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A Wake for a Bird

2011-09-20T20:52:00.000-04:00

The Holidays. Several weeks of worrying about travel, embarrassing relatives, forced conversations with people with whom you have nothing to talk about. Sure, there's some quality eating to be done, but after your end-of-year "vacation," you're looking forward to getting back to work, right?

OK, I get along great with my family, but this is the kind of lament that, if you haven't experienced it yourself, you know people who have, and do year after year. Wouldn't it be nice to have the good part of the holidays (that is, the food) without the obligations of family?

I propose a new annual tradition. Every year, friends should gather and have a huge meal. Thanksgiving turkey-with-all-the-trimmings minus the "Thanksgiving" part. Because every tradition needs something more than "that day we all stuff ourselves silly," my proposal is to hold a good old-fashioned wake. The guest of honor? Why, the deceased, of course. The reason we're all assembled. The turkey.

The organization of a wake is a personal thing, of course, but if I might make one suggestion, it would be for each diner to say a few words in the departed's honor. If each eulogy is accompanied by, say, a shot of whiskey, I certainly would not disparage. The whole idea is for everyone to enjoy the occassion, so have fun with it. Give the turkey a name, make up a back-story, share personal anecdotes. And don't worry if different people's stories are inconsistent.

So, when should this new holiday be held? Sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas (or your solstice-adjacent holiday of choice or custom) would perhaps be ideal, as a lighthearted break from holidays steeped with long-held traditions of no real immediate relevance. That might not be practical, however, depending on your and your friends' travel plans. Besides, after Thanksgiving everyone is sort of burned out on turkey. A few weeks beforehand, however, and you can justify it as a Thanksgiving dress rehearsal. You might even get some interesting ideas for new dishes to add to your family's Thanksgiving, if you're willing to brave the silent or vocal scorn of your relatives, for whom it's just not Thanksgiving without the same menu as the last century of Thanksgivings. And that's almost reason enough to hold a Turkey Wake—new side dishes, a new kind of gravy, stuffing made with cornbread instead of regular bread; the possibilities are endless!

I hope that this year you'll hold a Turkey Wake, with as many friends as you can. And spread the word. Next year, I want to see a line of Hallmark Turkey Wake cards, tacky cardboard decorations in all the supermarkets, and Turkey-Wake-themed songs on the radio. The following year, I want to hear people complain, "It's not even Halloween, and already they're putting up the Turkey Wake decorations!" This thing is going to be huge.

Feel free to leave your own ideas, including for a better name than "Turkey Wake," in the comments.

Bullshit Update

2011-07-20T07:37:00.000-04:00

I'm still happy to take requests for long-form bullshitting here, but I'm also bullshitting on Google+ in smaller, bite-sized pieces.

Testing some markup features

2010-12-29T08:32:00.003-05:00

This post has no real content of interest.

Ideally, this part should show up normally, though I've put it in its own <div> block.

If this is the second paragraph, then it didn't work.

Creating a Private Blog on a Free Blogging Service

2010-12-27T17:45:00.001-05:00

There are a few problems with Facebook (and similar services):

It's a walled garden
You have no control over your data (even though you think you do)
You're not the customer, you're the product

Free blogging sites get around problem 1, but not the other two. Generally, you have even less control over your data, since the whole point is to publish so that everyone in the world can potentially read it. To get around all of these problems, you'd need to host your own site, which can be a pain and costs more than it's worth to most people.

So, what can we do with a free blogging site? We can post encrypted articles, and only distribute the keys to the people we want reading them. Not only have we removed problem 1, since anyone with the appropriate crypto can read the articles, but we've also partially removed problem 2. Why partially? I'll get to that in a bit. We still have problem 3, but that's an economic reality for any free service. You can, however, shop around for a service that treats you as a product with dignity, at least, and you can potentially find a paid blogging service that doesn't support encryption (or whose encryption you don't want to use), at which point you become the customer, and just a little more human in the eyes of the service.

Why might you not want to use a perfectly functional encryption service provided by a blog host? It's a question of who has the keys. It's almost certain that the host would have your encryption keys, and would provide the encryption and decryption on the fly. While convenient, it's still a loss of control, and they can hand your decrypted data to anyone they choose (though you may have some contract protections in this regard). It's also likely that they'll use password-based authentication. We're going to use public-key authentication, and we're going to do it in a way that's fairly easy and robust againt forgotten passwords.

Let's consider the following scheme. You write a new article for your semi-private blog. The bulk of this article (or maybe just a small part of it) is a well-delimited block of ciphertext. Maybe it looks like the following:

BEGIN CRYPTOBLOG
Key: http://some.location/key_identifier
66fa53d9b7b04210a54853e406d7b119...
END CRYPTOBLOG

We use special tags to denote the beginning and end of the special contents. This is easy for a person to pick out visually, and is also easy for a program to parse. The first line points to a URL with keying information for this article. We'd expect many articles to use the same key, since there's no reason not to. Keys should be changed occasionally, to prevent certain attacks that come from large amounts of available ciphertext, and when you want to deny someone who previously had access to your articles access to any new ones. We'll use a nice strong symmetric key encryption algorithm, such as AES-256.

We now have our encrypted article, how do we distribute the keys? The simplest way to do this is through another blog post. We have one key, but we want to make it available to a potentially large number of people. Let's say each of them has an RSA public key. A simple way to propagate the key is with a list of the following form:

Alice   E(Alice,key)
Bob     E(Bob,key)
Charlie E(Charlie,key)

Here the first column is the person's name, and the second is the key encrypted with that person's public key. This isn't great, from a privacy standpoint, because you've just transmitted the names of all your friends. Slightly better is

Pubkey(Alice)   E(Alice,key)
Pubkey(Bob)     E(Bob,key)
Pubkey(Charlie) E(Charlie,key)

Now we haven't revealed anyone's name, but we've revealed their public keys. This allows someone to correlate public keys between subsequent AES keys, revealing the degree of churn in your list of friends. Also, by publishing pairs of public keys and ciphertexts, you're potentially giving an adversary a leg up in cracking the corresponding private keys. Since just a smidge more paranoia costs us very little, let's instead go with the following:

H(Pubkey(Alice)|E(Alice,key))     E(Alice,key)
H(Pubkey(Bob)|E(Bob,key))         E(Bob,key)
H(Pubkey(Charlie)|E(Charlie,key)) E(Charlie,key)

The first column is now a hash of the person's public key and the ciphertext in the second column. Note that previously, your friend could immediately recognize the appropriate line of keying material to decrypt in order to retrieve the AES key. Now he or she has to perform a simple hash based on each line until one of them matches. The hash function doesn't have to be particularly great for this, so we can use something simple like MD5 without worrying about security or privacy being appreciably compromised.

What are our security and privacy properties now? Well, your semi-private articles should be well protected by encryption, and your friends should be able to recover the symmetric key. The identities of your friends are protected, for the most part. What data does this system leak, though?

The hosting service knows who's retrieving your posts, though not who's successfully decrypting them.
The world in general knows how often you are posting.
The world in general knows how long your posts are.
The world in general knows how many people are able to read your posts.

We could do better if we were self-hosted, but this is about the limits of using a free service like Blogger. If you think you have a way to reduce the amount of data leaked, please let me know.

That's the scheme, but how to implement it is another matter. We'd like to have some way for someone to navigate to an article, and be presented with a decrypted page. The easiest way to do this is probably to create a Firefox extension. Note that this must be written in javascript and CSS. The state of cryptography in javascript isn't great, from what I've found poking around online. If a person's public and private keys are loaded into the browser, then the extension should be able to use them to decrypt first the symmetric key and then the article. The extension should probably cache the ciphertext (not the plaintext!) of the symmetric key, since it'll likely be used multiple times. The URL identifies the keys sufficiently at that point.

For most people, the public key is likely to be the most intimidating part. Someone running Linux can easily create an RSA key using OpenSSL. There's no need for a signed certificate. I don't know what would need to be done on Windows. If the blogger is reasonably crypto-savvy, then a BER- or DER-formatted RSA public key, an X.509 certificate, or a PGP/GPG certificate should be equally effective mechanisms for relaying public keys. Generating the list of ciphertexts for a new symmetric key will probably be done on the command line. We'll worry about friendlier interfaces later.

A really nice feature of a scheme like this is that if one of your friends forgets his private key password, he can just send you a new public key and you can either email him the key ciphertexts or edit the old postings to add the new public key's cipher.

Schwoops!

2010-06-12T15:22:00.002-04:00

I'm drinking a bottle of tonic water, and I just noticed the following warning:

CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE. CAP MAY BLOW OFF CAUSING EYE OR OTHER SERIOUS INJURY. POINT AWAY FROM FACE AND PEOPLE, ESPECIALLY WHILE OPENING.

This leads me to believe that someone, somewhere, had this happen to them. Someone was twisting the cap off a bottle of tonic water, when the cap, straining like a bronco that had been drinking from an espresso-laced stream, exploded forth as a tiny missile of blindness-inducing plastic. Or perhaps the victim wasn't the person opening the bottle. Image the tragic scene. A young mother, a thirsty child. "Sure, you can have some tonic water." Then, tragedy. Now little Johnny will never play baseball again.

Maybe I'm wrong. The truth is, we may never know what prompted this warning, nor how much gin was involved.

This is Just Ridiculous

2010-02-09T06:43:00.002-05:00

We've had about 45" of snow since Friday, with another 10-20" predicted for today and tomorrow. Buffalo has had about 60" this season. Buffalo. We might get more snow than Buffalo.

I haven't lost power yet, but my parents were out for over 30 hours, and Pepco still reports over 12,000 customers who haven't yet had their power restored (down from over 100,000). The roads are plowed, though many not to their full width. The snowplow crews have worked incredibly long shifts, with little or no time for sleep. They've got nowhere to plow the snow, so they've had to haul it away.

At the rate roads have been getting cleared, it's going to take at least all day Thursday before they'll be passable again. That's assuming the road crews can pull the sorts of hours they have been. Oh, and the local governments have already pretty much exhausted their snow-removal budgets for the year.

The next front looks like it'll pass to our south, dumping rain (and some wintery mix) on the South/Southeast from Texas to Florida. There's another one up in the Northwest, though. I have no idea what direction that one's going to go.

What is Wrong with Electronics Manufacturers?

2009-06-05T18:42:00.002-04:00

I currently have a clock radio and an answering machine that are driving me crazy. We've just started thunderstorm season, so I've had a few opportunities to lose power for extended periods of time. Neither of these gadgets performs what I'd consider well during these events.

The worse is the clock radio. It doesn't have a battery backup, just a capacitor. When I lose power for more than, say, thirty seconds, I lose the time, the alarm settings, and all of the station presets. I have another clock radio that does have a battery backup, but it has an analog tuner and no presets, and the clock tends to run fast on the battery.

The answering machine has battery backup, which lasts for a few hours. If the outage is too long, however, it too loses the time, but it also loses the outgoing and incoming messages. Yes, any messages that were stored on the machine are now gone.

Now, I've had both of these for awhile. The answering machine is from the mid-90s, and the clock is from 2001 or 2002. So I've been considering replacing them.

The thing that I find maddening is that, in 2009, clock radios still don't use non-volatile solid state memory to record their settings. The closest I've been able to find, in a form factor appropriate for my nightstand, is an Oregon Scientific weather radio. It uses non-volatile storage for settings, and even gets the time signal from the atomic clock in Colorado. It doesn't have a normal AM/FM tuner, though, only the weather stations.

Answering machines are no better. There's one model from AT&T that seems to have non-volatile settings. If you have caller ID an incoming call will even reset the time after an outage.

How much memory do you need to store settings and messages? Settings take almost nothing, the cheapest thumb drive would serve adequately. For a clock, it's 3 bytes per alarm setting, 4 if you want to specify on which days of the week the alarm should be active. A radio station is 1 byte. Voice recording takes substantially more, but still not ridiculous amounts. Yes, there are devices out there that have non-volatile storage, but seriously, one of each type?

One thing I've noticed, looking at clock radios online, is that they're either bare-bones pieces of garbage, or they can dock an iPod and produce concert-hall-like sound. Really? For an alarm clock? An alarm clock has a pretty simple function: to keep track of the time, wake you up when you've told it to, and do all of this with as small a footprint as possible. You would never know it from what's on the market today.

Answering machines almost seem to have been written off completely by their manufacturers. I don't get it. Voice mail is under someone else's control. (No, the irony of posting this on a blog controlled by Google isn't lost on me.) Voice mail can't tell you if your power's still out. Most answering machines these days are remotely controllable, and you don't have to remember a special number to call. You can walk through your door, look right at your answering machine, and know immediately if you have any messages. (Well, unless your power went out and your machine dumped all of them.) Mine has a number: "Hey, here's how many messages are waiting for you!" though I know some just have a little blinking light.

I guess what I'm really trying to say here is, can anyone recommend a good clock radio or answering machine with non-volatile storage?

Quite Possibly the Funniest Spam I've Received

2009-01-17T10:22:00.002-05:00

From: FBI Director Robert S.Mueller <kelvin.williams@info.net>
Reply-to: kelvinwilliams24@gmail.com
To: undisclosed-recipients
Date: Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 4:41 PM
Subject: FBI Director Robert S.Mueller

Attn: Beneficiary,

This is to Officially inform you that it has come to our notice and we have thoroughly Investigated with the help of our Intelligence Monitoring Network System that you are having an illegal Transaction with Impostors claiming to be Prof. Charles C. Soludo of the Central Bank Of Nigeria, Mr. Patrick Aziza, Mr Frank Nweke, none officials of Oceanic Bank, Zenith Banks, kelvin Young of HSBC,Ben of Fedex,Ibrahim Sule,Larry Christopher, Puppy Scammers are impostors claiming to be the Federal Bureau Of Investigation. During our Investigation, we noticed that the reason why you have not received your payment is because you have not fulfilled your Financial Obligation given to you in respect of your Contract/Inheritance Payment.

Therefore, we have contacted the Federal Ministry Of Finance on your behalf and they have brought a solution to your problem by cordinating your payment in total USD$11,000.000.00 in an ATM CARD which you can use to withdraw money from any ATM MACHINE CENTER anywhere in the world with a maximum of $4000 to $5000 United States Dollars daily. You now have the lawful right to claim your fund in an ATM CARD.

Since the Federal Bureau of Investigation is involved in this transaction, you have to be rest assured for this is 100% risk free it is our duty to protect the American Citizens. All I want you to do is to contact the ATM CARD CENTER via email for their requirements to proceed and procure your Approval Slip on your behalf which will cost you $110.00 only and note that your Approval Slip which contains details of the agent who will process your transaction.

CONTACT INFORMATION
NAME: Kelvin Williams
EMAIL: kelvinwilliams24@gmail.com

Do contact Mr. Kelvin Williams of the ATM CARD CENTRE with your details:

FULL NAME:
HOME ADDRESS:
TELL:
CELL:
CURRENT OCCUPATION:
BANK NAME:

So your files would be updated after which he will send the payment informations which you'll use in making payment of $110.00 via Western Union Money Transfer or Money Gram Transfer for the procurement of your Approval Slip after which the delivery of your ATM CARD will be effected to your designated home address without any further delay.

We order you get back to this office after you have contacted the ATM SWIFT CARD CENTER and we do await your response so we can move on with our Investigation and make sure your ATM SWIFT CARD gets to you.

Thanks and hope to read from you soon.

FBI Director Robert S.Mueller III.

Note: Do disregard any email you get from any impostors or offices claiming to be in possesion of your ATM CARD, you are hereby adviced only to be in contact with Mr. Kelvin Williams of the ATM CARD CENTRE who is the rightful person to deal with in regards to your ATM CARD PAYMENT and forward any emails you get from impostors to this office so we could act upon and commence investigation.

So Close...

2008-12-27T10:19:00.002-05:00

British Culture Secretary Andy Burnham wants to apply movie-style ratings to websites. His plan is to have major ISPs provide child-friendly services based on these ratings. He's getting close to a good idea, but he's not quite there.

He also begins with a false premise:

“It worries me - like anybody with children,” he says. “Leaving your child for two hours completely unregulated on the internet is not something you can do."

Leaving your child for two hours completely unregulated on the internet is not something you should do. You shouldn't leave your child for two hours to watch television unsupervised, either.

Here's the problem. You're going to try to separate out websites that are child-friendly, or age-range friendly, from other sites. Trying to do this via government regulation is doomed to failure. What if the content of a site changes? What about sites where comments are allowed? Take a site like Bad Astronomy, run by Dr. Phil Plait. Phil generally keeps it PG, if not G, but very occassionally he'll slip in some saltier language. The commenters do, too, but are generally good. What rating do you give this site? Who is going to validate the ratings that sites are given?

Another problem is that you're pushing the enforcement (at least partially) onto the ISPs. If they have to provide different levels of service, that involves either redundant networking or filters that run on all traffic, based on the subscriber. The redundant networking might be the cheaper option, since it doesn't require a lookup over a possibly-sparse set of subscribers for every packet or session. Plus, at the ISP level, you're probably going to be stuck with a pared-down internet or no filtering. That means keeping your children "safe" locks you out of quite a number of useful sites, even if the kids aren't even in the house.

