Neither my sister nor I has ever been able to keep our shoelaces tied for very long. We are both in our thirties and still can't tie our shoelaces properly. Naturally we blame our parents. I'm generally of the opinion that you can't blame your parents for anything non-genetic after age 25, but this is a clear exception.

It is therefore odd that my father has chosen to post a video he found about the correct way to tie one's shoelaces:

Kona and I made another Youtube:

During the period last summer that I only had one working arm, various people came to help take care of things. So I thought it would be useful to label some of the kitchen cabinets and drawers for them.

Of course, I wanted to warn them about the monster threat.

Little did I know that we would soon, indeed, suffer from a monster infestation.

It only got worse from there.

A few weeks later, we had houseguests on their way back from some sort of national high school Latin competition. They found the label maker ....

Apparently Aqua is Latin for faucet.

Meanwhile, the monster was still lurking. And sometimes, there were victims.

The Latin peoples were no strangers to monsters either.

If I ever have cause to order a hundred coffee mugs, say to stock up a new office or something, I'm getting a full periodic table set.

Update: And of course we could get a periodic table table for the conference room.

There is a long and fascinating thread of research about the health benefits of dogs. It turns out that the dog is a kind of wonder drug, an all-around stress reducer. Pet owners recover at a substantially faster rate from heart problems than do non–dog owners. ...

... Researchers at Azabu University in Japan found last year that the dog’s gaze at its owner increases the owner’s oxytocin level. ...

... specific canine qualities—the dog’s gaze, its unending adolescence, its uncanny responsiveness to human cues—evolved, a process that Serpell calls “anthropomorphic selection.” What was created was not, precisely, a human child, but it certainly was able to push some of the same buttons. According to one study, 84 percent of dog owners consider their animals akin to children—not a surprise, given all the baby talk. The British evolutionary psychologist John Archer has written, in critiquing Serpell’s work, that the dog’s ability to suck up human caregiving that could be going to human children while providing no evolutionary advantage makes them a social parasite. But possibly the stress-reduction effects, more than theoretical camp-guarding and hunting benefits, may have earned the dog’s keep.... —NY Magazine

The results of the OPM Cutest Pet Contest are in. Contestants' pictures were placed on a table by the cafeteria and employees could stuff cash into styrofoam cups to vote. Proceeds went to the CFC.

1st Place – Bobby the Ferret; Demi Mozian, HRPS/CRIS/ISP
2nd – Gwendolyn the Roach; Anonymous
3rd – JoJo the Yorkie; Lisa Baker, MSD/CHCMS/TMG
4th – Spencer & Kodi the Dogs; Jennifer Vassallo, MSD/CHCMS
5th – Kona the Pembroke Welsh Corgi; Joel Aufrecht, HRPS/CTS/ASMG
6th – Tucco the Wheaten Terrier; Yanira Rosado, OCFO/PICG
7th – Maddie the Boxer; Lucy M. Polk, SHRP/CEFSP/WFG
8th – Leica the Dog; Sharon Glick, HRPS/CRIS/MIB
9th – Maia and Electra the Bengals; Kim Bauhs, HRPS/USAJOBS
10th – Chance and Leo the Dogs; Willette Kinsler, HRPS/CRIS/RESG/RBB

I think fifth is respectable, especially given the evidence of ballot stuffing. Nothing like Afghanistan or the US, but I did see a fat wad of singles in Bobby's cup on the second day of voting. Rumor has it the cockroach was submitted by the accounting department. I'm providing you two different jokes from that starting point and you can read the one you like better. A: given how our new accounting system is going in FY'10, the roach is a pretty good mascot for that department; or, B: so where exactly did Accounting get the cash to buy second place for a cockroach?

In terms of actual dollars, I think first place went for something like $60, and I was told Kona got around $40, which means other people voted at least 27 times for her. I have the fifth-cutest pet at OPM.

My physical therapist has recommended swimming to help gently strengthen my left shoulder, and happily there is a public pool two blocks from my apartment. I couldn't find much information on the internet, so I went to scout it a few Saturdays ago. The whole complex, the Marie Reed Recreational Center, which is contiguous with or adjacent to or quite close to the Marie Reed Community Learning Center, is locked up on weekends, but I found this:

I spent some time accumulating critical accessories: goggles and a lock. Then one Tuesday morning I made it to the pool (after having to double back to get the money I'd forgotten, and then on the second walk I broke the goggles while trying to adjust the nose strap), and then at 6:45 am to find a group of people milling near the locked door.

"It was like this last week too."

"Have you been here since six?"?

"That woman that just left said it's been like this the last three weeks in a row."

So I gave up and went for breakfast. And I started mentally composing a story about how DC isn't quite a first-world place, and how everybody here is used to this kind of story and just rolls their eyes. My poor mood may have been slightly influenced by the hassle of the goggles: after scrounging for the receipt, I eventually went and replaced them. But the new pair is missing the different nose pieces, the attempt of which to change was the cause of breaking the first pair. So maybe that's just as well.

One silver lining of regularly heading to a Residence Inn in Macon, Georgia, is that it does have a pool, and you can have the pool completely to yourself. So I did manage to get in the water, do some floating, swim a few five-yard laps. But I needed some serious lap swimming. I checked my photo of the hours and compared it to the online hours. And Monday night, I tried again.

And again I had to double back to grab some money and an ID. But I finally made it around 7 pm on a Monday night, and the door was open. And I went in.

And I was completely blind as my glasses fogged. But slowly, I figured out that there wasn't an office, you just take off your street shoes and go to the locker, shower, and then jump into the pool. A perfectly nice, standard 25-yard heated indoor pool, lanes and all. A lifeguard on duty. Totally free, just go and start swimming. I did seventeen laps of various speeds and styles, including a length of butterfly and a few tedious laps with a kickboard. My first serious laps since high school swim team, and by the time I finished I could barely move my arms. But three days later they seem okay; maybe the left is a bit sore but that was the point, I think. And hey, totally free pool. Five evenings a week. Two blocks from my apartment. DC isn't so dystopic after all.

I charted out the performance of the top 56 Major League baseball players in 2009, as ranked by WARP3, which is the "number of wins this player contributed, above what a replacement level hitter, fielder, and pitcher would have done," normalized for difficulty (era, park effects, league, etc). The chart shows National League players in blue and American League in red. Position players have solid bars; pitchers' bars fade at the bottom.

I marked the top three vote-getters for the Cy Young and MVP awards in each league. Each award has its own scoring system, based on number of first-place votes, second-place votes, etc, and I show the total score. You can see that three of the four awards were given to three of the four best players in baseball; the fourth was given to the fourth-best candidate but the top eight NL pitchers were all very close. You can see that, after the first-place awards, the down-ballot rankings tend to get idiosyncratic. You can also see that the MVP award has pretty much morphed into "most impressive position player, preferably on the Yankees." You can see that I had to show the top 56 players because the third-place NL MVP award went to the fifty-sixth best overall player, thirty-first best in his league. And you can see that Pujols is playing a different game than everybody else.

In case the D & D podcasts weren't enough.

Something quite amazing happened yesterday in Congress: the House Finance Committee -- in a truly bipartisan and even trans-ideological vote -- defied the banking industry, the Federal Reserve, the Democratic leadership, and mainstream Beltway opinion in order to pass an amendment, sponsored by GOP Rep. Ron Paul and Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson, mandating a genuine and probing audit of the Fed.—Glenn Greenwald, Salon

Kona and I made another youtube.

So. How do I feel being a tiny cog in a giant machine? Prior to this gig I only once worked in a company bigger than a few hundred people. I was a contractor, but I would still get company-wide email, and some of it was pretty soul-killing, like the CEO arguing shrewishly—to his own employees—that the Gartner Group assessment of the company was unfair but not to worry, they'd get into the good quadrant next year. And yes, we get plenty of spam at OPM; I described some of it earlier. But some of the dictates from on high at least come from fairly high. This showed up in my inbox one day:

The White House yesterday released an Executive Order signed by President Barack Obama that states, in part:

"Federal employees shall not engage in text messaging (a) when driving GOV (Government-owned, leased, or rented vehicle), or when driving POV (privately-owned vehicle) while on official Government business, or (b) when using electronic equipment supplied by the Government while driving."

This Executive Order is effective immediately for all OPM employees and OPM contractors.

I was considering signing up at the gym under the Department of the Interior, because they are across the street from my office. Since talking to the physical therapist re: my clavicle, though, I've changed the focus of my procrastination from weight-lifting to swimming. Weeks after giving up looking for the DoI gym's website, I just stumbled across it by accident. Some of the upcoming events look pretty exciting:

SOFTBALL: Now is the time for organizing the 2004 IDRA D.C. Softball League. All who desire to field a team and those wishing to play should contact AMBROSE HARRIS, III
IDRA Fitness Director on 202-208-5756 as soon as possible.

I get a lot of internal spam at the office, mostly from the Director. Here are some examples (the bold ones were flagged important by their senders):

Annual OPM Toy Drive
Green Gov Challenge
Take the GreenGov Challenge
REMINDER: Save Awards
Hispanic Heritage Month 2009
National Preparedness Month
CFC Chili Cook-Off Update
OPM Walking Challenge
CFC Bingo!!!
GOLF NOTICE - 4 DAYS TO GO!!!
Constitution Day, 2009

The individual initiatives may well be worthy, but it turns into a stream of noise that I just automatically archive (so that I can compile it into a post like this, just another service I provide to you, my readers). But every now and then something stands out and I read the entire email.

"If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog."

Contrary to folklore, President Truman never made that statement. But it is not bad advice. To celebrate your friend, furry or otherwise, HRPS is sponsoring a first time OPM CFC event, the Cute Pet Contest. You can enter your dog, frog, cat, rat, parrot, or ferret. Photos will be on display at TRB December 1 - 3, 2009 (a notice will be sent for the location). OPM staff can vote – preferably by using a voluntary dollar bill – for the cutest pets. 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place photos will be honored with posting on THEO. All monies raised will go to CFC undesignated funds.

...

I happen to believe I have the most cutest, kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful dog in Washington. But that makes it hard for me to pick which specific picture is cutest. Please tell me which picture is going to win her the Cute Pet Contest:

It said to bring your dog in for a treat, so I did, and she got a treat. I think that if Kona had banking needs, she would probably open an account here.

My left shoulder is still a bit stiff and doesn't feel the same as the right shoulder, and the end of the clavicle protrudes up through the skin a little bit at the top.

My physical therapist recommended swimming (which I last did on a regular basis in 1990) as the best initial treatment. I just googled for pools, and there's one by my apartment. But closest to my office is the National Swimming Pool Institute. Naturally, it's on K Street, the infamous home of the American lobbying industry.

NSPI doesn't seem to have a website, so I can't check what their policies are. Most of the people on K street seem pretty predictable: people with wealth and power use their wealth and power to preserve their wealth and power. And somehow this always seems to involve collateral damage. Depending on the industry, this can be brutal and horrible—think of the blood on the hands of those who have prevented effective food safety procedures in the United States—or fairly petty, such as the compromise agreement between the US and Singapore that allowed US gum to be sold in Singapore (which banned chewing gum years ago) provided it was sugar-free and prescribed by a dentist. I can't help but wonder who the National Swimming Pool Institute opposes in the name of unfettered profiteering. Lifeguards? Water wing salespeople?

It's always nice to have your prejudices confirmed by hard data. The creators of the computer game World of Goo put it up for sale at the price of "pay what you like". And, in their own words,

We were expecting the average price paid to be highest for Linux users and lowest for Windows users, but the gap was larger than we thought it would be.

And, users of the specific distribution of Linux that I happen to use, Ubuntu, paid more than users of other distributions, such as Red Hat.

Kim Ng interviewed for the San Diego Padres’ vacant general manager’s job on Saturday, giving her another chance to become the first female GM in major league history.

Ng, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ assistant general manager, interviewed with Padres CEO and vice chairman Jeff Moorad, according to a person familiar with the process. —AP

The Dodgers considered promoting Ng to the GM position, but instead hired Ned Coletti, who has been deeply unimpressive. I have no data with which to evaluate her, but I'd still be happy to see her get a GM job. Preferably Ned's, but the Padres probably need more help.

We visited the embassy with this symbol (the flag is basically the same):

which belonged to this country. And we visited an embassy under this flag:

which was this country.

What

A set of rules for having efficient status meetings.

Why

Reading is faster than listening.

Status meetings should provide communication, not problem-solving or decision-making.

People don't usually need to be in all of each meeting

Who

Up to seven people or groups. If more than seven people, report by group. Five is better.

When

Every reporting period. Could be daily, every other day, weekly, monthly. First thing in the morning is a good time.

How

Everybody types out a PPPD the night before the meeting. A PPPD is four lists:

• Progress since the last meeting. Progress can usually adapted from previous Plans, from timecards, from personal To-Do Lists, from calendars, whatever your personal system is
• Plans until next meeting. Anything that stays on Plans for a second PPPD in a row should be marked (second time, third time). By the fourth time, you should move it to some wish list, because it’s clearly not a realistic, short-term Plan.
• Problems which are interfering with progress.
• Discussion points. This is anything you specifically want the group to talk about; it doesn't have to be an item from your P lists.

All PPPDs are distributed to all participants by end of business the night before the meeting. The Secretary reminds anybody who is late. Participants should read all of the PPPDs before the meeting.

The status meeting has three parts. The secretary manages the meeting.

• Review
  • Review goes one PPPD at a time, in the order they were sent.
  • Review consists of author saying good morning, asking if anybody has questions or responses to any of their PPP items, and then Q & A as needed.
  • Talking during Review is limited to brief question and answer, clarification, etc. Anything more than 30 seconds should be interrupted and added to the end of the Discussion list for that PPPD.
  • Continue until all people have Reviewed.
• Big Discussion
  • Go around all of the PPPDs again, in the same order
  • For each PPPD, raise each of the Discussion items in the order written.
  • If it only concerns a few people, bump it to Small Discussion.
  • If discussion goes more than a few minutes, bump it to the end of the meeting, or later.
  • Continue until all PPPDs with Discussion points have been covered.
  • Anybody not needed for Small Discussion leaves the meeting.
• Little Discussion
  • Discuss remaining discussion items, if any, in the appropriate smaller group
  • The secretary takes notes on any decisions made, and sends the notes around, and reminds people when the next PPPD is due.

