Salmonella poisoned snacks. China. Of course.

We've been playing it a bit safer with food. You know, Melamine. There was something else, but really, it's too much to keep track of. Oh, yes, defective tires. Maybe defective brakes. Definitely lead in toy point and christmas light wiring. Umm ... fraudulent medications. Fake hernia repair materials.

Let's see, what do they all have in common?

Right.

So we've been shopping at "organic" places, like our local "Mississippi market". You can't get any granolier in Berkeley. Really, I feel like an alien when I shop there. That's where my wife bought some "veggie snack" thingies that are supposed to fool the kids into eating something that's not a cookie. Snack thingies from one of those friendly "organic" companies -- Robert's American Gourmet Inc.

Snackes that were just recalled. My wife had to phone the kid's day camp to get the snacks pulled from the kid's lunches. Our local paper has a wee little blurb. Emphases mine.

Salmonella found in seasoning made with Chinese ingredients used on recalled snack foods:

...A seasoning made with imported Chinese ingredients used on recalled snack foods was contaminated with salmonella, a company official said Tuesday. The snack foods sickened dozens of people.

The seasoning, used on both Super Veggie Tings Crunchy Corn Sticks and Veggie Booty snack foods, tested positive for the bacteria, said Robert Ehrlich, president and chief executive of Robert's American Gourmet Inc. The 'veggie' seasoning's ingredients came primarily from China, the company said."...

...Ehrlich said he had been unaware of where the ingredients used in the seasoning originated. The products are made under contract; Ehrlich would not identify the manufacturer.

I love the last bit. It's so sweet. The "products are made under contract". "Roberts American Gourmet" doesn't know where they come from. Sounds a bit like Thomas the Tank Engine.

At least food is somewhat, intermittently, labeled. We don't buy any food now that has "China" on the label, but we know we can't dodge this completely.

You might consider writing your representative, thought it's been over two weeks and Betty McCollum's office has been suspiciously non-responsive (see update). Something for me to remember when the next primary comes by [1]. Or you might decide to grow your own food, but you'll have to synthesize your own fertilizer too ...

[1] In our district only the primary matters.

The only good thing is that we have a president we can rely on ...

Update 9/22/07: It took a while, but McCollum wrote me a pretty good form letter, turns out she's on the Agriculture appropriations committee. As usual, Bush is the villain here. Some excerpts:

• 2002: Farm Bill had Country-of-Origin labeling (COOL)
• 2004: Bush delayed implementation until 9/06
• 2005: Bush delayed implementation until 9/08
• 2007: Farm Bill requires COOL by 9/08 for all meat
  

McCollum has been a strong supporter of mandatory labeling, probably because it ought to boost Minnesota based agribusiness. It only applies to meat though, we need it for all food.

Liar scoots: a physics blog's commentary on Bush

CV, a physics blog, has one of the better commentaries on the Libby's get-out-of-jail pass. Perhaps the most disgusting bit of Bush's latest pile is GWB's record:

.... George W. Bush hates to pardon people or commute their sentences. Not his job to overrule a jury, he proudly proclaims. Even if we’re talking about a mentally retarded inmate sentenced to death by a jury that never had a chance to hear mitigating evidence. Those inmates could count themselves lucky if W didn’t openly mock them...

Bush is an awful human being.

Joel Spolsky starts a Wiki on the business of software

Spolsky, best known as "Joel on Software" is a hyper-productive scatter brained genius workaholic CEO. Or so I imagine. I've never met the man. I imagine he's very intimidating, but, who knows. Maybe he's actually a nice person too.

In addition to running a startup company, teaching us all on his blog, and writing several books, he has now launched a Wiki: The Business of Software Wiki.

Based on my longtime reading of Joel's blog, and the books of his I have, I assume he, and the contributors he will recruit, will create a template which anyone who wishes to launch a startup software business can try to apply. A franchise model, without the franchise fees. (Yes, someone might turn the template into a franchise model, or even create an outsourcing suite based on the template.)

Go Joel.

Ensembl Genome Browser: Take a walk on the wild side

Feeling adventurous? Visit the ensemble genome browser. Really, it's safe for work. All you have to do is click the link.

If you dare.

Come on, you know you want to. Browse a bit ...

There. That wasn't so bad, was it?

One link away.

Now, if you're old enough, remember the world of 10 years ago. I know it's hard, but try.

Things have changed more than we know.

Smarter terrorists: this seems ominous

Anyone who thinks physicians are particularly immune to evil needs a quick history lesson. Or maybe they just need to be reminded that Al Qaeda's true leader, Zawahiri, is a surgeon. Or that Serbia's genocidal murderer, still at large, was a psychiatrist. And, of course, there's dear old Mengele.

