unraveling
28.Feb.2002
We're calling them the axis of evil these days, but just a few short
years ago, we called them customers. Or at least
Halliburton, under the leadership of Dick Cheney did. The
Financial Times wrote about it in November, 2000, and
Salon covered the story a year later, post 9/11.
Thanks to
gwbush.com
for keeping the story alive.
The NY Times had a report last Sunday on the Olympics receiving a flood
of angry emails after Apolo Ohno was awarded a gold medal at the expense
of a disqualified skater from South Korea. I got an email, too, with
some links I couldn't quite follow, taking exception to my humble
opinion stated earlier this month. The suggestion was that the fall in the
race I commented on (in which Ohno managed to get up and stick a skate
over the line for silver) was really Ohno's fault, and I was all wrong
about the Korean kid pulling him down.
I politely disagreed, and also noted that I hadn't been able to verify
the purported "worldwide opinion" running against Ohno, in searching
newspaper sites in other countries. No word back on that, I guess the
games are over, after all.
My buddy JQT wrote me in email, "the issue... in that specific race is:
did the Korean use his hands to break his fall or did he also drag down
Ohno? I watched it many times and, the more I saw it, the less sure I
was about the intent of the Korean skater. You had four forces
potentially at odds here: gravity, centripetal force, fear, and desire.
Watch it again and tell me if you're 100% sure." Well, I don't have it
on tape, so I can't, but I'm inclinded to take his judgment. I was
commenting on my first view of short-track, and admitted I don't know
much about it. Ohno took the crash with equinamity. The races are fast
and furious, and those four forces act faster than consciousness, to be
sure.
I hadn't thought about how links in my blog were votes
before reading this piece by
John Hiler, but of course it's so. I've been pointing out what I
think is interesting, as have hundreds of thousands of other bloggers.
It all adds up. Information democracy.
The
NY Times piece that Hiler points to is interesting, not because it's
about weblogs (they've done that before), but it's about the
business (and technology) of them. They're coming up over the
horizon and onto the radar. Pretty soon I won't be getting that blank
"huh?" look with my engineer friends when I use 'blog' in a sentence.
Glenn Fleishman
isn't so
sanguine about the NYT piece; he thinks they should be further up
the curve by now, I guess.
This Matt Loney
piece on ZDNet got me to chuckling. As others have pointed out, the
Microsoft guy he's reporting on, Don Box, makes some good points, but
still. Http is working too well, Microsoft wants to replace it.
Do they find ubiquity and functionality in others' software offensive?
Or is it the ad-hoc "hackery" that rankles? Funny, that, it seems to
make Apache a much better web server than IIS.
It might have been this quote: "I need a way to send a request to a
server and not the get result for five days." Never mind the typo, who
wants 5-day response time? Is this something Microsoft wants to
implement for its user support?
I'm usually not much for Congressmen praying in public, but this one from
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich, sounds pretty good.
"Let us pray that our nation's leaders will not be overcome with
fear."
"We did not authorize war without end."
The
Entrepeneurial Thought Leaders
Seminar is a happening place, and it has a great website, offering
up video and presentation materials from some leading thinkers and doers
at the forefront of business. The production is for Stanford students,
but Stanford makes it available to the web at large
(through
the Center for Professional Development) at no cost.
Very cool.
If you're not sure where you might start there, I recommend
Geoffrey Moore's talk from two weeks ago.
As a regular reader of the New York Times Magazine (mostly in print),
I was disappointed by the contents of this
Editor's note. Finkel's pieces were intense, and moving, and now
there's a shadow over them. Ah well, as they say in the footnote to the
end-piece, "Lives," they receive more submissions than they know what to
do with. And they still have
Michael
Lewis.
I'm reasonably sure
this site has more about Fibonacci numbers than you'll ever want to
know. By Don Knott (singular).
24.Feb.2002
A slightly different perspective, from
John Stanton and Wayne Madsen, published by
Pravda: "Historians will record that between November 2000 and
February 2002, democracy-as envisioned by the creators of the
Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution-effectively came
to an end. As democracy died, the Fascist American Theocratic State
['The State'] was born." Thanks to Doc for the link.
What do I do if my flight is cancelled or delayed?
Trippler
& Associates answers this and other questions about flying.
Well, at least they will if they figure out how to make that user
interface work. I heard about the site in an explanation of the
"Contract of Carriage" that you enter into with an airline to go
somewhere (even if you, like most everyone, has not heard of, much less
read such a contract). As described in the more forthcoming "Defensive
Flying" tips from the
Department of
Transportation, time is legally not of the essence of your
agreement with an airline. "Contrary to the belief of some, airlines
are not required to compensate passengers for 'damages' when flights are
delayed or canceled."
They've agreed to get
you there, as best they can, but not on any particular schedule.
And you thought you were flying because you wanted to get there
fast, didn't you? Time has no meaning.
23.Feb.2002
Yesterday was the warm
before the storm, it was up in the mid-50s, felt just outrageously warm.
I rode home with just a sweater, no gloves, and appreciated the
forbearance of the big SE wind that was supposed to come up but hadn't.