There's a market solution here, and it could be implemented fairly easily without any government regulation or intervention. I call it .ratedg, or for the more network-geeky of you out there, RATEDG-DOM. The idea is that a new top-level domain (TLD) is created, where the sites are vetted initially and periodically for standards of content. On end-user computers, optional filtering software would be installed that only allows connections to sites in the .ratedg TLD. Traffic to other TLDs, or to numeric IP addresses, would be blocked. This isn't completely trivial, since all connections have to be addressed numerically, but a local DNS cache could handle this.

The TLD would be maintained by a nonprofit organization, which is funded by the fees paid by sites wishing to be listed. Some accommodation would need to be made for sites of nonprofits, hobbyists, and other cash-short groups. The fees could, for instance, be determined site-by-site based on the website's circumstances. This adds complexity, of course, but is not insurmountable.

The filtering could be provided by free software (funded by governments, the nonprofits, or volunteers), and disabled by password so that adults can have less-fettered access. One drawback of this is that software-based filters are notoriously susceptible to circumvention by clever youngsters. Of course, you're not letting your kids surf unsupervised, are you? The filter provides you with a no-accidental-bad-stuff net. You see the "Rated G" certification immediately, and if you click on a .com, .edu, .org, or whatever link by mistake, the filter blocks it for you with a friendly warning.

Another option, perhaps better for parents who insist on letting their children use the internet unsupervised, is a hardware filter. This would be inserted into your computer either between the network interface card and the wire, or between the card and the rest of the system (the latter is probably better). Filtering is now physically enforced by a key, which the parents can carry along with them. The case would have to be locked, as well, to keep the filter card from being removed.

This system also has extensibility. A RATEDPG-DOM could be created as well, or TLDs corresponding to other countries' standards. A hierarchy of allowed TLDs would arise naturally: a filter set for PG websites would allow both .ratedpg and .ratedg.

Note also that this would not force sites out of other TLDs that are otherwise descriptive. We already have websites that are in both, say .com and .co.uk. Having disney.ratedg would not preclude the same site being available via disney.com, though Disney would probably maintain pieces of its website other-than the G-rated portion.

Enforcement places some burden, but again the registration fees help fund this. It isn't feasible to completely verify a site's content, certainly not with any great frequency, but a combination of random compliance checks and public problem reporting can have great impact. If, say, Goggle contributes some of its resources to compliance monitoring, a much more complete picture could be obtained.

There are potential problems with this solution, as there are with any solutions. Filtering based on TLD punishes sites that do not or cannot register, and students who need access to information on non-registered sites. The Smithsonian Institution comes to mind, since there's likely to be photos of art that some would consider inappropriate for children. As the popularity of .ratedg grows, non-registered but compliant sites would feel pressure to register. Other sites might re-structure their content into G-rated and non-G-rated components, on separate IP addresses (though not necessarily different hosts). Still, other volunteer-run educational but not specifically child-oriented would likely be excluded. I'm sure there are other potential problems as well.

So that's my suggestion. It's an opt-in filtering system, both on the user and content provider ends. ISPs don't need to add or modify infrastructure. Governments don't need to add regulation or oversight. At-home implementation could be done by either hardware or software. The system is extensible. Implementation can be phased in, and some of the technical design could precede full implementation (such as prototype software that filters on .org or .edu). Since it doesn't require a strong-arm approach or extensive new infrastructure, the whole system could probably be implemented and deployed in under a year.

Happy Newtonmas!

2008-12-25T09:43:00.002-05:00

For someone who's 366, he's holding up pretty well. Sure, he doesn't do so well with very heavy objects and can't move too quickly, but he still puts in a fairly reliable showing.

The Natural

2008-12-07T13:28:00.002-05:00

There's currently a lawsuit filed that claims President-Elect Barack Obama is not eligble to be President because his father being Kenyan means Obama isn't a natural born citizen, as required by the Constitution. The case (on appeal to the Supreme Court, which is not likely to be hear it) hinges on the fact that "natural born citizen" never seems to have been defined. It would, in a way, be nice for the Supreme Court to weigh in on this, for the sake of precedent.

Here's what I'd consider a reasonable set of criteria to be eligible for the Presidency:

Either:
1. at least one parent was a U.S. citizen at time of birth; or
2. the person was born in the United States of America (yes, I'm excluding territories, but not embassies).
The person does not currently hold citizenship for any country other than the United States of America.
If the person has the right to citizenship of any other country by birth or circumstance, that right must be alienated.

What I find particularly interesting is that all of these criteria could be established by a Supreme Court ruling in regards to President-Elect Obama's eligibility.

Feel free to weigh in. Abusive comments will be deleted. Links to informative sites are welcome, but comments linking to propaganda (on whatever side) will be deleted. Yes, I get to decide where the line is between "informative" and "propaganda", but then it's my blog. Blogger hands them out for free, so go ahead and start your own if you disagree. I'll keep deleted comments available for re-posting if you want to try to convince me that something shouldn't have been deleted.

A Metaphor for Our Times

2008-11-21T20:38:00.003-05:00

I've been watching Mayor Booker (of "luxuriating in our deliciousness" fame) (and Newark) on the Colbert Report. Oh, and drinking homebrew. OK, the "Newark" part isn't fame so much as, well, that's where he's Mayor.

That's not my point, though. He was comparing America to a somehow-delicious symphony, among other things. It struck me that this isn't the "deliciousness" metaphor. Nor is the currently popular "tossed salad" metaphor of modern America. Face it, when is the last time you luxuriated in the deliciousness of a tossed salad? And how many of you chuckled when you read "tossed salad"?

No, my fellow Americans, I have a new metaphor for America. And it's one that we can all agree practically epitomizes deliciousness.

America is a banana split.

We've got chocolate and vanilla ice cream. We already understand that part of it. We've got bananas, which are yellow, or at least yellow-ish. Close enough, say I. Maraschino cherries are red (Hey, I didn't come up with the label. I'm a uniter, here.), as is strawberry ice cream, if that's your thing.

Now, I know what you're saying. "All that's left are whipped cream (whiter than vanilla) and hot fudge (which is more chocolate). Isn't that rather glaringly omissive?"

To that I reply, caramel sauce is just as delicious. Just make the chocolate ice cream double-chocolate or chocolate fudge, and you'll never miss the hot fudge. Trust me. Butterscotch is pretty delicious on a banana split, too.

Where am I going with this? I could really go for a banana split, and I'd wager ~~many~~both of you could, too. And when you're eating that banana split, luxuriating in its deliciousness, give a thought to the deliciousness that is our National Banana Split.

On a final note, which is eerily synchronicitous, Thomas Friedman is currently on the Report re-broadcast, and he kind-of looks like a dollop of whipped cream.

The Policy Here is to Aim the Cointreau at the Peach

2008-11-09T12:32:00.002-05:00

This popped into my head for no good reason today, and I thought I'd share.

Very Poor Housekeeping

2008-10-29T18:53:00.003-04:00

I think my house spiders are developing an attitude. And, if I'm not mistaken, a taste for human blood.

Ballot Questions in Montgomery County, MD

2008-10-28T22:08:00.005-04:00

This year there are two statewide ballot questions and two county ballot questions. Of these, Ballot Question A is the least clear, so here's some background information.

Sec. 311A. Limitations on Expenditures for Landfills in Residential Zones.

No expenditure of County funds shall be made or authorized for the operation of a landfill system of refuse disposal on land zoned for residential use. (Election of 11-7-78.)

Editor's note—See East v. Gilchrist, 296 Md. 368, A.2d 285 (1983); holding section 311A cannot be given effect under circumstances involving an order of the secretary of health and mental hygiene and requirement of local funding under public general law.

Sec. 311B. Limitations on Expenditures, Contracts, and Permits for Burying or Trenching Sewage Sludge in Residential Zones.

No expenditure of County funds shall be made or authorized for the construction or operation of a system for burying or trenching sewage sludge on land zoned for residential use, nor may the County purchase or contract for the service of burying or trenching sewage sludge on land zoned for residential use. Also, the County may not seek federal or state permits for the burying or trenching of sewage sludge in residential zones. (Election of 11-4-80.)

Sec. 313A. Purchasing, Contracting for Goods, Services with C&P Telephone Company.

The County Government may not purchase and contract for goods and services with the C&P Telephone Company (C&P) unless C&P includes telephone subscribers in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and Montgomery Village in the Washington Metropolitan Area Telephone Exchange (MET) at local rates no higher than local rates charged MET subscribers in Bethesda, Silver Spring, Kensington and Rockville telephone exchange areas. (Election of 11-2-82.)

Editor's note—In Rowe, et al. v. The Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company of Maryland, et al., 65 Md. App. 527, 501 A.2d (1985), it was held that Charter section 313A could not be given effect because it conflicted with a state Public Service Commission Order.

The League of Women Voters has a discussion of all four ballot questions, including (in part) the following on Question A:

Present Practice – The County Charter provides a framework for the governance of the county. Three provisions in the County Charter: 311A, 311B, and 313A currently have no legal force and do not affect how county government operates. The Maryland courts blocked implementation of 311A and 313A because each directly conflicted with some aspect of state law. More fundamentally, neither of these provisions are proper “Charter Material” because they do not address a fundamental aspect of the form and basic structure of county government. In addition, they attempt to legislate through a charter amendment, which the Maryland Constitution prohibits. Although the Maryland courts have not blocked the operation of 311B, a consistent line of Court of Appeal opinions makes clear that this provision, like the ones above, is in conflict with the Maryland Constitution’s prohibition on legislating through a charter amendment.

Quite Possibly the Funniest Spam Message I've Ever Received

2008-10-25T17:22:00.001-04:00

From: root@s119.evanzo-server.de (Cron Daemon)
To: root@s119.evanzo-server.de
Subject: Cron <root@s119> /etc/webmin/sysstats/sysstats.pl
X-Cron-Env: <SHELL=/bin/sh>
X-Cron-Env: <HOME=/root>
X-Cron-Env: <PATH=/usr/bin:/bin>
X-Cron-Env: <LOGNAME=root>

WARNING (eval)(disk.pl 176)  : ERROR while updating i3.rrd: opening 'i3.rrd': No such file or directory

Be Young And Beautiful Forever, Or At Least For Twenty Years!

2008-10-22T17:52:00.001-04:00

Defy ageing the natural way! Take up to 20 years^† off your appearance with the age-defying secret of flaxseed! But realistically no more than that! Ageing is as inescapable as the shifting sands of the Sahara, where the Riffian people of the Atlas Mountains have been defying the ravages of age for millennia by harnessing the cosmetic power of flaxseed!

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The Past 32 Hours

2008-10-20T17:56:00.003-04:00

Yesterday morning, I was mowing my lawn. This was quite the endeavor, since it had been a couple of weeks, the weather was good for growth, and I have a push-reel mower. This meant that instead of my usual mowing each row twice (up and back), I had to mow each four times, the first pass being substantial effort.

I'd finished the front, which is the worst part of my yard, mower-wise, and started mowing the side. The side is a bit of a pain, since it's on a slope, but it's small, so it's not generally that bad. As I'm pushing the mower up and back, I glance at one of my basement windows. And see a squirrel looking out at me.

Of course, I immediately cease mowing, and go inside. After pounding on the basement door a few times, I open it, turn on the stairway light, and close the door behind me. The squirrel is still sitting in the window, trying in vain to get out. I open another window, and it immediately runs over to it, but neglects to jump up to flee to safety. I figure that the window's too high for the squirrel to reach (a fact belied by the signs of gnawing I later notice), and stack a couple of boxes by the window. The squirrel won't go back, though.

At this point, the squirrel is, so I think, behind my TV and stereo setup, so I start looking around the basement to survey the damage (which at the moment seems minimal). That's when I see something that doesn't look right. There's a hole in the wall, through which I can see daylight. It's clearly a hole that was created by a human being. Not yet sure what the hole's for, I notice the dryer exhaust hose lying partially coiled behind the dryer.

I continued my survey of the basement, and find no sign of the squirrel. Now, I'm hoping that it found a way out while my back was turned. I close the window and go outside to take a look at the hole. It's behind a big plastic mini-shed that holds my garbage cans to keep the raccoons out. I see the remains of the vent hood, but no sign of the pieces of plastic that were formerly part of it. Given its placement behind the shed, I'm not sure how long it was like that. It could easily have been in that condition when I had the house inspected prior to purchase, though I'd hope the home inspector was more diligent than that.

The rest of the day was squirrel-dominated. After finishing the lawn, I went to Home Depot to pick up a new vent cover. While getting advice from the retired plumber working in that section, another customer (who was waiting to ask a question) ventured her own opinion. She claimed the plastic vent covers were useless, and that squirrels would just chew through them again. Of course, the store had nothing better. She finally asked her question, and was on her merry way, so I asked the plumber, "What would you use?" He didn't put much stock in the woman's claims, which are really probably more relevant if the squirrels have nested in the house, so I made my purchase and left.

Of course, with the current temperatures, it's not the best time to try getting caulk to set, but needs must win out, so my new cover is slowing sealing itself to the outside wall. However, I'm getting ahead of myself. After home depot I went over to Marco's to keg our latest batch of Winky Dink Marzen. Then I came home to replace the vent cover, which remains un-gnawed.

The day's manual labor done, I went over to my parents' house to borrow a squirrel trap. I didn't think the squirrel was still inside, but better safe than sorry. After baiting it with peanut butter, I called it an evening.

This moring, after getting ready for work, I went down to the basement again to check on the trap. I didn't get that far, though, because I could see the squirrel sitting at what it must have come to regard as its window. I opened a window, but it wouldn't budge. Figuring noise would stir it, I turned on the stereo and played NPR's pledge drive at high volume. That got it moving. Not to the open window, though. It was away from its window, however, so I opened that one as well.

There's a particular state of mind, helped along by wanting to get to work, that causes you to try to reason with a squirrel. It, however, was being thoroughly unreasonable. Fed up, I moved the trap into the finished part of the basement, close off the doors to keep it from going back to the laundry or furnace rooms, and left for work.

Knowing there's a squirrel in your house, trapped with your 42" flat-panel TV among other electronics, can make it difficult to focus on your work. I soldiered on, though, and put in a good innings. By the end of the day, however, the stress had my stomach a bit twisted.

Once home, I put on some old clothes (what I used yesterday to mow the lawn), a denim jacket, and a pair of reasonably thick gloves. Then I ventured into the basement. Sitting patiently in the trap was the squirrel. It didn't object when I approached, and only slightly when I lifted the trap and carried it up the stairs and outside. Outside—that was something it recognized, and became considerably more animated. I set the trap on the ground, with the door facing the large tree in my back yard, and carefully openened the trap. Squirrels can be, well, squirrelly, so I was prepared for it to view me as its foe rather than its liberator. No such occurrence, though, as it flew from the trap and up the tree.

I am now relaxing in an ostensibly squirrel-free house, enjoying some homebrew (Whitey's Gone Fishin' Pale Ale). And, of course, recording this for your entertainment. The clean-up will wait for another day.

The World Collectively Held Its Breath

2008-08-09T11:21:00.001-04:00

It's Olympics time, and this year in Beijing the world is collectively holding its breath.

This has nothing to do with the suspense of the games.

Maryland Driver's Licenses

2008-03-16T21:50:00.004-04:00

You'll find the following in the Maryland Code, under Transportation, §16-106:

(a)   Each application for a driver’s license shall be made
      on the form that the Administration requires.

(b)   The application shall state:
      (1)   The full name, Maryland residence address,
            employer, race, sex, height, weight,
            general physical condition, and date of birth
            of the applicant; [emphasis added]

Evidently, the Maryland General Assembly believes that the MVA needs to know for whom you work in order to determine whether you are a legal resident of Maryland capable of safely operating a motor vehicle.

This repulsive change to the law, which was passed in April 2003 and took effect in October 2003, was House Bill 838. The bill page lists the sponsors, and has links to how Delegates and Senators voted.

Hilarity Ensues

2008-02-26T18:40:00.002-05:00

I give you, Garfield minus Garfield.

From The Comics Curmudgeon.

w00t!

2008-02-19T18:49:00.001-05:00

That is all.

The SMC is Back!

2008-01-28T21:24:00.000-05:00

The Self-Made Critic is back, reviewing Cloverfield. I was laughing through the whole review, which is in perfect SMC style. I was also laughing through the comments. Of the 13 that were posted when I read the review, none of them seemed to realize that it was in jest.

No word if The Editor is going to make a return appearance, as well.

On Pigeon Populations in European Cities

2008-01-01T13:12:00.000-05:00

In the mid-1400's, the waning Hundred Years' War and the brutal Wars of the Roses left much of Europe, and England in particular, with greatly reduced populations. With nations eager to boost their numbers, various folklore traditions emerged regarding fertility. One popular myth linking pigeon consumption and fecundity emerged in London, from which it spread through most major European cities.

So great was the demand for pigeons that it drove quite a few technological and culinary advancements. The two most enduring developments from the 15th-century pigeon mania were the invention of crampons and gravy.

While the wealthier individuals could maintain private coops, for most people the typical pigeon on the plate was a wild bird. Pigeon wranglers had to locate and reach the wild pigeon rookeries, which necessitated new wall-climbing technologies. Eye-bolts were installed in many walls, and notches, called "pigeon toe-holds" (the origin of a common expression), were cut into many outside corners. The crampon (invented in Prague in the year 1483) allowed pigeon hunters to quickly attach to and release from installed eye bolts, without the need to repeatedly tie and untie knots. Hunters with this technology could collect many more birds than their competition, bringing in more profit.

