Sour Grapes

2010-08-24T14:31:00.003-04:00

Jihadists Seize on Mosque Protests

"The holy war is heating up: Islamic radicals are using the protests against the Islamic center near ground zero for their propaganda, according to The Wall Street Journal. 'When it comes to propaganda, extremists are pure opportunists,' one official says. 'They'll use whatever they can.' Another counterterrorism consultant says, 'We are handing al Qaeda a propaganda coup, an absolute propaganda coup'" [from today's Daily Beast Cheat Sheet].

This blog has moved

2010-03-18T20:06:00.001-04:00

This blog is now located at http://affectedscorn.blogspot.com/.
You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://affectedscorn.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.

2010-03-18T17:40:00.003-04:00

Glenn Beck accused of communism

Jon Stewart caught Glenn Beck in an inconsistency last Monday night (surprise! surprise); it was reported—with video included—on the Huffington Post thusly:

Glenn Beck... used his appearance at CPAC as a chance to alert the crowd of the dangers of Progressivism.
At the conference, Beck compared Progressivism to Communism, and cited previous progressives such as Woodrow Wilson and FDR, who pushed for the income tax and universal health care, respectively.... Beck stressed that these were the first steps on the road to ruin.

Upon hearing Glenn Beck announce that he learned this by reading books at the library, Stewart had some choice words for the Fox News host: "Glenn, the library isn't free! It's paid for with tax money. Free public libraries are the result of the Progressive movement to communally share books.... Community owned? That sounds just like communism. You're a communist!"

2010-03-16T17:58:00.002-04:00

Nipping innumeracy in the bud

Ed Zotti, who may or may not be the same person as Cecil Adams, published an article in The Straight Dope earlier this month. An avid reader of this column, I immediately spotted a big problem and wrote to Ed. He asked me—through an intermediary—to post it on the Straight Dope message board under the Questions, Comments for SD Chicago/Paulina St. Journal Columns section, which I did this morning:

Dear Ed,

The article, "One in a trillion", shows two graphs, one of hard disk drive capacity and the other of the national debt. In inviting comparison of the two ("Need I say more?"), you commit the grave mathematical sin of intimating that graphs on logarithmic and arithmetic scales can be visually compared by the mathematically unsophisticated. I'm sure you know this is NOT TRUE! I invite you to clarify and amend.

--
Hugh D. Hyatt
Willow Grove, PA

~ Afflictions are the good man's shining times. — Edward Young ~

Ed responded this afternoon:

This is a dagger to the heart of my analysis.

One nice thing about both(?) Ed and Cecil: they own up to their mistakes.

2010-02-18T15:31:00.002-05:00

Why is NBC f*#@ing up Olympic coverage?

On Tuesday Henri Blodget, in his blog at The Business Insider, asked six sets of questions of NBC about their television coverage of the Olympics:

1. Why do you delay events that are much more exciting to watch live?
2. Is the evening audience much bigger than it would be if you showed the events live during the day? How much bigger? Wouldn't you be able to make up the difference by showing the event live on one of your other networks during the day and then showing highlights on NBC at night?
3. How much money would you lose (or do you think you would lose) if you showed the events live on a subsidiary network and then showed highlights again in your prime time broadcast?
4. Do you expect people to avoid the news all day until you show the events in primetime, or do you not care that everyone knows who won?
5. Is the decision to show events on tape-delay a relic of the days when the Big Three networks ruled the world?
6. Do you care that sports fans from coast to coast are furious at you? How do you factor this into your long-term brand-value calculations?

Personally, I'm not a big follower of the Olympics, but I think this is a good set of questions and I'd love to see NBC's answers.

BTW, Mr Blodget is also CEO and Editor-in-Chief of The Business Insider.

2010-02-12T11:33:00.004-05:00

R.I.P. Walter Frederick Morrison

It was perhaps the least useful spin-off of the Space Race. But Walter Fredrick Morrison watched his invention, the Frisbee, glide through more than 50 years of success before his death this week.

[Via today's Daily Beast Cheat Sheet.]

2010-01-20T14:51:00.002-05:00

The Known Universe

From the American Museum of Natural History, via NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for today.

Frequently using the Digital Universe Atlas, every object in the video has been rendered to scale given the best scientific research in 2009, when the video was produced. The film has similarities to the famous Powers of Ten video that has been a favorite of many space enthusiasts for a generation.

2010-01-19T16:25:00.002-05:00

Fake News Gets Real

Fake news shows like The Daily Show are sometimes criticized for not being accurate sources of information. But last night Jon Stewart gave by far the most cogent and sensible—not to mention funniest and most apoplectic—commentary I've come across on the position in which Barack Obama and the Democrats find themselves in the face of losing Ted Kennedy's former Senate seat to the Republicans.

The whole segment is worth watching, but the final 3½ minutes, which neatly summarize the Democrats' predicament, contain the essence of it.

2009-09-02T12:04:00.003-04:00

Nate Silver on Fox News

His comment was specifically about the show Fox and Friends: "Wow. I've never met people more terrified of what might happen if they actually tried to engage in a rational discussion." The substance of his post on fivethirtyeight.com had very little to do with Fox at all (it was about the insignificance of Obama's favorability ratings being above or below 50%). His statement was pretty much just a throwaway comment at the end. Nonetheless, he's a very impressive and rational blogger and that's a pretty strong statement.

2009-08-27T16:32:00.006-04:00

Logo history

I forget where I found this surprisingly interesting article from Fortune about "new" (a very relative term in this case) logos. Consumers found Tropicana's new logo revolutionary? Who woulda thunk it?

2009-08-27T15:40:00.003-04:00

Why Neoconservative Pundits Love Jon Stewart

One of my friends on Facebook posted a link to this article from New York magazine. No wonder I like Jon Stewart so much!

Back in April, when the debate over torture was roaring, Jon Stewart invited Cliff May, a national-security hawk and former spokesman for the Republican Party, to come on The Daily Show and defend waterboarding. May was hesitant. He thought Stewart would paint him as a crazy extremist. The audience would jeer. It would be a disaster.... "
But May had a change of heart after soliciting advice from his friend Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard. "Kristol told me: 'You'll be pleasantly surprised. He doesn't take cheap shots. Jon is smart. You'll do just fine.'" Kristol proved to be right. Stewart's interview of May — a crackling, lengthy debate about where to draw the line between freedom and security — produced one of the most clarifying discussions about torture on television. "Literally, this is the best conversation I've had on this subject anywhere," May told Stewart.

2009-05-02T20:56:00.003-04:00

Franco Harris for U.S. Senate?

This speculation comes from today's fivethirtyeight.com (in the last paragraph of the post), and yes, this is the same African-American-Italian who was a key player in the Pittsburgh Steelers' "Immaculate Reception" in the 1972 NFL play-offs!

2009-05-02T20:46:00.003-04:00

Two cyclones feeding on each other

Today's very cool Earth Observatory Daily Image was taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite.

Cyclonic Clouds over the South Atlantic Ocean

2009-05-02T20:25:00.003-04:00

World's largest garbage dump?

As reported on in an article in today's Times (of London): "[T]wice the size of Texas and created from six million tonnes of discarded plastic."

The toxic soup of refuse was discovered in 1997 when Charles Moore, an oceanographer, decided to travel through the centre of the North Pacific gyre (a vortex or circular ocean current). Navigators usually avoid oceanic gyres because persistent high-pressure systems — also known as the doldrums — lack the winds and currents to benefit sailors.
Mr Moore found bottle caps, plastic bags and polystyrene floating with tiny plastic chips. Worn down by sunlight and waves, discarded plastic disintegrates into smaller pieces. Suspended under the surface, these tiny fragments are invisible to ships and satellites trying to map the plastic continent, but in subsequent trawls Mr Moore discovered that the chips outnumbered plankton by six to one.
The damage caused by these tiny fragments is more insidious than strangulation, entrapment and choking by larger plastic refuse. The fragments act as sponges for heavy metals and pollutants until mistaken for food by small fish. The toxins then become more concentrated as they move up the food chain through larger fish, birds and marine mammals.
“You can buy certified organic farm produce, but no fishmonger on earth can sell you a certified organic wild-caught fish. This is our legacy,” said Mr Moore.

Great Pacific Garbage Patch - Mapped

[Via today's Daily Beast Cheat Sheet.]

2009-05-02T19:25:00.007-04:00

Gitmo detainees to be tried by military tribunals?

Thursday, the New York Times reported that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates suggested that "[a]s many as 100 detainees at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, could end up held without trial on American soil." The article went on to note:

The Obama administration is debating how to establish a legal basis for incarcerating detainees deemed too dangerous to be released but not appropriate to be tried because of potential problems posed by their harsh interrogations, the evidence against them or other issues.

Then yesterday, the New York Times reported that "The Obama administration is moving toward reviving the military commission system for prosecuting Guantánamo detainees, which was a target of critics during the Bush administration, including Mr. Obama himself." This article went on to say:

Continuing the military commissions in any form would probably prompt sharp criticism from human rights groups as well as some of Mr. Obama’s political allies because the troubled system became an emblem of the effort to use Guantánamo to avoid the American legal system.
Officials who work on the Guantánamo issue say administration lawyers have become concerned that they would face significant obstacles to trying some terrorism suspects in federal courts. Judges might make it difficult to prosecute detainees who were subjected to brutal treatment or for prosecutors to use hearsay evidence gathered by intelligence agencies.
Obama administration officials — and Mr. Obama himself — have said in the past that they were not ruling out prosecutions in the military commission system. But senior officials have emphasized that they prefer to prosecute terrorism suspects in existing American courts. When President Obama suspended Guantánamo cases after his inauguration on Jan. 20, many participants said the military commission system appeared dead.
But in recent days a variety of officials involved in the deliberations say that after administration lawyers examined many of the cases, the mood shifted toward using military commissions to prosecute some detainees, perhaps including those charged with coordinating the Sept. 11 attacks.
“The more they look at it,” said one official, “the more commissions don’t look as bad as they did on Jan. 20.”

I find this worrisome [via yesterday's and today's Daily Beast Cheat Sheet respectively].

2009-04-30T08:41:00.003-04:00

Last night's Presidential news conference

I had two strong reactions.

First, with regard to torture, President Obama said:

What I've said—and I will repeat—is that waterboarding violates our ideals and our values. I do believe that it is torture. I don't think that's just my opinion; that's the opinion of many who've examined the topic. And that's why I put an end to these practices.
I am absolutely convinced that it was the right thing to do—not because there might not have been information that was yielded by these various detainees who were subjected to this treatment, but because we could have gotten this information in other ways—in ways that were consistent with our values, in ways that were consistent with who we are [emphasis added].

I generally liked this repudiation of torture. But I was disappointed in the rationale he used (the italicized bit). I wish he had said instead that we do not torture because it is morally wrong. That's why it's illegal. At first I was thinking that he had missed an opportunity to make the moral case, but then I realized I was presuming that he really agreed with me. Maybe he doesn't.

Second, I was surprised that President Obama seemed to tip the government's hand on their approach to the danger of Pakistan's nuclear weapons falling into the wrong hands. His initial response to the relevant question was:

I'm confident that we can make sure that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is secure. Primarily, initially, because the Pakistani army, I think, recognizes the hazards of those weapons falling into the wrong hands. We've got strong military-to-military consultation and cooperation....
We want to respect their sovereignty, but we also recognize that we have huge strategic interests, huge national security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable and that you don't end up having a nuclear-armed militant state.

The first half of his response to the follow-up—that he was not going to engage in hypotheticals—was what I expected. The second half, giving reassurance as to what was not going to happen, only seemed to emphasize the existence of contingency plans.

Q: But in a worst-case scenario...
OBAMA: I'm not going to engage in...

Q: (OFF-MIKE) military could secure this nuclear...
OBAMA: I'm not going to engage in—in hypotheticals of that sort. I feel confident that that nuclear arsenal will remain out of militant hands.

I have no doubt that such contingency plans exist. I am not surprised that they do. I am surprised that the President was willing to talk about them.

2009-04-23T10:49:00.002-04:00

Order return rip-off, not!

Last month I posted about my expectation of being ripped off by TigerDirect for the cost of shipping me the wrong product, which I returned to them. While it was true that they only credited me with the cost of the part—$14.99—rather than that plus the shipping and handling—an additional $6.99—I'm happy to report that after I wrote them a letter of complaint they credited my account for the additional $6.99 and sent me a letter:

Thank you for contacting us regard your concerns. We apologize for any inconvenience you experienced. Please be advised that as of 04/01/09 a refund in the amount of $6.99 has been processed for your original shipping charges...
TigerDirect.com has a longstanding service commitment to our customers and their satisfaction is very important to us.
Once again we apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

2009-04-23T10:17:00.002-04:00

When does GM count its cars as being "sold"?

In recent discussions of General Motors' plan to shut down factories for up to nine weeks this summer, I heard that GM recognizes revenue when vehicles are manufactured, not when they're sold. If I heard correctly, this practice is in accord with reporting standards set by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), who proclaim—apparently on every page of their website—that they are "serving the investing public through transparent information resulting from high-quality financial reporting standards, developed in an independent, private-sector, open due process."

I just have a couple of questions. The ability to report revenue in this way serves the investing public how? Do we need any more evidence that big business is vastly under-regulated?

2009-03-26T09:07:00.002-04:00

More on AIG bonuses

A few days ago, Nate Silver had a good post over at FiveThirtyEight on this subject:

Just think about some of the implications of this [the 90% tax on bonuses passed by the House].

A senior engineer at General Motors, who shepherds the production of a new hybrid vehicle that will turn out to be a best-seller, shouldn't get a bonus for that. Really?

Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan, who has managed his company's assets adeptly and kept it mostly off the taxpayer's dole, is no more deserving of a bonus than an AIG crook. Really?

An mid-level investment banker at Morgan Stanley, who works her butt off to persuade her bosses to facilitate a deal for a new wind-power company that turns out to be a big economic and environmental winner, should have her incentive compensation taxed at 90%. Really?

An administrative assistant at PNC, who is volunteering to work 70-hour weeks because of cutbacks in the company's staff, deserves a Christmas Bonus -- unless her husband happens to be a lawyer earning $250,000 per year, in which case it should be taken away. Really?

2009-03-26T08:54:00.004-04:00

If it weren't for bad luck...

From Tuesday's Daily Beast Cheat Sheet:

Invincible Japanese Man Found?
Atomic bombs have been dropped twice in history. Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived both of them. Yamaguchi, 93, is the first person to be certified a survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. He was in Hiroshima on a business trip on August 6, 1945. After suffering serious burns, he returned the next day to his hometown of Nagasaki, which was bombed three days later. Approximately 210,000 people died in the attacks.

Read it at The Guardian

2009-03-25T20:42:00.003-04:00

Quote without comment: responding to increased sexual assaults in combat zones

The military recently reported a 25% increase such assaults in the last year. The director of the Pentagon's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office commented in an interview (quoted in the article on the report cited above):

If you see one of your buddies serve drinks to somebody to get them drunk, maybe what you do is step in and say "Why don't you wait until she's sober?"

[Via today's Daily Beast Cheat Sheet.]

2009-03-25T20:08:00.004-04:00

Dear A.I.G., I Quit!

This is not a joke. The New York Times published a letter of resignation from AIG's executive vice president of their financial products unit as an op-ed article today. It's worth a read [via today's Daily Beast Cheat Sheet].

