I don't know why, but my default action at any web browser is to go to the Yahoo front page. I've been on the internet for almost two decades, and I've been going to Yahoo for as long as I can remember. I don't use them for anything else, like Yahoo mail or anything, and it's clear that they're a disastrously run company and a place to generally avoid, and they have an ongoing commitment to make their homepage mind-blowingly awful—in as many ways as possible but with emphasis on clutter, advertisements, and Flash animations that range from pointless to interfering to vomitously grotesque.

But I'm still addicted to the news blurbs on the front page. Google news doesn't substitute. NY Times front page doesn't substitute. Nothing can fulfill this craving except six to eight short headlines and a touch of celebrity gossip or news of the weird.

And it's changed over time, usually not for the better, but I'm still stuck there. The best was when there were always, I think, six headlines, and the last one was some kind of light-hearted human interest item. They've stopped doing that, but plugged in a few more columns of junk. The top left part with the rotating pictures is terrible, but it has brain-dead-magazine-cover-type lists that I'm utterly helpless to not click on. Six ways to reduce your mortgage. Ten cars to avoid. Five foods with more anti-oxidants. I probably even learn one useful fact for every ten or twenty lists I read.

But make no mistake, the (mostly outsourced and syndicated) writing and the editing and the journalism is all terrible. Here's an especially cringeworthy excerpt, from this morning's article, Best and Worst 2010 Cars:

... Plus, with only 25.7 to 51.3 cubic feet of cargo space, [the Honda Accord Crosstour] doesn’t provide much utility. [...]

[The Dodge Caliber] looks bold and provides a respectable 18.5 to 48 cubic feet of cargo room, but is marked by subpar interior materials ....

Update: The editorial team outdoes itself by including this AP "news" item seemingly headlined and written by a publicist:

Brilliant designer Alexander McQueen found dead

LONDON – Brilliant and controversial British fashion designer Alexander McQueen was found dead in his London home Thursday, his company said ... McQueen's sudden death robbed the fashion scene of one of its most innovative and successful young designers. His clothes were sexy and distinctive, dramatic and different, perfect for red-carpet presentations and late night rock gatherings.

...His pieces were coveted and treasured by stylish women across the globe....

One of the basic concepts that I retained from grad school was Douglass North's framework for understanding societies, and in particular the notion of "limited access order". My preferred formulation of this idea is, "the rich and powerful use their wealth and power to maintain their wealth and power." History interpreted through this prism becomes a series of lurches back and forth between extreme concentration of "access", or wealth and power, and slightly less extreme concentrations. This is not a Marxist view, but class-based analysis is certainly complementary. Populism is, at its heart, the anger of the people on the wrong side of the access boundary. And one major strain of the antagonism towards our government here in the US circa 2010 is that, first, the goverment is part of the establishment that just bailed itself out, at great public expense, from a massive disaster that was entirely of its own making; and second, that the government was the only part of that establishment that was in any way accountable to the public, that might have broken the stranglehold on access, and yet it still aided and abetted the swindle.

On a related note, these quotes from the Economist really grabbed my eye when they were published. (This is, I think, a separate case from the recent acquittal of Chirac's Prime Minister, Villepin, on unrelated charges.) The details are less important than the reaction from France's ruling class:

The French have greeted the decision to put Jacques Chirac on trial for misappropriation of public funds with mixed feelings ... Many politicians are calling for leniency for an old man who has served his country. ... "Why seek to wound him now?" wailed Jean-Pierre Raffarin ... "Today, he's a man who deserves to be left alone," declared Ségolène Royal.—The Economist, "Liberty, equality, no impunity". 7 Nov 2009, p 51.

Glen Greenwald and other bloggers have been calling this the Village Mentality, which is a specific manifestation of "limited access order". In the Village Mentality, the people wielding power and influence are a nice little club, and nothing they do as part of wielding that power could possibly be criminal; the only reason to consider any of it criminal would be as part of a partisan power play between factions within the village. This is, of course, in stark contrast to the notion of rule of law.

I finally cracked and got a cell phone in 2004. I was shuffling between San Diego and Los Angeles and working as a consultant and it was impractical not to have one. But it turned out that where I was living in Los Angeles was a coverage black hole for the carrier that I had randomly selected, so I canceled that, got screwed US$35 for having made one successful phone call, got another phone, settled in San Diego, canceled the second phone, got screwed for, I forget, maybe US$100, and spent a few months arguing with the carrier (couldn't check anything without logging in to my account; couldn't log in to my account since I had canceled it), and moved on.

In 2006, with ongoing business travel, I caved again. I had learned never to give a cell phone company my credit card number, so I got a prepaid phone. It was extremely simply, and pretty cheap. I used a land line for any serious calling, and the system worked well. I tried using Skype to replace the land line, but found it simply too unreliable for business use.

That worked reasonably well for a year or two, and then I moved to Singapore. If I wanted to socialize at all with my classmates, I needed a phone, so I got a very simple prepaid phone (only a US$20 ripoff; don't shop at Yeou Tat Trading Enterprises in Lucky Plaza. In fact, don't ever go to Lucky Plaza). That worked fine, and I started using the texting quite a bit.

I should clarify that by cheap, I mean that none of these phones was as much as US$50, most were much less, and that my total monthly cost for all the calling and texting I cared to do, including amortizing the phone, was never even as much as US$10.

Back in the US, I grabbed another disposable prepaid. With all of these prepaids, I'm probably already on either a terrorist or drug dealer watchlist. This one was $16, with a virtual network run by a South American telco (i.e., they do the billing and such and lease your minutes from US carriers). I was getting along fine with that, when a brand new HTC G1, aka Android, aka Google phone, dropped in my lap. You're supposed to have a contract with T-mobile to use these, but I was able to borrow a SIM card out of a t-mobile demo phone at the store for a few minutes, just enough to unlock it, at which point it was a palm-sized wi-fi computer with no phone abilities. After only two tries, I was able to get a competent T-mobile salesperson to sell me a $10 prepaid card (the secret is that the SIM card is $10, and comes with maybe $3 of credit, and then you need a separate card get a decent number of minutes; in my case, that's still less than $10 per month) that works fine. I even kept the phone number from the most recent prepaid phone.

So I have been using the G1 for perhaps six months now, and I'm ready to tell you about it. Keep in mind that I use an unorthodox prepaid card instead of a plan, so I don't quite have the typical gphone experience. Specifically, I only have internet access if I am in a wi-fi area; no 2G or 3G or EDGE or anything like that. Aside from that, and aside from the fact that I hate telephones, I think I have a pretty standard gphone experience.

And that experience is fairly poor. I do not like the gphone. It does a few things adequately, and a number of things poorly or not at all. Let's review its promise and performance, function by function:

• ultra-portable computer. Not bad. The screen is big enough to do light web browsing; the keyboard is adequate to type short web notes. There are a few games that you can use to fill a few minutes here and there.
• PDA, aka, personal digital assistant. Not nearly as good as my ca 1999 Palm V, not by a long shot. The Palm did five things absurdly well: calendar, to-do list, address book, memos, syncing with desktop versions of same. The G1 does all of this, but none of it well, and none of it with a desktop application. You can sync to your gmail account, so that gets you address book, calendar, and to-do list, but the address book and to-do list are lousy. And, damningly, the system lets you type in information that it then discards without storing or syncing. Which is to say, it forgets what you need it to remember. This is unforgivable: Death to you, G1 PDA functionality.
• wi-fi networking. Iffy at best. It can handle logging in to encrypted networks, including WPA, but it constantly loses connection, changes to different networks, fails to pick up the network you just told it to use that it said it could use, and generally makes your life miserable. Range is awful; speed is awful; wi-fi is awful.
• Email client for gmail. Barely adequate. The syncing is slow and weak. Combined with (or perhaps caused by) the lousy wi-fi, it's just one big lagfest.
• ultra-portable computer which stays on for more than an hour: FAIL. Battery life is terrible. Use it like a computer for an hour in the morning, and you probably won't have a working phone in the afternoon.
• Open-source computer: FAIL. The huge differentiating factor for Android (the operating system of the G1, the thing that Google sponsors) is that it's open, in marked contrast to the iPhone, which is part of Apple's icy white fortress of style and pain. This should mean that developers can share their work without kowtowing to an Authority, and that users can do what they want with the phones, such as use them with different carriers. The reality is, the gphone is locked to one carrier, unlocking hacks are not freely available, app developers are getting booted from the marketplace, and getting complete control of the hardware and operating system is an unapproved, laborious, and risky process. Perhaps it's open in letter of license, but certainly it is not in practice or spirit.
• GPS. awful. I have, on a few occasions, gotten my coordinates with the gphone. Much more common is for it to flair around, suck battery, and give up. I leave the GPS off now; the only practical difference between on and off is that the battery lasts a few moments longer.
• camera. FAIL. Press the camera icon, wait a few seconds, point the camera, fumble for the button which is small and very awkwardly placed, push the button, wait between one and ten seconds, sometimes more, and get a usually blurry picture of the wrong thing. Unless it's dark or indoors, in which case you get a picture of black. Awful, awful camera.
• phone: lousy. Oh yeah, the gphone can be a phone. Not a good one. I routinely get "no signal" messages in the middle of cities. It has a proprietary connector so you can only use the proprietary gphone headset. There is a lag of several seconds between pushing a button, like "hang up", and having it do anything. If you use it for automated services, it somehow detects this and turns the screen blank any time you need to push 1, so by the time you've unlocked the screen and pressed the wrong button, you've already been hung up on by the nice computer voice.
• mobile phone: FAIL. The battery life is terrible, so you have to disable all services and remember to plug it in every night and also turn it off when you are not using it. To turn it off, you have to hold down a button for a few seconds, then click "power off", then click "ok". To turn it on, you have to hold down a button, I think only for a second, but nothing happens for 4.5 seconds (I just timed it), so it's hard to tell, especially if the battery is low. Then you wait for 52 seconds for the normal screen to appear, and another 9 seconds before you have service. so that's just over a minute before you can use it. If you forget any part of this triumvirate (turn off everything useful like wi-fi and gps; charge it constantly; turn it off obsessively), then you will find it out of battery within the day. That is to say, it's a huge pain in the ass just to use it like a cell phone. It's also bulkier and heavier than all of the other phones and smartphones I've seen people using.

Conclusion: the gphone isn't worth the zero dollars I paid for it, much less the $400 I didn't pay for it. It's a terrible phone, a terrible wi-fi device, not an open platform. It is, however, an adequate palm-sized computer for periods of up to an hour or maybe a little bit more.

See Part One here.

I finished second to last in the NCAA pool, behind even Gus. My scientifically established brackets posited a historically typical 29% Madness level, but this year was only 15% Mad. Meanwhile he announced that next year's pool will include both mens' and womens' brackets, prompting some protest from some of the participants who actually watch college basketball (a set which overlaps closely the set of pool winners):

Gus,
have you ever watched a women's basketball game?
People don't ignore it because they're sexist.

Which is probably true as far as it goes, but if mens' college basketball was funded, recruited, and used as a conduit to (a remote chance of) extreme wealth to the extent that womens' sports are, it probably wouldn't be as much fun to watch either. Of course there's a chicken and egg problem with popularity and quality, but it's worth noting that the independent and player-friendly ABL women's basketball league was arguably forced out of business by the WNBA, which is owned by the NBA and operated for its own nefarious purposes.

Until next year, then, I offer this picture of Gus contemplating a picture of himself contemplating a picture of himself contemplating his moral vacuity.

At long last, surrounded and enveloped by the piercing rays of enlightenment--or at least the blinding rays of the California beach sunset--Gus looks away from a picture of Gus contemplating a picture of Gus contemplating a picture of Gus contemplating his own moral vacuity. Kona, fellow traveler on the eightfold path, quietly wishes him escape from Samsara and waits for him to drop some food.

My office is next to a bathroom. I'm in a building where they do lots of stuff with hardware. And the windows look out on a parking lot. So while it's not a bad office, it's not always the quietest. Last week, somebody in the adjacent parking lot, which belongs to a venture capital firm and has a "no dogs" sign (going to far as to cite irrelevant municipal codes) which one might suspect leads to a certain focusing of excretory activities (don't look at us; I always use poop bags)) sat in his Ferrari for ten or twenty minutes with the engine idling; it was slightly louder than the Odwalla truck that comes on Mondays. And a new alarm system was installed last month that has predictably led to regular false alarms.

So I was slow to react to this morning's weird noise, something like distorted, amplified speech, cutting very quickly into staccato syllables that just might be construction equipment while dying to a whisper, only to repeat again. Eventually I realized it was not coming from outside, it was not coming from the rest of the building, it was coming from the bathroom. Turns out a robot locked itself in the bathroom and was calling for help while running out of power.

Or, well, at least that's the cover story. As April Fools pranks go ... well, it wasn't any worse than the majority of them, I suppose. Perhaps another sign of my ongoing curmudeonation is that I rarely laugh on April 1. Not even for robots that have locked themselves in the bathroom.

