Electric Josh

More email
So Slashdot has picked up the story of the Laurie Garrett email I pointed to the other day, and Lawmeme has a good essay on the subject here. The Lawmeme essay concentrates on the privacy implications---yeah, yeah, everything you write can be published easily nowadays...be careful, kids---but manages not to talk much about the thing that really worries me, which is that journalists, whose job it is to write clever, informative reports like the one Ms. Garrett unwittingly published, would become annoyed at its publication. Well, except that it was unintentional---that would be marvelously unnerving.

I understand that not everything is on the record, but is a report that names as few names as this one really all that tough to release? Is there some career-threatening shame in her note's absence of the stilted, unreasonably self-conscious attempt at the appearance of dry objectivity that pollutes almost all American news (but makes The Onion funny)? Or do I just wish I was as good a storyteller as she? Read up, y'all.
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Dig
Bechtel's PR chief points to the actual rebuttal (PDF only; alas) to the Globe's hatchet job, which I linked to a couple of days ago. The Globe has kind of vaguely alluded to the existence of some document that Bechtel may or may not have produced. Well, voila. Thanks, Mike.
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Barlow
Here's John Perry Barlow, cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the one in the sidebar), former Grateful Dead lyricist, and one-time personal friend of Dick Cheney's: Sympathy for the Devil.
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Dirty
The Onion is particularly good this week.

Corey Flintoff Unleashes Sonorous, Pleasantly Modulated String Of Obscenities
WASHINGTON, DC-Upon injuring a toe Sunday, Corey Flintoff, newscaster for NPR's All Things Considered, unleashed a string of rich, pleasantly modulated obscenities. "God fucking dammit," Flintoff warmly intoned after dropping a heavy-duty router on his foot while working in his garage. "Stupid fucking cocksucking son of a bitch." Added Flintoff in a lush baritone: "Goddamn motherfucking shit-for-brains. This is NPR." Next-door neighbor Cheryl Thomas, who overheard the tirade, said Flintoff's delivery was so melodic, she was unaware that he was swearing.

Scanner
A couple of months ago I borrowed a scanner from Adam and Lee who, to be honest, seemed to be glad to have the thing out the door and no longer cluttering their office; K was pretty bummed that we were taking home yet another computer peripheral, and she correctly predicted that it wouldn't get nearly as much use as I had predicted it would. That was six months ago. Now I see what I've been missing, and it makes me feel bad. This dude is from Portugal.
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Museum
The Proudfully American Logo Museum.
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Frontline
The PBS show Frontline is running a show called The War Behind Closed Doors, which I haven't seen, but whose online presence contains long interviews with them that influence them that decide what we're going to do. I haven't seen the show itself, yet.
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Bad
Laurie Garrett is a reporter who was at the World Economic Forum in Davos just recently, and she sent this fascinating, mildly scary email to a couple of friends, one of whom enraged her (apparently) by forwarding it to someone else, and thence to the whole internet. Here is the scariest snippet, though by no means the most interesting:

The global economy is in very very very very bad shape. Last year when WEF met here in New York all I heard was, "Yeah, it's bad, but recovery is right around the corner". This year "recovery" was a word never uttered. Fear was palpable -- fear of enormous fiscal hysteria. The watchwords were "deflation", "long term stagnation" and "collapse of the dollar". All of this is without war.

You are wrong
Deep into timewasting, I've found, via Peter, who introduced himself at the Dave Winer thing a couple weeks ago, a large (though inevitably partial) enumeration of common errors in English. Read up.
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Homing devices everywhere
Those RFID tags (the RF means radio frequency) that sit in EZPass transponders and key cards like the one that gets me into the building at work are pretty fabulous pieces of technology. (Great article here.) The tags themselves consist of little computer chips attached to an antenna. When left alone, they are, by any definition, off. The antenna picks up the energy from an radio signal and converts it to current that powers the chip which, in turn, emits a unique (tho quieter) radio signal. It's this response signal that gets detected by the toll booth, cash register, spy van (holy crap!), or whatever.