Failure modes

Nobody reads the PPPDs. If this happens, go ahead and spend the first ten minutes of the meeting letting everybody read quietly while music plays.

People are late or miss meetings. You can punish the latecomers by making the last PPPD author be the secretary for the next round, but they will probably be a lousy secretary and you will have to nag them to nag other people. Unless your entire team is well-motivated (or anal-retentive), the natural nagger should remain the Secretary.

Acknowledgements

The PPP meeting process was passed tome from one of my mentors, Grant Tegtmeier, who also helped refine it into PPPD. The Progress/Plans/Problems template, of course, predates us all and presumably can be found in Sumerian tablets explaining why the new ziggaurat is running behind schedule.

In the last week and a half, I started a new job; took the civil servant oath [affirmation]; filled out the Declaration for Federal Employment (Optional Form 306), Employment Eligibility Verification (I-9), Statement of Prior Federal Service (Standard Form 144), Designation of Beneficiary (SF 1152), Education Data Update Form (Attachment 6 to FPM Ltr 298-42), Voluntary Separation Incentive Payment (Buyout) Certification Form, Self-Identification of Handicap (SF 256), Ethnicity and Race Identification (SF 181), Person to Contact in Case of Emergency (OPM Form 2927) and many others; went to a lot of meetings and met many people whose names I probably won't remember for another month; looked at eight apartments; signed a one-year lease, moved in, unloaded a storage unit, made extra copies of the keys, waited hours for the cable guy; mostly reassembled my bicycle; looked for and failed to find four critical retaining pins; sent in for Kona's new dog license; three times went looking for the new dog park in the wrong direction; twice went by the brand-new dog park when it was closed; given keys to a friend of a friend of a friend as part of the backup to the backup to get Kona taken care of during my first federal employee travel next week (Georgia, 3 days, business modeling training and meeting the technical counterparts to my Group); walked by the White House five or six times but only been able to see it through the trees once; and accidentally stumbled upon the Treasury. Details to follow. Today, a pilgrimage to IKEA.

Look closely at the middle of this picture. What's that by the streetlight?

Bill Wyman indicts the newspaper industry, top to bottom, as responsible for its own problems. I draw something slightly different from his article: the notion that we won't lose much of cultural or social value when print newspapers are gone. Most of their news was junk, and the key news-gathering functions are probably quite replaceable.

I note that despite all his good sense, his list of what he would do to save a newspaper doesn't talk at all about how it will make money.

I will further note that for my stay in Palo Alto I was a fairly regular reader of the Palo Alto Daily Post, which has almost exclusively local news, is free, doesn't post its content on the internet, and seems to be financially stable. Any time I had a meal on University Ave while waiting for the carpool, I grabbed a copy of the Daily Post to read with my food.

Kona is hard at work monitoring the squirrel situation:

Later, on deployment:

I read with great interest this article about robots (also on slashdot). The article describes the problem that "each robot has its own unique hardware and software, so capabilities like balance implemented on one robot cannot easily be transferred to others."

Brian Gerkey of the robotics research firm Willow Garage in Menlo Park, California [says] "People reinvent the wheel over and over and over, doing things that are not at all central to what they're trying to do." For example, if someone is studying object recognition, they want to design better object-recognition algorithms, not write code to control the robot's wheels. "You know that those things have been done before, probably better," says Gerkey. But without a common OS, sharing code is nearly impossible.

It's a very cool goal because it's a structural reform to the entire field of robots. Instead of trying to make a robot do a new kind of trick, Willow Garage is trying to make a system for making robots, so that the global community of robot researchers can share.

The other reason this caught my eye is that I'm sitting in Brian Gerkey's office, although sans Brian Gerkey. My office is being turned into a walk-in refrigerator, and Brian's out on vacation, so Kona and I are office-squatting.

Let me back up a bit. Last summer, when I was finishing my MPA in Singapore and was planning a move back to the west coast of the US, Gus offered to share his beach house in Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco. I started looking for a non-profit technology job in the Bay Area, but ended up working for an acquaintance's tech start-up in Menlo Park. We had three offices in the back hall of a bigger company that was working on robots. And Kona was allowed to stay in the office, as long as she avoided the robots.

The start-up ran out of cash at the end of the year, and I soon started consulting for the robot company. Not on robot technology, though. On some less sexy but equally important stuff: inventory management, accounting, and the like. I kept the same office in the back, right up until the much-delayed kitchen renovation finally claimed the back quarter of the building. Our daily catered lunches will be replaced by an on-site chef for breakfast and lunch starting in November, but I won't be here to enjoy them. I'll be in Washington DC.

While I'm excited about Willow's mission to establish an open-source robotics platform, and I certainly can't complain about the amenities of a well-funded Silicon Valley startup with Google roots, I spent the winter applying for, taking a test for, and getting Finalist status for, the Presidential Management Fellowship program. Last March I went to the job fair in Washington DC. And now that I've completed all of the paperwork, undergone a background check that showed I am not prone to betray the country to foreign agents or commit computer crimes with government property, and received a start date of August 31, I'm ready to tell you that I've accepted an offer from the Office of Personnel Management. I'll be working in the Product Development Team of the Center for Talent Services, in Washington DC. It's exactly what I was looking for after getting my MPA: doing public service in my area of expertise, which is making technology more helpful and usable for people. I'll start in less than a month, which would probably stress me out if I didn't already have a surfeit of experience moving thousands of miles to a new job (and great friends at both ends of the move).

So I'll miss the perks and the California life. But it was a bit of a rough summer for our household— here's one story from me and one from Gus, with a few more stories to come. But my left shoulder barely hurts these days, and I've gotten my new bicycle out for a few test rides, just in time to pack it up for the move. Kona and I are ready to start our next set of adventures, in Washington.

I've had two followup appointments since getting surgery five weeks ago to repair my broken clavicle. Things are going well; I stopped wearing a sling many weeks ago, and have a nearly full range of motion. But I do mean something very narrow by that: I can rotate the shoulder joint to just about any position that I could before the break, but for part of that range I don't have any speed or strength. I would guess this is partly because of remaining tissue damage around the clavicle and the AC joint, and partly because the muscles have atrophied from limited use. The broken ribs are also much better; I can now sneeze with minimal pain. So I look pretty normal but I'm not quite all right.

I'm now cleared for cycling and swimming, but the bone is not completely healed and I still can't move heavy things with my left arm, or weight train, or things like that. I took my old bicycle in to the bike store, and they confirmed that the frame is bent. It's therefore a writeoff, because straightening it would both be very expensive and would compromise the strength. Between the bicycle and what I was wearing, almost the only things that can be salvaged are my special cycling sandals and the pedals they clip on to. My helmet was shattered, gloves ripped, glasses scratched, shirt cut off of me (and threads of it picked out of my skin), and shorts shredded. I think the bicycle computer can be salvaged, too, and the panniers and their contents were fine. I have ordered another bicycle, the current version of the same model. Meanwhile, my next checkup in six weeks. Here's what the clavicle looked like last Monday:

I asked the doctors about the pain that I still get when I do shrugging motions, like hiking up my pants. "Oh, yes, well the trapezius connects to the clavicle—you know the trapezius?—and we had to cut a few millimeters off to work with the break. So that's going to hurt until it heals. But it's really tiny, just a few millimeters." "I see. Did you cut any other muscles off the bone?" "Well, there's the deltoid ... no, we didn't cut that, and the pectoral ... we didn't cut that ... no, just the trapezius" with big smile.

Okay, not a big deal, but I did specifically ask before deciding on surgery if they would cut any muscles. I wouldn't have changed my mind because of this, or because of the skin numbness below the incision that they also forgot to mention, but the fewer surprises after surgery, the better. And this is with a team of two very bright, very helpful and informative surgeons, who were asked a direct question about this very topic. Thus I'm not at all surprised by research on modern medicine that shows, for example, that "a simple five-step checklist designed to prevent certain hospital infections ... saved more than 1,500 lives and nearly $200 million."

I've been driving a borrowed Miata around Los Angeles the last few days. It's a 1993 model, fairly similar to my 1986 MR2 in size and performance and feel. It actually feels just a bit less peppy, with a narrower power band, maybe 3500 to 4500 RPM. It's a convertible, and that finally prompted me to do something I should have done a long time ago: buy Kona a dog seat belt. I did some online research and found very strong warnings against harnesses with load-bearing nylon buckles, which could easily break under stress. At the Centinela Feed pet store, that's all they had, so that's what I got. At least she can't jump out, although I think she's actually a bit nervous of the Miata—certainly she's terrified when I raise the roof with her inside— and she just sits quite still, or lies down so her nose almost interferes with shifting.

President Obama has asked for a private screening of the new Star Trek movie, Politico reports. They also quote a Newsweek anecdote from the campaign:

"That's an interesting belt buckle," he said to Michelle, mischievously. She feigned offense and said, "I am interesting, next to you. Surprise, surprise, a blue suit, a white shirt and a tie." Obama grinned and bent down until he was almost at eye level with her waist. He jabbed a playful finger toward her belt buckle, and let loose his inner nerd. "The lithium crystals! Beam me up, Scotty!" Obama squeaked, laughing at his own lame joke as Michelle rolled her eyes.

Just throwing out a wild guess, here, but perhaps if we checked the recording, we might find that he said "Dilithium crystals!" rather than "The lithium crystals!". After all, as Obama would surely know, lithium at room temperature is a soft alkali metal with a silver-white colour, not a crystal. Apparently neither the reporter on the scene, nor the Newsweek writer Evan Thomas, nor any of the editors or copy-editors or fact-checkers at Newsweek is a trekkie. Yet another reason not to lament the demise of their profession in its current form.

"Real" dilithium crystals:

Executive Summary: I have one extra ticket to see Leonard Cohen next Tuesday in Oakland. Email me if you want it.

As a non-drinker who doesn't like loud noise, I don't attend that many music shows. The whole part where you have to show up more or less on time if you want to stake out floor space close enough to see the performers, then wait for the opening act to start (late), wait for them to finish, wait some more for the headliner; after the main act, the fake encore ritual; all standing on your feet and getting bumped by drunk people. I didn't care for it in my 20s, and I really don't care for it in my 30s. We recently saw Dan Bern at a small club in Santa Cruz, which entailed driving an hour at night in the rain, all of the aforementioned waiting, and easily the loosest Dan Bern set I've ever seen. It was more or less worth it, especially since he sobered up somewhat during the set and started remembering more lyrics and putting a little more heat into the songs. And it was only $10, and I would have paid more just to not have the opening act. But the math came out pretty close.

All that said, I didn't hesitate very long when it came to Leonard Cohen tickets. He's on a small list of living legends that I hope to see perform live in my (their) lifetimes. It's going to be in a proper venue and we've been warned that the performance will start on time and that there won't be an opening act. I was a little surprised to realize he's on tour given his age and previous retirement, but apparently his business manager just robbed him blind. Similar circumstances led Billy Joel to do the River of Dreams album and tour, which tour's Los Angeles stop I was very happy to attend. I know that musicians stereotypically don't like to deal with the money stuff; perhaps there is a niche for a special kind of manager whose only role is to prevent the primary manager from running away with the money. Of course then you'd need a third kind of manager to keep tabs on the second kind ....

Meanwhile the Cohen tickets ran afoul of the institutionalized scalping scam. Trent Renzor has an informative post on this, although his diagnoses and suggestions aren't quite coherent. The basic issue is that demand for many musical performances exceeds supply. Normally this leads to an increase in prices, but musicians are reluctant to raise prices too high for fear of alienating their fans. So the popular performers routinely leave huge arbitrage opportunities—demand can peak at double, triple, or even more of face value. Scalpers used to buy some of the tickets for any given show on a speculative basis, reselling some for profit and eating others. But apparently, entire shows are now priced so far below market that institutional scalpers, such as StubHub, owned by eBay, are happy to buy all of the tickets the instant they are on sale. And now many tickets from Ticketmaster-brokered events (TicketMaster has nearly 70% of the concert ticket market in the US) end up for resale at TicketsNow. For example, "Ticketmaster received complaints after an AC/DC show in Vancouver sold out in minutes, only for tickets to be quickly available for higher prices on TicketsNow. The resale site also charged up to $1,199 for a $44 face-value ticket to a recent Killers concert in Toronto." Ticketmaster bought TicketsNow in early 2008.

In addition to scalpers, Ticketmaster has close ties to advertisers ("Outdoor advertising in US is a duopoly between CBS and Clear Channel Outdoor."), the radio stations (Clear Channel is "the largest owner of full-power AM, FM, and shortwave radio stations ... and is also the largest pure-play radio station owner and operator"), and the artists' managers (Ticketmaster "last year acquired Front Line, a top artist-management firm."), the venues (As of September 30, 2005, Live Nation owned or operated 117 venues, consisting of 75 US and 42 international venues." and bought House of Blues in 2006), and the promoters (Live Nation "persuaded some of the world's best-known music artists, such as Madonna, U2, Jay-Z and Shakira, to sign up to its '360 deals'".) To complete the web: Live Nation is a 2005 spin-off of Clear Channel. And, as of early 2009, Live Nation is in the process of merging with Ticketmaster.

So there's basically one company with a dominant share in each of the distinct markets of owning venues, managing artists, promoting shows, advertising shows and artists on outdoor media and radio stations, owning radio statios, selling tickets, and scalping tickets. But all of that is an aside to today's point, which is that what seems to be happening with concert tickets is that the artists refuse to charge market rates, so Ticketmaster pre-scalps the tickets and takes all of the money that the artists leave on the table. Presumably the artists make something back in merchandise (unless they've signed a 360 deal with Live Nation and lost control of that process, in which case they probably get completely fictitious royalty checks) and such, and get to defend their brand reputation or something, but is there really such a big difference between not going to shows because I'm disgusted with the ticket prices scalpers are charging, and not going to shows because I'm disgusted with the ticket prices the artists are charging? Is the nominally better PR of the latter worth the subsidy it provides to the slime industry?

