Good-bye NYT, Hello WaPo

The NY Times (and NYT contributions to the IHT) OpEd page has gone behind a paywall. I wouldn't mind paying $20 a year for the columnists, but they want $50. For that I'd have to be getting the entire newspaper -- or they'd have to negotiate a package with something else (ie. Slate + NYT OpEd, Britannica + NYT OpEd, etc). I'm surprised they're charging so much for so little.

It will be interesting to see if they win this battle, or cave on price, or add something better.

Meanwhile, I've switched my news page link to the Washinton Post (WaPo).

Weird SPAM from SPAMIS -- using my email address

Another weird twist in the old spam and identity theft saga. This spam is a message from "me" to me. I didn't send it though, it's spam. The header says it originates in keromail.com, but of course that could be faked (thought that site is pretty weird).

Getting spam from someone who's hijacked my email address is not new, but this appears to be spam from someone who has an axe to grind with Microsoft. They're not trying to get rich, they're spamming the world to attack Microsoft.

I have a bad feeling this sort of thing will catch on. Sigh.

From: jfaughnan@spamcop.net
To: jfaughnan@spamcop.net
Date: Sep 16, 2005 9:59 AM
Subject: BREAKING NEWS: Microsoft Plans to Outsource Over 10,000 Jobs to China
...

MICROSOFT PLANS TO STOP SUPPORTING THE AMERICAN ECONOMY
BY OUTSOURCING MORE THAN 10,000 JOBS OVER 10 YEARS TO CHINA

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002468560_msftgoogle03.html

....
COMMENTS AT: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/04/2256208&tid=109&tid=218

----- ---- --- -- - -
Public Service Announcement Brought to You by SPAMIS :
Strategic Partnership Against Microsoft Illegal Spam
----- ---- --- -- - -

[ SPAMIS NOTIFICATION ]:
Thanks to Individual and Server Contributions, SPAMIS is Now "FULLY READY"
to Begin Increasing Microsoft Public Service Announcement Emails to 20 Times
the Amount of Internet Email Users by 25 Times the Current Sending Rate &
Speed When a Certain Activity Transpires to "ANY" Past, Present or Future
SPAMIS Member(s) and/or "ANY" SPAMIS Affiliate(s).
[ CURRENTLY IN WAITING FOR THIS ACTIVITY TO TRANSPIRE TO BEGIN ]
[ SPAMIS / PO Box 1259, Seattle, WA 98101 - USA ]

So what's the 20x bit about? Some kind of blackmail scheme?

If Bill Clinton were president for a day ...

Bill Clinton talks about what he'd do, were he president for a day:

Clinton's worldview - FinanceAsia.com

...If I had 24 hours, I would at least lay down where I think we ought to go in the Middle East to finish the business between the Israelis and the Palestinians after the withdrawal from Gaza.

I would put a healthcare plan before the Congress that would end this insane system we have that's bankrupting the American economy and is leaving huge numbers of people out. And I would do my dead-level best to change the energy and environmental direction that the current government has.

And of course, now I would have to give them a budget plan to get rid of the deficit I got rid of once, and now - (chuckle) - he's brought it back.

Those would be the things I would do in my day as president.

Deep sigh. Bang head against wall. Contemplate future cave-based historians weeping at the election (bad) and re-election (unforgivable) of George Bush II.

Clinton gives more detail on globalization, employment and the Bush tax cuts:

...On trade, the fundamental problem is that in this decade America has found no new source of jobs. Now when you do a trade deal, the benefits normally cover 90% of the people and the real burdens only fall on maybe 1% of the people. The problem is that the benefits are diffused and the burdens are concentrated. America should, whenever we do trade agreements, have an economic impact statement in which we cost out how much it's going to hurt the people who lose their jobs and their livelihoods and then invest in them and make sure they are restored and they can do something new, something different and they can manage this transition; otherwise, you are always going to have politicians who don't want to do that for ideological reasons, being protectionists.

Instead, they gave me four tax cuts. So you got this ragged edge of the American economy because even though we've been having pretty good growth on the numbers over the last couple of years, we're not generating jobs, we're not generating new income. And if we had, for example, decided to do what I just suggested, gone into on aggressive clean-energy future, we would have created millions of jobs just doing that - but we didn't.