A whole industry is popping up around them. There's talk of using these things to track each individual item in a warehouse, each item with its unique chip; there are relatively simple schemes for identifying a whole bunch of these things at once. The chips are getting very small, and are apparently identifiable from hundreds of feet away. The Times and Slashdot are on the case somewhat.
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Secure
Must stop riffing on this Homeland Security foolishness (why, oh, why isn't it called Domestic Security?), but the Sunday Times Magazine's main story this week is called Fortress America, and demonstrates that choosing fear is tantamount to choosing, among other things, economic ruin. Hmmm.
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Maps!
I've now spent the last 45 minutes looking at maps of Boston from three different points over the last 300 years or so at the aptly named mapsovertime.com. The maps instantly suggest, of course, that an enormous fraction of the city is built on fill. Try to imagine what would happen today if a group of developers proposed, as they did in the early part of the last century, to totally fill in an entire body of water in the middle of town? It was the Back Bay, which is of course now one of the nicest parts of town. Also check out the airport in the 1995 aerial photo with the 1775 map semitransparently overlaid. Lousy environmentalists. At any rate, there are several dozen maps to peruse and compare, so have fun.
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Mr. Potato Head
From across the ether of the magical internetwork come these many parodies of ready.gov, the Office of Homeland Security's one visible product, 18 months in the making. Check here and here for starters. The picture to the left is obviously the international sign for "Beware of falling debris, especially if you have a really old computer." Here's my favorite. Compare with the actual site and see if you can figure out which one is a parody, and of what.
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Ex-pres
So The Atlantic is running an absurdly long interview with Bill Clinton, although to say that it's an interview is kind of a sloppy use of the word. The 42nd president has a speaking style that can only be described as exhaustive, and he manages to compose entire short essays on the spot, in his head. Dave Eggers said about him, "You can see his semicolons!" From the interview:

[Q: What about the recent speech by Al Gore, in which he criticized the Administration for using the prospect of war for political ends?] Well, I neither heard it nor actually read it. All I read were the press reports. And [here Clinton pauses for perhaps 15 seconds, the only such break in the conversation] my observations would be three.

Pronunciation
So given that I know a couple of Bechtel people I'm not going to comment on all the Big Dig related craziness upon which The Boston Globe is reporting, except to say the following: It's not pronounced beck-tell like it's some kind of telecom company, for chrissake. It's becktle, rhymes with rectal (which is exactly the sort of silly mnemonic that gifted PR types could prevent even family members from thinking of for the better part of a decade.)

Typically, when people's egregious telecom-style pronunciation is corrected, and it is pointed out that the company's name is the same as the owning family's name, and that that name is pronounced becktle, they say, "Oh. Okay." But I've been listening to one of the guys on NPR say beck-tell for the last five minutes, now, despite the fact that his interviewee, a guy who wrote a book about the company, pronounces its name correctly. It's totally maddening. How you pronounce someone's name isn't a matter of taste! It's their name, and they get to tell you how it's pronounced.

Poor Kara suffers from this all the time. The Boston accent is such that a lot of people can't distinguish between the two normally acceptable pronunciations of that name. We are thankful, though, that we don't live in Pennsylvania anymore, where people would routinely think, inexplicably, that she was saying her name was Carla. "No, it's Kara." "Oh, okay, Carla." Never did figure that one out.

When anyone in the Bush administration talks about the leader of Iraq, they call him Sodom Hussein. I can't decide if this is a calculated political gesture or just a symptom of the usual mispronunciation syndrome.
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Kids
Lee and Adam went and had their gestating baby looked at and found out what sort of baby it is. Congratulations, guys!
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30
Happy birthday, Emmett.
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Well, that was annoying
Email is back. I have returned to the magical land of two-way communication. Hopefully the recovery process (in the sense that rolling back an upgrade constitutes a recovery) didn't blast anything irreplacable. Grunt.
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Woof
Just like the caption says, woof.
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Not found
Read closely the 404 of Mass Destruction.
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Shuttle weariness
I hate to link to such rabid, over-the-top rejection of Public America and the bizarre interaction between its emotions, such as they are, and its media. But insensitive doesn't mean wrong, so here's the Buffalo Beast on the space shuttle explosion:

"The risk became real, and the sacrifice that the word courageous implies became a painful recognition of the lives lost, the families devastated and our own faith challenged."

As far as I can tell, this passage-which was written by the president of one of America's largest universities-makes sense up until the word "implies," and then not at all after that. Whose sacrifice is he talking about? The astronauts', you'd think-but then the sacrifice becomes a "recognition of the lives lost," and since a thing does not recognize its own loss... You can go crazy trying to figure this out.

