How addicted to the internet are you?

Lore Sjoberg provides you with an easy checklist to discover how bad your addiction may be:

If the ancient Egyptians had the internet, there would have been 11 plagues in Exodus, with “unreliable DSL” tucked in between the frogs and the lice.

It’s a pain when your DSL goes down, but the bright side is that it gives you a chance to rate yourself on the Internet Dependency Scale. Just compare your actions to those listed below and you’ll know what sort of pathetic digital symbiont you really are.

Stage 1 Internet Dependency

Immediate reaction: Check the wires, see if you can steal a neighbor’s Wi-Fi, then get up and do something else.

What you do while waiting for the connection to come back: Read a book, watch a movie, go for a walk. Is this a trick question?

If it doesn’t come back in an hour: Call your service provider, then go back to whatever you were doing.

QotD: The matriarchy

[Alan Oak]: In a correspondence with feminist scholar Sylvia Kelso, published in Women of Other Worlds (1999), you wrote:

“Where has anyone experienced a matriarchy for test comparison?” you may ask. In fact, most of us have, as children. When the scale of our whole world was one long block long, it was a world dominated and controlled by women. Who were twice our size, drove cars, had money, could hit us if they wanted to and we couldn’t ever hit them back. Hence, at bottom, my deep, deep suspicion of feminism, matriarchy, etc. Does this mean putting my mother in charge of the world, and me demoted to a child again? No thanks, I’ll pass . . .

This leads me to another thought [. . .] Women do desperately need models for power other than the maternal. Nothing is more likely to set any subordinate’s back up, whether they be male or female, than for their boss to come the “mother knows best” routine at them. We need a third place to stand. I’m just not clear how it became my job to supply it.

Lois McMaster Bujold, interviewed by Alan Oak at WomenWriters.net, 2009-06

Random links of possible interest

Just a few links to provide you with click-therapy:

• China decides that electro-shock therapy isn't appropriate for treating "internet addiction". No word on whether they've invested in Tasers instead.
• Simona Halep ignores an online petition and decides to promote her sports career over the interests of thousand of pasty internet geeks.
• Apollo 11 experience recreated on the web.
• I can't possibly improve on this article's title: Pic of the Day (Mid-1930s' Edition): Economic Suicide Girls Get Tattooed For the NRA!



• Tim Cavanaugh fisks Timothy Geithner.
• Auto Czar abdicates.
• An over-the-top analysis of why there is a Gender Gap among American voters (link via Gerard Van der Leun.
• Survey shows that one in six people too dumb to be allowed out on the internet by themselves.

Games for girls, critiqued

With all the unending uproar about how Grand Gears of BioDoomShockWar encourages violence and anti-social behaviour among boys, games for girls have been travelling under the radar. No longer:

Ridiculous Life Lessons From New Girl Games
Some parents worry that videogames might cause their children to become violent and antisocial, but what if the opposite were true? What if games could make kids exceedingly likable and fashionable?

A wave of new games for tween girls seeks to do just that, serving up innocuous gameplay designed to let players become perfect little princesses. Aimed at that lucrative, Hannah Montana-fueled intersection of childhood and adolescence, these games might give 8- to 12-year-olds their first experiences with fashion, make-up, popularity . . . even boys.

The weird thing is that you can view these "wholesome" games as being just as bad for girls as Grand Theft Auto’s random bloodshed and rampant criminality is for young, impressionable boys. And while GTA's influence on boys has been dissected to death, what about the Nintendo DS’ upcoming avalanche of games for tween girls? What kinds of values do preteens learn from these titles? Valuable life lessons, or bad habits?

Just for the record, I think kids are far more resilient than either class of critic can imagine. Playing a violent video game does not, in my experience, turn youngsters into nihilistic killers, nor would I expect girls to turn into proto-Stepford Wives after playing one of these "girly" games. Kids who have pre-existing problems may find more than just entertainment value in games, but (as with so many other "problems"), depriving everyone of the opportunity just to keep some people away from it isn't the answer . . . nor — if our collective long experiences with prohibiting drugs, sex, alcohol, and risky behaviour of all kinds — will it be any more successful.

Parkinson: the man behind "the Law"

He may be less familiar now, but most of us have heard of his most popular work: Parkinson's Law:

The book expanded on an article of his first published in The Economist in November 1955. Illustrated by Britain's then leading cartoonist, Osbert Lancaster, the book was an instant hit. It was wrapped around the author's "law" that "work expands to fill the time available for its completion". Thus, Parkinson wrote, "an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis . . . the total effort that would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil."

Parkinson's barbs were directed first and foremost at government institutions — he cited the example of the British navy where the number of admiralty officials increased by 78% between 1914 and 1928, a time when the number of ships fell by 67% and the number of officers and men by 31%. But they applied almost equally well to private industry, which was at the time bloated after decades spent adding layers and layers of managerial bureaucracy.

Links of potential interest

Some links you may find worth following:

• A brief history of the ubiquitous AK-47 assault rifle
• The "Equal Marriage" flag
• Tentacle porn threatens to overwhelm Japan's 3G networks
• Steve McNair's death declared a homicide by police
• Nick Gillespie offers an alternative (or two) to the government's stimulus:
• "Resolved: The New York Times Should Be Staffed By Volunteers, Like Meals On Wheels"

Link round-up

Various links of potential interest:

• Salamander Discovery Could Lead to Human Limb Regeneration
• Maybe this time it's different: Sustainable Biofuel, Canadian edition
• The Minnesota Vikings rank 89th of 122 in ESPN's "Ultimate Standings". Toronto's hockey team? 120th.
• Obama's Top Five Health Care Lies
• 200 year old ciphered message to Thomas Jefferson successfully decoded
• The 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest Winners

Examples of how to "fix" things

By way of a quick link from The Agitator, the wonderful world of "There, I Fixed It:

Wallabies? Pull the other one, mate!

Making the rounds at the office today:

DarkWaterMuse: Here we go, another ploy at mind control: 'Stoned wallabies make crop circles'.

No doubt financed by elitist US conservatives who continue to perpetrate the crime of burring the truth about supernatural global phenomenon. We cannot let these CCD — Crop Circle Deniers — wash away truth in a torrent of ill-gotten US propaganda dollars.

Show me one Wallaby in Alberta wheat fields! How about Wales, any Wallabies? No? Do you suppose Stalin hunted wild Wallaby on The Steppes? Doubtful.

These CCDs cannot be left to deny science any longer: Crop Circle Research

By the way, let me remind you to fill this out, Questionnaire on Crop Circles and Health, if you haven't already done so.

And an immediate response:

PR: The UK crop circles certainly were made by mammals "as high as a kite" but I don't think it was wallabies.

DarkWaterMuse: Members of Parliament throwing lavish fiscal end of year Spend The Surplus parties, perhaps?

DarkWaterMuse also occasionally blogs at Dark Water Musings.

New web application needed

I'm not much of a TV watcher — in fact, I can't remember the last time I turned on the TV to watch a program. Part of that is time constraints: I read a lot, and I'm busy blogging, gaming, or working on the computer for time that otherwise might be TV time. But there's another reason for it — I never know what's on, and I never know which channel it'll be on even if I did know.

We don't subscribe to the Toronto newspaper that includes a weekly TV guide, and I find that it takes far too long to scroll through the cable company's own online guide. Even though they helpfully provide some filtering options (by theme, with a fair selection of broad theme categories), it doesn't filter by which channels I actually have access to . . . and there are lots of channels in that category.

Here's an application that must be possible: a dynamic, customized TV guide that only tracks the channels I currently subscribe to. Just using a model like Amazon's recommendation mechanism would be a huge step forward. I could tell it that I liked certain shows and that I disliked other kinds of shows. By indicating the cable provider (assuming the cable provider wasn't also doing the guide) and the specific package(s) to which I'm subscribed, it should be able to let me know — in real time — what is on that I might want to watch, and where to find it.

So, for example, I could provide a list of "likes", both current and older:

• Firefly
• Tru Calling
• Rome
• Horatio Hornblower
• Family Guy
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• NFL football, especially Minnesota Vikings games
• Premier League soccer and (now that my team's been relegated) Championship soccer, especially Middlesbrough games

. . . and it should be able to tell me immediately if something I've specified is currently on, or will be soon, and if there's nothing on right now, provide both suggestions for things I might like and advance notice for upcoming shows.

Having described it, I'm certain it's technically easy (given access to the appropriate programming data, of course), but does it already exist? Everyone else might already be using something like this and I'd be none the wiser . . .

"We ain't got no irony. We don' need no stinkin' irony!"

Irony, Apple's App Store screeners don't do it:

. . . Apple rejected the application because it contained "objectionable content".

This was a link to a blog post which mentioned, and linked to, a Downfall parody, the film which charts Adolf Hitler's last days in his bunker. This version portrayed Hitler as an furious movie executive and demanding takedown notices be sent to everyone using his clips for parody. His officers warn him that parody is covered by fair use, so they might get sued by the EFF.

Displaying a fine grasp of irony, Apple removed the app from iTunes.

The EFF said it had no objection to Apple picking and choosing what appears on iTunes, but did point out that anyone could use YouTube to watch the video on their iPhone whether they had the app or not.

Ceci n'est pas une pipe step

It's not.

It's now officially summer

At risk of sounding positively Lileks-ian . . . it can't be summer until we get the gazebo set up. Today was gazebo day, so summer can start any time now . . .

New irritating telephone call

You know what really bothers me about the new style of telephone call from Sears? That they call me, using an automated dialler, then tell me to hold while they put a human on the call. Screw that, Sears! You want to call me? Pay a human being to make the call. Otherwise I'll hang up on you again.

Penn and Teller explain a simple trick

From Wired, the Neuroscience of Illusion:

One of the first tricks in Penn and Teller's Las Vegas show begins when Teller — the short, quiet one — strolls onstage with a lit cigarette, inhales, drops it to the floor, and stamps it out. Then he takes another cigarette from his suit pocket and lights it.

No magic there, right? But then Teller pivots so the audience can see him from the other side. He goes through the same set of motions, except this time everything is different: Much of what just transpired, the audience now perceives, was a charade, a carefully orchestrated stack of lies. He doesn't stamp out the first cigarette — he palms it, then puts it in his ear. There is no second cigarette; it's a pencil stub. The smoke from the first butt is real, but the lighter used on the pencil is actually a flashlight. Yet the illusion is executed so perfectly that every step looks real, even when you're shown that it is not.

Penn and Teller demonstrate the seven basic principles of magic.

The trick is called Looks Simple, and the point is that even a puff on a cigarette, closely examined, can disintegrate into smoke and mirrors. "People take reality for granted," Teller says shortly before stepping onstage. "Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn't mean it is simple."

The nicest way to say "thanks"

. . . is to pay the bill. I've been doing some freelance writing and analysis work and after some legalistic snags I finally got paid for my first two invoices today. It's mere peanuts in dollar terms, but it's nice to feel that I'm being a productive member of society again. Even nicer was the strongly implied possibility of additional work after this short engagement is finished.

Which is also a round-about way of explaining why I haven't done any blogging today . . .

Gotta find some wall space

Victor bought a small souvenir for us during his couple of days in Egypt:

Definitely something to frame and find an appropriate location for!

A different kind of moonlighting

Tracy Quan looks at what she calls "Kinkonomics":

As the economy takes a spanking, many women are turning to freelance fetish work to supplement their incomes.

"I've seen it before," says Linda, "during the tech bust in 2002. Women who thought they would always make a decent living in the tech sector lost their jobs." They came looking to Linda’s industry for freelance work, and now it’s happening again: professional women whose cubicle-bound careers have been downsized are entering Linda’s corner of the "gig economy" — a corner that involves whips, ropes, and occasionally, nipple clamps.

With staff jobs evaporating and former nine-to-fivers cobbling together incomes through scattered side projects, freelancing as a dominatrix — or "pro-domme," as industry types prefer to call it — has become a plausible gig option. As a former call girl, I know plenty of people in the industry, and I recently spoke to several who have started doing kink work to supplement their incomes. (I've changed their names to protect their privacy.) They agree: The sector is poised for expansion as more unemployed and underemployed women begin looking for extra cash.

You'd have to be really bored . . .

. . . to request one of pop music's best-known telephone numbers for your home:

After five years fielding thousands of calls to one of rock 'n' roll's most celebrated phone numbers, disc jockey Spencer Potter is hanging up on Jenny.

Her seven digits are familiar to anyone who paid attention to pop music in the early 1980s: 867-5309, immortalized by the band Tommy Tutone.

Potter and his roommates requested the number on a lark for their home phone in northern New Jersey. They got it, along with about 30 to 40 calls a day.

If you're equally bored, you can bid on the number through eBay (bidding was up to $3938.88 when I looked).

Goldberg, paging Mr. Rube Goldberg!

He'd have loved it.

H/T to "JtMc".

Snowfall

Yesterday's accumulation of snow on the back deck.

Merry Christmas!

I hope you all have a great holiday.

Because I'm feeling particularly lazy, here's a repost from last Christmas (but still as appropriate):

Rogier van Bakel was discussing the near-impossible level of effort needed to open some of the newer packages a few years back. It's still a topical post, especially right about now:

There's customer-unfriendly, and then there's customer-hostile. A few days ago I wrote about package design. More specifically, I excoriated the plastic retail hulls that have been proliferating for a few years now. The industry refers to them as clamshells, but I've dubbed them brinkswrap (that's shrinkwrap with the over-the-top protective properties of an armored truck). The post struck a chord with one reader of this blog who took a shine to the new name.

"Brinkswrap has been a longstanding frustration of mine. My daughter got a digital camera for Christmas — and a nice cut on her hand from the brinkswrap she had to break through to get to the camera. My wife got a couple of nice knives from her father. They were packaged together in brinkswrap. As I fought through the brinkswrap to get to them, I noted the irony of how much easier it would be to get through the brinkswrap if I already had the knives I was trying to get to."

Touché. Dante forgot to create a special circle of hell for these manufacturers and designers. Nevertheless, maybe we can squeeze them in somewhere. I'd put them between the apparel makers who sew scratchy brand labels onto the inside collars of their shirts, and the inconsiderate rotter who designed those maddening multiple seals on CD jewel cases.

OMG! It's snowing! In Canada!

Another winter storm rolls in, and of course I've got things to do today, so I can't just batten down the hatches and stay home warming my hands on the warm glow of the internet. Victor is ill, so we had to go down to the walk-in clinic to get him a note so he'll have something to hand in at school when they resume (he had a presentation to make yesterday, but was far too feverish to concentrate, never mind actually going to school).

This is a pretty impressive storm so far: nothing at 8:30, a few centimetres on the ground by 9. It's blowing all over the roads now, so driving is a bit fraught (that is, I was in 4-wheel-drive from the end of my driveway until I got back a few minutes ago).

The plow crews are, I hope, taking care of the major highways . . . because we saw no sign that they were out on our trip into Whitby and back. The two major roads connecting Brooklin and Whitby were both snow-covered and icy, and as there's a stretch along both that has no building or tree cover to break the wind, they're both at very low visibility.

Foods that shouldn't go together

For food items that are great by themselves, some people just can't stand to leave well enough alone and have to try combining them. Like bacon. And ice cream:

Who doesn't like bacon and eggs?

Ok, maybe vegans. And folks who are kosher. And people who don't eat eggs. Or those who don't like bacon. But I'm not sure that's possible. (I have a great bacon joke, but it's not 'pc', so I'd better keep it to myself.)

I'm a big fan of both bacon and the beautiful, bright-orange yolked eggs we get in France, so why confine them to breakfast? I was pretty sure Candied Bacon Ice Cream would work. I mean, it's got salt. It's got smoke. So why not candy it? Inspired by Michael Ruhlman, l wanted to see what would happened when they all got together.

H/T to Craig Zeni.

Happy (American) Thanksgiving

I suspect the web will be practically unoccupied today, as our American friends celebrate their Thanksgiving, and (retailers devoutly hope) head out to shop themselves into a frenzy on Friday.

Conspiracies and paranoia

James Lileks considers the world of the conspiracy theorist:

Some suggest that the great disenchantment began with the assassination of JFK, and I see the point. But it's strange that it led to a loss of faith in us, given who shot the President. (Yes, I'm one of those lone-gunman wackos. I'm a freethinker! I refuse to accept concensus!) If Oswald had been a card-carrying Kluxer or a dead-ender Bircher or some sort of far-right-wing nutcase, I wonder if we would have accepted the Warren Commission and moved along. But no, he was a Communist. Well obviously there has to be more to it, then. Same with Sirhan Sirhan: his motivation will forever be a mystery, won’t it?

Once you start to believe in the dark shadowy forces, you're done with the world. You're done engaging it, you're done enjoying it. There's no point. It's a sham, a shell, a shiny façade erected by the Jews / Bilderburgers / Trilateral Commission/ Council on Foreign Relations / Project for a New American Century / Masons / Knights Templar / Illuminati / Federal Reserve / Rockefeller-Royal Family Nexus / Bush Crime Syndicate / League of Grim Intent, and all you can do is post on the internet and call talk radio to argue with the hosts who think we're free people.

It's nice to see hope abroad in the land again, but I wonder who will be to blame when human nature asserts itself and the manna shipments fall behind. Someone has to be blamed, after all. It's not the task that's a fool's errand. It's the fools who refuse to believe in the task.

That was a lovely weekend!

Sorry for the lack of posting, but I needed some time away from the keyboard — literally. I've been suffering from a pinched nerve in my left shoulder for the past two months (I've been explaining it as a side-effect of "Extreme Pallbearing", but it was probably a TV I helped to move that did most of the damage). We've been on a big deadline at work over that time, so I've been wincing while I worked since mid-August. It's been good for my chiropractor's income, but bad for me.

A weekend spent almost completely away from the computer was just what I needed . . . still some pain in the arm, and a bit of remaining numbness in the little finger of my left hand, but otherwise I'm feeling much, much better.

The weather was wonderful, allowing us to get good use of the gazebo in the back yard for possibly the last time this year (all our neighbours have taken their sunshades & gazebo-equivalents down by now).

Victor and I spent Saturday visiting with some old friends of mine (for various values of "old"), including the discovery that one of them is now blogging as Rantibus, where he gleefully posts anti-Right Wing screeds:

Welcome to I, RANTIBUS.

It is my hope that this blog will fulfill two functions: It will provide analysis of past events that were under-reported or not reported at all, and of issues that shouldn’t be allowed to pass from public memory. It will also feature my satirical faux anthropological study complete with lexicon and taxonomy, AN OBSERVER’S GUIDE TO THE RIGHT WING - A Field Guide to the Fatuous.

Twice weekly, I shall add content in the form of an analytical article or two and an excerpt from The Guide plus two new definitions from the lexicon. (In non-alphabetical order) Plus any other outrages my fevered mind deems appropriate.

Years ago, I began writing political commentary. Eventually, I had to give it up because almost every thing I wrote about prompted me to take the next plane to Washington DC or Ottawa, stand outside the White House, houses of Congress or the Parliament Buildings and scream “F__K YOU, you ethicless, scurrilous swine,” leaping about, shaking my fist and doing a credible impersonation of John Cleese on speed. Needless to say, most of what I wrote was unprintable - not so much for the language, but that it eventually degenerated into a spit-flecked seething cauldron of invective full of sound and fury, signifiying the proverbial nothing. Very much like what Dennis Miller would read like if you stole his thesaurus. Then, I had the opportunity to work on two political campaigns and came to an interesting epiphany. Politicians have long since resigned themselves to the fact that they will be cursed in the streets and excoriated in the public fish wraps and have grown Teflon rhino-hide to insulate themselves. But there is one thing, to lapse into the vernacular, that really grinds their nuts.

They cannot stand being made fun of.

The photographer's plight

James Lileks relates a dream:

An indication you've spent too much time on the internet: you dream you're meeting Instapundit for a beer at Drew Curtis' house. The invitation showed a can of beer the size of a grain silo. I took the bus to get there, and was surprised at how dodgy the neighborhood was, but it had great signs and movie marquees. Naturally, I took pictures of these gorgeously decayed urban remants for the website. People started looking at me in a curious, suspicious fashion. Just like real life. When you can't even take pictures in your dreams we've become too suspicious.

Given the out-and-out paranoia displayed whenever someone pulls out a camera nowadays, the dream is pretty realistic.

As a thought experiment, wouldn't it be amusing if you had a group of photographers dress in traditional arabic garb, drive around in a vehicle marked "AQ Photography", and stop to pray, as ostentatiously as possible, five times a day, all the while blatantly taking photos of urban scenery. Would the police or other anti-photography busybodies dare to treat them the same way other photographers have been treated? (Back story here and here.)

It's possible that they'd be harassed, but I think it's more likely that the authorities would be terrified they'd be accused of racial profiling.

Playground equipment again

I guess that posting about playground equipment of days gone by is the way to connect with my readership . . . first, I got a follow-up link to this site sent by frequent commenter (when I had comments open) "Da Wife":

Vintage playground equipment is fast disappearing from America’s parks and school yards. The equipment we grew up with — from spring-mounted animals installed in the 1940s to imposing rocket ships erected in the 1970s — becomes more scarce each year. Even seesaws, merry-go-rounds and swings are becoming things of the past, along with towering metal slides and elaborate wooden structures. The photos on this website celebrate the beauty and history of playground equipment that may soon be gone from the American landscape.

And then, I have Jon sending me his own thoughts on the original post:

The modern playgound is still pretty dangerous. There tend to be far more climbing areas now — (rock walls, ladders, steps, poles with footholds, rope ladders and nets — and there are more high places to serve as destinations for all that climbing. A modern play structure — I'm thinking of the one at [the local] school and another "all access for gimps" installation at another nearby school — still has monkey bars, suspended loops, firepoles, and occasionally a zip-line sort of thing between raised platforms. Of the playgrounds we frequent, half still have metal slides.

What seems to be a little disappointing about modern playsets, though, is the fact that they seem to be so small. Part of this may be due to the distortions of memory, but I think a good part of it may be due to design: they're making them smaller to discourage teens from hanging out on them.

The modern playset seems to me to be better equipped than the crap we had in the local park when I was a kid. There's more to do and there are actually places to _go_ within the playset. Contrast this to the stuff we played on, where the biggest decision about what to do on the bent pipe climber was whether to get the paint chip rammed under the fingernail at the top of the ladder or down at the bottom.

Humph.

Clearly, I should post on childhood nostalgia more often . . .

Update: And yet more from the virtual landlord:

And about this bit —

"And they were different and unique, seemingly put together by the neighborhood handymen who in a burst of creative energy one Saturday morning emptied their garages of old tires, 2×4s, and chains and just nailed it all together."

This dates the 1000 Awesome Things author. If she's fondly remembering the scrap-lumber-and-old-tires-held-together-by-chains sort of playgrounds, she's reminiscing about the late 70's and early 80's. That's when this sort of garbage started showing up in my playgrounds and schoolyards. My friends and I recognized these things as the crap that they were and we noted then that we really missed the bent pipe and sheet steel playgrounds of our youth. We were 11.

Ah, childhood memories

Those deadly devices, the playground equipment of a bygone era:

And of course, there was my favorite — the Big Spinner, also known as a Merry-Go-Round, but not the kind with lights and plastic horses going up and down. This was just a giant metal circle that laid about a foot off the ground and could be spun, usually by someone standing beside it. If you were lucky you'd get a pile of kids on there and somebody's mom or dad would kindly whip you into a World of Unimaginable Dizziness. A couple kids would fly off from the G-forces but most would hang on, teeth gritted, eyes squinted, cheeks flapping wildly against the wind, until the Big Spinner reluctantly came to a slow stop and finally let you off. Then you'd all walk away in different directions, some kids hitting tree trunks head on, others falling down nearby hills.

These days those classic playgrounds sure are hard to come by.

Apology

Remember my post from the dim, distant past (that'd be yesterday)? The one calling the ignorant, arrogant barista a "douchebag"? Well, it appears that I was wrong: it's not the barista . . . it's the owner who's a douchebag:

What could a customer and a coffee shop be scuffling over that would lead the owner to publicly announce that if the customer comes back in, he'll "punch him in the dick?" And the customer saying the only way he'll come back in is with "matches and a can of kerosene?" The right to pour espresso over ice, obviously. The blogstorm began as follows...

Again, I should note that it's actually a good sign that we can get ourselves all frothed up over something as central to the values of human existence as whether it's okay to pour espresso shots over ice . . .

World's oldest blogger signs off

Clive sent me a link to this article about the world's oldest blogger:

The Australian woman renowned as the world's oldest internet blogger has made her final post, aged 108.

Olive Riley, of Woy Woy on NSW's central coast, died in a nursing home just after 6am yesterday.

She will be mourned by family and an international readership in the thousands.

"It was mind blowing to her," her great grandson Darren Stone, of Brisbane, told AAP last night.

"She had people communicating with her from as far away as Russia and America on a continual basis, not just once in a while."

Olive had posted more than 70 entries on her blog, or as she jokingly labelled it, her "blob", since February last year.

What's in a name?

There's another Nicholas Russon out there in the wide world, who was, last I checked, a student at UNB. I sometimes wonder if my online doings sometimes cause people to think that they're things that he's done. I hope that hasn't caused him problems. Still, having a namesake who is a libertarian moonbat isn't too bad, compared to what poor Lauren Bernat is experiencing:

The video, now a legitimate Internet phenomenon, features one Lauren Bernat, an advertising executive in Florida, exercising — or gyrating rather suggestively is more like it — while using Nintendo's Wii Fit.

Another Lauren Bernat, a master's degree candidate for library science at St. John's University, is not amused. Actually, "utterly freaked out" is probably the most accurate way to describe it.

Bernat, 22, works as a librarian at a library for teenagers in New York, and said she first became aware of the Wii Fit girl video on YouTube (real title: "Why every guy should buy his girlfriend a Wii Fit"), when several "random guys" began sending her Facebook friend requests Thursday. Bernat, who has the strictest privacy setting on her Facebook profile, says she responded to several and asked who they were and why they were adding her.

"One of them told me, 'Google yourself, you obviously haven't seen the video,'" Bernat said in an interview Thursday.

My name is rather unusual . . . so it was a surprise when I found there was another "me" out there. Some names are much more common . . . David D. Friedman, for example:

This is the home page of David Friedman. Not the Hawaiian artist David Friedman, or the composer David Friedman, or the fix-what's-wrong-with- government David Friedman (050) or the fifteen year old David Friedman or the eighteen year old David Friedman or even the economic journalist David Friedman but the anarchist-anachronist-economist David Friedman.

Now you know why I included my middle initial.

QotD: God games

It's an idea that many people seem to latch on to that if we were created by some kind of God, obviously he did it because he loves us so huggy-muggy much. Never are the holes in this theory more obvious than while playing god games, because it seems that when you place most people in the position of a god and give them responsibility over many tiny lesser beings then their attitude towards them may be less about beloved children and more about target practice.

Sim City Societies may, on the other hand, support the believability of your argument because if being God is this boring then unconditional love is the only reason I can think of for not having slaughtered the whole unstimulating lot of us around the time we were still squeezing our own smallpox boils for nourishment.

Ben "Yahtzee" Crowshaw, "Zero Punctuation: Sim City Societies", The Escapist, 2008-02-13

Sometimes, the mistake is the more accurate version

This was posted last month by Tian at Hanzi Smatter:

With two previous posts about the same incorrect tattoo, one would get the hint this does not mean "courage":

[The characters actually translate as] (n) serious error; gross mistake; big mistake or shortcoming; (punishment in school, etc.) a major demerit.

"And we'd have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those blasted kids!"

Grant McCracken points to a very relevant source of political and anthropological insight — The Onion:

But I think things are a little different in the world of politics. Here, the real sophistication of the under-35 voter means that you really have to watch it, and when you don't, this voter will make you pay.

Hence the article today in The Onion. This captures precisely the sensibility of the under-35 vote quite precisely. (With the proviso that The Onion is necessarily a little more observant and unforgiving.) In this wonderful piece, The Onion nails the Obama camp for its artifice in image building. Look, it says with glee, we see what you're doing. And it's precisely because you appear to think we cannot see the artifice here that we must point it out and make you pay. Play us if you must, but don't play us for fools.

The entire piece is worth reading [. . .] but if I may let me quote my favorite passage.

Obama has reportedly been working tirelessly with his top political strategists to perfect his looking-off-into-the-future pose, which many believe is vital to the success of the Illinois senator's campaign.

When performed correctly, the pose involves Obama standing upright with his back arched and his chest thrust out, his shoulders positioned 1.3 feet apart and opened slightly at a 14-degree angle, and his eyes transfixed on a predetermined point between 500 and 600 yards away. Advisers say this creates the illusion that Obama is looking forward to a bright future, while the downturned corners of his lips indicate that he acknowledges the problems of the present.

Oh, sublime. So much of politics is an exercise is posturing (figurative and here literal) that it is hard to image what politics can look like once the new voter is factored in. In the meantime, we leave it to the likes of The Onion, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart to point out to the would-be emperors that we can see right through that clothing they don't have on.

Confusing?

A man, dressed as a woman, was barred from entering an Australian bar . . . even though it's a transvestite-themed bar:

Paul Hurst lives much of his life as a woman.

For years the transvestite has been known to friends and those who have seen him perform in Darlinghurst clubs as Anne-Maree.

Dressed in one of his best frocks, Mr Hurst was photographed partying with Maria Venuti at the launch of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert at Star City's Lyric Theatre.

So much did he enjoy the event that a month later he and a friend again frocked up for a night out the casino's new spin-off bar, Priscilla's.

The cross-dressing staff serve cocktails in a flurry of sequins and feathers.

But Mr Hurst was shocked to discover that a security guard had deemed him to be a "man" and "inappropriately dressed" when he was refused entry to the casino at 9.15 on the night of November 1, 2006.

The inevitable Fark thread, where the troglodytes and the trolls play.

Another blogger in the family

Victor has started blogging again. He's already hammering away at things that make him want to rant. Stop by and tell him to watch his language, okay? ;-)

My number, he has it

"Understand that this will never, ever change. You will always be lazy, and you will always procrastinate. I know it's tough for you to hear, but it's a harsh truth that you need to internalize."