Just for the record, from the first news of them, I've understood but never liked the big deal being made about the bonuses paid to some AIG executives. If we're going to nail the guilty, let's be sure we've got the right folks. I'm quite sure there's not a one-to-one relationship between those responsible for the mess we're in and those receiving AIG bonuses. In fact, I'm pretty sure that those who are most responsible are most of the people who have been in Congress or been President since about 1980 (i.e., I blame deregulation). Furthermore, each U.S. taxpayer has provided AIG on average with $580-1,290¹ to bail them out (i.e., exluding the trillions spent for other companies' bailouts), while the total of all these bonuses comes to $1.20 per taxpayer. I've especially disliked the proposed legislation, which can't be much more than a thinly veiled ex post facto bill of attainder (both ex post facto laws—a law that retroactively changes the legal consequences of acts committed—and bills of attainder—declaring a person or group of persons guilty of some crime and punishing them without benefit of a trial—are forbidden by the U.S. Constitution—Article I, section 9).

¹The amount depends on what figure you use: I've heard amounts ranging from $80 billion to $173 billion. This the the next calculation are also based on 2007's estimated 138 million taxpayers.

2009-03-25T20:05:00.000-04:00

Help name the anti-Pluto's moon

The anti-Pluto—the large Kuiper Belt object named Orcus—is similar to Pluto in many ways: similar sizes; each with a single known moon; possibly similar origins; and, most strikingly, similar orbits in size, apsides (i.e., perihelion and aphelion) and [rather large] inclination. They are different in one glaring respect: Pluto and Orchus have, and will always have, exactly opposite positions in their respective orbits. As I understand it, this is due to their orbits being regulated by Neptune, with both orbs "circling" (ellipsing?) the sun twice for every three orbits of Neptune (making each a plutino).

Orcus was discovered in 2004 and its moon in 2005. The latter has only just recently come to need naming (presumably the former will also become the sixth official dwarf planet before too long). Mike Brown, of Caltech's Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, has an extremely interesting entry in his Mike Brown's Planets blog that talks about this need to name Orcus's moon and that invites submission of names, with rationales. Be sure to read at least some of the comments, which are full of suggestions (there are 249 as of this writing). I was hoping to have a stab at it myself, but I'm far too ignorant of mythology [via today's Astronomy Picture of the Day].

2009-03-05T10:53:00.000-05:00

Proposed political talk show rule

As part of the introduction to his discussion of Republican's use of the term "Democrat Party", Sean Quinn of FiveThirtyEight.com included a video clip of Ari Fleischer being interviewed by MSNBC's David Shuster. I commented on Mr Quinn's post as follows:

I respectfully suggest that David Shuster, and all other political talk show hosts, institute a rule that guests not be invited back to the show if they do not answer a single question they were asked by the interviewer. I understand that politicians appear on these shows because they believe they have something to gain by doing so. Quite often, what they hope to gain may be at odds with what the interviewer is hoping to gain (which, hopefully, is truthful answers to certain questions). Therefore you can't expect such guests to always answer every question without ever changing the topic. But in this video clip, I believe Ari Fleischer changed the subject of every single question that Shuster asked him. Why allow Fleischer back on this show ever again?

I also propose that such a rule be called the Fleischer Rule, in honor of this abysmal performance.

2009-03-05T10:38:00.003-05:00

Republican's pejorative use of "Democrat Party"

Sean Quinn has a nice post over at FiveThirtyEight.com about this. The very short summary is that it's no different than my elementary school tormentors calling me "Baby Huey".

Here's an excerpt from Mr Quinn's post:

[I]t is striking that a huge number of Republicans continue to go out of their way to use the epithet “Democrat Party” rather than the party’s actual name, the Democratic Party....

The intent seems to be twofold: First, it seems to be an attempt at branding/labeling/controlling the way language sounds in an audience’s ears. Democrat apparently sounds "worse" than Democratic, and it's also an attempt to separate the Democratic Party from small-d democratic, a popular American concept. If such a tactic nets votes, it’s objectively justifiable. Second, it’s designed to get under the skins of Democrats. From a Republican perspective, both seem to be independently important reasons to standardize the epithet....
One of the reasons the "childish" party of Fleischer and Limbaugh is having such a tough time in the wilderness is they've done a too-clever-by-half job figuring out how to systematically weaponize language. There's no referee. It's their right. It's also no great parlor trick, and you can go to any grade-school playground and find the same. The day Republicans work to signal good faith by policing their own house on basic respect in language will probably run parallel with the day we'll see the party reborn as an ideologically grownup force.

2009-03-04T14:17:00.007-05:00

Order return rip-off

The CPU fan on my desktop computer began failing intermittently last month. So I ordered a replacement fan from TigerDirect.com, where I had originally bought the computer in September 2004. The sales guy on the phone had my order on file, so he figured out which fan I needed and shipped it to me. After it arrived, I tried to replace the part only to find that he had sent me the wrong fan.

So I called the toll-free phone number on the packing slip. The first thing I heard was a warning that they were experiencing heavy call volume and suggesting I'd do better by going to their website if I was calling for a number of possible reasons that the voice listed. Since it was Monday morning—when I'd expect call volume to be heaviest—and one of these reasons was obtaining return authorization, I decided to visit the website. Here's what I found (click on the image for a more readable view):

The $14.99 they were offering to refund did not include the $6.99 I'd paid for shipping. Since they were responsible for the error, I certainly felt I should get a full refund, including for the shipping. So on Tuesday afternoon, thinking call volume would be lower then, I called their toll-free number again. I heard the same message warning me about heavy call volume and suggesting I go to their website. This time I stayed on the line. And—surprise, surprise!—got a representative immediately. It took him a while to process my request, presumably because their computers were slow, but there was no problem with the return. Shortly thereafter I received an e-mail with a link to a UPS shipping label. The question of whether or not my shipping would be included in the refund did not come up. So I'm assuming I'll receive a refund for the full $21.98. If not, I'll call and complain.

I printed the label, repacked the fan, and taped the label to the box. It was pre-paid, so return shipping didn't cost me anything.

Clearly it behooves a company to encourage customers to use their website. It's cheaper and should be more reliable than using a person. But I can't help wondering if, in the case of return authorizations at least, it's also an attempt on their part to avoid refunding shipping costs and to shift the cost of return shipping onto the customer. I should know about the shipping cost refund in a few days.

4/23/2009 11:10:00 AM Eastern time UPDATE:

See my follow-up post.

2009-03-03T11:00:00.004-05:00

Happy Square Root Day

As should be obvious to anyone with even a little bit of mathematical ability, there are only nine such days (ten if you cheat and count 10 October '00) every century. Frankly I had never of this "holiday" till I heard it mentioned on the news this morning.

2009-02-13T17:12:00.005-05:00

Betraying the public trust

You know there's got to be more to this story in yesterday's New York Times [found via the Daily Beast Cheat Sheet], right?

At worst, Hillary Transue thought she might get a stern lecture when she appeared before a judge for building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. She was a stellar student who had never been in trouble, and the page stated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke.

Instead, the judge sentenced her to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment.

She was handcuffed and taken away as her stunned parents stood by.

Apparently, the real cause of her detention was a $2.6 million kickback scheme.

The answers became a bit clearer on Thursday as the judge, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.

While prosecutors say that Judge Conahan, 56, secured contracts for the two centers to house juvenile offenders, Judge Ciavarella, 58, was the one who carried out the sentencing to keep the centers filled.

This is a most despicable betrayal of the public trust by two judges. They deserve what they will get.

If the court agrees to the plea agreement, both judges will serve 87 months in federal prison and resign from the bench and bar. They are expected to be sentenced in the next several months. Lawyers for both men declined to comment.
Since state law forbids retirement benefits to judges convicted of a felony while in office, the judges would also lose their pensions.

Ciavarella and Conahan are pictured above, respectively.

2009-01-21T15:20:00.003-05:00

Local Knowledge, by Liza Gyllenhaal

My old friend Liza will be reading from and signing copies of this, her first novel, at the Jenkintown Barnes & Noble on Saturday, 31 January at 1:00 PM.

2009-01-13T11:31:00.004-05:00

Official Election Results

Montgomery County, PA just posted official election results from November 4. Who am I to chide them for taking so long? I haven't updated my sidebar to the left in something like four years!

Bryn Athyn, where I live, has been a Republican stronghold since it was founded. I don't know when that was, but it was incorporated in 1916. In 2008, for the first time ever, I believe, a Democratic candidate received the highest number of votes:

Registration & turnout
  Registration         969
  Cartridge turnout    703
  Absentee turnout      54
  Total turnout        757

Presidential electors
  Barack Obama (Dem)   373  (50.20%)  (49.27%)
  John McCain  (Rep)   353  (47.51%)  (46.63%)
  Bob Barr     (Lib)    14   (1.88%)   (1.85%)
  Ralph Nader  (Ind)     3   (0.40%)   (0.40%)
  Total                743

  Undervote             14             (1.85%)

Total turnout was 78.12%. I interpret the undervote as "None of the above." The first column of percentages is based on total votes for the office; those in the second column are based on total turnout.

For all other offices, Bryn Athyn went Republican, with candidates getting from 53.52% (Marina Kats, for Representative in Congress) to 64.06% (Thomas Murt, incumbent Representative in the General Assembly, who even I voted for).

We'll see if I've been sufficiently shamed by Montgomery County to update my sidebar soon.

2009-01-13T08:31:00.003-05:00

PayPal's security lapse

I received the following e-mail message yesterday.

Subject: Notice of Policy Updates
From: PayPal 
Reply-To: paypal@paypal.com
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2009 14:23:08 PST
To: hughhyatt at bluehen.udel.edu

==================================================================

PayPal

==================================================================

Notice of Policy Updates

Dear Hugh Hyatt,

You are receiving this notification because you have elected to receive email notice of all PayPal Policy Change Notices.

PayPal recently posted a new Policy Update. You can view this Policy Update by logging in to your PayPal account. To log in to your account, go to http://Email1.paypal.com/u.d?9YGtvimT2lyrGX8k1Mh=0 and enter your member log in information. Once you are logged in, look in the What's New column on the left side of the page for the latest Policy Updates.

If you need help logging in, go to our Help Center by clicking the Help link located in the upper right-hand corner of any PayPal page.

Sincerely,

PayPal

Genuine? Or phishing attempt? I looked briefly at it and once I saw the link to a supposed login address, I did what I always do with such e-mails—forward them to an appropriate address at the website of the organization they purport to be from (in this case, spoof@paypal.com) and to the Anti-Phishing Working Group at reportphishing@antiphishing.org.

Normally I get a reply from the organization confirming that it was indeed a phishing attempt. But this time I got one back that said, in part,

Thanks for taking an active role by reporting suspicious-looking emails. Although we've determined that the email you forwarded to us is not a phishing attempt, our security team is grateful for your concern....

PayPal will never ask you for your password over the phone or in an email and will always address you by your first and last name.

Take our Fight Phishing Challenge at https://www.paypal.com/fightphishing to learn 5 things you should know about phishing....

To which I responded,

I can't tell you how appalled I am by what PayPal has done.

I am shocked that PayPal would send an e-mail inviting me to login using a URL embedded in the message.  To me the first rule of avoiding phishing schemes is never to use such embedded URLs to login to websites.  An invitation to log in is nothing less than a request for a password, which is something I thought PayPal would never do!

I suggest making sure your employees who produced the e-mail I originally forwarded take your Fight Phishing Challenge as well.  Question #5:

"Clicking on a link in an email is the most reliable way to get to your PayPal account.  True or false?

"False.  Many phishing emails have links that look valid, but send you to fraudulent sites instead. Here’s what you should do: Open a new browser window, type https://www.paypal.com and log in to your PayPal account directly."

2009-01-09T07:48:00.003-05:00

Who's up to no good in the financial markets?

Cecil Adams's The Straight Dope is almost always an interesting and fun read. He also tackles topics that you might have a hard time finding out about elsewhere, like today's article titled How would I go about laundering money? I was drawn up short by two statements in the last paragraph:

In short, money laundering has become a species of high finance. Some claim it's the third largest business in the world, behind legitimate currency transactions and the auto industry. It conceals some nasty enterprises — criminal-finance experts estimate that more than two thirds of U.S. money-laundering prosecutions involve illegal drug dealing, and terrorists shuffle their share of cash as well. Then again, knowing what we do about many legal global transactions of late, you'd have to say it's not just the criminals in the financial marketplace who are up to no good.

Currency transactions constitute a business? Hmm, I wouldn't have thought so. Currency trading might be a business, but I doubt this is what Cecil is referring to as the largest or second largest business in the world.

But what really caught my eye was the implication that many of the world's current financial woes are caused by non-criminals who are up to no good. I'll grant that some of them may not be criminals. But many certainly are. Bernard Madoff comes immediately to mind. Many others are not only in the sense that they haven't been charged, prosecuted and convicted. Many of these won't be (charged or prosecuted, I mean). Senior corporate managers who cooked the books, thereby obtaining large incentive payments for themselves and simultaneously hoodwinking investors, come immediately to mind. So do those at much lower levels who encouraged people to lie about their income on mortgage applications, as well as those who lied to obtain these mortgages. I find the idea that such behaviors are not criminal to be abhorrent!

2009-01-07T20:07:00.004-05:00

The problem with Gitmo

How can we have allowed this to happen?

When Muhammad Saad Iqbal arrived home here in August after more than six years in American custody, including five at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he had difficulty walking, his left ear was severely infected, and he was dependent on a cocktail of antibiotics and antidepressants.
In November, a Pakistani surgeon operated on his ear, physical therapists were working on lower back problems and a psychiatrist was trying to wean him off the drugs he carried around in a white, plastic shopping bag.
The maladies, said Mr. Iqbal, 31, a professional reader of the Koran, are the result of a gantlet of torture, imprisonment and interrogation for which his Washington lawyer plans to sue the United States government....

But the full stories of individual detainees like Mr. Iqbal are only now emerging after years in which they were shuttled around the globe under the Bush administration’s system of extraordinary rendition, which used foreign countries to interrogate and detain terrorism suspects in sites beyond the reach of American courts.
Mr. Iqbal was never convicted of any crime, or even charged with one. He was quietly released from Guantánamo with a routine explanation that he was no longer considered an enemy combatant, part of an effort by the Bush administration to reduce the prison’s population.

“I feel ashamed what the Americans did to me in this period,” Mr. Iqbal said...

I too am ashamed, Mr Iqbal [from an article titled "An Ex-Detainee of the U.S. Describes a 6-Year Ordeal" in the 6 January edition of The New York Times].

2009-01-07T19:32:00.005-05:00

The problem with SMS (Short Message Service)

For those who don't know, SMS is the service that underlies most text messaging on mobile phones. There are others SMS messages can be sent from the Web. I've been using it more and more, particularly internationally. Around the holidays, presumably due largely to network congestion, I discovered what seem to me to be some appalling features of SMS. These go way beyond the well-known limitation that messages cannot exceed 160 characters.

My service provider—CREDO, which uses Sprint's PCS network—does not support international texting. This may not be the usual practice, but I was unable to tell in my cursory examination of alternative providers. Worse than that, they are perfectly willing to charge me for messages that never get delivered, for messages that take inordinately long to arrive and for messages I receive that are garbage and the sender does not send. I know this because I called to complain and was basically told, "Tough luck!" The good news is that if I buy a relatively low-priced bundle—$2.99 a month for 50 messages a month (a 20-message breakeven point) or $4.99/mo for 300/mo (a 50-message breakeven point)—additional messages only cost 10¢ each. And I can purchase these options on a month-by-month basis, retroactive to the beginning of the billing period, so long as I add or subtract them by the day before my billing date¹.
There's no way to tell when a message was sent, only when it was received.
Some messages take over 24 hours to reach their destination! Sometimes I think I'd be better off sending a letter, which at least allows me to let my recipient know when I sent it.
Some messages never make it to their destination and the sender is not notified.
From one correspondent, who denies sending anything like these, I periodically receive a message consisting of two characters: e@. No one seems to be able to explain why this is happening.
There is apparently no way to block SPAM messages (short of blocking all messaging) on my mobile phone and I have to pay for these as well.

All in all, as a technical professional, this seems like a really poorly designed system.

