Snow Bunny, Post-Season

Life is funny. I had no thought whatsoever of skiing this year (or any year, really). But peer pressure/family pressure is a strong force, and desiring to spend time with my family, I ended up taking up skiing over the last 6-8 weeks of the ski season. The fact that we had good snow well into April helped, since I didn't even start until March!

Anyway, I found it remarkably fun, and thanks to the magic of friends with cameras, you can even see what I looked like, scooting along the rim of Alpine Bowl at Alpine Meadows. Pretty stylish, huh?

American Political Discourse

It is getting very hard to satirize American politics, but this is a pretty good attempt:

LINCOLN: Ahem, I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect slavery will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other...

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you love America this much (extending fingers), this much (extending hands slightly), or thiiiiiis much (extending hands broadly)?

LINCOLN: I think we covered this…

GIBSON: If I may interrupt…

LINCOLN: Please.

GIBSON: I noticed, Mr. Lincoln, that your American flag pin was upside down…

LINCOLN: Yes, the wind caught it. Now, as I was saying...

GIBSON: We get questions about this all the time over at Powerline and on Hannity’s talk show. Mr. Douglas has said this is a major vulnerability for you in the fall. So I’ll ask again – do you love America?

LINCOLN: (scowling with a forced smile). Yes.

GIBSON: If your love for America were ice cream, what flavor would it be?

*sigh*

Your Assignment for Earth Day

Yes, Earth Day is almost here. It falls on a Tuesday this year, so many folks are observing and acting on it this coming weekend.

One easy thing you can do is read the comics. Jim Toomey, who pens Sherman's Lagoon, is dedicating the current week to shark issues, and this Sunday's strip will be an opportunity for you and yours to get involved. You can see the details here, among other places.

Get the word out. Contact the National Marine Fisheries Service to encourage them to protect sharks. Contact your representatives in Congress to support the Shark Conservation Act of 2008.

Feel Your Arteries Hardening

Words fail me.



OK, one word: YUM.

Slightly Somewhat Positive Whale News (I Think)

Just caught this on Yahoo news. Apparently protesters were able to significantly disrupt Japanese "research" whaling this season:

Japan had aimed to kill 850 minke whales and 50 fin whales on its annual hunt, but the total catch for the year came to 551 minke whales with no fin whales due to a series of offshore protests.

Still a lot of whales killed, but that's about 350 whales that might have died that didn't.

Ed Felten on Electronic Voting

OK, one more for today.

Just saw this clip on yesterday's episode of Rocketboom. It's part of an interview with Ed Felten of Princeton University, discussing recent issues with electronic voting machines, including the ways vendors are keeping outside experts such as Felten from testing and validating their machines.

It's short, but interesting. The whole interview is on WhyTuesday's website. Felten mentions that a good site for e-voting info is at VerifiedVoting. But you knew that already, didn't you?

Also, I don't recall whether I've talked/written about Rocketboom before. It's an eclectic little video log ("vlog") from New York City that tends to give a humorous slant to small news stories, but also sometimes slips in a serious report or a weird little "art" video. And they do a great job of keeping one up-to-the-minute with the latest in Internet memes.

Check it out.

Sports Fans Behaving Oddly

As the rest of the family was out of town this week skiing, I got to sit and watch the entire NCAA men's basketball championship game on TV. It was a terrific game, very exciting, sent into overtime by a last-second 3-point shot, and all that. Everything you want in a championship game, and more.

And since one of my good friends who is even more sports-crazed than I am actually attended the University of Kansas (KU) for a time, I had to congratulate him on the victory. All the hoopla around the championship got me to thinking about the legendary chant that KU fans use, "Rock Chalk Jayhawk KU." I've always sort of wondered what it meant, but hadn't gotten around to looking it up.

But someone did it for me, and I stumbled across the explanation today. I am most proud that it was originated by the Science Club. Nerdz Rule!

And I had no idea that the term "jayhawk" was not, in fact, a bird, but an anti-slavery advocate! It's fascinating what you can learn by accident.

This also brings to mind the horror I felt last night at the ballpark when the crowd started doing "the Wave."

I'm not a fan of the Wave. When I go to a game, I go because I want to watch the game, not to watch the other fans. I will admit that when I was in college, the student section at football games used to do a fun kind of vertical version of the Wave, rippling from front to back, rather than around. It was a neat effect. And it's kind of intriguing to me that the origins of the Wave are even more obscure than those of the "Rock Chalk" cheer.

But the fact remains that we don't do the Wave at the Giants' ballpark. In part, that may be because the seats don't really go all the way around the stadium, so you can't really go all the way around with it. And in part, I like to think it's because we're all busy paying attention to the actual game.

Which brings me to last night.

Now, you have to understand that this year is different for the Giants. Before the season even started, they have basically put up a white flag of surrender. This is not a team that is going anywhere soon, at least as regards winning. They score runs at an anemic rate, and although they pitch well enough to keep most games in reach, they just aren't considered good enough to contend for much of anything.

So last night was the smallest crowd in the 8-year history of the ballpark (only about 30,000 fans in a stadium that holds about 42,000). And in the middle of a scoreless game, someone started doing the Wave. It went around twice, then mercifully faded out. It's quite sad and disturbing that this is what we're reduced to.

On the positive side, the Giants played well enough for the second night in a row to win in their last at-bat, in very exciting fashion. No Wave needed for entertainment.

Anyway, I think cheers are much better than Waves.

Random Sock Thoughts

One of the things that became painfully clear (and I mean that literally) as I went skiing a few times over the last month is that the quality of one's ski socks is very important.

Back in the day when I used to ski as a kid, the norm was to wear thick, woolly socks (I had some lovely ones knitted by my mother). Nowadays this has been changed on two fronts: 1) socks are much thinner, allowing for a snug, comfortable boot fit, and 2) synthetic materials that wick moisture away from the body aid in promoting warmth and comfort.

Fair enough. But not all modern ski socks are created equal. Even the thin socks generally provide some ticker padding in the front, where the shin will press on the boot (assuming proper posture). But the size and shape and thickness of that padding makes a lot of difference. For example, I found that my EuroSock Euro Ski socks didn't adequately protect me from pressure (and pain) from the tongue of my rental ski boots. But in the same boots, my SmartWool socks felt just fine. (It didn't help that the second day I wore the Euro Ski socks, I put a hole in them just trying to pull them up.)

So I like the SmartWool socks, but one thing about them worries me: Are they the product of that most dangerous of creatures???

Speaking of "Seasonal Humor"...

I got a good chuckle out of this:

Such structures will figure prominently in the world’s first Rainbow Farm, currently in development and slated for a 2012 grand opening. In other news, the breakthrough promises to balance the world’s economy via an endless supply of leprechaun gold.

Heh.

Catching Up

I meant to post about this a while ago, but it slipped my mind.

My niece pointed me at this article about e-voting work being done by a professor at a place near and dear to both of our hearts, UC Berkeley.

My favorite quote is this one:

Soon, researchers and hackers discovered that, among other vulnerabilities, voting machines could be opened with ordinary keys from hotel mini-bars, and their vote counts could then be changed undetectably by simply swapping out their memory cards. In other words, any poll worker, driver, night watchman or other individual with unsupervised access to the machines could throw the results of a close election.

But Wagner maintains that there could be a positive outcome, eventually:

“I’m optimistic now,” says Wagner. “Four years ago, secure voting looked hopeless, but more and more states are getting it. Meanwhile, I’m also impressed with all the election officials I’ve worked with; they’re very dedicated and conscientious. There’s no money or fame in being a county elections officer. You do it because you care.”

It matters.

Not Very Friendly

Gee, you think?

