The Obama difference

It's good to have a leader who's not universally despised ...

Op-Ed Contributor - No Hurt Feelings in Germany - NYTimes.com 

... I can’t remember ever seeing Angela Merkel smile at anyone the way she smiled at him in the photographs from the dinner at 10 Downing Street. Likewise, the images coming out of Baden-Baden on Friday evening make clear that whether she and the president are reviewing the parade together, meeting selected citizens or fielding questions from the press, the chancellor, too, has come down with an unequivocal case of Obama fever...

What stands between us and GD II

If not for what we've learned, we'd now be reliving the Great Depression ...

It’s 1930 time - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

.... What Eichengreen-O’Rourke show, it seems to me, is that knowledge is the only thing standing between us and Great Depression 2.0. It’s only to the extent that we understand these things a bit better than our grandfathers — and that we act on that knowledge — that we have any real reason to think this time will be better...

Except it would much worse today. The world population in 1930 was 2 billion, now we're about 6.8 billion. Our resources are more depleted, we're more dependent on agricultural trade. The cost of Havoc, of weapons of mass destruction, is far lower than in 1930.

We're not smarter than the leadership of 1930. We have the advantage of their mistakes, and the fortune that the GOP is out of power.

The twilight of voice mail

Kudos to the NYT for identifying a dying technology ahead of the commentariat. Voice mail is joining the telegram: For Some, Voice Mail Is Losing Its Allure.

I've always disliked voice mail, but I hadn't realized I had so much company.

Like these people I give corporate voice mail low priority. It's rare to have anything useful there -- typically recruiters. The best messages are from our front desk, reminding me to pick up a package. (Home voice mail/answering machines are still important, but that's where Google Voice comes in.)

Between instant messaging, email, mobile phones, Google Voice, and automated transcription corporate voice mail is obsolete.

Corporate voice mail's passing was preceded by the telegram, is accompanied by the expiration of postal mail and newsprint, and is survived, to the bemusement of horror of geekdom, by the immortal fax machine.

The danger of the right, and the Canadian solution

Start by understanding that the American right is overwhelmingly driven by white men who see their gender and pigment privileges disappearing. Then remember that violence is as American as apple pie.

Add in 20+ years of economic regression for white men without a college education. Then add loss of home value, collapse of retirement funds, decreasing access to health care, increasing unemployment ...

Now see why we need to be genuinely concerned ...

Pitchforks and Pistols - Charles Blow - NYTimes.com

... At first, it was entertaining — just harmless, hotheaded expostulation. Of course, there were the garbled facts, twisted logic and veiled hate speech. But what did I expect, fair and balanced? It was like walking through an ideological house of mirrors. The distortions can be mildly amusing at first, but if I stay too long it makes me sick.

But, it’s not all just harmless talk. For some, their disaffection has hardened into something more dark and dangerous. They’re talking about a revolution.

Some simply lace their unscrupulous screeds with loaded language about the fall of the Republic. We have to “rise up” and “take back our country.” Others have been much more explicit.

For example, Chuck Norris, the preeminent black belt and prospective Red Shirt, wrote earlier this month on the conservative blog WorldNetDaily: “How much more will Americans take? When will enough be enough? And, when that time comes, will our leaders finally listen or will history need to record a second American Revolution?”...

We need a way to divert or reduce the violent potential of the American right. We should examine the record of aggrieved tribes in other settings. It's easy to come up with example of things going very badly (talk radio was very big there), but are there examples of the alternative?

I'd suggest a close look at Canada.

Whenever Canada has a rage problem, the government appoints a Royal Commission of worthies to tour the nation. They don't wear powdered wigs any more, but they might as well. They're all trained to speak in boring drones, and they can speak and sit endlessly. After months of wandering about, by which time even the most deranged can't keep their eyes open, the Commission drops off a thirty pound document which nobody will ever read. (In fact it's always the same document, but no-one's noticed.)

We need a Commission on the tribal rage of the American right. Let the droning begin.

Update: Other ideas? Rupert Murdoch probably doesn't favor widespread violence. Will he ask his newspapers (including Limbaugh's Wall Street Journal) to provide factcheck.org style refutation of right wing rumors?

