Some perspective on sports doping

Freakonomics has reprinted a letter to the editor of Sports Illustrated magazine which is worth repeating.

The letter is from Brandon Gaut of Irvine, California.

As a scientist and a sports fan, I believe the current doping scandals compromise science as much as sports. The tests are performed by entities motivated by and funded to achieve the goal of detecting cheaters; their objectivity is suspect. Also, it is a scientific fact that there will be positive tests even when there are no cheaters. From my perspective, the puzzle is not the occasional prositive test, but why there aren't a great many more. The system is broken, and I fear it is not always due to cheating athletes.

I must admit I don't understand the obsession with banning "performance-enhancing drugs". All of sports training is designed to enhance performance, and none of it is particularly natural. Whether it is intensive training, dietary supplements or "approved" drugs (antibiotics, pain-killers, medicines of many varieties), none of it is especially natural, and all of it takes a great toll on the athlete's body.

I don't see that anaerobic steroids and other banned drugs are any worse for the athlete, nor cheating. We don't try to distinguish between natural athletes and "unnatural" athletes. All athletes are allowed to exercise and train hard, which is a pretty unnatural thing to do. They pump their bodies full of "permitted" chemicals, including antibiotics, painkillers and other drugs, as well as other chemicals such as vitamins, minerals and "nutritional supplements". They eat carefully tailored food combinations. There is nothing natural about "loading up on carbs". Why are hormones and steroids treated differently?

It is a double standard for sports administrators to allow athletes to eat protein supplements to put on more muscle mass, but not natural hormones that assist in growing muscles. I don't believe the excuse that it is because of the side-effects. If they were genuinely worried about the health of the athlete, they wouldn't allow them to become athletes in the first place. The high-intensity training and competition they go through not only leads to serious, permanent, mechanical damage to joints, but it also seriously weakens the immune system. Elite athletes might be able to push their bodies further, faster and harder than ordinary folks, but they aren't healthier. Sport is about performance, not health.

But all that is by-the-by. Even if we decide that "drugs are bad, m'kay?" and ban anabolic steroids and others, it is important to remember that the drug testing labs are highly motivated to detect cheats, and there will always be false positives. Claims of drug cheating should always be taken with a grain of salt.

[Update, 2 Sep 2007: fixed a silly typo/thinko where I wrote "anaerobic" instead of anabolic. Drugs for athletes who don't breathe perhaps?]

Aliens in Roswell

Thanks to Neuromesh, a.k.a. Jase, news that aliens have been arrested in Roswell.

When did the secret goings-on of the Men In Black become public knowledge? Did I miss a memo?

Compulsion in Islam

One of the most destructive myths about Islam is that it is uniformly hostile, misogynist, backwards-looking, and authoritarian -- or at least that it is all these things to a greater extent than other religions such as Christianity.

In fact, Islam is capable of just as many nuanced beliefs as Christianity, and while it hasn't quite proliferated sects to the same extent as Christianity (due, I believe, to the linking of Church and State in so many place), it is a mistake to lump all Muslims' beliefs together -- or even to just divide them up into merely Shiite, Sunni and the now uncommon Kharijite branches.

Jehanzeb Hasan states that "Osamaists [follows of Osama bin Laden] and Islamophobes ignore the dynamic nature of the religion and deny the diversity of belief within Islam. Instead of constantly being pondered and contemplated for meanings, Islam is dumbed down by those who seek to essentialize it for the purpose of augmenting their own sociopolitical agendas."

An example of the nuances of Islamic belief, and the way the Western media choose to ignore it in favour of scare-stories about the worst of them, comes from Juan Cole, who reports that Dr. Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, Grand Sheikh of al-Azhar Seminary in Cairo and (arguably) the closest equivalent the Sunni have to the Pope, has issued a statement that jihad is never to be used as a threat or a form of aggression against the innocent.

He also quoted from the Quran, "There is no compulsion in religion", emphasising that practices which contradict the principle of freedom of belief is a departure from "true Islam". Indeed, one of the oldest myths about Islam is that it spread across the globe by forced conversions. (I don't doubt that there were some forced conversions, but Christians can't throw the first stone on that score.)

It is, of course, true that there are many people who disagree with Tantawi's concept of "true Islam". The Wahabi sect is a prime example. But we shouldn't make the mistake of judging all of Islam on the behaviour of extremists like Osama bin Laden. That would be like judging all Jews by the behaviour of Samuel Byck, or all Christians by the behaviour of Timothy McVeigh.

One reader commented on Cole's blog to say:

[A]s a Muslim I can tell you the Saudi government is hypocritical and un-Islamic. There's a reason their rulings are given no weight by the worldwide Muslim community, and if it wasn't for Mecca and Medina in its borders, the country would be nothing more than another Yemen.

Another comment quoted from Abdal Hakim Murad's "Islam's Heart of Darkness":

Wahhabism was generally loathed in the Islamic world when it made its first appearance in the eighteenth century. The collapse of Ottoman power during the First World War allowed it to assert itself and, amid scenes of shocking massacre, the Holy Cities were annexed. In the late twentieth century, the explosion of oil wealth allowed Saudi Arabia to export this same puritanism to the outside world.

It is not true that "there is no such thing as a good Muslim". If the West is to win the war for civilization against the reactionary, backwards-looking, fundamentalist Muslims, without becoming in turn reactionary, backwards-looking, fundamentalist Christian ourselves, we need to ally ourselves with modern, moderate forward-looking Muslims, and not tar them with the same brush as the fundamentalists. After all, fundamentalism is the enemy of all modernists, not just secular and Christian modernists.

More on those cluster bombs

Cluster bombs make an effective weapon against massed ground troops. But they also make an even better weapons against civilians, a terror-weapon. By happy accident, cluser bombs have a habit of not going off immediately, which makes them one of the weapons of choice for the ethnic-cleanser and high-tech terrorist. Bomb an area, and not only do you kill people immediately, but you keep killing and crippling them for years or even decades afterwards, as unexploded bombs are found, often by children who think the small bombs are playthings.