Ouch. That truth hurts.

First sign of impending old age

You know you're not as young as you think you are when a little thing like staying up until 4 in the morning wipes you out the next day. The wine? That couldn't have had anything to do with it. Unpossible.

The performance was good, the dinner was delayed, but the conversations afterwards were worth hanging around for. Elizabeth bailed at midnight — clever of her, actually — but I somehow stayed awake and talkative for a little while longer.

The after-performance gathering wasn't quite a cast party, nor quite a going-away party, but had sufficient elements of each to satisfy the two different groups of participants. It was Brendan's final party in Stratford, as he's taken a job that will require him to move to Brantford . . . not too far away in actual distance, but quite some way in travel time if you don't have a car.

QotD: Bureaucrats

The problems with the actual good bureau'rats (the 'c' is silent) are:

a) their good efforts are often overshadowed by the effects of the nasty buggers, who really know how to play the system to worst effect — and as we know, a single bad experience wipes out a world of OK and good experiences in the mind of the 'consumer'.

b) everybody in a department might be a hardworking, efficient saint, but if what they are doing is not needed or is actively harmful in its conception and its implementation, then all the good will in the world won't suffice to put lipstick on that pig. Think Gun Registry.

I won't even get into the subclass of bureau'rats who are "true believers" — they can sometimes be worse than the malicious ones.

Kevin McLauchlan, personal email, 2008-05-02

Trespassers, beware

A few weeks back, Roger Henry posted this to one of the mailing lists I'm still gettting caught up on reading:

In tropical, North Queensland, the Barron River plunges over an escarpment (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barron_Falls ) A diversionary weir sends most of the water off to a hydro-plant and only a trickle tumbles down the rocks. Being more of a slope than a cliff the rocks are very tempting to rock-climbers, despite numerous warnings that operation of the power plant may, without notice, cause water to be restored to the falls. A siren alerts people that this is about to happen.

I asked a tour guide about the siren and if it was to give any climbers time to escape.

"No" he laughed "The water would arrive in a minute or two and climbers would not be able to get clear. The purpose of the siren is to give tourists a chance to prepare their cameras"

"And the climbers?" I enquired.

"Ahh. They would be swept away and certainly killed. No concern of ours. There are warning signs everywhere. The climbers have to get over a fence and trespass. Up to the police and relatives if they want to search for bodies".

That was many years ago™. Doubt if such candor would be PC today.

QotD: Defining the word "obvious"

More often than not, guys interpret even friendly cues, such as a subtle smile from a gal, as a sexual come-on, and a new study discovers why: Guys are clueless.

More precisely, they are somewhat oblivious to the emotional subtleties of non-verbal cues, according to a new study of college students.

"Young men just find it difficult to tell the difference between women who are being friendly and women who are interested in something more," said lead researcher Coreen Farris of Indiana University's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

This "lost in translation" phenomenon plays out in the real world, with about 70 percent of college women reporting an experience in which a guy mistook her friendliness for a sexual come-on, Farris said.

Some might think the results come down to "boys being boys," and so even the slightest female interest sparks sexual fantasy. But the study, to be detailed in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, also found that it goes both ways for guys — they mistake females' sexual signals as friendly ones. The researchers suggest guys have trouble noticing and interpreting the subtleties of non-verbal cues, in either direction.

Jeanna Bryner, "Clueless guys can't read women, study confirms: Why women's friendly cues get interpreted as sexual come-ons", MSNBC, 2008-03-20

The "Real Doll" for the maternally oriented

I don't know about you, but I found this particularly creepy:

Behind placid suburban facades, in seemingly normal neighborhoods, restless housewives are dismembering and enucleating babies, baking them in ovens in pursuit of that gently throttled look, then selling them to strangers. And, no, it's not Satan who's making them do it — it's eBay.

Thanks to a recent British documentary, My Fake Baby, the world at large now knows about the "reborning" community, a mostly female subculture of artisans and collectors organized around vinyl infants who begin life as inexpensive, plain-looking dolls and, through the meticulous craft of maternal Dr. Frankensteins, metamorphize into super-realistic creatures that look and feel just like genuine lifeless babies. The rarest specimens fuel high-stakes eBay bidding wars that can reach upwards of $5000.

Snowplow amateur hour

I was very late in to work this morning, partly because I had an appointment with my dentist, and partly because it was amateur hour for snow plow operators on highway 401 today. We had a moderate snowfall last night and into this morning, somewhere in the 10-15cm range, which wouldn't be too much trouble on its own. What was a problem today was the ineptitude or maliciousness of one or more snow plow operators on the stretch of the 401 from the 404/DVP interchange to at least Yonge Street.

The driver in question had managed to create nigh-on impenetrable ice-walls across the on- and off-ramps for Leslie Street and Bayview Avenue. It was so bad that drivers were up on top of these temporary ramparts trying to shovel their way through using snow brushes and ice scrapers!

Half-a-dozen notions lacking in importance and relevance

This is my best attempt to satisfy the outrageous demands of Chris Taylor and Damian "Babbling" Brooks who conspired to tag me with this meme.

Chris mentions his dislike of monkeys, and I'm with him on that: my best friend in grade 6 had a spider monkey at home . . . what a ghastly little monster. My feelings for the other members of the primates never recovered from that meeting. Chris also has this thing about cold pizza . . . I'd have to say that once it drops to room temperature, pizza is no longer human food. Chris must also be a writer, rather than a mathie, as I'm tagged as number 7 in a list of 6!

Damian, on the other hand, can't stand watching people embarass themselves. I'm absolutely with him on that. There are a large number of recent "comedies" I'll never bother to watch, as even the trailers were inducing that sort of sympathy cringe in me. I'm also down with Damian's reluctance to eat meat off the bone . . . it's just wrong in ways I can't describe, but are overwhelming to me.

So, what are my odd quirks? While I could be described as a walking encyclopedia of quirks, not all of them are uncommon enough to qualify for this meme. That'll take some head-scratching.

1. Aside from NFL football, I rarely watch television. I can't stand to have a TV on in the same room while I'm trying to do something. Elizabeth and Victor both have the ability to carry on normal life with a TV set blaring away, but it literally drives me out of the room.

2. I hate driving a car with automatic transmission. I cannot stand having the car make the decision for me on when it's time to change gears — even if modern automatics are technically "better" in the sense of being more fuel-efficient than manual transmission models. My most recent vehicle purchase was very quickly narrowed down to the few in my price range which still offered stick shift. (Yes, of course the Quotemobile is standard transmission.)

3. I'd be perhaps the best subject for market studies of the long-term viability of new products: if I like it, it's in trouble. If I love it, it's dead.

4. I always have dozens of books on the go at the same time. It's rare that I manage to read one book from start to finish without having also started at least one more book in the meantime.

5. I'm a collector by nature ("accumulator" is perhaps a more accurate term: collectors tend to be organized in their collections). I now try to avoid starting to collect something because I'll feel impelled to "complete" the collection, even after the original interest fades away. It's a sickness, I tell you!

6. I'm learning to dislike auto-flushing toilets and urinals: we've just had the washrooms at the office "upgraded" to use them. Far from being more ecologically friendly, they appear to use close to twice the amount of water that the older units do . . . and they operate at the most inconvenient moments.

No point in tagging anyone for this, as I think I'm usually among the last dozen bloggers on the planet to get most of these tag-memes passed along, but feel free to pretend I tagged you if you'd like to adopt the meme without being tagged with it.

I'm working on it . . .

With both Chris Taylor and Damian "Babbling" Brooks tagging me with this meme, I guess I'll have to come up with something vague and disappointing . . . er, I mean keep in with the cool blog-kids.

Give me a bit more time . . . I'm stuck at four.

Reviewing shopping guides

Jessa Crispin takes a quick look at a pair of shopping guides:

Quick: How do you tell if a woman in a movie is supposed to be intelligent? First off, she'd probably be brunette, but past that. Glasses, yes. Little to no makeup. Her hair is probably in a ponytail. Clothes she probably bought at the Gap in a size too big. You know she's the smart one because she thinks about more important things than her appearance.

It's a stereotype, yes, but it's constantly reinforced by intelligent women who should know better. Germaine Greer rallied women to taste their own menstrual blood in The Female Eunuch and then attacked fellow feminist writer Suzanne Moore by stating that "so much lipstick must rot the brain." Feminists must reject the male gaze and use those ten seconds it takes to apply lip gloss to bring down the patriarchy. (Why sensible feminists have not figured out how to band together and write press releases to disassociate ourselves from the crazy women who pretend to speak for us, I'll never understand.) Fashion magazines don't help much either. Elle talks to Ashlee Simpson. And writes down what she says. To be recorded for all time.

[. . .]

Instead of alleviating our body fears, however, so many books advising what to wear do nothing but exaggerate them. The entire structure of Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine's book What Not to Wear is built to help you define your particular version of body dysmorphic disorder. Do you think you have short legs? A big butt? Big arms? There's a chapter telling you how to dress around each perceived flaw. It's hard to walk out the door feeling hot and feisty when your entire dressing process has been focused on your main source of anxiety. If I tried to dress to hide all the parts of my body I have ever been self-conscious about, the only thing left to wear would be a hazmat suit.

[. . .]

If more fashion writing was done in the tone of smartypants Freeman, we could avoid the fear that caring about our appearance makes us a vain fool or a victim. A work colleague recently took one look at the four-inch peep toe heels I was wearing and snarled, "Don't you know why men invented high heels?" I doubted anything I said would deflect what was coming next, so I just shrugged. "So you can't run away when they want to rape you." I understand. I used to be a humorless feminist, too, complete with shaved head and my father's combat boots. Then I discovered Charles David heels and got over it. If only The Meaning of Sunglasses had existed sooner, I could have spent less time being a self-righteous twit.

Boosting self-esteem: not the solution

From a point-counterpoint article at The Guardian, Frank Furedi argues that boosting self-esteem has been a wasted effort:

In schools, decades of silly programmes designed to raise children's self-esteem have not improved wellbeing, and the new initiatives designed to make pupils happy will also fail. Worse still, emotional education encourages an inward-looking orientation that distracts children from engaging with the world.

Perversely, the ascendancy of psychobabble in the classroom has been paralleled by an apparent increase in mental health problems among children. The relationship between the two is not accidental. Children are highly suggestible, and the more they are required to participate in wellbeing classes, the more they will feel the need for professional support.

The teaching of emotional literacy and happiness should be viewed as a displacement activity by professionals who find it difficult to confront the many challenges they face. At a time when many schools find it difficult to engage children's interest in core subjects, and to inspire a culture of high aspiration, it is tempting to look for non-academic solutions. Many pedagogues find it easier to hold forth about making children feel good about themselves than to teach them how to read and count. This therapeutic orientation serves to distract pupils and teachers alike from getting on with the job of gaining a real education.

QotD: Self-Esteem

Self-esteem isn't all that it's cracked up to be. In fact . . . it can be a huge part of the problem. New research has found that self-esteem can be just as high among D students, drunk drivers and former Presidents from Arkansas as it is among Nobel laureates, nuns and New York City fire fighters. In fact, according to research performed by Brad Bushman of Iowa State University and Roy Baumeister of Case Western Reserve University, people with high self-esteem can engage in far more antisocial behavior than those with low self-worth. "I think we had a great deal of optimism that high self-esteem would cause all sorts of positive consequences and that if we raised self-esteem, people would do better in life," Baumeister told the Times. "Mostly, the data have not borne that out." Racists, street thugs and school bullies all polled high on the self-esteem charts. And you can see why. If you think you're God's gift, you're particularly offended if other people don't treat you that way. So you lash out or commit crimes or cut ethical corners to reassert your pre-eminence. After all, who are your moral inferiors to suggest that you could be doing something, er, wrong? What do they know?

Self-esteem can also be an educational boomerang. Friends of mine who teach today's college students are constantly complaining about the high self-esteem of their students. When the kids have been told from Day One that they can do no wrong, when every grade in high school is assessed so as to make the kid feel good rather than to give an accurate measure of his work, the student can develop self-worth dangerously unrelated to the objective truth. He can then get deeply offended when he's told he is getting a C grade in college and become demoralized or extremely angry. Weak professors give in to the pressure — hence, grade inflation. Tough professors merely get exhausted trying to bring their students into vague touch with reality.

Andrew Sullivan, "Lacking in Self-Esteem? Good for You!", Time, 2004-01-17

Happy Darwin Day

It's Charles Darwin's birthday (he'd be 199 today). The IHS is celebrating:

Hundreds of groups across the United States and the globe will celebrate the date as "Darwin Day" in honor of the discoveries and life of the man who famously described biological evolution via natural selection.

"Darwin Day promotes understanding of evolution and the scientific method," said Matt Cherry, executive director of the Institute for Humanist Studies. "This celebration expresses gratitude for the enormous benefit that scientific knowledge has contributed to the advancement of humanity."

The Darwin Day Celebration is a project of the Albany, N.Y.-based Institute for Humanist Studies, an international educational nonprofit that promotes reason and humanity.

As the folks at Fark say, strive not to be a Fark headline on February 13th.

Drummers deemed harmful

The original article and the Fark thread with all the drummer jokes.

[ObFarkJoke]: I have two drummers in the house right now, so I'm really getting a kick out of these replies.

A misty, moisty morning

It wasn't as bad as the fog last week, but it was certainly an "atmospheric" drive into work this morning:

Cute cat photos

Last night, trying to pack my equipment for badminton, I had to persuade a cat that he didn't really want to come along with me:

That's Harry, our youngest cat. He really thought that the badminton bag was a great place to play peekaboo.

Look out, drivers, here comes Victor!

The driving experience is about to get a bit more interesting . . . Victor just called to say he'd passed his G1 test and can now legally drive on Ontario's roads. The actual "learning how to drive" thing will take a bit longer . . .

Australian Surf

Photo and story sent along by Roger Henry.

Whipped Ocean in Australia

Suddenly the shoreline north of Sydney were transformed into the Cappuccino Coast. Foam swallowed an entire beach and half the nearby buildings, including the local lifeguards' centre, in a freak display of nature at Yamba in New South Wales. One minute a group of teenage surfers were waiting to catch a wave, the next they were swallowed up in a giant bubble bath. The foam was so light that they could puff it out of their hands and watch it float away.

Boy in the bubble bath: Tom Woods, 12, emerges from the clouds of foam after deciding that surfing was not an option It stretched for 30 miles out into the Pacific in a phenomenon not seen at the beach for more than three decades. Scientists explain that the foam is created by impurities in the ocean, such as salts, chemicals, dead plants, decomposed fish and excretions from seaweed. All are churned up together by powerful currents which cause the water to form bubbles. These bubbles stick to each other as they are carried below the surface by the current towards the shore. As a wave starts to form on the surface, the motion of the water causes the bubbles to swirl upwards and, massed together, they become foam. The foam 'surfs' towards shore until the wave 'crashes', tossing the foam into the air.

Whitewash: The foam was so thick it came all the way up to the surf club. 'It's the same effect you get when you whip up a milk shake in a blender,' explains a marine expert. 'The more powerful the swirl, the more foam you create on the surface and the lighter it becomes.' In this case, storms off the New South Wales Coast and further north off Queensland had created a huge disturbance in the ocean, hitting a stretch of water where there was a particularly high amount of the substances which form into bubbles. As for 12-year-old beach goer Tom Woods, who has been surfing since he was two, riding a wave was out of the question. 'Me and my mates just spent the afternoon leaping about in that stuff,' he said. 'It was quite cool to touch and it was really weird. It was like clouds of air - you could hardly feel it.'

Kent Taylor adds more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=478041&in_page_id=1811 and http://lighthousepatriotjournal.wordpress.com/2007/12/19/myth-blaster-foam-envelopes-beach-in-new-south-wales/.

QotD: Business Schools

The danger is that this will be another jolly club, where pals appoint pals, and the odor of self congratulation extinguishes the possibility of fresh thinking. Creatives may have the Canadian problem I was talking about this week: people who are brilliant as individuals and small groups working in agency circumstances find themselves diminished by still larger groups and the scale, to say nothing of the pretensions, of university life.

I guess the real challenge is how you get the academics and the creatives to play together This is not a famously productive relationship and it will take some tremendously good mediation to make these two parties mutually useful, let alone mutually inspirational. No one has a Rosetta Stone for these two communities, and it is hard for me to imagine an ExEd program that manages to install a linga franca even over 18 months.

Grant McCracken, "B-School + B-School = C-School?", This Blog Sits at the, 2008-01-18

More eye-searing photos from the 1970's

From the decade that time wishes it could forget, photo studio outtakes (at least, the folks in them probably wish these were outtakes).

Update: Argghhh! Forgot to credit Jeff Shultz for the URL.

The secret language of cats

You suspect Fluffy is dissing you? You're probably right:

Remember that vocalizing is not your cat's preferred mode of communication. A cat's "first language" consists of a complex system of scent, facial expression, complex body language, and touch whereas we humans communicate primarily through sound. Cats soon realize that we don't understand the non-verbal signals they send to each other, so they vocalize in an attempt to communicate in our language. By observing which sounds elicit which actions from us, a cat is always learning how to make requests (or demands).

It's contribute your link day . . .

Continuing the trend to reader-suggested links, frequent commenter "Da Wife" sent this one along with the comment "I just had to smirk and shake my head":

Malaysia's Muslim men are suffering sleepless nights and cannot pray properly because their thoughts are distracted by a growing number of women who wear sexy clothes in public, a prominent cleric said.

Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat, the spiritual leader of the opposition Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, said he wanted to speak about the "emotional abuse" that men face because it is seldom discussed, the party reported on its Web site Wednesday.

"We always [hear about] the abuse of children and wives in households, which is easily perceived by the eye, but the emotional abuse of men cannot be seen," Nik Abdul Aziz said. "Our prayers become unfocused and our sleep is often disturbed."

I'd like to say that I, for one, don't at all object to women wearing "sexy clothes in public", and would encourage as much of that as possible . . .

Introverts, unite! Except . . . separately. And quietly.

A paean to the joys of full-blown, red-blooded, rip-snortin' . . . introversion:

Introverted children are pressured to "speak up" and "make friends" — or told they're not leaders. Introverted adults are hounded to "be more outgoing" and tortured with invitations that begin, "Why don't we all . . ." No thanks, we don't want to do anything that involves "we" and "all"; we prefer to visit you, just you, and not a dozen other people.

The 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote, "The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room." Introverts do.

So let's make Jan. 2nd "Happy Introvert Day." We'll be quiet and happy. As a bonus, January's weather is on our side.

You say it might snow? Oh darn, I guess I'll have to stay home.

Before you start opening all those plastic packages . . .

Rogier van Bakel was discussing the near-impossible level of effort needed to open some of the newer packages a few years back. It's still a topical post, especially right about now:

There's customer-unfriendly, and then there's customer-hostile. A few days ago I wrote about package design. More specifically, I excoriated the plastic retail hulls that have been proliferating for a few years now. The industry refers to them as clamshells, but I've dubbed them brinkswrap (that's shrinkwrap with the over-the-top protective properties of an armored truck). The post struck a chord with one reader of this blog who took a shine to the new name.

"Brinkswrap has been a longstanding frustration of mine. My daughter got a digital camera for Christmas — and a nice cut on her hand from the brinkswrap she had to break through to get to the camera. My wife got a couple of nice knives from her father. They were packaged together in brinkswrap. As I fought through the brinkswrap to get to them, I noted the irony of how much easier it would be to get through the brinkswrap if I already had the knives I was trying to get to."

Touché. Dante forgot to create a special circle of hell for these manufacturers and designers. Nevertheless, maybe we can squeeze them in somewhere. I'd put them between the apparel makers who sew scratchy brand labels onto the inside collars of their shirts, and the inconsiderate rotter who designed those maddening multiple seals on CD jewel cases.

Fairytale of New York

Recent report on attempt to censor the song here. Common sense prevailed, thank ghu.

Winter outside the office window

The view directly outside my office this afternoon. Brrrr!

Velcro is not your friend

We had our Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa/Noodlemas gathering on the weekend. It went fairly well, given the number of folks who couldn't show up for weather-related reasons. The storm didn't hit until the last of our guests were already well on the road home, so we timed it quite well.

Last year, we tried something a bit different with our C/H/K/N lights (the ones we usually string haphazardly across the front of the house). Instead of using the normal mounting method — plastic hooks snapped on to the edge of the eavestroughing — we went all high-tech with adhesive-backed velcro patches and velcro-backed hooks. It seemed to work very well last year . . . no difference in time or effort to put them up, but much easier to take down and — the bonus part, so to speak — putting them up again this year was going to be a breeze . . . just re-attach the hooks to the pre-positioned velcro patches.

And, with a minor exception, it worked exactly as advertised . . . one of the velcro patches detached from its adhesive backing, leaving an unsightly droop in the lights over the middle of the garage. Still, the job was very quick and easy . . . not an inconsiderable benefit in -9C weather.

On Friday, before the party, a few of the velcro hooks decided that they'd reached their end-of-service date and let go. By the time we got home again, over a third of them had come down. With all the other party prep going on, the lights were a pretty low priority. On Saturday, nearly half of them had fallen, but we just wrapped the trailing edge of one string around the pillar at one side of the front door and pretended not to notice . . .

Of course, yesterday we had the significant snowfall so nothing could be done about the fallen light situation, and it may well be Wednesday or Thursday before it gets seen to . . . and that will require a full re-stringing of the entire length of lights, because we now have to remove the blasted velcro hooks and replace them with something a bit more traditional and sturdy.

The problem with 'one-size-fits-all' education

David Friedman points out the big assumptions of standard educational models:

Our approach starts with the fact that I went to a good private school, my wife to a good suburban public school, and both of us remember being bored most of the time; while we learned some things in school, large parts of our education occurred elsewhere, from books, parents, friends, projects. It continues with some observations about the standard model of K-12 schooling, public and private:

1. That model implicitly assumes that, out of the enormous body of human knowledge, there is some subset that everyone should study and that is large enough to fill most of thirteen years of schooling. That assumption is clearly false. Being able to read and do arithmetic is important for almost everyone. Beyond that, it is hard to think of any particular subject which there is a good reason for everyone to study, easy to think of many subjects outside the standard curriculum which there are good reasons for some people to study.

2. It implicitly assumes that the main way in which one should learn is by having someone else tell you what you are going to study this week, what you should learn about it, and your then doing so.

As some evidence of the failure of that model, consider my wife's experience teaching a geology lab for non-majors at VPI, probably the second best public university in the state. A large minority of the students did not know that the volume of a rectangular solid — a hypothetical ore body — was the length times the height times the depth. Given that they were at VPI they must have mostly been from the top quarter or so of high school graduates in Virginia; I expect practically all of them had spent at least a year each studying algebra and geometry.

As all students and most teachers know, the usual result of making someone study something of no interest to him is that he memorizes as much as he has to in order to pass the course, then forgets it as rapidly as possible thereafter. The flip side of that, routinely observed by parents, is that children can put enormous energy and attention into learning something that really interests them — the rules of D&D, the details of a TV series, the batting averages of the top players of the past decade.

I have to admit that I was always a bad student: it was a struggle to stay awake in most of my classes all through public school, and I still find sitting in a classroom being lectured to be a trying experience. This probably predisposes me to accept most educational reform proposals which don't revolve around classroom lectures . . .

QotD: Underachievement

I've long believed that all the hyperbright procrastinators I know, many of them underachievers, are the product of a particular mindset about intelligence. They are people who long ago internalized the notion that performance is largely based on innate talent--and are therefore putting off work because they know it won't be perfect. Procrastination delays the moment at which you find out that you aren't as talented as you hoped and believed you were.

Megan McArdle, "A for effort", Asymmetrical Information, 2007-12-05

QotD: The ever-expanding waistline

Meanwhile, there's the Disney World turnstiles problem. Uncle Walt's Florida showcase opened in 1971, and its turnstiles are sized for waistlines of that era. More than a few Americans now cannot pass through the Disney World turnstiles; when my son Spenser and I were at Disney World a couple of years ago, gate staffers were on hand to help those who needed to bypass turnstiles to enter the park. Two years ago when 300-pound defensive tackle Tommie Harris was drafted in the first round by the Bears, Harris exclaimed that he might be huge but he was fit and said the proof of his fitness was that he recently had been able to go through a turnstile at Disney World. Today, significant numbers of visitors to Disney World are bigger than a Bears defensive tackle. Something to think about.

Gregg Easterbrook, "TMQ: Ticket, Please!", ESPN Page 2, 2007-10-30

Someone has a sense of humour

The Communist Manifesto, filed in the Fiction bargain bin.

At least I didn't hit it . . .

On the way home from my badminton club last night, I nearly killed a skunk. Mr. Skunk was running down the middle of the road, in the same direction I was travelling. I came over a small rise, saw him in the way, and swerved ever so slightly so that my wheel didn't run directly over him.

He thanked me for my kindness in the usual manner.

The Quotemobile is now in desperate need of a carwash.

Good morning

I'm not used to getting up early enough to see this sort of thing.

Okay, so it's not a Kylie Minogue thing

Unlike the esteemed Major-General Flea, I don't have a Kylie Minogue fascination going. I do, however, quite enjoy listening to Bif Naked, so her pre-wedding video was of interest.

(Preview here, full clip at Bodog.)

Library Porn

Jerrie Adkins sent along a URL to Curious Expeditions:

Everyone has some kind of place that makes them feel transported to a magical realm. For some people it's castles with their noble history and crumbling towers. For others it's abandoned factories, ivy choked, a sense of foreboding around every corner. For us here at Curious Expeditions, there has always been something about libraries. Row after row, shelf after shelf, there is nothing more magical than a beautiful old library.

We had a chance to see just such a library on our recent visit to Prague. Tucked away on the top of a hill in Prague is the Strahov Monestary, the second oldest monastery in Prague. Inside, divided into two major halls, is a breathtaking library. The amazing Theological Hall contains 18,000 religious texts, and the grand Philosophical Hall has over 42,000 ancient philosophical texts. Both are stunningly gorgeous. Strahov also contains a beautiful cabinet of curiosities, including bits of a Dodo bird, a large 18th century electrostatic device, numerous wonderfully old ocean specimens, and for unclear reasons many glass cases full of waxen fruit. Our delight was manifest.

Shocked into a library induced euphoria, Curious Expeditions has attempted to gather together the world's most beautiful libraries for you starting with our own pictures of Strahov. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do.

QotD: Modern Families

Well, I would say that, wouldn't I? As National Review's in-house demography bore, you'd expect me to find in a successful single woman's $27,000 fertility treatments the flip side of the Afghan baby boom I mentioned last issue. Just as Europeans preserve old churches and farms as heritage sites so Martha has amputated the family from family life, leaving its rituals and traditions as freestanding lifestyle accessories. So okay, let me nudge the argument on a bit. Today many of the western world's women have in effect doubled the generational span, opting not for three children in their twenties but one designer yuppie baby in their late thirties. Demographers talk about "late family formation" as if it has no real consequences for the child.

But I wonder. The abortion lobby talks about a world where every child is "wanted". If you get pregnant at 19 or 23, you most likely didn't really "want" a child: it just kinda happened, as it has throughout most of human history. By contrast, if you conceive at 42 after half-a-million bucks' worth of fertility treatment, you really want that kid. Is it possible to be over-wanted? I notice in my part of the world there's a striking difference between those moms who have their first kids at traditional childbearing ages and those who leave it to Miss Stewart's. The latter are far more protective of their nippers, as well they might be: even if you haven't paid the clinic a bundle for the stork's little bundle, you're aware of how precious and fragile the gift of life can be. When you contemplate society's changing attitudes to childhood — the "war against boys" that Christina Hoff Summers has noted, and a more general tendency to keep children on an ever tighter chain — I wonder how much of that derives from the fact that "young moms" are increasingly middle-aged. I wish Miss Stewart happiness and fulfillment, but she seems a sad emblem of a world that insists one should retain time-honored traditions when decorating the house for Thanksgiving but thinks nothing of re-ordering the most basic building blocks of society.

Mark Steyn, "Homemaking for One", National Review, 2007-09-06

Amusing co-incidence

I opened Google Earth this evening, intending to try out the hidden flight simulator. Instead, I thought to zoom in on my local neighbourhood . . . and found that I can give you an exact date for when the photos of my area were taken: 5 May, 2005, because I recognized the overturned gravel truck across the road from that morning . . .

Burlington Ribfest

After delivering the layout to Burlington, my sister suggested that the four of us (Elizabeth and I, Hil and Gord) go out for dinner. We had a variety of food allergies and preferences to cope with so we ended up compromising on where to go . . . Montana's. Now that was an experience. I'm sure they'll have lifted the lifetime ban within a few years . . .

Hil didn't get into a fistfight with the manager (but it could have gone that way, and the smart money wouldn't have been betting on the restaurant employee), but it wasn't the kind of memorable experience we'd expected. To compound the awkwardness, Hil also tipped off the waiter that it was my birthday, so I got the kind of "birthday treat" I'd been able to avoid since I was about 13: having the wait staff all gather around and sing to me.

On the way out to the truck, Hil tried to get me to double-dog dare her to moon the restaurant. I valiantly resisted. It didn't help. She insisted on doing it anyway.

On the drive back, Hil persuaded Elizabeth that it would be a really good idea to go to the Burlington Ribfest.

I should point out that I'm not a fan of crowds, so I wasn't expecting to have a particularly good time on this outing. Aside from the crush at the front of the main stage (where the performers were the Downchild Blues Band), it wasn't too bad at all. This was at the back of the crowd, just within sight of the main stage:

That's Elizabeth and Gord, with Hil's shoulder just edging into the picture. Here, Hil has been trying to persuade the balloon guy to make her a balloon hat that "looks like half a peace sign":

Hil decided that a "blooming onion" was the perfect food to eat while strolling the festival. Here she's trying to get Gord to try some:

At one booth, it looked like the decriminalization movement had won:

Sadly, the other half of the sign said something like "Old-fashioned fudge".