Accidental upgrades
So I've erased my email program. It proves that I'm an idiot. Alternatively, it proves that the number of computer problems one has is more closely related to the amount of time he spends screwing around with computers than any notion of computer literacy. Alas. Email's gonna be quiet for a couple of days. Update: At least I'm not the only one; Debian bug report #180182.
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Plan
As we watch Boston's cool new zillion-dollar ultraroads fall into place, it's still nice to read about towns that are actually getting rid of roads. The Seattle Times has a piece on Portland and Vancouver's successes with urban planning.
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Hiding
So K and I hid out for the weekend, watched a rented movie, coded, read. That's about it. On the way back we stopped in a convenience store, whereupon I was greeted by the warm, smiling headlines of the Times, Globe, and several others all saying something like Millions across globe rally against war. It's the most pleased I've ever been about something I missed, and wanted to be at. Next time...
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Om
How to survive WMD attacks, by Sergeant Red Thomas.

These weapons are about terror, if you remain calm, you will probably not die.

Live free or die
If the paper is to be believed, I'm jittery about being gassed or sickened or irradiated like cousin Harry. Don't believe everything you read. If someone wants to inform me that I, Josh, will be injured in some specific fashion at some certain time, then I'm happy to do something about it. If, on the other hand, I'm supposed to sit around and worry or maybe just buy some duct tape, then I'll have to happily ignore all the fearmongering. I mean, didn't Winston Churchill go out to the theatre every night, braving the V2 rockets that terrorized London just to demonstrate that there was no point in acting frightened? That's what I want Tom Ridge and W. to be doing.

I, for one, find it tough to avoid thinking of Scissorfight's apt appropriation of a certain Revolutionary era motto. Heavy redneck metal is really the only way to deal with polychromatic boogeymen about which citizens can do nothing but burn less oil:

Weed, guns, and axes
We don't pay our taxes
Cause we don't exist
On any government list
Yeah we're survivalists
In the wilderness
Our battle cry:
"Live free or die"

We've got a war to wage.
We've got a war to wage.
You wanna war to wage?
Give you a war to wage...

NY
Just realized that I won't be going to the war march in New York this weekend, which I had told myself I'd go to. Kind of bummed about the timing.
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Pictures
Dan Bricklin posted pictures of the Dave Winer thing I lurked at last night, and there's a mug shot of me looking super pissed at something. It's about 2/3 of the way down this page. If you've never seen me before, I'm the guy that looks super pissed. I really wasn't mad at anything---quite the contrary! Oh, well.

I did wish on the way home that it had occurred to me to point out that the fragmentation of the universe of web logs is something that's natural, sure: people think differently, so why should their websites crosslink much? But the natural barriers between viewpoints or political philosophies or whatever are easier to overcome when all you have to do is click somewhere, even on a link that says something like, look at this ridiculous statement over here. For example, I'd never pick up an entire print copy of the Washington Times nor watch an entire episode of The 700 Club, but scanning the websites of each is relatively painless. It's good for us. (Another guy picked up the slack just after I spoke, and then Cap'n Dave tyrannically but probably correctly moved the conversation on.)

How do you know what you think if you never think?
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TV
Man, I forgot how much I like watching hockey on TV. If only there were no ads.
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Visiting Professor Dave
I went to this live blog thing that Dave Winer had over at Harvard; he's an official Harvard man now, for some stretch anyway. Pretty interesting. First of all, the ratio of recognizable smart people to Josh was at least 10:1, and that's mostly because I didn't put names on most of the faces. At any rate, Brent Simmons from Userland was there, along with Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, the guys who invented VisiCalc, the first ever spreadsheet, and several others my audience of five don't care about. This surprised me: of the 50 or so people there, 96% were white men, a large fraction of whom had beards.

Donna Wentworth from Copyfight (the same one as in the sidebar) kept a semi-transcript, which can be found here. I'm the "Blogger" about 2/3 of the way down with lots of ellipses. I talked kind of fast, and miscommunicated (and Dave either missed or didn't care about---hard to tell) my point. Me and a bunch of clever operators of (and machinists behind) websites with heavy flow. Are these sites journalism? Are they prose's grand return to being the preferred communication form of the rabble? Is it just a bunch of dudes who have easily updated websites all of a sudden?

The kind of random event lurking at which makes one glad to live in Boston.
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The TV is loud
Article at American Prospect about the right-wingedness of FOX News, and how the left ought to get its own loud network:

If the cable space opened up, would talented liberal loudmouths learn to raise their voices, overcome their ambivalence and mop the floor with the right's shoddy arguments? Would they take off the gloves and remind their audiences who their opponents are? The histrionic gifts of Paul Begala and James Carville, currently sharing Crossfire, suggest that the answer is yes. But there's no way to know other than to try.