We owe the existence of gravy to the foul taste of pigeon, especially the wild variety. Cooks would experiment widely with different ways to mask the taste of wild pigeon, preferably with something with superior flavor. Early gravies, being experimental, were largely pastiches of whatever was at hand.

The word "pastiche," in fact, derives from these culinary experiments. One early (and not particularly successful) gravy used orzo as a thickening agent, and crushed cherries as the flavoring. The resulting concoction was called "pasta and cherries," which was shortened to the portmanteau "pastiche."

The end of widespread pigeon consumption is credited to King Henry VIII of England. Concerned with his legacy, he consumed at least three pigeons in gravy with every meal (breakfast, elevenses, lunch, tea, and supper). In spite of this, he produced only three children, largely discrediting the pigeon consumption-fecundity link. Further, his death was the result of choking on a pigeon bone while enjoying a midnight snack. This was widely publicized at the time, though the official histories covered this up with a less embarrassing cause of death, namely syphilis.

Because of the taste and proven lack of efficacy, pigeon consumption dropped precipitously. With a century of cultivating the wild birds, most cities possessed sufficiently large breeding populations that pigeon eradication became impossible. One early attempt involved introducing hawks to Paris, but this was quickly ended when the hawks began preying on poodles. Since then, pigeons have become an endemic part not only of European cities, but (due to long-distance shipping) major cities throughout the world.

Dietary Supplements

2007-12-31T12:17:00.000-05:00

For those who think that FDA regulation of dietary supplements would be a bad idea, and that the current system works:

FDA: Chinese Dietary Supplements Contain Viagra [FOXNews.com]

The agency advised consumers to stay away from Shangai Chaojimengnan supplements sold under the names Super Shangai, Strong Testis, Shangai Ultra, Shangai Ultra X, Lady Shangai and Shangai Regular. The Chinese-made supplements are packaged and distributed by Shangai Distributor Inc. of Puerto Rico.

Note the "advised consumers to stay away..." Even though it contains a prescription medication, because it's sold as a "dietary supplement" the most the FDA can do (unless people start dying) is to advise people to avoid the product. Something capable of producing serious drug interactions, and that itself contains a controlled substance, cannot be removed from the market. The FDA also had no authority to test this "supplement" before it was imported and sold.

The simple fact is that we don't know what's in these quasi-regulated pills and potions. There are labelling laws, but they rely on the manufacturer, testing by the FDA is minimal and infrequent, and it's difficult to get even a proven violator taken off the market. There's a reason we have a federal agency whose purpose is to guarantee the safety of our food and drug supply.

Painting

2007-12-23T21:35:00.000-05:00

Previously...

Prepped:

Primed:

Progress:

Presto!

It's Not Stupid, It's Art!

2007-12-11T19:05:00.000-05:00

I've decided that anyone who espouses a view that I consider patently absurd is, in fact, a performance artist. Ann Coulter? Performance artist. (This has been suggested before.) That woman who wants to ban cupcakes and force Santa to lose weight? Performance artist. Creationists? The largest performance art troupe in human history.

It's a lot less disconcerting, isn't it? It can even be impressive, like Stephen Colbert writ large (OK, larger).

Oh, and I totally call dibs on credit for coining the insult, "Stop being such a performance artist," or, "What are you? A performance artist?" I mean, I do have to think of my legacy.

Advice for People Who Are Painting a Room

2007-12-10T17:42:00.000-05:00

If you're thinking of painting over the vents, please don't. It becomes a pain for whoever is going to paint the room the next time. It's not difficult to remove the vents before painting; it's certainly easier than removing them after they've been painted over. It's even easier to put masking tape around the edges, though you can't then be as cavalier with the roller. Actually, it's easier to remove the vents — two screws, pull, and you're done.

If you really want the vent covers to be the same color as the wall, remove them first, paint them separately, let them (and the walls) dry, and then replace them. It's more work, sure, but you won't then have painted the damned things to the wall. The better option is still not to paint them, so the next person doesn't have to buy replacements.

This has been your grumpy homeowner's rant for the day.

Culinary Meme

2007-12-02T19:14:00.000-05:00

JACE tagged me to keep this going.

What were you cooking/baking ten years ago?

I've been cooking to some extent for a long time, though for awhile my cooking was confined to breakfast-type items, mostly eggs. I took "Creative Foods" and "Baking" in 12th grade, to round out my schedule, but that was 17 years ago. Ten years ago I was in the midst of grad school, and I tended to keep things fairly quick and simple. I'd make stir-frys (often vegetarian, because tofu is easier to work with than meat), curries (with whole spices, of course), and the occasional macaroni with cheese sauce (not from a mix!). I'd also made a decent vegetarian chili.

What were you cooking/baking one year ago?

My cooking habits have, if anything, gotten worse. I still make the occasional curry, and I've learned how to make soups. Crock-Pot roast, in the colder months. Too often I throw something packaged into the microwave. And I make beer, which is like making stock, baking, and preserving all rolled into one. I'm generally cooking for one, which makes me less ambitious and adventurous.

Five snacks you enjoy:

I'm not much of a snacker, but...

popcorn, especially while watching 24
nuts, which I've started keeping on the kitchen counter in a pop-top plastic container
chips, with or without dip, if I've been stressed and have made the mistake of having some in the house
tortillas with melted cheese
does coffee count?

Five recipes you know by heart:

I rarely use recipes, preferring to wing it and go by smell. So, given that caveat..

cheese sauce
the way I make Crock-Pot roast
the way I make curry
real Belgian waffles (Brussels variety)
nachos (which is why the Super Bowl was invented, right?)

Five culinary luxuries you would indulge in if you were a millionaire:

This is a tough one, because my tastes generally run to the simple.

a home renovation to double the size of my kitchen, including putting in a pantry
a ten gallon conical fermenter
a meat grinder for making sausage, and someone to clean it
a wood-burning oven
a greenhouse with hydroponics so that I could have fresh produce, especially tomatoes and herbs, year-round

Five foods you love to cook/bake:

beer
nachos
macaroni and cheese, usually with sausage on the side
just about anything in the Crock Pot, if I can motivate myself to cook after eating dinner
pasta with ragout

Five things you cannot/will not eat:

As Cervantes wrote, "hunger is the best sauce." That being said, there are some things that I find unappetizing:

shrimp with the face still attached
anything with a mucous-like texture
pineapple on pizza
mayo on pastrami or corned beef (a reuben gets a pass, since russian dressing ends up not being particularly mayonnaise-like)
offal

Five favorite culinary toys:

five gallon ball-lock keg
Crock Pot
probe thermometer (useful for roasts and beer!)
rice cooker/vegetable steamer
deep fryer (though I haven't made wings in years)

Five dishes on your "last meal" menu:

If it's my last meal, it's still a meal, right? It should be coherent. So, we'll lead with the star:

lasagna
garlic bread
broccoli or brussels sprouts — I'd have to see which I'm in the mood for that day
Snapping Ginger Ale
a powerful anesthetic

Five happy food memories:

pretty much every Thanksgiving, including the ones I hosted in Ithaca
pretty much every Channukah, with my Mom's latkes and brisket
making filo triangles at home for cooking class, and having them come out perfect
making huge batches of Belgian waffles, just for the heck of it
the pot-lucks (both of them) that we had in Ithaca

Passing the Buck

I don't have many friends who blog (it must be an age thing). So, Stavros, you up for it?

Butternut Squash Soup, the Easy Way

2007-11-26T20:30:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine in Ithaca gave me this recipe. Hopefully, he doesn't mind me sharing it with you, the blog-reading public. Scale this up as needed. I make one of these per two people, and it's become a Thanksgiving staple.

12oz. (1 block) frozen cooked winter squash
1/2 c. heavy cream
1/2 c. chicken broth
3 T. butter
milk
pumpkin pie spice
salt
pepper

Put the squash, cream, broth, and butter in a saucepan, and heat slowly. Do not allow it to come to a boil, or the cream will curdle. As it cooks, the mixture will thicken. Add milk to get the desired texture, roughly that of cream. Season to taste, typically a small pinch of salt, a few grinds of pepper, and maybe 1/4 t. of the pie spice.

Beowulf

2007-11-24T10:36:00.000-05:00

I saw Beowulf with friends last night. It blew like "the wind that bark like a bird with breast of foam."

From the brief clips show in the advertisements, it wasn't clear that the movie was entirely computer-generated. It wasn't good computer animation. It looked to me like the Sims had made a movie.

We spent most of the movie lauging at both the dialog and action. It was, frankly, suprising that Beowulf kept his clothes on while fighting the dragon; it seemed to go against his fighting style. I was also interested to learn that the state of the art of computer animation is apparently incapable of rendering the human wang. It was like watching The Cosby Show when Phylicia Rashad was pregnant, but her character wasn't, so the director kept placing objects conveniently in front of her belly. In a display that Beowulf is in fact capable of learning, in a later battle he wore underwear, though in that "battle" he evidently didn't keep them on.

One of the most impressive features of the movie is that in the opening scene, before you've even seen the monster, you're already rooting for Grendel. The Danes in Heorot are being obnoxious. Grendel clearly just wants the frat next door to keep the noise down at their kegger because, you know, he's got to go to work tomorrow. Those sheep aren't going to kill themselves, after all.

As far as I can tell, the only reasons for this movie to receive any positive reviews are if people are still suckers for 3D (I saw it in a normal 2D theater), and the fact that cyber-Angelina Jolie was cyber-naked.

This may have contained spoilers, but I feel absolutely no guilt for not warning you. The spoilers won't ruin the movie any more for you than the movie itself already does. Am I bitter? Perhaps, but the last three movies I've seen in the theater are Beowulf, X-Men 3, and The Hulk. You'd be bitter, too.

Halloween 2007

2007-10-31T22:02:00.000-04:00

It's just past 10pm, and it looks like the tricksters-or-treatsters are done for the evening. This was my first Halloween in my house, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect, volume-wise. I bought five bags of candy, figuring I'd have more than enough, which is better than running out.

My usual thing is to get a variety, and let the kids pick. I'd been told by my neighbors not to expect a huge number of kids, so from the outset I let them take two pieces each. A couple of the younger kids only took one. What amazed me was that one of them, fairly late in the tricking-or-treating, actually commented that he only needed one.

I'm not sure if I should despair of this generation.

Metapost: Metainformation

2007-10-10T18:49:00.000-04:00

Think of this as housekeeping, but without the pine-fresh scent.

If you're a loyal (or at least grudging) reader, ask yourself these two questions:

"Have I submitted anything to the request line?"
"Have I told at least one other person, who probably doesn't know Mike, about this blog?"

When a Fish is not a Grape

2007-10-06T17:02:00.000-04:00

There is a common etymological misconception that the phrase "puppy dog eyes" traces its origins to 1957 at Wilmington, Delaware's Camp Wanahakalugee, a summer camp frequented primarily by the children of employees of the Dupont Corporation. The story was that a particularly bad growing season resulted in a crop of white grapes that were somewhat lacking in firmness. This unfortunate texture, when combined with the natural tendencies of the pre-teen mind, was supposed to have led campers to begin referring to these grapes, often included with the camp's lunch or as an appetizer before afteroon tea, as the aforementioned immature canine ocular organs.

The prevalence of this explanation is such that a recent random sampling of linguists found that an astonishing 97% of them believe this to be the correct origin of the expression. It is, nevertheless, incorrect, as the true origin comes not from the monied solsticial juvenile boarding institutions of the Eastern Seaboard, but rather from the arboreal recesses of Appalachia.

A young lad, along with his faithful hound, was fishing one day in an eastern-Tennessee creek. The dog, as well as the boy's fishing gear, were piled into the go-cart with which the boy had recently won the Sevier County Non-Motorized Downhill Race and First-Aid Training Course, his Radio Flyer wagon being in the shop at the time for a transmission rebuild. As luck would have it, the only fish biting that day were mud puppies, but their size was made up for by their number, and as evening approached the go-cart was nearly full.

The boy loaded the rest of his gear and the hound into the go-cart, and began pulling it towards home. While rounding a bend in the road, he glanced back and saw that his dog had been gorging on the mud puppies. Intending to scold the animal, the boy turned, at the same time letting go of the cart. Owing to the slight downward slope of the road, and the quality with which the go-cart was constructed, the cart immediately began to roll under gravity's influence, quickly reaching speeds well beyond the boy's capacity to keep pace.

Eventually, of course, the go-cart rolled to a stop, coincidentally not far from the center of town. The hound, both frightened from its ordeal and queasy from the mud puppies sitting uneasily in its stomach, began to exhibit signs of digestive discomfort. Much to the consternation of the gathered townsfolk, the hound began vomitting up the fish it had eaten.

Oddly, the most distinguishable feature of the mud puppies in mid-digestion were their eyes. The sight of the distressed hound and the fish eyes was by far the saddest thing any of the onlookers had ever seen, resulting in the expression "as sad as mud puppy eyes" gaining currency in the local vernacular. Over time, the most common usage was to refer to something pitiable by comparison with "mud puppy eyes". The expression spread to neighboring areas, and as it was employed increasingly be people having little or no familiarity with the origin, it was further shortened to "puppy eyes". The transformation to the phrase as currently known (with the earliest recorded instance being in a 1963 op-ed piece in the New York Times) derives from a misunderstanding of its origin.

The veracity of this origin for the phrase "puppy dog eyes" is established by the fortunate coincidence that a now-anonymous local was, at the time, recording local footage with his recently purchased Sears Roebuck home video camera. The audio, while somewhat faint, clearly establishes a prototypical form of the original expression. The video, for its part, while grainy, still conveys enough detail that you would likely not want to watch it on a big-screen TV.

The hound, for its part, was ultimately none the worse for wear for its ordeal. Local lore has it that it was extremely repentant of its actions, and subsequently refused to eat seafood.

In Honor of "Talk Like a Pirate Day" We Present "Write Like a Pirate Day"

2007-09-19T19:17:00.000-04:00

liusadhyfv 3 37y vfro87 873 yvro87resygf 43 87o o87v343 87f3 vr o8v3q7oq o87fds liufhv lksdh 43q 3

[Note: Most pirates were illiterate. Me hearties.]

My Dinner with Danger

2007-09-12T22:37:00.000-04:00

I was sitting at the bar at Johnny Spatula's, getting stewed on scotch with bourbon chasers. The door opened, basting the place in dusty daylight, which was odd, since I didn't expect anyone but me to be drinking at eight in the morning. I blanched as a meaty hand landed on my shoulder, spinning me around on my barstool like a rotisserie chicken. My worst fears gelatinized when I found myself staring at the ugly mug of Rocco Gelato.

"I shoulda known I'd find you here, Sam," he growled, "spending the money you owe me on the sauce." Rocco was a tough egg. He was real hard-boiled, over-boiled, and he looked almost boiled over. But I knew he was just steamed about the clams. I knew I'd have to feed him some half-baked excuse, I just had to hope he'd swallow it.

"Simmer down, Rocco. I'm working on a big case, a real tought nut, but it'll be a couple days before it's cracked." It was all a lie, of course; I didn't even have anything on the back burner, but it was enough to extract a grunt from Rocco, who left after one or two muddled threats.

I caught a cab that whisked me back to my office, where I could hone my anxiety over what that masher Rocco would do to me if I couldn't pay up. There was a wrap on the door, and in walked a leggy tomato in a lime-green blouse and a wine skirt that looked like it'd been reduced by half. She may have had bad taste, but at least she didn't have much of it. "My name is Bree Souffle, Mr. Trivet, and I'd like to employ your services."

"Have a seat, Ms. Souffle," I said, gesturing to an empty chair, "You look like you're about to collapse. Now, what's cooking?"

"It's my fiance, Ned Shanks. It turns out he was playing me for a fool all along, and the engagement was just a recipe for him to get his hands on my inheritance. I don't want the publicity I'd get by going to the police, so there's a thousand dollars in boullion for you if you can get my money back discreetly." A grand would square me with Rocco, with gravy in the mix, so I said I'd take the case.

If Shanks was on the lam with that kind of dough, I knew there was only one guy who could give me a lead. As I walked to where I figured I'd find him, my wool suit had me in a sweat in the 90 degree weather. I was braised like a ham hock, but at least I knew I'd be bringing home the bacon.

A couple of boring days of chasing down leads and getting my jaw broken, it looked like I was in the soup when I finally tracked Shanks down to the waterfront. "Give it up, Shanks," I said, "Return Bree's inheritance, and I'll let you cheese it."

"Why should I?" he replied, "You've got less on me than a kosher deli has ham."

"You forget, I've got this Magnum, and it's pointed right at that cabbage of yours," I reminded him.

"Baloney. You shoot that thing, and the cops will be crawling over this place like ants on a picnic basket." His tone was defiant, but I could see in his eye that he was waffling.

"Let them; Sam Trivet can handle the heat. Besides, I'll just tell them it was self-preserving."

"You're not getting the money, and this conversation is getting rather bland," he sneered, his self-assuredness steeling, so I peppered him with bullets. They say you've got to season to taste, and I've always been partial to hot lead. Now Bree's back rolling in dough, Rocco's got his bread, and there was enough left over for me to wet my whistle.