¹There's a similar monthly option to start the weekday no-charge calling period at 7pm rather than 9pm. It costs $5/month.

2008-12-26T11:41:00.000-05:00

SEC Chief: Staying calm a "signal achievement"; Madoff a "big asterisk"

The head of the Securities and Exchange Commission has denied any responsibility for the U.S.'s current economic woes. From a December 24th article in the Washington Post (as are all quotes in what follows except where noted):

Christopher Cox, the embattled chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, is defending his restrained approach to the financial crisis, saying he has provided steady leadership as Wall Street's main regulator at a time when other federal regulators have responded precipitously to upheaval in the markets.

During his tenure, the SEC has watched as all the investment banks it oversaw collapsed, were swallowed up or got out of their traditional line of business. The agency, meanwhile, was on the sidelines while the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve worked to bail out the financial sector....

I don't know about anybody else, but I'm certainly not pleased that my investments in financial institutions have tanked, due in large part, as I understand it, to widespread deception and misinformation about the true value of assets on these institutions' books as well as the risks involved. How can this possibly not be the SEC's job? I'm supposed to evaluate these things myself?

... Cox said... that he had responded properly to the broader financial crisis given the information he had. Confronted with a barrage of criticism from lawmakers, former officials and even some of his staff, Cox said he took pride in his measured response to the market turmoil.

"What we have done in this current turmoil is stay calm, which has been our greatest contribution—not being impulsive, not changing the rules willy-nilly, but going through a very professional and orderly process that takes into account unintended consequences and gives ample notice to market participants," Cox said. This caution, he added, "has really been a signal achievement for the SEC...."

Although Cox speaks of staying calm in the face of financial turmoil, lawmakers across the political spectrum counter that this is actually another way of saying that his agency remained passive during the worst global financial crisis in decades. And they say that Cox's stewardship before this year—focusing on deregulation as the agency's staff shrank—laid the groundwork for the meltdown.

"The commission in recent years has handcuffed the inspection and enforcement division," said Arthur Levitt, SEC chairman during the Clinton administration. "The environment was not conducive to proactive enforcement activity...."

In a 90-minute conversation in his 10th-floor corner office last week, Cox said the SEC's emphasis on enforcement is as strong as ever. "We've done everything we can during the last several years in the agency to make sure that people understand there's a strong market cop on the beat," he said.

He also said that "the SEC is not a safety and soundness regulator" despite the fact that the very first sentence in the SEC's statement on what it does says, "The mission of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation."

Further evidence that the SEC has not been doing its job appears in a New York Times article from yesterday titled "Federal Cases of Stock Fraud Drop Sharply," which notes that there have been only 133 prosecutions for securities fraud in the first 11 months of this year, versus 437 in 2000 and a high of 513 in 2002 while the number of investigations leading to such prosecutions has dropped from 69 in 2000 to just 9 in 2007.

Furthermore he implied that failure to do anything about the biggest Ponzi scheme in history was no more than a footnote to an otherwise highly successful tenure.

[T]he SEC, by its own admission, failed to detect an alleged $50 billion fraud by Bernard L. Madoff that may be the largest Ponzi scheme in history.

But in his first interview since the Madoff scandal broke, Cox said he was not responsible for the agency's failure to detect the alleged fraud...

"That's why Madoff is such a big asterisk," he added. "The case is very troubling for that reason. It's what the SEC's good at. And it's inexplicable."

2008-12-25T09:47:00.004-05:00

I Pray on Christmas

I had never heard this song until a few days ago, despite Harry Connick, Jr. being one of my favorite male singers. I hope you enjoy it too! Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Cool Kwanzaa, Sunny Solstice, or whatever it is you celebrate!

2008-12-20T19:51:00.004-05:00

Drug Discounts for All Pennsylvanians on All Drugs at All Drugstores

A fellow technical professional I met last night at Philly–TPNG was handing out cards that provide any PA resident with discounts on all prescription drugs at all pharmacies in PA. I quote from a follow-up e-mail he sent to the group today:

This is a FREE program for the residents of Pennsylvania and it provides an alternative pricing option for prescription medicines.

If you are interested, please go to www.padrugcard.com and register for your own FREE card and take that card to your pharmacist so they can register your Group and ID number. Then, when faced with a charge for a prescription medicine that you think may be higher than you would like to pay, ask them to let you know what that price would be under the PA Drug Card Program.

I am part of the Pharmacy Business Development team who are getting the word out to all Pennsylvania residents that this program is available to us all for FREE. The program is expected to provide a discount off of the retail pricess of over 16,000 medications in the range of 10% to 75%.

While this doesn't help me immediately (I'm enrolled in a plan that allows me to mail-order 90-day supplies, which are cheaper than the 30-day supplies offered under this plan), it appears to offer savings potential to anyone who is not covered by a prescription plan and even to some people who are so covered, as the discounted price might well be lower than the co-pay.

The website also provides links to a medication pricing calculator that will show the nearby pharmacies at which the drugs you need are cheapest.

2008-12-18T09:44:00.005-05:00

Bagosora convicted for Rwandan genocide

In the 1996 Presidential election, I voted for Robert Krueger, rather than either Bill Clinton or Bob Dole. Krueger had served Clinton as Ambassador to Burundi, then to Botswana. While primarily symbolic of the repugnance I felt for voting for either of the mainstream candidates, I picked Mr Krueger for a very important reason.

Earlier that year while serving in Burundi, a county of inconsequential strategic importance to the U.S. with the poorest and most unhappy people in the world, at significant personal risk¹, Mr Krueger tried to draw attention to the horrific human rights abuses that were occurring in that country, whose ethnic make-up and conflicts mirrored those of neighboring Rwanda. A significant part of the Rwandan genocide of 1996 took place in Burundi against Burundi Hutus. Because of his commitment to human rights and against genocide, and specifically because of his commitment to the people of Burundi and his willingness to do something, Robert Krueger is one of my heroes².

All of which is a bit of a personal lead-in to today's news that a United Nations court in Tanzania sentenced Theoneste Bagosora, the former Rwandan Minister of Defense who organized the genocide, to life in prison along with two co-defendants, for genocide and crimes against humanity. He was responsible for over 800,000 people dying in 90 days, as well as for the death of a former Rwandan prime minister and 10 Belgian peacekeepers. There are too many former (and current) leaders in the world who are guilty of such crimes and still free. Let this be an example of what can happen to those who would abuse their fellow human beings, and a beginning to doing away with such evil in the world.

¹ In 1995, while in Burundi, his convoy was ambushed.
² Mr Krueger and his wife co-wrote a book about their time in Burundi called From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi: Our Embassy Years During Genocide.

2008-12-09T07:57:00.006-05:00

Car czar

What on earth makes anyone think that a government appointee would be any better at ensuring the viability of the auto industry than a carefully selected and knowledgeable executive whose first duty to his or her board, stockholders, employees and customers is to ensure the viability of the business? In fact, it seems pretty obvious that anybody with a proven—or even with a high likelihood of having—ability to do so would already be running an auto company. Not that the executives we've seen have necessarily done a good job (and to the extent they haven't, others have stepped in to fill the gap: Honda, Subaru, Toyota, Volvo, etc.). I'm just asking we wouldn't expect government to do worse than the capitalists.

Furthermore, let's call this what it is: nationalization of the auto industry. To nationalize, according to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language means, "To convert from private to governmental ownership and control." In what sense is this not what we're considering?

2008-12-07T15:29:00.003-05:00

A joke and a true story from our Obama Change brunch

Today a group of us formerly associated with the Obama campaigns's Baederwood (Jenkintown/Abington) office, held a brunch, the ostensible purpose of which was to take photos of us each holding a sign naming the issue on which we most stood with President-Elect Obama (mine was "Civil Liberties" but at my feet I also had my protest placard I've been using for years that says "Pray for Peace"). Mostly what we did though was share our hopes, aspirations and stories with each other.

Gail told a joke. It's shortly after the Inauguration. A man walks up to the White House and tells the guard he's there to see George Bush. The guard says, "He doesn't live here anymore" and the man leaves. Next day, same thing. "I'm here to see George Bush." "He doesn't live here anymore." The man leaves again. Third day, same thing yet again. "I'm here to see George Bush." "He doesn't live here anymore," but this time the guard adds, "This is the third day you've been here asking the same question and I've given you the same answer all three days. Why do you keep coming back and asking it?" And the man replies, "Because it sounds so wonderful!"

Another of the attendees had been at the Bush anti-Inaugural in 2000. They were protesting at the Supreme Court building, where five of the nine justices had essentially appointed Bush president despite the fact that he lost the election (at least this was this man's opinion). At one point he got so angry he started kicking at the steps leading up to the courthouse. A security guard rushed over and asked, "What are you doing?" When he heard the explanation, the security guard leaned over and whispered, "Would you please kick it for me too?"

2008-12-05T18:25:00.006-05:00

FiveThirtyEight.com: Quick Thoughts From Kansas

[Quoted in its entirety.]

Six points of general consensus among the reporters, strategists and analysts that were present at the Dole Institute.

1. Obama will have a relatively long honeymoon period, and the public will be inclined to be relatively sympathetic toward him.
1a. The Democrats' largest problem is with the public perception of their Congressional leadership.

2. Obama, politically speaking, has handled his transition very well. The Republicans on the panel felt extremely reassured by appointments like Jim Jones and Robert Gates. This bought Obama a huge amount of political capital.

3. The Republican bench is relatively inadequate at the present time in terms of candidates for national office.
3a. On the other hand, the 2012 Presidential cycle is already being looked at as something of a lost cause. Some of the stronger candidates—both known and unknown—might want to wait until 2016 to run.
3b. In the long-term, the future of the party probably lies in governor's offices. If the Republicans are smart, this may be their major focus in 2010-12, as opposed to the Congress and even perhaps the Presidency.

4. Sarah Palin is, for the time being, the public face of the Republican Party.
4a. This is not necessarily a good thing for the Republican Party.

5. The compressed primary calendar is problematic.
5a. The compressed primary calendar is unlikely to change.

6. Obama ran the best campaign we have seen in a generation.

I'd say that's it in a nutshell!

2008-12-05T12:05:00.003-05:00

WSJ: Rename Homeland Security

Wow! Finding something I want to blog about in the Wall Street Journal twice in one day! Peggy Noonan has a piece titled "At Least Bush Kept Us Safe". About this statement, which is not hers but "more or less" a quote of what some apparent Republicans were saying at a Christmas gathering she attended in Northern Virginia, Noonan says,

It is unknown, and perhaps can't be known, whether this was fully due to the government's efforts, or the luck of the draw, or a combination of luck and effort. And it not only can't be fully known by the public, it can hardly be fully known by the players at all levels of government.

I agree—it can't be known. Personally I'm inclined to assume it's largely been the luck of the draw. Partly because I'm pretty sure if anything major had been thwarted, somebody would have made sure the press found out about it (those that did make the press all seem to have turned out to have been overblown). And partly because thinking that it was the government's effort makes it all that much easier for government to justify continuing the abuses of the last 7+ years in the name of Homeland Security.

Which brings me to the first point I want to emphasize in Noonan's article:

What's at stake for him [Obama] is two words. When Republicans say, in coming years, "At least Bush kept us safe," Democrats will not want tacked onto the end of that sentence, "unlike Obama."
By the way, he should both reorder the Department of Homeland Security, that hopeless bureaucracy, and change its name. Homeland is a Nazi-ish word, not an American concept at all. And at this point "Homeland Security" is associated more with pointless harassment than safety. No one knows who came up with it. Probably some guy with two Christmas trees in Northern Virginia.

I don't always agree with Peggy Noonan, but on this I'm with her 100%, and have been saying the same since 25 November 2002.

The second point was even more of an aside in the article:

At such a gathering a month ago, there would have been some angry mutterings at John McCain, but not now. He's come quietly back to the Senate, where one of his colleagues told him of an amazing thing. The colleague had been touring the young democracies of Eastern Europe during the American election, and he found it wasn't so much Barack Obama that immediately knocked out observers but Mr. McCain's concession speech. This is the first American transfer of power they'd seen in eight years, and they couldn't get over the peacefulness and grace with which Mr. McCain accepted the people's verdict. "It really impressed them," the colleague told Mr. McCain, and later me. It gave them a template, a guide to how the older democracies do it.

Nice! I'm glad. It was graceful, kind and an excellent model for peaceful transfers of power in a democracy [also via The Daily Beast's Cheat Sheet].

2008-12-05T11:49:00.005-05:00

WSJ: End marijuana prohibition

In recognition of the 7th anniversary of the end of the First Prohibition, the Wall Street Journal is running an op-ed calling for the end of the current prohibition against certain drugs.

Today is the 75th anniversary of that blessed day in 1933 when Utah became the 36th and deciding state to ratify the 21st amendment, thereby repealing the 18th amendment. This ended the nation's disastrous experiment with alcohol prohibition.
It's already shaping up as a day of celebration, with parties planned, bars prepping for recession-defying rounds of drinks, and newspapers set to publish cocktail recipes concocted especially for the day.

But let's hope it also serves as a day of reflection. We should consider why our forebears rejoiced at the relegalization of a powerful drug long associated with bountiful pleasure and pain, and consider too the lessons for our time....
Why did our forebears wise up so quickly while Americans today still struggle with sorting out the consequences of drug misuse from those of drug prohibition?
It's not because alcohol is any less dangerous than the drugs that are banned today. Marijuana, by comparison, is relatively harmless: little association with violent behavior, no chance of dying from an overdose, and not nearly as dangerous as alcohol if one misuses it or becomes addicted. Most of heroin's dangers are more a consequence of its prohibition than the drug's distinctive properties.

Amen! Sensible legalization of drugs would immediately and dramatically reduce the crime rate and at the same time free up prosecutors to go after the real bad guys [via The Daily Beast's Cheat Sheet].

2008-12-02T13:52:00.004-05:00

Physics for Future Presidents

Subtitled The Science Behind the Headlines, this book, by Richard A. Muller, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, addresses the problem of how the president of the United States, with a blizzard of issues to deal with daily, can stay informed on scientific and technological developments that have an impact on society, when even scientists can hardly keep up with the influx of new research discoveries. It based on a course Muller's been teaching for years that was voted "best course on campus." Physics News Update 878 [← invalid link as of original post; should be valid shortly] says about the book that it:

... uses no equations or detailed mathematical description. Instead it imparts a commonsense, but accurate, appreciation of certain technological hazards and opportunities.

For example, Muller believes the president should know about radiation levels (it's the accumulative dose that is medically important), about the difference between nuclear fission and fusion explosions (the latter are much more powerful), about the relative energy content of various substances (gasoline, and even cookies, have more energy per weight than TNT), and about the relative cost of electricity obtained from batteries used in cell phones, computers, and automobiles. The president must be able to intelligently absorb information about the impact of human technology on climate, and to know that no single unexpectedly hot or cold day denotes a significant indicator of things to come.

The president can't afford to learn about such things as the danger from radiation at the last minute, argues Muller, because in certain circumstances, every second counts. Consider, for example, the detonation of a dirty bomb, in which an ordinary (non-nuclear) explosion spreads radioactive materials. Fatalities, property damage, and even residual radiation, would likely be very small. "The biggest danger from a radiological weapon is the misplaced panic and overreaction that it would cause. A dirty bomb is not really a weapon of mass destruction, but it is potentially a weapon of mass disruption," Muller says. Allocating resources during a crisis—military, medical, emergency, and engineering—requires quick and shrewd thinking.

Muller views physics as the "liberal arts of high technology," insofar as physicists are trained to solve problems in a broad category of topics, many of them relating to the very topics—such as energy and nuclear issues—that form the backdrop to numerous national-security concerns. This is probably why so many presidential science advisors have been physicists.

The Physics News item contains a link to an article from Nature, but may all you really want to do is take the presidential test (I'm embarrassed to say I only got 5 of 17 answers correct).

