Videochat family reunions: Cringely on Apple's strategy

Cringely is no Jobs-sycophant, but he can't help wetting himself over what he thinks Apple's going to do next. (I say that fondly because I love Cringely's column.)

Sometimes he's way over the top (retinal laser headmounted displays), sometimes he's spot on. He's always interesting. Today he's skirting the edge of plausibility with a column on Apple's possible media, VOIP, iChat, video-conferencing, HDTV play. Whoa. Makes me want to wait on Mum's Mac Mini purchase until after the January iTV announcement -- just in case.

If Apple could really do this they'd sell of a lot of HDTV units for someone. I fear, however, that the bandwidth requirements would kill most home WAN connections. of course Cringely had another column recently on why homeowners should pay for fiber to the home ...

Immigration and African American incarceration

Mankiw, a libertarian economist intellectual who once worked for George (torture) Bush, points with interest to an article alleging a strong and possibly causal correlation beween "immigration, black wages, black employment rates and black incarcerations". This is something many have suspected, but evidence is hard to come by. The same, I believe, will be found to be true for other groups including white collar workers (maybe without the inarceration effect, they have more room to fall).

Mankiw is right that this will likely have a big influence on the immigration debate. It's not proof, but that's hard to come by in economics.

Sleep and brain development - in flies

Fruit Fly sleep is proportional to neuronal development. Dull flies sleep less, smart flies more. It's especially important that young flies get social stimulation -- and sleep.

I wonder what this says about homework in young children, or sleep deprivation in middle-aged parents?

Stop reading this blog and go to sleep.

DeLong explains why China is paying for our toys and homes

Why does China keep sending us spending money? What's in it for them. DeLong tries to explain it ...

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Brad Setser on Similarities Between Amaranth and the People's Bank of China...:

... The Politburo and State Council may understand it. They may be thinking as follows: 'We grow at 8% per year as long as we can keep export-led industriallization going. When export-led industrialization stops and we have to substitute domestic-demand-led industrialization, our growth rate is likely to fall to 5%. Thus each year we keep this juggling act going raises China's GDP--permanently--by about RMB 500 billion a year, an increment to the present value of China's total national wealth of RMB 10 trillion. To keep the juggling act going requires that we spend RMB 3 trillion a year buying dollar-denominated securities that will be worth only RMB 2 trillion when we sell them. That looks like a benefit-cost ratio of 10:1. So let's keep juggling as long as we can.

That maybe what they are thinking in the Politburo and the State Council.

I think this falls into the category of "bizarre ways market systems route around structural anomalies". If we think of the market as a massive optimization algorithm, and we think of structural anomalies in infrastructure, law, resource allocation, etc as obstacles, then we can imagine China's subsidy of US consumption as the result of solving an allocation problem despite structural anomalies.

Deviant, but gets the job done.

The Economist did a recent review of the rise of the 'developing world' (now greater than 50% of world output); I've not finished the series but it will be interesting to see how it intersects. The part I've read predicts greater upheavals than the 1st industrial revolution. This fits.

Ray Charles: It was a good ... What the?!

I'm listening to Ray Charles and Willie Nelson singing "It Was A Good Year" when I realize the last "good year" is 35. Next is the "dregs of my life". Wow. That's really harsh.

Special Harvard admissions for the wealthy: why I approve

One would think a commie like me would disapprove of the practice of special Harvard admission for the wealthy and privileged. Not so. Like the non-legacy admit Mankiw quotes I consider this a reasonable form of corruption, one with benefits for non-legacy funding. (I attended Williams College for "free", doubtless due to a similar sort of corruption.)

How can a socialist-commie-traitor approve of class-based privilege? It's the flip side of my dislike of the enthusiasm for 'merit based' rewards, and is really a sign of my twisted nature. After all, what is "merit" but the results of a genetic and social lottery? Get good genes, have the fortune of a supportive family (or not, in Newton's case), a few good teachers, and you have merit. The converse -- non-merit. To be born/adopted to wealth and privilege is a great gift, probably greater than winning the genetic lottery, but it's not substantively different.

So, all praise to those who enter Harvard by chance-given talent, but also to those who enter on the promise of their parent's future donations, and those who enter by compensation of their economic misfortune. It is all of the same.

BTW, a similar reasoning applies to reforming political corruption. The wealthy would never really accept having the same influence as a common voter; political corruption is the means by which the powerful get just enough extra influence so that they tolerate democracy. The problem we have now is that the "powerful" are being over-compensated with influence, for much the same reason that CEO's are over-compensated for their "leadership". We don't want to eliminate corruption in politics, we merely want to stop over-compensating the wealthy. They'd tolerate a democracy with less corruption that what we now live with.

