unraveling
31.Dec.2002
It seems to be official that the US foreign policy vis a vis North Korea
and Iraq just does not add up. NK's got the weapons of mass destruction
(WMD) and Iraq might. NK kicked out its UN inspectors, while Iraq is
pretty much playing along with theirs. We can solve the problem with NK
with diplomacy, but... huh? Well, Bush says he hasn't made up his
mind on going to war with Iraq yet, I guess that's good. (But why on
earth is it up to him?)
It's political contribution
payback time,
with a big rollback of the Clean Air Act, lawsuit protection for big
Pharma hiding in the Homeland Security Act, a
slew of outsourcing contracts for the Total Information Awareness
effort, and so on.
Here's an idea:
commercial-free
schools. Leave no child behind.
The local ski report
doesn't make a lot of fine distinctions. Practical
conditions seem to be either "powder" or "groomed runs" or both.
They also mention "rain" and "ice" once in a while, and those days are
definitely best avoided. Of course, they want you to come up and play
in the snow. That's their business. Sooner or later, we learn to parse
the report independent of the expressed enthusiasm.
After rain all day down here yesterday, and more overnight, I wanted to
be lured to the snow. 14" in the last 24 hours! But 31°F at
6am. There have been times when the skiing was good at 31°, but in
general that's not salutory. Conditions were reported as "awesome"
on powder and groomed runs. Ah well, give it a try, it's time to get in
the season.
After slogging around in the "powder" for a while, looking for pitches
steep enough to allow turning and prevent augering in, I started to
think about the other names we need for snow. "Champagne powder" might
be the lightest and most effervescent. Some day I'll ski in that
(but probably not at Bogus Basin and 7500'). Then perhaps "dry powder,"
"medium powder," and today's variety, "heavy powder," on the verge of
not-powder, but still fresh snow. Powder should not be a synonym for
fresh snow (and definitely not applied to stale or used snow).
It was fun to be up in the forest in a winter snowstorm, breathing hard
and finding paths through the trees and snow and fog, but turning
conditions were not quite in my "awesome" classification. They were
"demanding," occasionally "surprising" and even "rewarding," but my
predilection for untracked snow was stymied by the better skiing
actually being on the runs that had been carved up a bit, into soft
"crud," as it's termed. When crud is good (freshly cut, soft), it's a
lot of fun. When crud goes bad (too crusty, icy), it's very, very
bad.
A lunchtime stop at the Pioneer condominiums, shared with some friends
who've moved in for a 10 day holiday was a nice respite, although when
it was time to put my gear back on, the amount of water I was carrying
around was a bit alarming. The steady snowfall, the face plants, the
surprise spinouts in the fog-hidden bumps and hollows had left their
toll on me. I warmed up and soaked up some more in a few more runs in
the mid-afternoon, rolled down the hill before the afternoon rush, and
was revived by the return below the snowline, where the wet winter dress
of the desert -- gold, brown, bits of green, red willow branches -- was
incredibly vivid after being a black and white world for 6 hours.
30.Dec.2002
Warren Christopher says
Iraq
belongs on the back burner. It seems obvious that terrorism and
the nuclear threat from North Korea are more imminent threats than Iraq,
but is the Bush administration ready to concede the obvious?
Yemen may have signed on to be a partner in the war on terrorism,
but they have some trouble at home to deal with: extremists
open fire in a hospital and kill three American missionaries.
The Washington Post notes that "impoverished, factionalized,
predominantly Muslim Yemen has for years been a haven for wanted Muslim
extremists. Bin Laden enlisted thousands of Yemenis to fight alongside
the mujahedeen of Afghanistan in their U.S.-backed war against an
occupation Soviet army in the 1980s. Many returned when the Soviets
withdrew, and they are a powerful political force here."
You may remember the country's name from the recent news about a
shipload of North Korean missiles being intercepted -- and then released
-- on its way there.
You've seen a phantom traffic jam, haven't you? Everything slows down,
maybe even stop and go, people jockey to get out of the "slow lane"
which moves around as they do. A little ways ahead, things spread out
and speed up, with no breakdown or accident to explain what was wrong.