2008-12-02T10:05:00.003-05:00

On memory

Me and my friends—those close to my age anyway—have been continually complaining about our gradual loss of memory for at least a decade now. But today I found an article, An Infinite Loop in the Brain by Samiha Shafy [from Sp i egel Online via The Daily Beast Cheat Sheet], that enlightened me a little, convincing me that a good and accurate memory is not always something to be desired:

[Jill] Price can rattle off, without hesitation, what she saw and heard on almost any given date. She remembers many early childhood experiences and most of the days between the ages of 9 and 15. After that, there are virtually no gaps in her memory. "Starting on Feb. 5, 1980, I remember everything. That was a Tuesday...."
People say to me: Oh, how fascinating, it must be a treat to have a perfect memory," she says. Her lips twist into a thin smile. "But it's also agonizing."

In addition to good memories, every angry word, every mistake, every disappointment, every shock and every moment of pain goes unforgotten. Time heals no wounds for Price. "I don't look back at the past with any distance. It's more like experiencing everything over and over again, and those memories trigger exactly the same emotions in me. It's like an endless, chaotic film that can completely overpower me. And there's no stop button."

2008-09-09T14:27:00.002-04:00

NFL: Refs make a horrible call

Five minutes into the Bears-Colts game, Chicago coach Lovie Smith challenged the refs' call that Indianapolis player Courtney Roby was down by contact at his own 22-yard line after returning a punt from 3 years inside his own end zone. The replay showed he had tripped over his own player and clearly fumbled the ball. It was also clearly impossible to determine who had recovered this fumble from the replay footage shown on TV.

The referee ruled that the play stood as called and charged the Bears with a time-out. The commentators speculated that he ruled the way he did only because he hadn't been able to tell who recovered the fumble. I doubted that. I figured it was because despite the fumble, whistles had been blown before any recovery and therefore the ball would remain with Chicago. Shortly thereafter, the TV crew got word from the replay booth that it had been ruled the way it was for the very reason they had speculated.

What appalls me about this call is that despite Lovie Smith being totally correct in asserting that it had been a fumble, the fact that the refs had blown the call cost Chicago a time-out. Why couldn't they uphold his challenge, but admit that they couldn't determine who had recovered it and therefore had no choice but to allow Indianapolis to keep the ball? At least that way Chicago wouldn't have been penalized for the refs' mistake.

2008-09-04T11:51:00.002-04:00

Why I Hate Politics

Last night, Jon Stewart had a segment on The Daily Show that perfectly illustrates the reasons for my disgust with the current political climate (by current I mean the last 20 years or so). While it unquestionably has a liberal slant—thus reinforcing my own prejudices—a similar segment could have been produced with a conservative slant.

At one point, I was very enthusiastic about Barack Obama, in large part because I thought he could make a major contribution to changing this climate. I went so far as to actively campaign for him in the PA primary last spring. But as time goes on, I'm less and less convinced that he's much different from the rest of them. There are other more important reasons for my newly found lack of enthusiasm—his vote in favor of the FISA Amendment Act after promising to support a filibuster against it and his desire to continue making war in Afghanistan—but his willingness to take the low road at times rather than the high one is certainly a significant factor. Over the last 20 years I've often written in a candidate rather than vote for any formally nominated candidates. Still, I'll probably still vote Obama-Biden rather than go for a third-party candidate or a write-in [there's a list of about 60 possible write-in candidates near the bottom of this page] but with much reduced expectations.

2008-04-06T15:08:00.002-04:00

Obama foreign policy adviser's roundtable

Last Thursday I was invited to attend this roundtable at Arcadia University in Glenside, PA. Senator Obama's campaign was represented by four of his foreign policy advisers, impressive people all: Denis McDonough, Susan Rice, Paul Bucha and Richard Danzig. It re-inspired my strong desire to see Senator Obama become next President of the United States.

There was a limited opportunity for the audience to participate. I had several things I wanted to say and had my hand up to get the microphone the whole time, but never got it. So I'm posting my thoughts here. My ideas are certainly not original or new. Mr Bucha came close to making the first of these points himself on Thursday. The second—perhaps others as well—reflects a position that Senator Obama has already taken. And the third was briefly alluded to in another question asked that day.

(1) War on Terror: I believe one of the biggest mistakes President Bush made after 9/11 was to declare this a "War". For one thing it raises the status of the vile people who committed this heinous act far beyond what they deserve. Al Qaeda is obviously not a nation against whom we can make war. We should be treating them as nothing more than the uncommon criminals that they are.

More importantly, there is no way to define how we will know when this "war" has concluded. If there was thing I thought we had learned from Vietnam, it was that we must have clear and measurable objectives before we go to war. Apparently not.

Mr Bucha made a similar comment about the Iraq War and added that U.S. citizens have not been called upon to make any sacrifices for that war. I disagree. The one thing we have been asked to sacrifice and, unfortunately, seem all too willing to give up, is our civil liberties. Invoking the War on Terror helps make this possible. We'd be far less willing to give up these liberties in the name of catching criminals hidden away in the remote mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

(As a side note, this is the big problem with things like a War on Drugs as far as I'm concerned: they can't be won -- and for that matter we can't even lose and know that we're done with them.)

(2) Nuclear Weapons: It's been almost two decades since the Cold War ended. The U.S. still maintains a stockpile of almost 10,000 nuclear weapons. While this is about half what we had at the end of the Cold War, it's still a huge number. In the same period of time, the Russian stockpile has been cut by more than 90%, from well over 30,000 to a little over 3,000. I'm sure this is a very complicated topic and that an analysis such as mine is overly simplistic.

I also know that Senator Obama would pursue nuclear arms reductions. Nevertheless I would like to hear this receive much more emphasis.

(3) Military Draft: I vividly recall watching on TV as lottery numbers being drawn for the first time while I was attending Occidental College (where my education enabled me to obtain a student deferment). My birthday drew #197, and when I learned from my local draft board that they were only going up to a number slightly lower, I dropped my student deferment at home on Christmas break, becoming 1-A for a few days. A few days later, on January 1st, I was reclassified 1-H—not currently subject to processing for induction—and thus avoided any military service in the Vietnam Era.

One questioner at the roundtable on Thursday alluded to the role the draft played in bringing about the end of the Vietnam War. For decades after Vietnam I opposed any kind of military draft. But during the Bush years I have completely reversed my position. I now believe that a necessary pre-condition for this nation ever going to war should be the institution of a widespread draft with minimal possibilities for obtaining deferments. Doing so would ensure that we, the people, support any such war. And if things get out of hand, as they have in Iraq, an on-going draft would help bring about the kind of pressure to end the war that we saw in the late 60s and early 70s.

2008-04-06T11:05:00.016-04:00

Ten things you should know about John McCain (but probably don't)

John McCain voted against establishing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Now he says his position has "evolved," yet he's continued to oppose key civil rights laws.¹
According to Bloomberg News, McCain is more hawkish than Bush on Iraq, Russia and China.² Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan says McCain "will make Cheney look like Gandhi."³
His reputation is built on his opposition to torture, but McCain voted against a bill to ban waterboarding, and then applauded President Bush for vetoing that ban.⁴
McCain opposes a woman's right to choose. He said, "I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned."⁵
The Children's Defense Fund rated McCain as the worst senator in Congress for children.⁶ He voted against the children's health care bill last year, then defended Bush's veto of the bill.⁷
He's one of the richest people in a Senate filled with millionaires. The Associated Press reports he and his wife own at least eight homes!⁸ Yet McCain says the solution to the housing crisis is for people facing foreclosure to get a "second job" and skip their vacations.⁹
Many of McCain's fellow Republican senators say he's too reckless to be commander in chief.¹⁰ One Republican senator said: "The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He's erratic. He's hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me."¹¹
McCain talks a lot about taking on special interests, but his campaign manager and top advisers are actually lobbyists.¹² The government watchdog group Public Citizen says McCain has 59 lobbyists raising money for his campaign, more than any of the other presidential candidates.¹³
McCain has sought closer ties to the extreme religious right in recent years. The pastor McCain calls his "spiritual guide," Rod Parsley, believes America's founding mission is to destroy Islam, which he calls a "false religion."¹⁴ McCain sought the political support of right-wing preacher John Hagee, who believes Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment for gay rights and called the Catholic Church "the Antichrist" and a "false cult."^15,16
He positions himself as pro-environment, but he scored a 0—yes, zero--from the League of Conservation Voters last year.¹⁷

[Extracted rom a 5 Apr 2008 e-mail from MoveOn.org.]

¹"The Complicated History of John McCain and MLK Day", ABC News, April 3, 2008
²"Buchanan: John McCain 'Will Make Cheney Look Like Gandhi'", ThinkProgress, February 6, 2008
³"McCain More Hawkish Than Bush on Russia, China, Iraq", Bloomberg News, March 12, 2008
⁴"McCain Sides With Bush On Torture Again, Supports Veto Of Anti-Waterboarding Bill", ThinkProgress, February 20, 2008
⁵"McCain says Roe v. Wade should be overturned", MSNBC, February 18, 2007
⁶"2007 Children's Defense Fund Action Council(R) Nonpartisan Congressional Scorecard", February 2008
⁷"McCain: Bush right to veto kids health insurance expansion", CNN, October 3, 2007
⁸"Beer Executive Could Be Next First Lady", Associated Press, April 3, 2008
⁹"McCain Says Bank Bailout Should End `Systemic Risk'", Bloomberg News, March 25, 2008
¹⁰"Will McCain's Temper Be a Liability?", Associated Press, February 16, 2008
¹¹"Famed McCain temper is tamed", Boston Globe, January 27, 2008
¹²"Black Claims McCain's Campaign Is Above Lobbyist Influence: 'I Don't Know What The Criticism Is'", ThinkProgress, April 2, 2008
¹³"McCain's Lobbyist Friends Rally 'Round Their Man'", ABC News, January 29, 2008
¹⁴"McCain's Spiritual Guide: Destroy Islam", Mother Jones Magazine, March 12, 2008
¹⁵"Will McCain Specifically 'Repudiate' Hagee's Anti-Gay Comments?", ThinkProgress, March 12, 2008
¹⁶"McCain 'Very Honored' By Support Of Pastor Preaching 'End-Time Confrontation With Iran'", ThinkProgress, February 28, 2008
¹⁷"John McCain Gets a Zero Rating for His Environmental Record", Sierra Club, February 28, 2008

2008-04-02T22:11:00.010-04:00

Obama's misstatement regarding the Iraq War

I watched Senator Obama with Chris Matthews on Hardball tonight (watch the video of it here). Senator Obama stated that the Iraq War has gone on longer than World War II, World War I and the Civil War (28:10–28:28 in the video). With regard to World War II, this is correct only with regard to the length of U.S. involvement (7 December 1941 - 15 August 1945, 1,347 days). We reached that length of involvement in Iraq on 25 November 2006.

World War II is generally considered to have run from 1 September 1939 to 15 August 1945 (2,175 days). The Iraq War will have lasted as long on 2 March 2009. Despite what I expect to be Senator Obama's upcoming election to the Presidency, U.S. troops will surely still be in Iraq on that date.

Conflict in the European theater of World War II—the shortest portion of that war—lasted 2,076 days. For the Iraq War to be longer it would have to be continuing as of 23 November 2008 (which in all likelihood it unfortunately will be).

On 7 July 1937 Japan invaded China. One could reasonably argue this as the beginning date of World War II, in which case the length of World War II would be 2,961 days. For the Iraq War to last that long, conflict would have to continue till 27 April 2011. I pray that U.S. troops are long gone by then.

This repeats the essence of an e-mail I just sent the Obama campaign.

6 Apr 2008 15:45 Eastern time UPDATE:
Added a link to youtube video of Obama's appearance on Hardball.

2008-03-12T13:41:00.002-04:00

The value of Democratic candidates winning "swing" states' primaries

The New York Times has an article today headlined "Democrats in a Fight to Define ‘Winner’". In it, among other statements is this one: "Mrs. Clinton, meanwhile, has focused on her victories in states with the most Electoral College votes, like Ohio and California." What does this have to do with the likelihood of her winning the state in the general election? The races she's won are primary elections, i.e. she had the most votes among self-identified Democrats (plus, in certain states, with some number of non-Democratic crossover voters, who chose among the Democratic candidates for various reasons). The fact that she won the Democratic primary in George Bush's home state by a little over 3½% has only marginal relation to her ability to win Texas in the general election. This is especially true given Obama's demonstrated ability to attract Republicans and Independents.

2008-03-11T13:59:00.004-04:00

Superdelegates

Lately there has been a lot of discussion about how Democratic superdelegates ought to determine which candidate they will support to become their nominee for President. To me it seems quite obvious and simple: they should use their best judgement based on whatever criteria they deem important. Personally I hope such criteria will be in for what is in the best interests of the party and the nation—candidates' positions, abilities and character; probability of success in the general election—rather than what is in their own personal interest—which candidate will offer them a position in their administration, should they be elected. The Democratic party purposely does not prescribe how superdelegates should make this decision. There are no rules; there are not even guidelines.

Partly because this is what I think superdelegates will do, but also because superdelegates have tended in the past to support establishment candidates, I have been predicting since early January (after the New Hampshire primary) that Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee [full disclosure: using similar logic I predicted at the same time that Mitt Romney would be the Republican nominee, although one could say there were no establishment candidates among the Republicans). I still think this outcome is somewhat likely. I hope I am wrong, because of the three remaining candidates for President, Obama is the only one I would vote for in the general election. My vote will not go to Clinton, if she's nominated.

I remain optimistic however, since the odds makers—who back their predictions up with their own real money—are currently favoring Obama. Here are the odds as of today from oddschecker.com:

Democratic nominee: Obama–1.36 to 1, Clinton–3.5 to 1, Evan Bayh–101 to 1
President, by party: Democrats–1.54 to 1, Republicans–2.75 to 1, Independents–101 to 1
President, by candidate: Obama–2.2 to 1, McCain–2.75 to 1, Clinton–5.5 to 1

Finally, for anyone interested in learning more about superdelegates, I recommend A Brief History of Superdelegates, a post by poblano¹ (whoever he or she is) over at Daily Kos. Only partly a history, it's also an analysis and concludes with an argument for why Democratic superdelegates in 2008 should support the winner of "the popular will of Democratic voters and caucus goers," who will presumably be Barack Obama. Even if you don't agree with the argument, it's worth reading for the history. It summary, it gives the four rationales espoused at the time the concept of superdelegates was created (1982) [parenthetical comments are mine]:

to increase the sense of order and avert a crisis at the Convention (this was in the wake of the disastrous—for the Democrats—1972 and 1980 general elections);
to get party officials more involved with the eventual nominee (which, ironically, undid the reforms made for the 1972 election cycle, which took power away from party officials who were deemed responsible for the 1968 Convention fiasco, and thus beginning the era of the modern primary election);
to nominate a candidate who can win; and
to check against a plurality, factional candidate who does not reflect the prevailing sentiment of the electorate (having in mind a non-mainstream candidate who only wins a plurality of pledged delegates while multiple mainstream candidates divide up the majority of such delegates).

¹ poblano has a rather interesting website of his or her own: fivethirtyeight.com, a "new, semi-continually updated blog on polling and electoral math for the 2008 general election," 538 being the number of electors in the Electoral College.

2008-03-11T09:49:00.002-04:00

Federal laws against prostitution

The news that a Federal wiretap picked up a phone conversation of Eliot Spitzer's in which he arranged a visit to a prostitute raises some questions that I haven't seen addressed anywhere. Why is the Federal government investigating prostitution? How can Federal laws against prostitution be constitutional? Given charges of money laundering and the fact that the IRS is involved, there are clearly other Federal laws that are alleged to have been broken. But there is also apparently a Federal law against prostitution; this New York Times article names two people "charged with a conspiracy to violate federal prostitution laws."

