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.

Slow Season

Wow. Almost a week has sneaked by without a post. I suppose that's to be expected at this time of year. Many things going on as the holidays swoop by. I don't really know, since I haven't blogged through a holiday season before (though my perception as a blog reader has long been that things are slower this time of year).

I notice that in my absence, Blogger has finally gotten its new software out of beta, and somewhere along the way they've managed to relocate the search bar that was supposed to be at the top of this blog all along. So that's progress.

The primary reason for my absence has not, in fact, been holiday celebrations (although there have been some). Mostly it is the fact that my little software startup company has moved into its first offices, and I've been spending a lot of cycles doing things like debugging the network, chasing phone lines, and learning where to buy lunch in the neighborhood (San Francisco, near the Civic Center, sort of).

So at least some of the time, I will now be commuting to the office, which has its good and bad points. I like the fact that I will get to see my coworkers more often. I regret that I will spend more time in transit, though much of that will be on BART. I believe it will also be easier to get to baseball games, as I will be much closer to the stadium when I am at work.

A secondary reason for my absence from scribbling on the blog is that I've been reading a very long book, Twenty Years After, which is the (first) sequel to The Three Musketeers, which I reread a year or two ago. It's very long, but I'm almost done, and struggling to finish before we take off for holiday visits. Because I really don't want to schlep an 800-page book along with me, just so I can read the last 50 pages or so.

I won't spend a lot of time writing about the book, except to say that it's quite engrossing. Not quite as swashbuckling as The Three Musketeers, which is to be expected, I suppose, with them all being twenty years older. More about politics and the motivations of the characters.

I find that it would probably be helpful to know some French. Even a little. I allegedly studied some Latin in high school, but that doesn't really help here. I've picked up some insight into the idioms in the translation, but it's no substitute for actually understanding the language. One very helpful item in the Oxford World's Classics edition I'm reading is a little two-page map of Paris in the 17th century, highlighting the locations that figure in the story. That little touch is extremely helpful to me, and would have been nice to have when I read (a Penguin Classics edition, as I recall) the first book (or Les Miserables, for that matter). But I'm learning.

Particularly interesting is the way the story meshes with my limited knowledge of European history. I've had a fascination for the 17th century ever since I took a course called Rhetorical Theory and Practice of the 17th Century back in college. It was fascinating to read Descartes, Moliere, Bacon, Jonson, and many others, and learn about them in the context of a century of intellectual upheaval. Cool stuff.

So I haven't been wasting my time, really. I just haven't been sharing very much of it with y'all.

Baseball, Wealth, and Rationality

One of the fine things about being a baseball fan is that during the off season, I get to think about baseball. Now, obviously I think about baseball during the season, too. But in the off season, I get to think about baseball without the distraction of actual baseball games.

Fans have long called it the "hot stove league," sitting around a hot stove during the winter, speculating about what happened in the past, what will happen next year, and what their team should do about the burning issues of the day.

Which brings us to money. Baseball players make a lot of it. Even not-particularly-good players make a ton of it. The minimum annual salary for a Major League ballplayer next year is $380,000. That's just for being on the team: $380K even for sitting on the bench and scratching occasionally.

Now, I realize that when one talks about money, and particularly about large amounts of money, rationality rarely enters into the equation. It's easy for me to sit here on my couch and say that Barry Bonds should play baseball for a mere $10 million a season, when he feels he needs $16 million. Really. For those of us not involved, it is hard to imagine how $10 million vs. $16 million makes a difference, particularly when one pocketed $90 million over the previous five years.

Heck, even if I hadn't banked $90M (and I haven't!), it seems like $10M would be just fine.

My wife, with the prestigious MBA, would probably say that it's like tulips, Cabbage Patch Kids, Beanie Babies, and Internet stocks: supply and (irrationally inflated) demand. With some ego thrown in on the side.

Which makes you realize that timing is very important. You can make a nice living in the tulip market today, but nothing like you could in the 17th century. And you can make a nice living on Internet stocks today, but not like you could in the day.

But because of this timing issue, it's important to remember that just because the commodities in question were highly valued (and apparently, overvalued), we should not necessarily devalue those in the same business outside the bubble. I got to thinking about this today reading some humorous commentary on current baseball contracts. My favorite is the section about what Willie Mays' agent would say if Mr. Mays were a free agent in a market like this after one of his greatest seasons.