Toiling in Obscurity

As a professional software developer, it is sometimes hard to explain to people just what it is that I do. Although at times I have been able to point to a screen or hand people a disk containing something I've created, I have to admit that the product of my work is somewhat nebulous and ephemeral. At least when I was a tech writer I could point to a set of manuals and say, "I wrote that."

The fact that I was writing manuals to instruct programmers in how to use software tools that enabled them to write other software was a bit murky to many.

Later I was working on software that "explored" networks, cataloging resources (documents, mostly) it found so that one could search for them. Still, pretty obscure, particularly to those who don't actively use computers or who just use them as glorified typewriters.

And now I work in the realm of enterprise middleware, meaning we write software that helps other software share information. Worse yet, I work on the software tools that enables other programmers to configure and program said middleware. So once again, I'm on the obscure edge of a pretty obscure place.

So this morning I found this article from Red Hat:

That got me thinking and sent me to Google to look for a short definition of middleware. I found a lot of them, but they mostly were either too vague or too dependent on the reader already having some knowledge about middleware.

And ultimately, he comes up with this answer:

Middleware is plumbing.

It's a fairly amusing metaphor, which the writer thankfully only extends to input sources (water pipes and faucets), rather than the output system.

In any case, the next time my mother tries to figure out what it is I do, I think I'll tell her I'm a plumber.

No, Really: DO NOT REPLY

I found this post in the Washington Post's Security Fix blog. I'm not sure whether it's more humorous or more disturbing, but it does point out some of the major issues in social engineering involved with computers and e-mail.

The issue is that a lot of companies send out mail from bogus e-mail addresses because they don't want people to respond to the e-mails. They often use something@donotreply.com as the "return address," hoping that a) people will see that and realize they shouldn't reply, and b) if people do reply, the message will simply vanish somewhere or bounce.

Except...there is a donotreply.com, and the guy who owns it gets all those messages:

As owner of www.donotreply.com, the Seattle-based programmer receives millions of wayward e-mails each week, including a great many missives destined for executives at Fortune 500 companies or bank customers, even sensitive messages sent by government personnel and contractors.

The social engineering part of the matter is this: good security practice tells one not to click on links in e-mail messages. But that's exactly what these lazy companies are trying to get people to do. So not only are they being weaselly and trying to send one-way messages and make it hard for people to respond, but they're also encouraging what is essentially dangerous computer behavior, because if you want to reply you have to click a link in a message.

What's with these companies, anyway? Is it so hard for them to get that if they send me an e-mail message, if I want to respond I will click "Reply"?

This is vaguely reminiscent of a company I told off yesterday. They have been calling for several weeks now, trying to get me to sign up for a service I don't want. I have tried telling them I don't want their service, I don't want to talk to them. I have tried rudely hanging up on them. Finally, yesterday as they started their spiel, I said "Stop." Had to say it about five times before she actually stopped. "Don't call anymore." She made some reply that indicated she didn't understand. I explained that I didn't want their service, and I didn't want them to call me ever again.

We'll see how well that works out.

99 Sea Otters

One way to spend Easter morning, apparently, is to go on a nature cruise. I didn't know this before, but my family had scheduled it, so I went along. It turned out to be quite lovely.

The destination this morning was Elkhorn Slough, off Monterey Bay. The cruise is run by Elkhorn Slough Safari, which is a little local operation. Captain Yohn Gideon has been running these tours for about a dozen years.

One feature I quite liked is that about a half-dozen of the passengers were given clicker-counters to count sightings of specific critters. So someone was responsible for counting sea otters, another sea lions, another (me!) harbor seals, and others blue herons, snowy egrets, and great egrets. The captain turns over the counts from each to researchers, so I felt like we were doing something useful as well as sightseeing.

And boy, was there wildlife to see today. We saw 99 sea otters (93 on the cruise, and six back in the harbor afterward), about 75 sea lions and 49 harbor seals. I forget the bird counts, except I know we only saw one heron. But I must admit, I was expecting to see maybe a couple of dozen otters, total. Seeing nearly 100 was a great surprise!

Anyway, it was great. Sunny and calm and pleasant, with lots of critters out playing, feeding, etc. Spring is a great time to visit the slough, and I will definitely be back again.

The New Splash Zone

We're down in/around Monterey this weekend, and I want to post my first impressions of the new Splash Zone exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I know some of my multitudinous readers are fans of the aquarium, so this seems pertinent.

Normally I would avoid a tourist spot such as the aquarium on a holiday weekend, but last night was Members' Night, so we got to go in for a couple of evening hours without the crowding that accompanies holidays.

We hit some of our favorite spots first, to let the throng of children work its way into/through/out of Splash Zone, then headed over there.

First thing we noticed is that it's much bigger. Basically, the whole second floor on the old end of the building is now branded Splash Zone, incorporating the old Splash Zone and the part upstairs from the big kelp forest tank that used to be called the Kelp Lab, as I recall. Since we came over the walkway from the Outer Bay side, that's the part we saw first.

I like what they've done to the old kelp Lab. It's still focused on the kelp forest, but with several important upgrades. One is a HUGE touch pool. It's really long, and it has a big fish tank under it, so you can see rockfish and kelp, and then touch sea stars and such on a shelf above. Very nicely done, and able to accommodate many more investigators.

There is also a very nice kelp canopy tank, where you can walk under and get a feel for what it's like to be under the kelp. It's not quite like diving, but it's a good illustration.

And there are numerous tanks with kelp forest fishes, including some wonderful kelp fish (they look like kelp, really). The label claims there are spiny lobsters, but they were not in evidence last night.

One favorite for us was that one of the new kelp tanks has a very young, small black sea bass. We have always liked the two larger ones who live in the large tank in the Monterey Bay Habitats section, so it was a treat to see a really small one, less than a foot long, right up close. Black sea bass are huge but slow-growing fish. We have encountered sea bass that were easily 7-8 feet long in the Channel Islands off southern California. They're very inquisitive, beautiful fish, and it's fun to see them in the aquarium.

There are also some new interactive kelp forest things that I didn't get to go through. Ten we headed off to the other side, the previous home of the Splash Zone. Superficially, it seems much the same. Beautiful tropical fish tanks as you walk in, but you quickly notice some differences. To the left as you enter, they've got cuttlefish on display again (they used to be down by the octopi)! It's a much nicer habitat for them, with piles of rock and coral they can hide in.

The play and splash area seems unchanged, but I could have missed some nuance there. But as you go past it to the penguin habitat, you see where they've made big changes. The penguin habitat is considerably larger, with much more vertical structure for the penguins to climb and sit on, and much better visibility for visitors. It's not just a one-sided exhibit anymore. The window curves around and provides much more viewing area. The penguins weren't very active last evening, but the exhibit looks great.

Just beyond the penguins, next to the gift shop, there has always been a spot to look down into the big Monterey tank with all the large sharks (and the black sea bass). That's still true, but they've turned it into a resting spot for the common murres that also live there, so you can see and observe these fascinating sea birds much more closely than before. Also, the barrier here is now clear plastic instead of metal bars, so it's much more inviting.

Finally, as you head out of Splash Zone, the tank that used to have moon jellies now has leafy sea dragons. The lights were out last night, but it looks like a good, fairly quiet spot for them.

Overall, they've managed to keep the spirit of the Splash Zone quite well, while expanding it to make it feel less crowded, and probably less frustrating to people who just come up to see the penguins. It's good work!

Snow Bunny, Part II

Hoping that I learned something from my last venture into snow sports, I went with the family again to the snow this weekend. Following my daughter's sage advice, I decided to strap a board to each foot this time, rather than just one board shared between the two.

And boy, did it work out better! (I told you she was wise.)

I must say, the technological advances in skiing since I last tried this are quite amazing and worthwhile. Step-in bindings are worth their weight in gold, and although the boots are a hassle to put on, they are much more comfortable.