Which makes the use of cluster bombs on civilian areas a war-crime. Deliberately endangering non-combatants is not an act of war, it is a crime. Civilized countries do not deliberately drop cluster bombs where children are sure to find them.

In the south of Lebanon, an incredible ninety percent of the cluster bombs dropped on civilian areas were dropped in the last 72 hours of the war, when Israel knew that a diplomatic resolution was imminent. The south of Lebanon, mostly villages and farm land with large civilian populations, are littered with unexploded cluster bombs. This immoral crime is part of Israel's attempt at ethnic cleansing, like the bulldozing and bombing of civilian houses and factories, cynically defended by the oft-repeated lie that Hezbollah military units were hidden in civilian areas.

Doctrine of Ignorance

The Seattle Times has a powerful piece about the Bush Doctrine of Ignorance. The Bush administration is perhaps the most pointlessly secretive administration the US has ever seen, to the point of "locking the barn after the horse has escaped -- and died of old age", as the editorial describes the re-censoring of fifty-year old public documents dealing with the Cold War, documents which were innoculous enough to have been made available even to the Soviet Union, and which have been openly cited in government heaings, reported on by the media, and even written up in history books.

Anyone who doesn't see a pattern here has not been paying attention. From its 18-hour blackout of news that the vice president had shot a man, to its paying a newspaper columnist to write favorable pieces, to its habit of putting out video press releases disguised as TV news, to its penchant for stamping top secret on anything that doesn't move fast enough, this administration has repeatedly shown contempt for the right of the people to know what's going on. At a time when information is more readily available than ever, this government is working like 1952 to enforce ignorance.

And the people, too many of them, shrug and say okey-dokey. As if we learned nothing from Abscam, Iran-contra, Vietnam and Watergate. As if it's OK for an arrogant and paternalistic government to decide for us what we get to know.

Well, it's not. An informed electorate is the lifeblood of democracy, the ultimate check on despotic ambitions.

Exceptions to TPM legislation

Expect to see more from me about this topic, but for now just a quick word: the Australian Federal Government has put up their DRAFT legislation regarding exceptions to the Technological Protection Mechanism laws.

Nutshell: under pressure from the US government, out government has passed laws not just outlawing copyright infringement (which was already illegal) but making it a criminal offence to bypass technology which could be used to prevent infringement. So, hypothetically, if a music CD hijacks your computer and installs a root kit that takes over the functioning of your computer and allows viruses to break in, but by doing so it also prevents you from illegally burning copyies of the CD, it is illegal to remove that root kit.

The draft legislation can be downloaded from here.

We don't have much time to move on this -- the government is putting it up for comments only until the 22nd of September.

A quick look at the summary (not the legislation itself) makes me say -- "phew! we dodged a bullet!". The government seems to be relatively clueful, maybe, and is recommending that the offence be tied to actual copyright infringement, rather than a blanket ban on bypassing the TPM:

The scope of the scheme is limited to preventing circumvention of TPMs designed to stop copyright piracy. The scheme will not cover TPMs which are not designed to prevent or inhibit people from infringing copyright. The scheme will not apply to TPMs solely designed for other purposes, such as market segmentation (eg region coding) or the protection against competition in aftermarket goods (eg spare parts) where the TPM does not have a connection with copyright.

In other words, if you bypass the TPM in order to break copyright law, you've broken the law, but if you don't, you don't.

We know the US government really doesn't like this, and has been pushing hard to make any bypassing of TPMs illegal. The next few weeks/months will be interesting. We'll see how much of a lapdog we are to the US, or whether our government is prepared to act in our best interests instead of the RIAA and Microsoft.

Keep your fingers crossed.

Nicotine update

Earlier, I wrote about claims that tobacco companies were deliberately increasing the amount of nicotine in brands that were purchased by teenagers.

Further information adds an element of doubt to the story. At the very least, the story isn't as cut-and-dried as I first thought.

Tastes like chicken

It grows on wounded trees, it looks like bright yellow intestines, and it tastes like chicken. What is it?

It's a mushroom, the chicken of the woods!


Original picture here, with thanks to BoingBoing.

Guilty even if innocent

According to a report in the Toledo Blade, Ohio's government has rubber-stamped a new law which will allow people to be publically listed on the Internet as criminal sex offenders (complete with photo and current address), even if they have never been charged, let alone convicted.

As a listed sex offender, they would be subject to strict restrictions on where they can live, the sorts of work they can do, and required to notify both authorities and the local community whenever they move.

According to the Toledo Blade:

No one in attendance voiced opposition to rules submitted by Attorney General Jim Petro's office to the Joint Committee on Agency Rule Review, consisting of members of the Ohio House and Senate.

The Roman Catholic Church suggested this new legislation, as an alternative to lawsuits against them for child sexual abuse. What a great win for the Church: in return for listing Father O'Molester, who is now 75 and living in some church hospice out of the way somewhere, the Church gets out of their responsibility for protecting the abusers, the victim doesn't see a cent, and a horrible precedent is made. Forget innocent until proven guilty. It will be guilty even if innocent.

Thanks to Echidne.

Physics 1, Faith 0

Evangelist preacher Franck Kabele had a revelation that if he had enough faith, he could repeat the miracle of Jesus walking on water.

He took his congregation out to the Komo estuary in Libreville, the capital of Gabon in west Africa, and set off to walk out to sea.

Eyewitnesses report that the water soon covered his head, and he drowned.

