An inside view of Google

men.style.com: GQ

Yes, this was written in GQ. I can't explain that!

Gmail - Inbox (47) - of which 2/3 are spam

We're losing the war on spam. Google's filters had been doing well, but now they're failing dismally. Today about 2/3 of the messages that passed Google's initial spam filter are in fact "obvious" (to a human) spam. I've not seen such a rotten screening rate in years.

Spam from SONY: thank you congress

Sony Media Software – Home for Vegas, Sound Forge and ACID

Congress gave us CAN SPAM. CAN SPAM gave us this:

The monthly newsletter for Sony Media Software product information, news, and tips...

Sony Media Software
1617 Sherman Ave.
Madison, Wisconsin 53704
http://www.sony.com/mediasoftware
Customer Service and Sales: 1.800.577.6642
THIS IS NOT SPAM
You received this message because you requested to stay informed of products and promotions when you registered a product.

The Direct Mail Association paid off our corrupt congressperps (yeah, most of the CAN SPAM supporters were GOP) so they'd make this kind of spam legal. Sure I can tell SONY to remove me from the mailing list -- but I know from years of trying to get myself off paper junk mail lists that my name will just get added back on. There's an entire industry that develops in these situations; the "frontmen" like SONY insulate themselves from the guys doing the dirty work of adding addresses any way they can.

The one good news is that SONY is probably using a legitimate mailheader (CAN SPAM did require this). So when I submit them to various spam filtering services there's a better chance they'll get blocked.

The pain of CAN SPAM is that it did nothing to stop all the porn/phishing spam, but it legitimized the equivalent of paper junk mail -- without creating a "postal fee" to attach a cost to the marketing. This SONY junk is only the beginning, in the absence of a "postal fee" our mailboxes will finally collapse under a deluge of "legal SPAM". I'd place a hex on the GOP Congress, but it's clear my hexes are working.

The only bright spot is the certainty that marketers will overreach, and that eventually they'll have to pay a postal fee (tax) and join a certification program paid for by the tax. The certification program will require a "V-Chip" like tag identifying the type of email as determined by an independent group. My ISP will filter all those messages out at my request.

Or so I can dream. I just hope GOP voters get this stuff too.

Hey, all you black hat bad guy pirate hackers out there ... could you please plunder a SONY movie for me?

NYT discovers Africa and is intensely confused

The New York Times > Opinion > Editorial: Thousands Died in Africa Yesterday

The NYT has a long and vacuous editorial today on poverty and death in Africa. In failing to express a plausible approach to the disaster of much of Africa, the NYT effectively came out in support of complacency.

Others have done better. Dismantling trade tariffs is a part of most solutions. Putting pressure on South Africa to stop supporting Zimbabwe's tyrant is another. Helping less vicious tyrants to replace more vicious tyrants is probably worth trying. Vaccination programs (thanks Bill and Melinda, at least there's an upside to the pain Microsoft has given me) and early infant nutrition programs will help; on this point the NYT's support of the Blair initiative is correct.

That which remains: Ken Kifer's bike pages

Years ago, before kids, I did quite a bit of bike commuting. I put up a web page on the topic. Back then Ken Kifer's site was a great resource. I came across his name again through a bio he wrote on Major Taylor; it was there I discovered that Ken was killed by an intoxicated driver at the end of 2003.

A friend now preserves and tends Ken Kifer's site including his bike pages. and his utopian visions.

This is the last entry on his "what's new" page:

August 30, 2003: I have returned from a 6,500 mile bicycle camping trip to the Pacific Ocean in Washington and back. I am preparing my trip report, and I have already revised my page on Touring with a Solar Laptop to reflect changes.

Here's to you Ken.

Hope -- the american talent for subversion

The New York Times > Arts > Frank Rich: Hollywood Bets on Chris Rock's 'Indecency'

I found this oddly encouraging:

Once the feds vowed to smite future 'wardrobe malfunctions,' the customers started bolting the annual TV franchises where those malfunctions and their verbal counterparts are apt to occur. An award show sanitized of vulgarity and encased in the prophylactic of tape delay is an oxymoron. And so the Golden Globes lost 40 percent of its audience in January on NBC, the Grammys lost 28 percent of its audience this month on CBS. The viewers turned up instead at the competing 'Desperate Housewives' on ABC, where S-and-M is the latest item on the carnal menu.

