Northern Planets

Forty years ago

2009-07-20T07:16:00.003+10:00

Forty years ago today, the Apollo 11 Luna Lander touched down on the surface of the Moon. NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first two people to walk on another astronomical body.

We could do this forty years ago. Today, would we have the passion or the technology?

Ankh-Morpork in the Jungle

2009-04-08T23:52:00.002+10:00

There are some amazing parallels between Terry Pratchett's Ankh-Morpork and Papua New Guinea. Jim Austin's tales of being an active member of the Royal Papua New Guinea Police Force in the 1980s attests to that.

We have the old, pre-'Guards Guards' Night Watch in action:

To call their procedures non-confrontational was an understatement. Both cops stood on the road and began hurling gravel on the roof.

The roofs were all corrugated iron in our neighborhood so the racket was deafening. The idea was to alert the criminals to the presence of the police and then leave them a convenient escape route. In this case they could run out the back door, scamper over the fence and be gone. It worked. After ten minutes of rock throwing the police entered the house in a tentative manner and sure enough, no criminals. Now was my chance to join this cadre of crime fighting professionals.

And a touch of the old Night Watch, when it was run by street monsters:

When I finally climbed up the bank I saw Andy with his shotgun about halfway up the nose of the evil driver's passenger. The driver himself was in a fetal position on the road where four of PNG's finest were vigorously putting the boots to him.

It was sort of like a Rodney King deal without the caring gentility of the LAPD. Eventually the cops tired of stomping our suspect and tossed him and his pal into a waiting paddy wagon. On the way home I advised Andy to have an ambulance waiting for us at the station as I was sure our man was severely injured if not dead.

PNG highlanders still retained a strong element of traditional dwarfish clang:

[I] returned to see Andy in heated discussion with the head man. He was demanding that all of the men leave their spears behind before they entered the town.

The head man argued that the spears were merely ceremonial and were necessary to complete their tribal dress.

Traditional Ankh-Morpork activities are a big part of life in the PNG highlands:

The road was blocked with oil drums, logs and boulders. On the other side of this barrier were about 1000 screaming people and two flatbed trucks whose beds were crammed with so many people that the tire were virtually flat and going nowhere. We all stepped out and Appelis, our regular force member parlayed with some of the more prominent members of the mob.

The problem was that everyone wanted to board a PMV to get to town to see the dead politician and take part in the traditional rioting and sacking of the town. By the time the PMV's got to their part of the highway they were already full and just sped by the growing crowd.

And my favourite line in the story?

Most PNG mechanics know that six lug nuts on a rim is a waste of four

If you like that story, there are more by the author here.

Looks like April Fools but aren't

2009-04-02T22:30:00.002+11:00

Wikipedia's "In The News" for April 1st looks like it's nothing but April Fools pranks, but in fact all the stories are true -- despite Faux News' usual quality reporting:

Every item on the home page of the user-generated site Wikipedia is fake. The featured article is about the "Museum of Bad Art" in Boston. The headlines include such stories as NASA monitoring diamonds falling from the sky and the Irish prime minister streaking in public — both of which barely stretch real recent news events.

In fact every one of those is a legitimate, real news story. The April's Fools prank was to fool people into thinking the stories were pranks:

Ireland's Taoiseach [President], Brian Cowen... is seen publicly naked in Dublin, following months of economic uncertainty.

NASA reports a shower of diamonds from the sky.

German scientists unearth a row of suckers belonging to an ancient order.

A revolutionary new online tanning service receives one million hits within two months of being established.

Henry Allingham of the United Kingdom credits cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women for his seemingly impossible longevity.

A newspaper discovers that pay-per-view porn is amongst a number of unusual things being purchased by British MPs on their claimed expenses.

The merging of Hartford and New Orleans is found to have severe environmental consequences.

For those who don't know their US geography, Hartford, Connecticut is about 1424 miles away from New Orleans, Louisiana.

The real stories:

The nekkid Taoiseach: an artist snuck naked portraits of Brian Cowen into two of Ireland's most prestigious art galleries.

The NASA shower of diamonds: a meteor that exploded over the Sudan included nano-diamonds in the fragments remaining.

Row of suckers: the discoveries of three ancient extinct octopus species.

Online tanning service: a viral PR campaign to alert people of the dangerous of tanning salons.

Cigarettes 'n' whisky: Britain's oldest man, and the oldest surviving World War One veteran, really did credit his longevity on cigarettes, whiskey, wild women... and a good sense of humour.

Politician claiming pr0n expenses: Come on now, are you really surprised?

And the merger of Hartford and New Orleans actually refers to the collision of two ships.

Wikipedia's "On this day" for 1st of April are amusing too. Go check them out here.

Conan versus the Copyright Lawyers

2009-03-30T23:30:00.000+11:00

Copyright was invented to encourage the production of works of art and literature (not necessarily fine literature -- even pulp novels have their place in a society). Well, technically the original copyright law was intended as a form of censorship: it was a bribe from the British government to the book publishers guild, giving them a monopoly on books so long as they didn't publish anything that the government and church didn't like, and were vigorous in stomping hard on anybody who did. But putting that aside, modern copyright law was created with the motive to promote the useful arts and sciences. The intention is that since the creation of a work of art is of doubtful profitability, since an author could spend months or years creating a work only to have some other publisher copy it and make the profit, society as a whole is better off if we grant that author a limited monopoly on the publishing of said work. The good to society (more works of arts and sciences) was the intention, the author's profit, if any, merely the mechanism to get that good.

An admirable intention, but over the centuries, it has become corrupted by the involvement of corporate interests. Copyright law is now, de facto, treated as a method for the promotion of profit. The emphasis is on the copyright owner's profit, rather than the benefit to society. The historical record is unclear on whether copyright ever really did lead to more works being produced, but it seems clear to me that today copyright is a barrier to be overcome rather than a tool for the promotion of useful arts.

From New Zealand comes an example of how copyright law is used to reduce rather than increase the amount of useful arts available to society. Copyright law in New Zealand lasts for fifty years after the death of the author, and consequently Robert E. Howard's Conan The Barbarian stories are in the public domain. The New Zealand non-profit, all-volunteer website BrokenSea Audio produces audio dramas based on Howard's work.

Alas, the Conan stories are not in the public domain in the US, where the monopoly on Howard's work is owned by a corporation, and they see New Zealand's volunteer, non-profit Howard fan as a threat to their bottom line:

All Conan audio dramas and audio books produced by its volunteers have been removed from the website, and a major project — a production of Howard's only full length Conan novel, Hour Of The Dragon, which Mannering had adapted into a full cast audio drama script — has been cancelled.

We see this over and over again: copyright law being used to reduce the amount of useful arts produced, instead of increasing it.

The inhuman Flash vulnerability

2009-03-30T21:04:00.003+11:00

A reliable security exploit for Flash is big news, or at least it should be big news, because Flash is on nearly every graphical browser on nearly every operating system, and there's only one supplier. (Sure, there's Gnash, but that's not yet ready for prime-time, and may never be.) A good exploit against Flash could allow Bad People to p0wn nearly every desktop everywhere. So even though this is a year old, this is still important.

Cyberdyne Systems, er, sorry, IBM researcher Mark Dowd demonstrated an incredible vulnerability that allows a single Trojan to exploit Flash in either IE or Firefox while leaving the Flash runtime operating normally. And it can bypass Vista security. Although Dowd doesn't explicitly mention other OSes, I see no reason to believe the same technique wouldn't work on Linux as well.

Start with the vulnerability.

It’s an integer overflow, but not a simple one.
...
The net result of this silliness is that it’s hard to do what attackers normally do with a write32 vulnerability, which is to clobber a function’s address with a pointer back to their buffer, so that their shellcode is called when the clobbered function is called. So Dowd’s exploit takes things in a different direction, and manipulates the ActionScript bytecode state.
...
Clobber the right value in the length table, and you can make an unused bytecode instruction that the verifier ignores seem much longer than it is. The “extra” bytes slip past the verifier. But they don’t slip past the executive, which has no idea that the unused bytecode has trailing bytes. If those trailing bytes are themselves valid bytecode, Flash will run them. Unverified. Giving them access to the whole system stack. Game over.

Security is hard.

Early morning walk

2009-03-25T08:35:00.003+11:00

I'm normally a night-owl, but once in a blue moon I wake up unassisted at a very early time. Today was such a day: I woke before daylight, read my email, and just after first light decided to go for an early morning stroll around the neighbourhood.

It had been raining just before I went out, so everything was damp, the air was clean and moist, the temperature was just perfect -- not too hot, not too cold. To the west, the sky was completely covered by the sort of grey rain clouds that I love, with a double rainbow appearing over the houses: a broad but short rainbow with clear pastel colours, and a second, fainter, narrow rainbow by its side. To the south I could see three hot air balloons serenely floating off in the distance. To the east, the sun was barely peeking out from behind the clouds, just enough for there to be patches of blue and yellow visible against a backdrop of grey-and-white clouds. Flocks of random birds wheeled across the sky, and right nearby a half-dozen or so brilliantly coloured wild parrots of some kind feasted on a fig tree. If only I could have reached the figs myself :(

The only downside is that it was the start of peak-hour traffic, so the main roads were busy busy busy, and even the side-streets had traffic going by. Can't you people telecommute or something? But apart from that, it was glorious.

I must do it again next year.

Fashion adverts

2009-03-24T22:03:00.000+11:00

One of Melbourne's biggest (or at least most pretentious) department stores, David Jones, has started running a massive advertising campaign for something call "Industrie". I can't find a copy of the advertisements I see on the backs of buses everywhere, but this will give you an idea of what they look like:

In the adverts, the female model is standing behind the shirtless male model and quite obscured, the background is black instead of light grey, and the words "David Jones" and "Industrie" are written in the appropriate corporate fonts. That's about it.

Pop quiz: what are they selling? Has David Jones perhaps started their own chain of tattoo parlours?

Answer: what they're actually selling is dreams and illusions, but the product they're selling is menswear. To be precise, Industrie is a "youth-oriented menswear fashion brand". Yes, that's right, the way they are promoting men's clothing is to show a male model not wearing any of the clothing they're selling.

If your brain hasn't just shut down in self-defence, then you've drunk the fashion Kool-aid (in a nice raspberry flavour, peach being so last year) and there's no hope for you.

Another question: given that David Jones has presumably sunk millions into the promotion, why can't I find anything about it on their website? Why can't I find copies of their advertisement campaign on the net?

(For more photos, see here .)

Ex-Bush official confirms innocents at Gitmo

2009-03-22T17:17:00.005+11:00

If it wasn't obvious by now, it should be: most of the people rounded up and jailed without charge at Guantanamo Bay were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Retired Army colonel and former chief of staff to the then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, Lawrence B. Wilkerson, told The Associated Press last Thursday that many of the detainees were innocent men, and that there was no meaningful attempt by US forces to distinguish actual terrorists from civilians.

Not only were they unable to separate civilians from fighters, but they had no desire to. Wilkerson revealed that he learned from military commanders that they had determined early on that the men were innocent, but decided to keep them imprisoned regardless: "It did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance." [Emphasis added.]

Wilkerson wrote, "U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released." Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney prevented the situation from being addressed, because "to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership."

Wilkerson also confirmed that many detainees had no connection to either the Taliban or to al-Qaida, and had been turned in for the $5,000 per head reward money.

Of the 800-odd prisoners at Guantanamo, of which 240 remain, Wilkerson claimed that two dozen are actual terrorists. (That's a ratio of over 32 innocents per terrorist.) He also revealed that the US government couldn't try them even if they wanted to, "because we tortured them and didn't keep an evidence trail."

More here.

This is a good time to remember that while President Obama has promised to close Guantanamo Bay, he has so far refused to do the same for the even more secret Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Not only has Obama refused to close Bagram, or open it to oversight, or at least to trials, but there are plans to increase the number of people disappeared into the secret prison.

Holy hand grenade!

2009-03-22T11:29:00.001+11:00

From the Department of You Can't Be Too Careful, a British pub was evacuated after workmen came across a prop from the 1975 movie "Monty Python And The Holy Grail". Bomb disposal experts were called in to inspect the "Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch", and declared it safe after nearly an hour.

Left: the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch; Right: the Holy Hand Grenade Whoopee Cushion.

Another earthquake

2009-03-18T23:42:00.000+11:00

Australia is usually one of the most geologically stable continents, and yet less than two weeks after the last earthquake, Melbourne experienced another one.

According to Professor Malcolm Wallace from the earth sciences department at Melbourne University, today's earthquake was likely an aftershock from the one twelve days ago, and the chances are that there will be a few more aftershocks. However, Professor Wallace does not believe that we're at any greater risk of a large earthquake.

Where has all the money gone?

2009-03-17T01:16:00.001+11:00

The CEO of the Blackstone Group, Stephen Schwarzman, has claimed that over the last eighteen months 40-45% of the wealth in the world has been lost.

Lost? How can people lose trillions of dollars? Did they check behind the sofa or in their spare pants? Did some super-villain break into Fort Knox and teleport all the gold away? Perhaps they put it in a Swiss bank vault and lost the key and now can't get it back.

No, the reality is that most of the money lost never really existed -- it was all in our heads, and by "our" I actually mean mostly the jokers on Wall Street and bankers and crooks like Bernie Madoff. These guys fooled themselves that they were producing value when all they were doing was shuffling electrons in computers: a shell game, a confidence trick, where so long as everybody stays confident we don't notice the trick. Money is, when you get right down to it, a shared illusion, and often based on some really weird ideas too. Gold, too soft to make into either swords or plowshares, is considered valuable, while good clean air, without which we sicken and die in as little as minutes, is valueless.

Another example of the illusion of money is the diamond trade. Diamonds never wear out, they don't rot or break down. Almost without exception, virtually every gem-quality diamond every found still exists. Every year, the total pool of diamonds available in the market continues to increase. In truth, diamonds are not really that rare, and getting less rare every year. By the accepted laws of economics (to say nothing of common sense), diamonds should depreciate in value. But they don't. Under the cunning marketing of De Beers, diamonds are massively over-valued relative to the number of diamonds potentially available. De Beers' genius was to convince people for the last half century to buy diamonds, but not sell them. And now, with a Depression looming, they fear that this massive stockpile of diamonds may suddenly re-enter the market, flooding the market for diamonds and causing the price to crash drastically.

This is what happens when you value something under the assumption that it is far rarer and more precious than it really is. Sound familiar? Tulip mania, the South Seas bubble, the dot-com boom, the various housing bubbles, Worldcom, Enron... the list goes on and on.

By the way... what's wrong with Forbes? How can a magazine with their reputation write something as ridiculously stupid as this?

In 1920, Charles Ponzi, an Italian immigrant, began advertising that he could make a 50% return for investors in only 45 days. Incredibly, Ponzi began taking in money from all over New England and New Jersey. By July of 1920, he was making millions as people mortgaged their homes and invested their life savings. As with all frauds, he was discovered to have a jail record and was indicted on 86 counts of fraud. Some tens of millions of dollars were invested with him.

(Emphasis added.)

All frauds have a jail record? How can they make this claim in an article about a fraud with no previous jail record?

(I was also interested to see that Wikipedia seems to suggest that all financial futures are martingales. If this is the case, and I haven't misunderstood something, then futures are mathematically guaranteed to lose money in the long term.)

Schultz City

2009-03-16T22:07:00.002+11:00

Thanks to ninjaink at DeviantArt, what if Frank Miller wrote Peanuts?

You can see the whole image here, or visit ninjaink's page here.

WikiLeaks cracks secret Pentagon documents

2009-03-11T01:05:00.004+11:00

News from Wikileaks:

Wikileaks has cracked the encryption to a key document relating to the war in Afghanistan. The document, titled "NATO in Afghanistan: Master Narrative", details the "story" NATO representatives are to give to, and to avoid giving to, journalists.

The news doesn't seem hugely interesting: NATO lies, the Pentagon lies, they try to manage journalists to spread the message they want spread rather than the truth. Well duh. After eight years of Dubyah and his propaganda, anyone surprised by this is terminally stupid.

There are two bits of interest though: the password cracked by Wikinews was... "progress". Yes, that's right, the best and brightest NATO and the Pentagon can hire are utterly clueless about choosing passwords. Ain't it grand?