Best of the day - The Tweeting Guardian

One of the very best of the day's efforts, from the Guardian ...

Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink | Media | The Guardian

... A unique collaboration between The Guardian and Twitter will also see the launch of Gutter, an experimental service designed to filter noteworthy liberal opinion from the cacophony of Twitter updates. Gutter members will be able to use the service to comment on liberal blogs around the web via a new tool, specially developed with the blogging platform WordPress, entitled GutterPress.

Currently, 17.8% of all Twitter traffic in the United Kingdom consists of status updates from Stephen Fry, whose reliably jolly tone, whether trapped in a lift or eating a scrumptious tart, has won him thousands of fans. A further 11% is made up of his 363,000 followers replying "@stephenfry LOL!", "@stephenfry EXACTLY the same thing happened to me", and "@stephenfry Meanwhile, I am making myself an omelette! Delicious!"...

Earlier Steven Fry is compared to Madonna.

This one wins for the blend of British humor, topical news (death of newspapers, inane twitter) and good writing. The Guardian is great.

Gmail Autopilot powered by CADIE

Gmail autopilot is one of the half-dozen or so Google CADIE themed jokes today.

They're all very good, including CADIE's 3 post blog (from Panda's to post-singular in 4-5 hours - were the blog comments machine generated?).  Part of what makes them good is they're more credible than I would prefer. On the one tentacle they're obvious jokes, not "are they serious?" teasing. On the other tentacle they're written by people who are thinking about how one would create CADIE.

Gmail autopilot is particularly believable. It's not hard to imagine something very much like it before 2020. Indeed, it may be inevitable. Look for auto-generated Tweets later this year ...

Don't take passport forms to Post Office

Our daughter needed a passport renewed. This used to be a small thing, but in its great wisdom Congress decided both parents must be present during renewals.

So the entire family went to our local post office before the start of school. The post office "passport person", unfortunately, was not so prompt. She was late for work. So we aborted that one.

We tried again another day - at mid-day. This time the passport person was out to lunch.

It's not a new problem. Five years ago, in a previous renewal, the "passport person" was on vacation when we drove out to the post office.

Mercifully, the morning of the latest Fail, a friend had mentioned a passport center near our office. So we ended up at a regional passport center. In addition to doing renewals they take pictures; that was fortunate because our daughter wore a headband in her Kinko's passport picture -- and that's not permitted. It had to be retaken.

The bottom line -- don't bother with the Post Office if there's a regional passport center you can get to. If you can get through to the national number (good luck) they supposedly do reservations.

Oh, and bring a checkbook too -- they don't take credit cards.

Lessons from Outlook 2007 Notes colors

Enthusiastic web sites promote Outlook 2007 category colors as a feature for Notes ...

Customize Notes In Outlook 2007 ~ Windows Fanatics

... Another option you have for customizing notes is to categorize them by assigning color categories. If you have a large number of notes, this can be a great way of organizing them...

Clearly the author of this me-too web site never actually used this feature. It's unusable.

Here's why. In prior versions of Outlook color attributes were unrelated to categories. In Outlook 2007 color attributes became a property of a category.

This worked well for most aspects of Outlook. The color attribute is displayed in some parts of the UI, but not in the text field.

Notes, however, get the color background on the text field. The resulting text/background color combinations are hallucinogenic. This means Notes can no longer have categories.

The obvious fix would have been to apply the Category color to the notes header -- but that would have required editing the source code for Outlook Notes. I suspect that code is obfuscated assembler and it hasn't been touched in fifteen years.

Since only uber-geeks and Palm users ever use Outlook Notes, much less assign Categories to them, Microsoft chose to sacrifice the Category feature of Notes.

I have to admit it's a rational decision.

Sigh.

War is going to the robots because ...

War is going to the robots because we can't pay for the traumatic brain injuries.

The cracked Netflix DVD problem

A 2008 Netflix Community complaint about broken DVDs didn't attract much sympathy. The respondents claimed Netflix was blameless, and any problems were the fault of the USPS and the recipient.