I'm losing badly in my NCAA pool. This may partly reflect my methods: I followed the seeding blindly, and then randomly added upsets until my "Madness Level" reached the historical norm. I was solidly in the middle for the first round or so, and since then have sunk steadily to my current position second to last. Gus started near the bottom but has slowly worked his way up, and key to this has been Missouri: he picked his home state to go one round further than pure seeding suggests, and then abandoned them in favor of top seed UConn in the fourth round. He called this an "emotional hedge". I send the following email to the pool participants this morning, and felt very satisfied that, before 11 am on a bright, not-cold, not-windy spring morning, I'd already ridden 8 miles and written the best email of the day.

Gus contemplates the moral vacuity and, we might even say, spiritual nihilism of placing an "emotional hedge" against his own soil and heritage. Kona observes, non-judgmental in all matters not involving food.

My satisfaction was premature, however, because moments later I sent out the new best email of the day:

Gus contemplates himself contemplating his moral vacuity. Searching for his tattered, damned Catholic soul, he finds only the University of Connecticut. With no food at hand, Kona gives Gus his space.

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".

Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation make a very good point, that if you browse to something like Google Office, it downloads a proprietary program onto your computer, so that even though you may be using only free software on your computer (e.g., linux, firefox) and the program is in an open language (javascript), you still end up with a non-free program. They go on to propose some simple conventions to help avoid this.

But in the middle of making the point, some inflammatory language appears:

The term "web application" was designed to disregard the fundamental distinction between software delivered to users and software running on the server.

I use the term web application myself, and I don't use it in order to disregard the fundamental distinction between local and remote software. I use it because it accurately describes most of the programs I work on, programs which are complicated enough that "web site" is misleading, and which users interact with via web browsers instead of local desktop applications. I don't feel like a useful idiot or dupe of nefarious forces who "designed" the term to obscure an innate distinction with implications for freedom. I suspect the people who coined and popularized the term had the same motive that I do using it: it is an accurate and terse description of a type of software. It wasn't designed to obscure a distinction; instead, it describes a situation in which changes in technology have blurred what was previously a fairly sharp distinction.

I find it useful to be reminded that many web applications have a substantial (or perhaps any) downloaded component, and that that may not be free. The rest of the article is very helpful and very reasonably worded; why did this slip through?

A few interesting articles went by recently about tax rates. This New York Times blog post points out an ABC News article in which it appears that the reporter didn't understand the difference between marginal and average tax rates. This doesn't require higher math, but I found it tricky enough that when I suddenly understood the difference, it was definitely an a-ha moment. The articles explain the issue, but perhaps a visual aid would help more people reach the a-ha.

In the graph below, the X axis is your pre-tax income, also called your gross income. The Y axis is after-tax income, or "take-home pay". In order to focus only on the difference between marginal and average taxes, I'm ignoring deductibles, allowances, payroll tax, FICA, joint filing, local taxes, and so forth. The only tax we examine is Federal Income Tax. I used the 2007 tax rates. The first chart goes up to $40,000 in income:

The red line is how much income you take home if there is no income tax. Unsurprisingly, pre-tax and after-tax income are the same if there is no tax. You make $20,000, you take home $20,000.

The yellow line is what you take home if you pay an average tax. I'm using the Wikipedia terminology here. In this example, if you earn $7825 or less, you pay 10%. If you earn between $7825 but less than $31,850, you pay %15. I.e., you are in the 15% bracket. More than 31,850, you pay 25%. I plotted after-tax pay at $1000 increments, and you can see clearly that when you go from $31,000 to $32,000, the amount of money you take home actually drops, because you went into a higher tax bracket. If you were making $31,800 and you accepted a $100 raise, your take-home pay would drop by thousands of dollars. It wouldn't make sense to take a raise unless it was many thousands of dollars, so that you would make up for the higher tax rate. This is how many people believe the US income tax system works. This is wrong.

The blue line shows a marginal tax. You pay 10% on the first $7825. Then you pay 15% on the amount between $7825 and $31,850. Then you pay 25% on the amount above $31,850. When you get a raise from $31,000 to $32,000, taking you into the next marginal tax bracket, your take-home pay increases. The only portion of your salary you are paying 25% tax on is the amount over $31,850, i.e., the last $150 dollars. This is the actual federal income tax system in the United States.

The tax brackets don't stop at 25% and $31,850. The chart below shows all of the brackets in the 2007 tax system, including the highest bracket, 35%, which starts at $349,700.

As you can see from the smooth curve of the blue line, it is always in the taxpayer's interest to earn more money. Each additional dollar of income always leads to increased after-tax income. Some people argue that the higher tax rates at the top reduce the incentive to earn more, because that 349,701st dollar is only worth 65 cents instead of 68 or 70 or 75, but I don't want to address that argument here. The point I'm trying to make is that the US has a marginal tax rate system, and earning an additional dollar never reduces after-tax income.

For analysis that moves beyond basic innumeracy, see this article at FiveThirtyEight and the stories it links to. The point there is that focusing on the rates and ignoring the bracket levels is also a mistake, and that maybe we should re-introduce higher rates for much higher income levels.

from Friday through the end of May, you can sign up for an 8GB iPhone 3G in Japan for a grand total of zero. ... so long as you sign up for a new two-year contract ....

...

SoftBank subscribers will still have to pay monthly voice and data charges, of course, although as AppleInsider notes, the carrier is chopping its standard data plan (about US$62 a month) by more than 25 percent.

So the two-year contract costs roughly a thousand dollars. The article doesn't say what that phone cost before the price cut, but it was probably between US$100 and US$200. So the price drop could be, at the most, from $1200 to $1000. But the headline is "Get an iPhone 3G for free".

The charitable interpretation is, I guess, that it's simply assumed that everybody pays for a monthly cell phone service contract, so that should reasonably be excluded. Since I represent a walking, breathing refutation of that assumption, I'm more prone to be irked by people sweeping a thousand dollars under the rug.

It doesn't take much further inspection to notice the prominent product placement for a certain retailer, which makes me wonder about the ratio of "journalism" to "advertising" in this "story". It's a reminder that print newspapers had some standards, however tattered and breached, that we're probably going to miss in the online world.

The Obama administration is expected to impose a cap of $500,000 for top executives at companies that receive large amounts of bailout money, according to people familiar with the plan.

[...]

"That is pretty draconian — $500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus,” said James F. Reda [of] a compensation consulting firm.

(New York Times)

Andrew Leonard at Salon adds,

The hell with nationalization! If we hear any more backtalk from Wall-Streeters-with-their-hands-out on how half a million dollars is "not a lot of money" it will be high time to round 'em all up and sell 'em to the highest bidder.

How much would you pay for a Vikram Pandit, John Thain, or Ken Lewis?

Actually, I think I could make a fair amount of money selling "2 CEOs, 1 Cup" videos.

A further comment: you don't have to have a Che Guevara poster on your wall to perceive that people with money and power use that money and power to get more money and power. The current crisis is increasing the awareness of this basic fact. Perhaps that will lead to some changed laws. But what would help move the balance a bit further for a bit longer might be changes in mores and norms.

After all, CEO pay didn't start skyrocketing because CEOs suddenly got greedy. They've always been greedy. Pay started skyrocketing because that class of people, the executives and the board members and all that, had the dawning realization that they could simply give themselves more and more money and nothing bad would happen to them. Laws and SEC regulations count as "something bad", but can be circumvented. A general resetting of expectations would, I suspect, last a bit longer. Although I admit that the only way I can think to accomplish that is to send a lot of these people to prison or a life of well-earned destitution.

In the US, Obama is dogged by rumors that he's a Muslim, which to many Americans is a compelling reason not to vote for him. (Colin Powell regains a tiny shred of self-respect with his comment: "Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim," Powell said. "He's a Christian. He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no. That's not America.")

In the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed is challenging the quasi-dictator Maumon Abdul Gayoom in what seems to be a relatively free and fair election. However, Gayoom has responded to the threat by spreading unfounded rumors about his opponent's religion:

"I do believe he (Nasheed) could spread Christianity," said Aishath Sulthana, a 32-year-old mother of five who planned to vote for Gayoom.

Surely this speaks for itself?

Flexcar was acquired by Zipcar while I was away; last weekend I had my first zipcar experience and also my first Prius experience. Related posts: Review of the Hybrid Flexcar, from 2003, and Hybrid cars, from 2008.

Zipcar

The nearest Zipcar location to Half Moon Bay is 25 miles away, near Stanford. It's in an industrial park, not close to any transit or commercial centers. I forgot to write down the exact address, so we spent ten minutes driving through parking lot after parking lot looking for the car. Finally I called the number on the zipcard. It went something like this:

Zipcar voicemail: please enter your user number and pin
Me: uh, what?  0#
Z: please try again
Me: 0# 0#
Z: please try again
Me: 0# 0#
Z: Please enter your user number and birthday
Me: xxxxxx# xxxx19xx#
Z: please enter your user number and birthday
Me: 0# 0#
Z: please enter your user number and birthday
Me: 0# 0#
Z: please wait for customer service ...
Z Human: how can I help you?
Me: Hi, I have a reservation for the zipcar in Stanford but 
I didn't write down the exact address.  Can you tell me where the car is?
[10-minute hold]
Z: Okay, Mr Aufrecht, I can move you to a new car
Me, gritted teeth: Can you give me the street address of the car that I have reserved?
Z: Yes, just a moment ... [ten seconds] it's 3145 Porter.
Me, gritted teeth: That was all I needed.  Thank you.

The car was filthy: some kind of white powder spilled across the back seat, thoroughly stained floormats in back, and a general tinge of dinge in front. Also, it had less than a quarter tank of gas, which is a big no-no. When I stopped at a gas station, the gas pump wouldn't take my member number for the gas card, so I had to use my own credit card. Aside from those problems (all of which Zipcar either addressed or apologized for after I reported them), it was fine. I rented the car for a full 24 hours for $60, inclusive of insurance and gas, and I paid an extra $0.30 per mile after the first 180 miles, so it was comparable in price to a rental car, and much less hassle. The only other Zipcar-specific problem was that Zipcar wants you to leave the key in the "ignition" slot, which means that the car is beeping at you whenever the driver's door is open.

Prius

The Prius has a TV screen in the middle of the dashboard for controlling the radio, CD player, and air conditioning. The Zipcar model didn't have GPS or mapping. The interface is one percent good, 99 percent bad. It's good in that some parts of the UI have been well-thought out, such as how to unobtrusively show a new CD track while the screen is in the energy mode. It's bad in that it's a touch screen in a car.

A touch screen is modal. The defining feature of a modal interface is that it behaves differently in different modes. But this requires attention. When driving a car, you don't want your attention diverted from your surroundings to figure out why touching something doesn't do what it's supposed to do. An ATM can have a touch screen because you are staring at the ATM screen. A car should have lots of knobs and dials, with distinctive tactile properties, that your fingers can memorize so your eyes and brain don't need to bother.

The energy flow picture that is supposed to show you the gasoline vs electricity balance at any given moment is way too complicated.

The Honda design is much better; in the picture below, it's the thing to the left of the speedometer; the bars go up from halfway if you are using up battery and go down from halfway if you are charging the battery.

The scrolling graph of mileage, in five-minute chunks, is reasonably cool, and certainly what I left the screen on most of the time. But it takes an extra step to get to it. First, you push a button (a real button) to see a screen with three choices. Two of the choices are settings, which you will use rarely. Each time you finish changing the temperature a degree up or down, you need a button push, look at the screen, and then push a virtual button just to get back to what you were doing before your toes got cold.

Despite the high technology guts, the Prius is lacking some other small refinements in the cabin. The CD player won't eject CDs with the engine off. The digital clock looks cheap. It doesn't have daytime running lights. My normal catalyst to turn on headlights has always been when I can't see the instrument console clearly, but that was thrown off by the touch screen and I accidentally drove deep into twilight without turning on the headlights. The far side of the dashboard displays the printed text "Passenger", and below that it lights up with "airbag". This is to tell you that the airbag is off. I figured this out when a passenger got it and, next to "airbag", it lit up "On". So that's bad design, since you don't know what it means until after you've seen all the possible states. Why not "passenger airbag off" and "passenger airbag on"?

The gearshift is simplified, in a bad way. Reverse is up and Forwards is down. There's a button for "park" mode, but the car automatically goes into park when you turn it off. I guess you might want that if you are stopped and want to leave the engine on (so you can eject CDs) while taking your foot off the brake, but since Park has been a part of every automatic gear sequence that I've ever seen, why move it from the gear to a button? There was also a gear for "B", which I did not try because I didn't know what it was.

When you put the car in reverse the touchscreen turns into a rear view camera, which probably helps not run over children, but its distorted perspective is useless for parking. And the annoying beep the car makes while backing up is annoying.

The car drives fine; it was adequately powerful for city and freeway driving. I went over 200 miles, mostly freeway, and got just over 50 mpg. Visibility was adequate, even out the funky rear window, and it was as spacious as any other compact car. It's just a shame that the experience is marred by such trivial, easily avoidable mistakes in the cabin user interface.

Some things come easier than others. I've always had a hard time with simple arithmetic than goes between single and double digits. I'm probably better at estimated square roots of numbers under 100 than I am adding two numbers between six and nine quickly and confidently. Don't ask me why, just a hole in the brain. For calculating any time zones outside of the US, I've learned to absolutely, no matter what, re-check my calculations with a special tool like the World Clock Meeting Planner. And analog clocks with hands always slow me down just a bit. It almost always takes me a few seconds to sort out which is the big hand and which is the little hand, and while I know the hours, I usually end up working out the minutes under my breath just to be sure.