The other bit of interest is that the documents reveal that Jordan is secretly part of the US occupation forces, the ISAF. I'm sure that won't go down well in the Middle East.

Why loony leftists matter

2009-03-10T22:42:00.005+11:00

The consequences of giving power to the far-left -- whether the loonies in the London city council, Politically-Correct socialists in the ivory tower of macademia[1] or the genocidal criminals in Soviet Russia and Cambodia -- has been baneful and calamitous. As James Wimberley of the Reality Based Community says:

The record of these people in power is so disastrous that it would be tempting to wish them gone, as has more or less happened in the USA. Tempting but wrong. Like the gene for sickle-cell anaemia, the far left plays a useful irritating and balancing role, so long as it stays in a permanent minority.

I'm a great believer in the value, no, the necessity, of a few irritating trouble-makers, malcontents and enfants terrible who can stop us from becoming complacent, arrogant and self-satisfied. In the late 1800s and first few decades of the 1900s, capitalism was scared of communist revolution. Marxism was still a vigorous intellectual paradigm. The workers were flexing their muscles and demanding improved working conditions, better conditions and a measure of justice. Consequently, those hard-hearted and selfish capitalist leaders feared for their profits and their lives, and (eventually, reluctantly) modified their behaviour, and so the 20th century saw massive improvements in quality of life for those who weren't at the top of the social pyramid: pensions, universal health insurance and education, the 40 (or even 38) hour week, holiday pay, unfair dismissal laws and much more.

But in countries like the USA, where the masses turned their backs on unions and swallowed the lie that class warfare is by definition the lazy and envious poor against the deserving rich, things are very different. It seems like at least half the country -- even many of those going hungry because of medical expenses -- believes that having the government use its massive purchasing power to buy medicine at a discount is one tiny step away from outlawing private property and sending everyone to the gulag. Far-right wingers pose as centrists and moderate right-wingers are vilified as communists. Consequently, the fat cats in the capitalist classes have been behaving like the fox in the henhouse for decades now, with crisis following bubble every couple of years. Every crisis is followed by an even bigger one, and those perpetrating the disasters get rewarded each time. After losing inconceivably large amounts of money, the banks have gone to the US government begging for bailouts. No social safety net for the tellers, but the CEOs and executives get to give themselves massive pay rises.

And why not? What have they got to be scared of? The working class in the US is convinced that all they need is a couple of lucky breaks and they too will be as rich as Bill Gates, or at least comfortably middle-class, when the reality is that income inequality has exploded over the last thirty years. It's not clear whether the current economic crisis will level things out again, or simply punish those who work for a living while allowing the mega-rich even more opportunity to buy up assets. A lot will depend on moral outrage, and very few people do moral outrage over pigs-at-the-trough like old-school leftists. So let's give three cheers for the Loyal Opposition of Loony Leftists, may they prosper, but not too much, just enough to keep the bastards honest.

[1] Caution: May Contain Nuts. Back

Perverse incentives

2009-03-10T20:43:00.000+11:00

Bruce Schneier has written an article on perverse security incentives. The concept of a perverse incentive comes from economics, where it refers to an incentive that, deliberately or accidentally, rewards inefficient or bad behaviour.

Such "perversely" inefficient behaviour isn't necessarily bad. It's an economic term focusing on a single aspect of the human condition: a rather narrow view of economic efficiency. Spending money on taking Granny to the doctor instead of selling her to the glue factory would, according to some definitions, count as inefficient, and therefore love, loyalty, affection and kindness might be counted as "perverse incentives". This isn't a bad thing -- we'd all be a lot happier if we admitted that we're all pervs in one way or another, and besides it's not the job of economists to make value judgements. Their job is to tell us how efficiently we're spending, or making, money, and it's our job to make the value judgements that, all things considered, Gran's got a few more years left in the old bird, and besides one day we'll be that old too.

So remember that while perverse incentives are often harmful as well as inefficient, this isn't necessarily the case. Schneier discusses the case of a store who fired an employee for stopping a shop-lifter escaping with hundreds of dollars of stolen food. Sounds ridiculously stupid, yes? But not if you look at the big picture: a few hundred dollars worth of food is nothing compared to the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars the store could be liable for if the staff member tackled and injured an innocent customer, or if the thief pulled out a weapon and killed somebody. As Schneier explains (and so many of the commenters on the blog fail to grasp), "You Will Not Attack Shop-Lifters" is a security measure: it protects the store against worse consequences than a backpack full of groceries being stolen.

For the same reason, banks typically have a strict No Heroics rule. It's not worth the life of a teller to save the insurance company from suffering a slightly lower profit in one quarter. This sort of economic reasoning comes hard to most people. It comes hard to me -- even knowing all the reasons why it would be stupid to put yourself in danger for somebody else's profit, the very thought that thieves are getting something for nothing offends every fibre of my being[1]. As a species, we have a deep hatred of cheaters who break the social contract (unless it is Us breaking the contract against Them -- we're a moral species, but also a hypocritical species).

[1] As a 19 year old, when I was young and invincible, one of my fellow uni students and I almost walked into a bank robbery in progress at a bank on Melbourne University campus. We saw these two masked gunmen, and came *this close* to deciding to tackle them when they came out of the bank. Fortunately, we decided to walk around the building once first, and if the robbers were still there, then we would tackle them. They weren't. Back

Whatever happened to bin Laden's Super-Fortress?

2009-03-09T23:53:00.007+11:00

In the lead-up to the US invasion of Afghanistan, there was a lot of press about Osama bin Laden's super-fortress buried deep under the mountain of Tora Bora. The British press told us that bin Laden was holed up in a vast redoubt, a fortress buried as deep under the mountain as the World Trade Centre was high, powered with its own hydroelectric generators, housing 2,000 fanatical fighters and equipped with at least one Russian tank in perfect working order.

This story caught the imagination of the press corps, especially when the basic claims were repeated by American officials such as Donald Rumsfeld.

In December 2001 Afghan mujahadeen forces attacked the "impenetrable" fortress, assisted by American and British air-strikes and a small number of American, British and German special forces. According to Time Magazine, the battle cost the lives of one mujahadeen and seven Taliban fighters. Afterwards, American troops combed the mountain for bin Laden. No fortress was discovered, no hydroelectric generators, no massive hotel housing thousands of fighters, and no Russian tank.

They did however find a tube of deodorant.

(On a related note: Edward Jay Epstein also casts serious doubt on the box-cutter story from 9/11.)

Did the earth move for you too?

2009-03-06T21:17:00.003+11:00

(Update, Monday 9th March: I seem to have forgotten to actually publish this post. Oops.)

Just before 9pm tonight Melbourne experienced an earthquake measuring 4.6 on the Richter Scale. There was no serious damage reported.

Mrs Impala and I were home when the entire house wobbled -- it was a fascinating and exciting experience to have a solid brick house built on a concrete slab wobble like jelly on a plate for two or three seconds. I'm glad it was only a minor earthquake, almost one hundred kilometres away from my house, and apparently 8km deep under ground. It certainly puts you in awe at the power of moving tectonic plates -- and Australia is an ancient, quiet continent, far from active. I can't imagine the forces involved in the Ring of Fire.

My cat came into the house just moments before, and sat calmly in the middle of the living room during the quake. My chickens slept through the whole thing, and the next door neighbours' hell-hounds were quiet. My mum's dog and cat were also surprised by it. Talk about mysterious animal senses...

Happy Darwin Day

2009-02-12T21:05:00.004+11:00

Hello to all. After a seven month absence I have returned. I'd like to explain my absence with a tale of derring-do, of frontiers crossed and mountains scaled and disasters averted, of femmes fatale and gangsters and wild ambulance rides and desperate last stands, but the honest truth is that I've just been busy with ordinary life. Sigh.

Today is the bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth. Happy 200th birthday to him! (It's also Abraham Lincoln's 200th.)

It's astounding that, in the year 2009, more than one in two people in the USA don't accept the reality of biological evolution. This is the cause of, and is caused by, the politicisation of biology by religious fundamentalists: evolution has been, for well over half a century, a convenient whipping boy to rally the troops. Opposition to a scientific theory has become a good defining characteristic of a certain type of fundamentalist. It's relatively safe and easy too: it doesn't require you give up your DVD player or plasma TV, like the Amish do, or avoid medical treatment like followers of so-called "Christian Science" do.

While Darwin's contributions to biology are eminently worthy of respect and even celebration, I don't think the plans for Darwin Day are entirely innocent. After all, there's little or no serious movement towards celebrating Sir Isaac Newton's birthday (25th December), or Maxwell's, or Einstein's, or any other noted scientist. I think that there is a little bit of cocking a snook at the Fundamentalists here. They've spent decades demonising Darwin, and I'm sure a lot of people (myself included) wouldn't be too unhappy to see the fundies squirm over Darwin Day. But I think it is important to remember that Darwin never sought controversy, and although he became an atheist himself, he wasn't a militant one. He never begrudged his wife Emma's faith, and he deliberately held off publishing his theory as long as possible because of his concerns that it would upset people.

So, for Darwin Day, some links on why Darwin is important.

From the Guardian:

There can be no such equivocation in the week of a survey which showed that only around half of all Britons accept that Darwin's theory of evolution is either true or probably true. In a democracy, citizens should respect each other's beliefs; and citizens have a right to express their beliefs. But in a democracy, a newspaper has an obligation to what is right. The truth is that Darwin's reasoning has in the last 150 years been supported overwhelmingly by discoveries in biology, geology, medicine and space science. The details will keep scientists arguing for another 200 years, but the big picture has not changed. All life is linked by common ancestry, including human life. The shameful lesson of this 200th anniversary of his birth is that Darwin's contemporaries understood more clearly than many modern Britons.

Jerry Coyne on why Darwin is still important, 150 years after Origin Of Species:

Darwin had far more influence on modern evolutionary research than Newton has on work in modern physics. In fact, in no other area of science has a research program suggested by one person lasted for a century and a half. ...

But some biologists, chafing in their Darwinian straitjacket, periodically announce new worldviews that, they claim, will overturn our view of evolution, or at least force its drastic revision. During my career I have heard this said about punctuated equilibrium, molecular drive, the idea of symbiosis as an evolutionary force, evo-devo, and the notion that evolution is driven by the self-organization of molecules. Some of these ideas are worthwhile, others simply silly; but none do more than add a room or two to the Darwinian manse. Often declared dead, Darwinism still refuses to lie down.

(A small aside: Richard Dawkins has a glowing review of Coyne's book Why Evolution Is True. One for the shopping list, methinks.)

And Darwin fan-grrl Soupytwist has written a short, sweet and kick-arse post about her attitude to Darwin and his theory:

It's about seeing the world for what it is, not for what we might percieve it to be, and seeing the actual underlying processes underneath: processes at once so simple and so far-reaching that they boggle the mind.

I mean, "things that survive are the ones who get to pass on attributes to the next generation" seems pretty obvious, really. But as simple as that idea is, it really wasn't obvious, not in the face of a world where basically everybody thought species were created immutable, and absolutely not before we knew there was definitely such a thing as DNA which might provide the actual mechanics of the whole thing.

On a related note, if anybody tries to tell you that Darwin recanted his theory on his deathbed and returned to Christianity, don't be fooled. It simply isn't true.

UPDATE: thanks to Mrs Impala for her l33t editing and proof-reading skills, and the link to Soupytwist.

Electricity from footsteps

2008-06-28T00:05:00.003+10:00

I like this idea -- it's thinking outside the box. British engineers are working on a plan to use the footsteps of pedestrians to generate electricity.

The Times reports that the technology has already been successfully trialled and the firm behind it is in talks with supermarkets and railway stations. It works by using the footfall of pedestrians to compress pads under the floor, pushing fluid through turbines to generate electricity. Copy and paste this URL into your browser to see more:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4087518.ece [1]

According to the report, calculations suggest that the 34,000 train-travellers passing through London's Victoria Underground station every hour could generate enough electricity to power 6,500 lightbulbs.

[1] The Times' Terms and Conditions prohibit giving the newspaper free advertising by linking to pages on their website. Links are prohibited, but merely providing the URL is allowed. Stupid, isn't it? Back

Whatever happened to Osama bin Laden?

2008-06-27T22:47:00.000+10:00

Osama bin Laden seems to have gone from Most Wanted Man Alive to Care Factor Zero. President Bush, after swearing to bring bin Laden to justice, admitted some years ago that bin Laden was not a priority. But this interview with the late Benazir Bhutto is very interesting...

On 2nd November 2007, less than two months before she was assassinated, Benito gave an interview with David Frost where she talked about the people wanting to stop the democratic process in Pakistan, and her fear that they were involved in the previous assassination attempt against her and would try again. Six minutes into the video, Bhutto claims that bin Laden has been murdered. Frost didn't bother to question her about this: either he considers the murder of bin Laden old news, unimportant, or he's simply losing his mojo as an interviewer.

Bhutto clearly felt that she was at risk of assassination from Pakistani government forces. It's not clear why al Qaeda would have assassinated the opposition leader, if indeed it was al Qaeda: arguably they could have been motivated by pure misogamy, or perhaps they prefer having an anti-democratic military strong man in power.

Of course, this assumes that al Qaeda really was behind her assassination. It's not clear that al Qaeda is anything more than a convenient bogey-man for the US and Pakistani governments. It wouldn't be the first or the last time that a supposed revolutionary or terrorist group had been infiltrated by so many government agents that in fact there were no revolutionaries left in it. Once a government, or even part of a government, starts defining itself in terms of opposition to shadowy criminal figures, the temptation is very large to create such convenient scapegoats.

Big Brother is Watching

2008-06-27T22:17:00.000+10:00

How very apt...

(Click image for full sized image.)

At least the Spanish tell you when you're being filmed.

You can't have too many vowels

2008-06-27T08:05:00.002+10:00

Yesterday I received an email (as a C.C.) where the sender couldn't remember if the person he was writing to spelled his name "Neil" or "Neal", so he compromised with Neail.

That's very ... something.

Put what where now?

2008-06-22T23:21:00.002+10:00

Today I bought a jar of white Tiger Balm. The white variety isn't quite as hot or aromatic as the red, but I find it useful for headaches and nasal congestion.

I was amused to read the label:

Tiger Balm White for the symptomatic fast and effective relief for headaches, stuffy nose, insect bites, itchiness, muscular aches and pains, sprains and flatulence.

Apply Tiger Balm gently on the affected area.

Flatulence? Apply it where exactly?

Aussie drivers

2008-06-20T22:54:00.001+10:00

There are times that I wonder how some people get their driver's licence. Perhaps they get it from the back of a corn flake packet.

On the way to work this morning, I got stuck behind a driver doing 40kph in a 60 zone. (That's about 25 and 37mph for those who prefer imperial measurements.) Oh well, he's just a nervous nellie being cautious about revenue speed cameras -- or so I thought, until he approached a traffic light that turned red just ahead of him, and suddenly accelerated and ran the red light, well after the traffic on the cross road had already started moving.

I guess that's what happens when the government hammers in the message that "Speed Kills" while giving licences to anyone who can do a three-point parallel park on the fifth attempt. (Okay, I exaggerate a tad, but the driving tests seem to be far more concerned with proving you can park than seeing if you can drive safely in a range of conditions.) Bad driving, but slowly.

A little later, I was on a street with two right-hand turn lanes. (Note to those from forn parts: in Australia, we drive on the left hand side.) I was on the left-most turning lane, and as I went around the corner, the car to my right -- a different car -- completed his (her?) turn and immediately tried to do a sharp left turn to get to the petrol station. I can only assume he wanted to buy a Clue, or possibly even a brain, because I can't think of any other reason why anyone would do a left-hand turn from the right-hand lane in the middle of heavy morning traffic. He ended up almost pointed straight at me, and fortunately missed my car by centimetres. (That's less than inches, for those who prefer imperial units.)

Australian drivers don't have a reputation for skillful driving. We tend to be as car-mad as the Americans, without their compulsory Driver's Ed in school, and there is little or no effort made to enforce safe driving. There seems to be a widespread assumption that if you obey the posted speed limit (set by a committee which may not have even seen the street except on a map) and don't drink, then anything else you can do in a car is perfectly safe. Tailgate? Change lanes without indicating? Drive backwards down a one-way street with a lampshade on your head? Sure, why not? There's no Stupid Driver cameras, and hence no revenue to be made, so the police and government apparently don't care.