One of the hardest things to know is what to have faith in. There are so many would-be prophets, religious leaders, saints, holy men and spiritualists, all claiming to get their power from any number of gods (some, or all, of whom may be the same god). Who should you put your faith in? Whoever you put your faith in, whatever interpretation of god you choose, there are millions, maybe even billions, of people who are just as certain in their faith as you are but have picked something else to put their faith in. If they can be wrong, can't you? And if their tenacious hold on their faith is misguided and not a virtue at all, how do you know yours is not the same? Because you have faith in your faith? Just like they do.

Many religions, perhaps even the majority, put faith right up at the top of the virtues.
Faith, believing an opinion no matter what the facts say, is the highest manifestation of righteousness in almost all religions, and very high in all the others. Indeed, not only is faith despite lack of evidence celebrated by religion, but faith in spite of the evidence is often considered even better. "I believe because it is impossible" boasted Tertullian. Faith in the impossible is one of the hallmarks of religion. And yet, outside of mere stories and tales (which the religious believe implicitly, despite the lack of evidence, or even in spite of evidence, logic and common sense), the track record of faith is pretty lousy.

Whether it was Native American Ghostdancers who had faith that God would make them impervious to bullets, an evangelist who thought he could walk on water, or millions of people who hope to protect themselves by hanging a small figurine of a man being tortured to death from their car's rear-view mirror, physics always trumps faith: they weren't bulletproof, he couldn't walk on water, and seatbelts and airbags protect the car's occupants equally well regardless of what hangs from the mirror.

IE website

Microsoft hasn't registered previous IE-related domain names, like ie.com or ie5.com, but then none of these have been used in quite the same way that ie7.com is being used.


The question is, will Microsoft treat this as beneath their dignity to react to, or as a case of cyber-squatting?

Tax farmers

Economist Paul Krugman discusses the US Government's recent decision to put tax collection in the hands of private "tax farmers":

It’s an awful idea. Privatizing tax collection will cost far more than hiring additional I.R.S. agents, raise less revenue and pose obvious risks of abuse. But what’s really amazing is the extent to which this plan is a retreat from modern principles of government. I used to say that conservatives want to take us back to the 1920’s, but the Bush administration seemingly wants to go back to the 16th century.

[...] Maybe people who’ve spent their political careers denouncing government as the root of all evil can’t grasp the idea of governing well. Or maybe it’s cynical politics: privatization provides both an opportunity to evade accountability and a vast source of patronage.

It never ceases to amaze me how conservatives and "economic rationalists" who are constantly going on about fiscal responsibility are so often prepared to just toss money down the toilet, so long as it is a private company doing the flushing.

Steve Irwin killed by sting-ray

The "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin, who has done so much for conservation and the protection of wildlife in Australia and across the world, has been killed today in a tragic accident, aged 44.

According to reports, Irwin was killed by a sting-ray while filming a documentary in far north Queensland. The Queensland Ambulance Service have confirmed that he died of lacerations to the heart from a sting-ray's barbed tail.

Sting-rays are not aggressive, but they are dangerous, and will strike out with their poisonous barbed tail if trod on or startled.

Many Australians have been embarrassed by Steve Irwin's broad Aussie accent, his use of stereotypical slang like "crikey!" and "what a bewty!", and especially his habit of putting himself into "Danger! Danger! Danger!". But for all his joking about, he was a great populariser of nature, an environmentalist and conservationist, a man who brought a welcome sense of fun to a field that is often stuffy and boring. He was a true Aussie larrikin, in the good sense, a man who knew how to treat serious topics with affection, joy and respectful irreverence. He was a real Australian icon. He will be missed.

His producer and good friend John Stainton said:

Today the world has lost a great wildlife icon, a passionate conservationist and one of the proudest Dad's on the planet. He died doing what he loved best, he left this world in a happy and peaceful state of mind, he would've said 'crocs rule'.

Source: ABC Far North Queensland News.

More news reports here:

Bloomberg

Cairns Newspapers
(warning: contains Javascript animated banner)

Also of interest may be his "Crocodile Hunter" website, and a collection of Steve Irwin quotes.

The world is just a little bit of a darker place without him.

Prime Minister of Israel?

The Ha'aretz columnist Bradley Burston has a radical idea -- he wants Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah to run for Prime Minister -- of Israel.

Now it's official. Israel is a country without a prime minister.

This had been no more than an educated suspicion until Monday night, when Ehud Olmert effectively made the announcement. Not in so many words, of course. Instead, in a long-awaited television address to the nation, Olmert took Israel's last remaining expectations of him and kicking them in the teeth, by ducking a full-out probe into his handling of the war.

If nature abhors a vacuum, imagine how it feels at this point about Israel's senior leadership.

The titular head of state, our model for probity, is looking down the barrel of rape charges. The army chief of staff, our model for dedication and sacrifice, took a break for a bit of financial planning just as the nation's leaders were deciding whether the military was ready, plans, supplies, training and all, to go to war.

The justice minister might have helped Olmert this week, had he not resigned over suspicions that he forced a French kiss on an unwilling young woman soldier.

And then there is Olmert himself, the man who acted as prime minister from January 4, when Ariel Sharon suffered a devastating stroke, until July 12, when Olmert suffered a debilitating, evidently permanent lapse of responsibility.

After nearly six decades of existence, Israel has found itself a practical experiment in Anarcho-Zionism. Unlike its neighbor the Palestinian Authority, which is a government lacking an independent state (and a number of officials jailed by Israel), Israel has become an independent state lacking a government.

[...]

Maybe that's our answer. If assassinating or abducting the Hezbollah leader is still on the agenda, as Israeli officials maintain, why not put Nasrallah to useful purpose?

Look at the issues. Consider his record. Here is a man who is both strong and wise on security issues. He saw to it that his troops were well-prepared, well-trained, well-supplied, and and well-protected.

Nasrallah would be a new sort of Israeli leader. One who gets things done.

