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.