Fortunately, linux offers a plethora of clocks. Here are just a few:

To change subjects for a moment, let's talk about desktop environments. A desktop environment is the code that provides the borders around all of your programs, the maximize and minimize buttons, the system menus and settings, the glue for all of the other things you look at and poke with. It's like The Force for your computer screen. It is part of the "operating system", but technically distinct from the inner guts of the operating system. If your computer were a car, the file system and kernel and such would be under the hood; the desktop environment would be the upholstery and dashboard and indeed the hood; and your programs would be the places you drove to, I guess.

If you use Windows, then all of this is smushed together; Windows XP is your kernel and your desktop and your catechism and everything else. This used to be true of Macs as well. But with OS X, Apple brought in industrial-strength Unix guts, and put a glossy desktop environment on top, and proved that you can put lipstick on a pig. Actually that's unfair to the Unix guts (BSD); it's more like proving that you can make safe and friendly consumer products with nuclear turbine engines carefully hidden inside. Neal Stephenson's 1999 essay In the Beginning was the Command Line, by the way, remains required reading if you are interested in the subject of user interfaces and operating systems.

In the Linux universe, things are more wide-open. While the industrial-strength guts are more or less standard, a much broader range of choice remains at the desktop environment level. The two main options are KDE and Gnome. KDE has a reputation as the more flexible, configurable one, while Gnome has gone aggressively in the direction of simplicity. Since I'm not a new user and I'm stubborn about how I do things, I tend to prefer KDE—more on that later. I just want to mention a single feature that comes standard with the KDE bundle, a killer feature whose absences from Gnome is sufficient to guarantee I'll stick with KDE for the duration: the fuzzy clock. It's an option within the Panel Clock (Configure -> Appearance -> Clock Type: Fuzzy). It looks like this:

At minimum fuzz, it says "twenty five to eleven". If you turn up the fuzziness, it will say "twelve o'clock", and then "Night", and then, at High Fuzziness, "Weekend!" I keep it at minimum fuzz because I do want to know what time it is; I just don't want to know to the minute, or watch the seconds and minutes ticking away. I like my doses of mortality just a bit vague. And until Gnome offers the fuzzy clock, I'll never switch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The AP reports that

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

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

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

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

I wrote in March about the Democratic candidates for president that "I can visualize any of them as an excellent president and I can visualize (and have seen) all three of them disappoint." I wish the future weren't so easy to predict. Obama disappointed in a big way this week with his FISA cave. Sigh.

Some excerpts of what H.R. 6304 does:

• ... permits the government to conduct mass, untargeted surveillance of all communications coming into and out of the United States ...
• ... explicitly permit[s] the government to continue surveillance programs even if the application is denied by the court. The government has the authority to wiretap through the entire appeals process, and then keep and use whatever it gathered in the meantime.
• ...ensures the dismissal of all cases pending against the telecommunication companies that facilitated the warrantless wiretapping programs over the last 7 years.

Jon Stewart interviewed Doug Feith, one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, and the Daily Show website has the full ~17 minute interview online. It almost goes without saying that Feith lies more or less continuously throughout the interview, and I won't attempt to catalog that. Instead I want to point out something damning that Jon Stewart says:

Feith (at about 3:40 in Part 1): "there was a serious consideration of the very great risks of war and I think that many of them were actually discussed with the public, but to tell you the truth one thing is absolutely clear: this administration made gross errors in the way it talked about the war, some of the them are very obvious, like the WMD—"

Stewart: "—That was all we had to go on."

Which citizen in their right mind would rely solely on their own government to inform their decision about whether or not to support war? And I don't mean that in a post-Watergate, cynical Generation X or Y kind of a way, or even in a democratic way. Governments start wars. There is, in the lingo I learned last semester, a principle-agent problem, in that we the people delegate the power of war-making on our behalf to a government, but the decision-makers in that government have incentives that do not reflect the desires and needs of the people. If I could make one structural reform to the United States, it would be to require a three-quarter majority of the Senate and House to declare war. Of course, as a necessary corollary we would also have to restore the norm that the president and the military don't actually wage war without a declaration from Congress, a norm which disintegrated during the Cold War.

Anyway, on occasion of Feith's book promotion appearance on the Daily Show, a book which he claims that "if the public doesn't have accurate information, it's impossible in a democracy like ours to have a serious proper discussion of these enormously important issues. My purpose in writing the book was to provide accurate information ...." Here are a few of what I take to be well-established historical facts about the Iraq War:

• Key decision-makers in the administration, most notably Cheney and Rumsfeld, wanted from before the election to wage war with Iraq.
  • The reasons varied with each person
  • Chief among the reasons was oil, directly and indirectly
  • Another key reason for many decision-makers was to benefit Israel
• Hussein and Iraq were not an imminent threat to the United States
  • Al-Queda was not working with or operating in Iraq
  • Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction
• The administration deliberately lied to and misled the US Congress, the people of the United States, American allies, and the United Nations in order to create support for an invasion.
• Bush decided to invade Iraq in 2001 or early 2002.

From the body of a Reuters article:

... the survey, conducted among 69 U.S. rock-formatted stations in markets as diverse as Los Angeles and Knoxville to Buffalo, found 84 percent of the respondents planned to vote in the November election.

...

About 30 percent of the respondents called themselves Democrats, while nearly 22 percent described their politics as Republican and 21 percent declared they were independents.

...

Asked about their overall presidential preference, Democrat Barack Obama led the pack with 26 percent support among those planning on voting in the November election. McCain ranked second with 22 percent and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton drew 18 percent.

The survey found women and fans of alternative radio, featuring '80s and '90s rock, tend to be Democratic, while men and classic rockers lean Republican.

So Democrats are a plurality of respondents and Obama is the leading candidate. What's the headline? "Male rock fans likely to vote Republican: survey"

Nicholson Baker uses a review of a book about Wikipedia to rhapsodize about it and discuss his own role as a defender of articles facing deletion. The discussion of the dynamics of Wikipedia is very interesting. What's even more interesting is that the entire article goes by without a hint that the "2.2 million articles" Baker talks about are only the English-language articles. These make up less than half of the total. Some obvious questions: When there is discussion to delete an article in one language, what does this mean for the versions of the article in other languages? Which leads to, what are the relationships and communications between the Wikipedia communities in different languages? Are most languages just shadows of the English? How many articles have no English version? Most interestingly, I think: do the bodies of contributors in various languages each comprise distinct communities, and if so, how do they differ amongst themselves and what, if anything, do those differences tell us?

For the first two cents, see here.

Here are a few more beliefs to provide context for what I want to say today.

• The media is, on average, terrible. Certainly the English-language media I have ready access to, probably all of the rest of it. Nor was it likely much better in the past. Nor should this be surprising; we depend for basic information about reality on an institution whose primary mission is profit, not education. Public media are somewhat better, but have plenty of other problems. I hope nothing in this paragraph is in way news to you.
• The blogosphere is amazing but not a panacea. Many blogs repackage commercial reporting. The term blog is misleading; it might be better to call it "the public". It's pretty amazing that technology has given the public a voice^*; from blogs I get reporting both large-scale and small, commentary, and analysis, and most importantly I get a much wider variety of biases. Blogs plus mass-market media together are imperfect but much better than either alone. Losing blogs and going back to only newspaper and magazines, I would feel blind and ignorant. (Going back to TV only I would feel blind, ignorant, and neurologically impaired.)
• Media coverage of the 2008 US presidential election is awful.

That said, the specific analysis I would like to see, and have provided to my fellow American citizens in the channels they frequent, would be a more realistic analysis of the types of political/personal compromises the candidates have made. For a specific example, consider the Obama/Pritzker issue. Obama's "Finance Chair, Penny Pritzker, owned a failed Chicago thrift that helped pioneer sub-prime financial instruments and faced accusations of abuse."

What I want is realistic perspective. Any politician at any level of success will have made some compromises that make them, and their supporters, uncomfortable—I don't think it's possible for a democracy to function without this happening. But how big of a deal is this? Presumably if Obama's team presented him with two choices for Finance Chair, both of equal stature and capability and rolodex size etc etc, he probably would have picked the one without the sub-prime skeletons. But things probably didn't happen like that. I don't have any more information on this issue, nor the inclination to see it as significant enough to dig deeper. Should I? Just as the candidate probably had to make a snap decision to offer someone with a fat stack of checks in hand his Finance Chair, so we have to look at all of these things and decide what might be more or less important than it seems and how much, if any, research we're going to do.

I happen to believe that most very wealthy people probably got that way by taking advantage of other people to some extent or another. I haven't seen anything in life to suggest that having a really good idea or being a really good person (either good as in nice or good as in capable) is exceptionally lucrative in and of itself. So the odds are that any candidate for Finance Chair is going to have some bloody dirt under their fingernails, while the US political system simply requires candidates to spend hundreds of millions of dollars. In the grand scheme of things, this is less troubling than the fact that McCain is running on a "pure from lobbyists" platform while his chief political advisor is a major lobbyist who has admitted to making lobbying phone calls from McCain's campaign bus. Or that Obama's chief economic advisor, a position for which Obama probably had the pick of the litter, comes with baggage and probably screwed up big-time with the Canada/NAFTA thing.

My point is that, if I could suggest a single, modest, plausible change in mass-market media reporting on the campaign, I'd like each potentially scandalous gotcha to come with context, and I'd like to see the reporter's professional opinion on if the gotcha is the real deal, or something everybody does that inevitably comes with the territory and ought to be ignored, or something that everybody does that inevitably comes with the territory with none-the-less ought to be exposed and shunned every single time it happens. I'm sure all three types abound.

And when I read something, I want to know which type it probably is so I can decide how much I care.

Addendum: It's true that taller candidates tend to win more often, though apparently not to the extreme that urban legend suggests. Still. Let me tell you a story. Two days ago, Kona and I were jumped by a feral kitten, which I fought off while Kona ran away screaming. This morning, Kona was running ahead of me and looking over her shoulder when she took a spectacular header into a drainage hole. Between the two of us, we accumulated six bloody scrapes in two days. All of these inquiries occurred at roughly the same distance from the ground. However, for one of us the cuts are distributed around the shins and ankles; for the other, around the face. Obviously, there is a substantial advantage to height, and we should not be so quick to dismiss the evolutionary benefits of this bias in presidential selection.

---

* if you are literate in one of the global languages and have internet access, and some level of freedom or bravery, and the wealth (or gender) to have spare time

This shockingly bad BBC article is better than most of the US-based articles: although it introduces the purpose of the missile shot as protecting human life from the deadly hydrazine in the satellite, it at least mentions that one possible alternative motive for the satellite shoot-down was to test the anti-satellite weapon. But it presents the flimsy hydrazine excuse as fact and the alternate motive as merely a "Russian claim". And the graphic at the bottom is so misleading as to disqualify any person involved in its publication, from the graphic artist to the editor, from ever doing any fact-based journalism again and, in a just world, have them banished to Sports or Style or Royalty or other content-free sections.

When a missile hits something in orbit, you get a lot of smaller things in (depending on the relative masses and speeds) roughly the same orbit. Some higher, some lower. But still in orbit. They don't fall out of the sky as if their wings broke off, the way the picture might lead you to believe. They'll come down as their slightly varying orbits bring them through thicker bits of the upper atmosphere, which slows down the pieces which puts them in lower and lower orbits until they orbit into the dirt. The Australian dirt, by preference.

That stupidity aside, the plausible reasons for the shoot-down that I've heard:

1. To make sure some secret bit of spy technology is kept secret
2. To saber-rattle, especially in response to the (even more stupid and destructive, because it was done to a satellite that wasn't in a decaying orbit and so the debris drastically and semi-permanently increased the space-junk count in Earth orbit) Chinese test last year
3. To help justify the budget for an unnecessary, expensive, and destabilizing military program

Kudos to the BBC for mentioning even one of these reasons, which is one more than any US-based MSM reporting I've seen.

Update: the Washington Post story isn't bad, actually.

It's hard to give a good presentation, especially if you have little experience speaking in front of groups, or if you are speaking in a foreign language. I would like to tell you some things that I have learned as a presenter and an audience member. There are three important ideas: practice, practice enough to give a relaxed and comfortable conversation, and practice enough that you don't need Powerpoint slides. There is one most important idea: practice.

Now that I've mentioned the importance of practicing, I have a question for you. Why are you giving a presentation? Aside from the fact that your boss or your teacher told you to, I mean. Why are you doing this, and how will you know if you succeed?

Let's think a bit. What does a presentation offer that nothing else offers? People can read, they can watch a video, they can listen to a recording, or even a webcast of a presentation. Those are all more convenient, but none of these is the same as an in-person presentation. Why? What is unique and special about an in-person presentation?

The human connection. So if you give a presentation but don't make a human connection, you create a wasted and probably unpleasant experience for yourself and for your audience.

What else is special about a presentation? Two-way interaction. You can see them, and hear them. So you can adapt to your audience, which means that you can do a better job of teaching them something. Remember that it's impossible to teach: it's only possible to create a chance for someone to learn. With a book there is only one chance to learn, but with a presentation you can get feedback and make adjustments, and provide more, and more specific, chances to learn.

