Relatives on the Internet

Here's a link to a lovely picture of a close relative.

For those who need an explanation, try this.

You never know what you'll find on a blog. Small world!

On the Paper, Dammit!

Some good news today on the electronic voting front. Congress is considering legislation to require paper ballots as an official record. California's Secretary of State, Debra Bowen, testified today in favor of the measure, despite having reservations about implementation.

Still a long way to go on this. but at least it's getting serious consideration.

Remember, there is nothing more important in a democratic republic than verifiably fair elections!

Name That Ballpark

Baseball season is in the offing, which means it's time for my mind to wander to important subjects, such as the naming of ballparks.

I saw this encouraging news today:

The Rangers are changing the name of their ballpark from "Ameriquest Field" (Ameriquest is a mortgage company) to yet another corporate moniker. ..."Rangers Ballpark in Arlington." It's the first case I can remember from this callow age of ubiquitous corporate sponsorship that a stadium has been renamed in the right direction.

It seems positive, but my guess is they just haven't found The Right Company willing to shell out the bucks yet. My money is on someone stepping forward to pay for the rights.

Interestingly, this is the second ballpark in Texas to be renamed because of the embarrassment of having a scandalous (and/or bankrupt) sponsor. The Houston Astros changed the name of Enron Field to Minute Maid Park after the Enron implosion.

It's nice to be writing about stuff that really matters again!

Wag More, Bark Less

Since my sister is doing bumper stickers (and such) of late, I thought I should share this one:


I'm not a dog person, but I saw this on a car last week, and the sentiment struck me as simple and useful. Be happier. Be less annoying.

Flags

OK, this is weird. There is clearly some kind of cultural difference here that I don't appreciate. I lived in northern Virginia for a brief period, which I realize isn't the same as living in the deep south, but then, Florida is its own sort of weird "southern" culture.

But it is inexplicably weird to see people displaying a confederate flag with pride. Friends of mine moved out of Georgia in part because they were tired of the debates over whether to keep the confederate flag as part of the state flag.

But this was the most surprising bit to me:

It's interesting that Florida has a law that forbids "public desecration" of the Confederate flag. This is especially interesting given that the American flag is protected by no such law.

Could that be true? Ack! Independent verification from another blog:

What I find infuriating is the Florida statute making it illegal to "deface, defile or contemptuously abuse" the Confederate flag.

Yeah. That's offensive. I like his take on the whole pride thing:

Of course the Sons of the Confederate Veterans are pissed. They see the flag as part of their heritage. That is, they are proud that their ancestors owned people based on the color of their skin, killed and raped them at will, and stole their labor for hundreds of years. The commander of the local there, Robert Hurst, calls the display, "offensive, objectionable and tasteless." I would use those same terms to describe any display of the Confederate flag as a symbol of pride. And I would be right.

Amen.

My thanks to Robert Farley at LGM for pointing this out.

Reading List

Just saw this meme developing over at Pharyngula (a terrific science blog), and thought it would be fun to see how my reading matches up. My guess is I'll be heavier on the SF and lighter on the fantasy, but let's see how it plays out.

Bold means I've read it.

The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years, 1953-2002

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

Hmmm. Only 27. And more surprising to me is the number of books on the list I've never even heard of. And then there's the number of books on the list I think are horribly overrated. Oh, well. We can't all agree on everything.

It does strike me that I haven't been reading much SF of late. I've been a bit bogged down in a nonfiction book for a while, and need to get to something lighter.

If you feel like playing, the list is at The News Blog.

Penguins in Civil Discourse

And while we're on the theme of civil discourse, let's include the notion of projecting things into people's comments that have nothing to do with the subject at hand.

Witness, for example, this poor, misunderstood penguin.

Just need to give credit to Tom Tomorrow. His comic is consistently clever, witty, and spot-on-the-mark when it comes to characterizing the trends in American society and politics. I've admired his work since I saw a great comic he'd done for independent booksellers many years ago, parodying chain bookstores. I loved the sign about "books by the pound."

Anyway, if you don't read Tom Tomorrow, you should.

Civility and Subtlety

I have written previously about civility and choice of language in blogging. We've discussed "F-Bombs" and "bad words" various other expressions.

But there's another aspect of current discourse (both within and without the blogosphere) that I find much more disturbing. That's the casual use of the unthinkable: saying things we can't possibly mean, but in an uncaring way.

The trigger that got me off my rear and blogging again after a few weeks is the current discussion of some inflammatory rhetoric at a conservative political gathering this week. I won't cover the details, since they're quite well documented. (Good discussions by Digby and Glenn Greenwald and Anonymous Liberal.)