So it would not be surprising if the principals in a recent set of terrorist attacks were physicians. Not surprising, but ominous.

The last few years the terrorist attacks and plots in the UK and US have, as nearly as I can tell (I try to track this) involved pretty incompetent people. No geeks. Nobody clever. Many persons with obvious psychiatric ailments or cognitive disorders.

This group is not like this. Maybe they were incompetent, or maybe we were just very lucky, but they're not naive or disabled. They more resemble the terrorists of Hamas than of the past few years of al Qaeda.

I'd very much like to know why they're getting smarter.

Future expected, future forgotten: ubiquitous robotics

I was chatting with a colleague recently about the impact of robotics on infrastructure repair costs. Many older cities, most catastrophically New Orleans, have deferred infrastructure maintenance. In most cases this doesn't result in the annihilation of the city, but it does produce collapsing roadways in Montreal.

There's an upside to deferring infrastructure maintenance, assuming one is willing to risk a few motorists or, in the case of New Orleans, much of the city. The cost may shrink. Modern robotics is making a lot of everyday tasks, such as replacing gas mains, far cheaper. Roads are no longer torn up, instead robotic tunnelers wend their way beneath the asphalt.

Which makes me think about how the future arrives. Sometimes it arrives with great fanfare and long anticipation. Other times, though, it builds off to the side, sleepily and beneath our attention, and merges to take us unawares. I think robotics may be like that. They've been getting smarter and better in the deep ocean, on the battlefield, flying simulators with organic components, vacuuming, mowing ... Incrementally improving.

Japan is highly incented to lead in robotics. Korea is likely to take the same track. It seems inevitable that within 10-20 years most of us will own, and become dependent upon, many increasingly sophisticated robots. A future so long predicted that we've almost forgotten about it, will abruptly be upon us.

The implications for immigration, and for much of the work done by non-knowledge workers, will be substantial. (American knowledge workers, of course, are already doomed by globalization.)

Silencing Libby - Bush acts

Bush has acted as expected. It would be interesting to know what deals were made, what role Cheney played, and what Libby threatened to reveal.

Gordon's Tech is not gone -- but feeds may require a manual update

The short version: I moved Gordon's Tech to a new address: tech.kateva.org. Subscriptions (like bloglines, google reader) were supposed to auto-update, but it's not working. If you read that blog, you'll need to update your feed. Sorry!

The longer version: Gordon's Tech is one of my 3 public blogs (Gordon's Notes is this one, Be the Best You Can Be focuses on cognitive disorders). GT consists almost entirely of technical notes and discoveries I'm interested in; instead of storing them in a desktop file I put 'em into a blog. Works for me, and the results are available for search. Most readers find those posts when solving a tech problem with Google. A small number of readers subscribe to the feed, though the blog doesn't make many concessions to a subscriber audience.

Yesterday I moved Gordon's Tech from a blogspot domain to a Google custom domain. In theory Google's Blogger uses a "301 redirect" to tell feed readers to update their feeds. In practice, that's not working. So subscribers need to update manually. The new URL is tech.kateva.org.

We now return you to your regular programming ...

The joy of parasitism and the strategic wisdom of the cat

I'm a dog person, but I'm kindly inclined to the Dog's historic rival in exploiting the human host. Not that Dogs and Cats are pure parasites, though the cat's role as a toxoplamsa vector arguably moves them closer to the dark side. Dogs do eat garbage and thus reduce disease (like toxoplasma, which can't live in dogs), cat's do kill pests, which reduces disease (do cats get plague?) and food loss.

Quibbles aside, as a happy host to my current canine parasite, I'll raise a toast to the strategic brilliance of the cat, an animal that went from chewing on primates to switching sides when the time was right ... (emphases mine)

The Near Eastern Origin of Cat Domestication (Science)

... Some 10,000 years ago, somewhere in the Near East, an audacious wildcat crept into one of the crude villages of early human settlers, the first to domesticate wheat and barley. There she felt safe from her many predators in the region, such as hyenas and larger cats.

The rodents that infested the settlers’ homes and granaries were sufficient prey. Seeing that she was earning her keep, the settlers tolerated her, and their children greeted her kittens with delight.

At least five females of the wildcat subspecies known as Felis silvestris lybica accomplished this delicate transition from forest to village. And from these five matriarchs all the world’s 600 million house cats are descended....

a subsequent NYT editorial comments:

Cats Among Us - New York Times

... This new genetic evidence resolves the puzzle of cat remains turning up in Cyprus before the rise of the Egyptian civilizations that were supposed to have domesticated the cat.