So, what are the goals of a good presentation? Make a human connection, help your audience learn something, and entertain. If you do all three, you will have a successful presentation.

How are you going to do this? Imagine that your friend has just asked you, "hey, you know a lot about (some topic), right? Tell me something about it." Now have a conversation with your audience. You are going to talk and move and point, and they are going to respond with body language from their seats, and you will have a dialog. Would you respond to your friend by reciting everything you know on the topic in alphabetical order as detailed on slides? I hope not.

Instead, think in terms of your goal. You want to create lots of chances for everyone in the audience to learn. You must provide many chances in many modes: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic are the classic modes, but also think about input versus output, reading versus writing, listening versus speaking, absorbing versus creating. You must touch as many modes as you can, without being a clown, and in particular you must make your audience do some work.

Each person will respond differently. Pick one or two most important ideas that you want everybody to learn, and repeat them; beyond that, don't worry whether everybody understands everything. In fact, don't even worry about covering 100% of your material. It's better to have a relaxed conversation with the audience in which each person retains two or three points, maybe even the important points, and has a nice time, than a presentation where everybody is asleep or thinking about lunch and retains nothing.

The tips:

1. Practice. Stand in front of a mirror. Start a timer. Go. When the timer goes off, stop. If you didn't cover what you needed to, cut stuff and start over, until you can say what you need to say in time and without rushing. If your talk is over ten or fifteen minutes, do this in sections.
2. Think about your audience. Who are they? How are they going to react? If they don't understand you, how will you know? How and when are you going to test for comprehension? for interest? How might you need to adapt in the middle of your presentation? Practice being interrupted with imaginary questions, and adjusting accordingly. Practice getting more detailed. Getting less detailed.
3. Present without Powerpoint slides. Your audience should have a conversation with you, not with some text on a projector screen.
4. Practice until you can do the whole thing without notes. At most, you can have one card to remind you of the basic topics. Reading a speech is not having a conversation.
5. Face your audience. Look at them. Make eye contact. Don't turn your back. Don't look down.
6. Speak comfortably. Vary your pace and volume and tone. Especially if you are not a native speaker, your audience will much prefer listening to your casual voice, which will be free and easy (because of all your practice), than your formal voice, which will be stilted and awkward.
7. Be bold. Lowering your voice or trailing off signal that you lost confidence and you should be ignored, so speak confidently and don't send that signal.
8. Move.
9. Stop when your time is over.
10. Make the audience think. Ask them a question, wait in silence for five seconds, and then answer your own question. Don't expect answers from the audience, and don't make everybody uncomfortable by waiting for them. Just pause enough for them to use their brains, then give them the answer. Do this with easy questions at the beginning, harder questions later on.
11. Don't set yourself up to fail. The best time to ask if there are questions is when you can see someone wants to ask a question. Don't ask "are there any questions?" because the answer could be no. Solicit questions in a way that makes the audience think and helps create more learning chances: "Imagine yourself trying this technique I've just showed you tomorrow morning. How will your colleagues react? Tell me some examples of how you imagine them reacting."
12. Before you decide to use text or pictures, ask yourself if you really need them. Would you use them while explaining to a friend? Maybe you would draw her a picture. I hope you wouldn't use bullet-point text. During your presentation, try to draw pictures on a board instead of showing slides. The audience watching you draw wants you to succeed; the audience receiving new slides is just consuming.
13. If you do need to use a computer to present pictures or data, do so in a way that your body and voice are still the focus. Does music, animation, clip art, or a zippy sound effect serve your goals of making a human connection and providing chances to learn? Are they likely to entertain your audience or distract or annoy them?
14. Test everything before you present. Give a complete dress rehearsal in the real space. If you have drawings, make the drawings. If you have a presentation, load it and use the computer. This reduces the chance of problems. And when the problems happen anyway, you will not be surprised and you will continue with your human conversation.

Resources

• Dick Hardt's OSCON 2005 presentation on Identity is a great example of polish, practice, and entertainment value. The content is irrelevant for our purposes: study and understand the style and technique.
• Hans Rosling at TED 2006; an entertaining presentation of global statistics. Notice how he keeps himself the focus despite the incredibly sexy visual display.
• Some very good, practical tips on presentation
• My own post from last semester, based on obversation of many presenters who did not practice. A bit more critical.
• The best powerpoint presentation of all time (that's not a compliment)
• Tufte on Powerpoint

Writing for the New York Times, Atul Gawande reports on

a program that instituted in nearly every intensive care unit in Michigan a simple five-step checklist designed to prevent certain hospital infections. It reminds doctors to make sure, for example, that before putting large intravenous lines into patients, they actually wash their hands and don a sterile gown and gloves.

... The results were stunning. ... the rate of bloodstream infections from these I.V. lines fell by two-thirds.

However, "the Office for Human Research Protections shut the program down" because the researchers had not followed the informed consent protocols required for experimenting on patients: changing a checklist may alter patient care as much as an experimental drug, and so should be subject to the same controls. Gawande concludes, "the authorities ... [are] in danger of putting ethics bureaucracy in the way of actual ethical medical care."

As a project manager and Master of Public Administration student, I'm sensitive to the accusation of bureaucracy. I went and looked it up, and it turns out that's it's always been pejorative. OED defines bureaucracy as "Government by bureaux; usually officialism", and defines bureau as

An office, esp. for the transaction of public business; a department of public administration. ... Hence bureauism, officialism, 'red-tape-ism'.

Gawande condemns the Office for Human Research Protections for following "a certain blinkered logic" to reach a "bizarre and dangerous" decision, which it then imposes broadly to the detriment of many. But it's basically just enforcing some rules about paperwork, albeit poorly. Isn't the checklist he lauds another set of rules about paperwork? It seems to me that either bureaucracy should be acknowledged as a neutral word, leading to good bureaucracy and bad bureaucracy, or, if bureaucracy is to maintain its pejorative status, a new word should be introduced for an office transacting public business in a positive fashion.

It seems like this article, in which a Christian writer explains why J.K. Rowling is wrong when she says that one of the characters in the series of books she wrote is gay, goes nicely with this article.

* and the editorial staff behind her.

A few ignorant gems from the New York Times' special baseball supplement today:

George Vecsey writes, "... baseball players come off as average people, although obviously their hand-eye coordination is anything but typical. (The bulked-up physiques seem to be returning toward normal dimensions, for some mysterious reason.)" That's the sort of cheap shot that I guess you can get away with when you aren't held to journalistic standards. If you look at a chart of player height/weight over the last hundred and thirty-plus years, you see a very clear trend of annual increases in height and weight, back to 1871 when ballplayers averaged about 155 pounds and five foot eight and a half. The 2006 average was about 200 pounds and almost six foot two. Not normal dimensions. Further, most of the steroid users caught in the last two years of testing have been using drugs to rehabilitate injuries, not grow to hulk-like proportions.

Next, a classic "back in my day..." story, "Of Rocks and Apples and the Disappearance of 20-Game Winners." Murray Chass investigates the mystery of the first-ever full-length baseball season without any twenty-game-winning pitchers, with penetrating analysis like, "Gone are the days, as recently as in the mid-1970s, when pitchers worked 300 innings a season, started every fourth day, and often finished what they started." Note the moral judgment implied in that wording—what kind of man doesn't finish what he starts?

Which expert does he quote in depth? Third-base coach Rich Donnelly, who relates, "I was raised in an alley. They would deliver coal for the furnaces, and waste would come out and there would be a clinker, a rock. We had rock fights all the time. These guys never had an apple fight or a rock fight in their life. I'll bet all the no-parking signs in their neighborhoods are clean." Chass adds, "And they don't win 20 games."

Donnelly also says, "It used to be if you're tired, you're coming out. Now you get around 100 [pitches], you're coming out ... I think everybody is overprotective." Sadly, Donnelly and his ignorance coach for the Dodgers. At least he's not a pitching coach, though. Yankee pitching coach and former star pitcher Ron Guidry: "I don't know if there are as many quality guys as you used to have ...." (Guidry was a very good pitcher, with one great season at age 27, and a sharp decline in his last three seasons, retiring at age 37 in 1988. I guess he ran out of quality.)

Stephen Jay Gould wrote the book on this argument, Full House. He convincingly argues that the decline of statistical high outliers in the major league baseball population proves that the quality of competition is increasing, not decreasing: as everybody gets better, it's harder and harder to stand out. In the book he talks about .400 hitters, of which there haven't been any since 1941, but the argument applies as well to 20-game winners. One more bit of actual data for you: a chart of the best baseball pitchers in history, with currently active pitchers in bold. You will notice that two of the four best pitchers in history are still pitching (probably).

On the bright side, the same article quotes Curt Schilling, who seems to be one of the smartest guys in baseball: "I think there's a lot more good pitching in the game now." And the same section does have a fact-based article, No Reason to Use a Designated Hitter Who Doesn't Hit, which includes quotes such as "Had [the Mariners] instead acquired Branyan ... they probably would have added enough offense to win two or three more games this season, and saved $6.5 million." If only the Times baseball writers would read their own paper. Or be expected to base their opinions in reality. (Of course, David Brooks and many other Times opinion writes fail that standard as well....)

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

Highly readable despite it's length...

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

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

• Oracle
• Java
• emacs

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—forwarded email from Drew Ihlenfeld, PMI

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

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

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

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

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

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

—PMI 2005 Annual report, p 23-24

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In my current project, I work with a lot of users who are very good at what they do (essentially social work on a hotline), but not especially technically inclined. To the extent that they can be trained to file high-quality bug reports that developers can act on directly, the project benefits. I often step in to rewrite the subject (for example, from "another big bug!" to "search in zip code 91101 returns fewer than expected results"), adjust the priority, or otherwise touch things up. But the users are doing a great job, and probably under five percent of bugs require conversations to clarify.

The key principle in a good bug report is that you have to provide all of the information necessary to reproduce the bug. Corollary to that, you have to have a good sense of what is germane and what is extraneous. Usually it doesn't matter that you encountered the bug on a Tuesday, but every now and then that might be the key to fixing the bug.

The third point I want to make is that one very exciting aspect of open-source projects is that the bug database is in full public view. Every piece of software has bugs, but in an open-source system you can often get the bugs that matter to you fixed sooner if you file good bug reports, make it easy to diagnose and fix the bug, and generally are nice and helpful to the developers. I've had paid Intel developers put in hours fixing a bug in the linux driver for my wireless card; I'm not a big corporate customer, but I was willing to jump through a few hoops for them as they diagnosed the problem. Sure, Intel gets my services as a tester for free, but I get personal bugfixing service that would cost hundreds of dollars otherwise.

With all that as context, check out this bug report from Firefox, an excellent example of how to use "Steps to Reproduce":

1. Create 2 unique user accounts (for steps sake, let's call 
   the two accounts Joe and Mary) in Windows XP Home.
2. Logout and sign-in under Joe.
3. Open Firefox and go to an e-mail site or to jdate.com or wherever.
4. Attempt to log-in to the site so that Firefox will ask 
   whether or not you want your password saved.
5. Choose not to save the password.
6. After successfully logging in and having selected the
   "never save password" option, logout.
7. Log-in as Mary and open Firefox.
8. Browse, browse, browse... but you don't really have to. 
   Just go to "View Saved Passwords," click on the tab that 
   will show you sites to never save passwords for, and you'll 
   see whatever painful site Joe denied to save a password for.
9. Break-up with fiancé.

In an uncharacteristic burst of non-stupidity, the Department of Homeland Security wants to allow small blades back on airplanes. Naturally, this causes consternation among people who don't understand what security means:

"It's not about scissors, it's about bombs," Mr. Hawley testified. "Sorting through thousands of bags a day at two or three minutes apiece to sort out small scissors and tools does not help security. It hurts it."

Weighing the risk of small scissors and tools against that of bombs, he said, "If you do the analysis, it is not even close."

But the committee chairman, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, said he found that logic "difficult to follow." Mr. Stevens proposed instead that the security agency reduce the number of bags that passengers may carry on board to one from two, giving the screeners fewer items to handle.

You will note two problems with Stevens' response. One is that he finds fairly rudimentary logic—should airplane security spend limited resources on bombs or on scissors?—hard to follow. The second is a more subtle but very common mistake. For a resource to be secure, not only must unauthorized not be able to access it, but authorized people must be able to access it. If it's "secure" even from the person who's supposed to use it, it's not really secure. Denial of service is a security attack. Self-inflicted denial of service is probably the biggest security attack in the world: think about the times you've lost your keys or forgotten your passwords. Stevens' solution allows screeners to check for both scissors and bombs (one of those two checks is worthless), but prevents passengers from having two carryons. Carry-ons are part of the service; fewer carry-ons amounts to a denial of service. Thanks, Ted. Though I guess in his world we are all driving across his bridges rather than flying in planes.

The only other senator at the hearing, Daniel K. Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii, said; "I could understand if some man or woman would want to bring on a knitting needle. I've seen a lot of ladies knitting. But I've yet to see someone cut paper dolls on the plane."

Perhaps Inouye stays in a private curtained booth, and is unfamiliar with the Swiss Army knife and Leatherman. And he probably hasn't seen this.