And at the same time, it's probably important to recall that those who profit off a bubble are not necessarily wiser or more worthy than those doing the same thing in a different era. I admire some of the people who created some of the technology that begat the "dot-com boom," but they were not necessarily smarter or somehow better than those who labored in different fields or at different times. By the same token, I know a lot of people who made a lot of money just for being in the right place at the right time. And I know that some of them are not nearly as capable as some of their contemporaries.

So it's important that we not judge people by how much money they have, or how much people are willing to pay them at any given moment.

It is always hard to compare people (baseball players included) from different eras. But that's the most amusing part of the hot stove league. Because discussing who was the best player of all time is fun, and the discussion has no definitive answer. And because worrying about where your team is going to pick up a better first baseman can only take you so far on a cold, rainy day.

Unintended Consequences

The seasons are changing, and my wife and daughter both have rather dry skin, so of course, I will gain weight.

Huh?

For the dry skin, someone recommended coconut oil. Now, my family smells wonderful.

And I have a strong desire to eat a Mounds bar. Ah, the sacrifices one must make for soft skin.

Be Excellent to Each Other

I haven't talked about torture here for a while. I suppose that's good; I don't like to dwell on torture, and it's a subject that I would prefer not to have come up very often. Indeed, the frequency with which the subject comes up these days is itself almost as disturbing as the torture itself.

Anyway, the thing that brought me to the subject today was reading this post by Scott Lemieux on Lawyers, Guns and Money (LGM). Although I don't think what's currently being done to Jose Padilla constitutes torture, per se, it is inexcusable, or as Lemieux puts it:

This kind of systematic mistreatment of prisoners is an utter disgrace on every level: moral, political, legal, and pragmatic.

I hate to think that my government, my countrymen, tortures anyone for any reason, but at least in the case of active warfare or imminent threats, I can understand how one might arrive at some kind of rationalization. But when one has incarcerated and incapacitated someone for literally years, the ongoing abuse loses any rationality.

It's sick, it's wrong, and it's pointless. So stop it. We need to get remove from power the people who seem to think it is a good or useful practice.

This Just In: E-Voting is Bad!

Big shock to those of us who have been following the issue: The National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) has examined voting machines, and preliminary reports say that they come up lacking (PDF).

The standard they apply, and which I like, is "software independence":

A voting system is software-independent if an undetected change or error in its software cannot cause an undetectable change or error in an election outcome.

Essentially, that means that the ability of election officials to tally and audit election results cannot depend solely on the reliability of the programming of the voting machine.

News reports after the November elections indicated that some jurisdictions had issues when they went to verify results, like sometimes the machines reported different numbers.

Clearly, this is no way to run a democracy. A vote is a vote, and no matter how many times you count it, the vote should still come out the same way. I realize that in some cases (as we all learned in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, dimpled chads and all), there are ambiguities, and reasonable people might interpret the same data differently. But in those cases, humans should be able to examine the evidence and make a ruling, not just accept the "judgement" of a technological system.

I like this quote from the end of the Washington Post's story today:

"Why are we doing this at all? is the question people are asking," said Warren Stewart, policy director of VoteTrustUSA, a group critical of electronic voting systems. "We have a perfectly good system -- the paper-ballot optical-scan system."

Anyway, enough ranting for the moment. More to come, obviously.

Mexicoland

As noted earlier, we recently returned from a week in Cozumel. I had been there once before, about ten years ago. Friends had told me things had changed, but I don't think I fully appreciated the degree of the change until we got there.

Cozumel used to be a diver destination, and that was about it. The vast majority of the tourism to the island was scuba divers. Much of the reef system off the west coast of the island is a national park, ecological preserve, or other protected area. That's great, and very healthy, and the diving is quite spectacular (weather permitting). Much of the economy of the island, therefore, catered to the needs of divers.

The biggest change since my last visit is the increase in the number of cruise ships visiting Cozumel. A decade ago, there were several each week, and the big scandal among divers was that they had dynamited a reef to put in a cruise-ship dock. Today there are three or four such docks, and multiple cruise ships in port every day except Sunday.

The result has been that virtually everything in Cozumel is now geared toward extracting dollars from American cruise-ship tourists. [I'm reminded of a line from a song about Cancun: "Montezuma extracts his financial revenge."] Virtually every price on the island is quoted in U.S. dollars, and dollars are accepted everywhere. I never had to acquire any pesos, although I did get some in change. Nearly everyone on the island seems to speak and understand English very well.

Compared to my last visit to Mexico (when we went to Puerto Vallarta and stayed in the old part of town, not the newer, touristy part), it was almost like not being in Mexico at all. More like being in a sort of Disneyland version of what Mexico might seem like to American tourists, or as I came to call it, "Mexicoland."

