Flutterby™! From 2005-04-01 to 2005-04-29

Terri Schiavo dies. Watch for the angel to roll the rock away from the morgue door come Sunday.

Once again, Domain Monger rawks, giving a level of personalized service that just feels above and beyond the call.

I feel that I should note that the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction has reported that the intelligence on WMDs in Iraq was wrong, and that this faulty information was fed to the Bush administration.

I think I need to go to the library, poke through some microfilm, and read the above the fold New York Times for late 2002 and early 2003.

[ related topics: Politics War ]

I generally avoid the April Fools thing, but Brad is doing a particularly good job of it today.

And you "shave the ounces" cycling weenies might be interested in the FasterCard^tm, everyone else who hasn't dealt with the "carbon fiber handlebar tape" crowd can skip it.

[ related topics: Humor Bicycling ]

QOTD, and, no, this isn't an April Fools joke, the date on the article is last Sunday. Pastor and parent Ray Mummert, talking about the uproar over Dover, Pennsylvania's school district choosing to teach "Intelligent Design":

We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture.

Thanks to Elf.

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Quotes Sociology Current Events Education ]

The season is starting to kick in. This one was just on the west side of White's Hill, near Spirit Rock.

[ related topics: Photography Bay Area ]

Okay, all of you world travelers, how about some suggestions on a visit to Alaska, the week of August 13^th this year? Gotchas on cruise packages? Things not to be missed? Wants: lots of whales and wildlife and cool views.

And for the rest of you, some images from an overcast hike this morning:

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment Archival Dan & Charlene's 2005 Alaska Trip Alaska ]

Trekked in to San Francisco today, a little later than my normal leaving the valley, saw some turkey vultures sunning themselves in the morning sun, and some wild turkeys, and was a little early getting to my meeting, so I spent some time wandering along the beach out in the Western Addition. It was a bird day.

[ related topics: Photography Dan's Life Nature and environment Bay Area Birds ]

Ouch! What happens when you try to surf a 22 foot sailboat under Golden Gate Bridge.

[ related topics: Photography Bay Area California Culture ]

Since I managed to get the weight of my aerial photography rig down so low, I'm now looking to add a second "sensor" to the gondola. It would be great to get simultaneous infrared photos with my digital true-color imagery. Does anyone have any experience with infrared film? I want to use it with a fairly inexpensive point-and-shoot with IR remote control like the Olympus Stylus 400.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Larry asked if I'd seen this claim that San Francisco may regulate blogging. The city ordinance it refers to is about election spending, it's hard to excerpt any one bit of it, but:

The proposed legislation would regulate those communications often referred to as issue advocacy or electioneering communications by requiring persons who pay for such communications to: (1) identify themselves on the communication; and (2) file reports with the San Francisco Ethics Commission disclosing the costs of each communication and the names of any other persons who donated money for the communications.

And applies to those who'd spend more than $1000 on this in any calendar year. So, yes, another good example of why campaign finance reform laws are grease on the slippery slope, but not quite as alarmist as some would paint them.

[ related topics: Politics Weblogs Ethics Free Speech Bay Area ]

I've started with Digital Fish, reading a lot of documents marked "Confidential" and sprinkled with greek letters, starting to slog through code. Alas, however, I'm still waiting on computer delivery, so it's all theoretical, but I'm jazzed: I'll be doing what I'm good at, I'll be challenged, I'm excited about the product, and I think I understand what the market for it is. However, the lack of a build environment does have me slightly distracted...

We missed a real vacation last fall because of the whole job situation, and similarly this spring, so we've decided to go a little above for a late summer trek. Normally we'd take a week and go road tripping, but the whale watching on our trip to the San Juan Islands two summers ago has us interested in wildlife. We figured we could probably do 4 or 5 days straight of just that. Hence the query about Alaska.

There are a number of ways to see Alaska.

The cheapest is on land. Fly in, camp and hike, see the back country. But we're more interested in whales and wildlife, and Charlene's not in shape to do serious hiking. You could do this without hiking, via bus and train (or even rental car) from Anchorage, but the whales are more prevalent over on the southeast, in the inside passage. And the terrain is rough enough over there near Juneau that roads and railways are scarce.

The easiest is from a cruise ship; fly to Seattle, cruise out of Bellingham, $1k per person "all expenses paid" for an inside cabin. But that only gives you what you can see from the cruise ship, quickly you have to supplement that with trips on shore, $400 a person for a helicopter flight to a glacier here, $200 for a whale watching trip there. And these trips are hurried, a thousand people descend on a town for a few hours and all hell breaks loose.

Everyone we've talked to who's gone that route has been happy with their experience, but has said they've looked with envy from four stories up as the people down below in the little boats really saw Alaska, and that the experience is really more like a week in Las Vegas with different scenery. Frankly, the idea of wearing a tie to dinner to appease the red staters had no appeal. And after the third time we heard "yeah, two hundred packed seats in the auditorium for the movie, but the next morning I was one of 5 people there to hear the nature talk before we went ashore" we realized that maybe that wasn't an experience tailored to us.

So knowing that a cruise would actually end up being at least twice the advertised price, and probably wouldn't be what we wanted anyway, we started thinking about the "do everything for one rate" trips. What really sounds cool, if money is no object, is a trip on a small charter boat. $3.5-4k each gets you that same 1 to 2 staff to guest ratio as on a big ship, only it's two crew and four guests, and if everyone's having fun on the glacier then the boat leaves a little later. The Heron and the Home Shore are two such boats. So we started with the "well, a cruise is really going to cost us $2k each", and the escalation started, and the next thing you know we're trying to find a schedule which works with Alaska Passages.

But finding two other people to share that week is hard, especially matching arrival and departure schedules, so we were searching around last night and realized that the reason so many (I think we've found four or five) of these charter boats run out of Petersburg, Alaska is that Frederick Sound, one of the great places to see Humpback whales, and Le Conte Glacier, icebergs and calving and all that, are right near by. And you can do day charters of fishing boats and all-day whale watching for a lot less than the 3 hour tours out of the towns with cruise ship docks. And apparently the bald eagles are as thick in Petersburg as pigeons in most towns.