The wild subspecies that gave up their DNA for these tests still exist, though barely. That is one of the painful ironies of domestication. Creatures who come in from the wild eventually prosper — domestic cats number, after all, in the hundreds of millions — while those who don’t almost inevitably fall upon hard times...

Humans are the ultimate predator, compared to which the old saber tooths were ... pussy cats. We may not last long, but in the meantime we are pretty sure to wipe out every large animal that doesn't find a way to serve us. The cat made a good strategic move. With luck they might outlast us, and return to having primates for lunch long after we're gone ...

Flash and Silverlight in the iPhone's crosshairs

There are two complementary articles out discussing the big time battle for control of the web's presentation layer. I wrote about this in my tech blog a week or two ago, but it's really more a technological and marketing battle than a "how to" issue -- hence the crossover to this one.

The first article is by Cringely. An AIR of Invisbility is about Abobe's flash descendant, once Apollo and now AIR. It's compact, responsive, and Cringely thinks it will beat Microsoft's Silverfish ... err ... Silverlight on the web and as the presentation layer for the post-PC era.

The second is by a Mac geek site, Roughly Drafted. RD thinks the iPhone's exclusion of Flash is the declaration of a war that Apple will win. It's a nice bit of work, I learned a few things about Flash and the Flash video codec.

My experiences with Adobe's products doesn't make me happy about them winning this battle. I might even prefer Silverlight, except that would be the death of the non-Microsoft web. Since Apple is pushing a suite of non-Apple standards that Google and Mozilla also favor, I hope they win, but I don't expect a knockout victory.

I don't think Silverlight will win -- with enemies like Google, Adobe, Apple and everyone else that's too much even for Microsoft. I hope.

I don't think Flash will die, I think Google will want to keep it around to fight Silverlight, but I could see it's advance slowing.

So I'm cautiously optimistic.

Justice takes a surprise turn - the man that got away goes to prison

What?! This inverts my entire sense of how the world works. Can I rely on nothing?!

Two years ago Richard Scrushy escaped what seemed to be a slam dunk conviction. The outsider consensus at the time was that the charismatic Mr. Scrush used his nefarious talents, and the language of the southern baptist, to persuade a religiously inclined jury to disregard the evidence. Certainly the people I personally know who knew him well felt that way.

Today, accidentally, I read that he's gone to jail. Here's what happened, emphases mine:

TheStar.com - Business - Richard Scrushy's road to prison

Richard Scrushy, the rehabilitation king turned TV preacher, is trading his 92-foot yacht for a jailhouse bunk.

The former HealthSouth Corp. chief executive – cleared in a landmark corporate fraud trial in Birmingham but convicted on unrelated bribery charges in Montgomery – was sentenced late Thursday to nearly seven years in prison.

Scrushy's third wife, Leslie, a former HealthSouth secretary, cried as marshals took the millionaire with nine children into custody.

The term was imposed two years after Scrushy beat charges in Birmingham that he presided over a $2.6 billion (U.S.) accounting fraud at HealthSouth, a sweeping acquittal in sharp contrast to high-profile corporate convictions won against Enron Corp., WorldCom Inc. and Tyco International Ltd. executives.

After losing the case involving false earnings reports at the rehabilitation company Scrushy founded, federal prosecutors targeted his dealings in 1999 with then-Gov. Don Siegelman, who was also convicted and sentenced to seven years and four months in prison.

So Scrushy – the brash guy from small-town Alabama who mostly recently cast himself as a minister trying to save lost souls – is being sent far from his big boat, the Chez Soiree, and his estate in Birmingham, where HealthSouth is based.

A judge ordered him to serve six years and 10 months in federal prison, where there's no chance of parole. He must pay $417,000 in fines and restitution, serve three years on probation, and perform 500 hours of service work once freed.

It's a long fall for a man who once hobnobbed with celebrities and politicians. Asking the judge to spare him from prison, Scrushy, 54, portrayed himself as a humble man of God who did nothing wrong. "I'm just a pastor," he said.

Scrushy studied respiratory therapy before coming up with the idea in the early 1980s for a company focused on rehabilitation in outpatient clinics rather than hospitals.

Pooling money from investors, Scrushy launched what became HealthSouth, which billed itself as the nation's largest rehabilitation company with some 2,000 locations worldwide. Reported revenues exceeded $3.5 billion.

But something sinister was going on. Evidence at Scrushy's first trial showed a group of executives who called themselves "the family" began fudging earnings in a bid to bolster sagging stock prices. The company overstated earnings by $2.6 billion from 1996 through 2002.

