The law of large numbers: identical fake email addresses

Real.com was infamous for abusing users of their "free" audio clients. Spam, nagware, inline obnoxious ads, intrusive reminders, seizing file ownership, quasi-spyware -- the whole nine yards. Bad news.

Alas, the BBC uses RealAudio.

I'd heard RA had reformed out of desperation and litigation, so I downloaded the Mac client. You STILL have to provide an email address, so I provided my usual fake address: nospam@nospam.spa.

It was in use.

So I tried nospam@nospam.nospam.spa.

In use.

Then nospam.nospam@nospam.nospam.spa.

In use.

Finally nospam123.nospam@nospam.nospam.spa

That worked.

I want to know how many clones I have, and how many are a substantial improvement upon me.

The Economist. Adieu.

Twenty years ago I began my subscription to The Economist. I had my first real job, as an intern (aka "first year resident) in family practice. I could afford The Economist.

The first 10 years were superb. Then things began to slip. There were still some fabulous issues though. Their millenium issue was unequalled. Alas, from 2001 onwards it was downhill all the way. The Economist managed to be shocked by Clinton's extramarital affairs; a bit rich for a magazine better known for its libertarian bent. The US coverage grew, the international coverage shrank, and about four years ago they brought in a total moron as "Lexington".

Now they've made the moron their editor.

Crooked Timber � � White smoke at the Economist

... I have to say that my first reaction is to wonder whether it’s too late to cancel the recent renewal of my Economist subscription. I expect the Economist to be vehemently pro-market, but by reading certain kinds of stories with a skeptical eye, and by skipping past certain others, you can find a lot of value in its pages. It has a clear ideological bias, but it isn’t usually actively dishonest. But Micklethwait, together with his scrofulous sidekick Adrian Wooldridge, was responsible for The Right Nation which is one of the lazier and more dishonest books on American politics that I’ve had the misfortune of reading in the last few years, and for the Lexington column which has shown a pretty reliable track record as a purveyor of Republican talking points. There are still a lot of very good people working for the magazine – but I worry that it’s about to undergo a quite substantial deterioration in intellectual quality.

Update: It’s Micklethwait as expected.

CT is too young to know that today's Economist is a mere shadow of its former self. The deterioration is well underway, and now it's a race to the bottom. Happily, over a period of a few years, I've been preparing myself to say good-bye. I'd decided earlier this year not to renew, but I was waiting for the editorial announcement before ordering my alternatives. I will substitute The Atlantic and Scientific American for The Economist. Newsweek has been doing well lately, I'll start reading that online.

Good-bye, The Economist. You were great once, but you have gone the way of all things.

Danger: Addictive temptations from the BBC

I'm becoming a frothing mad lunatic fan of the BBC Radio 4 show In Our Time. I want to buy a T-shirt.

Damnedly, you can't download all the old programs to put them on an iPod. Here's the archive -- full of untouchable goodies for online access only. What am I supposed to on my commute, listen to mere NPR? (I used to like NPR, but now it's fit only to wrap the fish. I've seen the light.)

Maybe it's time for me to get some use out of 'Audio Hijack Pro'. Surely such misuse can't be immoral given the need to elevate my mind.

Let's not even glance at Radio 4's science archives or their history selection. Arggghhh.

Update 3/27/06: I can say that, theoretically speaking, Audio Hijack Pro (AHP), works very well for transferring the archival streams to an iPod. I suggest capturing as 'mono' with a bit rate of 64 kpbs. I use bookmarkable AAC so I can readily return where I left off.

The result is about the same size (20MB) as a podcast. It won't show up in the podcast menu on the iPod (since it's not), but it's easy to create an 'In Our Times' playlist that includes both the shows delivered via podcast and those delivered via AHP. You need the RealAudio client, which is now tolerable.

Read the section in the AHP documentation for tips on configuring capture from RealAudio; you'll do much better than flailing about. Using AHP properly you can set all the tags up in advance, including autonaming the saved file with the title tag using the %name% variable. You can also set the time to 45 minutes and auto-stop on silence. When you're done turn 'record' off and then drag and drop the file onto the "In Our Times" iTunes playlist icon you created.

AHP is slighly flaky. It caused problems on my iBook when the laptop went to sleep with AHP running. Just restart after use.

Theoretically speaking, it's quite easy to build up a a library of a large number of these sessions and catch up on years of IOT one commute at a time. Zoroastrianism is quite good, for example. Actually they all are. I'm awed.

Ask a stupid question ...

A pompous general questions the patriotism of a journalist who writes about national defense. I wouldn't have used his response, but there's something to be said for it:

Early Warning by William M. Arkin - washingtonpost.com:

.... General: 'Mr. Arkin, do you consider yourself a journalist or an American.'

I took a drink of water as my blood boiled.

Me: 'Well General, because I am an American, I cherish the fact that I can call you a f***ing idiot for asking the question.

I'm too genteel to answer that way, and it did get his military sponsors in trouble which seems a bit impolite, but I see the point ...