Amazingly, after something like three decades away, I put on the skis and headed out to the hill, and it was as if I'd never left: I picked up right where I'd left off. Which is not to say I was any good at it, but my skills (and flaws) were almost exactly as they had been when I was a teenager.

But I did have to tell my wife, as we paused midway down our first scoot down the bunny hill (we were shadowing our daughter's lesson), that I'd already had more fun in the first few minutes that day than I had in the whole day of snowboarding lessons.

After a couple of hours of messing around, I took a two-hour private lesson with a really terrific teacher. She listened to what I wanted, and within mere minutes had corrected my worst flaws, and suddenly I was parallel skiing. Just that easy. We spent the rest of the time doing some drills and little refinements, but truly, within just a few minutes, I went from sloppy snowplowing to fairly competent parallel skiing. It was great! I suppose if I'd been able to make that leap as a kid, I might have kept skiing all along.

Anyway, it was great fun, and not nearly as hard on my body as being repeatedly slammed by the snowboard. I guess I'm just Old School.

Prevent Unwanted Presidencies

Driving past the fabulous Grand Lake Theater today, I was tickled by the message on the marquee:

PREVENT UNWANTED PRESIDENCIES
AMERICA MUST BRING BACK
HAND-COUNTED PAPER BALLOTS

As my throng of long-time readers will recall, this is a hot-button issue for me, and I agree completely. 'Nuff said.

But while I'm thinking about electoral politics, I have to point to this terrific post on LGM about the late, unlamented, Richard Nixon:

By the time his career ended, it was as if the nation's brain had been infested by parasites or poisoned by arsenic; and forty years after his election, we're still cramped up, delirious and vomiting and scratching our skin raw because of what he managed to do in less than six years. And the fact that we got a couple of fucking pandas out of the bargain does not, in my view, set things right.

This was the best-written screed on Nixon I'd read since Hunter S. Thompson's note appended his book "Better Than Sex," which included this fine paragraph:

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

As much as I like to excoriate the current administration, Nixon really paved the way for them. He deserves a special circle in political Hell.

Administrivia

I have just turned off the ability to comment anonymously on this blog. Over the last couple of days I've started getting comment Spam, so the system will now require a Google login or an OpenID login for comments.

I apologize for any inconvenience. If this is a problem for anyone (and I don't think it is, at least for those who leave the vast majority of the comments), please let me know.

I truly don't see the point of comment Spamming, but it appears it is now a fact of life here.

An Old Fashioned Butt-Kicking

Went to the snow for a couple of days. It was meant to be a work outing, but only the host and I showed up, and I had the presence of mind to bring along my ski-enthusiast spouse. Now, playing in the snow can be fun. But I haven't been on skis since I was a teenager (which is, um, several years ago now), and I've been having my doubts about taking it up again. On the other hand, snow-boarding looks kind of fun, and seems like it would be gentler on my knees. Several friends recommend it. OK, so I'll take a lesson.

Boy, did I get a lesson.

I mean, the instructor (an Aussie bloke) was great, and the basics were easy, scooting with one foot on the board, sliding, curving, and so on. No problem. Until the hill came into play. Not that the hill was a problem per se, except for two things: One, it had this nasty habit of jumping up and hitting me, quite hard. And two, once down, I found it nearly impossible to right myself and get back atop the board without once again falling on some already-bruised part of me.

I was prepared for this. Everyone told me that the first couple of days on the board are tough, and it's not until you've had at least three days of lessons and practice that it begins to be really fun. I must say, for me it wasn't fun. At all. It hurt. It was frustrating. I kept thinking that my first day on skis was (although frustrating at times) fun, and featured some accomplishments, and by the end of the day, I was happily riding up the beginner hill and snow-plowing down.

Not like that on the board. For one thing, you have to keep taking one foot in and out of the bindings. Now, once you're actually skiing a meaningful distance down the hill, this won't be a big deal, but when you're mostly stumbling and falling on the little class hill, you spend an inordinate amount of time removing and refastening the bindings. Add to this all the time spent sitting on your rear end trying to get back up, and a huge portion of your day is spent not riding your board.

I know it gets better. But it wasn't fun.

And did I mention it hurt? Nice, well-groomed, packed slope. That means it's hard. Not quite like ice, but hard. You feel it when you hit it. When you fall. When you slip getting back up. It hurts. Oy.

Ibuprofen is my friend.

Anyway, after tumbling and sitting much of the day Sunday, I was in no shape to get back on the hill today. I rested. I watched a movie. I did a little work. My spouse and my coworker went off to the ski resort and had a lovely day of skiing. I rested. I feel much better.

I came home and told my daughter about my adventures. She was very excited that I had taken a snowboard lesson (though not as excited as she was by the new skis my wife bought), but she suggested very seriously that the next time I go to the snow, I should try skis, because they're much, much easier.

I think I will take her advice. She is very wise.

And Now For Something Completely Silly

I'm just going to cram the last couple of days in NYC into one post (because I'm writing it long after the fact).

Thursday, and off to the Museum of Natural History again. This time we wanted to make sure to see two things. One is a special exhibit on water, and the other is the Hall of Human Origins.

Ultimately, the water exhibit is a bit disappointing. They have some good displays, but it didn't seem very compelling to me. Perhaps it's because I already know a lot about water and water issues, in part because of my background in Environmental Science, and in part because living in California, we confront water issues All The Time. If it isn't about too much or too little, it's about who gets it from whom, and what it will cost.

The Hall of Human Origins, however, is quite magnificent. They do a terrific job of showing lots of fossils and what they might mean, how they've been interpreted at different times, and so on. Since my daughter has dome some reading and watched several documentaries on the subject, she found it all quite fascinating, and we took a lot of pictures so she could do a presentation to her class. It's great fun to watch her thinking about the science, sometimes suggesting alternative interpretations of data and theories. Don't know whether she'll actually become a scientist, but it's nice to see that she's understanding they way they approach things.

Thursday evening we had one more set of theater tickets, to a show I've wanted to see since I first heard it was going to happen, Monty Python's Spamalot. If I have to explain it, you wouldn't appreciate it, anyway. Suffice it to say it's a riff off the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I guess for a lot of people, it was meaningful that Sir Robin was played by Clay Aiken, but since I'd never seen or heard of him before, it didn't mean much to me. He was fine, though. As we were entering the theater, we'd noticed a large number of sailors in full dress uniforms coming in another door. I gather they were up in the balcony, and the cast made a couple of nods to them (such as the Knights who now say "Ecky-ecky-ecky-anchors aweigh," which cracked up King Arthur and got a huge cheer from the balcony). Anyway, great fun for those who know and love the Pythons and their work.

Friday was to be departure day (in the evening), but we woke to considerable snowfall, and weather warnings that included dire predictions of flight delays and cancellations. Attempts to get further information from our airline were futile: the phone got a recording saying they were overwhelmed, doing the best they could, and please call back later. The website just timed out. Great. After some deliberation, we decided to check out of the hotel anyway, and take our chances. Ultimately, this proved wise. Apparently flights within the northeast were having trouble, and LaGuardia Airport was a mess, but our non-stop flight across the country from JFK was unaffected.

So we had an afternoon to spend in NYC. I decided to make use of the extremely useful site I'd found recently, ChocoMap. Mostly this showed that midtown Manhattan is full of outlets for European chocolate companies, which I'm sure are fine. But I stumbled across a real little chocolate factory, right in midtown, called Vere Chocolate. They are quite adamant about the fact that they make chocolate, not candy. All dark, at least 70% cacao. Oh, and on Friday afternoons, they have tours and tastings. Bingo!