The 10^th amendment to the Constitution of the United States says, in full, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Where in the Constitution is the power to regulate prostitution given to the Federal government? The commerce clause perhaps? I wouldn't be surprised if this were the justification. After all, this prostitution ring was international in scope, with multiple places of business in the United States. But as with so many applications of this controversial clause I see this as another unwarranted usurpation of power by the Feds. Is this what the writers of the Constitution had in mind? That the U.S. government would be prosecuting prostitutes and their johns? I doubt it.

2007-10-13T11:18:00.001-04:00

In-depth reporting

Late this morning, as I was eating my fried eggs and toast, I turned on CNN. The story being covered at the moment was General Ricardo Sanchez criticism yesterday of the Bush Administration's handling of the War on Iraq.

After reporting on what he said, a segment came titled "Who is Sanchez?"

"Ah, good," I thought, "it will be nice to get to know a little bit more about this guy."

This segment made three points. While Gen. Sanchez commanded forces in Iraq, from June 2004 to June 2004,

Saddam Hussein was captured.
Saddam Husseins sons were killed.
The Abu Ghraib scandal unfolded.

Oh, great! I'm so glad I stay tuned. I now know so much more about General Sanchez.

Is this what in-depth reporting has come to?

2007-10-11T13:21:00.000-04:00

Mexican restaurants

I'm a big fan of Mexican food. Unfortunately there aren't a wealth of Mexican restaurants around here. One I've been going to regularly for years is El Azteca, a very fine BYO place in Northeast Philadelphia. Another that's closer but a much smaller (and cheaper) operation is La Morena in nearby Hatboro, also BYO. I've also eaten at Coyote Crossing in Conshohocken and though the food is very good, it's a bit out of the way for me.

Recently Las Maracas opened up even nearer by in Southampton. Last night I ate there for the first time. The food was quite good (I ordered chicken enchiladas with a mole sauce). I was telling my waiter—who, it turned out, was the brother of the owner—about these other two good Mexican restaurants I knew about and learned that his sister the owner had sold La Morena in order to open up Las Maracas. I'll have to go back to La Morena and see if the quality remains good. When I spoke his sister later, she told me she hopes this is the beginning of a chain of Mexican restaurants.

BTW, they have a big banner across their window trumpeting "Complimentary Margaritas" and I was indeed offered one, but after leaving with a take-out version of the menu, noticed that it's a BYO kind of place too, so I'm not sure what kind of Margaritas those would be.

2007-10-11T13:00:00.000-04:00

Michele Tafoya's secret assignment

In case you don't recognize the name, she is a sideline commentator for Monday Night Football. Did you know that before each game, she gets a challenge to include a specified word or phrase into her telecast? And if she succeeds, $100 goes to charity. So far in her career she's raised about $2,000 this way. Read all about it here. Pretty cool! Just don't let it get in the way of reporting on the game, Michele (actually, I understand she's determined to do just this, i.e. not let it get in the way). [I learned about this from a sidebar in a recent issue Sports Illustrated.]

2007-10-11T12:38:00.000-04:00

Fact-free advertising

There are many examples of this kind of advertising around, but the ones that are currently bugging me are from Temple University. You can find several examples of what I'm talking about on the special website they set up for this marketing campaign. I'd like to quote the one I've been hearing on the Temple radio station, WRTI, but I can't find it, so instead I've transcribed one for radio that I found on the website:

There are certain people who don't believe in the easy way out. For them, that's a cop-out.
They don't believe in cutting corners; "turning" is what corners are for.
They know that what you drive isn't as important as where you're going.
They see the road less travelled as the road with less traffic.
They realize that the only time something will come to them is if they call for a pizza. That you can't appreciate sweet if you don't taste sour once in a while.
They simply can't use the word can't.
They don't just walk the walk, they run it.
They believe that inside of them they have the capacity to make anything happen. Because inspiration, ambition and determination fit them to a "T".
They come from many places, and also from one: Temple University.

What a bunch of malarkey! If any college or university had come anywhere close to figuring out how to ensure that any set of positive characteristics—let alone these particular ones—could be used to describe their graduates, we'd all know about. Not that we'd all want to attend that school. Thinking about it now in this way reminds me of Hitler Youth, a Communist Youth League, the People's Temple, or the Moonies, where indeed the effort is to convince everybody to believe in a common set of values. Is this what a university education is all about? Ironically, I believe that Temple does a very good job of not providing the kind of education that this marketing campaign claims they do.

2007-10-05T17:14:00.000-04:00

The coming fate newly available broadcast spectrum

Much of the debate that goes on over what the FCC should or should not be doing leaves me confused and ambivalent. I hate not having an opinion, preferably a strong one, and especially on such an important set of topics. So when I read something on one of these debates that I makes a strong case, I'm happy.

I was very happy indeed to read Scott Bradner's article, FCC ignores the lesson of Wi-Fi's history, in the 13 Aug 2007 issue of Network World¹. Mr Bradner is Harvard University's technology security officer. That's good too; I tend to trust academics. He writes about the FCC's proposed rules for splitting up of broadcast spectrum that will become available after end of analog television on 17 Feb 2009²:

The FCC has decided on a public-private partnership to run the public safety part of the spectrum. The other option was a government-run, national public safety network. I'm not sure the path the FCC wants to take will change the overall result. Considering the unblemished history of such projects, I fully expect any useful network will be decades off—if it ever shows up—and will produce vast windfalls for a few selected vendors at the taxpayers expense.

The FCC's decision about the public safety network was quite predictable and, sadly, so were its decisions about the rest of the spectrum.

Anyone who has been paying attention at all knows that the most dynamic explosion in the uses of wireless has come in the unlicensed, small chunks of spectrum where such technologies as Wi-Fi prosper. It would seem obvious that if the FCC's goal in deciding what to do with the to-be-released spectrum was—as the FCC press release states—"serving the public interest and the American people," at least part of the spectrum would have been added to these unlicensed bands. Communications companies, however, do not spend billions of dollars (the FCC's minimum bid for a part of the spectrum is $4.6 billion) to open up spectrum for everyone to use, for free. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin noted in his statement accompanying the news release that the FCC had to produce "a fair return on this asset for the American people." In focusing on the auction return, the FCC ignores the proven value - far more than $4.6B - that more unlicensed spectrum would have returned to the U.S. economy.

Well I haven't paid a lot of attention, but I know that what he says about what's happened in unlicensed spectrum is true. And, wow! does his anti-government slant ever appeal to the libertarian in me! And boy! does the infinitesimal likelihood of anyone but the big spenders (i.e. communications companies) benefiting in any significant way ever appeal to the cynic and the pessimist in me!

Well, now I've got at least one strong opinion on this set of issues.

¹Interestingly enough, you'll never learn who the author is by reading the article on Network World's web site.

²Oh yeah! Did you know your non-digital television will become obsolete in 16 months? This is the date when non-digital broadcasts will cease, by Act of Congress. I have a feeling a lot of people are in for a rude surprise. Even if, unlike me, you do have a digital set, you probably have at least one analog set you still use.

2007-10-05T16:44:00.000-04:00

White hat phishing expeditions

Phishing for the Good Guys [found in the 13 Aug 2007 issue of Network World] is an interesting article about Markus Jakobsson, a cybersecurity researcher and professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, who

spends much of his time perpetrating online attacks on unsuspecting Web surfers—without actually harming them, of course—to see what types of ruses people will fall for and to predict potential new techniques phishers might pursue....

The typical procedure is to tell them about the research after they've unknowingly participated, which Jakobsson admits has led to some angry responses.

Among his conclusions are that many people:

seem to have have no qualms about accepting a self-signed certificate

who won't click on a link contained in an e-mail will willingly copy and paste that same link into their browers

will respond to fraudulent e-mails that correctly identify the first four digits of their social security numbers (which are not random, but identify the issuer of the number)

if they are male, are likely to click on a link sent by a female, more so than one sent by a male

who appear to be politically on the extreme left or extreme right are likely to click on links sent to them, more so than those who are more moderate politically

Like others mentioned in the story, I have my doubts about the ethics of going about this the way Jakobsson is. But I also would probably be happy to volunteer to be one of his guinea pigs. But that would spoil the results, wouldn't it?

2007-09-21T12:05:00.000-04:00

Windows to Linux—e-mail

I took a major step in my plan to avoid ever having, for any personal reason, to install Windows Vista: I switched my primary active e-mail client from Thunderbird on Windows XP to Evolution under Gnome on Ubuntu Linux. It actually went quite easily. The way I saw it there were three things I wanted to accomplish before making the switch:

Get dynamic signature generation working

Make sure I had a way to deal with SPAM working

Switch each of my accounts, pseudo-accounts and news & blog subscriptions over

The first was the hardest. Years ago I started collected quotations that appealed to me. Shortly thereafter I wrote a Perl script to modify a quotation at the end of a standard signature file. Then I wrote a bash script (using Cygwin) to do this every 60 seconds on Windows. Then I modified the bash script to recognize which of my several computers I was on, specify the location of the quotation and signature files on that system and run the Perl script, again every 60 seconds. It's actually quite a bit simpler with Evolution than on Windows (with whatever e-mail client I've had). I've documented what I had to do in a thread at the Ubuntu forums.

The second was the easiest. Evolutions came with 31 plugins. For some reason, both the Bogofilter junk and Spamassassin junk plugins were enabled. At first I thought all I had to do was turn off one. I gave the filters some time to start learning. After I'd marked several hundred SPAM messages, it didn't seem like any were being filtered directly to my Junk folder. Then I read another thread on the Ubuntu forums about how to enable both of them. I followed the instructions but then realized the instructions were for an earlier Ubuntu release and that most of what I had done had somehow been disabled behind my back. Around this same time, I noticed that SPAM was beginning to be filtered to my Junk folder automatically, so I let it be. It's still learning, but the amount of SPAM I have to handle manually is down to something reasonable.

The third step was quite easy too, though I had identified 13 accounts/pseudo-accounts/subscriptions to deal with. (By pseudo-accounts, I mean accounts without their own e-mail servers—particularly without SMTP servers—that I use to generate messages for different purposes; e.g., one for my business, one for personal use, one for a volunteer organization I work for, one for an anonymous blog I write, a no-spam one to which any message replies will be sent to bit limbo, etc.) It only took me a few minutes for each one of these.

For now, I've got a bunch of saved e-mail on my Windows system that I haven't gotten onto my Ubuntu system. I know it's possible, but my hope is to delete all but the really essential stuff before I copy those messages over. I've also got a bunch of contacts that I do want to copy, and I'll deal with that sooner.

By the way, I've been regularly browsing the Web from both systems for quite a while. I found a nifty Firefox add-on called Foxmarks Bookmarks Synchronizer that keeps bookmarks on the two systems synchronized almost seamlessly. Once or twice I've had to manually choose between different sets of bookmarks in a folder because I had changed them on both computers within a short amount of time. But it was easy to figure out the right answer and it's totally lovely to have the same set of bookmarks on both systems. Now if I could only synchronize them with "foreign" computers, like those at my clients', even if it meant going to my own personal Foxmarks page and clicking on links from there.

Note: I originally drafted this post on 2 Sep 2007 ~20:30. Today I've added a bunch of links and added some newer information about my experience battling SPAM. I've since made some additional progress on the Windows-to-Linux conversion, which I hope to post about soon.

2007-09-21T10:35:00.000-04:00

Look out!

I'm reading e-mail via Outlook at a client's system. A message I want to respond to has some content that's been blocked: "To help protect your privacy, Outlook prevented automatic download of some pictures in this message." No problem. When I click on Reply, I get the following message in a dialog box:

To complete this action, Outlook must download content from a server other than your e-mail server. This could verify to the sender that your e-mail address is valid and increase the amount of junk e-mail you receive in the future.

I can check a box labeled, "Please do not show me this dialog again," but other than that, the only two choices are OK and Cancel. OK means, "Go ahead; download the blocked content and let me reply." Cancel means, "I changed my mind, I don't want to reply." Where's the choice that says, "Don't download the blocked content, but let me reply to the content that isn't blocked"?

Not only isn't there one, there's simply no way to reply without downloading the blocked content. Here's what Microsoft's Support website says on the subject:

If you have the Don’t download pictures or other content automatically in HTML e-mail option turned on, and you want to forward, reply to, or edit an e-mail message that contains blocked external content, you must download the full body contents of the e-mail message.... If you click OK to the warning message, and subsequently download the previously blocked content, Outlook 2003 does not provide any method to block or re-protect the message as it was originally presented.

Note the word must. What Microsoft is saying here is, "It's potentially harmful, so we'll block it for you, but if you want to do anything with the non-harmful parts, you must load the potentially harmful parts first." Phooey!

2007-09-06T17:56:00.000-04:00

Bin Laden videotape?

Tonight's so-called "breaking news" is that an Islamist website may soon post a videotaped message from Osama bin Laden to mark the 6^th anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Can you tell I'm not impressed? Why does so much news involved things that "may" happen or are "going" to happen?

But it got me thinking: If Bin Laden is so vehemently anti-Western and such a good Muslim, why would he commemorate such an event based on the Western and Christian Gregorian calendar? Why not commemorate it on the anniversary based on the Islamic calendar? The attacks occurred on Tuesday 23 Jumaada al-THaany 1422 A.H. according to the Islamic calendar. The 6^th anniversary by the Islamic calendar would have been several weeks ago (Sunday 8 July by the Gregorian calendar). What's up with that, Osama?

2007-09-05T20:09:00.000-04:00

Another view on Larry Craig

From Sam Frantz, who's on an e-mail list I'm on:

You caught me being a homo but I don't want people to know I'm a homo so I'll plead guilty to a charge that doesn't indicate I'm a homo, but whoops everybody will know I'm a homo anyway, dang, I shouldn't have pleaded guilty, oh shit, I guess I'll announce my resignation, but wait, maybe it doesn't matter if everybody thinks I'm a homo, they can't fire me for that, so why give up the Republican vote? OK, I'm not resigning! And I'm NOT a homo either! As proof, look at my record, and see how much I hate homos! So there.

2007-08-31T09:30:00.000-04:00

A hero for the 21^st Century

I'm thinking of Abdul Sattar Edhi. He came to my attention when I read this article about Pakistan in the September 2007 issue National Geographic.

[I]t is a measure of the country's underlying goodness, and a sign of hope, that 60 years after independence the most revered figure in Pakistan is not a mullah or a sports hero, but a 79-year-old man who routinely washes dried blood off dead bodies and fishes his clothes from a donation barrel.

Abdul Sattar Edhi began serving his fellow citizens a few years after the founding of Pakistan, when he opened a free clinic in Karachi. Later he bought a dented Hillman station wagon, its blue paint peeling, and turned it into Pakistan's first private ambulance. He shuttled poor people to medical care and collected the bodies of the city's homeless from the gutters, washed them, and gave them a proper burial. "I felt it was my duty as a human being," he says, recalling the revulsion he learned to overcome. "It was obvious the government wasn't going to do it."

Decades later, that hasn't changed. While the military accounts for a quarter of the national budget, less than 3 percent is spent on education, health, and public welfare. And so Edhi still tends to Pakistan's dirty work, body by body. His one-man charity is now an acclaimed international foundation. His single, beat-up old station wagon has grown into a fleet of 1,380 little white ambulances positioned across Pakistan, tended by thousands of volunteers. They are usually first to arrive on the scene of any tragedy. In May 2002, when police found the remains of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered in Karachi, it was Edhi who gently collected the body parts, all ten, and took Daniel Pearl to the morgue.

