Adopting a mutt - new age

We're adopting a dog. Things have changed since we picked up Molly more than 15 years ago at the Delta County pound. Back then there was no web, now we have petfinder.com and computer generated breed recommendations.

Impressive. The breed recommendations were pretty much what I'd have guessed. On the other hand, the Delta pound had some beautiful mongrels, and their mutts weren't $250 each.

They should, however, include a longevity question in the breed selector. I'm going to see if I can get them to add that in.

Defining the Drake equation: how common are rocky planets?

A new imaging technique allows visualization of a very large rocky planet orbiting a red dwarf:

Scientists spot a new Earthlike planet - Space.com - MSNBC.com:

The planet and star are separated by about 2.5 astronomical units.

The finding means planet hunters are one step closer to detecting their holy grail: a habitable Earthlike planet that can sustain liquid water and support life.

The distance sounds comparable to our asteroid belt. I wonder if that's coincidental.

The significance of the discovery may be the proof of the microlensing technique. We probably have years to go before we can begin to put more meaningful numbers into the Drake Equation, and thus constrain the solutions to Fermi's Paradox.

A retrospective look: the war on terror

I don't read Juan Cole regularly, but I thought his recent retrospective on the 'War on Terror' was well timed. In September of 2001 I was certainly asking myself -- was 9/11 a fluke, or was al Qaeda really something new? Did they "get lucky", or could they repeat?

Early on the safest guess was that they were something new. I still think that the falling costs of havoc have changed the old equations. Richard Reid, though made me wonder. Clearly al Qaeda was scraping the bottom of the barrel when they used him. Since then we've seen more evidence that al Qaeda's bench is weak. They can get lots of fairly ordinary people to commit suicide, but they seem to have trouble holding and recruiting the elite operatives that would make them truly dangerous.

In retrospect, al Qaeda's "success" on 9/11 seems to have had a large element of chance. They were "unlucky" on a prior attack on the WTC (the basement bombing) and they were almost supernaturally "lucky" on 9/11. Having Afghanistan as a base was critical, and being left relatively alone helped them too. They don't loom so large now, in large part due to the US military action in Afghanistan. Since then, however, Bush has seemed to be acting as an agent of bin Laden -- helping rather than hurting him. Cole expands:

Juan Cole - Informed Comment Top Ten Mistakes of the Bush Administration in Reacting to Al-Qaeda
Tuesday, January 24, 2006

... On September 11, 2001, the question was whether we had underestimated al-Qaeda. It appeared to be a Muslim version of the radical seventies groups like the Baader Meinhoff gang or the Japanese Red Army. It was small, only a few hundred really committed members who had sworn fealty to Bin Laden and would actually kill themselves in suicide attacks. There were a few thousand close sympathizers, who had passed through the Afghanistan training camps or otherwise been inducted into the world view. But could a small terrorist group commit mayhem on that scale? Might there be something more to it?...

Over four years later, there is no doubt. Al-Qaeda is a small terrorist network that has spawned a few copy-cats and wannabes. Its breakthrough was to recruit some high-powered engineers in Hamburg, which it immediately used up. Most al-Qaeda recruits are marginal people, people like Zacarias Moussawi and Richard Reid, who would be mere cranks if they hadn't been manipulated into trying something dangerous... They are left mostly with cranks, petty thieves, drug smugglers, bored bank tellers, shopkeepers, and so forth, persons who could pull off a bombing of trains in Madrid or London, but who could not for the life of them do a really big operation.

The Bush administration and the American Right generally has refused to acknowledge what we now know. Al-Qaeda is dangerous. All small terrorist groups can do damage. But it is not an epochal threat to the United States or its allies of the sort the Soviet Union was (and that threat was consistently exaggerated, as well).

In fact, the United States invaded a major Muslim country, occupied it militarily, tortured its citizens, killed tens of thousands, tinkered with the economy-- did all those things that Muslim nationalists had feared and warned against, and there hasn't even been much of a reaction from the Muslim world. Only a few thousand volunteers went to fight. Most people just seem worried that the US will destabilize their region and leave a lot of trouble behind them. People are used to seeing Great Powers do as they will. A Syrian official before the war told a journalist friend of mine that people in the Middle East had been seeing these sorts of invasions since Napoleon took Egypt in 1798. "Well," he shrugged, "usually they leave behind a few good things when they finally leave."

Because they exaggerate the scale of the conflict, and because they use it cynically, Bush and Cheney have grossly mismanaged the struggle against al-Qaeda and Muslim radicalism after September 11. Here are their chief errors:

1. Bush vastly exaggerates al-Qaeda's size, sweep and importance, while failing to invest in genuine counterterrorist measures such as port security or security for US nuclear plants.