A B&B there appears to run about $100/night, and Alaska Airlines says in their Domestic Contract of Carriage:

Bicycles: One item of bicycling equipment is defined as one bicycle, non-motorized, with single or tandem seats.

Emphasis mine. So we could fly in, pedal from the airport to town (and have transportation to tool around the island), spend the week doing day trips, see whales, glaciers, and experience at least one small part of Alaska up close for roughly the same price as these big ship cruises. And it'd be a vacation that feels a lot more like us.

So we've got a bunch of email out, but right now we're tending toward that.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Aviation Travel Boats Bicycling - Tandem Dan & Charlene's 2005 Alaska Trip Alaska Dan & Charlene's July 2003 San Juan Trip ]

You'd think Homeland security and such people would be the first on this kind of thing.. I use my own DNS server, and even it had been attacked recently. The scale and scope of this rash of DNS poisoning is incredible. The real meat of the story is that the internet is not safe or trustworthy: http://isc.sans.org/presentations/dnspoisoning.php

[ related topics: Bay Area Net Culture ]

From Slashdot to SFGate: This Story - Brought flashbacks.. of ST3, and a personal memory of Mike Cunnyngham (Multiple Felony Con Artist) telling me his Dad (Former Mayor of Dayton TN) and Al Gore were friends (just another lie? who really knows..). But somehow this smells of Mikey. Anyone spotted him?

[ related topics: Politics Art & Culture ]

I'm a bit stunned at how quickly this comes on the heels of the last one. It's also symmetrical: the last one was about data out, this one about data in.

In short, Sony is taking out a patent on a process to create virtual sensory data by directly stimulating the brain with ultrasound. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi...&OS=PN/6,729,337&RS=PN/6,729,337

radix

[ related topics: Intellectual Property ]

If you have any interest in people doing to cars and tires things that should not be done, then fire up Windows Media Player and take a look at this.

[ related topics: Automobiles ]

Just a place to hang bookmarks for Dan & Charlene's 2005 Alaska Trip

[ related topics: Travel Dan & Charlene's 2005 Alaska Trip ]

Annoying use of JavaScript OTD: Alaska Airlines has two annoying features:

1. You can't sign up for their mileage partner program from Opera for some reason, the error message indicates gratuitous use of JavaScript.
2. The really annoying one: Their search button has some JavaScript so that clicking it repeatedly doesn't search again. Fine, except that often what I want to do is search, then use the back button, change parameters, and search again. This means I have to search, use the back button, hit shift-reload, reselect all of the pulldowns (because, noooo, they couldn't just give you a text box for date, could they?) and if I wasn't going to a place that only they fly to I'd have long ago found a carrier whose website actually wants my business.

And, not JavaScript related, but:

3. When retrieving an itinerary, you can enter your last name and one of two fields, the reservation number or the e-ticket number. You also have to select a pulldown to tell which one you filled in. Like software can't check to see if one's filled in and the other is blank?

[ related topics: Web development moron ]

I sent this query as an email to crasch, but I figured the rest of y'all might have some answers. Got a friend who lives simply. He's got a small hut hidden away in a place with a temperate clime, but sometimes come winter he wants just a little bit of heat. In the colder months, he can heat the place with a couple of candles, but he's been thinking that a ring of copper pipe, perhaps run vertically in the hut for convection circulation, would make a nice hot water system if he could find a small heater that he could run off of a 5 gallon propane tank.

I've suggested various ways to build such a heater, and I see that there are some RV systems, but most of the RV systems appear to want a 12v power source. Any of you folks who've investigated living off of the grid seen such a system or have ideas on engineering one?

[ related topics: Cool Technology ]

I remember hearing a couple of weeks ago how Hitachi is working on increasing hard drive storage capacity by storing data vertically, but I didn't really understand the mechanics of what they were talking about until a friend sent me a link to this School House Rock-style animation.

[ related topics: Animation Consumerism and advertising Marketing Education ]

Ex-Dominatrix gets government job, boss is a former client, has long struggle to sort things out. But she seems to have succeeded.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Work, productivity and environment ]

One more Alaska trip planning message, then I'll leave it alone for a few: We're going to have a short (2:15) stopover in Sitka, it seems like the ferry terminal is pretty far out of town. The Sitka Convention & Visitor's Bureau tour page says that there might be a ferry layover tour, but I don't know if they'll be operating at 7:15 in the morning. Anyone have experience with this?

And, we've got two bunks free in our stateroom from Petersburg to Juneau via Sitka on the evening of August 18^th, anyone going that direction want one?

[ related topics: Travel Public Transportation Dan & Charlene's 2005 Alaska Trip Alaska ]

In planning for the August Alaska trip I did a Google search for "Seattle airport hotels". The first page of results were all various aggregators and travel agents. I clicked on AirportHotelSearch.com's Seattle Airport Hotels, it gave me a $54 overnight near the airport, claiming that it had to charge a $5 processing fee to cover their costs. I thought "no worries", entered my data, and then got a cryptic error message.

So I tracked down the actual hotel page, which didn't appear anywhere on those first few pages of search results, discovered that, in fact, the deep discounts promised were the regular fare, and the hotel page gave me a reasonable error message about why my reservation didn't go through.

This is clearly a place where the page ranking mechanisms of the major search engines are failing. If I enter "hotel" or "B&B" and the city I'm interested in, it's extremely hard to pick through all of the people who want to obfuscate my transaction and take their $5 here or there in exchange for... well... the fact that they can insert themselves into a search engine.

So we need a new ranking system. And, as Jerry Halstead's query about cool things to do in the Bay Area reveals, we also need better ways to discover what's available locally. I'm not sure where to go with this, and I've sworn off developing new web apps for a while, but it sure seems like something that takes advantage of weblogs and provides regional information could be a starter...

