Is Amazon.com in trouble?

Is Amazon.com in good health? I've been wondering lately. I've been a customer since the initial launch, back before they were sending customers Amazon.com mugs. Over that time I've seen some performance and customer service issues, but their core software systems have been remarkably reliable. Lately, however, I'm running into bugs. Mostly they're cosmetic or irritating, like a wish list that can't be accessed (server error). Most recently, however, I have an order that's stuck in limbo. It can't be cancelled, but it doesn't ship. It is 'being prepared for shipping' - apparently they're mining the metals to build it.

Amazon's always tweaked their UI (annoying), but lately the tweaks have been moving backwards. I used to usually be able to sort a search result by ranking, sales, etc -- but that ability is increasingly constrained. Also, Amazon hasn't removed negative reviews, but they are increasingly obscured.

My sense is they've lost some important software people. Maybe it was an outsourcing move. Maybe some relatively senior people vested and left. Maybe they've downsized. Whatever they've done, it's not working ...

Why does Miers horrify a part of the GOP? Because to see her is to see Bush

Obsidian Wings objects to Miers feeble writing abilities. Should an inability to communicate, or to reason clearly, disqualify someone from the Supreme Court?

The assertion that Miers lack of writing ability should disqualify her would be more persuasive if, for example, George Bush were capable of clear writing, or even of clear speech. Molly Ivins has written on this. George Bush used to be quite articulate speaker, but in later years he lost the ability to speak clearly. It appears this is not simply an affectation, he simply can't do it any more.

I've sometimes speculated that Bush suffers from some complex and probably undefined progressive environmental and genetic organic brain syndrome. Eight years ago Bush was still a very capable person, I suspect his condition has progressed. Perhaps as a consequence of his own disability, Bush does not value rationality and clear reasoning. He may feels Miers' spiritual and emotional/reactive behaviors are much more important than her cognitive or linguistic abilities. In other words, he accepts the very lefty-liberal squishy idea of 'alternative intelligences'.

Miers is Bush as he would be on the supreme court. It would not surprise me if he expects to go there himself some day; Miers is his precedent.

This pattern of appointing people that are in his mold (athletic, anti-intellectual, evangelical, emotional, charismatic -- ESFP on the old Myers-Briggs) is very Bush (nee Andrew Jackson, king of the spoils system). This can be seen in the infamous list of his 15 most incompetent appointees and especially in his very troubled scientific/technical appointees (they don't last).

The horror for Republicans is that the more they look at Miers, the more they see Bush. That's why this is tearing apart the 'know-nothing' party.

Katrina - what happened in the prisons?

The lost and forgotten. The criminals. You know, your kids.

Democracy Now! | After the Hurricane: Where Have All the Prisoners Gone? More Than 500 From New Orleans Jail Still Unaccounted For

Will anyone ever know what happened there?

Feverish update on the Fitzgerald investigation

Since the mainstream media doesn't really cover Fitzgerald's grand jury investigations, one must subsist on the speculative fever of bloggers: Obsidian Wings: The Plot Thickens.... Beats reading nothing at all! Bush's hatred of Fitzgerald must be a thing of terrible beauty.

Firefox is less supported now than it was a year ago

I'm finding more sites like this AMEX site. Firefox worked well on the American Express site until they redesigned it, now it doesn't work (I'm using 1.5b2, maybe it still works with the release version?). I'm seeing that more often now. I have a sneaking suspicion the new generation of Microsoft's web tools break non-IE browsers. Shocked, shocked I am.

This might explain why Firefox use is declining.

There's no place on the AMEX site to complain of course.

[Update 10/11: My caveat about 'maybe it's the beta' may have needed more emphasis. My sister-in-law reports the site still works with the release version of Firefox. I've submitted a report to Firefox on this site.]

Minnesota was almost a creationist state

I live here, read the papers, and had no idea this was going on. I learn about it today in FLORIDA blog posting. We have the most unbelievably incompetent newspapers in creation.