Trains to Burlington, conclusion

As you may remember, the saga of moving an HO scale train layout to Burlington has taken a bit longer than originally planned. I'm happy to say that the final piece has been installed and is working well. Jimmy is delighted with his new model train empire.

The ceremonial first trip to the new turntable was awarded to, of course, Thomas the Tank Engine:

The installer's ceremonial wine glass was also accorded a place of honour:

Kim's management guidelines

Kim du Toit has a few management guidelines to share:

So I called in the advertising managers and the studio head, and gave them a little speech. From memory, it went like this:

"I don't know how your jobs work, and I'm not going to learn how. I'm not going to ask you for progress reports each day, and I'm never going to ask you 'How's it going?' — I expect you to keep me abreast of things, at times where it seems appropriate for you to do so, or only when you have a problem. Otherwise, I will assume you are all doing your job, and everything's running smoothly.

"Now, about problems: I'm not going to solve them for you, because once again, I don't know how your jobs work. So if you come to me with a problem, I'm going to chase you out of my office and tell you to find the solution. I expect you to come to me with a problem with two or three possible solutions, and you can't decide which one would be the best. (Obviously, if there's only one solution, you don't have to tell me anything.) If we discuss the solutions, and the 'best' solution still doesn't present itself, then I'll make the decision, because that's my job, my responsibility.

"If anyone from another department is giving you any trouble, and you can't resolve it, tell me and I'll take it up with their manager. If it's their manager who's giving you the problem, tell me and I'll try to straighten it out with him; or if I can't, then I'm going to go to my boss, and let him straighten it out after hearing my suggestions — because he too, is going to want options and not complaints.

"Don't send me memos, because I won't read them. Talk to me, and if you feel compelled to put the results of our discussion onto paper, go ahead, and put me on copy. Give the memo to my secretary and tell her to file it wherever.

"The mark of a successful manager is how long he could be dead at his desk before any of his staff notices it. I'm shooting for two weeks."

There were no questions.

[. . .]

None of this is designed to make me look like some kind of superhero manager. But it is intended to make people think about the proper way to manage people:

1. Give them responsibility to go with their accountability.

2. Force them to live up to your expectations of them. Trust them to do a good job.

3. If they make an honest mistake in an otherwise exemplary job, forget about it, and cover for them if the Corner Office starts causing trouble.

4. Don't sweat the little things. If someone needs a little extra time off to look after a sick child or have their hair done, let them go.

5. Eschew paperwork and bureaucracy (other than when mandated like for hourly workers and time cards). Show me a manager who demands constant progress reports from his staff, and I'll show you an insecure manager who doesn't trust them.

I'd have to say that, for the most part, that's the way I try to manage (I hate both giving and receiving status reports . . . just deal with the unexpected developments and deviations from the plan). I've never run an organization as big as Kim, but these guidelines can apply to any organization.

H/T to Jon, for sending me the URL.

Random PDA photos

A few Treo photos taken over the last few weeks:

Someone missed a clue here: the sign extolls the virtues of Ontario VQA wines, but all the wines on the shelves below are not VQA . . . they're not even Canadian wines!

When falling domino chains are too tame

New dog pictures

Well, despite my best judgement, we seem to be close to adopting a new dog . . . but at least Xander is happy about the new arrival:

Xander checks out the new arrival in the backyard. She's a part Yorkshire Terrier, part Shi-Tzu (we've been told). Her rescue kennel called her "Jazzie", but she doesn't really respond to that name. She is partly blind, through some genetic condition and needs several daily applications of an ointment to her eyes.

We've been told that she was picked up from the side of the road after being thrown from a truck, somewhere in Ohio.

The new dog tries to mask her scent with whatever is on the grass.

Hmmm. The new dog appears to be part Ewok.

Xander is thinking "Can I play with you if I'm this small?

Sure! Can you run away?

Stop playing . . . I've got an itch I need to scratch.

DNA testing and Ancestry.com

Ancestry.com recently announced they will be adding an inexpensive (at least compared to what it used to cost) DNA testing kit to their line-up of products and services for genealogical researchers. Slashdot thread here:

Daniel Dvorkin: Here's the worry, I think: law enforcement agencies could take a crime scene sample, run it against the entire Ancestry.com database, and decide that whoever comes up with the closest match must have done it. And in the current climate, they might well make it stick, even if the crime involves ... [gasp] pedophilia ... or [shock] terrorism ... or [falls over dead from the horror of it] record piracy.

east coast: I hate the relatives I have. Why would I want to find out that I have more?

laron: This is going to be interesting. Doctors calculate that about 5-10% of all children have a different biological father than they (and their "social" fathers) think.

John Scalzi addresses the suckitude of teenage writers

John Scalzi pulls out all the stops (again) to help teenage writers improve:

More than a year ago I wrote my "10 Things Teenage Writers Should Know About Writing" entry, which had ten bits of useful information for teen writers, the first of which was "The Bad News: Right Now, Your Writing Sucks." Because, well, it probably does: Most teenage writers, for various reasons, aren't particularly good writers (I wasn't). I thought it was important to get that bit of news out of the way, because among other things, the fact that teenage writing sucks isn't a bad thing (that's point number 2), and because I think it's not a bad thing to be honest with teenagers about this stuff. They might not listen (I probably wouldn't have), but they deserve the truth nevertheless.

The only problem with this set-up is that reading the comments to the piece, it's clear that quite a number of the teenagers reading the entry never got past the first point, in which they're told their writing sucks, before making a comment that explains why teenage writing doesn't suck — or, at the very least, why their teenage writing doesn't suck.

He's not just addressing teenagers . . . if you have any interest in writing, there are interesting and useful nuggets of information in this article and in the original he posted last year.

Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis

H/T to Nick Packwood (aka Ghost of a Flea). This is one of Elizabeth's favourite pieces of music.

Modern childhood

Hit and Run has a graphic example of one of the reasons childhood obesity is becoming more common:

Click to see full-size image

Image from this article in the Daily Mail.

Bucket status: undefined

To borrow a meme from James Lileks, my state of bucket-ness is not yet resolved. I had an interview today for one of the (now three) positions I'm potentially able to take on. At 1:30 this afternoon, while waiting at the dealership for information on why the Quotemobile's dashboard was displaying a particular idiot light, I'd have said that the top choice was no longer in play. The interview went okay, but I'd hate to play poker with the HR manager I interviewed with: I had no idea whether I was still considered a viable candidate for the position or not.

At 4:00, I got a very welcome bit of news that I'd survived the HR interview and was being scheduled for the next stage: meeting senior management at the firm. Wonderful! And yet, at the same time, a great opportunity to fall flat on my face. Let's see what wonders next week might bring . . .

You may have encountered something of the same ilk: literally on the way up the street this morning, I found that the Quotemobile's error-sensor had decided that I needed to pay attention to the tires. The friendly warning light was letting me know that I was taking my life in my hands to drive anywhere other than an authorized Toyota dealership. Having not left enough spare time for a side-trip to the service department, I drove on . . . probably setting an Ontario record for slowest maintained speed on an 400-series highway, for fear of a four-tire blowout at the worst possible moment.

Kudos to Whitby Toyota, for quickly diagnosing and fixing the problem: the spare tire pressure was just a bit lower than the other four tires, and had set off the sensor. Even more kudos for not charging me for the service.

Mailing list etiquette

I know, having run a few mailing lists in my time, that list membership varies substantially: some people sign up the day the list is opened while others drop in and out so fast they barely leave a ripple. Apparently, some folks need a little time in a corner with a cluebat, because they've completely lost the sense of how things are properly done:

Would those of you who are on AOL and who decide that you don't want to receive list postings any longer please unsubscribe instead of reporting postings as spam to AOL? I have to spend time dealing with the fallout, and you jeopardise the ability of other AOL users to receive their mail (and not just list mail; anything else that goes through that server).

That's the administrator of one of the busiest lists I subscribe to: probably at least an order of magnitude larger than any list I've ever run. It describes a lovely sense of both entitlement and petty revenge on the part of the no-longer-desiring-to-be-members. They can't be bothered just unsubscribing, so they flag the no-longer-wanted incoming email as spam and let the big guns of the ISP take care of it for them. To call that inconsiderate is a big understatement.

QotD: Life

As I grow older I am unpleasantly impressed by the fact that giving each human being but one life is a bad scheme. He should have two at the lowest — one for observing and studying the world, and the other for formulating and setting down his conclusions about it. Forced, as he is by the present irrational arrangement, to undertake the second function before he has made any substantial progress with the first, he limps along like an athlete only half trained. His competitors, to be sure, are in the same case, and in consequence his inadequacy tends to be concealed, but it is there none the less, and I sometimes suspect that it may be the main cause of the blowsy vacuity which marks so much of the so-called thinking of mankind.

H.L. Mencken, Minority Report, 1956.

QotD: High School

I had one last thing to tell them, which I didn't say. I intended it to be inspiring, but I just wasn't sure if it would come across that way, so I edited myself and left it out. I'll reprint it here, though, in case any of them stop by to read this:

This is entirely unrelated to writing, but it's something I wish someone had told me when I was your age: High school is a really important time in your life, and what you learn here and how you grow as a person will profoundly impact your adult years. But the social thing? It really doesn't matter, because after you graduate, you never have to see anyone from high school again, unless you really want to. A guy said to me yesterday, "If you win at high school, you lose at life," and that made a lot of sense to me. I'm sure you guys are a creative bunch of people, which means you have a certain degree of sensitivity, something that is usually the object of ridicule in school. Well, don't deny that because you're afraid of being unpopular. It's really not worth it. So stay focused, go to college, and thank me in your acknowledgments when your book is published. It's "Wil" with one "L."

Wil Wheaton, "on writing . . .", WWdN: In Exile, 2007-05-17

Jane Galt: fellow sufferer of bandwidth shortage

Jane Galt's main blog is down right now, and her host's blog is also down. She's got a temporary backup site running at http://janegalt.wordpress.com/.

Mouseworld, part 3

James Lileks covers the third day of their Disneyworld experience:

It's like that all over. The Disney Experience is one of the most psychologically all-inclusive and seductive thing I've experienced in years. After a while you stop thinking outside the possibilities of Disney; it absolutely drives out everything else from your imagination. It hits you from every angle. It works your soft spots and worms in through the cracks; it finds your fascinations and feeds them. [. . .]

[. . .] It's as if Mickey exists both outside time and inside its specific examples. The effect is Total Mickey, Mouse without End.

The old tired Sinclair Lewis quote gets dragged out by the professional hysterics: when fascism comes, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a bible and etc. Well, friends, this is the Corporate State, right here, a world unto itself, bigger than two US states put together. They control the horizontal and the vertical, and the utility grid. The roads are private. The lakes are private. The control is hardly total — let Disney cease to pay taxes, and watch what happens. But the enormity of the area and the totality of the control is almost unprecedented. Surely it cannot be benign. Right?

James wrote something completely appropriate to finish this thought a few years ago, which I must recycle here: "Imagine, Winston, that the future consists of a boot pressing on a face. Here's the worst part, Winston — inside the boot is" MICKEY'S FOOT!!!

Disneyworld, Lileks Style Part 2

James Lileks continues the tale of the family vacation:

When we ended yesterday’s entry, I was stuck in a small, crammed room in the dark at the Haunted Mansion, and remarked that I have been severely claustrophobic for many years. The various references to "the paper" or "my career" concern the trials of my employer, which began a several-year project of feeding jobs into the woodchipper right before I went on vacation. We continue:

The doors were shut and the lights went out and the room began to sink.

This was the test, in a way: the test of whether that evening attack in a movie theater in 1984 had any power left. I had my first panic attack — out of the blue, no hints or omens, ever — during a showing of "Vertigo." Honest. Rapid heartbeat, disorientation, fight-or-flight, the entire suite of symptoms at once. While I had to commend my condition for choosing an apt moment to assert itself, it also meant I had a difficult time convincing the emergency room nurse I wasn't just reacting to a well-crafted thriller. But it happened during the scene in the stable. Nothing was going on. Well, that's the genius of Hitchcock, isn't it? Even the most mundane moments are saturated with dread. Yes, and my shirt is saturated with sweat. Now if you could give me something.

The Lileks family hits Disneyworld

James takes the family to the secular high temple of Disneydom:

It's Disneyworld. The happiest, smiling-est, hottest, sweatiest, standing-in-lineiest place on earth. This year's motto: "The Year of A Million Dreams," which suggests they've completed Jungland: cool! I had a dream in which a large mouse was pulling my brains out my nose, and my brains were made of gold. Doctor, what does it mean? I didn't think it meant I had Disneyphobia, which makes its sufferers treat Mickey as a sin visited upon the world, a demon equalled only by that Dark God of Body-Rot, Ronald McDonald. I've always enjoyed Disney Products™ — I've just never had awestruck melty adoration of all things Mouse-related. At best, total love of this or that. At worst, shuddery dislike of some of its manifestations. For the most part, temperate admiration. I looked forward to this.

Not to spoil the story, but having spent four days in the realm of the Mouse, you could cut my wrists and I'd bleed Disney Kool-Aid. Because that's how much I drank.

Happy Mother's Day

Not much post-able activity this weekend . . . yesterday was a performance of "Taming of the Shrew" by PlayMakers (a few photos may be salvageable), and today was (finally) contacting all the team members for this year's soccer squad. Busy, but not bloggable stuff.

Modern parenting

Wil Wheaton has a bee in his bonnet about the failings of too many parents nowadays:

[. . .] I've recently concluded that there is, in fact, an entire generation of parents, about my age or just a little older, who are substituting technology for parenting. As a result, there's an entire generation of children who are overstimulated and undersocialized, and in some cases heavily medicated, because their damn parents would rather distract them with a DVD or video game than, you know, interact with them.

Is this the new way we're supposed to raise emotionally healthy and well adjusted kids? I must have missed a memo, because these people are everywhere. [ . . . ]

There's a car commercial running right now that is an unintentionally powerful and disturbing commentary on how many people in this generation of parents are raising their kids. It starts in a school lunch room, filled with kids who are jumping and running around, throwing food, and generally raging out of control. A teacher tries to get them to settle down, and is ignored, so he flips down a little display, like you'd see in a car-based DVD player, and the entire room instantly turns into slackjawed, television watching zombies. What's the message here? "If you can't get your kids to listen to you, don't worry, all it takes is a little DVD action to do it for you, so you can get back to the peace and quiet you inexplicably thought you'd enjoy when you had seven f*ing kids."

Literary erotica

I dunno, it's not the way I'd have expected 'em to raise money, but you can't doubt that it'll be more lucrative than a sale of old books:

Vienna's City Hall has launched a "sex hotline" to raise money for the capital's main public library, officials said Tuesday.

It's unusual, but it's not particularly raunchy: Callers pay 53 U.S. cents a minute to listen to an actress read breathless passages from erotica dating to the Victorian era.

I can't imagine the same thing working in, say, Peoria, somehow.

Ten times better?

Well, my Symantec license expired for my Norton anti-virus software yesterday, so I installed MacAfee in its place. The biggest difference I've noticed so far has been speed. The last full virus scan I ran using Norton went over 40 hours. Macafee took less than 4. That's pretty significant, if you ask me. As I wrote in a comment on the earlier post, "Now, admittedly, this isn't a big, bad kick-ass machine — it's only a 3GHz box with 2GB of memory, so perhaps it's underpowered for a strenuous task like virus scanning. (Tongue ever so slightly in cheek here, of course.)"

Part of why I decided to switch was the whole update problem I've encountered every time I needed to download the latest version of Norton (detailed here).

Superconducting Maglev Toy Train

H/T to Roger Henry.

Swordfighting . . . not just a sublimation of violence

According to this article, the noble art of fencing is also really good at boosting your mathematical abilities:

Mitch Slep took up fencing at the age of 14 because he wanted to improve his coordination and loved the grandeur of the sport. Aside from the aesthetics, there was an aspect of problem solving that appealed to him as he tried to psyche out his opponent's next move.

"It's a really high level of frustration and concentration," says Slep, now 26. "I just felt I was hyper-aware of my opponent's movement."

Little did he know that wielding a sword would enhance his mathematical prowess. What Slep found while serving on his high-school and college teams was that the abstract and analytical aspects of fencing heightened his skill with all things numeric.

"There's a lot of intriguing visualization of space that's involved," says Slep, who majored in math during college and is now a Microsoft software engineer in Seattle. "I haven't picked up a sport with as much technical aspects as fencing. It helped me get where I am today."

What Slep discovered is something sports psychologists are increasingly preaching to educators: Dueling with any one of the three types of fencing swords, whether the lightweight foil, the epee or the thrashing saber, can actually improve math skills.

Hmmmmm. If that's the case, then my base mathematical skills must be pre-reptilian, because I've been involved in various forms of swordplay for decades, and I'm just barely able to calculate the tip to leave when I pay the bill in a restaurant.

Basic human nature

"A sorrow shared may be halved, and a joy shared doubled, but a humiliation shared is at least cubed."

QotD: Sex-Ed's relevance

Before I start, let me say I'm no fan of abstinence based education. But the much-hyped study from HHS, showing that abstinence based education makes no difference in adolescent sexual behaviour, is not exactly a triumph for the prior consensus on sex ed. Everyone seems to have missed the explosive finding, which is that abstinence-based education makes no difference in adolescent sexual behaviour. The kids didn't have sex any later, but they also weren't any less likely to use birth control. If this study is correct, it implies that all sex-ed is useless, a result I don't find particularly surprising, actually.

Jane Galt, "I do not think that means what you think it means", Asymmetrical Information, 2007-04-16

Equestrian dance

The WEG2006 Freestyle Dressage Final performance of ANDREAS HELGSTRAND on BLUE HORS MATINE. H/T to Diane Echelbarger.

QotD: Human Nature

The more I think about it, the more I'm beginning to feel that this is the basis for all wrong-headed thinking in the world. To quote Monty Python: "Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is not a basis for a system of government." We all had a good giggle at that; and yet, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is no less ridiculous as a basis for a system of government, because it starts off with an unreal premise: that Man is a selfless human being, will continue to suppress his innate selfishness for the sake of the greater good, and will not take advantage of the hard work of others to make his own life easier.

Kim du Toit, "Not That Way", The Other Side of Kim du Toit, 2007-04-11

No more racist, sexist, ethnic or other hurtful language

Marty Beckerman discusses the several recent brouhahas (brouhahii?) over hurtful epithets:

So when does race-based humor qualify as harmless entertainment — albeit risqué and provocative — and when does it qualify as actual racism?

With my friends of other ethnic backgrounds — and okay, I probably need some more of these — the back-and-forth of boorish jokes is simply a way to kill time, share a few laughs and ease subconscious tension: the other night I joked that my Japanese immigrant friend should have applied for a yellow card instead of a green card; he fired back that if my bad Jewish self ever walked into a brick wall with an erection, I'd suffer a broken nose. (Neither of us felt the need to file a petition with the Anti-Defamation League, although I might need to watch my back for the little guy's razor-sharp throwing stars.) The wider American culture's embrace of stereotype-laced humor serves a similar purpose to our banter: making people feel more comfortable with one another so they can get past their prejudices.

This is why Richards, Coulter and Imus landed on their faces even though Americans love to laugh at bigotry: these entertainers poured salt into centuries-old wounds with cheap punch lines-simple, worthless slurs; spiteful, desperate pleas for attention-instead of throwing our collective ridiculousness back into our faces. Their sin had nothing to do with edgy jokes; it was that instead of shedding light on everyone, they only shed light on themselves.

It really has changed the public sphere over the last generation: racist jokes were very common on the playground when I was a child, and sexist neanderthals still inhabit some niche ecosystems in the working world. Anti-gay jokes are less common — at least I encounter them far less frequently than just a few years ago, although (to borrow a term from Berke Breathed) offensesensitivity seems to be more widespread now than ever before.

There's really only one safe group to joke about: Englishmen. Not English women, certainly. And not British people in general: the Scots, the Welsh, and the Irish have been slighted sufficiently. Other Europeans have borne the brunt of more than their fair share of jokes. No other form of stereotyping will pass muster in this day and age, so stick it to the Bloody Poms . . . they're (temporarily) safe to abuse.

Peter Bagge on the homeless problem

Last month's artistic interpretation from Reason magazine, now online.

Avoid Tagged.com at all costs!

I recently received a "tagged.com" invitation from a fellow blogger, with whom I'd had friendly conversations, but who I didn't consider a close friend. I just ignored it. A few days later, another invitation arrived, telling me that if I didn't join up, the fellow blogger would feel I wasn't his friend. I emailed him directly, to let him know that I wasn't interested, and discovered just how sneaky the idiots at "tagged.com" really are:

It took some generic contact details from me, then informed me who else in my email list is also a member. I figured, sure, I will add them to the set, since they are already involved. But one thing I did NOT want to do was spam all my friends - I KNOW who my friends are and I don’t need a stupid internet network to tell me who they are. I hit send…

Then I scrolled down as I waited for the next page to load.

And discovered it had not just flagged the people in the system but flagged EVERY SINGLE PERSON I HAVE EVER EMAILED for an invitation to this stupid network!

I had messages going out to customer service departments of a dozen companies, billing companies, former clients, casual acquaintances, my PASTOR, my professors! I tried to cancel it, but it was too late.

Let's do our best to stamp out this kind of abusive practice . . . and please don't sign up with those idiots!

Deep in a hole

"Da Wife" sent along this link to a really big pit.

QotD: Self-esteem

The world is full of belligerent numbskulls; frequently, the more ignorant, the more belligerent.

It is a soppy, and dangerous, progressive cliché that lack of self-esteem among the indigent and the criminal is a cause of poor social integration. There's actually no evidence that the indigent and the criminal do have low self-esteem. On the contrary in fact, they tend to have rather too much of it.

Yeats got that. Polly Toynbee gets it too. Charles Darwin wrote, "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."

While this is distressing for the world's more sentimental do-gooders, and seems to have had no impact at all on the growing self-esteem industry, it is an important observation, having great explanatory power, and not just for the history of idea. It is, I submit, at the core of such diverse social phenomena as gangstas, bling, Islamism, dangerous driving, the bullying petty official, the modern media health scare, the conspiracy theorist, and large chunks of the content of the web. Combined with the tendency for the assertive and persistent to get their own way, because others can't bear endless futile arguments, it is much more than a marginal nastiness. Which is distressing even to the unsentimental.

Guy Herbert, "Doctor Bickle, I presume", Samizdata, 2007-03-06

Lileks on "the new design paradigm"

It doesn't happen as often as it used to, but something caught James Lileks on the raw, and he must scream:

What really caught my eye was an interview with a University of Minnesota professor named Thomas Fisher, the dean of the U's new School of Design. It was a conversation about the new Design Economy, a term I hadn't heard before. America will compete and thrive because we design good things, like the iPod. You might wonder how a nation of 300 million can be sustained by design, but rest assured the term has broader definitions. The interview, called "Intelligent Design," focused on cities. As you might expect they are in dire need of Design, and I suspect this design will be administrated by experts. (As Dr. Johnson once said: A man who has tired of criticizing London is tired of tenure.) In order to compete, our cities need better design. No argument here — until we look at the specifics.

While it might seem a bit unsporting to take potshots at experts of this type, it can be very satisfying. Read the whole thing (after the initial refrigerator digression, that is).

Continental travel experiences

As one or two of you know, Victor went off on a school trip to Europe yesterday. His flight was delayed getting out of Toronto, so they missed their connecting flight from Charles de Gaulle Airport, and their baggage went somewhere else entirely, but the last email from the group indicated they'd successfully arrived in Montpellier and (a few hours later) their baggage was present and accounted-for.

Tomorrow, off to Nîmes!

QotD: Homophobia

Not to be too snarky about this, but at what point should a reasonable person simply assume that any minster all het up about the gays is just a step away from being a Bathhouse Billy? Because I have to tell you, at this point it's getting to be my default setting.

John Scalzi, "I'm Willing to Bet The Reporter Was Snickering His Head Off as He Wrote This Lede", Whatever, 2007-02-24

QotD: Jet lag

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

William Gibson, Pattern Recognition, 2003

Home in-security

"Da Wife" sent along a link to this blog posting debunking typical home security installations.

Dog meets MP3 player . . . dog wins

Victor's almost brand-new MP3 player (vintage February 2007) met an untimely end at the hands . . . well, actually the jaws of Xander:

I somehow suspect that Samsung's warranty department isn't going to accept the "My dog ate my" excuse any more than Victor's high school teachers do.

The climate change meme

Jon sent me an email from which I had to extract a lovely little mini-rant:

Speaking of which, the local theatre will be hosting a special engagement of A Convenient Bullshit Excuse For Socialist Domination, or whatever Gore's version of Apocalypto is called. Because it's "an educational film that everyone should see" (according to the theatre owner), admission to the show is significantly reduced. I expect Jamie's school to make attendance at the damn thing mandatory.

Crickey. It seems to me like this hysteria is getting a little out of hand. I prefer my hysterias to be just a little better managed, like, say, the Princess Diana thing. You have to admit that that whole thing was pretty well choreographed. This climate change freakout is just getting out of control.

You have to admit, whether you believe that global warming is a serious issue or not, recasting the issue as "climate change" allows you to use every single instance of unusual weather as "proof" that it's the end of the world as we know it. This leads directly into subtle-and-not-so-subtle calls for "something to be done", which usually entails handing control over to a small group of experts, specialists, or what-have-you. Because, of course, the problem is too big and complex for mere individuals to be allowed to make their own decisions . . .

Update: Oddly enough, L. Neil Smith alludes to the same thing in an article in the latest Libertarian Enterprise:

This is exactly the situation we're seeing lately with another false orthodoxy, that of Global Warming. Its advocates are having more and more difficulty getting people to accept it, so now they want to "decertify" meteorologists who are, in their words, "Global Warming deniers".

It's also the same dynamic that fuelled the Inquisition.

16! 16! 16! Yikes!

Today is Victor's 16th birthday.

I feel very . . . old.

Victor and his friends didn't destroy our house during the party. No calls to the police were made (or required). Only minimal damage to property was recorded. In spite of this, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves.

Those shifty IT guys

According to a recent study by CERT, the ones you need to watch carefully for sabotage are the IT workers:

The research suggests that potential troublemakers should be easy to spot. Nearly all the cases of cybercrime investigated were carried out by people who were "disgruntled, paranoid, generally show up late, argue with colleagues, and generally perform poorly."

According to the research, 86 percent of those who committed cybercrimes held technical positions and 90 percent had system administrator or privileged system access. Almost half — 41 percent — of those who sabotaged IT systems were employed at the time they did it but most crimes were committed by insiders following termination. Most incursions — 64 percent — involved VPNs and old passwords that had never been terminated, highlighting a lack of security controls and gaps in their organizations' access controls.

So, the next time you have a run-in with a surly system administrator or LAN technician (and you know it's going to happen), you can get your revenge by fingering them on the anonymous tip line as a potential saboteur. Revenge and self-righteousness in one easy package.

Or, you know, not.

Furious responses from readers who work in IT starting in three, two, one . . .

QotD: Perfectionism

The surest hindrance of success is to have too high a standard of refinement in our own minds, or too high an opinion of the judgment of the public. He who is determined not to be satisfied with anything short of perfection will never do anything to please himself or others.

William Hazlitt, 1778-1830

Reader contributions

Jon sent along a couple of photos as possible blog-fodder:

"[. . .] a tree decorated for the holidays. The tree is on Old Yonge Street in Holland Landing, just north of Newmarket. It's been like this since at least the beginning of December. Every time I passed it I meant to snag a photo — finally got around to it a few days ago."

"[. . .] a restaurant in the soon-to-be-demolished Terminal 2 at Pearson. I had breakfast there last week. Why is it that ferry terminals never have airport-themed concessions?"

I also received a couple of links from "Da Wife": Severely overdue library book returned, and Tales of corporate idiocy. Thanks for the links!

That would have to hurt

Jon sent me a link to a new item in the Lee Valley Tools online woodworking catalogue: a chainmail glove for woodcarvers. He titled the email "SCA masturbation accessory".

Just in case you need . . .

. . . some stinkin' badges:

H/T to Richard Zellich.

QotD: Disappointment

Just because it's amazing on the commercial doesn't mean it's amazing in real life

Natalie "Gnat" Lileks, as quoted by James Lileks in "Amazing commercial, not-so-amazing real life: I'll hire the guys who hyped those useless Blo-Pens!", Star Tribune, 2007-01-12

How does Symantec stay in business?

Victor's anti-virus subscription appears to have expired some time in the last month. He didn't get any pop-ups from Norton informing him of the fact until today, when it told him that he had to uninstall and re-install because of a critical error in the Norton engine. After doing that, it finally got around to mentioning that he needed to re-subscribe in order to re-install.

Okay, that was pretty sleazy, but sure. I dug up my "online use only" credit card and we started navigating the Symantec website to get him re-subscribed. To no surprise at all, just like every previous year, the route to paying for the download is very straightforward and direct. You provide the basic info, select the download you want, provide your credit card number, and badda-bing, you're done.

And just like every other year, when it comes to actually receiving the product you've just paid for . . . it gets extra difficult.

We've paid, the invoice number is provided, along with a "Download Now" button. Simple. Just copy the access key to a separate file, then click the download button. Except that when you click the download button, it invites you to download a file called "pixel.GIF", of 1 byte in size.

Call me suspicious, but I don't think this is the file I just paid to download.

Click the button again, same result. Try downloading, and the browser goes off into a reverie, but never actually downloads anything useful. Try a different browser . . . same result.

Try finding a way to talk to a real human being . . . you might as well be searching for Amelia Earhart. They've invested huge amounts of time and money to prevent you ever finding a contact email or telephone number that might possibly lead to a real person. A few years ago, I had to actually get a friend who had high-level contacts at the firm to prize out a contact email for me to get the damned program to download.

After half an hour of wasted time, we cancelled the order and Victor downloaded Macafee instead. It took less than five minutes from deciding to switch Anti-virus vendors to having the Macafee software installed and running on his machine.

