoleted by the Shure SE110, and I paid about US$100. They are about as good as the Ultimate Ears Super.fi 3. The sound quality seems about the same. The in-ear fit is a bit better but the part of my ear outside the ear canal tends to get sore. The thick wires are less tangle-prone than the UE's super-thin wires and have less of a stethoscope effect.. The case, a stiffened nylon discus kind of thing, is much more convenient and sturdy than the UE leather pouch. Overall, I like them better than the UEs. (And, to be clear, they are in a different league than the earbuds that come with iPods and Sansas and whatnot, which you can replace for like US$10. This is not "audiophile" better, this is a very concrete, walking down the street the difference is night and day kind of better. I don't know how much of that is because of the earplug-style design, versus superior electronic guts, and perhaps there are cheaper earplug headphones that sound as good. But when I was shopping, the slightly cheaper products, especially the Sennheisers of the same style, advertised "bass-driven" sound that was really unpleasant.)

Right around this time, I also dropped my trusty old Palm Vx for the last time; the front bezel came partway off and the buttons stopped working properly. This is technically the third or fourth Palm V; I first bought a Palm V in 2000 for US$330, but left it on the roof of a car in Alaska. I bought a used replacement in Hong Kong for about US$100 in 2002. In 2007 I snapped one up in a junk store for US$20 just to get the real brass stylus (and as a spare), and I think that's the one I have now, the other lying in storage somewhere. I may also have bought one on eBay, also for about US$20, or I may just have price-spotted. At my age the memory starts to go, which is precisely why one needs a Palm Pilot. But beautiful as it is, it's too heavy, about half a pound, and it's getting harder to harder to find serial ports (instead of USB), so rather than try to fix it I'm just giving up.

Just to complete the story, I also lost my Jimi wallet by leaving it under my seat at a movie. It was on its last legs, with some cracked corners and a slowly tearing plastic hinge, but it was an apparent gift from Tom Bihn and so I mourn its loss. Happily, the thing is so damned small that all I could fit in it to lose was a subway card and a few bills.

Meanwhile, I had to do something about my laptop, because the screen tended to not work. Repair was the first option, but a place at Sim Lim had it for most of a week and then gave it back, no charge but unfixed and possibly unfixable. Since it was three years old and accumulating various problems (keys that didn't work too well, a scary clicking noise in the hard drive, deteriorating screen even before the backlight died), I opted for replacement. Naturally, the only suitable option was the latest Thinkpad X; the X60/61. I did try the Asus EEE, much closer to my "don't spend more than $100 on anything you can lose" rule, but the keyboard was too small for real touch typing.

I'd been window-shopping this model for a few months, and even tried out my lessons from Negotiation class at Sim Lim over winter break. The X60 was selling in the US for about US$1000, before tax and shipping and without the 8-cell battery and extra RAM that it really needs. At Sim Lim the bundles started at about S$3000, or roughly US $2200, after tax. So my strategy was to print out the US page and go to vendors and say, "I can get this much more cheaply in the US, but then I have to pay tax and shipping and wait for it. If you can give me an equivalent price, I'll buy it from you right now." What I found was that most (out of 4 or 5 places I tried) would give an immediate S$300 to S$500 discount, but also juggle some more balls, so that they take away hundreds of dollars of value at the same time, and keep you from comparing apples to apples.

One interesting tidbit was that they all wanted to give me 3 gigs of RAM, whether I asked for it or not. When we did practice negotiations in class, we all worked from scoresheets, that told us what our total points would be for various combinations of concessions. But you couldn't see the other party's scoresheet, so the challenge was to figure out what was worth a lot to you but not much to them, and vice versa. Clearly, Lenovo was dumping RAM out that channel cheaply. This wasn't especially important to me in negotiation, but it was cool to see how, by comparing lots of players, you can start sussing out what their scoresheet looks like.