Spam: blacklists are back, and the war may be turning

I didn't expect to have anything good to say about the spam wars after my recent Gmail meltdown. Surprise.

It began when I finally accepted that Google is a set of adaptive algorithms rather than a traditional corporation. That meant I could sit back and rethink things. Google was malfunctioning because I had redirected an unfiltered mailstream at Gmail, and Google seems to be effectively doing something I'd asked for years ago: selective filtering based on the managed reputation of an authenticated sending service. In this case Google was treating the 'sending service' as my redirector (which I don't think authenticates), rather than the distal source of the email. That meant faughnan.com acquired a reputation, from Google's perspective, as a really bad place.

Well, I can't be too mad if they're doing what I'd long urged everyone to do. It would have been nice if I'd known about it earlier, but them's the breaks. Don't do redirection to Gmail and expect it to like you for long.

So I turned off all the redirects, forwarded from Gmail to my ISP (VISI), flowed faughnan.com and spamcop.net to VISI's Postini service, and finally dropped all my email lists. Lists are very 20th century, this is the age of subscription/notification (Atom/RSS). Good-bye lists. The world calmed down.

With all the lists gone, and postini churning away, it was interesting to see what spam got through. Lots of political solicitations (Note to dems: you can get my money again when you stop spamming me) and various incredibly annoying newsletters. What they all had in common were that the domains were real. Yes, spam with persistent, verifiable, domains.

Some had unsubscribe links and some of those even worked -- though my experience with the political spam is that one's email gets back on their lists shortly after it's removed (recycled by the trading of addresses), just as in the world of physical junk mail. No matter, because with persistent and verifiable domains, personal blacklists work.

I've blacklisted 9 domains, all of whom have failed multiple unsubscribe attempts, and with postini and these few filters, my spam is gone. (Note Gmail filters will do this easily too).

1. mail.united.com
2. itw.itworld.com
3. theclubbingforum.net
4. travelmole.net
5. trustmakers.com
6. emaillabs.com
7. peakperformancellc.com

I have less spam in my inbox than I've had for five years. Wow. Sure my postini spambox has hundreds of entries, but I've reviewed them -- all spam, no false positives.

The war, dare I say, is turning. Next step, once I've verified with spamcop, is going to be to redirect my mailstream through spamcop and back into Gmail, which will then be receiving a "purified" stream. I'm hoping Gmail will "learn" that the domain has been "rehabilitiated". Gmail can forward copies to my VISI account, so I'll be back to having a local store of my email as well. Updates to follow.

Update 9/22/06: Spamcop approved my plans and Gmail is back in the loop. This is the current setup:

• several less used email accounts, including an ancient mindspring account, all forward to faughnan.com
• my faughnan.com email forwards to my spamcop.net address where the heavy filtering occurs. I
  
• my spamcop address forwards to my gmail address, that's where I keep a set of blacklist filters as above
  
• my gmail account keeps a copy and forwards to my visi.com address
• I use POP and IMAP on various machines to view and collect email from visi.com

So the mail I'm forwarding to Gmail is now cleansed by spamcop, which does a pretty darned good decent job. This also means that faughnan.com is no longer the proximal forwarding account, so what spam there is should count against it. BTW, a good tip for creating a "secret" mailbox like the visi account I use for POP services -- use GRC Passwords to create the username, something like "1E22F67AFD3116925A". That prevents spammers "guessing" the username and putting spam through.

Update 10/4/06: Since my original post, a few updates:

• spamcop does a decent job, but not quite as good as VISI's postini. I may try moving their spamassassin settings up a notch (default is minimal, spamcop is very domain focused)
• I added a Gmail filter so that email sent directly to my Gmail address gets a unique tag. Since only spammers and Gmail use that address it helps me quickly identify spam. More importantly, it's safe to mark email sent directly to my Gmail account as spam. If spam gets redirected to my Gmail account I delete it, I don't mark it "as spam". I think if I mark redirected email as spam Gmail assigns a poor reputation to the redirector, which I don't want.
• I'm now getting about 3-4 spams in my Gmail inbox daily, of which 75% is spam that passed through the spamcop filters. I'll see if I can improve that a bit but it's tolerable.

Update 9/6/09: An updated version of the problem. In the years since I wrote this I've taken Spamcop out of the picture, but a new quirk may have arisen.