Minnesota was almost a creationist state; religious fundamentalists came, very quietly, with a hairsbreadth of writing creationist "science" standards:
Florida Citizens for Science - A Brief History of the Minnesota Academic Standards in Science.

What is the inconvenient fact about Miers?

Shrillblog welcomes the foul National Review into the world of the anti-Bush shrill, and tells the Lovecraftian tale of Miers:

Shrillblog: Corner of Shrillness

Harriet Miers... the crawling chaos... I am the last... I will tell the audient void...

And it was then that Harriet Miers came out of the West Wing. Who she was, none could tell, but she was of the old Bush-loyal Texas blood and looked not like a member of the Federalist Society. The state Republican Party chairmen knelt when they saw her, yet could not say why. They said she had risen up out of decades of loyal Bush service, and that she had heard messages from places not of the reality-based community. Into the lands of the judicial branch came Harriet Miers, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. Conservative men advised one another to endorse Harriet Miers, and shuddered. And where Harriet Miers went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent with the screams of conservative activists betrayed and undone. Never before had the screams of nightmare been such a public problem; now the Bush functionaries almost wished they could forbid sleep in the small hours, that the shrieks of conservative judicial activists might less horribly disturb the pale, pitying moon as it glimmered on green waters gliding under bridges, and old steeples crumbling against a sickly sky...

It doesn't make sense though. There must be an 'inconvenient fact' somewhere, something our journalists prefer not to mention -- less they ruin the party?

My guess? It's religious fundamentalism. The great alliance that forged the modern GOP was a dark blood oath sworn between regulated industries (new military-industrial-regulated complex) and christian fundamentalists. Miers is first and foremost a christian fundamentalist. I think the MIR complex is losing its love for Bush (the only thing worse than taxes and regulation is a trashed world), and Miers's fundamentalism is the last straw.

It's a thought. There's got to be an inconvenient fact, something neither side in the battle wants to bring up, somewhere ...

Editing memories and a thought on how AA might work

The Economist's science writers have a particular interest in research on the nature and manipulation of memory; a science which seems to be advancing quickly. This article has an excellent overview of some of the latest techniques for memory deletion, and the possible benefit for addiction (misuse, of course, is inevitable).

Economist.com -
Brainwashing

Abolishing addiction
Sep 15th 2005
From The Economist print edition
A new way to treat drug abuse (in rats, at least)

A DRUG addict's brain alters in response to the drugs he takes. There is the instant change that provides the chemical high, of course, but there are also more subtle, long-term modifications. It is these that turn a user into an addict. Some of them are responses to the drug itself. But some are responses to the circumstances in which the drug is taken. Such things as viewing the paraphernalia of drug taking, for example, serve to remind abstinent addicts of forbidden pleasures and tempt them to relapse.

Two pieces of research just published in Neuron, a specialist journal, suggest that it is possible to impair the brain's memory of such associations—at least, if the brain concerned is a rat's. Courtney Miller and John Marshall, of the University of California, Irvine, have worked out how to disrupt the memories that cocaine-taking rats develop for the place where they get their fix. And a team led by Jonathan Lee, of the University of Cambridge, has prevented rats from using environmental cues to seek cocaine.

Three regions of the brain are thought to be linked to addiction: the prefrontal cortex, the nucleus accumbens and the amygdala. All three have a multitude of receptors for a chemical called dopamine, which is part of the nervous circuitry involved in the perception of desire, and all are involved in the laying down of long-term memories.

That process, surprisingly, is not a one-off event for each memory. Every time a memory is recalled, it seems to be actively refiled afterwards—a process known as reconsolidation. This is why people are vulnerable to suggestion when recalling memories of, for example, childhood abuse. Observing this, Dr Miller and Dr Marshall wondered if they could manipulate the refiling process to abolish a memory altogether.

To do so, they first had to establish the memory they wanted to abolish. They did this by putting their rats into an apparatus containing two chambers and teaching them to associate one of those chambers with cocaine use. (Rats are at least as keen on Bolivian marching powder as humans are.) The two “rooms” had different colours, textures and smells, so the rats could easily tell them apart. In normal circumstances, when trained rats were allowed to chose which room to enter, they preferred to spend most of their time hanging out in the cocaine chamber even when no cocaine was available.