When psychics attack

2008-06-20T09:07:00.002+10:00

Orac from Respectful Insolence discusses what happens when zero tolerance meets psychics about :

You get the Child Protection Services called in to investigate the suspected (or should I say imaginary?) sexual abuse of her autistic daughter on the basis of a vision by a so-called psychic.

So this mother was reported to the authorities on the basis of a pinheaded, woo-loving, credulous teacher's aide who apparently regularly sought out the advice of psychics and even believed their B.S. I understand that the law probably seemed to leave the school authorities no choice in the matter. [...] The credulous insinuation of a moronic teacher's aide who believes in psychics must be treated exactly the same as a real allegation based on observations and evidence.

Fortunately for Colleen Leduc and her daughter, to say nothing of her fiancé, she had recently equipped her daughter with a GPS unit that made a continuous audio recording of everything that happened to her daughter, and this proved that nothing untoward had happened to her daughter.

And the reason she had bought the GPS unit in the first place? She had become tired of the school repeatedly losing her daughter.

The Internet is how old?

2008-06-20T08:09:00.003+10:00

Bill Gates recently visited South Korea, where he declared that the Internet was ten years old. Richi Jennings commented:

Tell that to the National Science Foundation, who switched on the Internet as we know it today in 1983, migrating from the old ARPANET, which had been going since 1969.

He can’t possibly mean the Web, as that’s been going for over 15 years. He can’t even mean Internet Explorer — the first version of which was released in 1994.

Bill Gates was famously slow to notice the Internet. It barely got a mention in the first edition of his book The Road Ahead, although history was extensively revised in the second edition. But surely even Gates remembers Windows 95?

Deathless prose

2008-06-20T00:24:00.001+10:00

This piece of deathless prose is worthy of winning a Bulwer-Lytton Award:

"Had it persevered - if awful chance had decreed that it escape from the quicksand as nightfall closed in over that foetid marsh, neither Colonel Jameson or Jim Tressidy or anybody in Horton's Crossing or camped in the adjacent hills would have survived to greet Lieutenant Wade Castro when, shortly after dawn the next day, he reported, red-eyed through lack of sleep, to the officer who had received instructions to accompany him in the spacious helicopter waiting on the hard-core, clambered aboard, took the ungainly seeming machine to tree-top level, and, half an hour later, brought it down skilfully in the deserted town's main street within yards of Sheriff Regan's office - just as Colonel Jameson had instructed."

-- Victor Norwood, 'Night of the Black Horror'
(Quoted in "Ghastly Beyond Belief", by Neil Gaiman.)

(Thanks to Mrs Impala for digging this one out for me.)

Silent longing

2008-06-20T00:06:00.006+10:00

What a piece of work this guy is.

Last month, Sith Lord Benedict XVI declared that American Indians had been "silently longing" to be converted to Christianity by the Spanish Conquistadors 500 years ago, and had been seeking the god known only as God "without realizing it".

(One wonders how Emperor Popetine knows what was going through the minds of people from a foreign culture who died half a millenium ago? Oh wait, that's right, the god known only as God has made him infallible. That's what the Pope says, and he's infallible so he must be right.)

(Click image for full view.)

Losing the faith

2008-06-19T23:42:00.004+10:00

Over the last century, what's the most successfully growing religion? Is it evangelical Protestant Christianity? Islam? Scientology?

Trick question: the answer is actually not a religion at all. It is the faithless -- atheist, agnostic or simply "no religion" -- that has seen the largest, most sustained increase in numbers over the last century. From a minuscule 3.2 million people (0.2% of the globe) in 1990, the number of non-religious has sky-rocketed to almost a billion people world-wide in 2000, and continues to increase at the extraordinary rate of 8.5 million people per year. Worldwide, there are almost as many non-religious as Muslims, or as Hindu and Buddhist combined.

In the USA, the proportion of non-believers has increased from 1-2% in the 1940s and 50s to 9% today, with a further 12% saying they are not sure. At a growth rate of more than tenfold, the raise of atheism and agnosticism far outpaces even the growth in Mormonism and Pentecostalism.

There are now 30 million American atheists, far outnumbering American Jews, Muslims and Mormons combined. They outnumber Southern Baptists, and gaining new recruits every day.

In "Why the Gods Are Not Winning", Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman write:

To put it starkly, the level of popular religion is not a spiritual matter, it is actually the result of social, political and especially economic conditions (please note we are discussing large scale, long term population trends, not individual cases). Mass rejection of the gods invariably blossoms in the context of the equally distributed prosperity and education found in almost all 1st world democracies. There are no exceptions on a national basis. That is why only disbelief has proven able to grow via democratic conversion in the benign environment of education and egalitarian prosperity. Mass faith prospers solely in the context of the comparatively primitive social, economic and educational disparities and poverty still characteristic of the 2nd and 3rd worlds and the US.

[...]

The practical implications are equally breath taking. Every time a nation becomes truly advanced in terms of democratic, egalitarian education and prosperity it loses the faith. It's guaranteed. That is why perceptive theists are justifiably scared. In practical terms their only practical hope is for nations to continue to suffer from socio-economic disparity, poverty and maleducation. That strategy is, of course, neither credible nor desirable. And that is why the secular community should be more encouraged.

Even the fear, uncertainty and doubt following Sept 11 didn't put a dint in the rapidly increasing secularization of the world. Church attendance increased immediately after the tragedy, and then fell back to previous levels, and continue to fall. America has seen its first openly atheist Congressman, something which just two years ago I didn't think I'd live long enough to see.

And even among the religious, belief is becoming more liberal and less virulent: in the US since 1972, liberal religion has grown at a significantly faster rate than Fundamentalist religion.

We're still along way away from a world where people stop clinging to myths, but despite the priests and the mullahs, every day we get a little closer.

Monster parents

2008-06-19T23:07:00.002+10:00

The Times describes the rise of a new class of "monster parents" in Japan:

The stage was set, the lights went down and in a suburban Japanese primary school everyone prepared to enjoy a performance of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The only snag was that the entire cast was playing the part of Snow White.

For the audience of menacing mothers and feisty fathers, though, the sight of 25 Snow Whites, no dwarfs and no wicked witch was a triumph: a clear victory for Japan's emerging new class of “Monster Parents”.

For they had taken on the system and won. After a relentless campaign of bullying, hectoring and nuisance phone calls, the monster parents had cowed the teachers into submission, forcing the school to admit to the injustice of selecting just one girl to play the title role.

(No link for the Times, as their Terms and Conditions prohibit linking to anything but their home page. However, they don't prohibit telling what the URL is, just linking, so feel free to copy and paste this URL into your browser:

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article4083278.ece

Remember kids, with a law degree you too can be paid the big dollars to write stupid, unenforceable documents.)

Sagan's dragon

2008-06-19T20:01:00.004+10:00

The late Carl Sagan once declared that he has a fire-breathing dragon living in his garage:

"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle -- but no dragon.

"Where's the dragon?" you ask.

"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."

And for every test that the skeptic proposes, Sagan had an excuse for why the test won't detect the dragon. It floats in the air; it's incorporeal; the flame it blows is heatless; and so on.

Naturally Sagan didn't actually believe he has a dragon in his garage, but he was making a point about religion and the invisible, incorporeal god that many people believe is in their garage. Instead of gathering evidence to support the idea of the dragon in the garage, believers insist that we accept the existence of such an invisible, soundless, heatless, incorporeal, undetectable dragon unless it is disproved. But of course it cannot be disproved, because there's an excuse for every failure.

Under normal circumstances, we treat the failure to find expected evidence as almost as good as positive evidence. In a murder trial, the failure to find gunpowder residue on the accused shooter can legitimately cast doubt on the claim he was the shooter. But such negative evidence is only useful when there is a clear-cut pass or fail. You can't accuse somebody of shooting the victim, and then when no evidence supports your accusation, turn around and say that the murdered must have used a special gunpowderless gun that fired invisible bullets that left no visible wounds.

God is invisible, that's why you can't see him.

In the face of such special pleading, then the failure to disprove the claim doesn't mean anything. There is no way to disprove the existence of god, because for every test there's always an excuse after the fact why it didn't work.

The game is always rigged, and you will lose if you play.

The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You'd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously?

(Thanks to PhillyChief.)

Believers will counter that of course they have positive evidence for their god. (It's evidently only other gods that are illusionary or mythical.) But the problem with the evidence given is that it either has other explanations ("see, there are no elephants living in my garage, because the dragon ate them"), or that it's entirely subjective. Your epiphany is my bad burrito -- and contrariwise, the awe and sense of wonder I have when I contemplate dirt is a never-ending source of amusement for Mrs Impala and her friends. (Some people hug trees. I play with dirt. If rocks are the bones of the Earth, then dirt, earth, is the flesh. Carl Sagan famously said we are all star-stuff, but the star-stuff had to become dirt before it became us.)

I can put my hands in the dirt, I can touch it and weigh it and dig it over, and if I treat it right, it will bring forth all manner of life. Perhaps that's the difference between religion and spirituality: spirituality is about subjective feelings related to real things, while religion is about subjective feelings about imaginary things.

It's good to be back

2008-06-19T18:07:00.002+10:00

Things have been really hectic and stressful at work, which has lead to me not having the time or energy to blog even semi-regularly. But things are starting to look up, so here I am again.

Let me start off with a bashism that caught my fancy:

omega: i like star trek because it's actually pretty realistic. the technology is fiction, but it follows real physics
Kuiper: In Star Trek, whenever there are torpedoes or phaser fire hitting a ship, you can hear the explosions even though they're in space. How is that "real physics?"
omega: in space, explosions are actually louder
omega: because there is no air to get in the way
omega: dumbass

Not all democracies are equal

2008-05-14T03:01:00.004+10:00

One of the defining myths of the second half of the 20th century, and the start of the 21st, is that by slapping the label "Democratic" on a system of government, it magically becomes good.

It's part of the lazy thinking that judges books by their cover, the self-satisfied idea that because we live in a democracy we can do no wrong, and of course it is cynically encouraged by the Bad Guys who know damn well that democracy just means you get to vote, not what happens either before or after the vote. People voted for the late, unlamented Saddam Hussein, and by memory he won 98% of the popular vote.

Saddam was a strong man who didn't feel the need to be subtle in his stealing of elections. In the West, we have a long tradition of quietly subverting the popular vote, from gerrymanders to super-delegates to outright ballot-stuffing. As Boss Tweed said, "I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating." Or for that matter, counting the votes. And if that fails, well, it's nice to have some friendly Supreme Court judges rule against the need to actually bother counting the votes. (In the words of Justice Scalia, counting the votes fairly and carefully would threaten "irreparable harm" to Bush "by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election." Got that? Actually having a fair election is a Bad Thing, because that would challenge Bush's public claim that he won in a fair election.)

But generally, despite the flaws, Western post-WW2 democracy manages to mostly be good, at least compared to dictatorships and faux-democracies in the developing world. More or less -- mostly more, with occasional less.

But the illusion that democracy implies goodness is dangerous. Over in Iraq, one of the former members of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), John Agresto, was tasked with rebuilding the country's education system. (Sadly, the CPA neglected to actually give him any money to do it with.) Agresto bitterly wrote:

America's been so successful at being a free and permanent democracy that we think democracy is the natural way to rule--just let people go and there you have it: Democracy. But all the ingredients that make it good and free--limited government, separation of powers, checks and balances, calendared elections, staggered elections, plurality selection, differing terms of office, federalism with national supremacy, the development of a civic spirit and civic responsibility, and above all, the breaking and moderating of factions--all this we forgot about. We act is if the aim is "democracy" simply and not a mild and moderate democracy. Therefore...we seek out the loudest and most virulent factions and empower them...

We, as a country, don't have a clue as to what has made our own country work, and so we spread the gospel of democracy-at-all-costs abroad. Until this country can find a Madison, it would be far better off with just a good ruler.

[Emphasis added.]

Dissecting an apologist

2008-05-13T09:03:00.004+10:00

Avram Grumer from Making Light has written about yet another abuse of power by sad, angry little Hitlers. The details aren't terribly unexpected: young people meet at the Jefferson Memorial to celebrate Jefferson's birthday; humourless cops overstep their authority by ordering them to disperse for no reason; one young woman asks why; the cops rough her up and arrest her.

Grumer observes that "the primary mission of authority is to preserve authority", and notes that "knowing that almost anyone could be holding a video camera and their actions could wind up on YouTube, cops will still bully and assault people for refusing to instantly defer to arbitrary authority". But what's really interesting is Grumer's dissection of the apologist mindset:

[Megan McArdle's] comments section quickly fills with forelock-tuggers and knee-benders justifying the actions of the Park Police, even if they have to make up facts to do it. It’s practically a catalog of dishonest argumentation and propaganda. In fact, I think it’s useful to dissect the examples so that we can recognize them when we see similar arguments on the nation’s editorial pages. [...]

For example, a commenter named Jeff asks “If the Memorial is closed and people refuse to leave, why NOT arrest them for disorderly conduct?” — not aware that the memorial is open 24/7, too lazy to spend ten seconds on a Google search to check his facts, too lazy even to read the earlier comments where this had already been pointed out. When his mistake is rubbed in his face, Jeff adopts a faux-polite writing style and moves his goalposts. He argues first that the memorial is closed to certain kinds of events, of which group dancing might be one. (It might not, but hey, he doesn’t know, it might.) He later argues that since DC is a high-crime city, the Park Police have a legitimate concern, and even though it isn’t immediately clear, we need to grant them the benefit of the doubt. Of course, that’s totally ignoring the actual facts of the case — that the police didn’t arrest all the dancers, but merely the one who questioned their orders, and that the police offered no explanation for their actions. In Jeff’s mind, it’s only the authorities who get the benefit of the doubt. Ordinary citizens just have to obey orders.

Then we’ve got MarkG, who blames the dancers for appearing “odd”, and claims that “the police have to make a snap judgment about what to do”. Why exactly the police should need to make snap judgments in cases where no violence is occurring and no weapons or threat to life or limb are evident, that’s beyond me. Apparently, the fact that authorities sometimes unfortunately need to make snap judgments to preserve the lives of themselves or others means, in MarkG’s mind, that all judgments made by cops should be granted this same life-or-death importance.

There's a lot more:

The argument that if you're relying on society to provide you with safety, you shouldn't complain when it fails to do so.

The "they found you in contempt of cop -- no reprieve" argument.

The "only in this country" argument:

Only in this country can one march in the streets of the capital obnoxiously protesting “the oppression inherent in the system” without fear of retribution.

Grumer says:

I want to admire that paragraph. One sentence of not even thirty words, and it packs at least three propagandistic payloads. Let’s unpack them:
[...]
All of these tactics — the use of your ideals to overturn your trust in facts, the assertion of nebulous threats that justify arbitrary authority, the portrayal of protesters as lunatics, the claim that an all-encompassing bureaucracy has legitimate authority over our every breath and step, that you’ll be fine as long as you don’t “make trouble” — these tactics can be seen and heard every day wherever political discussion takes place. They’re the words with which once-free people talk themselves into tyranny.

A steampunk night out

2008-05-06T09:58:00.002+10:00

(Click image for full view.)

Water water everywhere

2008-05-04T19:42:00.003+10:00

Via Les the Stupid Evil Bastard, another article debunking the myth that people are chronically dehydrated and need to drink at least eight glasses of water a day.

Myths have consequences, and this myth leads to an absolutely enormous market in bottled water: $7.7 billion in the USA in 2002. In Australia, consumers bought 520 million litres in 2004, and at a growth rate of 20%, that's probably passed a billion litres this year. The water has to come from somewhere: often it's merely tap water stuck in a fancy bottle, but it's often shipped great distances, increasing the environmental harm done by the manufacture of all those billions of one-use-only throw-away plastic bottles. And it frequently doesn't make economic sense either: the water companies have enough muscle to distort the market. For example, in the middle of a long-lasting drought in Victoria, a subsidiary of Coca-Cola has a permit to buy aquifer water at one quarter of one percent of the market rate for water: $2.40 per megalitre, compared to $960 per megalitre for tap water.

The Sydney Morning Herald wrote:

The 750ml size remained the same - people want a big drink these days. And as many people say they find it hard to drink the recommended two litres of water a day, Frucor brought in flavoured - but still colourless - waters to relieve the monotony.