The cause is likely one or two drivers who miscalculate, have to hit the
brakes, whatever, and it sends a ripple through dense traffic that can't
accomodate the disturbance. It's something like a supersaturated
solution getting a seed that sets off crystallization.
Driver-assistance systems are being proposed, and the aspect of
this story which caught my eye is that if just 10 or 20% of vehicles
were equipped, it might solve the problem. It supports my intuitive
response: if I can drive more smoothly, anticipating the slowdown and
making my braking and acceleration less drastic, I'll reduce the
problem, or avoid it. Now if I can just get more people to play
along... Of course, in Boise I thankfully don't get much practice at
this. The road report is idle entertainment, not a commuting necessity.
Your mileage may vary.
29.Dec.2002
A fuss over whether the
i
in internet gets capitalized: I didn't know it was a question. But
then I didn't know that someone had a trademark (which they decided not
to enforce) on the term, either. Since I generally don't let MSWord
modify my spelling (or typing), it never was "carved in stone" for
me.
Bill Keller asks
Who's
Sorry Now? and reminds us that meaningful contrition is best
followed by penance and/or restitution. The new Senate majority leader,
Bill Frist, is identified as the likely author of the the Eli Lilly
lawsuit protection provision of the last-minute Homeland Security bill.
My guess is he gets away with it, just one more bit of gristle in the
legislative sausage-making.
28.Dec.2002
Although it was pretty obvious that the Bush administration didn't have
much interest in the Johannesburg summit, I didn't realize until I'd
read Carl Pope's
"Ways and
Means" editorial in the January/February '03 Sierra magazine
that they'd explicitly torpedoed it ahead of time: At the summer
preconference in Bali, "U.S. negotiators revealed that they were going
to block any detailed language that would establish clear goals and
timetables for improving the environment, whether the issue was water,
forest, fisheries or gobal warming." The Bush plan is "voluntarism and
partnerships between corporations and governments."
Remember when "deregulation" was touted as a panacea? You don't hear
that so much after California was bilked by the energy traders, but the
ideology is very much hard at work in the federal government, and will
undoubtedly reach new heights (or depths, depending on your point of
view) in the next two years. Pope points out that treaties are still in
when it comes to trade (NAFTA, et al.), but not for environmental
protection. We have the examples of the Clean Air and Clean Water acts,
the Montreal protocol and the International Whaling Commission to show
that explicit government action works. But the constraints they impose
are not salutory to the "invisible hand" that is dipping into the
Commons for short-term profit. "Bush killed Johannesburg not because
treaties don't work, but because they work too well."
Is this the biggest item ever sold on e-Bay? A town in northern
California,
sold for $1,777,877, more than twice what the sellers had set as the
minimum.
Jakob Nielsen's
Top Ten Web-Design
Mistakes of 2002 is useful and succinct, and
illustrated nicely, by Doug Sheppard and Katrin L. Salyers.
27.Dec.2002
We got a small dose of winter weather, as
rain in the Bay Area stretched our 3-hour connection to 5 hours, which we
split between San Diego and SFO. (Just rain, you ask? Doesn't seem
like that should be enough to throw things off, but there you are.)
We were fat, dumb and happy when Dad and Marcia dropped us off at the
airport in the early afternoon sunshine, drove home from the airport just
after midnight.
I used the opportunity to finish a collection of Stephen J. Gould's
essays from Natural History Magazine,
Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History. They provide a
good overview of careful thinking about evolution and our earth's
history, separating the sense and non-sense in the 100+ years leading up
to the understanding we had in the mid-1970s. That was about the time I
studied some of this stuff in college, so it was interesting to me as a
snapshot, as well as for the longer view of the history of science.
Bit of trouble at the NY border this Christmas, it seems that
Santa was trying to enter the country illegally. Fortunately, the
Border Patrol shut him down.
An aircraft carrier can't turn on a dime, and neither does our
military-industrial complex. Not even Don Rumsfeld can stop the
logrolling keeping the F/A-22 ("while critics say the plane is no longer
needed, the only battle was over how many F/A-22's would be made") and
Osprey (10 years late and 23 casualties, so far) alive. The least they
could would be to set up the F/A-22 simulators in local arcades. We've
already paid for the ride. As it is now, you have to visit Lockheed in
Marietta, Georgia, or be a Pentagon insider to get your turn.