I'm thinking that I'll do the same for my own machine, when my subscription expires in the next month or so (assuming that Norton tells me in advance, that is).

Symantec may have a good software package to sell, but when I encounter difficulties every year when I try to renew my license, I have to assume that they don't really want my business. Macafee clearly does.

Statues that make you go "Huh?"

Lois McMaster Bujold sent this link to her mailing list: Strange statues around the world:

Melbourne

QotD: Aging

Age is not measured by years. Nature does not equally distribute energy. Some people are born old and tired while others are going strong at seventy.

Dorothy Thompson

Close call, follow-up

Following up from my earlier posting. The technician at Toyota took an hour this morning, spraying and digging mud out of the engine compartment before he could diagnose the problem. In brief, a mangled radiator. Not leaking, just a bit . . . um . . . resculpted. They're ordering in the new rad for me, so I need to go back to the dealership tomorrow morning to have it installed. Could have been much worse, I suppose.

Update: In the cold light of day, the damage didn't look too bad (from the outside, anyway):

Now THAT is a snowthrower!

H/T to "JtMc" for the URL.

A close call

On the way home from Victor's indoor soccer game tonight (a 6-6 tie, with the other team recovering from a 5-3 halftime deficit), we found ourselves taking an unexpected detour. It had been snowing earlier in the day, so the roads were a bit greasy on the way down into Whitby, but otherwise no problem. The drive home was a bit more fraught.

Coming north, just about where the 407 is eventually going to come through our area, we hit some black ice and had an unscheduled off-road experience. The traffic was light, thank goodness, so even though the road went to the left, I continued in a rough straight line through the [empty of opposing traffic] oncoming lane and then across the gravel, down into a ditch, up the other side of the ditch, and then about 20 metres into a field.

I have to admit, in the past I've sometimes wondered just how people got themselves into odd situations like this. I usually assume that they were travelling too fast, or not paying attention to road conditions, or just plain careless. In my case, I was well under the speed limit, paying what appeared to be careful attention to the condition of the road, and still ended up sitting in a snowy field looking stupid. I could easily have made the situation worse . . . by trying to brake or trying to steer in the direction the road was curving, for example . . . but there's a certain peaceful feeling once the situation has gone fully pear-shaped and all you can do is mitigate the consequences as they come along. I don't recommend this as an experiment, however.

Victor and I were both fine . . . seatbelts fastened and not enough impact to deploy the airbags, and from what I could see in the flashlight beam, the Quotemobile had only suffered minor damage. I had been planning to go in to the dealership tomorrow for an oil change, so I'll have them look to see if there's more significant (that is, more expensive) damage that isn't immediately visible.

Getting out of the field was a bit more effort than getting into it. I had to drop into four-wheel drive and find a more solid portion of the ditch to cross to get back to the road. I don't think I'd have managed without the 4WD. Having accomplished that, and resuming our interrupted journey, we found that we were far from the only folks to have left the road . . . we'd just been the most southerly. There were three or four vehicles abandoned in the ditch or through the ditch and into the Hydro field beyond, plus plenty of dramatic skidmarks in the road to show that several others had nearly had the same experience, too.

QotD: Compact Fluorescent Lighting

Personally, my home is practically a cave. I have to burn lights even in the day, because I'm in a first floor apartment shaded by tall buildings. I'm also really cheap, and a fairly committed green. So if you can't get me to use the things [compact fluorescent bulbs], you know there's a big problem. And that problem is not, as the article suggests, that light-bulb companies are resisting producing enough of them, that consumers are uneducated, that they are not displayed in the stores correctly, or that the bulbs are a funny shape. The problem is that after five minutes of sitting under a compact flourescent bulb, I feel like an extra in a Fellini film. I use one in the range hood, and if I had closet lights, I'd install them there. But there's no way I'm using them as my primary form of illumination unless legally forced to do so; it's just too murderously depressing. Which is what every single other person who writes about the things says. I can only assume that the New York Times author has never tried the product, or is out too much to actually notice what the lights look like, or lives in some kind of penal institution where such lighting looks natural.

Jane Galt, "Let there be (compact flourescent) light", Asymmetrical Information, 2007-01-02

What's in a name?

"Jane Galt" briefly references her own real first name:

Megan says I said I didn't like her. What I actually said was that I don't like being around other Megans, because I get confused when someone else says their name. If you're a David or a Jennifer you get used to this, but I was a rare breed in my generation.

Growing up, I had a relatively obscure name. I don't recall meeting anyone else named Nick, Nicky or Nicholas in my neighbourhood or at my school, so I felt a bit singled out. I hated my own name, largely because of all the jokes (especially near Christmas), and being quite a self-centred little brat, it took me a long time to realize that almost everyone's name is a burden to them at some point in their childhood.

I started to prefer being called "Nicholas" when I entered the working world, and I've stuck with that ever since.

The more recent problem is that the name has been quite popular for the last dozen years or more, so that I'm constantly hearing parents bellowing my name at their misbehaving children. Some twitches, you just can't ever quite shake off, I assure you.

The most important link for tonight

Dave Slater sent along the most important URL of the day, at least if you've got young 'uns: the NORAD Santa Tracker page.

QotD: Social Status

Status seems to me under-examined as a biological (as contrasted with a social) motive. It's necessarily a group thing; no one has status as a lone individual, as it is created relative to the group in which the individual is embedded. But of course, humans evolved in small social groups. Lack of status can really kill one, in any crunch situation. (Lifeboats, starving villages, the hunt, etc. See Lord of the Flies.) So humans have a biological need for enough status to obtain whatever their personal threshold may be to feel safe. There are a million ways to satisfy status needs, just as their are a million ways to prepare food to satisfy the underlying universal biological need, hunger. When a person drops below their comfort zone of status, they are thrown into a state of status emergency or panic behavior (often bad or wildly disproportionate) sometimes having little relation to any actual physical threat (see any internet flame war. And a lot of real wars.)

Lois McMaster Bujold, email to the Bujold mailing list, 2006-12-07

Posted by Nicholas at 12:43 AM | Comments (0)

The truth finally comes out

I'm not much of a fan of fanfic, but in this case, I'll make an exception: the real Hermione Granger from the J.K. Rowling Harry Potter series:

They all think they know me. My roommates, my classmates, my teachers. How blind can people get? I sometimes wonder. I honestly think that, with some of them, I could be caught robbing Gringott's Bank, or murdering Dumbledore, and they'd find excuses for me. Being a girl is so useful, sometimes — especially here in the wizards' subculture, which, frankly, is old-fashioned about some things.

It's so ironic that the clues have been there all along. It's just that nobody either has thought to put them together, or come to the correct conclusion. I do think that if Dumbledore knew what my real long-range plans are, I'd be Obliviated and out of Hogwarts so fast that the speed of light would look rather slow and crippled. However, luckily for me, he never has Legilimensed me, and sees me as an adjunct to my two friends. He pays a lot more attention to Harry Potter than he does to me, and that's just the way I like it.

QotD: Gender

Gender formation consists of a certain amount of biology overlain by a lot of culture. In our culture, gender differentiation goes into high gear at puberty, and consists to a large extent of a process of deletion. The individual ejects or suppresses aspects of him/her/self perceived as belonging to the other gender, and the resultant cripples are called "young men" or "young women". Maturity, to an interesting extent, consists of people reclaiming a lot of these lost aspects to become more complete persons again.

Lois McMaster Bujold, email to the LMB mailing list, 2006-12-07

Beer

Our "local friendly beer elf" would like to bring your attention to a worthy beer now available at LCBO outlets.

A lovely rant

Michael O'Connor Clarke lets loose a lovely little rant on a few topics that have been galling him.

Hurricane absentees explained

I was wondering, along with many others I'm sure, what might have caused the dearth of hurricanes this year, compared to the predictions before the season started. According to The Register, El Niño is the culprit:

So what is behind the drop off in activity? Is this the end of global warming? The BBC reports that the dearth of stormy weather is behind attributed to a building, but weak, El Niño event.

This influx of warm water in the Pacific is triggered by slower-than-average trade winds. Researchers think it disrupts hurricane formation because it creates strong upper wind shear. The shear shreds the top of the thunderstorm at the centre of a hurricane, causing it to lose intensity and wind strength, and to dissipate much faster.

The El Niño event is expected to last until well into 2007

Mother's not always right

According to a new report, your mother's admonition to "sit up straight" was flat-out wrong:

They used a special MRI or magnetic resonance imaging scanner to look at the pressure placed on the spine by various seating positions — a forward slouch, a 90-degree angle and a relaxed position where the knees weren't at a right angle to the floor and the back was reclined slightly.

The scans showed that sitting at a 90-degree angle puts unnecessary pressure on the disks of the lower back, which can lead to back pain, disk degeneration and sciatica.

One of the authors, Dr. Waseen Bashir of the University of Alberta Hospital, said that's because the body is actually working against gravity in that position.

A different ad paradigm

Advertising is so different in other parts of the world that some examples would seem to be the exact opposite of appealing to a western audience.

Ouchies! (H/T to Craig Zeni)

Maybe I should see this film . . .

Jacob Sullum has a belly laugh at Borat:

Because I live in the U.S. rather than Russia, last night I had the opportunity to see Borat, which I highly recommend. In addition to making me laugh so hard I couldn't breathe (the look on former Georgia congressman Bob Barr's face during his brief encounter with Sacha Baron Cohen's Kazakh alter ego is by itself worth the price of admission), it made me sympathize a bit (a teeny-weeny bit) with the Anti-Defamation League's concern that people confronted by the outrageous anti-Semitism of Borat and his compatriots might not get the joke.

[. . .]

What the ADL misses, I think, is that part of Cohen's talent is to amuse and discomfit his audience at the same time. Sometimes you laugh because you're so uncomfortable. I still have reservations about his mistreatment of perfectly nice people whose patience he tests with Borat's boorish and disgusting behavior, but it produces some undeniably hilarious moments. Many of his targets, who include mysoginists, homophobes, anti-Semites, and anti-Muslim bigots, deserve to be goaded and mocked, and their comments tend to make you uncomfortable in a different way.

Indulge those atavistic urges

Let it burn, baby!

H/T to JtMc.

First Snow Flurry

As I took Xander out for his afternoon walk, we were treated to the first snow flurry of the season:

He's been enjoying chasing all the fallen leaves, but the snowflakes had him a bit confused for a while.

He was throwing himself into the air, trying to bite the blowing snowflakes, but this meant I had a heck of a time trying to get a photo of him. This is about the best I could manage:

A trip down (web) memory lane

If you started using web browsers with one of the modern tools (Firefox, Opera, etc.), you may find this link to be an eye-opener. It's an emulator, showing what web browsing was like in the early days . . . try opening a page you visit regularly with some of the early browsers. You'll quickly discover a much less interesting, less colourful, less easy-to-navigate web experience!

Very clever T-shirt slogan

In the last few weeks, Universal has been trying to actively suppress the fan base who did so much to publicize the movie Serenity. They're busy sending cease-and-desist orders to the small firms and individuals who have been selling Firefly and Serenity merchandise — including those which do not use images or artwork from the movie or TV shows.

While clearly on firm legal ground for this, the moral stance is particularly galling: they benefitted from literally thousands of hours of free work by fans, who went far beyond the call to raise awareness of the movie release, and who invested lots of time and money to try to make it a success. Universal should have either policed the merchandise earlier or made the licensing easier to access in order to at least go some way towards recompensing the individuals and small companies who've done so much (and, in hindsight, for so little from Universal).

This T-shirt slogan says it all.

Lois McMaster Bujold blogs

More blog posts from Lois McMaster Bujold, talking about The Sharing Knife: Beguilement: here, here, and here.

Inappropriate Halloween costumes for kids

This Fark.com thread links to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Sophia Lever and her 13-year-old daughter, Storm, were looking for a Halloween costume on Friday. It turned out to be a long day.

For example, when they walked into Halloween Headquarters on Market Street, the first thing they saw was a wall of costumes that looked like they'd fit in better at Victoria's Secret than the Seven Hills School's Halloween party in Walnut Creek, which was where Storm was going after shopping.

The choices included "Sponge Bath Betty," a skimpy nurse's costume; "Home Wrecker," a construction-worker costume with a plunging neckline; and a "White Bunny" costume with a tiny skirt, white stockings and a garter belt.

[. . .]

And that's fine. Grown women can certainly make up their own minds. But what makes some parents uneasy is the way the racy outfits are targeting not only teenage girls but preteens, meaning girls 10 to 12 years old.

For example, "Sexy Army Lady" isn't incredibly revealing, but it has a definite sexual vibe. And what about "Miss Teddy Bare," another costume sized for younger girls?

"We have a French maid costume for a toddler," Jyoti says. "It's amazing."

I'm not sure if this is a trend that's already swept California, or if it's continent-wide . . . I haven't been looking at kids' costumes for a few years now, but you could probably have predicted it was coming, given the ongoing sexualization of children (James Lileks has ranted several times about the pre-teen skankware and the Bratz-style dolls now available).

It's just another sign of the apocalypse, or something like that I'm sure.

A Poster Girl on the wrong side of the world

Via SDA, Beccy Cole, Poster Girl.

Gadget of the week

At last! A use for Bluetooth!

H/T to "Tom".

Old TV ads for . . . computers?

Someone should be cringing for their work on some of these advertising embarassments. Yikes!

LMB guest-blogs at EOS Books

Lois McMaster Bujuld, author of the "Vorkosigan" SF series and the "Chalion" fantasy series, is guest-blogging this week at the EOS Books blog. In her first posting today, she talks about some of the differences between her writing habits and those of other writers:

It was suggested that among things of interest to readers I might post in my week of guest blogging would be out-takes, discarded bits and pieces of the recent book that would show my writing process at work. Now, there are as many processes as there are writers, but mine doesn't leave much on the cutting room floor readable by any eyes other than mine (and sometimes not even by mine — what word was that penciled squiggle intended to be . . . ?), because most of my structural revision takes place at the outline stage, which is ornate and multi-layered, more resembling thinking out loud on paper than anything else. After the first draft goes onto the page, revisions, for me, tend to be a line here, a paragraph there, partial re-tooling of a scene, but very seldom wholesale slaughter of bad ideas that didn't grind to a halt quite fast enough. This is not only because my prose sets up like concrete and I have to revise with a jackhammer, and I hates it, Precious, although there's an element of that, too.

Also, for those interested, the sample chapters from her latest book, The Sharing Knife: Beguilement are available here. While I must admit that the book didn't grab me as much as her "Chalion" books have done, this is only the first half of the story, so I'm still hoping that the second part (due out next year) will be more to my — admittedly uneducated — taste.

New small-press publisher

An old friend of mine has started her own publishing company: Kitsune Books. There are only a couple of initial offerings, but who knows where this one may lead?

Saturday links

A couple of links that were worth passing along:

• Risk of Autism doubled with Single Gene Mutation: "This discovery has far-reaching implications because this gene, a variant form of a gene called MET, is not just specifically a brain gene but rather a gene which has its effect on multiple systems in the body such as immune function and gut repair." (H/T to SDA)
• Perry de Havilland goes Dancing with Sister Morphine: "I felt surprisingly well considering I have been under a general anaesthetic and had quite a few squishy bits from inside lopped off me. In fact I felt amazingly well.
  
  "The journey back home was interesting. The colours were so very bright and someone seems to have turned up the contrast. Sometimes when I looked closely as the things written on the back of people's tee-shirts whilst walking down King's Road, the words seemed to suddenly zoom away from me towards some vanishing point."
• Radley Balko points out the WTO-violating aspect of the Internet gambling ban: "The WTO allows a country to ban some goods and services within its borders (Muslim countries with alcohol, for example), but you can't ban a good or service from another country while allowing it to be sold from domestic providers. That's sort of the whole point of "free trade." The gambling ban does exactly that.
  
  "This has already been hashed out before. The tiny country of Antigua filed a WTO complaint against the U.S. last year, well before this latest law was passed. Antigua won its complaint in March. The Bush administration — free trade champion through and through — has chosen to simply ignore the ruling."
• Jane Galt indulges in a little (too much) "Full Disclosure: Andrew Heller is a vicious human being whose superficial charm fools only those who have never met him before, or heard about him from someone who has. After one junior journalist wrote that his work was 'Interesting, but a little too shrill for my taste', Mr Heller spent three years ceaselessly campaigning for her destruction. She was found three weeks ago in her car with empty bottles of SoCo and Valium, and a note that just said 'It's just not worth the hassle.' I would rather have all my teeth extracted without anaesthesia than say something that might offend him."

QotD: Trust

We grown-ups, however public-spirited, are all now assumed guilty until proved innocent.

As a result, adults are being deterred from offering to help with children. The Girl Guides and Scouts are chronically short of volunteers: the Guides have a waiting list of 50,000, the Scouts 30,000, and some parents have resorted to signing their children up at birth. These checks will reveal not just convictions, but also offences of which people were accused but not convicted. This could wreck the lives of adults who have been falsely accused. [. . .]

One of the nicer aspects of being a child used to be the random acts of kindness offered by adults outside the family: the friendly shopkeeper who ruffled your hair and gave you a sweet; the enthusiastic PE coach who gave up time after school to help with your gymnastics and was constantly — and wholly innocently — adjusting your body position to get the moves right. These adults were generous with their time and their affection. We knew who the pervs were and took pains to avoid them.

Now all adults are deemed to be perverts unless they can prove that they are not. Most will now avoid contact with other people's children and will refrain from touching them for fear of the action being misconstrued.

Mary Ann Sieghart, "The Bill that will kill trust between the generations", TimesOnline, 2006-10-19

"The Turk" called

As I alluded to in an earlier post, the Turk came for a visit today and asked me to turn in my playbook access card. I'm back to what we in the software business call "consulting".

Unlike the last time I was in this situation, my employer handled it with a fair amount of grace and tact . . . not the least of which was that I was allowed to go around and say goodbye to the folks I'd been working with for the past eight years. I still don't know what my package looks like, as they are supposed to be sending it to me by courier tomorrow. I hope the "class act" doesn't wear out when I open that envelope.

Waiting for "the Turk"

I don't blog about my employer, for both obvious and obscure reasons. This past few weeks have been fraught: my company has been taken over by a competitor, and there's much fear and loathing in the halls as we adapt to our new reality. We are all, to one extent or another, waiting for the Turk to call:

For a two-week period each year in late summer, NFL players, who generally are a resilient and tough-minded group, are reduced to bundles of insecurity and nervousness while waiting to hear if their names make the final roster.

It's cut down time in the NFL. Time for the Turk.

Who is this Turk? He is the individual assigned by the organization to go to a player's room, knock on his door and utter those dreaded words: "The coach wants to see you — and bring your playbook." In short, the Turk is the NFL version of the Grim Reaper.

Friday links

Items that might once have grown into full posts:

• Troops face high times: 10 foot marijuana plants provide good cover for Taliban. (H/T to Jon)
• Racism accusations against 14-year-old girl: she spends some time in a police cell for asking to be moved to a different group in her class.
• Of course, it could have been worse . . . she might have been carrying a comb
• Samantha Burns chronicles the life and times of breast implants: game show prizes and gracing wanted posters.
• Going the SUV owners one better. Tanks for the memories.
• Rogier van Bakel talks about Damsels In This Dress:

If we insist — by applying social pressure, as in the U.K., or by making laws, as in France — that Muslim women must not wear the hijab or the burkha, then we should logically also require nuns to (at least in public) shed their habit. We should then perhaps also nix yarmulkes and turbans, à la the French. Come to think of it, is a golden cross or a star of David or a Wiccan pentangle worn around the neck an example of people potentially making others uncomfortable, inappropriately shoving their religion into others' faces? Do we allow orthodox Jews to wear black hats and side curls? May teenage girls wear WWJD bracelets without risking setting us off? Could Amish folks pose an affront to our secular or "neutral" preferences when they openly wear straw hats and ride horse-drawn buggies?

Live and let live. If Muslim women want to dress in dour black tents, or if the Pope is hellbent on proudly preening his pointy hat, I'll be the last person to stop them. At the same time, of course, I do reserve the right to laugh like a hyena at their chosen outfits (that picture above, for instance, really tickles my funny bone). And they shouldn't be surprised, much less hurt, if others shun them or regard them with suspicion based on those get-ups and on what those get-ups signify.

Thursday links

Today's random selection of stuff includes . . .

• Ian's Shoelace Site. If you need to immerse yourself in shoelace lore, this is the site for you. (H/T to Barb)
• Mars. Some very cool images of the surface, taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. (H/T to Jim Reynolds).
• Saxons march to battle (a few centuries too late, perhaps). You can also watch the live webcam on Saturday morning (UK time, of course).
• "Brooke's main achievement seems to have been in preventing Churchill from losing the war." A brief review of War Diaries, 1939-1945: Field Marshall Lord Alanbrooke. (H/T to Samizdata)
• Sexual office politics: "My Morning: A Play in One Uncomfortable Act" (do read the follow-up postings too).
• The Trojan Horse rides again.
• Some doubts about Iraqi casualties (even though The Grauniad is running with the claim that 4% of Iraq's total population has been killed so far)

Wednesday links

Another edition of "if only I had more time" . . .

• Burn, baby, burn! Parent objects to school reading assignment for his daughter.
• Sample chapters from The Sharing Knife: Beguilement, Lois McMaster Bujold's latest fantasy novel. Amazon sent me a shipping notice for my copy on Monday . . .
• When anti-depressants don't work for some Some hope for those who do not benefit from certain drugs. (H/T to "Rowena")
• A Discworld wedding cake Just the thing for your Pratchett fan friends (H/T to Meg Justus)
• LibraryThing, an attempt to find communities of interest by common book suggestions. (H/T to Jim Hart.)
• Wikipedia's Unusual Articles page. I'd avoid going there if you are easily distracted. There are hours and hours of potentially wasted time linked from that page. (H/T to Roger Henry)
• "Only in economics can you conduct a study of Playboy playmates and not see anything."
• Upper Midwest political campaigning . . . "Wisconsin Republican runs on strong sex-with-Green-Bay-Packers platform"

Tuesday links

More links that might have turned into articles if I had any spare time at all right now . . .

• Struggling? (intersection cameras fail to perform as expected . . . in the revenue generation department.)
• The economics of bad news (Markets are up? That's bad. Markets are down? Hey, that's also bad.)
• Frank Hilliard makes an offer (I'm surprised it's not an illegal one here in Canada, actually)
• Michelle Malkin is Banned on YouTube
• People really can be absurd (H/T to Barb)
• Cruelty to telemarketers (H/T to Geoff Hart, who sent this to the Techwr-L mailing list)
• Extra-geeky geek gift

A blanket "thank you" to Jon for forwarding several links to me over the past few days.

QotD: Mutability of Human Sexuality

Today's QotD is NSFW, so it's in the extended entry. If adult language will offend you, don't go there.

[. . .] there's no parallel imbroglio in the gay community is because adult gay men rarely, if ever, decide to change their gender. I've been out of the closet for more than two decades now (since I was 7 years old), and in all that time, I've never known a single adult gay man who decided — particularly in midlife — to run off and become a woman. The only men I've known who changed their gender as adults were heterosexually identified men who now identify as lesbians.

However, I've known lots of lesbians who later decided that they were and always had been men, and many more lesbians who decided they were and always had been heterosexual. At the risk of being burned in effigy at the next dyke march, the fluidity of female sexual identity sure does make me appreciate the solidity of male sexual identity. While I have to worry about my boyfriend leaving me for another man (he assures me that my worries are irrational — but he would, wouldn't he?), I don't have to worry about him walking into the kitchen one day and announcing that he's always been a woman, or that he's only just realized that he's straight. A guy that's sucking cock at 18 will be still be sucking cock at 28, 38, and 108 — but it seems that a woman can be eating pussy at 18, sucking cock at 28, and having her cock sucked at 38.

Dan Savage, "Savage Love", The A/V Club, 2006-08-30

A complete waste of time

Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, of course . . . Falling Sand Game.

Hat tip to Rachel G.

JRR Tolkien's final work?

A link from Ghost of a Flea led to this article in The Australian:

The "new" work does not include characters such as the elves Arwen and Legolas. It is much darker and is based on the Kalevala, an epic poem from Finland. Tolkien, who died at 81 in 1973, took the tale and weaved his own story around it.

The Children of Hurin will tell the story of the family of an elf warrior taken prisoner by Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, held responsible for torturing elves and producing the first orcs, a race of evil goblins.

Hurin, the elf warrior, is given powers by Morgoth to foresee what will happen to his children.

"Death you may yet crave from me as a boon," Morgoth tells him.

One son, Turin, is manoeuvred into having sex with his sister Nienor and becomes a carrier of doom, triggering the death of everyone close to him.

One Tolkien expert, William Ferguson, said last weekend: "Turin makes folks like Othello and Hamlet and Oedipus look like lucky devils."

Yikes! Sounds like the book will appeal to a very different mix of audiences than the LOTR and The Hobbit.

Hindu/Christian similarities

The Indian Cowboy has a post up on the similarities between various Christian ideas and their counterparts in Hindu beliefs:

4. The rapture is again an idea first seen in Hindu mythology.
Kalki has yet to arrive. This is probably a good thing, since when he does so, the Earth will not be a nice place. He will make war–just war. He will cleanse the sins from this earth and take into his kingdom those who are worthy. This next quote is from Revelations, but it was just as I’d been raised to envision the Maha Avatar:

I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war. His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns [diadems]. He has a name written on him that no one but he himself knows. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God.

Kalkin has been depicted since well before the birth of Christ in just such a fashion. The Rapture, the second coming. Even the flaming sword Gabriel wields as Azrael is eerily similar to the comet that Kalki has appropriated for a similar purpose.

Monday links

Some links which, had I more time, might have grown into fully fledged postings on their own, but I don't, so they didn't:

• Canada's (temporarily) unguarded southern border (neither the first nor the last time this will happen)
• The first "plug-and-play" ship is launched (the US Navy's first Littoral Combat Ship, the USS Freedom)
• "A Scary Native Leader" (H/T to Jon, who sent me the link last week and I didn't get around to posting it until now)
• Declaring Jihad on car dealers (another H/T to Jon, who linked to a post at Little Green Footballs)
• Star Trek and the Holy Grail (okay, I thought this was brilliantly funny)
• Jim Henley shows why Radley Balko is a hero (the Cory Maye case)
• Actual Headline: "British sperm banks near empty after donor anonymity lifted". I guess Fark.com would give that an "Obvious" tag.

Click. Click. Scroll. Yup. Obviously.

Trivia time-waster

A Serenity trivia quiz. I managed 23 out of 25.

Saturday links

Some random Saturday morning links, for those of you bored enough to be surfing the weeb instead of enjoying real life . . .

First off, an amusing student suspension story. (H/T to Kalina V.)

You'd have to admit that a lot of politicians seem to be stamped from the same set of cookie-cutter profiles: lawyers, labour leaders, business tycoons. But not always . . . this is the kind of NDP candidate we need more of:

The quiet campaign took on a nasty tone in its final days. The Liberals released selected portions of DiNovo's past sermons to claim she was sympathetic to Karla Homolka and supported the ordination of pedophiles and axe-murderers.

Another Liberal release from Watson's campaign urged DiNovo to "come clean" about remarks she made in the past, including one where she admitted to smuggling LSD from California in hollowed-out Bibles.

Follow-up: This is the somewhat less newsworthy resolution to this NSFW item: Apparently he said "pump" not "bomb". Darn those accents . . . get you in all kinds of trouble in certain areas of the world.

The Economist re-imagines what a truthful airline would say during their pre-flight announcements.

And a story of really really alternative medicine. Ouchies.

Welcome back, SDA readers

Kate, at Small Dead Animals, was kind enough to link to a recent post here (Carnival of Liberty no. 61), and so did Glenn Reynolds (the well known Instapundit). To my surprise, the traffic from Kate's link swamped the traffic resulting from Glenn's link, running at approximately five-to-one:

I emailed, to thank her for the link and told her the surprising traffic stat . . . so today, SDA readers are again my largest number of visitors:

We clearly need a new word for "an avalanche of hits from SDA"!

How not to fire someone

Martina sent this link, illustrating just how clueless some companies are when they have to downsize:

The list of dehumanized moves is long and not likely to get shorter in an age where speed, telecommuting, cost cutting, efficiency and assets rather than human capital are king.

"The things that get done in the name of expediency are quite shocking," said Dale Klamfoth, senior vice president at WJM Associates, an executive and organizational development firm.

Just last week we were treated to news of 400 employees at Radio Shack who were laid off by e-mail.

Before that we heard of money-saving tips offered to newly laid-off employees at Northwest. The list includes helpful advice like "Don't be shy about pulling something you like out of the trash" and that ever-useful tip when you lose a job: "Bicycle to work."

I've had some doozies in my career as well. One of my favorites was when my employer was planning to lay off a significant portion of the development staff. I received a meeting invitation for later in the week, titled "Strategic Planning". Oddly, among the invitees to the meeting were two of my staff members, three other development managers, a trainer, and one of the receptionists. You could say that I got very little productive work done for the rest of that week.

Another employer had laid off 90% of the development staff while I was on vacation, but nobody thought to let me know what had happened. I walked in to the office on Monday morning . . . and there was nobody there. At first, I thought I'd somehow come in on Sunday, but the traffic had been normal for a Monday morning. I found the only other survivor from my department by following the sounds of clicking keys. He told me the story of the layoff: everyone had been called in to a meeting, the doors had been closed (with security guards posted), and people were called out of the room one at a time. The people who were called out were the ones being let go. Everyone else had to wait until either their names were called or the VP of HR came back into the room to announce the end of the layoff.

It took over two hours.

Almost the only even slightly amusing thing about the story was that one of the VP's, who had been particularly brutal in telling his staff that they were being laid off, was the last person laid off. He supposedly didn't know that he was also on the list.

The only survivors were those staff members working on a project for which the company had a paying customer waiting for the work to be complete (we all assumed that we'd be gone immediately after we delivered the new software package, so most of us were busy looking for other work at the same time).