Is that bad? Hard to say. The island seems much more prosperous than it did ten years ago, in spite of some of the lingering damage from last year's hurricanes. The town is clean, and the food is good. Even driving through some of the back corners of town (yeah, we took a couple of wrong turns), one never go the impression of rampant poverty. Some parts of town are less nice than others, but nothing awful.

And on the other hand, you have Burger King, Pizza Hut, Subway, and a Hard Rock Cafe. Not exactly what I look for when I travel to another country, but I realize some people want that.

More interesting to me is that the locals seem to prey on the cruise ship commandos. They ask you what ship you're from, and apparently they raise their prices accordingly. One diver told us a cab driver quoted him a cab fare of US$6, and when he replied "I'm not from a cruise ship," the cabbie lowered his request to $4. Prices in general seem to have gone up; Cozumel is not a cheap vacation spot. But it appears that it's cheaper for those staying in the hotels than for those who debark from a ship, hit the market square, and take off again.

And my personal complaint is against Royal Caribbean cruise lines, who for some reason feel the need to blast their P.A. system outdoors at 5:30 am as the ship pulls into port (outside my hotel). I can understand making announcements to those on the ship, but it was clearly audible in my room, probably a quarter mile away. Grrrrr.

Ultimately, Cozumel was still a terrific place to visit, and a wonderful place to dive, but I left with this weird sensation that I hadn't really been to Mexico. Walking around the Mission district in San Francisco feels as much like Mexico as walking through most of Cozumel. Maybe that's globalization. But it felt like Disneyland (especially when the Disney cruise ships were in port!).

Visiting Trebekistan

I've been holding off writing this post, because I didn't want to spill some beans for a particular reader. But now I know it's safe, so I'll go ahead.

One of the great things about this here "blogosphere" (even more so than the rest of the World Weird Web) is the way one can stumble from one place to another and meet all kinds of new and interesting people, places, and things. And books to read. One of the topics I have meant to cover in this blog is books I've read, but that seems to elude me thus far.

But I want to write about one, partly because I discovered it via blogs, and partly because I really liked it, and partly because it hit home in a number of unexpected ways for me.

Let's cut to the chase, and then I can explain the back story.

The book in question is Prisoner of Trebekistan by Bob Harris. I've mentioned Bob and his blog a few times here, mostly because he's led me to some interesting stuff (including pudus). His blog is often funny, as well as insightful, in part because he is (or has been) by trade a comedian.

I was attracted to the book partly because the proprietors of several blogs I read recommended it, and I had appreciated Bob's writing. But more than that, I am a longtime fan of the TV show Jeopardy!. And among other things, Trebekistan is about Bob's experiences trying to get on the show, getting on the show, studying, winning, losing, and so on. If you like Jeopardy!, you'll find something to like in Trebekistan.

But the book is about much more than that. And that's good.

It turns out that Bob Harris and I are approximately the same age, and although we have different backgrounds, we went through some of the same stages at similar times, so I could relate to a lot of what he writes about. That was cool. And he has a rather offbeat sense of humor, which appeals to me. And his venture into Trebekistan brings him into contact with a professor of Rhetoric at Berkeley, which happens to be where I studied (although not from the professor in question).

And then there's Jeopardy!.

I can remember vividly, sitting at home as a kid, watching Jeopardy! with my family, and realizing that my mother knew a lot of the correct questions (though she was truly devastating when it came to Name That Tune). Anyway, being a kid, I figured Mom should go on Jeopardy!, be on TV, win some money, get famous. But mostly be on TV. Mom explained that although she knew a lot of the answers, she was sure she wouldn't be able to call them up under the pressure of the game. Prisoner of Trebekistan is about, among other things, what it takes to acquire enough knowledge to succeed, and also what it takes to be able to recall that information in a game setting. On TV. It's fascinating stuff.

About the time I was reading the book, my sister mentioned that a number of years ago when Ken Jennings was making his historic run through the Jeopardy! record book, she took a small TV to the family's mountain cabin just to follow the show. So I figured she'd like the book, too.

Here's where it gets personal. One of the things you learn about Bob from his book is that he also has a sister, and his sister has a very debilitating autoimmune disorder called Crohn's Disease. And as it turns out, so does mine. Thankfully, my sister's Crohn's doesn't seem to be as severe as Bob's sister's, and is currently well controlled by medication. But I can really relate to the frustration of trying to pin down just what's wrong (autoimmune disorders can be incredibly difficult to isolate and identify), and worrying and wishing that someone you love could just be all right.