That
other war. The article in The Nation quotes the
Justice Policy Institute, "between 1985 and 2000, spending on state
corrections grew at six times the rate of funding for higher education,"
and "from 1980 to 2000, three times as many African-American men entered
jail or prison as were admitted to colleges and universities
nationwide." The US' incarceration rates remain the highest in the
world, and there is no way to look at the statistics without
acknowledging racism.
Christmas
Christmas in San Diego is wonderful enough, but hearing the news about
the nasty winter weather in the rest of the country makes sunshine and
60s that much sweeter. It's not Schadenfreude, but rather a
well-informed pleasure at being here, and not being there.
Jeanette gave me a beautiful and profound little book that I just
finished reading after Christmas dinner:
Grasshopper Dreaming, by Jeffrey Lockwood. Its copyright page lists
subject classifications as "1. Grasshoppers 2. Grasshoppers -- Ecology
3. Insect pests -- Control -- Environmental aspects," but that seems to
me to be well wide of the essential point. It's published by
Skinner House, a clue to its
underlying religious nature, exploring the irony and paradox (as Lockwood
describes it) of the impossibility of victory in the battle between
scientific materialism and religious understanding. Good reading for
a religious holiday (or any other day).
"We are coming to understand that the universe is fundamentally
intractable and ultimately indeterminate. Our uncertainty is not a
function of inadequate experiments, instruments, or equations; mystery
is the essence of reality."
2002.12.21
A palindromic day in a palindromic year, the penultimate ternary day
until the end of the decade. Oh yeah, and the
solstice
is 6:14pm MST.
Been a member of any criminal extremist organizations lately? You might
be surprised at the answer if your local police department has been
running
surveillance the way Denver has been. The American Friends Service
Committee, for example, was marked as one of those extremist
organizations.
It seems like those long "boings" you've been hearing on your
hydrophones are minke
whales.
One of nature's design principles: bend so that we do not break. Hence the
dancing
daffodils. One of the scientists mentioned, Steven Vogel, is also
an author on my reading list.
The
Mirror Project
is still a nice place to stroll on a rainy day.
2002.12.20
So, it looks like we're going to have a doctor for our
next Senate majority leader, and Lott will tough out the last 4
years of his Senate term (or as many years as there's a Democratic
Mississippi governor). It also looks like the White House worked to
undermine Lott and promote Frist, which of course they deny, deny,
deny.
Howard Kurtz reviewed the gamut of Lott-bashing, before his
announcement today. It included Gore's skit on SNL, Clinton's talk with
CNN, Colin Powell, Jeb Bush, opinion polls (47 to 30% Lott should go vs.
stay, 49 to 21 unfavorable to favorable), Shelby Steele, National
Review, and so on. Steele's inside story is especially interesting --
the Lott camp came to him for advice on how to recover from the
Senator's self-disclosure. He wonders
How far will Trent Lott set back conservative principles?
19.Dec.2002
Reading about the
measuring of
Proxima Centauri, the small star that happens to be the closest to
our solar system at 4.2 light years, I got to thinking about the
vastness and emptiness of space. You look up at the night sky and you
see... stuff. Lots of stars and galaxies out there, from horizon to
horizon, if you're lucky enough to be away from city lights. But mostly
what's up there is emptiness. If our sun were the size of a pea,
Proxima Centauri would be a marathon's distance away - more than a day's
walk. And when you got there, that small star would be much smaller,
about the size of a grain of sand. Think about those 50,000 steps you
took between the pea and the sand: all emptiness. Think about the
sphere whose radius you just paced off: all of it empty.
The headline for the NY Times article in the Business section is
decidedly understated:
Deciding
on Executive Pay: Lack of Independence Is Seen. Things like this:
At Clear Channel Communications, the nation's largest radio chain, only
one of the five people on its compensation committee is free of
potential conflicts. The committee has retained -- indeed, sweetened --
pay packages that guaranteed raises for the chairman, L. Lowry Mays, and
his two sons, regardless of company performance. The sons have severance
agreements that entitle them to 14 years of salary, bonuses, benefits
and stock options if they quit because the board fails to choose one of
them to succeed their father as chief executive. Clear Channel said the
committee met existing federal guidelines for independence."