So all of our growth is in corporate profits, housing (because interests rates have been low so there's a huge housing boom in America but that always bursts sooner or later) and consumer spending, financed because the Chinese buy our debt along with others every year.

The other big problem is the legitimate concern in America, or a genuine concern, over the Chinese military build up - and whether China is basically being nice now but some day, once they get the most modern military equipment in the world, is going to provoke some sort of a showdown with Japan, which will draw us in, and throw the world into a turmoil. And there are people in the Pentagon who push that line every single day. Just like there are people in the military in China who, every single day say that someday we're going to have to confront the Americans. They're too aggressive, They're too over-reaching. The Japanese are becoming militant again.

They key is: Where are the people? And where are the leaders? There will always be people who will have an institutional interest in finding an enemy - and finding division. And I don't think we've answered that question yet. So yeah, I'm concerned about it.

We live in a dark age of American politics. It's Taft all over again.

More encouraging news from brain science: your frontal lobes are toast

Assuming you're middled aged that is: PLoS Biology: Gene Expression in the Aging Brain.

Recent articles claim that while the average age of non-neural tissue is 10 years, brain tissue age matches chronologic age. (Yeah, a few years ago there was a claim that brain tissue actually regenerated, but that's looking like wishful thinking now.). Now it appears the frontal lobes, the seat of judgment and foresight, wear out fastest.

Brain rot. It affects all of us, and it starts in our twenties. By our forties our brains are definitely hurting (quick, get into management!) and by our sixties we're ready to retire -- except, oops, we can't any more.

There will be a lot of fighting for those grocery bagging jobs @ 2020.

In the meantime, despite all the 'use or it lose it' cliches, it's worth noting that this decay of the frontal lobes (aka, the person) may be related to protein oxidation -- which is related to mitochondrial activity. Perhaps it's better to give those lobes a rest. Stop reading this blog and turn on the TV! Or better yet, go to bed.

Flying over Africa with Google Earth and National Geographic

I'd mentioned earlier that Google has web National Geographic's Africa flyover to Google Earth.

Today, using the map from the Natl Geographic Sept 2005 supplement I tried it out. Here's one link I followed up on:

Megaflyover @ National Geographic Magazine

The houses, like others we have seen in the older parts of the western side of the Djado Plateau, are built from blocks of salt collected in the oasis. They were stacked into an unbelievably complex maze. The houses without roofs reveal room after room, some only a few feet square, hundreds of rooms. What they were used for is beyond me. Like other old habitations, this one looked like a ghost town. There were no people milling around or pots and pans around fireplaces or clothing hanging on lines. These old salt castles are fast melting into the desert they came from. Newer towns are built of mud brick and have satellite dishes and telephones.

I thought they'd have a larger volume of higher resolution images, but this is all still miraculous to an old timer like me.

I'd like to talk with someone who lived in a solt village, but I probably never will. (Though there are probably only six degress of separation between that villager and me.)

Tracking references with Bloglines and Google Blog Search

I tried the Google's blog search on one of my blogs to see how much they index:

Google Blog Search: blogurl:http://jfaughnan.blogspot.com/

Superficially it looks quite up to date (latest was yesterday), but they only go back to July 2005. From what I read that's their current limit, but they will extend backwards over time.

Once they get all my posts indexed this will be a great service for searching my own site. In the meantime, it will be intersting to compare the results of these searches to searching on usenet or the web.

You can subscribe to the search results as an RSS feed, so if there's a topic you want to follow you can add that as a search to your blog reader.

For example, this is a link to a search that finds recent references to Gordon's Notes (as you can see, there are few links!). At the bottom of this page is an Atom feed link that references the same search.

I took the URL from the Atom feed link and entered it in my Bloglines collection. So now when I review my blogs there's an entry that will track any references to Gordon's Notes. Kind of neat, really.

The New Balance 991: Cult of the Geek Running Shoe

What running shoe does a geek wear?

The requirements are steep.

It must come in different widths, to suit the neaderthal geek and the anorexic geek. It must never change, so one can order a new version of the same shoe online every 2-4 years. It must be suited to bicycle pedals, frisbee toss, walking the dog, work and lounging. It ought to be very plain, but have highly reflective materials for night time safety. Did I mention it must never change?