Some SW, but not enough to slow me down. The storm did come in last
night, but didn't wake me. This morning it's wet, clearing, 40, the
birds are flocking and the crocuses are coming up.
Where did the winter go?
Taking over ribosomes with a
nanocircle Trojan Horse.
Nice digital clock,
with hands. (Uses Flash.)
From the
whitehouse.org
newsroom: "I DID NOT HAVE IMPROPER RELATIONS WITH THAT WOMAN: MISS
ENRON." They also have the rundown from the Prez on his
recent trip to
China. Warning: 85% of you may find this distasteful.
Capitalism and Enron venture capitalism explained:
You have
two cows....
Building for
sustainability, and using salvaged materials. Nice.
A mention of this online
model of
the solar system again reminded me of the local model that I wrote
about last month. I rode by it today,
and stopped at Pluto to admire the plaque. "Pluto" is 2150 meters from
the (model) sun at the Discovery Center, and it's barely 2mm in
diameter. Voyage's scale is less than a third of this - 600m
from Sun to Pluto, so their Pluto must be less than a millimeter
across.
It would be interesting to do this sort of "walking" model of the earth,
with stations noting the transitions from core to mantle, mantle to
crust, to atmosphere, ionosphere...
22.Feb.2002
Let's see, what can we do with all those 2s? More palindromes:
22.02.2002 20:22 and 02.22.2002 22:20.
Little fun with our proxy war on ebay, bidding for "more than 1,000
votes" on the HP/Compaq merger, until
ebay pulled the plug. You can't even auction off your vote for prom
queen, ebay says. A snapshot of the bids in the middle of the day
(the price was $66) showed some creative userID grabbing, so that "Carly
S. Fiorina," "Walter Hewlett" and "Lew Platt" had all put in bids.
Meanwhile, the employee polling has indeed extended to Boise. We had a
site-wide voicemail with management telling us the poll wasn't
HP-sponsored, and expressing their regret for the employees having been
pulled into this controversy. Yeah, it's been a sorry mess for some
months now, but I hardly feel the need for an apology for being polled
(should I turn out to be one of the chosen). They didn't apologize for
Innisfree M&A's and Georgeson Shareholder's recent lobbying calls on
behalf of the board of directors. (They did call our house, but not
while I was here.) Those went to stockholders, of
course, but there's a sizeable overlap in the populations.
And the proxy mailings keep rolling in. With 4 different accounts
(old and new employee purchase plans, a 401k stock fund, and shares
held in a brokerage account) and 2 colors (white and green, or WHITE and
GREEN as the HP mailings like to say), we were due to get 8.
Today's bulging mailbox had the last of the original set, and
more duplicates from HP, for a total of 11 and counting.
Innisfree M&A doesn't seem to be a very capable administrator.
Instead of business reply envelopes, they're sending stamped
envelopes. For a low volume account, B.R.E.s can
cost twice as much
as first calss, so that might make sense,
but sending out duplicates for everything spoils that deal. Then
there's the multiple copies of the 190 page proxy statement; we could
landscape our yard with all the trees they're wasting.
The .NET story is
still confusing,
although the part about not wanting Microsoft to control everything seems
clear enough.
"We'll define the framework, (provide) the guidance, for example, of
what a user is," said Eric Rudder, senior vice president of developer
and platform evangelism.
It looks like a language I understand, but it doesn't make any sense.
Microsoft will tell us what a user is?
Threatening to sue didn't get the job done, so the GAO has taken the
next step:
suing the Bush administration for the documentation of the secret
meetings in which Enron and other companies helped shape energy policy.
Somehow the ability of the administration to get "candid" advice from
businesses, and keep that advice secret as they go about shaping policy
to benefit those businesses doesn't seem like a high moral position.
It's not looking like a very high legal or political position
either.
Also in the news-we-thought-we-already-knew department, from the Dow
Jones Newswire (and forwarded via email), "LOS ANGELES -- A former
Enron Corp. employee has written a letter to U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer
claiming that he has knowledge the company's trading arm manipulated
wholesale electricity prices in California...." What a shock that must
be. (I guess it was so unremarkable that the majors didn't feel the
need to feature the story.) After it's proven beyond a reasonable
doubt, however, I don't think consumers are going to get their
$9 billion back.
There's just one after the other: now we learn that big music companies
are
attempting the monopolization of digital distribution.
"These ventures look bad, smell bad and sound bad," Judge Patel wrote.
You go, Napster!
I don't understand what the point of
lip-synching and tap-synching for a TV audience is. But then I
don't understand the attraction of figure skating night after night,
either.
21.Feb.2002
Did you notice 20.02 2002 20:02 go by last night? Next shot at
such a date/time is in 110 years, and then game over forever.
Or at least until we invent a new calendar.
If I were Dave Barry, I'd have to say "I am not making this up."
Alabama's chief justice
declares homosexuality 'a sin.' Roy Moore says homosexuality
is "an act so heinous that it defies one's ability to describe it,"
suggesting the state should wield "the power of the sword" to confine or
even execute such sinners.
Also on AU.org,
Jerry Falwell trying to
cash in. Hardly seems like news, but he claims he was viciously
smeared, by people quoting him. Interesting fund raising approach,
though - "I made an ass of myself, and people have pointed it out
unrelentingly. Please send money."