In other, similarly themed news:

[San Jose] officials said Thursday they were shocked to learn that Emerald Hills Golfland, a three-acre theme park with two miniature golf courses, had been placed on a Homeland Security watch list.

"The moment we realized it was on the list, it was taken off," said San Jose police officer Rubens Dalaison, who handles "critical infrastructure assessment" for the department. "I myself took it off."

But the list remains secret, and even San Jose Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, who is the ranking minority member of a House subcommittee on terrorism risk assessment, said she did not know whether it is still listed. —Associated Press

The story of Er and Onan, among others, with Lego illustrations. Warning: contains Lego nudity.

What if our fiscally clueless president really does keep spending at a rate that far exceeds what our government can take in at these low tax rates? What happens if the president's acolytes and the Pollyannas in Treasury keep believing that we can grow our way, fairy-tale-like, out of this jam? You can bet that when you cash out your nest egg of nice U.S.-based mutual funds and solid common stocks, your dollars will fit nicely into a wheelbarrow designed specifically to cart worthless currency to the bank.

Or you can take matters into your own hands and build a portfolio around these five imminent-Bush-disaster stocks. Be the first on your block to immunize yourself against what may turn out to be the most financially reckless president in history with these anti-inflation equities designed to profit from our president's unbelievably foolish Panglossian profligacy.

—New York magazine

I've been trying to take a Chinese class for a while. This spring I noticed a language school downtown, less than a mile from my apartment, so I called and found out that, while they don't usually have Mandarin classes (mostly they teach English), they had a recent burst of interest and I might be the necessary fourth person in a new class.

Three months of intermittently returned phone calls later, as fall classes loomed at the local schools, I started looking around. San Diego State University and UC San Diego offer Chinese classes daily. SDSU's runs from noon to 12:50. Either involves at least an hour of bicycling each way; neither route is especially appealing, nor is the idea of travelling over two hours a day for less than one hour of class. Mesa College, a community college, is only 7 miles away and offers twice-a-week classes from 6:30 pm to 8:50 pm.

I almost rejected the idea, not wanting to spend hours a week on my bicycle going to and from class. Then I realized that the concept of rejected the commuting and class time in order to keep my schedule clear was incompatible with my key goals for this year: learning Chinese and exercising more. So I rode over to the college to drop off a signed enrollment form and try out the ride. Mesa College, oddly enough, is on a mesa. The problem is that I live on a different mesa. So it's uphill both ways, but still only a 35 minute ride, reasonably free of nasty traffic.

I ended up having to do some faxing as part of my enrollment. I don't have a FAX machine, and I didn't feel like running over to Kinko's, so I signed up for an online fax program. I actually did this months ago; first I tried to get Yahoo's fax service, but after a deranged amount of trouble trying to recover my secure password I gave up and went with eFax because they were at the top of the search results. I never actually used it that time, and forgot to cancel, and so they made off with $13/month for two months of nothing.

This time I looked at a longer list, and tried Innoport. After signing up, I got an email saying that it would take between a few minutes and a day to verify my information and open my account. I waited half an hour and, when nothing happened, wrote an email back asking them to cancel the signup. Then I signed up with efax, which took about a minute, uploaded a document, and faxed it. No problem.

When I got a fax back the next day, problems started. After flailing around for a few minutes, I figured out how to download the fax. As a .efx file, which is apparently a proprietary format of eFax. Which requires a Windows-only program to decode. Not cool. I was in a rush, so I fired up the Windows partition on my laptop, installed the software, and managed to extract my fax.

The next day, I was done with my faxing needs for the time being, so I went to cancel my eFax account. This is when it got ugly. There are no links to cancel from the eFax pages; I had to search for "cancel" to discover that you have to have an online chat with a customer service drone in order to cancel. This is when I remembered going through this the first time and started hitting myself on the head. Excerpts from the chat:

jaufrec: Hello. I would like to cancel my eFax account ...
Dennis Godair: Thank you for the information. I am sorry to hear that you wish to cancel. May I ask why you are cancelling your fax account?
jaufrec: because you require a windows client to view faxes
jaufrec: and because your cancel process is unnecessarily difficult
Dennis Godair: we have an exclusive offer for you. If you wish to keep this account, then you can avail a one time offer on this account. You can keep this account at a nominal non refundable rate of $6.95 for the next 90 days instead of paying $12.95 every month, as such saving $31.89 over a period of 90 days.
jaufrec: please cancel my account
Dennis Godair: I surely understand your decision to cancel, but, this is a very good offer and you will be paying around only $2.31 per month as monthly fee during this period. You will need to contact us just once by the end of this period to let us know whether you wish to continue or not. There is certainly no obligation to stay back after this period if you do not wish to.
jaufrec: please cancel my account
jaufrec: is there actually a human being present?
Dennis Godair: Okay. I will cancel your account with immediate effect.
Dennis Godair: I'm sorry that you are leaving eFax. At eFax, we are continuously improving our products and services. Please do consider us if your faxing needs should change in the future.

So much for eFax. Meanwhile, a full eight days after I aborted my signup for Innoport, I got this email:

After further review, we have determined that we will have to decline activation for this innoport account with the billing information provided during the sign up process. Please be advised that the credit card entered has not been charged. [...]

So, obviously, a big thumbs down and avoid-at-all-costs warning for both eFax and Innoport. Innoport in particular was so bad and weird that I am keeping an eye on my bank statement in case they are just a front for identify theft or something. eFax I'm thinking is just maliciously greedy and stupid.

1. It's a criminal affair with no significant implications, and so it's none of our business
2. It's celebrity gossip and so it's none of our business

The San Diego Union-Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times all had Jackson headlines above the fold. Only the Wall Street Journal had a respectable front page.

I'm all for the EU constitution, because I'm all for the EU, because I'm all for mind-numbing bureaucracy instead of continuous warfare with industrial technology. But the charge that there's something fishy about any document which begins, "HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF THE BELGIANS" is hard to refute.

Skim past the preamble, though, and it only gets better.

Article I-1: Establishment of the Union

1. Reflecting the will of the citizens and States of Europe to build a common future, this Constitution establishes the European Union, on which the Member States confer competences to attain objectives they have in common. The Union shall coordinate the policies by which the Member States aim to achieve these objectives, and shall exercise in the Community way the competences they confer on it.

Still and all, I think the US constitution holds up pretty well:

Article. I. Section 1. All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Larry McVoy is a software developer who has had a mixed relationship with the open-source world. Here he's interviewed by Forbes magazine, and the fallacies are fast and furious. What's especially amusing is that it's hard to differentiate McVoy's fallacies from Forbes'. Which of these two statements is a quote from McVoy, and which is prose by journalist Daniel Lyons?

One problem with the services model is that it is based on the idea that you are giving customers crap--because if you give them software that works, what is the point of service?

Open source products typically are distributed free, since it's pretty much impossible to charge money for something that anyone can copy.

The first fallacy in the first quote is that the only role of software service is to compensate for quality flaws in the original product. This ignores, primarily, customization, but also training, installation, upgrading, and other services. The second fallacy is to imply that good software should not require any service; in other words, it should be completely bug-free, not have any security errors, not rely on any other software that may in turn have bugs or security flaws, be automatically and risklessly upgradeable, be so usable as to not require any training, etc etc.

The first fallacy in the second quote is that open source software is distributed free because it's impossible to charge for it. In my experience in a number of OS projects, the software is open-sourced because the authors want to give it away for free. This is precisely opposite causality to the quote. The second fallacy is that it's impossible to charge money for open source. Even though you can get exactly the same code for free, Red Hat still sold US$151 million worth of free software in 2004. That's distinct from the $45 million in services revenue for the same year.

The first quote is McVoy, the second is the article's author. It surely doesn't reflect well on Forbes that I can read financial statements better than they can.

Wow. Cardinal Ratzinger becomes Pope Benedict XVI. I know he was spoken of frequently as a possible, even one of the most likely successors to John Paul II. But I'm still a bit stunned to see it.—Josh Marshall

"NOBODY expects the German Inquisition!"[1] [2]

[1]: "Ratzinger's stern leadership of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the modern successor to the Inquisition, delighted conservative Catholics ..." — Reuters

[2]: "NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again." — Monty Python

I received a flyer for the St. Patrick's Day parade. This is a downside of living across the street from the park: the parade goes right by, and streets are closed in a rectangle two blocks wide and fourteen blocks long. After the parade there is "a huge free festival" and a "children's ride and entertainment center." I plan to spend the day elsewhere. I mentioned the festivities to an Irishman, who said, "the coming of Christianity to Ireland should be a reason to mourn rather than celebrate."

After vehemently disagreeing with just about everything I've read on Instapundit, typically because it was disingenuous partisan material, I was very happily suprised to be pointed (from the leftist Talking Points Memo's Special Bankruptcy Bill Edition) to an Instapundit post I completely agree with:

I assume that the Bush Administration is supporting this legislation, but I really don't see it as consistent with "compassionate conservatism." I see it, in fact, as consistent with the worst stereotypes about corporate-friendly Republicanism.

—Instapundit

He further quotes approvingly:

"If the blogosphere could mount an effective campaign for people to write to their senators, it would mark its emergence as a genuinely independent force in US politics." — Jim Bennett (Instapundit)

So one force that can unite the left and the right in American online political commentary is the aggressively greedy credit card companies. Well, if it starts here, and continues through opposition to other un-partisan villains (let me propose cable companies, spammers, virus writers, and possibly insurance companies, HMOs, and pharmaceuticals), maybe we can narrow the partisan gap a bit. Too bad the bankruptcy bill already passed all substantive hurdles.

Don't put your iPod shuffle in shuffle mode when listening to murder mysteries.

Mar 2, 2005
11:50 P.M.: CN, BILLING INFORMATION RECEIVED
10:14 P.M.: SHANGHAI, CN, DEPARTURE SCAN
2:54 P.M.: SHANGHAI, CN, EXPORT SCAN
12:37 P.M.: ANCHORAGE, AK, US, ARRIVAL SCAN
9:48 A.M.: SHANGHAI, CN, ORIGIN SCAN

I just ordered a new IBM laptop. I did this because my old IBM laptop is slow and heavy. It was a year old when I bought it used, two years ago. Actually, it's not even the same laptop. The screen on my Thinkpad A20m was glitchy, and it finally went almost full-time on the fritz last year in Copenhagen. I swapped its hard drive with Lars' unused Thinkpad A21m, so it's only the same laptop in spirit, not in fact. It works generally pretty well, but has a few problems: hibernate has never really worked; startup takes about 5 minutes, including KDE, and starting new applications can take quite a while. Once an application is running, however, it's perfectly responsive, so the irritation is intermittent, not constant. Battery life is poor, so it's more of a portable computer than a mobile computer. Continued dismay with this state of affairs, plus the realization that my travelling bicycle load (clothes, computer, a book, a lock) is 35 pounds, and an upcoming international trip, led me to finally promote the new laptop from the wishlist to the reality list.

I got a Thinkpad before because of the reputedly excellent linux support. In practice, it's not awful, but it's not excellent either. The quality of the machine was generally good, except for the video screen that went on the fritz, but I did buy used over eBay. IBM's eraserhead pointers are excellent, and I cannot stand the touchpads. So I settled on a new X40 fairly quickly, and it is at this point that our mini-saga begins.

Ordering over the internet on a Sunday went fine, but I didn't get an email receipt. I called Monday, was on hold for maybe five minutes, and then talked to a very nice person who explained that the machine was back-ordered 10 business days, and the wireless card I had specified 20. When I explained that I had only picked that wireless card out of the four choices (three, because two choices had identical text) because it was the only one with a model number, allowing me to verify linux compatibility. "Intel Wireless Card" is not helpful to a linux user. He got a nice technician on the line, who said that he had exactly what I wanted already in stock ("except - you sound like a savvy guy. Can you - " "yes, throw the extra memory in the box and I can install it myself."). I mentioned that I never got an email, and that the order number I had retrieved out of my browser cache didn't work. He set me up with a correct order number, and made sure I got an email.

And the next day, Tuesday, I got another email. With a shipping date of April 5, over a month in the future. So I called again, waited 5 minutes again, and talked to a very nice lady who said that I should ignore that date, and that my computer would ship in five to seven business days. I said, "I noticed an offer on the web site to ship a computer the same day, if I order by 3 pm. It includes exactly the computer I want. Can I cancel this order and do that instead?" "No, sir. The shipping label was printed yesterday, so you cannot cancel your order. And that would not ship for one to three days anyway." "So where it says 'ships same day,' that's simply not true?" "Correct."

Great. I did read the fine print, and it says that IBM will ship the same day the order is completed, and completing an order includes, in their definition, processing the credit card, which takes one to three business days.

Then I got a few more emails, and a UPS tracking number, with which I have been eagerly following the progress of my new hardware. (It's mine, I figure, because my credit card was charged Tuesday.) Today my RAM arrived, and some shipping information for the rest materialized on UPS's website. As you can see above, UPS isn't especially careful with time zones or date lines.