There's really only one choice. The New Balance 991. Astoundingly, still made in the USA (by prisoners? illegal aliens?). Worn by Steve Jobs. They made some minor cosmetic changes 4-5 years ago and haven't modified it since (the outcry must have been terrible).

My last pair still worked, but it was getting extremely shabby. It took a few minutes online to get the new ones, which fit exactly the same way the old ones did. The only delay was looking for a C width, but (alas) nowadays they only come in B, D, 2E and 4E. I stuck with my B width, which works very well. The size range is quite impressive:

New Balance:
2A: 8-13,14,15,16
B: 8-13,14,15,16
D: 7-13,14,15,16
2E: 7-13,14,15,16
4E: 7-13,14,15,16

You know you're a geek when you mail order the same running shoe every 3 years. I intend to be cremated (recycled?) in a pair.

Google Earth Integrates National Geographic Africa: this is so bloody amazing

Here's the quiet announcement on Google's Blog:

Google Blog: The illuminated continent: "Have you ever dreamed of Africa while reading National Geographic? The exotic photographs and thoughtful articles take you there with a magical sense of place. Today we embraced that magic by releasing Google Earth data layers that index National Geographic stories, images, journals, and even a live webcam in Africa.

Just start Google Earth, enable the National Geographic layers, and begin exploring.

Across Africa, you will see the familiar yellow National Geographic logo. Zoom in to see the title of each feature article or photograph. Click the icon and a pop-up balloon shows a photo and description along with links to the content. Follow those links to read the entire story right where it happened. Not only will you learn about Jane Goodall's Fifi, you'll see her home. Joining the stories and images are layers for National Geographic Sights & Sounds multimedia resources, a live WildCam in Botswana, and a collection of Mike Fay's Megaflyover images.

The Megaflyover images are stunning. Mike spent more than a year taking 92,000 high resolution photographs of the continent. That project is described in Tracing the Human Footprint, an article in the September 2005 National Geographic. He selected 500 of his favorite scenes of people, animals, geological formations, and signs of human presence and annotated them in Google Earth. Look for the red airplane icons as you fly over Africa. Each of these marks a spot where a high resolution image awaits your own personal voyage.

I bought that issue of NG for the articles and the map. I kept the map, now this will be a fantastic complement.

Maybe I'm not too old to work at Google. If I dye my hair, get plastic surgery, move the family to California ...

An evolutionary biology blog on the ASPM and Microcephalin papers

Excellent commentary on an anthropologist's blog. Evolutionary biology is one of his key interests. I'll add him to my bloglines list.

John Hawks Anthropology Weblog : Recent human brain evolution and population differences

See also my prior post.

The joy of bugs -- Access and Excel

It's been a while, but I experienced the joy of using advanced features of Microsoft software.

1. Create link to Excel spreadsheet in Access database.
2. Sort, view data in Access.
3. Click on properties button, get warning that properties can't be changed.
4. Click cancel (ok, i won't bother)
5. Lose connection to Excel spreadsheet
6. Discover spreadsheet is now gibberish
7. Regret not creating other copy prior to step #1

I suspect I could not duplicate this I tried, but I'm not going to try. This is the price one pays for using features of Microsoft products that are not tested by millions every day ...

Hold off on iTunes 5.0 updates until Apple fixes the bugs

Gordon's Tech: iTunes 5 - don't upgrade

The Mailinator Spam Map - where spam comes from

Mailinator:Spam Map

The US and China of course, but Brazil is big too.

Whatever happened to parental controls on software?

I'm intrigued by things that we need that vanish, particularly in software. It's an interesting form of market failure.

Ten years ago one could buy very good third party 'shells' for Windows 3.1 and Mac Classic designed to allow children to work in a controlled software environment.

Now there's nothing comparable for OS X and XP. I knew XP had nothing to offer, but I was a bit more optimistic about Tiger: Gordon's Notes: Tiger and parental control software,

Alas, Tiger isn't all that much better than Panther -- it looks like there are decent parental controls, but if you try to use them you soon learn that they are fundamentally unworkable. I suspect they never really tested them with parents and children. They're not useless, but they don't really protect the child's environment from the child -- and it's a pain to recreate that environment.