America has an odd genius at corruption, diversion and subversion. Perhaps more of our national anxiety attacks will be subverted.

I must confess though, that our family doesn't have a bone in this fight. We don't watch TV. I thought the V-Chip was a great idea, but Al Gore and I were the only two people who thought so. Label the content and let the family decide what to do with it ...

Monbiot summarizes the 'Left Behind' series

George Monbiot � Apocalypse Please

I got to this one via the Moyers speech. The 'Left Behind' delusions are fairly typical of the kinds of delusions that have circulated in American subcultures since the founding of the nation. Monbiot has a pretty good summary of the overall belief system. I don't think Bush himself actually believes he's fighting the Antichrist, but many of his acolytes very much believe he is.

...In the United States, several million people have succumbed to an extraordinary delusion. In the 19th century, two immigrant preachers cobbled together a series of unrelated passages from the Bible to create what appears to be a consistent narrative: Jesus will return to earth when certain preconditions have been met.(4) The first of these was the establishment of a state of Israel. The next involves Israel’s occupation of the rest of its “Biblical lands” (most of the Middle East), and the rebuilding of the Third Temple on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosques. The legions of the Antichrist will then be deployed against Israel, and their war will lead to a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. The Jews will either burn or convert to Christianity, and the Messiah will return to earth...

In this article Monbiot says the Rapture Index is 144, "just one point below the critical threshold, beyond which the sky will be filled with floating nudists". Today I see it's hit 153. It's risky for prophets to be so specific; wise prophets never make numeric statements.

Bill Moyers all but despairs of our leadership, and our citizens

Drunk and Disorderly � Blog Archive � There Is No Tomorrow

Moyers gave a speech in the last few months. A version of the speech was published on AlterNet, then copied to this blog. So much for copyright!

Moyer all but despairs of our government and our citizenship -- but he still has hope.

HyperCard: My past is ancient history ...

Smackerel: When multimedia was black and white

This site was written to introduce HyperCard and the days before color screens to an audience raised on the web. For me this stuff is just the day before today, I still have dusty old books with black and white HyperCard screenshots.

Heck, I even remember Gopher.

So what happened in Fallujah?

This is story alleges brutal war crimes by US forces during the assault on Fallujah:Iraq Dispatches: Stories from Fallujah.

I suspect the stories are not entirely true or complete, but I suspect most hellish urban battles have similar stories -- so they are not entirely implausible either.

We don't hear much about what happened in Fallujah. Just silence.

Suffer the children

A man kills his two children and wounds three others. A surgeon and blogger tells his side of the story: A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure.

He visits one of the survivors a day after surgery:

As I was rounding on them today one told me, 'I was bad.'

The baby name voyager and the science of epidemics

The Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager

This Java app actually works -- even in OS X. It takes a long time to load and get going, but then it's quite responsive. Brinna has never been in the top 1000. Ben is popular now. But check out "Emily". It has an explosive growth from about 1960 and is still on a rapid growth path. Alma and Alfred show a terrific crash between 1900 and 1950.

My guess is that this represents a true nonlinear ("chaos", butterfly wing, epidemic, etc) pattern. It would be interesting to do similar chart for various infectious diseases.

ChoicePoint owns you

Shifting sands in data leak (SFgate)

ChoicePoint knows quite a bit about you. If you're unlucky, you're one of the people who's identity has been stolen through the misuse ChoicePoint's data. So who are they?

...ChoicePoint, based outside Atlanta, was created in 1997 as a spin-off from Equifax, one of the leading credit-reporting agencies. Its original purpose was to analyze claims on behalf of the insurance industry.

That mission evolved and expanded as ChoicePoint went on a buying spree, acquiring about 60 other firms with businesses ranging from data collection and background checks to DNA analysis and direct marketing.

ChoicePoint is now one of the leading data brokers in the country, acting as a sort of private intelligence service for both corporate and government clients (including the FBI).

The company had about $900 million in sales last year and is believed to have more government clients than its two main rivals, LexisNexis and Acxiom.

'Any interaction where you give up personal information can create an opportunity for them to obtain it and put it in their database,' said Chris Hoofnagle, who heads the San Francisco office of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

'You get arrested, you get married, you have a child -- ChoicePoint can get copies of the records and sell it,' he said. 'If you've ever had dealings with the government, they have information about you.'

From a consumer's point of view, one of the biggest problems about ChoicePoint is that there's no way to opt out or otherwise prohibit the company from circulating your personal info.