Clothing and Fascism — The Truth Can Finally be Told!

2007-08-08T18:32:00.000-04:00

Much has been written of Mussolini's ruthless pursuit of efficiency as a means to a strong nationalist economy. For example, it is almost cliché to point to the fact that under his rule the trains always ran on time, to preserve the freshness of the marshmallow fluff that was the backbone of the pre-war Italian economy. (It is chilling for modern geo-politics to note that the role of crude oil in contemporary Venezuela is essentially identical to that of marshmallow fluff in 1930's Italy.)

Less has been written of Mussolini's ruthless pursuit of carousels. He was completely obsessed with them, and was known to travel for hours just to see a single carousel pony that had been painted in a particularly unique manner. It was one such carousel that dramatically changed the direction not only of Mussolini's avocation, but that of Italian Fascism and, indeed, world history.

The carousel in question was part of Federico Fellini's Carnival dell'Assurdità. Before his career as one of the great auteurs of cinema, Fellini was well known in the carnival community for his fascination with the bizarre. It was at this carousel that Mussolini spied a toddler riding in a giant fiberglass pair of pants. Immediately, a spark was ignited in Mussolini's mind; a spark that would become an obsession, a frustration, and ultimately a humiliation.

Mussolini's idea was to design a pair of Techno-Trousers that would give the wearer the ability to travel great distances at high speed without tiring (while developing exceptionally toned thighs). He immediately focused the bulk of Italian technological research towards the development of these Techno-Trousers, though he was unable to convince Adolf Hitler to assist in this, being met instead with ridicule from his ally (who chose to focus German war-time R&D on the Combat Skort).

Work on the Techno-Trousers greatly influenced Italian foreign, as well as domestic, policy. The 1936 invasion of Ethiopia, for instance, was planned predominantly to gain control of Ethiopia's vast cotton resources. Mussolini believed this was essential, so that the linings in the prototype trousers could be changed to cotton from wool, which caused considerable chafing of the wearer. Mussolini was also motivated by Ethiopia's coffee crop, as Italian scientists were working nearly around-the-clock on the Techno-Trousers project, and required vast quantities of caffè perfecto to remain awake.

Ultimately, the Techno-Trousers never got past the prototype stage. The only known deployment of a Techno-Trouser was a prototype worn by Il Duce himself to help keep him upright during his legendary marathon speeches. This was noted briefly by several Italian fashion reporters as "Mussolini's big pants," which was followed quickly by the reporters being shot and the articles being purged from the record. Other fashion reporters, who entered journalism for the hem lines, not the firing lines, quickly took the cue and omitted any subsequent mention of Mussolini's clothing. There were, however, one or two veiled references made to his "strong fashion sense."

By the time of Mussolini's capture and execution, the existence of the Techno-Trousers project was known to the leaders of the anti-Fascist opposition. As an act of symbolic defiance of the Fascist war machine, Mussolini was hanged pantsless at his execution. It is a testament to the continued power of Mussolini's spirit, even in death, that photos taken of his lifeless body were framed so as not to reveal this final indignity.

Today, Mobile Armored Lower-Limb Outer-Wear (as they are known officially) are banned by the Geneva Convention. Rumors that they have been used recently on suspected terrorists, forced to participate in involuntary and hours-long games of "Dance Dance Revolution," are most likely fabrications.

A Few Useful Scripts

2007-04-20T09:07:00.000-04:00

I have a set of perl scripts that I use fairly often. They convert numbers between decimal and hexadecimal, as well as to and from dotted-decimal. All are released under the GNU General Public License.

The calling syntax is the same for all of them:

$ dectohex 12345

$ echo 12345 | dectohex -

This allows them to be chained together.

[dectohex]

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Copyright (c) 2007  Michael A. Marsh
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or any
# later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
# General Public License for more details.
#
# The GNU General Public License is available at
# http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt or by writing to the
# Free Software Foundation, Inc.
# 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor
# Boston, MA  02110-1301 USA
#

$usage = "Usage: dectohex  | -\n";

$arg = shift @ARGV || die $usage;

sub do_translate
{
   my ( $dec ) = @_;

   $hex = sprintf "%X", $dec;

   print "$hex\n";
}

if ( $arg eq '-' )
{
   while(<>)
   {
      do_translate($_);
   }
}
else
{
   do_translate($arg);
}

[hextodec]

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Copyright (c) 2007  Michael A. Marsh
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or any
# later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
# General Public License for more details.
#
# The GNU General Public License is available at
# http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt or by writing to the
# Free Software Foundation, Inc.
# 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor
# Boston, MA  02110-1301 USA
#

$usage = "Usage: hextodec  | -\n";

$arg = shift @ARGV || die $usage;

sub do_translate
{
   my ( $hextotal ) = @_;

   $dec = hex($hextotal);

   print "$dec\n";
}

if ( $arg eq '-' )
{
   while(<>)
   {
      do_translate($_);
   }
}
else
{
   do_translate($arg);
}

[dectoip]

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Copyright (c) 2007  Michael A. Marsh
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or any
# later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
# General Public License for more details.
#
# The GNU General Public License is available at
# http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt or by writing to the
# Free Software Foundation, Inc.
# 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor
# Boston, MA  02110-1301 USA
#

$usage = "Usage: dectoip  | -\n";

die $usage unless scalar(@ARGV);
$arg = shift @ARGV;

sub do_translate
{
   my ( $dec ) = @_;

   die $usage unless $dec =~ /^\d+$/;

   $hextotal = sprintf "%x",$dec;

   @digits = split(//,$hextotal);

   while(@digits)
   {
      $digit = pop(@digits);
      $digit = pop(@digits) . $digit if(@digits);
      unshift(@pieces,hex($digit));
   }
   while ( scalar(@pieces) < 4 )
   {
      unshift(@pieces,0);
   }

   $ipaddr = join('.',@pieces);

   print "$ipaddr\n";
}

if ( $arg eq "-" )
{
   while(<>)
   {
      do_translate($_);
   }
}
else
{
   do_translate($arg);
}

[iptodec]

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Copyright (c) 2007  Michael A. Marsh
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or any
# later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
# General Public License for more details.
#
# The GNU General Public License is available at
# http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt or by writing to the
# Free Software Foundation, Inc.
# 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor
# Boston, MA  02110-1301 USA
#

$usage = "Usage: iptodec  | -\n";

$arg = shift @ARGV || die $usage;

sub do_translate
{
   my ( $ipaddr ) = @_;

   @pieces = split(/\./,$ipaddr);

   die $usage unless ( @pieces == 4 );

   for($i=0;$i<@pieces;++$i)
   {
      die "IP address must be in dotted-decimal form\n"
         unless $pieces[$i]=~/^\d+$/;
      $hexvals[$i] = sprintf "%02x",$pieces[$i];
   }

   #$hextotal = @hexvals[0..4];

   $hextotal = join '',@hexvals;

   $dec = hex($hextotal);

   print "$dec\n";
}

if ( $arg eq "-" )
{
   while(<>)
   {
      do_translate($_);
   }
}
else
{
   do_translate($arg);
}

rms reminisce

2007-04-18T20:18:00.000-04:00

In keeping with my policy of violating my policy on not posting personal stuff, I had dinner this evening with Richard Stallman. It wasn't, of course, a one-on-one dinner. He was speaking at the university, and I was one of the group that went with him to dinner.

I have to say, I've read and heard a lot about his personality, and dinner was very pleasant and non-contentious. I was prepared for impassioned arguments throughout the meal. Granted, he spent much of the time catching up on work, but he'd certainly chime in with "GNU plus Linux" whenever someone slipped up and referred to "Linux." We were also watching ourselves to not accidentally say "open source" but rather "free software." I understand and sympathize with both points — he's right on both counts, if you want to be pedantic. As an activist who's always "on," it's his job to be pedantic, which can't be easy.

There wasn't much getting to know the guy, but I suspect he appreciated the opportunity to get some work done as the rest of us chatted, and he contributed significantly more to the conversation than just correcting our terminology. He seemed to enjoy his sushi, as well, certainly enough to get a couple of extra pieces.

What's the point of this post? None, really, other than to say, "Hey, I met Richard Stallman," and that, as someone who isn't a confidant, I found him reasonably pleasant to be around. Given many of the accounts I've read online, that seems to bear mention. You know, balance and all that.

Impressions of an Idiot

2007-04-08T14:17:00.000-04:00

Today, I mowed my lawn. From my last post, you know this means I pushed a reel mower around my yard. I also had to pick up a bunch of twigs, which took some time.

All told, I spent about an hour clearing my yard and mowing. I could tell I was getting a workout, and by the end I was ready to take off my jacket, even though it's in the 30s here.

My impression? It wasn't too bad. Given the first mow of the season is supposed to be the most difficult, since you're mowing older growth, I don't expect it to be a difficult lawn to mow. Negotiating the roots in the back was perhaps the most difficult part, but as I was mowing there I noticed that the grass wasn't particularly full, so some sort of ground cover would probably grow better there anyway.

The biggest surprise was that the slopes in my yard were much easier to mow than I'd expected. It helps that they're both short and narrow. Overall, I think my yard looks nice after the push mow, and I'll be guaranteed at least half an hour of cardio exercise every week during the growing season.

Idiot Not Included

2007-04-05T16:29:00.000-04:00

In another of an infrequent series of posts relating to me personally, as a new homeowner I suddenly have to worry about things of which I was blissfully oblivious in the past. Water in my basement was one such thing. Another is suddenly finding myself with a lawn that has decided, against all reason, to grow.

As a consequence of this lawn growth, I've bought a lawn mower. It has what my Dad refers to as a 1IP engine. That's one idiot-power. Yes, it's a push reel mower. This wasn't an effort to be cheap. Nor was it particularly an effort to be "green." Gas mowers are a pain, and electric mowers seem to suck. Electric mowers either have power cords, which, face it, sucks, or they have heavy batteries that make them a pain to push and that take a day to recharge (also sucks). I've used a good electric mower, but that model hasn't been made in years.

So, I researched my mower options, and a push reel mower seemed to make sense. For one, I have a very small yard. The front is mostly level, with slopes along the sides towards the back. The back is again mostly level, though with a fair number of tree roots. It's also only about half grass, with extensive slate work and some planter boxes. If the roots give me trouble, the back might become even less grass-covered.

If you're curious, I bought a Brill Luxus 38. I've only just assembled it and taken it for a test swath. I have to say, it's pretty nice. At $210, with free shipping, it's on the pricey end of push mowers, but it allegedly won't need sharpening for a decade. I've got it set at 4cm (it's made in Germany), which was a reasonably easy cut through some appreciable grass. So, while it's still a bit early to tell, I think I'm going to be happy with it. The weirdest thing about was that the assembly instructions were effectively in reverse. I suspect it would have been a lot easier to assemble the handle completely (one Phillips-head screwdriver required) before attaching anything to the reel. When mowing, it makes a pleasant shwuff shwuff shwuff sound — much nicer than the buzz of a gas or electric mower.

Mmm...beer

2007-03-31T14:54:00.000-04:00

I'm pleased to announce yet another blog. OK, this one doesn't get a lot of attention, and "Lying Scum-Weasels" was more-or-less a colossal failure. This new blog will be different, though. This new blog is: 36 Pints. It's about homebrewing, in particular about the homebrewing that my friends and I are doing. I'll be following each batch from inception to consumption. See the welcome post for more details.

Will Shill for Swag

2007-02-12T17:57:00.000-05:00

As a renowned blogger, my opinion carries a lot of weight. If you're a manufacturer or distributer of fine products, for example a Sumo Omni, why not send me goodies to receive a (most likely favorable) review on this very blog?

NOTE: No guarantee is made regarding my own renown nor the effectiveness of my personal endorsement. All shilling is at the risk of the shilled.

The Great Beerjunction

2007-01-30T21:11:00.000-05:00

Later this week, I'm bottling the second batch of beer (a Märzen) with one friend at his house. This weekend, I'm starting the second batch (probably an IPA) with another friend at his house. Sometime soon, possibly next weekend, I'll be kegging the first batch (a honey lager) at my new house.

I'm Doctor Zoidberg, Homeowner!

2006-12-17T20:03:00.000-05:00

I'm going to break my rule of not discussing personal items. I'm about to move into my new house. If you

feel like you should have my new address and phone number,
didn't receive my email, and
read this blog,

drop me a line.

This One Goes to Eleven

2006-12-12T19:47:00.000-05:00

This has been eating at me, and I can't be the only one. Whenever I hear that Eric Clapton commercial where he's talking about listening to records over and over, all I hear is Nigel Tufnel from Spinal Tap. "You can't dust for vomit."

And Only Seven Months Late

2006-10-18T21:55:00.000-04:00

Because this blog is nothing if not a bellwether for cultural trends, I feel obligated to direct you to The Show, starring ZeFrank. He's thinking, so you don't have to.

A Couple of Administrative Notes

2006-10-14T13:47:00.000-04:00

First, I have another blog, co-written with Luwak P. Civet, called Lying Scum-Weasels. It updates less frequently than this blog does, despite twice the authors. I have added it to the sidebar links for your convenience and derision.

Second, the request line is still open, and will remain so indefinitely until I get sick of it. Since Blogger neglects to inform me to which article a comment was submitted when it notifies me, any comment can become a reader request. To minimize confusion (if you're into that sort of thing), you might favor adding your requests to the comments of the original post, referenced above.

The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy

2006-10-11T22:23:00.000-04:00

The way Hillary Clinton is shooting off her mouth these days, attacking the President and blaming America, you'd think it was already 2008. Hillary's public antics are reminiscent of Michael Dukakis. The only good thing about Dukakis was the number of states he gave away to George H. W. Bush.

Dukakis is emblematic of the problem with Liberals in America, even down to his Greek heritage. I think we all know what kind of "family values" were practiced in Greece during it's so-called "Golden Age." Hillary's not shying away from the Homoliberal Agenda, either.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the Left is their constant drive to take the "God" out of the "governed." This agenda isn't always as obvious as efforts to repeal the Ten Commandments. Even our woodworking classes, which are as American as anything taught in our Liberal-controlled public schools, are being corrupted by the crypto-Darwinian message hidden in something so seemingly innocuous as "Gorilla Glue." As if "uncle Bobo" were in the shop at the next bench, using tools like the proto-human that atheists would have us believe he is.

It's no wonder that Liberals support abortion-on-demand. According to them, killing a cockroach with an X-Acto knife is no different than killing a fetus with a scalpel, since either one could turn into a human being at any moment. While the college-age Liberals seem to like living in their own filth and surrounded by vermin, we should never forget that the driving force behind the Liberal Agenda are the wealthy Californians and New Yorkers who want to assuage their feelings of guilt for living in immaculately maintained and pest-controlled mansions.

Liberal attacks on God are nothing new. Back in 1845, the Devil-worshipper Daniel Webster tried to block Texas' entry into the Union. He wanted to prevent a new bastion of Godliness that would stand up to his Satanic ambitions. Well let me ask you, Mr. Webster, would we have the transistor today if Texas weren't part of these United States? I'll let you guess the answer to that one. I can tell you for certain that your Rand-McNally road atlas would look a Hell of a lot different, without the economic drive provided by the natural resources of Texas. Instead of having to learn Spanish to give instructions to the Mexican who scrubs your toilet, you'd have to learn Spanish to understand the instructions of the Mexican whose toilet you scrub.

We have to remember that Liberals have a definite agenda. That agenda is to destroy America's moral foundation, and with it our entire Nation. This destruction is being done methodically, one moral precept at a time. One day, it's denying God's Creation. The next, it's defying holy proscriptions against sodomy. After that, who knows? Possibly attacking our divine right to own guns. (I believe that was Leviticus 12:8.) In November, remember to vote Godly. Our futures depend on it.

Hyper-Sensitive Fucknut of the Week

2006-10-03T17:57:00.000-04:00

This story is just completely stupid. Or rather, the the vice-principal is completely stupid. I'm an atheist, and pretty openly so, so it's not like I'm prone to coddling the God Crew when it comes to thinly veiled proselytizing masquerading as "private worship." But this is just moronic. What purpose is possibly served by preventing any student from reading any book (other than "controlled" books such as pornography, and there are undoubtedly people who would argue with that distinction)?

I'd be happy to see students reading The Bible. Or The Koran. Or The Age of Reason. Or The Necronomicon, for that matter. If they're reading, they're using their minds. Hopefully, when this girl reads her Bible, she actually thinks about what she's reading, whether to evaluate it critically or to figure out how the various teachings fit together into a single whole.

Imagine the uproar and protests if the school had prevented a student from reading The Koran. Muslim advocates would be up in (metaphorical) arms about this perceived attack on their religion. If I were cynical (OK, a touch more cynical), I'd say this was done deliberately to set a precedent for when a Muslim student is targetted by this sort of arbitrary censorship. Not that I think the girl was put up to this, but to the vice-principal, this could have been a God-send.

How Else Are You Going To Learn This?

2006-09-24T17:37:00.000-04:00

or: From the "Public Service" File

If you have an opened packet of chewing gum in your shirt pocket when said shirt goes into the wash and then the dryer, the gum does not, in fact, make a mess of the entire load of laundry. Instead, you'll find the paper wrappers from the individual sticks slightly shredded, and the foil-wrapped sticks folded neatly into thirds and slightly compressed. At least, that's how you'll find three of the four hypothetically laundered sticks of gum. The jury is still out on that fourth stick.