2. Bush could have eradicated the core al-Qaeda group by putting resources into the effort in 2002. He did not, leaving al-Zawahiri and Bin Laden to taunt us, inspire our enemies and organize for years after the Taliban were defeated. It would be as though Truman had allowed Hitler to broadcast calls for terrorism against the US from some hiding place as late as 1949.

3. Bush opened a second front against Iraq before he had put Afghanistan on a sound footing.

4. Bush gutted the US constitution, tossing out the Fourth Amendment, by assiduously spying on Americans without warrants. None of those spying efforts has been shown to have resulted in any security benefits for the United States. Bush says that he wants to watch anyone who calls the phone numbers associated with al-Qaeda. But some of those phone numbers were for food delivery or laundry. We want a judge to sign off on a wire tap so that innocent Americans are not spied on by the government.

5. Bush attempted to associate the threat from al-Qaeda with Iran and Syria. Iran is a fundamentalist Shiite country that hates al-Qaeda. Syria is a secular Arab nationalist country that hates al-Qaeda. Indeed, Syria tortured al-Qaeda operatives for Bush, until Bush decided to get Syria itself. Bush and Cheney have cynically used a national tragedy to further their aggressive policies of Great Power domination.

6. Bush by invading Iraq pushed the Iraqi Sunni Arabs to desert secular Arab nationalism. Four fifths of the Sunni Arab vote in the recent election went to hard line Sunni fundamentalist parties. This development is unprecedented in Iraqi history. Iraqi Sunni Arabs are nationalists, whether secular or religious, and there is no real danger of most of them joining al-Qaeda. But Bush has spread political Islam and has strengthened its influence.

7. Bush diverted at least one trillion dollars in US security spending from the counter-terrorism struggle against al-Qaeda to the Iraq debacle, at the same time that he has run up half a trillion dollar annual deficits, contributing to a spike in inflation, harming the US economy, and making the US less effective in counterterrorism.

8. Counterterrorism requires friendly allies and close cooperation. The Bush administration alienated France, Germany and Spain, along with many Middle Eastern nations that had long waged struggles of their own against terrorist groups. Bush is widely despised and has left America isolated in the world. Virtually all the publics of all major nations hate US policy. One poll showed that in secular Turkey where Muslim extremism is widely reviled and Bin Laden is generally disliked, the public preferred Bin Laden to Bush. Bush is widely seen as more dangerous than al-Qaeda. This image is bad for US counterterrorism efforts.

9. Bush transported detainees to torture sites in Eastern Europe. Under European Union laws, both torture and involvement in torture are illegal,and European officials can be tried for these crimes. HOw many European counterterrorism officials will want to work closely with the Americans if, for all they know, this association could end in jail time? Indeed, in Washington it is said that a lot of our best CIA officers are leaving, afraid that they are being ordered to do things that are illegal, and for which they could be tried once another administration comes to power in Washington.

10. Bush's failure to capture Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri allows them to continue to grandstand, to continue to frighten the public, to continue to affect financial markets, and to continue to plot. Al-Zawahiri almost certainly plotted the 7/7 London subway bombings himself, and gloated about it when he issued Muhammad Siddique Khan's suicide statement. Misplaced Bush priorities are getting our allies hit. The CIA is reduced to firing predators at villages because our counterterrorism efforts have been starved for funds by the Iraq quagmire. If al-Qaeda does pull off another American operation, it may well give Bush and Cheney an opportunity to destroy the US constitution altogether, finally giving Bin Laden his long-sought revenge on Americans for the way he believes they have forced Palestinians and other Muslims to live under lawless foreign domination or local tyranny.

If al Qaeda is not an ephocal threat, do we really need to surrender our freedom, and change the balance of American government? Are we throwing away our freedom for no good reason?

My best explanation for Bush is that he's a deep KGB plant -- or an agent of a malign alien civilization. Next that he's incompetent. Lastly that he's the human expression of a rather scary desire of many Americans for the Great White Father. However, America elected him (once), and America elected his party to control the House, Senate and Supreme Court, and now America may choose to support his reinterpretations of the Constitution. If Bush is not challenged, history will judge that Americans took this road voluntarily and consciously. Thus will a great dream die.

Smile for the satellite: Google Maps update

Six inch imagery at some spots.

Official Google Blog: New year, new imagery

... added extensive 6-inch imagery for many parts of the U.K.

... added two more zoom levels in Google Local's Satellite mode!

Take a look at people standing at the gates of Buckingham Palace in London, or jump over the pond and see the Statue of Liberty in New York, and then maybe drop down to the southern hemisphere and check out the boats sailing past the Sydney Opera House.