Of course, for a bit more perspective:

1. this is nothing new. The entertainment industry has never been especially clean or treated artists especially well. At least now, more of this information is openly available.
2. There are plenty of smaller-scale options, from people like Ani DiFranco who owns and operates her own completely independent record label to local venues that have nothing to do with TicketClearLiveMasterNation.

Anyway, after scalpers devoured tickets for a show in Oakland, even though the tickets averaged around $100, Cohen's people added some more shows and went to some effort to avoid this, using a special code posted in fan club forums to allow pre-sales, with a maximum of two tickets per buyer that must be picked up in person with photo ID. That price point suggests Cohen's in a weird spot of touring for the money, but not charging at marginal demand. I guess that's admirable. Anyway, we've ended up with four tickets for three people, so if you'd like to go see Leonard Cohen next Tuesday, April 14, let me know.

The current modules on the International Space Station are called:

• Zarya (sunrise)
• Zvezda (star)
• Unity
• Destiny
• Columbus Research Laboratory
• Kibo (hope)
• Quest
• Pirs (pier)

The next module going up, "Node 3", is the subject of a NASA naming contest, in which the write-in "Colbert" just beat the most popular NASA option, "Serenity". Serenity itself was popular in large part because it's the name of the spaceship from the tv show "Firefly" and movie "Serenity". NASA now has to either call the module Colbert, screwing up the naming convention, or override their poll. I propose a different solution:

Call it "Colberity".

Obama became president at noon (EDT) today:

The terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January, and the terms of Senators and Representatives at noon on the 3d day of January, of the years in which such terms would have ended if this article had not been ratified; and the terms of their successors shall then begin. (US Constitution, Amendment 20, paragraph 1)

However, he could not begin "executing" his office until taking the oath/affirmation, which happened a few moments after noon by my clock:

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." (US Constitution, Article 2, Section 1)

Chief Justice Roberts and president-elect Obama clearly did not practice the oath; for those keeping score at home, you can call that an E-1, batter safe at first. (update: In baseball score notation, E is error. The defensive positions are numbered one through nine, from pitcher to right fielder (pitcher, catcher, first base, second base, third base, shortstop, left field, center field, right field. There are nine Supreme Court justices, and Roberts as chief justice is #1).

2:09 CST: [Sean] Lynn Sweet and Obama joke about her injury (which apparently took place when she was running to his speech in Grant Park), then she asks about what kind of dog Obama's going to buy, which Presidents he's spoken to, and where his girls will go to school. Obama jokes he's only talked to "living" presidents, and it's not a "Nancy Reagan type seance situation." But has re-read Lincoln. Dog is very important, Obama says, a "major issue." —fivethirtyeight.com

I hope they get a corgi.

Update: A more complete transcript reports that Malia is allergic, so the First Dog will have to be hypoallergenic. Corgis shed prodigiously and continuously, so I guess they are out of competition.

This weekend was extremely clear in Half Moon Bay, culminating in a gorgeous nearly full moon overhead tonight. I took Kona down to the beach for her night walk, and it was lovely. Moonlight is roughly 500,000 times dimmer than sunlight, but the beach and the surf were very clear. It was like being in the afterlife in an Ingmar Bergman movie: everything is visible, crisp and distinct but grey and dim; it's very cold; and a crashing and roaring.

More human rights:

Connecticut's Supreme Court ruled Friday that gay couples have the right to marry

And the Iowa election market may be the only market in the world with a positive trend over the last few weeks. I continue to walk around with crossed fingers, hoping for the election to be over and Obama to be victorious so that we can return to a state of merely being disappointed by our elected leaders instead of being betrayed, bloodied, and exploited for criminal gain.

Over four months beginning in early August, Kearsarge planned to visit Nicaragua, Colombia, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana, delivering free medical and engineering assistance to isolated, impoverished populations. It was actually the second phase of Operation Continuing Promise, which began in May when the amphibious assault ship USS Boxer made a humanitarian run down the Pacific side of Central and South America, eventually treating around 14,000 patients and conducting 127 surgeries, while an accompanying force of Seabees rebuilt eight schools and repaired roads.

Continuing Promise is just a single chapter in a much broader U.S. military "medical diplomacy" initiative in Latin America that began in earnest in summer 2007, with the four-month deployment of the hospital ship USNS Comfort. That trip resulted in some impressive figures: 1,170 surgeries, 32,322 immunizations and 24,242 pairs of glasses handed out.

—David Axe, Seapower Magazine

What a good idea.

One of the lists I've been working on is the "default answer per domain" list. The idea is that, in any specific field of knowledge, there's one answer that's far more common than any other. My friend Michael introduced me to the idea by explaining that, in pilot training (he's a military pilot), when the instructor is screaming at you and your mind is completely blank, your best bet is to reply, "sir, to maintain the stability of the aircraft, sir." It's very rarely outright wrong, and even if it doesn't answer the question, it's still a good thing to be doing at all times. There are in fact NTSB crash reports that essentially say, "something minor went wrong, and while the pilots were trying to fix it, they flew a perfectly functional airplane into the ground." When you are flying an airplane and something goes wrong, the need to continue flying the airplane remains both urgent and important.

So I set about trying to extend this concept to other domains. Here's my list so far:

• piloting: "maintain the stability of the aircraft"
• martial arts: "foot position"
• construction: "vapor barrier"
• computers: "permissions problem"
• electronics: "grounding"
• economics: "marginal cost"

My bicycle, as it turns out, was manufactured by RANS, whose primary line of business is airplanes. And the rule for piloting applies to cycling: rule one is always to keep the bicycle upright.

One of the benefits of a recumbent bicycle is supposed to be greater safety in crashes. You ride lower and you are basically supine, not vertical, so your head, container for your vital brain, is not only lower but less likely to lead your body in a Newtonian arc over the handlebars and into pavement. However, Wikipedia does warn that "remaining clipped in during a front tire or wheel failure at high speeds can result in the recumbent rolling over the rider and taking a clipped in leg or legs with it. This scenario, although very rare, can create severe spiral fractures of the femur ..."

So I was riding Sunday morning, southbound on the 1, big shoulders, hardly any traffic, dry road, partly sunny. The only problem was that I couldn't see the ocean. So I craned my neck and tried to peek over the rise between the 1 and the ocean. Then I looked back at the road, saw the pothole, and went down. Fortunately, I was going uphill, hence only about 13 mph, and I went down on dirt, not asphalt. So, did the recumbent layout save me from serious injury, or did I fracture both femurs in matching spirals?

Good news. I basically fell a few feet onto my ass and slid to a halt, balanced on one side of rump. Total damage: a bit of road rash, a small tear in my shorts, and a dirty pannier bag. I'll count that as a cheap refresher lesson in the keeping my eyes on the road.

It's barely past noon but I heard something at lunch that I'm confident will be the most important thing I learned today. If a killer robot is chasing you, throw unbalanced things with weird moments of inertia at it, like frying pans and cats. Robot motion controllers can't handle stuff like that, so if it catches a gyroscope you threw at, it may get confused long enough for you to escape. For now.

I've published the airplane recognition poster on Cafe Press, where you can buy it as a 20" x 14" poster. Enjoy!

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.

I supported the notion of impeaching Cheney enough to make T-shirts, which very aggressively failed to sell. Now that Kucinich has introduced a bill to impeach Bush, it's worth thinking about again.

Briefly, the basic argument for impeachment is that Bush committed many impeachable offenses. But just as Supreme Court decisions are rooting more in counting to five than in pure application of legal theory, impeachment is a political, not legal act. Probably most presidents have committed impeachable acts; after all, the US has gone to war at least eight times since the Congress, the sole organ with Constitutional power to wage war, last passed a bill declaring war. But only two presidents have been impeached, and neither was convicted.

Politically, both Bush and Cheney would have to be impeached simultaneously, which would lead to the speaker of the house succeeding to the presidency, which puts Pelosi in a very awkward position and probably ends up as a strong incentive for her not to allow impeachment. The other standard political arguments against are that it will distract from more important issues, and than Bush will be out of office very shortly anyway.

The strongest argument for, I think, it to begin re-establishing the basic civil norm that politicians, even and especially the president, must obey the law, and that there will be consequences if they do not. From that perspective, Ford's pardon of Nixon morally enabled the disasters since. A commenter at Making Light argues that it literally enabled some of the disaster-makers:

... if [they] are impeached (House) and tried and convicted (Senate), they will not get Federal pensions and they will be ineligible for any Federal office.

This is what should have been done to Nixon and Reagan's cohorts -- if it had we wouldn't be dealing with the current criminals.

A third argument would be that impeachment might help restore international respect for the United States (and restore some of our "soft power"). Between that, re-establishing rule of law, and removing many dedicated imperialists from government permanently, I think impeachment is at least worth serious public discussion. Otherwise, it's business as usual.

Google Foundation has a program, RechargeIT, to promote plug-in hybrids. This is very exciting because a plug-in hybrid can have radically less impact than a regular hybrid. In a nutshell, a regular hybrid is just a standard gasoline car with some doodads to make it more efficient. But a plug-in hybrid is a real electric car, that can also use gasoline so you don't get stranded on the road.

And now for the details. First, although hybrid sometimes means an engine that can burn natural gas or ethanol in addition to gasoline, here we're talking only about gasoline/electric hybrids.

Cars burn gasoline to move you around. That is, they spray gasoline into cylindrical chambers of an internal combustion (e.g., "inside-burning") engine, mix it with air, and then explode the mixture with a spark. The hydrocarbons—molecules of hydrogen plus carbon—in the gas combine with the oxygen in the air to produce carbon dioxide and hydrogen dioxide—water— plus some energy. The resulting hot exhaust gas wants to be much bigger than the space at the top of the cylinder where we detonated the fuel/air mixture, so it pushes a piston in the cylinder. The motion of the pistons spin a shaft, and that drive shaft in turn connects to the wheels via the transmission, moving the car forward. But only about 35% of the energy from the gasoline makes it even as far as pushing a piston. The rest just heats up the engine block, which heats up the coolant fluid, which heats up the air passing through the radiator. Unless you live in Alaska and hence diverted a bit of that heat to warming up the inside of the car, it's purely wasted energy. And of the fraction of initial chemical energy that did go into pushing the pistons, almost half will be wasted in friction along the path between the driveshaft and road/rubber interface, so that only about 20% of the energy in the gasoline actually moves the car forward. At best.

The exhaust gas, meanwhile, has some impurities, such as incompletely burned carbon (carbon monoxide instead of dioxide, the former being far more toxic) and even raw gasoline. It travels through a device which catalyzes the incomplete chemical reactions into finishing (hence, a "catalytic converter"), various other devices to capture other impurities such as sulfur from the gasoline, a muffler, and out the tailpipe. If all of that equipment is modern and in good working order, the exhaust gas is actually fairly free of toxins and smog-producing chemicals. It does, however, have plenty of carbon dioxide, which of course is a greenhouse gas the emission of which will possibly turn Miami into another New Orleans by 2050.

A diesel is much the same except that it burns at a temperature so high it doesn't need a spark; because of the higher combustion temperature, a modern diesel engine can be more efficient than a gasoline engine.

So what's a gas/electric hybrid? Well, it's a gasoline engine car with a set of electric motors and really big batteries. Big as in hundreds of pounds of batteries. What's the point? Well, gasoline engines aren't especially flexible. They like to run at a certain speed. Even with a transmission—a set of gears that let the engine shaft turn at a different rate than the wheels—cars are finicky. My old Toyota MR2 had an unusually wide "power band", from about 2000 rpm to 7000, but even it didn't develop much power at 1000 rpm. And to get a range that wide, the engine computer has to play tricks like spraying in extra gasoline that won't get burnt (called a "rich" mix), or extra air (a "lean" mix). I hope you will not be surprised to learn that a rich mix is not good for your mileage, or, for that matter, your catalytic converter. I'll skip over the details of Carnot efficiency and stoichiometric ratios; what you need to know is that any particular gasoline-burning engine can be made very clean and very efficient, but only in a very narrow range of speed and power. The engine block design that got 30 miles per gallon in my 2500-pound MR2 at 60 miles per hour (or would have, if I hadn't driven it with a 21-year-old right foot) will not be as efficient in a two-ton truck. In fact, it won't even be as efficient in the MR2 at 30 miles per hour. And that's where hybrids come in.

The thing with energy is that it can't be created or destroyed, only transformed. Power plants don't create energy; they just transform the chemical energy in coal or oil or natural gas into the kinetic energy of a spinning turbine, and then into electrical energy. Dams and windmills, well, you can probably figure them out yourself.

The other thing with energy is that it's hard to store. So almost all of the energy that we generate—by generate I mean liberate from coal, or steal from rivers and breezes, etc—gets used right way. And I don't mean right away as in "your call is important to us" right away. I mean that if you flip a switch to turn on the light on the ceiling, at the same instant a turbine in a big industrial building somewhere shudders microscopically.

The total power output of the entire Western United States power grid at any moment equals the total power consumption. (Almost. About seven percent of the output is wasted in transmission, turning into heat and that eerie hum you hear around power lines.)

The power grid notwithstanding, it is actually possible store power on a smaller scale. And that's what a hybrid car does. Each wheel has its own electric motor, and they all connect to a big battery. The big battery in turn connects to the engine. It tries to keep the engine running at its optimal speed, and when that speed produces more power than the car needs to move, the extra power at the drive shaft is converted, via an alternator, into electricity stored in the battery. When the driver asks for more power than the engine can efficiently produce, the battery sends electricity to the wheel motors to supplement the power coming from the transmission. Electric motors are more efficient over a much wider range of speeds and powers, especially in starting from zero, than gas engines attached to mechanical transmissions, so this can work out quite well. In particular, hybrids will often use only battery power at low speeds, with the gas engine helping push the car only at faster or freeway speeds.