Having established this preference, Dr Miller and Dr Marshall then sought to abolish it using a drug that inhibits the production of a protein called Extracellular Signal-related Kinase. This protein, which is generated in the core of the nucleus accumbens, causes long-term changes in gene expression that are thought to be involved in the storage and retrieval of memories, including those of drug use.

Two days after being trained to associate one of the chambers with cocaine, the rats were divided into three groups. Some were given the inhibitor drug and then returned to their cages. Some were given it and then returned to the two chambers. And some were first returned to the two rooms, giving them the opportunity to remember the cocaine chamber, and were then given the inhibitor drug. In these tests, rats in the first group—who had not been given the opportunity to retrieve their memories of cocaine when they received the treatment drug—preferred to spend time in the cocaine chamber. But rats in the other two groups showed no particular preference for either room. Their previously strong memories had become disrupted.

Dr Lee and his colleagues, meanwhile, were studying the amygdala. This part of the brain serves as a “Pavlovian” learning machine that associates a pleasurable event, such as being fed, with a neutral event, such as the sound of a bell ringing. Dr Lee's rats learned that they received cocaine when they poked their noses into a particular hole. At the same time, a light went on. The rats were then put into a similar set-up, but this time they received no cocaine when they poked their noses into the hole, and there was no light.

Dr Lee and his team then treated their rats to shut down the gene that produces a protein called Zif268, which seems to have a similar role in the amygdala to that of Extracellular Signal-related Kinase in the nucleus accumbens. (They did this using pieces of “anti-sense” DNA that attach themselves to the gene in question and stop it being read by the cellular machinery that transcribes genes.) Several days later, the rats were returned to the test site, but this time two levers had been installed in it. One of these levers did nothing. The other lit the light associated with cocaine use. The rats who had not received the treatment pressed the lever that lit the light many more times than did the rats who had received the injection, suggesting that only they remembered the light's association with cocaine.

Both teams of researchers believe that the amnesia they have induced relates only to memories of drug use, because those were the memories that were being recalled at the time the inhibitor drugs were given...

Which led me to wonder again how and why AA might work -- when it does work. My guess is that it works by editing memories -- specifically by reinforcing the most negative memories associated with an addiction. Since contemporaneous memories seem to conflict for neuronal resources, emphasizing the negative while removing reminders of the positive might lead to an altered balance, one that prejudices against the original experience.

At least 26,000 people have run afoul of 'no fly' lists

Many, many americans are mired in the purgatory of Homeland Security "no fly" or "mega-search" lists: Wired News: Stuck on the No-Fly List

What's new is there's a form to submit -- at least if one is "no fly". We've spent tens of millions of dollars on the no-fly and 'search always' lists. A bright medical student would know in ten minutes they wouldn't work. If one is testing for a rare disorder (terrorist), a test that's right 99% of the time will fail miserably. The overwhelming number of 'positive results' will be false positives.

This is what comes from assigning unqualified persons to lead government agencies.

Arctic oil - now ANWR makes sense

ANWR has never made much sense to me. Why so much fuss over a site thought to hold only a few months of US oil consumption?

As a general rule, whenever a ferocious public debate doesn't seem to make sense, there's an inconvenient but fundamental fact that both sides recognize and both don't want to discuss. In the case of abortion that fact is probably the extent to which abortion is birth control for the 'underclass'. In the case of ANWR it's that geologists believe there could be a huge amount of oil in the arctic:

As Polar Ice Turns to Water, Dreams of Treasure Abound - New York Times

Last year, scientists found tantalizing hints of oil in seabed samples just 200 miles from the North Pole. All told, one quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas resources lies in the Arctic, according to the United States Geological Survey.

This is an awkward fact for both sides, so it's not mentioned. Environmentalists want to point out how little oil there seems to be in ANWR, oil companies don't want to admit they intend to rape the entire Arctic -- and ANWR is only a tiny beachead.