If I needed a model for an "accessibility statement," I'd
dive into
mark, definitely. Whew.
The executive director of the Authors Guild says
writers need to be compensated or "they will be forced to turn to other
lines of work." How exactly does extended copyright 70 years after the
death of the author help that, I wonder? The
NY Times on the Supremes' decision to hear the case from Eric Eldred
and other plaintiffs, one of whom is "a choir director who buys
inexpensive sheet music in the public domain." I can relate to that.
Finding good sheet music is one of the hardests information retrieval
tasks I know these days. If it weren't so hard, I could support more
authors.
18.Feb.2002
Spending some of my holiday working for state and federal governments:
doing our income tax returns. Last year, I was worried about having to
do a California state return as well as one for Idaho, for our
temporary relocation. California's a big state, with a big government,
after all. But the nonresident return is not that bad -- two sides of
form 540NR and a 2-sided schedule CA, with all of the numbers already
handy from the completed federal forms. The forms and instructions are
all available from a reasonably
well-organized website, downloadable as PDF files.
Some of our state tax money went to California, but we didn't have to
pay any more state income tax: Idaho credits us for what we paid to the
Golden State, and our total bill is the same as if we'd stayed home.
I was ready for a repeat experience this year, but noticed something
new: "Fill-in" icons, noting that some of the forms are "fillable."
Something like electronic filing? Not exactly: the PDF file comes up
with two yellow "buttons" up top, "Print and Reset Form" and "Reset
Form." After the Reset, clicking on one of the fields allows me to type
into it, in neat, blue capital letters.
Hmm, that's kind of nice, I can print out a filled-in form and it will
be clean and readable for the Franchise Tax Board down south. It
doesn't do arithmetic, though; I have to add, subtract, multiply and
divide on the side. And it doesn't link in the numbers that have to be
supplied from schedule CA, so I have to pencil out one of those on the
side, too.
And all the time I'm doing this, I'm thinking about those two options.
There is no "save your work" option, or an "oops, I need to correct just
one number" option. It's not just all or none, but all and none;
printing erases your work. It's a perfectly idiotic user interface, but
I imagined I could work carefully and get it to print, and then I'd
have the most beautiful tax return I've ever filed, hot off the
LaserJet.
But no. I got one page, 5 lines, in lineprinter font:
PCL XL error
Subsystem: KERNEL
Error: IllegalOperatorSequence
Operator: SetCursor
Position: 11852
Of course, the form had been reset, as promised by the button label,
just as soon as I'd pressed the "OK" button on the printer dialog.
Maybe other people using a patched version of Acrobat v4.0, or a
different operating system than my Win95 OSR2.1, or a different printer
will get everything right on the first try, and print their completed
forms, and be happy as clams. I'm not terribly upset, as it's not
that much work (more to write about it, actually) or time that
I've lost, but I am impressed with this idiot savant
implementation of Adobe's product. (I blamed them first, but after
my sister defended them, I see
their product
does have "save" capability advertised. Of course, with the printer
error, it wouldn't do me any good to have it saved, either...)
John Ashcroft collects a prestigious award:
Hillbilly of the
Month. I liked the picture of the calico cat with a message for
him.
Reading about
riding
the skeleton is about as close as I need to get. Not everything
that can be done should be done.
More on the
short
track from the NY Times, including a slide show just after the AP
photo I fairly used, below. I don't feel so bad about the Aussie
collecting the gold after reading about his previous luck. Oi oi
oi.
Reading
Safire's
column makes me think of
1984. So it took a couple extra decades; did you doubt it would happen?
Orwell just didn't figure on the LDV measurement of window pane
vibrations.
New meaning for
refrigerator magnets: the magnetocaloric effect.
Chilling.
Taking another look at the
Fifth
Amendment, and whether it's gone too far. I don't know what the
answer is, but having Oliver North and the Enron team pay for their
crimes seems an attractive modification.
Speaking of pictures of cats,
Genetic Savings &
Clone is the name of the outfit that came up with "CC," the cloned
cat. Their home page is a hair too cute (and oddly Untitled when I saw
it). The
FAQ
page has a stray band of orange and black running through the
explanation of why CC doesn't look like her original, Rainbow.
Rainbow's a calico, and CC came out tiger-tabby.
In keeping with the circus atmosphere, the explanation sprinkles in
"not relevant here," "for reasons which are not germane here," then
"on the other hand" and "conversely" in one sentence. The goal of
the "Missyplicity" project is to work their way up to a dog. Aim high,
as they say.
17.Feb.2002
We collected a lot of this year's acorns into 5 gallon buckets, and the
squirrels have been enjoying the convenience. Well into winter, the
buckets are getting low, and when a squirrel jumps up, they rattle a
bit. That was my cue to get out the camera, and catch one in his
two-legged-stand-on-the-edge trick. I'm not quick enough to catch the
dive down into the bucket; they've figured out that we're pretty
harmless when we're behind glass, but it's a long way down there, and
not a comfortable position when someone's watching.
It's been almost a month since I "developed" the pictures in the camera.
This batch included the last big dump of snow we had, January 20th.