Incidentally, the comments are still open and being monitored for reader requests, which has, disappointingly, resulted in only one entry so far.

Wax Production in Medieval Germany

2006-09-09T15:39:00.000-04:00

The German city of Homburg is perhaps best known today for its contributions to haberdashery. Homburg, like it's similarly named cousin, was the birthplace of a casing-less ground-meat product, a revolutionary idea in Germany. Unlike the other ground-meat product, the Homburg patty was not, in general, favorably received. A common remark by the citizens of Homburg was, "Better on the head than in the mouth." Fashion at the time being at least somewhat subject to practicality, the Homburg patty was modified over time both to sit more reliably on the head and to be made of a material that failed to begin smelling rank after only a few days of wear.

Back in the Eleventh Century, however, Homburg was a major center of dyed wax production. It was noted particularly for a variety of purple wax. The color was derived from the extract of a local herb, Salvia puniceus; the mixing of this dye into parafin by the standard techniques (that is, melt the parafin, add the dye, and allow the parafin to set) resulted in an extremely uneven distribution of the dye.

As a consequence, the city's monopoly on Homburg purple wax™ (or it would have been, had the concept of trademark existed at the time) owed at least as much to the proprietary nature of the blending technique for the dye as to the geographic uniqueness its source. So lucrative was the purple wax business, and hence so secretive the dye-blending technique, that it was protected both by Act of the city magistracy and a committee of municipal witch-hunters. In the year 1031 alone, over 20 witches were burned at the stake for attempting to learn the method of making Homburg purple wax to use in the furtherance of the Devil's unholy purposes.

Particularly popular were Homburg's purple wax drawing-sticks. (The word "crayon" would not appear for almost two more centuries, when they were popularized throughout Europe by the Duc de Rayon, who was later commemorated by the DuPont Corporation for his pioneering contributions to chemical engineering.) Children in every south-German hamlet or burg could be seen playfully defacing their homes' walls with colorful drawings of horses and inedible meat products.

Homburg purple wax fell out of favor in the year 1036. A travelling Greek organ grinder named Stavros arrived in town in early May, after having been chased out of Saarbrücken by the torch-wielding citizenry for reasons that have been lost to history. His monkey, named Gunther (after the organ grinder's grandmother), escaped one day while the organ grinder slept after a particularly valiant lunchtime attempt to consume the local cuisine. Gunther slipped into the home of the Chief Magistrate through an open window, where he came upon a few unattended purple drawing-sticks belonging the the Magistrate's 9-year-old daughter, Helga. Being a monkey, and hence not especially adept at discerning the edible from the inedible, Gunther ate the drawing-sticks.

Upon being discovered by the Chief Magistrate, the startled Gunther emitted a simian shriek, reported to sound like "Mwa! Ha ha! Ha!" In shrieking, Gunther displayed his bare teeth, which had been colored purple by the wax. So amusing was this sight, that the Magistrate related it regularly at cocktail parties to anyone who would remain in his vicinity long enough to hear. Soon, the story of Herr Purpurroteraffe (as the Chief Magistrate came to be known behind his back) spread throughout West-Central Europe.

News of the Purple-Mawed Monkey of Homburg eventually reached the court of Conrad II, the Holy Roman Emperor. The Emperor, being of royal blood, took this story to indicate that a monkey in Homburg was attempting to usurp his throne. A military expedition was launched at once, with over one thousand troops assembled to march on Homburg. The military contingent marched to the gates of city, which they were about to sack when the magistracy requested a parley. The situation was explained to the Emperor with the assistance of some cleverly improvised hand-puppets, and the attack was called off. However, a condition for sparing the city was that they were to cease production of purple wax immediately and indefinitely. The citizens of Homburg eagerly agreed, secretly being grateful for the attendant decline in time spent scrubbing wax off of their walls.

The prohibition on purple wax continued for many centuries as a tradition among wax-workers, until 1908 when the Crayola Company introduced a purple crayon with its new "Condemned Colors" box of eight. Purple is now a widely accepted constituent of crayon assortments everywhere, only slightly diminishing the popularity of perennial favorites red and blue.

Riffing the Light Fantastic

2006-09-07T19:42:00.000-04:00

I'd like to do something a little different. I'd like to take requests. Use the comments, and give me a couple of words (perhaps drawn randomly from /usr/share/dict/words or the equivalent) or a phrase. I'll try to come up with something for as many of the suggestions as possible. I won't promise anything deep or well-researched, but there's likely to be a fair amount of sarcasm. Posts will appear as I get around to them, which will depend on the quality of the suggestions and how entertaining I find the whole exercise.

And no, this is not a cheap ploy to figure out how many actual readers I have. I'm pretty sure that number is somewhere between two and five.

Posturing

2006-08-10T17:48:00.000-04:00

I'm currently undergoing physical therapy for back pain related to decades of bad posture, exacerbated by actually attempting to exercise. Part of the treatment is to try to maintain better posture while sitting at the computer at work or at home. In order to remind myself to sit up straight, I wrote the following Python script using Tk, which I have named "nag":

#! /usr/bin/python
#
# Copyright (c) 2006  Michael A. Marsh
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or any
# later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
# General Public License for more details.
#
# The GNU General Public License is available at
# http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt or by writing to the
# Free Software Foundation, Inc.
# 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor
# Boston, MA  02110-1301 USA
#

from Tkinter import *
import tkFont
import select
import random

def callback(event):
    root.quit()
    root.withdraw()

root = Tk()
frame = Frame(root)
frame.master.title("nag")
frame.master.geometry("+0+0")
f = tkFont.Font(family="Times", size=40, weight=tkFont.BOLD)
l = Label(frame,text="Sit up straight!",fg="red",bg="white",font=f)
l.pack()
frame.pack()
frame.bind_all("<Button-1>", callback)
random.seed(None)
while True:
    t = 60 * random.randint(5,10)
    select.select([],[],[],t)
    root.deiconify()
    root.mainloop()

Users of Fvwm might find the following snippets from my .fvwm2rc helpful as well:

# Styles for various common programs:
Style "nag"             NoTitle, NoHandles, DecorateTransient, Sticky

AddToFunc InitFunction
+                         "I" exec nag

[Edited 8/19/06:] The original version had a memory leak. This version preserves the initial window, hiding it when clicked and revealing it after the 5-10min delay.

Wikipedia Redux

2006-08-02T21:14:00.000-04:00

After Stephen Colbert mentioned Wikipedia on The Colbert Report, the Wikipedia entries on the show, the character Stephen portrays, and elephants received repeated edits corresponding to suggestions that Stephen made on his show.

Only one word comes to mind to describe this:
Meow.

Biodeterrence

2006-07-31T22:06:00.000-04:00

Today the Washington Post ran an article on human-engineered viruses (registration might be required). While I certainly wouldn't want to discount the threat posed by bioweapons, it seems the press at least is prone to viewing threats in a overly compartmentalized fashion. To protect ourselves from bioweapons, we need stockpiled antivirals or other biological countermeasures, or laws to restrict the proliferation of the technology.

What seems to be ignored, though possibly not by the policy-makers, is the fact that the best way to protect ourselves against bioweapons is to prevent them from being used. Non-proliferation is definitely part of this, but one that is ultimately futile. The genie, as the cliche goes, is notoriously difficult to put back in the bottle.

We have at our disposal a considerably more effective deterrent. Consider that some country, let's call it Malignia, decides it wants to support a war of terror against the United States. Malignia manages to develop or acquire a biological weapon. If Malignian-sponsored terrorists sneak this weapon into this country and release it, it could spread very quickly causing millions or tens of millions to become severely ill or die. In response, we could launch a nuclear strike against Malignia that would completely obliterate its population.

The ability to pursue a disproportionate response to any potential attack from a terrorist state automatically gives us a strategic advantage, and is the nature of deterrence. It would be foolish to ignore this deterrent capacity in any consideration of how to prevent biological attacks.

Medieval Pandering Vote-Whores

2006-07-19T20:52:00.000-04:00

Here's what the House leadership considers the nation's vital business:

The House, citing the nation's religious origins, voted Wednesday to protect the Pledge of Allegiance from federal judges who might try to stop schoolchildren and others from reciting it because of the phrase "under God." [Associated Press]

Let's be clear about this. Our politicians don't think this is important, they think it will be popular. It's a bold move of stating how courageous they are to take a position with which most of their constituents agree and which addresses no real threat. Whether or not you agree with the phrase "under God" being in the pledge (dating only as far back as the McCarthy witch-hunt era), this is a waste of time designed to do nothing but garner votes in November. The legislation is, in fact, completely irrelevant. The Pledge was established by Congress, and the debated phrase was added by Act of Congress in 1954, so if the Pledge is unconstitutional without this new bill, it will still be unconstitutional with it.

This kind of legislation shows absolutely no respect for the intelligence of the voters. It's pure pandering. And it works. Our Congressional representation, in both parties, has been treating us like children or idiots, and will continue to do so as long as we keep rewarding them for it by repeatedly returning them to their elected positions.

Show the vote-whores that you've had enough of their pandering. The sponsors and co-sponsors of this legislation can be found at thomas.loc.gov for the House and Senate.

Net Neutrality, On The Record

2006-07-15T16:37:00.000-04:00

While looking through The Congressional Record today for interesting items for my new blog Lying Scum-Weasels, I came upon this interesting speech by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) about network neutrality. In it, he presents three examples of anti-competitive scenarios that could (though, of course, might not) occur if telcos were allowed to discriminate against certain traffic in the way permitted by the legislation that recently passed the House and is under consideration in the Senate. I found it remarkably readable and reasonable as a representation of the potential issues. It is not overly technical, yet does not condescend to the audience.

Naturally, network neutrality is a complicated issue, as most issues debated in Congress are. Neutrality and discrimination can mean different things, and for a broader discussion of the types of network discrimination that are possible, I recommend Ed Felten's paper. It's ten pages, and features a handy "Take-home lesson" at the end of each section.

A Random Tip for Embedding Python

2006-07-15T16:18:00.000-04:00

I learned this one the hard way. I'm working on a simulator, written in C++ and using embedded Python for the interpreter. It works great, except that the arrow keys spew escape codes rather than allowing line or history editing.

I poured through Extending and Embedding the Python Interpreter. An afternoon of searching on google turned up nothing. I looked for "embedded python," "arrow keys," "readline," "escape codes," and anything else I could think of in varying combinations.

The solution was ultimately to RTFS. I downloaded the source for the version on the machine I have at work (2.2.3) and the latest release (2.4.3). The solution, found in Py_Main() in the latter, was to import the readline module in my own program before calling PyRun_InteractiveLoop().

It's simple enough, and perfectly sensible. Why the hell couldn't it be mentioned in the documentation, though?

In any event, hopefully by posting this here I will have made life a little easier for the next poor soul who finds himself googling for how to get the arrow keys to work in embedded Python.

Slightly Belated Farewell

2006-07-13T20:14:00.000-04:00

I've got a clan of gingerbread men.
Here are men,
There are men,
Lots of gingerbread men.
Take a couple if you wish,
They're on the dish.

IDT are Scum-Sucking Bastards

2006-07-08T16:48:00.000-04:00

I tried to make a phone call today to a friend who doesn't live that far away, but far enough to be a regional call, rather than local, so that it's handled by my regional/long-distance carrier, IDT. After dialing, I get a recorded message that my call was "unauthorized," and that I should call IDT's customer service line for more information. I call, and the automated system reports that my service was terminated on April 30th.

Note that in this little saga, IDT never notified me that they were terminating my service, though I know why. I know because they've done this to me before.

See, IDT has this policy that if you haven't made any calls for something like two months, they "assume" that you've switched long-distance carriers. The fact that they keep sending me bills for $3.95 plus taxes and fees, and I keep paying them, and no other company has told them that I've switched providers, doesn't seem to matter. Oh, and the only way to know that this is their policy is for it to happen to you. At least I haven't been able to find anything else. In fact, their comparison chart showing a couple of their plans against competitors' plans claims there's no minimum calling for this plan.

Once they've stopped your service, the only way to get it back is to call, wait who-knows-how-long, and talk directly with a human being. And then, you still have to wait several days for service to be restored.

Since my local provider (Verizon) offers the same long-distance rate with the same monthly fee, I'll be switching my service over to them. That is, assuming they don't have an inactive termination policy as well. If they do, it's pre-paid calling cards from now on. That, or actually get a cell phone. Since I can't trust anything online, and have to ask a human being to be certain, I can't even switch my service until Monday, at which point I'll still probably have a wait of several days. Unless Verizon don't have their heads up their asses.

I'm certainly not giving those bastards at IDT any more of my money.

Update, 7/10: Verizon do not, it would seem, have their heads up their asses.

What is This World Coming To?

2006-06-06T20:33:00.000-04:00

I just went through all of the negative reviews for the remake of The Omen on rottentomatoes.com, and not one of them referred to any of the actors as a "devilled ham."

Spam, Egg, Sausage, and Spam

2006-05-21T18:23:00.000-04:00

Here's my good deed for the day. You might not be aware of this, but if you're in the U.S., the government wants your spam. Phishing, stock pump-and-dump schemes, "Nigerian" scams, bogus pharmaceuticals, forward it all (with complete headers, if possible) to spam@uce.gov.

For phishing attempts, many companies have specific addresses to which you should also forward the messages. Here's a list, sampled from phishing attempts that I've received, as well as a few other institutions that come to mind. A few of these (too few) provide a link for information regarding phishing, including the reporting address, right on their main page. Others required digging.

American Express: Anti.Phishing.Team@aexp.com
Barclays Bank: internetsecurity@barclays.co.uk
BB&T: InternetFraud@bbandt.com
Chase Bank/JP Morgan: abuse@chase.com
Citibank, Citigroup: emailspoof@citigroup.com
EBay: spoof@ebay.com
HSBC (USA-specific): usphishing@us.hsbc.com
PayPal: spoof@paypal.com
Visa: askvisacorporate@visa.com
Washington Mutual: spoof@wamu.com
Wells Fargo: reportphish@wellsfargo.com

Incidentally, AOL sucks. They might very well have an abuse address for phishing, but if they do they make it much too difficult to find. They don't even list an abuse address in the whois database.

Amazon sucks slightly less. They don't provide an email address, but they have a web form that's not too difficult to find. Go to www.amazon.com, click on "Help", and look for questions on security and phishing. I don't want to provide a direct link, since it's likely to change.

MasterCard is just dumb. They tell you to forward phishing attempts to them, but they neglect to provide an email address. "Priceless," indeed. There is, of course, nothing in whois either.

Rational Immigration Reform, Part III

2006-05-11T17:41:00.000-04:00

This is the third and final part in a series on immigration reform. The first part provided background, and the second part dealt with current illegal aliens.

There is still the problem of avoiding a flood of additional illegal aliens. By providing a (slightly punitive) path towards permanent legal residency, we maintain an appeal to other would-be immigrants unable to enter the country legally. Thus, without addressing legal immigration we are setting ourselves up for another wave of illegal entry.

There are, naturally, a number of suggestions currently on the table. The Minutemen are a vigilante group trying to enforce our immigration laws themselves. As with all vigilante groups, they have little or no training in law enforcement procedures, standards of evidence, or other sometimes subtle aspects of police work. H.R.3622 would grant legitimacy to the Minutemen as part of a border-sealing initiative. Other civilian border enforcement bills are H.R.3704, which would establish a Border Patrol Auxiliary, and H.R.4099, which would establish a Border Corps within a Citizen Corps. This last is notable in that it appears to relegate civilians to roles as spotters and general assistants to formal border enforcement personnel, the latter being the ones who would potentially detain illegal crossers.

Farther down the rabbit hole are H.R.4083 and H.R.4313, both of which propose building a fence along the entire border with Mexico. H.R.4437, which has passed in the House, calls for a partially fenced border at key crossing points, which isn't necessarily unreasonable. I will not address other issues with this bill, as it is very long and has been discussed quite a bit in public and in the Congressional Record.

It seems clear that our economy has become at least somewhat reliant on foreign workers. A guest worker program has often been mentioned as a means to satisfy this reliance in a legal framework that would control the number of foreign workers and the terms of their residency in this country. H.R.2330/S.1033 would establish a new category of visa for nonimmigrant workers for a period of three years (renewable once for another three years). It would also provide labor protection for foreign workers, as well as encouraging economic development within Mexico. This last point is important, as improved economic conditions in Mexico will decrease Mexicans' incentive to come to America looking for work. Other Central and South Americans might also prefer to work in a more economically vibrant Mexico, where the local culture more closely resembles their own. H.R.3333 is similar in some ways, though it limits a foreign worker to a maximum of 365 days in the country for every two years. While apparently renewable indefinitely, this restriction effectively prevents foreign workers from changing their status from nonimmigrant to immigrant.

H.R.3333 has an additional provision worth noting. It requires that a potential guest worker obtain an offer of employment before being granted a visa. In order to match potential workers and employers, the bill mandates an Internet-based job listing site. This has the distinct advantage of ensuring that any foreign worker coming to this country has a job lined up in advance. For seasonal workers who come to America at planting or harvesting time and spend the remainder of the year at home, this could be very effective. There is always the danger of exploitation, however, and the listings and employers would have to be monitored carefully.