So this seems to be pretty much the inverse of Dell. The product is, I assume, excellent, but the ordering process is third-rate. Specifically:

• The order status page uses more warehouse language than user language. My order is for a "** EXP X40 INTEL PENTIUM M LV 1.4 12" XGA 256 40 802 BG" and "RECYCLE FEE FOR PRODUCT WITH 4 TO 14 INCH DISPLAY". There is no link to show any more information about the product I ordered; I would have to go back to the ordering screens and try to match the part number. I didn't even realize that the laptop doesn't have a DVD drive (it's only 2.9 pounds, so I guess they cut these things at that price range. Hopefully I'll be able to install linux from a USB device. And you know, I was just thinking yesterday that after putting a whole audiobook (The Little Yellow Dog, Walter Mosley), three CDs, and a bunch of Salon member-only downloads onto my new iPod Shuffle, I still had 100 mb or more to spare. Fortune smiles, I guess.
• Every date estimate I've gotten has been wrong one way or the other. Better that the reality is early instead of late, but accuracy would be nice.
• It was never clear when I would actually be charged.

Aside from that, it's going smoothly and I'm excited.

I run pretty much pure debian linux—on my desktop, on my home server, on my laptop, and since last week on my internet server. Every linux distribution must address the issue of how to package and distribute programs, and there seem to be basically three solutions: debian packages, Red Hat packages, and Other. So every linux distribution can be put into one of these categories. It's probably not the overall best way to sort out distributions, but on the other hand maybe it is, and here's why:

"Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics." (The quickest citation is Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC (Commandant of the Marine Corps) noted in 1980, but the axiom is probably much older.) Similarly, users think about features, but professionals study upgrades. Many program and most operating system upgrades suck, but those on debian usually suck less. Distributions may add polish, testing, configuration, and so forth over and above the basics, but upgrades are constrained by the architecture. Any upgrade system includes both the technology itself, and the quality of the process and people maintaining the repository of programs. Debian's repository and team are both huge and both very well polished. (To digress, Debian-based distributions you may have heard of include Linspire, Knoppix, Ubuntu, and Xandros. Red Hat, of course, uses Red Hat rpms, and SuSE also uses rpms, I believe. The Other category includes those built from source, with gentoo being the one I've heard most of, and stuff like Slackware which I know has a cadre of adherents but I've never encountered it.) (To further digress, some other famous repositories that I've heard of include CPAN, for perl, with which I've had mostly bad experiences; Windows Update; and bsd ports, which is superb.)

One limitation of Debian's repository, or strength if you drink the koolaid, is that it has very strict licensing requirements, and only limited means to work around them. I'm currently deviating from the pure path on my desktop machine in three ways: I run a proprietary binary kernel module from NVidia to get proper performance from my video card (not for games, but to run my wide screen and let me switch workspaces quickly; I use qmail for email, more because of my invested time in understanding its quirks then because it is still the best, and djb's restrictive source license means that installing qmail requires jumping a few extra hoops for no discernable valid reason (the key trick, sadly, I have forgotten to document three times in a row now, but it involves extra flags forcing the qmail.deb installation without de-installing exim and its dependents); and java, for which these instructions are as a rosetta stone. My point, though, is the site which the title of this posting links to is such a sublime way to present large quantities of data that it's worth installing java to see and feel it.

Here's an important educational tool from the United States government to help children process the Indian Ocean disaster:

http://www.fema.gov/kids/games/tsunami/

(as discovered by my friend Jason)
http://jmccargar.blogspot.com/2004/12/red-cross-priorities.html

I was riding my bicycle last Saturday when I noticed an irregularity in the rear wheel. I took it to bicycle repair shop on my way home, and the mechanic quickly removed and stripped the wheel, noticing in the process that it looked like I needed a new chain and that the gear cassette was also terminally worn, and then diagnosed a broken spoke. (I'd actually noticed that months before as a 'loose spoke' but not bothered to do anything about it.) I concurred that I was experiencing very disconcerting chain jump going up steep hills, and added that I also couldn't go down hills very quickly because my big front chainring, i.e., high gear, is no longer accessible because the derailleur no longer moved far enough. Also my pannier rack has two cracked welds, which doesn't seem to matter except that it rattles a lot. I've had the bike over nine years, at a total expenditure of US$3,835: it's a $500 bicycle, but I paid $858 the day I bought it, including helmet, gloves, lights, tools, bags, etc; later I added clipless pedals and shoes, the pannier rack and panniers, several ill-fated bicycle computers (which is why I can't give a total mileage figure for the bicycle, nor a cost per mile comparison, but we can estimate crudely: cars cost between $.375/mi (IRS) and $.56/mi (AAA) to own, fuel, insure, and operate— let's call it $.5/mi, so I would have had to get 852 miles a year out of my bicycle to save money over a car. Probably I fell short of this.), spandex garments, tuneups, new tubes and tires, a lock, a light to replace the stolen one, and a numbing sequence of ultimately defective rear lights. The mechanic interrupted my reverie to announce that the rear wheel was not just out of alignment but bent and unfixable. He put it back together with the new spoke and said he couldn't charge me anything for the work.

"So I should hurry up and get a new bicycle?" I asked.

He bent over my bicycle and cupped his ear. "What's that? 'Take me off life support'?"

So this morning I test-rode some recumbent bicycles. These are lower, longer, heavier, more expensive, more comfortable, and more aerodynamic than traditional upright bicycles, which are properly called "safety" bicycles because they replaced the "dangerous" penny-farthing designs. After riding three models around the block many times, my initial impressions are:

• I got used to steering very quickly; the key is to remember you are on a bicycle and to maintain balance, rather than to get sloppy like on a tricycle and steer by moving the handlebars. Within a few laps I was able to stick my arm out to signal turns without swerving.
• I sat much higher than I expected to.
• I'll have to use a rear-view mirror, which is probably a good thing
• There are perfectly nice recumbants for $550 to $750, which surprised me.
• The higher pedals of a short-wheel-base bicycle feel much more athletic.

And a purchase? Deferred until January.

It seems like every article about gasoline in the last few years says something like, "gas prices hit a new record of X today. However, this is still lower than the peak in 1981, when adjusted for inflation," but no article ever says just how much gas was in 1981, adjusted for inflation or otherwise. So I went googling and found: "the following plot shows how much I paid for each gallon of gas over the past 25 years or so." With the advent of the internet, those anal-retentive records that some of us keep (I kept a gas log while I still had a car, but never actually looked at the data) finally have the broad exposure and high google PageRank that they deserve.

A summary of anomolies reported. So far, nothing at all to call into question the national result, but the primary electronic voting products are (still) extremely low-quality software with few safeguards. I think the only fix is a national voting law, and a much better one than 2002's Help America Vote Act. From the summary:

In Broward County FL, in balloting for Amendment 4, ES&S software for tabulating absentee ballots began counting BACKWARDS once a total of 32,767 [2^15 - 1, in a signed 16-bit field] votes had been reached in a precinct. When this was discovered, the corrected totals for the precinct went from 166,000 to 240,000, and actually caused the statewide results to be reversed on this amendment. Apparently the same flaw was detected two years ago in the same software, and remained uncorrected.

I'm not going to leave the country because Bush won. It's my country too. I spent two of Bush's first four years overseas and I find that I like America better. I'm going to stay and promote my values and work to change America to be what I want it to be.

I'm not going to spend the next four years angry.

Democrats don't need to tear everything down and start over. Kerry lost 51-48. He was a good candidate to win, and the other side beat him. The Democratic party is not a perfect institution or a perfect representation of my values, but it's the best political vehicle for me in this country in this system. I will continue to support the party.

Nader is right in many of his criticisms of both parties and of corporate capitalism, but wrong to think his independent candidacy promoted constructive change. We should build alternatives to the two parties, but first we must reform our winner-takes-all systems at the city, county, state, and federal levels, and I will help do this.

For the whole of 2004, [Drewry Shipping Consultants] estimates that the number of TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units) leaving Asia bound for America’s west coat could top 11m, while the number going the other way may be only 4.9m. — Economist

If you couldn't see the money flowing, what would you make of one part of the world carefully crafting hundreds of millions of artifacts and sending them to another part of the world in an endless stream of ships, and getting back in exchange ... less than half as many things. And repeating this year after year.

The Stages (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance) became the foundation for an entire "Death 'n' Dying" Movement ... while there is no doubt Kübler-Ross made an important contribution to the treatment of dying patients ... she also contributed to a kind of cultlike reverence for the allegedly superior truth-telling wisdom of the dying ....

But then, quietly, in the late '70s, the Queen began to go around the bend, began declaring there was no death, there were only "transitions" from one permeable boundary to another. And often back. So, if one takes her belief seriously, not only have the reports of her death been exaggerated but reports of death itself have been exaggerated. ...

... its popular success was due in large part to the behavior control function of the five stages and its appeal to hospital and hospice caregivers, who all took D 'n' D workshops. It made the five stages into a kind of moral progress: Potentially disruptive and annoying anger would give way to the more quiet stages of "depression" and "acceptance." Easier on the night nurses.

Well. I guess I can get rid of the Five Stages poster with pushpin I used when Piazza was traded to the Marlins.

Tom Ridge will announce that September is Preparedness Month ... on September 9th. That won't give us much time to prepare, but it will catch the news cycles leading up to the 9/11 weekend. Many have challenged the administration's terror announcements as deliberately manufactured and timed for partisan purposes. The response is, you complained that we didn't alert people and now you complain that we do alert people. What would you have us do? This suggests an obvious response — stop scheduling non-news-driven events in an blatantly partisan manner.

Pictures of protesters confined to crummy, caged pens far from the action. At the Democratic convention. Very not cool. Don't let your reactions to Bush's policies blind you to the fact that the Establishment includes both major parties and the Democratic Party are only the good guys in comparison.

I hate cell phones. This is because they are telephones which you carry around, so that other people can bother you wherever you are. It's also because cell phones enable people to behave like asses in public, and cause even considerate users to withdraw from public interaction. And it's because the devices themselves are ugly and unpleasant. I don't deny the utility of cell phones, and on those occasions where I've (hypocritically?) used somebody else's phone, I've been struck by the poor usability.

The obvious reason is the form factor - many buttons are squeezed onto a small object which must fit smoothly into a pocket. But more subtly, it suffers from computer syndrome—any object, combined with a computer, behaves like a computer. That means it is probably excessively complicated in design and interaction, that is probably crashes, that it is certainly not simple and perfectly suited to the task.

Consider, then, the Siemens GigasetSL1. It's a cell phone posing as a cordless phone. I already hate cordless phones, because they introduce pronounced unreliability and battery limitations for inadequate gain, particularly in an office environment where a cord is a negligable problem. But what makes the GigasetSL1 an astoundingly awful idea is that it carefully husbands all of the limitations and design compromises of cell phones into an application where they are completely unnecessary. Office phones, which don't have to move frequently, can offer large displays, sizeble and well-labelled buttons with dedicated functions, and in general a less computer-like interface. Instead, we get the short end of the stick - all the drawbacks of a cell phone traded off for ... nothing.

Visit this site every day through November 2, 2004. You should be crazy by August.

(...excerpts from Heather Mallick's column in The Globe and Mail, Saturday April 10 2004. I first read this whilst high as a kite; I revisited it sober and it still blows me away.)

Home is the place where they have to take you in, Robert Frost wrote. In the case of the American army deserters now arriving in Canada, home is the place where they want to give you a lethal injection. So all they're asking of Canada, their new home, is a bed in the spare room of a Quaker family, and all we ask of them is that they never complain they can't see the puck. That remark makes Canadians crazy.

These young men--there have been at least two so far, and probably women to come --are different from the Vietnam lot in that they weren't drafted. The United States itself is different in that it's worse. Such is the huge divide between rich and poor that these young people signed up so they could afford to go to college. They thought that National Guard duty meant, say, guarding supermarkets against looters during the next Mississippi flood. Then they were in Iraq with American soldiers and mercenaries and some pissed-off troops from Poland and Italy.

Little did they know that the man who stole the 2000 election would boast with that unnerving, uncertain grin that he was "a wartime president." Osbert Sitwell once wrote a poem about Junior's very situation: "I think, myself,/That my new war/Is one of the nicest we've had;/It is not war really,/It is only a training for the next one/Besides, we have not declared war;/We are merely restoring order." Trouble is, Mr. Sitwell wrote this in 1919. How embarrassing for Mr. Bush, a Chihuahua chewing the pant leg of history.

Read economist Paul Krugman's The Great Unravelling about how Dick Cheney's army of the radical right has given the rich tax breaks the way you pump food down the throat of a fat goose until they flap their wings to signal they're full, thanks, and you keep squeezing the bulb. The poor and middle class got comparatively nothing to such an extent that for the first time in history, Americans on average are becoming shorter than their European counterparts, who are raising ceilings and lengthening beds. Americans, through the 19th and 20th centuries, were two inches taller than the peasanty Brits; now they're half an inch shorter, the result of bad food and no health care for the poor.

I'm not saying the deserters signed up as part of a long-term plan to avoid having short children, but that's how it worked out. You may think the United States won't execute them if Canada sends them back. But the U.S. Army no longer even recognizes shell shock (a soldier who had anxiety attacks after seeing an Iraqi sliced in half was recently charged with cowardice, which means a firing squad). Even Bill Clinton, in 1992, upheld the death sentence of a man so profoundly brain-damaged that when he was given his last meal, he said he would save his pecan pie for later.

(...)

You must now believe in peace, order and good government. Don't pursue happiness; let it find you.