The weather's gone kind of dry and monotonous since, sub-freezing
nights, up to the 40s most days. Bulbs are pushing up, more birds
coming around to check things out.
Watched a little of the Olympics last night, including the men's 1000m
short track final. Ohno was robbed, but I guess that's the way it goes
in short track. This AP photo is great, shows the moment just before Ahn
Hyun-Soo pulled Ohno down. I guess the lesson is that if you go down,
make sure you take someone with you. Happily, Apolo managed to get up
and stick a skate across the line behind the "winner," who coasted through
the melée from the back of the pack, and get the silver.
Not clear yet whether the gash in his leg will keep him out of his other
three events. :-(
16.Feb.2002
There you are, a lowly Earthlink luser, with a page that gets noticed by
someone at a big PC magazine, they send out the URL in a newsletter and
in their column, and you're famous! Or, you're
over quota.
Organique
has an entertaining gallery of False Advertising. I liked
No. 9.
It also has a stylin' blog called
Footprints.
The "bloglinx" column has a list of sites I've never seen before.
It's nice to get out once in a while.
Acme Heartmaker.
Check out "All your candy are belong to us." Wish I'd known about this
site two days ago, eh?
Deconstructing school crossing signage.
By Monsieur Jean -
coiffeur.
"Lack of snow brings early warnings of fire danger"
Sounds like a familiar headline in the intermountain west, even though
we started off with ample snow this winter. But this warning is from
Minnesota
instead!
Bush "solves" the nuclear waste problem by
declaring
Yucca Mountain A-OK. If only we'd realize it could be that easy!
Now it's time to start shipping nuclear waste in from all over the
country, I guess. Well, almost: the Nevada governor gets to veto the
move, and then the Congress gets to decide. I can imagine the House
would be happy to stomp on Nevada, but the Senate?
With the market in the crapper these days, everyone's looking for a good
investment. Political parties and candidates seem like opportunities:
"David and Julie Koch’s investment in the Republican Party paid off by a
factor approaching one thousand to one." From
The Cash 'N' Carry
Chronicles.
"It is one of the greatest political scandals in American history, fusing
financial corruption, extremist right-wing politics, and the most
compromised White House in living memory." Doesn't seem to be making
the newspapers. Yet.
Another hot tip from Joel, something that could be
"Google for the desktop." Big claim, but Creo's future
Six Degrees sounds like it could be it. I keep the things I'm
working on spread out around me, and I can find important pieces of
multiple projects quickly. But as things get stale, that works less and
less well. If the relationships
are captured, I can tap into old networks, and recover them.
Speaking of deconstruction and all,
Larry Wall
talked about Perl, the first postmodern computer language. Well, he
titled his speech that, anyway. Mostly he talked about Modernism and
Postmodernism. Interesting.
I don't go out of my way to listen to music the way I once did. I
probably spend more time making music, arranging stuff for our
choir, rehearsing, singing, and so on, and I don't spend near enough at
all that. But today while avoiding doing the taxes, and the while
getting going on them, I was stuffing CDs into my computer, to keep
myself entertained. Two of note, one I hadn't heard before,
The Rough Guide to the Music of Africa. It's an anthology of 15
songs from 15 disparate albums, and several of the tunes make me want to
hear the rest of the CDs they came from.
The other is an old favorite, one I bought after hearing a tune from it
on the radio:
Mirror by Monte Montgomery. The tune that hooked me, "When Will I,"
seems like one of those perfect moments in a musician's life when he
hits the groove, the audience is with him, and the tape is rolling. It
couldn't have happened in a studio, I think. I still get excited
listening to the energetic, free excursion of his solo, its smooth exit
and smoother re-entry. It just makes me want to get up an'
dance!
14.Feb.2002
It's Valentine's Day. One nice way to celebrate would be to think
about this
request from the Dalai Lama.
Step 2 of the practice seems just right for the day (and for every day):
"Spend 5 minutes breathing in cherishing yourself, and breathing out
cherishing others. If you think about people you have difficulty
cherishing, extend your cherishing to them anyway."
BT: The internet is ours.
WriteTheWeb: BT is
daft.
Taegan Goddard's
Political Wire
looks like an interesting, and deep source of links to US political
news.
"President Bush has taken a starring role in a new, decidedly critical
advertisement that is running in the states of five Democratic senators
who voted against his economic stimulus package."
From the
NY
Times. Must be an election year, eh? So much for that wonderful
bipartisan feeling. W. sez "don't cross me, bubba!"
I'm still finding interesting things in this Opera browser. Today's tip
came from flutterby
in a snippet about CSS. Ctrl-G changes how things look, what's that?
Check the Ctrl-B list of accelerators, find 'Ctrl + G' = toggle user mode /
author mode. Interesting. Try it on
this site
if you want to see it really go.
Ooo, another one -
this
guy has one of those Mac stylin' things with excruciatingly tiny
type. Ctrl-G and I can READ IT without any trouble. Opera rocks.
(The piece is worth reading, too - on Google's
Search Appliance.)
I also found out from flutterby that
Henry
Kloss died on January 31st. I used to drive by his billboard on the
freeway in Milwaukee. I used to groove on his headphones as a teenager.
