July 31, 2008

Don't talk to the police

If you haven't seen this pair of videos by a law professor and a police officer on the topic of why, if you're under suspicion for some crime, you shouldn't talk to the police, you should check it out. The basic concept is that even if you're innocent (and it's likely you're guilty of something) if what you say doesn't directly incriminate you, it is likely to be interpreted as incriminating, or contain inconsistencies which would potentially seem incriminating. The police officer also gives some useful background on the various techniques he uses to get suspects to talk. Practice saying "I want my lawyer."

Posted by ekr at 9:05 PM | Comments (0)

July 26, 2008

Why do airport bathroom stalls open inward?

I flew from SFO to LAX today, and noticed again a phenomenon that has annoyed me before: the doors on the bathroom stalls on both airports open inward (evidence below).

Ordinarily, this isn't a big deal, but in the airport it is. There you are with your bag. You walk into the stall, and then you somehow have to close the door behind you, but since it has to clear your bag you need to cram up against the toilet to let the door clear. If the doors just opened outward, this wouldn't be a problem. In SFO, at least, this would be no problem; the aisle is at least 6 feet wide. Even the LAX aisle is wide enough, though it might be a bit cramped to walk through with the door open if you were really fat. Still, this seems like it would be a simple improvement.

Posted by ekr at 6:27 PM | Comments (5)

Dictation versus typing

Barry Leiba and Jarrod observe that doctors routinely use dictation plus transcription:

Oh boy "And Doctors." A Forensic Pathologist I know spends at least 15 hours a week outside of the office dictating cases. Especially important ones she types herself, but it takes much, much more of her time than recording a dictation, emailing the .mp3 to the transcriptionist, and then reading and correcting the report for errors before sending it out. Typing speed isn't really a limiting factor either, as she does about 80wpm.

I certainly understand why one would want to dictate material if you were doing something else with your hands at the time (cf. TV shows where you see a coroner dictate while performing an autopsy). But I must say it's not apparent to me why you would dictate instead of typing if you were a good typist. I've tried dictating material to authors and always found it much easier to just type it in myself. Is this just a skill you have to practice? Is there something special about doctors?

Posted by ekr at 6:15 PM | Comments (6)

July 25, 2008

Fire suppression versus global warming

This Science article reports on a counterintuitive result: extensive fire suppression reduces, rather than increases the amount of carbon captured by trees.
Lightning-caused fires serve a natural mechanism within forests. They destroy small trees and underbrush while often allowing large trees to remain standing and flourish. But since roughly 1910, U.S. forest managers have sought to fight as many small forest fires as possible. That policy has allowed more shrubs and small trees to grow than in the past. The increasing quantity of vegetation, scientists calculated recently using tree measurements and other data, sucks 50 million metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere each year--roughly 14% of the total amount of carbon pulled in by U.S. forests. However, historical data on tree sizes weren't available to allow scientists to confirm that the forests had absorbed that much carbon over the past century.

To do that, ecologist Michael Goulden of the University of California, Irvine, and a grad student used previously overlooked forest inventory measurements taken in the 1930s on 269 California forest wilderness plots. They then compared these data with measurements taken in the 1990s on 260 plots in the same general vicinity. The number of trees per hectare across all plots rose by 4% in 60 years, an increase the scientists attributed to the federal policy on suppressing fires. Yet the total amount of carbon held by trees declined by 34% over the same period, the researchers report this week in Geophysical Research Letters.

The scientists conclude that the large trees in the plots had to compete with the growing population of small trees, making the big trees more susceptible to drought, wind, and insect attack than they would have been without the crowding. Because the large trees died, they didn't absorb as much carbon dioxide. "It's counterintuitive," says Goulden

I've heard arguments before that fire suppression is bad policy because it blocks the thinning effect of occasional fires, with the result that wildfires become more serious. [*] [Note that I'm not saying that's the cause of this year's severe wildfires. According to the fireman I talked to on Wednesday, the vegetation is especially dry this year—as dry now as it usually is at the end of the summer.] It's interesting to ask whether there's some optimal, nonzero, amount of fire suppression, or whether it would be best to just let fires burn except where they actually threaten human activity. Unfortunately, this is a topic I know basically nothing about.

Posted by ekr at 9:55 PM | Comments (3)

July 23, 2008

The electrosecretary

From Arthur C. Clarke's A Fall of Moondust (1961):
When he had finished dictating, he paused ot marshal his ideas, could think of nothing further, and added: "Copy to Chief Administrator, Moon: Chief Engineer, Farside; Supervisor, Traffic Control; Tourist Commissioner; Central Filing, Classify as Confidential."

He pressed the transcription key. Within twenty seconds, all twelve pages of his report, impeccably typed and punctuated, with several grammatical slips corrected, had emerged from the office telefax. He scanned it rapidly, in case the electrosecretary had made mistakes. She did this occasionally (all electrosecs were "she"), especially during rush periods when she might be taking dication from a dozen sources at once. In any event, no wholly sane machine could cope with all the eccentricities of a language like English, and every wise executive checked his final draft before he sent it out. Many were the hilarious disasters that had overtaken those who had left it all to electronics.

This is one of those predictions that's sort of right and sort of wrong. While practically nobody dictates letters any more, it's certainly true that you can't trust computer's attempts to interpret ambiguous human input, as anyone who has tried to use a voice recognition system, typed on an iPhone can attest, or carelessly accepted the suggestions of their spell checker can attest. It's not usually an artifact of excess load, though: computer performance doesn't usually degrade that way. Of course, a modern system of this type would most likely run on a local computer, rather than some remote centralized timesharing system that faxes you your output, but this was a common blind spot of science fiction writers prior to the personal computer era.

More off-base is the assumption that dictation plus transcription (whether manual or automatic) is a good way to write. It's true that people wrote letters that way back in 1961, but practically nobody does that now. This isn't because computer voice recognition systems suck (though they do)—plenty of people could afford to have a full time secretary type their messages—it's just vastly more convenient to use a modern word processing system than it is to dictate, even to a secretary. Pretty much only older people who never learned to type or use a computer need to dictate any more. I'm skeptical even a much better voice recognition system would be good enough to displace typed interfaces to word processing systems. Now maybe if you could use a Cerebrum Communicator... That said, the IBM Selectric was introduced in 1961, so I think Clark can be forgiven for failing to predict how convenient typewriter-style interfaces would eventually be.

Posted by ekr at 10:48 PM | Comments (4)

July 12, 2008

Crop tagging for deforestation enforcement

On my way to gym today I caught a Living On Earth segment about Greenpeace's efforts to get large soy traders not to buy or distribute soy products produced on cleared rainforest land:
GELLERMAN: But a soybean is a soybean is a soybean. I mean once they're in the bag you don't know where they've come from. How do you enforce that?

ALLEN: Well we don't look at the soybean we look at the farm. So the mapping and the monitoring and the land registration all go together and what we do is we want to have maps to a scale where we can, as soon as we see deforestation happen, we note it. We know who owns that land, we know what has been planted there, we know if it's related to cattle grazer, rice production, soy production, and we then essentially blacklist those farmers so that the traders know that they cannot buy from these farmers even if part of the farmer's land has been used legally to grow soy if they've deforested a new area they will be blacklisted and the traders have agreed to this as part of the moratorium.

This procedure probably will work, but I wonder if there's a technological fix here. The basic idea would be to tag areas of the rain forest with chemical signatures, which would transfer to the soy beans grown in those areas, thus allowing you to determine where a given bean was grown.

The most attractive technique in terms of biocompatibility is to use isotope ratios. For instance, sulfur isotope ratios (S-34/S-32) can be precisely measured and are used as natural environmental tracers. [*]. What we want is an element which is taken up from the soil and is relatively geographically immobile (so that you don't get contamination of neighboring regions). It's possible that there is a set of isotopes that is already characteristic of each region, but more likely we'll need to tag each region so we also want an element with a rare, reasonably long-lived isotope, so that we don't need to spray/dump too much onto the soil in order to bias the isotope ratios in some measurable way. Even better if we have several elements since we can independently vary the ratios to give unique combinations—we may also be able to combine tagging with natural variation if we take measurements. I did a little looking about what elements fit this bill. Some possibilities:

Another alternative is to use tagging chemicals. Lots of compounds get taken up by organisms (think DDT, PCBs, etc.), and it shouldn't be that difficult to use compound ratios (perhaps combined with isotope ratios) to produce distinct signatures. The problem here is to find some set of chemistry that everyone agrees is safe to spray over a somewhat inhabited area (again, think DDT, PCBs). We don't really have that problem with isotope tagging as long as we stick to non-radioactive isotopes or isotopes with very long half-lives (remember that there's some baseline radioactivity in the world anyway).

Posted by ekr at 9:42 PM | Comments (2)

July 11, 2008

Inflation

Watched some of The Eiger Sanction today. What with the constant boozing, casual sexism, homosexual stereotypes (check out Jack Cassidy as the amazingly flaming Miles Mellough with a dog named "Faggot"), and prehistoric mountain climbing technology (in the early rock climbing scenes they're not even wearing swami harnesses, just a loop of rope tied around their bodies; later they're using around the waist belays) the movie feels incredibly dated. But you know what's really dated? Clint's a professional assassin who's standard fee is $10,000

Posted by ekr at 8:55 PM | Comments (1)

July 3, 2008

Hey, free carbon tax

Even now that public opinion has started to shift towards more concern about climate change, political inertia—and especially the inherent conservatism of the American system—make a dramatic change like a nationwide carbon tax or cap-and-trade system incredibly difficult to implement. It's just too easy for a small group of vocal opponents to block legislation, or more likely dilute it to the point where it doesn't do anything. [When I say "too easy" I'm not taking a normative position; I just mean that the system isn't designed to make change easy.]

But consider our current situation: in the past year the price of gasoline has gone from about $3.00 to about $4.00/gallon. In effect, from the perspective of 2007, we've imposed a $1.00/gallon carbon tax. For comparison, even proponents of carbon taxes are looking at more like $.10/gallon. This isn't ideal for a number of reasons:

The good news, though, is that the inertia of the political system works to keep prices high. Even if there was something effective the government could do to bring prices down—which seems unlikely in any case—all that carbon control proponents need to do is block that legislation, which is a lot easier than getting their own legislation passed.

Posted by ekr at 10:10 PM | Comments (1)

June 28, 2008

On public radio popularity

I was listening to NPR this morning and caught an interview that made me think about the hierarchy of importance of appearances in public radio. Obviously, being on the radio is good, but some appearances are better than others. In ascending order of importance in the public radio universe, the list goes something like this.

I'm not kidding about the last one, by the way. I heard an interview today with Ernest Hemingway's son, on his 80th birthday—the son's not Ernest's.

Posted by ekr at 8:34 PM | Comments (1)

June 23, 2008

Rent seeking for cancer

So, I'm at Safeway yesterday and they ask me whether I want to donate $1 for prostate cancer. Here's the promotion of which I speak. Now, I'n not unsympathetic to the cause of prostate research—I own a prostate and it might someday decide to go berserk—but one suspects that this isn't the most efficient way to run a health research program. Indeed, it looks rather like a case of rent seeking, with the monopoly rent in this case being space at the Safeway cash register. And as with all rent seeking, we have to worry about two kinds of inefficiencies: inefficient allocation of resources, and money spent lobbying to acquire the monopoly rents. Again, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with funding prostate cancer research (though I think it was breast cancer or MS a few months ago), but it's also pretty unclear what the connection is between being able to convince Safeway to sponsor you and being a good place to put research dollars. This, after all, is what we pay NIH to do.

That said, while I did see people in front of me in line handing over their money, I wonder whether the value here as far as the prostate cancer foundation is concerned is the money they collect at Safeway as much as commitment and consistency: once you've handed over your dollar (as I recall that's what they're asking for), you're probably a lot more likely to be willing to favor prostate cancer research later, whether you're asked to hand over significant amounts of money or just to vote for it. While we're on the topic: I wonder whether this sort of promotion has any impact on how likely grant reviewers are to favorably rate proposals for research the disease du jour.

Posted by ekr at 9:34 PM | Comments (4)

June 21, 2008

You can't mail order an atomic bomb

When I was at the NIST IBE workshop, I happened to notice the NIST standard reference material (SRM) catalog. Leafing through it, I noticed you could order a bunch of cool stuff, like, for instance, Plutonium-239. So, interesting question: could you order enough fissile material to make a bomb? Unsurprisingly, the answer appears to be "no." NIST's Pu-239 SRM is 220 Bq and costs you about $1000 ($937). Plutonium's activity is about 4.4x10^{-10} g/Bq, so the SRM consists of about 10^{-7} g. Critical mass of plutonium is about 10 kg (10^4 grams), so you would need need 10^{11} samples, for a price of $10^{14} (100 trillion). Seems a bit spendy. I should probably mention that the samples are 5 ml each, so this would be 5x10^8 liters of fluid, which might be a bit much to manage. Also, I suspect that NIST would notice when you called to place your order.

Posted by ekr at 8:19 PM | Comments (0)

June 12, 2008

Getting thirsty on USAir

I'd already heard that a bunch of airlines were going to start charging for checked baggage, but I read that USAir is now going to charge for soft drinks. Unlike the checked baggage policy (and previous policies for good seats), however, it doesn't look like they're going to exempt elite flyers. It's easy to see why that would be inconvenient for them to do ("please show me your card, sir"), but this, along with new, higher fees for award travel (travel bought with miles), elimination of mileage bonuses, and closures of a bunch of lounges, starts to look like they've decided that they don't value their elite flyers. Obviously, they have no obligation to suck up to elites, but the result is that travellers don't have any real incentive to choose USAir over other carriers, so they're forced to compete almost entirely on price.

Conversely, the charge for checked baggage (at least on United) may actually make being elite more attractive, at least comparatively. First, not having to pay the baggage charge is a benefit if you want to check baggage. Second, a baggage charge incentivizes everyone to bring more carry-on, which makes overhead bin space scarcer, which makes the early boarding privileges that come with being elite more valuable.

Posted by ekr at 4:41 PM | Comments (4)

June 10, 2008

Hills and valleys

Hovav Shacham ran a small physics problem by me the other day. You have a body rolling along a flat, frictionless, track of length L, as shown in "A" above. Assume it's been given a single initial impulse so it's moving at speed S. We all know that it will take time L/S to traverse the track completely.

Now, consider the diagrams labelled B, C. These are two tracks with the same horizontal displacement as A, but we've added either a hill or a valley to the middle of the track. The diagrams aren't to scale and don't assume that shape of the hill/valley is an arc, even though it's shown that way, but you can assume that:

So, two questions:

  1. What's the relationship between the time the ball takes to traverse B and C? You don't need a numerical answer, just equal to, less than, or greater than.
  2. The same question as above, but for A and C.

This doesn't require calculus or detailed mechanical calculations, just simple qualitative physics and some intuition.

Answers after the break. Question 1: This is relatively straightforward, though a lot of people's intuition leads them wrong, since intuitively it feels like B and C are symmetrical so the result should be the same. I'll work through this in enough detail that you can see that that's wrong.

Obviously, B and C are the same length, which we can call L' (L' > L). Because of conservation of energy, the ball must be rolling at speed S at both X and Z, and between the start and X and Z and the end. In other words, while the ball speeds up going down the hill it needs to slow down by the same amount going up. So, we can ignore the flat sections of the track because they're the same and focus on the non-flat sections.

Looking at track B, we can see that while the ball starts with speed S, it slows down as it climbs the hill till it reaches Y. Then it speeds up to the point Z, where it is again at speed S. So, if we write its speed as a function of horizontal displacement, d, we can say Sb(d) ≤ S. By contrast, if we look at track C, we can see the opposite. The ball starts with speed S, but slows down as it descends the hill till it reaches Y. Then it speeds up to the point Z, where it is again at speed S. So, if we write it's speed as a function of horizontal displacement, d, we can say Sc(d) ≥ S.

Since Sc(d) ≥ S ≥ Sb(d), and we know that at least at point Y, the ball in C really was moving faster (actually, it's moving faster everywhere but on the flat spots), and the lengths are the same, we can conclude the the ball traverses C faster than B.

Question 2: I originally told Hovav I would need a pencil and paper and probably calculus to work this problem, but you don't. The short answer is that B is always slower than A, but C can be slower, faster, or the same speed. To see that, consider the following diagram, D, which is has a clearly non-circular hill.

Again, using only the conservation of energy, we can see:

As before, we can ignore the regions start-X and Z-end, since they are the same in both diagrams. What we need to concern ourselves with is the horizontal component of speed. Now, consider the section between L and M, which is flat on both tracks. Clearly, the ball is moving faster on the lower track: i.e., it's moving at S(L) > S. So, the time the ball takes to travel between L and M in the lower diagram is less than the time it takes in the upper diagram. It's greater by (M-L)/((S(L) - S)). Since S(L) - S is a constant, we can make the difference arbitrarily small or large by making the L-M distance longer. Clearly, then, even if the time it takes to get from X to L and M to Z in D is greater than the equivalent time in A, we can compensate for this just by making the L-M distance larger. Clearly, then, the track with the dip in the center can be faster than the flat track.

But I said it depends, so let's look at how it can be slower. Finally, consider track E, shown below.

In this diagram, the ball gets minimal additional horizontal velocity. It gets to go very fast, but it's almost all happening in the vertical direction. By making the well in the center arbitrarily deep, we can make the travel time to the bottom of the well arbitrarily high. The bottom line, then, is that depending on the shape of the dip, the travel time can be either greater than or less than the flat track. It it requires actual math to determine which one it is in the general case, though.

UPDATE: People are complaining, I think rightly, that there's something wrong with case (E). The problem is at least in part, as Bob McGrew observes, that the horizontal component of the ball never goes down. So, I've been thinking of the ball as following the track, but in this case it would clearly fly off and go bouncing into the far wall, at which point things get fishy. We could talk about a different system where it's attached to the track. In retrospect, I worry that that's a problem with this whole question unless (even if?) the shape of the curves is very carefully designed.

Posted by ekr at 7:35 PM | Comments (7)

June 7, 2008

Ethics lessons from Philip Morris

Noticed this sign in the window of a drug store today.

Aside from the fact that I'm a bit nonplussed to be lectured on ethics by a company which spent years denying nicotine was addictive, but this seems like the bumper sticker version of some pretty confused ethical reasoning. It's not like there's some principled ethical argument to be made that selling cigarettes to 18 year-olds is OK but selling it to people who are 17 1/2 isn't. I'm not claiming that it's OK to sell it to toddlers, but setting the dividing line at 18 is purely arbitrary. In fact, according to Wikipedia, the legal age is 19 in some parts of the US, let alone the rest of the world. Is PM claiming that the state of Utah is immoral? You'll notice that they don't say "18", just "minors", so these signs are quite usable in Utah.

Now, that's not to say that it's not necessarily moral to sell tobacco to 17 year-olds. For instance, you could argue that it's wrong to sell tobacco to anyone, in which case it's also immoral to sell it to those under 18. Presumably, that's not the argument that PM is making. More plausibly, one could argue that while there's nothing special about the 18 barrier, but that it's wrong to break the law in any case, but then "It's not just wrong, it's illegal" doesn't make much sense, since it's wrong only because it's illegal.

Posted by ekr at 5:59 PM | Comments (4)

May 25, 2008

New FCC regs on cell phone termination fees

AP reports that the FCC is considering significantly restricting cell phone service provider early termination fees:
Cell phone companies routinely charge customers $175 or more for quitting their service early. Under a proposal to the Federal Communications Commission, the wireless industry would give consumers the opportunity to cancel service without any penalty for up to 30 days after they sign a cell phone contract or until 10 days after they receive their first bill.

The proposal also would cap such fees and reduce them month by month over the course of a contract based on how long customers have left, according to people familiar with the offer speaking on condition of anonymity because the FCC has not accepted it. The plan would not abolish cancellation fees entirely.