With all of this extra gear, you can play some extra tricks. The coolest one is regenerative braking. Electrical motors can easily reverse; that is, they can turn motion into electricity instead of vice versa. So when you tap the brakes in a hybrid, the car does not need to push brake pads into rotors, thus converting your precious energy of motion into hot brakes. Instead, the motors turn into little generators, with your car wheels playing the role of the rushing river. The wheels get slowed and the battery gets topped off. If everything were perfectly efficient, you could start at the top of the Grapevine with a dead battery and empty tank of gas, roll several miles down the hill, brake to a halt, enjoy an In-n-Out burger, then turn around and roll all the way back up on battery power. (This would work better if the Earth didn't have any air to cause wind resistance, but then the milkshakes probably wouldn't taste right.)
View Larger Map

Regenerative braking is unique to hybrids, because you need both the electric motors and big battery. But the other trick hybrids can play is simply to turn the gas engine off whenever it's not needed. In particular, an idling engine always gets zero miles per gallon regardless of how efficient it might be. (Similarly, a really expensive Lamborghini which is lost and going in circles isn't any faster than a Hyundai, though it's much funnier to watch go past you the second time around.) This is something that most new gasoline cars are supposed to start doing Real Soon Now, since improvements in gas engine technology mean that starting the engine no longer wastes a minute worth of gas, the way it used to when Eisenhower was president.

The upshot of all of this technology and cleverness is that the current batch of hybrid gas/electric cars, most famously the Toyota Prius but also plenty of Hondas, Fords, and so forth, get maybe a quarter more energy out of a gallon of gas. So the Prius gets about 45 mpg. By the way, there's all sorts of controversy about how the US government calculates mileage. One of the things RechargeIT is doing is driving some Priuses around with lots of instrumentation; among other things, they are averaging 44.6 mpg over the last year. That's pretty good, but it's barely better than a diesel Jetta, which doesn't have the hundreds of pounds and thousands of dollars of extra equipment. And VW claims to have 60 mpg Jettas on sale in the US in months.

To make sense of this apparently poor performance, you have to remember is where a gas/electric hybrid gets its energy from. Yes, it has an electric battery, but what charges that battery? The Toyota Prius doesn't plug into anything. The only way that you add energy to the car is by pumping gasoline into the tank. The battery charges only when the engine is running. So all that fancy technology merely makes the car a really, really efficient gas-powered car. But gasoline engines have efficiency limits; the hybrid system lets the car spend more time at those limits, but cannot exceed them. The bottom line is that current hybrids are still 100% gasoline-powered.

I wrote about this when I first drove a hybrid Honda in Seattle's Flexcar fleet, five years ago. I wrote then that "by putting electric technology into a non-masochistic package (unlike the EV1 or earlier Honda Insight) that will actually sell tens of thousands of units, familiarizing consumers and generating real-world trial experience, it's a medium-sized technological step towards true renewable-resource cars." Well, Toyota's sold a million Priuses, gas has passed US$4/gallon, and the next step is at hand. The next step is plug-in hybrids. The difference between a regular hybrid and a plug-in is $10,000 worth of extra equipment and lots more batteries. Enough batteries for the car to hold forty miles worth of electrical energy. And instead of filling the batteries by burning gasoline, you can plug the car into regular 120-volt outlets. Suddenly, that entire second drivetrain, previously slave to the gas tank, is liberated. To be sure, it's still going to be slave to oil, natural gas, and coal-fired power plants, but the frying pan is a better place to be than the fire: even coal plants can be well over 40% efficient, and an electrical drivetrain is much more efficient than a mechanical transmission. Of course, from a climate change perspective we probably want to look at pounds of CO₂ emitted mile traveled, which is a research topic for another day, but remember that you can use zero-emission wind, solar, and nuclear power as well. So a plug-in hybrid is the best of both worlds: you can use clean electrical power for shorter trips, plug in anywhere to recharge, and if you don't have time to recharge or want to go more than 40 miles, you've got a gasoline motor and gas tank that give you all the freedom of a very efficient regular car.

How well does it work in the real world? Again, RechargeIT has equipped a fleet of cars with sensors, in this case four cars, and they end up getting 66.2 mpg. Since every single trip is recorded down to the second, you can start getting at the why of the numbers. Here's a trip from yesterday:

Speed (mph):

Engine RPM

Battery (%)

Even though the trip was only 3.6 miles and never broke 40 mph, it looks like the gas engine still kicked in 11 times, almost once per minute. And of course on a long freeway trip, you're going to completely deplete the pre-charged battery and then all of your energy will come from the gas tank. So I guess there's still a ways to go. Even so, over the last year the plug-ins' mileage averages about 50% better than the stock hybrids, and the greenhouse gas emissions are 29% lower per mile. I think the GHG numbers are based on the Googleplex using all solar power, in which case the plug-in charge is emission-free. I would want to know if they take into account drivers' plugging in at home or elsewhere, in which case you'd want to charge the plug-ins with the GHG emission per Wh of power sources for the Bay Area power company. And of course a true lifecycle analysis would take into account the GHG emitted building the cars, shipping them to Mountain View, etc etc. Even so, plug-ins are almost certainly another step in the right direction.

Oh, and one other thing. Remember before when we were talking about the power grid in the US, and how it doesn't have any ability to store power? Well, what if we attached a bunch of batteries to the grid, and charged them up at night, when there is surplus (and more efficient) capacity, and then dumped it back into the grid at noon, when demand peaks and the old, less economical, heavily polluting power-plants have to be maxed out to prevent brownouts? A fleet of plug-in hybrids, of course, could do that. Apparently, if you play your cards right and all the regulation falls into place, your plug-in hybrid could be a profit center.

One thing on the RechargeIT blog really surprised me:

Not the Lexus hybrid; I've even seen them on the street here in Singapore. But I had assumed that when a hybrid motor is put into a luxury car, producing only a 1-2 MPG efficiency improvement, it was pretty much a farce, a bit of greenwashing. But what this graph points out:

is that an improvement from 10 MPG to 12 MPG is worth as much as an improvement from 30 to 60. So maybe those hybrid limos and SUVs aren't completely ridiculous. But don't get carried away; 30 is still much than 12.

Meanwhile, California's regulators, CARB, seem to have done a decent job over the last few decades in standing up to car manufacturers to force them to improve the environmental impact of their cars. But the terminology can get confusing: LEV, for Low-Emission Vehicle, ULEV for ultra-low, and on and on to the latest: AT-PZEV, "Advanced Technology Partial Zero Emission Vehicle". This refers to different levels of pollution coming out of the car, like sulfer dioxide and carbon monoxide. The confusing thing is that, when they use "emission", they aren't talking about carbon emissions. So a car can be ATPZEV and still be pumping out the CO₂ that will ultimately put Miami and Bangladesh underwater. Perhaps one day CARB will start regulating greenhouse gases as well, though for all I know that's tied up in a lawsuit or something. Apparently RechargeIT is lobbying CARB on the issue.

By the way, the head of the EPA, which is federal as opposed to the California state CARB, has been going to absurd, and possibly illegal, lengths to stall on doing anything about GHGs. Watch for yourself:

Yay! George Takei is getting married! E! Online incorrectly refers to him as "the once and forever Lt. Sulu", but of course we all know that he is now Captain Sulu.

Today's good news:

Spain's re-elected Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero announced a government Saturday which for the first time included more women than men and a female defence minister. —AP

Meanwhile in Singapore:

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong reshuffled his Cabinet on Saturday, as part of a process to groom the next generation of leaders for Singapore.

The most eye-catching in the slew of changes announced by PM Lee was the appointment of Mr K. Shanmugam as Law Minister and Second Minister for Home Affairs from May 1. —Straits Times

The newspaper featured pictures of twenty faces: from the PM and Minister Mentor and Senior Minister to the various Ministers. As many as five looked Indian or had Indian names; at least one had a Muslim name. None appeared Malay, and none were women.

This is both a symptom and a problem. It's a problem because it restricts the viewpoints present in discussion by Singapore's ruling group (though, arguably, not any more than one-party rule). Some Singaporeans brag about the meritocratic government recruitment system, but it's a poor excuse for meritocracy that doesn't raise up any women or many minorities.

The equivalent for the US: five women out of twenty one. Four ethnic minorities out of twenty one. For most cabinet members I've never heard anything about their religion, so I would assume all are professed Christians.

Side note: Did one second of Google on that assumption, and found the most adorable Hegelian dialog within the Radio Islam web site (that's Farrakhan):

• Jews in Bush’s Cabinet? Don’t Hold Your Breath
• USA´s Rulers -They are all Jews !

It's not quite as tasty as it looks, since the first link is a reprint from the New York Observer and the second refers to Clinton's administration. But it did lead me here, which (taken with, obviously, a very large grain of salt) suggests that there are no Jews in Bush's cabinet. I'm sure there are no Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists. I can just barely imagine one of them being a (very discreet) atheist, but I haven't heard anything. Of course I wouldn't be the first to suggest that many of them appear to actually practice Manichaeism. This is getting a bit off-topic and I'm using too many fancy words, so let's just re-iterate the positive: a majority female Spanish cabinet, and female heads of government in Argentina, Chile, Germany, and Liberia. This post should not be construed as a declaration of partisanship in the US Democratic Presidential Primary race of 2005-2008.

It's a cop action/procedural story, like 24 or CSI or something. But it's set in 1974. And it's about crimes against books. And it's a graphic novel, not a TV show.

Ninety percent of the housing for Singapore's 4.5 million residents is HDB, public housing. The rest has gotten far more expensive in the last two years. The chart shows a roughly 50% increase between 2005 and 2007, but people have told me anecdotes of 100% increase. The latest government data shows an increase in rental rates in the central district of over 40% in 2007 alone. My scholarship at LKYSPP included a stipend and partial tuition waiver (later increased to full), but no housing. The LKY school occupies part of the beautiful and historic Bukit Timah campus of NUS (the National University of Singapore), a campus dating back to colonial times in the 1920s, when the design was selected through an "Empire-wide" competition. The downside to this is that there is no cheap housing for a several-kilometer radius around the school. In this context, and with a dog, I ended up roommates with another American student in an apartment less than a mile from school, Naga Court.

(As a side note, this very interesting column makes a very interesting argument. To paraphrase: the price for real estate is the measure of how much stuff those who want property will have to give to get it from those that have it. Since property owners tend to be older than buyers, the price level in the real estate market indicates the rate of wealth transfer from the young to the old. So "falling markets are bad news for the old, good news for the young." And presumably, rising markets are opposite.)

One interesting phenomenon in the Singapore real estate market is the "en bloc" sale. If 80% of the residents of a condominium agree to sell, everybody is compelled to sell. This is usually followed by the building or complex being demolished and a newer, bigger one being built. Naga Court was sold en bloc in 1999, but was still standing in 2007, despite the real estate bubble. Most of the residents had moved out, but a company specializing in these projects came in and subdivided many of the large apartments (~2000 square feet). My classmate and I signed a lease for a two-bedroom apartment roughly a thousand square feet in size. It had originally comprised the living room, kitchen, utility washroom, and a small sideroom that might have been the maid's quarters. With the addition of some paper-thin walls, the living room was split in half and the whole thing was isolated from the rest of the apartment, which was turned into three more apartments (master bedroom and its bathroom, two small bedrooms sharing a bathroom, and another room that I never got to snoop around in). The carpet was disgusting, the kitchen featured disintegrating particleboard cabinetry (complete with bugs) and no hot water, the bathroom was unfortunate; but it was spacious, dogs were allowed, and it was easy walking distance to campus. The buildings to either side lease apartments for S$10,000 a month or more, and we were paying S$2600 (US$1700 at the time). When we signed the one-year lease in July 2007, we were assured profusely that the building was not supposed to be demolished until August 2008. Perhaps you can already tell where this story is going?

We lived in blissful ignorance until I overheard some kind of building inspector having a cell phone chat in the front lobby, and the month December being mentioned. We were therefore not completely surprised when we got an one-month eviction notice on November 30, but the timing was inconvenient, given that final exams were in a week, followed by a school trip to Malaysia and then and my roommate was going to India for a month immediately after. So when the company showed us another apartment (as they were contractually obliged to do), we took it, even though it was S$600/month more. Perhaps the only compensation was that they provided the movers and moving truck.

After finals, my roommate packed her stuff and left on vacation. I packed at a leisurly pace—we don't have that much stuff between the two of us—while the exodus proceeded:

Kona was not allowed in the swimming pool, and by the time I got around to checking out the pool on the last day to see if she could finally take a swim, it was already being drained:

The new place is much nicer. Same template, a two-bedroom apartment carved out of a living room and kitchen, one small maid's bathroom with jury-rigged shower. But the building hasn't been on death row for eight years, so the decay has barely started. Tile floors, no carpet. Hot water in the kitchen, and our own washer and dryer (built in Singapore, and the washing machine often gets stuck mid-cycle and runs water through your clothes for six hours or more if not stopped). We are a few blocks from the big shopping district (Orchard Road), which is more bad than good because it "justifies" (or at least motivates—we had a signed contract and I'm sure we couldn't have unilaterally started paying S$600 less rent, so nothing will ever justify the increase to me, but when you don't have good alternatives you don't have power, and when you don't have power, you get screwed) the rent increase while at the same time we are more than twice as far from school. On balance, though, I like the new place better.

When we signed the new, shorter lease, the leasing company agents assured us that this building would not be emptied before our lease expired. At least a year, they said. Definitely no problem. Probably. How long are you staying again? Meanwhile, the property is adjacent to no less than three different construction projects:

A few weeks later there were movers in the elevators, as the owners started fleeing. One mover asked, "when are you shifting?" "Why, what do you know?" He shrugged. Here's what I saw on the next floor up: (Incidentally, a classmate who is an expat for a big MNC said his moving allowance is two containers. That's two forty-foot shipping containers. The expat package is alive and well.)

Next I asked the nice people at the desk. They had no idea when the building would be destroyed, they said, but at least a year.

A few weeks after that I saw someone in the elevator with a "Far East" shirt, Far East being the property company that owns this building along with half of the hill. No idea, he said. October, he said.

So we'll see. Personally, I figure 50/50 odds of our being displaced again before July.