I've had a pair of Advent speakers for most of three decades now. And
Cambridge Soundwork speakers on the computer, I think I'll put on some
music, and raise a glass to his memory.
That page on Cambridge Soundworks' site is a lovely tribute to him:
"He was a warm, clever, generous, funny man. We shall miss him very,
very much." 45 years of acoustic innovation; what a guy.
Interesting collection of links and opinions on the subject of
Are Tables Really Evil? It's an inside thing for HTML hacks.
I use 'em, but I try not to rely on them for everything. I try to avoid
them, actually. Is it misplaced purism? I dunno.
I haven't studied it much, but this
three-column,
table-free layout seems a tour de force. (What was wrong
about just using tables, I wonder? Having to include a bunch of
Javascript to make the CSS method work doesn't attract me.)
From where I sit, it's somewhat of a contest to figure out which is more
tedious: CSS or
XML/Web services. I read the FAQ. I don't get it. But if someone
wants to tell Dave that they grew up coding CGI with perl, and that's
all you need for web services, I'm sure it would be a good show.
Here's a
demo for UDDI from
IBM. It doesn't work with Opera v6. Thunk.
ArsDigita
didn't survive without Philip Greenspun. The VCs wished he would
get lost, and he did, buying an RV and an airplane, among other things.
Do you suppose they'll be any more careful with what they wish for
now? (Thanks to
Joel
for reminding me of Philip's Travels with Samantha.
Someday I may even read all the way through
Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, too.
The drug war
comes home: "We're saying, don't have a double standard here -- the
Bushes want to treat this as a private family matter and well they
should, but other people should have the opportunity, too."
Paul Andrews
lets Davos have it: "Was there any real reason to hold the conference,
especially with no ski slopes in sight?" (Another site that benefits
from Opera's Ctrl-G. Woo hoo!) John MacArthur takes a
bigger
swing at the plutocrats. (Love that word.) "Above all, Davos is
about the hollowness of public relations, the hot air of advertising and
the monotony of mutual congratulation."
Inside the Olympics:
Catch it quick before the 5-ring police shut it down!
"HER: They respect rules and also they think it’s funny the way
Americans smile when they give you bad news." And lots more to smile
about. More fun than being there, maybe.
12.Feb.2002
Our local "Airport Police Chief" knows that this is his moment;
all eyes are on him, looking for leadership. He's backing a bill in our
state Legislature to make it a felony to intentionally smuggle a weapon
past one of his security checkpoints. It's only a misdemeanor now, and
he thinks the change will "significantly increase the safety of
travelers," as the Statesman put it.
He probably thinks that having all travelers take off their shoes and
run them through the X-ray machine is providing a significant boost to
safety, too. Yup, we're keeping those terrorists away from flights out
of Boise, yessirree.
11.Feb.2002
Digital Sensor Is Said to Match Quality of Film (NY Times). This
sounds like a Very Big Deal to me, or at least to my digital photography
hobby. "Having a sensor that measures all three colors at every element
at full exposure has been the engineering holy grail," Alexis Gerard,
publisher of The Future Image Report, said. (That trade newsletter's
website
looks like it keeps the good stuff for paying customers, though.)
10.Feb.2002
As noted here on groundhog day, the Idaho
Legislature has tossed out the term limits that voters expressed the
desire for twice, via the initiative process. It's been a while since I
thought about term limits, but IIRC, I was against them back when Newt
Gingrich and his cohort thought they would revolutionize government.
The national R. party was hoist on their own petard when the ancient
ones had to give up the choice committee chairmanships, but that fell
out of the limelight when Jim Jefford went Independent on 'em and they
lost the Senate.
I do think it takes some serious chutzpah on the part of the Legislature
to override two initiatives, but hey, they never did really care what I
think.
Does it make me a conservative to think that we should be able to elect
whomever we want? Could be: now there's talk of an amendment to the
state Constitution to abolish any talk of term limits, for good.
They've shown they can get 2/3rds of both bodies to raise their hands
for this one, they'd just need a majority of the voters. You can follow
along at home with the
Idaho Statesman.
Their readers'
letters are predictably full of indignation (perhaps the strongest
motivator of letter writing?), but I'm not holding my breath for any of
the bums to get voted out this fall, as they can be every other
year. "Angry Republican" and friends will probably get distracted by
November.
The Boise Weekly (whose website has devolved to a "look for our new
website in 2002" page, alas) had a nice little "person on the street"
feature, asking "when did you realize you were a grown-up?" Jeanette
coupled that with an NPR interview we heard today, and deduced that it
was when she realized there wasn't an afterlife, no pie-in-the-sky.
(The interviewee noted that religious belief in the afterlife had a
correlation with hardship in society.) On the one hand, I wasn't keen
about stating such a thing publicly, fearing it could spoil a nice
placebo effect, but then we had just heard it on the radio. It's
only an opinion, nobody knows for sure, eh? And don't forget to keep
your Pascal's wager paid in full.
Farming is no longer the only business that you can use to turn $2
million into $1 million any more. You can also do it with
creating a power plant at
home. The author's
fight with
PG&E to get them to trade low-cost power is interesting.
