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?

The Fermi Paradox goes mainstream - Dyer

Gwynne Dyer is a thoughtful fellow, but he doesn't strike me as a fan of science fiction. He's a military historian and veteran journalist, and has not a geek gene to his name. He's also, to be blunt, old.

Even older than me.

So it's noteworthy that even Dyer is pondering the Fermi Paradox ...

Probably not alone ....

"Is intelligence a rare accident in the evolutionary process, or such a self-destructive attribute that intelligent species don't usually survive more than a couple of centuries after they industrialise? Are they all observing radio silence because there is something dreadful out there?

Or have we just not figured out yet how mature galactic civilizations communicate?

It's now legitimate to ask the big questions. Geek power rules.

Now that Dyer is getting his geek on, is it too much to ask that get a feed?! Please?

New York's Senator Gillibrand conceals her deal with Satan

Kirsten (Rutnick) Gillibrand was appointed to complete Hilary Clinton's term as a New York senator. When she took the position nobody talked about her dark secret.

Was she a heroin dealer? A crack addict? A mugger?

No. Worse.

She made her name by taking a client her fellow lawyers chose to avoid. Philip Morris ...

As a Young Lawyer, Gillibrand Defended Big Tobacco - NYTimes.com

The Philip Morris Company did not like to talk about what went on inside its lab in Cologne, Germany, where researchers secretly conducted experiments exploring the effects of cigarette smoking.

Tobacco executives told Congress in 1994 that they did not believe there was a proven link between smoking and cancer. Later, the Justice Department sought to prove that they had lied about the dangers of smoking.

So when the Justice Department tried to get its hands on that research in 1996 to prove that tobacco industry executives had lied about the dangers of smoking, the company moved to fend off the effort with the help of a highly regarded young lawyer named Kirsten Rutnik.

Ms. Rutnik, who now goes by her married name, Gillibrand, threw herself into the work. She traveled to Germany at least twice, interviewing the lab’s top scientists, whose research showed a connection between smoking and cancer but was kept far from public view.

She helped contend with prosecution demands for evidence and monitored testimony of witnesses before a grand jury, following up with strategy memos to Philip Morris’s general counsel.

The industry beat back the federal perjury investigation, a significant legal victory at the time, but not one that Ms. Gillibrand is eager to discuss...

Someone has to defend the pedophiles of the world. That's an honorable job, however. There's no money in it, no fame, no career.

Philip Morris though, they're rich. They can afford their pick of attorneys, and they can pay very well. It's a simple deal. You work for Philip Morris, you get money for your eternal soul and you serve the dark side until you die. Afterwords, who knows.

If you server Philip Morris and you want to be in politics, you join the GOP.

You don't try to become a US Senator for New York. Gillibrand should never have been appointed and she should be defeated in the primaries.

Carrington class solar storms -- another reason to own a cabin with running water

(Via KW) We're used to estimating the frequency of calamities by studying the historic record.

That works for meteors, earthquakes, climate change, volcanoes and the like.

It doesn't work for Carrington class solar events, because they didn't mean much until recently ...

Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe - space - 23 March 2009 - New Scientist

IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters...

... an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that....

...The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma - charged high-energy particles - some of which escape the surface and travel through space as the solar wind. From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball known as a coronal mass ejection (see "When hell comes to Earth"). If one should hit the Earth's magnetic shield, the result could be truly devastating.

The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth's magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer's magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer's copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and six million people spent 9 hours without electricity. But things could get much, much worse than that...

... The most serious space weather event in history happened in 1859. It is known as the Carrington event, after the British amateur astronomer Richard Carrington, who was the first to note its cause: "two patches of intensely bright and white light" emanating from a large group of sunspots. The Carrington event comprised eight days of severe space weather.

There were eyewitness accounts of stunning auroras, even at equatorial latitudes. The world's telegraph networks experienced severe disruptions, and Victorian magnetometers were driven off the scale.

... According to the NAS report, a severe space weather event in the US could induce ground currents that would knock out 300 key transformers within about 90 seconds, cutting off the power for more than 130 million people (see map)...

... The truly shocking finding is that this whole situation would not improve for months, maybe years: melted transformer hubs cannot be repaired, only replaced. "From the surveys I've done, you might have a few spare transformers around, but installing a new one takes a well-trained crew a week or more," ...

... The good news is that, given enough warning, the utility companies can take precautions, such as adjusting voltages and loads, and restricting transfers of energy so that sudden spikes in current don't cause cascade failures. There is still more bad news, however. Our early warning system is becoming more unreliable by the day.

By far the most important indicator of incoming space weather is NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) ...ACE can provide between 15 and 45 minutes' warning of any incoming geomagnetic storms. The power companies need about 15 minutes to prepare their systems for a critical event, so that would seem passable...

...observations of the sun and magnetometer readings during the Carrington event shows that the coronal mass ejection was travelling so fast it took less than 15 minutes to get from where ACE is positioned to Earth...

... ACE is 11 years old, and operating well beyond its planned lifespan...

What we need is a technological fix that helps with some common electrical system problem -- so we can justify it that way -- with a side-effect of protecting against Carrington-class solar storms. Preferably something that doesn't rely on an early warning system or human judgment, but behaves more like the household Ground Fault Interrupt.

Reinhardt on Obama's health plan

Uwe Reinhardt is a Clinton economist who was one of the godfather's of Hilary's failed reform plan.

Today he gives us a high level outline of Obama's reform plan and promises more to come.

Sure looks hopeless to me. I can't line it up in any significant way with what we have to do.

I'd be happy if all they did was rip health related benefits out of employment -- which was actually a McCain position.

How big should financial firms be?

The Baseline Scenario suggests we simplify financial services regulation by setting size limits. Then, in theory, market forces can punish the foolish -- without destroying the economy.

I'm sympathetic.

The bit of the post I liked best, however, was the reference to a classic paper on corporations ...

Big and Small The Baseline Scenario

.... this is the issue that Ronald Coase discussed in “The Nature of the Firm” (Wikipedia summary; paper). A firm’s optimal size is reached when the transaction costs of doing business in the market equal the administrative costs of managing the firm; the bigger the firm, the higher the administrative costs... To this equation, we now need to add the social costs (negative externalities) of being Too Big To Fail: moral hazard, socialized losses, and so on.

I suspect a simple interpretation of this theorem would find many corporations are far larger than the "optimum".

What the theorem may miss (I've not read the paper) is that corporations don't just compete in the marketplace. They attack each other through acquisitions, cutting off suppliers, buying up critical components, purchasing senators (typically by paying for their election and reelection) and so on. In other words, within certain boundaries, corporations go to war.

That may favor bigger corporations than simplistic models of economic efficiency.

Death to Captchas

Beck when machines had trouble solving simple Captchas, they weren't a bad idea.

Now the machines are much better at solving them than we are. I see red when I see a Captcha, no matter the color of the cursed thing...

Recent Stuff That Bothers Me - Pogue’s Posts - NYTimes.com

... These days, blogs and Web sites often require you to prove that you’re human by typing in the text version of some distorted picture of a word. The idea is to screen out automated software spambots that fill the Comments area with auto-generated ads...

... I suddenly realized how much I hate these things when I got a note from reader Jason Donovan, who’s started a Web site where you can post your favorite (meaning most ridiculous) Captcha images.

Some of the starter images posted there aren’t hard to figure out. But the ones in color, one of which I’ve pasted here, are living, breathing proof that these things have gotten quite out of control.

I moderate all comments and foreswear the cursed Captcha. It was a nice try, but the experiment failed. The machines aced the Turing test.