The demise of Citgo

The New York Times > Business > World Business > The Troubled Oil Company

"Troubled". Good word that. Sort of like "The Titanic" was "troubled" after it encountered a heavy frozen object. I tried looking up Citgo's share price but Yahoo couldn't find it -- maybe it's not publicly traded?

What an extraordinary tale. If you think you work in a troubled company, then it may be nice to know things could be far worse. You might work at Citgo's Houston headquarters.

You know it's true -- tv experts

The Onion | Actual Expert Too Boring For TV

The Onion explains how those TV and radio experts come to be:

SECAUCUS, NJ. Dr. Gary Canton, a professor of applied nuclear physics and energy-development technologies at MIT and a leading expert in American nuclear-power applications, was rejected by MSNBC producers for being "too boring for TV" Monday...

..."[Canton] went on like that for six... long... minutes," Salters said. "Fact after mind-numbing fact. Then he started spewing all these statistics about megawatts and the nation's current energy consumption and I don't know what, because my mind just shut off...

... MSNBC chose Skip Hammond, former Arizona State football player, MBA holder, and author of Imprison The Sun: America's Coming Nuclear-Power Holocaust. Hammond is best known for his "atomic domino" theory of chained power-plant explosions and his signature lavender silk tie.

"Absolute Armageddon," Hammond said when asked about the dangers increased reliance on nuclear power might pose. "Atoms are not only too tiny to be seen, they're too powerful to be predicted. Three Mile Island? Remember it? I do. Don't they?"

"Clouds of radiation, glowing rivers, a hole reaching to the earth's core...

... Reached at his office, Canton said he was unsure why he wasn't chosen for the program.

"I discussed the interrelated technical, economic, environmental, and political challenges associated with increased nuclear-power usage over the next half-century and their relevance to government, industry, and community leaders," Canton said. "You'd think it would be exactly what they wanted. It was exactly what they wanted, according to the producer who contacted me."

Hammond is scheduled to appear in all six parts of the upcoming Learning Channel series Frost Or Fire: America's Coming Energy Tribulations.

The ultimate information tool: National Brand wirebound subject notebooks

I have not one, but two Palm PDAs. (This is a bug, not a feature, but it is true and I use both my CLIE and my Samsung i580 phone.) I have a home XP workstation, a personal iBook, and a corporate laptop.

Years ago I abandoned the Franklin Planner for the Palm. It has been a tortured relationship; Palm was a beauty once but she turned into a (very) high maintenance partner. My wife gave up on hers; I've come close. And yet, despite the tragic disappointment of the Palm PDA, still I cannot return to my Franklin Planner. Flawed, vile, troublesome -- the PDA still worked better for me than the paper planner (I think for most people the paper planner is now sadly better).

Except for the right side of the planner -- the place to put notes and scribbles, filed simply by date. I tried many substitutes. Legal pad. Faux-leather portfolios that always disintegrated. Loose pages that I tried to scan in a Fujitsu 10C -- until I sagged under the weight of scanning metadata and unspported SCSI drivers.

Then, by chance, my employer started stocking National Brand Single Subject Wirebound notebooks, 50 pages (33-986) and 80 pages (33-709). These are to conventional notebooks as a Mercedes is to a Yugo. They could inspire poetry in a nobler soul than mine.

Check out the specs on this beauty:

National Brand 33-709 (usually search as 33709)
Single-Subject Wirebound Notebook
Assorted Color Front Covers
White paper
11 x 8-1/2 Notebook—College/margin ruling
80 sheets per notebook.
$2.56 (officeworld.com)

I keep a 50 pager for personal use, an 80 pager for business. All notes, scribles, phone numbers, etc are entered chronologically. I try to date the top of a page every so often. The business notebook lasts about 2 weeks, the home notebook about 4 weeks.

They were a bit pricey for my workplace, and I needed to buy my own for personal use, so I'm happy to announce a quality supplier. Buy more than $50 or so (why not?) and shipping is free. UPS shipping is reasonable in any event.

My supplier for these beauties is officeworld.com. Search on the part numbers of 33709 (80 pages) and 33986 (50 pages), yes the site is slow.