Kucinich and Dodd best matched my values. Of the big three, I can visualize any of them as an excellent president and I can visualize (and have seen) all three of them disappoint. For context, here are a few of my beliefs:

1. Bill Clinton was a big disappointment as president. He compromised far too many liberal values. The economy was good, including by more stringent standards such changes in income inequality. On balance, the best thing about Clinton was that things didn't get worse.
2. The only people who really love a candidate unreservedly and never get disappointed, are probably those who are getting paid to do so. The nature of politics is compromise, especially with 100,000,000 million voting constituents. If you turn your nose up at this, you give up your voice; there isn't another, better, cleaner, purer system of government hiding in the back.
3. The nature and quality of a candidate's advisors are probably better predictors of performance than their rhetoric.
4. I'm thrilled that there will be a major-party nominee for president of the US who is not a white male. Symbolism often matters.

Since Washington State's primary doesn't affect delegate apportionment, I didn't bother to get an absentee ballot. In the general election, I'll happily vote for whichever one is nominated.

As much schadenfreude as I get from this story of conservative authors suing the ultra-right-wing Regnery press, what prompted me to post is the quote below. The authors accuse Regnery of selling books very cheaply to wholly owned subsidiaries such as the "Conservative Book Club", thus reducing the royalties paid to authors.

"The difference between 10 cents and $4.25 is pretty large when you multiply it by 20,000 to 30,000 books," Mr. Miniter said. "It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance." He added: "Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?"

I love the cognitive dissonance. The thought process implied here starts with tribalism: "everyone in my tribe is good and everyone in your tribe is bad", taken to the next level: "everything bad is in your tribe". If a conservative business is acting poorly, by definition it's acting non-conservatively. E.g., it's impossible for anything sharing my ideology to be bad, so it must actually have your ideology. It must be a betrayal.

Any similarity to the mainstream conservative thought these last years, or to the stabbed in the back meme, is no doubt coincidental.

Today's good news: conservative San Diego mayor Jerry Sanders gives a speech explaining why he changed his mind and supported a city council action in support of gay marriage.

Very nice to see this instead of the usual thanking of God for miracles:

Kevin Everett voluntarily moved his arms and legs on Tuesday when partially awakened, prompting a neurosurgeon to say the Buffalo Bills' tight end would walk again -- contrary to the grim prognosis given a day before.
[...]
"It's totally spectacular, totally unexpected," Green told The Associated Press by telephone from Miami.
[...]
"I don't know if I would call it a miracle. I would call it a spectacular example of what people can do," Green said. "To me, it's like putting the first man on the moon or splitting the atom. We've shown that if the right treatment is given to people who have a catastrophic injury that they could walk away from it."
Green said the key was the quick action taken by Cappuccino to run an ice-cold saline solution through Everett's system that put the player in a hypothermic state. Doctors at the Miami Project have demonstrated in their laboratories that such action significantly decreases the damage to the spinal cord due to swelling and movement.
"We've been doing a protocol on humans and having similar experiences for many months now," Green said. "But this is the first time I'm aware of that the doctor was with the patient when he was injured and the hypothermia was started within minutes of the injury. We know the earlier it's started, the better."

I bought a new backpack in Seattle, specifically for school, and I love it. It's actually made in Seattle; you can go to the showroom in South Downtown, and see the sewing machines. At the moment it holds:

• In the inner main compartment:
  • my laptop (in its Brain Cell)
  • two library books, by Immanual Wallerstein, whom I was hoping would have some interesting alternative ideas to IR Realism and Neoliberalism for the paper due in a week, and he does, and he's a very smooth writer, but about half of his writing triggers my BS meter, especially the Krondratieff cycle, which in his writing has so many exceptions and special cases that it reminds me of anthropogenic climate change deniers' charts in that it features facts being fixed around the policy
  • A plastic folder with my name placard, blank paper, relevant assignments for the day
• In the outer main compartment:
  • The totally awesome (if a bit too hot for this climate) Seattle Sombrero
  • A flimsy, cheap folding umbrella
  • The power cable for the laptop
• In the little top pocket:
  • A Jimi wallet with my EZ-link card, student card, and one or two bills. The plastic hinge has started to tear so I'm careful not to overfill it.
  • US Army handkerchief from the Fort Lewis PX. And, if I remember, a tissue package since hawker centers don't hand out free napkins
  • Keyring on the short lanyard, with mini Swiss army knife, house key, small nail clippers, and USB drive
  • Sunglasses
• In the left side pocket:
  • Palm Pilot Vx in blue hardshell(still ticking from 2001)
  • cell phone, turned off
  • Uni-ball Signo Gel Grip pens, 0.7 and 0.38mm
  • iPod Shuffle. I was happy with my original shuffle but it died a slow death so now I have a 2nd gen shuffle which I overpaid for at Mustafa Center before I realized that, despite the horribly overstuffed and crowded store, they aren't actually cheap.
  • headphones in case
• In the mesh pocket
  • Nalgene OTG water bottle.

On the one hand, you could say my efforts to get less materialistic have failed completely. On the other hand, you could say that if this backpack and its contents replace my old productivity pod, then I'm downsizing quite nicely.

Today's good news: Gays can get married in Iowa. Probably it will be stayed and then overturned on appeal, but let's keep our fingers crossed.

Here. Here is where I'll build my secret island fortress.

Ever since I read that a GE90 jet engine could empty out all the air in Madison Square Garden in one minute, I've been keen to see jet engines more broadly integrated into our daily lives. Here's a good start.

The immigration authority text messaged me last week that my student visa was ready, so during an unexpected break in classes I headed down to ICA for the fourth time. Despite not having my original claim ticket, I was in and out (successfully) in under 20 minutes. I spent more time than that beforehand, running around the VIVO City mall following bad directions trying to get my NETS card charged with S$100 to pay for the visa. First I went to an HSBC branch to pick up my ATM card, finally, three weeks after I opened my account; their first attempt to mail it to me failed and they didn't see fit to mention that until I called asking where the hell it was. I showed them the NETS card I bought at a 7-11, but they said they couldn't charge it there. Turns out I have a NETS cashcard, not a bank-linked "NETS card". I asked if they could give me a NETS card but they said I would have to go to a local bank. I asked if they were a local bank and they said they were not. I pointed to the slogan on the wall behind the nice lady and asked if that meant they were going to remove that bullshit (), and she said no, it didn't. Long story short, you can only change your cashcard in a 7-11, and they take a minimum of 0.5% per charge. So your payment options in Singapore include NETS, which stores value on the card itself and goes into a reader, and is linked to your bank account in a way I don't know and don't care to know; NETS cashcard which is similar but not linked, and which are allegedly but not actually accepted anywhere NETS is; EZ-Link, which is a contactless stored-value card used mostly on mass transit; the spectrum of credit and ATM cards; or cash. If you have a car and drive downtown you have to have a NETS card to put into your on-board card reader in order to drive into the downtown congestion zone. Last time I was in Hong Kong, five years ago, they seemed to be standardizing on Octopus, which is actually the same technology as EZ-Link, to handle both transit and other transactions. Hopefully NETS will die out soon.

We have two core classes and two electives, plus I'm overloading with one extra elective, plus 5501 is split into Micro and Macro and each appears to have a full course load of reading and assignments. I've been trying to get my readings done this weekend; yesterday at quarantine I read a bunch of very dry definitional material on PPP, HDI, GDP, etc. Nothing new, just underscoring that, with tremendous international effort and investment over many decades, we now have statistical measures that are only mostly misleading guesswork. Then on to Public Administration and Public Affairs by Nicholas Henry. I was going to see if there was an IVLE forum where I could post my notes, but two of my six modules still aren't available online (going into week 2!) so you get to read my notes on Henry here.

• Totally and completely US-centric. Drat.
• p 7: "When Daniel Shays ignited his ill-conceived Rebellion in 1786 ... the nation's political leaders discovered that no arm of 'American government,' such as it was, had been authorized or organized to put down the disturbance, and eventually that chore fell to the Massachusetts state militia." The substance of this paragraph may be true, but I don't care for the wording. It gives me the impression that the "leaders" were sitting around in a pub when word came in of the revolt, and somebody (who were these leaders in the pre-Constitutional period?) said, where's the secretary of the Army?, and somebody else said, oh shit, we don't have a War Department, and somebody said, what about an FBI? Do we have one of those? Because an FBI would be very handy right about now. I imagine it as a scene out of Get Your War On.
• p 14: "[In 1900] government workers at all levels accounted for less than 2 percent of the American population ... Today ... more than 7 percent". How much of that is military? Hmm. Apparently there are 2.7 million federal employees, less than 1% of American population, and 16.1 million state and local government employees. That's around 7 percent. Half of them are teachers. There are no other big categories. All of these figures exclude the military, which with 1.4 million active-duty people would be the second biggest category if counted together.
• p 30. POSDCORB: Planning, Organizing, Staffing, Directing, Coordinating, Reporting, Budgeting. That sounds vaguely familiar
• p 36. "Publicness and privateness in society are comprised of three dimensions ..." Ack!
• Finished the first two chapters. Well, it's readable. I'm not falling asleep or skimming rapidly.
• Watch out when the word "locus" shows up. "Nevertheless, locus is retained in public administration's current paradigm because the locus-centered Paradigm 5 — public administration as public administration—continues unaltered." Uh, sure buddy, whatever you say. "Our definitions of public administration—institutional, normative, and organizationsal—are in no way mutually exclusive; rather, they are mutually reinforcing. Together, they form the 'public' in public administration, the locus of both the field and the profession." So what you're saying is that your definition of public defines public? Great. Inconsistent use of spaces around em dashes is sic.
• I don't know if it's this book, or a reaction to textbooks in general after years of cultivating my cynicism, but I find myself looking for blogs and wanting to fact-check footnotes and alternate narratives...

Update: this blog post has been corrected.

I'm generally very excited about the classes I'm going to take, optimistic about the professors, and feeling that I did the right thing coming here. (News that my scholarship was just increased to cover all tuition, which is the offer I had in 2006 before I deferred a year and lost part of the scholarship, certainly helped!) That said, on to the kvetching....

I'm sitting in on a lot of classes I don't intend to attend, just to get a taste of the instructors and topics. All of the classes are packed—I guess other people are shopping too. Today I sat in on law seminar from a guest lecturer on threats to secularism in India. It was incredibly interesting but I had to leave very early to catch the beginning of the Ethics class. After 45 minutes of boilerplate introductory material about ethics in general, somebody interrupted with the obvious question: "how does this relate to civil servants? How does this deal with corruption?" The answer was fairly unsatisfactory: "(paraphrase) I have nothing to say about corruption because, ethically, we all agree it's bad; and because pure philosophy is helpless with the practical problem of corruption." The pure philosophy might be interesting, but in a one-year program populated mostly by civil servants, I think we were all expecting something more immediately applicable to decision-making or to anti-corruption policies.

Then the conversation started to get interesting along these lines but I had to leave to hustle to quarantine to see Kona, and then back for the media class. The content is interesting but other classes are higher on the list. Snippets of audio from the wireless mike in another lecture hall keep blaring out on the loudspeakers. "ow-" and "the nationa-" and, most notably, "... not true!" Also, the instructor started with words guaranteed to keep me out of your class: "I teach by powerpoint." Sorry, buddy. You might lecture by Powerpoint, but people don't generally learn by looking at Powerpoint.

In one class I sat next to an exchange student who turns out to be Neena's and my next-door neighbor at Naga Court. (In the lobby one night I met two Jews on exchange from an Israeli university, one sabra and one from Pennsylvania, who are here for a semester. They said another resident told them the building might come down this December rather than next August. I guess we'll die in that pile of rubble when we get to it.)

Several classes had very enthusiastic professors who knew a lot about their subjects but didn't seem likely to offer a strong learning environment.

I also put two and two together and realized that Bob Herbold is actually on the faculty of LKYSPP as an Adjunctprofessor. He's a former COO of Microsoft, worth perhaps US$100 million. I had previously learned that his wife is the US ambassador to Singapore in a local newspaper article about how she decorated the residence. I guess he wanted something to do. He's not teaching any classes as far as I can tell. Perhaps there will be a Herbold building by the time I leave. But if LKS paid S$100 million to name Block A, I doubt Herbold can afford the larger Block B or the Tower Block.

Speaking of Microsoft: we all have Exchange email accounts with the school system. The mailbox limit is about 30 Mb. We get five to ten emails per day, and most of them have 300Kb to 2Mb attachments. This includes a steady stream of announcments for seminars and parties, "gentle reminders" for those seminars and parties, confusing "clarifications" from the staff with large attachments, the beginnings of standard mailing list pollution ("me too's", items for sale, requests for clarification (of "clarifications") which quote the originals in full, etc, all cc'd to the whole class), etc. I got an email warning that I was about to lose the ability to receive email, the correction of which apparently involved finding a department that I think only exists at the other campus, 45 minutes away, so I now work steadily, and by steadily I mean hour by hour, to weed my mailbox.

More generally, it doesn't seem like the administrative process is able to see the program from the perspective of students. This manifests in two ways. First, many different parts program seem well developed in isolation, but collectively dissonant. One example is that each syllabus seems to follow its own format (and two of my five classes still lack syllabi), but a much bigger example is the profusion of "groups". As best as I can tell, I'm in the following groups:

• All full-time students have to take some evening classes so that the part-time students can mix with the full-timers. For purposes of which evening classes I have to take, I'm in group D (out of A through E). This group was defined as "If you are in Groups C and D, you will not be attending any evening session in Semester 1. You will only be required to attend an evening session in Semester 2. More information regarding the modules will be given later." but that definition turned out to be inaccurate.
• For 5501, which is Wednesday mornings and then repeated Wednesday night, I was in the morning group (which comprises groups B, C, D, and E). But the morning group is very large, so I swapped with somebody in the night class (comprising group A and all part-time students). This means I have two evening classes this semester and may or may not have any next semester.
• For 5501 (Macro) data analysis exercise, I need to find somebody to form a group of 2.
• For 5501 (Micro), I'm in group 3 (of 27) with Helen and David. There was some confusion when I changed from D to A as to whether or not this would affect my membership in 3, put after about 20 emails back and forth it appears I can remain in 3.
• 5502 has a Monday evening combined segment, mandatory for full-timers and part-timers. Full-time students in group B, and all part-time students, stay for 3 hours. On some days, full-time students in group A (which is defined as groups A, C, D, and E from the other list) attend for only 1.5 hours, and then have another hour and a half session Tuesday morning. The rest of the time, those full-timers stay the full three hours Monday night and have no Tuesday morning session.
• For 5502, I'm in group 6 (of 10) with Nazmul, Rudy, Seon Joo, and Caroline.
• For 5136 (Applied Public Sector Economics), 5264 (States, Markets and International Governance), and 5524 (Negotiation and Conflict Management), I'm not aware of belonging to any groups.