In exchange for the government's approval, the agreement would let cell phone companies off the hook in state courts where they are being sued for billions of dollars by angry customers. If approved by the FCC, the proposal also would take away the authority of states to regulate the charges, known as early termination fees.

The nation's No. 2 wireless company, Verizon Wireless, offered the proposal to the FCC for its review after high-level meetings with senior FCC officials. It did so in consultation with other leading wireless companies, whose executives indicated they would not oppose its provisions, people familiar with the offer told the AP.

Hmm...

Cingular's current plan is:

So, this new plan wouldn't be much of an improvement, since $7/month would decay to 0 over the life of a 2-year contract, especially as this article doesn't say that the fees would actually decay to 0. Reading between the lines, this looks a lot more like a plan for the cell companies to preempt state action than it does like the FCC intervening to help you out.

Posted by ekr at 9:16 PM | Comments (1)

May 23, 2008

Refinances and Recourse

One of the weird tropes in the mortgage crunch is reports of people walking away from their houses when the value of their loan exceeds the value of the house. Obviously, this works better if your mortgage is non-recourse, meaning that the lender can't go after your personal assets once they foreclose. If you don't have any other real assets anyway, this doesn't make much difference, but if you're someone with substantial other assets who just made a bad investment, then this is pretty convenient (though it doesn't exactly do wonders for your credit score). As far as I can make out, in California, first mortgages are generally non-recourse, but refis are often recourse (see the FTB's discussion here). That could be a nasty surprise...

Posted by ekr at 8:55 PM | Comments (1)

May 22, 2008

Sexism and fairness in science and technology

The Times reports on a study (press release here) by the Center for Work Life Policy on women in science and technology fields. The study isn't available yet, but the press release and the NYT article seem to confuse a number of issues:
The 147-page report (which was sponsored by Alcoa, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Pfizer and Cisco) is filled with tales of sexual harassment (63 percent of women say they experienced harassment on the job); and dismissive attitudes of male colleagues (53 percent said in order to succeed in their careers they had to ?act like a man?); and a lack of mentors (51 percent of engineers say they lack one); and hours that suit men with wives at home but not working mothers (41 percent of technology workers says they need to be available ?24/7?).

...

The result, she said has been a work environment that dismisses women. Female employees come up against "the kind of culture that evolves when women are in the extreme minority," she said. (Think "Lord of the Flies.") The ideal worker in this realm is "the hacker who goes into his cubicle and doesn't emerge for a week, having not showered or eaten anything but pizza. Those people exist and they are seen as heroes."

So, there are five complaints here:

  1. Sexual harassment
  2. Dismissive attitudes
  3. Lack of mentors
  4. Long hours and inflexible schedules
  5. A culture that rewards lone work

When evaluating these complaints, we need to examine two axes: the pragmatic question of what would benefit companies, and the fairness issue of how companies ought to behave. In many cases, these are aligned. For instance, it's clearly unfair to subject women to sexual harassment and it's doubtful that it's somehow favorable to the company either, since at minimum it demoralizes a significant fraction of your workforce.

On the other hand, in some cases these forces may be in tension. To take one example: if engineers willing to work 80 hours a week are a lot more productive than engineers who can only afford to work 40 hours week (I'm not saying this is so; I suspect the relationship is a lot more complicated than this), then expecting your engineers to be willing to work long hours might well benefit the company; it's a tradeoff between the additional effort you get out of your existing staff and the reduced population you're able to draw from (assuming that some people simply can't work those hours). Similarly, it could be true that lone hackers slaving away in their cubicles is the best way to produce software (it's far from clear that that's true, but I've certainly seen plenty of high quality software produced that way), in which case again it may be in the company's best interest to rely on such people, even if they're harder to find than the average programmer.

Now, obviously one could say "yes, it's true that practice X would be more efficient, but it's so difficult for a large segment of the population that it's unfair to engage in it". It's not clear to me that this argument has anywhere near the moral force that (for instance) an argument against practices that aren't beneficial to the company are, since you're asking the company to do something that's against their interest. Ignoring the question of male vs. female, if I'm the kind of worker who would like to put in my 40 hours and then go play PS/2, I'm going to be at a disadvantage compared to my co-worker who is prepared to spend 70 hours a week at work. It's not clear to me that when he gets promoted and I don't that that's inherently unfair.

Let's try turning this around and look at a job where most of the employees are women: day care workers and day care. Now, I haven't done a scientific study, but it seems to me pretty likely that the reason that most of these workers are women is that women like working with kids a lot more. Yet, I don't think it would be reasonable to say that this was an anti-male environment and that employers should find some way to remove the aspects of the environment that make it less congenial to men (i.e., the kids). That would obviate the whole point of the job!

So, at minimum we've got some kind of spectrum of practices that are preferential to some types of employees:

So, I think we can all agree that we should move away from practices that disadvantage women and that are also bad for job performance and we can probably agree that practices which are neutral should be changed as well. This leaves us with how to handle practices which are beneficial to the organization but preferential to some types of employees. [I should note at this point that it can be hard to assess which category any given practice falls into. The people in charge of the organization will generally defend any existing practice, no matter how stupid.] The general social consensus seems to be that organizations should have to make accomodations as long as the hit to their productivity isn't too large. But of course, this leaves us in the uncomfortable position where the organization which is faced with making a change which would probably reduce productivity somewhat is incentivized to claim that it would result in a huge productivity reduction while activists for whoever is on the disadvantaged end of the practice (in this case, women), have an incentive to claim that there wouldn't be any impact on productivity, with neither side being much interested in the truth.

Posted by ekr at 6:10 PM | Comments (1)

May 15, 2008

On restricting immigaration of HIV patients

I totally agree that banning (or even significantly restricting) people with HIV from entering the US is nuts, but despite Andrew Sullivan's protestations to the contrary, it's really not unenforceable.

This law has lasted so long because no domestic constituency lobbies for its repeal. Immigrants or visitors with HIV are often too afraid to speak up. The ban itself is also largely unenforceable -- it's impossible to take blood from all those coming to America, hold them until the results come through and then deport those who test positive. Enforcement occurs primarily when immigrants volunteer their HIV status -- as I have -- or apply for permanent residence. The result is not any actual prevention of HIV coming into the United States but discrimination against otherwise legal immigrants who are HIV-positive.

Rapid HIV tests are readily available, and the OraQuick test involves only an oral swab and reads out in 20 minutes minutes. It wouldn't be at all hard to design an immigration system that forced people to go through oral HIV testing. You'd just need somewhere to hold them for 20 minutes, which I suspect CBP could easily arrange.

More to the point, the idea that for such a ban to be enforceable requires point of entry testing strikes me as basically wrong. We have a whole array of immigration controls (not a terrorist, not a nazi, etc.) that are based on matching up information that's indexed by personal identity (i.e., your name, age, passport #, etc.) against the person standing in front of the immigration agent. But those checks to a great extent rely on accurate record keeping and enforcement by the country who issued that individual's passport. If my country of origin doesn't bother to check identity before issuing passports, I'll be able to get in even if I'm actually Osama bin Laden. The United States certainly could require that people who wish to enter the country come with a certification that they've had recent HIV testing and are HIV negative. Those who didn't could be deported or tested on entry.

Even absent such infrastructure, there are plenty of immigration requirements that don't get routinely checked but if you're found to have lied are used as the basis for prosecution or deportation. When Mrs. Guesswork got her green card, they asked her if she was a Nazi. I doubt they checked up on that, but I'm sure if it later came out that she was Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS they'd find some way to punish her.

Posted by ekr at 8:00 AM | Comments (2)

May 13, 2008

Daddy, where do you live?

Watched the first couple episodes of Rome last night. Looks like a generally pretty solid show, though I notice that being a Roman seems to involve having a lot of noisy, semi-public sex. Anyway, I was particularly struck by the scene where Lucius Verones gets home after 8 years away with the legions and his kids don't recognize him. Times sure have changed now that we don't have the Roman Legions. These days when that happens it usually means you've made United Global Services..

Posted by ekr at 8:12 PM | Comments (0)

April 29, 2008

How to annotate?

I'm currently working my way through Lolita (Appel annotated edition) and finding the annotation a bit heavy. Here's a not-so-randomly chosen but not-totally-unrepresentative page from the endonotes:
158/6 Christopher columbus' flagship: the zoo exists, in Evansville, Indiana. Its monkeys—kept out-of-doors on the ship from April to November—continue to be the zoo's most popular attraction.

158/7 Little Rock, near a school: rereading this passage in 1968, Nabokov called it "nicely prophetic" (the larger "row" over school desegregation, September 1957). For further "prophecy," see 226/3.

158/8 à propos de rien: French; not in relation to anything else; casually.

159/1 town... first name: "his" refers to Quilty, Clare, Michigan; an actual town.

159/2 species ... Homo pollex: H.H. combines the familiar Latin homo, "the genus of mammals consisting of mankind," with pollex, or "thumb."

159/3 viatic: H.H. sustains his "scientific" vocabulary; a coinage from the Latin root via. Viaticum is English—an allowance for travelling expenses—but H.H. has gone back to the Latin word viaticus, which specifically refers to the road.

159/4 priapically: from Priapus, the god of procreation.

159/6 man of my age...face à claques: Quilty, with "a face that deserves to be slapped; an ugly mischevious face." For an index to his appearances see 31/9.

159/6 concupiscence: lustfullness.

159/7 coulant un regard: French; casting a sly glance.

This is a bit less than one page of endnotes1 (I've omitted a note about Burma Shave2, and that reference XXX/Y means "note Y on page XXX", so this represents about half the notes on two pages of the text, since 158 has 5 notes which I haven't transcribed. You can of course ignore all these notes and just read the text, but if you're interested in a careful reading, you may well want to read them, with the concommitent risk of Wallacitis 3. The problem here is that while these notes are indicated in the text in the same way (with numbers in the margin), they're actually of quite different types:

So, we have at least three categories: (1) translations of language you might find difficult (2) explanations of subtle allusions in the text [Quilty] and (3) more or less irrelevant asides that you might be interested in. If, for instance, you knew that reference 158/8 was just a translation from French, and you already knew what à propos de rien meant, you wouldn't need to go look it up in the endnotes at all, but as it is your reading flow is totally broken up while you flip to the back of the book.

The natural fix here is to have multiple types of annotation in the main text so you can tell at a glance what you're working with. Foster Wallace5 attacks this problem by using the notation IYI to indicate that a note is parenthetical, but this is not wholly satisfactory because the notation appears in the note and so your flow is already broken (though the fact that Wallace uses footnotes as opposed to endnotes does help). Given the exemplars above, we might do something like:

The point of all this is to let you ignore the notes that you want to.7 This isn't wholly satisfactory, since we either have to intermix the allusions and asides at the end of the book (though of course you should be using footnotes) or have two separate sets of notes, both of which are clumsy (even if you have the allusions as footnotes instead of endnotes). Another possibility with a high enough note density is to put them on the facing page, but this chews up a lot of real estate if the note density is sufficiently low or highly variable.8

This is of course one of the cases where technology could really help. If you had an e-book, you could stop worrying about how the note text (as opposed to the indicator in the main text) was rendered. And if notes simply popped up when you selected them instead of taking the full context switch of a new page, you could minimize the flow interruption. Also, you could presumably program the e-book to display only notes you were interested in,9 while eliding the ones you don't care about. Of course, this would require there to be enough customers for e-books to bother giving them a treatment more sophisticated than just re-rendering the manuscript as it was typeset on the paper.

1. For more on endnotes see Rescorla 07
2. Famous for progressive road advertising signs, see 1925-1963.
3. After David Foster Wallace; observation due to Hovav Shacham.
4.159/6 is also a translation, but the primary purpose of the note is to point us at Quilty.
5. Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity.
6. Given the particular nature of many of these allusions, it might make sense to mark Quilty references with a symbol rather than a number.
7. But of course this creates a hierarchy that's fixed in the text. This is sort of inherent in the fact that things are printed on paper, unless you want to have them printed in color/somehow plane polarize and wear filters on your glasses or something.
8. None of this applies to a book like Pale Fire where the notes are part of the text; Shacham again.
9. Note that you could also use colors, but many e-paper displays, such as the Kindle, don't have color displays, and since such a small fraction of the text will be color, this would add significantly to the cost of goods.

Posted by ekr at 9:36 PM | Comments (3)

April 28, 2008

Traders and testosterone

In the April 22 PNAS, Coates and Herbert report on a study of the correlation between testosterone/cortisol levels and performance by traders:
Little is known about the role of the endocrine system in financial risk taking. Here, we report the findings of a study in which we sampled, under real working conditions, endogenous steroids from a group of male traders in the City of London. We found that a trader's morning testosterone level predicts his day's profitability. We also found that a trader's cortisol rises with both the variance of his trading results and the volatility of the market. Our results suggest that higher testosterone may contribute to economic return, whereas cortisol is increased by risk. Our results point to a further possibility: testosterone and cortisol are known to have cognitive and behavioral effects, so if the acutely elevated steroids we observed were to persist or increase as volatility rises, they may shift risk preferences and even affect a trader's ability to engage in rational choice.

I don't have access to the paper (it's behind the PNAS paywall), so I don't know if they address the obvious correlation/causation issues. If it's just the case that better results result in increased testosterone levels, that's not very interesting.

What's more interesting is the suggestion that there's some set of cognitive enhancements that would make you a a better trader. One interesting question is whether these traders are outperforming the market (contra the efficient market hypothesis) or just themselves. Even more interesting would be the (implied) claim that performance increases because of more risk-taking behavior. As I understand it, the general on conventional gambling is that it's not really to your benefit to get more aggressive and/or risk-taking.

Posted by ekr at 10:23 PM | Comments (0)

April 9, 2008

True to form

It's well known among authors, it's incredibly dangerous to look in your book once it's published—you're sure to find some embarassing error as soon as you open it. (Don't get me started about some of the errors in SSL and TLS). In that vein, I recently picked up Matthew Yglesias's, Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats. Yglesias is famous for writing quickly and having numerous typos, homonym mixups, etc. in his posts. Sure enough, I hadn't gotten past page xviii when I discovered he had misspelled the name of his roommate, Kriston Capps, except Yglesias spells it "Krison." It's reasonably interesting otherwise, though.

Posted by ekr at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)

April 7, 2008

UPS store != UPS

Went by the UPS store to mail something today. I had a prepaid shipping label so it was just a matter of slapping a pouch on the box and shoving in the label and dropping it off. Turns out they don't actually have pouches and they usually charge you a dollar to tape it on, though the clerk waived the fee. According to her "We're not UPS, though a lot of people think so." I can't imagine why anyone would think "The UPS Store" was UPS. As I understand the situation, The UPS Store is the new name for Mail Boxes etc., and they're franchised, which, I guess, is why they want to sell you supplies rather than give them to you for free like FedEx (and as I recall regular UPS locations) do.

Posted by ekr at 9:59 PM | Comments (4)

April 6, 2008

Random YouTube links

A treasure trove of Tom Lehrer viseos.

More Tom Lehrer: Silent E and LY from the Electric company.

Chris Sharma doing the first ascent of Dreamcatcher, 5.14c/d in Squamish, BC.

Posted by ekr at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)

April 5, 2008

Surprise, disk drives break a lot

Computerworld has a good article about hard drive failures. The bottom line here is that (unsurprisingly) real world drive failure rates far exceed the failure rates (MTBF and AFR) reported by manufacturers. This won't surprise anyone who has operated systems with a reasonable number of disks.

Fundamentally, though, what's annoying about disk drive failures isn't that they happen but that they're unpredictable. After all, the gas in my car keeps breaking—every three hundred miles or so I need to put more in—but that's not a big problem because I have a gauge that tells me when I need to refill the tank. If hard drives behaved the same way, you could just treat them as a consumable. The problem is that (as Pinheiro et al. report), disk drive failures are random and the SMART diagnostics don't provide reliable warning. Instead, you're left with failures as surprise events requiring emergency recovery. Even if you have backups, this kind of failure isn't fun, coming as it always seems to right when you're about to go home for the weekend.

The standard answer here is to use RAID and then swap the drives whenever one fails, but my experience (and that of other home users I've talked to) is that RAID systems fail to recover often enough on drive failure that you not infrequently end up with something that looks more like a backup and restore than an emergency replacement.

Posted by ekr at 10:05 PM | Comments (2)

March 7, 2008

I seriously doubt Moses was high

Benny Shanon from Hebrew University argues that Moses was taking psychedelics when he saw the burning bush, etc.:
Such mind-altering substances formed an integral part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times, Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem wrote in the Time and Mind journal of philosophy.

"As far Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a supernatural cosmic event, which I don't believe, or a legend, which I don't believe either, or finally, and this is very probable, an event that joined Moses and the people of Israel under the effect of narcotics," Shanon told Israeli public radio on Tuesday.

Moses was probably also on drugs when he saw the "burning bush," suggested Shanon, who said he himself has dabbled with such substances.

...

He said the psychedelic effects of ayahuasca were comparable to those produced by concoctions based on bark of the acacia tree, that is frequently mentioned in the Bible.

I'm pretty ignorant of the religious practices of the pre-covenant Israelites, and it's certainly undeniable that intoxicant/psychedelic use is a common feature of a number of religions. That said, I don't really see the point of looking for natural explanations for events in the Bible (for instance, this article arguing that the 10 plagues in Exodus were caused by a volcanic eruption.

What's weird about efforts like this is that they're simultaneously religious and anti-religious. Trying to provide a natural explanation for religious history fundamentally undercuts the religious claims, which rely on supernatural explanations. The Bible pretty clearly says that God spoke to Moses (Ex 3:4). If you believe Moses was just hallucinating, what does that say about God? On the other hand, once you deny the special status of the Bible, then why bother trying to explain the stories at all. It's not like the Bible is this uniquely consistent book of history with just a few mythological pieces. On the contrary, even even the history is to a large degree unverifiable stuff that people only believe because of their preexisting religious (or ethnopolitical) commitments. If you've abandoned those commitments, there's no more need to try to provide scientific explanations for biblical events than there is to provide a scientific explanation of how Sauron crafted the One Ring.

Posted by ekr at 8:01 AM | Comments (6)

March 2, 2008

No nukes please, we're Cylonish

More on movie plot holes...

In Battlestar Galactica, the Cylons attack the "12 Colonies" from space and we get treated to the usual terrifying scenes of people running from strafing Cylon fighters. Here's the thing, though: they're trying to kill every human in the galaxy, so what's with the up close and personal attack? Wouldn't it be simpler to just nuke the cities form orbit? For that matter, you could skip the nukes and just use kinetic weapons from space.

Posted by ekr at 8:52 PM | Comments (4)

James Bond and the futility of technical access controls

OK, so Mrs. Guesswork and I just finished watching Casino Royale and something bugging me. (spoilers after the jump).

Bond is in this poker tournament playing for $150 MM. The money is being held in escrow by a swiss bank. At the beginning of the tournament, each player enters their password into this briefcase-keypad-terminal-crypter thingy held by said banker. At the end of the tournament, the winning player enters his password and the destination account and the bank transfers the money into that account. After Bond wins, the villain (Le Chiffre) kidnaps him and the Bond Girl (Vesper Lynd) so that he can torture the account number out of her and the password out of Bond.

How does this make any sense at all? First, why does Le Chiffre need the account number? That's where Lynd wants the money to go! He wants the money put in his account and Lynd doesn't know that number. Second, why does he need the password? Remember that any one of the players could have won, so they all have passwords. What controls who gets the money is that the banker only lets one of them transfer the money out of escrow. Wouldn't it be much simpler to kidnap the banker and force him to hand over the money? He's not a secret agent so he's probably a lot easier to kidnap and threaten than Bond is. Moreover, if Le Chiffre shows up with Bond's password and asks that the money be put in his account, why would the banker allow that? Clearly something is fishy, so Le Chiffre will probably have to threaten him anyway. Why not keep things simple and start with the banker.