So OS X is better than XP, but not good enough. Annoying.

The children in the cages - sentencing Ohio

The BBC has a short piece on what I expect is getting coverage on tv: BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Eleven US children 'found caged'.

Astoundingly, I will reserve judgment.

Putting children in cages is probably not a good idea. These parents probably have, at best, some significant issues (the article does not reference other aspects of abuse or neglect). I wonder though, how well the state of Ohio supports the care of what appear to have been special needs children (presumably even before the cages).

It would be a good thing if this story were to lead to a thoughtful and considered discussion of the care of special needs children, and increased research funding to study which interventions and approaches have the better short and longer term outcomes.

Alas, that would be unlikely.

In a better world, we'd judge the state of Ohio as well as these parents, and possibly sentence every adult in the state to a day of community service. (Minnesota, of course, is likely no less guilty.)

Nasty, snappish and dull -- the president of the USA

I'm not sure we've had many "nice" presidents. Still, some have been more agreeable than others. Clinton is generally considered, even by his political enemies, to have been a decent sort -- despite a famous temper.

In contrast, Bush has long had a reputation, in some circles, for being a nasty and vengeful man. Now that reputation is spreading -- despite the vengeance so many have felt.

Washington Post - Dan Froomkin - Now They Tell Us

Judging from the blistering analyses in Time, Newsweek, and elsewhere these past few days, it turns out that Bush is in fact fidgety, cold and snappish in private. He yells at those who dare give him bad news and is therefore not surprisingly surrounded by an echo chamber of terrified sycophants. He is slow to comprehend concepts that don't emerge from his gut. He is uncomprehending of the speeches that he is given to read. And oh yes, one of his most significant legacies -- the immense post-Sept. 11 reorganization of the federal government which created the Homeland Security Department -- has failed a big test.

Maybe it's Bush's sinking poll numbers -- he is, after all, undeniably an unpopular president now. Maybe it's the way that the federal response to the flood has cut so deeply against Bush's most compelling claim to greatness: His resoluteness when it comes to protecting Americans.

But for whatever reason, critical observations and insights that for so long have been zealously guarded by mainstream journalists, and only doled out in teaspoons if at all, now seem to be flooding into the public sphere.

The last paragraph is the most interesting. Bush's nature was common wisdom among journalists. They, however, did not put that impression into print. One wonders ... why not? Fear, perchance?

Gore did not have trouble understanding his speeches.

This Newsweek article provides more background. On careful reading this article is actually pretty sympathetic and emphasizes that Bush, once he recognized the scale of the problem, was deeply troubled and engaged. Even I can believe that. The fundamental problem remains however that Katrina played to all the weaknesses of this administration, and those weaknesses spring from George Bush. If he wants to rescue his legacy, he needs to shake up his administration and bring in the disloyal.

Update 9/13:

I was pleasantly surprised that someone left a comment on this post. I think of this as a mono-blog. The poster is correct that no-one in the Bush administration is willing to go on record as saying Bush is nasty, vengeful and distracted. On the other hand, almost no-one denies he is vengeful, so lack of commentary is not surprising. O'Neill was an insider who said all of this of course, but he was so thoroughly obliterated by Bush's gang that even his mother doesn't remember him very well.

As a proxy I offer the words of Molly Ivins, who's known Bush since before he stopped drinking. She adopts what is becoming the critics consensus on Katrina -- this is what you get when you staff government with people who hate government:

Some of you may have heard me observe a time or two -- going back to when George W. was still governor of Texas -- that the trouble with the guy is that while he is good at politics, he stinks at governance. It bores him, he's not interested, he thinks government is bad to begin with and everything would be done better if it were contracted out to corporations.

We can now safely assert that W. has stacked much of the federal government with people like himself. And what you get when you put people in charge of government who don't believe in government and who are not interested in running it well is... what happened after Hurricane Katrina.

Many a time in the past six years I have bit my tongue so I wouldn't annoy people with the always obnoxious observation, "I told you so." But, dammit it all to hell, I did tell you, and I've been telling you since 1994, and I am so sick of this man and everything he represents -- all the sleazy, smug, self-righteous graft and corruption and "Christian" moralizing and cynicism and tax cuts for all his smug, rich buddies.

Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention.