unraveling
31.Oct.03
Today's shopping expedition gave me some new material for considering
the merits of buying local: the little guy
versus the Big Box. Attitude can make a difference.
Didn't get to see charged particles in the sky last night, as it was
overcast; the clouds brought snow down here to 2600'. It'll be clear
tonight, which is nice for star-gazing, but
cold: the forecast low is 19°F.
Good, maybe even
great news on the economy, and we're squarely facing the
post hoc, ergo propter hoc logical trap. The answer to every
economic problem from the Bush administration has been "tax cuts," so
now that we have some good news, it must be because of... the tax cuts!
The big
buts are that the bold advance in consumer spending is on credit
(hey, just like the government!), and we still have that jobs
problem: while the economy grew an estimated 7.2% in the 3rd quarter,
the number of jobs went down. Again.
There's also this problem of headline timing and attention span:
"By the way, for the last month there's been a peculiar pattern: each
week, headlines declare that new claims fell from the previous week; a
week later, the past week's number is revised upward, and the apparent
decline disappears.)"
And on that other front, where Saddam Hussein is "no more," "no longer a
threat," on the run and so forth, there's also the chance that he's
coordinating the attacks by his loyalists. One or the other.
It's kind of pitiful, but there is at least one race that the Green Bay
Packers are winning --
Click
for Cans. The Cleveland Browns put up a challenge early on, but now
we're pulling ahead strongly.
30.10.03
Another fillibuster,
another judicial nominee on the cutting room floor. The usual
accusations fly, but try this on for size: "Democrats said they had
filibustered only four of the 171 judicial nominees who have come before
the Senate. Republicans said that was four too many and predicted more
filibusters by the Democrats." Is that because they know more sub-5th
percentile nominees are going to be offered up?
If you're making a list of bad places to go in certain kinds of
Halloween costumes, I noticed a sign in the bank today suggesting that
was one, and
Congressional office buildings would be another. Add to your irony
collection: "One of the hearings disrupted by the incident was a meeting
of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security."
Domestic cats (among other species)
can carry SARS. Not good.
Little bit of dusting up there on the Boise front, think snow!
Got in one
last sailing session
yesterday, some chilly tennis today to call it a season. It is almost
November, after all.
Speaking of storms, we're getting blasted by yet another
coronal mass ejection. Might be time to bundle up and go out to see
if we can find an aurora tonight. Check
the map
to see if it's in your neighborhood.
Even if we don't get out in the cold and dark we had one nice celestial
event already today: a multi-colored
sun
dog in late afternoon.
After seeing an interesting email from one of my lists, I took a quick
look to see if I could find the original source, but it seems to have
rapidly moved into
urban legend
status. Legends, of course, can be true, and George Herbert Walker
Bush did indeed decided not to march to Baghdad, and write this
in his and Brent Scowcroft's political history book,
A World Transformed:
"Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United
Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international
response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the
invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an
occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."
What he said. And what his boy and his pals didn't pay attention to.
(Or as Jeanette points out may be the problem, what they held in
contempt.) Who could imagine looking back on GHWB's presidency as
the good old days? But then the Cold War did come to an end on his
watch, after all.
Once upon a Time, a longer excerpt of the Bush/Scowcroft book was
published -- and then redacted -- by a popular news magazine, a fact
preserved by
The Memory Hole.
I'm knocking back the big bucks on Amazon Associates referrals;
this last quarter I got 2.7% of a $1.50 item, for a whopping 4 cents.
Maybe it was editorial commentary, the title was
Your Eyelids are Growing Heavy.
Speaking of Amazon, I'm wondering if they discontinued their Trivia game
wherein web visitors could collect a few nickels every day for slogging
through some pages and advertising. If they're still doing it, they
sure make it hard to find on their site. Searching for "nickels" or
"trivia" doesn't get you there. For a while they were automatically
embedding the questions in whatever page they assembled for you, and
chopping them out when you were done for the day. But now, nothing.
Could you imagine if they paid people to watch advertising on
commercial TV? You could have Tivo report on what all you watched,
and if you like some ads, just watch them over and over.
There's a
new low-cost Segway soon to be available. Only 4-large now. You
could make my Associates day, week, month, quarter and year by buying
one of those via a referral link. I put it on my wish list, too, in
case you're feeling really generous. (Apparently I have to wait
"a few days" for it to become visible to others.)
I just spent some time wandering around the myriad recommendations
Amazon has for me. Their starting point is the handful of things that
I've bought from them, but they also use things I've searched for, and
each item that's added opens up new connections. It's all rather
fascinating. The limits on time and attention are the big problem, of
course, even if I were the sort of person who bought things
regularly.
At first I was a little annoyed at the idea of asking celebrities about
their great ideas; you don't need to be famous to have a good idea,
after all, just being asked might be enough. But ideas are what they
are, and the correspondents are quirky enough to make this
collection of vignettes interesting. I don't know if the NYT
will let them run free longer than their 7 day window, so get 'em while
they're fresh.
John
Perry Barlow and
Patricia F. Russo want a simpler technological life: "my whole life
is a sea of gimcrackery and doodads."
Bill Joy: The Cone (or cap) of Silence.
Margaret Cho: the computer of her dreams.
Moby wants a new drug, hasn't figured out that
Life offers more than enough recreational opportunities.
William Gibson: make George Bush's speeches more colorful.
Donald Trump wants everyone to know what he wants (so we can provide
it for him, of course).
Michael K. Powell just wants a decent application for a PDA, the
MePod. (He probably wants it to be theft-proof, too...)
Chris Collinsworth will probably get his portable TiVo, unless DRM
gets in the way. Maybe Michael Powell could help with that.
Martina Navratilova wants a good call.
Scott Adams probably wants his link on the other pages, but he'll
settle for a cat locator.
Now I know the feeling of power that comes from being a name dropper,
and from being Donald J. Trump.
When you're Fannie Mae and you have a mistake in your spreadsheet,
the error can go to 10 figures:
"its mortgage portfolio grew by $1.7 billion; its total assets by $1.04
billion; and its unrealized gains on certain securities, by $1.3
billion." Nice that they were all on the plus side, but do we
believe these numbers now?
29.Oct.03
I'm not sure who this Carl Estrada guy on Paul Chasman's dot org is, but
he writes
some funny letters,
like the one on September 9th (permalinks anyone?) with a clever
suggestion for George: "Here’s what I think you should do: Go to your
Photo Shop program and erase 'Mission Accomplished.' In its
place, write: 'Mission Impossible.' You can do it--trust
me--you’ll be amazed at what Photo Shop can do."
That would have been a better plan than the one that was rolled out
yesterday, at the garden press conference, which Scott McLellan referred
to playfully as "bannergate," while he was being
rotisseried by the press corps today:
Q Scott, knowing what we know now, that the Navy, apparently they
say that they did request this banner, that what the President said was
technically accurate, but would you concede that the gist of what he was
saying was misleading because it left the impression for -- that he was
saying that the White House didn't have anything to do it. You don't
think it was misleading?
MR. McCLELLAN: No, that's not what he -- no, that's not what he
said.
I swear, the guy must have "No, that's not what he said" written on a
cue card. If not, he ought to. I happened to see the excerpt of
W.'s press conference
(RealAudio), wherein "what he said" (with that "I've got a
secret joke" smirk going), was "The 'Mission Accomplished" sign of
course was put up by the members of the USS Abraham Lincoln, saying
that their mission was accomplished. I know it was attributed
somehow to some ingenious advance man from my staff, ah... they weren't
that ingenious by the way...."
Yeah, I think that was
misleading. Was W. lying again, or was he just misinformed,
and how long are we going to give the guy the benefit of the doubt for
being misinformed all the time?
The new
camera arrived in good shape yesterday evening, and now I'm figuring
out how to make it go. I like the user interface, I'm lukewarm on the
digital viewfinder, downright cool on the toy image editing program. 8X
zoom is like having a really, really big hammer -- works great on the
16d nails, but for finishing nails it can be somewhat overpowering. One
oddity is a very limited number of choices for resolution (the default
shown bold):
| 5Mpx | 1Mpx |
| Best | 2.6 MB | 1.25MB |
| Better | 1.25 | 0.6 |
| Good | 0.6 | 0.3 |
I'm still messing around, but I expect I'll dial it up to the max size
and resolution and mostly leave it there; if I'm lucky enough to take a
keeper photograph, I want it to be the best it can be. It's easy enough
to discard or downsize the less archivable shots, but you can't improve
the quality after you've pressed the shutter. It feels
like there ought to be more choices, but since I'm unlikely to use them
anyway, I guess I shouldn't mind that there aren't.
The "first shot" here was
from trying to take a nighttime, hand-held shot of the crescent moon,
and I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I liked the result! :-)
Thanks to alert reader Mark Odell for catching three of my favorite
media topics reaching harmonic convergence:
Rupert Murdoch threatens to sue himself.
You can listen to the source of the controversy on...
Fresh Air, of course.
It's understandable that Fox News wouldn't want The Simpsons to
do the news crawl parody, "because it might confuse viewers into thinking
it was real news." Or confuse them into thinking that Fox News
is a parody.
27.Oct.03
The BBC's
coverage of the California fires has emailed first-person
accounts, along with video and photos (including the one excerpted here,
showing the smoke visible from space). We have family down there too,
and had an update from my dad midday yesterday: "The skies in Solana
Beach are overcast with smoke, the sun (at 11am) is orange (like a
sunset) and a scattering of large white flakes (in Milwaukee we'd call
it snow) drift down onto our driveway." Close to a thousand homes
destroyed already, and things sound worse today.
Bill Gates has the road show going for
the next big O/S revision, somewhere between 1 and 3 years out.
At this distance, it's all about mindshare, trial balloons and
distraction, but the touted features don't sound all that exciting.
Better security, a filesystem more tightly integrated with proprietary
application file formats, "more sophisticated" graphics, etc.; in other
words, they're going to get closer to successfully delivering all the
things they've promised for the last 5 or 10 years. If they can include
the best of
what Apple has already
done (this year), the market will probably continue to accept their
monopoly.
If I could put in one small request... (ha!) it would be to please
include something that unix operating systems have had for, um, 20 years
or so? Links to files provide multiple names and/or paths to
the same information, so that "USbudget2004" could be filed under
/Clipfile/politics/budgets and /Clipfile/economy, say, without copying
the bits. Two pointers, one file. Simple, effective, brilliant, and
missing in action in DOS and its offspring. (And yes, I would also
support correcting the erroneous use of '\' to mean '/'.)
Giving the
Avant browser
a whirl, and there are some things I like a lot. Number 1 is tabbed
browsing, with the middle mouse button opening links in the background.
I got used to that with Opera
on my win95 machine, but I haven't got around to installing that better
software on the w2k machine.
The installation seemed fast, seamless and clever, keeping all my MSIE
Favorites (although alphabetizing them -- I hate that), as well as its
cookies. After looking around a bit, finding keyboard shortcut
customization and a useful Help index missing, it became apparent that
it's not a browser at all, but rather a (much improved) user interface
wrapper for Internet Explorer. No wonder the installation was quick and
easy! The good part about that is that (almost all of) MSIE's familiar
shortcuts remain exposed; the bad part is that all of MSIE's shortcoming
are along for the ride.
My buddy on the inside keeps telling me to try
Mozilla... so I did that, too,
but its tabbed interface doesn't seem quite as simple or effective as
Avant's or Opera's. He said it didn't have that old Netscape feel,
either, but it rather did to me. I liked that, once upon a time...
26.Oct.03
That other Ichiro, Ichiro Irie, made the news just after the baseball
season, for what has to set
a new
standard in the realm of bizarre fetishes. As the Associated Press
reported, "police arrested a man for stealing shoes at a southern
Japanese hospital then found a collection in his home of 440 women's
shoes -- all for the left foot."
Doc
pointed to the
NPR
ombudsman's report, criticizing Terry Gross for her interview
with Bill O'Reilly. I added to his email load with this:
I disagree with your assessment -- and your castigation --
of Terry Gross. As you say, she is "one of the best
interviewers anywhere in American journalism," and it was
O'Reilly who made the interview the ugly thing that it was.
His shtick is all about bluster and intimidation, and poor
little Bill got beat up by Ms. Gross?
Puhlease. There is enough liberal hand-wringing and second
guessing going on in our little "culture war," without us
abasing ourselves before the forces of self-righteous
commentators who know no truth but their own.
Surely you read
the report that viewers of PBS and NPR are better
informed than those of FOX News? That's what the culture war is
about -- people who are looking to find what the truth is, against those
who are certain they know it already.
So just when you're wondering what else can go wrong, there's this
coronal
mass ejection from the sun headed our way, at two million miles an
hour. That sounds fast, but then the sun is a long way away -- it takes
a few seconds for the light to get here, and almost two days for that
CME to cover the distance. (This is a bit of old news; the first wave
arrived Friday.) You can check whether there's an aurora to view
without leaving the bright city lights on a
NOAA site.
It says we're on the fringe at the moment, less than 0.1
erg/cm2/s. (Ergs, you say? 1 erg/s/cm2 is
a mW/m2, versus the [very] "round number"
solar constant of 1.4kW/m2 at our orbit.)