Our universe is a lovely shade of pale green,
as
it turns out. About like that over there, they say. (Be careful
about judging it with a white background, as the visual effect of color
depends on its neighborhood. Black seems more likely to me than white,
but I guess we're not going to be able to know that for sure.)
It used to be bluer, and we're heading for red.
Utah's attempt to
define
"commercial" terrorism is designed to make America safe for commerce,
but what about democracy?
9.Feb.2002
One of my posed shots of decaying Chinese lantern fruits won an
honorable mention in an internal-HP photo contest. Since I can't refer
the public to the pages with my 5 co-honorables, and the big winner, you'll
have to settle for a couple alternate views. (They look better small,
anyway.)
For those with botanical interest, the "lantern" is formed out of the
fused calyx of the flower (petals -> corolla, and below that
are the sepals -> calyx). After hanging around a while, the
tissue of the calyx gradually disintegrates, and eventually leaves only
the venation as a cage within which the round, orange fruit is no longer
hidden.
Usually when I take plant pictures, I capture them "as is," but for the
tissueless lantern, I figured a sharp shadow would really add to the
image, and bring it back to a three dimensional view. It also shows the
shape of the fruit better, since the veins still block the direct
interior view somewhat. I posed it on a black matte board, and shot it
in full sunlight.
Show us the damn cat
Or so said a faithful reader after I professed to be a cat person.
I guess the last picture I posted
was still fresh in my mind. (It's Jeanette's profile's background image.)
Let that suffice for now.
Speaking of dog people, I might further comment that there are two kinds
of dog people: those who pick up after their dogs, and those who do not.
We have a neighbor who lets the dog out to do what it may, and what it
may often ends up in our yard. This time, I privately scrubbed
the bottom of my shoe, and picked up after it. Next time, I may provide
delivery service.
7.Feb.2002
There are roughly five kinds of people in the world. Cat people, dog
people, cat and dog people, no cat and no dog people, and those for whom
having an animal companion is a non sequitur. People in two or
three of these categories make fun of cat pictures on personal web
sites, and people in two of the categories do not. When this pithy
thought occurred to me, I'm sure there was a punch line, but it has
since escaped. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a cat person.
Dogs are OK, but I don't care to live with one.
What I look for in a good review is definitive evidence for
whether I should bother reading the work in question. My two favorite
kinds of reviews are (a) the positive, entertaining review that leads me
to a book (or whatever) that I really enjoy, and (b) the negative,
entertaining review that saves me the trouble.
The ones I avoid are the gasbag reviews that hurt my brain,
making me follow convoluted and overblown verbosity that leads me
nowhere. These are, however, sometimes entertaining as parody.
In that spirit, I got a kick out of a
JOHO quoted paragraph that included all of the following words
and/or phrases: McLuhanesque convolutions, ramifications, contiguity,
digerati elite, stupefaction.
The problem, of course, is that I still don't know if I should trouble
myself to read Weinberger's
latest offering.
Maybe. The book's own site (!) is attractive, and includes
recommendations from some people I also respect, and includes
chapters 0. through 2.
That is one
beautiful photo of Saturn, from a ground based telescope with
adaptive optics. I'm afraid I'm spoiled by "fly by" images, real and
imagined, though. I expect edges to be sharp and the zoom to be
infinite, as in the opening scene of Star Trek:Voyager.
Business Week asks (and tries to answer),
What's the Truth about Walter Hewlett?
Did Tivo users know that when their set phones home, it can
tell
tales as well as fetch? I suppose it's in the fine print of the
user agreement somewhere.
All those pop-up ads you're seeing lately may not be from the sites
you're visting, but rather from the latest in
scumware, FlashTrack.
I used to be in the disk drive business. Built clean areas, production
lines, wrote procedures, solved mysteries, designed base castings,
covers, seals, filtration, that sort of thing. HP exited HD
manufacturing in 1996, and in retrospect it was a great move: we were
never going to get big enough to compete with the majors, and profit
margins have continued to tank. Consumers, on the other hand, have
never had it better. Buckets of gigabytes for a hundred bucks.
That's the background info you need to know just how hard I hit the
floor laughing when I got to the "Tools you'll need" section of
Hard
Drive Mod. And then the pictures. As he says, "have a method of
contain the aluminum shavings." (Hint: do not try this at home.
Also, do not view this site while eating or drinking.)
Britain's largest IT interest group did their own analysis of what
Microsoft's "License 6.0" would mean. $1 billion over 4 years, flowing
from its 98 member corporations, to Microsoft. As Larry Shutzberg, CIO
of Rock-Tenn in Atlanta, says, "This sucks. This sucks all the way
around." It's monopoly, baby.
Darwinmag brings us the plan behind the curtain.
6.Feb.2002
Doc's snippet on the
Enron end
run reverberated with some of the corporate goings-on I'm in the
middle of. His distillation of the corporation as "ways of organizing
work and routing paychecks" seems pretty apt.
"Companies at their best have whatever it is that puts a good
band in a groove." But how big can a group be and still
have that sort of synergy? I suspect a connection to the
brain's tribal limit, some 150 people that we can know well.
