Bombing to the stone age - why now?

Google news is picking up a lot of stories about the alleged US threat to bomb Pakistan "back to the stone age"...

KRT Wire | 09/22/2006 | White House denies threat to bomb Pakistan `back to the Stone Age'

With the United States and Pakistan united in a war against terrorism, the suggestion Friday that the United States once threatened to bomb the Pakistanis 'back to the Stone Age' landed like a diplomatic bombshell...

Hmm. Puzzling. I thought everyone assumed Pakistan signed up with the US because of do-or-die ultimatum -- they sure didn't do it for love. Musharaf's version seems a bit direct, but maybe Armitage is like that.

So no surprise there. The surprising part is Musharraf is talking about it now, and that the topic is getting so many Google hits. I wish someone who knows Pakistan would explain why now, and what Musharraf might be up to ...

Brad DeLong read my blog!

Wow.

My wife will be very impressed. Seriously, she's a big DeLong fan too. We're just two geeks in a pod.

She'll be back from her urgent care shift soon. I have to figure out how best to spring this on her. Maybe I'll casually leave the laptop open to DeLong's page so she scans it while winding down ...

In my previous universe, Bush/Rove used more than nukes to sell their invasion

Salon has a laudatory review of a book by the inestimable Frank Rich on the tragic history of the Bush II (aka Vlad) regime. This sort of book is presumably written for future history students writing essays on the Fall of America, it’s unlikely to have much impact on anyone living now. The picture is indeed dire, with the usual mention of how imminent nuclear attack was used to build support for the way and Bush’s reelection:

Why we are really in Iraq | Salon Books

…What reason could team Bush come up with for attacking Iraq? 'Abstract and highly debatable theories on how to assert superpower machismo and alter the political balance in the Middle East would never fly with American voters as a trigger for war or convince them that such a war was relevant to the fight against the enemy of 9/11 ... For Rove and Bush to get what they wanted most, slam-dunk midterm election victories, and for Libby and Cheney to get what they wanted most, a war in Iraq for ideological reasons predating 9/11, their real whys for going to war had to be replaced by more saleable fictional ones. We'd go to war instead because there was a direct connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda and because Saddam was on the verge of attacking America with nuclear weapons…

Dire as this story is, things were worse in my old universe. In my universe smallpox and biowarfare threats were used as well, and they were even more persuasive than the fear of nuclear weapons. Much was made of mobile labs that turned out to be nothing much at all. In that alternate timeline this led to a massive smallpox immunization program that was widely debated and partly implemented. In that reality some of the vaccination volunteers were seriously harmed by side-effects.

In this universe, however, that clearly never happened — or someone besides my wife and I would remember it. Bad as things are here, in the reality I used to inhabit they were actually worse …

Google Spreadsheets: the next Gmail?

Google hit a home run with Gmail, despite my personal problems with its spam management.

Looks like they may be equally serious about Google Spreadsheets, judging by what they're adding. For many home users this is plenty of functionality, this will probably be my wife's spreadsheet and a shared workspace for quite a few things we do (lists, schedules, etc).

It's time for me to create an internal family page with links to key web apps and services that we'll use on our home network and remotely -- a kind of shared application space.

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]