Random Wednesday Links

Whatever falls within my limited attention span and seems worthwhile to share:

• The only all-Haiku NFL preview (h/t to ESR's Musings).
• Google adds newspaper archives to search resources (h/t to Jon for the link).
• You want a fast car? Try a Swedish-made Koenigsegg CCX. It is said to manage "0-60 mph in a blistering 3.1 seconds with an estimated top speed of almost 260 mph." (h/t to Dave Slater for the link.)
• On the topic of driving, you might want to avoid Russian drivers for your own safety.
• From the "Duh!" files, Fast food consumers underestimate the calories they consume.

QotD: Appropriate Reactions

I have, in my time, reacted to being groped with defensive physical violence, and the fact is, people go on about all these violent dreams of how women ought to respond, but when there's an actual large male on the ground, guess who gets all the sympathy and who gets to be the humourless nasty overreacting bitch?

Marna Nightingale, posting to the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list, 2006-09-04

Thursday quick links

A short list of things that amused or alarmed me:

• Icons at war (old, but still amusing if you haven't seen it before)
• Peter Jackson to remake The Dambusters (could be quite interesting . . . I bet they'll rename the dog, though)
• Jonathan Woodgate signs with Middlesbrough and so does Robert Huth (after that 4-0 thrashing the other day, any help at fullback is welcome)
• Castle-building, the old fashioned way (and it's become self-supporting, through tourist income)
• Vikings fail to sign A.J. Feeley (mostly because they're paying their current starting QB slightly more than minimum wage, and won't pay more money to someone as his backup)
• KFAN's Adam Doctolero predicts who'll make the final 53 on the Vikings roster (I think he's got some good reasons for predicting who'll stay and who'll go, but I've only seen one preseason game, so I don't have any useful insights myself)

Random links

• Ipod causes terror alert
• Swear words in print
• An alternate use for those spare stem cells
• Robert Heinlein's final novel to be published in September

User-friendly technology

My system at home is due for a backup, as Norton Systemworks kindly reminds me every time I turn the machine on. Last night, it finally got me worn down enough to start the Norton Save 'n' Restore utility to burn a CD. I did a full system backup a couple of months ago, so I only really need to do an incremental backup now (only new and changed files). I selected the directories and files to pick up, clicked OK to start the backup and went downstairs for twenty minutes.

When I went back upstairs, I find that my backup is still processing . . . and it's only at 5% completion. Hmmm. Odd, that. There's only a couple of hundred megabytes of data to work with here, so why is it taking so long? After a few more minutes with no further sign of success, I kill the backup process and start over again.

This time, after half an hour, it managed to get to 3% before going off into the weeds. Crap! The error messages are remarkably unhelpful, but they do provide a link to the Symantec web site. Fine, let's go there to see what's the likely cause of the problem.

Oh, but wait. Symantec wants me to install some ActiveX controls to allow it to diagnose my problem . . . and, of course, it won't allow me to use any browser but IE. So, I copy the URL into an IE window, download and install the ActiveX controls, and . . . hey! presto! . . . it doesn't find any issues. But it directs me to another page . . . which is full of bonehead-level "help". You know the sort of thing you get when you call first-line support at an ISP: "Is your computer plugged in?" "Is it turned on?" "Does anything appear on the screen?"

But it's too late to worry about it now. I just shut down the machine and went to bed.

This morning, rather than running the Norton backup utility, I decided to just run a manual backup with Nero. It's less than half a CD's worth of data, so I can easily do that before getting breakfast. But Nero can't manage to burn a CD either. As soon as it starts to write to the blank CD, it spits out a bunch of errors about unregistered calls and goes off into the weeds.

One software package going weird — it happens. Two of 'em? That implies either operating system problems or hardware issues.

Anyone taking bets on how long it'll be before I manage to run a successful backup?

Essential gaming site

For those of you sitting at home all summer, just gaming away the time (you know who you are), you might want to add this site to your bookmarks. It's a compilation of game information, FAQs, walkthroughs, reviews, and other information for all kinds of games.

QotD: The decline of old hobbies

Pity the stamp collectors.

A friend in Brockport Theater is an active stamp collector. [. . .] Twenty years ago he was the youngest member in the Buffalo/Rochester stamp club. Today, he still is.

Christian Tucker, message posted to Yahoo group Railroad Modeling Still Makes Me Grumpy, 2006-08-28

USB = Used to be Secure, Buddy

Bruce Schneier points to a cute little piece of software which "silently copies the contents of an inserted USB drive onto the PC. The idea is that you install this piece of software on your computer, or on a public PC, and then you collect the files — some of them personal and confidential — from anyone who plugs their USB drive into that computer."

I've been quite casual about plugging my 1Gb USB drive into computers. Clearly, I need to be more careful from now on . . .

Contributed links for Friday

Jon (who really should be blogging) sent in these links:

• The facial expressions make this just a little... ummm... disturbin': http://www.coxandforkum.com/archives/000917.html
• This one too, but more so: http://www.shortpacked.com/d/20060823.html

Martina sent this one along as well: Stupid Comics. Scarily bad Canadian content from the 1970's.

And for you multitool fanatics, here's a doozy. Contributed by Pat M.

I'd noticed this on a few Google Earth viewings myself, but Edmonton seems to suffer worst from sudden seasonal dimorphism.

Specialized Chess Set

This is for heavy chess players: it's made of chain mail.

Minimalist art

A sheet of paper, some glue, and a lot of creativity. Some rather delightful creations here.

Hat tip to Kalina V. for the URL.

Weekend Puppy Pictures

As usual, below the fold to allow those who aren't interested in puppy pictures to avoid 'em.

The spare propane container in the background marks a spot where Xander thought he could tunnel through into the backyard of the house behind us.

Puppies at rest appear so calm. It's such a misleading impression.

Saturday Gun Pr0n

My favorite handgun, from the range trip on Wednesday afternoon. It's my Florida co-worker's wife's gun. She clearly has excellent taste in firearms.

Weekend puppy picture

Below the fold, for those of you who aren't interested in cute puppy dog pictures . . .

Xander, this morning on the front porch, before he discovered just how much fun it is to help dig up dandelions. He's good with the pulling 'em up part, but he's still not sure why I want him to stop digging after the roots are out of the ground (it's amazing how fast those clumsy puppy paws can dig up six inches of ground . . .).

Literary engine

Lois McMaster Bujold sent this link to her mailing list: gnooks.com. It's a neat little toy for finding authors whose work you might enjoy. For example, if you specify Lois herself, you'll get a map of authors that other readers consider similar (including the odd mis-spelling).

Now, we wait for the double-blind study

I've occasionally been accused of "liking certain cultural foods only to appear more pro-multicultural". I now have another justification for liking curry (other than it tastes really good):

Eating curry may boost the brain and stave off Alzheimer's disease. Scientists looked at the curry consumption of 1010 Asian people aged between 60 and 93 who were currently unaffected by Alzheimer's. Their thinking ability was compared using a standard test called the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE).

Participants who ate curry once or more in six months, or more than once a month, had better results than those who "never or rarely" ate it.

Dr Tze-Pin Ng, from the National University of Singapore who led the study, told New Scientist magazine: "What is remarkable is that apparently one needs only to consume curry once in a while for the better cognitive performance to be evidenced."

And I'll have a side-order of vegetable pakoras to go, please.

Saturday evening photos

After dinner on Saturday, we drove down to the lake to let Xander have a walk in new and different surroundings. It was dog-walking central . . . the only people who didn't have dogs with them were the young couples who clearly wished all us dog walkers would get the heck out of their romantic moment.

I took the opportunity to try doing some low-light photography with the new camera.

Looking northwest from the eastern breakwater in Whitby harbour. This was taken with an 18-55mm zoom lens on manual focus (ISO 200).

Xander found the constant boat traffic fascinating . . . and the even more constant water bird noise quite distracting. Same lens using the autofocus feature.

Looking south towards the harbour mouth. Same lens and settings.

Switched to a longer, but slower, manual focus lens here (70-200mm zoom). All the sunset photos I took appear with more yellow and less red than was visible to the naked eye. I tried compensating for it, but it was only partially successful.

The light was fading rapidly by now, so I switched to my fastest lens, a 50mm manual focus lens at 800 ISO.

The harbour light (same lens and settings).

Proof positive that there are idiots and vandals everywhere. I've bumped up the brightness and contrast a bit so this would show up. This was one of the "artworks" left by previous visitors on the base of the harbour light. Same lens at 800 ISO.

Hey, look! A puppy!

Custom-tailoring the news

This news article was pretty much custom-tailored to catch my attention. It's a big-money government handout to a corporation, the corporation is a railroad, and the railroad has a spectacularly bad safety record.

Oh, and the money is to allow the safety-challenged railway to run dirty and/or toxic loads through a major urban area alongside an internationally known hospital. How could the story get any better?

Using government statistics, the Mayo Clinic prepared a report for the FRA showing that DM&E "has one of the worst, if not the worst safety records of all U.S. railroads." According to the report, DM&E had 107 accidents involving trains carrying hazardous materials in the past 10 years, including a record 16 in 2005, and the company reported train accidents at a rate of 7.5 times higher than the national average from 2000 to 2005.

Larry Mann, a national rail safety expert who helped draft the Federal Railroad Safety Act of 1970 and who's now working with Mayo, said DM&E is "a poster child" for not how to run a railroad.

"It's unsafe at any speed," he said.

The amount of money in question? Two point five BILLION.

Debunking hydration

Kim du Toit asks why "hydration" is suddenly the fixation of the week:

Good grief, I watch the local soccer moms going for their daily "walk" around this neighborhood, clutching quart bottles of water as though thirst will overcome them before they reach the corner of Coit and Legacy. Good grief.

"Hydration" is rapidly approaching "tactical" as my own personal most-loathed word.

Here's a newsflash: even in our current 100+ temperatures, if you've had a couple of glasses of water within half an hour of setting out for your walk, you're not going to get dehydrated. Especially if your walk is less than half an hour's duration.

Gah.

He's quite right: low-level panic about dehydration is endemic. Nobody seems to know why they're worried about it, but everyone seems to have a bad case of the dehydration meme this year.

Hat tip to Jon for the link.

Truer words were never spoke typed

I belatedly read a series of email messages which quite amused me. This is from a Yahoo group called Railroad_Modeling_Still_Makes_Me_Grumpy, which is a successor group to one that Jon founded several years ago. The discussion started with some product announcements including a very spendy item:

<Original poster> I'd be very interested in some more info on that Heljan container crane

<John> 1000 units being imported by Walthers. $800 bucks a piece (I rounded up). Very cool, and can be joystick controlled (not included). My problem is that I'd need a container ship to go with it . . . And I'm down to a single kidney.

<CT> When any SWMBO finds that someone has spent $800 on an operating toy crane that is going to get really boring after about an hour, lack of kidneys is going to be a really minor problem.

The operating toy crane fantasy that is common to the male species will NEVER be understood by the "My Little Pony" species . . .

From deep in the music video vault

Dire Straits, "Money for nothing"

Geek social interaction

Michael Suileabhain-Wilson wrote about the Five Geek Social Fallacies a few years back. It's still worth reading:

Within the constellation of allied hobbies and subcultures collectively known as geekdom, one finds many social groups bent under a crushing burden of dysfunction, social drama, and general interpersonal wack-ness. It is my opinion that many of these never-ending crises are sparked off by an assortment of pernicious social fallacies — ideas about human interaction which spur their holders to do terrible and stupid things to themselves and to each other.

Social fallacies are particularly insidious because they tend to be exaggerated versions of notions that are themselves entirely reasonable and unobjectionable. It's difficult to debunk the pathological fallacy without seeming to argue against its reasonable form; therefore, once it establishes itself, a social fallacy is extremely difficult to dislodge. It's my hope that drawing attention to some of them may be a step in the right direction.

Hat tip to Tracy MacShane for asking for the link and to Scott Raun for providing it (when Tracy's "google-fu" was insufficient).

Playing with a new camera

Traded in my Nikon CoolPics 4300 with a dodgy autofocus mode for a Pentax *istDL digital SLR. The autofocus was just fuzzy enough that sometimes down-sampling the images for posting on the blog improved the photos dramatically. The Nikon also had a shutter speed measured in minutes: forget taking any action photos at all, unless that blurry motion smear is an intentional effect.

I didn't realize how much I'd missed the SLR until I started using the *istDL today. Being able to swap lenses is a luxury you can get quite used to, I'm afraid. I'm still no photographer, but I'm much happier with the quality of photo so far.

Molly was quite unimpressed as I tried to work out the differences between the way the old and new cameras worked. This was using the new 18-55mm autofocus lens that came with the camera.

Along the shore of Lake Scugog, just off the new waterfront trail in Port Perry. We were looking for an area to take Xander so he could cool off in the water . . . it turned out he wasn't too interested in getting wet, he just wanted to drink the lake water.

This is an attempt using the macro feature of my one long zoom lens (a 70-200mm). The bee was fairly co-operative.

Xander was wilting in the heat after about half an hour.

Sunday Puppy Pictures

As usual, photos of the pup in the extended entry:

Hey, no red eye for a change!	As you can see, we believe in colour-coding our pets. Anything in white and orange is a pet. . . Harry tries to sneak up on a sleeping Xander
Thin rawhide chew substitutes for the hard-boiled puppy PI's jaunty cigarette.	A new toy that makes non-squeaky noises when you bite it. Just the thing to hide under a chair.

QotD: Boys

Society is awakening to the possibility that boys have been disadvantaged. In past decades, what it means to be a boy has been redefined, deconstructed, reconstructed, politically analyzed and mathematically modeled. In the process, the meaning of being a boy's father has become jumbled as well.

In the midst of the confusion, The Dangerous Book brings non-political truths into focus. For example, most boys like rough-and-tumble. They are riveted by tales of heroism on blood-soaked battlefields. They will learn history eagerly if it is presented in a chapter on Artillery.

Like Peter Pan, the Iggulden brothers have rediscovered the Lost Boys and are beckoning for them to come out to play. "Oh . . . and bring along your father too," they add with a dangerous wink and a smile.

Wendy McElroy, "New Book Revives Lost Notions of Boyhood", FOXNews.com, 2006-07-04

And you thought waterskiers were bad . . .

Just imagine your lake with half a dozen of these babies flying around all day . . .

While on the topic of Asian railways . . .

This link was sent to one of the mailing lists I monitor:

How about some human-power?

http://www001.upp.so-net.ne.jp/noz/jinsha/ejs-idx.html

Click on the first photo, "Wudu station of TRA", then click the "Next Page" link at the bottom of each photo. Be sure to read the captions . . .

Taiwan, in 1976, still had a human-powered railway. 1946 I might have believed, but 1976?

Hat tip to "<><><> TOM <><><>"

Update: Christian sent another URL to the list with this little gem:

Travellers in Cambodia have to deal with one of the world's worst train networks.

There is only one passenger service a week, and it often travels at not much more than walking pace.

So people in the north west of the country, near Cambodia's second city of Battambang, have taken matters into their own hands.

They have created their own rail service using little more than pieces of bamboo. The locals call the vehicles "noris", or "lorries", but overseas visitors know them as "bamboo trains".

A tiny electric generator engine provides the power, and the passenger accommodation is a bamboo platform that rests on top of two sets of wheels. A dried-grass mat to sit on counts as a luxury.

While definitely a step-up from human-power, it's still not quite Eurostar.

"Extreme" rail travel?

You don't normally pay extra for these kinds of thrills:

Pens leaked. Air-tight bags of crisps and peanuts burst open. Laptops crashed and MP3 players stopped working. Passengers began feeling nauseous, and some reached for their oxygen masks. A few were sick.

But few of the 500 passengers on board were complaining. For railway buffs, this was as close as it came to paradise. We were on board the first passenger train to journey the 4,000km (2,500 miles) from Beijing to the ancient Tibetan capital of Lhasa and the final 1,110km yesterday took us up through the 5,072m (16,640ft) Tanggula Pass and across the roof of the world.

Hat tip to Phil Clark for the URL.

Jim Baen, RIP

Jim Baen, one of the best science fiction publishers ever, has passed away. David Drake has the obituary:

Jim's father died at age fifty; he and his stepfather didn't warm to one another. Jim left home at 17 and lived on the streets for several months, losing weight that he couldn't at the time afford. He enlisted in the army as the only available alternative to starving to death.

Jim spent his military career in Bavaria where he worked for the Army Security Agency as a Morse Code Intercept Operator, monitoring transmissions from a Soviet callsign that was probably a armored corps. One night he determined that 'his' Soviet formation was moving swiftly toward the border. This turned out to be an unannounced training exercise — but if World War III had broken out in 1960, Jim would've been the person who announced it.

Jim Baen, as editor for Ace and then as proprietor of Baen Books, published a distinctive style of science fiction, usually heavier on technology than on soft science, very often military oriented. If you liked one of the authors he published, you would often find that other authors would appeal to you nearly as well. Conversely, if it didn't work for you, you could fairly safely avoid other authors in the Baen line.

I only met Jim Baen once, at a science fiction convention in Michigan during the late 1970's (it might have been Confusion, but I genuinely don't recall now). My girlfriend and I had taken the bus from Hamilton to Detroit, and then had some odd experiences wandering the utterly deserted streets of Detroit after midnight. We did finally get a cab and made our way to the con hotel.

The following night, while roaming around the hotel looking for room parties, we encountered Jim and a few of "his" writers. It was quite entertaining, although we were late enough in the night that everyone seemed to have had more than their fair share of Tullamore Dew (the SF fan's all-purpose alcoholic elixer, circa 1979). I headed off to use the washroom, leaving my girlfriend and a small group of the literati (ess-eff-erati?) chatting. In the brief time I was gone, my girlfriend had to ward off passes by several of the men (she was carrying my kukri, and had at least a vague idea how to use it, so no-one was too pressing).

Not too exciting a reminiscence, eh?

Amazing model airplane tricks

This looks like what the pilot of my last flight in to Glasgow seemed to be attempting . . .

Hat tip to Kalina V. for the link.

PlayMakers! End-of-season BBQ

On Saturday, Elizabeth, Xander, and I drove out to Stratford to attend the PlayMakers! end-of-season BBQ. Victor had a prior engagement, which allowed him to escape puppy-minding duty for the day. Xander did very well on his first long trip in the truck — sleeping for the first hour, then crawling up front to sit on the centre console and watch the road through the front windshield.

The infamous balloon artist was plying his trade.	Even seasoned PlayMakers veterans couldn't escape the balloon madness. (Liam, Ellen, and Nora)
Balloon red tape?	Balloon mad-hat-ness.
The mighty warriors — both tall and short — engaged in manly battle . . .	. . . some of them ending up shorter than when they started the contest.

Saturday Puppy Pictures

As usual, I'm hiding these below the fold for those who don't want to be bothered with puppy pictures.

Xander, almost disappearing under the couch.	The living room floor is now covered in dog toys. Some of which he'll deign to play with, now and again.
Victor still occasionally leaves potential dog toys just lying around . . . like his socks. Xander really enjoyed playing with this one. He was moving around too quickly to capture much in the pictures, so this is one of the few that doesn't just show a white-and-orange blur.	Elizabeth tried introducing him to being brushed. He preferred the brush as another doggie chew toy.
Looking deceptively innocent and calm.	Puppies need to be bathed now and again. This is the start of his first bath.
The wet horror continues.	And now the dreaded rinse cycle.
The misery of damp fur.	Dried off, and able to relax again.

QotD: S.C.U.M.

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.

Valerie Solanas, The S.C.U.M. Manifesto

Disabling the spyware portion of MGA

Firewallleaktester.com is releasing a defang utility for Microsoft Genuine Advantage:

A firewall testing website has released a tool it says will spike Microsoft’s controversial WGA tool.

Firewallleaktester.com is careful to state its RemoveWGA tool does not affect the "validation" element of Microsoft's WGA software.

The company's tool targets the "notifications" element of the WGA tool, preventing it from repeatedly connecting back to Microsoft to transmit information about users' software set-up.

More information on the nasty little "upgrade" is available here.

Microsoft's spyware problem

If you're running a Microsoft operating system, you've probably been prompted to download the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) tool recently. You may find it to be a bit less like an advantage than to have it take advantage of you:

Windows Genuine Advantage — the controversial program Microsoft auto-installed as a "critical security update" on many PCs starting on Apr. 25 — not only causes problems for many users but has now been proven to send personally identifiable information back to Redmond every 24 hours.

This behavior clearly fits any plausible definition of "spyware." Some tech writers have said categorizing WGA as spyware is arguable. But I have no hesitation in calling the program a security nightmare that Microsoft should never have distributed in its present form.

Hat tip to Geoff Hart for posting this link to the Tech Writer mailing list.

More puppy pictures

Victor has been told that he must provide more photos of the puppy. For those of you less interested, I've put them in the extended entry.

Saturday afternoon, in the backyard. On a leash for the first time — and not enjoying it too much.

He didn't mind it quite as much as long as he got to carry the end in his mouth:

Back inside the house, learning where the food bowl will be kept:

Next day, Xander (the puppy's new name) trying to snooze in a chair with Victor:

Xander has two modes right now: frenetic activity (which is amusing to watch, but very tough to catch on camera) and sleeping. Here's a brief moment when he wasn't moving too fast to blur the image:

He'd just finished bouncing around with Victor, but wasn't quite ready to fall asleep here:

It doesn't show up at this resolution, but he's already carrying a battle scar from getting too close to one of the cats: Cinders popped him in the eye when he foolishly tried to run past her. He's been avoiding her much more carefully ever since.

Today is P-Day

More later, as time allows.

Update (later):

The new, as yet nameless, puppy. Victor is really happy (he's wanted a dog for years, but only recently wore me down enough to agree). The cats, of course, are totally baffled by the new addition.

QotD: Belief

Four billion people say they believe in God, but few genuinely believe. If people believed in God, they would live every minute of their lives in support of that belief. Rich people would give their wealth to the needy. Everyone would be frantic to determine which religion was the true one. No one could be comfortable in the thought that they might have picked the wrong religion and blundered into eternal damnation, or bad reincarnation, or some other unthinkable consequence. People would dedicate their lives to converting others to their religions.

A belief in God would demand one hundred percent obsessive devotion, influencing every waking moment of this brief life on earth. But your four billion so-called believers do not live their lives in that fashion, except for a few. The majority believe in the usefulness of their beliefs — an earthly and practical utility — but they do not believe in the underlying reality.

Scott Adams, God's Debris, p. 27-28

Today is P-1

Counting down.

Today is P-2

Counting down.

Today is P-3

Counting down.

Today is P-4

Counting down.

Reg: Why phishing works

The Register has an eye-opening summary of why those low-life, mouth-dragging, knuckle-breathing phishers keep doing it . . . it works:

Think that cues in the browser will help? Forget it.

When Firefox 1.0 came out, I thought it was a major benefit that the background color of the address bar changed to gold when you were on a site using HTTPS. "How cool!" I remember saying to a friend, "In addition to the gold lock, the entire address bar is gold too. That'll make it even more obvious to people that they're on a secure site!" And that was in addition to the other three indicators that Firefox provides. How utterly naive of me.

In the study by Dhamija et al, 23 per cent of the users don't even look at cues provided by the web browser, such as the address or status bars. Many have no idea what the padlock icon means; in fact, one participant confidently asserted that the padlock indicates that the website can't set cookies.

Instead of browser cues, these people look at the web page itself. Does it "look" and "feel" right? Are there VeriSign logos on the page? How about animations? Does it seem authoritative? In some cases, the padlock icon on the web page itself was enough to convince some that the site was safe, more so than if the padlock was in the browser's chrome.

There's more. Read it, and shudder.

Still, I did learn how to set my favicon for the blog, so it wasn't a completely terrible experience . . .

Comparing Mal Reynolds to Dr. Who

I guess you can prove anything with the right selection of stills.

Oh, I guess that should be spoiler-warning for those of you following the second season of the current Dr. Who.

Hat tip to Colleen Hillerup.

New use for office supplies

You can use 'em to build your own trebuchet.

Hat tip to Jerry Penner, the Chain Mail Guy.

QotD: Nostalgia

I'm officially an Old Guy now; my boyhood was a long, long time ago. If you're not particularly careful to avoid it, the viewpoint of a child, and the passage of many years, can act like gauze laid over a camera lens, concealing hideous blemishes that would have been unavoidably obvious at the time to an adult.

L. Neil Smith, "Pipe Smoke and Flannel Shirts", Libertarian Enterprise, 2006-06-04

These are not your father's bookcases

And they're nothing like the ones I'm building, either:

:

Online immunity illusions shattered

eBay, for all its warts, is a pretty good place to buy and sell things. The vast majority of users are honest and most transactions go through without a hitch. A few, however, are less successful. Some people are tempted, for whatever reason, to cheat. The advantage for them, most of the time, is that they never actually meet or interact with the people they intend to cheat.

Not always.

Diet Coke and Mentos

Unleashed.

Hat tip to Kalina V., who sent the link to the Bujold mailing list.

Reasons not to leave your teenager alone at home

A teen, left alone at home while his parents were on vacation, blew the roof off the house:

A teenager left at home while his parents were on holiday blew the roof off and caused £35,000 damage after deciding to do some washing, it was reported.

Sean Davey, 18, left a washing basket full of clothes on top of the electric cooker and then accidentally knocked one of the hob rings on before going out, the Daily Telegraph reported.

The heated ring set fire to the clothes, which set alight a nearby bag of shopping.

That caused a can of deodorant to explode with such force that it not only blew out windows but cracked a wall and even, briefly, lifted the roof off the bungalow.

Misleading studies

A link from SDA took me to this debunking of a study on the economic value of housework:

Salary.com released a "study" of the value of housewife work. They claim that if paid for all their work, housewives would earn $134,121 per year. In addition to the usual maid, cook, and chauffeur roles, Salary.com included CEO and psychologist. I think they forgot, um, callgirl.

As Kate put it in the SDA post, "Let's just say she has 'issues'." The author is a very strong advocate of daycare and perhaps even more strongly against stay-at-home moms. It's still a very funny post.

Dance interpretation

Alex K. sent this link to the Bujold mailing list: Evolution of Dance. I get exhausted just watching this one . . .

Get your Hamlet geek on!

SJK has started a blog which, for the time being, is all about Hamlet.

Hugely belated hat tip to Liam, who "was supposed to post about that a week ago."

Nooooooooooooooo!!!!

Say it's not true, Bob!

Nearly fifteen years ago, I stumbled across a line in Details magazine that's always struck me as good advice: always leave a party ten minutes before you should. At least I think that's how it went. On first reading it's a bit like Heraclitus' "can't step into the same river twice" comment, but once you figure out, it all falls into place. Anyways, over time, I've done my best to abide by that bit of advice, sometimes doing better than others.

All of which is an overly long way of getting to my point: it's time to shut down Let It Bleed.

Another of my favourite blogs shutting down. It's getting lonely in the blogosphere . . .

I don't know if this counts as blasphemy or not . . .

The Chosen Beers:

HE'BREW 9

The First Ever Extreme High Holiday Beer.

Hat tip to James Lileks.

Canada takes 4 of top ten spots . . .

. . . on the Worst Beers in the World list. Steelback's "Tango" was rated the second worst, while their "Silver" was fifth. Sleeman's "Clear" was judged the fourth worst, while their "B-40 Bull Max" malt liquor came in as eighth.

Of course, the beer ratings were heavily biased towards beers available in North America — I'm sure there are some terrible beers lurking in England, Germany, or India, for example — but they didn't make this list.

Mid-century comic books

I wasn't really much of a comic book reader, although I did pick up the odd Superman or Fantastic Four. James Lileks, however, appears to have spent far too many hours reading comics:

Oh, they could ask us to buy the chick comics (Millie the Model) or the half-heartened Western features, but they knew we were here for superheroes, for Titanic Combat, for the thwacks and the ptangs and titles like "Lo, a Villain Cometh!" or "Enter — the Paste-master!" or "This is the Way A Hero DIES!" The best Marvel covers had no word balloons — the comic equivalent of dumping the laugh track in the operating room scenes of M*A*S*H — and even the cheapo reprint Monster titles had a Marvel vibe, thanks to Stan and Jack.

Everyone read Spidey, because he was Us. Everyone read Fantastic Four, because we all wanted to be smart like Reid, funny and strong and Tragic like Ben (although we could do without the skin condition. On the other hand, he had a girlfriend chicks, which was a bit depressing to someone who got laughed at in the lunchroom for a single volcanic zit.) I don't know if anyone wanted to be Johnny Storm — the whole burning & flying thing was fine, but there was something colorless about him. Likewise Sue Storm, who was a wimp at first — a literally colorless Betty Brand if that's not redundant — before she got the Kirby Hottness Upgrade Package in the early 70s. Everyone read these books. They were the best.

I guess I sat out most of the hyper-enthused comic book era . . .

Still, he got me with this observation, because I did grow up with the rockets-and-ray-guns SciFi vision of the future:

These books still have a tremendous pull, mostly for nostalgia's sake. [. . .] Now the future is the present; we all have gadgets and computers, space exploration is rote and dull, and the idea of the future — a place with jumpsuits and slender finned rockets and Planet Squads and men barking "Come in, Space Command!" to a hand-held mike — seems like a false alarm. There is no future, as such; there's just more of the same. Quicker smaller better faster, but no big change. No skyscrapers with Saturnian rings around their apex, no 50th floor walkways, no interplanetary Congresses with Venusian fish-men applauding Future Superman for his exploits.

After watching the small black-and-white TV pictures of the Apollo 11 mission — men on the moon! — I think we can be forgiven for thinking that by now we would have the Moon bases, the tourist traffic to Mars, the manned exploration of the gas giants, and all the cool toys of the most golly-gosh-gee-whiz 50's and 60's space operas.

On second thought, we do have most of the toys: we're just missing the big stuff. The exploration of space stuff that somehow got bureaucratized to death in the 70's and 80's. NASA, you've got a lot of karmic debt to work off.

Sidewalk art

Some pretty impressive sidewalk art pieces.