25.Oct.03
It looks like 6 games will do it this time, with a fantastic performance
by Josh Beckett to silence the Yankees in 9 shut-out innings. I had no
trouble staying awake for all of this one! That 27th championship will
just have to wait while
the Marlins enjoy their 2nd, and the magic of Yankee Stadium can
take a break until April or so. The look on Juan Pierre's face as he
ran in from centerfield told the story: uncontainable physical joy.
And they did all that on one-third the payroll. Just goes to show you,
money ain't everything.
It used to be that parents would aspire for their children to someday
grow up to be President. Now they can aim for a more widely achievable
goal and have their children grow up to be a
blogger, just like George, er, just like GeorgeWBush.com, who seems
to be the "person" making the entries in that site's "Official" blog.
Of the many heart-warming entries, I especially enjoyed the quotation
from
George Will's latest paean to the Chief and Rummy, where we find out
that (a) our Defense Secretary has as an axiom, "A narrow focus on the
certain obscures the almost-certain," and (b) the administration may
have been wrong, but their intentions were true:
"Critics correctly fault the mistaken certitude of some of the
administration's prewar pronouncements. But critics indicting the
administration not merely for mistakes but for meretriciousness would do
well to avoid that in their indictments."
I don't tend to think or write much about "meretriciousness," so I
checked what the dictionary says about the lovely word. Was Will
thinking of the 1a sense (in the
4th ed. of The American Heritage Dict.), "attracting attention in a
vulgar manner," or more likely 1b, "plausible but false or
insincere; specious." (We assume he wasn't referring to the 2nd sense,
"relating to prostitution.") So, we critics are not to fault the
Administration for insincerity. George Will somehow knows that their
hearts are pure.
I think what he wants to say is that "they weren't lying to us,
even though it sounds like they were," but that doesn't sound nearly
as mellifluous and is a much harder argument to make. Buried in the
florid prose is the purpose of his essay: Rumsfeld is A-OK, and we
shouldn't even think of firing his ass for the mess in Iraq.
It was a really, really hard job (maybe impossible), but we had to do it
to stave off the "grave and gathering" (not "clear and present") danger
that was (apparently) Hussein's Iraq. It became very important this
week to note that no one in the Administration ever said the danger was
imminent; in fact Bush said just the opposite in his State of the
Union address: the danger is NOT imminent, so we should act before it
becomes imminent. There are NO elephants in the living room, so we
should get going on that elephant hunt to keep it that way. (Oh wait,
there are elephants in the living room, aren't there?)
If you got the impression that there was some imminent danger (say, of a
Weapon of Mass Destruction landing on our shore, or a "mushroom cloud"
headed your way), or that Iraq was somehow involved in the 9/11 attack
on our country, why, you must have been confused, and how ever did you
get to be that way you silly goose? Rest assured, it wasn't
meretriciousness.
Or, maybe it was. For a different point of view, consider the teachings
of Leo Strauss, "a great believer in the efficacy and usefulness of lies
in politics"
according to Shadia Drury, who's studied him at least as well as
the neocons. Consider Irving Kristol, for example, striving for a
higher ideal: "(T)he goals of American foreign policy must go well
beyond a narrow, too literal definition of ‘national security.’ It is
the national interest of a world power, as this is defined by a sense of
national destiny ... not a myopic national security."
On a similar subject, I finished Michael Moore's book,
Stupid White Men ...and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the
Nation! Even for a sympathetic reader, his attitude can get in the
way at times; it's better suited to
film, I think. This book was written before 9/11, before the latest
war in Iraq, so it seems dated in some ways, but the collection of facts
he had to work from into early 2001 were damning enough. Read the
details of how Jeb delivered Florida to W. (it was more than just the
Supremes), the Wars on intelligence, Drugs, poor people, and on and on.
He doesn't spare the Democrats, or Clinton/Gore, either; the last minute
barrage of Executive Orders from the last administration was more of an
indictment for what they didn't get done, rather than a grand finale.
(Lest we forget, however, 3/4ths of the Clinton administration was
post-"Contract with America"; they had a lot of help.) The book has a
lot of funny stuff in it, but not so much funny ha ha when it's all said
and done.
24.Oct.03
Well, I actually tuned in for the whole baseball game last night,
although I dozed off for some of the later innings; yet another reason
to tape the beginning and check in at the end. Out of some sort of
masochistic impulse, I even watched the playing of the national anthem,
which was done by Yanni, accompanied by an unnamed violinist and an
another electronic technician.
This guy
is insanely popular around the world, but I've yet to hear any of his
music that attracts me. His treatment of The Star-spangled
Banner seemed to define "insipid," with no singing and the violin
blanketed by two workstations' worth of electronic noises. He seemed to
be swimming in waves of smirky self-satisfaction while he diddled the
thing out... hmmm, there's a parallel with our President now, isn't
there?
Just to experience this cultural phenomenon to its fullest, I checked
out the "Fan Area" to see how the devoted felt about the performance.
I think member LADYGOLD probably speaks for all umpteen million (or is
it billion?) of them:
"I absolutely loved the way Yanni got that little grin on his face and
couldn't wait to put that special touch of 'Yanni' music on the end of
the anthem!!! I loved it when he did that and did his famous hair
FLIP!!! Man, if some people didn't know who Yanni was before, they
should by now! What great exposure! Good also to see Ming and Karen
Briggs....!!"
Yes, now we know who Yanni is.
(Actually, there was one dissenting voice in the fan zone, but "Yanni
Management" (a.k.a. YMusicMuse) stepped in and reminded folks to
"move on" should any polite disagreement arise.)
Paul
Krugman observes that Treasury Secretary John Snow's optimistic
forecast still leaves the bar far too low:
"Bear in mind that the payroll employment figure right now is down 2.6
million compared with what it was when George W. Bush took office. So
Mr. Snow is predicting that his boss will be the first occupant of the
White House since Herbert Hoover to end a term with fewer jobs available
than when he started.... (T)o have kept up with the population growth
since Mr. Bush took office, the economy would have to add not two
million, but seven million jobs by next November."
 |
Jeanette and I voted yesterday, for Boise's next mayor, and four city
council members. Boise is till using those infamous punch card ballots,
and voting absentee, you're completely on your own with the card and a
stylus. They give you a styrofoam backing card, but that's it.
I've punched a lot of chad (or is it "chads") in my day, and never
considered it a problem. But who knows, maybe all my ballots have been
thrown out. It certainly wouldn't have changed any of the results in
this state!
A big old black spot on the face of the sun and a coronal mass ejection
headed our way means problems for radio (can you hear me now?), and
likely auroras. How nice that we're getting longer nights to view
them with.