The interesting question is why journalists don't seem to care to reveal the 'awkward fact'. They're often very capable people, they probably know what it is. Why don't they write about it? Is it because they fear to spoil the party? I'd love to know.

By the way, the Times series on global warming is commendable journalism. Note the byline on this particular article: "Clifford Krauss reported from Canada for this article, Steven Lee Myers from Russia, Andrew C. Revkin from New Hampshire and Washington, and Simon Romero from Norway. Craig Duff contributed reporting from Canada, Norway, Russia and Alaska." Craig likes to travel.

How the Republican party morphed into the know-nothing party - the republican war on science

The GOP made a deal with two devils: regulated industries and religious fundamentalists. They shared an antipathy to science, and the GOP acquired that antipathy. From an author's comments:

TPMCafe || On the Origin of The Republican War on Science

...The modern conservative movement, which now dominates the Republican Party, has many key constituencies, but among those are religious conservatives and regulated industry. These two interest groups want very different things, but their desires frequently stray into scientific areas. For instance, religious conservatives want to challenge the way that evolution is taught in public schools, while business interests--ranging from tobacco to some fossil fuel companies--want to challenge the science demonstrating health or environmental dangers resulting from their products, or the way they go about doing business.

Catering to these constituencies, as the Republican Party has increasingly done, has inevitably led politicians and political appointees to humor what essentially amounts to their scientific lobbying. This has happened even as such lobbying has itself become state of the art, encompassing strategic, think tank driven campaigns designed to skew what's actually known on hot button scientific issues with big political ramifications, such as evolution and especially global warming. Both of these trends have converged under the Bush administration, a fact that goes a long way towards explaining the current crisis over the politicization of science.

There are other factors as well: Conservatives' distrust of government easily translates into a distrust of government-funded science or the science produced by federal agencies. Conservatives' distrust of academia easily translates into a willingness to dismiss cutting-edge science coming out of our leading institutions of higher learning. Roll it all up into a ball and I think you get precisely what we're seeing today: Repeated abuses and distortions of scientific information by the political right. That's not to say no one on the left has ever misused or distorted science. It's just that we now encounter a systematic problem from the GOP, one that's the combined result of history, ideology, politics, and the simple fact that Republicans are running the entire government (a situation that lends itself to abuses of power)...

I emphasized the comment on how lobbying has become so much more powerful than it once was. Evolution in action ...

The Manchurian President

I've joked for years that Bush was either a KGB plant designed to destroy the US or the agent of an alien civilization seeking to slow our hectic scientific development. It appears others have similar thoughts. This is from a very right wing UK business publication that used to slavishly worship his Bushhood (via DeLong):

George Bush, the Manchurian candidate -- thebusinessonline.com

... This newspaper is second to none in its pro-American sentiments; in the early Bush years it devoted much ink to defending the President against the often malevolent and ignorant attacks of a congenitally anti-American European media. But we know a lost cause when we see one: the longer President Bush occupies the White House the more it becomes clear that his big-government domestic policies, his preference for Republican and business cronies over talented administrators, his lack of a clear intellectual compass and his superficial and often wrong-headed grasp of international affairs – all have done more to destroy the legacy of Ronald Reagan, a President who halted then reversed America’s post-Vietnam decline, than any left-liberal Democrat or European America-hater could ever have dreamed of. As one astute American conservative commentator has already observed, President Bush has morphed into the Manchurian Candidate, behaving as if placed among Americans by their enemies to do them damage.

... His presidency is unlikely to recover, as The Business pointed out at the time. Of course, Mr Bush is not the only one to blame for the country’s inadequate reaction to Katrina; but given the scale of the natural disaster, the buck was always going to stop with him. As far as most Americans were concerned, it did: suddenly they saw the same incompetence of a commander-in-chief who had created a deadly quagmire in Iraq played out in the streets of one of their own cities. A president who, whatever his other shortcomings, had claimed leadership skills and competent administration was stripped bare. It was not a pretty sight and the response to his political plight was typically Bush: he announced his intention to throw a massive $200bn into reconstructing New Orleans. This merely completed Mr Bush’s demise among America’s wisest conservatives, who have always regarded his big-government conservatism as the greatest betrayal of all. Nor is it just the White House that is contaminated by it: when senior Republican leaders in Congress, who have presided over an orgy of public spending and pork-barrel, claimed that there was no fat left to cut in federal spending and that “after 11 years of Republican majority we’ve pared it down pretty good”, it was clear that the inmates had indeed taken over the asylum.

