What ails NH? Live by the rules, then die.

In New Hampshire, state law mandates that water slides must be used sitting up.

Seriously.

In New Hampshire, many of the towns we visit have signs saying: "No dogs, no bicycles, no skates".

I have lots of family here, so I'll restrain myself a tad, but, really, this is ridiculous. Commie "nanny" states like Vermont don't have all these repressive rules, but a Libertarian-wannabe like NH does? Talk about falling short of aspirations.

Demographically, NH isn't too atypical. A bit short on children, but average for over 65. I can't blame it ALL on aging boomers. I'd love to hear some theories...

I've said in the past that as a quick gauge of how liveable a place is, one should look at how it treats dogs, bicyclists, and skaters. By that measure NH ranks pretty low, so it's a shame it's so beautiful.

The cursed gender

Pedophiles, like terrorists, convicts, journalists, politicians, and physicians use online resources to amplify their "intelligence" (emphasis mine):

On the Web, Pedophiles Extend Their Reach - New York Times:

... In April, with summer fast approaching, both groups of online friends chatted about jobs at children’s camps. Did anyone, one man asked, know of girls’ camps willing to hire adult males as counselors? Meanwhile, elsewhere in cyberspace, the second group celebrated the news that one of their own had been offered a job leading a boys’ cabin at a sleep-away camp...

...Today, pedophiles go online to seek tips for getting near children — at camps, through foster care, at community gatherings and at countless other events. They swap stories about day-to-day encounters with minors...

I think in most primates adult males are kept away from children. I believe in most human societies that has also been often true.

I bet we will increasingly move to keeping all adult males away from children, with possible exceptions for fathers (I have 3 young children).

It is hard to imagine a long future for my gender, at least not without some substantial genetic re-engineering.

Global Warming: We're scr***d.

The 9/06 Scientific American special issue was about global warming. I haven't finished it, but the take-away so far is that it's feasible to keep CO2 in the human-evolutionary-history range (less than 500 ppm).

I haven't finished it, but the take-away so far is that it's feasible to keep CO2 in the human-evolutionary-history range -- but with near-term technology it would require an unprecedented amount of international cooperation and human vision. It is most unfortunate that while we may be running out of oil, but we have a century of coal to burn.

Greg Mankiw tells us why that cooperation won't happen. The first 50 years or so simply are expected to be not so bad for China or the US -- though I suspect they don't know the moisture distribution effects. Certainly in the Twin Cities, where we're on the leading edge of mainland US climate transition, most people like the almost snowless winters. (I hate them of course, what do you do with the kids!? Besides, I like to ski and skate.)

We will need a blooming technological miracle. Even if the US doesn't do to badly for the first 25 years, I think things change above 500 ppm.

Maybe our quantum-computer heirs will find the planet tolerable ...

Update 9/7/06: Oh, wait, it's worse.

Dell's debacle gets interesting

Dell made its vast fortune by copying other companies, and was famously reluctant to employ R&D people. I think of that when I read about their battery charging design. If this is correct then Dell's problems are only beginning; their legal liability may dwarf the cost of the battery recall.

Good Morning Silicon Valley: Dell Built-To-Order now includes "fire blanket" option:

...Most Japanese makers don't allow high voltage to flow from their AC adapters to the computer battery, out of safety concerns.' Computer maker Lenovo had a similar message: 'Our management software makes sure no such overheating occurs, and we are confident that the computers are safe,' he said. Interesting, eh? Makes you wonder what's going on over in Dell's design department, doesn't it...

OTOH, "management software" is not something I'd trust for device safety ... I do wonder what Apple does ...

Sky bombers: think bench

The dolts and "thin bench" interpretation of the latest busted terrorist (al Qaeda?) plot look more likely (The Register).

The FBI's system malfunction: It's a dead canary

The WaPo has a longish article on the failure of the FBI's major IT product: The FBI's Upgrade That Wasn't. Oddly enough, I have an informed opinion for once -- I do this type of work.