[ related topics: Web development Bay Area Travel Seattle Dan & Charlene's 2005 Alaska Trip ]

Trained Monkey provides us with a link to my QOTD, from Kragen Sitaker describing "enterprise software":

Enterprise software is software that gets sold to a so-called enterprise. If you know English well, you might think an “enterprise” is something brave, noble, and dangerous, like starting a small business, but in this case, “enterprise” is used to mean the opposite: it means a large, risk-averse company, whose executives use the term to flatter themselves by pretending that they’re engaged in something brave, noble, and dangerous.

[ related topics: Language Quotes Software Engineering Marketing ]

Why does everyone think IE owns the browser space? Maybe it's because referer spammers use IE as their faked browser.

[ related topics: Web development ]

So, FedEx and UPS already have some sort of wireless link to report delivery, I wonder what the economics of attaching a GPS to that would be so that you know where that truck that's got, say, your PowerBook on it is.

Bandwidth charges from people like me mashing "reload" would probably be a bitch.

[ related topics: Web development Wireless Economics ]

Just a few more voices to toss off into that tempestuous ruckus that is the conflict between those of us who are quite happy with the occasional exposure to your children, thank you very much, and those who revel in the parenting experience. Mark's mention of "daddy moments" came at a time when Charlene has been helping an elderly friend of ours with her struggles to spend her last few months, perhaps years, but not likely, at a pace and place of her own choosing. This process has involved not only said friend's children, but lawyers as well, and it's heartbreaking to hear "I just want some peace".

Charlene has regularly accompanied her to the ballet, but with the issues at hand I ended up with the extra tickets and we went and enjoyed in the company of the very young, the occasional little aspiring ballerinas, and the very old, with almost no one in between.

Anyway, not sure what that has to do with anything, but these thoughts were in my head as I read Diane's A brief ache from Cambridge.

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

I hated Lord of the Rings. I didn't know what to expect about Sin City. It was different.

This dark story had me confused - in some ways I wanted to leave early - in others I was drawn into the reality of it all. Its not P.C. thats for sure, its raw truth. The cops and politicians are crooked, the peace is maintained by hookers with machine guns, and violence is always appropriate because evil and good are never the same.

I was drawn into Marv - I am Marv in a way. He is one tough guy - so maybe I'm not Marv really, but I loved the way he acted sympathetically and would walk through walls when he knew he was right. 'Is that all you got'?

I didn't know about the novels. It has graphics but they seemed integrated not like LOTR.

It really is three novellettes so I got confused but I left - wanting to see it again. This is a real movie. Well done.

I now am a Micky Rourke fan.

Ziffle

[ related topics: Movies tolkien Graphics Law Enforcement Guns ]

Need help - we are working on documentation for a web site. It needs to be useful and also I want to be able to print out the docs for a written manual for those of us attracted to paper and three ring binders.

It would be nice if we could collaborate on the docs too, some working on some pages and others other pages.

I was shown Wiki -- and its interesting but I am not finding anything that will allow us to print out the pages in any useful way. Some allow printing to pdf but only one page at a time - now thats useful -- not.

Any ideas?

Ziffle

Andrea Dworkin dead at 58. I was alerted to this by Debra Hyde's notes on the matter, as this seems to have slid quietly by the San Francisco press, but if you were so inclined you could go find all sorts of reports out there: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

So, Diane, while you were at MIT did you score one of the t-shirts (Formerly a link to www.caltechvsmit.com/pranks.html which is now a coupon spammer)?

[ related topics: Humor Education Clothing ]

Day 1 of serious work with the Mac. Fink is an absolute necessity, as is the realization that installing stuff from the distribution CD often means that the packages have been installed, and now you need to go to "Applications" to install the packages. Still not sure if my frustrations are actual frustrations or just a different way of working, I have to use this for a while before I know.

One glimmer of hope dashed was that I heard that x2x might work with a Mac. It might, but only with the X portions. Damn, because what it does is let you use one keyboard and mouse across multiple machines. Which would have totally rocked because then I could have the app running on the PowerBook display, a Linux box up for my editing, and a shared drive or SSH session in between to connect the two. Those who've used it on strictly X setups are overwhelmed by its massive coolness.

Speaking of multiple monitors, if all KVMs suck, anyone have experience on which ones suck least to connect a PowerBook and a PC to a common monitor and USB keyboard and mouse? I'm okay with having my other peripherals tied to a specific machine.

[ related topics: Free Software Dan's Life Open Source Work, productivity and environment Macintosh ]

I held off for nearly two days. Nearly two! So... Finished Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings by Jonathan Raban. An account of his taking a 35 foot sailboat from Seattle to Juneau, with many stops and excursions in between, interspersed with George Vancouver's expedition along the same route. Beautifully written, but somehow that writing got in the way of the tale he was telling. When he docks the boat in a hidden harbor and grabs a floatplane to civilization to go see his dying father in England we discover things about him that, while entertaining, seem like an extraneous tale to the one I was hoping to read about.

I have a wonderful new appreciation for the challenges of the region, feel like I'm wiser for having made the journey with him, but also like I got snippets here and there, missing too much to give myself a full story. So while I look forward to context of the huge whirlpools, at times 10 feet deep, and rapids in sea level saltwater, and I appreciate his insights into what happened to the native American cultures with the influx of the European, I feel like I've gotten only a small taste, and now I want more.

It is with that in mind that I hope I can get a copy of Following the Alaskan Dream: My Salmon Trolling Adventures in the Last Frontier from Marilyn Frink Jordan George. My local bookseller couldn't get it, although their suppliers claim they once had it, and she self-published it, so I'm hoping I can get a copy from her. The PDF of the first chapter makes it sound like one of those family stories I want more of.

Update: Marilyn tells me she's got copies as the web page says. Check goes out today.