What do you suppose the chances are that federal guidelines could be
made meaningful in the next couple years? Not too good from a
Treasury
secretary earning $160,000 while he's getting a $2.5 million annual
pension from his old employer, I'd think. (That story is actually about
pensions, or "post-employment" compensation. Executives' is better than
yours will be.)
Speaking of executive compensation, Capellas' salary and bonus plan is
A-OK
with the bankruptcy court judge. 3 years, $20 million. Sweet. Or as
the judge put it, "imminently reasonable." It was all of $6 million
less than the original proposal, but since he gets to appoint his own
board of directors, something tells me he'll do alright. It'll be
interesting to see if he can actually stick around for 3 years.
Another business story from the NY Times, this one about corporate
lawyers
organizing to "block some proposed standards of conduct for
the profession." The last sentence of the email blurb was particulary
striking: "A provision that would require
lawyers to take evidence of potential fraud to a company's
top managers and even its board could drastically hinder
business deals, the lawyers contend." No doubt.
18.Dec.2002
Made a day trip to Palo Alto yesterday, and caught the tail end of the
heavy soaking they've been having. The sky was full of big clouds and
everything is turning green. It was my first plane ride since the new
Federal security force was put in place, and contrary to the warning
that it would take longer, lines seemed shorter and faster than ever
since 9/11. They have a lot of personnel on the job, maybe twice
as many as before.
I was shocked by how deserted SFO was. I remember
getting off a plane and having to wend and squeeze my way through a
morning crowd, but the place looked liked they'd rolled up the sidewalks
on a Tuesday morning at 8am. And yet the fill-the-bay airport expanders
have not given up hope on the next big expansion.
The highways were crowded as ever; some things haven't changed.
Religious polarization is increasing in India, evidenced by the
landslide victory of the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) in
Gujurat.
Alan Silverstein is assembling
information, advice
and trivia "related to separating from Hewlett-Packard."
"Being 'kicked out of the tribe' kind of sucks even when you're half
glad of it and/or see it coming; and I've sure met a lot of people who
were neither."
Agnostica
is the only truly secular winter celebration. Not to be confused with
Festivus
of course.
16.Dec.2002
Serious downwinder into work this morning, high wind warning for SE40G60,
but I was only riding on 30 with gusts to 40. My usual route's transitions
slowed me down more than anything else. On the unimpeded stretches, I put
the hammer down and dodged the flying trash cans. It'll be payback time
this afternoon, sounds like wet for sure, and I could have that same
strength wind in my face, but I'm hoping for the clock to SW by quittin
time.
Happy ending: wind backed off almost to calm, with just enough rain to
make it pleasant. Free ride!
Coping with post-bubble economics:
The Tao of Bojon
"Only those who take leisurely what the people of the world are
busy about can be busy about what the people of the world take leisurely."
Howard Kurtz'
Media Notes broke the news of Gore's retirement to me. Everyone
else heard about it on 60 Minutes last night, I guess. The idea
of this encouraging Lieberman to run is somewhat amusing. Save us all
the trouble, Joe, you don't have a chance.
Total Information Awareness goes
both ways: Poindexter's privacy under assault.
15.Dec.2002
I was wrong about yesterday's weather -- it wasn't the 50s, it was over
60°F, into the windy evening and close to midnight when we
came home from a get-together with friends. The wind finally settled
down, without adding much rain down in the city, and the overnight low
was around 40.
On the way out, we took a slow drive through Bayhill Springs, a
relatively new subdivision of closely-packed megahomes that has
collectively decided to go over the top on Christmas lights. All
the trees along the roadways are wrapped with thin strings of green in
their branches and white around the trunks, giving a very nice
effect on a windy night. Then the individual homeowners let their
imaginations go wild, lining the multiple roof lines, dressing their own
trees, metalwork reindeer, wreaths, candle-lined walkways, and this
year's trendy addition, inflatable snowmen. The animated metalwork
animals and larding of dripping "icing" are fads from yesteryear that
are fading, but not everyone got the memo. This place had it all,
including the crèche with lighted figures (sadly overexposed in
my picture).
 |
Now imagine a whole subdivision of these artistic statements, and a
steady stream of people crawling through it in their cars, shaking their
heads in wonder. After we'd found our way out, and continued on our way
through ordinary neighborhoods, the single string along the eve, the
occasional tree, wreath and inflatable snowman all looked rather paltry
and pathetic. Leave it to this culture to turn Christmas decoration
into an arms race.