It is not all that alarming that a new custom solution has hundreds of bug reports. I don't know what universe Mr. Azmi comes from, but it's not custom software development. I assure you that Microsoft Word has hundreds of significant bugs and some hideous design flaws -- but of course it's crap. Even Excel, however. has bugs - and it's been in production for about 15 years.

It is alarming that they intended to do a big-bang deployment of what was beta software. Big-bang deployment has advantages, but mostly with relatively proven solutions. (That said, some large health care systems are doing big-bang deployments of Epic's fairly new acute care software and I haven't heard of big flame-outs yet.)

I'm not as alarmed abut the idea to "write from scratch" rather than modify a commercial system. What would they modify? I presume they were using commercial database systems (Oracle probably) and middleware, etc. "Scratch" doesn't mean what it once meant. I fear they might have tried Java on the client -- but they weren't the only company to follow Sun's path to disaster. That flaw can be remedied.

The biggest problem seems to have been that the FBI is said to be a devastated agency, with most of their senior management gone and a very limited IT staff. It sounds, though the article is skimpy here, that the FBI didn't support the analysis process; didn't have the resources or the leadership needed, and the vendor didn't bail from the project. That would create an IT disaster.

So this story is interesting, but primarily as a "dead canary" warning of poisonous gases in the mine. The FBI is either in intensive care or it's now dead. That's a much bigger problem than a failed IT project ...

The end of the family motel - and the family road trip ...

We're on another road trip. This night we end up at the Battle Creek Best Western "executive" hotel.

No luggage carts. Whirlpool out of order. Old, frayed carpets. Prisonlike decor. Weeds in the back parking lot. It's not quite the Bates Motel, but it's heading that way. It's not alone. The night before was an ex-AmericInn where kids weren't allowed in the refrigerated pool before 8am. (Shades of the old south.)

It's been a trend the past few years. Each road trip it's harder to find kid-friendly motels. Reminds me of the disappearing pay phone, now so rare I plan to photograph the next one I see.

What happened? There are lots of kid friendly places -- in resorts, water parks, etc. So it's not a universal disinterest. we're just out of step with the temper of our time. Smaller families can travel by air reasonably cheaply, and few share our anachronistic appreciation of byways and forgotten places (Indiana Dunes: Highly recommended. Don't miss the drive along the Beverly Shores beach -- it's top secret.) There are fewer children anyway, and as our society comes apart there are fewer middle class families who'd choose a road trip over a seaside restort.

We are dinosaurs, Left Behind by the modern world. Soon our habitat will be gone ...

Why Flipper reminds you of Lassie

The Loom : The Origin of the Ridiculous

Whales are beautifully ridiculous...

...Fossil discoveries have documented how coyote-like mammals moved into the water about 45 million years ago and became more and more adapted to the marine life....

So Lassie and Flipper might have had a reasonably proximal common ancestor ...

Evolution is astonishing. I wonder how closely their genes resemble one another now ...

Update: My error, Zimmer goes on to say cows and hippos are the closest terrestrial relatives. Coyote like presumably meant by form and behavior, not genetics. On the other hand a dog by another gene ... (or something like that)..

HAR1: The Uplift gene?

David Brin wrote a series of science fiction novels about "uplift" -- genetic manipulation applied to create human-like cognition in nonhuman animas. Carl Zimmer, a man who defines the true power of the blog, gives us an excellent interview of a gene Brin can reference in his next book ...

The Loom : And the award for the fastest-evolving piece of human DNA goes to...

... The scientists found 49 candidate segments. These segments have evolved a lot in our lineage. The most drastically altered of all is a segment the scientists dubbed HAR1 (for human accelerated region). It is 118 base pairs long. Chimpanzees and chickens, separated by over 300 million years, carry versions of HAR1 that are identical except for two base pairs. In humans, on the other hand, 18 base pairs have changed since we split from chimps.