[ related topics: Sociology Writing Boats Whitewater Seattle Alaska ]

Videos Challenge Accounts of Convention Unrest:

"We picked him up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed," the officer, Matthew Wohl, testified in December. "I had one of his legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own."

... [snip] ...

During a recess, the defense had brought new information to the prosecutor. A videotape shot by a documentary filmmaker showed Mr. Kyne agitated but plainly walking under his own power down the library steps, contradicting the vivid account of Officer Wohl, who was nowhere to be seen in the pictures. Nor was the officer seen taking part in the arrests of four other people at the library against whom he signed complaints.

Unfortunately, in Bloomberg's New York there's probably little chance that this corrupt cop will get stripped of his badge and prosecuted for perjury, as he so strongly deserves, but at least Mr. Kyne got off with being detained for a few days in harsh conditions and, presumably, a whopping lawyer's bill.

[ related topics: Language Books Photography Invention and Design Law New York ]

RIAA finds Internet2 - So one of the purposes of I2 is to allow a place to play with technologies, as well as fast access between schools, supercomputers.. etc.. What else do they think students would test a network with. I can see the geeks doing this now:

Student1: "Dude, I transfered all 3 Matrix DVD's back and forth 100 times in an hour, had 300 packet retries." Student2: "Kewl, set the MTU smaller and try it again".

[ related topics: Children and growing up broadband California Culture ]

I know we've got some Latin geeks out there who can confirm or deny this (and some Terry Pratchett fans who will be disappointed that his version isn't correct), but by way of Robin D. Laws, The Independent brings us the tale of Christopher John Frayling being granted a nighthood, with the motto:

"Perge, Scelus, Mihi Diem Perficias". The gentleman at the College translated this, quite accurately, as "Proceed, varlet, and let the day be rendered perfect for my benefit." But it sounds better in the demotic: Go ahead, punk, make my day.

[ related topics: Language Terry Pratchett ]

While I've long heard the phrase "eco-porn" used for meaningless pictures of beautiful nature, the SFGate.com article Eco-porn: Great Sex For A Good Cause is a little fluff promo piece on FuckForForest.com (mentioned previously).

[ related topics: Photography Sexual Culture Nature and environment ]

Brad has a request to the online mapmakers: how about walking directions? I'd like to know the bikeability of roads.

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping Bicycling ]

So I can find it again later: Downloading and Formatting Earth Images (Topographic Maps and Aerial Photographs) from Terraserver for Recreational, Scientific, Educational, and GIS Use.

[ related topics: Photography Maps and Mapping ]

In Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings, Jonathan Raban quotes from the journal of Archibald Menzies, sole civilian on George Vancouver's expedition up Alaska's Inside Passage, in August of 1793:

28th. One of [the] Natives was during this time very anxious in his solicitations to go with us to England & Caps Vancouver seemed inclined to indulge him as it was his own voluntary request, but on the 28th punishments were inflicted on board the Discovery of a very unpleasant nature, on seeing which all of the Natives left the Bay, & he that was before so solicitous to go with us now went away without taking leave of us & never afterwards returned to the Vessels.

Some of the records around this time have been lost, but apparently the incident in question was punishment of a sailor for failure to follow orders.

[ related topics: Quotes History Boats Alaska ]

How to make a simple curry anything. (Via Elf).

[ related topics: Food ]

STATES UNITE TO PROMOTE SUV SAFETY WITH $27 MILLION PUBLIC EDUCATION CAMPAIGN

Does anyone else find it ironic that our tax money is going to educate people who drive SUVs because the government gave them a huge tax break to purchase? I wish SUVs were more like motorcycles in that if someone wants to be really stupid about how they drive a bike, they are mostly risking their own asses. But screw up in an SUV and your likely to take out a bunch of other people as well.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Humor moron Consumerism and advertising Currency Education Bicycling ]

About a month ago, MarkV pointed out Simon Tatham's Coroutines in C. Worth a look if your C chops need a little updating. Yesterday, Rafe had a link to Sam Ruby's Continuations for Curmudgeons, which showed me Python's facility for doing the same thing. I hadn't run into yield yet, and it's a cool way to think about restructuring code.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Python ]

According to the Times of London, Christies is offering for sale the oldest known map that shows the coast of the Americas and the Pacific, dated 1507. Considering that it took 4 months each way to sail to the New World from Europe, this is a lot of data to gather in a little over a decade. What intrigues me is the projection used, which even 500 years ago was making an attempt to render the continents in their true relative sizes. This is true state of the art imaging for the 16th century, the equivalent of our getting pictures back from the Huygens probe. (Sorry about the tiny picture, but Christies hasn't yet posted a better one. Maybe our imaging systems still need work.)

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Graphics Maps & Mapping ]

It's a damned good thing I'm psyched about my work today, otherwise I'd be tempted to slack a bit and write a cached native Python version of http://mapper.acme.com/ . Takes a lattitude, longitude (or UTM coordinates) and scale factor and serves you up an HTML table with images sourced from TerraServer-USA, topo maps or satellite pictures. Much better coverage of the areas I'm interested in than Google Maps satellite view feature, and no "when's my freakin' image gonna load already, or will it?" of WorldWind. For instance, satellite imagery of the house I grew up in and house of my high school years, a topo of the town we're visiting in Alaska this summer, the put-in on the Ocoee (and I vaguely remember giving them permission, but it's kinda cool to run across your own work, check out all of my photos on this Ocoee page!) and where I'm sitting right now.

[ related topics: Photography Dan's Life Chattanooga Whitewater Maps and Mapping Real Estate Python Alaska ]

FindLaw's Sherry Kolb with some musings on a proposed bill to ban male circumcision.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Health Law ]

Mac observation of the moment: I can adapt to most of the quirks of this platform, many of these things are just different, and while I have my preferences I can adapt. The one thing I hate hate hate is the stupid menu bar and focus rules. That whole "gives you an infinitely tall target" thing may have won out when a 9" 512kx384k screen was the rule, but in this day of multiple monitors and two decades of mousing skills, having to go all the freakin' way over to the other screen to do something is beyond annoying. Worse is when I get over to the menu and realize that the app I was reading from didn't have focus. What do the Mac folks who are using those huge displays that have to have two DVI ports to drive them do?