As it turns out, the tour isn't really. You basically get to step in the front door, where they've set up a tasting table. You can look into the factory, but can't go inside. Oh, well. At least they have tasty samples, and you can buy some to take home. I particularly liked something they call Pumpkorn, which is chocolate-covered caramel corn with spicy pumpkin seeds. Really quite interesting, and like nothing I've had elsewhere. So that was worth the trip.

Since we weren't far away at that point, we decided to visit the Macy's mother ship. I don't know how many times I've seen the movie Miracle on 34th Street, but I still love it*, and I've always kind of wanted to go see that Macy's. So we did. I was rather disappointed to learn that they don't have a toy department except during the Christmas season. Alas. On the other hand, I did find that they still have some very old, wooden escalators on the upper floors of the main building. I can't remember ever seeing such a thing, though my mother insists that I must have in my younger days. I guess there were some in this part of the world in my youth.

Anyway, it was still a treat to go there. My wife was quite pleased to do a bit of shopping, as their petites department is several times larger that those at our nearby Macy's stores, and even our daughter got in the act, uncharacteristically. She decided that she wanted to do some dress shopping, and happily tried on quite a number before choosing two that she had to have. I got to shuttle between the 5th and 7th floors, which meant I got to observe (and use) the wooden escalators, so I was happy.

All in all, a fine finish to a fine trip to New York.

* Original 1947 version only, and definitely not the colorized version. Boy, was I surprised a few years ago to learn that Maureen O'Hara has brilliant red hair!

Baa, Baa, Black Sheep

[Yikes! Way behind on the blogging. I will back-date a few entries I've been meaning to post...]

As noted last year when we went to New York, we love riding the subway system. It's easy, it's fast, and it always costs the same amount, regardless of where you are going. This makes the whole thing very useful.

So last night we were riding the subway home across town after going to dinner and the theater and then out for a nightcap (more about all that below), so it was shortly after midnight. Standing on the subway platform, I became aware that people were looking at us. Not in a threatening or weird way, just in a kind of "What are you doing here?" way.

Now, it occurred to me that we were about the whitest people around on the subway at that hour. Unlike the evening rush hour when I headed over to dinner surrounded by yuppies, this was a working-class and largely non-white crowd. But that wasn't it. They weren't looking at our faces.

Then it dawned on me: Everyone but us was wearing black. No, really...Everyone. Black is the color of winter in New York, apparently. Black overcoats, black parkas, black jackets, and mostly black pants or jeans. I wasn't too far off with my blue-and-black rain/snow jacket, but my wife was wearing her very favorite pink ski parka with the fake fur ruff around the hood. So she, in particular, stood out like a sore thumb. We got a good chuckle out of that.

OK, other highlights of the day: Dinner was at a location recommended by my wife's coworker who used to live in NYC: Trattoria Dell'arte. The food was wonderful, and the decor was pretty casual and funky (the theme is noses), right across the street from Carnegie Hall. (So I taught my daughter this joke: "How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Take the subway and walk a couple of blocks up Seventh Avenue....") I had the Tordelli Bolognese, which was quite good, but the big hit was my wife's Lobster Carbonara, one of their signature dishes. Sadly, it was too big a portion for her to finish, so I had to share some. Absolutely fabulous.

The show for the night was the real reason we'd come to New York, Tom Stoppard's latest, Rock 'n' Roll. It's very good, though I wouldn't call it one of his best. Well worth seeing, of course. Quite different from just reading it. My wife and I both read the play in advance, which was probably good, but we both had a different impression of the play from reading it than from seeing it. The character who seems to be the focus in the text ("Jan") was much less of a presence on stage. The actor seemed to be losing his voice, which might have contributed to this impression, but all in all, his character seemed much more meek and less consequential than the way I'd read him. All very interesting, as Stoppard always is.

After the show, a little stroll up Broadway. The lighted sign said it was 24F. Chilly, but not unpleasant. We decided to stop in for a quick drink at a bar/restaurant called Serafina, under the Dream Hotel, where I once stayed on business. The woman tending the bar was a bit clueless, but she did make an excellent Manhattan (seemed like the right thing to drink in Manhattan).

New York State of Mind

Yes, it's a Billy Joel song, and it always gets stuck in my head when I visit here.

Lots of good things here, like the bagels for breakfast, theater, and museums.

This morning, two of the staff at the bagel shop were vying for the favors of my daughter. The first guy refused to take her order until she went with him to get a free cookie at the other end of the counter. He promised that every time she comes in, if she remembers his name, she gets another cookie. She has a great memory anyway, but with a cookie at stake, I imagine that information is well ingrained now!

Last night we went to an off-Broadway show called "Speech & Debate" at a new theater starting up under the auspices of the Roundabout Theatre Company. The Roundabout Underground's Black Box Theatre is literally that, a box-shaped room, four stories below ground level. It seats 62 people in regular chairs, so it's a pretty intimate experience.

Anyway, for those who know my family, you know that the title alone was enough to hook us in. My wife and I met in high school as members of the speech and debate team, and her mother was one of our coaches. So all three of us went to the play last night with high expectations.

The play is the first effort of Stephen Karam, a young writer who really gets the sound of his youthful characters. You feel like you're listening to real high school students, rather than just scripted characters. Not sure how well that would translate to a bigger theater/audience, but it this setting it worked well. The show has its rough edges and slow parts, but all in all, it worked well. We got luck with this one, as the run ends this coming weekend after being extended twice. We just happened to be in town this week (because it's school vacation, and we wanted to see another play here), so when I saw this play listed, I knew we had to see it.

And we've already spent one full day at the American Museum of Natural History, of course. Mostly we were on the fourth floor again, looking at the dinosaur fossils and tracing the course of vertebrate evolution. Next visit we plan to spend more time in the hall of human origins, which is another point of interest for us.

Yesterday found us walking down Broadway through Times Square during daylight hours, ducking into various stores to keep warm. Asa result, my wife has a stylish new purse, and my daughter has some new toys (and we rode the indoor ferris wheel at the big Toys R Us). Oh, and we have some M&Ms from M&Ms World. Perhaps the most intriguing thing to me was that as we got to the top of the ferris wheel, I could see into the meeting room or boardroom at the top of the front corner of the store. About two dozen people in business dress were having a meeting or conference call or something in a big fishbowl, all glass, all around, with a huge flat-panel TV facing away from me, so I couldn't see their PowerPoint presentation. It all seemed rather incongruous in a toy store, but it's a reminder that this is business. Big business, at that.

And lastly, although it is generally a good thing that they seem to have gotten the crack dealers off the streets of New York, it concerns me that they've just moved inside into some of the stores. For example, there's an outfit called Dale and Thomas Popcorn that is definitely selling addictive substances from their storefront. Luckily, it does not have to be purchased in the 6.5-gallon tub, although that would greatly reduce the price per dose. Darned tasty, that.

The Legacy of Torture

I'm on vacation, but stumbled across this tonight:

...torture always comes home. And the techniques of this war are likely to show up in a neighborhood near you.

Just something to look forward to.

Useful and Important Web Site

I just stumbled across a link to this site on another blog.

I plan to use it soon and often!

My Government Tortures People

I'm not proud of this fact. And for those of us who've been paying attention, it's not news, either. Anyone who saw the pictures from Abu Ghraib and read some of the other accounts of people who have been detained over the last six or seven years knew, even if they didn't want to admit it, that the United States government has been torturing people.

The news this week is that now they've basically admitted it, though they still try to couch it in terms that suggest they aren't doing it anymore (unless they feel like they need to). And I should point out that the discussion/admission pertains almost exclusively to a particular technique known as waterboarding. There are plenty of things, short of waterboarding, that constitute torture, and it's pretty clear that many are in current use.