Here's a hint folks: if your body is telling you "No more water please!", that's a sign that you should stop.

On a related note, with Australia in a state of essentially permanent drought, a British House of Commons report on the state of water treatment in Australia makes fascinating reading.

Driving Miss Black

2008-03-16T12:16:00.004+11:00

For the last month or so I've been helping out my dear friend Miss Black by giving her some driving lessons in my car.

It's been equally an education for me as for her, I think. I've tutored people in maths and science for many years now, but there's a huge difference between doing geometry and differential equations sedately on a piece of paper and doing them instinctively while quarter- and half-tonne lumps of metal and glass whizz by you at twenty metres per second. Which is a lot faster than it sounds, especially when the lumps are being driven by Aussies.

For one thing, if you get something wrong and drive your car up the back of another car, you don't get to cross your answer out and do it again.

Not that Miss Black did anything like that -- although my car does have a few scrapes on the front bumper from a ninety-degree turn in an extremely narrow alley. How narrow? Well, let me just put it like this: after navigating in and out of the alley a few times, Miss Black is confident of her ability to drive a stretch Hummer through a revolving door without touching the sides.

So far we've had a couple of ... interesting ... experiences, like a couple of "No, not that left, your other left!" moments, a distressing tendency for her to check the wrong blind-spot, or to swivel her entire upper body so she can look directly out the rear windscreen when changing lanes, and the time I had to grab the steering wheel to stop the car from drifting across into on-coming traffic. (Actually, I make it sound more exciting than it really was. It was a very slow drift, and it was less a grab and more a gentle correction.)

But on the plus-side, Miss Black has exhibited a remarkable level-headedness on occasions when others might have panicked, like the time when the Temporary Australian decided that it was a great idea to step out from in front of a stopped bus, against the lights, without checking to see if there were cars coming. Miss Black managed to avoid the moronic pedestrian without swerving into the next lane, and continued on her way while I was still gibbering in shock. I'm glad she didn't hit him -- the police make you fill out paperwork if you do.

She's also very good at parallel parking. I'm finding it difficult to teach her how to parallel park, and that's not because I don't know how to do it myself, thank you Mrs Impala. Just last Tuesday, she surprised and amazed me -- in a good way -- with an expert example of trick parking. She went from a start position of angle-parked on one side of the road, and finished in a parallel-parked position on the other side of the road, in one smooth movement. Forget your three-point parks, this was a one-point turn and park, in reverse.

Admittedly the car ended up a smidgen further out from the curb than ideal, but I'm hardly going to complain about that.

RIP Joseph Weizenbaum

2008-03-15T23:30:00.005+11:00

Joseph Weizenbaum, the creator of Eliza, has passed away. That lead to this amusing exchange on the comp.lang.python newsgroup (compiled from various contributors):

How do you feel about creator of Eliza?

Does that question interest you?

Earlier you said what is Eliza. Do you still feel that way?

Does it bother you that this vaguely disrespectful exchange made you laugh out loud?

Linux users wanting to play with Eliza can run the Emacs text editor and choose "Emacs Psychotherapist" from the Help menu.

Happy Pi Day

2008-03-14T22:41:00.004+11:00

March fourteenth 3.14.yy is Pi Day, and as an extra bonus this year it is also Friday.

(Click image for full view.)

Did you remember to eat pie on Pi Day?

The truth behind the surge

2008-03-13T23:19:00.003+11:00

Iraq has more or less fallen off the radar for many people. But it's a mess. The all-important "surge" that was supposed to bring peace to Iraq has done no such thing. (That's not to say that it hasn't had any effect. But too little, too late, and almost certainly it is setting Iraq up for an even more horrifying tragedy.)

It's a sad day when the most detailed, insightful pieces of journalism come from magazines like Rolling Stone magazine instead of "proper" news outlets. Unfortunately, the newspaper and television news industry have all but stopped doing investigative journalism, leaving it up to magazines like Rolling Stone.

Very disappointingly, even Rolling Stone confuses Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda in Iraq, two very different groups with little in common. Keeping that in mind, their article about the surge is depressing but informative. The nation of Iraq is no more, no matter what flag still flies in the UN. It is now a failed state, with a central government unable to govern and bombings and assassinations virtually every day.

"The situation won't get better," he says softly. An officer of the Iraqi National Police, a man charged with bringing peace to his country, he has been reduced to hiding in his van, unable to speak openly in the very neighborhood he patrols. Thanks to the surge, both the Shiites and the Sunnis now have weapons and legitimacy. And what can come of that, Arkan asks, except more fighting?

Sitting in our comfortable house in the West, safe and secure, it is sometimes tempting to think of the Iraqis as ungrateful wretches. Don't they know we're doing all this for them? How dare they resist, this is for their own good.

But even if we ignore the serious doubts about the real reasons for the invasion and occupation, and accept for the sake of the argument that it was done with the best possible intentions (please don't laugh), for those on the sharp end there are many good reasons to hate the occupiers:

The grunts are frustrated: For most of them, this is as close to combat as they have gotten, and they're eager for action.

"Somebody move!" shouts one soldier. "I'm in the mood to hit somebody!"

Another soldier pushes a suspect against the wall. "You know Abu Ghraib?" he taunts.

The Iraqis do not resist — they are accustomed to such treatment. Raids by U.S. forces have become part of the daily routine in Iraq, a systematic form of violence imposed on an entire nation. A foreign military occupation is, by its very nature, a terrifying and brutal thing, and even the most innocuous American patrols inevitably involve terrorizing innocent Iraqi civilians. Every man in a market is rounded up and searched at gunpoint. Soldiers, their faces barely visible behind helmets and goggles, burst into a home late at night, rip the place apart looking for weapons, blindfold and handcuff the men as the children look on, whimpering and traumatized. U.S. soldiers are the only law in Iraq, and you are at their whim. Raids like this one are scenes in a long-running drama, and by now everyone knows their part by heart. "I bet there's an Iraqi rap song about being arrested by us," an American soldier jokes to me at one point.

And so it is in every military occupation.

Sensible privacy ruling

2008-03-13T22:31:00.004+11:00

It isn't always bad news, sometimes those in power get it right.

Bruce Schneier reports on a good ruling from the German Constitutional Court: the court rejected a state's law allowing investigators to covertly search computers online, finding them to be a severe violation of privacy. Instead the court declared that searching PCs need to be treated like telephone wiretaps and similar such exceptions to the expectation of privacy.

More here.

Schneier also discusses David Brin's "The Transparent Society", and why transparency on its own is not enough to protect people from abuse at the hands of the powerful. David Brin responds, but sadly completely misses the point of the imbalance of power made by Schneier: in the restaurant analogy that Brin favoured, all the patron's have roughly equal power.

UPDATE, 16/3/08: I'm liking those Germans more and more. The High Court has put a stop to British-style total surveillance of car number plates. The surveillance laws were described by one German newspaper as having "all the hallmarks of a totalitarian state, which wants to know everything about everyone, suspect or not, without cause and without limitation", and the High Court seemed to agree.

The ruling isn't a complete win for citizens, with the court declaring that "random samples" were allowed, and scanning of cars crossing the border, but at least the German government isn't hell-bent on returning to the days of Stasi domination, unlike the British government.

Smoking worse than, well, everything?

2008-03-13T21:46:00.002+11:00

You know the anti-smoking lobby has crossed the line from admirable social reformers to left-ear staring nutters when people make a new St Trinians movie showing the girls using hard drugs and working as prostitutes, but putting a cigarette in their hands is completely verboten.

The Horror, the Horror!

2008-03-13T21:41:00.002+11:00

There are some things Man Was Not Meant To Do...

Not your usual computer horror story

2008-03-08T22:45:00.005+11:00

I found an old archive of emails involving computer horror stories: backups gone bad, deleting the wrong files, and so forth.

Somewhere along the line, somebody asked for the more Stephen King-ish style horror stories, about the system clock running backwards, files undeleting themselves, and so forth. That lead to this anecdote:

Many years ago a tiny little college in the middle of nowhere purchased an NCR tower, then a newfangled contraption. A half-dozen of us were using it for an assembly class. The prof should have made his warnings about TRAP a little more clear. One student runs his program and it suddenly begans spawning processes, rapidly filling the machine. The prof came in, amused, logged on as superuser, and killed a process. Another process was immediately spawned. The prof tried again. He was ignored. He was also no longer amused. After several minutes he gave up and turned off the box. The tower didn't even flinch. He pulled the plug. Nothing. He ripped the back off the box and dug around. Finally he found the fuse and pulled it, killing the machine.

Some of us later claimed we heard laughter as it went down.

(Many times since then I have wished other computers came with a backup battery as standard issue.)

Sometimes my work is fun

2008-03-08T21:48:00.002+11:00

Here is a transcript of an IM conversation from work. Names have been changed to protect the guilty.

<vlad>

<vlad>

<vlad>

<sonny>

"Sonny" is the same fellow who once broke his monitor by bashing his desk so hard the leg broke and the monitor fell off it. He was upset at the thought that there are people out in the world who don't use Emacs.

Pedagogy

2008-03-08T21:33:00.003+11:00

I think this anecdote is amusing. Sad, but also amusing.

As director of communications I was asked to prepare a memo reviewing our company's training programs and materials. In the body of the memo one of the sentences mentioned the "pedagogical approach" used by one of the training manuals. The day after I routed the memo to the executive committee, I was called into the HR director's office and told that the executive vice president wanted me out of the building by lunch. When I asked why, I was told that she wouldn't stand for "perverts" working in her company. Finally he showed me her copy of the memo, with her demand that I be fired, and the word "pedagogical" circled in red.

The HR manager was fairly reasonable and once he looked the word up in his dictionary, and made a copy of the definition to send back to her, he told me not to worry. He would take care of it.

Two days later a memo to the entire staff came out, directing us that no words which could not be found in the local Sunday newspaper could be used in company memos. A month later, I resigned. In accordance with company policy, I created my resignation memo by pasting words together from the Sunday paper.

You can look up the word here.

How unfair is this?

2008-03-08T21:03:00.003+11:00

Life is full of injustice, big injustices and little injustices. This is a little one, but still.

Local councils in Sydney (and almost certainly Melbourne as well) can fine you for over-staying in a parking spot -- even if you move your car to not just another spot, but another street.

The State Debt Recovery Office has rejected an appeal by a Coogee woman to be excused from a $79 ticket she received when she parked in Darling Island Road, Pyrmont. The woman, a Fairfax Media employee, wrote explaining she had moved her car. At 5.30pm she had driven "around the corner" into nearby Fyfe Street, another two-hour zone. But when she emerged at 7.20pm, she found she had been booked.

This week she received a reply from Gregrory Frearson, assistant director of operations at the Debt Recovery Office, advising that her appeal to have the fine waived had been rejected.

"Based on the circumstances you describe we cannot, under our guidelines, cancel or offer leniency for this offence." he wrote. "While a vehicle may be moved to a different spot, if it remains within the overall parking sector the time limit does not recommence."

See here for more.

The reality is that parking tickets are a lottery. Even if you do absolutely everything right according to the letter of the law, if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, and get a careless or dishonest parking inspector, you will lose money. And because local councils make more money the more incompetent and dishonest their inspectors are, they have little incentive to do anything about it. I received a fine for supposedly parking in a No Standing spot, when I was actually parked in a shopping centre car park five blocks away. I did some research, and with the threat of further expenses if I contested the fine, and the likely cost of thousands of dollars in legal fees even if I won, not to mention the inconvenience and stress, I paid it.

As far as I'm concerned, Footscray local council stole eighty-odd dollars from me as surely as if one of their inspectors had picked my pocket.

The theological necessity of goats

2008-03-08T19:47:00.004+11:00

Thanks to PZ Myers, I hear that Texas is hearing legal arguments concerning the theological necessity of goats related to a priest's argument that if he is prohibited from sacrificing live goats his god will cease to exist.

(And that would be a bad thing, why?)

In related news, the British government has taken blasphemy off the books, and a Malaysian woman has been jailed for worshiping a giant tea pot. No, seriously. It seems that while Malaysia has laws permitting freedom of worship, it also has sharia laws which prohibit apostasy. See here for more.

Now that's a thought... one way that Obama could gain the redneck vote would be to remind everyone that millions of Muslims will be absolutely shattered to learn that the son of an apostate is the most powerful man on Earth. Oh my.

The clique that is American politics

2008-03-08T18:37:00.003+11:00

American politics is strongly family oriented. I don't mean that politicians care about families, or at least say they do. I mean that there are these enormous political dynasties that are based on a handful of families.

The Kennedy family. The Bushes. The Clintons. John Kerry and George W Bush are related. And Barack Obama is Dick Cheney's cousin.

Not surprisingly, there are those who consider the US to be more of an oligarchy than a true democracy:

According to this school of thought, modern democracies should be considered as elected oligarchies. In these systems, actual differences between viable political rivals are small, the oligarchic elite impose strict limits on what constitutes an 'acceptable' and 'respectable' political position, and politicians' careers depend heavily on unelected economic and media elites.

Sounds like American politics to me. And to a lesser extent, Australian.

I think it is a fine thing that Americans are seriously considering a black man whose father was raised a Muslim but became an atheist for president, but why am I not surprised to learn that he's not quite so much of an outsider as he appeared at first glance?

Speaking of the incestuousness of the ruling class, did you know that Queen Elizabeth II is directly descended from the prophet Mohammad?

Mixed in with Queen Elizabeth's blue blood is the blood of the Moslem prophet Mohammed, according to Burke's Peerage, the geneological guide to royalty. The relation came out when Harold B. Brooks-Baker, publishing director of Burke's, wrote Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to ask for better security for the royal family. ''The royal family's direct descent from the prophet Mohammed cannot be relied upon to protect the royal family forever from Moslem terrorists,'' he said. Probably realizing the connection would be a surprise to many, he added, ''It is little known by the British people that the blood of Mohammed flows in the veins of the queen. However, all Moslem religious leaders are proud of this fact.''

Singing cosmos

2008-03-08T17:38:00.003+11:00

How cool is this? The northern lights sing:

It's safe to say that the majority of scientists who do research in this field are skeptical of the notion that the aurora's dazzling light show has its own built-in soundtrack, but while visiting Lapland, Hill worked closely with a geophysicist who does: Esa Turunen of the SGO, whose research focuses in part on scientifically establishing the audibility of the phenomenon. Certainly the aurora borealis produces sounds in space, and those sounds are monitored and recorded regularly by observatories all over the globe, including the SGO. But the sounds heard on Earth are probably more local in origin.

Field instruments are finally sensitive enough to capture these weird sounds for empirical analysis, hampered a bit by the fact that the sounds only occur during the most intense geomagnetic activity. The Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) has an Auroral Acoustics program that statistically analyzes field recordings of auroral acoustics and compares them to a "control group" of recordings from nights when there was no geomagnetic activity. It's an ongoing project, but to date, findings support the anecdotal evidence: the sounds are real, they strongly correlate with particularly intense auroral displays, and they are produced locally, although scientists remain mystified by the exact mechanism doing the producing.

(Click image for full view.)

More here.

Noir versus gonzo

2008-03-07T08:45:00.002+11:00

Mrs Impala and I were discussing the differences between noir and gonzo:

Mrs Impala: "Noir is a mysteriously-buttoned trenchcoat. Gonzo is sleeping in clothes that got torn somewhere you don't even remember."

Me: "... in a bathtub."

Mrs Impala: "Well, naturally. The bathtub goes without saying."

Friends

2008-03-07T01:31:00.002+11:00

I dislike social networking sites that misuse the term "friend" to mean "random people on the Internet whose blogs I like to read". The decision whether or not to reciprocate when somebody links to you is hard enough even without the baggage of faux "friendship". LiveJournal, you know I'm talking about you.

But LJ is not the only one. Recently, FileDen has transformed itself from a file hosting site to a social networking site, all the better to sell more advertising, and they too abuse the term "friend". Last time I logged on, I had a message from another user wanting me to "friend" him, apparently on the basis that since I had an account I must be worth friending.

When I checked out the user, I discovered that (s)he had no fewer than 1,586,620 "friends". I'm sure that there are thousands of Internet users (not just on LJ) with the emotional age of about 10 who see nothing creepy and sad about somebody claiming to have 1.5 million "friends", but in fact see it as something good to aspire to.