Memo: no more phones for Joel

Sprint sent Joel Spolsky, entrepreneur, CEO, blogger, writer, uber-greek and smart person a phone to review. That was a mistake ...

Joel on Software

... The phone they sent me, an LG Fusic, is really quite awful, and the service, Power Vision, is tremendously misconceived and full of dumb features that don’t work right and cost way too much...

Joel is a good writer and he clearly loves his topic -- he rips Sprint and LG along several new dimensional planes. It's funny, but mixed in the swordplay is a serious point. Sprint is a complete mess. You don't screw up this badly without having a very dysfunctional organization. If I were on Sprint's board, I'd take this essay as justification to fire the CEO and bring in someone who can clean house.

Which brings me the second coming of the geeks, aka Apple's iPhone. Regular folks like the RAZR, but it doesn't move the geeks. Nothing does. All the phones are lousy. The network owners, like Sprint, are idiots. The iPhone shines like a beacon of hope, presumably carried on Apple's network (leased capacity). I'm sure it will be perfect... *

* Note to early adopters. Go ahead. Don't be worried about Apple's history of doing hardware alpha testing on their first set of customers ...

(Hat tip: Jim L)

One Republican in ten accepts evolution

Scientic American's Skeptic, Michael Shermer, tries to sell Evolution as good theology. It's a bit of a pointless exercise, and a feeble one at that, but the introduction included some remarkable numbers:

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Darwin on the Right -- Why Christians and conservatives should accept evolution

According to a 2005 Pew Research Center poll ... 60 percent of Republicans are creationists, whereas only 11 percent accept evolution, compared with 29 percent of Democrats who are creationists and 44 percent who accept evolution. A 2005 Harris Poll found that 63 percent of liberals but only 37 percent of conservatives believe that humans and apes have a common ancestry.

Wow. One in ten Republicans lives in the world of the rational. Democrats are four times as likely to be a part of the world of logic, reason, and evidence. You can make a very good guess about someone's political party if you ask them about Darwin.

I think this helps explain why so many GOP voters think Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. They live in a world well removed from mere evidence.

Update 9/21/06: The Royal Society takes on Exxon. Commetn: the GOP war on science is fueled by the GOP voter's antipathy to science.

Howel-Evans syndrome on Wikipedia

Nobody but a researcher, geneticist, or the few physicians who treat an afflicted patient, needs to know anything about this Howel-Evans disorder. I came across it because my real-world work involves medical ontology/knowledgebase maintenance, and I needed to know what this thing was.

So my eyes bugged out when the first hit I got was on Wikipedia, and it was an excellent description, probably written by a bored dermatologist (though I must admit that dermatology is more lively than industrial ontology):

Howel-Evans syndrome - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Howel-Evans syndrome is an extremely rare condition in which the skin of the palms of the hands, and soles of the feet, are affected (hyperkeratosis). The effects on the palms and soles is called tylosis, and in Howel-Evans syndrome, there is a predisposition to oesophageal cancer, particularly squamous cell carcinoma.

Howel-Evans syndrome was described in 1996 as being identical with palmoplantar ectodermal dysplasia type III...

Wikipedia is an honest-to-goodness 21st century wonder.

Your universe on drugs

The New York Times > Science > Image > Graphic: Separated at Birth lies two images side by side, one rather small, one a bit big.

To understand the title of this post, by the way, you had have beeen a young person in 1978 or thereabouts.

[pointer: Brin]

Gordon's Notes: a graph

The HTML DOM Visualizer Applet will render websites as a graph. Careful - it sucks cycles. My G5 iMac went into windtunnel mode as long as the page was up.

Here's a graph of Gordon's Notes. I don't know how to interpret it, but I do wonder about that tight dnese cluster in the top left.


By comparison, here's Gordon's Tech. Very similar though rotated. I did it twice to see if I'd missed something. I'd guess the big cluster is OS X related ...



By comparison, my old web site has very few pages (though they're much longer than blog postings):



Ok, so that wasn't all that useful ...

Generals won't join Rumsfeld's staff?

Amid the all-too-plausible fears that the GOP is going to invade Iran, comes something that surprised me:

INTEL DUMP - National Insecurity?

...However, his appointed successor REFUSED To accept the Army's highest position, preferring to retire rather than work with Rumsfeld and the Bush administration. Many other generals also refused the Army's highest position, and for the first time in US history an already-retired general had to be recalled to active duty to become chief of staff, an unprecedented show of no confidence in Rumsfeld and the administration by the officer corps of the US Army...