Blogging the Old Testament

David Plotz has undertaken a new task: blogging the Bible.

• Introduction:

Like many lax but well-educated Jews (and Christians), I have long assumed I knew what was in the Bible — more or less. I read parts of the Torah as a child in Hebrew school, then attended a rigorous Christian high school where I had to study the Old and New Testaments. Many of the highlights stuck in my head — Adam and Eve, Cain vs., Abel, Jacob vs. Esau, Jonah vs. whale, 40 days and nights, 10 plagues and Commandments, 12 tribes and apostles, Red Sea walked under, Galilee Sea walked on, bush into fire, rock into water, water into wine. And, of course, I absorbed other bits of Bible everywhere — from stories I heard in churches and synagogues, movies and TV shows, tidbits my parents and teachers told me. All this left me with a general sense that I knew the Good Book well enough, and that it was a font of crackling stories, Jewish heroes, and moral lessons.

So, the tale of Dinah unsettled me, to say the least. If this story was strutting cheerfully through the back half of Genesis, what else had I forgotten or never learned? I decided I would, for the first time as an adult, read the Bible. And I would blog about it as I went along. For the millions of Jews and Christians who know the Bible intimately, this may seem obscene: Why should an ignoramus write about the stories and lessons that you know by heart and understand well?

• Genesis, Chapters 1 through 7:

Chapter 4
First murder — that didn't take long. I never realized there was a vegetarian angle to Cain and Abel. Cain offers God the fruit of the soil as an offering, while Abel brings the choicest meat. God scorns Cain's vegetarian platter, so Cain jealously slays his brother.

Here is a more charitable reading of what kind of father God is. He's not indulgent or lax. He's laissez faire. His job is to push the children in the right direction, but in the end, He understands they must be free to make mistakes. When He rejects the vegan special, God chastises Cain with this advice. "Sin couches at the door; Its urge is toward you, Yet you can be its master." This is just about the best advice you can give anyone. It is conservative idealism, compressed into a sentence: We must decide for ourselves to do right. Not that Cain pays attention: He kills his brother in the very next verse.

• Genesis, Chapters 8 through 19:

Chapter 19
This chapter makes the Jerry Springer Show look like Winnie the Pooh. The Sodom business is worse than I ever imagined. Two male angels visit Lot's house in Sodom. A crowd of men (Sodomites!) gathers outside the house and demands that the two angels be sent out, so the mob can rape them. Lot, whose hospitality is greater than his common sense, offers his virgin daughters to the mob instead. Before any rapes can happen, the mob is blinded by a mysterious flash of light. The angels lead Lot, his wife, and daughters out of the city, and God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah with brimstone. Lot's wife looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt. (God may have listened to Abraham's rebuke, but He surely didn't heed it. What of all the innocent children murdered in Sodom and Gomorrah? What of Lot's innocent wife?)

This will be an interesting series to follow . . . it's a long, long time since I read any part of the Bible longer than a chapter. I'm looking forward to more of this.

Hat tip to Let it bleed.

Update, 18 May: The next set is now posted:

Chapter 21
That Sarah is a nasty piece of work. In an earlier chapter, she pimped the slave-girl Hagar to Abraham, then grew furious and exiled Hagar when she got pregnant. Now, having borne her own son Isaac, Sarah throws another fit about Hagar. She orders Abraham to banish Hagar and Ishmael (to protect Isaac's inheritance). With God's endorsement, he casts them out into the wilderness with just bread and a little water.

The play's the thing

Yesterday, we drove out to Stratford to catch the final performance of "Hamlet" by Playmakers! Theatre School:

As many people have noted, watching "Hamlet" is always a series of little "So that's where that phrase came from!" experiences. It's always amazing to me how many common phrases were introduced in that play. It can be a bit distracting — if you're afflicted with an etymological mind — but pleasantly so.

This is only the second time I've seen Playmakers perform "Hamlet", but both times it has been a wonderful opportunity to watch young actors demonstrate how much they've learned and how good they can be. The first time, Brendan McKenna's portrayal of Claudius and Jennifer Zylstra's Gertrude (while great personal performances) were pushed into the background by absolutely rivetting scenery-chewing by Chris Huggins in the title role.

This cast, while tackling a longer version of the play, was much more well-balanced: Andrew Petker's Hamlet, was a more intellectual portrayal . . . his Hamlet was much more human . . . and much more believable. Eric Finlayson, in his final Playmakers appearance, had more of the calculating Claudius than the bluff, hearty portrayal Brendan McKenna chose in the previous production. Kiersten Hanly's Gertrude was less tortured by Hamlet's madness, but much more hurt by Hamlet's clear distaste-growing-into-hatred of her new husband.

Nora Smith did a brilliant job as Ophelia, managing not to let the character's descent into madness become the predictable route, but rather highlighting the pressures which finally caused her retreat from the "sane" world.

Brendan McKenna, now the Fight Choreographer, had a very convincing rapier duel between Hamlet and Laertes. It's been a few years now since I did fight scenes for any Playmakers! performance, so I was able to enjoy watching this one without making any mental notes about how I might have arranged things differently . . . Andrew Petker and Tom Beattie were excellent onstage swordsmen (from my non-judgemental seat in the audience).

A very cool translation site

Geoff Hart sent this link to Polly Glotto. It's where you can find how foreign phrases are pronounced (I'm not sufficiently multilingual to decide how accurate the renditions are, but it's at least good for a general sense).

I sent the link to my co-workers, and soon had to send this message: "Je regrette maintenant d'envoyer cet URL".

QotD: Manliness

Manliness certainly isn't in demand. The women of today seem to want a metrosexual who loves to shop, helps with the housework, and never does anything that she wouldn't want to do. He may wear an earring. Modern marriage sounds like a sort of heterosexual lesbianism. The man should be as little like a man as possible while having complementary genitals.

This gelding of men, pushed everywhere in the media (note the universal prevalence of girlish male models with waxed chests and slight figures) can easily be seen as the desired consequence of female hostility to men; the corresponding de-feminization of women, as another front in an anti-male war led by hostile feminists. Perhaps. I have assuredly thought so at times. Yet women seem as unhappy in their mannish roles as do men in womanish ones. One thing is sure, which is that women do not understand men — their drives, needs, nature, or inner light.

Fred Reed, "Playing At Adventure: Thoughts On The Spreading Mismatch", Fred on Everything

A link for math geeks and Lego fans

Andrew Carol has managed to build a Babbage Difference Engine using Lego blocks.

Hat tip to Pat Mathews.

Misappropriating Jane Jacobs' legacy

An article in Opinion Journal points out that modern urban planners claim to revere her teachings, yet are clearly missing the point:

Modern planners have contorted Jacobs's beliefs in hopes of imposing their static, end-state vision of a city. They use a set of highly prescriptive policy tools — like urban growth boundaries, smart growth, and high-density development built around light-rail transit systems — to design the city they envision. They try to "create" livable cities from the ground up and micromanage urban form through regulation. We've seen these tools at work in Portland, Ore., for more than three decades. But the results have been dismal and dramatic. The city's "smart growth" policies effectively created a land shortage, constricting the housing supply and artificially inflating prices. By 1999, Portland had become one of the 10 least affordable housing markets in the nation, and its homeownership rate lagged behind the national average. It has also seen one of the nation's largest increases in traffic congestion and boasts a costly, heavily subsidized light-rail system that accounts for just 1% of the city's total travel. Not exactly how they planned it.

That's because these planning trends run completely counter to Jacobs's vision of cities as dynamic economic engines that thrive on private initiative, trial and error, incremental change, and human and economic diversity. Jacobs believed the most organic and healthy communities are diverse, messy and arise out of spontaneous order, not from a scheme that tries to dictate how people should live and how neighborhoods should look.

QotD: Why men murder

While a man, sociobiologically speaking, seeks a beautiful young woman as the (or a) mother of his children — beauty being a biological metonym for health — a woman seeks a man who is of high social status, because he will be a better, more secure provider for their children. This distinction helps to explain why men are much more likely to kill in response to public humiliation than women, and also why murder is, statistically speaking, a lower-class crime. Lower class men are more sensitive to insult because they have nothing to offer women except raw physical power, an asset that declines sharply with age. If they fail to display such raw physical power in response to a public challenge or humiliation, their value as a potential mate vanishes altogether. They face genetic oblivion.

Theodore Dalrymple, "The Murderer Next Door: The limits of sociobiology", City Journal, 2006-04-24

Blacksmithy link

An old, old friend of mine has recently started blogging at Hammered out bits. Darrell has been busy researching and re-creating blacksmithing for many years (he'd already been doing it for years when I first met him in the late 1970's).

Hat tip to Dea for the link.

Truck accessories

Maybe I should add one of these babies to the Quotemobile.

QotD: 18

I was wondering over the weekend what it's like to be 18. This is not because I want to be 18 again. I am deeply grateful to have escaped my youth, a time that now looks to me like Eastern Europe before the collapse of the Soviet, a time defined by arbitary restrictions, ideological immobility, and terrible shortages (in my case, sex, sense and sensibility).

Grant McCracken, "What's it like being 18?", This Blog Sits at the, 2006-03-27

Cellular Phone Porn

Ars Technica reports that cell phone users are more than twice as likely to search for pornography than PC users:

Less than 10 percent of all searches done on PCs these days are porn scavenger hunts, a number that is down 50 percent from 1997. As the Web has matured and more consumers have come online, porn's percentage of searches has consistently dropped. On mobile phones, though, users are still partying like it's 1997 — more than 20 percent of all mobile queries looked at in the study were for "adult" content.

This is counterintuitive in several ways. First, browsing for content on mobile phones can be expensive, especially when compared to PCs, which most cell phone users own anyway. Second, there's the screen issue. Who wants to watch video clips on a mobile phone when they could just step over to the computer and have a 21 inch monitor? Apparently, though, cost and quality are beaten handily (no pun intended) by the one great advantage of mobile phones — privacy.

I had wondered who was paying for video service to their handheld devices (phones, PDAs, hybrids), given the high cost and low image resolution, not to mention the much more limited choice of programming available to mobile users. This study — at least to some degree — answers that question.

Just don't ask me what it's about, okay?

Victor tried his hand at producing a short movie the other day. I think "Link" is the hero, but the hero in which context? Beats me. Still, for a first effort, I think he did quite a good job.

More range photos

A couple more photos of Jon and me at the range, firing borrowed rifles:

Bingo as a blood sport

In some areas of large cities, you run the risk of being robbed of your Rolex, your BMW, or even your Guccis . . . but who'd believe you run the risk of being beaten to death over your $1,000 Bingo winnings?

Police are looking for as many as four women who beat and robbed a bingo player for his C$1,000 winnings, leaving him dead.

Yousif Youkhana, 58, was attacked as he left a suburban Toronto bingo hall on Friday, but managed to make his way back inside before he collapsed and died.

Now, just imagine what they'd be willing to do to pry a bigger prize out of your hands . . .

Another scam to "watch" out for

"Tom" sent this link:

It isn't a crime police have seen many times before.

An unsuspecting woman purchased a "flat-screen television set" at a bargain price, the package even bubble-wrapped and complete with cord and controller.

But when the street consumer returned home that February day with her "steal" of a product, she was likely steamed.

"It was actually an oven door inside the package," explained South Bend Detective Sgt. Jim Walsh.

Proving, once again, that most people who get swindled are at least partly to blame for their misfortune . . .

Odd image of the day

A random photo taken last month, in Hershey, Pennsylvania:

It had never occurred to me that there would be enough sales of any one book, even the Bible, to warrant an entire store devoted (pun unintentional) to it.

Light sabre duel

A fan's tribute to Star Wars, in the form of a very extended light sabre duel.

Hat tip to Kalina Varbanova.

The antidote to social network sites

Have you had one too many invitations to join someone's circle-of-vaguely-familiar-names on yet another social network? Snubster might be for you:

"The whole concept of online social networking was really starting to irk me," said Choung, who initially envisioned Snubster as a way to stem the often irritating flow of invitations to join networking sites like Friendster and LinkedIn. While such sites seemed like a good idea at first, their usage too often devolves into "an attempt to get as many fake friends as possible."

Snubster members, by contrast, focus on what irritates them. Targets of discontent include individuals (President Bush is a popular pick), groups (guys who talk at urinals) and things (bologna). Besides storing lists, the site has a tool for sending an e-mail to someone newly added to a list to tell them why they're being snubbed.

A cautionary video

On a slightly less sombre note, another post at Castle Argghhh! included this disturbing sleeping and driving video.

Yikes!

Scary shotgun shootin'

Jeff Shultz sent this link to a video file at Sondra K's blog. It's amazing what can be done with practice, I guess, but I wouldn't want to be on the same range as this guy.

Machinalia

A link that was posted to one of my many mailing lists, but which I only got around to following today: Boris Artzybasheff's Machinalia.

In his introduction to the section titled "Machinalia" in his book As I See, Boris Artzybasheff says, "I am thrilled by machinery's force, precision and willingness to work at any task, no matter how arduous or monotonous it may be. I would rather watch a thousand ton dredge dig a canal than see it done by a thousand spent slaves lashed into submission. I like machines."

Making of Steel: Charging the Open Hearth

Other Artzybasheff works worth looking at are collected in Neurotica and Diablerie.

Hat tip to "John the Mc"

A long out-of-print H. Beam Piper novel

I thought I'd read most of the late H. Beam Piper's works, but this was news to me:

H. Beam Piper wrote a detective novel, in which he shows off his vast knowledge of antique firearms. Murder in the Gunroom is now available as an e-book (plain text or html) at Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/17866

Enjoy!

Piper was one of the best hard SF writers of the 1950's and early 1960's. His writings ranged from the Terro-Human future history series (including the Fuzzy books), to the brilliant novel Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, part of his Paratime series of works. More information on the author and his work is available from http://www.zarthani.net/.

Hat tip to Jerrie Adkins, from the L.M. Bujold mailing list, for the heads-up on the e-book version.

QotD: Nudes

[G]ay media outlets have plenty of male nudes, but that's because they're read by . . . men. Men and women are biologically wired to be attracted to different aspects of the people they lust after. Women, for some reason still opaque to me, are sexually attracted to a man's soul, his character, his style. Men want to see titties, as Dave Chapelle would say. Gay men and straight men are no different in this. And so the single standard [Vanity Fair] is using is a simple one: let's sell as many magazines as we can. I fail to see how they can be criticized for doing their job.

Andrew Sullivan, "Naked Sexism?", The Daily Dish, 2006-02-23

Snow and sky

It was remarkably pretty on the drive in to work today. The temperature was around -11 C, and the sky was brilliantly blue. The photos don't even begin to do it justice:

The extra-dark looking road surface is one of those pleasant novelties of driving in southern Ontario . . . it's not quite frozen, not quite liquid, and only marginally slippery — except when it's very slippery. The sunlight works to heat the road surface, while the air temperature works to keep it cold.

Heinlein centennial in 2007

It was just called to my attention that next year is the centennial of the birth of (in my opinion, anyway) the greatest SF author, Robert A. Heinlein. There is a website for the upcoming event to mark the occasion.

This is a cool part-time job

Elizabeth's cousin Ross emailed her the other day to describe a new part-time job he's taken on:

I have got myself another part-time flying job. It is flying a 1968 Cessna 172 (old single engine piston) for English Heritage. The job is aerial photography of ancient earth works/listed buildings/standing stones etc. etc. How good is that for a job?

I was up last Friday afternoon and the dude was photographing an iron age settlement in one of the villages less than 5 miles from ours. We have been shoeing in the village for years and had no idea. [After leaving the army, Ross became a farrier.] In fact one of the old farms that we have shod in has been demolished ready for development and the developers have allowed an archaeological dig to go in before they build.

From the air, with the low sun, you could easily see the outlines of the old settlement and ridge and furrow ploughing. I believe we will even go as far as Carlisle and Hadrian's Wall. It is only where and when the weather is right and they have a target to shoot, but having done one flight for them I am looking forward to my next, whenever that may be.

The drill is, you fly to the target, circle it until the dude works out the best angle for the shot. He then opens the window while you bank the aircraft and hangs out and shoots.

It certainly sounds like a much more interesting job than being a flying truck driver!

Ingredients in fast food

I've had to become much more aware of what ingredients go into the various fast foods, as members of my family are gluten-intolerant, but it's getting harder to do so, as even things that shouldn't contain wheat are having it added:

McDonald's Corp. is facing at least three lawsuits related to its disclosure last week that its french fries contain wheat and dairy products.

Debra Moffatt of Lombard, Ill., seeks unspecified damages in a suit filed Friday in Cook County Circuit Court that accuses the company of misleading the public. Her lawyer, Thomas Pakenas, said his client has celiac disease that causes gastrointestinal symptoms when set off by eating gluten, a protein found in wheat.

"You cannot sell gluten-free french fries when they have gluten," Pakenas said. Moffatt's lawsuit seeks class-action status.

McDonald's said Feb. 13 that wheat and dairy ingredients are used to flavour its fries. Those substances can cause allergic or other medical reactions in food-sensitive consumers.

Wheat is an incredibly cheap additive that is used in vast numbers of products which (on first glance) would not be considered to have any need for it. It is very frequently used to replace more expensive ingredients and to provide more bulk in the finished product.

That might explain it

This might explain why Jon always orders his Coke with no ice at the fast food joints in which we sometimes have lunch:

Jasmine Roberts: "I found that 70-percent of the time, the ice from the fast food restaurant's contain more bacteria than the fast food restaurant's toilet water."

Hat tip to NealeNews.

Quick links

• Why Lincoln Stopped Blogging (via Relapsed Catholic)
• Liam's last visit to Toronto (warning: graphic and disturbing imagery, foul language, and mature subject matter)
• Western Standard website hacked?
• Economics on campus . . . in the same store, actually

Steve H. on childhood memories

I've sometimes said that I'd rather not imagine re-living my childhood . . . I was a miserable child (only partly self-inflicted, I must admit), but mine was apparently not as bad as Steve's experience:

If you told me I could relive my childhood or lose a leg, I'd tell you to start cutting, and that is no exaggeration. I could not face it again. For some reason, I started thinking about my childhood last night while I was trying to sleep, and I felt real pain. I listed horrible memories in my mind, and it surprised me how many there were. The pain kept me awake an extra hour and a half. It was the strangest sensation. Like having a broken bone, except that the pain was in my mind.

Yikes!

More on the ethical side of healthcare

Another case where medical ethics, economics, and basic humanity all rumble for supremacy:

I somehow missed the culture war moment last month when it was reported that Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano, Texas, disconnected a dying, uninsured cancer patient, Tirhas Habtegiris, from the ventilator that was keeping her alive. The 27-year-old abdominal cancer patient was conscious and did not wish to be disconnected because she hoped that her mother would arrive from Africa for one last visit before she died. The hospital warned the patient and her family that it would keep her on the ventilator for just 10 more days. Ms. Habtegiris died 16 minutes after the ventilator was shut off on December 14, 2005.

The hospital acted pursuant to a law passed in 1999 that allowed it to discontinue "inappropriate" medical care despite the wishes of a patient or the patient's family.

[. . .]

These left-leaning bloggers and commentators were in favor of leaving the ventilator on. Curiously, as far as I can tell, very few right-wingers and pro-lifers, who were in high dudgeon over the Terry Schiavo case, have commented on the Habtegiris case.

This horrible situation raises a number of hard questions. First, would the hospital have cut off the ventilator had Ms. Habtegiris had insurance to pay for it? The hospital insists that was not the issue, but one can't help wondering. A second harder question is what obligation do physicians, hospitals and the rest of us have to pay for the health care of others?

My impression of the controversy is that most left-wingers believe that every conscious patient should have as much medical care as they want regardless of the cost to the rest of us. On the other ideological hand, right-wingers seem confused. As the Terri Schiavo case showed many apparently want to offer unlimited medical care to brain-dead patients whose wishes are unknown or contested by family members. Meanwhile their silence in the Habtegiris case might be construed to mean that it's all right to make hard-headed decisions like denying medical care to conscious patients who are indigent.

There are no easy answers to these kinds of dilemmas: no obvious "right" answer that will satisfy everyone. Healthcare costs money . . . sometimes inconceivable amounts of money. Most of us don't have enough money to pay for all the healthcare we may need to consume over our lives, and most of us don't want to die prematurely.

If medical care was "free", there would never be enough of it to meet the demand. If medical care was priced to cover costs (setting aside the concept of profit for a moment), many poor, elderly, and those suffering from chronic conditions would not be able to afford to pay for their own needs. In most of the western world, healthcare is — to greater or lesser degree — socialized: the state pays some or all of the costs for most or all patients. The one who pays the piper gets to call the tune. This means that someone in the bureaucracy is going to be (at the very least) guiding the medical decisions on who gets what services.

As Ronald Baily writes, "As someone who is very conscious of his mortality, I joke with my friends that the whole U.S. gross domestic product should be spent keeping me alive when I fall ill." Most of us feel the same way — if not for ourselves, certainly for our loved ones.

VRWC gathering blogged

The VRWC bloggers, and assorted MSM, NQAVLWC bloggers, blog readers, and puzzled onlookers gathered last night at Fiddler's Green, a pub in downtown Toronto.

As is my usual habit, I was among the advance party, arriving just at 6:00. Among the other advance party were co-host Bob Tarantino and Heather, Damian "Babbling" Brooks, and Brian Mertens. We were joined not long afterwards by Liam NeesonGreg Staples, John the Mad, and a non-blogger friend of his who took full part in the political discussions around the table.

I started to lose track of the arrivals, and there were a lot of arrivals. I'd guess we ended up with 50-60 bloggers/MSM/blogreaders (and there may have been more folks arriving as I had to leave earlier than usual). It was a remarkably well-behaved party, under the political circumstances, and almost the only violence of the night was when Andrew Coyne hit me with a pool cue.

I took more bad photos, but most of the early evening photos are just too dark to use. We were driven out of the downstairs room we'd swamped when the staff started up the Karaoke. You have never seen a party die so fast. We moved up to the third floor, to the room we had originally booked (or so Bob claimed . . .).

John the Mad, not quite as mad as advertised.	Greg Bester and John the Mad's non-blogging friend
Jason Cherniak, the other co-host of the gathering.	The T-shirt of the night, worn by an anonymous non-blogger who arrived with WonderWoman (the shirt was actually grey, but my Treo's built-in camera doesn't handle low-light images as well as I'd like).
The Last Amazon	Andrew Coyne, just before the pool cues came out
Accordion Guy provided some musical accompaniment to the political blather	Antonia Z and Greg Staples (I took a much better photo using Greg's camera, actually)

The party was great, overall, but I certainly felt I'd over-used my vocal cords when I woke up this morning. I sounded like someone trying to do a bad Lauren Bacall imitation at the bottom of a well.

QotD: Heaven

It is a commonplace that the Christian Heaven, as usually portrayed, would attract nobody. Almost all Christian writers dealing with Heaven either say frankly that it is indescribable or conjure up a vague picture of gold, precious stones, and the endless singing of hymns. This has, it is true, inspired some of the best poems in the world: Thy walls are of chalcedony, Thy bulwarks diamonds square, Thy gates are of right orient pearl Exceeding rich and rare! But what it could not do was to describe a condition in which the ordinary human being actively wanted to be. Many a revivalist minister, many a Jesuit priest (see, for instance, the terrific sermon in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist) has frightened his congregation almost out of their skins with his word-pictures of Hell. But as soon as it comes to Heaven, there is a prompt falling-back on words like 'ecstasy' and 'bliss', with little attempt to say what they consist in. Perhaps the most vital bit of writing on this subject is the famous passage in which Tertullian explains that one of the chief joys of Heaven is watching the tortures of the damned.

The pagan versions of Paradise are little better, if at all. One has the feeling it is always twilight in the Elysian fields. Olympus, where the gods lived, with their nectar and ambrosia, and their nymphs and Hebes, the 'immortal tarts' as D.H. Lawrence called them, might be a bit more homelike than the Christian Heaven, but you would not want to spend a long time there. As for the Muslim Paradise, with its 77 houris per man, all presumably clamouring for attention at the same moment, it is just a nightmare. Nor are the spiritualists, though constantly assuring us that 'all is bright and beautiful', able to describe any next-world activity which a thinking person would find endurable, let alone attractive.

George Orwell, "Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun", 1943

New Theodore Dalrymple articles

The latest City Journal articles are now online, including a look at A Clockwork Orange and the aftermath of the French riots.

QotD: The King James Version

Some years ago, an editor asked me how he could give his children an appreciation for the English language. He wanted them to write well. Since he's an evangelical Christian, I told him he should teach them Psalms from the King James translation of the Bible. My mother did that with me as a child, and it gave me an early sense of metaphor and rhythm. It taught me to appreciate, and understand, complex, beautiful English.

My friend didn't like my suggestion. After all, nobody reads the KJV anymore. Forget poetry (not to mention sensitivity to the underlying Hebrew), today's suburban Christianity is all about accessibility. It's been dumbed down.

Now I'm not a Christian, let alone an evangelical. If megachurches want to play bad-to-mediocre rock instead of great hymns, that's their business. But the spread of Christian pap does have spillovers, not the least of which is that devout Christian faith no longer brings with it a deep familiarity with what's actually in the Bible, as opposed to a few verses from the preacher's PowerPoint. Unless the person is over a certain age, Biblical literacy, when you do find it, rarely means acquaintance with great English. Forget theological or philosophical sophistication. I'd settle for the ability to comprehend complex sentences.

Virginia Postrel, "The Pap-ist Threat", Dynamist Blog, 2006-01-10

The Last Amazon asks "How weird are you?"

Kate tagged me with this meme, after being tagged herself by Canadianna.

Five weird things about me? Hmmmm. Only five?

1. I once earned a living as a swordfighting instructor.

2. I had the shortest possible career as a tarot card reader.

3. I worked in a carny for a similarly short period of time (and got ripped off on my pay for the short time I worked, to boot).

4. Nope, that's too weird for public consumption.

5. I won every fencing tournament I entered last year, suffering no hits and killing or disabling all my opponents.

Explanations, as such, below the fold.

1. In 1981, I was hired to go to Nova Scotia and teach SCA swordfighting to a new group of SCA folk. It was a nice summer job (the pay was basically airfare, room, and board). I stayed in contact with several of the folks I met down there until quite recently.

2. I was working at an occult shop when the owner — who was also the card reader — was too sick to come in. I sat in for her and did the couple of readings that were scheduled (and who didn't have the common sense to reschedule). Not a job I'd ever want to take again.

3. I was hired as casual labour to disassemble the rides after the carny closed. I worked for five hours, was only paid for four, and discovered that I had absolutely no interest in working that kind of job ever again.

4. There is no entry four.

5. I only entered one tourney last year. And it was a very small group of fencers.

I guess I need to tag a few others with this meme. Chris Taylor, Shane Edwards, Robot Guy, Alan McLeod, and Greg Staples.

I hope everyone had a good holiday . . .

. . . for those of you who celebrate one of the various seasonal occasions. Especially you devotees of the Great Flying Spaghetti Monster, of course.

I'm off to visit my family today, after having entertained guests for Christmas at our house. It's always a bit of a fraught occasion for me: my sister and I manage to antagonize one another just by existing, so staying peaceful all the way through Boxing Day is going to be a challenge for each of us! Thank goodness the rest of the family gets along fairly well.

And I hope you have a better holiday than one of my friends, who actually went back in to work on his vacation because "staying at home is driving me crazy. The kids are steering and my wife is working the pedals!"

A very Pogue-y Christmas

Fairytale of New York, by the Pogues (Windows Media file). A seasonal fruitbasket to Ghost of a Flea (hat tips are so rest-of-the-year).

Thomas Sowell admits to religious persecution

Thomas Sowell confesses that he has been guilty of religious intolerance and attempts to mitigate his crime by pretending that nobody was hurt:

The idea is that any mention of Christmas might offend people who are not Christians — and that this should be avoided at all costs.

As someone who does not keep track of my friends' religions, I have undoubtedly over the years sent out Christmas cards to people who were Jewish or non-religious. Yet none has protested or seemed to be traumatized.

Christmas is now one of many things that make us walk on eggshells during this supposedly liberated era. Are we all wimps?

Is it just me, or is the whole "war on Christmas" meme just a bit overwrought?

QotD: Childhood Toys

Remember when kids could play with toy guns and they were not a symbol of all that was evil in the world? My daughter doesn't. She warned me that she could never bring the potato gun to school without the risk of expulsion. The sheer joy of running around being a kid is denied to our children today. It is a shame — it is no wonder our kids are so fat today. The slightest hint of rambunctiousness is medicated out of them and diagnosed as ADHD. A pointed finger becomes a symbol of a weapon that requires therapy or suspension. The whole world is now a place where mean adults (especially males) will kidnap you if you dare venture out into the world. It is best to just stay home, watch tv and eat junk food to squelch whatever desire you have to be autonomous in the world. Do we ever realize what joy we have taken from our kids in exchange for safety?

Dr. Helen, "Potato Guns!", Dr. Helen, 2005-12-12

A new meaning for the term "googled"

Jon sent me a link to a post by Kim duToit, talking about his bitter experiences with being "googled":

[. . .] Kim was offered a job based in Pennsylvania. Kim flew there to meet with the client on a Monday and Connie drove up with the kids (reluctant and upset about the major change, but on-board because of few other options) to find a new home.

At the end of the client meetings the company offered Kim the job on the spot, and they shook hands on the deal. The next several days were spent looking around the area, trying to find a place to live.

Early on Friday morning Kim received an email from his future superior who said that he was very upset about Kim's website and the fact that Kim had mentioned something about the company.

The fact is that Kim didn't mention anything about the company. What he said was that he had found a job through a friend of a friend and that it would require relocation. But, since this was something that obviously upset the company, Kim took the post down AND turned off his website. Connie did the same.

After the two conversations that day, we never heard from the company's executives again. They didn't return emails or phone calls. Even their HR Department (who, we think, had done the Google search on Kim's name as part of their new policy of due diligence) could not get these executives to return phone calls.