Here, by the way, is a chart for one of the class exercises. Paige Turner's literary agent negotiates a new book deal with Bestbooks. There are eight different points to the deal, from royalty rate to the size of the advance to how many books the deal includes and how long the book tour will be. Each point has five options (e.g., 2% royalty, 3%, 5%, 10%, 15%). So there are 5⁸ possible outcomes, or about four hundred thousand. Some of the points are win-win (translating books into many languages helps both parties); some are purely distributive (royalty and advance payments; if Paige gets more, Bestbooks gets less), and some are very asymmetrical (Paige really, really doesn't want to go on a long book tour but Bestbooks, while preferring a long tour, doesn't actually care very much). So it's possible for two parties to reach a deal where one robs the other blind, or where both do relatively poorly, or even where both do great. Each dot on the graph is a possible deal; the further to the right, the better for Paige; the further up, the better for Bestbooks.

What I learned from laptop shopping in Singapore was to order from the US if at all possible. Singapore has lots of shopping, but very few bargains. Lenovo USA refused to ship to Singapore, so I figured I'd have somebody accept delivery and then re-mail it. But it was a two or three week wait, and then there was some hassle with authenticating my (US) credit card, and my bank (credit union) said there was no problem on their end, and whoever I talked to a Lenovo US said there was no problem on their end, but some other machine in the Lenovo apparatus disagreed because the order got cancelled.

So I headed back to Funan Digitalife Mall, the slightly less seedy and more obnoxiously named alternative to Sim Lim, to the place that had been the squarest dealer in my first round of window shopping. I ended up paying S$2000, or about US$1500, for a "special employee deal" model extracted from the back room that was almost as good as the US model that was US$1200 not including tax and shipping. Break-even, if you count the ten to twenty total hours of time I put into research and haggling over a period of three months as equivalent to spending ten minutes clicking through a web order form.

The X61 is basically the same as the X40. Faster, of course. The battery has some extra rubber feet that make the whole thing about half an inch thicker, and even so it still seems to run a bit hotter. They squeezed in yet another special windows function key, which is annoying until your finger muscles retrain. The left shift key is two keys wide, but the plunger is in the middle of the keycap. I shift with my left pinky (never the right, it turns out) and I don't stretch my finger far enough, so I often depress the keycap without triggering the plunger. That is to say, the left shift key is unreliable due to poor design.

The top bezel, above the keyboard and below the screen, hosts the power button, volume buttons, and a "ThinkVantage" key. I personally find "ThinkVantage" to be a thing that I don't want; if the keyboard must have a silly button with a hideous portmanteau name, I would prefer "FrikSharkLasr". But the real problem with the bezel is that it's flimsy, and flexes when the power button is pushed. This kind of cheap design damages the impression of solidity typical to ThinkPads.

The fan is a bit noisy. The volume buttons were rearranged from the X40 for no good reason. The power supply plug and dock are different from the X40 so you can't re-use any accessories. The ThinkLight is white instead of amber. Of course I put Kubuntu on it. The volume and screen brightness buttons didn't work, though I could still control those things from the command line, until I upgraded to Kubuntu 8.04, at which point almost everything works perfectly without any fussing. One exception is the microphone for Skype, which hasn't worked on any machine I put Kubuntu 7.10 or later on. After a futzing session, it now works; the critical change seems to be turning on the Capture thingie in alsamixer. Wireless seems less reliable than on the X40: at school, the connection often spontaneously died until I reconnected or even unloaded and reloaded the wireless kernel module, a problem which I didn't have with the previous laptop. Battery life is about the same: a reliable four hours plus while the battery is still new. Sleeping and hibernating work fine in Kubuntu, but the machine intermittently refuses to wake up promptly, in particular if it went to sleep on battery and wakes up on AC. That could be the model or Kubuntu or the fact that this particular specimen came out of a box in the back of the shop. All in all, the X61 offers negligible improvement over the X40, to the point where I wish they had upgraded the chips without tweaking the case design; they probably just did that to obsolete the accessories.

And finally, I was able to sell the old ThinkPad (after a thorough hard drive wipe) for scrap at Sim Lim. For all of S$50 for the full kit:

A friend working in the medical data analysis business explained to me that nobody every has diastolic blood pressure of 89, 90, or 91. This is because 90 (mmHg) is the threshold for high blood pressure, so when a doctor or nurse measures your blood pressure, if it's 89 or 90 or 91 but you are otherwise healthy, they squint and write down 88. That way they and you don't have to deal with all of the extra paperwork and hassle of having high blood pressure. It's only when your blood pressure is 92 or 93 or higher that they decide that it's in your best interest to be recognized as having high blood pressure. So if you look at aggregate blood pressure data, there's a gap between 88 and 92.