So, this week both the U.S. Attorney General and the Director of the C.I.A. have acknowledged past uses of waterboarding by the C.I.A. We tortured three people. The excuse given is basically that they thought it was a good idea.

Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post writes in his excellent column today:

Putting aside for a moment the question of whether the ends did in fact justify the means -- and there is considerable evidence that the waterboarding of those three men miserably failed that test as well -- the White House argument is deeply perverse and goes against core American values.

Waterboarding is undeniably cruel. It is undeniably an assault on human dignity. The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution -- the one banning cruel and unusual punishment -- doesn't come with an asterisk indicating: Except when you think it's really, really important.

I guess it's been a while since I wrote on this topic (for a while, it felt like all torture, all the time), but this is undeniably awful. Whatever moral standing the U.S. still had left is quickly evaporating.

No wonder all the presidential candidates keep running around saying they are in favor of change (even the ones who support the current policies). There's not much in this current stand to like.

Torture is wrong. It's always wrong. And any government official who condones it belongs in prison, not in office. As a friend e-mailed me tonight: "Impeachment: It's not just for sex anymore!"

I Touched the Future

Election day today, so I voted (of course!). Because we were not allowed to use the touch-screen voting machines, we used...PAPER ballots! Easy, quick, and reliable. And I got to personally place my ballot into the reader, saw that it counted the vote, and got a physical receipt torn from the ballot.

Apparently there is a downside to this sudden reemergence of paper ballots: Election officials actually have to provide enough of them:

An Alameda County Superior Court judge made the decision after several cities in the county - including Berkeley - had no real ballots for voters to use. Some voters used ballots that were paper copies of real ballots.

Oops. But it wasn't just my home county. There were plenty of others:

There were problems elsewhere during the region because of heavy turnouts.

In Santa Clara, one polling station ran out of ballots, forcing voters to use sample ballots from their election packets. ...

In Contra Costa County, so many independent voters showed up at the polls to vote Democratic that the county registrar of voters had to deliver stacks of extra Democratic ballots to polling stations. Eight precincts reported they were running short of ballots. In lieu of actual ballots, the county registrar was prepared to let voters use sample ballots.

Anyway, I was just remembering the little "I touched the future" stickers they gave us several years ago when we first used the new touch-screen voting machines. Now I wish I'd kept mine. Because the future is looking a lot like the past, as we manually submitted our votes. I particularly liked the "privacy shields" they gave us to put our ballots in between the booths and the reader. They seemed suspiciously like manila file folders!

All in all, par for the course. Democracy marches on, in a sort of wobbly, uncertain path.

Good Discussion of E-Voting

Over at slashdot. The head of the discussion is about using open-source software to get around some of the issues with proprietary voting systems.

I sort of like the commenter who says voting machines ought to meet the standards set up for gaming machines in Nevada, but ultimately, I fall on the side of the paper-and-pencil crowd:

You can't trust what you don't understand, so any voting system needs to be Universally Comprehensible. An electronic system based on Open Source principles -- where the blueprints for the hardware and the listings of the software are available for all to examine -- is still really only comprehensible to a minority of the population. It doesn't satisfy the goal. (In the worst case, you could conceal a deliberate design defect by a combination of hardware and software techniques: anybody examining the hardware and not the software, or vice versa, will miss it.)

Just forget the whole thing as a failed experiment, and go back to pencil and paper and manual counting. Everybody knows what all the possible failure modes are, and how to minimise their effects.

Tomorrow is "Super Tuesday," which means lots of voting around the U.S. (including here in my neighborhood). I hope it goes well.

Welcome, Giant Elephant Shrew!

It's always cool when someone discovers a "new" species (although it's obviously been around a long time).

Today, we welcome a new kind of elephant shrew to the party:

Despite its name, the creature, along with the 15 other known species of elephant shrew, is not actually related to shrews.
...
In fact, the creature is more closely related to a group of African mammals, which includes elephants, sea cows, aardvarks and hyraxes, having shared a common ancestor with them about 100 million years ago.

The odd family relations of these and other creatures is one of the wonders of science to me. I recall hearing an interview with Richard Dawkins on NPR several years ago, when he was promoting his book, "The Ancestor's Tale." He was asked what the most remarkable thing was he'd learned in writing the book. His reply was that he found it amazing that the hippopotamus, which he'd always supposed was closely related to pigs, was in fact only very distantly so. The closest evolutionary relative of the hippo turns out to be the whale.

Driving On the Other Side

Very, very amusing piece by Jon Carroll in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle. Laugh-out-loud funny stuff, particularly if read aloud. Among other things, it contains sheep, tussocks, quadriceps, stairs, and cars. All quite funny.

As my antipodean readers have experienced first-hand, I have actually driven on the unaccustomed side of the road (we all survived). The main difficulties I had were lane positioning (which had to do with the driving position and point-of-view, not so much the side of the road) and turning on the windshield wipers when I wanted to signal a turn ("Couldn't you tell I was going to turn? Why else would the wipers be swishing on a sunny day?"). Also good for a chuckle, but Jon's column is much funnier.

For what it's worth, Jon is a distant acquaintance. We've met several times at events, and he occasionally sits in front of me at baseball games when he attends with my seat neighbors. So read the story already. It's funny!

The More Things Change...

...the more they go back to the way they were. And that can be a good thing. Witness, the resurgence of paper-ballot voting:

New state rules severely limiting the use of touch-screen voting machines in California have left many counties scrambling to prepare for elections using paper ballots. Napa, Santa Clara and about 20 other counties will have to move from their all-electronic systems for the first time in years.

Most of the article discusses the difficulties from the perspective that it might take a long time to know all the results. My response: Who cares? As long as you get the right answer, there is no need to hurry.

Cool Posters

For the last couple of months, I've been walking past a series of posters on my way to work, and I finally located the images online. The one above is my favorite.

The City of San Francisco has an Arts Commission that is responsible for, among other things, public art. Some of that is really awful, but some, like these posters, are quite whimsical.

I just like of like the concept of a streetcar line with a corkscrew track....

Who is Minding the Store?

This comes as absolutely no surprise to me.

As one of the many lucky humans who happens to have a common enough name that someone with a similar name is on the No Fly List, I have to put up with extra hassles every time I want to fly. Like, I can virtually never check in online, which is most annoying when flying with, say, Southwest Airlines, where the order of your check-in affects the quality of your seat (first come, first served).

It only takes a few moments to get it all cleared up: one look at my driver's license, they see the birth date doesn't match, and off I go. But the damage has been done: I've already had to stand in a line and hope that someone who knows what they are doing is at the counter.

At one point, I was interested in trying to clear my name. Early on, there was a very unencouraging many-generations-old photocopied letter that the airlines would give me, helpfully pointing me to a page at the TSA website where they basically said I could write them a letter and they might think about doing some unspecified thing that might help.

Um, gee...no thanks.

Now it appears they eventually did an equally unspectacular job when they created the online version. From the Washington Post Security Fix blog:

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform began its investigation into security lapses at the TSA's Traveler Redress Web site last year, after Security Fix and other media outlets pointed out that the site accepted Social Security numbers and other sensitive information from travelers without encrypting the data, potentially allowing hackers to intercept the data. Wired.com noted in its coverage that the site was so laden in spelling errors that it resembled a phishing Web site, the sort typically set up by scammers to lure people into giving away personal and financial data.

Great. These Keystone Kops can't even put up a secure website. I sure want to hand over lots of my personal information to them. And for what? It's not like they're going to remove my namesake from The List, so the airlines will still have to verify that I'm not him.
But in the meantime, they'll have exposed my personal information so some identity thief can buy himself some tickets to Rio and then find himself unable to fly anyway. I feel so much better.

Idiots.