(And what's with Safari's word wrapping in text boxes: Type in a multi-line paragraph, go insert something in the middle, see that line extend and not wrap. How utterly 1981.)

[ related topics: User Interface Macintosh ]

I knew that European archers use fingers wrapped around the string to draw, with the arrow held in place between the fingers, and gloves to protect the fingers from the release of the bow string. I didn't know that Asian archery developed a completely different style, using the thumb to draw, and protecting the thumb from the string with a ring.

[ related topics: History Cool Technology ]

I'm a big believer in drinking lots of water. "Piss clear" is the motto, and I credit my weight loss to retraining myself to drink water when I thought I was hungry. However, too much water can be deadly. Something to think about, especially since I'm signed up for a 31 mile hike on May 7^th.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Health Physiology ]

Student asks Scalia the pertinent question:

One gay student asked whether government had any business enacting and enforcing laws against consensual sodomy. Following Scalia's answer, the student asked a follow-up: 'Do you sodomize your wife?' The audience was shocked, especially since Mrs. Scalia [Maureen] was in attendance. The justice replied that the question was unworthy of an answer."

This article identifies the questioner as law student Eric Berndt. Mr. Berndt needs some public accolades!

[ related topics: Sexual Culture moron Law Marriage ]

After that contentious Scalia thread down there, maybe we can rile up someone to embarass Tom DeLay, who recently came out against freedom:

The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that's nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn't stop them.

(Thanks to Lyn). This is wrong for the same reason Scalia was wrong when he said:

The Constitution just sets minimums. Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires.

No, what should distinguish our system and approach to the law is that The Constitution needs to be interpreted as setting maximum limits on government, not mininimums on citizens.

[ related topics: Religion Politics Privacy moron Law Civil Liberties ]

I'm writing my first "real" code in about three years. I stuck in VBA-land writing an extension to ESRI ArcGIS 9 to produce cartograms. The enviornment is both good and bad. I finally started to split the window and noticed that I keep pressing ALT-Up Arrow to try to switch to the window above. I haven't used BRIEF in almost a decade...

[ related topics: Writing Real Estate ]

You know you're too far gone when... I read this article about Welfare fraud in the Bay Area, which starts out:

Brigido and Quintina Pullan, both 81, have no use for the pair of power wheelchairs and the two semielectric hospital beds sitting in unopened boxes at their tiny South of Market rental unit. Yet the federal government's Medicare program was billed more than $15,000 for them.

And my first reaction was "Ooh, I'll bet those power wheelchairs would make kick-ass robot platforms. I wonder if there'll be a surplus market for them?"

[ related topics: Politics Robotics Bay Area Economics ]

So I know some folks out there liked Sideways. We rented it last night and... well... it was kind of like Leaving Las Vegas, ie: drunk tries to consume himself into oblivion, only without the happy ending. Completely unsympathetic characters. Well played, but I couldn't find any reason to care.

What made it work for others?

[ related topics: Movies ]

We went to see Alasdair Fraser at the Palace of Fine Arts, but it wasn't him solo, it was a performance with the SF Scottish Fiddlers, a group of folks into Scottish music. They range from the learning through the jaw dropping incredible, but the overall performance really worked.

They're loading up into buses and heading north, if you're in Oregon or Washington it's worth checking to see if they're coming and catching a performance. We (and Zack) really enjoyed it.

[ related topics: Music Bay Area Theater & Plays ]

MarkV pointed out a pair of Blackbirds parked on the ramp at Edwards AFB. A quick search brought up one of 'em parked a few hangars down. And, while we continue to publish porn of a certain sort, I can't tell if I'm looking at the top of Half Dome (I don't recognize the "diving board" or a few other features, but that's about where it should be), although it looks like Half Dome in the lower res Google version.

[ related topics: Aviation Maps and Mapping Yosemite ]

Two stolen from Sensible Erection:

• Can't find anything more on this, and it being an Ananova story makes it instantly suspect, but a robot builder claims to be building more realistic sex dolls, including internal heaters for body temperature and a pseudo-heart/pulse.
• An archeologist claims to have found a 7,200 year old statue depicting sex.

And, Philip Greenspun asks about an Efficient Market Hypothesis for Dating? as he ponders the "really nice guy" who's looking for a relationship but can't find one. One of the problems with simple economic models is that there's a lot of friction, flocking and momentum that's rarely accounted for, but it may be a useful light in which to cast that search. If we consider that certain market forces and contractual obligations, like being a public versus a private company, or being married, imply behaviors which transcend the simple producer/consumer relationship, I think there might be some useful parallels to draw out even further.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Robotics History Sociology Current Events Economics Marriage ]

Over at Sgt Stryker's Daily Briefing, there's a note by Joe Comer titled Who needs commercial stuff when scroungers rule. It's worth reading on several levels, from a "the street finds its own uses..." to why large systems often have trouble moving quickly and acquiring the right technology to a recounting of a different time and place than we live in now, when telephone calls home from the war in Korea could cost a soldier a month's paycheck, and do-it-yourself networks were a key to getting all sorts of perks. But this note struck me:

God bless one man, not with us any more: Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) had about the best ham station on earth. And he had volunteers to staff it. On holidays, he would place our calls for free, and everybody got to call home without the expense of a collect call. Now, that was a man who cared about the GI's. And everybody in the service at the time knew it.