Update 3/8/2010: See also an earlier article of mine that references the even higher cost legal rule 80 sheet Mead-Cambridge notebook. As of 2010 I can't find a place to buy a discounted bulk supply. I'd like to buy 50 of each size and get a price break.

You can handle four variables at a time

How much can your mind keep track of?

Another limit to human cognition:

Halford et al concluded from these results that people -- academics accustomed to interpreting the type of data used in the experiment problems -- cannot process more than four variables at a time. Recognizing these human limitations can make a difference when designing high-stress work environments--such as air-traffic control centers--where employees must keep in mind several variables all at once.

This seems to be a "hard limit", if true then I'd guess that the cognitive burden grows exponentially with the number of items tracked. In that case five items might be vastly harder to track than four.

It's interesting to think how this might limit our ability to manage certain types of problems.

Your guilt, my guilt

Crooked Timber � � Torture and culpability

Well, maybe if you really, really worked for Kerry then you could let yourself off the hook a bit. If you didn't, however, you're guilty too.

There seems to be some discomfort among a couple of commenters (and perhaps in the blogosphere more generally) with the argument that the US is itself culpable for torture when it hands prisoners over to a regime that the US State Department and the UN describe as a “systematic” torturer. A historic analogy might help clarify matters. On June 21, 1964, three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were arrested by the police in Nashoba County, Mississippi. They were then released by the police at night, on the side of a rural road, where they were picked up by the Ku Klux Klan and then murdered...

It's a good and obvious analogy. America, we are guilty. And yes, we hard fought Kerry supporters are less guilty than those who voted for George.

Backpack: a web-based PIM and collaboration tool

Boing Boing: Backpack: a web-based personal info manager worth trying

Normally I wouldn't look at these things, but Cory's description is enticing sadly misleading:

Backpack is 37Signals's latest project -- a Web-based personal information manager that makes it easy to create projects, break them down into steps, and then track each step. Because it's Web-based, it's well suited to communicating and collaborating with other people, sharing tasks and status-messages, The whole thing syndicates as XML, streaming updates into your RSS reader or to your phone. It synchs with iCal and thence to your handheld PIM.

The iCal sync is key, since it means one could keep a local copy.d

Update: Uh-oh, Cory was a bit hasty. It does syndicate changes, but it doesn't sync with iCal. It publishes using the iCalendar standard, which is compatible with iCal (Mac) and Netscape Calendar. That's quite a bit different from synchronization.

Quartz Composer: an OS X Tiger surprise

QuartzComps

Tiger comes with more than a few suprises.

QuartzComps.com is a weblog and file archive devoted to the vast possibilities of creating media using Apple’s new Quartz Composer application which shipped as part of the developer tools of Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger). For more information about the application, check out.

Spotlight: life without folders

Apple - Mac OS X - Tips - Spotlight

I eliminated all folders in Outlook when I implemented Lookout. When I go to Tiger I'll be using folders quite differently, probably as a way to conveniently group like items on a loose ad hoc basis and to provide some wrapper metadata for enclosed objects.

It will be good to forget folders.

I vote bogus: Ugly Children May Get Parental Short Shrift

The New York Times > Health > Ugly Children May Get Parental Short Shrift

I vote "bogus" on this one. It would be extremely hard to control for confounders like number of children, wealth (correlates with looks), IQ (somewhat correlates with attractiveness, but not strongly), genetic behavioral disorders including ADHD & autism (associated with dysmorphic features in some cases), etc.

I can imagine bias based on multiple attributes, particularly when children have high survival value for parents and/or family, but this is too crude to be a likely candidate. Variable seatbelt use based on attractiveness? Nahh -- that's a wealth/education confounder at work.

Trashy, but nice flair for the headlines. Got your attention, didn't it?

Apple's Tiger Slays Microsoft's Grazing Longhorn, Leaving Bloody Entrails Strewn All Over OS Marketplace

Extra! Extra! Tiger Headlines Roar! (kottke.org)

I'm just imitating Brad DeLong here, but I think the original deserves the cite.