Sheryl Crow wore an antiwar t-shirt on Good Morning America recently,
which apparently caused a stir. She wrote an eloquent
letter to her
Fan Forum explaining her views. "I have to question the intentions
of those considering taking our young men and women into a war based on
fear and greed."
It's interesting to me that many antiwar statements include the
obligatory apologies that of course Saddam Hussein is an evil person,
and that he is a real threat to the world. I have my doubts, as I
believe we all should when one of our imperfect fellows tell us
so-and-so is "evil." The Bible that underlies so much of our
collective piety reminds us to "judge not," working against one of
our innate urges. America's politicians have had plenty of friendly
dealings with regimes responsible for evil acts - Hussein's, for
starters, when we backed him against Iran, Pinochet, Pahlavi, Thieu,
Noriega, Marcos and on and on.
How do we go about building a world that is safe for democracy? It's
often said that if you want peace, work for justice. Waging a
pre-emptive war on Iraq does not have anything to do with peace or with
justice, I'm afraid.
Maureen
Dowd sizes up the flappage in DC and Trent Lott's sincerity.
"As usual with pols, the rhetoric tended to be the reverse
of the reality. In 1998, Mr. Lott was only too glad to be
the featured speaker at the dedication of the Jefferson
Davis Presidential Library in Beauvoir, Miss., where he
said he sometimes felt 'closer to Jefferson Davis than any
other man in America.' On Friday, he proclaimed that
'segregation and racism are immoral.'"
The NY Times also has a long piece in the National section,
In Lott's Life, Long Shadows of Segregation. The apologies keep
coming, and the once ardent segregationalist now sees that position as
"a stain on our nation's soul," but it's not clear if he's recognized it
as a stain on his own. The story of the place Lott grew up is pretty
chilling: back in 1948, when Thurmond ran for president, fliers warned
that a vote for Truman would mean "anti-lynching and anti-segregation
proposals will become the law of the land and our way of life in the
South will be gone forever." Let's hope they were right about that,
even if it takes longer than could have been imagined.
The NY Times' report on the tribulations of once high-flying execs,
Life Without a Jet, and Other Laments is sort of a predictable tale,
but I was struck by Dennis Kozlowski's electric bills, of all things.
For his three houses, in three states. $726.46, $1,047.26 and
$267.57. Right around 100 times our electric bill, altogether.
In the bed and bathos department, Mrs. Ken Lay runs
"Jus' Stuff, which sells furnishings, antiques and decorative items
from, among other places, the 14 homes and investment properties the
Lays recently sold, including their Aspen ski house."
Siebel nets $321 million from his options while the company's stock
drops 94%. Could the $36 million the compensation committee members
cleared in their own options deals have something to do with it?
A major stockholder, the Teachers' Retirement System of Louisiana
is suing to get the stink out.
14.Dec.2002
The weather's back to the way it should be this time of year - wild and
wooly, and never the same for long. We had snow, rain and fog this
week; today there's a big wind out of the SE and it's absurdly warm, up
in the mid-50s. Fresh snow at the top of Shafer Butte, but not much
promise of skiing yet with this kind of temperature.
Finished Randy Stapilus' delightful collection of vignettes from our
state,
It Happened in Idaho. A fast jog through the last 150 years or so,
stories of how the desert was made to bloom, how Idaho potatoes became
famous (that part happened in Chicago!), the first city lit by
nuclear power, Evil Knievel's flight into the Snake River canyon and
more. Once I was done with the 31 stories (and the "fun facts to know
and tell"), my only complaint was that it was once over a little too
lightly.