Voting Technology

Just saw a video clip of the California Secretary of State (among other things, the chief election official), Debra Bowen, doing research in New Hampshire.

It's nice to see that she's doing some field work. She seems extremely impressed with the technology they use in New Hampshire to provide a paper trail.

BTW, the clip is on an interesting-looking videolog (vlog?) called Why Tuesday? I like their slogan: "Fixing our voting system, one question at a time." That also led me to another blog about election reform, All About Voting. Election year...time to pay attention!

Vintage Jim Henson

This is kinda cute. The voice is clearly Henson (and the banjo player looks like him), and the song is very clever. I have no idea where it came from, though. Doesn't really look like the Muppet Show.

[short time later...]
Ah...the wonders of Google: this site pins it down to a specific episode of The Muppet Show's first season. I love the Internet!

Evil Mad Scientists -- Yay!

Just found this site via a link on Pharyngula: Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

What's so great about them? Two words: edible science.

I was initially taken with the edible Flying Spaghetti Monster (which is extremely cool), but they cemented it with edible Origami (hint: wonton wrappers!). Dessert sushi, meringue Peeps....

I will be examining this site in much more detail!

Big Waves

Locally, people are all excited about the big wave surfing at Mavericks this weekend. So I was pleased to see this blog post about really big water.

Science is cool.

Musical Fun for Geezers

Had to share this, which a friend pointed me to tonight:



It rocks. Really.

Cricket is Cool

As my devoted readers know, I love baseball. But a few years back, while working in Australia, I got hooked on cricket. What an interesting sport.

And I never get to watch it here in the States. But I can still follow it via the Internet, which is kind of surreal, but fun.

So I just caught the end of a five-day cricket test between Australia and India, which came down to the last few minutes before it was going to be declared a draw, when Australia brought in a new bowler, and suddenly he takes down the last three batsmen from India to salvage a record-tying sixteenth consecutive test win for the Aussies.

Just amazingly cool. Wish I could have been there to see it in person!

Holiday Travel and Airline Security

I seem to recall blogging about this before, but I just read an item from the NY Times about it, and it reminded me of this ongoing example of stupid government policies and our sheepish accession to them:

Thus, what most people fail to grasp is that the nuts and bolts of keeping terrorists away from planes is not really the job of airport security at all. Rather, it’s the job of government agencies and law enforcement. It’s not very glamorous, but the grunt work of hunting down terrorists takes place far off stage, relying on the diligent work of cops, spies and intelligence officers. Air crimes need to be stopped at the planning stages. By the time a terrorist gets to the airport, chances are it’s too late.

I'm still steamed at the TSA guy who got all huffy when I made some cavalier comment after removing shoes and putting them through the x-rays about how I felt so much more secure. He got in my face about how that was the most severe threat, etc. Oy. I mean, I guess it's important to him to believe his job has a purpose. Mostly, it has the purpose of keeping airline passengers off-base and docile.

Happy New Year!

Some Good Whale News

Just spotted this:

Giving in to U.S. pressure and worldwide criticism, Japan's government on Friday announced a whaling fleet now in the Southern Ocean for its annual hunt will not kill the threatened species as originally planned.

On the other hand,

The fleet will, however, kill some 935 minke whales, a smaller, more plentiful species, and 50 fin whales.

But they had planned to kill 50 humpbacks for "research," and now it appears they will not, at least this year.

Killing whales is still a bad thing, but this is an improvement. One can hope it signals a willingness to resolve some of the ongoing issues between the whaling nations (primarily Japan and Norway) and the rest of the world.

Cancer Claims Another

Damn, but I'm tired of this.

Just saw a note that musician Dan Fogelberg died of prostate cancer over the weekend. I always admired the poetry of his music and lyrics, and I'm sad to see him go at such a young age (56, the same age my Dad was when he died of cancer).

Dan's own words:

Sometimes in the night I feel it
Near as my next breath and yet untouchable
Silently the past comes stealing like the taste of some forbidden sweet
And every ghost that calls upon us brings another measure in the mystery
Death is there to keep us honest and constantly remind us we are free

Stay healthy, get yourselves checked regularly, and live strong.

Failure of Imagination

That phrase was used to try to explain why the 9/11 attacks were able to happen and why the initial American response to it was so poor.

Well, it appears that lack of imagination is rampant in government:

All five voting systems used in Ohio, a state whose electoral votes narrowly swung two elections toward President Bush, have critical flaws that could undermine the integrity of the 2008 general election, a report commissioned by the state’s top elections official has found.

“It was worse than I anticipated,” the official, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, said of the report. “I had hoped that perhaps one system would test superior to the others.”

Wow. How dense does an elections official have to be to not get the gravity of this issue? If they don't take this stuff seriously, how can we expect voters to do so?

Here's the key: Those who run elections are paid to anticipate the problems in voting systems, be they verbal, physical, printed, or electronic. At this stage of the process with electronic voting, anyone who doesn't anticipate problems either hasn't been paying attention or is completely incompetent.

Knowing nothing about this Jennifer Brunner, I can't say one way or the other, but it doesn't speak well for her.

Meaningless Personality Tests

First, a quick introduction to my friend, JS Ouyang. I discovered his blog recently, and it's as eclectic and interesting as he is. I hired JS years ago at E-LOAN, and I think at this point he pretty much has my old job.

Perusing his blog, I found Yet Another Personality Test (but at least it's a very simple one):

What Type Are You?

I initially shied away from one image, and clicked one that turned out to be completely not me. ("Extroverted"? I think not!) So I went back and clicked the image that initially appealed to me, and it seems entirely accurate: "analytical, trustworthy, self-assured."

You appreciate high quality and things that endure. Consequently, you like to surround yourself with little "gems," which are often overlooked by others.

Culture and tradition are important to you.

You have found your own personal style, which is elegant and exclusive, free from the whims of fashion.

Your ideal, upon which you base your life, is sophisticated pleasure.

Sounds like me. Cool.

Belatedly Marking a Passing

I didn't know Dave well. I know a lot of people who did. We were about the same age, went to the same college, and cared about a lot of the same things.

I only found out recently that Dave had died. Today I learned the details:

When I finally meet the Doctor, he seems relaxed and happy to see me. I bluntly ask — is it a tumor? Yes. Is it malignant? Yes. Oh crap. I have cancer.

There's a lot more. It was quite an ordeal, with ups and downs, and it doesn't have a happy ending. Yet another friend touched (hard) by cancer.

Take care of yourselves, take everything seriously, and live strong. We can beat cancer.

Dammit.

Nice Job, Guys

My jumbo package of Microsoft security updates arrived this evening. Yipes! Twelve updates for a Windows XP Pro system with Office 2003 this month.

Then I read this in the Security Fix blog:

Of the seven patch bundles released today, only two did not affect Windows Vista systems, suggesting that the vulnerable components were carried over into Vista from older versions of the OS despite the multi-year secure coding review conducted for Vista. That said, two of the bundles were released to plug security holes that were found exclusively in Vista.

I know security is hard, and I know Windows is/was a mess, but really. Two years.

Ack!!!

Say it ain't so!

Just found this on the net:

Workers in the cocoa management bodies of the Ivory Coast have gone on strike. Ivory Coast is the world's largest producer of cocoa, controlling almost forty percent of the global supply. A continued strike could lead to chocolate shortages this Valentine's Day or even sooner.

This could be dire. Thanks to PZ at Pharyngula for alerting me to the impending disaster.

A Storybook Story

I've been meaning to write this for a week or so. *sigh* Life....

Anyway, last week I was relaxing by watching all the special features on the extra DVD for The Princess Bride (Buttercup Edition). I love that movie, have watched it far too many times (and yet somehow, not enough), but hadn't gotten to watching the special features. That was a blast! Gets a little repetitive (it was as if each documentary maker just had to show Billy Crystal snarling out through the peephole in the door), but quite a fun way to spend an evening.