... There is now a distinctive fin de regime stink about Republican Washington. Karl Rove, the President’s eminence grise, has been called to testify before a grand jury investigating the leak of a CIA officer’s name. The cronyism of Ms Miers’ nomination to the Supreme Court is now the rule in DC, not the exception: for example, Julie Myers, another inexperienced Bush lawyer, has been nominated to run the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. She has no convincing qualifications for this post, a vital one in an age of terror; but she is the niece of retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers and the wife of the Department of Homeland Security secretary’s chief of staff...

... Then there is the case of Tom DeLay. The Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives since 2002 has been indicted with “conspiracy in a campaign finance scheme” and charges of conspiring to launder money. He has been forced to step down from his job as majority leader until the matter is resolved. Republicans claim the charges are politically-motivated and should be thrown out – Ronnie Earle, the Travis County District Attorney who has brought the indictments, is a Democrat – but even if Mr DeLay is cleared, the once fresh-faced Republicans who were ushered in on the tail coats of Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America in 1994 now look tired and complacent.

President Bush and his entourage are cultural conservatives, rather than radicals in the mould of Reagan, who was driven by his belief that freeing individuals and liberating the economy would produce a new and better society. The attitudes of Team Bush are driven more by upbringing, emotion and simple religious faith rather than an intellectual belief in the superiority of private action and the market economy...

Gamma ray bursters and the Fermi paradox: Earth has 1 billion years left

Worried about avian flu? Distract yourself with a far worse and quite inevitable catastrophe -- the sterilization of our galaxy.

One of the standard solutions to the Fermi Paradox is that are we are not overrun by visitors because technological societies are either short-lived or rarely form. The Gamma Ray burster is often proposed, particularly in science fiction, as a plausible transgalactic killer. A burster sterilizes quite a bit of the surrounding galaxy.

Wired News: Gamma-Ray Burst Mystery Unraveled
By Robert Zimmerman
02:00 AM Oct. 04, 2005 PT

Astronomers have long theorized that merging neutron stars produce massive explosions capable of wiping out nearby solar systems for thousands of light-years around....

Now a flurry of research is coming to a head that offers the first detailed view of the origin of so-called short gamma-ray bursts, revealing a picture that is consistent with the merging neutron star theory. That means the universe could be far more hazardous than previously thought, given the number of known and probable neutron star pairs in relative proximity to Earth.

... As astrophysicist Tsvi Piran stated at a Hubble Space Telescope symposium in 1999, "Every gamma-ray burst apparently signals the birth of a black hole."

Steve Thorsett of Princeton University has calculated the consequences if such a merger were to take place within 3,500 light-years of Earth, with its energy aimed at the solar system. The blast would bathe Earth in the equivalent of 300,000 megatons of TNT, 30 times the world's nuclear weaponry, with the gamma-ray and X-ray radiation stripping Earth of its ozone layer.

Three such binary systems have been discovered, and one, PSR B1534+12, presently sits about 3,500 light-years away and will coalesce in a billion years.

Our galaxy is about 100,000 light years across, so a 3,500 light year kill zone is only a modest portion of the galaxy. Alas, PSR B1534+12 is not alone. As far as we can tell we live in a reasonably quiet galactic neighborhood; if we have a killer nearby they are likely fairly common elsewhere.

The earth is about 4.5 billion years old. We find evidence of life 3.5 billion years ago. If we have one billion years left to live [1] then our world of life is a senior citizen. Of course a billion years is a little while. Time enough, assuming no runaway nanotech, for quite a few life forms to develop technological civilizations on earth.