I don't buy it. About 15% of our child-audience DVDs are cracked or unplayable, but we rarely see problems with adult DVDs (admittedly a much smaller sample, most of our rentals are for younger children).

If it were the USPS the damage rate would be similar, and we don't handle the disks differently.

I suspect Netflix is skimping on their testing and quality control -- a sure way to save money.

This is a problem. Sure Netflix will reissue a replacement, but that's worthless for us. We just return the broken ones.

So now we're looking for alternatives. I'm not sure there are any when it comes to children's material, but we'll take a second look at Amazon and Apple. We could look at Netflix's streaming offerings, but then we'd be rewarding bad services. Humans are programmed to punish cheaters ...

Why the EU can't do stimulus programs

If Paul Krugman has a weakness, it's that he doesn't work very hard to explain why governments don't want to follow his (well reasoned) recommendations.

The NYT's coverage of the ceremonial G20 meeting has the first justification I've read of why the EU doesn't feel able to do an economic stimulus package ...

Obama Will Face a Defiant World on Foreign Visit - NYTimes.com

... Compounding the problem for Mr. Obama is that the route that he has chosen to lead the United States out of the mess — heavy government spending — is not available to many other countries. European governments, for instance, are far more lukewarm about enormous stimulus programs because they already have strong social safety nets, and more fears of inflation, than does the United States...

Our social safety net has been destroyed by 12 years of GOP obstruction and 6 years of total GOP control. So even rebuilding it partially is a huge governmental economic stimulus. The EU can't double government spending programs because then the government would be most of the economy.

The can do the modern equivalent of printing money, but that may be a lot harder to do with a single currency spread across very diverse nations.

Reporter is tasered - interesting video

A local reporter is voluntarily tasered. If one skips the tedious intro it's a 15 second video demonstration. I don't know if the setting used on her is explained (sorry, skipped ahead) -- I assume it was on the low side.

Hardly novel, but this is the first one I've seen where the volunteer is a middle-aged female. She described it as feeling like a "blowtorch" was turned on her, but claims to return quickly to normal.

Worth seeing one of these at least once. I hadn't realized how quickly a tasered person would return to full power; that might explains some of the repeat tasering episodes associated with injury and death.

Financial Times - Satirical 2020 edition

Via Monbiot, I find: Financial Times 2020 - FT 2020.com. It's an Onion-style (ok, not as good as The Onion) satire of the Financial Times. Monbiot says it will be offline soon, so get it while you can. (In the US I think obvious satire is protected speech, but maybe not in the UK.)

Freeman Dyson and Linus Pauling

When Linus Pauling, winner of several Nobel Prizes, was old he became obsessed with Vitamin C. Later he came up with "orthomolecular medicine". His genius had been so great everyone at first strained to make sense of his new passions. He was a happy contrarian, sure he'd overturn the establishment again.

Eventually his colleagues just averted their eyes. It was a complete waste, and a bit of a sad end to a glorious intellectual career.

Now Freeman Dyson, another uber-genius, is convinced he's going to overturn the climate science establishment. Maybe, but it smells like Vitamin C to me.

Pauling and Dyson never had normal minds. So it's not surprising their minds may age very differently from the rest of us.

Evolution of dog and human - mutual selection

I've had a longstanding obsession with the the evolution and plasticity of my favorite parasite, Canis lupus familiaris. Happily our co-evolutionary companion is at last getting well deserved attention.

Today my favorite paleoanthropologist almost asks the right question (emphases mine):

Preverbal infants in canine clothing

For the past couple of thousand years, maybe more, our selection on dogs has been both intentional and unintentional. Before that, as dogs were first becoming commensal with human societies -- more than 20,000 years ago -- the essential changes in dog social behavior were the natural effect of human social systems.

If we were generating all that selection on them, imagine how much we were imposing on each other.

Well, yes John, we believe humans imposed vast amounts of selection on each other, and your readers know that you've shown human evolution is active and rapid.

The question I'm particularly interested in, however, is how did dogs change humans? Isn't it a principle that symbiotes and parasites change their hosts/partners even as they themselves change?