Dropping in on Doc Searls
always produces more threads than I can follow, but I enjoy the ones I
do. He positions Tim O'Reilly's essay,
Piracy
is Progressive Taxation, high in the realm of definitive statements
on digital rights management (DRM). O'Reilly argues that piracy is not
a problem, in essence. Obscurity and shoplifting (which can lead to
obscurity -- the computer says your work is on the shelf, but no one
sees it after it's stolen) are bigger threats than piracy.
Consider the company that is subject to more piracy than any other --
Microsoft -- and calculate how much they suffer from it.
13.Dec.2002
A useful "technology tips" article about
copyrights and images on the web, from HP. "Assume that every
image on the Web is owned by someone else." The ones
on this site, for example, are (almost entirely)
owned by me.
If you're just getting started with sailing, here are two pleasant
introductions, to
terminology, and to
learning
the ropes.
It's not a new aphorism that attitude is everything
but it shows up in a new collection:
rules
of the bazaar, from HP's mobile e-services Bazaar team.
"Luck is always a factor, and we're good at luck here.
This is one of the pathological optimism rules," says Peter. "We always try
to look at the bright side of life, no matter how bad things seem to
be."
I'll say one thing for Trent Lott, he writes a hell of an
apology. It almost seems like he recognizes that he got more than a
little carried away effusing at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday and
Senate swan song. Thurmond was remarkable for his longevity, but I'm
happy to see him leave the Senate. All the "girls" will have to get
their candy somewhere else now.
Our Idaho schoolteacher had her shuttle liftoff schedule bumped up, to
November of next year. You go, Barbara!
K-man decides his consulting firm could not withstand the light of
scrutiny, and
bails out of the 9/11 comission. Perhaps Mr. Bush can find a more
suitable candidate for his next try.
Yet another
critical security flaw in Internet Explorer. I see they're no longer
offering patches for Win95. Yet another reason to stick with Opera.
No big Christmas present for California: instead of the $9 billion
payback they wanted, Judge Birchman says they were bilked out of $1.8
billion, but that leaves
$1.2 billion owed to their power suppliers. Just what a foundering
economy needs, eh?
Ya wonder why government gets run for the rich? (Ok, maybe you don't,
but let me tell ya anyway.) It might have something to do with
40-something retirees from Goldman Sachs with a hundred million
dollars in their pocket, ready to do something righteous for "the
team."
12.12.2002
An arresting decision from an
Australian court: posting to the web opens you up to prosecution
from any country that has internet access.
"Stuart Karle, a lawyer for Dow Jones, said yesterday that libel law in
(the Australian state of) Victoria -- going further than even the strict
British libel laws -- allows plaintiffs to bring suit based on their own
particular interpretation of the offending passage in an article.
Defendants are not permitted to suggest a more benign reading of the
passage, he said."
The ink is barely dry on Michael Capellas' $14.4 million severance check
from Hewlett-Packard, and now he's set up for
$9
million when he quits Worldcom. A federal judge is not too keen on
that and the $20+ millions in compensation and stock that the bankrupt
company proposes to pay Capellas. See chutzpah, definition
of.
Alan Arnette's going to try to
climb Everest
again this year. The starting page on his website gives a nice, terse
description of the process, but you need a longer version (his journal
from this year's attempt, say, or
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer) to start to comprehend how far over
the edge this undertaking is.
The pictures are fantastic, though.
2002.12.11
Joel on Software:
"Big handwavy generalizations made from a position of deep ignorance is
one of the biggest wastes of time on the net today." That's a
self-indicting statement, I think, but he makes the case for
specialization at some length. The only problem I see with that is that
5 or 10 years from now, all those nuts and bolts are going to be
obsolete, and you'll have to learn new ones.
Cool case of the month:
Fatal
Error. Yet another realm (along with piercings and tatoos) that
I have no desire to enter, but I can admire it from afar.
2002.12.10
Last three ternary dates before the 7 year wait for 2010.
The weather cooperated in making it a joyous occasion by snowing some
today, busting up the inversion, if briefly. More storms coming,
bring 'em on. We need the water, at the end of the driest year in
Idaho's recorded history.
Iowans for Peace are maintaining a
compilation
of myths and misinformation given to justify war with Iraq. No
shortage of material there.
Case studies in right-wing media from
Scoobie Davis; visiting Rush Limbaugh's show, Moonie disinformation
campaigns.