Here is a man who addresses social welfare needs head-on. He doesn't wait to help home-owners rebuild residences destroyed by aerial attacks. He hands out literal lump-sums, immediately, in cash.

Here is a man who delivers medical care to the needy, affordable housing to the homeless, food and even clothing to society's disadvantaged.

Here is a man who cares deeply about, and puts major emphasis on, education and youth (even if the message is one of incitement, hatred, and anti-Semitism).

Moreover, as he proved this week in admitting to having miscalculated the Israeli response in Lebanon, Nasrallah, as opposed to, say, Olmert, is a leader who, when he's made an error in judgment, can openly admit to it.

For more than 20 years, Israeli prime ministers have come to office pledging to be leaders for all the people, only to exacerbate existing divides and create new ones.

Why not tap the one leader who has managed to unite the Israeli people as has no prime minister in memory?

Thanks to billmon.

Of course, it is fascinating to see how the Israeli left and right have joined ranks in their opposition to Hezbollah following Hezbollah's retalitory rocket attacks against Israel. Remember, in almost six years of niggly you-shoved-me-first low level fighting over the Israeli-Lebanese border, only six Israeli civilians died from border violence. As I said before, that's six too many, but it was hardly a real threat.

But once Israel launched the July attacks to stop it, Hezbollah retalitated in force, killing perhaps a few dozen Israelis (mostly Arab-Israelis) in just a few weeks. In the face of enemy aggression, both the Lebanese and Israelis put their political differences aside and closed ranks against the attacker -- regardless of whether the attacker was the aggressor or not. This oh-so-very-human habit just goes to show the futility of trying to win hearts and minds via warfare.

Disney and fingerprinting

Another reason to avoid the over-priced rides, junk food and crowds of Disneyland: Disney now fingerprints visitors to their theme parks.

Their excuse for doing so is that it is necessary to prevent ticket fraud and resale of tickets. That's nonsense. You don't need to fingerprint buyers to prevent fraud, and as for preventing resale, that goes against everything that the free market stands for. What does Disney care if I buy a valid ticket and sell it to somebody else? They got their money, what I do with the ticket -- use it, burn it, eat it with ketchup, sell it for ten times the price -- is none of their concern and not their business.

Cory Doctorow writes:

For me, the worst part of this is that it conditions us to get used to being treated like crooks. If you were asked for a fingerprint when you bought a doughnut, you'd rightly leave the store. Why should an amusement park get a walk?

Also in Doctorow's post is one of the best quotes I've seen for a long time:

Our national immune system has begun to attack us in a terrible anaphylactic spasm -- indiscriminate NSA wiretaps, meaningless TSA security theater, secret aviation rules and no-fly lists, "free speech zones," suspension of habeas corpus and all the rest.

Tim O'Reilly on P2P

Back in 2002, Tim O'Reilly (founder of O'Reilly Publishing, perhaps the biggest IT and computer book publisher in the world) wrote an article about piracy and copy-protection. He details four lessons he had learnt from years in the business of selling, and giving away, books, and explains why they also apply to music and video:

1. Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.


2. Piracy is progressive taxation.


3. Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.


4. Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.

O'Reilly describes the bias of the existing distribution and advertising system, and points out that for many artists, piracy is a boon, not a problem:

For all of these creative artists, most laboring in obscurity, being well-enough known to be pirated would be a crowning achievement. Piracy is a kind of progressive taxation, which may shave a few percentage points off the sales of well-known artists (and I say "may" because even that point is not proven), in exchange for massive benefits to the far greater number for whom exposure may lead to increased revenues.

Our current distribution systems for books, music, and movies are skewed heavily in favor of the "haves" against the "have nots." A few high-profile products receive the bulk of the promotional budget and are distributed in large quantities; the majority depend, in the words of Tennessee Williams' character Blanche DuBois, "on the kindness of strangers."

[...]

I have watched my 19 year-old daughter and her friends sample countless bands on Napster and Kazaa and, enthusiastic for their music, go out to purchase CDs. My daughter now owns more CDs than I have collected in a lifetime of less exploratory listening.

Then, in 2005, O'Reilly linked on his blog to an article by The Book Standard titled Buying the Cow, Though the Milk Is Free: Why Some Publishers Are Digitizing Themselves. According to O'Reilly:

[...] free downloads can be good marketing, or in the worst cases a minor inconvenience, rather than the horror story that the copyright mafia makes them out to be.

Last month, he revisited his earlier ideas about piracy and copyright, and continues to stand by his earlier conclusions.

On a related note, Nat from O'Reilly discusses the sort of fan mail authors like to hear:

I downloaded a copy from the Net, but realising how good it is, today I will buy a copy to support your work. I do not need a hardcopy, I will continue [to use] the digital version, but I will buy a hardcopy anyway.

Two train wrecks masquerading as products

Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing sometimes has a lovely turn of phrase. Referring to disappointing sales for Blu-Ray and DVD-HD, he describes them as "two train-wrecks masquerading as products", and explains:

No one seems to want to buy a box whose selling price has been doubled through the inclusion of "security" measures that treat the box's owner as a potential criminal. What's more, the actual performance of the devices is reportedly poor, the picture just not as sharp as promised (standard DVD pictures are substantially degraded through a series of superfluous digital-analog-digital-analog conversion steps meant to frustrate home copyists).

Why would you pay more to get less?

Details here.

Democracy not going down without a fight in Mexico

Unlike the US, which seems to have simply accepted the gutting of the democratic process with barely a whimper, Mexico's people have not given up the fight for fair democratic elections.

Opposition parties blocked out-going President Vicente Fox from giving his annual speech, calling him a traitor to democracy, while protestors clashed with police in the streets.

Fox's successor, Felipe Calderon, won the election by just 244,000 votes, less than 0.6% of the total, under suspicious circumstances and allegations of fraud.