..Jones said the company's services range from $5 overviews of new employees to in-depth profiles of individuals costing clients thousands of dollars.

...To be sure, not everything ChoicePoint does is a potential threat to consumers. For example, the company offers its vast resources free of charge when children are missing or abducted...

They're an unregulated industry and they're overdue for regulation. Interestingly even the CEO is quoted as welcoming more oversight. "Stop me before I kill again ...".

Orwell figured this kind of thing would be the provice of governments. He really didn't understand capitalism all that well.

American torture: the case of Maher Arar

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Thrown to the Wolves

I've previously written about this story here and here. We're still doing this; outsourcing our most extreme torture programs to other nations. Note that while we evidently were using Syrian dungeons in 2002, we're now threatening to attack Syria. I guess their torturers didn't give us the answers we wanted.

I really, really, really, tried to defeat Bush.

...In the fall of 2002 Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, suddenly found himself caught up in the cruel mockery of justice that the Bush administration has substituted for the rule of law in the post-Sept. 11 world. While attempting to change planes at Kennedy Airport on his way home to Canada from a family vacation in Tunisia, he was seized by American authorities, interrogated and thrown into jail. He was not charged with anything, and he never would be charged with anything, but his life would be ruined.

Mr. Arar was surreptitiously flown out of the United States to Jordan and then driven to Syria, where he was kept like a nocturnal animal in an unlit, underground, rat-infested cell that was the size of a grave. From time to time he was tortured.

He wept. He begged not to be beaten anymore. He signed whatever confessions he was told to sign. He prayed.

Among the worst moments, he said, were the times he could hear babies crying in a nearby cell where women were imprisoned. He recalled hearing one woman pleading with a guard for several days for milk for her child.

He could hear other prisoners screaming as they were tortured.

"I used to ask God to help them," he said.

The Justice Department has alleged, without disclosing any evidence whatsoever, that Mr. Arar is a member of, or somehow linked to, Al Qaeda. If that's so, how can the administration possibly allow him to roam free? The Syrians, who tortured him, have concluded that Mr. Arar is not linked in any way to terrorism...

... Mr. Arar is the most visible victim of the reprehensible U.S. policy known as extraordinary rendition, in which individuals are abducted by American authorities and transferred, without any legal rights whatever, to a regime skilled in the art of torture. The fact that some of the people swallowed up by this policy may in fact have been hard-core terrorists does not make it any less repugnant.

Mr. Arar, who is married and also has an 8-year-old daughter, said the pain from some of the beatings he endured lasted for six months.

"It was so scary," he said. "After a while I became like an animal."

A lawsuit on Mr. Arar's behalf has been filed against the United States by the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. Barbara Olshansky, a lawyer with the center, noted yesterday that the government is arguing that none of Mr. Arar's claims can even be adjudicated because they "would involve the revelation of state secrets."

Even now US courts can still surprise. Perhaps Mr. Arar's case will yet be heard. Judging by the fall of Zimbabwe, sometimes the courts can retain integrity even when all other institutions have been corrupted.

The IQs of nations

I came across this post in a Slashdot thread:

The following countries have lower average IQs than that of the US (which is 98):

Canada 97 Czech Republic 97 Finland 97 ... Guinea 66 Zimbabwe 66 Congo (Zaire) 65 Sierra Leone 64 Ethiopia 63 Equatorial Guinea 59.

I wondered where the heck this alleged data came from, so I searched on a subset of the list (what did we do before the net?). It turns out it's from a book called the IQ and the Wealth of Nations, evidently inspired by the notorious/famous/infamous "Bell Curve" book.

Hong Kong was #1 on the full list, but one could argue it's too small and atypical for this sort of ranking. South Korea was #2 and perhaps deserves pride of primacy (Despite being a euro I have some strong familial bonds to SK, so I'll claim a sort of secondary pride. One amusing correction: the web page links from SK to an article on the IQ benefits of learning Chinese characters -- which kind of misses the point that one of Korea's most brilliant inventions was a phonetic script that led to widespread literacy.)

So is there anything to this ranking? I'm skeptical of both the quality of the data and the agenda of this web site, but from what we know of the impact of malnutrition and intrauterine stress I would expect many of the world's most poor nations to be at the bottom of an "honest" list. The lesson here is that we we need to couple interventions to improve nutrition and reduce disease burden to the economic interventions critical to reducing poverty.