9.Dec.2002
I was reading along in the NY Times story,
California Is at Fiscal Brink, thinking how bad for them (and for
the US economy, since they're such a large part of it), when I got to
the part about only 5 states being in worse fiscal shape as a percent of
the budget; Idaho is one of the five. There's no happy way out for
either state. Higher taxes and smaller government are in store for
both.
8.Dec.2002
From democratic process in action on a small scale
(our church voting on a
new mission statement, and deciding not to vote on a resolution against
the war in Iraq) today, to the larger scene: the latest
CBS/NYT
poll results. The full detail of the latter is fascinating.
After the election, more people - and more than 2/3rds of those polled -
approve of the United States taking military action against Iraq to try
and remove Saddam Hussein from power. (The support drops off at the
prospect of "substantial U.S. military casualties," but it's still a
majority.) About the same 2/3rds expect it to come to fighting.
And what will that do to the threat of terrorism against the US?
7-to-1 think the threat will increase rather than decrease, almost
3-to-1 increase rather than stay the same. (63% increase, 9% decrease,
23% stay the same.)
Wrote another
postscript to my page on the
neighborhood buzz (a.k.a. "hum"), after observing it in Spokane Valley,
and more local observation. I'm noticing it more, but still managing to
not let it bother me. If and when that changes, I'll be shopping for a
white noise source. Would I get tired of a
CD
looping in my sleep every night? Or just
tune the radio between stations, I suppose.
Try your skill at detecting photographic hoaxes
with this on-line quiz from the
Museum
of Hoaxes. I got 80% on round 1, 60% on round 2.
5 of my 6 mistakes were failing to believe a real photo, so I tend to
err on the "this is fake" side.
7.Dec.2002
Deepening inversion, nothing really like sunshine today. The sky is a
featureless grey, and at best not too close to the ground. At worst,
visibility is a quarter mile and the putrid fog closes in around you.
While there are ample things that might make it smell, the sugar beet
factory over in Nampa is the most pronounced and unwelcome odor.
Our big oak has finally let go of most of its leaves, and they add a
bland beige to the scene.
We're one of United Airlines' creditors, with a couple of prepaid
tickets for later this month. When
bankruptcy becomes official, what becomes of our tickets?
UAL looks like one of those dot-com bubble stocks, off well over
90% for the year, now trading around and below $1, off the Dow Jones
Transport Index, and may be delisted from the NYSE. Oh, how the mighty
have fallen. I'm glad we burned off most of my frequent flier miles a
while ago.
5.Dec.2002
It's the ugly time of year in Boise, trapped under an inversion that
looks to last a week and a half. Relief is in sight - sunshine and high
clouds - but out of reach in a bubble of our own effluent. Visibility
was less than 2 miles on my way to work today, with a 2-county ban on
wood stove burning, warnings against exertion outdoors and pleas for
people to carpool or use mass transit. This is the same stalled air
mass that was over eastern Washington and NE Oregon last week, it's
now exanded to cover most of the Pacific NW east of the Cascades.
Jonathan Freedland, writing in the Guardian says we need to
use brains, not brawn in the war on terror. His proposal for a middle
road between the hawks and doves makes a lot of sense.
Received any good email greeting cards lately? In the last month,
the
"friendgreet" worm has been spreading, using infected machines'
contact lists. The interesting part about this one is that it asks for
permission, presenting you with an end user licensing agreement (EULA)
that describes what it's going to do. Ok? If you don't read those
things, maybe it's time to consider starting to.
Clay Shirky on
Weblogs and
the Mass Amateurization of Publishing: "Weblogs aren't a form of
micropublishing that now needs micropayments. By removing both costs
and the barriers, weblogs have drained publishing of its financial
value, making a coin of the realm unnecessary."
The
darknet
sounds like something vaguely disquieting and evil, and for those
who make their living distributing expensive content, it is.
The Register can't figure out whether Microsoft will have the last
laugh or not, but the conclusion that content swapping/theft is
here to stay seems certain.