In a sense, it doesn't matter whether the election was fraudulent or fair; what is encouraging is that Mexicans believe in the democratic process, and unlike Americans who meekly grumble over their morning coffees and then get back to chalking up credit card debt, are prepared to fight for it.

But in fact there is significant evidence of fraud.

ePluribus Media reveals that:

• ballots have gone missing


• in one case, officials opened a sealed ballot box only to find it was empty


• over 130,000 ballots have been obviously altered


• sixty percent of the recount sites have discrepencies between the official tally sheets and the actual votes


• and in some precints, the number of votes counted was more than the number of ballots handed out

And this from a recount of a mere 9% of the nations polling stations.

At this stage, we don't know the magnitude or seriousness of some of these errors. It is effectively impossible to count forty-plus million votes without some minor errors, but at this time, evidence for deliberate, significant fraud is looking strong.

Alternet describes more evidence of fraud, including evidence of old-fashioned vote-buying, and points out that there is more publically available evidence for fraud in the Mexican election than there was in the over-turned fraudulant Ukrainian election of 2004.

Other links:
The Nation editorial
Disputed election
Scoop
Sign On San Diego

I've written about the disputed Mexican election before.

Flat daddy

The US military has started giving the families of servicemen life-size cardboard cutouts of the troops, called "Flat Daddy" and "Flat Mommy". This is, apparently, at the request of the troops' families.

From the Boston Globe:

[Kay] Judkins said the cutout has been a comfort since her husband was deployed in January.

"He goes everywhere with me. Every day he comes to work with me," said Judkins, who works in a dentist's office. "I just bought a new table from the Amish community, and he sits at the head of the table. Yes, he does."

You can just see the denial in her eyes as she says that. "Yes, he does." Judkins even takes the cutout to confession. I wonder what she thinks a cardboard cutout has to confess.

This, surely, is the behaviour of a woman who is already thinking of her husband as dead even while he is still alive. If she's this neurotic while he's merely away, how is she going to act if he actually does die?

Check out this picture of "Flat Daddy" Lt. Col. Randall Holbrook and his children, and tell me that these kids aren't disturbed by the whole thing. Keep in mind that this was surely the best, most flattering photo the photographer could take.

More here and commentary from BoingBoing here.

What to do, what to do...

Quinn of ambiguous.org has a suggestion:

I think someone should try to blow up a plane with a piece of ID, just to watch the TSA's mind implode.

I'd pay a dollar to see that.

(TSA: the USA's Transportation Security Administration, part of the Department of Homeland Security.)

Tobacco companies increasing nicotine for kids

A new study reported by the Boston Globe has found that tobacco companies have been slowly and quietly increasing the amount of nicotine in cigarettes, particularly the brands smoked by children.

Between 1998 and 2004, the amount of nicotine per cigarette had increased in 92 of 116 cigarette brands. 52 of those brands had increased by more than 10%.

Nicotine, apart from being quite poisonous, is the major addictive component of cigarettes.

The amount of nicotine in Marlboro products, the brand of choice of two-thirds of high school smokers, had increased by 12%.

I'm in favour of liberalising drug laws, but one factor which gives me pause is the behaviour of the tobacco companies. We've seen how the tobacco companies covered-up evidence that their products were toxic, deliberately marketed their drug to children, filled their products with toxic fillers to make them burn faster, and other immoral, anti-social acts. If and when the so-called "hard" drugs are legalised, what will prevent the suppliers from acting with reckless disregard for people's well-being, as the tobacco companies do?

New crime-fighting tool: dark choc M&Ms

Just two days after offering a reward of two million dark chocolate M&Ms for the return of the stolen painting The Scream by Edvard Munch, it was recovered by Norwegian police.

Coincidence? I think not...

The owner of the painting, the City of Oslo, had offered a $300,000 reward for the recovery of the painting after it was stolen by masked gunmen in November 2004. The Scream has been valued at as much as $81 million. Two million M&Ms are worth about $22,000.

Further details on CNN Money.

Pickle lamp

How to make a lamp out of a pickle:

Plug it into the electricity mains and watch it glow. It is so elegant in its simplicity.

DANGER: Do not try this at home. Unless you really want to. But do take care: live electricity can ruin your whole day.

Click image for full-sized picture. Sourced from Daryl's Science.

BoingBoing discusses the glowing pickle, and points out there is a scientific mystery here: why does the pickle glow only at one end?

McDonalds to stop killing hedgehogs

It has taken five years of negotiations, but the British Hedgehog Preservation Society has convinced McDonalds to redesign their hedgehog-killing McFlurry icecream containers.

The hedgehogs push their head into the discarded containers to eat the left over icecream, and then get trapped, dying of starvation. After five years of little activity, McDonalds said they put in "significant research and testing" to make the hole in the lid smaller.

Stories on Yahoo:
Hedgehogs humble McDonalds
McDonald's tackles prickly issue of hedgehog-friendly ice cream

Bag Lady syndrome on the rise

MSN Money discusses "Bag Lady syndrome", the (semi-)irrational fear felt especially by women that they could easily end up penniless and on the streets. And not just working and middle class women: according to the article, even wealthy and successful women like Lily Tomlin, Gloria Steinem, Shirley MacLaine and Katie Couric have admitted to this fear.

Homelessness is not, of course, unique to the USA, but for a developed nation, America suffers greatly from an epidemic of homelessness. The lack of government or social safety nets makes financial security a matter of "not-so-easy come, easy go", and the US has Third-World levels of economic inequality and poverty: a tiny percentage of mega-rich sitting at the top of a pyramid of many insecure and nervous middle-class and an even bigger base of working class people who are one pay cheque away from the streets.

I think that it is very telling that this anxiety is becoming more comment at the moment. Consumer debt, already at dangerous levels in the USA, is rising, there is great uncertainty in the housing market, banks are offering insane loans, and the political Right is crying The Sky is Falling over Social Security. The increasing levels of financial insecurity and anxiety are surely a factor in the American move towards religious fundamentalism.

