Another reader suspects the Economist might be in decline

Tim Bray suspects something's amiss with the Economist. He's a bit late to the party -- the decline began in the mid-90s and it's been in the mud for years. I'm giving it a rest for a year or so.

He'll figure it out eventually ....

MySpace: So what's there?

Myspace seemed to have enough zeitgeist to it that I decided to sign up. Lest anyone get the wrong idea, my profile has my DOB in 1910, my build as "extra pounds", and my wife and daughter in my 'to meet' list.

I can now reveal the shocking, astounding and unexpected news that MySpace is all about recreational encounters. The more information you provide, the more "friends" appear in your network. I thought there'd be some interesting web 2.0 technology, but it's very much web 1.0.

Other than the lack of Ajaxity, the other surprise was that you can't readily display your real name. First and last names are private.

My kids are too young for this stuff, but I can see I need to catch up on my Gibson security podcasts. In a few years I'll be wanting some fairly sophisticated traffic analysis software ... (Cell phones, what cell phones?)

john

Cataclysmic change: Faughnan.com dog picture changes

A change of this magnitude should not go unremarked.

In addition to the Gordon's Notes and Gordon's Tech blogs, I have ten + year old personal web site: http://faughnan.com. It changes little these days, I maintain a few of the more popular pages every few monhts. One item that's been slow to update is the main page picture, which for 10 years was my dog Molly. Molly went wherever we all go about two years ago, but only now has her heir appeared. Kateva is now the iconic representative of my ancient site. Happily she's relatively young.

Why do (some) humans hate democracy?

Conversely, why do some love tyrants rather than futile blogging about authoritarian trends?

Ocrinus reviews the literature.. Alas, there's not that much science to the review, but it is illustrative. Evolutionary anthropology is probably a better explanatory source.

Ten cosmologies and Theory 10

I agree with FMH. Theory 10 is oddly persuasive; there's something to be said for explaining the bizarre features of our universe as computational artifacts.

Theory 10 is, of course, fundamentally indistinguishable from the 'omnipotent deity' explanation, that should warm the hearts of the Creationists.

Incidentally, one must give due credit to the last 15 years of science fiction writing, which has explored many aspects of 'life in a simulation'. One of my favorites featured a simulation-within-a-simulation-within-etc. The very alien inhhabitants of the ultimate simulation went to immense lengths to explain their fundamentally illogical universe, much to the amusement of those who'd created the simulation. Incredibly they finally produced an internally consistent explanation of their odd cosmology; their solution propagated outside the simulation and destroyed the host universe ...

Minneapolis is a civilized town

Today my son demonstrated an unprecedented interest in the unequalled Minneapolis riverside dog park, just south of Minnehaha park. Hours passed, and we blew through our parking meter time.

When we returned I saw the pink ticket, and remembered, too late, that our spot was metered. To my astonishment, however, the ticket was an offer I could not refuse. I could pay $35 for the ticket, or $28 for a one year park pass:

Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board - Parking

...Effective May 27, 2006 , the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board (MPRB) is issuing administrative tickets for parking violations. First-time offenders have the option to purchase a $27 Annual Patron Parking Permit and save $8 rather than pay the $35 parking citation.

Annual Parking Permit Option

First time parking offenders may choose to purchase a $27 Annual Parking Permit or pay the $35 administrative ticket. Purchase of the Annual Parking Permit requires that payment of $27 must accompany the ticket, be made in the ticket envelope and received within seven days. Payment must be made by mail or in person:

Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board
2117 West River Road , Minneapolis , 55411

Wow. This is so civilized. Parking fees are an entirely reasonable user fee system, and this is a most elegant extensions of this. I live in St. Paul, but I have to admit Minneapolis has its own style.

I'll see if they'll let me get two passes, normally that's the base rate plus another $10.

Never apologize

The Japanese, at least in theory, had a culture of responsibility, where senior leaders apologized for errors in judgment. Sometimes the apologies were gruesome.

I don't think Charles Krauthammer should commit Seppuku, but an apology would be nice. Kudoes to Crooked Timber:

Crooked Timber: Credibility problems

... But even better to my mind, was Krauthammer’s confident judgement on Iraq WMDs back in April 2003.

...Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem.

Krauthammer is now advocating military action against Iran.

Bics and bump keys: innovation diffusion

Innovation diffusion studies were popular in the 1980s. How do new techniques, new methods, move through a population? I don't hear much about it any more, perhaps because diffusion has accelerated substantially.

Crooks have quickly learned how to steal "theftproof" cars (manufacturers left "back doors" for mechanics and for internal use). A few years ago the internet had demonstrations of opening bike locks with a Bic pen -- a vast number of locks had to be replaced.

Now it's the household lock. The newest innovation in breaking and entry is the use of the (Future Feeder) � Bump key. A set of 9 or so specially cut keys, combined with a light hammer blow and a quick twist, will open the vast majority of household locks. The methods leaves no sign of entry, so you may simply discover your diamond tiara is gone -- but nothing else is touched. Might be hard to get a claim paid ...

New locks will come along. The interesting bit to me is the speed of diffusion. Car theft, lock picking, blowing up planes -- new techniques are deployed quickly.

Leiberman lost on the merits

He wasn’t defeated by a conspiracy of loons. He deserved to lose.

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Was David Broder Always *This* Stupid?

... Not true. A switch of two percent of the voting electorate would have given Joe Lieberman a victory. If Joe Lieberman had announced that he was going to live or die by the result of the Democratic primary, spent his $2 million in the bank on the primary, and gotten all the extra Democratic politicians who would have been happy to campaign with him under those conditions into the state--he would have won. If Lieberman had made up his mind whether Lamont was really a Republican from Greenwich or a tool of the far left that believes Osama bin Laden is not a threat, he would have won. If Lieberman had been willing to talk this spring about how Bush could handle the situation in the Middle East better--he would have won. If Lieberman had been willing to call for mass resignations from the Bush administration for failed implementation--he would have won.

Lieberman had to work very hard to lose this one. In claiming that "it was clear" that Lamont would prevail, David Broder is simply being a very rare species of idiot. ...

One of the reasons I don’t subscribe to the NYT Select is so I don’t have to worry about accidental exposure to Broder, who’s far more irritating than Ann Coulter. Ann is a self-referential parody and loon, but Broder is a brainy moron. Ok, so the Times Select also costs $50, which is a lot to pay for Value = (Krugman) – (Broder+Friedman).

Talent, terrorism and the shoulders of giants

Yesterday I wrote (Gordon's Notes: 8/09: How talented is this group?) that I thought the talent level of al Qaeda’s team has been pretty low the past five years.

I'm looking forward to learning more about the current crop of suspects (some of whom will likely turn out to be innocent); particularly how many have engineering or science degrees from serious institutions, etc. That will tell us if George Bush's al Qaeda recruitment strategy is bearing fruit. If it turns out that this is a talented bunch then we have to give even more credit to Pakistani, UK and US counter-terrorism efforts. Given the size of the conspiracy, however, I suspect they’re dolts. No-one with any brains would launch an effort that big from the United Kingdom.

Today I give credit to two recent public radio shows for emphasizing another part of the talent puzzle. One show was part of a superb series on supermax prisons and solitary confinement, the other was an interview this morning with a remarkable counter-terrorism expert. I wish the latter kept a blog ...

First the supermax. The inmates at supermax prisons are not generally known for their creativity, insight, or intelligence. So I was surprised by the range of ingenious and lethal techniques they deployed to support violence, commerce, and recreation. A handful of innovators, combined with modern and traditional communication channels, intense motivation and ample time to scheme, and memetic selection, have delivered advanced techniques to the average prisoner. These men and women stand on "the shoulder of (nasty) giants".

Then the counter-terrorism specialist. He pointed out that a large range of modern terrorist methodologies seem to have been developed by a few unfortunately talented IRA engineers and specialists. Their techniques and technologies, developed during the 1950s to 1980s (perhaps with some KGB help as well?) have been widely disseminated though print and spoken methods (I’m sure the net helps too). Apparently some of this team continues to work gainfully in South America (guess where?), though it’s not clear how inventive they are nowadays. Terrorists too have shoulders to stand on.