Our home isn't available at the very highest resolution, but check out this random shot from Boulder, Colorado. The altitude, clear air and high resolution imagery means it's easy to tell cars from trucks.

A use for blacklists: Political spam

I've never had much use for blacklists. Most spammers don't use valid email addresses.

Times change. Political parties and candidates do use valid email addresses, and they are spamming me like mad. Oh what a fool I was to give my email address along with money to various democratic party candidates. (Lash, lash, lash.)

This guy is typical: spam email with no way to get off the list. Of course he won't get my money, but he's a fringe candidate anyway.

So now my blacklists and bounce tools will get a workout. It's nice to know blacklists are good for something.

Cervical ribs and cancer risk

I remember being taught that cervical ribs were a relatively harmless congenital anomaly. True, it's been years since I practiced clinical medicine, but is this widely known? Is it true?

Pharyngula

There isn't much variation in cervical vertebra number, though. There is an exception: sometimes, the 7^th cervical vertebra is found to undergo a partial homeotic transformation and forms a pair of ribs, which are normally found only on thoracic vertebrae. Humans develop cervical ribs with a frequency of about 0.2%; do they also develop cancers? The answer is yes, with a frequency 125 times greater than the general population.

The power of the contest: Booting XP on a MacTel

[Update 1/24: Colin added an Amazon donation link and I kicked in $20.]

A very clever person has created a several thousand dollar prize for getting XP to boot on a MacTel box -- out of thin air:

The Contest

My MacBook is shipping on the 15th of February. I told my boss that this would replace my IBM desktop and I could boot Windows XP on it. I am still confident it can be done. I am pledging $100 of my own money and offering anyone else who would like the instructions on how to Dual boot these two operating systems the ability to donate some of their money into the pot as a reward for the person / group that can make dual-booting Mac OS X and Windows XP happen on an Intel Mac.

He started with $100 in seed money, and is now raising serious funds. There are thousands of geeks who seriously want to do this. Apple, for unknown reasons, is not helping (security?, strategy?, support concerns?, Digital Rights Management?). The primary obstacles are drive format and the MacTel's BIOS replacement.

Unfortunately he only accepts PayPal or I'd kick in $20. Happily he's added an Amazon link to the PayPal option so I kicked in $20 (I despise PayPal.) The contast has now gotten enough attention that it's a matter of both money and glory. I would not be surprised to see some silicon valley millionaires sweeten the pot considerably.

We've seen contests used in aerospace, human powered vehicles, and other settings. In a connected world, where the costs of reaching millions of people is very low, the power of these contests is likely to grow. If this particular effort succeeds, it may, in retrospect, be a truly historic event.

Google news now learns what you like

Google News is "out of beta", meaning Google is committing to it for at least a few years. Google news now "learns" what you might like to read. Another small step for Skynet.

Official Google Blog: And now, News:

You can sign up for Personalized Search to view and manage your history of news searches and the articles you've read. When you're signed in to your Google Account, you'll receive recommended news stories based on the previous stories you've read. These recommendations will be highlighted just below the top news stories on the page, in a clearly marked section. You can also get a full page of recommended stories by clicking on the section. All of this is done automatically using algorithms.

Update. It took a few minutes for Google news to start showing the new section, but now I have an extra news section that looks like this:

Recommended for jfaughnan@gmail.com » Learn more
UK support for rights groups raises suspicion in Kremlin
Guardian Unlimited - 1 hour ago - Russian non-governmental organisations, yesterday expressed concern that spying allegations against British diplomats ...
Los Angeles Times - Telegraph.co.uk - The Moscow Times - all 376 related »

Sudan seeks to end split at African Union
Financial Times - 1 hour ago - By Andrew England in Nairobi and Reuters. Sudan said yesterday it was willing to withdraw its candidacy for the ...
Reuters - News24 - Voice of America - all 425 related »

Saudi Araba in Energy Deal With China
Houston Chronicle - 13 hours ago - By ALEXA OLESEN Associated Press Writer. BEIJING — Saudi Arabia and China inked a deal on energy cooperation on ...
Financial Times - Arab News - Hindu - all 339 related »

The stories listed are moderately interesting to me; it will be neat to see where this goes.

Travelers tales: a list of favored cities and times

Obsidian Wings, a politically moderate security-focused blog, drifted into the topic of fun business travel and places. It's the comments that make the piece. Many of the comments are about places that would require a time machine to visit.

I can vouch for some of these lost places -- Chiang Mai in 1981, Jerusalem in 1983. I regret not having visited Kashmir when I might have @1981 -- the way the war is going there I won't ever see it. I'm told old Laos was a rare gem. Manhattan in the 1940s and 1950s. Shanghai before the boom. Koh Samui when it was hard to reach.