(Link thanks to Boing Boing.)

Help ban this offensive book from Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart has, in the past, banned books from their shelves if they have contained offensive, objectionable content. Unfortunately, they have missed a truly repulsive example of a book containing the most horribly offensive passages. This work of depravity:

• calls for discrimination against women and the disabled


• endorses slavery and the treatment of human beings as property


• incites hate crimes against American citizens


• encourages rape and murder of children


• calls for the murder of religious people and the destruction of their cities


• and, in what I would have thought should be of particular concern to Wal-Mart, demands the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of Wal-Mart employees merely for doing their jobs

When you consider the hateful views espoused in this book, I'm shocked that Wal-Mart would allow that book to be sold in its stores.

That book is the Holy Bible, and there is a petition for Wal-Mart to remove the book from their shelves.

(I've written about a related matter before.)

Poodle disguise for Dobermans

And other "fierce" breeds:



See here for the full details of the kit, including larger pictures.

Another innocent terrorist released

For four years, the US Government has declared that German-born Murat Kurnaz was a terrorist, and that they had "secret" evidence to prove he was a member of al Qaeda.

A week ago, Kurnaz was released from the Guantanamo Bay military prison and turned over to Germany, a free man again.

Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen born and raised in Germany, was kidnapped in Pakistan and handed over to the US. He was held without access to a lawyer for at least two years, and was not charged with any crime. Nevertheless, the US government declared him a terrorist based only on secret evidence. Once the evidence against him was declassified, it became clear there was nothing linking him to al Qaeda, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden or any other threat, and Germany was finally able to negotiate his freedom.

Donor wants her kidney back

WARNING: satire alert.

LarkNews tells the tale of an organ donor who wants her kidney back:

Aleta Smith, who donated her kidney to a 20-year-old college student last year, wants it back now that the student has changed religions.

Smith, a self-described "on-fire Christian," gave her kidney to Hannah Felks, a Lutheran and regular Christian camp counselor, last year after seeing Felks on the local news.

[...]

"I feel helpless," she says. "Part of my body, my DNA, is stuck inside a person who's going to hell."

Smith suffers nightmares of her former organ filtering "strange Asian teas, pig blood and witch doctor brews in Africa," she says. She wonders if the Lord really wanted her to donate the kidney, or if she acted on a "triple-espresso high" she had that morning. She is also concerned that when her body is resurrected, it might be incomplete.

The biggest story you never heard

I should be used to news reports about the gutting of the democratic process in the US by now, but somehow I still find it shocking that the mainstream media just doesn't care.

Back in June, the Republican candidate for California’s 50th Congressional District, Brian Bilbray, slightly out-polled Democrat Francine Busby. The election was under a cloud of irregularities, such as precints where there were more absentee ballots than registered voters.

Despite the obvious opportunities for fraud, and significant evidence that fraud actually did take place, Bilbray was sworn in as a member of the United States House of Representatives. It wasn't until more than two weeks later that the Registrar of San Diego County officially certified the electoral results. Amazingly enough, more than fifty percent of the votes had not been assigned to the correct precinct (PDF).

The next day, the result was contested, on the grounds that there was affirmative evidence of irregular results (i.e. clear and obvious signs of fraud and cheating, like all those unregistered absentee ballots that were counted).

What happened next is surreal. San Diego Superior Court Judge Yuri Hofmann threw away any pretence of democratic principles by ruling that, once Bilbray was sworn in, the actual votes he may or may not have received become irrelevent.

Let me say that again: once the Speaker of the House of Representatives swears somebody in as a Member, it doesn't matter one whit whether he was duly elected or not. The judge declared that "Once the House asserts exclusive jurisdiction and selects a candidate, the court no longer has jurisdiction", and that the swearing in alone was sufficient to establish Bilbray’s election.

This ruling, if allowed to stand, effectively gives carte blanche to the Speaker of the House to appoint anyone he chooses, for any reason. The American House of Representatives is no longer the People's House, it is now the Speaker's House.

Downer tried to bury WMD letter

Yesterday the Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer responded to allegations that he had tried to suppress a damning letter by Dr John Gee of the Iraq Survey Group, which stated that Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction and that Canberra and Washington were reluctant to accept the facts.

Mr Downer, naturally enough, denied trying to bury the letter, saying:

"Of course not. Why would I?"

and admitting that the government's confidence in the WMD threat had gradually declined after the March 2003 invasion.

Well, for starters, there was the timing of the letter: not long before the 2004 Australian Federal elections. Criticism of the government's WMD fantasies could have hurt the Liberal Party's standing in the election.

And then there are these quotes by Mr Downer in February 2004:

• "The government stands by its presentation of the case for disarming Iraq of its WMD capabilities"


• [Evidence collected since the conflict began showed Saddam Hussein] "was pursuing WMD programs and that his regime was concealing these activities from U.N. inspectors"

They don't look like the words of a man starting to have doubt about the existence of WMD in Iraq. They look like the words of a man lying through his teeth, because as we now know, there was no such evidence in February 2004. It isn't as if there was evidence in February, and then, oops, somebody lost it and now nobody can find it. There is no evidence now, and there was no evidence back then.

More on the allegations here.

I don't expect these revelations to have any lasting effect on the Australian political scene. I see no evidence that anything more than a minority of Australians actually care whether the government ministers lie to the public and cover-up inconvenient facts. Past revelations of Prime Minister "Honest John" Howard and his cabinet lying to the public have lead to a brouhaha for a few days or weeks, then back to business as usual. I don't imagine this will be any different.

Plush Discworld

Complete with Great A'Tuin:


Click here for the original.

Customers. Bless them.