I should mention that when later the banker shows up to complete the real money transfer with Bond and Lynd enters the wrong account number, that does make sense. She needs the banker to accept the transfer and needs Bond to authenticate it. It makes sense, that is, except for the password, which is still pretty pointless, unless your theory is that after you win, someone else is going to pose as you and have the money transferred into your account. A far simpler system would be that when you register for the tournament you give them the account number where you want your winnings to and have the subsequent transfer happen automatically.

Posted by ekr at 9:38 AM | Comments (9)

February 21, 2008

Wait, everything is videotaped?

Check out this report from Seton Hall, published two weeks ago. They FOIAd a bunch of documents an uncover some, stuff that is not widely known (þ Slate):
I. A report issued by a Lieutenant General of the United States Army indicates that more than 24,000 interrogations have been conducted at Guantánamo since 2002.

II. A second report, produced almost simultaneously by the Surgeon General of the United States Army, reveals that all interrogations conducted at Guantánamo were videotaped. Thus, many videotapes documenting Guantánamo interrogations do or did exist.

This has the potential to become interesting pretty fast.

Posted by ekr at 9:38 PM | Comments (0)

February 14, 2008

Synthetic fuel

The NYT reports on an interesting concept, making synthetic fuel from atmospheric CO2:
Scientists there say they have developed a way to produce truly carbon-neutral fuel and useful organic chemicals at large scale using water and carbon dioxide removed from the air as raw materials. There are plenty of schemes brewing to capture carbon dioxide, both directly from the atmosphere and from the stacks of power plants. All of them, for the moment, are costly or hard to envision at the billion-tons-a-year scale that would be needed to blunt the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere coming mainly from fuel burning.

UPDATE: 2/13, 5 p.m.: This plan has a minor hurdle, too; the electricity for driving the chemical processes, according to a white paper describing the overarching concept, would come from nuclear power. The proposal says it'd be worth it to have a payoff of steady, secure streams of methanol and gasoline with no carbon added to the atmosphere (and a price for gasoline at the pump of perhaps $4.60 a gallon -- comparable to petroleum-based fuels as oil becomes harder to find).

So, I don't know if this particular plan makes sense, but there's an important underlying concept here: gasoline (any fossil fuel, for that matter) serves two purposes: it's both a source of stored energy that we can extract and an energy transportation medium. From a physics perspective, energy is energy, but since batteries have a fairly low storage capacity and you don't want to tow a power line behind your car, chemical fuels are pretty much the only game in town. That's why people are interested in hydrogen power, since it's plausible that you can synthesize it from common materials (e.g., water) by application of energy. Hydrogen's not an energy source in itself, but it's at least a plausible carrier.

Unfortunately, it's not really that plausible a carrier. The problem is that it's not really compatible with our current storage and distribution infrastructure. On the other hand, if you had some way to efficiently synthesize liquid fuels that were compatible with the existing infrastructure, then you could synthesize it centrally without changing anything else. Moreover, this would give you flexibility to use any energy production mechanism that was convenient or practical (wind, solar, nuclear, etc.)

Based on this article, I can't tell if this method actually is practical and of course it doesn't solve the problem of aggregate energy supply. However, a practical version of something like this would allow you to separate the fuel problem from the energy problem, which seems like a good first step.

Posted by ekr at 10:04 PM | Comments (5)

February 3, 2008

The lawn sign primary

I don't claim it's any kind of statistically significant sample, but on my run today, I saw 5 Obama lawn signs and 0 for anyone else.

Posted by ekr at 4:57 PM

February 2, 2008

A cool optical effect

The NYT describes some pretty cool research by Yorobyev and Guo where they use a femtosecond laser to restructure the surface of a metal and change its optical properties. Here's their abstract. The article is behind a paywall, but here's the NYT summary:
The result is that pure aluminum looks like gold, and the appearance is literally skin deep.

"I cannot tell it's not gold," Dr. Guo said. "It looks very pretty."

...

The laser bursts -- each lasting only about 60 millionths of a billionth of a second -- melt and vaporize metal atoms near the surface, which then reassemble in minuscule structures including pits, spheres and rods that are a fraction of a millionth of a meter in size.

By changing the length, strength and number of pulses, the researchers found they could vary the resulting color.

In some cases, the change causes the structures to absorb a range of colors so that they cannot be seen. But the colors that are not absorbed are still reflected, and thus visible, resulting in gold aluminum or dark blue tungsten.

That's some clever stuff. Not quite programmable matter, but still pretty cool.

Posted by ekr at 8:58 PM | Comments (3)

January 28, 2008

MT 4

I've upgraded to Movable Type 4. This may produce some weird artifacts, which you should let me know about.

UPDATE: Yes, I know the archives are broken. For some reason, MT4 wants to replace spaces with hyphens instead of underscores. Currently RTFMing for the setting to change this back. If anyone out there knows and wants to save me the trouble, please let me know.

UPDATE: Problem solved, I think. Not the world's most intuitive UI.

Posted by ekr at 8:23 AM | Comments (2)

January 23, 2008

Savage Lovin'

In this installment of EG career day, I give sex advice. Every year The Stranger runs a charity auction and this year I bought the right to be Savage Love's guest expert. So, last week I flew up to Seattle, met with Dan, and picked out some questions to answer.

Here's me with Dan Savage:

(Sorry about the low quality... it was taken with my iPhone.)

My so-called advice runs in The Stranger this week and in other papers next week and can be found here.

Last time on EG career day, I made burritos.

UPDATE: Props to Jon Peterson, who did the actual eBay bidding for this item.

Posted by ekr at 1:32 PM | Comments (9)

January 21, 2008

Jello Biafra said it first

I haven't gotten my copy of Liberal Fascism (aka "a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care") to make fun of yet, but it seems to me that this theme isn't exactly new to Goldber. Here's Jello Biafra in 1979:
I am Governor Jerry Brown
My aura smiles
And never frowns
Soon I will be president...

Carter Power will soon go away
I will be Fuhrer one day
I will command all of you
Your kids will meditate in school
Your kids will meditate in school!

[Chorus:]
California Uber Alles
California Uber Alles
Uber Alles California
Uber Alles California

Zen fascists will control you
100% natural
You will jog for the master race
And always wear the happy face

Rest of lyrics here.

Posted by ekr at 6:11 PM | Comments (1)

January 18, 2008

Tolstoy said it first

On my way home last night I caught Eric Weiner, author of The Geography of Bliss on NPR. Anyway, Weiner claimed that all languages had many more words for negative emotional states than positive ones that this was some sort Sapir-Whorf thing). I'm not sure that this is really true—there are actually quite a few words for positive states— but of course Tolstoy said it first:
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

And of course along the same lines, here's Richard Dawkins:

True, there are many different ways of being alive - at least ten million different ways if we count the number of distinct species alive today - but, however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead!

Posted by ekr at 6:11 PM | Comments (1)

January 16, 2008

Feng shui and consistency

Mrs. Guesswork and I just finished watching Penn and Teller's Bullshit! episode on feng shui. Regardless of the merits of feng shui, I was surprised to see that the recommendations from the various practitioners varied so widely. I don't know much about feng shui, but I'd always had the impression the rules (whatever you think of their merits) were pretty well defined. By contrast, while there's some variation in the exact rules, it's not like half the Orthodox rabbis in the world think it's cool to eat bacon double cheeseburgers.

Posted by ekr at 8:21 PM | Comments (3)

January 15, 2008

The famous article

Courtesy of Steve Bellovin on the cryptography mailing list, here is the (a?) article about Mike McConnell's desire to "tap into cyberspace":
Spychief Mike McConnell is drafting a plan to protect America's cyberspace that will raise privacy issues and make the current debate over surveillance law look like "a walk in the park,\u201d McConnell tells The New Yorker in the issue set to hit newsstands Monday. "This is going to be a goat rope on the Hill. My prediction is that we're going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens."

At issue, McConnell acknowledges, is that in order to accomplish his plan, the government must have the ability to read all the information crossing the Internet in the United States in order to protect it from abuse. Congressional aides tell The Journal that they, too, are also anticipating a fight over civil liberties that will rival the battles over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Part of the lawmakers' ire, they have said, is the paltry information the administration has provided. The cyberspace security initiative was first reported in September by The Baltimore Sun, and some congressional aides say that lawmakers have still learned more from the media than they did from the few Top Secret briefings they have received hours before the administration requested money in November to jump start the program.

I can't tell if there's even anything new here.

Posted by ekr at 9:58 AM | Comments (0)

January 14, 2008

Viral load up, IQ down

Sorry about the lack of posting over the past few days—the combination of all-day meetings and a bad cold has left me pretty useless. My viral load is still high but my meetings are over, so expect posting to resume shortly. In other news, nasal spray is the greatest medical invention of the 20th century.

Posted by ekr at 7:24 PM | Comments (0)

January 6, 2008

No, you're not supposed to open the printer

The Times Magazine has a mondo article about electronic voting. I haven't had time to write up a full comment on it, but check this out:
Still, the events of Election Day 2007 showed just how ingrained the problems with the touch-screens were. The printed paper trails caused serious headaches all day long: at one polling place, printers on most of the machines weren't functioning the night before the polls opened. Fortunately, one of the Election Day technicians was James Diener, a gray-haired former computer-and-mechanical engineer who opened up the printers, discovered that metal parts were bent out of shape and managed to repair them. The problem, he declared cheerfully, was that the printers were simply "cheap quality" (a complaint I heard from many election critics). "I'm an old computer nerd," Diener said. "I can do anything with computers. Nothing's wrong with computers. But this is the worst way to run an election."

Here's the thing: those printers (called voter verifiable paper audit trails (VVPATs)), are supposed to be tamper sealed, so that they provide a record of how people voted. You're not generally supposed to be opening them up and screwing with them.

Posted by ekr at 9:07 PM | Comments (2)

January 3, 2008

Euphemism contamination

I caught NPR on the way home discussing the Iowa Caucuses and Huckabee and Obama were described as "insurgents." Given that that seems to be the semi-official term for "bad people we're fighting in Iraq", maybe it's not the best word choice...

Posted by ekr at 9:11 PM

December 30, 2007

A minor optimization

The elevator in the International Terminal at SFO only goes to two floors. Internally, it has two buttons, for the top floor and the bottom floor. But of course, when you get in it's either at the top floor or at the bottom and the only place it could go is the other floor. So, at most, you only need one button: next floor. I guess this would need a different internal design for the elevator software/firmware/wiring, but the programmer in me does find the current arrangement a bit inelegant.

Posted by ekr at 10:18 PM | Comments (7)

December 25, 2007

It's no fun being a legal alien

Mrs. Guesswork and I are in White Rock, BC visiting her parents for the holidays. White Rock is only a few miles from the US, and I needed to go for a run, so I figured two great tastes that taste great together and header and headed for the border. Anyway, I usually fly into Canada (passport required) but my understanding was that you just needed ID to travel between the US and Canada, so I shoved my driver's license in my pocket and headed out.

I ran out to the 175th street border crossing and after a little screwing around figured out which building to go into. I showed the DHS guy my license and he asked me where my passport was (in my room) and said that due to the WHTI I would soon need a passport to enter the US. He asked me a bunch of questions about where I was born, etc. and then said that while he would let me into the US, without proof of citizenship the Canadians might not let me back in. I asked if he thought that was likely and he sort of waffled, but finally said that they might make me sit around until someone brought me a passport but that it probably wouldn't be a problem, especially if I had recently used my passport to enter Canada so they had records (I flew in on Monday).

I entered the US and ran to the Peace Arch border crossing. I went into the office there and showed my license and explained that I didn't have a passport. The woman asked me a bunch of questions (where I was staying, who I was with, etc.), then called over another agent who asked me some more questions, and then filled out some form, gave it to me, admonished me to carry proper ID, and send me over to another window where the agent asked me some more questions and said I could go on through.

A few notes about this:

Next time I'll bring my passport, though.

Posted by ekr at 8:58 PM | Comments (2)

December 20, 2007

Upside down

Proaxiom writes:
I've been trying for some time to find a globe oriented with Antarctica at the top. I could do this with a regular globe, but the writing would be upside-down.

I presume demand isn't great enough for anyone to manufacture such a globe. You can find maps with south-at-top orientation, mostly from Australia, but no globes.

I want to have such a globe to put it in my office. For me it serves as a reminder that many things we naturally think of as immutable are in fact completely arbitrary.

Here's Iain Banks:

"Sma, believe me; it has not all been 'fun.'" He leaned against a cabinet full of ancient projectile weapons. "And worse than that," he insisted, is when you turn the godamn maps upside down."

"What?" Sma said, puzzled.

"Turning the maps upside down," he repeated. "Have you any idea how annoying and inconvenient it is when you get to a place and find they map the place the other way up compared to the maps you've got? Because of something stupid like some people think a magnetic needle is pointing up to heaven, when other people think it's heavier and pointing down? Or because it's done according to the galactic plane or something? I mean, this might sound trivial, but it's very upsetting."

Incidentally, a lot of GPS-based navigation systems seem to be configured by default to orient the map in the direction you're travelling. I suppose you could get used to this, but really I'd rather have it oriented North up.

Posted by ekr at 8:09 PM | Comments (2)

December 18, 2007

The center of the map

The other day I was listening to one of Thomas Laqueur's History 5 lectures and he mentioned that many older maps were centered on Jerusalem [*]. Laqueur observes that the center of a map is arbitrary and that there's nothing wrong with using Jerusalem as the center. Well, sort of. It's true that the Earth is roughly a sphere, but remember that it spins on an axis going between the North and South poles which gives it a natural asymmetry. So, while the longitude of the center of a map is certainly arbitrary and there's nothing particularly special about Greenwich1, the Equator is special and it would be sort of weird to center the map vertically anywhere else—and at about 31 degrees North, Jerusalem is way off the Equator.

Note that this isn't purely a matter of latitude not having been discovered yet. The Greeks knew that the Earth was a sphere and already had the idea of latitude and longitude. Techniques for measuring latitude (and impractical techniques for measuring longitude) were known in Medieval Europe as well at the time such maps were produced. The choice of the center of the map was an issue of religious commitments, not simple ignorance.

1. See Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time for a lucid description of the political maneuvering around the selection of GMT as the zero reference for time.

Posted by ekr at 11:25 PM | Comments (1)

December 8, 2007

Some bonus channels

The TV in the apartment I was staying at in Vancouver featured some unusual extra channels:

The first two are a little weird—though I imagine a video fireplace might be of some value to someone—but I have to admit I don't have a good explanation for the spectrum analyzer thing.

Posted by ekr at 10:58 PM | Comments (4)

December 4, 2007

The probability of divisibility

Yesterday Dan Harkins cornered me in the hall and asked me the following question:
Given a random 128-bit integer d and another random x-bit integer n where x >> 128, what is the probability that n is an even multiple of d.

My immediate answer was 2-128. My second was to retract this and suggest that Dan ask a mathematician. My third was to try to work the problem. My reasoning below.

Unless I've screwed something up (always possible), I guess my intuition isn't completely broken.

UPDATE: 2/3 -> 1/3. Thanks to Dan for the fix.

Posted by ekr at 5:04 PM | Comments (3)

November 29, 2007

My kingdom for a Zener diode

I've written before about Asimov's blind spot about hardware versus software. A related issue in more recent science fiction is the treatment of various kinds of input overload. The two cases that come most naturally to mind are:

Now, whole volumes could be written about Gibson's ignorance of how computers work, but Haldeman was scientifically trained so it's a little more surprising coming from him, but both of these examples are basically nuts. You'd have to be nuts to build a system that could potentially pump enough energy into the human body to actually burn your skin.

The Neuromancer case is particularly egregious because you've presumably got some digital system plugged into your brain-computer interface, so it's just a simple matter of never giving the BCI enough voltage that it could potentially damage you. Even if you can't do that for some reason, it's easy to add physical voltage (e.g., zeners) or current limiting devices (e.g., fuses) to the leads to make electrocute you. This is pretty basic electronics and not really subject to circumvention no matter how malware infested your computer gets.

The Forever War passage is more interesting because at least in the past image intensifiers were quasi-analog devices. However, it's pretty hard to believe that one would make an amplification stage that could actually emit enough power to burn your skin in milliseconds, especially since the amount of energy emitted by the displays in analog image intensifier systems is partially gated on the relaxation time of the phosphors— no matter how many electrons you pump into the phosphor, it only phosphoresces so fast, so once all the molecules are in the excited quantum state, the electrons simply aren't absorbed. As I understand it, when standard night vision systems are overloaded (e.g., someone shines a light on them) they just stop working, not burn your face off. And of course any system in which the amplifier stage is digitally read and then displayed on a screen can be easily set with a maximum emission power. So, ultimately, I don't think getting burned by your image intensifier is a plausible story either, but I guess in both cases having your face catch on fire is more exciting than saying "my computer crashed".

Posted by ekr at 7:30 PM | Comments (2)

November 28, 2007

Preliminary iPhone info for YVR IETF

If you're an American with an iPhone or are just crazy enough to use AT&T as your wireless carrier, you may be wondering how much you're going to get gouged to use your phone in Canada. The answer is: a lot.

Welcome to Canada!

Posted by ekr at 11:09 AM | Comments (4)

November 26, 2007

Agency problems with smog checking

California law require vehicles to be smog tested in order to be registered in the state of California. The smog testing is done by independent (but licensed) operators. This creates two major principal/agent problems:

There are a number of countermeasures used against these problems. The first is to have "check only" stations, which will test your car but not fix it. The state requires some vehicles to be tested at check only stations, both by random assignment and by preferentially selecting vehicles they expect to be high emitters. The idea here seems to be that check only stations have no incentive to give a false failing grade because they can't profit from it. Similarly, because they don't have a relationship with you—unlike your regular mechanic—it's harder for you to bribe them since they're less likely to trust you're not entrapping them (see below).

This program seems like it's likely to be of limited effectiveness. First, only a small fraction of vehicles are assigned to check only stations and so you're only decreasing the amount of fraud by that fraction. It doesn't serve as a deterrent to fraud in itself. Second, at least for the second kind of fraud, the check only station could at least potentially get a kickback from your mechanic, though it might be hard for them to get together.

Another countermeasure is that the smog testing machines transmit their results to the state directly before (at least according to my mechanic) they're displayed to the mechanic. This is actually pretty clever, since it reduces the opportunities for a fraudulent mechanic to see the result and offer to fix the results for you. Obviously, you can still bribe the mechanic in advance, but that requires you to know in advance what's wrong. I tend to think it's less useful for the second kind of fraud, since it's surely pretty easy to gimmick the sensors to produce a positive reading. I should also mention that the connection between the machine and the state appears to be via modem, and, unless cryptography is being used, is probably pretty easy to spoof, which would let you bypass the initial negative test.

Another countermeasure against the first kind of fraud is that only test only and "gold shield" test stations can certify a vehicle once it has failed its smog check. It's obvious why this makes sense for test only and I assume that gold shield are subject to extra scrutiny by the state.

Finally, I assume that the State periodically sends people out with pre-calibrated vehicles to see if the testing stations are producing accurate results, if they offer to falsify the results for you, etc.

By the way, my car passed, though I needed a new gas cap.

Posted by ekr at 9:00 PM | Comments (2)

November 25, 2007

Race to the front

OK, I totally understand why there is a race to the front for state primaries. The earlier primaries have a disproportionate effect on who gets selected as the final presidential nominee. Obviously, if you want to get pandered to the way Iowa and New Hampshire do, it would be to your advantage to move the primary up.

So, what I don't get is why the Democrats are pushing back on the states (e.g., refusing to seat Florida's delegates), since it's not clear that it's in their interest to have the current early primary states be so influential. In this case, since the party's interest is to have the most credible candidate for the general election, and Florida is often a determining state, it would be to their advantage to encourage Florida go first. In any case, it's not clear to me why they are actively discouraging it.