So, it turns out that
Rumsfeld understands the situation well enough, but is just running
on a spin cycle with a broken timer. Talk about a loose cannon; how
long before W., Big Dick and Condi send this guy and his high priest
General Boykin packing? He's not exactly on message with W.'s current
theme song, It's Getting Better All the Time.
The time has come to upgrade our digital camera. It's not an order of
magnitude improvement in multiple dimensions the way computer upgrades
tend to be, but then it didn't take 5+ years, either. (Our 1998
computer with a measly 6GB HD and 266MHz processor seems quaint, while
our 3-year-old 2Mpx camera is merely outdated.) I looked at local
retail outlets for the
model I
wanted, but since it didn't turn up there ("we have them on order")
I went mail-order.
Tracking the "5 to 7 business days" FedEx ground shipment is the
compensating entertainment while waiting for the goods. After my order
the evening of the 22nd, the first entry is "Customer-Loaded Trailer
Picked Up" at midnight, meeting the promise to ship an order placed by
10pm on the same day. The trailer was picked up in Memphis, meaning the
vendor has put their distribution center at FedEx's hub, long-ago chosen
for having an airport that could be taken over and put to work. (No
doubt the Interstate Highways around there are nicely upgraded, too.) 45
minutes later, "Package information transmitted to FedEx," and then half
a day later, it was "Scanned at FedEx sort facility." This morning, at
9:21, it left the sort facility, for its road trip west.
23.Oct.03
Rush Limbaugh's tribulation with addiction gives us a chance to
reconsider the whole mess of outlawing drugs. Charley Reese's point
of view is close to my own:
"The phony war on drugs that has cost billions of dollars and wrecked the
lives of thousands of people is Prohibition all over again. Whenever the
government decides to arbitrarily outlaw a product people want, outlaws
organize to provide it.... What has the drug war accomplished? It has
created new, more deadly criminal organizations, expanded the power of
government and practically institutionalized public corruption. In
neither case has the original purpose -- reduction of consumption --
been achieved." (Thanks to Lee Killough for the link.)
Friedman: "(T)here is nothing about the Bush team's performance in
Iraq up to now that justifies a free pass. If Republicans don't get
serious on Iraq, they will wake up a year from now and find all their
candidates facing the same question: 'How did your party lose
Iraq?'"
Turns out I don't have any missing or rifled mail after all (at least
not that I know about). The company decided to stop sending out pay
statements, and their notice to "all employees" didn't include me.
(The alternate source for fetching the statements, "The Portal," no
longer includes me, either.)
I have to admit, I've been skipping most of the World Series. For one
reason or another, I end up with the first part of the game on tape,
tune in toward the late middle, and just pick up the highlights as time
permits between innings, pitching changes and after the game. Watching
things out of order doesn't seem to make it any less interesting,
surprisingly, although the "live" part is better, once I remind myself
that I don't know what will happen next. With 75% of the Marlin's
offense in the first inning last night, and the remainder in the last
swing of Alex Gonzales' bat, it worked out nicely. I got to see Roger
Clemens sent off smartly by the Marlins batters and then by the Florida
fans, after he'd settled down for 6 innings.
I can also appreciate the work of the Fox cameramen in as much detail as
I like. Going to a ball game was never like this, with intimate
close-ups of pitcher, batter, runner, fielder, in endless succession.
Watching the flop sweat of Ugueth Urbina develop over the course of his
blown save in the 9th inning was remarkable, for example. And those
extra innings -- and commercials -- gave me time to watch more of the
first part of the game.
22.Oct.03
Waht's the dael wtih tihs ntioon taht you dno't need to get all
yuor leettrs in the rghit odrer as lnog as the frsit and lsat oens
are crorcet? It smees to wrok eevn tohguh it's hguley ipmroablbe,
and wr'ee
not srue if any uvinesrity has stdueid it or not. Wierd.
Two letters from my Congressman arrived today, in response to opinions
I'd passed on by phone and email. One was about the
$87 billion appropriation
for Iraq; the long and short of his letter was that he was backing
the President and the money. He didn't comment on whether or not half
of the money for rebuilding Iraq should be a loan. But there was this
fascinating snippet: "I believe there are many other nations across the
globe -- including France, Germany, and Russia -- that will benefit a
great deal from the removal of Saddam Hussein. They should be forced
to contribute financially to the reconstruction of Iraq." (My
emphasis.)
Mr. Simpson did not give any hints how he would propose to
force those countries to contribute... it did make me think of
an old Randy Newman song called
Political Science, though. My goodness, that record came out 31
years ago.
Sometimes speaking truth to power isn't enough. Robert Byrd's speeches
will make one hell of a historical collection, but at the moment they
seem to be falling on deaf ears. Last week, he told the Senate the
story of the
Emperor's New
Clothes, which seems to be segueing into
The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
"It is dangerous to manipulate the truth. It is dangerous because once
having lied, it is difficult to ever be believed again. Having misled
the American people and stampeded them to war, this administration must
now attempt to sustain a policy predicated on falsehoods. The president
asks for billions from those same citizens who know that they were
misled about the need to go to war. We misinformed and insulted our
friends and allies and now this administration is having more than a
little trouble getting help from the international community. It is
perilous to mislead."
The so-called Right to Life folks are having a great month. Action on
abortion from the Congress, and now Jeb Bush
overriding the
judiciary, a woman's presumptive widower and common sense, with the
help of the Florida Legislature. The good news, if there is any, is
that the person nominally at the center of the case, Terri Schiavo,
isn't feeling any pain. She checked out more than a decade ago,
leaving a family who apparently believes denial can overcome the
inevitable outcome of living.
Imagine if someone were wounded and brain-damaged as Ms. Schiavo was,
and it was proposed that her body be kept alive for 10 or 20 years as an
experiment. We would be justifiably outraged, I think. But with this
amazing stunt, we're now told that
the decision could be good for the GOP at the polls.
It's enough to make you get that Living Will written, isn't it?
I'm an organ donor; please don't waste the good parts after my brain is
gone.
21.Oct.2003
Even though I'd read
Robert
X. Cringely's lament about how the U.S. Postal Service doesn't
really care or do anything if your mail is lost, I still believed that
there might be something they might do about a concern at our
house. It seems my most recent pay statement didn't arrive with the
punctuality I've come to expect after 20 years. After waiting 5
deliveries past when it should have arrived, I gave a call to the number
listed under my local branch in the phone book. That's an 800 number,
and it doesn't go to my local branch. The woman on the other end said
I'd have to go talk to the people there.