I'm reluctant to link directly to somebody who is likely to be some sort of spammer, but for those who want to see for themselves, if you go to FileDen and search for the user "mituozo" you'll see what I mean.

Unless (s)he really is a spammer, and has had his account suspended.

Amazon's chutzpah

2008-03-04T08:54:00.004+11:00

There's a lot to like about Amazon, but also a lot to dislike, such as their ridiculous "One Click" patent and their spamming of customers. But you have to admire their chutzpah. They're running ads for their e-book reader, the Kindle, which includes this image promoting BoingBoing:

What does BoingBoing have to say about the Kindle?

Mark Pilgrim has a great, incisive post about the Amazon Kindle e-reader that sums up almost all of the reasons I won't be buying it -- it spies on you, it has DRM (which means that it has to be designed to prevent you from modding it, lest you mod it to remove the DRM), it prevents you from selling or lending your books, and the terms of service are nearly as abusive as the Amazon Unbox terms (and worse than the thoroughly dumb-ass Amazon MP3 terms).

Raising the little devils to be little people

2008-03-03T01:30:00.003+11:00

Are children little devils or little angels?

Trick question: they're neither. They're little Homo sapiens (sometimes known as Pan narrans), with all that that entails. That means that they're animals, not angels or devils. I don't mean that as an insult. I'm an animal. So are you. What else could you be? You're not a plant, or an abstract concept like "justice", and the state of the art of artificial intelligence is not good enough for you to be a robot. Even if you believe that you have a soul (whatever that is!) your soul doesn't stop you from hurting when you stub your toe, or let you flap your arms and fly, or see electric fields. We can do what our bodies can do, and nothing more.

As animals, our wetware has certain modes of behaviour, and one of those is that we learn. We learn a lot. We're the ultimate learning machines on the planet, at least until 20 or so.

(Animals and machines? Sure, why not? We're machines made of meat instead of steel and plastic. If you think that's an insult to the dignity of human beings, that's only because you're thinking of machines as those clanking, primitive piles of junk like cars and grandfather clocks and space shuttles. What you should be thinking of is the other machines, like eagles and dolphins and tigers and cobras, of hearts and muscles and eyes and nerves. There's nothing clanking about them. The simplest, most basic cell in the human machine is a million times more complex than the most advanced metal-and-plastic thing we can yet make. We'll catch up, eventually, and make machines worthy of being called "alive", but for now, there's a great yawning chasm between meat machines and metal machines. The metal machines might be stronger and tougher, but let's see them make new machines without our help, huh?)

But I digress... so, little children are learning machines. They soak in data like a sponge, and they learn. Depending on what they learn, we label them as little angels or little devils. But in fact they're neither: they're just risen apes, and we older, supposedly wiser risen apes should be helping them to grow into the best apes they can be.

The problem is, they have this annoying habit of learning things that we don't want them to learn. I don't mean such trivialities such as four-letter words, but things like temper tantrums.

There's an imperial ton of advice out there about raising children (and that's bigger than a metric ton). Most of it is bad advice, because it is based on wishful thinking that kiddies are little angels, or little devils, rather than the reality that they're Homo sapiens.

In civilized countries, you won't find many people willing to publicly talk about "beating the Devil out of children" (although there's always a few barbarians who will privately do so), but there's still plenty of folk who will talk about sparing rods and spoiling children without any clue whatsoever about how to get maximum learning from the minimum brutality. If that sounds harsh, it's because I have a generally low opinion of those who mindlessly quote Biblical aphorisms, not because I am philosophically opposed to mild corporal punishment when necessary.

Unfortunately, parenting skills are very low. There's no classes we can take, the books we buy all contradict each other, and when we do what was done to us, the chances are we're just repeating the same lousy mistakes our parents made.

So, what to do? I was going to spend time searching high and low on the Internet looking for serious academic sites to back up the following assertions, but it's the wee hours of the morning and I need to sleep sometime. So I'll fall back on the tried and true Argument By Assertion, and say if you don't believe this, do your own research. You know where Google is.

It's about the timing.

Conditioning is not the only way we Homo sapiens learn, but it is an important part of it. That's the way our brains work: behaviour which is rewarded becomes more likely to be repeated, and behaviour which is given negative reinforcement becomes less likely. Not all learning is based on conditioning, but a lot of it is, especially for children (but also for adults!). The refusal to accept the reality of how we learn means that we are doomed to implement ineffective or even counter-productive teaching strategies, and then wonder why our children aren't learning the lessons we intended them to learn.

The most important factor about reinforcement is the timing. If it doesn't happen immediately, it might as well never happen at all. Yes, people can -- eventually -- learn delayed gratification, but that takes time, and three year olds don't have those skills yet. There's probably nothing, short of brutal physical abuse, less useful and more harmful to a child's ability to grow into a decent human being than "Wait until your father comes home!".

To give a concrete example: when your child screams and cries in the store because he or she wants a candy bar, if you give him or her a candy bar you have just reinforced the temper tantrum behaviour. It's hard to ignore a screaming child, especially when everyone else is giving you those Looks that say "control your brat!", but if you don't ignore it, you're just reinforcing the tantrum. And no, spanking the child isn't going to help, not if the only attention it ever gets is when you smack it. Children will take bad attention over inattention every time.

Just like adults really.

There's more here and here on Violent Acres. They're hardly scholarly articles, and there's some adult language so watch those nanny-filters, but they're worth reading.

The Conehead Economy

2008-03-03T00:43:00.003+11:00

Economic growth is a good thing. (Well, there's some big questions over both the possibility and desirability of perpetual growth, but let's ignore them for now.) On average, economic growth means that more people can afford more things, which means they can live happier and healthier lives and not need to worry about starving to death.

Ah, but there's a trap hidden in that statement: on average. Average growth is a very different thing than real growth, especially if you measure average with the "arithmetic mean" that you probably learnt about in school. A toy example will show what I mean: suppose our toy economy consists of five workers: Homer, Moe, Apu, Barney and Mr Burns. In 2006, Homer, Moe, Apu and Barney make $30,000 a piece, and Mr Burns makes $3,000,000. In 2007, Mr Burns' income has increased by $1,000,000, while the others earn exactly the same amount. The result is that the average income increases from $624,000 to $824,000. Lo and behold, Mayor Quimby can crow that his Millionaire Friendly Policies has led to the average worker getting a 32% increase in income in just one year! Marvellous! Obviously a rising tide raises all boats.

Drawn out in detail like that, it seems so obvious that nobody could possibly be fooled by it. Lies, damned lies and statistics. But in fact, that is precisely what the miracle of American economic growth since the late 1970s is made up of. Only the numbers are different, the principle is the same: the vast number of Americans have seen virtually no economic growth, or even a loss of income, while the overall average is inflated by enormous gains at the top of the pyramid. There's been growth, and plenty of it, but only a relatively small number of people, the richest 1%, have seen much benefits.

As Ezra Klein writes:

In the past, I've called this "The Conehead Economy." Plenty of growth in the economic body, but all of it happening in the top percent. Were that to happen to a person, you'd see six inches of growth in their forehead and doctors everywhere would be puzzling over how to correct the grotesque deformity. As it is, the media trumpets the growth, the politicians backslap over the roaring economy, and everyone wonders why the average American seems so unhappy. [...]

Meanwhile, government policy is explicitly aimed at accelerating the income distortions. [...] But don't object, o' Democrats, lest you be accused of class warfare which, as we know, only happens when the middle class wants their wages to keep up with productivity, as they did in the last generation.

Lest anybody conclude from this that statistics are essentially dishonest, consider this: there are many ways to calculate the average. The method used above, the mean, is just one way of many, and while it has its uses, it is very vulnerable to being distorted by a few very high or very low values. When it comes to income, a better measurement of average is usually the median, which for the above toy economy works out at $30,000 a year, with zero growth on average. Not quite so useful a figure for either the economists or for Mayor Quimby's re-election chances, but it reflects better the actual experience of 4 out of 5 people.

A reminder

2008-03-02T21:46:00.004+11:00

When it comes to politics, it's easy to spend all your time blogging about bad news. But it's important to remember that although politics can be dominated by venal, short-sighted and selfish motives, it doesn't have to be.

In 1978, the Principality of Liechtenstein was admitted to the Council of Europe, which gave it the right to nominate a judge to the European Court of Human Rights. Their nominated judge was the eminent Canadian jurist, the late Ronald St. John Macdonald, the only non-European appointed to the Court. MacDonald served on the Court for 18 years and was succeeded by the Swiss human rights lawyer, Mark Villiger. To quote James Wimberley:

Liechtenstein thus set a truly revolutionary precedent for staffing international bodies simply with the most qualified people.

Navy wren dead on floor

2008-03-02T16:28:00.003+11:00

Accidents will happen. People can die from undiagnosed illnesses due to no fault of anyone. But in the case of Royal Navy Lieutenant Emma Douglas, there's a big question over responsibility for her death.

Douglas was an undiagnosed diabetic. After being ill for a week and vomiting blood, the medical officer on board the HMS Cornwall pronounced her fit for duty and sent her back to her cabin. A day later she collapsed with stomach cramps. But that's not why there's a question mark over her death: Douglas had not previously shown any of the symptoms of diabetes. But four days after being passed as fit for duty, and three days after collapsing with stomach cramps, Douglas was found collapsed on the floor of her cabin half naked. The duty watch sailor who found her described her as having "laboured breathing" to the officer of the day. Despite being known as a light drinker, her shipmates assumed she was drunk, and nobody checked on her for 24 hours -- by which time she was dead from diabetic keto-acidosis.

What I'd like to know is: is it normal for Royal Navy sailors who are vomiting blood to be pronounced fit for duty? Is it common practice for sailors supposed to be on duty to get drunk, and having drunk themselves into unconsciousness, are they normally left for 24 hours sprawled where they lie?

I think it says a lot about the British Navy culture that a sailor found unconscious on the floor is assumed to be drunk rather than sick.

Anarchy

2008-03-02T15:47:00.001+11:00

Secret Service versus the candidates

2008-03-02T12:40:00.003+11:00

Why isn't the Secret Service protecting Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama?

Among other duties, the Secret Service is responsible for protecting America's presidential candidates. But something strange has happened this electoral campaign: the Secret Service has started letting people into Clinton and Obama rallies without being screened for weapons or even given a visual check.

The story first broke when the Dallas police force publicly questioned the orders they were given to stop screening, but it's since come out that, this campaign, it's been standard Secret Service policy for all of Clinton's and Obama's rallies: set up metal detectors and screen the crowd, then at some arbitrary point stop and let everyone else in.

The Secret Service has admitted that this is standard procedure, although there's been no word on whether they apply the same procedure to Republican candidates. They certainly don't apply it to public appearances by Bush and Cheney, nor did they apply them during the 2004 presidential elections.

There have already been death threats against Obama. The Secret Service initially took them so seriously that he was given Secret Service protection earlier than any other candidate in American history.

Pledge of what now?

2008-03-02T03:51:00.004+11:00

American schools have a pledge of allegiance? And teenagers -- rebellious, hormone-crazed teenagers -- stand for it without mass rebellion? WTF is wrong with you people???

One day during my high school years, I chose not to rise for the Pledge of Allegiance. A daily compulsion to demonstrate my patriotism seemed wrong on the face of it. My fidelity to the United States, the republic for which the flag stands, should be assumed. The next day, I made the same choice. And you can guess what happened next.

The school was very uncomfortable with my stance. In only a day or two, nearly all my classmates and teachers knew I was the guy who wouldn't stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. Because they had to enforce pledge-making every morning, teachers had, by and large, a bigger problem with my stance than my fellow students.

As a child in primary school (years 1-6) we were expected to salute the flag every morning. As a Jehovah's Witness (don't worry, I got better) I wasn't supposed to give my allegiance to anyone but Uncle God in the sky, so on the (rare) occasions I wasn't late I just stood at attention respectfully and didn't salute. I never got any stick from either my fellow kiddies or the teachers over it. As near as I could tell, the entire school, from the Head Master to the youngest Grade 1, felt the whole thing was a tedious and pointless exercise, but one that had to be done lest the entire British Empire instantly collapse. (In the 1970s, Australia was sleeping around with the flash Yanks but hadn't quite got up the nerve to tell England we wanted a divorce. We still haven't, but at least we're more open about the trial separation and the whole "seeing other countries" thing.)

But once I got to High School (years 7-12) all that changed. At least when I was at school, public schools (for the benefit of any foreigners, that is government-run schools) didn't do any such thing. The thought of getting a couple of hundred fifteen year olds to salute the flag seems ludicrous to my experiences. Although I guess the private schools that run army cadet camps probably manage it, although how many of the kids playing at being soldiers actually treat it seriously and how many are doing it just so they get to play soldiers and get out of school work for a while I'm sure I don't know.

The Deserter's Tale

2008-03-02T03:35:00.003+11:00

Smoking Chimp reviews a book by former US soldier Joshua Key, who deserted from the army and ran away to Canada because of the things he did and saw in Iraq. His application for refugee status in Canada has been rejected and he faces deportation to the US. In his book, he says:

“My own moral judgment was disintegrating under the pressure of being a soldier, feeling vulnerable, and having no clear enemy to kill in Iraq. We were encouraged to beat up on the enemy; given the absence of any clearly understood enemy, we picked our fights with civilians who were powerless to resist. We knew that we would not have to account for our actions.”

“... the American military had betrayed the values of my country. We had become a force for evil, and I could not escape the fact that I was part of the machine.”

“How would I react if foreigners invaded the United States and did just a tenth of the things that we had done to the Iraqi people? I would be right up there with the rebels and insurgents, using every bit of my cleverness to blow up the occupiers.”

(Quoted here.)

It's easy to forget that bad things happen in wartime not just because bad people go to war, but because war makes even good people turn bad.

Comparisons are odious

2008-03-02T03:27:00.003+11:00

Especially when they don't support the myth that conservatives are better for the economy.

(Via Brad De Long.)

Speaking of PZ Myers...

2008-03-02T02:14:00.004+11:00

Oh my, check out what he has to say about the latest in a long, long line of toxic evangelists here.

In the spirit of Oscar Wilde, I think I shall have to start using the term "demented goblin" at every opportunity.

Devil toads and narwhals

2008-03-02T01:53:00.004+11:00

PZ Myers reports on the discovery of the extinct Beelzebufo frog:

It means "devil toad," and it was a 10 pound monster that lived 70 million years ago, in what is now Madagascar. It's huge, and judging by its living cousins, was a voracious predator. If it were alive today, it would probably be eating your cats and puppies.

In other words, this was an awesome toad, and I wish I had one for a pet.

Who wouldn't want one of these little beauties? (Artist's impression, naturally.)

(Click image for full view.)

And new research into narwhals has solved the mystery of the narwhal's 8-foot-long tooth. It seems that the tooth is actually a high-tech sensor: it is filled with millions of nerve connections, and is capable of sensing changes in water temperature and pressure, and in particle density of the water.

Adventures in hypocrisy, part eleventy bazillion

2008-03-02T01:23:00.003+11:00

Remember the Turkish invasion of northern Iraq that Turkey denied they made?

Seems that Junior Prez Dubyah Bush has something to say about that. Namely, that Turkey shouldn't ignore the will of the international community and that they better leave Iraq right now, terrorists or no terrorists. Pretty please. Or something like that.

Earlier, Turkey admitted that they had 10,000 troops battling the Kurdish terrorists. Naturally, the elephant in the room that the media doesn't want to mention is that northern Iraq has been under US and UK protection since the first Gulf War ended in 1991, and even today, the US is sheltering the Kurdish independence groups who have been committing terrorist attacks against Turkey.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said:

It's very important that the Turks make this operation as short as possible and then leave, and to be mindful of Iraqi sovereignty.

It would be nice to say that his words were received with peals of laughter, or even stunned silence, but such is the irony-free 21st century that they were probably accepted as self-evidently true. Some things never change.

I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq.

Diamond-coated Oscar madness

2008-03-02T00:43:00.003+11:00

People with more money than sense can sometimes be amusing, and in the lead up to the Oscars the entertainment press is usually good for some Hollywood-silliness stories.

It seems that the latest fad amongst actresses is for diamond-dust facial scrubs.