The organization I'm in has a local presence of 50 or so,
and multiple remote adjuncts of a similar size, and we could
get it together.... The "workplace" has some real obstacles
to making such a thing happen, though, not the least of
which come down from on high.
My current thinking on HP is assembled from bits and pieces
of our history and potential. First off, I keep reminding
myself of the core statement of our Standards of Business
Conduct: We conduct our business with uncompromising
integrity. Second, in spite of (or in contradiction to)
pundits' and others' blatherings, our culture is alive and
well within the spirit of our experienced workforce, and if
the company lives long and prospers, that will be why.
5.Feb.2002
Krugman:
"In short, the administration's strategy is to prevent criticism of what
amounts to a fiscal debacle by wrapping its budget in the flag. And I
mean that literally: the budget report released yesterday came wrapped
in a red, white and blue cover depicting the American flag."
I guess when you've got 85% of the population behind you, you can get
away with quite a lot. Unfortunately, we'll be paying for this well
into the next decade, the way things are going. But then the wheels
didn't come off Reagan's voodoo economics until the end of Poppy's
term...
Harmonic convergence of email correspondants: two pointers to SatireWire
in a row.
Angered by
Snubbing, Libya, China Syria form axis of just as evil, and
this one, about the
surprise
settlement in the Microsoft case. "Everyone here is asking
themselves, 'Do I want to be part of the problem, or part of the
solution?'"
Then another I can't leave off,
Arafat, Sharon
Walk Off Set of "Israel," just because the caption under the last
picture made me laugh so hard.
Yet another pundit
discovers and elucidates the blog phenomenon. Be still my heart.
Diaries, Hyde Park corner blather, blatant exhibitionism and
obvious self-indulgence? I'm sure many have or are those things, but as
far as answering the question "what is a weblog?" that's just lame.
On Sunday, I mentioned a site whose URL I couldn't remember to a couple
friends, and said they could find it on my blog. They had that smiling,
agreeable look friends get when they don't know what the hell you're
talking about, but want you to know they still like you well enough.
I stumbled to explain, and have since filled in the blank: it's some
combination of a journal, an online commentary on news of the day,
things on the web. It has daily, or at least regular postings.
That's enough, eh? To learn more, you have to go out and experience it
for yourself. But please, no more columns about it, we've had plenty.
(Not believing me? Check out this
compendium
that J.D. put together.)
The big, hairy,
2001
Statistical Abstract of the United States is online for your reading
pleasure. I like information-rich graphics like this one, showing
percent population growth, by state for 1990-2000. The colors are under
10% (tan), 10.0 to 19.9% (blue-gray), and 20% and over (dark green).
We live toward the top of that big sweep from Texas to the Pacific
Northwest.
40 pdf files, collect the whole set. (I wish I could remember where I
found the link to this, so I could tell the fellow blogger that you can
too copy/paste excerpts out of the PDF files... and even use a little
brute force to put tabulated data into a spreadsheet, if you have a mind
to, and change the sort of "No.65.Religious Bodies--Selected Data,"
for example, from alphabetic by "religious body," to numeric by
membership reported, and find that more than a third of the reported
membership is in the Roman Catholic Church. Catholics and the Southern
Baptist Convention accounts for about half of the 157 million reported.
One thing Acrobat doesn't have -- at least in my version -- is a "save"
choice in the file menu, an idiotic oversight. You have to save it up
front, or hunt it down in the cache... sheesh.)
The mean center of the population marching from the Chesapeake Bay
across the lower Midwest and over the Mississippi river in the last 2+
centuries is also interesting. (Fig. 1.2).
4.Feb.2002
As Bob Herbert says, "Alarm bells automatically go off when this
administration claims to be helping the financially disadvantaged."
It's a
sneak
attack to redefine "child" back to conception.
"This rules change by Health and Human Services, which does not need
Congressional approval, is both devious and dangerous. It exemplifies
the administration's right-wing allegiance, and its contempt for the
poor."
In this new millennium, it's Russia providing
the voice of reason in response to rabidly militaristic talk from
the US of A. Something about Iraq being their next-door neighbor, and
its headman being our headman's family feud. China sounds pretty
reasonable, too. Wolfowitz, as is typical, does not. When the Brits
start backpedaling, you know we've gone too far.
While reading this piece by
Jane Perlez about teaching young Indonesian Muslims to follow the
example of Osama bin Laden, I thought about just what the example was.
Be born into a wealthy family. Become a radical fundamentalist, and
hide in caves while sending young men off on suicide missions that they
may or may not know about in advance.
I don't suppose Baasyir presents it quite that way, though.
Zeldman's
glamorous
life is often arresting, such as these moments from the urban
forest.
3.Feb.2002
Not I, but the world says it:
———— All is one ————
In emptiness, wholeness:
The membrane of a cell,
the walls of a building,
the silence gathering our thoughts,
making space for us to share
our joys and sorrows.
So nice to hear from the "junior high,"
reminding us to roll down the window and stick
our heads out into the cold, refreshing
blast of LIFE coming at us.
Our speaker this morning was a visitor, a Pentecostalist Russian
immigrant, who played music with his two children, and spoke to
us on his view of two countries. In the time for congregational
response, there was a wonderful question: given what you've observed of
the two countries, are there ways in which we less free?