That's tough, serious stuff for a book that is often humorous. But the book is much like life: it has its ups and downs. Bob has a good perspective on the winning and losing, and it extends well beyond the set of Jeopardy!. That's part of the power of the book: Bob lets you into places in his psyche that most people wouldn't admit to, or at least wouldn't admit us into. Whether it's his love life, his family life, his obsession with Jeopardy!, or any number of other things, the book is ultimately satisfying because it feels real.

Is it real? Hard to say. I don't actually know Bob Harris (we've exchanged exactly one e-mail in each direction), but I feel like I do, and that's very unusual for reading a book. I expected to come out of it knowing a lot about Bob Harris, and feel like I came out with much more. So that's a good deal.

It's a small world, and Trebekistan is an interesting and fun part of it. Go there. Buy the book.

The Island Blues

We decided to go away for the Thanksgiving holiday week to Cozumel to do some diving, and the song running through my head is an old Styx song that was popular when I was in college:

You've been working and saving for your Jamaican dream
Paradise is waiting across the sea
But when you plane lands, Montego turns to Monsoon
You've got the Island Blues

'Cause nothing ever goes as planned....

Indeed, Nature seemed to be inclined to thwart our plans to dive by blowing in a wind the locals call "El Norte." Great for kiteboarding, apparently, but it closed the port to small boats (such as those that take out divers).

OK, but hey, we're in the tropics, so we can just hang at the pool, maybe lie in a hammock under a palapa and read a book or snooze. Or not. Because that same lovely wind is blowing the ocean into wave that splash right up against the seawall at our hotel, splashing into the pool and soaking the hammocks. And did I mention it was windy? Like, all the time?

*sigh*

At least it was a pleasant 3-mile walk into town, so we got a little exercise each day, and had plenty of time to sample the cervezas and tequilas. And we could sit in our room and admire the big cruise ships that ate up much of the view.

But I can't complain. We were on vacation, and the hotel room was a nice enough place to nap or read, and there are a number of good restaurants in town that made it a bit less painful.

Eventually we rented a little car and drove it over to the other side of the island, which is the first time I'd been over there. We found a pleasant place to sit and watch the ocean and sip more of the cervezas and eat some fish tacos. Apparently, that side is usually the rough side, while the side with the tourist hotels is calm. But El Norte changes all that, so the east side is suddenly very quiet and pleasant, and we tourists all flee the west.

By now we've missed three of our planned five days of diving, and things are getting desperate, so we tell the dive shop that if the port is still closed the next day, we want to rent tanks and drive them over to the east side for some shore diving. Miraculously, when the port is still closed the next day, they have decided to organize a trip across the island, so at least we didn't have to schlep the tanks and weights over for ourselves, and they provided a dive guide.

The shore diving at Chen Rio and Punta Morena was OK, but unspectacular. It was nice to be in the water instead of just looking at it, anyway. The big win on the first dive was seeing a pegasus fish (sorry...I can't find a picture online that does it justice). Oddly, none of my references says they live there. Hmmmmm. Second dive, one of our buddies found the endemic splendid toadfish in a hole. So it wasn't a complete loss.

Finally on Thursday (Thanksgiving), the port was open, and we were able to do "real" Cozumel diving on the spectacular reefs of the west side. We got two dives on each of our last two days, so it wasn't a complete washout, but not nearly as much diving as we had planned.

On the other hand, we were able to channel some of our free time into locating things such as tasty lobster dinners for US$18, so I shan't complain too much.

More about the culture of Cozumel later.

Language and Government

Just saw a link to this speech by Ursula K. LeGuin. [hat tip to Jonathan Schwartz.]

I like the speech for a number of reasons, including its brevity and eloquence. But it also touches on the importance of literature, and the relation of that literature to government and freedom, including the inherent tension between government and literature:

Government and Literature, even when they share a palace, exist on different moral planes. Each is the ghost in the other's bedroom. A government can silence writers easily, yet Literature always escapes its control. Literature cannot control a government; poets, as poets, do not legislate. What they can do is set minds free of the control of any tyrant or demagogue and his lies and disinformation.

And indeed, it is the ability of writing to acquaint the mind with both the habits of thought that can detect tyrannical control and the knowledge of evil without the experience of it that make literature so critical to freedom. Governments manipulate language and ideas [Or as the journalist I.F. Stone notably said, "All governments lie...."], so it behooves us to understand that and learn to deal with it. And the key to that is using and learning about language.

This was one of the essential points made by John Milton in his classic treatise against censorship, Areopagitica (my emphasis):

Since, therefore, the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely and with less danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.