What bothers me is not the name-calling. I don't like that, but you know, "sticks and stones...." More worrisome is the casual use of language suggesting killing, genocide, torture, poison, and so on. Some of it is clearly joking, and hey, there's a long history of it. One of my favorite lines from Shakespeare comes from Henry IV, part 2: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." (some context here (PDF)) I used to love wearing a t-shirt with that quote as I walked past the law school at Berkeley.

But as I get older, I hear words coming from my daughter and her friends, suggesting that one can solve problems just by killing people or locking them up or sending them away. One can understand that kind of simplistic, childish reasoning from actual children. But the fact is, we hear it from adults, too.

And last night, my wife and I attended a play at Berkeley Repertory Theatre called "The Pillowman." This is an award-winning play by Martin McDonagh. The play was well done, though I wouldn't say it's a great play. And many of the things that bother me about it are the same things that annoy me about a lot of modern theater, such as excessive, gratuitous swearing.

But the play also rather casually incorporates torture, police brutality, child abuse, murder, and similar topics. And it tries to be funny. Not that these are inappropriate subjects for theater, or even for humor. But it got me to thinking about how inured society has become to depictions and discussions of subjects that ought to be unthinkable.

In fairness, one of the themes of "The Pillowman" is a discussion of this very tension: the main character is a writer, and the writer has written stories that depict some awful things happening to children. When some of those things really happen, the police have issues with the writer.

But in some ways, I suppose it is the play's self-awareness of the gratuitous violence and incivility that bothers me all the more. Part of what makes art art is an artist's ability to convey something without depicting it. Let's just say there are more artful ways of showing that someone is crude than by having him swear a lot and hit other people. A really good writer can do that with words, with descriptions, with metaphor.

Or maybe that's it...maybe subtlety is dead. It would certainly appear to have died long ago in the major media. Watching television these days is like being hit in the face with a two-by-four, repeatedly. Which is probably why I rarely watch. The "nice" shows are treacly, and the "not nice" shows are vulgar, violent, or insipid. Where is the art???

Happy Darwin Day!

I seem to recall, once upon a time, when February 12 was observed and celebrated in my home country as the anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln (although it was never a national holiday). That seems a worthy thing to remember. Unfortunately for Abe, his birthday fell a bit too near that of one of the other revered former Presidents of the United States, a certain George Washington (February 22). So during the term of office of one of the slimier occupants of the job, the holiday was moved to the third Monday in February, which oddly enough never actually occurs on either Washington's or Lincoln's birthday.

[From looking at the Wikipedia entry on President's Day, I note that Washington wasn't actually born on February 22, either, but you'll have to go read that for yourself.]

This is all a roundabout way of getting to the actual subject of this post, which is the anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. As a trained environmental scientist (that's my other degree; I also have one in Rhetoric), I have a certain soft spot in my heart for Darwin and his work. You can't get very far in studying the life sciences without encountering Darwin, his theories, and the century-and-a-half of subsequent work that has come from it.

Fairness dictates that I should mention that Darwin's work did not occur in a vacuum. There were plenty of other scientists (notably, Alfred Russel Wallace) who were arriving at similar conclusions at around the same time. Scientific "discoveries" often happen like that, but someone usually gets the credit.

Be that as it may, Darwin is clearly the iconic character in the modern understanding (and often misunderstanding) of evolution. It is fair to say that for many people, Darwin is responsible for them having any notion of the existence of evolution or the mechanisms behind it (As far as I can tell, he did coin the term "natural selection".).

I like the fact that Darwin Day focuses on science and humanity. Any event that can join those two notions is a worthy one in my view.

So, things change, and I guess even holidays evolve. If it's mid-February, you could do much worse than to ruminate a bit on the contributions of Darwin and science.

And if you feel generous, put in a good thought for Galileo (February 15), too. He tried very hard to bring light to a dark age, and was condemned and banished for it. The work that got him banned, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, is absolutely brilliant. It was probably the single most influential science writing I ever read (and I read it in a Rhetoric class!).

There is much to celebrate.

Cogent Analysis of Iraq Options

There's a great op-ed piece in today's Washington Post by retired General William Odom. In it, it spells out great reasons why getting the U.S. out of Iraq is the key to getting beyond the mess:

The first and most critical step is to recognize that fighting on now simply prolongs our losses and blocks the way to a new strategy. Getting out of Iraq is the pre-condition for creating new strategic options.

I highly recommend reading the whole thing. [hat tip to the TPM crew]

Oh, and here's a hint: the title of the piece is "Victory is Not an Option."

Nuts

I thought yesterday's "Super Bowl"(tm) was pretty mediocre (as usual). Unfortunately, the advertisements that often salvage the day were awfully disappointing this year.

One, however, managed to clear up for me what often happens to me in the afternoon:



Now I need to go find some nuts to save me this afternoon.