Guest worker visas are just one aspect of the immigration reform that we need, and address only one of the reasons that people want to come to America. America is not simply a source of employment, it represents the hope of a better life. Throughout our nation's history, immigrants have come here with the belief that if they work hard, they can be successful and provide a better future for their children than in their countries of origin. In turn, we have benefitted from their hard work and ingenuity.

Immigration benefits this country, and it is time that Congress lifted the isolationist barriers to and caps on immigration that were enacted in the 1920's.

I would like to close with yet another quote from 1870. This one is by Sen. Jacob M. Howard of Michigan, in relation to the bill advocated by Representatives Fitch and Johnson, and was made on December 22, 1869 (page 300 of the Congressional Globe for that session):

I desire to call to the attention of the committee to whom this bill may be referred that very singular provision of this bill. It is not unlawful for an American to make a contract with an Indian even in Canada or elsewhere out of the limits of the United States for the service of the person employed in the United States. There is no law, and never has been a law so far as I know, prohibiting such contracts. If they are fairly and honorably entered into they are as binding as any other contracts, and I should like to know how it has happened that the Chinese, with whom we have just entered into a treaty of friendship and commerce, are to be excluded from the right which is enjoyed by the people of all other nations of the earth, and even by our own aborigines. The right of individual immigration into the United States, I notice, is preserved by the bill. That is all well enough. I have no fault to find with that; but I do object to a discrimination against the whole population of China, such as is embraced in this bill. I think it incompatible with the spirit of our treaty with China, and unkind and unfair.

Rational Immigration Reform, Part II

2006-05-10T16:46:00.000-04:00

This is the second part in a series on immigration reform. The first part appeared yesterday. The third part will appear tomorrow evening.

So, there is a problem. Is there a solution? Several have been proposed.

Enforce the current laws, and deport illegal aliens.
With most estimates putting the number of illegal aliens above ten million, it is difficult to see how this could be tenable. Nonetheless, this is the solution proposed by H.Con.Res.221, H.R.3693, H.R.3938, and H.R.4079. Perhaps the immigration laws should have been enforced more rigorously, but the time for that has passed. Similarly, we cannot deny illegal aliens treatment in emergency rooms, both because of the public health issues that would create and the mandate of emergency rooms to treat anyone who walks through the door. If emergency rooms cannot ask for proof of insurance, requiring them to ask for proof of citizenship would create a logistical nightmare. We also cannot exclude the children of illegal aliens from our public schools. For one, it is fundamentally unjust to punish these children for the actions of their parents—few if any of the children chose to come to this country illegally. For another, if they are here, and remain here, it is much better for them to have a basic education than to doom them to illiteracy, which increases the likelihood that they will eventually turn to a life of crime.
Grant citizenship to all illegal aliens currently in the country.
This solution does not have much traction outside of the Latino community, and even there its support is nowhere near unanimous. I list it here because I have heard it suggested, especially by members of the illegal alien community who feel that they are by rights citizens. This ignores the facts that:
1. They entered this country illegally; and
2. Many people who have entered legally have followed the rules, waited longer, and do not deserve to see those who have flouted the law jump ahead of them in the queue for citizenship.
Grant illegal aliens legal status short of citizenship.
This is a more reasonable approach, though proponents of this solution still differ on how best to implement it.

The problem of illegal aliens is not simply one of what to do with those people who are here illegally now. There is a larger problem of preventing future illegal entry into the country. Consequently, I would like to build on the third type of solution, while also addressing the broader problem.

I will begin with how to reconcile the ten million or so illegal aliens currently living in the United States. First, we must parameterize what is and is not acceptable. I believe it is fair to say that anyone here illegally who has committed a felony must be deported. It is also fair to say that a person in this country illegally cannot be granted immediate citizenship (barring acts of Congress, of course). I would go further and say that illegal aliens cannot be granted permanent residence status as their first legal status. This has the same fairness problem as granting them immediate citizenship, given that there are many people who have followed the rules and are waiting for permanent resident status.

This implies that whatever legal status we give illegal aliens, it must be temporary. Further, it should not have a shorter waiting period for permanent resident status than the status of those who enter the country legally. Consequently, upon attaining legal status a person should have to wait at least as long to become a permanent resident as someone who entered the country legally with similar status. It is not unreasonable to add an additional one year penalty to this wait time, as well as any typical wait time experienced by people applying for visas through normal channels.

As for the specific status, there are existing visa categories for foreign workers, both skilled and unskilled. The principal argument for allowing illegal aliens to stay is that they are gainfully employed and contributing to society. An illegal alien who can demonstrate that he or she has a job and is paying taxes should be able to get a temporary worker visa in some existing category. That person's dependents can then be given appropriate visas based on that. Because of the cost of leaving the country to obtain a visa, as well as the risk of losing a job, it should be possible for illegal aliens to apply for these visas from their current locations. This granting of legal status must also have a limited period of availability. This period should be long enough to process all illegal aliens currently in the country, and might be adjusted as the time to process each individual is better known. We might also require that illegal aliens seeking legal status demonstrate a basic proficiency in English or complete a course in English as a foreign language; this reduces the burden they will place on public services and is a fair additional price to pay.

I believe this to be a fair way to grant current illegal aliens legal status. If they are contributing to the economy, obeying the law, and learning the language, then they may remain. They do not, however, gain any advantage over those who entered the country legally. Unemployed illegal aliens or those who have committed serious crimes may not remain, though.

A potential wrinkle with this plan is that many illegal aliens are employed for less than the Federal or local minimum wage. Currently, they have no incentive to demand increased pay, even if they are aware of minimum wage laws, since to do so invites their employers to report them to Citizenship and Immigration Services. With legal status, there is greater incentive to demand the minimum wage. While not threatened with deportation, the threat of job loss is still present. If newly legal foreign workers lose jobs as they gain legal status, this could lead to workers declining to become legal or possibly a large number of legal foreign workers who have lost the eligibility for their visas. This is a serious potential consequence of legalizing current illegal aliens, and one I am not competent to assess.

In the third part of this series, I will discuss changes to the immigration system intended to deter illegal entry.

Rational Immigration Reform, Part I

2006-05-09T17:44:00.000-04:00

For reasons of length, I will be posting the following piece as a series. This first part provides some background. The second part will appear tomorrow evening.

If you've been reading the news, or merely not living under a rock, then you know that there has been considerable debate about the millions of people in this country illegally. It seems the only thing that everyone agrees on is that Something Must Be Done. For some reason, this issue is more urgent than Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, the Sudan, warrantless wiretapping, failing schools, rebuilding New Orleans in such a way that it won't get destroyed during the next hurricane season, or an impending avian flu pandemic. The only thing that might be as important to the American people is who in Major League Baseball is injecting steroids into their butts.

National priorities aside, there is a real problem, and it has existed for many years. We can trace much of the current problem to the Immigration Act of 1924, which severely limited the number of aliens who could legally immigrate to the United States. For many countries, their nationals were completely excluded, since the Act limited immigration to a fraction of that country's nationals who had already immigrated. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 eased this restriction somewhat, providing for a minimum quota of 100 immigrants from any country. This did not, however, substantially change the fact that 1924 marked the year in which America effectively declared itself no longer a nation that welcomes immigrants seeking a better life.

America remained prosperous, however, making it an attractive place for would-be immigrants, who might not have heard about the change in its attitude. Indeed, we have retained the Statue of Liberty as a national symbol, with its words of welcome:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
[from "The New Colossus", Emma Lazarus, 1883]

In truth, it was this spirit of welcoming that made America prosperous, and has infused us continuously with creativity, ingenuity, and industry.

The fact that immigration issues have come to a head recently, when Latin American populations are becoming more predominant in many areas and a majority in some, raises suspicions of racism in immigration policy. If this is true, it is certainly nothing new in the politics of American immigration law. Consider, for example, this speech given to the House of Representatives by Rep. Thomas Fitch of Nevada on May 27, 1870, as recorded in the Appendix to the Congressional Globe (the predecessor of the Congressional Record):

With so much of the speech of the gentleman from California [Mr. Johnson] as expresses unfriendliness to the encouragement of Chinese immigration I earnestly concur. I do not believe in the cheap labor which supplants contented and well-paid toil, nor in that social theory which would force the Caucasian to rival the domestic economy of the Asiatic. I do not believe in the policy of introducing extensively into this country a race who have a distinct civilization, religion, habits, and language of their own; a race who are alike incapable and unworthy of assimilation with ours; a race with whom polygamy is a practice and female chastity is not a virtue; a race who are thrifty in habit yet slothful in thought, apt yet retrogressive, educated yet without newspapers, courageous yet without self-respect, honest in monetary affairs yet without moral principle, faithful to obligations yet utterly destitute of any regard for the truth; a race which rears no families and acquires no landed property among us, possesses no past and hopes for no future in common with our civilization, and whose members are of their own will perpetual strangers in this land, where they never design to remain, and from which they contract to have even their dead bodies exported.

A longer tirade appears in the January 25th Congressional Globe of the same year, given by the Hon. James A. Johnson of California.

We can, perhaps, see echoes of this in recent speeches, such as this one given by Rep. Sam Graves of Missouri on April 27, 2005, regarding the Emergency Immigration Workload Reduction and Homeland Security Enhancement Act of 2005:

Mr. Speaker, I rise today still afraid for our nation's security. Not because of terror alerts, but because our borders remain porous. The enforcement of our immigration policy is impotent, resulting in a continued flood of illegal immigrants across our borders.

It is time for the federal government to stop letting unchecked mass immigration undermine the wages, safety, and benefits in one occupation after another. It is time for the federal government to moderate immigration and to treat American workers, citizen and immigrant, with the respect they deserve.

Our constituents did not elect us to help cheapen the quality of their lives by importing foreign workers at six to eight times the historical average. There is no getting around the fact that when we cheapen labor with unchecked illegal immigration, we cheapen our neighbors, both citizens and immigrants alike.

I do not mean to imply that the Hon. Mr. Graves holds the sort of repugnant racial views of Mr. Fitch, nor that he opposes immigration. A critical point to observe is that Mr. Graves is discussing illegal aliens, not legal immigration against which Mr. Fitch spoke. The protectionist arguments regarding American workers are, however, similar.

In the second part of this series, I will discuss illegal aliens in this country, and how we might grant them legal status in an equitable manner.

Dodged a Bullet

2006-05-04T16:02:00.000-04:00

Today, I had my first brush with the legal system.

Technically, I suppose it actually began about a month ago with a short questionnaire, but today was the summons. To be more specific, and to begin yet another sentence with a parenthetical, I had jury duty today.

It wasn't too bad. There were two cases on the docket at the county circuit court. The first was a civil case, and only seven people (six jurors and an alternate) were empanelled. My call-in number was high enough that I didn't even come close to having to serve on that one. The other case was settled before voir dire. We then had to wait to see if the district court needed an "instant jury," which they didn't, and at 3PM we were dismissed.

At the beginning of the day (8:30AM), and later at 11AM, a number of returning jurors arrived. The woman running the juror's lounge and coordinating the orientation and selection process announced that they were dismissed, which was met with cheers. She chided them for cheering, joking that it was making a bad impression on us first-day jurors.

They had just been dismissed as potential jurors for the trial of John Allen Muhammad.

Urgent (Though Somewhat Belated) News

2006-04-25T18:24:00.000-04:00

Joe Bob is back!

Chrome for Firefox and Thunderbird

2006-04-16T16:58:00.000-04:00

This one's a post that might be helpful for users of Mozilla Firefox or Thunderbird.

If you're like me (and I know I am), you're not completely happy with the fonts and display styles from either program, and you can't find a theme that really satisfies you. Mozilla calls all of the customization options for the display (other than actual document contents) chrome. I've gone through the trouble of figuring out some of the (undocumented) chrome settings, and now I'm passing the savings along to you with this limited, one-of-a-kind offer.

Sorry...I got carried away there for a moment.

Let's start with Thunderbird, since that's the one that I modified first. I was unhappy with the use of bold to indicate a folder or account with unread messages, since the switch from regular weight to bold changes the letter spacing. When screen real estate is an issue (and when isn't it, honestly?) this gives you the choice of having part of a folder/account name become "..." and wasting space by making the folder pane wider than it typically needs to be. My changes make the account names green, and folders with unread messages red. Accounts with unread messages ideally have their icons change, though that isn't the case for movemail accounts. When you change any of the chrome settings, you'll have to restart the relevant program to see the effects. Ideally, you should make your changes while the program isn't running, but I doubt you'll actually run into any problems, since the chrome file seems to be loaded at startup and then ignored.

The file to change is chrome/userChrome.css in your profile. If this file doesn't exist, create it as you would any other text file. Adding the following lines to userChrome.css will implement the above changes:

treechildren {
  background-color: #F1F1F1 !important;
  font-family: Nimbus Sans L !important;
  font-size: 14px !important; } 

treechildren::-moz-tree-cell-text(unread) {
  font-size: 13pt !important;
  font-family : Nimbus Sans L !important;
  font-weight: normal !important;
  color: #C50000 !important }

treechildren::-moz-tree-cell-text(read) {
  font-size: 13pt ! important;
  font-family : Nimbus Sans L !important; }

treechildren::-moz-tree-cell-text(folderNameCol, hasUnreadMessages-true),
treechildren::-moz-tree-cell-text(folderNameCol, subfoldersHaveUnreadMessages-true)
{
  font-weight: normal !important;
  color: #C50000 !important
}

treechildren::-moz-tree-cell-text(folderNameCol, newMessages-true),
treechildren::-moz-tree-cell-text(folderNameCol, hasUnreadMessages-true),
treechildren::-moz-tree-cell-text(folderNameCol, specialFolder-Inbox, newMessages-true),
treechildren::-moz-tree-cell-text(folderNameCol, biffState-NewMail, isServer-true) {
  font-weight: normal !important;
  color: #C50000 !important
}

treechildren::-moz-tree-cell-text(folderNameCol, isServer-true) {
  font-weight: normal !important;
  color: #00A500 !important
}

Some of this is slightly redundant, and some of it ends up having no effect, but it gets the job done. If you don't like (or don't have) Nimbus Sans L, you can replace it with any other font. The font sizes and colors are also easy to change. Colors are in standard 1-byte hex RGB values, so each color is specified from 00 to FF.

A more recent change that I made was to the overall menu, toolbar, dialog box, and other fonts. I did this to correct for a bunch of changes that recently went into X.org in Debian's unstable distribution. The lines to add are:

* {
  font-family: Nimbus Sans L !important;
  font-size: 14px !important; }

The "*" tells Thunderbird to apply this to everything that isn't otherwise specified.

The modifications I've made for Firefox are almost identical to the last change for Thunderbird. Again, you'll want to modify chrome/userChrome.css for your Firefox profile. Firefox seems to want to use smaller fonts (don't ask me why), so I've added the following lines:

* {
  font-family: Nimbus Sans L !important;
  font-size: 18px !important; }

For some reason, this seems to make the actual text size the same in Firefox as it is in Thunderbird. Your mileage may vary, but at least you now know how to set the font sizes for the browser or mail reader.

As an extra bonus, if you're a Gmail user, you might find some or all of the following useful:

div.msg div.mb {
  font-family: Courier !important;
  font-size: 14px !important;
}

table.tlc {
  font-size: 20px !important;
}

table.cv {
  font-size: 16px !important;
}

table.nb {
  font-size: 16px !important;
}

div.tbc {
  font-size: 16px !important;
}

div.nl {
  font-size: 16px !important;
}

td.ml {
  font-size: 14px !important;
}

This should go in chrome/userContent.css in your Firefox profile. Note that this is userContent.css, not userChrome.css. div.msg and div.mb control the display of messages. I like to use a monospaced font for these, since I often get email that has structured text in it, such as source code snippets or scripts. The rest control various decorations such as the list of folders, the panel with the "Archive" and "Report as spam" buttons and various "Select" options, the account name in the upper-right, etc. Again, once you know how to set these things, you can play around with fonts and sizes. As with the chrome settings, you'll probably have to quit Firefox and start it up again to see the effects. I've tried using the Web Developer extension to modify the Gmail style information interactively, but it doesn't seem to work.

Helpful Hints

2006-04-05T20:11:00.000-04:00

Let's say you're a deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, and you're looking for a little online action with a supposed fourteen-year-old girl (SFTYOG). Here are a few hints that the SFTYOG might, in fact, be an undercover sheriff's deputy:

The SFTYOG writes "tee hee" a lot.
The SFTYOG uses the latest slang, like "rad" or "tubular".
The SFTYOG does not recoil in horror when you offer to send her pictures of your naked fifty-five-year-old body.

The Futility of Anonymity

2006-03-06T19:49:00.000-05:00

As a people, we place great value on our personal privacy. Very few of us would gladly accede to State scrutiny of our every move. This sentiment is captured by one of our revered Founders, on the eve of war with Britain:

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

Closely related to privacy, many of us (myself included) are fascinated with and motivated to the enabling of anonymity. Though distinct, both rely on the ability to hide or obscure some information. Anonymity, like privacy, played an instrumental role in our nation's founding. But is anonymity real, or is it illusion? Is anonymity even possible? In particular, can anonymity exist on the Internet?