If this is true, it's been kept pretty quiet. If the US Army leadership fears and despises the Secretary of Defense, isn't that news?

Philip Morris, Exxon and the Climate Change Deniers

George Monbiot, a journalist for The Guardian, has written a book about junk science and the global climate change "deniers" (by which he means skeptics who deny reason). He's excerpting the book on his blog.

The story is appalling of course, but it's also darkly hilarious. Even I, with my twisted admiration for the sheer unrelenting evil of the tobacco lobby, didn't expect this one. I really did laugh.

Sure Exxon and Cheney and Bush and all the usual evil, corrupt and stupid men and women have been promulgating junk science (it became junk science when all of the rationalist skeptics decided the case was made). Sure a surprising number of British journalists are even dumber than David Brooks (hard to imagine). But Philip Morris funding climate change deniers?!? That's hilarious.

Why? Monbiot claims it was somehow related to Philip Morris' attack on science, in alliance with the GOP of course. Science can be so inconvenient. Personally, I think it's just sheer evilness. The executives of Philip Morris are so steeped in evil they just can't help themselves any longer. They are compelled to be bad.

Guilty of dishonor of the first degree: America

I wrote of the Aher case in Jan 2004 and again in Feb 2005. The Canadian investigation confirms that Mr. Aher was falsely accused of terrorism by Canadian officials, and that the RCMP may have tried to cover up their error. The judge could not rule directly on the legality or morality of the American action, but the very end of a NYT article summarizes things fairly well:

Canadians Fault U.S. for Its Role in Torture Case - New York Times:

... On Sept. 26, 2002, the F.B.I. called Project A-O and told the Canadian police that Mr. Arar was scheduled to arrive in about one hour from Zurich. The F.B.I. also said it planned to question Mr. Arar and then send him back to Switzerland. Responding to a fax from the F.B.I., the Mounted Police provided the American investigators with a list of questions for Mr. Arar. Like the other information, it included many false claims about Mr. Arar, the commission found.

The Canadian police “had no idea of what would eventually transpire,’’ the commission said. “It did not occur to them that the American authorities were contemplating sending Mr. Arar to Syria.”

While the F.B.I. and the Mounted Police kept up their communications about Mr. Arar, Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs was not told about his detention for almost three days. Its officials, acting on calls from worried relatives, had been trying to find him. Similarly, American officials denied Mr. Arar’s requests to speak with the Canadian Consulate in New York, a violation of international agreements.

Evidence presented to the commission, said Paul J. J. Cavalluzzo, its lead counsel, showed that the F.B.I. continued to keep its Canadian counterparts in the dark even while an American jet was carrying Mr. Arar to Jordan. The panel found that American officials “believed — quite correctly — that, if informed, the Canadians would have serious concerns about the plan to remove Mr. Arar to Syria.”

Mr. Arar arrived in Syria on Oct. 9, 2002, and was imprisoned there until Oct. 5, 2003. It took Canadian officials, however, until Oct. 21 to locate him in Syria. The commission concludes that Syrian officials at first denied knowing Mr. Arar’s whereabouts to hide the fact that he was being tortured. It says that, among other things, he was beaten with a shredded electrical cable until he was disoriented.

American officials have not discussed the case publicly. But in an interview last year, a former official said on condition of anonymity that the decision to send Mr. Arar to Syria had been based chiefly on the desire to get more information about him and the threat he might pose. The official said Canada did not intend to hold him if he returned home.

Mr. Arar said he appealed a recent decision by a federal judge in New York dismissing the suit he brought against the United States. The report recommends that the Canadian government, which is also being sued by Mr. Arar, offer him compensation and possibly a job.

Mr. Arar recently moved to Kamloops, British Columbia, where his wife found a teaching position.

The FBI lied to the RCMP, then abducted Mr. Aher and sent him to be tortured. There has been no statement, no apology, no offer of compensation from the Bush administration.

Insofar as we are all American citizens, even those of us who've jeered, heckled, berated and campaigned against the neo-GOP and the Bush administration, we share in the responsibility for the kidnapping, torture of this man. In a way, the failure to apologize is almost as loathsome as the policies that led to the crime.

We are guilty of dishonor in the first degree, and we should be pilloried in the stocks.

Update 9/21/06: Hilzoy is very familiar with this case. He brings in some more details on the role torture played in producing the false claims against Mr. Aher. It's easy to understand why Venezualan crackpots win applause every time they mock Bush.