Let's flash back, say, 15 years. At that point a Fido Technology Network might have been a reasonable way to help a soldier stationed overseas make contact with loved ones at home. How many Senators do you think knew such a network even existed? I'm sure if I stretch I can come up with examples later, although all of them will be poor analogies, but... well... there are a lot of social changes tied up in the changes between that paragraph and now, some on a personal level, some on a worldwide technological level, and if you ever catch me spewing bullshit about "the good old days", the feeling that one person can make a difference by pursuing their hobby is most of what I want to evoke.

[ related topics: broadband History Cool Technology Community ]

A bit of discussion on web economics from one of the Penny Arcade founders, in the context of Schlock Mercenary's recent departure from Keenspot.

[ related topics: Web development New Economy Consumerism and advertising Economics ]

[Further Edit: Reading the book now. it's fascinating, and I think that I was misrepresenting Rees' thesis in the places where Pete was disagreeing. More later]

[Edit: Pete makes a convincing argument that Laurence Rees is full of crap and I need a better look at history, so feel free to ignore this post...]

Had the rat boys over for dinner last night, and this morning ended up driving Alec's book bag over to him at school. In the process, heard a bit of Laurence Rees on Fresh Air. Rees is author of Auschwitz: A New History, but unfortunately that book doesn't sound nearly as interesting as the discussion on the show. In it he talked about the differences between Nazism and other regimes that we often compare it to, like Stalinism. Rees' opinion is that one of the things that differentiated Nazism was that, unlike most totalitarian regimes, it was a social structure that actively encouraged innovation. Radical solutions within the framework and belief structure were encouraged, and the eventual emergence of the death camps wasn't initially planned, but lead from decision to decision until those who implemented the "work them 'til they die then kill them" felt like that was the only way to accomplish the overarching goal because circumstances had lead them to that stage.

I'm not doing his sequence justice, but he described a decision making process that started with the desire to expel the Jews from Germany, but when they couldn't find other nations to emigrate to, ghettos were created. Isolated, the economy was closed, which meant that soon those inside the ghetto couldn't buy food. The solution proposed was an organized labor system, from which they could earn food. But, of course, you have those who couldn't work, the artificially low wages didn't allow support of non-working members of the community, and this lead step by step to the conclusion that killing large numbers of people was the more humane option.

Through decision chains like this, Germans could accept a belief chain that started with "the Jews control Churchill, and Churchill won't let Jews living in Germany emigrate to England" and ended with "Jews brought the Genocide on themselves".

This struck a particular chord recently because I've been seeing a lot of places where there's a cultural willingness to base a decision structure on flawed premises. And while I could force and stretch some issues of national importance into these modes, I'm thinking more of simple corporate politics; situations where it becomes accepted that, say, someone who refined a piece of code was the originator of the technique, thus the original implementor is stuck trying to work within that flawed belief structure, because a direct attempt to take credit would be interpreted as backstabbing or disloyalty. Once we find a belief system that makes sense we build on it, rather than periodically re-checking our premises to make sure that the decisions we're making are still valid in the broader context of reality.

[ related topics: Politics Books Invention and Design Sociology Work, productivity and environment Economics ]

Zack(who's staying with us this week) just exclaimed: "Holy shit, the new pope looks exactly like the Sith lord"

[ related topics: Religion Dan's Life Current Events ]

In my ongoing attempts to obsess over something that's not happening for another 4 months, here's http://www.juneauphotos.com/ , regular photographs of the Juneau area. Almost 1,600 of them, over 8 years.

From the FAA's Alaska Airports photos and diagrams, an oblique shot of PSG, the Petersburg airport, including some background and the town itself, two overhead shots (1, 2), and the diagram.

The crashed DC3 that used to be outside of Petersburg along Mitkoff Highway and the Wrangell Narrows has apparently been sold to be a museum piece up in Juneau as of May 2000, so it may be up there by now.

The Project Gutenberg online version of The Alaskan by James Oliver Curwood

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment Alaska ]

Obesity Danger May Have Been Overstated. Um, yeah. Okay, I hike once a week and take the occasional bike ride, so maybe I'm a little more athletic than some, but I'm no gym monkey or distance runner. If I round up on my height, I'm a little above the middle of my suggested BMI range, and, according to my fancy dancy measures body fat by impedance electronic scale, if I got towards the bottom of that range I'd be in the single digits of percent body fat, way into the "risking heart damage" range of anorexia.

The new analysis found that obesity — being extremely overweight — is indisputably lethal. But like several recent smaller studies, it found that people who are modestly overweight actually have a lower risk of death than those of normal weight.

(Mark V had a link to the JAMA article)

[ related topics: Health Physiology ]

In The Swinging Accident, Violet Blue reports on accidentally attending a swinger's party.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Just passing along a meme in pointing out that on the 10^th anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Time Magazine runs on its cover someone who said of the bomber: "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building" (Interview with George Gurley in the New York Observer, 8/20/2002). Who needs Al-Jazeera?

[ related topics: Quotes Politics War ]

I biked over the hill today for grocery shopping and a meeting, and on the way back through San Anselmo I was reminded of the date by a high school student who called out: "Happy 4/20!" Indeed.

[ related topics: Drugs Children and growing up Dan's Life Bay Area San Anselmo ]

I keep getting reminders of just how much more complex security issues are with wireless networks. Here's a good reason never to pay for wireless access. Setup a laptop in a public place as a wireless access point with some dummy pages stolen from T-Mobile Wireless and start farming credit card numbers as people pay for their day's surfing.

[ related topics: Wireless ]

Slate today offers, for no particular reason, a meditation on the works of e.e.cummings, who after all these years years enjoys a particularly strange position in letters. Everybody knows of him, we all read his poems in school, and his style is instantly recognizable. Yet he doesn't come to mind when we discuss the great poets of the last century. anybody who tries to fiddle with the typesetting for effect looks not daring but rather derivitive of cummings. And in a world where the real vigor in poetry is coming out of the performance and slam arenas, his "inaudible" work is useless. Which, I suppose, makes him unique. Maybe that's honor enough.