What's HAR1 for? This is the sort of question that seems like it should be easy to answer unless you're the scientist doing the answering. The scientists found that human cells make RNA molecules out of the HAR1 segment. Specifically, they found that brain cells do. Specifically, brain cells in the cortex, the hippocampus, and certain other regions. We do love our brains, and so it is reasonable to consider that HAR1 took on some new role in the brains of human ancestors. The sequence of HAR1 suggests that an RNA molecule produced from it would be stable enough to carry out some important job, such as regulating the activity of protein-coding genes. HAR1 probably plays several roles. It is not just active in the adult brain, but in development-guiding cells in the fetus.

In a commentary that also appears in Nature, two Oxford scientists point out that HAR1 is also active in the ovary and testis of adult humans. And it is true that genes associated with sex are fast-evolving. So they don't want to rule out the possibility that selection has acted on HAR1 in connection with reproduction, rather than with thought. It's a fair point, but I was struck by the fact that the expression of HAR1 is far smaller in the sex cells than in the brain.

Still, it's a strange point that may be worth raising at your next party: we have genes that are only active in our brains and sex cells.

Elsewhere I read this gene is most active in humans from 7-19 weeks of gestation. How long before we tweak it in chimps? Just a bit ...

It would be interesting to study the effect of ultrasound on the operation of RNA that doesn't code for proteins.

CastingWords: Distributed transcription using Amazon's Amazing Turk services

CastingWords Podcast Transcription Store FAQ markets itself as a podcast transcription service. It uses the human bot network assembled by Amazon -- the 'Amazing Turk' service.

Cost is per minute of transcription. Best suited to public material rather than, say, medical or legal transcription. Jon Udell describes his experience.

Why don't they appreciate all we've done for them?

I want a counter on my desktop that will tell me how long Bush has left to rule:

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Why Oh Why Are We Ruled by This Clown?

Joshua Marshall: ...president expressed frustration that Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the United States had made in Iraq, and was puzzled as to how a recent anti-American rally in support of Hezbollah in Baghdad could draw such a large crowd. "I do think he was frustrated about why 10,000 Shiites would go into the streets and demonstrate against the United States," said another person who attended...

Atheists, Jews, Professionals, Internationalists, Nihilists and Cosmopolitans: Michael Barone channels F. Chernov

Michael Barone writes for the WSJ editorial pages. Mao would understand Michael Barone. Here a brilliant blogger (billmon) provides a set of quotes contrasting the writings of Barone with those of another like-minded fellow …

Whiskey Bar: Rootless Cosmopolitans

... The Connecticut primary reveals that the center of gravity in the Democratic Party has moved . . . to the secular transnational professional class that was the dominant constituency in the 2004 presidential cycle.

Michael Barone
Wall Street Journal Op-Ed
August 10, 2006

Consisting in part of cringing before foreign things and servility before bourgeois culture, rootless cosmopolitanism produces special dangers, because cosmopolitanism is the ideological banner of militant international reaction, the ideal weapon in its hands for the struggle against socialism and democracy.

F. Chernov
Bolshevik Magazine Op-Ed
March 1949 …

It goes on. Brilliant, really. I’d worry they’re coming for me, but I’m working to be classified in the ‘harmless whacko’ group. They’ll do us last. Credit to TMW.

Google will date and file your images shortly ...

You have 5,000 prints you've just scanned in the Acme PrintScanner 2008. How do they get dated and named? What print has Aunt Madge in 1940 vs. Benjamin Francis in 2001? Google wants to help ...

Official Google Blog: A better way to organize photos?

Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects. This technology just may make it a lot easier for you to organize and find the photos you care about. We don't have any specific features to show off today, but we're looking forward to having more to share with you soon.

Upload all to Picasa. Provide the core data set: dated images of Madge and Benjamin at ages 1, 3, 5, 9, 11, 13, ... 25 ... 70 ... 90 etc. Let Picasa do the work, churning through thousands of images, attaching metadata to them ...

If your head isn't spinning, you're not paying attention ...