I had this interesting phone call this morning. Names have been changed to protect the guilty.

phone rings, I answer it

"Good morning, Vlad speaking, how may I help you?"

"Hello, this is Betty from Acme Products. Should I be speaking to you or to Robert?"

"That depends on what you want to discuss. What did you want?"

"I don't know."

I swear that's a real quote.

Details continue to emerge on the British terror plot

Bruce Scheier discusses the details (as few as are actually known) on the British "liquid explosive" terror plot.

Details are still sketchy, but those few that are emerging are in this New York Times article, which is unavailable for readers in the UK. A shorter version of the story is here.

In a nutshell, it looks like:

• the plot was real;


• there was no imminent threat as the plot was not very advanced despite being in motion for over a year;


• the plotters had been radicalised by the Iraq war and were allegedly plotting the bombings as retaliation for US and UK alleged crimes against Iraqi civilians ("as you bomb, you will be bombed; as you kill, you will be killed");


• while the chemicals the plotters wanted to use are dangerous, there are real questions about whether they are a practical threat, but they could likely bypass existing airport security systems;


• there was strong pressure from the US government to arrest the plotters for political reasons, which has severely weakened the British case against them (it is hard to convict people of crimes when no crimes have been committed) and wrecked the chances of finding other, possibly more dangerous, terrorists linked to the plotters;


• and the plotters were caught through old-fashioned police investigations, not highly invasive, civil liberty-destroying techniques like widespread surveillance.

Like all these political cases, what gets claimed in the press conference is not necessarily what gets said under oath in the trial. The press conferences about the ricin plot made it look like a real threat too, but that blew away like dust in a tornado once it came to trial. The most serious terrorism-related guilty verdict that came out of the ricin "plot" was conspiracy to make a public nuisance, so I'm keeping an open mind about this until the trial and appeals are completed.

Strangely enough, Schneier's silent on the Pakistan torture angle, but he makes an excellent point about the futility of the current security strategy being used:

As I said on a radio interview a couple of weeks ago: "We ban guns and knives, and the terrorists use box cutters. We ban box cutters and corkscrews, and they hide explosives in their shoes. We screen shoes, and the terrorists use liquids. We ban liquids, and the terrorist will use something else. It's not a fair game, because the terrorists get to see our security measures before they plan their attack." And it's not a game we can win. So let's stop playing, and play a game we actually can win. The real lesson of the London arrests is that investigation and intelligence work.

There are some more interesting details: Schneier mentions a 1995 plot to use liquid explosives: the plot was foiled and planes protected without a complete ban of liquids. A reader commented on Schneier's blog "Just to play devil's advocate, it's possible to say that they made the wrong decision then", to which Schneier responded: "All we have to do is look at the enormous number of planes blown up in midair using the same technique to know the answer to that one."

Can you legally play an overseas DVD?

Virtually all DVDs have "region encoding", one or more codes on the disc that tells the player where in the world you are supposed to watch the DVD.

Needless to say, consumers are split into two groups: those who don't notice region encoding, and those who hate it passionately. For example, there are millions of fans of Japanese anime across all DVD regions, but anime DVDs are typically only released on Region 2 discs, making watching them difficult in the US or Australia. Hence, there are thriving black- and grey-markets for "mod chips" and other technologies for removing region encoding.

Kim Weatherall looks at the legality of playing DVDs from other regions in Australia. Although it is a very simple question -- "Can I legally watch this legally purchased DVD from overseas?" -- the answer is not simple at all.

After looking at various laws, including the Australian Copyright Act, the Aus-US Free Trade Agreement, and various legal rulings, the conclusion is that it is legal to watch those overseas DVDs -- but only just. It assumes two factors: firstly, that the copyrights on the computer code and video on the DVD disc, in both countries, are owned by the same person, and that the amount of video copied into the DVD player's temporary memory is not "substantial" -- whatever that means.

Weatherall's conclusion is sobering:

your right to play a DVD legitimately purchased overseas rests on as slender a thread as this: if a copyright owner can prove that a substantial part of the film is embodied in RAM at some given moment, they will be able to show that you are making a temporary copy, which is not covered by the section 43B defence.

Is this likely? Well, the question is effectively open. And Sony tried quite hard to demonstrate this after the fact in Stevens v Sony, using a demonstration of how much game could be played without keeping the disk in the machine.

iPod in toilet over-reaction

Bruce Schneier links to the behind-the-scenes details of a "terror scare" on board a plane flying to Canada when a passenger accidently dropped his iPod into the toilet.

An iPod in a toilet. Easy fix, right? You just pull it out, no big deal, right? Not in the Kafkaesque world of "security", where the more Sturm und Drang you can generate, the more secure your job is. Just because the guy who dropped the iPod told the stewardesses what he'd done, that's no reason not to interrogate everybody on the plane, and ask them frighteningly personal questions about their sex lives.

Of course, once you realise the passengers were left waiting on the plane for forty minutes before being taken off for questioning, it becomes obvious that there was never any genuine fear amongst officials that there was a real threat. If they actually thought there was a bomb on the plane, they would have got the passengers off immediately it touched down, not kept them in their seats for forty minutes.

It's all security theatre, to keep the voters and tax payers frightened so that the money will keep flowing to the security organisations.

Science Is Dead

... so says Mark Noonan, and that Reasonable Conservative, Jon Swift, agrees:

I must say I haven't been so happy since we reached the End of History. What is especially great about Noonan's theory that science is dead is that he doesn't have to conduct any experiments or present any evidence to prove science is dead because science would actually have to be alive to do that.
[...]
Now I suppose a few namby-pamby intellectuals will try to point out that scientists are responsible for a lot of practical things we enjoy, like decaffeinated coffee, Velcro and spell-checkers. Like Al Gore, they will probably try to take credit for inventing the Internet, too. But we wouldn't have those things unless God wanted us to have them. They, are, in short, modern miracles. I think that even if God decides not to give us anymore "scientific" miracles, when you weigh all the bad that science has been responsible for (the Holocaust, Marxism, cable television) against the few modern conveniences we enjoy, I think you'll agree that the death of science is a good thing and we should all thank President Bush for helping to kill it off.