A time traveler would have no end of wonderful cities and places to visit. Many were most wonderful for a short period of time, modernity has come fast and hard to much of the world. I can't deny the urgency of poverty, but I suspect one day many Chinese will deeply regret what has been destroyed. In my home town of Saint Paul/Minneapolis an awful lot of local history and charm was plowed over for roads and trains from 1950 to 1970.

Travel while you can. You cannot cross the same river twice (or even once).

PS. If once read a book titled '1,000 Places to See Before You Die'. It was awful. Really 1,000 hotels to visit before you die. The author apparently never left her room. I have to admit, I remember some of those hotels fondly -- but really ...

iTunes users are Democrats?

iTunes grown (14% of net users) is huge news for Apple. iTunes embedding is fundamental to Apple's success. They may have crossed the "tipping point". Most interesting, however, is that their user base appears to be democrat:

BBC NEWS | Technology | Apple iTunes users growing fast

Curiously, the market research firm also found that iTunes users comprise a readily identifiable audience in terms of their likes and dislikes for certain goods and services.

For instance, Nielsen said, iTunes users were 2.2 times more likely to own a Volkswagen than the average internet user. Audi and Subaru were also popular with regular users of the Apple store.

Marketers usually consider ownership of these vehicles as a very reliable market for someone who votes Democrat first.

Microsoft needs to go for the Republicans.

Parasite and master

I'm addicted to these stories of parasites controlling their hosts. Were we less fussy when we carried worms? Is OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) an adaptive response to the lassitude and carelessness worms create? (In other words, OCD is the disorder that emerges when the worms are gone, when the worms are present the same neurologic structures counteract the worm effect).

The big focus now is on Toxoplasma. How does this lovely litte brain infesting critter change our behavior? What's the curious relationship to some schizophrenia-like conditions? Carl Zimmer, one of our best science writers, summarizes the stor to date: The Return of the Puppet Masters.

Parasites are cool.

The transformation of the American economy

Another economist wonders what the heck Americans are going to do with themselves:

Exporting Expertise, if Not Much Else - New York Times:

.. The share of the economy devoted to medical care services has grown by eight percentage points in the past four decades, with commensurate changes in employment. But this isn't necessarily great news for the economy. With exceptions like online consultations and robotic surgery, medical care services are not as easy to export as, for example, medical equipment.

The leisure and recreational industries have also expanded, with the share of employment up by four percentage points. Here, too, exporting is difficult: after all, gambling, artistic performances and restaurant dinners usually take place on site.

More promising, management and professional services like law and finance resumed their strong growth after taking a hit in the recession. These areas are the ripest for exporting. Need some business advice? No problem. Want some derivatives structured? Great. First, however, we need to train those consultants and bankers.

... We are becoming a nation of advisers, fixers, entertainers and high-tech engineers, with a lucrative sideline in treating our own illnesses...

In my own world I've seen job opportunities for US citizen software engineers shrink radically in just a few years. On the other hand, it's very hard to outsource plumbing.

This is great news for most of the world. The best thing we can do for most of humanity is to facilitate globalization, but we should balance that with aid to those in the US who will be displaced. The trick is figuring out how best to provide that aid.

In the Futures market both "US Socialism" and "Servants are US" are up 20 points.

Republican strategy: energize the wackos

It is fundamentally reassuring that Republican operatives consider their base to be raving loonies who should be brought out of the asylum only for elections:

Crooked Timber: Wackos:

Michael Scanlon … explained the strategy in an e-mail to a tribal client.

“Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them,” he wrote. “The wackos get their information [from] the Christian right, Christian radio, e-mail, the internet and telephone trees.”

I prefer the rule of cynical and evil people with good sense to the rule of wackos. Karl Rove is of the Scanlon camp -- but where's George?

Keeping the Elderly on the Road, but Out From Behind the Wheel - New York Times

A year or two ago, bicyclists on the roads of Montreal were dropping like flies on a windshield. Elder drivers were churning out road kill.

Montreal has narrow roads, and an aged population (the remnants of the engish quebecois) in the west end of the island. Aging sucks. Visual perception is a complex processor intensive internal simulation of the external world. Aging hits perception everywhere -- the lens stiffens, the vitreous opacifies, the retina atrophies, the brain rots. Perception goes. Let's not discuss the impact of cell phones (hey, it's the only way I can call my mother).

We compensate in our forties and fifties by driving more cautiously and by avoiding sleep deprivation and mind-altering substances (except caffeine). This only goes so far. By age 65 the tide has turned ..