The most crowded waiting room pre-Oscars is at the Beverly Hills clinic of celebrity skin specialist Sonya Dakar - where stars line up for her signature £1,000 facial.

Madonna is said to have headed there for a treatment last year which includes a diamond scrub (using diamond particles to exfoliate the skin), an exfoliating skin peel, green tea face mask and red-and-blue UV light therapy to prevent acne.

Diamond particles huh?

Even the oldest, toughest, most dried-out and sun-fried human skin is unlikely to be tougher than pumice stone, let alone the regular quartz particles you find on emery boards. Even Madonna's skin is unlikely to be harder than (say) a steel nail file (6.5 on the Mohs hardness scale, compared to diamond at 10). This is a good example of conspicuous consumption. Diamond dust is quite cheap: I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the diamond scrub contained less than a dollar's worth of diamond dust.

Wikilinks

2008-03-01T23:11:00.003+11:00

Wikilinks is a website devoted to disclosing leaked materials, including confidential information, with the aim of discouraging unethical and illegal behaviour by corporations and governments.

The site currently includes:

leaked documents showing that the US military in Iraq is equipped with anti-personnel chemical weapons in contravention of US-ratified treaties prohibiting the use of such chemical weapons in warfare.

the suppressed auditor's report detailing the extent and details of the corruption by former Kenyan Prime Minister Daniel Moi, including the purchase of 10,000 hectares of land in Australia with stolen money.

The use of psychologists by US forces at Gitmo while torturing prisoners (I'm old enough to remember the US roundly criticizing the USSR for doing more or less the same thing).

Secret trust structures used for money laundering and tax evasion and to hide assets by Swiss bank Julius Baer.

A leaked German report showing that some of the people in charge of former Stasi files are themselves ex-Stasi.

Just under two weeks ago, a US judge ordered that the Wikilinks site be shut down. Specifically, the judge ordered that the hosting company remove the Wikilinks domain name. Naturally, to those who understand how the Internet works, that's no barrier to accessing the site, domain name or no domain name. Even the New York Times didn't hesitate to describe the judge's action as "feeble":

The feebleness of the action suggests that the bank, and the judge, did not understand how the domain system works or how quickly Web communities will move to counter actions they see as hostile to free speech online.

The site itself could still be accessed at its Internet Protocol (IP) address (http://88.80.13.160/) — the unique number that specifies a Web site’s location on the Internet. Wikileaks also maintained “mirror sites,” which are copies of itself, usually to insure against outages and this kind of legal action. These sites were registered in countries like Belgium (http://wikileaks.be/), Germany (wikileaks.de), and the Christmas Islands (http://wikileaks.cx) through domain registrars other that Dynadot, and so were not affected by the injunction.

Fans of the site and its mission rushed to publicize those alternate addresses this week. They have also distributed copies of the sensitive bank information on their own sites and via peer-to-peer file sharing networks.

Yesterday, the judge rescinded his own order, lifting the ineffective injunction.

I have high hopes that this site will be around for a long time.

Holocaust idiocy

2008-03-01T08:25:00.004+11:00

Totally without irony, Israel's Deputy Defence Minister, Matan Vilnai, threatened the people of Palestine with a holocaust (Hebrew "shoah"). Considering that Matan Vilnai was born in 1944 and has a B.A. degree in History, I find it inconceivable that he was not aware of the connotations of the word, even if he were not Jewish (yes, there are non-Jewish Israelis).

Meanwhile, here in Melbourne, artist Sam Leach has made a controversial self-portrait of himself in the same pose used for one of Adolf Hitler's famous portraits. Defending the painting, Leach stated:

Personally, as a white Australian, I inherit this Western European cultural tradition and the one of the products of that tradition was Nazism. In a nutshell, what I'm trying to say is that I think that we can't take for granted that Nazism can't happen again...

The president of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, Anton Block, replied by stating that Leach was:

deluding himself[.]

Well, certainly someone is deluding himself.

Microsoft cartoon figures

2008-02-25T02:06:00.004+11:00

This is just weird. Microsoft has released a set of collectible cartoon action figures, aimed at developers who attend their training sessions.

(Click image for full view.)

Apparently Microsoft hope that by ascribing "heroic justice crusader" virtues to the toys, people will be attracted to their products:

Slick, quick, and with a fistful of super-style tricks, Windows Vista Sensei is the new karate-kid on the scene. Born in the United States and trained in Tibet, he acquired hardcore martial arts moves, and the wisdom to use these powers wisely. Once he'd perfected his signature preying-mantis kick, the bullies at school stood no chance.

The Anonymity Experiment

2008-02-25T01:03:00.005+11:00

Can you live in a big city without leaving traces? Who is watching you and what you do?

2006, David Holtzman decided to do an experiment. Holtzman, a security consultant and former intelligence analyst, was working on a book about privacy, and he wanted to see how much he could find out about himself from sources available to any tenacious stalker. [...] When he put the information together, he was able to discover so much about himself—from detailed financial information to the fact that he was circumcised—that his publisher, concerned about his privacy, didn’t let him include it all in the book.

[...] Last year, 127 million sensitive electronic and paper records (those containing Social Security numbers and the like) were hacked or lost—a nearly 650 percent increase in data breaches from the previous year. [...] Last November, the British government admitted losing computer discs containing personal data for 25 million people, which is almost half the country’s population.

[...]

It was strangely calming, standing in this dim room, watching the words and thoughts of strangers reveal themselves to me. I still had my hat on, but for once there were no surveillance cameras, so I sat down on a bench in the room and pulled out my notebook, grateful to finally be the observer rather than the observed. And then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her: a security guard standing in the room’s darkened corner—silent, motionless, watching.

Unlike some, I'm not ready to give up on privacy in the information age. I'm with this important essay by Bruce Schneier:

We've been told we have to trade off security and privacy so often -- in debates on security versus privacy, writing contests, polls, reasoned essays and political rhetoric -- that most of us don't even question the fundamental dichotomy.

But it's a false one.

Security and privacy are not opposite ends of a seesaw; you don't have to accept less of one to get more of the other. Think of a door lock, a burglar alarm and a tall fence. Think of guns, anti-counterfeiting measures on currency and that dumb liquid ban at airports. Security affects privacy only when it's based on identity, and there are limitations to that sort of approach.

Since 9/11, approximately three things have potentially improved airline security: reinforcing the cockpit doors, passengers realizing they have to fight back and -- possibly -- sky marshals. Everything else -- all the security measures that affect privacy -- is just security theater and a waste of effort.

[...]

There is no security without privacy. And liberty requires both security and privacy. The famous quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin reads: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." It's also true that those who would give up privacy for security are likely to end up with neither.

Speaking of privacy... I want this.

Three links

2008-02-25T00:56:00.004+11:00

Three interesting miscellaneous links:

Can the Cavendish banana be saved from extinction? (No.) Can the fruit growers create a new variety acceptable to the American market? (Probably not.)

The town of Brattleboro, Vermont, has tabled a motion authorizing the local cops to arrest Bush and Cheney if they come into the town.

A leaked British government document shows that they intend to coerce the population into giving up their privacy.

Major security hole in encryption products

2008-02-25T00:33:00.004+11:00

Professor Ed Felton has published research that demonstrates conclusively that disk encryption can be defeated quite easily due to a hardware leak: even when you turn off power, modern memory chips will hold their contents for minutes without any special actions. If you cool the DRAM chips they can hold their contents for hours. This is important because it allows an attacker to retrieve the encryption key from memory and use it to decrypt the hard disk.

This news doesn't make disk encryption useless. It will still protect your data in the event of casual theft, but it does mean that if you have sensitive data, and you believe you could be targeted by people wanting that data, you can't rely on disk encryption. At this time, there is no work-around, and the operating system you use is irrelevant. I expect that the eventual fix will be a circuit to fill the DRAM chips with random data when the computer is turned off.

Striking at the terrorists

2008-02-25T00:25:00.002+11:00

Remember when the "War On Terror" was supposed to make us safer? Well, somebody forgot to mention to the US military that their supposed to be stopping terrorists, not sheltering them while they attack one of the US's NATO allies.

Turkey, fed up with Kurdish terrorists launching attacks while under the protection of the US military, has invaded northern Iraq. While this isn't a full-blown invasion, nor is it a border incursion with a handful of troops: it apparently involves thousands of soldiers. Turkey has publicly denied the invasion, a denial which is looking less and less credible every day. Why isn't this big news?

And a reminder that it's not just "Islamo-fascists" who are terrorists, like racists and conservatives would have us believe. Christian terrorists in Serbian have attacked and burned the US embassy in Belgrade, angry at Kosovo gaining independence.

Equality of the sexes

2008-02-25T00:02:00.004+11:00

It's all too easy to forget that "women's liberation" hasn't even begun in some parts of the world, and that women aren't even given the dignity of being treated as second-class citizens.

In Saudi Arabia, an illiterate woman is set to be executed after she was tortured into confessing to using witchcraft to make a man impotent. And tribal elders in Pakistan decide that women shouldn't vote.

Here in the western civilized world (and I make no apology for using that term), there are people who want to roll back the clock and return to their imagined glory days where women knew their place. Childless old men like Pat Buchanan and macho wanna-be Patriarchs are trying to frighten European women with scare stories that if they don't give up their jobs, stay home, obey their husbands and have lots of babies, the terrorists will win and the Muslim Hordes will take over. It's the Yellow Peril redux, only now it's the "slightly off-white, not quite brown, Islamo-fascist Peril".

I believe that many feminists have well and truly lost their way, but don't imagine that means that feminism is no longer relevant or necessary. The forces of evil are still out there.

But it's not all bad news. Although the meme of sexism dies slow, it does die. When a religious school tried to ban a woman from refereeing a basketball match, her male colleagues boycotted the game:

The reason given, according to the referees: Campbell, as a woman, could not be put in a position of authority over boys because of the academy's beliefs.

[...]

"I said, 'If Michelle [Campbell] has to leave, then I'm leaving with her,'" Putthoff said Wednesday. "I was disappointed that it happened to Michelle. I've never heard of anything like that."

Fred Shockey, who was getting ready to leave the gym after officiating two junior high games, said he was told there had been an emergency and was asked to stay and officiate two more games.
"When I found out what the emergency was, I said there was no way I was going to work those games," said Shockey, who spent 12 years in the Army and became a ref about three years ago. "I have been led by some of the finest women this nation has to offer, and there was no way I was going to go along with that."

Isn't that something?

Why don't more conservatives go to university?

2008-02-24T22:55:00.009+11:00

Why are most university professors liberal? Two academics, Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner, have done a study that suggests that most conservatives simply aren't interested in the sorts of things that attract people to academic careers. Matthew Woessner himself is an interesting counter-example: he's a fan of Fox New, Rudy Giuliani and Rush Limbaugh and usually votes Republican, and unlike most of the conservative students he has studied, has a deep interest in the scientific method. (Although he clearly doesn't apply it to Fox, Giuliani or Limbaugh...)

The Agonist has this to say:

What do you do when there are not enough laissez-fare loving, personal responsibility professing and family values fundies at your university? You make it more socialist:
The research led the Woessners to conclude that if higher education wants to attract more conservatives to the professoriate, it should smooth the way financially, offering subsidized health insurance and housing for graduate students

I've often thought that conservative politics simply meant "handouts for me, not for thee".

Read more here.

Last major music labels give up on DRM

2008-02-24T22:35:00.004+11:00

The last two of the big music labels -- and of course the independent labels weren't stupid and arrogant enough to install spyware and rootkits on their customers' computers -- Warner Music and Sony BRM, have finally stopped trying to hold the tide back and have given up using DRM on their music downloads, at least for most of their catalogues. Warner caved to the inevitable in December last year and allowed Amazon to sell mp3s, and in January Sony BRM also announced that they are giving up DRM for music downloads.

This isn't quite the death of DRM for music, but it's close.

Another reason to hate Flash

2008-02-24T21:21:00.002+11:00

There's a lot to hate about Flash video. And yes, I'm aware of the irony of saying this when I myself put Flash videos on my blog. If YouTube would use a decent format, I'd be onto it so fast your head would spin.

It's not a fully open standard, making it near impossible for anyone to create Flash applications that don't depend on Adobe. There are a zillion movie players for .avi, .mpg, and even a handful for .mov, there's only one player for Flash .swf applications. (In fairness, mplayer can, sometimes, play .flv videos. mplayer is awesome!) That's a warning sign of data obsolescence.

Specifications for the Flash formats are only released to developers on the condition that they don't create Flash players. Flash videos contain executable code, which is a serious security hole: it's only a matter of time before somebody creates a virus which runs through Flash, even on Linux. Most Flash applications are poorly written, with terrible user interfaces and buggy implementations: Flash sites frequently lock up my browser. You can't index or search Flash sites, or copy text out of them, and if you are blind and use a screen-reader, web designers who use Flash are giving you a big F-U. And if you're a movie creator, why on Earth would you be happy with the crappy, low resolution, compression-artifact-filled ugliness that is the typical .flv file?

I could go on, but I'll just link to one more reason to avoid Flash if possible: Adobe is now adding Digital Restrictions Management software to the format.

Finally, there's a classic suite of arguments against DRM that will be as true for online video as they were for music. DRM doesn't move additional product. DRM is grief for honest end-users. And there's no reason to imagine that new DRM systems will stop copyright infringement any more effectively than previous systems.

The things you never hear about

2008-02-24T20:40:00.003+11:00

I understand that it's a big world, and it's impossible to keep up with everything happening everywhere.

But still, it's kind of creepy and shocking to discover that the Middle East's version of the Berlin Wall was (temporarily) knocked down a month ago, and nobody I know has heard anything about it. Described by one commentator as "the biggest prison break in the history of man", Joel Beinin, Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University, described it thusly:

About 3:00 am on Wednesday morning Jan. 23, well-coordinated explosions demolished the iron wall built by Israel to seal the southern border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt (the Philadelphi axis). Tens of thousands of Palestinians streamed across the border and entered the Egyptian side of the town of Rafah, which had been bisected by the wall, in search of food, gasoline, and other basic commodities which have been in short supply for many months in Gaza. The first wave of Palestinians to cross consisted of hundreds of women who were met with water canons and beatings by Egyptian security forces.

Read the rest of his op-ed here.

For that matter, most people I know didn't even know there is a Wall cutting off Palestinians from their own farms and jobs, or that it has already lead to the avoidable deaths of innocents.

Bad writing and poor grammar

2008-02-24T19:29:00.006+11:00

One of the most pernicious myths about English grammar is that you should never split an infinitive. Linguists point out time and time again that the prohibition against splitting infinitives makes no sense in English, and that it was originally derived from Latin and French where it is impossible to split an infinitive.

An infinitive is a verb with the word "to". For example:

We plan TO GO immediately home.

At the time I intended TO INVADE only half of Poland.

My auntie told me TO KICK the guy viciously.

And here they are again split:

We plan TO immediately GO home.

At the time I intended TO only INVADE half of Poland.

My auntie told me TO viciously KICK the guy.

There's no doubt that sometimes splitting infinitives can weaken a sentence, but very often it makes it clearer and stronger. In case you still believe that infinitives should never be split, please read this and this and this.

But then there are still those who continue to spread the superstition that splitting infinitives is bad grammar, like the aptly-named "Lousy Writer". When I first came across his site, I had just spent a delightful half hour or so browsing the World Wide Words site. Compared to Michael Quinion's delightful prose, which has flow and rhythm, going to the Lousy Writer site is like having your eyeballs sand-blasted. I can't imagine taking the Lousy Writer's advice on style matters, or common English idioms.

There's at least one common construction where even the most rabid "Thou
Shalt Not Split Infinitives" mavens end up splitting their infinitives:

An effective way TO more than DOUBLE your income is by mugging little old ladies.

On a related note, are you shamed by you English?

Click thumbnail for full-sized image.

I so have to get a t-shirt of this

2008-02-24T19:14:00.005+11:00

Thanks to BoingBoing:

(For the benefit of anyone who has been living in a cave for the last thirty years, the person in the image is Fawlty Towers' Manuel, shown in the style more familiar from the iconic photograph of South American revolutionary Che Guevara.)

Taking back democracy

2008-02-24T17:53:00.004+11:00

Sick of the Republican Party trying to block them from voting, students at Prairie View A&M University in Texas decided to take back democracy one street at a time: literally.