There are not a lot of phrases that stick with one over the years, and it has been nearly 30 years since I read Areopagitica in my high school Oral English class. But "the benefit...of books promiscuously read" stuck with me, and I think it fair to say that my reading habits qualify as reasonably promiscuous. So among the many debts of gratitude I owe to Mr. Dansky, the Oral English teacher, is that he forced a lot of us to read and comprehend Milton's rather difficult language, and to appreciate both the language and the lessons contained.

And one last note about Ms. LeGuin. I like her writing, although I have only read a few of her classic novels. But I have to note a small family connection. Ursula Kroeber (that's the "K.") grew up in Berkeley, California, where her father was a professor at the university. The anthropology building on the campus is named after him. One of her school classmates and close friends was my aunt Pat. I just think that's cool.

Anyway, go read something (besides this). It's good for you, and it's good for all of us.

Language and Rationality

Returning to one of my favorite subjects, civil discourse. I was just reading this fine post at Dr. Free-Ride's blog. Great discussion in the comments.

The issue, in this case, deals with a child saying a "bad word." The bad word in question is "bitch." Now, admittedly, in some contexts it would be entirely inappropriate for a kid to use that word, particularly if applied to a person, such as a classmate. Name-calling is not good.

On the other hand, the child in question apparently didn't know the word. It was spelled (incorrectly), and the child pronounced it, at which point someone tattled, and stupidity ensued.

This brings me to two points:

1. Intention is key. A word is not a "bad" word if it is merely pronounced. You'd think from the administrative reaction to this event that merely invoking the word "bitch" would cause one of the Ancient Great Ones to manifest on the spot (which would probably make dog shows a lot more interesting to the layman, but I digress) or something equally dramatic. The child in question didn't call someone a bitch, just said the word.
   
2. Context is also key. Clearly there are times when using the word "bitch" is useful, appropriate, and correct (e.g., the aforementioned dog show) and inoffensive. And in other cases, such as when applied to human animals, it might be offensive (although I'm unclear how this makes it a bad word). I can think of other words that have no useful, correct, inoffensive uses (though I'm finding it amusing to try). But somehow, making it a punishable offense to say the proper names of certain female animals, free of context, seems absurd.

And ultimately, where I'm going with this: There really are no bad words. To paraphrase my second-amendment-booster friends in defense of the first amendment:

Words don't offend people. People offend people using words.

Words are like guns and bullets (more like bullets in this context, but I think this simile is going to be dangerously overextended if I pursue this): they are useful tools that can be used for good or evil (and a huge range of other things in between), but they have no intrinsic value. It is we humans who employ and interpret them that determine goodness and badness.

Overreaction seems to be what we do best these days. As my scuba instructor used to say, "Stop. Breathe. Think." Good advice in many contexts.

Election Day: Progress By Regression

How cool...that image looks just like the little sticker I got for voting.

Anyway, the best news is that not only did I vote (and apparently there was a mid-morning "rush," as all four little carrels were in use, with at least one person waiting), but I voted with a paper ballot! Apparently this time, unlike in the primary in June, we scrounged up enough scanners.

And the poll workers had a good attitude, chuckling as they handed me my "voting device," which looked suspiciously like a black ballpoint pen, and my privacy shroud, which strongly resembles a manila file folder. Cool.

So I voted. The way it should be, with human interaction. There's a paper trail. I even have the torn-off tops of my ballots so I can prove it.

And I have a little sticker, of course. Very important.

Make sure you get your sticker, too. Vote!

ARGH!!!!!

Note: No one actually needs or wants to read this. I'm just venting. Go on about your lives: I'll be fine. Really.

OK, so I get that there isn't truly such a thing as an uninterruptible power supply. I do. But would it be so hard for the beastie to somehow indicate that it was no longer functioning as even a momentary backup to cover for glitches in our fine (and normally dependable) electrical power? A light, a beep, an e-mail, a wink, a nod...SOMETHING??? Is that so much to ask?

The "UPS" on my desktop system appears to be defunct. We had some tiny tick in the power an hour or so ago; tiny enough that NOTHING in the house noticed except the one computer that I would most like to have continue running, thank you very much.

This is about the fourth time something like this has happened recently. That happens to be the computer most responsible for my current livelihood, and I would really appreciate it not crashing while I'm working on it. Apparently tomorrow I get to go shopping for a new UPS.

I'm going to bed.

Amen

This is right on.

Pretty much the only freedoms you lose are the ones you give away.

Watch your back.