Ski
I miss having "going skiing" be my only goal for the day.
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First the Iraqis, now the Brits
This space is trying really hard to be apolitical. Being amazed, though, at people being just plain stupid and plagiarizing old reports doesn't count as being political. Now back to my newly usual apolitical voice:

I wonder what's on TV?
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Ah!
So that's how trackback works.
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It's not unconstitutional until a court says so
People starting to notice USA PATRIOT II, coming soon, apparently. Sounds like it'll peck away at those pesky first ten amendments even more. I found this at boingboing; Oliver, their attributed source; his link to the National Review's take on the New York Sun's idiocy on the matter, which equates loyal opposition with treason; and some Patriot II analysis. Update: Here's Volohk's own elaboration of what he wrote in the Nat'l Review article.
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Why do you suppose they're losing people?
The Globe tells us that states are losing track of child molesters that are supposed to be in Megan's Law databases, but, for whatever reason, aren't. Database problems? But computers are infalliable! See if the real article has appeared here yet.
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Rod Serling hiding here somewhere?
The CIA's homepage for kids. In fact, check out this gallery of terrifying (or something) .gov websites.
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Empire
Cursor (in the sidebar) points us to a London Times essay that is one of the more clearly thought-through pieces of prose I've seen about Gulf War II. I'm not so sure that all the things the author thinks will go right actually will, nor am I sure that the author really believes so either. But I can still count on one hand the number of op-ed pieces and articles and whatnot that enunciate real, logical arguments, pro- or antiwar, without a disingenuous undercurrent of either A) being antiwar because one doesn't trust the president, or B) being prowar because one does trust the president. Have people always been this bad at thinking for themselves?

At any rate, go read How to be a thoughtful critic of the war right now.

How many different newspapers do you read in any given month, anyway?
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Search
Google says so: that which isn't quite oil is officially out of the way. Only the nukular second cousin left to go.
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SOTU
The State of the Union drinking game is almost as funny as buzzword bingo was.
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Keep on painting
The den was a horrible, faded blue color that looked as accidental as walls can look, so I've been painting it yellow the last couple of days. It's always a longer process than it should be, because before one can even paint one has to move all the furniture out, wash the walls, tape everything up, spread tarps, gather the brushes and pans and stuff, &c. The scary part came, though, when I realized that I'd been humming (or is it mumbling?) the same Oysterhead song to myself since Sunday morning. It's one I haven't listened to in probably four months (since I smashed the screen on the previous laptop and switched to one with sound hardware that's nonfunctional under Linux). The damn thing keeps running through my head, along with the fumes...

He always liked to paint with his sunglasses on
Cause acrylics tend to burn on his eyes
And nothing brought him closer to the canvas
Than the warmth of Eleanor's thighs
He never had much of a devious nature
But was hardly a modern day saint

If you asked the little boy what
he'd be when he grew up
Said I'd rather be a fireman than paint

Dave
I might just have to go to this.
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Are we moving backwards in time?
Lee wonders if I find it rough to be right all the time: Engineer's '97 Report Warned of Damage to Tiles by Foam. The answer to Lee's question can be found in this space, where I rant incorrectly and often. But this one was no surprise to anyone who has had a job of any technical sort at all and had to interact with a management layer whose job it is to convince people that everything is great. Also no surprise to anyone who's read Feynman's second (memoir-ish) book.
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Deja vu
Speculation from the Times about NASA responding to safety warnings by shooting the messenger. This is sounds quite a bit like what happened before the explosion of the Challenger 17 years ago. My prediction is that someone in NASA predicted some massive likelihood (like 10% or something) that this reentry would fail. Just wild speculation, informed by what happened last time, when Feynman famously said,

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Yesterday
The reason that the shuttle's reentry failed is obviously that I forgot to say rabbit, rabbit when I woke up, as one is supposed to do on the first morning of every month. Sorry, everyone.
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Best headline ever
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Deer.
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Hmmm
Uh oh. CNN has good pictures. Here's the official mission site at NASA. As usual, the Slashdot comments have a bunch of info.
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Well, this isn't good
It seems that NASA has lost contact with the space shuttle. The picture at right shows two contrails coming from the shuttle. Why would an unbroken space craft, one that normally lands by gliding, doubly emit smoke. Couple of stories here:

• Boston Globe (AP)
• CNN

See what happens.
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