Surviving an attack to come -- the local nuke

U.S. Called Unprepared For Nuclear Terrorism

I loved the example from the government's site: if a nuclear weapon is detonating a block away, go around the corner. Well, I guess that advice can't hurt; it won't make anyone more dead than they would be if they just stood still and waved. Perhaps it was meant to be advice for a truck bomb surrounded by radioactive material?

The advice on what to when you are (most unfortunately) downwind of a somewhat distant mushroom cloud was more interesting. Determine wind direction and run (carrying the children?) somewhere between perpendicular to the wind and downwind. I suspect the best choice might depend on what direction was easiest to travel in. The presumption is one will be afoot since roads will be blocked by crashed vehicles. A bicycle might help, but it might also expose one to opportunistic assault. Going underground is not considered particularly helpful.

I can see why the Feds prefer not to deal with public education in this domain. To admit such things are thinkable is to open a discussion that the Bush administration prefers to avoid.

iMac G5 update: now this is nice

Apple - iMac G5 - Technical Specifications

Apple recently updated the PowerMacs. It was a dull update. Not so for the update to the G5 iMac. Much better Graphics processing (full Tiger support), bigger drives, Bluetooth standard, GB ethernet, 512MB standard (at last), 802.11G built in and a software bundle that includes Mac Classic:

iLife ’05 (includes iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie HD, iDVD, GarageBand), Mail, Dashboard, Spotlight, iChat, Safari, Sherlock, QuickTime, iSync, iCal, DVD Player, Address Book, AppleWorks, iWork (30-day trial), Classic environment, Quicken 2005 for Macintosh, 2005 World Book Multimedia Reference Suite, Nanosaur 2, Marble Blast Gold, Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac Test Drive, Zinio Reader, XCode Developer Tools and Apple Hardware Test

At list price for the top-line 20" machine with two (paired?) 512MB SIMMS - $1924.00. Not bad at all for all of this.

If this machine passes its initial 1 month teething period it will replace our old Win2K box, leaving me with the one XP machine every home office (sadly) needs.

DeLay: the story of a good person corrupted?

Salon.com | Tainted conservative

... Over the course of DeLay's political career, he and his wife, Christine, have adopted three foster children, raised millions of dollars for child-related charities, and spoken out in Washington on behalf of abused kids. The couple has won awards from various organizations and praise from such unlikely allies as Hillary Clinton and Eleanor Holmes Norton, all while improving the Hammer's otherwise dismally uncharitable image.

For the past 17 years the DeLays have also operated their own charitable outfit, the DeLay Foundation for Kids, which aims to raise $10 million to build the Oaks at River Bend, a special faith-based housing subdivision for a small number of foster families on 50 acres near Richmond, Va. (Interestingly, the homes are to be constructed by Perry Homes, the company whose enormously wealthy founder, Bob Perry Jr., was the largest donor to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.) Evidently this activity allows DeLay to cut food stamps, children's health insurance, federal housing and tax credits for the poor while remaining certain that he is a compassionate conservative, doing God's work. According to DeLay, the intention of his charity's "biblical" project is "to show that you don't need a government program to take care of kids."

What you need instead is a powerful politician with enough influence over government to shake down big donors.

Of all the profound and petty offenses charged against DeLay, his use of a children's charity to aggrandize himself and raise money from lobbyists and corporations may be the most distasteful...

I'm a card carrying Kerry supporter, and a secular humanist besides. So I'm not likely to be sympathetic to Tom DeLay. He's earned his many investigations.

And yet ...

Three foster children adopted. That doesn't make one a saint, but it doesn't exactly fit DeLay's later image. I wonder if his is the story of a flawed man with good aspects later gone bad ... I would like to learn more about that man's life.

GMSV has a blog

Columnists : Good Morning Silicon Valley -- SiliconValley.com

GMSV is the gossip column of Silicon Vallley geeks -- who's merging with who, who's on the outs, and what's Steve doing today. Quite good. They've added a new blog. I believe I'm the first bloglines user to subscribe.

Things scientists would teach others about science

spiked-science | survey | E=mc2 centenary survey | E=mc2 survey - AtoB

I liked the comments I read from this selection. Popper, Natural Selection, Mind as matter, etc. A good set - especially in these post-rational days.