So I did, and I was given a 5-part Form 1510 to fill out. I took it
home and used an older statement to describe it as exactly as possible,
sender, addressee, size, color, etc. Then I took it back to the Cole
Rd. branch office. "You know, you should really take this to the
downtown office," the clerk said. I wasn't all that keen on adding to
my trouble at that point, and as we conversed, the particulars of the
situation became clearer to her. "It has to be missing for 30 days
before they'll even do anything," she said. Blank incredulity from me.
"You can't even file this claim for something that was sent to you.
It has to come from the sender."
I don't suppose the sender really cares, and even if they did, they
couldn't ask to start the investigation for another three weeks.
Neither rain nor snow nor sleet nor dark of night and all that jazz; we
still get plenty of junk mail, but when the stuff we want
goes missing, tough.
Well the twenty-umpteen time "world" champion Yankees are up 2-1.
I'm sure if they prevail in the series, they'll be highly regarded
everywhere they go,
except maybe in Boston, where there's now a summons out for for
Jeff Nelson and Karim Garcia for their class-act pounding of a Fenway
park employee and Red Sox fan.
18.Oct.03
It was the 2nd day of a 3-day
fall classic at Lucky
Peak today, the lake's best windsurfing of the year, late in the
season. Most of the locals seem to have put away the gear, but those of
us who showed up had a great time. The wind was even more camouflaged
than usual, with the flags limp and lifeless up on the plateau by
highway 21 and Federal Way, but the Boise River canyon filled in and
cranking. Not too cold (with a good rubber suit!), sunshine
(in between some clouds), clean water and plenty of lake left.
It was the opposite of the result I was looking for: Marlins vs.
Yankees, when I wanted the Cubs and Red Sox. We have to work with what
we get though, and since the Yankees have won quite enough forever,
it's Go Marlins!
I love the "lead off man" part of baseball, and the top of the 1st was
perfect: a beautiful bunt single, a hit and run bloop single and a sac
fly and "my" team is up a run. Juan Pierre makes me remember how much
fun it was to watch Ricky Henderson. The Yankees tried to match the
effort with Soriano, but no dice. He got the first inning steal, but
didn't get home, and then grounded out and into a double play. And
Johnson picked off third base to end the bottom of the 3rd? You call
this a baseball team? The only thing that could be better is if the
pitchers were batting. ("Designated hitter" -- that is so
lame.)
Juan Pierre did a number on storied Yew Nork; scored the first run, hit
in the last two, stole a base and collected the last out to end the
Yankees home streak at 10. As George Bush says, "bring 'em on!"
Frank
Rich: the Rat Pack is back. "One survey shows that even a large
number of high school students, some 30 percent in all, have adopted Mr.
Bennett's high-rolling habits; surely no former secretary of education
has ever been so successful a role model to impressionable youth."
Rich includes this, in case you missed it, from that dependable source
of humor, the Wall Street Journal editorial page:
"It looks as if the first party to get totally wired-in to a
mega-celebrity is, incredibly, the G.O.P. Something weirdly attractive
was coming off the Schwarzenegger camp's victory stage on TV round about
midnight Tuesday." Weirdly attractive, indeed. And I guess Deputy
Editor wasn't born yet when the GOP went ga-ga over Ronald Reagan?
(This is a trick question, of course; no True Believer could deny
RRR's "mega" anything status, but fawning over the Terminator
must have got away from him.)
17.Oct.2003
Don't bother with just the MPAA's FAQ on the "broadcast flag"
when you can have their FAQ along with
the Electronic
Frontier Foundation's illumination.
Here's a little snippet:
Q: Who created the "broadcast flag?"
MPAA answer: The Broadcast Flag was created by the
Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), which is the
standards-setting organization that developed the technical
specifications for digital television in the U.S.
EFF comment: The broadcast flag was created by Fox,
and subsequently ratified by ATSC as an optional part of ATSC's
standards. (ATSC did not create any obligation for manufacturers to
respond to the broadcast flag in any way.)
There's a new top dog out west: Gail Norton has shown
she's
more powerful than California's irrigators. It would be too clumsy
a pun to call this a sea change, but trust me, it's big. Very big.
"The deal calls for the largest movement of farm water to municipal
users in the nation and will be in effect for at least 35 years."
But the quid pro quo is in the next sentence: "As compensation, farmers,
some of whom might need to plant less, will be paid handsomely for water
they get for a very small cost from the federal government." Read on
down to quantify that "buy low, sell high" deal: $15-20/acre-foot
delivered by the US Govt., $258 going out to a California
municipality.
Speaking of irrigation, with the New York Canal turned off, the
Diversion Dam pool has reverted to something riverine. Lucky Peak
reservoir is 115 feet below full pool, but still
fine for sailing
with a late blast of Indian Summer in the neighborhood.
16.Oct.2003
The Idaho Statesman's
outdoor photo contest winners include some lovely scenes from our
fair state. It's a bit heavy on the fawns and smooth water reflections
for my taste, but there's something for every taste. I liked the 3rd
prize full moon over an inversion, skiing at Schweitzer from
Chris Grant of Boise, among others.
Time for the rivers around here to dry up; irrigation ditches are done
for the season, and the Boise will be
throttled from 684 cfs to 300. Aside from a touch of frost and some
clouds and a hint of rain yesterday, you could still imagine it's
summer: a warm wind out of the south today, high just above 70F.
Well, I wish
Steve Bartman hadn't got in the way, but I'm not going to throw a
beer on him or anything. I'd like to think I'd have been more heads-up
and would've stayed out of the way myself, but then those other 5 people
around me would've got after it, eh? Nah, I probably would've gone
after it, too, and I would've had a mitt on. Note to self: don't get
front row tickets. Nothin' left to do but root for the Red Sox.
I was thinking about the
Bill O'Reilly / Fresh Air debacle this morning, and how Bill
had summarily dismissed Terry Gross and her program as a personal attack
on him, a "hatchet job." Having listened to and enjoyed many Fresh
Air interviews, I know that O'Reilly was the exceptional, negative
component, rather than something integral to the show itself. Thinking
of the interaction in William Isaacs'
terms, I see that at least part of the problem was that O'Reilly and
Gross were acting at different places on the spectrum of communication.
I suspect (having seen only a few snippets of it) that O'Reilly's show
tends to be in the realm of controlled discussion or skillful
conversation -- defending a point of view, which I'm guessing usually
gets back to his theme of the "culture war in America."
What makes Fresh Air a great show is how often Gross is able to
find a space of reflective dialogue with her guests. The most
interesting part of the O'Reilly interview was there, in fact, when he
was talking about his upbringing, his relationship with his father,
etc. When it came to owning up to name-calling, though, O'Reilly got
into a different space, one where he wasn't in complete control. He
didn't like where it was going, thinking it was at
him, when in fact it was in to him. Both can be dangerous
directions, but for very different reasons.