Note that this is the first time I've ever tried embedding a video in a post, so I do not guarantee any level of success.

How to Think About War

Just found a link to a terrific piece by Dan Froomkin over on FireDogLake, in which he tells journalists how they should approach matters of war and peace. It applies equally well to those of us trying to evaluate the information we get through the media and other sources:

Lessons we thought had been learned from Vietnam were forgotten in the rush to invade Iraq. And now, as we cover President Bush’s ratcheting up of the rhetoric against Iran, it’s looking like the lessons we should have learned from Iraq may not have been learned at all. So at the risk of stating the obvious, here are some thoughts about what those lessons were.

It's a great read, and perhaps a good checklist to keep around. Sadly, people seem to keep falling for the same tricks.

Good for a Laugh

Just stumbled onto a quiz via another blog: Which Science Fiction Writer are You?

Apparently, I'm William Gibson:

I am: William Gibson The chief instigator of the "cyberpunk" wave of the 1980s, his razzle-dazzle futuristic intrigues were, for a while, the most imitated work in science fiction.

Which science fiction writer are you?

Dumber and Dumberest?

A friend just pointed me to this posting on BradBlog, which indicates that the e-voting folks at Diebold have truly no sense of how to secure a system. Not only do they use the same key for all their machines, and a common, file-cabinet key to boot, but now this:

Of course, they'll only sell such keys to "Diebold account holders" apparently --- or so they claim --- but that's hardly a problem. J. Alex Halderman, one of the folks who worked on the Princeton Hack and tried to keep the design of the key secret for obvious reasons, revealed Tuesday that a friend of his had found the photo of the key on Diebold's website and discovered that was all he needed to create a working copy!

Yes, really. Just by looking at a picture of the key, someone was able to use a grinder to make one that worked.

Makes you kinda long for the days of dangling chads, doesn't it?

P.S. Sorry for not posting much. Things are crazy at work and in Real Life, too.

How'd THIS make it into print?

Good heavens. Somehow, the San Francisco Chronicle managed to sneak a responsible op-ed piece calling for accountability from pundits and politicians (by David Sirota) into the paper today:

Pundits and news analysts are employed to expose this sort of nonsense so that our democratic discourse -- and the policy choices that come out of it -- are grounded in fact. But that has not happened. Instead, we have seen a furious stampede by the most prominent media figures to cover their own hides with either more lies, or more out-of-the mainstream bluster.

And furthermore:

How can we expect to change course in Iraq, if a president is given a pass to claim he has never stayed the course in the first place? How can we expect to hold lawmakers accountable if they are never questioned about their efforts to deliberately mislead us? How can we expect the media to be a watchdog if its leading analysts and news framers face no public sanctions when they disrespect the truth or give credence to fringe ideologies?

David's a good writer, and I enjoy some of his blogging and other writings. But this is hardly the sort of thing you ever find in print in a mainstream media outlet.

I guess it's good to live in/around San Francisco!

Digging into the Past

My wife and I went away over this three-day weekend, and one of the things I did was reread a book I read long, long ago. It's called "I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally," by Jim Bouton. It's a sequel to his best-seller, "Ball Four." Ball Four was a ground-breaking book when it was published in 1970: a first-person description of a baseball season written by a major-league baseball player who told it as he saw it, including telling a lot of stories that were not terribly flattering about baseball and its players, including some of the biggest stars in the game.

Today, this sort of thing is commonplace, and we're treated to stories of stars injecting each other with steroids in the restroom and such. But 35 years ago, this just wasn't done. Bouton was ripped by many in the business, and arguably driven from the game prematurely because of the reactions to his book.

A year or two later, he followed up with "I'm Glad..." (the title comes from a discussion Bouton had with the sportswriter, Dick Young). In addition to tying up some loose ends, describing what happened during the baseball season after Ball Four was published (his last season in professional baseball, other than a brief comeback several years later). Bouton also described
the reactions of players, management, and sportswriters to his book.

A couple of lines jumped out at me from his descriptions and analyses as being applicable to the current discussions that surround blogging and the traditional press. Here's one bit about writers with pre-written stories:

...a lot of bad things happen when a reporter sets out with a story already written in his head. He is in fact acting as a roadblock between the public and the truth. There's something vaguely sad and at the same time hackle-raising about Marty Martinez, the Astro utility man, coming over to me and saying, "I always said something nice when they asked me about the book, but they never put what I said in the newspapers."

Clearly, a lot of what ends up in print these days is the result of writers already knowing what they want to write, and doing "research" that is a matter of finding material to back them up, rather than doing the research first to find out what's true, then writing based on that. It's true in the "mainstream media," it's true in blogs, it's true in academia. I see it all over the place, and it's lazy, sloppy, misleading, and just wrong. I have somewhat less of a problem with people who at least expose their biases and acknowledge them, but if they won't also acknowledge differing viewpoints, they do a service to no one.