Note further that, while IVLE has a provision for creating and tracking groups within a class, nobody's using it. Instead we get emails with 300K Word documents attached (which are of course included in each group reply).

The second kind of problem is stuff that just doesn't make sense for us newbies. The most trivial yet exemplatory example is the locker keys. Each student has a small cubbyhole in one of two student lounges. On the second or third day of orientation we all got keys, with instruction to get them duplicated and to return the original within a week. What kind of sense does it make to ask 68 people, many of whom have been in the country less than 48 hours, to each individually go and find a locksmith? Is this some kind of challenge to see if we can self-organize? Too, the key turns out to be an unusual size which most locksmiths don't have in stock. What a waste of time to have everybody deal with this individually. After three weeks and two attempts to make a copy, nobody's asked for my original back and I've stopped trying to get it copied.

So, lots of energy, lots of exciting things, not quite the polish to have everything go smoothly.

Update: This post has been corrected.

I'm in Singapore, having enjoyed a day of orientation stuff (speeches, etc), and now working on satisfying a peculiar variant of Maslow's Hierarchy: temporary housing, bank account, mobile phone, plug adapter, etc.

I was walking the dog in downtown Seattle when a man passing by pumped his raised fist as me and said, "Spoon!" As cool as that was, I was taken aback until I remembered I was wearing my Tick t-shirt .

Gus and I put a new website up, ReadyToImpeach.com. It sells t-shirts that say,

Call your representative's office and tell them, "I vote in district ___ and I want Representative _____ to co-sponsor H.R. 333, Articles of Impeachment Against Vice President Cheney.

Each shirt has the district, name, and phone number for about 20 representatives. We've got six and a half states covered so far.

Update 13 Jul 2007. The sample shirt I ordered arrived today, so I followed my own advice and called my rep. Jim McDermott's office said he gave a speech on the House floor two weeks ago advocating Cheney's impeachment and co-signed H.R. 333.

I've been using the 3007WFP for a few months now, and I'm generally quite happy. But I do want to document a few annoyances:

• My screen has one bad pixel. It's dark, and on a light background looks like a permanent speck of dust.
• The monitor accepts only DVI-D input, and prefers dual-link. You can't hook it up to a TV or DVD player, or to a game player. This is in sharp contrast to the 20" Dell, which is very promiscuous in its input, accepting DVI, VGA, S-video, and composite video.
• If it's plugged in but turned off, it makes a high-pitched whine.
• For a few minutes after being turned on, the backlight flickers.

(Don't ask why. There is no why.)

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• 12
• 13
• 14
• 15

On July 20, I'll be flying to Singapore for a one-year Master of Public Administration program at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. I hope to combine several of my interests: China, free software, and management. Perhaps when I'm done I can move up from project manager to bureaucrat.

The last time I lived in King County (Seattle's county), it was still named after William R. King, the thirteenth vice-president of the US. "King supported a conservative proslavery position, arguing that the Constitution protected the institution of slavery in both the Southern states and the federal territories...." Apparently it was renamed to honor MLK Jr in 2005. And now the county is working to change the logo to include an image of his face. As symbolic gestures go, this one is pretty good.

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.

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.

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)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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).

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...

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

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.

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.

This is the kind of news I like to wake up to:

The Dodgers win big and Cardinals fans get their hearts broken.

Remember, it's not enough to win. The other guy has to lose, too.

When fifty thousand people gather a block from your home on a sunny, comfortably cool Sunday afternoon to march for immigrant rights and human dignity, what else can you possibly do but join them? Si, se puede! ("Yes, we can!")

Bonus points: "Attendance for yesterday's march topped that of the largest known San Diego march, a 1994 'March for Jesus' that drew 25,000 to 40,000 people to the waterfront." San Diego Union-Tribune

Today's good news....

You may be aware of the ongoing national campaign by phone and cable companies to get protection from competition. New Orleans has been running a free wireless internet network for locals and local businesses, reportedly set up for only a million dollars, and providing 512kbps service. The business interests had already gotten a "Fair Competition Act" passed, and so that free network would be illegal but for an exception granted for emergencies. The cable and phone companies are preparing to argue that the emergency is over and the network should be reduced in speed (so that they aren't facing unfair competition - remember that to telecom companies, all competition is unfair). The good news is that New Orleans technology chief Greg Meffert is ready to fight. "In the end, it takes a federal judge to issue a restraining order. Until that point, if that point ever comes, we'll keep running it. It's a lifeline to these people."

Today's good news:

The state House of Delegates this week voted 137-0 to approve a bill prohibiting election officials from using AccuVote-TSx touch-screen systems in 2006 primary and general elections.

The legislation calls for the state to lease paper-based optical-scan systems for this year's votes. —Computerworld

Today's good news:

Effa Manley, a savvy businesswoman whose gravestone reads "She Loved Baseball," became the first woman elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame yesterday.

Today's good news:

The (bad) president of Harvard resigned under pressure.

Today's good news:

86 evangelical Christian leaders have decided to back a major initiative to fight global warming, saying "millions of people could die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors." ... The statement calls for federal legislation that would require reductions in carbon dioxide emissions through "cost-effective, market-based mechanisms" — a phrase lifted from a Senate resolution last year and one that could appeal to evangelicals, who tend to be pro-business. The statement, to be announced in Washington, is only the first stage of an "Evangelical Climate Initiative" including television and radio spots in states with influential legislators, informational campaigns in churches, and educational events at Christian colleges.

Massachusets has been pushing a new policy requiring all government software to use open standard document formats. The software itself can be proprietary and expensive, but the files have to be standard. Of course this would torpedo Microsoft's monopoly on office software, so Microsoft has been fighting tooth and nail. They recently went after the state CIO personally, via bought and paid for state senators, and the CIO indeed quit. Today's good news:

In an important new development, the administration of Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has not only appointed a permanent replacement to State CIO Peter Quinn, but also dedicated the press release announcing that appointment to reconfirming its steadfast commitment to the implementation of the OASIS OpenDocument Format.

Today's good news:

The best route for mass transit in Los Angeles is down Wilshire Boulevard. According to the LA Weekly, in an article I discussed here, this has not yet happened because the wealthy residents along much of Wilshire oppose this for class reasons. Their elected representative Henry Waxman, although primarily notable for a career of good government watchdogging, has duly enacted this opposition in the form of a law blocking subway development in a specified area around Wilshire. The premise of the law is that underground methane pockets make safe tunnelling impossible, but the real reason is class-based NIMBYism. The good news is that somebody has made a deal or twisted Waxman's arm enough to finally change his stand:

But new research has convinced the Los Angeles Democrat that tunneling can be done safely and he has introduced legislation to lift the ban. "We need a transit system. We have to alleviate the congestion," he said.

Today's good news:

A University of Michigan project to bridge the gender gap in science and engineering has been so successful that officials have decided to make it permanent with funding commitments approved through at least 2011.

The number of women hired annually for science and engineering faculty positions has increased three-fold since the National Science Foundation first supported U-M's ADVANCE program as a five-year project in 2001, aimed at improving recruitment and retention of women faculty in science and engineering . The University's commitment to extend the program of "institutional transformation" guarantees the effort will be at least a 10-year mission.

In the years before ADVANCE, just 14 percent of tenure-track hires in science and engineering went to women. Now that number is 34 percent.

Today's good news:

A new law in Wisconson ...

requires that if a municipality uses an electronic voting system that consists of a voting machine, the machine must generate a complete paper ballot showing all votes cast by each elector that is visually verifiable by the elector before he or she leaves the machine.—The Capital Times

The law also, and equally importantly although unmentioned by the Capital Times, requires open source software:

5.84 (3) If a municipality uses an electronic voting system for voting at any election, the municipal clerk shall provide to any person, upon request, at the expense of the municipality, the coding for the software that the municipality uses to operate the system and to tally the votes cast. 2005 Assembly Bill 627

Today's good news:

The Senate blocked an attempt to open an Alaska wildlife refuge to oil drilling Wednesday, foiling an attempt by drilling backers to force the measure through Congress as part of a must-have defense spending bill. It was a stinging defeat for Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska ...—AP Wire

Today's good news:

Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District is a major victory for science and a major blow to those who have tried to sneak religion into the classroom by disguising in scientific garb. But it’s more than that. It is a brilliant, insightful, profound decision that reaches to the bottom of ID and finds it empty.—Timothy Sandefur

Today's good news:

The Senate on Friday rejected attempts to reauthorize several provisions of the USA Patriot Act as infringing too much on Americans' privacy, dealing a major defeat to President Bush and Republican leaders.

In a crucial vote Friday morning as Congress raced toward adjournment, the bill's Senate supporters were not able to garner the 60 votes necessary to overcome a threatened filibuster by Sens. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and their allies. The final vote was 52-47.—Associated Press

The joy in these recent small steps away from torture, gulags, and police state powers is tempered, by the horror that our government has been engaging in these very un-American activities in our name, by the fact that so many officials make parody-proof statements like:

The failure to renew the provisions would be "interpreted by our enemies as somehow inviting or even enabling further terrorist attacks on U.S. soil," Sen. Orrin Hatch (news, bio, voting record), R-Utah, said. ... "In the war on terror, we cannot afford to be without these vital tools for a single moment," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said earlier today before the Senate vote.

In the future I'll try to highlight good news that doesn't have such a dark side.

Today's good news:

The Senate is poised to approve a measure that would require the Bush administration to provide Congress with its most specific and extensive accounting about the secret prison system established by the Central Intelligence Agency to house terrorism suspects. —NY Times

I continue to be very pleased with my Ultimate Ears headphones. Today I was listening to Will Wright talk about game design—very interesting but maddening not to see the slides—and a plane flew about 300 feet overhead on final approach to Lindbergh. I didn't miss a word.

In other news, I passed a thousand miles on the new bicycle I bought in January. Next year's goal is, I guess, two thousand miles.

Today's good news is superficially pretty technical: "Core KDE developer George Staikos recently hosted a meeting of the security developers from the leading web browsers. The aim was to come up with future plans to combat the security risks posed by phishing, ageing encryption ciphers and inconsistent SSL Certificate practise." But this is interesting not just because it may help improve internet security, and not just because it is a bit of much-needed cooperation between competitors, but also because of how open the process is becoming. You can even read a narrative of the event from the Microsoft developer's perspective.

I know that Frank and Gerv from Mozilla, George from Konqueror and Yngve and Carsten from Opera have their own thoughts for an improved certificate standard and how they would handle that in the user experience.

I wish we could promise you that you will see this experience in IE7 and its equivalent in other browsers but there are a lot of details to work out before browsers can differentiate SSL sites based on how well vetted they are. For this to work, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera and Konqueror, amongst others, think there should be some common validation guidelines for rigorous website identification. There is a lot of preliminary agreement but also a lot of work to do. The American Bar Association Information Security Committee is providing a forum to pursue this. You can check back with us and other browsers to see how the process moves along.

—Microsoft developer Rob Franco

It's easy for me to take this in stride, especially since I wasn't paying much attention to commercial software development processes in the seventies and eighties, but the openness and access that the internet is providing is really something out of science fiction.

... a rare defeat for Republican leaders as well as the White House as 22 Republicans teamed up with Democrats on Thursday to kill a major health and education spending measure. The 224-to-209 rejection of the $142.5 billion in spending on an array of social programs was the first time since the early days of the Republican takeover of the House a decade ago that the majority had come out on the losing end of such a vote. ...

In rebelling against the spending measure, Democrats and some Republicans said it fell woefully short of fulfilling federal commitments.

They pointed, for example, to $900 million in health care cuts that took a toll on the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and on rural health care. They opposed the elimination of $8 billion to prepare for a potential flu pandemic. And they pointed to a provision that would strip money from a variety of popular education programs and leave Pell Grants to college students frozen, as part of the first reduction in education spending in a decade.

—New York Times

Note that this is good news because my values are being expressed in Congress, not because "my side" won a fight.

I've decided to feature one piece of good news every morning. Here's the first installment:

Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed a bill Tuesday meant to provide comprehensive health coverage for every uninsured child in Illinois. —Chicago Tribune

After all my complaints about things, I felt I should highlight a success. My Kinesis keyboard started acting funny. Actually, it has a few minor problems: the Escape key doesn't always register, and sometimes it goes into caps-lock mode when I press one of the keys in the vicinity of caps-lock. But this was a new and more serious problem: the r key went wonky. When I pressed it, I got somewhere between zero and about five r's. I cleaned it up and the problem persisted. I started to panic. I emailed their support line and got an answer in less than an hour, to try a hard reset. I did that; it didn't fix the problem, but did force me to figure out how to restore my customizations (this time I wrote it down). So I called, and they asked if it was under warrantee. "Maybe." The serial number was worn off, because I type with the keyboard in my lap, but they were able to look it up based on the purchaser, even though that wasn't me. (Thanks, Lars!) It was about 19 months old, and so still covered, so they sent me a replacement unit for the right keywell free of charge ($35 + shipping otherwise). The next day, the r key mysteriously worked fine, but the arrow keys stopped working. A hard blow to the case made that problem go away, and it's been fine since. The replacement part showed up a few days later, but until more problems crop up I won't disassemble the keyboard to use it. Still, it's a nice security blanket, and great service from Kinesis.