Keeping the Elderly on the Road, but Out From Behind the Wheel - New York Times

... People 65 and older account for more accidents per miles driven than any group other than teenagers, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

... In 1988, Ms. Freund watched a motorist run over her 3-year-old son, Ryan, as he played in front of their house. The 84-year-old driver later told investigators that he thought he had run over a dog. The accident left Ryan in a coma, but he eventually recovered. Ms. Freund went on to study the issue of elderly drivers while in graduate school.

By the time she left the University of Southern Maine with a degree in public policy, she had refined her idea. She knew that older drivers' cars often got little use. Using the model of a reverse mortgage, a home equity loan that enables people to tap into the value of their homes, Ms. Freund applied the formula to cars.

Under her program, elderly people trade in their cars and the value is booked into an account from which they can draw to receive rides. On average, $7 to $8 is deducted for each ride. Family and friends can add to the account by donating cars or cash, or their time as volunteers.

Taking cars away from the elderly is not an easy business. Nobody is great at it, neither physicians nor licensing boards not families. Most American cities are so car centric it would be less bothersome to lose a leg than a car. This problem will get worse every year for the next 30 years; we'll hear more about it. We need to put a lot of "smarts" in cars and in the transit environment to compensate for what we're losing. Maybe gas at $12/gallon will help ...

How to write a business plan

The most useful summary I've read on how to do a business plan. Valuable for your next startup or for justifying an internal project or acquisition.

Kawasaki is going to burn out on his blogging soonner or later, but I hope he keeps his work online. At the moment his is among the best entrepreneurial writing online. (Joel Spolsky and Paul Graham are two other favorites.)

Let the Good Times Roll by Guy Kawasaki: The Zen of Business Plans:

... "# Pitch, then plan. Most people create a business plan, and it's a piece of crap: sixty pages long, fifty-page appendix, full of buzzwords, acronyms, and superficialities like, “All we need is one percent of the market.” Then they create a PowerPoint pitch from it. Is it any wonder why that the plans are lousy when they are based on crappy pitches? The correct sequence is to perfect a pitch (10/20/30), and then write the plan from it. Write this down: A good business plan is an elaboration of a good pitch; a good pitch is not the distillation of good business plan. Why? Because it's much easier to revise a pitch than to revise a plan. Give the pitch a few times, see what works and what doesn't, change the pitch, and then write the plan. Think of your pitch as your outline, and your plan as the full text. How many people write the full text and then write the outline?
# Put in the right stuff. Here's what a business plan should address: Executive Summary (1), Problem (1), Solution (1), Business Model (1), Underlying Magic (1), Marketing and Sales (1), Competition (1), Team (1), Projections (1), Status and Timeline (1), and Conclusion (1). Essentially, this is the same list of topics as a PowerPoint pitch. Those numbers in parenthesis are the ideal lengths for each section; note that they add up to eleven. As you'll see in a few paragraphs, the ideal length of a business plan is twenty pages, so I've given you nine pages extra as a fudge factor.

# Focus on the executive summary. True or false: The most important part of a business plan is the section about the management team. The answer is False.* The executive summary, all one page of it, is the most important part of a business plan. If it isn't fantastic, eyeball-sucking, and pulse-altering, people won't read beyond it to find out who's on your great team, what's your business model, and why your product is curve jumping, paradigm shifting, and revolutionary. You should spend eighty percent of your effort on writing a great executive summary. Most people spend eighty percent of their effort on crafty a one million cell Excel spreadsheet that no one believes.

# Keep it clean. The ideal length of a business plan is twenty pages or less, and this includes the appendix. For every ten pages over twenty pages, you decrease the likelihood that the plan will be read, much less funded, by twenty-five percent. When it comes to business plans, less is more. Many people believe that the purpose of a business plan is to create such shock and awe that investors are begging for wiring instructions; the reality is that the purpose of a a business plan is to get to the next step: continued due diligence with activities such as checking personal and customer references. The tighter the thinking, the shorter the plan; the shorter the plan, the faster it will get read.

# Provide a one-page financial projection plus key metrics. Many business plans contain five year projections with a $100 million top line and such minute levels of detail that the budget for pencils is a line item. Everyone knows that you're pulling numbers out of the air that you think are large enough to be interesting, but not so large as to render urine drug-testing unnecessary. Do everyone a favor: Reduce your Excel hallucinations to one page and provide a forecast of the key metrics of your business--for example, the number of paying customers. These key metrics provide insight into your assumptions. For example, if you're assuming that you'll get twenty percent of the Fortune 500 to buy your product in the first year, I would suggest checking into a rehab program.