Graphene, quasiparticles, anyons and quantum braids

Two days ago, I read a popular news report on graphene, a form of carbon with novel properties. In particular it appears to allow one to experiment with quasiparticles, a family which includes not only our familiar bosons and fermions but also, perhaps, anyons. In the article electrons were said to move within the two dimensional graphene surface at relativistic speeds. Here's an article, but it's not what I read.

Yesterday I read an article in Scientific American on topological quantum computing using "braids" to perform error-resistant qubit processing. It's only theoretical, for it to work one needs a good source of anyons. The Sci Am article was written months ago of course. The same issue included a book review pointing in which a physicist saw no challenges to the Standard Model of physics since there are no meaningful places where both quantum and relativistic effects are simultaneously important.

Hmm. Graphene and anyons. - 49 googlits today. Add topological, get 31 hits. Add braid and ... Google stops working. That's funny!

Update: Google finally returned! There were 3 hits when I added braid, including this conference. By the way, most of the physicists mentioned in the SciAm article on using topological methods (braids) to enable error-resistant quantum computing work for Microsofts Project Q. There are surprisingly few googlits on Project Q, apparently it came up during a site visit for one blogger. It's nice to know Microsoft is putting its monopoly rents to interesting uses.

Dana Reeve: never smoked, died of lung cancer

The Blog of death covers Dana Reeves, best known, despite her considerable achievements, as the wife of Christopher Reeves.

She was only 44 when she died of lung cancer.

It is worth noting, I think, that she never smoked. As fewer people smoke, what lung cancer there is falls ever more often upon non-smokers. I need to get up to date on what the risk factors are now thought to be. (Second-hand smoke? Radium exposure? ?)

Life seem absurd? Maybe it is.

One of the explanations for the Fermi Paradox is that God 'made the world for Man'. Only for 'world' substitute galaxy or universe.

This is by far the most commonly held answer to the Fermi Paradox, even though the faithful don't usually think about their beliefs that way. Indeed, it's one of the more interesting arguments for the existence of God. Or rather, of a Designer.

A Designer of the physical universe? Or of a Simulation? And is there a difference? Brin returns to the theme, albeit without mention of my favorite paradox:

Contrary Brin: Design? Accident? Or Simulation?

* Leonard Susskind's new book, The Cosmic Landscape pits intelligent design against string theory and the megaverse. Surprisingly, Autodesk founder John Walker sides with intelligent design, but not by a deity -- by post-Singularity intelligences creating a reality simulation: "What would we expect to see if we inhabited a simulation?" Yes, I have discussed this in fact & fiction, many times. But the “symptoms” delineated by Susskind are definitely the kind plumbed by theoretical physicists who have a more extensive union card than I do! http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/2006-03/000664.html

To see this scenario played out in one of my short stories, go to: http://www.davidbrin.com/stonesofsignificance1.html

Any fan of the genre knows from the start how Brin's story will turn out, so it's mostly interesting for the digressions along the way. If one were looking for evidence of a simulation, I'd suggest looking for hacks and shortcuts. Computation is never free; any deity running our simulation would be doing something recursive, like reusing an intermediate output as a part of more than one result. One might be able to create an experiment that would stress the system, and expose the hacks. Something using a quantum computer ....

Two occupations: Iraq and the Falklands

Do we Americans understand?

The Falklands: A lesson for America in Iraq - Editorials & Commentary - William Pfaff - International Herald Tribune:

... The third obstacle to the intervention's having a positive political effect in the region is that (for incomprehensible reasons) the model of conduct the administration has imposed on the U.S. Army resembles that of Argentina's military dictatorship rather than that of the British Army that liberated the Falklands.

The Bush administration practice of torture recalls that of the Latin American military dictatorships. So does its flair for totalitarian logic. Few understand why American forces now practice torture, sometimes torture to death, and systematic abuse of prisoners and 'detainees.'

This is conduct for which the Western allies hanged Gestapo and SS officers and Japanese prison camp commanders in 1945. Do not the Bush people, and U.S. Army commanders, know even that much history?

A totalitarian logic also exists, just revealed by the former deputy White House counsel Timothy Flanigan (who has been nominated by the Bush administration to become the United States' deputy attorney general).

Asked by two senior Republican senators, John Warner and John McCain, to describe the standards governing U.S. prisoner treatment, he replied that there are no standards.

The indirect meaning of Flanigan's statement that there are no standards is that nothing is forbidden. This seems a deliberate choice by the Bush administration.

This is why the United States is not a force for justice and order in the Middle East. It has become the opposite, a creator of disorder and injustice. Does the American public understand this?

William Pfaff

William Pfaff used to be one of my favorite writers, along with Gwynne Dyer.

I forget now why he was dropped from my news page. Maybe he was on sabbatical, or behind a paywall. Anyway, you can find his articles in the International Herald Tribune now. They're good reading. I'll put the search link back on my news page.

Canadians are made for suffering: Rogers wireless

I grew up in Montreal, but I've been in the land of the market for many years. Today, in Montreal, I returned to the land where the consumer is supposed to suffer. I used Rogers Wireless' automated phone system for adding minutes to a cellphone.