After several weeks of silence it became obvious that they were reneging on their offer. Kim relaunched the job search and soon discovered that his legacy on the Internet was going to make it impossible to find "traditional" corporate work again.

The lessons to be drawn are many and varied: it would be obvious to point out that some of Kim's earlier writings were outspoken and presented certain politically incorrect notions strongly. It would be wrong to tell someone not to state their beliefs, but it would be prudent to point out that everything we've written in an online environment can — and almost certainly will — turn up again in a thorough Google search. Even things you've written which were not shared with the outside world can come back to haunt you. The days when you could reasonably expect your personal privacy to be inviolate are long gone: you should now assume that almost every aspect of your life is possible for a curious person to dig up.

And who would be more curious about you than a prospective employer?

Or someone interested in stealing your identity?

Or a law enforcement organization on a fishing trip?

Curses! Foiled Again

The not-quite-new Quotemobile has a pretty kick-ass sound system — at least compared to the old Quotemobile. The 6-CD changer apparently plays MP3 files, which isn't exactly spelled out in the manual, but we've proven it experimentally. This is good: I can rip a bunch of CDs to MP3, record my own CDs, and have a much wider selection of music available in the truck.

So, today I tried it out: I got out some old Pogues CDs, ripped them to MP3 and then burned a CD with all the MP3 files. Worked just fine . . . except that I must have had my MP3 settings way too high: I could only fit one and a half CD's worth of MP3 files on the new CD. So I try again, this time deliberately choosing a pretty low-quality setting for the MP3 files. Hmmm. I still only manage to fit one and a half CD's worth. WTF?

Check the help for the CD burning software and the answer is suddenly made clear:

F.Y.I.! If you want to make audio CDs from existing MP3/mp3PRO music files you don't need to convert these files into WAV files first. Nero includes a free MP3/mp3PRO decoder, than automatically converts your MP3/mp3PRO files into the appropriate format while you burn your audio CD. The audio CD can then be played on all commercially available CD players (and most DVD players), provided that the player can read CD-R (or CD-RW if you recorded on a CD-RW) discs.

To make your own MP3/mp3PRO files (using music from your audio CDs or audio files in supported formats such as WAV) you need the Nero MP3/mp3PRO encoder, which can be purchased separately.

No wonder I couldn't get many tracks on to a CD: the damned software was diligently uncompressing the damned things for me!

Now to see if I have any other software that will burn the CD without being quite so helpful.

Arabs finding anarchist "volunteers" more troublesome than helpful

Jon sent a link to an article about International Solidarity Movement volunteers making the situation more dangerous for the people they claim to be helping:

The anarchists, many of whom are members of the International Solidarity Movement, flock to flashpoints throughout Judea and Samaria, ostensibly to help PA Arabs contend with IDF closures and protect them from harassment. In actuality, many of the volunteers seek confrontations with IDF soldiers and local Jewish residents, taking advantage of their Western passports to cause havoc — knowing that, at worst, they will be deported, not jailed.

The local Arabs in the Hevron region whom the activists claim to be helping are now complaining that the American and European students behave in a provocative and offensive manner in Hevron's public areas. The Arabs say the activists disrespect the moral norms and standards of the local population.

Several local Arab residents told the Kol Ha'Ir newspaper that the activists have been exposing the local youths to drug use and sexual promiscuity.

You'd think, if this situation is common, that the Israeli government would change their laws to allow foreign agents provocateur to be treated in the same way as anyone else: deportation is clearly not much of a deterrent.After all, how much worse could the press coverage be for anything that reflects badly upon the Israeli government in the western press?

"Is that the realistic one or the grotesque one?"

Did you like that caricature you got at the Exhibition last summer? Here's a chance to get yourself immortalized:

A cathedral is offering people the opportunity to have their face immortalised in stone on its spires.

St Paul's Cathedral in Melbourne has come up with a novel fundraising plan for people to have their likeness carved on one of about 170 stone figures - for an estimated $50,000 each.

[ . . . ]

Buyers have three options: a realistic sculpture, a caricature, or a grotesque - a bizarre gargoyle-like sculpture.

Hat tip to Drew Curtis' FARK.com.

Sony releases list of poison CDs

Sony, after a public relations nightmare of epic proportions, has announced that they will stop including rootkit code on their music CDs. This is a list of all the poisoned CDs they did release. I'd recommend, if you've bought anything off this list, looking for rootkit removal advice ASAP.

Here is a quick Google search to get you started.

Free book from Scott Adams

Scott Adams is making the PDF version of his book God's Debris available as a free download. I haven't read it, so this doesn't quite count as a recommendation from me, but I did enjoy reading some of his other books, so free is a pretty good price, I think.

Why is it Free?

Frankly, this is the hardest book in the world to market. When it first came out in hardcover, booksellers couldn’t decide if it was fiction or nonfiction. Was it philosophy or religion? It’s a religion/science book written by a cartoonist, using hypnosis techniques in the writing. It's a thought experiment. It's unlike anything you've ever read. How do you sell something that can't be explained?

Nonetheless, the hardcover version of God's Debris was a solid success. I lost count of how many people e-mailed me to say it was the best book they've ever read. By way of comparison, I've published over thirty Dilbert™ books, two of them number-one New York Times best-sellers, but I've never gotten the kind of excited responses that I did from readers of God's Debris.

Still, God's Debris is emphatically not for everyone. Although there’s no sex or violence, I don’t recommend it for readers under fourteen unless a parent has screened it. And if you don't like to have your perceptions challenged, this book isn't for you. However, if you like a good book-induced buzz now and then, I think you'll agree that the price was right.

It's free because it's designed to be discussed with people who have also read it. I'm confident that some percentage of the free e-book readers will be inspired to buy a physical book for friends or for their own collection. And if you like it, you might want to try the sequel, The Religion War, available only in hardcover. At the end of the e-book you'll find some links to Amazon.com for your impulse-buying pleasure.

For your urgent alcohol-buying needs

Courtesy of The Accordion Guy, I find a link to the potentially very useful Beer Hunter:

It's currently 9:38pm on Wednesday in Toronto*. There are 38 places you can get booze right now. (* More cities coming soon!)

The post-modern family

I'm on a deadline at work this week, so I'm barely crossing paths with the family at home. I got home last night at 11:30, and to my surprise Victor was still up. He'd had a really good soccer game and desperately wanted to give me the highlights. I got the condensed play-by-play and he went off to bed. While I don't want to encourage him to stay up too late just to catch me coming in the door, I wasn't too upset about it.

Until about an hour later when I find this posted on his blog:

Well, got my first report card in highschool. The marks are as follows:

Art: 92%
Geo: 62%
Eng:76%
Gym:70%

Geography needs to go up if I want to get to England this summer... I'm starting Midsummer night's dream soon, and my English teacher couldn't hate my class more, so this is going to be a fun time.

You'll notice the irony right away: he couldn't wait to tell me about his soccer game, but completely forgot to mention his mid-term marks!

When "help" is actually "extended harm"

Kate, at SDA has a brilliant post up about the dangers of modern psychological "help":

A few years ago a friend revealed, almost matter-of-factly, that as a young teenager she had been the victim of a gang rape. She jumped through the counselling hoops of conventional psychological wisdom until the day she realized that she was still wallowing in the event, stretching a brief trauma into an extended one. She decided instead to accept what happened, put it behind her and get on with her life. She never looked back.

While not everyone has that type of strength, her story does tell us something. If we want to help victims of sexual crimes regain normalcy, it's time that society and the justice system stop sending mixed messages. We claim there is no shame in being a victim of sexually based crime, then try the cases in courts that "protect" identities and ban publication of testimony. We applaud their courage, then use "fate worse than" hyperbole equating rape with murder, as though the truly couragous victim would have choosen death over submission.

This is a specific case of the general problem: by automatically assuming that any serious or tragic event in one's life is something that requires counselling, assistance, and ongoing (sometimes life-long) psychological care, we downplay or completely override the ability of the human mind to recover its equilibrium unaided. Some people certainly do need more than casual help, but for most people, an excess of counselling probably retards recovery rather than speeding it.

This is especially relevant today, as we remember the sacrifices of our parents' and grandparents' generations: many of them came back from horrific wartime conditions and succesfully re-integrated with civilian life. It wasn't easy, but it needed to be done, and — for the vast majority of them — it was done. It would have been taken as an insult to offer counselling or psychological assistance to returning warriors, even in those cases where it might have helped. Those who needed help were seen, fairly or not, as being weak or even cowardly. Theirs was a different time indeed.

Photoblogging Algonquin Park

Elizabeth and I took the new Quotemobile out for an extended day-trip today, covering nearly 500 km. We headed north, stopping in Bancroft for lunch and then entering the southern reaches of Algonquin Park:

Not too far inside the Park boundary, you reach Brewer Lake. This is a view looking northwest across the lake.	This is looking southwest. The skies were getting dark, and it appeared that we were going to have to give up hope for photos soon after this.

Of course, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to take a couple of photos of the new Quotemobile, since we were parked in a scenic area:

Victor has accused me of caring more for the new vehicle than I do for him, but that's just because he's not able to drive yet, I'm sure. Plus, he's probably mad that I make him sleep in the driveway . . .

From Brewer Lake, we carried on along the parkway, missing several very scenic views along the way: either there wasn't enough room to park the truck so we could get photos, or I had someone too tight to my bumper to safely slow down. The next time we could stop for a few photos was at Lake of Two Rivers:

All four pictures were taken through a brief gap in the trees, perhaps 100 metres long. Aside from the beautiful scenery, what struck us most was the absolute silence. It was almost eerily quiet, with so little traffic in the park, it was several minutes between passing cars, and the air was relatively still. There were very few birds in the trees and they all seemed to be listening, too.

The road turned generally west after this, leading us eventually into Huntsville. We stopped for ah hour in Huntsville, wandering along the main drag and getting a a couple of photos:

A view of the church, from the waterside just below the bridge.	Looking away from the church, taken from the approach to the bridge.

After leaving Huntsville, we worked our way back to Dorset, and had dinner at the Fiery Grill restaurant. Unfortunately, I failed to notice the state of the gas tank on our way out of Huntsville, and we arrived in Dorset just after the only gas station in town had closed. After dinner, we had a bit of a concern that we'd run out of fuel somewhere on highway 35, before we could get to Lindsay. There was nothing in any of the little villages along our route (Pine Springs, Halls Lake, Boskung, and Carnarvon), until we got to Minden. To my surprise, we even found the price to be reasonable (88 cents per litre, rather than the 96.9 cents per litre we had to pay in Apsley on the way north).

All in all, a great way to spend a day. The weather co-operated for the most part, only threatening to rain every now and again, but never actually doing it.

The new Quotemobile

I picked up my new vehicle yesterday night:

Not as glamorous as proposed Fleamobiles, but (I hope) entirely satisfactory to my needs.

Halloween hauntings

Victor hosted a small group of ghouls for a Halloween gathering last night:

Victor and "Ozzy"	The witch, the ghoul, and the victim.

Magnum, P.I. and the case of the missing head.

Honda's Ridgeline

According to a brief post on Autoblog, Honda chose exactly the wrong time to introduce their first pickup truck, the Ridgeline:

An article from Bloomberg today reveals that Honda's inventory of the Ridgeline pickup has risen to more than 100 days. The automaker has decided to cut production of the pickup by 3,000 units next quarter in response. While it would have been difficult to predict the current high price of gas that's forcing consumers to reconsider large vehicle purchases, it may be that Honda picked a bad time to take on the Big 3 in the full-size truck segment.

I test-drove a Ridgeline earlier this year, and it was a very pleasant experience. Aside from looks only an auto designer could love, it handled well, had plenty of power, and the interior was very passenger-friendly. I didn't seriously consider buying it because it was only available with automatic transmission. The significant increase in the price of gas since then would almost certainly have left me with a bad case of buyer's remorse, had I decided to purchase one.

Somebody got a patent for XML?

According to a thread at Slashdot, a company called Scientigo has patent no. 5,842,213 and no. 6,393,426, which they claim cover the transfer of 'data in neutral forms.' As a result, they feel that they can sue companies that use XML in their products for royalties.

I'm absolutely flabbergasted that the patent office would issue a patent — in 1997 — when SGML (the effective parent of XML) had been available at least ten years before then. I was attending SGML/XML conferences in the early 1990's, fer crying out loud!

Flu

With all the talk about influenza pandemics in the media at the moment, you can imagine the undertone of conversation in the office today, with at least half a dozen of us suffering from mild flu-like symptoms. I'm certainly not sick enough to stay home from work, but I'm working at much reduced pace and my brain seems to be stuck in low gear.

Blogging may — or may not — be affected by this.

These shoes were made for driving

Nissan is catering to the athletic-shoe-wearing segment of the population by offering a car that looks like a shoe:

Based on Nissan's own Note model, this version features a "wearable" concept wherein certain parts of the exterior and interior can be changed at will just like the Adidas-branded sportwear its target customer is wearing. It's not a new idea, nor one that was all that successful last time around on the Saturn Ion. The interior also features storage nets on the dashboard, a glovebox that opens with a zipper and a removable bag in the center console.

A clap-out for clapped-out jalopies

Autoblog is reporting that

. . . a new oil additive with the unfortunate name of "Clap" could improve the fuel consumption of old car engines by as much as 10 percent.

Clap (stop snickering!) was originally developed in Russia, as a nanoscale powder intended as a lubricant additive. The nanoparticles fill in cracks and abrasions in cylinder walls and pistons, improving combustion and thus fuel efficiency. The problem was finding a powder material that would do the job without compromising the lubricating properties of the oil.

A real-life Lovejoy?

Jon passed along a link to a Toronto Star article (reg. req'd) on theft in the antique map world:

With his neat blazer and scholarly air, it was not hard for E. Forbes Smiley III to blend in at the Yale rare books library and make himself at home among its atlases and maps.

But this visit to the Beinecke Library at Yale on June 8 by Smiley, a 49-year-old dealer in antiquities who plied his trade on both sides of the Atlantic, took a turn that has jolted the closed and covetous world of map dealers and collectors, as well as the serene if starchy institutions that hold treasured maps.

According to the local police, a library worker's discovery of an X-Acto knife blade on the reading room floor near Smiley was the first hint of trouble. By early afternoon, they say, librarians had video images of Smiley removing from a book an antique map valued by Yale at $150,000 (U.S.). Later that day, the police say, they found in his jacket a fragile map that appeared to have been taken from a 17th-century book; others that also appeared to be stolen, worth more than $700,000, were in his briefcase.

Vindicated!

I finally got around to ordering my next vehicle, but I won't actually take delivery until late November . . . because I insisted on manual transmission (if I'd been willing to take an automatic, I could have had it within a few weeks). Call me an anarcho-anachronist, if you like. Here is another good reason for sticking with manual transmission vehicles:

Carjackers are lame. Carjackers who can't figure out how to drive a manual are even more lame. An employee of a Kansas software company was approached by someone with a shotgun who was looking to borrow the victim's Chevy Camaro. Our would-be carjacker fled the scene after finding that his new ride had a third pedal.

The 4th annual blogger Boobie-Thon

Rue, at Abraca-Pocus would like to call your attention to the Fourth Annual Blogger Boobie-Thon (main page is SFW, others not so much), which starts on Saturday.

This year's fund raising efforts will be split between breast cancer research and Hurricane Katrina victim relief.

Guest editorial: Response to today's QotD

Today's quote of the day has prompted a lengthy response from M. DeMuren, which I publish here with permission:

Back in the day (presumably in the time when the article would have been called, 'Our culture, look how much there is'), my betters taught me that unhappiness is a state of emotion/feeling, and is experienced by all sentient beings at various times. Conversely, also that depression was all about thought processes, and not entirely tied to an emotional state, i.e., depressed people didn't feel unhappy all the time, but quite possibly more often than someone who wasn't depressed.

In those days, we thought that unhappiness was something that you either 'stiff-upper-lipped' through, or fixed by 'get-off-your-ass-and-do-something-about-it' . . . er . . . proactive management. Depression, on the other hand, was handled very differently, as it was thought to be caused by faulty mental processes. The party line was that the only way to successfully treat depression was through medication (as a crutch to support you while you got on with feeding your children, etc.) and therapy (to teach new long-term thought patterns). To only participate in one aspect of the treatment was setting yourself up for failure, as the drugs were needed to adjust the chemical processes in the brain, allowing a patient to successfully break out of the patterns causing inability to deal with life. With the help of a trained professional, the patient learned coping skills, recognition of internal inconsistencies (aka "Am I on crack?"), explored their social safety nets, and eventually, created their own monitoring system so that they could see when they were losing control over themselves.

Back in the day, there was a hope expressed to new patients that they would be able to stop taking the drugs and stop going to therapy, having learned the tools that they need to survive/flourish.

However.

I have been told by a multitude of health professionals that today's patient does not wish to change their lifestyles in any way. It is this disinclination towards change which leads firstly to the need to thin blood and adjust insulin and control cholesterol, etc., and later, to the practice of popping a pill or pushing a needle into a vein while continuing to not make any lifestyle modifications. So, as there are diabetics still 60 lbs. overweight, keeping themselves from coma by a needle with nary a scheduled workout, there are depressed people popping a Paxil daily instead of hauling themselves to a professional to discuss why they wish they could accidentally get hit by a bus. Both groups, though admittedly alive, are no better off in six months, having done no work on the underlying foundational problems.

And so, I see three groups of people: the ill, their doctors, and the drug companies. The ill, reportedly, want tomorrow to be easier/more comfortable/happier than today. Their doctors want the patient to be somewhere other than in their offices. The drug companies want their drugs prescribed now, and forever.

There are two pathways, one with hard work, one without:

1) The work-free path leaves the sick still sick, the doctor unaffected, and is a steady stream of income for the drug company.

2) The hard-work path improves the lot of the sick, is still neutral for the doctor, and causes a negative financial impact for the drug company.

Interestingly, you'll note that the doctor is not affected one way or another by the patient's choices, except perhaps in a warm fuzzy way if s/he still has 'the passion'. This leaves the influences on the decision down to the patient and the drug company.

The drug company can't force the patient to take the pills forever, but they can market the enticing idea of a 'perfect life', available in pill form. Due to the current lax government regulations, there is no requirement for 'truth in advertising', and this means that the marketing can target both the mentally ill through general media, and the doctor through incentives and studies commissioned by the manufacturer.

This leaves us with the patient. For improvement, the patient has to want to be different, and not just on the surface ("I went to work today and didn't spend 10 minutes crying on the floor before I left"). They have to want to be different so badly that they're willing to work at it, maybe for years. This willingness to undertake hard and uncomfortable work is the crux of the matter.

If the patient isn't committed to full treatment, then they place the doctor in the position of choosing to either ease some of the symptoms with drugs, or leave the person suffering with their depression. With the Hippocratic oath in their minds, they choose to 'band-aid' and thereby alleviate some of the suffering, even though they're not actually improving the condition.

So, I do not accept that it is the media's fault for removing 'unhappy' from our collective vocabulary, nor the doctor's for over-prescribing 'happy pills', none of which actually make people happy. If we're looking at blame, I place it squarely at the feet of the individual. There are many depressed people out there, but I've seen no proof that anyone who has taken pills for their depression become less depressed as a result. They don't kill themselves, and remain (somewhat) functional members of society, but they are still depressed. If you take their pills away, they still have the baseline condition, because nothing has changed. If the individual is interested in improvement of their condition, they themselves must work at changing it. It appears most are not interested in undertaking the work, and prefer to have their doctor medicate them until death.

Lest I lay no blame on society though, I will say that it has had a hand in creating a generation (or two) of people who think that they are OK, nay, better than OK just the way they are. It may have sprung from the 'free love' movements of the 60's, the 'we own you' ego of the 70's, the 'I'm OK/You're OK' self-esteem exercises of the 80's, or the celebration of the average starting in the 90's. The interest in bettering yourself seems to have disappeared entirely, with the notable exception of increasing one's physical beauty. In this environment, I don't expect that the general populace ever would opt for the steep, rocky and oft-times painful road of self-improvement to attempt to fix their problems, be they social, environmental, or in this case, mental.

After all, they've heard their whole lives that they're a great person, so it can't be their fault that they feel bad . . . and since it's not their fault, it must not be their responsibility to fix it. Better just to take a little pill, and make it all better.

Executive Summary:

Current culture says: If you're unhappy, go change your life; if you're depressed, go take a pill. People are too lazy to do anything about their lives, so they prefer to be lumped in with 'depressed'. Most are also too proud to admit that their brain is broken, and still too lazy to do anything about fixing it. Doctors must choose between letting people be depressed and giving them a pill that distracts them.

Taking a pill only requires the filling of a glass of water.

Today's commercial endorsement

As you may have noticed, I don't carry advertising on the site . . . at least, not paid advertising (*cough*Serenity*cough*). Every now and again, though, I find a product that I feel is very worthwhile and deserving of a little word-of-blog plugging.

Today's product is the humble Fruit Fly Trap.

It's tomato season, and Elizabeth's small selection of tomato plants has produced a bumper crop of them. We're awash in fresh tomatoes at the moment. We're also suffering a huge infestation of fruit flies, because I forgot to replace the last trap we set in July. It's so bad that I had to use a piece of paper to cover the top of my wineglass yesterday to keep the blasted things out of my wine (even so, I still had a few "swimmers"). So, it's off to Lee Valley at lunch today to belatedly replace the trap.

Increased severity of hurricanes

There's a brief article in the current Economist, talking about the increased severity of hurricanes in recent years:

Looking at the hurricanes themselves, though, they found no long-term trends in the number of storms per ocean basin or the length a storm lasts, except in the North Atlantic, where both increased. That is unfortunate news for Caribbean countries and the United States, which bear the brunt of those storms. But it suggests that whatever is increasing hurricane incidence it is not — or, at least not solely — to do with ocean warming. If it were, such increases would have shown up in other places where the sea is getting warmer.

Nor was there any increase in the maximum windspeed that storms attained anywhere. What there was, however, was a doubling around the world of the proportion of storms in the most destructive categories (4 and 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale usually employed by meteorologists). And, although the exact rise in that proportion varied from basin to basin, all of them saw a significant increase.

This is the sort of troubling result of too little data: the studies could only cover the last 35 years, as the satellite coverage was too spotty before 1970 to provide valid data. It may indicate a significant result of higher ocean surface temperatures interacting with weather patterns, or it may be part of a longer-term shift in weather patterns. We can speculate, but the data does not prove one thing or another.

That aside, expect more banging of the drum for the Kyoto-worshippers, as this report gives them some more numbers to use for their own purposes.

Suicide is painless?

Hit and Run reports Hunter S. Thompson's last (written) words:

No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun -- for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax -- This won't hurt.

The latest Serenity poster

I have to admit, this one is somewhat more misleading than I'd like: it looks more like "Kill Bill in Space"!

Fans of Bush in unexpected places

It might come as a bit of a surprise to find that Nick Packwood, aka "Ghost of a Flea" or just "Flea" to his friends, is a fan of Bush.

Er, I mean Kate, not George. Just to clear up any incipient misunderstanding.

Saturday at SFX2005

Victor ambushed me on Friday morning with the news that there was a huge combined Anime / SciFi / Comic / Horror / Gaming convention on this weekend and that we had to go. I wasn't overjoyed: the last big convention I attended at the Metro Convention Centre was highly unpleasant. But I've got to pretend to be a good dad every now and again, so Saturday morning found us on the GO train in to Union Station.

I'm not an Anime, Comic, or Horror fan, and the last time I did regular gaming the hot new game was something called Advanced D&D. So the area of interest for me was restricted to just over a fifth of the activities. I was rather disappointed to discover that the SciFi was really restricted to movies and TV shows, rather than written Science Fiction (although the use of the five-letter abbreviation should have tipped me off).

I did get a brief glimpse of "Jayne Cobb", from Firefly:

The hall was already pretty crowded by the time we arrived (the line-up to buy tickets was just over half-an-hour from where we joined until we got to the booth). It got much worse as the day wore on:

I should mention that I'm not good with crowds.

After visiting the Serenity booth staffed by volunteers from the Canadian Browncoats, I eventually found myself a quiet piece of wall to lean against and waited for Victor and his friend Jacob to spend themselves dry.

Not that I obsess, but . . .

If there's an active blogger on the face of the planet who can honestly say they don't obsess about their traffic, then I've never met that person. Today's little minor panic attack came courtesy of the TTLB Ecosystem:

That's a pretty steep drop in links. I sure hope it's just another one of those occasional re-jigging of the system!

An alternate universe history of Canada

Colby Cosh links to a fascinating alternate history which ends like this:

The Second World War ends with a rain of atomic Avro-bombs on Dresden and Berlin, a show of might that makes official what has been whispered for years: the Empire no longer belongs to England but to its former colony. On July 1st, 1947, Canada's Prime-Minister-For-Life Maurice Duplessis effectively dissolves the English Parliament in London. "A Flannel Curtain has descended across the continent," Winston Churchill thunders; he dies in a Yukon gulag for daring to challenge "Duplessisme." King Edward VII is re-installed as Canada's puppet monarch; he lives out his days playing shuffleboard in Victoria's Empress Hotel. Duplessis expires in 1967; the bench-clearing brawl for his succession is won by the blustering Field Marshall Donald Cherry.

Chilling. Just chilling.

Non-traditional "traditions"

Amir Taheri's New York Times article from August 15th is now available here:

All these and other cases are based on the claim that the controversial headgear is an essential part of the Muslim faith and that attempts at banning it constitute an attack on Islam.

That claim is totally false. The headgear in question has nothing to do with Islam as a religion. It is not sanctioned anywhere in the Koran, the fundamental text of Islam, or the hadith (traditions) attributed to the Prophet.

This headgear was invented in the early 1970s by Mussa Sadr, an Iranian mullah who had won the leadership of the Lebanese Shi'ite community.

In an interview in 1975 in Beirut, Sadr told this writer that the hijab he had invented was inspired by the headgear of Lebanese Catholic nuns, itself inspired by that of Christian women in classical Western paintings. (A casual visit to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, or the Louvres in Paris, would reveal the original of the neo-Islamist hijab in numerous paintings depicting Virgin Mary and other female figures from the Old and New Testament.)

Sadr's idea was that, by wearing the headgear, Shi'ite women would be clearly marked out, and thus spared sexual harassment, and rape, by Yasser Arafat's Palestinian gunmen who at the time controlled southern Lebanon.

Hat tip to Damian Penny.

Stormblogging

Some images from the massive storm that just rolled through Toronto:

Jon and I went outside to see what we could see. Not much. The photo doesn't really give you an accurate impression of how heavy the rain was: we were about ten feet back from the open area and still got our shoes and pantlegs splattered with rain.	The hail came down for about ten minutes in our area. It set off at least one car alarm in the parking lot . . . but you could barely hear it over the noise of the hail landing.
The power went out, killing the lights in front of the building.	The little enclosed area in front of the door rapidly transformed into a small lake. We amused ourselves by trying to come up with appropriate names for the new wetland, and calculating how long it would be before it was officially designated as such.
The workers who'd been replacing some of the roof of our building lost some insulation panels (fortunately, they were too light to damage any of the cars they fell on).	The "T" junction in front of the office flooded deeply enough to stall out a few cars.
It's amazing the number of drivers who tried to gun it through the flooded intersection.	What was perhaps more surprising was the number of near-collisions as people tried to get through or around the flooded area.
The aftermath: incomplete roof repairs PLUS massive rainstorm EQUALS one heck of a clean-up job indoors.	This is the area of the floor just a few feet from my desk.

Test Drive Tips

I wish I was as organized as the folks who wrote up this article on how to get the most out of a test drive.

Is the SCA getting too authentic?

An unconfirmed report from The Pittsburgh Channel says that a woman was raped by two unknown assailants at the SCA's Pennsic War being held this week just north of Pittsburgh.

Steve Stirling interview

S.M. Stirling is a science fiction author whose more recent works are very good indeed (just skip the early "Draka" stuff unless you've got a strong stomach). I've certainly enjoyed his Island in the Sea of Time books and the more recent Dies the Fire. Glenn Reynolds has an interview with Stirling at his Tech Central Station site:

GR: Your novel "Dies the Fire" — and for that matter, earlier books like "Island in the Sea of Time" — depends a lot on ordinary people having hobbies that turn out to be pretty useful. That's partly a plot device, of course, but do you see the widespread possession of all sorts of cottage-industry skills as a good thing?

SS: Well, it's fun for the people who do it, and having a broad skills-base is always a good thing. It's also a sign of the quirky individualism of the American population, also a positive factor.

GR: Do you think that people are more inclined to develop those sorts of hobbies as society gets richer?

SS: Certainly in an absolute sense; you can't afford the time if you're scrambling to stay alive 24/7.

GR: In writing your books, did you interview or observe a lot of armor-makers, SCA types, etc.? Or was it just based on longtime personal experience? What do you think motivates people to take up hobbies like that?

SS: I've moved on the fringes of that set for a long time; and I also made contact with a lot of them specifically for this series. As to motivations . . . it's romanticism, of course, the same thing that makes people read books like . . . well, like mine! Living it out is a more recent development, but as you say, people have more spare time these days.

I was one of the people who provided some input — although my contribution was microscopic compared to many others who were in contact with Steve.

It is interesting that some of the fastest growing hobbies today include things like woodworking and other "creative" no-longer commercial skills and activities. It is quite possible that there are more active woodworkers, potters, glass-blowers, and the like than at any time since the end of the 19th century: we've grown to appreciate the appeal of the hand-made one-off item due to its rarity (our grandparents were delighted to discover that mass-produced items were cheaper and more dependable). This is a luxury of our relative affluence: we can value the aesthetic appeal more highly because we can more easily meet our basic economic needs without undue strain. Mere functionality is assured, so we can place more emphasis on the beauty or other appealing aspects of everyday items.

Hat tip to Samizdata.

QotD: Whimsy

Whimsy is an aesthetic category for cultural artifacts that do not quite conform to, but do not fully violate, the rules of contemporary culture. Whimsy is licensed departure. It makes free with cultural conventions in a way we find charming, funny, winsome and sometimes freeing. Whimsy is chaos on a leash, departure that may not stray.