I also picked up some new headphones to replace the uncomfortable and defective iPod earphones. Most of my listening is in one of two situations: on my bicycle, where I listen to books on tape but only with my right ear; or on the train, where I want to drown out the cell phone conversations, redundant announcments, and snoring. I ended up at the bottom end of the in-canal products, the Ultimate Ears Super.fi 3. Ear canal headphones get put inside your ear like an earplug, and block out all of the other sound, like an earplug. The two big brands are Shure and Ultimate Ears. You can spend up to $900 on these, and if you go above $200 you have to get custom molds from an audiologist. The pair I got is $100, and they work exactly as well as I imagined. When I got them, I opened them up, read the instructions to figure out how to get them in my ears, plugged in the iPod, turned the volume way down, went out to the balcony, started the music, and got a big big grin on my face. The sound quality is excellent, both because the earphones are very high-quality and because they block out other sound. I was able to hear for the first time the electrical noise in the iPod circuits, a squealing and hissing when it's on but nothing's playing.

So far, the only problems I've found are inherent in the design:

• They get a bit uncomfortable after 30 minutes or an hour, just like earplugs do. They are more comfortable than the iPod buds, though.
• Even if you stop the music, you can't hear very well unless you remove them from your ears.
• Bumps and scrapes along the cord, such as when you turn your head, get transmitted into your ears.
• If you are walking, especially on pavement, the thud-thud of your tread is very noticable. I suspect this would be much worse for jogging, though on a bicycle they are okay.

All eight Dover, Pennsylvania school board members up for re-election have been booted out after introducing intelligent design to the science classroom. In their place are a number of those who campaigned against the policy.

...

Meanwhile in Kansas, the Board of Education has voted to make the teaching of the principles of intelligent design mandatory.

Sir Richard Mottram ... is to take on the key job of the prime minister's top security and intelligence adviser. ...

He was permanent secretary at the Department of Transport when, on September 11 2001, Jo Moore, an aide to Stephen Byers, then secretary of state, told officials in an email that it would be "a very good day" to "get out anything we want to bury" ...

Mr Byers, who did later resign, gave a confusing account in the Commons about what had gone on. Sir Richard put it more succinctly. He is said to have told a colleague: "We're all fucked. I'm fucked. You're fucked. The whole department's fucked. It's been the biggest cock-up ever and we're all completely fucked."

—The Guardian

The CBC television network is showing Canadian Football League games without announcers.

It's not some bold experiment, the way a similar move by NBC was 25 years ago. It's the CBC reacting to a bad situation it created itself when it locked out 5,500 camera operators, directors and announcers who are members of the Canadian Media Guild.

Still, a good idea is a good idea, even if it happens by accident.

... make no mistake: We'll never have the chance to get used to such a thing. Announcers aren't there to provide insight and analysis or to identify players and describe action. They're required to do all those things, and we judge them on how well they do them.

But their primary purpose is to read promos. The networks and sponsors aren't giving that up. We're stuck with announcers for as long as we're stuck with money.—King Kaufmann, Salon

August 18th, 2005 - a milestone in the history of the State of Israel.

This was the day on which the settlement enterprise in this country went into reverse for the first time.

...

At the beginning of the settlement activity, during one of my clashes with Golda Meir in the Knesset, I told her: "Every settlement is a land-mine on the road to peace. In due course you will have to remove these mines. And let me tell you, Ma'am, as a former soldier, that the removal of mines is a very unpleasant job indeed."

If I am angry, profoundly sad and frustrated today, it is because of the price we all have paid for this monstrous "enterprise". The thousands killed because of it, Israelis and Palestinians. The hundreds of billions of Shekels poured down the drain. The moral decline of our state, the creeping brutalization, the postponement of peace for dozens of years. Anger with the demagogues of all stripes that started and continued this March of Folly, out of stupidity, blindness, greed, intoxication with power or sheer cynicism. Anger over the suffering and destruction wrought on the Palestinians, whose land and water were stolen, whose houses were destroyed and whose trees were uprooted - all for the "security" of these settlements.

... the settlers had lost the crucial battle for public opinion when their real purpose was revealed: to impose by force a faith-based, messianic, racist, violent, xenophobic regime, with its back to the world at large.

But most importantly, this was the day when a new chance was born for achieving peace in this tortured land.

A great opportunity. Because the Israeli democracy has won a resounding victory. Because it has been proven that settlements can be dismantled without the sky falling. Because the Palestinians have a leadership that wants peace. Because it has been proven that even the radical Palestinian organizations hold their fire when Palestinian public opinion demands it. —Uri Avnery

On Monday morning, after six months of Republican posturing that an evil liberal cabal in King County had stolen the gubernatorial election, stubborn GOP candidate Dino Rossi got his comeuppance. Let's not mince words: Chelan County Superior Court Judge John Bridges methodically destroyed the Republican case in his hour-long recitation from the bench, unraveling months of spin and dismissing as meritless the wild charges of fraud from Rossi lawyers. By the time Bridges finished, Rossi's hopes of overturning the election were over. His defeat was so total that at a Monday evening press conference, despite previous promises to appeal an unfavorable ruling to the state supreme court, Rossi threw in the towel.—The Stranger

The Apology t-shirt appears in this week's East Bay Express. See 2003 in:
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/art/media/2005-05-04/2.pdf

-Jon

I recently spent a week outside Amsterdam running a training session for Greenpeace's various regional webmasters. In addition to spending time with so many bright, shiny world-changers, my trip offered a few highlights. One, I was able to meet my grandfather's cousin, Heinz Aufrecht, whose family fled from Berlin to the Netherlands in 1934 or 1936, shortly after my grandfather Werner Aufrecht fled to the US. I also caught an Einsturzende Neubauten concert at the Paradiso, very cool former church which is now a nearly perfect music club: great acoustics and two big wraparound balconies providing plenty of seating for those (like me) who would rather not stand jammed in a crowd for hours, peering around tall Dutch (Paradiso) or having drunk people lurch into them (Belly Up in San Diego). Also very cool was that the band started very close to the printed time on the ticket, which essentially never happens in my experience. In fact, what they did was even cooler: around starting time, the lights dimmed partway and roadies came out and turned on the two air compressors on stage. The conversations then competed with the chugging compressors until first one and then the other coughed and stopped, leaving silence and darkness as the band came out on stage ....

Instruments played included: PVC pipes, played with compressed air sprayed into ends or beaten like xylophone keys; spoked metal wheels in conical shapes, struck; kettle drum, drummed; electric guitar and bass, played normally or, once, with a golden vibrating dildo to the strings; synthesizer keyboard and Powerbook; big metal plate, drummed; power drill, applied to metal plate; 10 gallon tin can, e.g. an olive oil can, drummed; five ten-gallon cans, tied together like a cat-o-nine-tails, dragged across the stage and flung overhead; wrenches or tools, rattled and tapped; giant slinky, strummed; metal brick, drgged along metal plate; throat singing; chains and sand, moved around on steel bench; electric grinding tool, applied to steel plate; space blanket, shaken gently; long plastic pipe, blown like a horn; transistor radio, played (possibly a prop); spinning cellopane/plate/cup contraption, function and sound hard to discern; plastic jerrycans, beaten; face and mouth, sprayed with compressed air; pvc pipe, about (10cm x 2m), curved and strung, string beaten to produce tenor-like tone; stage, drummed; metal pipes, arrayed on the stage on bumpers and played by seated band members to produce a hex on a previous manager and record company; various sound control boxes, played with bare feet and used, among other things, to produce loops of previously played sound.

I am posting my working notes on how to set up a computer.

I've taken my new bicycle out for two rides now, both out to the beach. The first was to Ocean Beach, 17 miles round trip. The second, last Sunday morning when there was hardly any traffic, was also past Lindburgh field but then I turned into Mission Bay and chased some of the crew teams around. (Since Mission Bay is a bunch of peninsulas, islands, bridges, and public and private parks and resorts, a few hundred yards on the water can be four miles on a road.) I went a total of 27 miles, in about 2.5 hours of rolling time (with a fair amount of slow cruising). Planetbike sent a new bicycle computer to replace the one that fell into an elevator shaft, and it works very well. My butt and back started to get a bit stiff by the end of the trip, but I was afraid to slide the seat around until I get a grease pencil to mark its position so I can return to positions that I liked. I still have a tendency to wobble, especially at higher speeds where I have to pedal harder, but it's certainly a fast bicycle.

Reading the newspaper, it's hard not to get the impression that the main change civilization brings over barbarism is that , while people still act solely out of greedy self-interest, the object of that self-interest is more abstract. When Eric Rabe, the vice president of public relations for Verizon criticizes Philadelphia's plan to set up wireless broadband, "Government doesn't do service well," (NY Times) of course his statement is ridiculous on the face of it. Call Verizon and try to get good service. Verizon, Cox, the phone companies who have changed their names because so many people hated them that they had negative brand value, they all provide terrible service, constrained only by the law (somewhat) and the free market (not really - they just tacitly collude to all uniformly bad service); in contrast my encounters with government services are varied but frequently quite satisfactory. Rabe makes this obviously questionable assertion because he has a job with a company that has a greater profit opportunity if Philadelphia does not provide a particular service. So many quotes in stories are completely predictable in tone simply by knowing the financial interests of the speaker. This may not be an especially brilliant or original observation, but I just had to vent. On the bright side, at least he's just lying to reporter James Dao instead of bashing him over the head and taking his woman and land. Civilization is only a bust compared to our ideals. On a related note, as I'm sure I've written before, the European Union must be considered one of the greatest successes in the history of civilization if only for getting people to argue about regulations in conference rooms Brussels instead of shooting each other in trenches in northern France.

On an even brighter side, An Indiana state bill that would have made it hard for cities to build their own broadband networks was killed on Wednesday. Municipalities are perfectly suited to provide city-wide natural monopolies such as broadband, and they are accountable to their citizens, whereas corporations are accountable to managers and other corporations who stand to make more money by devising convoluted voice mail systems to make you hang up in despair before ever getting your problem fixed.

After I brought my new bicycle home, nothing really happened for a week. It was rainy or cloudy all week ("If we continued at that rate for the rest of the season, we'd get 26.17 inches, which would be the most ever in San Diego. The record is 25.97, set in 1883-84." - Rob Krier), so I didn't want to go for a ride. After a week of staring at the thing, and using my old bike for grocery runs in the rain, I finally took it across the street to the park on Sunday. I felt like everybody was staring at me as I went through the crowds, but that could be because I was wearing shorts but no spandex underneath, an ill-considered combination for the necessary riding posture. Cruising through less crowded park streets, I stumbled upon the Administration building's very nicely landscaped courtyards, with several fountains, and spent half an hour practicing starting, stopping, starting into a left turn, starting into a right turn, tight circles, and so forth, with lots of looking over my shoulder and signalling. I learned that, in tight turns, I really do need to pedal with only the outside foot, holding the inside foot away from the front wheel overlap. In panic stops, if I obey my instinct to sit forward, the rear wheel comes up and then everything pivots around the steering column and stopped front wheel and I am forced standing and almost over. If I instead sit back in the chair while panic-stopping, I swerve but both wheels stay grounded. At least, it seemed like that would happen but I didn't test very hard after realizing that I might be screwing up my tires. Good lessons to learn at low speed.

I also picked up a new set of tire levers, a 650c-sized tube, a cheap pump on sale, a patch kit, and more water bottles. Given my history of losing water bottles, I hesitate to call them purchases; leases, perhaps. And, happily, I have already received a new Bike Planet Protege 8 computer, with a stiffer mount so that hopefully it won't fall into the elevator shaft.

Last weekend I went up to Los Angeles to pick up my new bicycle. I'm very excited about it, but getting it home was a bit frustrating.

The bicycle I settled on is a red RANS Force 5 LE. I like it because it has large wheels (more efficient, cooler) and a very supine riding position, with the feet almost at eye level. I added clipless pedals, a pannier rack, a rear light, a mirror, a computer, and a water bottle cage. The total weight is now 30.2 pounds, or just about the same as my old bike, which has the same stuff. I rode it about 10 miles through the Valley, and it was mildly scary. I could turn my head fine, but if I lifted a hand from the handlebar, or pushed too hard to get my shoe into the pedal, or otherwise didn't just sit still, I wobbled severly.

Bringing it home to San Diego was also uncomfortable. The panniers sit over and almost behind the rear wheel, and this moves the balance point to an area of the frame where there's no good way to grip it. In contrast to my old bike, which I can hoist up on a shoulder fairly well-balanced, even when it totals 50 pounds with my stuff, the F5 is almost unmanageable with a load. I got it down the subway stairs by reaching through the seat to grab a bit of frame, but soon resorted to using elevators (which, being terribly macho, I never do with my old bike). I also felt very weird and obvious, like everybody was looking at me. And when you take public transportation in Los Angeles outside of rush hour, and you are an Anglo, you are usually the only Anglo.

The myth that recumbants are harder to take up hills seemed true enough to me going up Banker's Hill in San Diego. I can climb almost anything on my old bike, or could until the spokes and chain wore down too much to take the load of steep hills, but I couldn't imagine going up some hills on this thing.

It all came together after I turned up Fifth avenue to go home. In the far left lane of a three-lane, one-way, high-speed street, I decided to take advantage of a lull in traffic to merge to the right side. I couldn't use the left-mounted mirror to check the street, so I was craning my neck but trying to keep my body perfectly still, except for pedalling up the hill. Just as I had decided to change direction, a bum shouted, "Hey!" I looked. "Don't fall asleep on that." I was so stressed from a fear of either falling down or being hit by a car I couldn't see that this distraction right as I was changing lanes made me furious, and if I had been able to control my direction I might have committed an act of violence. In retrospect, it shows pretty clearly how uncomfortable I am on the thing that one person shouting something inane could destabilize me so badly.

When I did manage to get home, huffing and puffing, one elevator was not working. The other one took forever, and even came to my floor and left without opening the door. With more button-pushing (and in the garage, you have to turn a key just to push the button), it came back. I waited for somebody to get off, but before I could wrestle the bike around to enter the elevator, the doors closed. When I punched them in frustration, I had my keys in my hand so now I have a some sort of bloody gouge under the skin of my palm. When I dragged the bicycle onto the elevator, there was a bump and something plastic skittered through the gap and down the shaft. Eventually I figured out that this was the bicycle computer. This tendency of the Protege 8 to fall off into elevator shafts compensates for the fact that, in every other way, it is far more usable than my current, much-hated bicycle computer.