By the way, if you love the movie of The Princess Bride but haven't read the book, you really ought to. It's very funny and well-written, and there is more to the story, including a lot more background on all the characters that explains some of the lines in the movie.

But out of it all, I came across several interesting bits:

• Mandy Patinkin and Cary Elwes didn't know how to fence before the film (it's an important item for both of them), but both learned and did all their own sword work, which is quite impressive.
• When Andre the Giant was a child in France, he was too big to ride in the school bus, so one of his neighbors who had a big car often drove him to school. The neighbor was Samuel Beckett. (No, not Sam Beckett!)
• Wallace Shawn claimed he had no sense of humor whatsoever, and didn't get the jokes. He said he just played the role in ways that seemed to make people laugh.
  

But by far the most interesting to me was Mandy Patinkin talking about his role as Inigo Montoya, the Spaniard seeking revenge on the Six-Fingered Man who killed his father. Patinkin talked about how he had lost his own father, to cancer, and how Inigo's quest to avenge his father's death somehow became his own attempt to come to grips with losing his father to cancer.

[SPOILER ALERT -- Don't read the following if you haven't seen the movie!]

(Spoiler: You have been warned!) At the moment where Inigo finally exacts his revenge, driving home his sword into Count Rugen, who has offered him "anything" if he will spare his life. Inigo finishes with the memorable line, "I want my father back, you son of a bitch!" Patinkin says at that moment he felt his own kind of catharsis, that for just a moment he had brought his father back to him.

I mention this mostly because that scene and that line have always gripped me. I could sense and share the feeling Inigo was expressing, and had no way of knowing that Patinkin was acting out not just the scene in the story but a scene in his own life drama, which is one I can relate to all too well. That line has always brought tears to my eyes (even now, just writing about it), because there is nothing in the world I have ever wanted so much as my father back.

Maybe writing about it can help me drive that sword home and at least momentarily defeat the cancer that took away my dad. It doesn't dominate my life the way it does Inigo Montoya's, but certainly not a day goes by that I don't think about my dad and miss him terribly. It motivates me to stay healthy and make sure I will be around for a long, long time for my daughter, and it makes me nag all of you to stay healthy and support cancer research.

Live strong.

In Case You Weren't Sure

Irony is completely dead.

As evidence, I offer this: Evel Knievel died of (more or less) natural causes today.

Like Breathing

Saw a link to this article from the Washington Post today. Short version: Kids don't read. People don't read. This is bad.

The story the numbers tell, Gioia said, can be summed up in about four sentences:

"We are doing a better job of teaching kids to read in elementary school. But once they enter adolescence, they fall victim to a general culture which does not encourage or reinforce reading. Because these people then read less, they read less well. Because they read less well, they do more poorly in school, in the job market and in civic life."

This hits home, of course, because I come from a long line of book addicts. My house is full of books (kinda overflowing...sorry for those who have to squeeze into the guest room!). We read all the time; all of us.

Anecdote: Last week, we went for a parent-teacher-student conference at our (six-and-a-half year old) daughter's school. One of the exercises in the conference was for each of us to list strengths, challenges, goals, and action plans for our daughter. One of the things that surprised me when my daughter was listing her strengths was that she left out reading. That's probably the area where she excels most, and it could be called her defining characteristic. She's always walking around, carrying a book and reading it.

It occurs to me that she doesn't see this as a strength: everyone around her (at home, anyway) is always reading, too. It reminds me of an experience my wife related, where she was at a class, and people went around the room listing their hobbies. She was surprised how many people listed "Reading" as a hobby. She'd never thought of it as one, though she reads daily, because "it's like breathing, just something you do." It seems it's like that for our daughter, too. We have always read with, to, and around her. We read for pleasure, read for work, just read.

Now, I realize that this is atypical. We read far more than most people. But I also realize we're reading so much that we (and people like us) skew the averages upward. Which makes the overall decline in reading all the more disturbing to me.

So, go out and read a book in public. Support your public library. Support your local bookstores, especially independent ones. Make it visible; make it popular. Carry a book with you so people see what you're doing. Talk about what you read. Especially around young people. They need to know that reading is a Good Thing, and not just in the "taking your medicine" sense. It may not be as easy as watching TV, but it's much more rewarding.

Techno-Geezer Humor

This is a fairly amusing parody. The premise is that the TV show "24" is set in the year 1994.

I've never watched 24, but I thought it was amusing, anyway, in a weirdly nostalgic sense.

Oh, Those Good Old Days

Tom Tomorrow this week waxes nostalgic for those innocent days, back in the twentieth century, when we used to discuss how to parse "what is is" and what constituted sex.

Baffling and Mind-Boggling

I found a reference to this posting on LGM:

These are weirdest, most ill-conceived toys from around the globe. If you're about to say that they're "weird" only because of our own xenophobic ignorance of other cultures, well, we have two words for you: Poop toys.

I had heard of some of these before. I laughed a lot while reading the list and comments.

I have nothing further to add.

Bad News, Bears

No, this is not a post about my favorite college football team, although the title might be apt.

Rather it is about actual bears, or more to the point, the fact that three quarters of the bear species on the planet are in danger of extinction:

Six out of the world’s eight species of bears are threatened with extinction, according to recent assessments by the IUCN Bear and Polar Bear Specialist Groups.

Those of you who know me probably know of my fondness for bears. That alone makes the news very sad to me. But beyond my personal preferences, threatened bears are probably an indication of great danger to the larger ecosystems in which they live. The common threat to most of the threatened bears is habitat destruction. If the bears can't live there anymore, it's likely an indication of general ecosystem degradation.

I may be wrong about that. For one thing, different kinds of bears play very different roles in their ecosystems. Polar bears, for example, are top-level predators, where black bears (not terribly threatened) are generalist scavengers, for the most part. Pandas are highly specialized, particularly with regard to diet. So threats to a particular type of bear might just mean that bear is too specialized.

I'm not an ursinologist (nor even a wildlife biologist), but I do know that bears are magnificent creatures, and it's sad that they're in decline. It might not be the kind of dire threat that the precipitous decline in sharks is, but still, it would tend to indicate problems.

It's the Incompetence, Again

(Updated below)

As you probably know, we had a fairly nasty oil spill in San Francisco Bay last week. I almost commented on the idiocy of the reporting of the event, as the initial news reports said it was 140 gallons of fuel, which later became 58,000 gallons of fuel, which later became 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel. But that's a detail, really.

No use crying over spilled fuel; just clean it up.

Oh...wait.

It seems we're not so good at that. Now, I realize that oil spills are nasty, devastating things, and rather hard to handle, but the first rule of such things is not to turn away the people who want to help, especially if they know what they are doing.

I get that it might be important to turn away the untrained, especially if they could make things worse for themselves or the overall situation. But to turn away the people who are specifically trained to handle just this scenario is moronic:

The city of San Francisco offered 150 specially trained municipal workers to help clean up beaches and save birds - but essentially got shrugged off by the Coast Guard, according to the city's acting mayor and the president of the Board of Supervisors.
...
The city workers are firefighters and workers in the health department "who have training to deal with oil-contaminated creatures and spills, but all they've taken from us is a handful," Dufty said, noting that only about six have been called out.

Apparently we learned nothing from Katrina. The combination of operational incompetence and P.R. bungling is deadly. It hurts the operation at hand and also poisons the attitudes of those whose support you need.

And there is a basic rule of the universe: when people show up to volunteer, find something for them to do, even if you really don't have anything meaningful for them to do. If it's too dangerous to put them out on the beach, then put them in an office, a warehouse, covering for the people who are on the beach. Don't just send them away.

Oy.