(...)

If you want to understand politics, grab the whole range of American politics and move it left. Our current Liberals are conservative Democrats, our New Democrats are Naderites, except younger, cooler and not getting Democratic death threats; our Conservatives, who used to be Reform, are Radical Right Republicans on Nyquil. They don't like immigrants; I'd vote NDP if I were you.

Religion: If you have one, don't mention it at parties. The subject does not arise here. Army deserter Jeremy Hinzman is a Buddhist; you can talk about that, Jeremy, because people think it's yoga. Jeremy's a nice name. None of the deserters so far have been called Billy Ray. If you are, change it to Jeremy-- there's a good Canadian.

Learn the name of our PM. Then tell us, because we forget. Don't refer to breasts as hooters, headlights or a great rack. Just call them breasts.

(...)

Recycle like you mean it. Read Fire and Ice by pollster Michael Adams about how Canadians are growing ever more different from Americans. Then read Margaret Atwood and Doug Coupland, shop at Roots, stop in at Tim Hortons for a pile of Timbits (...). Arrive in a Prius or a Smart Car, which shouts, "I care about the environment," and you, short Buddhist, are a shoo-in for citizenship.

After the electrocution in New York, Con Ed tested about 260,000 underground structures, manholes, metal plates and service boxes and found less than 1 percent of them had stray voltage, company spokesman Joe Petta said. Still, two more dogs were shocked in New York this week.

Note the fallacy that Con Ed puts forth - they imply that things are okay because less than one percent of the New York electical plant has stray voltage. The AP reporter, by using the word "still," perpetuates the fallacy. Do the math: up to 2,600 manholes, etc, have stray voltage - why is it then surprising that two dogs were shocked in a week?

Of course, if you want to get a better idea of how many dogs we would expect to get shocked, you would have to guess or measure how many dogs there are, how frequently they get walked, how many potentially (electicity pun - hah!) dangerous objects that contact per walk, how many objects with stray voltage have lethal current, how many dog owners notice, how many who notice report the incident, etc. Still, if there are a few thousand objects in New York that may kill by touch, two zapped dogs a week isn't surprising.

Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 13:04:22 -0400 (AST)
From: Nathan <nathan>
To: Joel Aufrecht <joel>
Subject: Re: Greetings

On Wed, 10 Mar 2004, Joel Aufrecht wrote:
>
> My question is: (ask the buddhist) someone stole the bicycle light
> from my bicycle, which I discovered this morning.  How do I stop
> feeling pissed off and violated?

There are certainly a number of ways of going about this.

You are a very intellegent person, so perhaps you want to take this as
a great opportunity to see how your mind works and explore this
feeling. Some questiosn you might ask yourself, is "if this feeling is
a real thing, then it should have a color, a shape, a location, or
other identifying marks, what are these? Is this feeling a single
feeling or does it have parts, and if it has parts what are they?"
Actually try to answer the question, and watch what your mind does.

Another method is comparison.
-If one was following the news, one might have noted that in the fall
of 2000 the election was stolen in the United States, losing a bike
light is nothing to be upset about compared to having your rightful
leader cheated out of office.
-Or how about the massive theft of taxes from the American taxpayer,
to finance a campaign of demoralizing, bombing, beating, raping,
killing, and stealing from the Iraqui people. Losing a bike light is
nothing compared to losing 79-Billion dollars, or your life, liberty,
and/or pursiut of happiness.

Contemplation of impermanence.
-At one point or another, you will lose everything that you have ever
owned. This is true of all people. Your life is short, and precious.
You will die, why waste your precious life away wishing harm on others
who will also die in due course?
-Nothing lasts forever. Even the greatest mountains are slowly ground
into sand by the weather, leaving nothing in their place. That bike
light too will break, buying a new one means that it'll be longer
before you have to replace your bike light again.

Compassion.
-If someone was willing to steal a bike light things must be quite bad
for them. Usually if someone could afford it they'd just buy one
right? So if someone stole your bike light, perhaps they are already
suffering more than you are.

If you were the type of person who was interested in faith, devotion,
or perhaps just turning the tables on your habitual patterns you might
recite the "four immeasurables", with this loss in your mind.
{
  May all beings enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.
  May we be free from suffering and the root of suffering.
  May we never be separated from the great happiness devoid of
      suffering.
  May we dwell in the great equanimity, free from passion, aggression
      and prejudice.
}
You could even replace the "all beings" and "we" with "the person who
stole my bike light". And watch what happens after you say that about
a dozen times slowly. (repeat as needed ;)

There are lots more I'm sure.

> I was thinking of putting the recharger (without which the light
> won't last long) outside near the bicycle, with a note and some
> money.  I feel like this is going through the motions of not being
> possessive but really I'm still pissed.
>
I wouldn't put out the recharger or money, I think that's just rubbing
it in. If you wanted to write a note, I would suggest politely
explaining that you can not find your bike light, and ask if anyone
can help you find it. Be sure not to accuse anyone of stealing, that
just makes things harder to sort out. Keep it simple, don't get
dramatic. Be happy and thankful if someone returns it.


How's that for an answer?

-Nathan

===

Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 22:17:36 +0100
From: Joel Aufrecht <joel>
To: Nathan <nathan>
Subject: Re: Greetings

> How's that for an answer?

It exceeded all expectations.  Would you do me the honor of posting it
on my blog to share?  I will endeavor to do as many steps as I can.

>
> -Nathan
>

I'm working through Peter Singer's collection of his own writing, in part because it's interesting and in part because I'm trying to slowly self-educate myself on the basics of philosophy. I formed the opinion several years ago that the discipline of philosophy was in some sense a failure because, after thousands of years of work, philosophers haven't reported back to the rest of us yet. My evidence for this assertion was the fact that I made it through sixteen years of education, including four years at a liberal arts college which included a diverse set of required classes, without a clue as to the principles and tenets of philosophy. I have been accumulating rebuttals since, including:

• I didn't take any philo classes
• If we define philosophy to be the study of everything in human thought, except the things that have their own disciplines, then philosophy's success is evident in the fact that its domain has shrunk so much as it's "solved" problems and spun them into specialized branches to work out the details (we call these biology, economics, etc), and the remaining issues are necessarily the hardest
• Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism and Confucianism, have reported back early and often, as evidenced by their deep influence on many Asian societies.

Singer's work in Ethics is particularly accessible, in part because ethics are less abstract and in part because his writing is very clear:

It would be possible to bring medical practice into line with the current definition of death in terms of the irreversible cessation of all brain function. [...] From the perspective of an adherent of the sanctity of life ethic, of course, the gain is that we are no longer killing people by cutting out their hearts while they are still alive. (Singer, Peter. Writings on an Ethical Life. p175)

Gerd Gigerenzer discusses risk and its applications in daily life, with examples from medicine, the O.J. Simpson trial and DNA testing in general, wife battering, AIDS counseling, and other fun avenues of life.

Executive Summary

The human brain has evolved several mechanisms that helped us survive in the African veldt but now hinder us from understanding our world. Our brains see in terms of certainties instead of chances - we round "unlikely" to never and "likely" to now. I can observe my own brain working this way, but the evolutionary benefit is not obvious to me and I would like to read more. We see patterns when there is noise. This could be a direct result of evolution: a bias towards false positives prevents catastrophe at the cost of paranoia, which is a perfectly good tradeoff for hominids who usually die by age twenty but is not so good for, say, rational stock trading. Or, this could be a side-effect of simply having powerful pattern-recognition mechanisms. We see cause and effect when it doesn't exist. And we think in terms of natural numbers, not percentages.

Two examples of our evolutionarily triggered false conclusions: (this part is not from the book). I read a true story (in another book about risk and math, I think) in which the narrator asked a bunch of senior military leaders how many generals were "great." They conferred and said, about five percent. He then asked, how many battles does one have to win in a row to be a great general. They answered, "five in a row." If the chance of winning a battle is 50%, then the chance of winning five in a row is 1/2^5, or 1 / (2*2*2*2*2), or 1 / 32, or about 3%. In other words, there's no reason to think the typical "great" general is anything other than lucky, at least not until they rack up a bigger lead over random chance. The other example was similar, and applied to sports. The chance that purely random performance - shooting baskets, getting hits - will read to streaks during the course of a season is easily calculated, and it turns out that many or even most streaks in most sports are as frequent as you would predict from random chance. In other words, most streaks are just random chance. Since our brains are geared to recognize patterns and attribute cause to effect, we falsely see that someone is performing especially well, probably because they ate their lucky pasta before the game.

Gigerenzer outlines a number of common statistical mistakes, and I'll repeat the interesting ones here, skipping boring ones like confusing a 50% chance of rain tomorrow with the expectation of 12 hours of rain.

Risks expressed as probabilities are less understandable than risks expressed as frequencies. Compare:

  The probability that an asymptomatic woman aged 40-50 in region X
  has breast cancer is 0.8 percent.  If a woman has breast cancer, the
  probably is 90 percent that she will have a positive mammogram.  If
  a woman does not have breast cancer, the probability is 7 percent
  that she will still have a postive mammogram.  Imagine a woman who
  has a positive mammogram.  What is the probability that she actually
  has breast cancer?

Write down your answer before proceeding to try the second question.

  Eight of every thousand women [aged 40-50 etc] have breast cancer.
  Of these eight with breast cancer, seven will have a positive
  mammogram.  Of the remaining 992 without breast cancer, about 70
  will have a (false) positive mammogram.  Imagine a sample of women
  with positive mammograms.  How many actually have breast cancer?

The correct answers are .008 / ((.008 * .9) + (.992 * .07)) = 0.104, and 8 / (7 + 70) = about one in ten.

It is the same problem expressed in two ways, and the second way is easier for most people. One thing that did confuse me in the book, though, is why Gigerenzer argues for physicians to use the second method instead of a third method:

  For every ten women with a positive mammogram, typically one
  actually has breast cancer.

It is then even easier to answer the question, "If you have a positive mammogram, what is the chance you actually have breast cancer?"

Expression of relative risks without a base rate. Example: Mammography screening starting at age 40 reduces the risk of death by breast cancer by 25%. This seems like a convincing case for screening. However, the overall chance of dying from breast cancer is actually quite low; screening reduces the risk of death from breast cancer in the next 10 years from 0.4% to 0.3%. Once the consequences of the high rate of false positives, from stress to unnecessary surgery, is accounted for, the case for mammography screening is slim, especially if the effort put into mammography screening could instead be put into finding the real killers (i.e., smoking, poor nutrition, and lack of exercise).

Prosecutor's fallacy, confusing the chance of a match with the chance that, given a match, the defendent is not guilty. This also involves ignoring the base rate: If your DNA matches DNA found at the scene with a one in a million chance of a false match, this does not mean that the chance that you are the real killer is 999,999 in a million. If the only evidence differentiating you from the other 10 million Los Angelenos is the DNA, then there are nine other people in LA who will match, and thus only a one in ten chance that you are the right match. (And this assumes that the other links in the chain are not broken - ie, no lab error, no planted evidence, no possibility that you were at the scene and left DNA before or after the crime, or during a crime you didn't commit.)

Given a Monty Hall situation, you should switch doors.

Newt Gingrich continues to be contra-rational. In an article arguing for radical reform of the State Department, he says,

One can hardly overstate how poorly the United States communicates its message and values to the world: Large majorities in France, Germany, and South Korea opposed the U.S. perspective on Iraq - not to mention the 95 percent disapproval rate in Turkey."

Apparently Gingrich cannot conceive that the United States may well have communicated its message and values, and that the French, German, Korean, and Turkish people may simply have disagreed. The article contain other lines that suggest Gingrich cannot imagine legitimate disagreement:

The values- and fact-based advocates note immediately that Libya is a dictatorship with a history of terrorism, and they thus conclude that Libya cannot chair the commission with any moral standing or credibility. By contrast, the accommodation worldview contends that Libya won the vote in the United Nations and that contesting Libya's moral and legitimate claim to the chair would be impolite and a violation of proper process.

I don't know about "moral" and "impolite," but it seems to me that contesting Libya's legitimate claim to the chair without technical grounds, of which I've heard none, would indeed be a violation of proper process. I see parallels between this attitude and the idea that the US should invent "unlawful combatants" or reserve the right to use cluster bombs, land mines, and other such weapons - see, we're the good guys. You can trust us.

But everybody thinks they're the good guys. Serbians slaughtering Croats thought they were defending their beseiged nation. Chinese nationalists threatening Taiwan and occupying think they're liberators (sound familiar?). The point of due process and rule of law is that the system is more fair than the players and thus must be maintained even when somebody is acting disagreeably, as long as they are still within the rules. Or, what goes around comes around. This is a lesson that I don't see evident in Gingrich, Rumsfeld, or the others.

Giving Gingrich more rope:

In May 2001, when the United States was ambushed and voted off the U.N. Human Rights Commission for the first time since the commission's inception in 1947, those people who focus on facts, values, and outcomes were justifiably outraged. But the State Department, admitting it was surprised, did nothing. Such passivity emboldened France to launch a campaign seeking to defeat U.S. foreign policy objectives articulated by Bush.

So the State Department's failure to break the UN rules caused France to oppose US foreign policy. Okay, next ...