Whether anonymity might possibly be brought about, I cannot say. I would argue, though, that it has never really existed in the past. I doubt greatly that it will exist in the near future, either.

Why do I claim that anonymity has never existed? We will ignore, for this discussion, the variety of anonymity that results from an author's identity becoming lost through time. Nobody who wishes to benefit from anonymity has this in mind. What I claim is that true anonymity from our contemporaries is an illusion, because no work of authorship exists in a total vacuum. The authorship of The Federalist Papers is not known through the claims of its authors, but through their prominence as proponents of the Constitution and samples of their other writings. Even absent these, the articles were published in newspapers, and must have somhow been delivered. Even if under cover of darkness, the odds of avoiding all observation over the course of 85 articles is remote.

That aside, a letter might be printed anonymously by a newspaper, but that does not mean that it was received anonymously. The Washington Post, for instance, requires a name, address, and telephone number for letters, though names may be withheld on publication. Even unsolved murders have suspects: someone had motive; reputations abound; nobody knows the drifter's name, but they remember him and would recognize him. There is always speculation, whether or not there is proof.

In a society bound by the rule of law, and possessing rules and standards of evidence, a functional sort of anonymity might arise. If you cover your tracks well enough, you might escape official punishment. Social punishment, however, is another issue, and suspicion of wrong-doing is often enough to have a severe impact on an individual. If a crime or indiscretion is committed, and some individual "seems like the kind to do that," little else might be needed for community sanctions to be put into place.

Because there are people who are interested in anonymity, the problem has inevitably entered the electronic world, where it presents a special challenge that has attracted a great deal of technological interest. The fundamental difficulty with the network is that it carries data, which must be able to get from one location to another. This means that the intended recipient must somehow be specified, or the data sent in effect to every potential receiver in the world. An observation of this data reveals some or all of the path it takes, and over a large number of data transmissions, a determined adversary can learn a great deal about the data's origin. We can add to this the fact that our current network includes the origin of the data as a part of the transmission, though this can be forged without much difficulty, as long as a response is not required.

The exact origin of specific data can be obscured through various techniques. These generally involve the accumulation of a number of messages and their delayed transmission in random order, often with random "noise" data and simultaneous transmissions of data to receivers who have no interest in them but are participants in the "anonymizing" system. At best, these provide what is termed 1-out-of-n anonymity. That is, the sender (or receiver) of the data can be determined no better than belonging to a set of n individuals.

These systems rely on the honesty of the intermediaries (servers or other participants) storing and forwarding the data. While dishonest intermediaries can be accommodated, there is always an assumption about the maximum number that might be dishonest. This is unavoidable, and not necessarily a problem, so long as the assumption that is designed into the system holds. Because the assumption might be violated, we cannot say with certainty that the system is anonymous.

Setting aside the issue of honest participants, to what extent does such a system provide practical anonymity? The situation is very similar to whistle-blower hotlines. Calls to whistle-blower hotlines will show up in phone company logs; it is through law and convention that these calls maintain "anonymity." A warrant can negate this protection, however, and the existence of a whistle-blower is still only 1-out-of-n protection, since the set of people who could blow the whistle is limited. Thus there will be a set of suspects, and the difficulty of narrowing this down to a much smaller set will depend greatly on the circumstances.

1-out-of-n anonymity is a particularly dangerous illusion when the standards of proof are much different than in this country. To a repressive government, mere participation in a computer system providing this "protection" might be taken as evidence of guilt. Those taking a principled stand by using such a system, despite using it exclusively for activities that are already permitted, will nonetheless be viewed as subversives.

This leads to an issue that applies to privacy as well, and has more thoroughly been studied in that context. Encrypted communications are very useful for hiding the contents of messages from prying eyes, but again might in and of themselves be viewed as evidence of misdeeds. There is a term of art: rubber-hose cryptography. This relates to the fact that it is often not necessary to spend hundreds of thousands of hours of computer time to break an encryption key when an equally successful result can be obtained if you spend ten minutes to break a kneecap to learn that same key. The same approach can, in many circumstances, be used to "revoke" someone's anonymity. Technological measures, like all measures, have their weakest points, and these points are not necessarily (in fact, rarely) technological.

Where does this leave us? The technological approaches to anonymity have led to a considerable amount of very interesting research, both theoretical and practical. Viewing this research as a way to restore anonymity in an environment hostile to anonymity is, however, misleading. Anonymity, in its truest sense, has never existed. What appears to us as anonymity arises more from social convention and good will than from any real obscuration of identity.

A Red-Letter Day for the Internet

2006-02-01T18:10:00.000-05:00

I'm pretty stoked. One of my favorite net.funny.people, Lore Sjoberg, has just had his first humor column published by Wired.

Easy, Breezy, Comical

2006-01-30T21:03:00.000-05:00

Cover Girl has some new lip gloss that's supposed to retain water, or some such. I've seen the commercial for it a couple of times now, and both times one thing really strikes me about the ad. When the model has this "amazing" lip gloss on, it looks like she's wearing a pair of wax lips.

I'm not sure if that's the effect Cover Girl was going for.

Why Blogging has been Light

2006-01-24T22:31:00.000-05:00

Big Brother is Watching...For the Children

2006-01-24T22:22:00.000-05:00

Everyone, it seems, is abuzz about the Department of Justice subpoenaing Google's records of searches performed by all users over the course of some presumably arbitrary week. The International Herald Tribune has a short but pointed story about this that addresses a number of significant issues.

What bothers me about this story, however, is the following quote:

Protecting minors from the nastier material on the Internet is a valid goal; the courts have asked the government to test whether technologies for filtering out the bad stuff are effective.

The first problem I have with this is that it is almost universally true that when someone advocates some action or law "for the children," it's an emotional appeal that has more to do with advancing a personal agenda than benefitting any actual children.

That's not my main complaint, however. I'm more concerned with the casual assertion that government intervention, and specifically technological intervention, is good.

Technological solutions are, generally speaking, the worst solutions, especially when the technology must make a yes-or-no decision on any particular item. This is because technology lacks nuance. The classic example of this was early web filtering programs that prevented children from reading information on breast cancer because the web pages contained the word "breast."

More recent filters are considerably more sophisticated, but there will still be grey areas. Does the use of the word "fuck" make this page unacceptable for children? Does it make this entire site unacceptable? And what about these fine individuals? (Links provided by http://blogs.herald.com/dave_barrys_blog/.)

If you have an email address, you probably know how quickly spammers adapt to the latest filtering techniques, leading to an arms race between spammers and spam-filter authors. The only way to eliminate all the spam is to filter out everything, but of course that isn't particularly useful. Anything less will filter potentially desirable (and innocuous) content while still allowing some objectionable content through.

Slightly better, in the sense of not being as bad, are legislative measures. The law, at least, allows for shades of grey. Laws are difficult to enforce online, however, and fairly easy to circumvent. They also tend to focus on punishing behavior rather than preventing it, though the threat of punishment can serve as a deterrent.

The real problem, though, is not that the web is a big, open, and sometimes dangerous place for children (and adults). The problem is that parents are too quick to provide their children with the tools to access the web without also providing supervision. A computer connected to the Internet is a powerful piece of technology. Just as a parent shouldn't give a child a gun or the keys to the family sedan, a parent shouldn't give a child unlimited and unsupervised access to a worldwide computer network.

The bottom line is that the best way for parents to ensure their children's safety online is to know what they're doing and when, and not to treat computers as just another type of toy. Not only will that produce real improvements in online safety for kids, it will give the government less of an excuse to invade our privacy or restrict our activities.

It's Amazing What You Can Do with Two Pieces of Foam

2005-12-10T16:11:00.000-05:00

I went to the grocery store today, a trip made considerably more pleasant by the use of ear plugs.

Seriously, what is wrong with people? Just because a song has the word "Christmas" in its lyrics over and over, that doesn't make the song good.

This is Truly Worrying

2005-11-18T19:23:00.000-05:00

Apparently, al Qaeda's intelligence capabilities now rival our own.

This Just In...

2005-11-09T19:49:00.000-05:00

Right now, I'm watching Todd Lynn on Comedy Central. He's my new hero.

Proud to be a Cornellian

2005-10-28T18:24:00.000-04:00

I hold two Bachelor of Science degrees from Cornell University, and have spent ten years of my life affiliated with the institution in one way or another. I was thus delighted to read in What's New (by Prof. Bob Park at my current employer the University of Maryland) that Cornell President Hunter Rawlings has not merely come out against the creeping influence of "Intelligent Design," but has committed the university to a campaign of public outreach designed to educate more Americans about the basic fallacies underlying ID. I can only hope that this effort will not only be successful, but that it will be extended to other realms of public abandonment of science. I won't get on my soapbox here; I just wanted to say how happy I am about President Rawlings' declaration.

What the Wiki?

2005-10-27T19:10:00.000-04:00

It seems to be pick-on-Wikipedia-day, so I figured I'd add my inconsequential voice into the fray. After all, the very fact that I have a blog means I'm a trendster. Before I trash Wikipedia, or at least the theoretical underpinning behind it, I'd like to note that I've found its articles on mathematics and statistics extremely useful.

The Register is running an article about Wikipedia, and ostensibly how it's a different kind of "open" than Linux. The article, however, really only touches briefly on this, preferring rather to focus on how Wikipedia differs from a traditional encyclopedia and why these differences are bad.

What disappoints me is that Mr. Orlowski (the author) misses the opportunity to highlight what I believe is the major fallacy behind Wikipedia. I refer, of course, to the idea of "Collective Intelligence," the theory that if you get enough regular schlubs together, you end up with a virtual Leonardo Da Vinci. To this I say: Hogwash!

I've seen very little rigorous discussion of Collective Intelligence (or the more soundbite-friendly "Hive Mind"). What I've seen, however, is very different than the purported effect behind Wikipedia's brilliance. The basis for the theory of Collective Intelligence seems to be that if you ask people who have a basic familiarity with, but no concrete data on, some thing, their estimates about that thing will tend to be distributed around the true value.

Note how different this is than, "if you have enough people reading and correcting an article, its quality and accuracy will gradually improve." Mr. Orlowski gives the lie to this with his quote of Carlo Graziani with which many will sympathise:

I'm relieved to see other people are also wary of information that they get from a source whose organizing principle appears to be that twenty jackasses make an expert. Although after reading your take on Wikipedia, it appears that the actual situation is worse - the output produced by twenty jackasses plus one expert is indistinguishable from what would be produced by twenty-one jackasses.

Unfortunately, I can't track down the original article, so I don't know to whom Mr. Graziani is responding.

The important point is that collective intelligence merely implies that as you ask more people to estimate some quantity, there's a good chance that the average will more closely approach the true value. That's all. You get no guarantees. You get nothing qualitative, nothing descriptive.

That's not to say that Wikipedia is an evil that must be wiped from the face of the Earth. As I wrote at the outset, I've found some of their articles very useful. The idea of a collaborative encyclopedia is fascinating. Supporting the idea with the misapplication of a set of empirical observations is just foolish.

This Week in God

2005-09-04T16:12:00.000-04:00

With the devastation along the Gulf Coast, people are praying for their god's help in getting through the human tragedy, either on their own or others' behalf. What relief people are receiving comes from emergency response groups such as FEMA, and much of this relief seems to be directed towards New Orleans, leaving many smaller towns neglected. There is, so far as I've heard, no word on why their god decided to destroy a large stretch of coastal towns and many lives. Presumably, the reason is somewhat similar to that for the December tsunami.

Will these prayers make a difference? I wouldn't have thought so, as an avowed atheist, but then apparently Pat Robertson's prayer for his god to off a Supreme Court justice was answered. That might, of course, be a coincidence. After all Chief Justice Rehnquist has been very ill for awhile.

Still, we might forgive Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez if he's feeling a little anxious.

What the Hell's Wrong with Congress?

2005-09-03T15:44:00.000-04:00

I don't mean the speed with which they're reacting to the hurricane. I don't even mean the way they seem to prefer political speeches and mutual congratulation to actual action.

Just how technically incompetent are their staffs? The military has had portable two-way radios for decades. As in, since WWII. And the radios are even better now.

If you're the Representative for one of the storm-hit areas, get a damned portable radio, and take it (either personally or send it with a high-level staffer) home to find out how your constituents are doing and what they need. This isn't rocket science.

Donate through www.usafreedomcorps.gov or www.redcross.org. Amazon also has 1-click donation set up for the Red Cross, which puts less of a strain on the official Red Cross site.

Pot, Meet Kettle

2005-08-15T18:53:00.000-04:00

I don't want to risk an aneurysm, so rather than another polemic, I'll keep this short.

James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family (there are a number of web sites with that general theme and that would like your credit card information, but I'm not sure that's what it means in this context), said the following at Justice Sunday II (mandatory subtitle: Electric Boogaloo):

There is a majority on the Supreme Court that is— and you'll have to pardon me, but this is the way I see it— they're unelected and unaccountable and arrogant and imperious and determined to redesign the culture according to their own biases and values and they're out of control. And I think they need to be reigned in.

We can say the exact same thing about the leaders of the fundamentalist Christian movement.

I Just Had to Share

2005-08-15T17:49:00.000-04:00

French bread, cut into thin (~1/4 inch) rounds. Scoop up a dollop of hummus (such as roasted garlic). Top with a little sharp bleu cheese.

You're welcome.

Just a Thought

2005-08-11T23:59:00.000-04:00

If people stop going to Rob Schneider movies, they'll stop making Rob Schneider movies.

Science is Science, Dammit!

2005-08-11T08:37:00.000-04:00

Who the fuck cares what religious leaders think about evolution?

Seriously, are we allowing artists or literary theorists dictate our science curricula? These atavistic, knuckle-dragging morons are the last people who should be determining what gets taught in a science class. If they need to control some aspect of the curriculum, give them phys. ed.—that's about the right level for their intellects.

For some bizarre reason, neo-Creationists (and that's what the "Intelligent Design" advocates are, whatever they say) just love to use the second law of thermodynamics as an argument against random mutations leading to greater complexity. Hey, you might not have noticed, but there's this big, yellow, glowing thing in the sky an average of twelve hours every day, and it makes things hot. The second law applies to closed systems. That means no outside source (or sink) of energy. It also applies to entropy on the whole. There's absolutely no inconsistency between the second law of thermodynamics and a piece of a closed system becoming more ordered, as long as the order of the system taken as a whole decreases.

Oh, and the "scientific debate" over evolution? Yeah, just when the blue and red monkey-birds speciated is the lynch-pin of evolution. If biologists can't agree on that, the whole thing must be wrong. Or whether new features evolve only when there's an open niche due to extinctions or whether they evolve constantly and rarely provide sufficient advantage to oust the current niche-holder (or other members of their own species). That's another major debate by which evolution must stand or fall.

People who claim that evolution (random mutations, competition for resources) can't explain the variety or complexity of life are lacking in imagination. Just because they can't see how it could happen doesn't mean it couldn't happen. So their intellectual laziness should trump the work of people who have spent years studying and understanding evolution? Does anything else in life work this way?

Do evolutionary biologists understand every aspect of how every current species (or really any current species) came to be? No, of course not. The fossil record is necessarily incomplete, since fossilization is so rare. Is this a problem? If you're trying to trace a complete lineage (whatever that might mean, given evolutionary changes are extremely slow), then sure, it's a problem, or rather an obstacle. If you're trying to explain the origin of species more generally, then no, it's no problem at all. Any particular lineage might be spotty, but there are so many examples of gradual changes within large groups of species, and so many observable examples of micro-evolution in the lab today, that the general framework of the theory holds up very well.

Let's put this in perspective. Darwin's theory of evolution has held up better than Newton's theory of classical mechanics. You know, that whole "F=ma" thing? What they use to plot the trajectories of inter-planetary spacecraft? Evolution has perhaps required a few tweaks over the years, as we learn more (and isn't that what science is all about?) (unless, apparently, if you live in Kansas) (OK, the 60% of Kansas that voted to appoint blithering idiots to the school board). Mechanics required a substantial re-writing in 1905 when Einstein realized that there was a fundamental limit to how fast things can go. Oh yeah, and then there was the 1920's, when another group of physicists discovered that when things get really small, you have to throw a whole bunch of the theory away and replace it with something really weird (and I say this as someone who holds a PhD in physics).

Intelligent Design is fundamentally intellectually dishonest. It's authors and supporters shouldn't be telling others what to teach in science class, they should take the class themselves. Who knows? They might even learn something.

Who'd've Thought JR?

2005-07-22T21:13:00.000-04:00

It's been almost a month since my last post, so the recent nomination of John Roberts for the Supreme Court seems like a good reason to write something. To start with, I'd like to point out the following: John, Jane, Josie, Jack. Judge Roberts loses points right away for that whole alliterative theme.

That aside, it's hard to know what kind of a Supreme Court justice he'll make. By all accounts, he's very knowledgeable, very reasonable, and very nice. He's argued conservative positions, but he's also argued liberal positions. He's a lawyer, and apparently a good one, so the fact that he's argued one way or another says very little about his personal views.