So perhaps there's a silver lining here. Maybe this research suggests that galaxies have a stable middle age of about 4-5 billion years before the gamma bursters go off across the disc, sterilizing the galaxy. In other words, gamma bursters may be concentrated in time, not evenly distributed across the galactic timeline. If my terribly amateur interpretation is not far off, conditions are not so terrible for the development of interstellar civilizations.

On the other hand, if that's true, where are they? Well, there are other explanations for the fermi paradox ...

[1] We used to have 3-5 billion until the sun fizzled, but that more remote problem is far more manageable than a gamma burst.

Rogues gallery - 15 Bush appointees of remarkable mediocrity

I know some very capable civil servants and bureaucrats. They must weep in their beer when they contemplate their Bush-regime masters. I think it's time to reconsider the theory that Bush is a deep, deep KGB plant -- the last weapon of a dying USSR.

This appointee is typical:

TNR: Welcome to the Hackocracy

...12: Paul Hoffman
Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks, Department of the Interior

Paul Hoffman is an avid angler, hunter, skier, and horseman. So it was only natural to tap this former chief of the Chamber of Commerce in Cody, Wyoming, (population 9,000) to help run the National Park Service. Sure, Hoffman had no parks experience other than recreating in them and, as head of the Cody Chamber, advocating for more snowmobiles in nearby Yellowstone National Park. But he had spent four years in the 1980s working as the state director for then-Wyoming Representative Dick Cheney. Since arriving at the Interior Department in 2002, Hoffman has demonstrated a knack for thinking outside the box. In April 2003, he went against the wishes of the staff of Yellowstone and asked the U.N. World Heritage Committee to remove the park from its "In Danger List." Last year, he overruled geologists at the Grand Canyon National Park and instructed the park's visitor centers to stock a creationist book that explained how God made the canyon 6,000 years ago, ordering up a flood to wipe out "the wickedness of man." And, this year, Hoffman pushed for wholesale revisions to the Park Service's management policies. Instead of giving priority to protecting natural resources, Hoffman proposed that managers emphasize multiple uses for their parks--including snowmobiling, Jet-Skiing, grazing, drilling, and mining. After Hoffman's proposed reforms set off a firestorm of criticism from Park Service employees and members of Congress--"The inmates are in charge of the asylum," one Park Service retiree complained--the Bush administration claimed that Hoffman's suggestions were "no longer in play" and that he had merely been playing "devil's advocate."

kw: incompetent, inept

How to survive the coming pandemic?

Darn. I have long though a rural refuge would be a good idea, but perhaps I've waited too long. This writer is convinced it's time to prepare for the worst: Pandemic - Personal Pandemic Preparedness Plan.

Hmm. We put food and water in the basement for Y2K. We wondered about stocking Cipro during the Anthrax days. SARS had us thinking about infection control gear [1]. Bush convinced us Sadaam would blast us with smallpox [2].

And now avian influenza. Somehow Katrina seems to have boosted the anxiety level another notch.

I do agree that we're heading into a world of lower security and higher risk. I do believe that it will be increasingly reasonable to make 'survival kits a part of one's home (it'll be easier when Walmart stocks them). I don't however, think this avian influenza will devastate wealthy nations. I think between the immunizations and travel restrictions and meds we'll contain it -- and the recently resurrected 1918 virus had lethality tricks this flu still lacks. [3]

Still, it's an interesting article to read to pick up a few tips for possible future use. I won't be acting on all the recommendations myself, however.

[1] I have yet to read a decent explanation of what happened with SARS -- and I've been looking. It feels very odd that I still don't understand why SARS was so lethal for health care workers, or how it came under control. My longstanding theory was that there was a far less lethal immunizing coronavirus circulating around the same time.

[2] Why does no-one remember the WMD scare was about smallpox? Why does no-one remember the aborted project to immunize health care workers pre-invasion? Why has no journalist every investigated whether the Iraq-smallpox scare was contrived? Sometimes I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe ... (Some people got very ill from that vaccine, I think some might have died.)

[3] Were the 1918 flu to strike today I think we'd get it under control, and based on the gene sequence it was nastier than this avian flu.