Bouton also quotes extensively from a review of Ball Four by David Halberstam in Harper's, who wrote less about the book itself than about the reaction from the entrenched media toward someone having the audacity to enter their turf:

The sportswriters are not judging the accuracy of the book, but Bouton's right to tell (that is, your right to read), which is, again, as American as apple pie or the White House press corps. A reporter covers an institution, becomes associated with it, protective of it, and, most important, the arbiter of what is right to tell. He knows what's good for you to hear, what should remain at the press-club bar. When someone goes beyond that, stakes out a new dimension of what is proper and significant, then it is not the ballplayers who yell the most, nor in Washington the public-information officers, but indeed the sportswriters or the Washington bureau chiefs, because having played the game, having been tamed, when someone outflanks them, they must of necessity attack his intentions, his accuracy. Thus Bouton has become a social leper to many sportswriters and thus Sy Hersh, when he broke the My Lai story, became a "peddler" to some of Washington's most famous journalists.

This is a story we hear constantly these days about bloggers. Those in the mainstream press lash out at bloggers for being uncivil or for not having their journalistic expertise. Fundamentally, they resent being scooped, upstaged, or proved wrong. But it's nothing new. When a Jim Bouton or a Hunter S. Thompson comes in as an outsider or an amateur and outperforms those who are supposed to do the job, the reaction is rarely (at least initially) to question whether the job has been done right all along, but rather to attack the interloper.

And I suppose it's important to point out that Sy Hersh continues to break the stories that the rest of the press either ignores or hushes up.

De-lurking

I just learned about an important event: this is National De-lurking Week!

This is not a problem here. The handful of you who actually read this little blog have been very kind with your feedback and comments. But if you're reading other blogs and haven't let the writers know, it would be a great idea to use this week to let them know you're out there and that you appreciate (or don't) what they do.

I'll get off the soapbox for a moment now.

California moving away from e-voting?

This seems like good news:

California's electronic voting era could be facing a very quick conclusion as one of the nation's most visible e-voting critics will be supervising the state's approval of voting machinery.

Lowell Finley, a Berkeley attorney who's been involved in suits against voting machine manufacturers, the California secretary of state, San Francisco and Alameda counties and the ongoing dispute over electronic voting in Florida, is taking over as deputy secretary of state.

I haven't had time to think this over, but my initial reaction is positive.

Electronic Voting Update

Just stumbled across this update in InfoWorld on electronic voting issues.

I thought this exchange was telling:

IDGNS: Some of those ideas don't sound like they'd get around the "black box" question with e-voting -- that people don't see what's going on in the machine.

Spafford: There's something that I think has been overlooked by a lot of people who work in this realm. The average voter does not have the technological sophistication to have confidence that the mechanism preserves their anonymity and their vote. Some of the methods that involve cryptography, for instance, while scientifically very sound, would be used by people who don't understand the mathematics behind it and are mistrustful of the idea that they would have to take someone's word that it works.

The method of having a paper record is a technology people can immediately grasp and understand. That's really important. We want not only to protect the vote, but we want people to feel comfortable that their vote matters.

Anything that we do to make the system more complex or difficult to understand disenfranchises some people.

That last paragraph from Dr. Spafford is incredibly important. There's no point in spiffing up voting with new technology if it makes people even think that their votes are devalued. Voting is power, and arguably the only power we have that really counts. We should be finding ways to make people feel empowered, not discouraged.

Electronic voting is still a solution in search of a problem, much like high-tech weapons systems searching for a conflict to resolve.

Sauces, Gooses, and Ganders

It never ceases to amaze me when politicians criticize others for doing exactly what they have done (from FireDogLake):

The image of Roy Blunt standing in front of a microphone with a straight face and faking some sort of phony outrage for the cameras about procedures that he, himself, had a hand in putting into writing in the Congress when Newt Gingrich got his oily hands on the power reins? Chutzpah doesn't even come close as a descriptor.

But chutzpah is the essence of politics, Christy! (Not of governance, mind you, just of politics.) When I worked in Congress, someone once described politics to me as the art of seizing the moral high ground, and mercilessly berating anyone who tries to come near. I suppose I would amend that today with a notation that the supposed moral high ground need not be either moral or high; you just spin it that way.

I am looking forward to what Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic gang can make of their latest opportunity. If they can push through even a portion of their "first 100 hours" scheme, it will be a major sea change in Washington. Heck, just passing any meaningful legislation that doesn't gut the Bill of Rights would be an improvement.