Faced with systematic efforts to disenfranchise blacks and Democrat supporters, such as putting polling places seven miles away from the voting precinct, more than 3,000 students took to the highway, blocking it as they walked the seven miles to the polling place.

Nice one guys!

Technical Virgin

2008-02-24T17:17:00.003+11:00

The things that offend people, or that people are afraid will offend people (not necessarily the same thing!) often astounds me.

In 2006, actress and mother Melanie Martinez was sacked from her job of host of the PBS television program "The Good Night Show" because of two 30 second videos she had made over five years earlier. The videos, for the now-defunct "TechnicalVirgin.com" website, were send-ups of public service announcements for abstinence-only sex education.

Here are the two videos:

Boys Can Wait

Also viewable here.

I Have A Future

I'm amused (in that "have to laugh or else I'd cry" way) by this comment defending PBS:

But I think in her case she openly lied to her employers. Every job interview has that "prior history" question where if you did anything that would effect your job, it's best to say it then.

"Every" job interview? I've been to a couple of dozen job interviews (some of them were even successful) and I've never been asked if I'd done something that would make me morally unsuitable for the position. And for all we know, she did disclose the videos when she was hired. But if she didn't, it doesn't follow that she lied -- far more likely she just never imagined that they could possibly be an issue.

Deputizing the ISPs

2008-02-24T13:34:00.004+11:00

One of the more insidious dangers coming out of the copyright lobby is the idea that ISPs must be made responsible for enforcing copyright law on their behalf by choking off infringing material. It's a rather bizarre concept, no different from the idea that the Post Office must scrutinize every piece of mail posted for signs of illegal activities.

In practice, not only would this a huge burden on ISPs, but it's also ridiculously impractical. Since infringing bytes aren't coloured differently from non-infringing bytes, the only "solutions" are to either non-selectively cut off entire avenues of communication, or make an expensive and ineffectual attempt to analyze Internet traffic, trying to detect infringing material. That sort of censorship is ripe for abuse and prone to errors. And let's not forget the privacy implications of having your ISP actively monitoring every packet of data you send.

Such is the influence of the copyright lobby that the idea is being taken seriously, so it is good to see that British bastion of middle-class respectability, the Guardian, slam the idea:

Some internet users are irresponsible, and their behaviour may even be damaging Taylor's clients. But in seeking legislative relief for this distress, governments need to strike a balance between the wider public interest and the demands of a particular industry to defend an increasingly obsolete business model. And though the record industry is important, it's an economic minnow compared with the IT industry.

An analogy may help to illustrate the point. Millions of people use the telephone network for questionable, illegal or unethical purposes. But we would regard it as unthinkable to impose on phone companies a legal obligation to monitor every conversation.

Who owns data?

2008-02-24T13:17:00.004+11:00

Ed Felten raises a very important point about many of the debates we have about data portability: we start off by making a poor assumption, and that closes off options.

An example is the Internet storm over Facebook canceling well-known blogger Robert Scoble's account. Scoble had amassed a vast amount of data in his account, and got caught using software tools to export it. Facebook has a vested interest in locking people into their service (more users = more advertising revenue), and the way they have chosen to do this is to give people free accounts, encourage them to invest a lot of time creating valuable (to the users, if not anyone else) data, but prohibit them from extracting that data elsewhere.

Hmmm... I must update my Blogger backup script. It hasn't worked well since Google made the upgrade from Blogger version 1 to version 2.

The poor assumption that we make is that data -- facts -- must be owned by somebody. As Felten says:

Where did we get this idea that facts about the world must be owned by somebody? Stop and consider that question for a minute, and you’ll see that ownership is a lousy way to think about this issue. In fact, much of the confusion we see stems from the unexamined assumption that the facts in question are owned.

Once we give up the idea that the fact of Robert Scoble’s friendship with (say) Lee Aase, or the fact that that friendship has been memorialized on Facebook, has to be somebody’s exclusive property, we can see things more clearly. Scoble and Aase both have an interest in the facts of their Facebook-friendship and their real friendship (if any). Facebook has an interest in how its computer systems are used, but Scoble and Aase also have an interest in being able to access Facebook’s systems. Even you and I have an interest here, though probably not so strong as the others, in knowing whether Scoble and Aase are Facebook-friends.

How can all of these interests best be balanced in principle? What rights do Scoble, Aase, and Facebook have under existing law? What should public policy says about data access? All of these are difficult questions whose answers we should debate. Declaring these facts to be property doesn’t resolve the debate — all it does is rule out solutions that might turn out to be the best.

UPDATE: Chris Finke has an innovative solution to the Facebook problem, one which could (in principle) be extended to all similar such websites. His Facebook Scavenger extension for Firefox lets you capture copies of the data once it's in your browser.

The downside of proprietary data

2008-02-24T11:35:00.005+11:00

Mark Pilgrim is a published author, Google employee and long-time Apple Macintosh user and programmer. In the Macintosh universe, he's part of the pantheon: although never an Apple employee, and not quite up there with folks like Andy Hertzfeld, he's nevertheless one of the minor demi-gods of Apple mythology. He also helped create one of the few Mac viruses (the MBDF-A), but co-operated with police on his arrest and paid restitution for the damage done.

Putting aside his checked past, Pilgrim was considered one of the Mac power-user evangelists, so it came an unpleasant shock to the Mac community when he finally discarded his Mac in favour of Linux. There were tears and predictions of doom. Those predictions turned out to be wrong, and Pilgrim is predicting that 2008 will be the year of Linux on the Desktop. (With the sudden expansion of notebooks running Linux, like the EEE, I think those predictions will finally be right. And not before time.)

Not long after jumping ship to Linux, Pilgrim discussed his experiences with long-term data storage, and his frustration with the difficulty of keeping data accessible over a time frame measured in decades instead of months or years. The bottom line? Long-term storage of data is like a series of migrations from data format to data format. Anything which makes that migration harder is going to hurt you. Companies like Apple who don't grok openness are constantly trying to lock people into their products, then change the products. Every time they do that, there's pain and inconvenience for users, and usually the loss of data.

Pilgrim's conclusion is that using open source software and, more importantly, open formats, goes a long way to reducing this problem. You will still need to migrate data from computer to computer (anyone think that the computers of 2028 will still be running Windows Vista?) but the pain will be less.

There’s an important lesson in here somewhere. Long-term data preservation is like long-term backup: a series of short-term formats, punctuated by a series of migrations. But migrating between data formats is not like copying raw data from one medium to another. [...] But converting data into a different format is much trickier, and there’s the potential of data loss or data degradation at every turn.

Fidelity is not a binary thing. Data can gradually degrade with each conversion until you’re left with crap. People think this only affects the analog world, like copying cassette tapes for several generations. But I think digital preservation is actually much harder, in part because people don’t even realize that it has the same issues.

[...]

So if you care about long-term data preservation, your #1 goal should be to reduce the number of times you convert your data from one format to another. You should also strive to increase the fidelity of each conversion, but you may not have any control over that when the time comes. Plus, you may not know in advance how faithful the conversion will be, so planning ahead to reduce the number of conversions is a better bet.

Open source software is not a panacea for this sort of data loss: as Pilgrim discusses, the open source photo-editing software Gimp uses a deliberately undocumented file format that no other application can fully read.

If you care about accessing your data in ten years time, then go read the rest of his conclusions. (And if you care about people accessing your data in 200 years time, print it out on good acid-free paper and deposit it somewhere dry and safe.)

The Unbearable Burden of Blogging

2008-02-22T08:30:00.003+11:00

Well, perhaps not quite unbearable...

A big hello to Metro over at Metroblog, who liked my stuff enough to comment three times in one sitting and then promise to blogroll me. Don't worry Metro, if I steal your Avid Fans I'll let you steal some of 'em back...

That makes him, or will make him, the first blogger to blogroll me (hint hint Metro...) other than that reasonable conservative Jon Swift, but he'll link to anyone, even liberals and progressives. Thanks Metro.

More bloggage shall happen soon, but for now I'll just point folks at my other blog where I'm experimenting with Wordpress. Typical... here I am busier than a really busy guy who's just taken on two more commitments, and I've got fans relying on me to entertain and educate them.

If only I could use that TARDIS technology to be in two places at once...

Does the USA need a stupider motto?

2008-01-20T11:50:00.000+11:00

Thanks to Terrifel from the Straight Dope message boards:

1956 was of course the worst year that the United States had ever faced. Wracked by turmoil and social upheaval, beset by enemies within and without, the nation thrashed about like a dying, constipated beast. Whole cities crumbled into ruin amid the chaos as American society teetered on the very brink of collapse. The horror of that time has made the name of Eisenhower synonymous with anarchy even to this day. My father would never talk about how he and his family survived those grim times.

Fortunately, in the very nick of time, legislators realized the true cause of the crisis: America's national motto wasn't stupid enough. Like all of the country's other woes, this disaster could ultimately be traced back to that most sinister of Americans, Thomas Jefferson. The same treacherous impulses that led him to betray his rightful King also inevitably prompted him to sabotage the fledgling nation by giving it the worst possible state motto: E pluribus unum. Not only was this an unforgivably pompous classical reference, its subversive message-- "out of many, one--" would result in a catastrophic tradition of escalating tolerance and unity that was doomed to tear the country apart in less than two hundred years.

Read more.

I think it is time to change the motto from "In God We Trust" to "Try And Stop Us". Or perhaps "Are You Looking At Me?".

I have my crash recovery back!

2008-01-20T00:18:00.000+11:00

I tend to have a lot of browser tabs open. Not as many as some -- I work with one system administrator who regularly has 60-80 tabs open at once. But I'll frequently have a dozen or two.

So it's very frustrating when a browser crash or power failure knocks out all those tabs. Its not always easy to find them in your browsing history.

Some years ago, the Konqueror web browser introduced a Crash Manager that created a menu of any web sites you had open when the browser last crashed. Good stuff! You could open them all at once, or pick them one at a time.

Unfortunately, some time ago that feature was dropped from Konqueror as by default. I've missed it. A lot. Fortunately, Firefox now by default will recover from crashes by giving you the option to reload all your pages. Unfortunately, that's an all-or-nothing situation, and it doesn't help you if the crash was caused by one of those pages.

At long last, I've found how to put the crash recovery tool back into Konqueror. Its a two step process:

You need to have the KDE Addons package installed. On Fedora, a command like sudo yum install kdeaddons should work. Or use one of the graphical package managers like "Add/Remove Software".

In Konqueror, go to the Settings menu and choose Configure Extensions. Under the Tools tab, tick the Crashes Monitor checkbox.

Since I generally prefer Konqueror for 90% of the websites I visit, I think I'll be using it a lot more from now on.

Beer, glorious beer

2008-01-18T23:44:00.000+11:00

In the mid-1990s, I went through a stage of making my own home brew beer. It was reasonably successful, but a lot of effort considering that I'm not a big beer drinker, so after a four or five batches, I stopped.

Fast forward to January 2006, ten years almost to the day since the last time I had brewed beer. While cleaning up my garage, I came across a dozen or so bottles of my home-brewed pale ale that I had forgotten about. I was under the impression that beer didn't age well beyond a year or two, so I started pouring them out into the garden. Being a little slow, I didn't notice until the fourth or fifth bottle that they still had a good head and they didn't smell bad. In fact, they smelled delicious.

After a nervous taste I soon learned that ten year old pale ale not only smells delicious, but it also tastes delicious. It had darkened in colour to a dark red-gold shade, and had a magnificent malt flavour. Those last half-dozen plus bottles went straight into the fridge, and I enjoyed them over the next couple of weeks.

Today I stumbled across what is surely the very last bottle of home brew. One last lonely stubbie of pale ale, bottled on 2nd of January 1996. If beer becomes magnificent after ten years, words fail to describe what it becomes after twelve. A process worth repeating perhaps?

The dissolute doctor

2008-01-18T17:20:00.000+11:00

I stumbled across a blog -- alas, no longer being maintained -- from a British doctor, "Venial Sinner", who writes about the daily traumas of being a doctor in the British hospital system. Not a lot of humour there, except perhaps the gallows variety, but he writes good blog.

There's his frustration at seeing the only chance of identifying a mysterious disease disappear because of the interference of ignorant, judgmental, self-appointed god-botherers:

We have a single lead: an area of infective looking tissue on CT which we could biopsy and culture. Sharon cannot consent to the procedure; she does not currently have the capacity. In the morning, we spoke to her mother who agreed that the biopsy should go ahead all the same and that she would consent to this in place of her daughter (as the law allows).

That was the morning. By the afternoon everything had changed. Sharon's mother had some news. She had gone to the church and spoken with the Elders. The Elders has listened to the story, considered, and pronounced their verdict. Sharon had had no brain infection. God punishes those who live dissolute lives and Sharon had taken drugs. God does not like drugs. His punishment had been severe but he had heard the prayers of Sharon's mother and, being a good and merciful old chap, he had relented. Sharon would recover and all would be well. There was no infection and, ergo, there need be no biopsy. Sharon's mother, a devout Christian, swallowed it whole. She withdrew her consent for the biopsy immediately.

There's his example of how modern medicine can utterly fail to cure patients, and in fact make their life even more miserable and the common problem of patients with medically unexplained symptoms.

On learning that the new Polish government was cracking down on homosexuals, and that the Party Boss had declared that "The affirmation of homosexuality will lead to the downfall of civilization. We can't agree to it.", Venial Sinner remarked:

Downfall of civilisation, you say? Goodness, sounds bad. Who’d have thought it? You start off by letting two men hold hands in the street and before you know it the whole of mankind is poised to plunge backwards into benighted barbarity.

Cheers doc, where ever you've got to.

More nonsense about Open Source vulnerabilities

2008-01-18T16:55:00.000+11:00

Computer World is claiming that Red Hat Linux and Firefox are "more buggy" than Microsoft Windows.

That at least is the conclusion you are supposed to draw from the article's title, the summary and the opening paragraph:

Windows not that bad after all
By Matthew Broersma, Techworld

Secunia has found that the number of security bugs in the open source Red Hat Linux operating system and Firefox browsers far outstripped comparable products from Microsoft last year.

So they say. But if you read on to midway down the second page of the article, you get a very different picture:

Red Hat [Linux] was found to have by far the most vulnerabilities, at 633, with 99 percent found in third-party components. ...

Windows had only 123 bugs reported, but 96 percent of those were found in the operating system itself.

So let's see how that works. Red Hat Linux, which ships with multiple hundreds of third party applications, almost all of which are non-critical and don't even get installed, has about six vulnerabilities in the operating system. Windows, which ships with a handful of applications, has about 118 vulnerabilities in the OS. According to Computer World, an OS with six vulnerabilities is more buggy than one with 118 vulnerabilities.

Yeah, right. Sure it is. Just how much advertising does Microsoft do with Computer World?

The article goes on:

In the browser field, Firefox led the way with 64 bugs, compared to 43 for Internet Explorer, and 14 each for Opera and Safari.

However, in an examination of zero-day flaws - reported by third parties before a patch was available - Secunia found that Firefox tended to get more patches, sooner, compared to IE.

Out of eight zero-day bugs reported for Firefox in 2007, five have been patched, three of those in just over a week. Out of 10 zero-day IE bugs, only three were patched and the shortest patch time was 85 days.

You got that? The shortest time IE was vulnerable to known security bugs was nearly three months, compared to just over a week for Firefox.

But IE only looks as good as it does because ActiveX bugs are counted separately: IE had no fewer than 339 ActiveX bugs in 2007. If you include them in the count for IE, as you should, then you're comparing 382 for IE versus 64 for Firefox.

You almost -- almost -- have to admire the journalist's gall in trying to push a whopper of this size. Sadly, this sort of behaviour is very common: half-truths and deceptive statements in paragraph one, the actual facts buried deep in the article. That way you're not lying, because all the facts are there.

The people doing this know that there is a strong correlation between the number of readers and how close to the top of the article: for each extra paragraph you bury something under, you reduce the number of readers by a surprisingly large percentage.

I've written about the tendency of the IT press and security industry to make misleading if not dishonest comparisons between Linux and Windows before.

Don't mess with the geeks

2008-01-17T23:30:00.000+11:00

What happens when a clueless US senator pretending to run his own MySpace webpage hires clueless web developers to do the job for him?