I'm not the only one who thinks Mr Edhi a hero. And I'm not alone in thinking he should be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

2007-08-29T08:58:00.000-04:00

Senator Larry Craig

OK, I try not to come to conclusions about people before I know all the facts (perhaps I should say "as many as possibly can be known" since no one can know all the facts). If you've ever been involved in an event that was covered by the media, you know how difficult it is to know much that's accurate from them (not to be overly critical—to a large degree it's inherent in the nature of things). So I start by looking at a source document: the police report filed by Sgt. Karsnia, the arresting officer. Here are some excerpts:

I entered the men's restroom and proceeded to an unoccupied stall....

At 1213 hours I could see an older white male with grey hair standing outside my stall.... The male was later identified by Idaho driver's license as Larry Edwin Craig . I could see Craig look through the crack in the door from his position. Craig would look down at his hands, "fidget" with his fingers, and then look through the crack into my stall again. Craig would repeat this cycle for about two minutes....

At 1215 hours, the male in the stall to the left of me... exited... Craig entered the stall and placed his roller bag against the front of the stall door.... From my seated position, I could observe the shoes and ankles of Craig... At 1216 hours, Craig tapped his right foot. Craig tapped his toes several times and moved his foot closer to my foot. I moved my foot up and down slowly.... The presence of others did not seem to deter Craig as he moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot which was within my stall area.

At 1217 hours, I saw Craig swipe his hand under the stall divider for a few seconds.... I was only able to see the tips of his fingers.... Craig swiped his hand again for a few seconds... to where I could see more of his fingers. Craig then swiped his hand a third time... I could see Craig... had a gold ring on his ring finger as his hand was on my side of the stall divider.

At about 1219 hours, I held my Police Identification in my right hand down by the floor so that Craig could see it. With my left hand near the floor I pointed towards the exit. Craig responded, "No!" I again pointed towards the exit. Craig exited the stall... without flushing the toilet. Without causing a disturbance, I discretely motioned Craig to exit the restroom. I noticed that not all the stalls were occupied....

At this point, according to Sgt. Karsnia, they go to the Police Operations Center although Craig is reluctant and even resistant (nothing indicates that he resisted arrest).

I asked him for his driver's license.... Craig handed me a busines card that identified himself as a United State Senator as he stated, "What do you think about that?" I responded by setting his business card down on the table and again asking him for his driver's license.

Craig provided me his driver's license. In a recorded post-Miranda interview, Craig stated the following:

...

He was standing outside of the stalls for 1-2 minutes waiting for the stall

He has a wide stance when going to the bathroom and that his foot may have touched mine

He reached down with his right hand to pick up a piece of paper that was on the floor

He is unable to his gold wedding ring off of his left ring finger

It should be noted that there was not a piece of paper on the bathroom floor, nor did Craig pick up a piece of paper. During the interview, Craig either disagreed with me or "didn't recall" the events as they happened.

I've omitted what seem to me to be less important details—in the interest of brevity—and a statement of Sgt. Karsina's experience as to behavior commonly exhibited by persons engaged in "lewd conduct"—not to say that this not relevant, but I myself would probably have remained totally clueless about any such behavior for the rest of my life, but for this story (so I can easily believe there are many people who were, till now, similarly clueless, including Sen. Craig).

There are additional documents available at the link above. The only other one I want to excerpt is the Petition to Enter Plea of Guilty—Misdemeanor:

I, Larry Edwin Craig, am the defendant in the above action [State of Minnestor vs Larry Edwin Craig].... I state to the court that:

....

I understand the charges made against me in this case, which are: Disorderly Conduct... and Interference with Privacy... I am pleading guilty to the offense of Disorderly Conduct as a Misdemenor.

I am pleading guilty to the charge... as alleged because on June 11, 2007,... in the restroom... in Lindbergh Terminal, I did the following: Engaged in conduct which I knew or should have known tended to arouse alarm or resentment of others, which conduct was physical (versus verbal) in nature.

I understand that the court will not accept a plea of guilty from anyone who claims to be innocent.
I now make no claim that I am innocent of the charge to which I am entering a plea of guilty.

....

I am not represented by an attorney.

....

I understand that I have the following constitutional rights which I knowingly voluntarily and intelligently give up (waive) by entering this plea of guilty:...

Understanding the above I am entering my plea of guilty freely and voluntarily and without any promises except as noted in number 11 below.

I am entering my plea of guilty based on the following plea agreement with the Prosecutor:... sentence is 10 days of jail time and a fine of $1000.00; 10 days of jail and $500.00 of the fine are stayed for one year on the conditions that Larry Edwin Craig does not commit any same or similar offenses, Larry Edwin pays the unstayed fine of $500.00...

Is this behavior and the behavior reported all over the news media, such as not informing anyone in his life about these events, consistent with the denials that Sen. Craig is making? It's hard to believe. I understand him wanting to make it go away quickly and quietly. Easily. But putting myself in his shoes, if it had happened the way he describes, I have a hard time imagining myself accepting this plea agreement without even talking to an attorney (who, by the way, is ethically bound to confidentiality) or anyone else.

2007-08-28T10:29:00.000-04:00

Rioters in business suits

I came across a picture of lawyers in Lahore protesting the firing of Pakistan's chief justice by Gen Musharraf. It looked more like a riot than a protest to me, though I suppose riots are a subset of protests. What struck me was that the participants were wearing business suits. I don't think I've ever seen such a thing. Not particularly newsworthy almost six months later, but interesting. The picture to the left is related to a 12 March 2007 article on the BBC website. Clicking on the image will take you to the BBC story in pictures.

2007-08-27T15:52:00.000-04:00

Lying about Gonzales's resignation

There will comment a-plenty on this resignation. But I found something that won't get much attention but interests me. It's in today's New York Times story, (at the end of course):

There had been rumblings over the weekend that Mr. Gonzales’s departure was imminent, although the White House sought to quell the rumors....
A senior administration official said today that Mr. Gonzales, who was in Washington, had called the president in Crawford, Tex., on Friday to offer his resignation. The president rebuffed the offer, but said the two should talk face to face on Sunday.
Mr. Gonzales and his wife flew to Texas, and over lunch on Sunday the president accepted the resignation with regret, the official said.
On Saturday night Mr. Gonzales was contacted by his press spokesman to ask how the department should respond to inquiries from reporters about rumors of his resignation, and he told the spokesman to deny the reports.
White House spokesmen also insisted on Sunday that they did not believe that Mr. Gonzales was planning to resign. Aides to senior members of the Senate Judiciary Committee said over the weekend that they had received no suggestion from the administration that Mr. Gonzales intended to resign.
As late as Sunday afternoon, Mr. Gonzales himself was denying through his spokesman that he was quitting. The spokesman, Brian Roehrkasse, said Sunday that he telephoned the attorney general about the reports of his imminent resignation “and he said it wasn’t true — so I don’t know what more I can say.”

In other words, during the 1½ days between Mr Gonzales submitting his resignation and Mr Bush accepting it, it seems that reporters who asked if the rumor was true was lied to or at the very least intentionlly misled. Not necessarily by the various spokespersons, but certainly by everyone who was giving them information. Mr Gonzales himself for one. And if not Mr Bush for another, he does an appallingly poor job of managing his staff.

Is it any wonder nobody trusts government or the media these days?

2007-08-27T09:56:00.000-04:00

Billion light-year void in the universe

It appears to be 6-10 billion light-years distant and is described is this paper, which has reportedly been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. If I've made the right assumptions and done the calculations right, this void is about twice as big as the biggest known void. From today's Astronomy Picture of the Day:

The void is not a hole in space like a black hole, but rather a vast region of the universe that appears to be mostly devoid of normal matter and even dark matter. The void is still thought to contain dark energy, though, and is clearly traversable by light. The void's existence is being postulated following scientific curiosity about how unusually cold spots came to appear on WMAP's map of cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. One possibility was that this CMB region was not actually very cold but light from the spot somehow became less cosmologically redshifted than normal along the way. Other voids in the universe are known to exist, but this void appears to have an unusually large gravitational effect, and so might possibly be the largest in our entire visible universe.

2007-08-27T06:34:00.000-04:00

Total lunar eclipse

This eclipse (there's a minor error on the page that means you'll have to scroll up a little to see everything) will occur in less than 24 hours. Some aspect this event will be visible pretty much everywhere except most of Antarctica, Alaska, Hawaii, New South Wales and Queensland. Totality will be visible only from the Arctic, Africa, Europe, Greenland and Western Asia. Maximum eclipse will occur at 10:37:22 UT (6:37 AM here on the East Cost of the U.S.). Totality begins 0:45:00 earlier and ends 0:45:02 later, while the Moon enters Earth's umbra 1:46:06 earlier and leaves 1:46:08 later.

I wonder, "Why the 2-second difference? And the even bigger difference between times when the Moon enters and leaves Earth's penumbra? Also, why won't the Moon be full until 2 minutes after maximum totality?"

If you miss it, or the weather is bad, don't worry; the next one is in less than six months.

2007-08-26T11:21:00.000-04:00

Somebody to Love

According to a story published on Thursday by the BBC...

Queen star Brian May has gained his doctorate in Astronomy—36 years after starting his thesis. The rock guitarist... abandoned his studies to pursue a career in music...

The performer's thesis is entitled Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud, and he has been in the Canary Islands to carry out some astronomical observations.

Count me a fan of many Queen songs. One I like is Somebody to Love. To celebrate Dr May's new status, have a listen to this fantastic cover (.mp3) by Jim Boggia (pronounced BOH-zha). It's the first of several podcasts he's put up.

I'm giving away my cover of Queen's 'Somebody to Love' that I recorded to honor WXPN's Helen Leicht on her 30th year in radio.

If you live in Philadelphia and listen to WXPN (88.5 FM) like I do, or if you listen to their webcast, you are probably familiar with it. As Mr Boggia says, "you have seemingly not been able to escape from [hearing it]." He has an interesting post about the production of this unreleased number on his blog. Apparently he performed all 48 tracks by himself.

If I were one of those people who add music that automatically starts playing to their blogs or websites, this is probably the song I'd put up. But those sites annoy me terribly. So I won't impose my musical taste on you.

2007-08-24T18:53:00.001-04:00

Hole punch clouds

It's a day for weather I guess. I saw a picture of a cloud formation in September's issues of National Geographic. I've neither seen nor heard of this kind of formation before. Aussie School House has a whole collection of pictures of 'em. The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration has an explanation, but National Geographic says, ~~no one knows for sure how these are created, except that it's certainly not by the action of alien spaceships.~~ "UFO hunters be warned—there is probably a perfectly reasonable explanation for the massive holes that mysteriously form in cloud layers as if, well, a giant spaceship had blasted through. Scientists just haven't nailed it down yet."

25 Aug 2006 15:54 Eastern time UPDATE:

I substituted the National Geographic's actual words for my paraphrase.

2007-08-24T11:59:00.000-04:00

PoP (Probability of Precipitation)

Speaking of the weather, I've invested a fair amount of time over the years trying to understand exactly what this means. Based largely on my own sense of who and what are reliable, I've concluded that this definition from the National Weather Service is a good one, despite the obvious bit of awkwardness:

12-hour Probability of Precipitation (PoP12)

Is the likelihood, expressed as a percent, of a measurable precipitation event (1/100th of an inch) at a grid point during the indicated valid period.

It would read so much better if it ended "during the indicated 12 hours." There's a much longer but useful explanation consistent with the definiton at this University of Texas page (attributed to the NWS but unavailable anywhere else, at least that Google knows about anyway).

2007-08-24T11:19:00.000-04:00

Weather Forecast Accuracy

Who gives the best weather forecasts? ForecastAdvisor offers a free service that compares Accuweather, MyForecast, the National Weather Service (whose forecasts the Weather Underground repackages), the Weather Channel and others (Intellicast in SE PA). According to them, the Weather Channel was most accurate last month, being ¼% more accurate than Intellicast (and 1½% more accurate last year). Other services trail by 2% or more.

2007-08-23T17:59:00.000-04:00

Customer service lives

A while ago I bought a General Electric USB 2.0 4-port hub. For the last couple of months my webcam and printer have only been working intermittently. I finally figured out the problem is with this hub, through which I was connecting both to my computer. My first clue was that the hub overheated almost to the point of being too hot to handle, literally.

I spent a while trying to locate a way to contact G.E. about this problem over the Internet. When I finally found a web page that seemed suitable, I got numerous errors saying I had filled in the form with French characters, which, for some mysterious reason, was unacceptable. It also wasn't true. I finally got around that problem by eliminating all non-alphanumeric characters from what I was entering (i.e. no periods, commas, dashes, etc.). Then I started getting 404 (page not found) errors.

Next I attempted to contact the webmaster via a similar fill-in form. It worked! Several days later I got a response, telling me to call a toll-free number. I did and got someone who was obviously overseas. He kept giving me information then retracting it. Finally he said, "Oh, you have to call a different toll-free number for that part" and gave me the number. Which he then retracted. And gave me yet another. Without much hope of success I dialed it and got a recorded message saying they were closed.

Today I called again. None of the automated options seemed to fit my case, so I hit '0' to speak with an operator. She said, "Oh, you want the service department" and transferred me. Skeptical, when the service rep picked up (which was immediately), I started to explain apologetically exactly how I had come to be calling. She interrupted pleasantly and said, "What part number?" I gave her the part number and the next thing I knew she was taking my shipping address so she could mail me a new hub. No hassle! No more being put on hold! No more retractions!

Now all I have to do is wait for my replacement hub to show up. If I have problems, she told me to call her back. I would too, if I had bothered to note her name. What a surprisingly pleasant experience it was once I reached this company that I had never heard of. Who is it? Jasco Products, apparently a great company to do business with.

2007-08-22T19:49:00.000-04:00

Whose September report on Iraq?

Here are a couple of questions and answers from a White House press briefing on 1 Aug 2007 [full transcript]:

Q I'm asking how he [General Petraeus] can give an objective assessment of his own work.
MR. SNOW: Well, I think the first thing you ought to do is take a look again at the report that was filed to Congress, the interim reported July 15th—no sugarcoating there. You take a look—and they try to use real metrics on it. General Petraeus is a serious guy who sees his mission not as a political mission, but, in fact, as somebody who reports facts.
Now, let us keep in mind that the full burden of this report does not fall on his shoulders. A lot of the key judgments, especially about politics, will fall on Ambassador Crocker. So this is—although I know a lot of people talk about "the Petraeus report," in fact, you have a report that is a joint report by General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker. And so we trust him....
Q ...To what extent was the Vice President pre-writing the Petraeus report or setting expectations when he said he thinks it's going to show progress?
MR. SNOW: No, I don't think he's pre-writing it. Look, again, the one thing—if you talk to military guys, the last thing they want to do is get themselves embroiled in politics. What they try to do is to play it straight and to do it straight. And obviously the Vice President has his impressions based on what he's seen, but we're going to have to wait to see what General Petraeus has to report [emphasis added].

Now, according to a report on NPR, "the White House has indicated that it will write the report which Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker deliver to Congress..."

Needless to say, the difference between these two possibilities is huge.

2007-08-20T16:19:00.000-04:00

Electronic voting machines decertified in CA

I must have missed this item in the news.

After two months of unprecedented analysis of California’s voting systems and related security procedures, Secretary of State Debra Bowen today announced some of those systems can continue operating in 2008 in California while others are too flawed to be widely used.
Each of the systems that went through the top-to-bottom review has been legally decertified, and then each of them has been recertified with the addition of a number of conditions.

Ouch! There is a page of links to many more resources concerning this on the Secretary of State's website. Matt Blaze, one of the member of the review team, posted a blog entry describing events leading up to this decertification/recertification, as well as his personal observations. He concludes

I wish I could be more optimistic about their chances for success. Without radical changes to the software and architecture, it's not clear that a practical strategy that provides acceptable security even exists. There's just not a lot to work with.
I don't envy the officials who need to run elections next year.