The Wall Street Journal reports on China's preparations for the Olympics, and includes Beijing's pollution index for the last year. The numeric rating corresponds to concentrations of various pollutants in the air. China considers a rating above 100 to be dangerous; assuming the scale is consistent with that used in other countries, that's two to three times the level that triggers a warning elsewhere. Even so, there's something peculiar about this data:

In exactly which counting system is it normal to round numbers between 51 and 70 down to 50, and 101 and 120 down to 100, but leave all other numbers apparently untouched?

The Straits Times reports (5 July 2008, p S14) on the Large Hadron Collider about to go into to service:

the LHC can pump an energy of 7 teraelectronvolts (Tev) into a proton as it flies around the tunnel. This is roughly the energy of seven mosquitoes in flight. Although this may seem small, a proton is about a trillion times smaller than a mosquito.

Sort of. If a mosquito is, generously, a centimeter in size, then it's

(1)

1×10−2 m 1.65×10−15 m

which is about 10⁻¹³, or a ten-trillionth. But that's not especially relevant. The essential difference, for purposes of colliding masses, is in mass. And the difference there is

(2)

1×10−3 g 1.7×10−24 g

or about 10⁻²¹, which is a billion-trillionth.

So squeezing seven Tevs into one proton is more like putting the energy of ten million battleships into one mosquito.

The AP reports that

"There are a lot of people with new wealth looking for relaxation and enjoyment," said John Dane III, president of privately owned Trinity Yachts, the largest U.S. builder.

These days, the biggest problem at Trinity's shipbuilding yards is having enough workers to handle the 24 custom contracts the company currently is working for the luxury vessels.

Meanwhile the local paper reports that "sales for mass market cars may be sluggish but it's boom time for high-end marques" (Straits Times, Life p9, 5 Jul 2008).

The class war is going strong, and it's pretty clear who's winning.

Ambassador Patricia Herbold, former mayor, chair of the King County (Seattle) Republican Party, etc, etc, (her husband is, or was, an adjunct professor at LKYSPP, although there was no sign of him this last year) spoke at the National Library about the US election. We're in the "pod" on the top, 16th floor of the library in downtown Singapore, and the view is quite nice. The following text is my paraphrase of the speaker unless otherwise marked.

First election without an incumbent President or VP. Lots of young people voting. www.18in08.com. Joel's note: she may be a native speaker, but stilted remarks read off the page with good pronunciation are still stilted remarks. I can't remember the last seminar I attended where the speaker such much of anything interesting or even listenable during the prepared remarks. Turnout is between one and two hundred, very mixed. Perhaps there will be interesting questions.

Examples of how things have changed with modern media: Obama's "bitter" remark, Clinton's sniper incident; McCain's alleged, "unsubstantiated" relationship with a lobbyist. What a negative ad is. "These ... have no place in political discourse."

Primary and convention schedule. Delegates and superdelegates. "Superdelegates comprise about one fifth [of Democratic delegates]." (Bonus points for using "comprise" correctly.) Superdelegates can change their mind, so his nomination is not actually certain. Republican unpledged delegates comprise about one fifth of Republican delegates. Convention speeches as a precursor to future success.

The electoral college.

"So what should we look for as we follow this year's exciting election?" (delivered in a deadpan drone). Key groups: working-class males; young, single, college-educated women; latinos; young people. Influence of technology. www.fightthesmears.com. (A halt because somebody's phone is ringing. "Let me start that sentence again.")

The macaca video "went viral". She shows a video catching McCain in a contradiction. Then a video about Clinton and sniper fire. A video attacking Obama for being out of touch, which starts with a music clip, "Nigger better dance now."

Blogs and Facebook.