It was like a brief trip to hell. Their was no option for keypad entry, and it didn't like my diction. I had to speak a 16 digit number in such a way that it got every digit. This is a trivial task for most VR systems, but not for this one. There was no option for keypad entry and no escape from the system.

Astounding.

Even though America is in moral and economic free fall, we can at least take some minor solace from knowing that, in the US market, Rogers Wireless would be toast.

Rogue Unit, Rogue Nation

It would be interesting to know the date that Bush and the GOP stopped talking about a "single rogue unit" and "a few bad apples":

Before and After Abu Ghraib, a U.S. Unit Abused Detainees - New York Times

... The story of detainee abuse in Iraq is a familiar one. But the following account of Task Force 6-26, based on documents and interviews with more than a dozen people, offers the first detailed description of how the military's most highly trained counterterrorism unit committed serious abuses.

It adds to the picture of harsh interrogation practices at American military prisons in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as well as at secret Central Intelligence Agency detention centers around the world.

The new account reveals the extent to which the unit members mistreated prisoners months before and after the photographs of abuse from Abu Ghraib were made public in April 2004, and it helps belie the original Pentagon assertions that abuse was confined to a small number of rogue reservists at Abu Ghraib.

More like a rogue nation.

The rational right betrayed: Bush wasn't in on the con

A recent Brad DeLong post deserves to be read. Don't miss the "great" (as in terrible) Andrew Sullivan quote in Peggy Noonan Realizes She Has Conned Herself.

There are small government rationalists in the historic Republican camp. They play a key role in democracy; they are the respected opposition. They helped forge some of the best results of the blessed Clinton years.

They thought Bush was one of them, and that his apparent inability to add was just an act to con the proles. When the bills came due our 100% GOP government would, with immense and solemn reluctance, eliminate medicare, social security, medicaid and a vast array of Roosevelt's legacy. Now they've come to understand that Bush is a KGB agent designed to destroy America. Or maybe he's a space alien in disguise. Or maybe Bush is a mildly demented con artist and the GOP is corrupt. Whatever the truth, their horror is genuine.

They thought they were conning the dimwitted, but they've discovered their own wits were dim.

Tough on them, terrible for America.

The worldmind in action: finding impact craters

A scientist (amateur?), viewing a newly discovered asteroid impact crater using Google Earth, impulsively decides to look for more. He quickly finds two candidates (Astroseti.org), but hours of additional work don't turn up any more.

It's a truism of the history of science that new instruments create a flurry of new discoveries. The new instrument in this case is not satellite imagery (old), or even Google Earth (though it's cool), it's the distributed worldmind. Lots of minds doing a vast amount of analysis.

After 9/11 I, among many others, proposed using a large collection of minds to process visual data from Afghanistan (obviously the security risks require some thought). I don't think that happened, but this story again shows us the potential of the new instrument.

Incidentally, the story of the early find and then nothing seems odd, but consider how many must have looked this way. The same idea probably occurred to tens of thousands of enthusiasts. The vast majority would look for a few hours then give up. If it takes 10,000 hours to find a crater, and the average search is one hour, then roughly 1 in 10,000 persons will make a discovery like this.

My Homeland security interview: via MoneyGram

Recenly I had to send some money to my sister in Canada. A quick Google search suggested MoneyGram or Western Union were my best choices, and MoneyGram works with Canadian Post Offices. It was the better option.

I ran into some technical glitches (password problem) and experienced a mixture of both insecure (they use password hints!) and stupidly secure practices (they wanted my sister to know my home phone number), but it did work. They most interesting part, however, was the automated interview with "homeland security". Three of the four questions were about finding out which "John Faughnan" I was:

4. Based on your background, in what county is 'xxxxxxx'? ( The
address listed may be partial, misspelled or contain minor numbering
variations from your actual address )

One question, however, wanted to know who I knew:

1. With which of the following people are you most closely associated? (
Names may be listed as last-name first-name, include maiden names or contain
slight misspellings.) [I've removed names]

A... A...
G... B...
H... H...
L... F...
S... N...

The names were a bit odd. They sounded vaguely Arabic, but mostly they seemed computer generated. I googled on them (that should boost my watchlist ranking!) but came up with no matches at all. Odd.

It was an interesting example of how Homeland Security is implementing its watch lists, and seeking to match a name to a profile.

I do wonder if everyone gets the automated interview...

Bad Google, bad: Blogger misbehaving

Blogger/Google hit me with a real one-two.

First they temporarily locked down my tech blog because their brain-dead algorithms mis-identified it as a spam blog, then, the moment they "whitelisted" it, they had a major hardware outage. It took them about 16 hours to recover, and they were awfully slow to admit on status.blogger.com that they had a problem (times below are PT, outage was early evening on 3/16):

Thursday, March 16, 2006

The filer that we have been having trouble with in the last few days failed again. Those blogs that are stored on the bad filer are temporarily not available for publishing and viewing. We are working on replacing the filer and restoring access to the blogs affected.

Update (10:40 am, March 17): The filer has been restored. All affected blogs are available for publishing and reading.