The revival of an old piece about innovation of gunfire at sea
reminded me of the
Vasa,
a 17th century warship that sank on its maiden voyage. It's been
raised and preserved in a remarkable museum in Stockholm, but unfortunately
neither the museum's website nor the piece above tells much of the story
of what led to the disaster. "The king himself dictated the Vasa's
measurements and no one dared argue against him" is true as far as it
goes, but it conceals the fact of a (presumably) well-engineered vessel
that had an extra deck of guns added to please the pointy-haired boss.
Physics did not bow to the king, however, and the boat sank in a sudden
squall. The museum is a must-see if you ever go to Stockholm, and
you'll get the whole story (and the whole ship!) there.
4.Dec.2002
I've been laid low with a stomach flu virus (apparently). Got the
wake-up call early Tuesday morning and answered on the big white phone.
Back to more-or-less solid food today, I'm enjoying the pleasure of
plain white rice (each kernel an event), boiled potatoes.
Arianna Huffington pulls out the stops on
TomPaine.com
over the last-minute revision in the Homeland Security bill to let
expatriate corporations continue to get US government contracts.
The $70 billion tax avoidance and the work, nice if you can get
it. Just a little sampler of the sorts of things we'll get out of 2
years of Republican rule.
Paul
Krugman's reading of the Wall Street Journal's editorial stance is
that the conservative goal is for government to be hateful to all.
One of the interesting things is the WSJ's easy dismissal of payroll
taxes, coming up with a 4% tax burden for someone with wage income of
$12,000/yr. Krugman estimates it as "probably well over 20%" but at any
rate, 4% is a big, fat lie from a newspaper that's supposed to
understand economics. Ah well, no one ever claimed their editorial page
was worth the ink and paper.
Soil crusts now have their own
website. You may not know about
them, because they're more common where people are less so. If you're
curious, this is the place to find out more.
The City Stories Project
looks interesting. Urban stories from particular places, "halfway
between a personal journal and a travel book."
One striking story, found on an affiliate site more or less at random
tells the story of the
Angel-Devil game in South Gate, California.
2002.12.02
30 years on, and the War on Some Drugs has some recent legislative
"victories" if nothing else.
Bill
Keller analyzes the Bush administration's approach, and why they're
demonizing marijuana.
"Who better to investigate an unwarranted attack on America than the man
who used to instigate America's unwarranted attacks?"
Maureen
Dowd's take on the return of Henry Kissinger. "Now Mr. Bush can let
the commission proceed, secure in the knowledge that Mr. Kissinger has
never shed light on a single dark corner, or failed to flatter a boss,
in his entire celebrated career."
William
Safire weighs in as well, "(yielding) to nobody in presenting
credentials as a Kissinger critic." Safire thinks he's the right man
for the job, eager to please history rather than the current boss.
Harry Shearer does a great Henry K., to compliment his
Dick Cheney - Confidential. (Real audio)
The possibly darker side of Bush's maladroit use of language, from
Mark
Crispin Miller, writing Dyslexicon: Observations on a National
Disorder "It's only when he leaps into the wild blue yonder of
compassion, or idealism, or altruism, that he makes these hilarious
mistakes." When it comes to retribution and applying authority,
he gets it right the first time.
2002.12.01
The Idaho Statesman did a
big spread on the Owyhee Canyonlands in today's paper, detailing the
history, the conflicts over land use and the natural beauty of the
place. It's 8 pages, full-color and no advertising, earning them a
$1.50 sale from us. The website has more photos than the special
section did, but I was disappointed by the poor quality. The print
edition suffered from having them blown up too far in many cases, and
also from a little bit of shift between the color plates on at least
one of our printed sides. Their web team doesn't seem to know how to
maintain resolution and quality; the reduced pictures should be much
better than they are.
The website also has a longer slice of
Pete Zimowsky's journal, rather than the floating sidebars with a
few snippets in the print edition. (It's from a trip in May - of this
year? - and datelined 11-26, so maybe it ran in its entirety last week.
I see the longer copy of the insert is also datelined 11-26 on the web,
so I don't know what it means.)
I think they did a good job of showing the breadth of viewpoints of the
various parties, and outlining how difficult it will be for a compromise
to be reached.
raveling
Tom von Alten
tva_∂t_fortboise_⋅_org
ISSN 1534-0007
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Saturday, 11-Jan-2003 14:22:59 MST
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