As the world's only superpower, largest economy, and most aggressive culture, the United States inevitably infringes on the attention and interests of other peoples and nations. A country this large and powerful must work every day to communicate what it is doing. The world does not have to love us, but it must be able to predict us.

Under this logic, we should presumably keep starting preemptive wars without justification, in order to act predictably? Anyway:

Key to transforming the State Department's culture is the adoption of the right vision - President Bush's vision. We can no longer accept a culture that props up dictators, coddles the corrupt, and ignores secret police forces.

I think this is called projection.

Moreover, the rise of a global anti-American network of activists and nations - including left-wing nongovernmental organizations, elite media, and most of the elite academics around the world (including in the United States - further increases the country's need for a comprehensive communication and information strategy.

That's right - US universities, Amnesty International, the New York Times - they're all anti-American. I'm sorry, Mr Gingrich, but preemptive war is not American. Indefinite detention without trial is not American.

And if you think Gingrich is out of government and not important any more, then you probably haven't heard of the Defense Policy Board or our good friend Richard Pearle. Gingrich sits on, Gingrich advises Rumsfeld, and Gingrich is trying to get appointed Secretary of State.

Gingrich, being very smart and observant in addition to his less positive attributes, also advocates:

"a Foreign Service that is at least 40 percent larger"

"Indeed, diplomats should receive a significant extra monthly payment for language proficiency."

"U.S. authorities must initiate an ongoing campaign so that everyone who has suffered from torture or repression at the hands of dictators can tell their stories and bear witness;"

All good ideas. Call me morbid, though, but if we broadcast a few worldwide cable channels of nothing but people bearing witness (c.f. Shoah (INCOMPLETE - add link)), I can't help but wonder about the ratings.

So we -- spammers and the spammed alike -- have a common interest in finding a way to efficiently target only the people who really want to buy Viagra. I believe it can be done. Any ideas? - Robert X. Cringley

Huh? If it weren't Cringely saying it, I'd shoot the bastard. But since it's him, I think about it... - Steve

Well I say, shoot the bastard. Here's why.

His column, boiled down, says this:

0) [A red herring discussion of advertising-supported content]
1) Spam is the only successful type of internet advertising. If it wasn't profitable, it wouldn't exist
2) Spam is corrosive to email
3) Email is the killer app of the internet
4) We non-spammers should find a way to help spammers target their spam. Then it won't be corrosive.

0 I'll come back to later.

I agree with 1, 2, and 3.

I disagree with 4. It's true but too narrow. He's proposing an undefined systemic accomodation for a problem caused by a well-defined systemic flaw. As long as we're doing systemic fixes, why not fix the real problem?

Spammers are parasites who make money via quirks of the SMTP protocol. Specifically, the way email works today spammers can make recipients pay for some of the cost of each email. The solution is then to change our mail protocol.

Once spammers have to pay representative amounts of money, spam will be like junk mail. This may not sound like a big win, but it is, for three reasons. First, increased spammer cost will set a ceiling on volume, just as we don't get ten pounds of junk mail in our mailboxes. Second, increased cost will put the onus on spammers themselves to improve targetting accuracy, thus addressing the corrosion problem. Third, spam (and ultimately the morons who buy all the viagra and whatnot) will subsidize the rest of the internet.

Yes, changing our email infrastructure will be annoying and expensive. But it's a specific, concrete idea (here's one proposal) with a high chance of success. If it were implemented at the MTA level (back office) instead of MUA (desktop email programs), it would require hundreds of thousands of systems to change, but not hundreds of millions.

Now let's go back and look at the red herring, the implied link between spam and advertising-supporting content. The obvious conclusion, which perhaps he's saving for his next column, is that we should find some way to support content with spam, because that's the only kind of advertising that's profitable. Once again, let's look at the real systemic problem.

The real systemic problem is advertising-supported content itself. It's a system we've inherited from earlier broadcast media, where it succeeded due to the nature of the technology. If you want to produce content and send it to millions of households, and you have no way to charge any of them money, how do you collect money? You sell the attention of your audience to interested parties. Interested parties means advertisers. Since it's a business, that means that creative decisions are effectively made by advertisers.

Consequences? News is censored to avoid offending advertisers. Content is planned around the disposable income of the audiences it will attract. Content that takes time to develop audiences, or that appeals to niche audiences, is usually killed in favor of more immediately profitable material.

When the internet went commercial advertising-supported content was the most obvious pure-internet business model simply because it's what had come before. Now that it's failed, now that no business model is obviously successful, what possible reason could there be keep recussitating on the web the system that made television and radio intolerably bad for so many decades? Instead, let's keep experimenting with audience-supported content - for example Salon, the WSJ, and porn - and with micropayments and related technologies that were impossible in the 1930s but technically trivial today. Audience-supported content may not work yet, but neither does advertising, and only one the two has a future.

And let's recognize that the huge success of the internet, the killer app of the internet, is free content. All those emails zipping back and forth - that's content that people write and then just give away for free. All these weblogs, from crap to professional writing, give away content for free. As long as we all shell out twenty bucks a month to keep the machines humming, why should anybody else get a dime? Cringley writes:

Yahoo suddenly wants us to pay -- because they have figured out that advertisers won't pay, at least not enough to support the kind of earnings growth demanded by Wall Street.

If you haven't yet figured out that "earnings growth" is code for pyramid scheme, you're an idiot. And if you have, and you just want in before the pyramid collapses - collapses the rest of the way, I suppose - you're a criminal. Let's do our audience-supported experiments without the "benefits" of venture capital and Wall Street. I'm not saying down with capitalism, but I am saying, "up with post-capitalism." I'm just not sure what that is yet. But it probably includes blogs and micropayments and peer to peer. And it's a safe bet to have porn.

It's pretty hard to figure out where FCC Chairman William Powell stands on anything - he "[spoke] in eloquent riddles, whose circumlocutions left listeners elated but somewhat dizzy." (Economist). Though we do know he likes his Tivo. The FCC, you may recall, is the government entity responsible for making sure that the benefits of technology for the American public are held secondary to narrow commercial interests. Last week they had a nasty brawl, apparently over who could give the biggest handouts to the phone companies.

It's hard to tell exactly what happened. Powell apparently got screwed by fellow Republican commissioner Kevin Martin, who is also a fellow beneficiary of nepotism - sorry, "connections" - Martin's wife is Cheney's spokeswoman. Martin made a deal with the two Democrats on the commission and won the vote 3-2. The vote lets the Bells stop sharing their infrastructure with competitors.

A brief history lesson: last century, the government granted monopolies to phone companies, and, using what amounted to public money, they built big networks. It was basically a case study for socialism vs capitalism: the old phone networks were stable and reliable, and cost far more than they should have and many features were postponed decades. Deregulation tipped things the other way: now the systems are generally cheaper, and not nearly as reliable.

The 1996 Telecommunications Act, in a nutshell, randomly shuffled the industry. The Bells were supposed to start sharing their networks with competitors, and in exchange the Bells could compete in previously forbidden markets. The sharing has turned out to be fairly farcical - the Bells get fined regularly for not actually sharing (forgetting orders, randomly cutting lines - "oops, there went Hoboken. We don't care! We're the phone company." - and other dirty tricks) and they just pay the fines because it's much cheaper than real competition.

Anyway, the FCC decided last week to let the phone companies off the hook for even pretending to share. The idea is that, without the distraction of having to pretend to cooperate with competitors, the Bells could invest in real DSL infrastructure of their own. They promptly responded to the gift by complaining: "... forcing SBC and others to carefully consider how they will invest, where they will invest, how many people to employ and even what kind of consumer services to deliver." (SBC Press release). Reading between the lines, this means cutting DSL.

The Bells don't like DSL, because it's disruptive to their much more profitable main business. They wouldn't provide DSL at all if they weren't forced to for appearances and by competition from companies like COVAD. Companies that exist because they are legally entitled to share the Bell systems. The new rule phases out that mandatory sharing over the next few years, and thus the Bells will have much less pressure to provide DSL. The FCC naturally spins things differently: "The new framework ... brings the benefits of competitive alternatives to all consumers."

Basically everybody on the FCC is bought and paid for by phone companies, but the phone companies are even greedier (but stupider) than Chairman Bill. The Commissioners were tripping over each other to help them, and ended up giving them even more stuff for nothing. And despite all that, the phone companies still aren't happy. But at least Powell's position is starting to materialize:

After the ruling, many of the local phone companies announced that they would not be making new investments in high-speed services as a result of getting only half of what they wanted from the ruling. But Mr. Powell dismissed the Baby Bells' reaction, saying, "Here is a lot of crying crybaby reaction to the decision." He said he thought that the announcements were more like "public affairs reactions" than like reasoned management decisions. Mr. Powell also said he was getting tired of the "passion play between billion-dollar self-interested actors."

Almost eight years ago, in the summer after college as I entered the working world, I made my second wave of "adult" consumer purchases. The first wave, as I entered college, comprised most expensively a stereo and a computer. I replaced every single component in the computer case more than once before finally shelving it as hopelessly obsolete. The stereo I still have, except that I had to replace the receiver twice and the cd player once, but the speakers are original. The second wave including a car, some furniture, and a bicycle. Most of the furniture, transported home from IKEA on a Los Angeles freeway sticking out the sunroof of the car, has been replaced by other IKEA furniture. And the car's gone, too. But I still ride the bicycle almost every day - I rode it to work this morning. And this is why I felt betrayed when, after seven years of faithful service, the bicycle computer died.

It's not actually original equipment - I think I had to replace the first one after using it as a detachable pocket-watch and losing it - but it's of the same lineage. Every few years I have to replace the battery, and though I lost the manual a long time ago, a bit of fiddling always suffices to set the clock and tire size (which I miraculously remember. It's 2074. I think that's millimeters).

Well, it died last month. It got dimmer and dimmer, and then it just wouldn't wake up any more. I got a new battery, and put that in, and then you could see the display if you squinted and looked at an angle, but a day later even that was gone. So I needed a new bicycle computer.

The thing is, bicycle computers have infrastructure. They sit on "shoes," plastic clips on the handlebar with metal contacts that lead to wires that go down the front fork to a magnetic sensor that lines up with a revolving magnet on a wheel spoke. They installed the first one at the store, it's all covered with road grime, and has worked perfectly for seven years, except for when I change the front tire and put the wheel on backwards. I don't really want to futz with the shoe and the sensor, because I can tell it's going to be a pain in the ass. I just want to buy a new computer that fits the shoe. Of course, each manufacturer has a different shoe, so I need a new "Vetta C15," or at least some kind of Vetta.

I won't bother with the details of the visits to six different bicycle shops except to mention that Fremont Free Range Cycles is not open on Tuesdays, even if you go three Tuesdays in a row.

And Vetta doesn't make my model any more; in fact, they don't make any model with that shoe any more. In the end, I bought a CatEye Mity 3, because it was the cheapest on the rack at the bicycle store where I happened to be standing when I gave up on a simple replacement. Installing it was, as I had foretold, a pain in the ass. And when I finished, at a total cost of two months of calendar time, several billable hours, and $30 (twice what I paid for the old one), the replacement was in most respects worse that the original.

Why? Because it's a speedometer combined with a computer, and anything combined with a computer is a computer, and most people can't design computers. The old computer must have been designed by bicycle elves who have since departed across the Western Sea, because it actually worked. It told me how fast I was going, my average speed, my top speed, how far I'd gone, how long I'd been going, and the time of day. It did this with two unlabelled buttons on the front. Push the button on the right, it shows you different information. Push the button again, you see differenter information. If you push it a few more times, you're back where you started. Anything the computer can tell you, it will, if you just push the button enough times. Push the wrong button and nothing happens. Push both buttons and hold for two seconds, it resets the speed and distance for your new trip.

The new one had three basic modes, which you get to by pushing the button labelled Mode. Each mode has a different number of submodes, which you get to (if it's in AT mode, and don't ask me what AT mode is and what the alternatives are; I just know that AT mode has nothing to do with the Mode button) holding down the Start/Stop button, which is labelled S. The buttons are both on the bottom rim of the device, so that when you push them too hard you run the risk of popping the computer out of the holder and onto the street in front of - whoosh - behind you. Most of the screens display something cryptic like 0-Hr or "Tm 0.00.02. Setting the clock entails holding down three buttons at once - the two on the rim and a third, on the back of the computer and recessed so you need a third hand to hold the pin that you'll need to push it. It is, of course, inaccessible if the computer is mounted on the clip. But you knew that, didn't you? The instructions refer to the Set button, so make sure that you remember that that's the tricky one on the back and not the yellow button labelled S, which, remember, is Start/Stop except that holding it down for several seconds also does something non-start-stoppy; I think it changes you from one sub-mode to another sub-mode, which is something you'll have to do regularly because it each time you change the main Mode it goes to the first sub-mode, not to the sub-mode you left it in. But holding down the Mode button for two seconds also changes something. But not the same something.

I think I've reached an accomodation. I've got it set up so that I see the time and how fast I'm going. I'm not going to try and see other things, like how far I've gone or my top speed, because it's just not worth the pain. So while in theory the new computer does more than the old one, in practice it's not worth the bother. But by leaving it on current speed at least I can focus on the one improvement: it gives me tenths of mph instead of nearest 0.5. That's progress for you.