[ related topics: Language Pop Culture Typography Poetry ]

One of your fellow geeks registered the six names he thought were most probably going to include the one chosen by the new Pope. He got it right on his first guess. I was hoping for some catholic porn, but the guy's got different intentions. Benedict XVI

[ related topics: Religion Erotic Sexual Culture Invention and Design ]

I have, over the years, looked at some pretty amazing whitewater and thought "I think that's runnable". I don't, for instance, think Jesse Sharp was trying to kill himself when he died running Niagara Falls in a C-1. Maybe I'm just getting old, but "that looks runnable" was not my first thought upon seeing these photos of the Rupert River. Check out the virtual tour.

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment Whitewater ]

I scored an Olympus C-2020 Zoom from eBay and bought a Hoya H72 filter. The imagery is great and the shutter speed is 1/60 second. Plenty fast enough for my application. Note: the trees in the pictures are green. Also, note how bright the leaves are of the trees in the shadow of the building!

[ related topics: Photography ]

BoingBoing pointed to video of U.C. Berkeley Professor Jasper Rine trying to flush a laptop thief out of his class. There's a transcript of the pertinent bits:

I'm not particularly concerned about the computer. But the thief, who thought he was only stealing an exam, is presently - we think - is probably still in possession of three kinds of data, any one of which can send this man, this young boy, actually, to federal prison. Not a good place for a young boy to be.

I've no sympathy for the thief, but as Rine goes on to detail the three classes of information that were left, allegedly unprotected, on this laptop: data from an NIH study, trade secrets from a biotech company, and notes from a pre-IPO company, I start to wonder if Rine himself doesn't need some heavy pressure from the interested parties. We don't get more details on what sorts of these secrets these were, or how the laptop was stolen, but that this allegedly confidential and valuable information wasn't better secured would make me nervous about, for instance, being involved in an NIH study; was there personal information there?

Hopefully the laptop will be recovered, but I'd also like to see a full investigation of what Professor Rine was doing carrying around this allegedly sensitive data in as unsecured a manner as he claims.

[ related topics: Bay Area security ]

I got a postcard from Wired magazine, announcing their high-tech expo Nextfest is coming the Chicago this summer. It offered me 3 ways of attending: 1) Pay 10 bucks for a ticket and get a free year of Wired; 2) Skip the subscription and pay only 8 bucks; or 3) Join the Reader Host Committee and get a free ticket in exchange for distributing emails to 10 friends. Its a hard decision; Pay 10 bucks of my hard-earned bread to see models of flying cars and home nuclear reacters from China, or rat out my friends and loved ones to the marketing department of Conde' Nast Publications. I have decided to create a 4th alternative: I am saving up the addresses of the next 10 spammers who try to entice me with offers for herbal Viagra, cheap home loans or can't-miss stock tips. I look forward to meeting them at the expo.

[ related topics: Spam Consumerism and advertising Marketing Economics ]

A few quick ones I don't have a chance to do the background on to back up:

• Andrew Orlowski cliams a study has shown that email destroys IQ faster than marijuana, alas searches on the pertinent names aren't pulling up the source material. [Update: New Scientist article.]
• Mark Morford's latest rant points to a Knight Ridder article that claims that the latest U.S. Department of State Patterns of Global Terrorism report shows terrorism incidents at their highest since 1985. Don't have time to go verify this or make sure that the article is what it claims to be.

Finally, a question that I think may have an analog to other issues: It seems like the SUV has peaked. But whether or not it has, do you think that the social shunning from a small minority of the SUV over the past decade or so helped, hurt, or had no effect on the sales of that class of car?

[ related topics: Drugs History Net Culture Automobiles Mark Morford ]

The Oops List, pictures of incidents you're glad you're not involved in, mostly aviation, led me to Irish Luck - Surviving Partial Ejection from A-6 Aircraft, just in case your seat malfunctions and blows you half way through your canopy.

[ related topics: Photography Aviation ]

Augh. I've been spoiled by Python and Perl: I'm missing a convenient lambda facility in C++. Function pointers would make the code harder to read, but I'm on my fifth "iterate over this list in a slightly weird way and do ..." idiom.

[ related topics: Perl Software Engineering Python ]

Asha and I went to the preview of the new "Ocean Journey" section of the Tennessee Aquarium. The "petting zoo" was quite interesting as was the butterfly garden. I brought along the Oly 2020 and kept unscrewing the Infrared filter:

[ related topics: Butterflies Photography Invention and Design Chattanooga ]

Mechwarrior Land Walker - Made in Japan. Not exactly up to running across rough terrain while shooting at others, but I'll bet it will soon enough.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Sports ]

Yesterday I woke up, hiked 13 miles (in 4 hours), came home and pulled French broom for two hours. So when Charlene got back from her errands with a video, I was all over sloth.

The video was The Final Cut. Not the Pink Floyd album, the movie written and directed by Omar Naim. I've whined here before about the lack of ideas in modern SciFi, and in looking about at reviews of this film maybe it's because I've been ignoring film and looking to print, but this one spoke to a lot of themes.

The premise: At birth, parents can buy a device which records memories. After death, "cutters" (ie: film editors) edit the life down to a eulogy. Obviously there are things for which the deceased don't want to be remembered, or which the living don't want reminders of, and the particularly nasty cases fall to Robin Williams's character.

It's fashionable to hate Robin Williams nowadays, but he turns in a perfectly serviceable character, haunted by his past, living vicariously through his subjects, and willing to absolve those whose life he extracts as he searches for absolution from his own demons.

Omar Naim turns in that sort of meticulously crafted film that accomplished but young directors can sometimes do. Small touches matter a lot, but unlike old hams (ie: Stanley Kubrick ) don't always leap out as subtext applied with a power sprayer. The extras on the DVD show watercolor storyboards; he was obviously willing to go the extra mile on visualization but divert when the actors took him onto places he didn't expect.