Fifteen former executives pleaded guilty, and some said Scrushy directed the scam. But in a stunning defeat for the government, Scrushy was acquitted on 36 counts of fraud, false corporate reporting and making false statements to regulators.

Then came the bribery charges. Scrushy was accused of arranging $500,000 in payments for a seat on a board that regulates Alabama hospitals. He was convicted.

I'm sure there will be an appeal, but even so! The south is not what it was. An ex-governor and a wealthy evangelical con man both sent to prison for 7 years - without parole? What planet am I living on again?

The only thing that seems believable about this is how quietly the media has treated the story.

Did leaking gas intoxicate the london bombers?

The bright side, so far, of several failed attacks in London, is that the attackers seem incompetent and undersupplied. I wonder, reading this description, if the primary bomber failed because s/he was intoxicated by leaking petroleum fumes:

Scotsman.com News - UK - Second car bomb 'aimed at rescuers':

THE terrorists who attempted to bomb central London last week deliberately placed the second vehicle to catch rescuers attending the injured from the first explosion, Scotland on Sunday can reveal.

The senior security source also said the primitive gas and petrol devices were most likely the work of determined terrorists struggling - because of the security crackdown - to get their hands on the ingredients needed to create high explosives.

Yesterday, a huge police manhunt was under way for the terrorists responsible as forensic experts continued to examine the vehicles involved for clues.

The attack was thwarted after fumes were spotted leaking from the first vehicle, parked outside the packed Tiger Tiger nightclub in London's West End in the early hours of Friday morning...

The good news on global warming: not enough fuel

Dyer recently wrote of the CO2 "game of chicken" -- China and India vs. the post-industrial world in a race to see who can fry the world first.

FuturePundit (warning, he is irrational about global warming) posts a more optimistic view -- we can't fry the world because we don't have enough coal. His writing is referring to this blog post. If you buy this argument we can only roast the world a bit.

That's the most optimistic thing I've read all week. Of course I suspect it's not true, but one can dream ...

Why the Iraq war is a great thing for America

No, really. It's great. George Bush is a strategic genius, a farsighted visionary far beyond anything the world has seen before.

Yes, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died. Millions have suffered terribly. Over 30,000 allied solders will have significant lifelong disability. Thousands are dead. A trillion dollars has been vaporized. America's shame will live a hundred years. The middle east's problems are even less tractable than they were 10 years ago. Pakistan may yet collapse, becoming an arms dealer for nuclear terrorists (ok, so that would be particularly bad).

All this, thanks to George Bush.

And, yet, this would be much worse. If the fiasco, the horror, of the Iraq war makes America more cautious, less strident, wiser ... then we may avoid war with China. If we avoid war with China, future historians may decide that Bush's fiasco was a good thing for America and for most of the world, excepting, perhaps, Iraq.

Update 7/4/07: James Fallows makes a similar point from a different angle. Brrrr. There are worse fates.

Apple victorious

I've been reading the iPhone reviews. Grumpy geek iPhone fans like Coding Horror say to wait for 3G support and a few more physical buttons next year. More desperate sorts, less enamored of Microsoft's solutions, say to wait at least until this fall. Maybe then we'll have search, cut and paste, tasks, better synchronization, an external keyboard, disk mode, fewer crashes, etc.

No matter. This review, late to the game, sums it up best. It's quite possible, if AT&T can hold itself together, and if the phone crashes no more than once every few days (with no data loss), that Apple has won. They've put a serious OS, with serious multimedia and network capabilities, on a phone with serious graphics capabilities. They've established a cross-platform distribution mechanism (iTunes) for updates, software, backups, media retail, etc. They're allied with Google (for now).

Does Apple want to raise a few millions? Sell a "task" add-on for $20 a pop. Does Apple want to raise a few hundred million? Sell games.

You did notice that Apple now has a handheld gaming platform, didn't you? (With an accelerometer too.)

It's great news for Apple stakeholders and, in the near term, it's good news for AT&T. More importantly, it's fantastic news for the decaying American mobile phone industry. There will be a desperate scramble by AT&T's competitors to deliver better products faster, and the handset manufacturer will get whatever they want. And once the 3G iPhones start appearing overseas ...

Did I mention that Minneapolis is putting in metro-wide 802.11? The iPhone will work quite nicely there, including the VOIP services Jobs is promising.

Anyone who has a mobile phone number should be very grateful that Apple, it seems, has delivered.

7/2/07: Yes, victory indeed. When a US mobile phone stokes anxiety in Korean manufacturers, something radical has happened. It's bit like Brazil suddenly launching a star ship.

7/2/07: More proof. I really didn't think Apple could do it out of the gate.