The evitability of Stalin

Salon.com Books | The human monster

As he told numerous people after Nadya's death, Stalin had been a bad husband. Husband and wife were both volatile and unbalanced people -- she may have been schizophrenic, and he was, after all, Stalin.

Andrew O'Hehir, writing for Salon, reviews two biographies of Josef Stalin, and tells the tyrant's story himself. There seems nothing inevitable about the Monster of Russia; chance grew his bitter seeds, chance put power in his grasp.

Was Stalin the most evil of men? From this biography, I doubt it. If one in a million adult men is extremely evil, then in a world of 6.5 billion people there must today be at least a thousand men as evil as Stalin was. In all of human history we can probably double that number. Stalin would be lost in the crowd; but most of this group will harm only a few victims. (Imagine a town of them.)

Alas, Stalin had the power to inflict his nature on millions, personally directing more human suffering than perhaps any other of his evil kin.

So far.

The paradoxical gladness of suffering

Newsday.com: Doctor who treated herself at South Pole describes ordeal

The physician, now healty and a motivational speaker, concludes:

'Most people tell me they're glad they had breast cancer,' she told the luncheon Wednesday. 'It's because most people say they would rather take the chance and learn what they have learned, because it teaches you what's really important in life.'

I presume she's speaking of a subset of those who've had breast cancer and appear to be longterm survivors. I think few mortals would gratefully die for wisdom.

I've tended to think wisdom is overrated; and yet there are unhappy personal experiences I would not undo -- even if the devil were to offer that option. On the other hand, some wisdom I would surrender.

A gladness for the wisdom of suffering is worthy of more thought than this weak blog can manage.

The battle for Kansas has been lost

The evolution of a fight to the end - U.S. News - MSNBC.com

The battle for Kansas has been lost.

Defenders of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection are boycotting four days of hearings — beginning Thursday — over the science curriculum in Kansas, where the state Board of Education is made up of a majority of conservatives critical of what they see as errors in the standard theory.

Move on team, spend resources elsewhere -- Kansas has been lost.

This will be good news for Kansas private schools. Elsewhere, the battle for Minnesota is simmering; we are by no means safe ground.

Soon we'll learn if publishers will start putting christian creationism into public school science textbooks.

Google Web Accelerator for XP and Firefox (ok, for IE too)

Google Web Accelerator

Google's latest toy. Others have shipped similar bits of software, but this one uses Google's infrastructure as the page cache. Scary. I'll use it.

1. What is Google Web Accelerator?

Google Web Accelerator is an application that uses the power of Google's global computer network to make web pages load faster. Google Web Accelerator is easy to use; all you have to do is download and install it, and from then on many web pages will automatically load faster than before.

Please note that Google Web Accelerator is currently in beta test mode. If you have any problems using it or have suggestions for how we can improve it, please see the Google Group devoted to it.

Also note that during the first part of our beta testing period, users outside of North America and Europe may not see much improvement in their web page loading speed.

2. How does Google Web Accelerator work?

Google Web Accelerator uses various strategies to make your web pages load faster, including:

* Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
* Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
* Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
* Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
* Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
* Compressing data before sending it to your computer.

7. Can I run Google Web Accelerator on a browser other than Internet Explorer or Firefox?

For other browsers running on Windows, you'll need to manually configure your proxy settings to 127.0.0.1:9100 for HTTP connections.

I have a minor claim to fame with regard to page compression. It's been built into browsers for eons, but many years ago I came up with one of the first applications in a commercial web application.

It's XP only for now. Given the proxy address mentioned above (127.0.0.1 is 'localhost') I gather it installs a small proxy server on one's local machine. Of course I'll try seeing if I can use that proxy from my Mac laptop, replacing localhost with the XP machine's IP address (turn of firewall first of course). I'm sure Mac geeks will be figuring out how to jam this thing into Tiger asap.

PS. My wife, who tolerates this sort of geeky enthusiasm, notes that a "Google Accelerator" is just the sort of thing Calvin would have.

Update:

1. This thing is astounding. It saved almost 50% of the time it takes the Apple page to load. It's like Firefox is on speed.

2. So now Google knows what we browse to (like it didn't before?) -- including the things we don't search for. Of course that data isn't useful for profiling, directed advertising, etc. Not that I care, I actually like getting ads that are interesting to me. The other day I got one for an S-video cable -- a great find really. And as for privacy -- well, you don't really think you have any, do you? You should have listened to me years ago ....

Professor Cronin is now famous

SLIS IUB > News > Dean's Notes: BLOG: see also Bathetically Ludicrous Online Gibberish

SLIS Dean and Rudy Professor of Information Science Blaise Cronin, reprinted from SLIS Network spring 2005:

... Lately, I’ve been wandering around Blogland, and I’m struck by the narcissism and banality of so many personal blogs, of which, if the statistics are to believed, there are millions. Here, private lives tumble into public view, with no respect for seemliness or established social norms. Here, as the philosopher Roger Scruton said of Reality TV, '[a]ll fig leaves, whether of language, thought or behavior, have now been removed.' What desperate craving for attention is indicated by this kind of mundane, online journaling? Surely, one writes a diary for one’s personal satisfaction; journaling is, after all, a deeply private act.

One wonders for whom these hapless souls blog. Why do they choose to expose their unremarkable opinions, sententious drivel and unedifying private lives to the potential gaze of total strangers? What prompts this particular kind of digital exhibitionism? The present generation of bloggers seems to imagine that such crassly egotistical behavior is socially acceptable and that time-honored editorial and filtering functions have no place in cyberspace. Undoubtedly, these are the same individuals who believe that the free-for-all, communitarian approach of Wikipedia is the way forward. Librarians, of course, know better.

I don't think this will rank with early predictions on airplanes and the necessity of home computers, but it's not bad. I really liked "sententious drivel"; I want to use that -- but how can sententious mean both "pithy" and "pompous"?

Dave Barry is back again?!

Dave Barry's Blog

Ok, I missed something here. I used to read Dave's Miami Herald column religiously -- but then the Herald set up an annoying registration requirement. Feeling rebellious I sat out for a while, and then Dave "retired".

Only now he has a blog, and there's no registration requirement?

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?