Update:

Todd Woody of Green Wombat has a really good, first-hand look at the handling of the disaster and its response, with an eye toward how technologically backward the whole thing is.

Please Help If You Can

I'm finding there is very little awareness of (and little reporting of) the disaster currently taking place in the Mexican state of Tabasco:

A week of heavy rains caused rivers to overflow, drowning at least 80 percent of the oil-rich state.

Much of the state capital, Villahermosa, looked like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, with water reaching to second-story rooftops and desperate people awaiting rescue.

You read that right: 80% of the state under water. And an epidemic likely on the way.

Unlike New Orleans and the U.S. Gulf coast, Tabasco doesn't have the wherewithal to recover, nor does it have the attention of the world.

Bob Harris provides info on how you can help. Please do, if you can.

Here's another blog posting with lots of ways you can help.

The E-Voting Scam

Just when you thought I was never going to write about anything except torture, here I am, back on the subject of electronic voting.

Just read an interesting piece by "looseheadprop" at firedoglake on e-voting in New York, which includes this:

Remember HAVA? The totally misnamed, designed to do the opposite, “Help America to Vote Act”? It was passed in the wake of the 2000 hanging chad scandal. It appeared to have some laudable goals, such as forcing the states to make the voting experience handicapped accessible, and provided money to the states to “update” their voting systems to comply with its requirements. Coming from the Administartion that LUVS unfunded mandates, it sounds almost too good to be true, doesn’t it?

And by now you know why. It was yet another con, a really dangerous con if you believe in voting.

There's some great additional analysis. I recommend it.

While I'm on the subject, I should point out that the city of San Francisco is all agog over the fact that they have to hand-count all the results of Tuesday's mayoral election, and might not know the results for two to three weeks? It seems California's top elections official, Secretary of State Debra Bowen, ruled that although the City could use its electronic voting machines, they would have to hand-verify all the results, which will be a long and expensive process. On the plus side, the City is suing the manufacturer of the machines.

This is a story that is repeating itself in various ways, all over the country. At least Bowen is trying to ensure that the votes are counted properly, which is what really matters. It's a shame that it's such a costly process, but it is important to get it right.

I have no problem with the fact that it takes a long time to count the votes. It's a shame that the process is made less efficient by the very technology that was supposed to streamline things. But the goal of accurate vote counts is more important than the expense.

Not What I Wanted to Read

I was thinking this afternoon about a professor with whom I took four classes in my major field (Rhetoric) years ago. I'd been talking about him and one of those classes (Reader's Theater) with my wife the other day, and wondered whatever became of him. I figured (correctly) that he was long since retired.

But I didn't want to know this:

Robert Beloof, a poet and friend to both Robert Frost and E.E. Cummings, died unpoetically in Portland on Tuesday, hit by a Volkswagen van as he crossed Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard on foot. He was 81.

Two years ago. Man.

This part is highly accurate:

“He didn’t make friends unless people were willing to be honest and frank with him all the time,” said son Doug Beloof, a Lewis & Clark College law professor. “My father had no patience for etiquette or pretense or show.”

In addition to Reader's Theater, I studied two terms of oral interpretation of literature (one each of poetry and prose) and an amazing class on symbolism, the last half of which was spent reading Moby-Dick intensively.

I think it's fair to say that those classes shaped much of my understanding of literature, and certainly trained my voice for reading. There is probably nothing I've enjoyed in this life as much as reading with my daughter, and I'm sure a part of that I owe to my training with professor Beloof.

He was an interesting man, apparently rather difficult to get along with. His office was down a different corridor than all the other faculty in the Rhetoric department, for example. At the corner, a hand-printed sign pointed one way as the "hall of light" and the other as the "hall of darkness." I don't think they were just referring to the afternoon sunshine on the west side.

But he was very curious about many things. We used do discuss computers, since he knew I worked with and taught about them, and he figured he should get one to use in his work, particularly writing.

I'm sure if he'd had the chance, he would have come up with some choice words to describe his untimely demise, but he didn't. Alas.

Hmmm. I guess I should read my alumni magazine more carefully, because they ran an obituary for him in November, 2005. I knew only part of this:

Robert, a resident of Berkeley, was chair of the speech department at Berkeley in the 1960s, a period when many universities were converting their departments to study communications. He pushed in the opposite direction, expanding the department to cover more humanities and to use a pedagogy derived from classical rhetoric, which explains why the department is now called Rhetoric.

Good for him! That's a terrific legacy.

Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition

*sigh* At least, nobody expected it would reappear in the 21st century. In the United States.

As I wrote over a year ago, I can't believe we're having this discussion, much less a debate. For the U.S. Senate to be arguing with a nominee to be Attorney General over whether a technique directly out of the Inquisition constitutes torture is sickening. That there are people making not just legalistic hair-splitting arguments, but actual defenses of waterboarding, is appalling.

That one of my senators voted to approve said candidate's nomination is beyond belief. I thought it was bad when she voted to ban flag burning. I am deeply concerned that the moral underpinnings of this country may be lost, that there is not a sufficient number of people who actually understand what is happening to all of us and our reputation in the world.

Scott Horton has another excellent piece in Harper's today:

There is no respectable opinion that can hold waterboarding legal. It is criminal depravity. When we allow its justification as an article of polite conversation, we deal our society and its values a potentially mortal wound.

“Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,” George Orwell reminded us in “Politics and the English Language.” In the waterboarding debate, Orwell’s warning has found its most literal application.

The ongoing discussion is worrisome, but I am encouraged that so many voices are being raised in opposition. Horton, of course. Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake today. Anonymous Liberal had a couple of good posts on the subject yesterday. And Keith Olbermann did another of his excoriating special comments last night. And the LA Times' media watchdog comes out strongly over how the debate is portrayed:

When the media characterize it as a political struggle between the White House and congressional Democrats or as a complex debate over national security in a post Sept. 11 world -- two convenient dodges -- they aren't being realistic or fair. What the media really are doing is engaging in a sophisticated fan dance -- a convenient act of concealment.

What's really at stake is whether this country will continue to stand with the framers of our Constitution and our authentic moral traditions or whether we now will allow Bush and Cheney to put us shoulder to shoulder with Pol Pot.

Wow. I hate that things have gotten to this point, but it is encouraging to hear people speaking out, and speaking out strongly. Keep it up! Public opinion is on the right track on this:

Asked whether they think waterboarding is a form of torture, more than two-thirds of respondents, or 69 percent, said yes; 29 percent said no.

Asked whether they think the U.S. government should be allowed to use the procedure to try to get information from suspected terrorists, 58 percent said no; 40 percent said yes.

Now, why a substantial majority like that doesn't translate into political action, it's hard to say. The invertebrates on Capitol Hill don't seem to get that it's us they need to listen to, not their own echo chamber.

Who'll Stand Up For Us?

Great. Just in case you were on the fence on this torture thing (maybe I should change the name of this to TortureBlog...), here's fine news about the U.S. State Department: In order to keep their own options open regarding torture, they are now unwilling to condemn the practice of waterboarding even when applied to U.S. citizens by others. In other words, they say it's OK for people to torture me, so long as they get to do whoever they want to torture, too.

From an article in Harper's (pointed out by Digby at Hullabaloo):

And the reason for the public contempt consistently shown Bellinger by the [international] legal community is simple: He finds it impossible to condemn torture. No legal adviser before him had any problem with that proposition.

The Bellinger referenced is Jim Bellinger, senior legal adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Read the rest. Read Digby's comments, too. Who's supporting the troops now, eh?

Nice: disdain and derision. That's just how I like to see my country's legal stands viewed elsewhere. I'm really looking forward to my next international trip.

It's going to take a long time to build a new reputation for this country. I hope we get the chance to do it.