I fear for the deserved lack of public confidence that seems to be creeping into the electoral process in the U.Ṡ. We had problems in 2000 (did you know that "[a]lmost two million ballots were disqualified in the 2000 election because [electronic voting machines] registered multiple votes or none when run through vote-counting machines"?), in 2004 (more "lost votes, [votes] subtracted... instead of adding them, and doubled votes"), and now this?

2007-08-20T15:02:00.000-04:00

America the fearful

I took the title of this post from an interesting short essay on Capitol Hill Blue [found via their ]. It opens

"All we have to fear, is fear itself" enjoined President Roosevelt in the face of truly fearsome circumstances. Ever since politicians have worked hard at building a deep reservoir of fear upon which they can prey to gain even more power. But Americans are not wusses, we have shown admirable bravery in the face of extreme danger, so why is this tactic so successful in politics?

I didn't get the political kind of answer to this question that I was hoping for, but perhaps the answer given is the only one that will really be effective in the long run, namely, for each of us to look at and deal with the fear within ourselves. That's certainly consistent with my overall view of reality.

2007-08-20T13:41:00.000-04:00

Dark matter imaged?

Here's something I never thought I'd see: an image that shows dark matter in and around a cloud of hot gas (normal matter). Of course, it's from the good folks at the Astronomy Picture of the Day and, no, it's not a real image, only a simulated image, inferred from the way light from more distant galaxies is gravitationally distorted. Still, I'm amazed that anyone could come up with any kind of image that might bear a close relation to reality (whatever that it is). Click on the picture to go to the source and read a fuller explanation.

2007-08-19T11:28:00.000-04:00

When will they ever learn?

Earlier this month Congress enacted legislation, requested by the administration, that supposedly brought the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) up to date. But according to a New York Times article, now that Congress and everyone else has had time to study what the legislation actually says, "Democratic Congressional officials and other experts" say that this law "could allow the Bush administration to conduct spy operations that go well beyond wiretapping to include—without court approval—certain types of physical searches on American soil and the collection of Americans' business records."

The Times article continues, "Administration officials acknowledged that they had heard such concerns... [b]ut they said the Democrats were simply raising theoretical questions based on a harsh interpretation of the legislation." In fact the White House says, "This Act Is A Temporary, Narrowly Focused Statute To Deal With The Most Immediate Needs Of The Intelligence Community To Protect The Country" [bold and capitals from original]. Are You Surprised That I'm Extremely Skeptical?

Given government's history of abuse of powers—and I don't mean merely by the Bush administration, or by administrations of the U.S. government, but by governments everywhere, throughout history—we the people ought to be afraid, very afraid, of just how harshly government officials will interpret this law when they see a need for it.

What will it take for Congress to learn to start reading and understanding legislation they pass before voting for it, rather than waiting till after it's already signed into law?

By the way, Senators Casey and Specter from my home state voted for this legislation. Representative Schwartz from my district voted against it. I'll remember.

2007-08-18T13:25:00.000-04:00

News photos from 2005

A friend e-mailed me a slideshow of 2005 news photos from MSNBC. Some were quite spectacular. I Googled for and found the original and larger slideshow on the MSNBC website. For your viewing pleasure, here are thumbnails to what I thought, in order, were the fifteen best (I'm sure if I went through them again, I'd pick a few different ones and put them in different order). Click on the thumbnail to see a larger (16-103K) version.

Young victim of the Pakistan quake	Gaza settler's defiance	Last stage of the Dakar rally	Monks chant in Dalat, Vietnam	Guatemala gang violence
Red and white and brrr all over	Floral refraction	Berlin Holocaust memorial opens	A new dog, old trick	Wintry walk
Mooning over Emily	Smooth sailing	Crushing crest	Blast for the past	The reign of Rita

2007-08-18T12:38:00.000-04:00

Double spaceship flybys

From Space Weather News for 18 August 2007:

Space shuttle Endeavour is scheduled to undock from the International Space Station on Monday, August 20th. If that happens as planned, sky watchers across North America may be able to witness something rare and beautiful: a double-spaceship transit across the night sky. US cities favored for flybys on Aug. 20th or 21st include Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Las Vegas, New York and Phoenix. The space station and shuttle will appear as separate, bright points of light moving in tandem. Flyby times depend on where you live. Subscribers to Spaceweather PHONE will receive phone and email alerts when the pair are about to appear. Flyby timetables are also availabe from Heavens Above.

...The International Space Station is under construction, and with each new addition the sprawling complex becomes easier to see from the ground. To the naked eye, the space station now resembles a super-bright star gliding slowly across the sky....

The ISS by itself is quite a sight, and unmistakable. If skies are clear, do have a look.

19 Aug 2007 12:36 Eastern time UPDATE:

Due to the threat posed by Hurricane Dean, NASA has moved Endeavour's undocking up by one day to today. Unfortunately, forecasts call for several days of cloudy weather here in Southeast PA, so I'll probably miss it.

2007-08-18T11:37:00.000-04:00

The Jose Padilla conviction

Jose Padilla became something of a poster child for the Bush administration's abuse of civil rights in fighting terrorism. Now that he's been convicted&mdashnot of the original charge of plotting to set off a dirty bomb, but on the charge of conspiracy to kill, kidnap, maim, or injure persons or damage property in a foreign country—some will be tempted to see in it justification for the means the administration used. But it is not.

The New York Times, in an editorial yesterday, got it exactly right:

[I]t would be a mistake to see it as a vindication for the Bush administration's serial abuse of the American legal system in the name of fighting terrorism.

On the way to this verdict, the government repeatedly trampled on the Constitution, and its prosecution of Mr. Padilla was so cynical and inept that the crime he was convicted of—conspiracy to commit terrorism overseas—bears no relation to the ambitious plot to wreak mass destruction inside the United States, which the Justice Department first loudly proclaimed. Even with the guilty verdict, this conviction remains a shining example of how not to prosecute terrorism cases.

The crimes committed against due process of law by the U.S. government are of far more concern to me as a citizen than that committed by Jose Padilla.

2007-08-14T16:11:00.000-04:00

The Tenuous Case for Strategic Patience in Iraq

I hear a lot of really good interviews on the Charley Rose show on PBS. Particularly concerning Iraq. Last night, Dr. Anthony Cordesman was Charlie's guest and opined extremely well, I thought. I highly recommend watching the segment (by the way, he sounds uncannily like former President Gerald Ford).

Among the exchanges between them is the following:

CR: What is our moral responsibility in this circumstance? Because so many people, Iraqis and others, have depended on the United States?

AC: Again, I think Colin Powell made the point before we went to war about the idea that if we break it,...

CR: We own it.

AC: ... we own it. Well, we broke it.

CR: And now we own it.

AC: We own it, and we also are talking, again... We took a country with a dictatorship and because we focused only on one narrow idealogical goal—elections: our concept of trying to transform the government—the end result was to create an unworkable political system, to have no clear plans for dealing with the economy, for not addressing in time, or effectiveness, the differences that tore this country apart. And anyone listening to you can calculate the percentages: 2 million exiles, 2 million displaced, 8 million impoverished, unemployment at at least 30%. Getting rid of a dictator is an achievement. Destroying the core of a country is a massive moral and ethical failure.

[Several seconds of silence]

CR: And we've done both.

AC: The good news is Saddam is gone; the bad news is 27 million people.

Dr. Cordesman has just returned from Iraq and published a trip report titled The Tenuous Case for Strategic Patience in Iraq, which further outlines his case.

Everyone sees Iraq differently. As one leading US official in Iraq put it, "the current situation is like playing three dimensional chess in the dark while someone is shooting at you."...
From my perspective, the US now has only uncertain, high risk options in Iraq. It cannot dictate Iraq's future, only influence it, and this presents serious problems at a time when the Iraqi political process has failed to move forward in reaching either a new consensus or some form of peaceful coexistence....

[T]here is still a tenuous case for strategic patience in Iraq, and for timing reductions in US forces and aid to Iraqi progress rather than arbitrary dates and uncertain benchmarks....

2007-08-11T16:59:00.000-04:00

The power of sensory illusion

From one of my favorite websites of all times, one I has visited almost daily for something like 10 years, the Astronomy Picture of the Day, this the one for 17 July 2007:

Are square A and B the same color? They are. Are too. To verify this, click on the above image to see them connected. The above illusion, called the same color illusion, illustrates that purely human observations in science may be ambiguous or inaccurate. Even such a seemingly direct perception as relative color.

2007-08-11T16:20:00.000-04:00

Leaving Iraq

Now that it's becoming overwhelmingly obvious that we'll be starting to get out of Iraq before Bush's 2nd term ends,I'm glad to see that even the Democrats are becoming wary about the consequences, according to the New York Times:

John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator, would keep troops in the country to intervene in an Iraqi genocide and be prepared for military action if violence spills into other countries. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York would leave residual forces to fight terrorism and to stabilize the Kurdish region in the north. And Senator Barack Obama of Illinois would leave a military presence of as-yet unspecified size in Iraq to provide security for American personnel, fight terrorism and train Iraqis....

Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico stands apart, having suggested that he would even leave some military equipment behind to expedite the troop withdrawal. In a forum at a gathering of bloggers last week, he declared: "I have a one-point plan to get out of Iraq: Get out! Get out!"

On the other side of the spectrum is Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, who has proposed setting up separate regions for the three major ethnic and religious groups in Iraq until a stable central government is established before removing most American troops.

Still, many Democrats are increasingly taking the position, in televised debates and in sessions with voters across the country, that ending a war can be as complicated as starting one.

I've opposed both wars on Iraq from the start, but I've also consistently opposed a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq War II for the reasons these politicians are beginning to cite. Too bad about Bill Richardson's position; I think he's an otherwise very good candidate.

Despite the fact that this war was a bad idea from the very beginning, despite the fact that there was completely inadequate planning for how it would end, the United States still bears responsibility for instigating the whole horrid sequence of events that leaves us in the impossibly difficult situation in which we find ourselves today. There's a lot of blood on our hands, and it's imperative that we minimize the amount of blood still to come, including that shed by any government that replaces the one we toppled.

2007-07-14T20:51:00.000-04:00

Let your mobile carrier subsidize any phone you want

I saw this scheme in Dave Farber's IP List; he got it from Brad Templeton's blog, and Brad got it from Al Chang. The following just the essence of it; see Brad's blog entry for more details and related suggestions.

Go out and buy the phone you want, unlocked (or locked to the carrier you plan to use) from whatever source you like, including cell dealers, Amazon, Dell or eBay.

Next go to your carrier's web site and find the *most* subsidized phone they sell which works with the plan you intend to use. Find the most subsidized phone by looking at the subsidy price, and comparing it to the typical "completed auction" price on eBay for a no-contract (locked or unlocked) phone....

[S]ign up for new service, buying that subsidized phone. When you get the phone, pull out the SIM card and put it in the phone you actually wanted. So long as the plan you got is compatible with your phone of true desire, all should be happy. And now you have a no-SIM (locked) expensive phone you got with a subsidy.

Sell that phone on eBay or Craigslist.... [Y]ou will sell the phone for a bit below its *real* price. But you only paid the subsidized price, so you pocket the difference. In effect, it has reduced your price on the phone you wanted. If the phone you wanted is cheap, you may get more of a subsidy than it actually cost you.

Nifty, eh? Aren't free markets great?

2007-07-14T18:02:00.000-04:00

Senate hearings on Surgeon General nominee

As usual, I could hardly put it better than Robert L. Park did, in the 13 July issue of his What's New:

SURGEON GENERAL: FORGET SCIENCE, GET THE POLITICS STRAIGHT.

The leading spokesperson on matters of public health in the U.S. Government, the Surgeon General is nominated by the President, and gets to wear a really neat white uniform. It is the SG's duty to educate the public about health issues. To make sure the SG gets it right, everything the SG says or writes is vetted by a White House political appointee whose job is to ensure that the President is mentioned three times on every page, and issues the President has already decided are not mentioned at all, such as stem cells, Plan B and global warming. It all came out this week as the Senate began hearings on the nomination of James W. Holsinger to the post. Richard Carmona, who served as SG from 2002 to 2006 under Bush, testified Tuesday that if science doesn't support the White House agenda, it's suppressed. Holsinger testified yesterday that he would not give in to politics.

2007-07-14T16:30:00.000-04:00

Whither Internet radio?

I have listened to a fair amount of Internet radio over the years. When I have a computer on and am connected to the Interenet, it's very convenient, reception is never a problem and the sound quality is always high. Most importantly, the variety of formats available over the Internet far exceeds that of over-the-air broadcasting.

In the Fall of 2005, I noticed a problem. My favorite radio station was counting down the top 885 albums of all time, both over-the-air and on the Internet. They played two tracks from each album numbered 885 - 501, three from each of 500 - 26 and the entire album for each of the top 25. I was listening as much as I could at work, over headphones. But due to certain provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, WXPN was not permitted to broadcast more than three songs from any one album—or was it from any one artist—over a certain period of time (one hour I think). So for each of the top 25 albums, I got to hear only three tracks. They played some other filler over the Internet for the rest of the time.

Then on June 26, WXPN joined thousands of other US-based webcasters in a "Day of Silence" to protest a retroactive royalty rate increase imposed by the Copyright Royalty Board that goes into effect tomorrow.

Two days ago, a Federal appeals court denied a petition from many of these Internet ratio stations to delay the rate increase, saying it could kill the medium. For an idea of how significant this increase is, consider this: "the six biggest Internet radio stations—Pandora, Yahoo, Live365, RealNetworks Inc., AOL and MTV Online—will pay 47 percent of their anticipated 2006 combined revenue of $37.5 million in performance royalties" (from Reuters UK, "U.S. court denies Webcasters' stay petition" Thu Jul 12, 2007 2:15 PM BST144).

I tried, but failed, to find the actual ruling by the Court. If you want to know more, there's some interesting discussion on this topic over at Slashdot. There's also SaveNetRadio, a coalition artists, labels, listeners, and webcasters that "believes strongly in compensating artists," but thinks that "[t]he recent ruling by the Copyright Royalty Board to increase webcasters' royalty rates between 300 and 1200 percent over the next 5 years jeopardizes the industry and threatens to homogenize Internet radio."

[Thanks to Michael Geist's Internet Law News from 13 July.]

15 Jul 2007 12:55 Eastern time UPDATE:

I left off one of the most important points I wanted to make in my original post: that there's no reason to believe the future of Internet radio isn't bright—it just won't happen here in the US.

Furthermore, it now appears that there is still some hope of averting disaster here. According to Eliot Van Buskirk, writing in Wired:

SoundExchange, a group responsible for collecting music broadcasting royalties, on Friday confirmed it has proposed new terms for internet radio that could lower fees for some webcasters.

While limited in scope, Thursday's proposal offers a partial reprieve for smaller sites facing the axe Sunday when a payment scheme approved by the Copyright Royalty Board, or CRB, is set to take effect....

Under the new proposal, which must be implemented by the CRB, SoundExchange would cap the $500 monthly per-channel minimum fee at $50,000 per year for webcasters. In exchange, webcasters would be required to provide more detailed data on the music that they play and make an effort to stop unauthorized copying....

In addition to the minimum caps proposal, Webcasters were given assurances that negotiations would continue to work out breathing room for small and non-commercial broadcasters.

[Thanks this time to a posting on Dave Farber's IP list.]

2007-07-12T11:41:00.000-04:00

Calling all amateur (and wannabe) astronomers

According to the BBC:

A new project known as Galaxy Zoo is calling on members of the public to log on to its website and help classify one million galaxies.

Go to the Galaxy Zoo website to sign up and take a short tutorial. If you pass—no matter how many tries it takes you—you can contribute to this largest-ever census of galaxies in the universe [thanks to today's Morning Show on WXPN].