Posted by ekr at 9:58 PM | Comments (7)

November 19, 2007

Rap: a quantitative approach

This page, representing information conveyed in rap songs in visual form (e.g., the relationship between money and problems) has been making the rounds. I didn't see a way to submit your own entries, but here's my attempt:

Posted by ekr at 5:23 AM | Comments (2)

November 2, 2007

On body image and selfishness

Truepath objects to complaints about the way that women's bodies are portrayed in media:
So I've long been disgusted by the socially approval of complaints about models being too skinny and demands that 'real' women, i.e., less skinny women, be depicted in the media. I've already skewered most of the arguments elsewhere but the long and short of it is that the people who complain about skinny models aren't demanding we show more ugly people on TV. Rather they are just complaining about which features are considered beautiful.

Sure, often these views are voiced as mostly meaningless gripes the same way men might gripe that it should be illegal for women to prefer the guy with the fancier car, full head of hair etc. So long as these complaints are taken no more seriously than this they are a harmless way to express frustration and worry about one's sexual desirability. However, some speakers take these complaints quite seriously and that amounts to an (unconsciously) selfish ploy to get ahead by denigrating the competition. After all some people will always be more beautiful than others so at best they are demanding we change the standards to put themselves closer to the top. In men we recognize the analogous unpleasant behavior (dismissing every guy who is popular with the ladies as an asshole or sissy) isn't praiseworthy and we should do the same in women.

This is simple human psychology. We all (men and women) resent those we fear are more attractive/more successful than us and we look for ways to bring them down so we don't feel so bad about ourselves. It would thus be unfair to assign more than a little blame to the men and women who look for excuses to dismiss their potential competitors. They are just groping for ways to feel better about themselves. The true culprit here is society which doesn't call out this behavior for what it is.

I agree with some of the later argument about anorexia versus obesity, but I don't find this argument very convincing. It's certainly likely true that many who complain about extremely thin body images would like society to accept a body image that makes them feel better about themselves, but that doesn't mean that that wouldn't be a net win as well, even if we're just looking at self-image.

Let's start with an unreasonable model and assume that we can characterize body size by a single metric M corresponding to body mass index. To simplify things, we'll say that the smallest possible M value is 0 and the largest is 1. Further, we'll assume there's some ideal M value MI. If we assume that individual A has a size MA, then we can write their happiness as F(MA, MI). We could posit a large number of different forms for F, but in the spirit of oversimplification, let's say that unhappiness is always positive and is linear in the distance between your size and the ideal size:
Unhappiness = | MA - MI |
So, is there an optimal value of MI, i.e., one that maximizes average happiness? It turns out that the answer is probably yes. Let's assume (again unrealistically) that people's sizes are uniformly distributed between 0 and 1. As an example, let's assume that MI is 0. Remember that the average size is .5, so the average happiness is also .5. Because the distribution is uniform, we can extend this for any value of MI. We simply partition the space around MI and then note that the average size (and hence happiness) on either side of the partition is equal to halfway between the partition and the end. And since the fraction of people on either side is also proportional to the point of partition...
Avg-Unhappiness = 1/2((MI)2 + (1-MI)2)
or Avg-Unhappiness = 1/2(1 - 2MI + 2MI2)

It's not hard to convince yourself that the minimum of this function is at MI = .5. Moreover, unhappiness gets worse the further away MI gets from 0.5, reaching a maximum at 0 and 1.

Now, obviously, this model is unrealistic in a number of ways. For instance:

The last objection is probably the most serious. In fact, it's not clear it's any kind of distance function. You could imagine instead that it's a function of how many people are between you and the top. However, I doubt that's completely true. For most practical purposes, being merely more attractive than almost everyone you meet is almost as good as being the most attractive person in the world. Most women are never going to meet Brad Pitt, so if I just look more attractive than nearly every man they ever meet (which is regrettably not true), that's nearly as good as being as attractive as Brad as far as getting dates is concerned. And yet, very attractive people—even those more attractive than almost everyone they know—seem to be reasonably likely to be unhappy with their bodies as well, at least in part because they're judging themselves against people with whom they're not really competing directly.

This brings me to what I think is the more important point: it's not clear that the current media-portrayed ideal body image is within the possible range at all. I've never seen any supermodel in person, so I'm operating pretty much on the basis of photography and video, which (1) are very heavily made up (2) are posed and cherrypicked to be those people at their most attractive and (3) at least in the case of still photography, are extremely heavily photoshopped. In other words, it's quite possible that they appear to be at (say) -.2, which isn't actually achievable. And since the further away from the center of gravity the ideal image gets the more unhappy people get, having the ideal image outside the possible range creates unnecessary unhappiness. Even if we moved it to just the outer limit of the possible range, i.e., MI=0 that wouldn't upset the orderings but would make people happier because they would feel closer to the perceived ideal (this is actually Pareto dominant).

As I said at the beginning, this is a ridiculously oversimplified model. I don't know if any of these properties would hold up in a more realistic model, but it certainly seems possible they would, and if so, then it's possible we would in fact benefit—at least in terms of happiness with one's appearance—from an ideal body image more closer to the population norm, in which case wanting to change the ideal body image is potentially more than just a matter of rearranging the pecking order.

Posted by ekr at 7:52 PM | Comments (8)

October 26, 2007

Brooksworm, run!

Matthew Yglesias approvingly quotes David Brooks:
David Brooks really nails an important part of the internet experience:
Until that moment, I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants -- silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.
Right. I had a weird experience on Monday of playing on a pub trivia trivia team after not having done so for several years. Every time a question got asked that I didn't know the answer to, I felt this overwhelming urge to reach for my iPhone, a device I didn't have back in my earlier quizzing days. The idea of being limited to the information that was actually in my head was very distressing.

So, I started to write about how this is all really obvious and old news —I've seen people referring to their PDAs as external brains since long before they were even networked—but it's actually 6000 year old news. The first major technology that let you expand your ability to offload substantial amounts of work previously done by your brain was writing. The second was mathematics.

Computer scientists like to talk about a memory hierarchy: a computer can have a lot of different kinds of storage: registers, onboard cache (on the chip), offboard cache (on the motherboard), main memory, hard drive (typically a cache plus the disk), online tape, archival tape, etc. The general principle is that the further away you get from the CPU the larger the capacity is, but the longer the access time. So, performance is to a great extent limited by your ability to keep important data at hand. If the working set of your program is too large to be contained in the close/fast/small levels of the memory hierarchy, the CPU tends to idle as data needs to be moved in and out of memory levels.

Obviously, brains aren't constructed in this way, but you do have short and long term memory, and written words provide a form of ultra-long-term memory, as well as (of course) a way to communicate sections of your memory to others. One way to think about this second feature is that it's the ability to have things in your "memory" that you never actually learned. I.e., they never passed through your biological memory, you just look them up when you need them.

The disadvantage of this form of ultra-long-term memory, of course, is that it's unbelievably slow. I keep paper notebooks, but actually finding things in them can be quite difficult ("you can't grep dead trees"). An electronic memory is obviously much easier to find stuff in. The "remember stuff you never knew" feature is even worse. First, you need to actually find the book you're looking for, then you need to actually find the section of the book, then you need to actually digest the information. Only then is it in short term and you actually know it. Compare this to long-term memory, where you just need a reminder and it all starts to swap back into short-term (though this can take quite some time.)

So, the basic problem with paper memories is that the gap between them and the next step up in the memory hierarchy is just too large. One way to think of electronic memories is that they close that gap. At one level, that's great, but at another it still pretty much sucks. It's massively slower to find (let alone assimilate) things from the Internet than it is to remember them (assuming I actually can). What I really want is to just have the information piped directly into my brain. We're a ways away from that, but if we ever can, it will seem like every bit the miracle that the Internet does now, and Google will look just as clunky as books by comparison.

The above is all about memory, but there are actually at least four mental tasks you can outsource: memory, processing, input, and output. Our current technology lets us outsource all of these to some extent, but really it's quite far from what you'd like.

Required reading:
This sort of enhancement is one of Vernor Vinge's writing. "Bookworm, Run!", which is the first place I saw this kind "The Peace War" is very focused on outsourced processing. "Rainbows End" is a more complete vision of both the potential of this kind of technology and of the threats that come along with it.
P.J. Denning's "The Working Set Model for Program Behavior".

Posted by ekr at 11:36 AM | Comments (2)

October 17, 2007

Web traffic school recommendations?

I'm looking for a Web-based traffic school for a ticket received in Palo Alto. Have any readers investigated the options and want to share their experiences?

UPDATE: Apparently the only online traffic school you can use in Santa Clara County is DriversEd, which annoyingly requires you to take an in-person test at the end of the class. Has anyone done this? Trying to figure out if it's enough of a pain to make just taking the points attractive.

Posted by ekr at 9:24 PM | Comments (3)

October 14, 2007

If your doomsday machine is broken, keep it a secret

Re-watched Wargames last night and noticed something funny. I don't think it's a spoiler to note that the motivating factor for putting the computer in charge of missile launch is that NORAD runs a simulation and determines that 22% of missile commanders won't turn the key. A few notes about this. First, 78% launch success rate is pretty good. Given the amount of missile overcapacity had in the 80s—and still have, I suppose—it doesn't seem to me that this presents much of a problem.

Also, the point of deterrence is to make the enemy believe you'll destroy them if they attack. Once they have actually launched their missiles and they can't be recalled, launching your own missiles is just revenge—pretty questionable behavior if you're a consequentialist. Of course, maintaining a posture of deterrence requires a credible commitment to a strategic posture of retaliation (recall Hermann Kahn's advice about how to play chicken), or rather having your opponent think you have such a commitment. If that commitment is a bit rickety, there are two alternatives: shore it up or just don't let anyone find out.

Posted by ekr at 8:55 PM | Comments (4)

October 13, 2007

Follow that bus

Coming home from dinner tonight, Mrs. Guesswork noticed that a passing bus had "CALL 911" instead of the ordinary route number on the external LED display. We followed instructions and called 911, who said that others had called it in as well.

If anyone in Palo Alto notices this on the news and sees what's up, can you post something in the comments?

Posted by ekr at 10:14 PM | Comments (1)

October 11, 2007

Surprise! Christians think everyone should be Christian

Like Matthew Yglesias, I'm not particularly bothered by Ann Coulter expressing the opinion that the world would be better if Jews (and presumably everyone else) converted to Christianity:
COULTER: The head of Iran is not a Christian.

DEUTSCH: No, but in fact, "Let's wipe Israel" --

COULTER: I don't know if you've been paying attention.

DEUTSCH: "Let's wipe Israel off the earth." I mean, what, no Jews?

COULTER: No, we think -- we just want Jews to be perfected, as they say.

DEUTSCH: Wow, you didn't really say that, did you?

COULTER: Yes. That is what Christianity is. We believe the Old Testament, but ours is more like Federal Express. You have to obey laws. We know we're all sinners --

...

DEUTSCH: Welcome back to The Big Idea. During the break, Ann said she wanted to explain her last comment. So I'm going to give her a chance. So you don't think that was offensive?

COULTER: No. I'm sorry. It is not intended to be. I don't think you should take it that way, but that is what Christians consider themselves: perfected Jews. We believe the Old Testament. As you know from the Old Testament, God was constantly getting fed up with humans for not being able to, you know, live up to all the laws. What Christians believe -- this is just a statement of what the New Testament is -- is that that's why Christ came and died for our sins. Christians believe the Old Testament. You don't believe our testament.

I realize it's not considered polite to say this sort of thing in public, but let's recap the argument:

  1. We're all sinners (Rom 3:23).
  2. When sinners die, pretty bad stuff happens to them, even if it's just weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matt 25:30).
  3. Subscribing to Christianity is only way to escape this nasty fate. (John 3:16).

You don't exactly have to be Jack Chick to believe this stuff—it's pretty much the mainline Christian value proposition. And if you do, it seems like you might think it was pretty much a good thing if your fellow man subscribed to it as well, thereby avoiding an eternity of everlasting torment.

I do realize that phrasing this as there being no Jews is pretty offensive sounding—and of course Coulter specializes in that—but I don't think she's saying you can't eat latkes, just that you'd be expected to believe in Jesus, etc. Now, this isn't exactly a value proposition I'm particularly interested in either, but I don't see that it's really any worse than wishing everyone were a Republican, which I imagine Coulter does as well.

It should be relatively obvious that if you're a member of religion X, you probably think that the beliefs of religion Y are silly/wrong for any Y != X (and as Dawkins points out, atheists just think this for all religions). As a matter of civic politeness, people generally refrain from pointing this out, but that's just politeness, a collective version of refraining from pointing out that someone is wearing a really bad toupee.

Posted by ekr at 8:58 PM | Comments (4)

October 10, 2007

"Alleged"

In the comments on this this post about unredacting digital photos, Adam Roach writes:
Here's something that's confused me about the coverage of this case: whenever referring to the man in the pictures, the media has taken care to describe him as an "alleged pedophile."

Alleged.

Based on the descriptions of the portions of the photographs that haven't been published by the mainstream media, these are photographs of the man having sex with clearly under-aged boys.

I can see how you would need to be careful if you were attaching a name or specific identity to the statement -- any identified person would merely be an alleged pedophile until the case goes to trial and a conviction is obtained.

But the man in the photos? The man in the pictures that depict him engaging in pedophilia is a pedophile.

Well, yes and no.

First, I haven't seen the pictures—and no, please don't send them to me. So, I can't attest that they represent pedophilia at all. Rather, Interpol and those who have seen them allege that they do.

Look at it this way: the dude's face was obscured. Someone unobscured it. I think it's reasonable to assume that the unobscuring actually got the original face before the transformation was applied. On the other hand, it's certainly possible that the face we're now seeing was photoshopped onto the body of someone engaging in pedophilia (Rugbyjock, one of the Fark photoshop regulars, specializes in photoshopping people's heads onto gay pornography). If that were true, then while I guess it's true that the pictures show someone engaging in pedophilia, the referent of "the man in the pictures" starts to get a bit fuzzy.

To get a little more exotic, it's possible that the original source material was of someone having sex with under-age boys, but that the adult's face and body has been photoshopped to look quite a bit not like him. At this point, the referent of "the man in the pictures" starts to get extremely fuzzy. And then there's the possibility that the pictures were completely photoshopped, for instance, by photoshopping adults to look under-aged.

Do I actually believe any of these things are particularly likely? No. But they're not impossible and that's the sort of doubt "alleged" is intended to preserve.

Posted by ekr at 8:39 AM | Comments (2)

October 7, 2007

Mission Impossible locked room mysteries

OK, so I'm watching Mission Impossible and I've got some questions (spoilers follow after the break.)

Oh, and what's with the floppy disk that has a homing device? Cruise tells his contact that the disk has a transmitter, but they insist on booting it up. What, you've never heard of a Faraday cage?

Posted by ekr at 9:37 PM | Comments (4)

October 5, 2007

Same-Day Scheduling for Doctors

I wanted to point to Marina Krakovsky's interesting Slate article about the same-day appointment movement for doctors (sometimes called advanced or open access). The basic idea is that whenever patients call, you try to offer them an appointment the same day. Most of the doctor's schedule is kept open for appointments the same day so you can afford to do this. I go to the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, which uses this policy for their general practititioners, and I can attest that it works quite well. I don't always get to see my own doctor, but I generally get to see someone almost immediately, which is really nice. They don't seem to have the same policy for specialists, and it's pretty noticeable when you want to see one.

One essential feature is that the doctor's practice needs to accept some overcapacity. A detailed description of the issue can be found is here but the basic problem is the discreteness of the time units. Say you scale your capacity to match average load. On days when you exceed your average load you need to turn people away. This creates a backlog, but on days when you are under your average load, you generally can't call people in off that backlog, so you gradually build up a larger and larger backlog.

It would be of interesting to know how the overcapacity required to make open access work compares to the overcapacity required to make scheduled appointments work. Obviously, in a perfectly scheduled system, you can work with basically no overcapacity, bringing in an extra person to help out when the backlog starts to get too bad. But real systems have two forms of variance: emergency appointments and no-shows. Emergency appointments require you to keep some overcapacity to service them (the carve-out model), or deny service. By contrast, no-shows produce unintended overcapacity (airlines deal with this by overbooking, but if you're a doctor you can't really tell someone in your waiting room that you can't see them and compensate them with a free trip anywhere in the US). This means that you end up just being idle and doing paperwork, going home, or whatever.

I haven't done any kind of literature search for this, but it seems like a relatively straightforward operations research/queueing theory question.

Posted by ekr at 9:01 PM | Comments (3)

September 28, 2007

Talk about teaching to the test

The NYT covers the kabuki theater over the new citizenship test. Predictably, those opposed to immigration said the old test was too easy and those in favor say the new test is too hard:
The redesign of the test, the first since it was created in 1986 as a standardized examination, follows years of criticism in which conservatives said the test was too easy and immigrant advocates said it was too hard.

The new questions did little to quell that debate among many immigrant groups, who complained that the citizenship test would become even more daunting. Conservatives seemed to be more satisfied.

...

In a statement today, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, one of the groups consulted in shaping the new test, denounced it as "the final brick in the second wall." The group said the test included "more abstract and irrelevant questions" that tended to stump hard-working immigrants who had little time to study.

But several historians said the test appeared to be fair.

"People who take this seriously will have a good chance of passing," said Gary Gerstle, a professor of American history at Vanderbilt University. "Indeed, their knowledge of American history may even exceed the knowledge of millions of American-born citizens."

John Fonte, a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, called the new test "a definite improvement." But he said it should have included questions about the meaning of the oath of allegiance that new citizens swear. "I would like to see an even more vigorous emphasis on Americanization," he said.

This whole debate is a little hard to take seriously because the test only has 100 questions, all of which are published in their entirety along with the answers. In order to pass, you need to get 6 right out of 10 chosen by the examiner (this is unchanged from the previous test.) Whatever the questions, this doesn't exactly require deep knowledge. Given this format, it's pretty hard to take seriously objections that it's somehow too hard to pass. I'm pretty confident with a day or two to prepare I could pass a similar test on the history of Burkina Faso, or for that matter, Epsilon Eridani.

On the other hand, given this format it's pretty hard to get excited about claims that it's somehow too easy to pass—that somehow we're passing people who don't understand American civics—even with the old test. A test with 10,000 questions rather than a hundred would be a lot more plausible. It would at least preclude memorizing all the questions.

Posted by ekr at 8:39 PM | Comments (1)

September 26, 2007

More than you ever wanted to know about Frére Jacques

Mrs. G. was singing Frére Jacques earlier tonight and it reminded me of the generally incorrect English translation. As Landes points out, "sonnez les matines" is an imperative "ring the morning bell", not, as commonly translated "morning bells are ringing." The idea here is that this is an instruction to whatever monk is responsible for ringing the bells calling the other monks to morning prayer.

I seem to have lent out my copy of Revolution in Time, so I had to resort to Wikipedia, which goes on in some detail:

Given that some maintain that nursery rhymes have serious themes when they are examined in detail (this might not always be true, however[2][3] ), one might infer some morbid undercurrent to the French version of this song. Admittedly, if the song originally was created to commemorate some negative event, it might have greater cultural resonance and be more likely to be incorporated into the canon of cultural elements that are transmitted from generation to generation. Once a memetic unit like this song reached sufficient familiarity and social penetration, it presumably would continue to be passed on as part of a tradition even though its original meaning had been forgotten. If one subscribes to this line of reasoning, one might expect Frére Jacques to refer to a well known figure and a well known event.

Another piece of evidence that appears to support a dark interpretation of this song is the fact that in some places such as Austria, it was at one time commonly sung in a minor key, rather than a major key, giving the song the quality of a funeral dirge.[4][5]

In this vein, some have suggested that this verse might not refer to sleep, but to the death of a friar or monk, or perhaps a member of one of the religious military orders. For example, it is widely believed in France that the renowned Frére Jacques de Molay of the Templar Knights, who was executed in 1314, is the subject of the Frére Jacques song.[6][7] This claim should be probably approached with an air of caution, because there are many alternate interpretations. For example, the poet Jean-Luc Aotret has written a poem suggesting that the subject of Frére Jacques is the excommunicated Franciscan poet Jacopone da Todi (1236\u20131306).[8][9][10]

OK, then.