Q: something about Democrats, Republicans, and Singapore. And something about polls. A: Voter turnout was up in 2006 and I think will be up even higher this year. To answer your first question, if I understand it, voters can vote for a candidate of any party. They used to say the US was 1/3 Democratic, 1/3 Republican, and 1/3 Independent, though I think that has shifted. John McCain is not a far, far right Republican, and I think he will attract some independent voters.

Q: What impressed me about Obama is "change". You are telling us all these teennagers were impressed by the internet. Do you think if this Afro-American president wins the election, there will be a change in America? A: It's not easy to answer because what you hear on the campaign trail is designed to appeal to certain voter constituencies. And when you are elected, you have to face the realities of life. Strong Congress, lobbying groups ... you have a more reasonable and prudent eye. Example: Clinton was making some of the same noises about free trade, that it was bad for American, but when he was elected, he was responsible for NAFTA.

Q: You talked about young voters, but McCain is old. There is a large senior citizen population in America and most of the developed world. Will they come out and vote for John McCain? Do you believe there's going to be a change in Asia policy if a different party is elected? A: I think the majority of older voters will vote for McCain, not because he's older, but because they tend to be conservative. If elected, I'm sure McCain will not lose focus on this region. Barrack Obama spent some time in Indonesia ... People think we don't pay attention to these region, but it's not true. Our top leaders are spread so thin trying to attend so many meetings and conferences .... We have a very active embassy here, twelve different agencies of the US government, military to military contacts, training sessions, exchange of military personnel. ... Just because a cabinet member does not accept an invitation to a particular event does not mean the US has lost interest in the area. (Sounds like that's not a hypothetical problem)

Q: How much support for free trade in Congress? A: I am concerned. The current Congress seems to be more protectionist. I would like to think this is just posturing during the election cycle.

Q: do you think Obama will be like JFK, to inspire America again? A: I think he's already inspired a lot of people, especially young people.

Q: Which candidate will have a bigger impact on the US trade imbalance? Obama is always emphasizing on withdrawal of troops. Less global influence. If Obama is elected, will US influence as global military police go down? A: I'm not sure I've heard either candidate discuss anything specific with respect to China. Our policy is to encourage China to be a resposible global citizen, which they've been achieving. ... I take issue with your referring to us as military police. We don't go into a country to occupy, we go in to solve a problem. Certainly when you consider the loss of life of our military and the huge financial toll it takes on us, it's not something any of us want to jump into without ... a great deal of thought. McCain would be more inclined to maintain our military posture as it is, but I have no idea what Barrack Obama would do. He's not been in the military; the comments other than with respect to Iraq .... I'll be interested to hear his comments after he visits Iraq.

Q: My question relates to certain schools of thought that American society is fundamentally racist. So far Obama has had a fairly smooth ride; now that he goes out into the open, is it possible that people, red necks, racists, will [vote him out] A: I don't know the answer, but if you look at the number of minorities elected in towns, etc, it's hard to argue this is an overriding situation of racism. Yes there are pockets of racism, there are blacks who are racists, but .... with respect to electing an African-American, I don't think that's a problem. I would like to think that our country is past that.

Q: I'm curious about that issue of gender. Did it play a role in why Hilary Clinton failed? What do you think is going to happen to the constituency of women that were voting for her? Will they defect to McCain? Do you think Obama's choice of running mate might take this into consideration? A: Most Clinton supporters by November will become Obama supporters. Those who are most irritated may stay home and not vote; I'm not sure that they will switch and not vote for McCain. ... There are people, even in the Democratic party, who just don't like her. They think she's shrill, abrasive, any number of things. She started the campaign with an attitude that it was hers, she didn't have a plan if she didn't win after February 5. She had money problems, problems with her campaign manager. Her husband got irritated on the campaign trail and that was caught on video. That caused the media to decide that Obama was going to be the candidate, and the media focus on Hillary was more on the negative side. I don't think it was ever a gender issue with Hilary. I don't think her experience means that women won't be able to be nominees for the next quarter-century.

Q: What will be the major issues in the US political climate in the next several months? A: The economy; surveys show Iraq has moved down, I think because the surge has made progress, but no progress is being made with the economy. Kitchen table types of issue. ... That said, if there is some dramatic event, like another terrorist attack, that will swing things the other way.