A lot of people have commented on the fact that he's a white male. Perhaps it's because I'm not a minority individual (though seriously, isn't it about time that we had an atheist justice on the Supreme Court?), but I don't really see his race or gender as an issue. I'd much rather think that the President selected a candidate based on competence and (yes) compatible ideology than to fit a particular racial, ethnic, or gender profile. President Bush has already made enough token appointments—Condoleeza Rice might be brilliant, but she doesn't appear to be good at the positions she's held in the administration—I think we can cut him a break on this one. Better a somewhat moderate white male than an ultra-conservative woman.

Again, we don't know what kind of Supreme Court justice he'll be, and that's part of the problem. He might be great, but we have no way to assess that. He's been a judge for about two years, which isn't a lot of time to rate his performance and approach to the law. He's been nominated for the highest court in the nation; the only promotion he can contemplate is to Chief Justice.

This is actually a longer post that I'd expected to write, so I'll close with the following brief comment: If Karl Rove leaked Valerie Plame's identity to the press, he should be nailed to the wall. I find it disappointing that intentionally exposing an undercover intelligence agent isn't considered treason.

Unforgiven

2005-06-25T14:36:00.000-04:00

I'm listening to "Weekend America" on NPR or PRI or whatever organization produces it. They're talking about forgiveness, and in particular the recently convicted Edgar Ray Killen. They interviewed a pastor from the church which was burned in part to lure the activists to Philadelphia, Mississippi. The pastor, Rev. William Young, talked about the importance of forgiveness, and the fact that Killen's crime was not unforgiveable.

I'm not a trained philosopher or ethicist, so I guess my opinion doesn't count for much in this regard. However, I believe that the only injuries a person has the right or ability to forgive are injuries against himself. Nobody has the right to forgive on someone else's behalf.

In the case of a killing, whether intentional or not, the family and friends of the deceased have suffered injury as well as the deceased. Their pain can be forgiven. The injury to the deceased cannot, however, be forgiven, because the deceased has lost the facility to forgive. Just as he has been deprived of his right to live, he has also been deprived of his right to forgive that deprivation.

Crass Commercialism

2005-06-22T20:34:00.000-04:00

There's a Heineken commercial, you might have seen it, where the newest member of some sort of superhero team displays his superpower of turning a shoe into a bottle of beer. This is evidently more impressive than flying.

A six pack of a really good import might be about ten dollars.

A cheap pair of shoes is maybe twenty dollars.

Are our nation's superheroes (work with me here) rolling bums for their shoes because they don't have beer money?

Thought for the Day

2005-05-25T21:17:00.000-04:00

Anybody here seen the fuzzy-wuzzy loving cup explosion?

I think we missed it.

Check, Please!

2005-05-18T20:31:00.000-04:00

Our Constitution establishes a set of checks and balances between the three branches of government. This prevents any one branch from dominating and rendering one or both of the others irrelevant. The relative balance tends to shift over time, typically between the executive and the legislative branches, but overall one is ineffective without at least some support from the others.

While factionalism was already present during the drafting of the Constitution (most notably the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists), these factions were not included in the design of government. This stands in contrast to parliamentary systems, where political parties are made an explicit part of the government.

Here, the parties form what might be called extra-Constitutional branches of government. The checks and balances on the parties that are absent from the Constitution are instead embodied in the procedural rules of the House of Representatives and the Senate. In general, the impact of these rules is not felt so long as different branches of the government are controlled by different parties. The tensions between parties and the tensions between branches tend to combine, restraining imbalance through partisanship.

At this point, it is appropriate to take a closer look at partisan politics. Taking a charitable view, we will assume that all of our elected officials have the best interests of the citizenry at heart, and are not motivated by personal ambition or power. Entry into politics is typically through one of the major parties, so by the time a politician reaches national office, he or she has had many years working within the party structure. While individuals often have personal views of what is good or bad for the country that would be difficult to fit into the ideals of one particular party, they often identify more closely with one party than another.

Identifying with a party is fine, of course. The tendency of a partisan, however, is to come to view the positions of his or her party as the best positions for the country as a whole. Working for the common good thus becomes working to ensure that the party acquires or maintains control of the government, since this puts it in the best position to implement the policies that are "right."

In politics, there is rarely a unique definition of "right," however. If one party is "right," the other must be "wrong," albeit misguided rather than malicious. When the opportunity presents itself, it is therefore advantageous for a party to exert its influence as completely as possible. The opposition will, of course, eventually see the error of its ways and concede that the policies implemented truly were the ones the country needed.

In this way, parties tend to arrogate to their positions an almost divine right. This same arrogance afflicts the different branches of government as well, but there the Constitution mitigates its effects. When one party controls all or substantially all of the government, its arrogance is checked only by its respect for the established rules of engagement with the other party.

Of course, we now find ourselves in the circumstance where one party controls the executive, the legislature, and a respectable fraction of the judiciary. With the presence of judicial vacancies, it is natural that this party wants to fill those vacancies with judges sympathetic to the party's ideals.

Federal judges are a unique group within the government. Unelected, they serve terms considerably longer than any elected officials. This makes their selection a matter of great significance, as they wield considerable influence.

Approving a judicial nomination requires only a simple majority in the Senate. Clearly, if put to a vote an nominee favorable to the controlling party will easily win confirmation. Committees tend to be stacked in favor of the controlling party as well, so committee hearings give the opposition little leverage to object to nominees.

The opposition is left with one option with which to object to judicial nominees: prevent the nominee from coming up for a vote. This is more than a courtesy to the opposition; it is the only voice the opposition has in the process. While much of the Senate's business can be conducted with only a simple majority, important decisions such as filling the Federal Bench deserve a check by the minority.

A common argument for preserving the minority's right to filibuster judicial nominees is that eventually the tables will turn, and the party currently in the majority will find itself in the minority and faced with a similarly distasteful situtation. While this is a perfectly reasonable argument, I would like to present another. The purpose of checks and balances is to rein in political arrogance, and to acknowlege our inherent fallibility. The longer the results of our decisions last, the greater the humility we should exhibit when making them. For this reason, if for no other, we must preserve the partisan checks and balances established not by Constitution, but by civility, by collegiality, and by decency.

Is Bush Making Sense?

2005-04-30T19:15:00.000-04:00

Well, no, not really. That much should be obvious. I have to say, though, that I was impressed to hear him broach the topic of actual benefits reductions in Social Security.

What he's now advocating isn't actually a reduction in benefits, but a reduction in the growth of benefits for some retirees. I liked that he's distinguishing between the poorer Americans and the wealthier Americans, though I'm not sure that 30% is the appropriate line. I still don't think his revised plan is good, in large part because Bush is still adamant about private accounts, or whatever the current euphamism is for letting the wealthiest individuals shelter some of their FICA payments from the general fund.

Another thing I don't like about the President's new plan is that benefit increases would be based on earnings, as the benefits already are based on earnings. The point of Social Security isn't to be a comprehensive retirement plan for all Americans; the point is to be a safety net so that retirees aren't left homeless and starving, and ideally so that they can live fairly comfortable.

In my opinion, Social Security should provide a basic level of benefits to those who need it while weaning those who don't off of the benefits rolls. Benefits should be set based on local cost-of-living rates, and rather than paying more to those who earned more while they worked Social Security should pay less to those who have more income after retirement. This can be done very gradually, and in such a way that it doesn't really have a significant impact on those who legitimately need government retirement assistance.

The idea is fairly simple. For every, say, ten dollars of income received by someone eligible for Social Security, that person's benefits would be reduced by one dollar. This means that people are rewarded for saving or continuing to work, but that extra income reduces people's reliance on Social Security benefits.

A gentler reduction in benefits could be introduced by using a progressive scale, as with the current tax rates. Up to a certain amount of additional income could be exempt from benefits reduction, the next band reduced at a rate of as low as one-hundred-to-one, and so on. The point is that, eventually, the very wealthy should not receive Social Security benefits that they don't really need. Those who have earned and saved enough through their careers to ensure themselves a comfortable retirement should similarly leave what funds are available for those who didn't have the option of saving.

Will this encourage people to spend all of their money now and not save for retirement? I don't think so, for the simple reason that saving still guarantees you a higher total income during retirement, and hence a better quality of life. Nobody is punished for saving, their income from Social Security, wages, savings, investments, and so on is always strictly increasing.

Calculating benefits becomes considerably more complex, of course. Benefits would have to be calculated conservatively, so that nobody receives lower benefits than to what they're entitled. There's likely no fool-proof way of ensuring this, but a decent starting point is to begin with full benefits and calculate the appropriate reductions in the following year. That is, if I received $10,000 one year, but I should only have received $3,000, then the following year my benefits would be reduced either by $7,000 or by an amount that amortizes the excess over, say, five years. The baseline for benefits would not change, only the amount of the reduction based on prior-year overpayments.

I don't pretend that this is a solution to whatever problems Social Security might be facing. I don't even know if it's a sensible solution given current and expected demographics, or even a naive view of how Social Security operates. It does, however, present another way to look at how benefits are calculated. I'm currently saving for my retirement, because I can, and I don't expect that I'll need Social Security benefits when I retire. If I do need the benefits, I'd like them to be available; if not, I don't want them. My attitude towards FICA withholdings are that they're just another tax, and I'll never see the money again.

Would That be E-E-Mail?

2005-04-16T13:44:00.000-04:00

President Bush recently revealed that he no longer uses email, because he doesn't want the press to know what he's writing to his daughters. This is understandable, but he's really denying himself a great convenience unnecessarily.

During the '90s, there was a substantial debate regarding publicly available cryptography. The government strongly backed a requirement that all encryption mechanisms have a back-door so that law enforcement could decrypt messages. This was called "key escrow," and it was wildly unpopular among most academics and online free-speech advocates (with a few notable exceptions).

One major problem with key escrow is that the government can ban certain forms of cryptography, but there's a limit to what it can do to enforce such a ban. If all software development were controlled, the government could in principle prevent the development and use of "illegal" cryptography. There is, however, a substantial free/open-source software development community, which has brought us a large amount of high quality software. (Just about everything that I run on my computers at work and at home is open source software.) If it can be done, and someone wants it, there's either an open source program to do it or one is under development. In terms of cryptography, the demand for non-escrowed crytographic mechanisms means these mechanisms will exist.

Fortunately, key escrow was eventually shot down, and even the export restrictions on cryptography have become progressively more relaxed. One advantage of this is that programs like GnuPG are not only widely available, but also perfectly legal to use. In fact, GnuPG has been integrated into a number of email clients, so encrypting or digitally signing your email is easy.

Mr. President, if you want the convenience of emailing your daughters but you don't want anyone but them reading it, give encrypted email a try.

8 Glasses, 9 Lives?

2005-04-14T19:49:00.000-04:00

In the spirit of my new-found Blogness, I suggest beer instead.

Ascendance

2005-04-14T19:46:00.000-04:00

I noticed that my last three posts are very short. No well thought-out passages nor anything resembling argument or deep observation.

I guess this means that I'm now officially a Real Blogger.

A Quick Question

2005-04-09T21:02:00.000-04:00

How many Americans died so that we wouldn't have to care about the lives of royalty?

Isn't News Supposed to be New?

2005-04-05T21:58:00.000-04:00

OK, we get it. The Pope is dead.

I don't want to be snarky, but the coverage of John Paul II's death has gone way overboard. Retrospectives are one thing, endless stories about the people lining up to see his body are quite another. He was Pope for a good number of years, so naturally a lot of people have their own personal stories about how he touched their lives.

We just don't need to hear all of them.

Just What I Needed...

2005-03-14T22:02:00.000-05:00

My fortune cookie today said that I "will walk on the soil of many countries."

Great, now I have to worry about foiling an international conspiracy of vampires.

The Josephson Juncture

2005-03-12T13:08:00.000-05:00

My good friend Stavros pointed out that my previous post requires more explanation in places. I'll begin with a brief discussion of Nobel Laureate Brian Josephson. The other topics I'll write about later or leave to Stavros.

Josephson is a major personality in solid state Physics, particularly semiconductors. His work was instrumental in developing silicon microchips and justifiably earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics. In the years since his ground-breaking research, however, he has fallen victim to some of the claims of pseudo-science.

As a brief digression that does not do the subject justice, there is a marked difference between what we commonly call science and what we commonly call pseudo-science. Science involves forming hypotheses (or theories or educated guesses—take your pick of terminology) about how an effect comes about, and then through experiments trying to determine if that hypothesis is supported. Ideas are never proven, they only withstand disproval. Scientific hypotheses are obligated to account for what we observe (that is, what we think we know). We refer to this characteristic of scientific hypotheses as falsifiability, and scientists generally frown upon hypotheses that are not falsifiable—hypotheses that cannot be shown to be false. Further, science places the burden of experiment on the proposer of a hypothesis, either to perform experiments himself or to suggest experiments to other scientists. In contrast, pseudo-science makes hypotheses that purport to explain effects which might be real or might be contested, but these hypotheses need not conform to current knowledge not lend themselves to experimental testing, and the pseudo-scientist typically neglects experimental confirmation entirely.

As science has progressed, the theories have become more and more complicated (as a rule), making it difficult for the lay individual to judge at first blush whether an idea is credible or not. In addition to falsifiability, credibility requires that the theory account for relevant well-established phenomena. Most people only hear the jargon of science, used to describe credible research, and consequently throwing terms like "quantum", "resonance", or "electromagnetic" into an explanation can make the purest hogwash sound scientific.

Scientists are supposed to know better, at least when a theory overlaps their areas of expertise. In the case of Dr. Josephson, the expertise lies in Physics, and the pseudo-science is homeopathy. He is not alone; a regrettable number of other scientists have lent their names and reputations to equally undeserving ideas when they should have known better.

Homeopathy begins with the idea that, in dilution, harmful substances can confer a healing or preventative benefit. On its face, this does not seem entirely unreasonable, since it resembles the practice of vaccination. While homeopaths are quick to point out this similarity, homeopathy actually derives from the "law of similars," one of the bases of Medieval magical theory. Homeopathy takes the idea of dilution even further, with the hypothesis that if a little of a substance is a good thing, then less is even better. Certainly, it's less likely to cause illness. The most "potent" homeopathic preparations are so dilute that there is not even one molecule of the active substance in any commercially available quantity.

If this sounds odd, it should. A useful analogy might be a flashlight that grows brighter as its batteries fail. Homeopaths recognize this absurdity, and attempt to explain it away by claiming that water has a "memory" of substances dissolved in it to the point of effective non-presence.

Someone with a high-school level of science education should be highly suspicious of this claim. A water molecule comprises two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. The manner in which these atoms bind to one another is well understood, and leaves little room to store information. In addition, the molecules in a fluid are in constant random motion. Again, there is little room for a "memory" of once-present substances.

This reasoning should make anyone skeptical of homeopathy. Still, homeopaths make claims, and these claims are falsifiable. The burden of demonstration lies with the claimant, so these homeopaths are obligated to perform properly controlled experiments testing their hypotheses if they expect anyone else to take them seriously.

James Randi has a long-standing challenge to the purveyors of pseudo-science and other delusions. If they can demonstrate their claims under rigorous experimental conditions, they will win one million dollars. Mr. Randi has had an ongoing conversation with prominent homeopaths in an attempt to have them submit their claims to such experiments. I'll let Mr. Randi have the last word on this topic: "That challenge, folks, is the one thorn the quacks cannot remove from their collective foot. It's always there, being dodged and belittled, devalued and denied. But it remains."

Down Townes, or the Misguided Maser-Maker

2005-03-10T22:43:00.000-05:00

This morning I was listening to the radio, and an interview came on with Charles Townes, recent recipient of the Templeton Prize for "work in the field of religion" and co-inventor of the laser. In this interview, he explained that he did not view science and religion as being in competition, nor are they incongruous, but rather they should come together and work in concert. His reasoning for this is that both science and religion are attempts to discover fundamental truths about the universe.

As his fellow Nobel Laureate Brian Josephson illustrates, the disclaimer that "past performance is no guarantee of future results" does not only apply to the stock market. Put simply, Doctor Townes is wrong. There is a great difference between science and religion.

There are superficial similarities between the two. Dr. Townes mentions moments of epiphany or revelation in science; these often precede major advancements. They might also lead nowhere, often with many years of work and several careers along the way. In either case, the revelation is not science, it is an idea for an avenue of inquiry. It comes from a mind tuned to a particular problem and possessing the requisite skills to understand both the problem and the solution. Once imagined, an idea is not dogma; it must be tested experimentally, and only once confirmed can it be accepted as accurate.

Science does not deal in absolute truths, but in abstractions and approximations. We develop models to describe how the universe behaves. The advancement of science comes from the discovery of where our current models fail, and what new models might account for the unexpected behavior. Always, reality is our guide.

Religion presents its tenets as absolute truths. The untestable is glorified with the mantle of "faith." Where dogma and reality collide, reality is frequently ignored or denied until its weight forces dogma to change. Galileo was absolved in 1992 of the "crime" of finding that the Earth revolves around the Sun. This demonstrates how conservative the Roman Catholic Church can be in its dogma, and how unwilling a religious institution can be to reconsider its positions in the light of new evidence.

No, science and religion are very different. Science is the pursuit of the truth through investigation, knowing that you will never reach it but only grow closer and closer to it. Religion is the dictating of the truth by those more interested in being authoritative than right. It is a shame that a Nobel Prize-winning Physicist is unable to see this.