Posted by ekr at 9:18 PM

September 21, 2007

Today's reading

Via cilogear makes packs, a link to empirical work on how to dig out someone who was buried in an avalanche. Money quote:
To prevent the problem of digging straight down to the victim and creating a non-workable hole, we determined that it was essential to clearly define the excavation area before digging. This area, called the "starter hole," should be excavated first, preferably starting on one's knees. Once this hole is up to the rescuers' waists, then the next level can be excavated. Without this starter hole, rescuers tend to get "tunnel vision" and lose the opportunity to create a hole that will be workable when the victim is reached.

 

Via Crooked Timber Philippe Van Parijs tries to figure out a fair way for everyone to communicate using English. The basic point is that it's a lot easier for people to communicate if we all speak the same language, but it's a much higher burden for those who don't speak English to learn it than it is for native English speakers to, well, do nothing. Is there some way to balance this burden? Incidentally, there's some sort of analogy here to the transition from IPv4 to IPv6, but the incentives are in a different direction—the established players all have IPv4 addresses, it's those who by definition are less established who would likely benefit the most from IPv6.

Posted by ekr at 3:19 PM | Comments (1)

September 12, 2007

Well, as long as you're one of the 1.5 billion

In Slate, Daniel Engberg argues for/covers Alan Weisman (The World Without Us)'s argument for smaller families as an environmental move:
Oh, if we all just disappeared. According to The World Without Us, Alan Weisman's strangely comforting vision of human annihilation, the Earth would be a lot better off. In his doomsday scenario, freshwater floods would course through the New York subway system, ailanthus roots would heave up sidewalks, and a parade of coyotes, bears, and deer would eventually trot across the George Washington Bridge and repopulate Manhattan. Nature lovers can take solace in the idea that the planet will thrive once we've finally destroyed ourselves with global warming. But Weisman takes the fantasy one step further: Let's not wait for climate change, he says. Let's start depopulating right now.

Instead of burning down our numbers with oil and gas, we might follow the advice of the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, who tells Weisman that everyone in the world should stop having kids all at once. Weisman isn't up for quite so drastic a measure, but he makes his own pitch, moderate in comparison: Let's cut the birth rate to one child per couple, for a few generations at least. The population would dwindle by about 5 billion people over the next century, he says, ensuring the habitability of the Earth for the 1.6 billion who remained. At that point, they could all reap the rewards of a more spacious planet, sharing in "the growing joy of watching the world daily become more wonderful." It seems like a notion from the fringe, but Weisman's book has become a mainstream best seller. Could population control be the next big thing in green culture?

There are of course two ways of looking at preserving the environment: as something that's good in itself or as an instrumental good—who wants to live in a world where the environment is so destroyed that all you get to eat is soylent green? If you subscribe to the first theory, then sure, the lower the human impact the better. On the other hand, if you subscribe to the second theory, then it's much less obvious that a reduced population is a good thing. Those people who weren't born yet would presumably have taken some pleasure in life and now they won't. Now, obviously the people who are born will have a higher quality of life, but this kind of reasoning runs us right into Parfit's "How only France survives". I don't have a good answer to what the right population of the Earth is, but I don't see Weisman/Engberg's argument as particularly dispositive either.

Of course, it could easily be that Weisman subscribes to the first theory. I haven't read his book but I heard him being interviewed on NPR and got the distinct sense that he took some pleasure in contemplating a world without humans.

Posted by ekr at 8:45 PM | Comments (6)

September 10, 2007

Magid on 8830 vs. iPhone... huh?

In his article explaining why he would rather have a Blackberry 8830 than an iPhone, Magid writes:
In the iPhone's place, I'm now using a BlackBerry 8830 that I borrowed from Sprint, and I have to say that, on balance, I prefer it to the iPhone. I miss the iPhone's great Web browser and the way it implemented Google maps, but I'm much happier with the true 3G network from Sprint and BlackBerry's physical keys. I find myself typing messages on the BlackBerry and making fewer mistakes, though I do miss the iPhone's software that corrects mistakes as you type.

The biggest difference is Sprint's true 3-G broadband network which is not only faster but seems to work in more places. And, unlike the iPhone, the BlackBerry is able to display Word files, PDFs and some other attachments, making it a lot more practical to use to review business documents.

Obviously, everyone has their own opinion about whether they like the on-screen keyboard or not, but this stuff about PDFs and Word files is just wrong. The iPhone will display both Word and PDF files. Kind of hard to take the rest of Magid's comments seriously when he gets something like this wrong.

Posted by ekr at 8:01 AM | Comments (2)

September 9, 2007

Witches and negative outcome clusters

Pascal Boyer in Religion Explained argues that belief in witchraft, magic, etc. is not adequately explained by people's search for explanations for bad things that happen to them:
In the past, anthropologists sometimes suggested that this may be because people were not very good at understanding natural correlations or the work of random variables. In some groups, most cases of disease or death are ascribed to witchcraft. Surely, the argument goes, statistically aware people would notice that more or less everybody catches some disease at some point, that not all operations are always successful, and that in the long term we all will die. Failing to appreciate these contingencies, people resort to magical explanations for events that are in fact perfectly ordinary. This is what we generally mean by superstition." People see patterns and causes where there is just chance.

However, anthropologists know that people the world over are in fact rather good at detecting statistical regularities in their environment. Indeed, even the simplest techniques depend on such detection and this has been the case for as long as humans have been around. Early humans could not successfully maintain a rich food supply as foragers unless they could detect which fruit and tubers could be found where, with what frequency, in what season. People cannot hunt animals without without detecting which habits and behavior are true of a species as a whole and which apply only to particular exemplars, and so on. So it seems difficult to maintain that contingencies and random events are not generally understood.

I don't find this very convincing. It's absolutely true that people are extroardinarily sensitive to patterns. But like many evolution designed mechanisms, it's messy and heuristic. In particular, it tends to detect patterns that aren't there. This is well-known, as in for example the gambler's fallacy. It's absolutely true that if the detector didn't work at all, that would be a problem, but it's not clear that it needs to work perfectly. That said, it's possible that the particular set of built-in biases it seems to have aren't the optimal ones; that depends on the cost of seeing patterns that aren't there compared to the cost of missing patterns that are there.

It's also interesting to note that in the West, people make the same kind of attribution errors about bad outcomes, but they blame them on science and scientists instead of witches (cf. mercury/autism, fluoridation, EMF, cancer clusters, etc.) Of course, given the amount the average person knows about science, scientists might just as well be witches.

Posted by ekr at 9:33 PM | Comments (2)

September 2, 2007

Somin on photo resizing

Over at Volokh, Ilya Somin recently asked:
I recently bought a digital camera, and used it to take numerous photos on a trip abroad. To my considerable annoyance, after I returned I learned that digital photos are formatted to be 4.5x6 inches rather than the standard 4x6. As far as I can tell, after calling up several photo shops, my only two options are either to 1) have the pictures cropped to 4x6 (which might eliminate important material, or 2) pay a fairly high price ($0.39/photo, even for a Ritz member like me) to have Ritz Camera develop them in 4.5x6 (the other shops I called don't develop in 4.5x6 at all). I realize that I could manually crop the photos on my computer. But that's not a realistic alternative because there are too many of them and I'm not good at cropping. I bet that many VC readers probably know more than I do about digital cameras (not a high bar to clear, to be sure). So here's my question. Is there any way I can do one of the following:

1. Have the pictures resized to 4x6 WITHOUT cropping of either the automatic or manual variety - and at a reasonable price.

2. Have them printed at 4.5x6 at a price significantly lower than Ritz's (20-25 cents/photo or less would be acceptable).

I suspect that I'm not the only person who has encountered this problem with digital photos. So I'm hoping that someone more savvy about digital cameras than I am has come up with a good solution.

His commenters then spend a bunch of time explaining to him that you can't convert 4.5x6 to 4x6 (a ghastly aspect ratio by the way) without either (1) letterboxing (though in this case it's pillar-boxing) or (2) cropping or (3) changing the aspect ratio, which you don't want to do. It doesn't take any knowledge whatsoever of digital photography or photography at all to convince yourself of this. Just imagine the image as printed on a rubber sheet and think about what happens when you stretch it in any one dimension. You can't simultaneously have the same framing that you originally wanted without also introducing image distortion. In this case, the distortion is quite bad, because 4.5 is 12.5% bigger than 4, and a 12% shrink is very noticeable.

Here's a demo of what this all looks like with a picture that's vertically rather than horizantally oriented.

OriginalLetter-boxedCropped (centered)Resized

Somin then follows up with another post that suggests that he still doesn't get it:

Thanks to all who responded to my bleg on digital photo resizing. Pursuing one of the suggestions offered by commenters, I have downloaded a digital photo resizing program. Unfortunately, the resizing options are listed in terms of pixels rather than inches (i.e. -640x480 pixels instead of 4x6 inches). My question for you experts out there (or just those whose ignorance is less profound then mine): What pixel option should I choose to resize digital 4.5x6 photos to the standard 4x6, so I can then print them out in 4x6 size without cropping (my original objective)?

As previously noted: this means he has to pillarbox, not resize. Resizing won't do anything for him. Moreover, this can't be done by typing in pixel options. He needs to make a canvas with a 4:3 aspect ratio and then copy and paste a smaller version of the 1.5:1 aspect ratio image onto it.

I do find it a little puzzling that Somin seems to find this so hard to grasp. Is aspect ratio simply a difficult concept? Are people so dazzled by PhotoShop that they don't think about what they're actually asking the computer to do? I'm trying not to make generalizations about a legal versus technical education, but this seems like sort of a basic concept. I don't get it.

Posted by ekr at 7:51 AM | Comments (9)

August 28, 2007

Hash House Terrorists???

OK, you've all heard that some Hash House Harriers were arrested for laying down flour trails in New Haven:
Just before 5 p.m., the police received a call that someone was sprinkling powder on the ground. The store was evacuated and remained closed the rest of the day.

The incident prompted a massive response from the New Haven police and authorities from surrounding towns.

Dr. Salchow was at home waiting for the others who took part in the four-mile run to arrive for an after-party when his wife called to say there was a problem. He biked to Ikea and tried to explain to the police that the powder was just flour.

The club's tactics have caused problems elsewhere.

In 2002, a trail of flour caused a mall in Fayetteville, N.C., to be evacuated for two hours. A few months earlier, two runners in Oxford, Miss., were arrested after using piles of white powder to mark a route through a downtown square.

Dr. Salchow said that after the 9/11 attacks, club members started using chalk to mark courses. But as fears eased, they went back to flour because it is biodegradable. He said they would start using chalk again or find somewhere else to run.

Jessica Mayorga, a spokeswoman for Mayor John DeStefano Jr., said the city planned to seek restitution from the Salchows, and will meet Monday to decide how much.

Ms. Mayorga said they should not have used the flour if they knew it had caused scares in the past.

"You see powder connected by arrows and chalk, you never know," she said.

It's true, you never do know. In fact, I understand that arrows and chalk is the preferred method of bioweapon dispersal.

Seriously, say I had a weaponized bioagent in some sort of power. I can think of probably twenty different methods to use for distributing it that would be better than this (explosives, ventilation systems, just blowing it into the air with a leafblower, spreading it on food at the grocery store, water supply, etc.) Leaving it in a pile on the stret with an arrow pointing to it strikes me as one of the worst possible ways. Given the actual number of terrorist attacks in the US since 9/11, it's probably time to stop going to full panic mode whenever something the least bit out of the ordinary happens.

Posted by ekr at 8:36 PM | Comments (1)

August 23, 2007

Just wait till next year

Mark Kleiman argues against the arguments against a fast withdrawal from Iraq:
More Iraqis will probably die of violence just after a U.S. withdrawal than are dying violently now. That will hand the pro-war forces a rhetorical "I told you so." Anyone who can blame what happened in Cambodia on U.S. doves is clearly shameless enough to blame the civil war in Iraq on the people who opposed the invasion rather than those who carried it out and then bungled the occupation.

But that's not a good enough reason to hang around, unless at some point it stops being true: that six months, or a year, or two years, or five years from now we would be able to withdraw and not have civil war and massacre follow. If all we're spending blood and treasure on is postponing a catastrophe we can't prevent, the "humanitarian" argument against a fairly rapid withdrawal collapses.

I don't have a good enough understanding of the situation to do a real cost/benefit analysis, but this general form of reasoning is clearly untrue. You wouldn't tell someone with a treatable but otherwise fatal illness that there was no point in treating him because he'd die of old age eventually anyway. Cost-benefit decisions need to be made at the margin and if in any given year vastly more people in Iraq would die if we withdraw than if we didn't then all other things being equal, there seems to be at least some humanitarian argument for us staying that year, even if there's no reasonable possibility that the situation will ever improve. After all, that's another year of life that those people who are not dead got to enjoy.

Obviously, this is just the beginning of the analysis, not the end, since you then have to ask where else we could be spending our bloor and treasure and would that other place have, as seems likely, a better cost/benefit ratio? But the simple argument that we're just postponing the inevitable doesn't seem to do the job.

Posted by ekr at 8:18 PM | Comments (5)

August 22, 2007

Heads-up: AT&T Billing Issues

I was going over my first iPhone bill this morning and noticed something interesting: they don't seem to be reliably billing in-network calls as mobile-to-mobile. One of my friends has an iPhone and so of course he has AT&T and we should be getting free mobile-to-mobile minutes, but we're not.1 I've called AT&T customer service and they say they're working on it. You may want to check your own bill.

1. Note: you have to be careful reading your bill because on nights and weekends, the minutes get billed as NW, not M2M. But I'm getting these minutes billed as daytime minutes as well.

Posted by ekr at 8:59 AM | Comments (5)

August 21, 2007

Yes, Nalgene bottles do come in multiple sizes

Slate's shopping column always struck me as a little weird, but typically I don't know anything about the products they're reviewing. However, this week, they decided to cover a product I do know: water bottles. Like Nalgene users everywhere, Laura Moser discovers that the widemouth is a bit too wide:
Even without my prompting, audience responses were overwhelmingly negative. The mouth was judged impractically wide, and the bottle itself doesn't fit in most bike cages and car cup holders. Cheaper than most options, yes, and definitely a cinch to wash either by hand or in the dishwasher. But after a day in the sun, the water tasted flat and stale.

Is it really that hard to find out that Nalgene bottles come in multiple sizes? In particular, they come in smaller sizes and narrow-mouth bottles. You can also buy an insert that fits in the mouth of the bottle and stops it from spilling. I don't have any special brief for Nalge bottles, but I do wonder what the point of doing a consumer review is if you're not going to really survey the space.

Oh, and BTW, I don't have an informed opinion on Bisphenol A. I do, however, own a number of Nalge bottles and use them on and off.

Posted by ekr at 10:44 PM

August 16, 2007

Specialty blogs you may want to read

Bike Snob NYC (þ Cilogear makes packs:
Trek engineers were finally liberated from the crippling constraints of seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong, whose irrational demands for a durable, comfortable, and practical road racing bike long prevented them from implementing the types of design improvements we real cyclists all long for--most important among them being larger head tube bearings, the elimination of pesky bottom brackets, and proprietary everything. The Madone is their ultimate achievement in fulfilling the new Trek mandate--to create a bicycle that cannot and will not accept any components manufactured by a company other than Trek.

Thanks to the wealth of diagrams and photographs that have accompanied the introduction of the new Madone, it was completely unnecessary for me to ride it, because it's abundantly clear the carbon fiber construction and layup yielded a frame that was laterally stiff yet vertically compliant. More important though is the fact that Madone riders will no longer have to go to the bike shop when they have a problem with a noisy, rough, or sloppy bottom bracket. Rather, they will only have to go to the bike shop when they have a problem with their noisy, rough, or sloppy proprietary bottom bracket shell. And if you've ever owned a bike that takes a more-or-less standard seatpost size, you can relate to the frustrating and time-intensive process of choosing from among the vast array of posts available to you on the market. With the Madone, Trek have taken the choice away from you, so instead of agonizing over seatposts you can spend more time riding. But enough of all this technical jargon. The fact is that this bike climbs like a fever on a dumbwaiter, descends like a German U-boat, cuts corners like a UAW welder, and accelerates like a Fiat strapped to an ICBM. Overall, just knowing that you're riding a bike that puts a pair of pedals, a seat, and some handlebars under you in a completely revolutionary way is enough to make you drive that much faster when you've got this baby strapped to the rear rack of your Honda Pilot.

Cacaolab, home of the world's most secure chocolate:

The store carries a range of truffles and other chocolate candies, but he also sells bars of chocolate, some of them single origin. In the middle of these bars, in a silver package that sets it apart from the dark packaging of the other more "ordinary" Marcolini bars is the Limited Edition, made from his own private stash of Mexican Porcelana Criollo. And, it's a $15 for 2.5 oz of chocolate. Yikes.

Being a complete chocolate fanatic, and admitted sucker for status items, this (and an assortment of the other single origin specialities) was a clear must-have. (In the most effective sales pitch ever, the clerk explained that they only had 9 bars left, and would not be getting any more for a year.) Got to give Marcolini points for designing a great retail experience!

Outside of the theatrics, this is one monumental chocolate. The Porcelana bean is known for being a very light, fruity bean. Latin American beans, in general, have a chocolate taste that builds more slowly and is less powerful than the more monochromatic, more directly "chocolatey" African beans. In Marcolini's Limited Edition, he's roasted and conched these sophisticated little seeds into a baroque wonder. One of my favorite things about tasting really quality chocolate is how the taste can play out and elaborate over time. Different cocoa butter fractions will melt at different points, and cocoa solids will release different flavors as the chocolate melts on the tongue. In a good Venezuelan or Madagascar chocolate, this shows up as a pleasant fruit or floral note that typically plays out after the initial chocolate and nutty flavors. This chocolate is sophisticated enough that it carries at least three distinct fruit notes that play out sequentially on the tongue. It's full of pineapple, apple, and banana notes that blend seamlessly into the bready and nutty lower flavors. There is very little bitterness or astringency to distract from this little taste melody. The Limited is clean and light enough that the middle flavors actually are quite similar to the softness of a milk chocolate. The typical punchiness of a lower end dark chocolate is almost entirely absent. The Marcolini has a complexity evident in very few dark chocolates, with a gentle character that makes milk chocolate seem redundant. Extraordinary.

Posted by ekr at 6:59 AM | Comments (1)

August 15, 2007

Abusive technology

MSNBC has a fairly disturbing article about how abusive spouses, *-friends, etc. are using tracking technology (GPS, spyware, etc.) to keep tabs on their victims:
Leah lived for seven years with an abusive man. The bruises, the bleeding and the isolation were only part of his strategy to control her, she says. He turned technology on her, too. He installed spyware on her computer, read her e-mail, tracked her cell phone calls, spied on the Web sites she visited, even attached a GPS locator device to her car.

One day, after she visited her college Web site, he accused her of trying to contact a former boyfriend. The punishment was severe.

"He beat me all weekend after that," she said.

There's nothing new about abusive spouses using technology to terrorize, said Cindy Southworth, technology director at the National Network to End Domestic Violence. What is new is that now nearly all abusers use high-tech spying tools to try to extend their domination, she said.

I'm a bit skeptical of the "nearly all" claim (though without any evidence against it) but it's certainly very straightforward to do any of this stuff. This also seems like a case where the attacker has an enormous advantage. Just to take the GPS case, a GPS unit can be stuffed into a unit the size of a large watch. It's pretty easy to hide something like that in a car. It's true that GPS has trouble getting a fix without clear access to the sky, but you don't need it to work all the time to get a pretty good idea of where someone has been.