So the British terrorists (they were British citizens and terrorists, so they’re British terrorists) may have been executing a derivative attack, and they may have been dolts, but a lot of knowledge has been packaged to a point that even dolts can execute it. Process improvement, knowledge management, and the falling costs of lethal weapons — it’s all a part of the falling cost of havoc.

Quicken: I do loathe thee

Quicken 2004 is up to its old bugs again -- auto classifying every transaction incorrectly, creating myriads of nonsensical transaction splits. I clean it up and then it does it again. It also threw a memory exception; I had to 'copy' (rebuild) the database again.

I really only use Quicken now to download my credit card transactions and check transactions. I've gone back to spreadsheets for overall finance work and tax reporting, and given up on balancing the checkbook.

I've used Quicken since DOS version 2. It was a great piece of software then, though some DOS versions had nasty database corruption bugs. After about DOS version 4 it started downhill, and it's been sleazing about for years. One day I'll abandon it completely.

Progress in software is not guaranteed. The personal web building toolkits have never returned, that market is gone (iWeb doesn't qualify). Finance software is pretty meager on the PC, and non-existent on the Mac. Word processors aren't as good as they were 10 years ago. Photo management software is, of course, far better. Overall though, it's a mixed picture.

8/09: How talented is this group?

The initial impression, obviously uncertain, is that the 8/09 multi-plane bombing plan was (is?) a serious operation of an al Qaeda like group. I'm most interested in the talent level of the group.

The current hypothesis about why we haven't had major attacks post 9/11 in the US (exempting the mysterious anthrax bio-attack) is:

1. No robust command and control function left post Afghanistan.
2. A desire for a 'big' attack -- no wish for smaller actions.
3. An unexpected (by many) level of opposition, or at least non-support, among US muslims for any attacks.
4. Some minimal hardening of the most obvious targets. (Except for the cockpit doors, however, this is largely discounted.)
   

My personal hypothesis is different. I think al Qaeda has had a very weak bench. I think that the intellectual capabilities, operational effectiveness, and creativity of their "team" has been miserable.

I began to think this after the Richard Reid "shoe bomber" episode. Sending a cognitively disabled paranoid schizophrenic on an attack only made sense if it was either a "feint" -- or if that was the best they could do. In retrospect the Reid attack was not a feint, so the implication is that they had almost nobody left with any talent.

Why is this? Genius is everywhere. There must be tens of thousands of Muslims who are smarter and more creative than anyone I know -- albeit with, on average, fewer educational opportunities. If they wanted to destroy western civilization we'd be on our backs now. As it is, despite Bush's incompetence, we're still breathing.

For some reason, al Qaeda hasn't been able to recruit really talented attackers. I think Bush has been doing an outstanding job of helping al Qaeda improve their recruiting pool. Once we get a look at this bunch, we'll see how successful he's been.

Update 8/16/06: Early returns suggest a very thin bench here. I'm still waiting to learn if any went to college, and particularly if there were any scientists, technologists, geeks, or engineers.

Cancers can become parasitic life forms

A canine tumor turns out to be a parasitic form of a cancer cell from a dog that died 300-500 years ago. Now the hunt is on for additional forms of parasitic cancer:

The Loom : A Dead Dog Lives On (Inside New Dogs)

...One question the scientists do raise is how common such cancer parasites may be. Scientists have reported tumors that spread from transplanted organs, but these don't have a way to sustain their spread for centuries. Still, between mating, biting, and otherwise making contact, vertebrates provide plenty of opportunities for cancers to spread. And it is striking that our immune systems--and the immune systems of other jawed vertebrates--are equipped to battle so strongly against foreign tissues. What for? It's not as if Devonian-era sharks were giving each other liver transplants 400 million years ago. Perhaps, the scientists suggest, our ancestors had to fight against a different sort of tissue donation: cancer parasites.

In the dogs the parasite is relatively benign, in Tasmanian Devils a similar sort of parasite is lethal. This will be interesting ...