2007-07-10T18:04:00.000-04:00

Telephone privacy risk

Think the contents of your phone calls are secure? Not only are they susceptible to authorized (or unauthorized?) tapping by government officials, but the same software that makes these taps possible can be used by unscrupulous hackers, as demonstrated in an article titled The Athens Affair in the July 2007 issue of the IEEE's Spectrum

[Via Dave Farber's IP list]

2006-08-11T16:43:00.000-04:00

Hacking away at the First Amendment

If this report is accurate, then this ruling by Judge T.S. Ellis, III of the U.S. District Court of Eastern Virginia, is a significant reduction of freedom of speech and press in the U.S.

In a momentous expansion of the government's authority to regulate public disclosure of national security information, a federal court ruled that even private citizens who do not hold security clearances can be prosecuted for unauthorized receipt and disclosure of classified information.

Judge Ellis himself seems uneasy with the outcome.

In the end, it must be said that this is a hard case, and not solely because the parties' positions and arguments are both substantial and complex. It is also a hard case because it requires an evaluation of whether Congress has violated our Constitution's most sacred values, enshrined in the First and the Fifth Amendment, when it passed legislation in furtherance of our nation's security. The conclusion here is that the balance struck by § 793 between these competing interests is constitutionally permissible because (1) it limits the breadth of the term "related to the national defense" to matters closely held by the government for the legitimate reason that their disclosure could threaten our collective security; and (2) it imposes rigorous scienter requirements as a condition for finding criminal liability.
The conclusion that the statute is constitutionally permissible does not reflect a judgment about whether Congress could strike a more appropriate balance between these competing interests, or whether a more carefully drawn statute could better serve both the national security and the value of public debate. Indeed, the basic terms and structure of this statute have remained largely unchanged since the administration of William Howard Taft. The intervening years have witnessed dramatic changes in the position of the United States in world affairs and the nature of threats to our national security. The increasing importance of the United States in world affairs has caused a significant increase in the size and complexity of the United States' military and foreign policy establishments, and in the importance of our nation's foreign policy decision making. Finally,... mankind has made great technological advances affecting not only the nature and potential devastation of modern warfare, but also the very nature of information and communication. These changes should suggest to even the most casual observer that the time is ripe for Congress to engage in a thorough review and revision of these provisions to ensure that they reflect both these changes, and contemporary views about the appropriate balance between our nation's security and our citizens' ability to engage in public debate about the United States' conduct in the society of nations [emphasis added and citations omitted].

[Via Dave Farber's IP list]

2006-08-11T16:12:00.000-04:00

A False Sense of Insecurity

This is [almost] the name of a short paper written some two years ago by John Mueller, who holds the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at the Mershon Center of Ohio State University. On Tuesday, it was noted on Dave Farber's IP list as a paper that Bruce Schneier had called "interesting" on Monday. I call it outstanding.

[T]here is a perspective on terrorism that has been very substantially ignored. It can be summarized, somewhat crudely, as follows:
• Assessed in broad but reasonable context, terrorism generally does not do much damage.
• The costs of terrorism very often are the result of hasty, ill-considered, and overwrought reactions....
[T]he number of people worldwide who die as a result of international terrorism is generally only a few hundred a year, tiny compared to the numbers who die in most civil wars or from automobile accidents. In fact, in almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists anywhere in the world is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States.
Until 2001, far fewer Americans were killed in any grouping of years by all forms of international terrorism than were killed by lightning, and almost none of those terrorist deaths occurred within the United States itself. Even with the September 11 attacks included in the count, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts....
Frantz Fanon, the 20th century revolutionary, contended that "the aim of terrorism is to terrify." If that is so, terrorists can be defeated simply by not becoming terrified — that is, anything that enhances fear effectively gives in to them....
What is needed, as one statistician suggests, is some sort of convincing, coherent, informed, and nuanced answer to a central question: "How worried should I be?" Instead, the message the nation has received so far is, as a Homeland Security official put (or caricatured) it, "Be scared; be very, very scared — but go on with your lives." Such messages have led many people to develop what Leif Wenar of the University of Sheffield has aptly labeled "a false sense of insecurity."

I was horrified for days after September 11. I had some feelings of concern for the kind of world my grandson was born into on nine days later. But I very quickly came to the conclusion that the actual risks were low, that the costs that society was (and continues) paying are much too high and that most of our politicians are playing directly into the hands of terrorists. On September 11, 2002 I even announced to several members of my family and to some close friends that Al Qaeda couldn't be much of a threat since a whole year had gone by with no further acts of terror from them.

Yes, there have been horrific and deplorable acts of terrorism in the following four years. Just yesterday came the news of a foiled plot to simultaneously blow up 10 planes over the North Atlantic. Somehow I expect to learn in the weeks ahead though that the threat was not what it's been made out to be.

11 Aug 2006 17:22 Eastern time UPDATE:

Regarding the plausibility of the North Atlantic airline plot, see this, this and this from Dave Farber's IP list.

11 Aug 2006 17:27 Eastern time UPDATE:

And this article from the Washington Post. My expectations are being dashed.

2006-08-08T11:38:00.000-04:00

Land of the free and home of the brave

Words can't convey how sick I feel upon reading this article from the New York Times:

A C.I.A. contractor broke both the agency's rules and the law when he used a two-foot-long metal flashlight to beat an Afghan man [named Abdul Wali] who later died, a prosecutor said Monday at the federal trial of the first American civilian charged with mistreating a detainee in Iraq or Afghanistan.

But lawyers for the defendant, David A. Passaro, a onetime Special Forces medic, said he had been a frustrated but concerned interrogator who never hit the man and who checked daily on his condition.

"Dave is guilty only of trying to serve his country," said Joe Gilbert, Mr. Passaro’s public defender. "He’s not guilty."

I sincerely hope Mr Gilbert is right, and that Mr Passaro is not guilty in every sense. One reason this story sickens me so is that it has become far too easy to believe that he actually is guilty and that this case is just one of many.

One prosecutor, Pat Sullivan, said Mr. Wali was chained to the floor and wall of a cell as Mr. Passaro kicked him and struck him with the flashlight and his fists. Once, he said, Mr. Passaro kicked his captive in the groin, having lined up like a football place-kicker. Mr. Passaro's fingerprints were on batteries from the flashlight, said Mr. Sullivan, adding that photographs to be shown the jury would detail the extent of Mr. Wali's injuries.

Other versions of the story allege that Mr Wali begged to be shot to be put out of his pain.

[Thanks to today's Capitol Hill Blue.]

2006-08-08T00:33:00.000-04:00

U.S. Patent Office reform?

It's beginning to look like we might get some meaningful and long-overdue reform of the Patent Office [thanks to Michael Geist's Internet Law News].

The U.S. patent system could be inching closer to an overhaul long desired by the technology industry.

Just before departing for their summer recess on Thursday, Utah Republican Orrin Hatch and Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy, who serve as chairmen of the U.S. Senate's intellectual-property panel, introduced a 45-page bill that proposes a number of changes to the way American patents are awarded and challenged....

Called the Patent Reform Act of 2006, the measure followed two years of hearings, meetings and debate, the senators said. It bears a number of similarities to a bill offered last summer by Texas Republican Lamar Smith in the House of Representatives.

Specifically, it would shift to a "first to file" method of awarding patents, which is already used in most foreign countries, instead of the existing "first to invent" standard, which has been criticized as complicated to prove....

The bill would also establish a "postgrant opposition" system that would allow outsiders to dispute the validity of a patent before a board of administrative judges within the Patent Office, rather than in the traditional court system. The idea behind such a proceeding... is to stave off excessive litigation....

In addition, the Hatch-Leahy bill would place new restrictions on the courts where patent cases could be filed—an attempt at rooting out "forum shopping" for districts known for favorable judges. It would also curb the amount of damages for winners of infringement suits. Perhaps most notably... courts would have to calculate the royalties owed by infringers based solely on the economic value of the "novel and nonobvious features" covered by the disputed patent, not on the value of the product as a whole....

In case anyone needs to be persuaded that there are serious problems with the current system, I offer Patent #6,368,227 ("A method of swing [sic] on a swing is disclosed, in which a user positioned on a standard swing suspended by two chains from a substantially horizontal tree branch induces side to side motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other") granted to a 5-year-old Minnesotan on 9 April 2002.

2006-08-07T16:12:00.000-04:00

Did AOL publish your personal information?

Dave Farber's IP list has a message today quoting Adam D'Angelo, who has information about AOL publishing the search logs of half a million of their users.

AOL just released the logs of all searches done by 500,000 of their users over the course of three months earlier this year. That means that if you happened to be randomly chosen as one of these users, everything you searched for from March to May (2006) is now public information on the internet.

This was not a leak - it was intentional....

Update: Seems like AOL took it down. There are some mirrors of the
data in the comments of the digg story, linked below. I estimate about
1000 people have the file, so it's definitely going to be circulated
around.

As a follow-up, someone who wishes to remain anonymous made an alarming discovery.

A search for an SSN shaped regex on the full AOL search data returns a 191 results including repeat searches. Many of these have full names, and at least a dozen include either an addresses, drivers license number, date of birth or some combination of the three in the same query. There's no telling how much more information an aggregation of other queries by those same user ID would yield.

As I understand this, if any of these half million AOL subscribers searched for personal information about me during the months of March, April and May this year, the queries they used are now available to anyone with Internet access, even though AOL has had second thoughts and removed access from their site.

7 Aug 2006 16:23 Eastern time UPDATE:

The latest from the IP list is that AOL has apologized:

"This was a screw-up, and we're angry and upset about it. It was an innocent enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant," AOL, a unit of Time Warner, said in a statement. "Although there was no personally identifiable data linked to these accounts, we're absolutely not defending this. It was a mistake, and we apologize. We've launched an internal investigation into what happened, and we are taking steps to ensure that this type of thing never happens again."

8 Aug 2006 11:15 Eastern time UPDATE:

With some concern for the ethics of doing so, I invite you to take a look at some specific searches performed by AOL users and imagine what it would feel like to have your searches on display here [via Declan McCullagh's Politech list].

9 Aug 2006 13:15 Eastern time UPDATE:

The New York Times was able to determine the identity of searcher #4417749—a 62-year-old widow from Lilburn, Georgia—obtain her picture and interview her [thanks to Michael Geist's Internet Law News].

2006-07-25T18:15:00.000-04:00

Anti-terrorism scorecard

Declan McCullagh's Politech list pointed me to an op-ed piece by James Bovard in last Friday's Boston Globe titled The 'terrorist' batting average. It's purpose is to argue against Congress passing any law that would endorse the Bush Administration's use of military tribunals at Guantanamo and other places. I wholeheartedly agree. But it's worth reading even apart from its merit in making this case because it briefly totes up the administration's scorecard on combatting terrorism.

In the six weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, the US government rounded up 1,200 people as suspected terrorists, or their supporters.... None of the detainees proved to have links to the attacks.

The federal government has inflated the "No Fly List" to 200,000 names. But the list has nabbed more members of Congress than it has terrorists.... Federal officials make it very difficult to correct the list, thus tormenting citizens who are guilty of nothing more than having a name resembling a name suspected sometime by some government official.

Hundreds of disruptions have occurred at American airports since Sept. 11 after security breaches set off fears of terror attacks.... Though no terrorists have been apprehended, thousands of Americans have been arrested at airports for violating Transportation Security Administration regulations or other rules.

Since 2001, federal officials have carried out wave after wave of arrests and crackdowns on alleged terrorist financing. But none of those apprehended in the United States have been linked to Al Qaeda....

Thousands of Americans have had their phones tapped without a warrant, but none has been charged with supporting or conspiring with Al Qaeda.

Federal officials have charged 10 times as many people in terrorist investigations as they convicted on terrorist-related charges. Bush declared a year ago that "federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects, and more than half of those charged have been convicted." But only 39 people were convicted on crimes tied to terrorism or national security...

As for the use of military tribunals to try so-called "enemy combatants", the news that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that they were illegal—violating both the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice—left me feeling elated. This feeling was quickly dashed, however, on news that Sen. Arlen Specter, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, (and others) had announced plans to introduce legislation that would legalize these tribunals.

2006-07-24T19:43:00.000-04:00

Can I borrow your electron microscope?

Our office manager recently sent the following message to all our employees:

From:

Sent: Thursday, July 20, 2006 9:28 AM

To:

Subject: Petri Dish

This image below showing bacterial growth is from one of the glasses that has been sitting in [our] kitchen sink since last week.

When you borrow a glass or mug from the cabinet, please wash and return it to the cabinet when you are finished with it.

Thank you.

It's a small company with some very smart people. One of our senior people—one with multiple degrees from reputable institutions—asked the office manager which glass the sample had been taken from, in case it had been his. Someone else asked a similar question. I learned this after I (jokingly) asked our office manager about the possibility of borrowing her electron microscope sometime; she was afraid I'd taken her seriously too.

2006-07-24T19:14:00.000-04:00

Bolton's style at the UN

Yesterday's New York Times has a piece on U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is holding a hearing this this week on Bolton’s renomination (his was originally a recess appointment, because the administration didn't have the votes for Senate confirmation). At least one former opponent, Senator George V. Voinovich (R) of Ohio, has been won over by Bolton's performance. But many UN diplomats are not happy with Bolton, particularly when he's pushing his personal agenda of reforming the UN. The Times article cites the following incident.

Six ambassadors separately offered similar accounts of an incident in June that they said captured the situation. All were from nations in Europe, the Pacific and Latin America that consider themselves close allies of the United States, and they asked to speak anonymously in commenting on a fellow envoy.

Mr. Bolton that day burst into a packed committee hall, produced a cordless microphone and began to lecture envoys from developing nations about their weakening of a proposal to tighten management of the United Nations, his chief goal.

Gaveled to silence, he threw up his hands and said, "Well, so much for trying something different."

It was not merely rude, the ambassadors said. One recalled that moments later, his BlackBerry flashed a message from another envoy working on management change. "He just busted us apart," it read.

Remind me again: why do they hate us so? [Thanks to today's Capitol Hill Blue.]

2006-07-24T19:01:00.000-04:00

Lawyers' group criticizes Bush's signing statements

A task force for the American Bar Association produced a report that is highly critical of the unilateral exceptions President Bush often—over 800 times so far, compared to 600 in all previous administrations combined—makes to bills he signs into law. Calling this report critical seems like an understatement. The ABA's president, Michael Greco, said:

This report raises serious concerns crucial to the survival of our democracy. If left unchecked, the president's practice does grave harm to the separation of powers doctrine, and the system of checks and balances that have sustained our democracy for more than two centuries.

The members of the ABA will consider making this their official policy at their annual meeting next month.

[Thanks to today's Capitol Hill Blue.]

7/25/2006 12:49 Eastern time UPDATE:

Senator Arlen Specter, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, says he is preparing legislation that would allow Congress to sue the President and have these signing statements declared unconstitutional.

2006-07-24T18:21:00.000-04:00

Bogota, NJ iced coffee ad shock horror scandal probe

The Mayor of Bogota, NJ, Steve Lonegan, is calling for a boycott of McDonald's because he finds a Spanish-language billboard ad of theirs "offensive" and "divisive".

"The true things that bind us together as neighbors and community is [sic] our belief in the American flag and our common language," Lonegan said. "And when McDonald's sends a different message, that we're going to be different now, that causes resentment."

For the record, I am agnostic on this question of the American flag; I think there's a high probability that it's a figment of everyone's imagination.

Meanwhile, over at Language Log, Geoff Pullum is at a loss for words, Bill Poser is not and is organizing an anti-boycott, and Mark Liberman finds some juicy irony/hypocrisy on the Borough's web site. Oh, and Geoff Pullum finally does find some appropriate words and calls for e-mail bombing of the Mayor (something which I am not advocating despite the smug satisfaction I feel at seeing the Mayor's opinions ridiculed). As an added bonus, the transcript of Lonegan's "appearance" on CNN radio's Glenn Beck talk show is here (search for "Bogota" to find the beginning of the relevant segment). You won't want to miss the follow-up call from Mayor McCheese.