Don't let your children grow up to be atheletes

Schneier analyzes lessons from the Tour de France …

Crypto-Gram: August 15, 2006

... In the end, doping is all about economics. Athletes will continue to dope because the Prisoner's Dilemma forces them to do so. Sports authorities will either improve their detection capabilities or continue to pretend to do so -- depending on their fans and their revenues. And as technology continues to improve, professional athletes will become more like deliberately designed racing cars. ...

Don’t let your children grow up to be athletes. Just don’t.

Interesting observation on the effect of time-shifting — a test that’s negative with current technology will be positive in the future. The same thing applies to encryption. Interested persons are sure to collect all the strongly encrypted data they have, knowing that in 10 years they’ll be able to break the encryption …

Schneier speaks: The limited value of airplane security measures

Schneier is the wise man of security — both cyber and wetworld. In a few terse paragraphs he outlines the issues and dismisses much of the conventional reasoning about the liquid bomb attack. Emphases mine.

Crypto-Gram: August 15, 2006

... Last Week's Terrorism Arrests

Hours-long waits in the security line. Ridiculous prohibitions on what you can carry on board. Last week's foiling of a major terrorist plot and the subsequent airport security changes graphically illustrates the difference between effective security and security theater.

None of the airplane security measures implemented because of 9/11 -- no-fly lists, secondary screening, prohibitions against pocket knives and corkscrews -- had anything to do with last week's arrests. And they wouldn't have prevented the planned attacks, had the terrorists not been arrested. A national ID card wouldn't have made a difference, either.

Instead, the arrests are a victory for old-fashioned intelligence and investigation. Details are still secret, but police in at least two countries were watching the terrorists for a long time. They followed leads, figured out who was talking to whom, and slowly pieced together both the network and the plot.

The new airplane security measures focus on that plot, because authorities believe they have not captured everyone involved. It's reasonable to assume that a few lone plotters, knowing their compatriots are in jail and fearing their own arrest, would try to finish the job on their own. The authorities are not being public with the details -- much of the "explosive liquid" story doesn't hang together -- but the excessive security measures seem prudent.

But only temporarily. Banning box cutters since 9/11, or taking off our shoes since Richard Reid, has not made us any safer. And a long-term prohibition against liquid carry-on items won't make us safer, either. It's not just that there are ways around the rules, it's that focusing on tactics is a losing proposition.

It's easy to defend against what terrorists planned last time, but it's shortsighted. If we spend billions fielding liquid-analysis machines in airports and the terrorists use solid explosives, we've wasted our money. If they target shopping malls, we've wasted our money. Focusing on tactics simply forces the terrorists to make a minor modification in their plans. There are too many targets -- stadiums, schools, theaters, churches, the long line of densely packed people in front of airport security -- and too many ways to kill people.

Security measures that attempt to guess correctly don't work, because invariably we will guess wrong. It's not security, it's security theater: measures designed to make us feel safer but not actually safer.

Airport security is the last line of defense, and not a very good one at that. Sure, it'll catch the sloppy and the stupid -- and that's a good enough reason not to do away with it entirely -- but it won't catch a well-planned plot. We can't keep weapons out of prisons; we can't possibly keep them off airplanes ...

As you can guess by the excessive bolding, I am under Schneier’s sway. I particularly liked the comment about “we can’t keep weapons out of prisons”. Individual prisoners may not be terribly creative, but they share the human power of the evolving gestalt.

Schneier makes a point here that I think is new for him. He mentions “the sloppy and the stupid”. I think most of us have worried about the threat from smart terrorists (that’s a human flaw — we imagine everyone is like us …). I think what we missed is that, until now, the talent pool of al Qaeda has been shallow. A passion for the Dark Ages, an inclination to suicide, and the emnity of a lot of wealthy nations has probably discouraged smarter killers. We do need to maintain a core set of “security theater” for the sloppy and the stupid — of which there are many.

I fear that Bush’s incompetence is recruiting a smarter set of terrorists — at least Hezbollah class. My 9/01 scenarios were really wrong, so chances are I’m still wrong …