Microsoft in crisis: it's more than Vista

To put it mildly, I've never been a Microsoft fan. I think MS Word alone has knocked billions of our GNP. Their path to power was littered with the corpses of better solutions. On the other hand, I've always given them credit for Microsoft Excel, I think XP was a very good OS until the security crises of the past few years (not as good overall as OS X, but good), and I've always thought they made superb hardware. Really, they've been a good hardware company.

Then I bought the Microsoft LifeCam VX-6000. It takes real genius to produce an XP STOP screen on startup -- the rarely seen XP Blue Screen of Death (not on my home machine, on my pure work laptop). Only Microsoft would have the knowledge and cojones to hack into the ring 0 driver code of XP and do something like this (my guess is that the LifeCam software was written for Vista).

Microsoft is in deeper trouble than a Vista product delay. They increasingly feel like a company coming apart at the seams. This won't be pretty, but maybe it's the best alternative we have to a stifling monopoly. With luck they'll be back in 10 years -- without the monopoly ...

Ta Mok: An obituary

What was he like, as a child? Was he loved once? Do his children mourn him?

The Economist: Ta Mok

Aug 3rd 2006

Ung Choeun (“Ta Mok”), the last surviving leader of the Khmers Rouges, died on July 21st, probably aged 80...

... His name, “Ta Mok”, meant “respected grandfather”. Villagers mourned him because they said he had brought prosperity and work to their poor forests. He claimed the same. Under his authority, especially in the south-west of Cambodia where he had been zone secretary in the communist Khmer Rouge days, roads, dams and bridges sprang up everywhere, and bright green rice fields stretched to the horizon.

Yes, Ta Mok built dams. They were erected in the late 1960s and 1970s by thousands of slaves. These people had never done hard labour before. They were doctors, teachers, writers, scientists, forcibly evacuated from the cities with whatever they could carry, made to live in barracks and worked for 12-14 hours a day. Their food was rice, which at one point fell to 150 grams a day, or rice gruel, or watery soup of banana stalks. If they did not die of disease, starvation or exhaustion, they might be killed for reluctance or dissent, or for wearing glasses. Between executions and deaths from aggravated causes, almost a quarter of Cambodia's population—1.7m people out of 7m—died between 1975 and 1979, when the Khmers Rouges were in power.

Ta Mok denied that there was blood on his hands. Towards the end of his life, as he awaited a long-delayed trial before a UN-Cambodian court on charges of genocide, he asked his lawyer to tell the world that he had never killed anyone. Technically, this may have been true. The killings he ordered in the south-western zone were done in the deep jungle, where he never saw them. Those he master-minded for Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader, when he was one of his senior advisers and later his army chief, were more like mob massacres in which no general needed to intrude...

... As early as the 1950s his cruelty was notable, and noted. So was his distrust. He saw traitors everywhere, and more as the years went on. Not only his party rivals, but ordinary people too, became CIA agents, lackeys of the Thai government, agents of the Vietnamese: those neighbour-countries, especially, being threats to the Khmer Rouge regime. He made the peasants in his zone wear black clothes, the better to control them.

... Ta Mok, born a peasant and with no fancy French education, talked of himself as one of the “lower brothers” at the grassroots, doing the hard revolutionary work. But he enjoyed the material rewards. He put his family—brothers, sons, daughters, in-laws—into party jobs, and built himself a fine red-brick headquarters in the middle of a lake.

In power, his basic, crude advice often cut through the jargon of the other cadres. Phnom Penh was cleared out and sacked in 1975, with the deaths of 20,000 people, largely because Ta Mok condemned his colleagues as “layabouts”. The year before, in Oudong, he had cleansed the old royal city of its 30,000 residents and burned it to the ground. The people were marched away to an uninhabited region in which they could build the new Cambodia.

After the collapse of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979, Ta Mok kept on fighting for two decades. By the end of that time, though crippled by a landmine, he was the movement's leader. He had argued with Pol Pot, and seized power. The former leader died in 1998, in his custody, as both men fled farther into the northern mountains...

The writing is cold and restrained. The deeds must tell the tale, curses have no power here. I do not know how Ta Mok was made, but in a world of billions there must be hundreds such. Men mostly, with minds of malice and hate -- but for power they would be Ta Mok.

See also: Robespierre.