Viktor Goretoy's answer: "Let me be precise, and short. You guys have
too many churches. (We laughed.) And every church wants your soul."
Seen on the literature table: one of the nice biographical vignettes
from a series
put on the web by First Parish and the First Church in Cambridge
(Unitarian Universalist), Massachusets. (It was the one for
Sofia
Lyon Fahs but there are many more of a satisfying length, such as
Bucky
Fuller's. "Studying the whole thing, you find that all big
government, all big politics, all big religion, almost all big business,
would find it absolutely devastating to their activity to have humanity
a success.")
Figure skating rules change: "undignified" is out, so no more of that
pelvis pumping, an' stuff.
SFGate commentary: "This is, needless to say, an outrage, not to
mention bad for TV ratings."
He's a little fast and loose with the facts (or at least the
chronology), but the overall picture is clear enough in
Michael Moore's
letter to G.W.B. File it under "Operation Enduring Graft."
Another link from
J.D.,
Robert Wright responding to the State of the Union's rhetoric:
Axis of Incoherence.
"All incoherence has a common, primordial source, and is hence connected
— and humankind's mission is to rid the world of it, a project that
is, um, still underway." Invoking "enemy = evil" seems to be the
precursor to justifying any means to an end.
More
from Wright: the reasons for not making up new rules for holding
prisoners at Gitmo. Others will follow our example. It matters
what people think of the U.S. This administration doesn't show
any signs of getting it, really, and I have my doubts that they ever
will.
Play the
Enron Blame Game,
courtesy of Slate. Can I buy a vowel?
2002.02.02
Is it A DODGY HOG URN? Or perhaps a HODAD GUN ORGY? Do we need to
GOAD a GRODY HUN? Or are we witness to AN ODD HUG ORGY?
No, it's GROUNDHOG DAY! Somewhere designated "digital" Groundhog
Day, thanks to the 02/02/02 binary rendering of 10/10/10. I'm looking
forward to Palindromic Groundhog Day, in 18 years.
There should be a suitable
anagram we can serve up on that day...
Jim Wallis, writing on
sojo.net extracts the lesson from Enron: "The people on the top of
the American economy get rich no matter whether they make good or bad
decisions, while workers and consumers are the ones who suffer from all
the bad ones." (As usual, Tom Tomorrow provides the
Classics Illustrated version, in multiple
installments. "It's indisputable proof that the system
works." He's blogging
now, too.)
Idaho enters the next phase of the Contract with America by
repealing
the term limits voters repeatedly expressed the desire for through
the initiative process. The Gov. vetoed. The House and Senate overrode
his veto. They all want the voters to throw them out retail, rather
than wholesale. Let's see how we do.
2001.02.01
Deus ex machina: in a two-second bloatware wait state this morning, I
thought about how I needed a better response to that than irritation.
Our UU minister offered a constructive response to a similar
technological irritant: other people's watches that beep on the hour,
disturbing the mood in church (or wherever). She said she tries to use
the beep as a reminder of the ever-present manifestation of the ultimate
reality of the universe (or "God," if you like shorthand).
If you don't notice those little pauses, good for you. If you do,
why not use them as an internal bell, in resonance with the harmony
of the spheres?
Shooting yourself in the foot with privatization:
How our deal to increase security by turning
megatons
into megawatts ran aground on private shoals. (You need a free
subscription to see some of Science
magazine's online content, including this commentary.)
Donald Kennedy writes: "It is worth noting that since September 11, some
of our national enthusiasm for turning everything over to the private
sector has faded; see, for example, the spasm of second thoughts about
the airline security mess, another instance in which national security
interests and the profit motive collide. This loss of innocence about
markets is a good thing: They are fine in their place, but when market
incentives conflict with national security, security should come first.
The government probably can't repossess USEC, but it must make it
behave."
The 1998 privatization of USEC
leaves the security goal of moving weapons-grade uranium out of Russia
hanging,
hostage to a profit motive.
Also reported in
Science: "A government investigation has found that much of the data
from a 1997 ballistic missile test flight that the U.S. Department of
Defense labeled a solid success may be useless. Sources familiar with
two studies by the General Accounting Office say they highlight software
and sensor problems on the 1997 flight over the Pacific...."
Then there's the high-stakes thriller of scientists
trying
to recover radioactive devices laying around in Abkhazia before
the terrorists get them...
I've been debating whether to get the full, paid-for deal for this
magazine, but I think I'm already a couple periodicals over the limit.
I was about to respond to junkmail I got at work and accept a free
subscription to Infoworld
but then came to my senses.
Just the table of contents of Science is plenty (but with
half the links and/or stories beyond the reach of my free sign-up,
it's more annoyance than anything else).
The Supremes will hear the appeal in
Utah
v. Evans, potentially shifting one Congressional seat from North
Carolina back to the beehive state. It's not really about
statistical methods
this time, but whether a Census Bureau method for estimating households
when direct efforts to contact them fail meets the constitutional
requirement of "actual enumeration."
Also on the docket, the Big Guy found to be running a
monotheopoly.
raveling
Tom von Alten
tva_∂t_fortboise_⋅_org
ISSN 1534-0007
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