Good stories also aren't about what they're about, and Naim leaves room for interpretations. He makes some judgements, but leaves many questions open, so that in the end I felt like I'd watched a fairly light movie, but in the process got exposed to some explorations of ideas that I think were worthwhile.

Recommended.

[ related topics: Movies History Fashion Birds Video ]

Woke up early this morning with a bad case of the itches, must be lots of poison oak up there amongst the French broom. Yesterday my hands were still too torn up to do much, but I broke a rope four times trying to pull one of the more recalcitrant ones out with the car. I think that one's going to need a spade or whatever the modern incarnation of 2,4,5-T is.

Anyway, did some searches, but clicked randomly way down in the tens, twenties and thirties of search results. Discovered Virtual Tourist, which looks like it could be a version of that collaborative travel site we've talked about, if only they could do a little graphic design work and make the content a little more promising (and maybe find a way to integrate off-site data better). I found a bunch of local color stuff in the Petersburg, Alaska entry, but while the Juneau entry had some interesting tips I had to wade through a number of all caps entries from people who'd obviously not made it further than The Red Dog as they stumbled off the cruise ships. Supplements the Juneau Convention & Visitor's Bureau site nicely, though. Depending on how we're feeling, the Glacier Gardens might make a stop in a touristy sort of way.

Been wanting to throw this picture up somewhere I can remember it, not because it's a stellar beautiful shot, but because it captures Devil's Thumb from the vantage of Petersburg. Devil's Thumb is a fun addition to a search if you're looking for climbing stories, Jon Krakauer's got one, and there are a number of "spent some time dragging sleds up the glacier, decided that even that was too dangerous, turned around and camped out 'til our boat rendezvous arrived" tales.

(random pictures of Petersburg from someone who used to work at a fish processing company there)

I'm reading John Muir's Travels in Alaska, having finished One Man's Wilderness by Sam Keith from the materials of Richard Proenneke and T.C. Boyle's Drop City, the latter two having been recommended (and ordered on their initiative) by Michael et al. at Booksmith at San Anselmo when they saw what else I was reading (Beats Amazon cold). Notes on those coming soon, but one that might be more appropriate to the modern cruise ship traveler: Back in 1890, in Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist, by E. L. Lom (Found while I was looking for images of the aforementioned Devil's Thumb) had this observation:

The tourist goes necessarily when and where the steamer goes, will have an opportunity to see all there is of note or worth seeing in Southeastern Alaska.

Here's to getting off the damned ship once in a while.

[ related topics: Books Photography Nature and environment Boats San Anselmo Alaska Whyte's Booksmith ]

Hack The Planet had a link to A Sell-Out's Tale, wherein a writer describes a press junket for an automobile roll-out. I read it with interest, after all hanging out in exotic places with all of the accoutréments sounds like fun. But in light of the musings on web economics, makes me think about mainstream audience weblogs...

[ related topics: Weblogs Space & Astronomy Writing Automobiles Economics Archival ]

So that I can remember to point Charlene to it: Edge: Assortative Mating Theory: A Talk with Simon Baron-Cohen involving some theories about autism and sex (not gender) differences(thanks to Rebecca's Pocket).

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Sociology ]

A few days ago I asked if y'all thought the SUV backlash had hurt or helped SUV sales. A follow-up: Has it hurt or helped the sales of more fuel efficient vehicles, like hybrids?

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Automobiles ]

Didn't take the camera yesterday, so some experiences just have to live in memory. Charlene dragged me out for a break yesterday afternoon, biked out the Bear Valley Trail to Arch Rock and back. Gobs of flowers, three whale spouts (may have been the same animal or two animals), the usual assortment of deer (albino and otherwise), blackbirds, and a really cool classic red-topped woodpecker.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Nature and environment Bay Area ]

Courtesy of Jalopnik, some pages from Mitsuoka Motors , a Japanese car company I never heard of. They have a range of vehicles from Excalibur knock-offs down to micro-cars that look like something from a Lego layout. Even more intriguing is their sublime Japlish advertising slogans. In the micro-car page, I'm still trying to figure out the Santa references.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Lego Mindstorms Automobiles Graphic Design ]

San Francisco AM station to go to an "all podcast" format. The Inifinity owned station will style itself KYouRadio and broadcast on 1550 KYCY-AM.

[ related topics: Bay Area Net Culture ]

Flutterbarians are likely aware of the Dilithium Crystal that powered just about everything in the Star Trek Science Fiction Universe.

According to:

• New Scientist
• The Register
• And others...

Gene Roddenberry may have seen and written about the future, because it seems that lithium tantalate crystals have pyroelectric properties that "strips electrons from the (deuterium) gas molecules and accelerates them to huge energies. The electrons then collide with stationary nuclei in the crystal and generate X-rays" on the order of 10⁷ volts aka 'nuclear fusion'.

It's very early yet.. but maybe a future "SUV" will be powered by crystals... lithium crystals.. di-lithium crystals.

[ related topics: Humor Star Trek Invention and Design Bioinformatics Space & Astronomy ]

As I mentioned, I'm covered in poison oak from my ill-fated attempts at removing French Broom. I've got probably a quarter of the area cleared, and I think I'm chastened enough to wear appropriate clothing next time, but I've been thinking about building tool that both kept my hands out of the underbrush and gave me more leverage than I'm getting with rope and the car (which can't always pull in the appropriate direction). It looks like the Weed Wrench has a better gripper design than I was envisioning (although seeing their design has given me an idea...), and isn't another freakin' project.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Nature and environment Cool Technology ]

The author of Stay Free! Daily has postulated the existence of a dazzling new concept:

So, everyone's familiar with the concept of "wuv", right? The emotion related to "love" but more commonly praticed by bunnies, little pudgy naked babies/angels, and other cute things? As in a small, treacly cute figure with extended arms saying "I wuv you this much."

awww...ugh...

Okay, since we all get the concept of "wuv," now consider this:

Wust.

Thanks(?) to Elf.

[ related topics: Language Humor Sexual Culture ]