In an attempt to prove how 21st century he is, 70-year-old Senator John McCain hired web developers to create his MySpace page. Unfortunately, they hotlinked to the wrong person's files.

When Mike Davidson learnt that McCain was "stealing" his bandwidth, he decided to play a little joke on the Republican senator:

'I think the idea of politicians setting up MySpace pages and pretending to actually use them is a bit disingenuous, so I figured it was time to play a little prank on Johnny Mac.'

Davidson replaced the image referred to in McCain's profile. However, the new image was a lot less prosaic: it described a political about-face by McCain on the subject of gay marriage and a penchant for partnerships between passionate females.

'The only thing necessary to effectively commandeer McCain's page with my own messaging was to simply replace my own sample image on my server with a newly created sample on my server. No server but my own was touched and no laws were broken. The immaculate hack.'

McCain should consider himself lucky that the image wasn't redirected to Goatse Man.

The article is a little sensational, describing it as "the perfect cybercrime" despite admitting that no laws were broken -- except possibly by McCain, who I'm sure had no authorization to use Davidson's computer resources.

Speaking of hotlinking from MySpace, those of you running your own Apache webserver might find this little rewrite rule handy:


RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([a-z0-9]+\.)?myspace\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://collect.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=signout [redirect,last]

WARNING: I don't run my own webserver, and consequently I haven't actually tested this. No warranty is given. Use at your own risk. If it blows up your computer and eats your dog, don't come crying to me.

The jazz club versus the collections agency

2008-01-17T00:34:00.000+11:00

SGAE, the royalty collection agency that operates in Spain, recently sued a jazz club for failing to pay royalties on music played. The club responded by stating that they only played royalty-free Creative Commons music, and magistrate Luis Sanz Acosta ruled in their favour.

The royalty collections agency's evidence was poor at best. Especially noteworthy was the recording they claimed was made in the jazz club but was actually recorded elsewhere. The judge was not amused.

What is especially satisfying is that the magistrate displayed a good understanding of "música libre" and the Creative Commons -- no doubt far better than the SGAE, which stands to lose financially if significant numbers of Spanish musicians drop out of their cozy little system. Monopolies never really understand the people who opt out.

For those who are unaware of how the royalty system works, it goes something like this:

The collections agency collects royalties on the musician's behalf, based on an estimate of how many times his or her work is played. Once the money is collected from (e.g.) the radio stations and bars, once a year the agency pays it to the musician, assuming:

The royalty is more than a certain minimum amount.

The agency can find your bank details, and don't confuse you with somebody else and pay your royalties to them.

You have filled out all the paper work they insist on.

They remember to actually make the payment.

If any of those conditions (especially the last) are not fulfilled, you have to wait for the next year's pay run to see a cent. If you specifically ask, they'll offer to try harder to remember to pay you next time. In the meantime, they get to collect the interest on your money for another year.

Naturally this does not apply to musicians who can afford more lawyers than the collections agency, but since musicians generally only get into such a happy state by collecting royalties, there are far fewer of them than outsiders to the music biz usually imagine.

Buy our product or we'll sue you

2008-01-14T07:11:00.000+11:00

Two US companies have issues cease and desist letters to Microsoft, Apple, Real Networks and Adobe, warning them to stop not using their Digital Restrictions software.

That's right. Buy our product or we'll sue.

The manufacturers of the DRM software, Media Rights Technologies (MRT) and BlueBeat.com, claim that their product ~~makes water not wet~~ "effectively controls access to copyrighted material", and therefore failing to use their ~~snake-oil~~ product is illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act:

[The DMCA] makes illegal and prohibits the manufacture of any product or technology that is designed for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure which effectively controls access to a copyrighted work or which protects the rights of copyright owners. Under the DMCA, mere avoidance of an effective copyright protection solution is a violation of the act.

How's that again? If you fail to use DRM, that's the same as circumventing the DRM software that you would have used if you had used any.

(Or, to put it another way, if you give a sandwich to your friend without charging him money, you're guilty of being an accessory to theft, because your friend effectively stole from you the money he would have given you if you had asked for any, and therefore you assisted him in his crime. And if your brain hurts about now, you're not alone.)

That's a rather... unusual... interpretation of the DMCA. It's almost certainly a publicity stunt, and unlikely to go any further, but it isn't that far removed from media companies' efforts to outlaw open formats and mandate ineffective and restrictive technologies.

Would you invest in this company?

2008-01-11T12:34:00.000+11:00

Anti-virus computer software company MacAfee has recently warned investors that they enter into legally-binding agreements without understanding those agreements.

Naturally McAfee didn't quite put it that way. Instead, they warned investors that their ability to "commercialise products" based on open-source software -- that is, software which other people have created and published under an open-source licence -- might be at risk if they are forced to obey the licence, since they're not sure what their obligations will be.

Well, here's a thought. Maybe they could read the licence and find out? There are poor quality licences that are ambiguous and incoherent, but the GPL is not one of them. And despite McAfee's wishful thinking that the GPL has never been tested in court, it has, successfully. The reason the GPL rarely makes it to court is because the infringers generally settle out of court and promise to obey the GPL.

It really shouldn't be that difficult for McAfee and others like them. If you want to use open source software in your products, then you have to follow the rules in the licence you have to use that software. That's no different from closed-source licences you might get from Microsoft or any other software company. If McAfee warned investors that they might not be able to use Microsoft's software in their products without obeying the agreement they have with Microsoft, everybody would laugh at them. But put open source in there, and suddenly folks are bewildered -- do they have to obey this agreement or not?

I'm not the only one wandering if McAfee's comments indicate that they are infringing the GPL. Zdnet's Dana Blankenhorn also suggests they're asking to be sued.

McAfee also raises the specter of open source software infringing other copyrights or patents. Naturally it is difficult to tell whether open source software infringes, but that's because recognising infringement is very difficult. Every sizable software project will invariably infringe patents, because the software patent system is seriously broken. Whether software infringes patents has nothing to do with whether you can see the source code or not. It isn't even a barrier to whether patent holders will find out about the infringement. If McAfee were honest, they'd warn their investors that to the extent they licence closed-source software from third parties, they are at greater risk because they have less ability to recognise patent infringement.

Refuse to be terrorized

2008-01-01T00:01:00.000+11:00

As the clock ticks over to 2008, now is the moment to say enough is enough. It is time to refuse to be terrorized any longer. Repeat after me:

I am not afraid.

Watch this video:

or see it directly on YouTube.

(While I like the video's message very much, I fear that the dry recitation of statistics and facts will not grab people's emotions in the same way that fear-mongering does. But I am encouraged by the fact that there are people who are refusing to be terrorized.)

And from here:

I am not afraid of terrorism, and I want you to stop being afraid on my behalf. Please start scaling back the official government war on terror. Please replace it with a smaller, more focused anti-terrorist police effort in keeping with the rule of law. Please stop overreacting. I understand that it will not be possible to stop all terrorist acts. I accept that. I am not afraid.

Thanks to Bruce Schneier and Bex from the Argonist. See also what the terrorists want.

A new blog

2007-12-31T07:52:00.000+11:00

There is a lot I like about Blogger. I've been using it since June 2006, and I'm mostly happy about the way it works.

But not completely happy -- there are a few things that are irksome, such as:

No satisfactory way to get a cut tag into long posts. And I have a tendency to write a lot of long posts -- at least long enough that I need cut tags.

No way of removing or renaming the images you have uploaded. At this time, the only way to delete an image is to delete the whole post.

No good way of backing up your blog. I had a good, simple script using wget but since Google changed the layout of Blogger, it no longer works so well (or at all).

Google seems to have a very flighty attitude to making Blogger available to third party applications. The original Blogger 1.0 API does not work with Blogger 2.0; the Blogger 2.0 Atom API is now being deprecated in favour of yet another API. No wonder I haven't been able to find an Linux app that can successfully communicate with Blogger.

So I have decided to experiment with another blog, over on Wordpress. That doesn't mean I'm abandoning Blogger for Wordpress immediately, or at all.

Family walking on all fours

2007-12-30T08:00:00.000+11:00

National Geographic has an article about a Kurdish family where five out of the nineteen siblings in one family walk on all fours instead of upright.

Scientists who have studied the three sisters and two brothers insist that it is not a hoax.

Uner Tan, a Turkish neurophysiologist, has studied them and believes they are "evolutionary throwbacks" to our ancestors. A team of German scientists led by Stefan Mundlos believes they have found the precise gene which has knocked out their ability to walk upright.

It's not clear what they mean by "the" gene that controls bipedalism: walking on two legs successfully requires many features, both anatomical and mental, and knocking out just one of them will cause the whole system to break. To take an extreme example, it's hard to walk upright if you have no legs. Less extreme example: the move to bipedalism would have required changes to our hips and backs. Our backs are still not completely evolved to suit our upright stance, which is why people are prone to back problems. Comparing us to our cousins (gorillas, orangutans, chimps and bonobos) shows that we have significantly longer legs than they do, relative to our body-size. The evolution of bipedalism would have required all these features to evolve more-or-less in lockstep (albeit presumably in fits and starts), and it isn't credible that there is a single gene that controls them all.

Nevertheless, certainly there could be a single gene -- or many single genes -- that the lack of could disable bipedalism. If you remove the accelerator cable from a car, the car won't move, but that isn't to say that the accelerator cable is the thing that makes cars move forward.

After studying the family, the British evolutionary psychologist Nicholas Humphrey pointed out that the genetic mutation alone wouldn't be sufficient to cause the lack of bipedalism. He gives equal credit to a family that was accepting of the children's strange gait, and making no efforts to cajole them into standing upright. Sensible, so far. But then he goes on:

"This is for real," Humphrey said. "You only have to look at the calluses on the hands of the young man [Huseyin] to see he's been on his hands for a very long time."

Why single out Huseyin? Don't the other four siblings have calluses on their hands? And walking on your hands is hardly the only way to make them callused.

I don't have any specific reason to expect a hoax, but calluses on the hands of one of the five siblings is hardly a reason to give the all-clear. Nevertheless, in the absence of any specific reason to expect a hoax, I think it is worth treating it as genuine.

The behavior could potentially reveal much about our own evolution, Humphrey says.

"Here we've got a living example of how it might be for a member of our species to walk on four legs," he said.

Most experts assume that the quadruped ancestors of humans walked in a similar way to apes such as gorillas and chimpanzees.

But the Turkish brothers and sisters walk on only their wrists or the heels of their hands, with their fingers held off the ground, the researchers say. This position appears to have saved their fingers from damage; the sisters, for instance, engage in both crochet and embroidery.

Chimps, our closest living relatives, use their whole hands and fingers for walking.

"Chimpanzees basically wreck their fingers by walking on them," Humphrey said.

[...]

"I think this new evidence, suggesting that [early-human ancestors] walked on their wrists, is much more plausible and interesting," Humphrey said.

I question this completely. Chimpanzees wreck their fingers? Chimps have very good manual dexterity, I'd need to see some support for this astounding claim before accepting it.

But even if correct about chimpanzees, Humphrey's claim that the siblings walk only on the heels of their hands isn't supported by the evidence available. The article has one photo of four of the siblings walking. In it, you can clearly make out just two hands on the ground, and in both of them, the people are clearly using their entire hand, fingers and all.

(Click image for full view.)

The photographic evidence contradicts Humphrey's claim, and calls into doubt Uner Tan's conclusion that this is a viable model of pre-bipedal human movement.

If you try it for yourself, I'm confident you'll find that it is impossible to do what the researchers claim. With the heel of the hand, or the palm, flat on the ground, it is virtually impossible to bend the fingers back far enough to keep them off the ground. There's maybe a couple of millimetres give in the finger joints, and it is quite tiring. There are basically three ways of hand-walking: with open hands flat on the ground; on closed fists; or on the knuckles of the fingers, as apes do when knuckle-walking. I do not believe there is any evidence at all, either in anatomically modern humans or any plausible ancestor, for a mode of quadrupedal walking where the fingers are held up off the ground.

There is no doubt at all that human development is complex. The five siblings in question all display a range of congenital deficiencies, include mild mental retardation and lack of balance. It is absolutely possible that whatever genetic damage the five siblings have -- and it might be as little as a single gene -- could lead to them doing the "bear crawl" into adulthood.

But I am extremely skeptical that this gives us any insight into human evolution. For Uner Tan to describe this as "backward evolution" is as absurd as it would be to describe Tay-Sachs disease as backwards-evolution, or sufferers of Huntington's Disease as "evolutionary throwbacks" to an otherwise unsuspected ancestor. The siblings are clearly broken. They're not a throwback to "primitive Man". The most one could say is that, possibly, early pre-bipedal ancestors of human beings may not have had the gene which the siblings are missing. But that's not the same thing: if you rip out the computer chip from a modern Ford Fiesta you don't get a Model T Ford, you get a broken Fiesta.

(Unlike modern cars, biological organisms are astonishingly good at continuing to work with bits missing. As fragile as living things are, we're also incredibly resilient.)

Update, January 3rd: More information here.

The war on the unexpected

2007-12-27T12:59:00.000+11:00

Bruce Schneier has a good name for the faux-war on terror the cowardly Chicken Littles have created: the War on the Unexpected. Anything different or unexpected must be a threat:

We've opened up a new front on the war on terror. It's an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it's a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested -- even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats.

This isn't the way counterterrorism is supposed to work, but it's happening everywhere. It's a result of our relentless campaign to convince ordinary citizens that they're the front line of terrorism defense. ...

The problem is that ordinary citizens don't know what a real terrorist threat looks like. They can't tell the difference between a bomb and a tape dispenser, electronic name badge, CD player, bat detector, or trash sculpture; or the difference between terrorist plotters and imams, musicians, or architects. All they know is that something makes them uneasy, usually based on fear, media hype, or just something being different.

The full article is well worth reading, and contains many links to actual cases of the most awe-inspiring stupid security "threats". None of the examples quoted above are made up.

In recent weeks:

Concert-goers to an open-air concert in Perth were told that picnic blankets and rugs were prohibited as they were a security risk. Adding a note of the surreal, the tickets warned patrons not to bring "crocodiles or spears" to the concert.

A blind calypso musician and his band thrown off a plane after another passenger complained they had been in high spirits earlier but were now sitting quietly.

An orthodox Jew on a train was arrested after passengers panicked on seeing him praying while sitting next to a man wearing a turban.

A Florida bomb squad called in to blow up a typewriter.

Police evacuate everyone within a mile radius of some fake dynamite taped to the side of a house.

(The comments on that story are interesting: in summary, it seems that the cops simply followed the Department of Transportation's guidelines, which seem to be massively over-cautious compared to the guidelines offered by the Department of Defense and usual practice for disarming known high-explosive bombs.

Earlier incidents in the war on the unexpected:

An Australian pub patron thrown out by bouncers for reading a book called The Unknown Terrorist.

A Canadian firetruck racing to a fire in New York was stopped at the US border for eight minutes while border officials checked the firefighters' IDs and the truck's licence plates.

In 2005, a man in the UK who fell into a diabetic coma on a bus was shot twice with a Taser gun by police who feared he may have been a terrorist.

Are we feeling safer yet?

Copyrighting the pyramids

2007-12-27T12:23:00.000+11:00

How crazy is this? Egypt has announced that they are copyrighting the pyramids, and intend charging royalties to anyone who copies them.

Zahi Hawass, the charismatic and controversial head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the move was necessary to pay for the upkeep of the country's thousands of pharaonic sites.

"The new law will completely prohibit the duplication of historic Egyptian monuments which the Supreme Council of Antiquities considers 100 per cent copies," [Zahi Hawass] said.

...

However, the law "does not forbid local or international artists from profiting from drawings and other reproductions of pharaonic and Egyptian monuments from all eras - as long as they don't make exact copies."

"Artists have the right to be inspired by everything that surrounds them, including monuments," he said.

Asked about the potential impact on the monumental Luxor Hotel in the US gambling capital of Las Vegas, Mr Hawass said that particular resort was "not an exact copy of pharaonic monuments despite the fact it's in the shape of a pyramid".

If the copyright only applies to exact duplicates (that is, the same shape and materials inside and out) one wonders that the point of retroactively copyrighting something created more than four thousand years ago? Are there really that many people making exact life-sized duplicates of the Great Pyramid of Giza?