Comparing O'Reilly's website
with the online presence of Gross' show gives another snapshot of some
of the differences. O'Reilly is all about selling things - license
plate holders, Bill's latest book, premium membership in the
billoreilly.com club (which gives you access to discussion forums with
other paying customers, access to the "Exclusive Viewer Voting feature
where you can rate every segment on The O'Reilly Factor," "Outrage
Funnels," "Behind the Scenes" Photos from Bill and his production team.
and much, much more...!), DVD rentals, insurance, credit reports. It
feels like a world onto itself, in fact. (Not an attractive one to me,
either, but apparently there are plenty of people who like it.)
The Fresh Air site is about a
wide range of ideas, and most of the information comes your way "free."
(There are some things for sale, but they're immediate parts of the
program: collections of interviews, Barnes & Noble partner links to
books mentioned on the show.) It's about generative dialogue, rather
than polemics and rhetoric.
15.Oct.2003
I windsurfed off the California coast a couple of times (c.f.
the end of this day's
entry), at Waddell Creek. I found it more of an "advanced" spot
than the Columbia River Gorge; the Columbia is a mighty river, but the
ocean is a world onto itself. I survived, I avoided being shark food, I
had kind of a good time, but all in all it was humbling.
Doug Yamamato's outing at nearby Davenport sounds a bit humbling as
well. It had a happy ending, too, but with a way better story to
tell before it was over. Trapped for two days between a cliff and the
ocean, drinking water seeping down the cliff. Just in case you're not
sure this is a California story, there's this tidbit about the
55-year-old: "He was brought to Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz, the
first hospital stay he's ever had. Monday afternoon, he was treated
and released." The last word from his mom is kinda cute, too.
Wherever you are on the political spectrum, I would hope that you could
agree that the Bush administration and its Justice Department has gone
too far with Jose Padilla.
Nat
Hentoff gives the details in which we see our Commander in Chief
playing the role of absolute monarch. The official arguments
lead to the conclusion that "according to the Justice Department and
the president, the separation of powers -- at the core of the
Constitution -- has been suspended in the war on terrorism."
Donna Newman, "after . . . combing through sealed court papers the
Justice Department was obliged to reveal . . . concluded that the
government's case against her client relies on two informers: one with a
drug problem, she said, and the other who has recanted."
Two informants against you and you're locked up incommunicado,
indefinitely.
14.Oct.03
Discovered a trifecta of expirations today: two cars and my driver's license.
The former were half a month gone, the latter a month and a half.
Coincidentally, Jeanette had been to the DMV, alerted to her due date by
a grocery store clerk. It had been a two hour wait for her, and she
warned me to take something to read. I tucked
The Mind of God under my arm and headed out into the afternoon
sunshine, prepared to enjoy whatever wait I had coming. I got my
take-a-number from the driver's license side, then one for vehicle
licensing, then hit the hot dog stand outside. In response to one gal
who was complaining about how screwed up this city seemed to be, the
chorizo guy said it was pay day for a lot of people, plus it was the day
after a holiday; "it's not usually like this."
While my dog was cooking, a passer-by spotted my book, calls out "The
Mind of God, huh? Who's it by?" "Paul Davies," I said, showing him the
cover. "Paul Davis, huh? What do you think of it?" I told him I'd
just checked it out and hadn't started reading it yet.
"Have you heard about 'Intelligent Design'?" In retrospect, plenty of
more clever answers occur to me - yeah, I've done some intelligent
design myself. I told him a friend of mine was big on that.
He says "you know, Intelligent Design is beating evolution..." and when
I expressed my skepticism about that, he says, "oh yeah, at the
University of Virginia, Harvard, Yale..." I'm looking at the guy,
trying to assess how likely we are to have an Intelligent Conversation,
and toss him a bone with "cool! If it's a good theory, it'll win
out."
As he walks off to the parking lot, he says "it's not a
theory," and that's the last word in the exchange. Is it a
hypothesis? A belief system? A logical certainty? I didn't get that
far inside the Mind of the Passer-by.
The interim report on the search for WMDs in Iraq has generated op-ed
conclusions that are as wide as the political spectrum. One of the
"further reading" links from PBS/Frontline is to
David Kay's statement to Congress; you can get closer to the soruce
and draw your own conclusions from it.
The evidence on the ground seems certain to satisfy those who want
to conclude that "the world is a safer place now that we've
gotten rid of Saddam Hussein." Except of course that we haven't actually
rounded him up, and we don't know, and probably won't be able to
determine what all his regime had cooked up, and more importantly
what has happened to the stuff, and all the people who have the
expertise to use or recreate it.
More directly, even though the evidence is limited and equivocal,
the Bush Administration has enough to claim that its pre-emptive
war was justified, and opponents will be tilting at windmills to try
to use "no WMDs" in their campaigns. The issues of deterrence,
containment, threat assessment, and accuracy of intelligence are
subtle, nuanced and open to interpretation. That makes them
non-starters as deciding issues in the broad forum of public
opinion. The concept of "Weapons of Mass Destruction" was
brilliantly devised to ensure success. It's adjustable enough to
contain a wide range of weaponry, and once we have existence proof
of even one (never mind the date, tacit US support of its use, or
whether it's a "related activity" or even just the inferred desire in
Hussein's mind), it can be used successfully to justify war. Given that
we knew Iraq had used them once upon a time, the Cheney/Rumsfeld/
Wolfowitz/Perle team had a winner simply by focusing the
discussion on WMDs.
The power to frame the discussion is considerable. It has a lot to
do with why incumbents usually win.
Here's the
down-under
perspective on sexing up intelligence in the rush to war.
Sounds like the same program we had, basically.
13.Oct.03
In a move of near-stunning irrelevance,
China is about to launch somebody in to space for 14 orbits.
They want to go to the moon, apparently (oh and maybe do some Star Wars
stuff along the way). That'll be heroic, but you have to wonder what
they're thinking; even the Soviets figured out that robotic space
exploration made more sense, decades ago. My opinion today is colored
by Robert Park's book, mentioned yesterday,
Voodoo Science, in which he devotes a whole chapter to describing
why the era of manned space flight is behind us: "The Virtual
Astronaut, In Which People Dream of Artificial Worlds."
My first opinions on the subject were colored by a book with a slightly
different point of view,
You Will Go To The Moon. Park didn't say much about the opportunities
for space tourism; there are a lot of people still waiting for that 1959
promise to be fulfilled in some way. Watching it on TV was exciting,
but not the same as being there.