On the other hand, one could imagine a victim of abuse using this kind of communications technology in a positive way: microphones and cameras are now incredibly small so gathering evidence of abuse has gotten a lot easier. You can also get a cheap prepaid cell phone which your abuser doesn't know about and use it to call for help. You could even put a GPS in your abuser's car so you know when you had time to get away. Hard to know where the tradeoffs are here.

Posted by ekr at 9:03 PM | Comments (1)

August 13, 2007

Breathalyzer source code

Minnesota resident Dale Underdahl got busted for DUI and decided that requesting the source code for the Intoxylizer 5000EN would be a good way to get off:
During a subsequent court hearing on charges of third-degree DUI, Underdahl asked for a copy of the "complete computer source code for the (Intoxilyzer) currently in use in the state of Minnesota."

An article in the Pioneer Press quoted his attorney, Jeffrey Sheridan, as saying the source code was necessary because otherwise "for all we know, it's a random number generator." It is hardly new technology: One criminal defense attorney says the Intoxilyzer is based on the antique Z-80 microprocessor.

A judge granted the defendant's request, but Michael Campion, Minnesota's commissioner in charge of public safety, opposed it. Minnesota quickly asked an appeals court to intervene, which it declined to do. Then the state appealed a second time.

What became central to the dispute was whether the source code was owned by the state or CMI, the maker of the Intoxilyzer.

Minnesota's original bid proposal that CMI responded to says that "all right, title, and interest in all copyrightable material" that CMI creates as part of the contract "will be the property of the state." The bid proposal also says CMI must provide "information" to be used by "attorneys representing individuals charged with crimes in which a test with the proposed instrument is part of the evidence," which seems to include source code.

I have no informed opinion on whether Underdahl has a legal right to get a copy of the source code, but from a technical perspective it's not clear what he's hoping to find. It's certainly possible that the source code contains a random number generator or incriminating comment that says "insert .10 BAC reading here", or "this sensor doesn't work" but that doesn't really seem that likely. More likely it will be that it's just typical embedded software. I certainly don't see any problem with it being old technology. The Z80 is old, but it's a perfectly reasonable piece of hardware. Heck, I had one in my TRS-80 Model 3 back in the 80s.

If I were trying to call a breathalyzer reading into question, I'd probably be looking for a different angle: the measured accuracy of the system. This isn't really an issue of the source code but rather of the accuracy of the sensor. You might be able to learn something from the source code—for instance if there was some explicit fudge factor in the code—but more likely you'd need to actually examine the hardware or at least have access to studies done by someone else.

Obviously, if the vendors aren't willing to give up their source code, then subpenaing them may be a useful angle for now, but it's not likely to be a long-term effective strategy. It's not like states are going to give up on breathalyzers and even if CMI refuses to produce their source, some manufacturer eventually will. According to this article, some already do.

Posted by ekr at 9:32 PM | Comments (2)

August 12, 2007

Bringing back the draft?

War Czar Lt.-General Douglas Lute just put the draft back on the table:
Washington -- A top U.S. military officer in charge of co-ordinating the U.S. war effort in Iraq said yesterday that it makes sense to consider a return of the draft to meet the U.S. military's needs.

Lieutenant-General Douglas Lute, said the all-volunteer military is serving "exceedingly well" and the administration has not decided a draft is needed.

But in an interview with National Public Radio, he said, "I think it makes sense to certainly consider it, and I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table."

I'm having some trouble figuring out what's going on here. I guess this could be a Kinsley gaffe, but I'm pretty skeptical that (a) a draft could get passed in the current environment or (b) the American people are going to tolerate having their teenage children conscripted and sent to Iraq. Of course, I could be totally misreading the current environment, but if I were the Democrats, I'd be hoping that the Bush administration would propose a draft.

Posted by ekr at 9:30 PM | Comments (3)

August 4, 2007

Wait, you're not asking for ID?

I recently renewed my driver's license. Normally you can just renew my mail but after you've had two renewals by mail you have to go back into the DMV (carrying the form they send you). There seem to be two purposes here:
  • Make sure you can still see.
  • Get an updated picture.

Here's the weird part: they didn't check my current license (though as I remember, the form they send you say you need to bring it). They just took my money, checked my vision (in that order, which is also kind of weird) and then gave me the provisional license printout. You then walk over to a different window where they take your thumbprint and picture.

Assuming this is standard practice, and not just an error by the clerk, then attacker who pulled the form out of your mail, could just walk in and complete this process. In theory, they might catch you by comparing your existing biometrics (photo, thumbprint) against the newly captured biometrics. I don't know if they do that or not, but it seems like it would be relatively easy to bypass: people's looks change a lot in 15 years and while thumbprints don't change, there are also known techniques for cheating thumbprint scanners--assuming they check this stuff at all.

Obviously, if you went to the DMV and found someone else had already renewed your license, that might be something you'd notice, but it's not clear what the State would do about it. The wrong person would still have an ID in your name. There's no normal procedure for revoking driver's licenses. This isn't catastrophic, of course, unless you have some system that depends on positive identification of people, like say, a no-fly list.1

1. And of course if the person who's identity you were stealing was cooperating, then they wouldn't even have to report it. This doesn't make sense ordinarily, but you could use it to exchange the identity of someone who was on a no-fly list for a plant who was not.

Posted by ekr at 6:49 PM

August 3, 2007

0.946074!?!?!

Until today I had been unaware that the Canadian Dollar had passed parity with the US Dollar. The Canadian Dollar is now at 0.946074 US Dollars. Maybe I'll have to take back those peso jokes I made a few years back.

UPDATE 20070804 OK, this post was completely wrong. Someone had told me that the CAD had passed USD and then I somehow misread the results from the exchange site. Still, we're getting scarily close.

Posted by ekr at 8:47 PM | Comments (2)

July 26, 2007

Necromancy

The IETF Social was held Tuesday night at the House of Blues which is, as we all know, the hippest place in Chicago. Anyway, I'm there eating my pulled pork sandwich when some guy dressed in a cop uniform gets up on stage and announces that there are some dangerous fugitives in the audience, apparently dressed like uh, Hasidic diamond merchants. OK, OK, Dan Aykroyd owns the place so a little tribute sort of has to be expected, but then next thing I know the MC is announcing Cab Calloway, who, when I look over, appears to be somewhat younger, fatter, and less dead than I remembered him. He, of course, sang Minnie the Moocher.

This was followed by two vaguely Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi looking guys in dark suits singing what I believe to be the Blues Brothers set from the Palace Hotel Ballroom on the shores of Lake Wazzapamani. Now, I bow to few in my admiration for the genius of The Blues Brothers (27 years old now!), but when exactly did House of Blues cross over the line between tribute and parody?

Posted by ekr at 7:38 AM | Comments (1)

July 23, 2007

Queuing at doctors and movie theaters

Over at Yglesias, people are discussing this anti-universal health care ad:

A number of the commentors observe that this is a bit inartful, since movie theaters are not exactly bastions of state ownership. For instance:

Soooo...movie lines are government run? Movie tickets are Federally subsidized and not a matter of free-market supply and demand?

OK, so this is sort of a fair cop, since the advertisers brought up the comparison, but at some level these are different situations, or at least maybe are.

Queues serve two primary social purposes: exerting backpressure on demand and distributing load over time.

Exerting Backpressure on Demand
It doesn't take a queueing theorist to see that if a system can service 10 users an hour, then if the aggregate number of aggregate customers entering the system is 20 an hour on a permanent basis, then not all of them are going to be served. There are a lot of different ways to deal with this (rationing, auctions, etc.), but one is simply to implement a first-come-first-served policy. Everyone who can't be served immediately just has to wait in the queue. Now, if your aggregate demand exceeds your aggregate service capability, that means that the queue gets longer and longer. At some point, new users decide that they're not going to get served in any reasonable time and don't even bother to enter the queue. This provides a form of load management, sorting users to some extent by their willingness to wait. So, making people queue is one way of dealing with demand which would otherwise exceed capacity.

Load Distribution
The other major purpose queueing is load distribution. Lots of systems have extremely uneven demand profiles. If you average demand over time, it's less than the capacity of the system, but over short periods of time it significantly exceeds demand. You can of course deal with this by increasing capacity, but generally you just make people wait during periods of high demand and then catch up when demand is low. This lets you handle a plausible level of service even when you can't handle peak demand.

The flip side of load distribution—and this is where we get back to movie theaters—is that there are systems where the rate of service provision is extremely variable. In particular, any given movie theater room is only showing one movie at a time and people are only admitted every two hours or so. If that's at 12 PM, 2PM, 4PM, etc., and someone shows up at 1PM, they have to wait till 2 to get into the theater. This is true even if aggregate capacity far exceeds demand, i.e., the theater is always half empty. Even if people all show up at 1.59, only so many people can fit through the theater door at once, so you still end up queuing a bit. Now, obviously you could have 10 times as many movie theaters, thus reducing the amount of queuing, but nobody expects theaters to operate at 100x levels of overcapacity. It is worth noting, though, that there's a tradeoff between overcapacity (i.e., idleness) and forcing users to queue.

Now let's take the case of medical service, which is more complicated. When people talk about waiting for medical service, they're mostly using queuing as synechdoche for the system being overloaded and queuing as a form of pushback on demand. The implied claim, of course, is that free markets don't have this. Whether that's true or not (and if you were in Palo Alto on iDay you know it's not) queuing at movie theaters isn't that great a counterexample.

Posted by ekr at 10:32 PM

July 10, 2007

On scheduling jury duty

About 4 months back I received a notice informing me that I had been selected for jury duty. [Strangely, I've lived in California for 15 years and never been selected, whereas I know people who've been selected multiple times. I don't have any statistical data and clearly random results can look like they have patterns, but I still wonder about the quality of their PRNG.] It intersected with a time when I was scheduled to be in Barcelona giving a talk so I availed myself of the one-time deferral. Of course this turned out to be a mistake because I was of course just as busy the new week they scheduled me for....

In case you have never had jury duty in Santa Clara county, the system works like this. You're required to be available all week but you're only on "standby". This means that you get a jury group number and have to call a number or check a Web site to see if you have to come in. Here's how this works:

  1. The letter says "check back Friday after 5 for instructions".
  2. Friday at 6 you check and it says "check back Monday between 11 and 12."
  3. Monday at 11 you check and it says "check back Monday after 5."
  4. Monday after 5 you check and it says "check back Tuesday between 11 and 12."

Lather, rinse, repeat.

I actually managed to make it through the whole week this way without ever having to go to the courthouse. I guess that's good, but on the downside I could never plan more than a few hours ahead and had to inconvenience a bunch of people who wanted to meet with me when I had to keep saying "I could maybe meet first thing in the morning but I won't know till after 5". I'm to

I found the whole process really inconvenient and I've heard from others that they had the same experience. I would have much rather just had to spend a single day at the courthouse but be guaranteed that that was the only day (unless I was selected for a trial, of course). The problem isn't so much missing a day of work (especially since I own a laptop) but rather not being able to plan anything all week.

Designing a system like this involves balancing a number of variables, so it's hard to back out exactly what the constraints must have been, but I'm guessing it's something like:

  • It's dramatically more inconvenient for people to spend a day waiting in court than it is to not be able to plan their schedule more than 4 business hours in advance.
  • The marginal utility of being in the call-in pool for a week is not much worse than the marginal utility of being in it twice for 2-3 days.
  • It's very bad not to have enough jurors on any given day.

It seems to me that these explain most of the major features of the system, namely that:

  • They have you on call for a week rather than there for a day.
  • That the period is a week rather than having more frequent callups for two days at a time.
  • That they have to make constant adjustments to titrate the number of jurors.

Of course, another explanation is that nobody thought very hard about it and since it's illegal for you not to do what you're told there's not a lot of incentive to think about what's convenient for jurors, so we get whatever system we have.

Posted by ekr at 6:55 PM | Comments (4)

June 23, 2007

Contrarianism on credit card signatures

Matthew Yglesias and Tyler Cowen complain about stores which ask you for ID if you haven't signed your credit card:
I usually forget to sign the back of my credit cards. Or, with one of my cards -- the one I use most frequently -- the signature rubs off quickly. Every now and then the card will be rejected because it doesn't have my signature on it. Or they will require ID.

I then offer to sign the card, but they never accept this possibility. Hrrmph.

Could not a thief have signed a previously unsigned card before using it? In fact I would expect precisely that behavior from a thief. Wouldn't a thief take more care to sign than would a lazy, careless card holder? Upon seeing the unsigned credit card, their estimate of my honesty should go up not down (well, that's not quite a stable equilibrium...).

I've often complained about the same thing, though in my experience merchants do accept you signing the cards in front of them—though the clerk tends to look annoyed. However, let's consider for a moment the possibility that this isn't totally pointless and ask what the reason might be. First, we have to assume that the signature is of any use at all, that is that merchants do check signatures against the card and that the attackers aren't good at forging signatures. I'm not sure that either of these is true, but let's assume that they are. If so, Visa has an incentive to force you to sign your card immediately to avoid situations in which your unsigned card falls into the hands of criminals, who then sign it. Since they can't send a CSR out with your card to make you sign, having your card denied if it's not signed is probably the best they can do.

This sort of matches up with Visa's card acceptance policy, which actually requires the customer to sign the card in the merchant's presence (thanks to Tangurena on MR for pointing to this):

While checking card security features, you should also make sure that the card is signed. An unsigned card is considered invalid and should not be accepted. If a customer gives you an unsigned card, the following steps must be taken:
  • Check the cardholder's ID. Ask the cardholder for some form of official government identification, such as a driver's license or passport. Where permissible by law, the ID serial number and expiration date should be written on the sales receipt before you complete the transaction.
  • Ask the customer to sign the card. The card should be signed within your full view, and the signature checked against the customer's signature on the ID. A refusal to sign means the card is still invalid and cannot be accepted. Ask the customer for another signed Visa card.
  • Compare the signature on the card to the signature on the ID.
If the cardholder refuses to sign the card, and you accept it, you may end up with financial liability for the transaction should the cardholder later dispute the charge.

Of course, if this theory is true, then it just makes the question of why they don't make the strips so that the signature doesn't rub off even more puzzling.

Posted by ekr at 7:24 PM | Comments (6)

June 17, 2007

Embargoed

Saw an iPhone on Friday and got a demo but wasn't allowed to touch it and can't say anything except that it looks pretty sweet. Which I guess makes this post fairly useless.

Posted by ekr at 6:22 PM | Comments (4)

June 4, 2007

More on vampires

While we're on the topic of vampires... The central plot driver of Blade is Deacon Frost's plan to turn himself into the "blood god" who will somehow turn anyone in his path into vampires. Frankly, this is a pretty stupid plan, since it's kind of unclear why it would be useful to turn everyone into a vampire. What would they eat?

In a deleted scene, Dr. Karen Jenson (the female lead) makes this point and Frost shows her his incubator full of brainless corpses being used as blood production machines. This makes it a much less stupid plan. As I pointed out earlier, once you have a ready source of blood, vampirism becomes a sort of mild inconvenience, consisting of staying indoors at night and avoiding garlic pizza. Obviously it's uncool to turn people into vampires without their consent, but it's somewhere short of killing everyone and feasting on their blood. On the other hand, it's kind of unclear why it's in a vampire's interest for everyone else to be a vampire. Isn't the cool part of being a vampire having an edge over everyone else...

Posted by ekr at 7:49 AM | Comments (2)

June 1, 2007

Fellow members of the doucheoisie, we salute you

Via Matthew Yglesisas, here's this quite entertaining study of douchebaggery:
I'm waiting for a friend at a wine bar and I see that the guy a couple of stools down from me keeps ostentatiously checking the late-model smartphone that lies before him on the granite countertop. He has the all-black Samsung BlackJack, which happens to be the coolest-looking smartphone there is —at least until the iPhone comes out—and he's wearing jeans that look like they cost $400, and his haircut was probably half that. I also notice that he's got an expensive- looking European leather briefcase at his feet that he no doubt calls an attache.

I'm thinking, what a douchebag.

And then I think, wait a second. I'm here, at this wine bar, just as he is. And frankly, when the iPhone does come out, I intend to get it (even though it's slated to cost more than $500) to replace the Treo I'm currently carrying. (Also: I really should check my e-mail right now.) And I'm due for a (quasi-expensive) haircut, in fact. And where's the freaking bartender already? And . . . and . . . and . . . am I a douchebag? I have met the enemy, and he is . . . me?

[Checks self]

OK, I don't drink wine, my "haircut" is courtesy of Mr. Mach 3 and runs about $.50/each time, but I have a Treo and may well buy an iPhone. So far so good...

Posted by ekr at 9:06 PM

May 16, 2007

I'm sorry I didn't like your screenplay, novel, or short story

Terence Spies pointed me at Someecards, snarky electronic greeting cards:

Pretty entertaining.

Posted by ekr at 10:28 PM | Comments (1)

May 15, 2007

More Lord of the Rings plot whining

In the Fellowship of the Ring, as everyone knows, the eponymous fellowship sets out from Rivendell to RMA the One Ring. Clearly this is an important mission, but for some reason they're incredibly poorly equipped. Relatively early on we discover that Frodo is the owner of some really cool mithril body armor, which saves his life. Yet none of the others are issued any, something Boromir no doubt comes to regret later when orcs turn him into a pincushion. Similarly, when they pass through Lothlorien, the elves give them elven cloaks, some sort of elf superbread, and some other gifts.

So, here's my question: why does their gear suck so much? If you're going to send 9 guys out to save the world, wouldn't you want them to have the best gear you could scrape up? You'd think the elves could have managed to find enough. Seeing as they started out from Rivendell, would it really have been so hard for Elrond to have given them bread himself? Maybe he was out, but surely he could have had Galadriel FedEx him some. Similarly with the armor, I get that Mithril is expensive, but the dwarves had whole mines of the stuff, so it's pretty hard to believe the elves couldn't get their hands on it, unless some sort of Elvish Donald Rumsfeld was out to prove he could win the war against Sauron on the cheap.

Posted by ekr at 10:20 PM | Comments (8)

May 14, 2007

Niven and the legality of pickpocketing

Was rereading Niven's Neutron Star the other day and the following passage from Flatlander struck me:
"You picked my pocket?"
"Sure! Think I found it? Would I risk my precious hand under all these spike heels?"
"How if I call a cop?"
"Cop? Oh, a stoneface." She laughed merrily. "Learn or go under, man. There's no law against picking pocket. Look around you." I looked around me, then looked back fast, afraid she'd disappear. Not only my cash but my Bank of Jinx draft for forty thousand stars was in that waller. Everything I owned.

"See them all? Sixty-four million people in Los Angeles alone. Eighteen billion in the whole world Suppose there was a law against picking pockets? How would you enforce it?" She deftly extracted the cash from my wallet and handed the wallet back. "Get yourself a new wallet and fast. It'll have a place for your address and a window for a tenth-start stamp. Put your address in right away, and a stamp too. Then the next guy who takes it can pull out the money and drop your wallet in the nearest mailbox—no sweat. Otherwise you lose your credit cards, your ident, everything."

This all sounds very plausible initially—Niven has a talent for sounding convincing—but upon a moment's reflection it doesn't make any sense. I suppose it's possible that with a high enough population density it would become impossible to enforce laws against pickpocketing, but the rest of the reasoning doesn't make sense. You wouldn't expect people to react to an epidemic of pickpocketing by just accepting it, but rather by taking countermeasures. Sure, it's inconvenient to lose your entire wallet, but losing your cash isn't much fun either.

Of course, there are simple countermeasures. First, it's dramatically harder to steal your wallet if you're wearing it inside your clothes rather than in your hip pocket. Second, if people are actually having their wallets stolen enough that they need to put a stamp in them, you'd expect them to simply stop using bearer instruments entirely—or at least stop keeping them in their wallets. And of course, once people stop using cash, there's no point in picking their pockets. This certainly seems like a more likely equilibrium than one where pepople frequently lose their hard earned cash to pickpockets and don't take any countermeasures.