Monday, of course, it rained.

So, I'm going to keep riding my old bicycle in town. I'm completely comfortable in traffic on it, and it still works, albeit with assorted weird noises. Some time this week when the weather improves, I'll take the new bicycle on a longer ride, out to the beach. Hopefully its advantages, the better streamlining and the more comfortable seat, will kick in.

Along with long tail and the broader thing called disintermediation, one of the biggest qualitative differences between physical retailing and internet retail is the ability to directly measure the effectiveness of advertising. With Google ads for my own commercial site, I can tell exactly how much advertising money each sale has cost me. Jeff Bezos describes the same thing on a bigger scale:

About three years ago [Amazon.com] stopped doing television advertising. We did a 15-month-long test of TV advertising in two markets - Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis - to see how much it drove our sales. And it worked, but not as much as the kind of price elasticity we knew we could get from taking those ad dollars and giving them back to consumers. So we put all that money into lower product prices and free shipping. That has significantly accelerated the growth of our business.

The one thing that may eventually kill that revolting thing called the television commercial is hard evidence that it is not cost-effective. We can only hope that time comes before our civilization is gone.

CNN Will Cancel 'Crossfire' and Cut Ties to Commentator
By BILL CARTER

Published: January 6, 2005

CNN has ended its relationship with the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson and will shortly cancel its long-running daily political discussion program, "Crossfire," the new president of CNN, Jonathan Klein, said last night.

[...]

Mr. Klein specifically cited the criticism that the comedian Jon Stewart leveled at "Crossfire" when he was a guest on the program during the presidential campaign. Mr. Stewart said that ranting partisan political shows on cable were "hurting America."

Mr. Klein said last night, "I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart's overall premise." He said he believed that especially after the terror attacks on 9/11, viewers are interested in information, not opinion.

[...]

I have a bunch of science text books without warning labels. I finally found a website with appropriate labels to prevent others from reaching dangerous conclusions from my books.

The original from Cobb County Georgia:
This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.

From Berkeley:
This book does not contain the word evolution, the unifying principle in biology and in important component of the National Science Standards and Scholastic Achievement Test. For an overview of what your class is missing, go to: http://evolution.berkeley.edu

See 8 other stickers in the link. Also see the link to a CafePress t-shirt of these stickers. The t-shirts are not as stylish as the ones Joel is selling through (I think) the same vendor.

The link also points you to scary ID sites from the Discovery Center and the Intelligent Design Network.

Lars turned me on to the benefits of a dual-monitor desktop (and the Kinesis keyboard) in the Collaboraid office, and when I set up my home office I wanted the same. Having wasted more than a few Danish weekends struggling with X driver problems, I determined to do a lot more research. After wasting less than a day or two net, I've been working on my dual-monitor setup for almost a month without any problems, so I am documenting it on the internet for anybody else who was equally frustrated at how hard it was to find out what to buy.

The key features of my setup are:

• Two flat-panel monitors, each with 1600x1200 resolution
• digital connections from the video card to the monitors
• Both monitors driven from the same video card
• the correct video driver for Linux kernel 2.6
• Excellent performance

The hardware that provides this is:

• Dell UltraSharp 2001FP 20" monitor, US$800 each
• PNY Nvidia Quadro NVS 280 AGP video card, US$100
• LFH-60 to dual DVI splitter cable, US$30. The video card comes with a big 60-pin connector and a splitter to two VGA connectors, but the digital picture is noticably sharper.

Software:

• Debian Linux, sid distribution
• NVidia's binary driver, as per the Debian-nVidia HOWTO. There are two main ways to do multiple monitors in Xwindows; one is to use two or more video cards and have X span them, and the other is to let the video card manage the monitors and present X with a single workspace. In my experience, the second approach works much better.
• The relevant parts of my XF86Config-4 file are:

  Section "Device"
  	Identifier	"PNY NVS 280"
          BusID           "PCI:1:0:0"
  	Driver		"nvidia"
  
  	Option 		"TwinView"
  	Option		"SecondMonitorHorizSync" "28-80"
  	Option		"SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "43-76"
  	Option		"MetaModes" "1600x1200, 1600x1200"
  	Option		"TwinViewOrientation" "LeftOf"
  EndSection
  
  Section "Screen"
          Identifier	"Default Screen"
          Device          "PNY NVS 280"
          Monitor	        "Generic Monitor"
          DefaultDepth    24
          SubSection "Display"
  		Depth		24
  		Modes		"1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
          EndSubSection
  EndSection

• For high-resolution screen backgrounds at 3200x1200, PlasmaDesign.co.uk., £7
• The KDE Desktop includes Multiple Monitor support, which ensures that dialog boxes pop up in the middle of a monitor instead of splitting themselves in the middle and lets me maximize windows to just one monitor.

Since I type with the keyboard in my lap, the KellyRest Clamp-on Mouse Platform (US$20) was very helpful in getting the mouse tray close to the keyboard. My desk is an IKEA Ivar shelf unit (US$105 for two sides, five shelves, and a brace), which provides an adjustable monitor shelf, foot rest, and storage shelves above the monitors.

I'm a big fan of baseball, but I'm not a big fan of wealth transfer from tax payers to private corporations via subsidy. So naturally I'm deeply opposed to the deal between Major League Baseball (motto: "slightly less incompetent than the National Hockey League, but we make up for it with nastiness") and the city of Washington, D.C., in which DC would put up all of the money for a new stadium and the baseball team's owners would keep all of the profits. The fig leaf, that the money was coming from a new business tax, isn't worthy of being spit at. Are you telling me that businesses will submit to a tax for a stadium but not for schools?

I was pleased to hear a mainstream news source (NPR) finally mention on air what's been known for over a decade: that stadiums and arenas provide negligable or even negative economic benefits to their neighborhoods, and are therefore terrible ways for governments to spend money. But I'm even more pleased to find that the City Council has rallied behind dissident Councilmembers to defy MLB and their lapdog the mayor (motto: "Making you nostalgic for former mayor and crack addict Marion Barry") and demand at least 1/2 private financing. One half! The audacity. Let's hope this starts a trend of local governments standing up to extortion by sports teams and other companies demanding public funding in exchange for the pleasure of their company.

I checked my American Apology Shirt storefront and discovered that I've sold about 450 shirts since the election, easily putting me over the 3000 mark. So I've finally put together the design I had in mind a while ago, for a simpler, more legible, and more graphic shirt that can be offered in many languages. Check it out, and if you know something besides English, send a translation my way. Don't forget your Bill of Rights bumper stickers and mugs - they are politically neutral and make great gifts, plus might make good starting points for rebuilding civilization after the apocalypse. (I'm referring, of course, to the inevitable consequence of the Red Sox' winning the World Series.)

My grandfather had a problem with his new HP scanner. Every time his Windows XP desktop starts up, it automatically reinstalls the drivers. Every time he tu rns the scanner on or off, it automatically does some sort of reshuffling or reinstalling. Despite all this, it still worked for scanning and printing. Unti l this week, when it mysteriously stopped responding. It took me an hour just to get the HP drivers and miscellaneous crap removed. I then tried the Windows install to get a newer driver; this failed. I then tried the Windows install with the drivers from the CD-ROM. The system successfully installed the scanne r driver, and then cheerfully announced it had found some new hardware and would I like to install a driver for it?

Thinking there might be a hardware problem with the printer/scanner, we tried again on his XP laptop. Same results.

More out of curiousity than anything else, and since it was already on, I tried my Thinkpad running Debian Linux. I plugged in the printer, and the system log showed it was recognized. A bit of google searching revealed that sane was the standard scanner backend, so I installed it with "apt-get install sane." Then I needed a front-end, so "apt-get install xsane." A minute later I was ready and ran xsane - it said no scanner found. I searched for the model number of the printer and quickly discovered I needed another package with extra drivers; "apt-get install hpoj". I ran xsane, and got a preview, and scanned, and emailed him the picture. Total time: under 10 minutes.

This is perhaps the first time in my personal experience that linux has given me a radically better experience with new hardware than Windows.

The X-Prize has (un-officially) been won. And Richard Branson is already preparing to bring commercial spaceflight to market. The private sector has caught up to NASA circa 1960. Another ten years at this rate and we'll start to have a real space industry.

And, in vaguely related and nearly as good news, the US Air Force executive who pushed sweetheart deals with Boeing, at taxpayer expense, in exchange for jobs for herself and her family, is going to prison for 9 months. Her sentence would have been only 6 months but it turned out she continued to lie about the scope of her crime even after pleading guilty.

A third Johnson bill signed by the governor, SB 1438, requires that any electronic voting system approved by the secretary of state after January 2005 include a printout that voters can use to check the accuracy of their ballot. ...

He also signed AB 384 by Assemblyman Tim Leslie (R-Tahoe City), which prohibits adult and youth prison inmates from smoking.

As I continue the process of relocating to California, what could be more welcome news than progress on fair voting and a further step towards a non-smoking state? (For the record, as a strong supporter both of euthanasia and of personal liberties, I do support the right to smoke, in private, where noone else is harmed.) The entire LA Times article is recommended, because it describes a number of nice laws that Arnold signed. If all he did was not veto the progressive California legislature, he'd be no better or worse a governor than Gray Davis.

California air regulators Friday unanimously approved the world's most stringent rules to reduce auto emissions that contribute to global warming ... The industry has threatened to challenge the regulations in court. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has expressed support for the proposals and has pledged to fight any such lawsuits.

The vast majority of large global companies consume software rather than produce it. ... If the cost of software is driven down by competition from open source, and thus a major cost of doing business is reduced for global industry, will it be a net gain or net loss to the economy?

... Economics is not a zero-sum game. Money can be spent in ways in which its positive impact on the economy is greater or lesser. If a firm spends $25 million developing a software product that never achieves widespread use and never makes much of an impact (and a huge proportion of commercial software projects fall into this category), the only positive impact on the economy will be the transfer of funds from company coffers to general circulation (and taxes) via the salaries of the employees involved.

On the other hand, if a useful piece of software becomes available at little or no cost to many companies, especially to companies that otherwise would not have been able to afford such software, it can give a major boost to that company's productivity. In that case, even if no money was spent, all those companies increased their efficiency and revenues.

— David Adams, Free Can Mean Big Money: The Open Source Economy

I successfully vacated Denmark. This was not especially difficult, since thanks to the excellent public transportation, I could have taken any of four completely different routes to the airport. The vacation was very nice as well - two weeks in San Diego, Seattle, and Vancouver, including a lovely two days at the Vancouver Folk Festival. The picture on their website makes it look much more frenetic then it really is; last year Ani DiFranco had to mediate a dispute between the sitters and standers.

The trouble is getting back from vacating. In Copenhagen, with few friends, a haze of smoke in even the few good restaurants, an approaching summer that went into retreat in early June, the loudspeakered party room under my apartment, and a harbor view from my corner desk in the office, I didn't have a huge problem doing work. Back in LA, with my reassembled bicycle (about 0.5% of it didn't make it through shipping), good cheap food, old friends, abundant retail opportunities, and my grandmother's garage to help clean, it's been a bit harder to get into the groove. But groove I shall, because I am a seasoned professional. Also I've booked all my tickets to go back to Copenhagen in September to keep the ball rolling with the remaining projects that I'm doing with Collaboraid.

Meanwhile ... meanwhile I think it will be many months before Southern California doesn't feel like vacation, even when I'm working.

Even though I've been using ACS and then OpenACS to run my website since 1999, and managing releases for about a year, I've never been able to keep up with upgrades on my personal site. I'm happy to say, however, that this weekend I got fully upgraded to the latest version. Probably the most visible change is internationalization. You can now browse this site in about eight languages, with more to come. The content is pretty much all in English, and likely to stay that way, but you can get a lot of the interface in other languages. I've also started to internationalize the little apps I've built myself. If you would like to translate some of the text on the site, let me know. I can give you access to the very nice web interface. You don't need to write code or upload files or anything - just type translations on the pages.

The other thing I've done lately is repair and update The Quiz. It now correctly recognizes you if you log in, so you can work at a sustainable pace, such as ten questions per day, until you finish them all. By which time I'll have typed in dozens more. Give it a try, and remember: all of the answers have been verified by professionals, so no arguments.

Followup on the story I linked previously, about the Air Force/Boeing joint venture to swindle the American public. The summary of that story is that the Boeing, facing the closure of the 767 production line from lack of orders, asked for and received a massive handout from the Air Force, which bent over backwards to break the rules. You may not be surprised to learn that the primary mover in the Air Force for this project started a new job at Boeing last year. And, while I can't report that the deal has been cancelled and American taxpayers saved billions of dollars (the deal included over-payment of perhaps $5B out of $20B total, and that's without examining the assumption that the United States should maintain the infrastructure for complete air superiority of indefinite duration anywhere in the world), at least a few of the responsible parties got fired as Boeing executed evasive maneuver Charlie Yankee Alpha One:

The chief financial officer, Michael Sears, was fired for discussing a job with the Pentagon official, Darleen Druyun, while she was representing the government in talks with the company over a multibillion-dollar contract to supply aerial refueling tankers.

An internal inquiry found that Mr. Sears, once considered a candidate for Boeing's top job, and Ms. Druyun, who was also fired, tried to cover up their discussions, the company said.

Beginning July 1, 2005, [California] counties will not be able to purchase any machine that does not produce a paper trail. As of July 2006, all machines, no matter when they were purchased, must offer a voter-verifiable paper audit trail.

It appears that Bush administration's Labor Department is actually trying to make a law more fair.

Workers now are exempt from overtime pay if they earn more than $155 a week, or $8,060 a year, and meet other convoluted, confusing job criteria, such as devoting at least 80 percent of their time to "exercising discretion" and other "intellectual" tasks that cannot be "standardized in ... a given period of time."

The proposal would raise the salary cap to $425 a week, or $22,100 a year, and any worker earning less automatically would be required to receive overtime pay.

Jobs most affected by the changes likely would be assistant managers of stores, restaurants and bars, McCutchen said. They would get overtime pay despite their management status as long as they earn less than $22,100 a year.