Breaking news, it seems Rush Limbaugh's rehabilitation has
changed his political philosophy! Amazing
stuff.
Recognizing that the usual suspects in television news are filtering
what he as to say (improving the grammar perhaps?), we hear that
President Bush is
seeking unconventional media to get his message out. The ABC story
doesn't say exactly what television outlets he's talking about...
QVC? The WB network? The Cartoon Channel? I guess there are hundreds
to choose from these days.
12.Oct.03
Got to hear the tail end of
Terry Gross' interview of Bill O'Reilly replayed today, with the
follow-up about his retort on his own show, complaining about how
we all paid for it, thanks to the "billion dollar funding" the public
radio gets. Only off by an order of magnitude, Bill, and rather ironic
after the recent reports (seen here, two days ago)
about how well-informed FOX News viewers are. (It turns out that NPR
and PBS are worth paying for after all.) Having listened to the
rest of the interview via the web, I have to say I don't find Bill an
attractive character, and have no plans to pay to watch his show.
"The true story of that is, I didn't even know
I was registered as a Republican.... It was either an oversight on my
part, or... because I was never an ideologue." "It might have been a
rush job, or it might have been a myriad of things." Pretty wild stuff
for somebody who sees the political scene as a "culture war."
Kind of sad that the poor guy can dish it out but can't take it. "I had
to stop the interview," he said, "I actually enjoyed telling the woman
off." No sense of humor, apparently. You call people pinheads, you
gotta expect a certain amount of backatcha. The good news for Bill is
that his new book is #1, bumping Al Franken from the top of the list;
the bad news is that he can't show defamation because that requires
damages, and for the moment, at least, he's bullied his way to the top
of the pile, where he's puttin' the damage on everyone else.
Finished reading Robert Park's
Voodoo Science book, and enjoyed the read. I'd read about some of
the topics he covers (cold fusion, for example) in ample detail, but his
narrative ties together threads of credulity, foolishness, misperception
(gee, that sounds familiar), secrecy and fraud in an interesting way.
Among many interesting tidbits, we find out that the National Institutes
of Health has a
Center for Complementary and Alternative
Medicine. Go figure.
11.Oct.03
In one of life's little ironies, my copy of George Johnson's
Shortcut Through Time got mixed in with other reading, and when it
surfaced recently, I thought I'd already read it; but no, it had a
bookmark in it, in front of the last chapter and epilogue.
I'd started back about
early April
and while I thought Jim Holt's review was a bit terse at the time, it
remains succinct: "gets across the gist of quantum computing with plenty
of charm and no tears."
Catching up on reading is one of those things that you can do when you
retire, so after filling in some of the blanks on my private reading
list (using Quattro, Amazon and telnet/Lynx/the Boise Public Library),
Jeanette and I rode down to the library to pick up some books.
I'll say more if and when any of them make my
best books read lately list, something not
many books have done. (Not because there aren't good books out there,
but because I haven't been getting around to finishing them.)
The process included a reminder about monopoly power. My copy of
Quattro on a win95 machine can read and write Excel files, but my copy
of Excel2000 on the win2k laptop can't read (or write, ha!) Quattro's
format. I was surprised to see that once I'd "saved as" from Quattro,
and then done some editing, it continued to save in Excel format,
quietly, competently. Of course, there is no incentive for Excel to be
quietly competent; it excels at getting you converted, and keeping you
there.
10.10.03
As the old saying goes, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean
they're not out to get you. Maybe the new technology in voting machines
is a big improvement, and results will be more reliable and accurate.
Or maybe
not. I've been punching chads for a lot of elections now, and am
prepared to look back on them as part of the good old days.
I don't like the sound of technology that's uninspectable, because
it contains "trade secrets," or the possibility of increased numbers of
"amazing upsets."
The
Agonist examines the problems (in
two
parts) with less vituperation:
"(T)hese systems share a crucial feature: all information about the votes
is stored exclusively in digital format. The crucial difference from
more traditional voting systems (e.g., punch card and optical scan
machines) is that those systems keep the original vote in a physical
form (usually paper) that can be directly verified by the voter."
Read on for details of what testing has been done to date, and the
less-than-reassuring results. "Just trust us" doesn't seem like a good
idea.
Our Comptroller General, David M. Walker,
calls B.S. on the big guy: "The idea that this is manageable or that
we are going to grow our way out of the problem is just flat false.
Even if we repeal all the tax cuts, you are still going to have to make
tough choices." Thanks to the
Daily Misleader for the link.
Apart from David Kay's imaginative extrapolation, it now seems
reasonably certain that Hussein's regime did not have WMDs.
History may record
his bluff
as simultaneously brilliant and idiotic: he utterly fooled the Bush
administration even as he brought Armegeddon down on his regime.
Frontline's examination,
Truth,
War and Consequences, considers the questions
why did we go to war? what went wrong? and what's at stake?
(If you missed it on PBS, you can watch the whole show online.)
For counterpoint, the latest word from GWB is that hey, actually things
are going way better than you hear about in the media. Just like with
the voting machines, I suppose. Just trust him.
If you're trusting broadcast media for your
information, though, you might want to
consider changing the channel:
"In the run-up to the war with Iraq and in the post-war period, a
significant portion of the American public has held a number of
misperceptions that, as we will see, are highly related to support for
the decision to go to war. While in most cases only a minority has any
particular misperception, a very strong majority has at least one key
misperception." Does it belabor the obvious to point out that
manipulating public opinion is essential to garnering political support?
Perhaps, but here's the interesting part:
"...the frequency of these misperceptions varies significantly according to
individuals’ primary source of news. Those who primarily watch Fox News
are significantly more likely to have misperceptions, while those who
primarily listen to NPR or watch PBS are significantly less likely."
They focused on three significant misperceptions:
(1) evidence of links between Iraq and al Qaeda have been found;
(2) weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq; and
(3) world public opinion favored the US going to war with Iraq.
If you watch PBS and/or listen to NPR, chances are 3:1 you don't hold
any of these erroneous statements to be true. If you watch FOX "News,"
chances are 4:1 you believe one or more, and you're more than 3 times
more likely as everyone else to believe all of them.
Number of
misperceptions
per respondent |
Fox |
CBS |
CNN |
ABC |
NBC |
Print |
NPR/PBS |
| None |
20% |
30% |
39% |
45% |
45% |
53% |
77% |
| 1 or more |
80 |
71 |
61 |
55 |
55 |
47 |
23 |
| 2 or more |
69 |
51 |
41 |
38 |
34 |
26 |
13 |
| All 3 |
45 |
15 |
16 |
13 |
12 |
9 |
4 |
View the original report that everyone's writing about at
The Program on International Policy
Attitudes (PIPA) website.