Even stranger, it emerges later in the story that the pickpocket is an otherwise perfectly nice woman with a good job. Even if we accept that pickpocketing is legal, I think we can also agree that it's not exactly what you'd call nice. There are lots of things that are legal but still aren't done by people who desire not to hurt others. I would expect that even in a pickpocket-legal world, stealing others wallets would fall into that category.

Posted by ekr at 9:28 PM | Comments (6)

May 11, 2007

Input on Blackberry Curve?

I'm in the market for a new phone to replace my venerable Treo 600 and I'm thinking about the Blackberry 8300/Curve (allegedly available from Cingular/ATT in the US in a few weeks). Do any EG readers have one of these already and want to chime in with their experiences. I'm particularly interrested in (1) call quality and (2) how the keyboard compares to the Treo.

UPDATE: Here's CNET's Curve review

Posted by ekr at 11:07 PM | Comments (4)

Against Endnotes

Kieran Healy posts about how annoying endnotes are:
Via Andrew Gelman, a post by Aaron Haspel about the evils of poorly-done endnotes, and endnotes in general. This is something John has written about before, too. Endnotes really are a problem in scholarly books. In general, footnotes are better. Both are better than author-in-text citations (Healy 2006).

Indeed. It's important to distinguish between references used as citations and what are basically sidebar comments. It's not that bad to have to flip to the end of the book to figure out which exact publication someone is citing, especially if there is an inline explanation. The right form here is "Rescorla [9] argues that...". On the other hand, having to flip to the end of the book to see some endnote that explains a subtle point of the argument is quite intolerable.

One particularly horrid practice is using the same code point for multiple endnotes (Haspel's suggested practice of using symbols rather than numbers is particularly problematic here). If you must use endnotes, best to number them continuously from the front of the text. Otherwise one is forced to remember not only the note number but also the chapter—or worse yet which page—it appears.

All that aside, while I hate endnotes I rather like footnotes. The linear nature of manuscripts formatted on paper (as opposed to electronic hypertext) lends itself to a particular expository style with a fairly short maximum context stack depth. Footnotes provide a limited escape hatch to that linearity (kind of the way programmers think about goto). The context switch overhead makes this effect a lot harder to achieve with endnotes.

Posted by ekr at 12:03 AM | Comments (3)

May 7, 2007

Light bulbs and power savings

Mike O'Hare makes an interesting point about current efforts to convert incandescent lights to compact fluorescents (CFLs). Like many O'Hare posts, the writing is a bit hard to track, but the point is simple: any lighting system has two outputs, light and heat. The heat is typically thought of as waste and so CFLs are more efficient than incandescents in that they have a far higher light/heat ratio. If you're heating your home anyway, than that heat isn't waste, but rather it's something you want, so if you switch from incandescents to CFLs you end up heating your home some other way. Some of those ways are more efficient than others is,1 but you're certainly not getting the rated efficiency gain of CFLs. By contrast, if you're cooling your home (i.e., via AC), then not only is the heat waste but you then consume more energy by running the AC more to cool the house.

1 The physics here is a just a little complicated, but again the basic ideas not so much. When you burn fossil fuels locally to produce heat, you can arrange to capture the energy of the reaction quite efficiently (with the losses being in emitting exhaust that's hotter than the ambient temperature). So, if you're burning oil or gas to heat your house, this is quite efficient. By contrast, if you're using resistive electric heat, the fossil fuels are burned remotely and then turned into electricity and run to your house where you run them through wires to produce heat—just like a lightbulb but here the light is the waste and the heat is the intended output. Luckily, for second law reasons it's pretty easy to tune for a very high heat/light ratio. So, because of generation inefficiencies and transmissive loss, electric resistive heat is less efficient than locally burned fossil fuels. But there's not much efficiency difference between electric resistive heat and lightbulbs as long as you're lighting your house anyway. By the way, that while it's easy to burn fossil fuels for heat efficiently locally, it's not so easy to burn them for power locally, which is why plugin hybrids and electric cars are more efficient than regular internal combustion engines or even regular hybrids.

Posted by ekr at 6:30 AM | Comments (6)

May 6, 2007

AEI and evolution

Matthew Yglesias links to this depressing NYT article about some AEI conference where a bunch of conservatives expresed skepticism about evolution:
For some conservatives, accepting Darwin undercuts religious faith and produces an amoral, materialistic worldview that easily embraces abortion, embryonic stem cell research and other practices they abhor. As an alternative to Darwin, many advocate intelligent design, which holds that life is so intricately organized that only an intelligent power could have created it.

...

The reference to stem cells suggests just how wide the split is. "The current debate is not primarily about religious fundamentalism," Mr. West, the author of "Darwin's Conservatives: The Misguided Quest" (2006), said at Thursday's conference. "Nor is it simply an irrelevant rehashing of certain esoteric points of biology and philosophy. Darwinian reductionism has become culturally pervasive and inextricably intertwined with contemporary conflicts over traditional morality, personal responsibility, sex and family, and bioethics."

...

Skeptics of Darwinism like William F. Buckley, Mr. West and Mr. Gilder also object. The notion that "the whole universe contains no intelligence," Mr. Gilder said at Thursday's conference, is perpetuated by "Darwinian storm troopers."

"Both Nazism and communism were inspired by Darwinism," he continued. "Why conservatives should toady to these storm troopers is beyond me."

A few points worth making here. First, it would be great if the NYT would stop referring to the theory of evolution as "Darwinism". As far as I know, no biologist uses the term "Darwinism" to refer to the theory of evolution. The term is used more or less exclusively by Creationists as part of their frame that it's a religion rather than, you know, the consensus scientific theory of the development of more or less all life on Earth. It would be great if the NYT didn't implicitly buy into that frame. If they're going to call the IDers by their chosen name rather than "Creationists", the least they can do is use an accurate name in this case.

Second, it's not like Buckley, West, or Gilder are qualified to have any reasonable opinion about the truth value of the theory of evolution. Moreover, when you look at these quotes it becomes clear that at least in the case of Gilder his problem isn't that they have some evidence-based objection but rather that he doesn't like the cultural/moral implications of the theory, or even more ridiculously, that he doesn't like some of the conclusions that others have drawn. But of course that's not the criterion we use to judge the truth of a scientific theory, as Derbyshire points out:

As for Mr. Derbyshire, he would not say whether he thought evolutionary theory was good or bad for conservatism; the only thing that mattered was whether it was true. And, he said, if that turns out to be "bad for conservatives, then so much the worse for conservatism."

Exactly.

Posted by ekr at 10:11 PM | Comments (3)

Huckabee and evolution

At the Republican presidential debate, the candidates were asked whether they believed in evolution and apparently Tancredo, Brownback, and Huckabee raised their hands for no. Huckabee has since issued some kind of clarification:
"And the main thing ... I'm not sure what in the world that has to do with being president of the United States," said the former Arkansas governor.

Huckabee said he has no problem with teaching evolution as a theory in the public schools and he doesn't expect schools to teach creationism.

He said it was his responsibility to teach his children his beliefs though he could accept that others believe in evolution.

"I believe that there is a God and that he put the process in motion," Huckabee said.

Well, I supposed that not expecting schools to teach creationism is better than expecting them to (though I wonder about "intelligent design"). I'm not sure I really believe him, since Wikipedia quotes him as saying something rather different:

Huckabee has voiced his support of creationism. He was quoted in July 2004 on "Arkansans Ask," his regular show on the Arkansas Educational Television Network: "I think that students also should be given exposure to the theories not only of evolution but to the basis of those who believe in creationism." Huckabee also stated "I do not necessarily buy into the traditional Darwinian theory, personally.

Moreover, I can't agree that it doesn't have much to do with being president. Even if you ignore the fact that the president does have to decide on policy positions that require some knowledge of biology (and so it would be helpful to know something about it) what does it say about someone that they've managed to get to be 52 years old and be nearly completely ignorant of the foundations of biology (or at least being willing to pretend to be so to get elected)? Truth be told, I can't decide which is more depressing.

Posted by ekr at 12:02 AM | Comments (5)

May 4, 2007

Gear review: Big Agnes Seedhouse SL2

I've been backpacking for years with the venerable Sierra Designs Clip 3. A nice, comfortable tent (though like all n-person tents more suitable for n-1 people), but not freestanding and more importantly, not exactly light. For my trip to Emigrant, I updated my gear with a Seedhouse SL2. The SL2 is a freestanding double wall two-person tent (though I think two people would be pretty cozy) with a rated weight (trail weight) is 2 lbs 14 oz, lighter than many single wall tents of equivalent size. This weight reduction is achieved at least partly by having the tent body itself (except the bathtub floor) made nearly entirely of mesh.

Putting the tent up is easy. It's a single pole design with the pole being sort of an H shape, or rather >-<. One end goes in each corner, giving you a freestanding pole, and then you clip the tent to the pole. Getting the pole inserted in the corners is a bit tricky, since once you get the first two ends in the other ends tend to spring out a bit, but it's fairly straightforward once you get the hang of it. Although the tent is technically freestanding, as a practical matter you want to put in at least two stakes—one per side—to pull the walls of the tent away from your body. The ground I was camping on was fairly hard and the stakes hard to get in, so I settled for those two and two more to stake out the vestibule. Also, if you're using the rainfly you can clip the walls of the tent to the rainfly to tension the walls even more. This wasn't necessary with one person but with two it would probably be good to do this or (if you're not using the rainfly) to guy out the tent walls.

Generally, this tent worked well and was comfortable. My only complaint is that because the tent body is solely mesh, air tended to come up through the vestibule and into the tent, which wasn't that great on a cold night at 8000 feet. I only noticed this effect in the middle of the night so just dealt with it by unstaking the vestibule and lettign it sit against the tent wall, which worked fine. This could probably be ameliorated in a number of better ways, either by carefully staking the vestibule to the ground (this requires getting your stakes pretty much all the way in) or by just sleeping with your feet to the door.

Aside from this issue, I'm happy with the SL2. Also, currently, it's on massive sale at REI for $219, down from $319.

Posted by ekr at 11:19 PM | Comments (1)

May 3, 2007

Gear Review: Cilogear 40l

I spent a couple days in the Emigrant Wilderness (trail conditions report to follow shortly) earlier this week. A short trip, but a good opportunity to try out some of my new gear, including Cilogear's 40 liter worksack (the older model).

Cilogear is a tiny company run by a guy named Graham Williams (he's who answers the email when you write to them). Their special sauce is the extreme configurability of the packs. In particular:

  • It's an internal frame pack but the framesheet and backpad fit into a sleeve in the back of the pack, so that they can be removed and the pack used as a frameless backpack. This feature isn't unique to Cilogear, but is nice. The backpad also doubles as a bivy pad.
  • The hip belt can be easily removed to make the pack even more of a simple knapsack. The lid/loft comes off. as well.
  • Instead of fixed compression straps like most packs have, each side of the pack has two vertical rows of attachment points, one on in the front and one in the back. This lets you use a variety of strap arrangements to transfer/control the load as appropriate for how you've packed the pack.

I got a dynamite (super-tough) model on clearance for $80 (just before the new models came out) and then got the upgrade kit, consisting of a new, thinner hip belt, an improved lid, and some extra straps for $40, for a total cost of $120. Total pack weight is advertised as 3.6 lbs, which is heavier than an ultralight pack but still lighter than the much larger the Gregory Forester (just under 5 lbs) it replaces.

Generally, I'm quite happy with this pack. I was carrying a moderate load of around 30 lbs, but I never felt overly weighed down. The pack is narrow and rides close to your back so you're agile over even fairly rough terrain. I definitely felt like that aspect was better than with the Gregory. The hip belt conforms extremely well to your hips. With the Gregory my hips started to hurt after only a few hours (some sort of pressure point over the ischial spines), but with the Cilogear they were never sore at all. After two days, my suprapinatus (between neck and shoulder) were somewhat sore, but this is to some extent a feature of every pack I've ever used and I think is just a feature of wanting to carry a bit more weight than average on my shoulders rather than my hips. It could probably be ameliorated with better pack positioning, as I have a chance to tune this pack a bit. One thing you'd think would be uncomfortable is that the backpad is flat and fairly hard, so you'd expect to have it hurt your spine and also get a lot of sweat collection. Neither seemed to happen much, though.

I definitely like the ability to use this bag as a frameless pack—it's a nice feature when traveling. I haven't come to a decision about how I feel about the strapping system yet. In theory you're supposed to be able to do a lot of adjustments to optimize load carrying but I haven't experimented enough to really think I've done substantially better than the fixed strapping systems on standard packs. Maybe this is something I'll get used to as I work with the pack some more. It's at least not worse.

A few small quibbles:

  • There's a second, smaller rip-stop sleeve in front of the main frame/bivy pad sleeve, presumably to let you put small items in. The top inch or so of stitching on mine has torn out. This isn't a big deal and the pocket still works, but given that it is a small bug.
  • This pack doesn't have any pockets for water bottles in the sides of the pack—though the crampon pocket on the back can be used for this purpose. This means you absolutely have to take your pack off to get a drink (unless you use a drinking bladder, which I don't). On the other hand, my experience with those pockets is that they tend to either be hard to get your bottles into/out of or that they eject the bottles unexpectedly (or both), so that's not as biga drawback as one might like. This does seem like something Cilogear could easily fix,

All in all, I'm quite happy with this pack. It's comfortable and carries well and I expect to use it for future trips rather than my Gregory, unless I really need to carry a lot of stuff). I imagine that the new version is even nicer. If you're in the market for a new pack, I encourage you to check out Cilogear.

Posted by ekr at 11:11 PM

April 27, 2007

Who cares if carbon offsets are verifiable?

The recent vogue for carbon offsets has inevitably created a backlash. The basic claim is that the offsets don't really lead to reduced emissions. Here's a prototypical such comment from Jonathan Adler at Volokh:
An investigation by the Financial Times suggests that many carbon offsets are illusory, and that there is little assurance that purchasing carbon offsets does much of anything to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Specifically, the report found:
- Widespread instances of people and organisations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions.

- Industrial companies profiting from doing very little - or from gaining carbon credits on the basis of efficiency gains from which they have already benefited substantially.

- Brokers providing services of questionable or no value.

- A shortage of verification, making it difficult for buyers to assess the true value of carbon credits.

- Companies and individuals being charged over the odds for the private purchase of European Union carbon permits that have plummeted in value because they do not result in emissions cuts.

...

The bottom line is that if Al Gore and Leo DiCaprio truly want to be sure they are reducing their carbon footprint, they are going to have to reduce their own energy consumption, rather than paying others to do it for them.

First, let me say that I have no idea whether carbon offsets actually reflect real reductions by others or not.1 However, it seems to me the standard of "truly want[ing] to be sure" is an unreasonably high bar. An enormous number of the things that you do have carbon footprints that are hard to verify. One obvious way of reducing your carbon emissions is to buy a fuel efficient car, like a hybrid. But what's the additional energy cost of manufacturing a hybrid? I don't know and you probably don't either. Maybe it's zero and maybe it's huge (remember the Dust to Dust flap back in 2006). It seems to me that the best one can reasonably expect a consumer to do is act according to the best knowledge they currently have.

Second, any carbon reduction measure that people follow will almost inevitably involve a lot of paying others to reduce their footprint for you, unless you expect that someone is going to give you all that energy efficient tech for free. People (mostly conservatives) often bring up nuclear power as an example of a non carbon-emitting energy technology but surely everyone expects that if Gore is in favor of nuclear power he's going to lobby for his local utility to build a nuclear plant rather than setting up a pebble bed reactor in his back yard. That sure sounds like paying someone else to reduce your footprint for you.

Even if we assume that carbon offsets totally don't work, e.g., that the people selling them take your money and use it to gas up their Gulfstream Vs, that doesn't necessarily make them a bad idea. Think of them rather as a tax on carbon consumption (an idea that Adler appears to favor). Remember that the purpose of a Pigouvian tax is to align people's incentives with the externality costs of their behavior. In order to serve that purpose it doesn't much matter where the money goes as long as its collected (and in fact distributing the proceeds of a real carbon tax would turn out to be a somewhat tricky issue). From that perspective, the key point is that those who buy offsets are demonstrating that they have internalized the externality costs (or at least are trying to) and if it happens that the money actually somehow decreases emissions by others that's a nice bonus.

This of course raises the question of whether the price of the offsets actually is right to be a Pigouvian tax. The answer turns out to be sort-of. Wikipedia claims that the social cost of CO2 emissions is around $12 ton of CO2 (.3 tons of carbon). The cost of credits varies widely. Terappass's credits (which is what the Oscars used) sell for about $8/ton. Carbonfund's sell for $5.50/ton, which seems a bit low. But remember that that price is based on the externality cost alone. If you factor in that there's some probability that your money actually is going to reduce carbon emissions somewhere, than these numbers don't seem that far off.

1. I'm not unaware of the rhetorical context in which Adler and others make this argument, namely that Gore, etc. are supposed to be hypocrites for wanting others to reduce their emissions while not reducing their own. I'm simply ignoring it for the purposes of analysis.

Posted by ekr at 7:50 AM | Comments (2)

April 19, 2007

When do I get the bar on my A380?

Watching Flightplan (sort of the Jodi Foster version of Nightmare at 20000 Feet) which takes place on the "new E474", which seems to be an A380. Like all newfangled megasuperhyperjumbo aircraft it appears to be configured with a lounge complete with a wet bar. No doubt you've seen artists conceptions of the A380 configured the same way. It's of course true that the A380 has room for such amenities, but then so did the 747. In reality, of course, by the time you're actually allowed on the A380, they'll probably have removed the seats entirely so you can travel freeze dried and packed in a cardboard box.

Posted by ekr at 9:16 PM | Comments (2)

April 16, 2007

The black market in HOV stickers

So, California had this great idea to incentivize hybrid vehicles: they would let you drive them in the HOV lane. It was a big pain since you had to get a toll pass transponder and fill out a some forms, but eventually they gave you some stickers you could put on your car so you wouldn't get pulled over. But in January the state stopped issuing the stickers, suddenly rendering them a lot more valuable. This has had two big side effects (aside from the fact that since I never got around to getting stickers for Mrs. Guesswork's Prius so I'm stuck in the slow lane with the rest of the proles.)
  1. Cars with HOV stickers now command a significant price premium on resale. This site claims it's $4K.
  2. People are stealing the stickers off cars.

Outstanding!

Posted by ekr at 10:32 PM | Comments (1)

April 15, 2007

Nitpicking

Saw 300 last night. I was just fine with magic and monsters but one thing tweaked me. In trying to convince the Spartan council to send reinforcements, the queen says that they shouldn't let "a king and his men have been wasted to the pages of history." But of course, the Greeks used scrolls, since codices weren't available yet.

Posted by ekr at 10:47 PM | Comments (2)

April 10, 2007

An Open Source car?!?

I thought Open Source beer was absurd, but now someone claims to be building an Open Source car. As with the beer, the difficult part of building a car isn't that you're missing a design. It's that manufacturing it has very large economies of scale. Even something as simple and relatively forgiving as a bumper or tire requires a fairly substantial manufacturing operation. Now take a look at a carburetor:

Now, I've done a bit of metalwork and given enough time, the specs, and tens of thousands of dollars worth of machine tools I could probably actually manage to manufacture a semi-working carburetor, but it would take me weeks and here's an object that costs about $120 if you buy it retail. Now, a carb has a lot of moving parts but it doesn't take a lot of stress or have particularly fine tolerances, unlike, say, a piston or the frame. Now, of course you could say you'll buy anything really complicated as parts, but it quickly turns out that that's more or less the whole car. I guess you could still open source the pattern for those fuzzy dice...