Grant McCracken, "Discontinuous innovation and the mysteries of Roger Ebert", This Blog Sits at the, 2005-08-03

QotD: Shoes

Mismatched shoes are also nicely subversive. There is somewhere in the clothing code a notion that holds over from the Elizabethan era that says a person's shoes must show that they are in the Elizabethan lingo, unconcussable. Shoes, especially the shoes of the male and the young, are meant to show that the wearer is, all apologies, grounded. (High heel shoes take their semotic precisely from the way they break this rule. The wearer, a female, demonstrates her vulnerability, her fragility, her elegance, her powers of evocation by showing herself not at all grounded.)

Grant McCracken, "Cotton, Converse and co-creation", This Blog Sits at the, 2005-07-27

QotD: Clothing

I dress casually in the summer, because it's hot. But for the last few years I've returned to good slacks and decent shoes and a crisp shirt and a tie. Grown-up clothes. Dad clothes. A man ought to be able to put on a shirt and tie without thinking he's putting on a costume to deal with The Man; he should regard it as the Rainments of Masculinity, the costume we wear to project the impression of seriousness. If we're not serious, it'll be apparent quite soon. Likewise if we're a peacock, a grifter, a poseur, a drone, a cog — the uniform only says that you're part of the hard plain world, not whether or not you really belong there. I just know that I feel different in a shirt and tie. I stand up straighter. I don't feel as though I'm owed more respect; on the contrary, I feel obliged to be more respectful. It's hard to describe, but to paraphrase a drunken Marge Simpson after six Long Island Iced Teas — you guys in the audience, you know what I'm talking about.

James Lileks, Screedblog, 2005-07-25

Vanderleun finally confesses to his Insta-envy

In a shocking, yet strangely moving declaration, Gerard Van Der Leun finally admits his hidden envy of Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit:

I like and admire Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit. (Let me say that again: I like and admire Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.) (Just to be sure, let me reiterate: I like and admire Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.) Swell guy. Incisive legal mind. Rapier wit. Staunch Libertarian and Great Humanitarian. Inspiring teacher. Amazing photographer (digital). Devoted husband. Hardest working man in the Blogsphere — next to, of course, Mickey 25-Words-A-Day Kaus. Why if Montaigne had not lived, Reynolds would have invented the essay at the same time he invented the "UPDATE:"

(There, now that that's out of the way could somebody excerpt that paragraph and send it along to Glenn for a link, he doesn't answer my emails anymore, especially that one offering cash in large quantities to get on his blogroll. Thanks.)

Glenn? I'll expect my 10% of the proceeds, as usual.

Spontaneous sex changes?

Tim Blair links to the site of A.E. Brain, who claims to be undergoing a spontaneous gender change (from male to female):

Alan — 47 years old, married, and a parent — had long imagined he would have preferred life as a woman; he'd even selected a female name (Zoe) at 10, in case of some miraculous transformation.

Earlier this year, the transformation began. Without surgery. And involuntarily. Al was experiencing something known as idiopathic sex reversal

If this is genuine, I guess it says that the Placebo effect has even wider applicability!

Update: Gerard Van Der Leun spotted the typo in the quoted block of text, so I've corrected it. Thanks for the unpaid proofreading!

The Flea bites VDH

Nick Packwood has a go at Victor Davis Hanson (who seems to be getting the hagiographic treatment from a lot of bloggers):

I am increasingly irritated by the cult of Victor Davis Hanson. Take this assertion from his latest article, for example. [. . .]

This is not only wrong it is so obviously wrong that I find it difficult to believe the blogosphere does not fact check the good professor's ass instead of throwing laurels at his feet. I have read several of VDH's books and am an admirer of his writing style in addition to broadly sharing his views about the need for toughness in the face of barbarism. But his rhetoric, in hot pursuit of an over-arching narrative, often runs ahead of the facts.

For me the last straw was VDH's recent criticism of Jared Diamond. I am much less likely to share Diamond's prescriptions on the environment than Hanson's on foreign policy. I also think Diamond's theories are usefully made subject to the sort of nitpickery that should give us pause about any grand narrative, historical, biological, political or otherwise. But it is a bit rich coming from the historian best known for "the Western way of war", perhaps the greatest wet fart of all encompassing, ill supported bloviation in today's popular history.

I've read, and enjoyed, a couple of Hanson's books, but I have to admit that I'm also finding VDH's one-note symphony tiring . . . he seems to be recycling exactly the same ideas over and over in his recent essays and columns. Even if I agree with him, I find myself tuning out only a few paragraphs into an article — because I already know what he's going to say. It's going to be the same thing he said in the last half-dozen articles I read. Ho-hum.

Who says modern art can't also be useful?

At risk of seeming to be stalking the good folks at Hit and Run today, I thought this one needed to be shared:

Colorado Gov. Bill Owens has some harsh words for a piece of artwork that originally went by the apt title Twelve Dildos on Hooks. Tsehai Johnson, who created the ceramic and metal installation three years before she received a $5,000 state grant, explains that she renamed it Large Implements on Hooks because "I wanted the title to be a little more open-ended so that it didn't become so easily dismissed." After all, "They're meant to be sex toys, but sex toys that are talking about a lot of issues."

Rather like a few of the folks who commented on the thread, I thought the display looked rather more like a selection of odd handles at an avante-garde hardware store than a collection of sex toys. Perhaps that just shows how out-of-date I really am. . .

New Firefly Movie Trailer

There's a new Serenity trailer out, a big download (requires Quicktime to play). As if I wasn't already marking days off the calendar until the movie opens.

Update: If you're into podcasting, there's apparently a Firefly podcast blog you should check out.

Truck accessories

I had no idea that these were popular add-ons for trucks. Of course, the way some people drive, I should have guessed. Ah, the wonders of the modern internet . . .

ESR on hard and soft sexuality

Eric Raymond has some interesting thoughts on male and female bi-sexuality:

Fascinating. This NYT article [reg. req'd.] bears out a suspicion I’ve held for a long time about the plasticity of sexual orientation. The crude one-sentence summary is that, if you go by physiological arousal reactions, male bisexuality doesn’t exist, while female bisexuality is ubiquitous.

I’ve spent most of my social time for the last thirty years around science fiction fans, neopagans, and polyamorists — three overlapping groups of people not exactly noted for either sexual inhibitions or reluctance to explore sexual roles that don’t fit the neat typologies of the mainstream culture. And there are a couple of things it’s hard not to notice about them:

First, a huge majority of the women in these cultures are bisexual. To the point where I just assume any female I meet in these contexts is bi. This reality is only slightly obscured by the fact that many of these women describe themselves and are socially viewed by others as ’straight’, even as they engage in sexual play with each other during group scenes with every evidence of enjoyment. In fact, in these cultures the operational definition of ’straight female’ seems to be one who has recreational but not relational/romantic sex with other women.

Second, this pattern is absolutely not mirrored in their male peers. Even in these uninhibited subcultures, homoerotic behavior involving self-described ’straight’ men is rare and surprising. Such homeoeroticism as does go on is almost all self-describedly gay men fucking other self-describedly gay men; bisexuality in men, while an accepted and un-tabooed orientation, is actually less common than gayness and not considered quite normal by anybody. The contrast with everybody’s matter-of-fact acceptance of female bisexual behavior is extreme.

As is often said in cases like this, go read the whole thing. Even the comment thread is interesting.

Aerodynamic surprise

I was quite surprised to find out from this Road and Track article that lowering or removing the tailgate on a pickup truck is not a good idea:

Investigators at the National Research Council of Canada have determined that pickup truck aerodynamics is generally degraded — not improved — by the often-seen practice of lowering or removing the tailgate. Drag is generally greater and, to the detriment of yaw stability, rear lift can be increased by as much as 60 percent. Popular mesh tailgates worsen aerodynamics of these vehicles as well.

The researchers measured drag, lift and yaw behavior of pickup trucks in the same wind tunnel where, years ago, we evaluated Champ-car aerodynamics ("Putting the CART Before the Wind," June 1984). They also performed Computational Flow Dynamics analyses of two simplified pickup shapes. These CFD results agreed with their tunnel findings.

The differences in C_D were measurable, though not profound. For instance, with a 2002 Ford F-150 Crewcab, its tailgate-up C_D was measured at 0.5304. Tailgate down, it was 0.5425; tailgate off, 0.5596.

I've never owned a pickup truck, so this has not yet been of much interest or concern to me. My next vehicle, however, is likely to be a pickup of some sort (Honda, Nissan, and Toyota are the current vehicles in consideration), so I'm paying slightly more attention than I used to.

Tie your laces?

David Neeley sent this link to a mailing list I read: Shoe Lacing Methods. I had absolutely no idea that there were this many variations on what appears to be a pretty simple task.

A couple of other Kingston photos

We had dinner in Kingston on Saturday at the Kingston Brewpub, oldest active brewpub in Ontario and home of Dragon's Breath Pale Ale. They do offer tours of the brewery, although we were there too late in the day to be able to do this. This is disappointing, as I'd hoped to get a few photos — in spite of having two digital cameras, I got a remarkably small number of photos on this trip.

Victor and my mum. Victor is in the middle of fiddling with my "good" camera (this is a Treo photo). He was busy trying to take some photos of Samantha, who was sitting beside me.	Samantha, wearing a t-shirt which seemed to draw a lot of attention. Both at lunch and at dinner, she was asked where she'd found the really cool shirt. It caused some disturbance at the table beside us, where the men in the party took offense at their ladies finding the message very appropriate.

Kingston, the slow way

Yesterday's adventure was a drive up to Kingston with my mum and my niece. I've been told I'm not allowed to post any pictures of Samantha, so I'll just have to put up a couple of architectural photos:

The Prince George hotel. This was the first place I slept in after my family arrived in Canada in 1967. It nearly burned down the next day. I'm sure there's no connection between these two facts.	Kingston City Hall. I was told, but can't confirm from personal experience, that the local police station was in the basement in 1967. Escaped cons and wanted men were supposedly easy to find: they'd be in the bar at the Prince George right next door.
The traditional market square behind city hall is being ripped up — to put in something as historically relevant as a skating rink??	The east side of the Prince George hotel. As you can see, the hotel is apparently being renovated (yet again). The two boarded-up windows on the third floor were the room we stayed in. The fire was in the room immediately to the right of it.

The rain started just as I was taking these last two photos, so we had to make a dash for the car.

Sales taxes and basic arithmetic

It's occurred to me a few times that perhaps one of the reasons kids today have problems with basic mathematical tasks is that they don't get the same kind of day-to-day mental math exercises that my generation did. <Geezer Voice>Back in my day, we didn't have sales taxes levied at the cash register, so even a five-year-old could figure out that a 10 cent candy bar and a 15 cent comic book could be paid for by that one quarter.</Geezer> Nowadays, it's a crapshoot for anyone under 12 to figure out if they have enough money to buy what they want (especially with weird things like the "no Provincial sales tax on prepared food under $4 except certain pre-prepared items, but there's still Gouge-and-Screw Tax".

I'm sure it's not the main reason for kids' mathematical weaknesses, but every time I have to wait for a young cashier to try to figure out correct change for me, I wonder.

Killin's too good for 'em

The Register reports that some scumbags have released a virus disguised as a CNN newsletter with the payload as an attachment. The text in the message encourages recipients to play the attached "amateur video shots".

Victorinox struggles on, post-9/11

I'd never considered the impact of increased paranoia of airline security arrangments on the manufacturers of Swiss Army Knives:

"It was an absolute catastrophe for us," Elsener says. "Until then our knives had sold very well both in duty free shops and on board planes. Most airlines sold them, including British Airways. Then suddenly this distribution was closed. It was zero. The merchandise came back to us. This was really very hard." Under new airline regulations, passengers could no longer carry the Swiss army knife in their hand luggage. Those who didn't comply had their knives confiscated — and they weren't returned at the other end.

The effects were sudden, and devastating. Sales of Swiss army knives dropped by 40% almost immediately. Finally, in April, Wenger SA — the only other Swiss firm allowed to produce Swiss army knives — went bust. Elsener's company, Victorinox, named after the mother of the founding Elsener, decided to rescue its rival, buying it for an undisclosed sum.

Despite 9/11 it would be an exaggeration to talk about the knife's demise, however. The Elseners are still manufacturing 34,000 Swiss army knives a day in the tiny village of Ibach.

Further debunking of the BMI

Radley Balko's Morgan Spurlock Watch has some useful things to say about that public agenda tool, the Body Mass Index (BMI):

A huge part of the "ballooning" Spurlock speaks of has nothing to do with overeating. It's due to the fact that in 1998, the U.S. government redefined what it meant to be obese. The Centers for Disease Countrol lowered the bar. One magic night in 1998, then, 29 million Americans went to bed of "normal" weight, and woke up "overweight" — without ever gaining a pound. Millions more went to bed "overweight," and woke up "obese." That's not the fault of McDonalds or Frito lay, or Baskin-Robins. It's the result of an alarmist government moving the goalposts to manufacture hysteria.

[. . .]

Of course, none of these people's risk for these conditions increased overnight. The government merely drew a largely arbitrary line, and announced that one side of that line would now be healthy, and the other side wouldn't.

Of course, all of these statistics flow from the Body Mass Index, or BMI. BMI is by and large a completely arbitrary measure of health. It doesn't account for age, sex, gender, body type, or ethnicity. It also doesn't distinguish between fat tissue and muscle tissue (the latter is more dense). By now, you've probably heard about how big, muscle-bound athletes are classified as "obese" by the government. By BMI standards, more than half the NBA is obese or overweight. But in fact, any person who works out regularly is likely to fall into the "overweight" or "obese" categories. According to the government, for example, Johnny Depp is overweight. And Tom Cruise is obese. If your build is similar to theirs, you're probably obese or overweight, too [. . .]. Should give you an idea of how specious a tool the BMI really is.

Look at it this way: Muscle mass is denser than fat mass. If you've ever started a regular workout regimen after a few months of inactivity, you'll know that your weight tends to go up, not down, after the first few weeks. You're building muscle. Which means if ten people of normal build who don't exercise joined a gym, their collective BMI would go up, not down. But they'd be adding to the overweight-obesity statistics.

I've mumbled bits about the evils of BMI here, here, and here.

Knopfler in Toronto

Last night's concert at the Molson Amphitheatre was great. I really felt we got more entertainment than our tickets had cost. And that's a rare thing nowadays.

We'd spent the day in various activities, spending more money than I'd really planned on (of course), and generally enjoying having a day out. Victor made out like a bandit on stuff: books, clothes, a CD, and probably more that I'm not remembering now. I guess I was doing the stereotypical "divorced dad on visitation day" thing: showering the kid with merchandise to attempt to compensate for the lack of physical presence (although in my case it's been working long hours, rather than being divorced, thank goodness).

About the only "exciting" thing that happened during the day was getting rear-ended at the corner of the Queensway and Colborne Lodge on our way to Ontario Place. No real damage, thank goodness: the woman in the car behind us had handed her son a cookie, her foot slipped off the brake pedal, and she nudged the back of my CR/V. We were that far west due to the ongoing construction along Queen Street (replacing long stretches of streetcar trackage, by the look of things).

The venue was pretty good, although it was very distracting having people getting up and down all through the concert (we must have had to stand up 50 times to let people in and out of our row of seats). I took a photo of the stage before many folks had arrived, because it was unlikely that I'd get anything useful after the show started. Unfortunately, the guy who sat directly in front of me was tall, and wore a basball cap . . . and kept sweeping his head from left to right so that I couldn't see the stage. The couple directly behind us won complimentary seat upgrades from Bell Cellular, so they departed for the Bell VIP box and Victor and I climbed back a row, which gave us just enough clearance to see the stage over top of baseballcapguy's head.

The opening act was Jackie Green (photo linked from Guy Fletcher's tour diary), a young singer/songwriter who did a pretty good job playing his own repertoire on guitar or keyboard accompanied by harmonica. It wasn't quite my cup of tea, but it was pleasant listening. Jackie did a half-hour's worth of playing before the crew came back on to set up for Mark and the band.

The main performance was great, with a killer rendition of "Sultans of Swing" getting the crowd howling for more. I loved the live versions of "Sailing to Philadelphia", "Speedway at Nazareth", "Song for Sonny Liston", and "Boom Like That". Older material included "Telegraph Road", "Romeo and Juliet", "Money for Nothing", and "Brothers in Arms".

As I expected, my during-the-show photos are just smears of light.

Update: Guy Fletcher updated his diary entry for last night's concert.

Civilization IV preview

The preview for Civ IV is quite amusing. Hit the link and select the "Stream for free" link (you can download it if you're a member of Gamespot . . . which I'm not).

Grade 8 Graduation

Victor officially survived Grade 8. I even have photographic proof:

Victor is the tall one. The short guy is the principal of his (now former) school.

After the formal graduation ceremonies, Victor and his immediate circle of friends grudgingly had some photos taken:

Victor and his "twin" brother. Who is shorter. And has curly hair. But otherwise they're quite alike. So I'm told.	Victor and "the Scooby Gang": Victoria, Danielle, and John

Every now and again, a photographic mistake can actually work in your favour. This is an example of what might have been a botched photo which actually (in my opinion) looks better due to unintentional camera artifacts:

Victor strikes a dramatic pose.

Steve H. expounds on Nerdness. Nerditude? Nerdulaciousness?

Over at Hog on Ice, Steve H. goes out of his way to vivisect those odd folks who qualify as "nerds":

In one form or another, we all become nerds.

What are nerds, really? Not just people who are way into math and science. No, in my opinion, a nerd is anyone who is so heavily into a pursuit other people find trivial that he becomes sort of a social untouchable.

Neat summary. That'll probably make its way into the Quotulatiousness database by itself. But it gets much better:

Example: SCA nerds. "Society for Creative Anachronism." I've written about these unfortunates before. In the process, I smoked out more than one reader who owns a codpiece and canvas tights.

They dress up as Renaissance and medieval characters — I think those are the eras they obsess on — and they go to festivals where you will see a heartrending panorama of pathological nerddom. They call each other "varlet" and crap. Like, "Forsooth, varlet, a pox on thee, for thou hast Bogarted the last hot cross bun." And I think they also hit each other with cardboard swords. I certainly hope so.

That last paragraph is much like what Jon often says about my occasional dabbling in the SCA . . . except Jon's not usually as polite as Steve is here.

It's not just hapless SCA types who benefit from Steve's verbal-surgery-without-anaesthetic, either:

Where was I? You don't have to be a science person to be a nerd. There are gun nerds. I got yelled at here for smirking about people who wear camo to the GUN RANGE. Like you have to SNEAK UP ON A PAPER TARGET. Hey, that's funny. I'm sorry if it hits close to home. What do you want me to do? Lie?

And most of those guys would pretty much have to sneak up on a target if they planned to hit it.

The post was originally inspired by one of Steve's regular readers who pointed him in the direction of some art supplies (Steve's does some cartooning on his Huffington's Toast parody site). She referred to the catalogue from that supplier as being "porn for calligraphers". Steve continues:

One of the signs of nerddom is the worship of celebrities who are only famous within your unique nerddom field. Let me quote a little subject heading from the catalogue: "CHERRYL MOOTE HAS DONE IT AGAIN!"

Right away, if you have any grasp of how nerddom works, you understand why that sentence cracks me up.

I have no idea who Cherryl Moote is, but you just know that if she walked into a calligraphy convention, people would grab their cell phones and call their best friends and whisper, "YOU'LL NEVER GUESS WHO JUST WALKED IN! CHERRYL MOOTE! YES, WAY!"

If she backed into your car in front of the Shriners' Hall or whatever building the convention was in, and you got out and started yelling at her for being a clumsy oaf who shouldn't be allowed to drive a golf cart with rubber bumpers, calligraphy nerds would storm up to you and yell, "I hope you realize you just insulted CHERRYL MOOTE!" And they'd look at you, waiting for the horror to sink in.

There are so many groups within which Joe or Jane Normal suddenly becomes a NAME, with a slobbering coterie of followers, fans, and (inevitably) sniping detractors and grumpy anti-fans. Celebrity and fame, writ extra-extra-small, if you will. The smaller the group, the sadder it is when the "micro celebrity" starts feeling as if the world outside their little nerd universe should also be paying them the honour and respect to which they now feel entitled.

The worst ones, in my experience, are the folks who achieve SCA fame by becoming King of their SCA kingdom. For some of them, it gives delusions of grandeur — especially if they have never achieved any distinction in the real world. There are few things more irritating than someone who tries to carry on as "Duke Sir Hauteur of Arrogance, O.L., O.P., K.S.C.A" or "Countess Clique of Gossipmongertown" when they're unemployable career students or just barely able to keep a minimum wage job. It's a hobby, guys!

Just because your prize marrow was featured on the front page of Gourd and Squash Journal doesn't make you famous in the real world. Your prize-winning model of a glue factory (complete with realistic smells) isn't going to be valued outside your sub-group of industrial modelling.

I guess sometimes it's hard to look at your friends' hobbies and decide whether the appropriate response is encouragement, or a Thorazine suppository followed by an abduction and an intervention assisted by electric shock to the genitals.

Of course, none of my hobbies are in any way weird or unusual. It's all those odd and obscure interests of other people that are subject to the raised eyebrow of barely concealed amusement or the clenched jaw of repressed contempt.

Curry is addictive! Film at 11!

I'm a fan of many of the traditional Indian dishes we generically call "curry", but apparently I'm also addicted:

Mr Mohamad, an MP in Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi's party, says the food is laced with opium poppy seeds — known as kas kas in Malay, and used legally by chefs around the world.

He told parliament that it had become the norm for young Malaysians to hang out in Mamak restaurants into the small hours of the morning.

He believes they and many others have become addicted to the food and he called for kas kas to be banned.

However, Mr Mohamad stopped short of demanding that offending restaurant owners be locked up under Malaysia's Internal Security Act.

Now I understand why I get those inexplicable cravings for Dal or Channa Masala, or even Aloo Ghobi: it's not hunger, it's chemical withdrawal!

Hat tip to Fark.com.

Limitations of fixed-focus digital cameras

On Wednesday night, driving east out of Toronto at about 10:00 at night, the moon rising out of Lake Ontario looked just immense (and bright orange). I kept hoping I'd find a good spot to take a couple of photos, but between the need to keep the car on the road and the fact that I only had my Treo 600 with me, there was no opportunity.

When we got home to Brooklin, I took a photo, but it's really just an illustration of how a fixed focus camera is a poor mechanism for trying to capture what the eyes see:

This article discusses the "huge moon" phenomenon we were observing that night.

The kind of tale that grows in the telling

Victor got back from his class trip to Quebec City yesterday evening, and regaled us with his adventures last night. I'm not sure what Elizabeth expected, but the stories could almost have been taken from a WW2 prisoner-of-war movie, with curfews, guards prowling around the rooms, snap inspections, and post-lights-out visits from other "prisoners" who combat-crawl along ledges and jump over balconies. It sounds like all it needed to be complete were spotlights randomly playing outside the windows, air-raid sirens, and some marching jackboots in the background.

The floating poker game was usually in Victor's room, but (at least so far as I've heard) there were no tunnelling attempts. As to the less-exciting parts of the trip, those were breezed through in less than five minutes.

In summary, he had fun. He got so little sleep over the week that he was glazing over even while telling the tales.

When real life intrudes into blogging

Kim du Toit has an interesting post about how blogging has impacted his life outside the blogosphere . . . and not in a good way, at least financially speaking:

When The Mrs. and I first started DidToday, we discussed whether this blog, with its bad-tempered and foul-mouthed ranting, hoplophilia and pics of beautiful women, would be a liability for the company.

If it proved likely to be the case, what then? Should I just end the blog — say "Thanks for the memories", and quit?

In the end, we decided that attempting to rewrite the past three years, or trying to cover it up, would be worse — Google will not be denied — but at the same time this blog could be a liability for the company.

Well, it was, just this past weekend. A prospective investor, check in hand, decided to do a little last-minute research, and googled "Kim du Toit".

He’s no longer a potential investor.

I also realized, long before I started blogging, that there really is no privacy on the internet. Years before I started following blogs (or writing my own blog), it was clear to me that everything I'd ever written on various email lists, USENET groups, and other informal publications was going to be around long after I've shuffled off this mortal coil.

I try to be very careful what I blog about, in the personal sense, because bloggers have lost their jobs over flagrant (and sometimes not-so-flagrant) posts about their employers, customers, suppliers, and co-workers. I don't mention my employer here, and there is no way I'd discuss their business on the blog: it would be a violation of my employment agreement, but more importantly, it would be a breach of trust.

Kim has a tougher situation at hand: he is the public face of his employer, so everything he's posted on his blog is subject to scrutiny and may directly impact his business and their dealings.

Hat tip, again, to Jon.

Enough circuitry to launch Apollo 11

The innards of a not-too-modern industrial coffee machine. It's in the coffee room down the hall from my office, and it looks like someone was so desperate for caffeine this morning that they tore the door open. We're all a little coffee-deprived this afternoon as a result. It did occur to me, as I passed the machine for the third or fourth time today, that there's probably more computing power in that board than the Apollo command module had available back in the 1969 moon mission.

A beer for folks with gluten problems

I meant to mention this a couple of weeks ago, but it slipped my mind. The LCBO is now carrying a gluten-free beer from Quebec, La Messagere from Les Bieres de la Nouvelle France. It's priced at $16.95 for six . . . and you may have to ask them to dig it out of the back for you: both of the LCBO outlets we've found it at did not have it out on display.

While I wouldn't say it's the best beer I've ever tasted, if you have Celiac disease or other gluten intolerance problems, it may be the only beer you'll be able to safely enjoy. It's actually quite reminiscent of some wheat beers I've tasted, but I'm sure that Alan at A Good Beer Blog will want to mention it (if he hasn't already done so, that is).

Elizabeth used to really enjoy beer tasting, and she's been unable to indulge for years. La Messagere has been a very welcome addition to the LCBO product line.

Update: Oddly enough, Alan had posted something about some other beers from this brewery, and La Messagere was mentioned in the comments to that post. Synchronicity or what?

Search Engines

Every now and again I check to see where some of my traffic originates. A large percentage comes in from Google, Yahoo, and MSN search engines. Not that this is a bad thing: it's nice to have folks find my blatherings from outside the traditional blogosphere (sometimes it seems as if almost everyone who visits here is also a blogger).

Sometimes, however, I wonder just how my blog hits the search criteria shown. For example, among the last 100 visits, these have been some of the search strings used:

• Pappenheim Rapier — okay, I've referenced my renaissance fencing activities a few times, so that's fair.
• Rona Ambrose — Four hits here. I've mentioned her all of twice that I can remember, and I'm sure the folks on the Blogging Tories list are much more likely to have referenced her much more frequently than that.
• NHL strike effects — I've mentioned the entire NHL in one posting (I'm not a particularly hockey-mad blogger, I guess).
• Cilento wine — A brief review of one of their wines (2002 Shiraz).
• Political simulation — A post about a Stardock game called "The Political Machine".
• Order of canada ahenakew — Okay, this is a reasonable search. I did write about Ahenakew and referenced him being a member of the Order.
• Football AND metaphor — A recent QotD post.
• Canadian 1st SSF badge — Fair: a specific mention of the 1st SSF and the US Combat Infantryman's Badge.
• Skinhead bloggers — Two hits for this one. One of my most-requested photos: from the November 2004 Toronto blogger get-together at the Bishop and Belcher.
• Tina the brittle tech writer — Another fair cop: I mentioned Scott Adams' brief visit to the main tech writing mailing list and the almost immediate creation of the "Tina" character in his Dilbert comic.
• Health effects of defoliant testing in gagetown — I referenced the then-breaking news about the Canadian government secretly allowing defoliants like Agent Orange to be used at CFB Gagetown.
• Price of Remo Farina 2001 Valpolicella RIPASSO — Ah, yes, a wine I didn't give a good review for. I hope the searcher had a better experience with that particular Ripasso than I did.
• Ratzinger "gay pope" — I've only mentioned the new pope once on the blog, but the string "gay pope" did appear in a Colby Cosh quotation in that entry, so this was a valid hit.
• Movie-Mondovino — For a movie I haven't yet seen, this has shown up several times in my posts. I should get around to seeing it sometime soon.
• Strict training AND S&M — This one had me scratching my head: I couldn't think of anything that seemed to match, until I remembered a throw-away line on the "hog slapper" post. What's worse: I foolishly ran that particular search on Google, and I showed up in the top 70 hits for that string. I suspect my PG-13 rating is suddenly at risk. . .
• Words "boo daddy" — I was a bit puzzled at this one, but the string appeared in a quoted section back in September, so I guess it's reasonable.
• Battle of Bosworth reenactment 1985 — I've mentioned good King Richard a few times . . . and it's only fair, as I was his chosen successor.
• Toronto channel 47 TV show "night drive" — A false positive, I think: Garnet Rogers' song "Night Drive" is one of my favourite pieces, but I think the searcher was looking for a TV show of that name.
• Saskatchewan diamonds — Another Colby Cosh article referenced under that exact title. Probably a valid search result.
• All Saints Estate "Late harvest" Marsanne melbourne — I mention wine a fair bit, but I don't think anything here would be a good match for that search string.
• What is a diktatorship — I've mentioned this idea several times, so perhaps it was a useful hit for the searcher (in spite of the speelign eroor).
• Belinda Stronach nude — To my astonishment, there was only a single search for this in the past hundred hits. usually it's more like one in 20.
• Group sex Edmonton Balaklava — I don't think this searcher found anything useful here, either.
• Diane Schroer outside the beltway — Ah, yes, the transsexual former Army colonel who was illegally denied a job in the Library of Congress.
• Oppossum Ontario Canada — I've used the word Oppossum just once, and it was a reference to an etched brass detail for modellers. Probably not a useful result.
• Where do rivers run uphill — I've quoted David Friedman's "and the rivers will run uphill" a few times, almost always to indicate that something is incredibly unlikely.
• Mike Giuliano film