If the media do nothing more than report
what George Bush says, there's plenty of opportunity for
"misperception." Stumping for his re-election, he justifies his
pre-emptive war post-WMD, presumably without irony: "I acted because I
was not about to leave the security of the American people in the hands
of a madman. I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the
sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein."
"We're making great progress (in Iraq). I don't care what you read
about," Bush said in Kentucky. Is he getting his
information from Fox News, I wonder?
9.Oct.03
Governor-elect Schwarzenegger's plan is to
get a handout from Washington to help "streamline bureaucracy,"
make a whopping deficit disappear and keep from raising taxes.
"There's a lot of money we can get from the federal government," Arnold
says.
It would be brilliant if the state could print its own currency, the way
Uncle Sam can, but eventually someone is going to have to explain to him
that the buck stops at the states. It does raise the interesting
question of how much federal aid it would take to buy California's
electoral votes for George W. next year, though. Cheaper than votes in
Baghdad, no doubt.
Unlike our efforts to find Osama ("it doesn't matter where they hide, as
we work with our friends we will find them and bring them to justice")
or Saddam ("it's a matter of time before he is found and brought to
justice"), our president doesn't "have any idea" if we can find the
senior administration official who spilled the beans. You can give him
a hand by
signing an affidavit
that it wasn't you. Unless of course it was
you, in which case you can help by confessing.
8.Oct.03
I've been out of town, took a trip to north Idaho in a weekend with the
most glorious October weather imaginable. Worked outside for three
straight days in Palouse sunshine and weather in the 70s and 80s.
Monday night was warm and still, the moon dodging clouds and
spotlighting stubble fields in a cool, silvery glow. Some time in the
night, the wind picked up, bringing in a weak cold front to make the
drive home more pleasant: clouds, 70s in the canyons and 60s in the
mountains, until the lower Payette opened to the sunny desert down here.
I took the scenic route off of Paradise Ridge, on Lenville road by Tomer
Butte and down the grade to Julietta.
I passed blackberry patches, thinking "it's gotta be too late for
blackberries," then spotted an apple tree and put on the brakes. It's
not too late for apples! The tree was old, gnarly with unpruned
branches and standing on the edge of a steep bank.
It's a variety you won't ever see in a store, the fruit golden,
firm but not hard, sweet and juicy. Around another bend, a huge bramble
and easy pull-over enticed me to check the berries. It's
not too late for them, and I had my choice of the sweetest and
blackest, without having to move into the thorns.
Who knows if it was really a vast, right-wing conspiracy, but the
Republican plutocrats have to be chortling about Arnold the Barbarian
taking over
California this morning. Most elections don't give us the option to
"just say no" to politicians; somebody ends up with a majority, or at
least a plurality. This time, the majority said "throw the bum
out."
The faith-based
initiative of the Bush Administration is burbling along on the back
pages while war and economy scandals soak up the front-page ink.
Nothing wrong with this country a good dose of Christian morality
couldn't cure.
2.Oct.03
You gotta love the Republican National Committee complaining about the
Democrats
"scandalmongering". I mean, how cool a word is that, to start with:
mongering scandals. The question of someone -- let's say, Karl Rove,
perhaps --
outing Joe
Wilson's wife because he had the audacity to point out the
administration's bogosity on the Niger yellowcake deal somehow being
unworthy of a full blown scandal... hey, it's just plain old
character assassination, regular gummint stuff.
Perhaps this is progress, though: a few months ago, anyone disagreeing
with the administration was being called a traitor, now the worst
epithet they can come up with is "partisan Democrat." Sure looks like
time for an independent investigation by a special prosecutor to me.
Surprisingly, there is no room for an
opiniated, right-wing racist on the Disney team of sports pundits. With
his usual panache, Rush Limbaugh assumes that if people are upset, gee,
he must've been right: "All this has become the tempest that it is
because I must have been right about something. If I wasn't right,
there wouldn't be the cacophony of outrage that has sprung up in the
sportswriter community." Whatever. Just clean out your locker and get
the hell out of here.
Two words to warm the heart of any captain of industry:
tax holiday. If the tax advantages of moving operations off-shore
come as a surprise, you haven't been paying attention. They've been
there for the whole length of my 20 year engineering career, and it's
probably past time to restructure things in a domestic light. There
will be plenty of whinging about the fairness issue, though, without
even considering the complaints of the other countries who are going to
hear a giant sucking sound as cash runs home.
The "marginal activity" of
snow skiing in Scotland
may be on its way out. Not enough snow up there, and less all the time
with things warming up. If the Gulf stream shifts, it'll be a bonanza,
though.
Here's a prize you might have a shot at: the
Ig® Nobel.
This year is the "13th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony," which will
have a
live webcast
in case you can't be there. 7:30pm EDT tonight.
China's cracking down on intellectual property pirating,
starting with Dow Jones & Co., who alledgedly swiped a
calligraphy character from Guan Dongsheng. (They say he said they could
have it.) $50,000 for one character, you could make a living as a
writer for that kind of pay. His lawyers will take a big cut, I
suppose. He sued for $600,000.
"The Dao whose price can be named is not the Eternal Dao."
1.Oct.03
This compassionate conservative administration is demonstrating the
significant difference between "conservative" and "conservationist."
The latter wants to protect lands; the former wants to make sure land is
available for mining, logging, oil and gas drilling and so on. Unlike
the majority of Americans, the administration is willing to
forgo wilderness designation for millions of acres in the west,
in a move whose boldness might make Ronald Reagan and James Watt
blush.
David Pogue
reviews Office2003, and gives me a dose of déjà vu for
the 6 reasons not to buy Office2000
that I listed 4-½ years ago. He's lukewarm on the (minimal)
changes to Word, Excel and Powerpoint, but enthusiastic about Outlook's
makeover. Rush right out to give your $110 bill to Microsoft for that
one....
In 1999, it appeared that the company had designs on making HTML
proprietary, and while they've probably made some inroads, I think the
need for and the strength of standards has largely resisted them.
Now comes their go at making email a proprietary thing:
"Information Rights Management" (IRM). "If someone sends you an
IRM-protected document and you don't have Office 2003, meanwhile, you
can't open it at all." How many big corporate IT guys are going to roll
over for this, and insist that everybody, absolutely everybody in the
company must get this new version, so they can have self-destructing
messages and "secure" email for all?
I'll wait a year or 5 while the bugs and malware opportunities get
shaken out, I think.
raveling
Tom von Alten
tva_∂t_fortboise_⋅_org
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Monday, 17-Nov-2003 18:25:59 MST
http://fortboise.org/blog/200310.html