Posted by ekr at 6:20 AM | Comments (2)

April 1, 2007

The map really is not the territory

Apparently Google Earth has replaced the area photography of post-Katrina New Orleans with pre-Katrina images.
According to the GEC and my sources at Google, the imagery for New Orleans was actually changed last September. The previous imagery was directly after the storm struck, and was of inferior quality. Although the imagery of New Orleans is from pre-Katrina now, it is of better quality. If you have the Plus or Pro version of Google Earth you have the option to load two sets of post-Katrina imagery by logging out of the primary database. I think Google should consider getting more recent high quality imagery for New Orleans so it at least represents the present condition.

Apparently, Google selected a new set of high resolution photos for New Orleans. The only problem is that the new images are pre-Hurricane Katrina. So, all the damage that was caused by Katrina has now been erased in the Google Earth/Maps imagery database. CBS News says this move has sparked outrage and conspiracy theories in New Orleans. Ironically, the people in New Orleans have been some of the biggest fans of Google Earth as it helped save lives during and after the disaster. And, up until the recent update, residents used the pictures to illustrate damage to insurance adjusters, and to plan reconstruction efforts. Some of the conspiracies are that the local government itself requested the change to try and encourage tourism to come back to New Orleans.

Obviously, until the day that real-time satellite imagery is ubiquitous (probably not as far away as you'd think!) there's going to some tension between image quality and timeliness: is a timely but fuzzy image better or worse than a crisp but out-of-date image? While the answer does seem kind of obvious in this case and in other cases where the changes are dramatic and well-known, what about when the freeway on-ramp from my house is blocked this morning but the best images are from last week? It's not entirely clear to me that the modern fuzzy imagery is the right answer.

Current mapping and nav systems deal with this by treating maps as static and then overlaying meta-information (e.g., traffic, your directions), on top of the map. But if you had accurate remote imaging it might be more appropriate to simply display that—or maybe not. I certainly find it a lot easier to read traffic by seeing car density (and speed of motion) than the green and red lines on the Yahoo map displays, but there might be a display technique that would be easier yet. After all, maps are typically easier to get directions off than aerial imagery.

Posted by ekr at 9:49 PM | Comments (2)

March 28, 2007

Information is projected in slides

Rep Bruce Braley (D-IA)'s disassembly of GSA Administrator Lurita Doan is all over the Intertubes. Before you get to the actual embarassing content, check out Braley's explanation of PowerPoint:

And that during PowerPoint presentations information is projected in slides and usually those slides are reviewedby the person making the presentation to reinforce verbally the images that are displayed on the slides.

It's almost as if Braley just heard of PowerPoint this morning and figures maybe he needs to explain it to Doan...

Posted by ekr at 8:57 PM | Comments (1)

March 11, 2007

What are we going to call it

OK, we've got spam and spit (spam over VoIP) and spim (spam over IM). As soon as people actually start using VoIP—and I'm talking end-to-end VoIP where you "dial" a URL—we're going to start seeing phishing with VoIP. What'll that be called? "phit", "phitting"? Somebody make it stop.

UPDATE: Now that I've slept on it, I predict "vishing". In fact, it sounds so familiar I fear I've heard it already.

Posted by ekr at 11:55 PM | Comments (10)

March 8, 2007

Different priorities

When a young man dies in battle, we all agree that it's a bad thing, but it's generally considered particularly tragic if he leaves a family behind, especially if he has a young child. Apparently, things were somewhat different in Sparta:
In 480 the ephors sent Leonidas with the 300 men of an all-sire unit (soldiers who had sons to carry on their bloodline) and 6700 allies to hold the pass of Thermopylae against the hundreds of thousands of Persian soldiers who had invaded from the north of Greece under Xerxes.

What's interesting here is that it's not that the Spartans thought children were unimportant—quite the contrary—it's obvious they were incredibly important in some impersonal sense. It's just that the attitude seems to have been rather more instrumental.

Posted by ekr at 10:42 PM | Comments (1)

March 5, 2007

Think like an Inuit

I just finished Dan Simmons's impressive new The Terror. The Terror is a novel based on the 1845-1848 Franklin Expedition to discover the Northwest Passage. Both ships, the The Terror and The Erebus get frozen into the ice off King William Land (actually King William Island) and as the men slowly starve to death they find themselves being stalked by some sort of polar ice monster (no spoilers here, this is all laid out in the first 50 pages). Things just get worse from there (think frostbite, scurvy, rampaging monsters, etc...)

Sort-of spoilers below. One of the themes that runs through the whole book is how completely unprepared the officers and crew are for life in the Arctic. This despite the fact that they've had contact with Inuits (what they call Esquimaux). Based on Huntford's Scott and Amundsen, this seems to be fairly accurate:

Unfortunately, neither Franklin nor any of his 128 men survived to tell the tale. They all perished of starvation, exposure and disease. It was the supreme and, it may be, the characteristic disaster of the country and the age. While Franklin and his men were dying of hunger, Eskimos around them were living off the land in comparative plenty. But Franklin was hampered by grotesquely unsuitable methods, the product of rigid thought and incapacity to adapt to circumstances.

This sort of thinking extended well into the early 20th century. Here's Huntford again, this time on Robert Falcon Scott:

The derelict sledges, forlornly drifting up, stood as monuments to Scott's great foray into modern technology (Amundsen's was the diesel engine on Fram). The trouble was that even after the Discovery expedition, Scott had never come to terms with the Polar environment.

The ponies alone, totally unsuited to the conditions, fighting their way into the drift, their nearest food growing 2,000 miles away, bear witness to Scott's inability grasp the implications of the cold, storms and unpredictable surfaces of the Antarctic world. Perhaps he lacked the competence, the application, even possible the intelligence to carry technical aids through to success.

For at least four years he had known he would return to the Antarctic. He could have visited Norway or the Alps; learnt to ski and drive dogs himself; acquired a grounding in the internal combustion engine (he was, after all, a torpedo expert), or even tried some mountaineering. He had done none of these things.

Incompetent design penetrated into most details of equipment. Scott had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. He still used neither furs nor anoraks, but wore the same inefficient garments with separate hoods that had disfigured the Discovery expedition. His tents, without sewn-in groundsheets, slipped over a cumbrous framework of poles, like a tepee, were difficult to erect in a gale. And where transport was concerned, Scott trusted neither ponies, nor skis, dogs or sledge; in truth all he really believed in was human effort.

Jared Diamond's description of the Norse in Greenland 400 years earlier is strikingly similar:

Firmer evidence of face-to-face contact between the two peoples comes from nine Inuit carvings of human figures that were unmistakable Norse, as judged by depictions of a characteristically Viking hairdo, clothing, or a crucifix decoration. The Inuit also learned some useful technologies from the Norse. While Inuit tools in the shape of a European knife or saw could just have been copied from plundered Norse objects without any friendly contact with a live Norseman, Inuit-made barrel staves and screw-threaded arrowheads suggest that the Inuit actually saw Norse men making or using barrels and screws.

On the other hand, corresponding evidence of Inuit objects at Norse sites is almost non-existent. One Inuit antler comb, two bird darts, one ivory towline handle, and one piece of meteoric iron: those five items are the grand total known to me for all of Norse Greenland throughout the centuries of Inuit/Norse coexistence. Even those five items would seem not to be valuable trade items but just discarded curiosities that some Norse person picked up. Astounding by their complete absence are all the useful pieces of Inuit technology that the Norse could have copied with profit but didn't. For instance, there is not a single harpoon, spear thrower, or kayak or umiaq piece from any Norse site.

...

But we certainly don't find at Norse sites the bones of what I think would have been the most precious things that the Inuit could have traded to the Norse: ringed seals, Greenland's most abundant seal species during the winter, hunted successfully by the Inuit but not by the Norse, and available at a time of year when the Norse were chronically at risk of exhausting their stored winter food supply and starving.

Things didn't turn out much better for them than for the crew of the Terror.

Posted by ekr at 10:50 PM | Comments (2)

February 10, 2007

Execution procedure

If you want to have an opinion about capital punishment in this country you need to read this NYT article about the sorry state of the procedures used for administering lethal injections:
Over the course of Doerhoff's testimony, Anders uncovered many significant details similar to those uncovered in other states. For instance, Doerhoff testified that executions in Missouri have taken place in the dark, an execution team working by flashlight, and that the execution team routinely consists of "nonmedical people." For most, the day of the execution is "the first time probably in their life they have picked up a syringe . . . so it's a little stressful for them to be doing this." Doerhoff stated that he determined if an inmate being executed had been adequately anesthetized by observing the condemned's face through a window, which others noted was obscured by partly opened blinds. He also told the court that he reduced by half the five grams of anesthetic he had been using after the pharmaceutical company supplying it started packaging it in smaller bottles, which made it tricky to get the five grams in a single syringe. When Anders asked if he used calculations to determine the quantities of drugs to administer, he replied, "Heavens, no."

Later Anders asked, "Is any part of the execution procedure written down?"

"I've never seen it."

"There's no guide that you follow as you're doing it?"

"Absolutely not."

As background, the procedure involves three drugs:

  • Sodium pentothol to sedate the prisoner.
  • Pancuronium bromide (Pavulon) to paralyze him.
  • Potassium chloride to stop his heart.

These are all delivered through an IV. Unfortunately, if you screw up the IV, you might not get some or all of the meds. So, for instance you might be paralyzed but not sedated, which is no doubt terrifying and then quite painful when the KCl is injected. Now, you may be of the opinion that it's a good thing for those who are being executed to be in pain and terrified (I'm not) but surely that should be done intentionally, not just because we don't have competent procedures. However, in practice the procedures seem to be almost entirely ad hoc. Here's Chapman, who designed the Texas procedure:

It never occurred to me when we set this up that we'd have complete idiots administering the drugs.
The rest of the article is equally disturbing.

Posted by ekr at 9:45 PM | Comments (5)

February 7, 2007

DMV efficiency

For reasons that have never been entirely clear to me, the DMV seems to be fairly inefficient about sending me registration renewals for my motorcycle but extremely efficient about sending the Franchise Tax Board Vehicle Registration Collections my name so they can threaten me. As far as I can tell, they have the right address (I get the threatening letters) and they are perfectly good at sending me renewals for my car, but not the motorcycle. Anyway, I recently received one such letter threatening to suck the money out of my bank account and/or garnish my wages if I didn't pay up. You can't pay this over the phone via credit card and if you mail in a check it takes 4-6 weeks to process, by which time they've probably garnished your wages—you have to go to the DMV to pay up.

The good news is that once you get to the DMV they're amazingly efficient. The queue is short—less than 10 minutes—and they have a take-a-number system that lets you sit rather than standing in line. And once I got up there the clerk discovered that the original renewal notice had been returned in the mail and didn't charge me the late penalty. Start to finish time was less than 15 minutes. Too bad they couldn't have done the first part a bit faster.

Posted by ekr at 10:33 PM | Comments (6)

January 25, 2007

Newborn RFID

Schneier writes about the little lojacks they put on your baby in the hospital.
So why are hospitals bothering with RFID bracelets? I think they're primarily to reassure the mothers. Many times during my friends' stay at the hospital the doctors had to take the baby away for this or that test. Millions of years of evolution have forged a strong bond between new parents and new baby; the RFID bracelets are a low-cost way to ensure that the parents are more relaxed when their baby was out of their sight.

Security is both a reality and a feeling. The reality of security is mathematical, based on the probability of different risks and the effectiveness of different countermeasures. We know the infant abduction rates and how well the bracelets reduce those rates. We also know the cost of the bracelets, and can thus calculate whether they're a cost-effective security measure or not. But security is also a feeling, based on individual psychological reactions to both the risks and the countermeasures. And the two things are different: You can be secure even though you don't feel secure, and you can feel secure even though you're not really secure.

The RFID bracelets are what I've come to call security theater: security primarily designed to make you feel more secure. I've regularly maligned security theater as a waste, but it's not always, and not entirely, so.

I'm not saying that security theater isn't a lot of the reason for the RFID bracelets, but you do need some kind of tag for people's babies, which, after all, look pretty much alike. Tags let you ensure that you match the right mother with the right baby. Obviously, you could (and for many years people did) get away with old-style non-RFID plastic bracelets, but it's probably not that much more expensive to make them RFID, especially since it saves you the trouble of having more expensive security theater—guards at every exit. And of course having RFID tracking means that you can use the system to track where infants are even inside the hospital, which presumably is useful if/when you lose track of patients.

The leading systems seem to be made by VeriChip. They make infant protection gizmos, Hugs which had a cut-detecting band which triggers an alarm if it's tampered with and HALO which works with commodity bands but senses if it's attacked to skin. A related product is RoamAlert, a "wander prevention" solution designed to let you keep track of patients in nursing homes (and presumably mental hospitals).

Posted by ekr at 10:08 PM | Comments (2)

January 24, 2007

How much of an advantage are alternative fuels?

At the SOTU last night, Bush called for an increase in the use of alternative fuels like ethanol. The claimed goal is to replace 15% of gasoline use with alternative fuels by 2017. There are two potential reasons you might want to do this:
  • To replace imported sources of automotive fuel (i.e., oil) with domestic sources.
  • To reduce the total level of global greenhouse gas emissions.

There's a lot of debate about the energy balance of corn ethanol (what's mostly produced in the US). The USDA's The Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol An Update, which is on the optimistic side of the range, estimates a 1.34 energy ratio (though a 6.34 liquid fuel ratio because you can use coal and natural gas to power a lot of the production process). So, you should expect that you'll get quite a bit of that 15% as a substitution of domestic energy sources for imported oi, but the overall reduction in GGG emission is going to be closer to 5% than 15%.

Posted by ekr at 9:19 PM | Comments (1)

January 23, 2007

How people look on HDTV

The Times is running an article on the challenge of HDTV for pornographic movies (also see this Slate article from 2003). The problem here is that the improved resolution of HD is a bit too revealing of flaws that were easier to hide in standard def.
They have discovered that the technology is sometimes not so sexy. The high-definition format is accentuating imperfections in the actors from a little extra cellulite on a leg to wrinkles around the eyes.

Hollywood is dealing with similar problems, but they are more pronounced for pornographers, who rely on close-ups and who, because of their quick adoption of the new format, are facing the issue more immediately than mainstream entertainment companies.

Producers are taking steps to hide the imperfections. Some shots are lit differently, while some actors simply are not shot at certain angles, or are getting cosmetic surgery, or seeking expert grooming.

They may not be the only ones. Here's Neal Stephenson writing in 1995:

All of the politicians currently in power will be voted out of office and we will have a completely new power structure. Because high-definition television has a flat gamma curve and higher resolution, and people who look good on today's television will look bad on HDTV and voters will respond accordingly. Their oversized pores will be visible, the red veins in their noses from drinking too much, the artificiality of their TV-friendly hairdos will make them all look, on HDTV, like country-and-western singers. A new generation of politicians will take over and they will all look like movie stars, because HDTV will be a great deal like film, and movie stars know how to look good on film.

I haven't seen enough politicians in person to know if that's true...

Posted by ekr at 9:35 PM | Comments (1)

January 22, 2007

Find a grave

Stumbled upon this morning: Find A Grave. You never know what you'll find on those darn Internets.

Posted by ekr at 6:28 AM

January 15, 2007

All look same: swarthy guy edition

Mrs. Guesswork and I are watching The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, starring the distinctly un-Arab-looking Kerwin Mathews as the Iraqi Sinbad. I got to thinking about who you typically see getting generic "swarthy guy" roles:

ActorActual EthnicityEthnicities Played
Art MalikPakistaniIndian (Booty Call), Arab (True Lies), Greek (Year of the Comet)
Tony ShalhoubLebaneseLebanese (The Siege), Italian (Big Night)
Ricardo MontalbanMexicanHispanic (Spy Kids and others), Japanese (Sayonara), Indian (Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan) (thanks to Wikipedia)

I'm not sure how much of an improvement this is over the days when you could have Charleton Heston playing a Mexican.

Posted by ekr at 8:40 PM | Comments (2)

January 3, 2007

On secrecy of interrogation techniques

DOJ has refused a request by Senator Leahy, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee to turn over the CIA General Counsel's opinion about what interrogation techniques are permissible.
In his address to the Nation, the President acknowledged the existence of the CIA program, but there are many details about the program that he did not, and could not, share publicly. One example is the specific interrogation techniques that were authorized for use on these high-value terrorists. As the President explained, to disclose that sensitive operational information would be to "help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning, and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country," Id. Al Qaeda seeks information on our interrogation techniques—their methods and their limits&mdsah;and trains its operatives to resist them. We must avoid assisting their effort.

There are two ways in which this argument could make sense. The first is that there are some techniques which we use that Al Qaeda doesn't know about. If they did know about them, they could potentially train their operatives to resist them. The second way is that knowing that we don't use technique X would allow Al Qaeda to save training effort by not training their operatives to resist X. I don't find this second theory very strong: even assuming there's some set of officially off-limits techniques if I were an Al Qaeda planner I wouldn't want to count on some American interrogator not exceeding those limits.

This leaves us with the possibility that there are some secret techniques which we'll stipulate can be resisted if you're trained for it. If there are techniques which can't be resisted there's not too much point in keeping them secret (though it might be useful to keep the fact that you had irresistible technques secret if you thought that the enemy would assume otherwise and continue with plans known to people you'd captured).

In any case, there can't be an unlimited number of these techniques, which creates the question of what you do once you've applied them. It only takes one released victim of technique X to tell everyone in Al Qaeda that you're using X. You don't even have to release him; if you let him come in contact with other prisoners and he tells them about X, then they can tell others if they're eventually released. At the end of the day, this logic leads to keeping anyone you use X on in solitary confinement more or less for the rest of their lives. As I understand the current state of the law, even suspected "high-value terrorists" are entitled to some review of their status. What happens if they're determined to be innocent?

Posted by ekr at 10:59 PM | Comments (8)

December 20, 2006

SquidSoap

This Chrishannukwanzaa I was the proud recipient of some SquidSoap:

The concept here is that the top of the dispenser has an ink pad on it so that when you press down to get the soap it puts an ink mark on your hand. That ink mark takes about 20 seconds to wash off, so you get positive reinforcement of good washing habits. This is a pretty clever idea but the execution is a little off. With my model you need to press down unnaturally hard to get the ink to mark your hand much at all. That seems easily fixable.

A more serious problem is that while just getting people to wash long enough is important, there's a lot more to good handwashing than that—you need to wash your whole hand, not just the palms. Really getting your hands clean turns out to require quite a bit of dedicated scrubbing. I once attended an exhibit at the Puyallup Fair designed to demonstrate this. They had you rub this lotion onto your hands and then wash it off. Once you thought you'd done an adequate job of washing you put your hand under a UV light at which point all the lotion that you haven't washed off glows brightly. I thought I'd done a good job of washing already and was appalled at all the places that were still glowing (the webbing in between my hands, cuticles, under the nails, etc.) This is one reason for the growing emphasis on waterless hand sanitizers which do a pretty good job with less scrubbing. Still, washing for 20 seconds is a lot better than nothing. Now if we could just get a gizmo which would teach people to wash their hands at all!

Posted by ekr at 7:14 PM | Comments (1)

December 5, 2006

Life before computers

Thanks to the DVD TV-show time machine, I'm watching The Rockford Files Season 1 (1974). Rockford's at the Office of Vital Statistics:

Rockford: Could you tell me, are the dates of death and the birth certificates cross-referenced.
Clerk: Are you kidding, that would be a monumental task.
Rockford: So, the date of death doesn't appear anywhere on the birth certificate index.
Clerk: You got it.
Rockford: Doesn't that leave a rather large hole in the system?
Clerk: They're a lot of holes in the system. So what?
Rockford: So what? Do you realize that you could adopt a new identity by ordering a birth certificate of somebody that's already dead. And you'd mail it out without question because the date of death doesn't appear anywhere in the birth records.
Clerk: You're a genius.

Of course, with digital records this is a simple database query—though that isn't to say that modern birth certificates are handled much better.

Of course, 1974 was right when records were starting to go digital. Later in the episode Rockford has someone look up a bunch of insurance records, which goes pretty fast since "they're all on the computer."

Posted by ekr at 10:00 PM | Comments (1)