Full story here.

PZ Myers has a factual rebuttal, for those who can stop laughing long enough to take Mark Noonan seriously.

Morality and invasion

The Leiter Reports looks at the claims of a philosopher who insists that there is no moral case against the invasion of Iraq. Well worth reading.

All the options

William Edmundson, writing for the Leiter Report, discusses the "Madman strategy" of Richard Nixon, and how it relates to the current ugliness in the Middle East, where Republican shrills for the neo-cons clamour for war.

Edmundson quotes the NY Times, which reported a US official complaining about the intelligence community's insistence that there is no evidence Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons:

"When they say there is 'no evidence,' you have to ask them what they mean, what is the meaning of the term 'evidence'?"

And this from the same political party which criticised President Clinton for his duplicity about "sexual relations", and campaigns on Moral Values. (Yeah -- evil, wicked morals. But still morals.) Which is worse, lying about a bit of hanky-panky between consenting adults, or starting an unnecessary war and killing thousands?

Obviously it is the hanky-panky.

Edmundson continues:

In the same story, Newt Gingrich is reported to explain what "evidence" means:

"When the intelligence community says Iran is 5 to 10 years away from a nuclear weapon, I ask: 'If North Korea were to ship them a nuke tomorrow, how close would they be then?'"

And if peaches were tomatoes, then peach jam would taste just like napoli sauce.

Of course, if Gingrich really believed that, he would have to consider what if North Korea (or Pakistan, or China, or Russia) has shipped Iran hundreds of nukes, and they're planted all over the USA right now. Obviously the answer is, the US has no choice but to surrender unconditionally to Iran.

Of course, if Iran made such a claim, you can bet that Gingrich, like the US official, will suddenly remember just what evidence means, and start declaring that there is no evidence that Iran has nukes.

It shows you just what we've come to, when we find ourselves hoping against hope that the US president is only pretending to have the morals of a stoat.

The Arab street

In the aftermath of the Israeli war on Lebanon, Arab bloggers and writers have been very busy discussing "Who Won?" Marc Lynch at Abu Aardvark writes about the many, varied responses coming out of "the Arab street".

For reasons I've already discussed, it is quite clear to me that Hezbollah, bloody but unbowed, won the ground war. Clearly Lebanon the nation-state was the big loser: the United Nations is estimating that Lebanon's economy has been put back twenty years.

The most interesting thing from Lynch's blog isn't the various opinions on who won, but the fact that there is a great deal of diversity in Arab opinion. People are often tempted to lump diverse "others" into a single basket, like Bush's imaginary "Axis of Evil": with enemies and rivals Iraq and Iran, isolationist North Korea, and non-state terrorist organisation al Qaeda (enemy to both the secular Iraqi government and the wrong-sort-of-religion theocratic Iranian government) being treated as essentially identical. But in real life, people or nations don't come in two flavours of Us and Them.

There is, however, one sense in which the so-called Arab street is unified: their increasing anger and fury at the US, Israel, and their accomplices in the friendly Arab regimes.

Marc Lynch has a follow-up here. Both are worth reading.

Western, particularly American, political actions over the last few decades has been pushing the Muslim world to become more radicalized, more violent and angry. We (by which I mean the elites in government that rule in our names) have, whether by design, or stupidity, or accident, been pushing millions of Muslims into the welcoming arms of Islamic anti-Western Fundamentalists. I do not welcome the day that Hezbollah controls Lebanon's politics, but Israel's foolish, arrogant, wicked adventurism has made that day more likely. The people that we trust with keeping us safe from our enemies have been, through their short-sighted greed and hunger for power, been boosting the strength and power of those Medieval, vicious god-botherers who want to control how we dress, what we eat, how we wear our hair, and how we think.

Cluster bombs

Juan Cole discusses the thousands of unexploded cluster bombs in Lebanon which have already killed and maimed civilians, especially children:

The bombs frequently do not detonate, so now south Lebanon is littered with deadly fist-size bomblets that will inevitably kill and disfigure children and other civilians.

The US State Department will investigate whether Israeli deployment of these weapons in civilian areas violated secret agreements under which Washington supplied them to Israel.

Nothing will come of the investigation, given the clout of the Israel lobby in Washington, but someday the relative of an innocent maimed Lebanese may decide to take revenge on the country that supplied the cluster bombs. And the American public will ask in astonishment why anyone should hate us.

Because they "hate our freedoms", surely?

Gods and demons

Sujatha Sundar the Accidental Blogger writes about a fascinating linguistic reversal between Hinduism and Zoroastrianism: one religion's gods are the other religion's demons, and vice versa.

Hindu traditions derived from Indo-Aryan tenets, consider Suras (or Devas) to be beings of light, gods of various kinds, while Asuras ('not Suras') are darker beings, largely with dark instincts and are most commonly portrayed as the embodiments of evil (for instance demon king Ravana). In Zoroastrianism, the opposite linguistic paradigm holds true - Ahura is the being of light, all powerful and all good, while Daevas are the 'bad guys'.

Town name

It might be politically unsound to make fun of words derived from other languages, but what the hey.

Looking at a map of Western Australia this evening, I came across the town of Beeringgnurding, about 190 miles to the north-west (-ish) of Perth.

Beeringgnurding. Try saying that after a few beers.

Moral vacancy

In September 2004, E.L. Doctorow wrote a powerful essay about the moral vaccuum in the heart of President Bush the Younger. Since then, events have shown that Doctorow was right on the money.

I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our 21-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-Day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.

But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons of mass destruction he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man.

He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the 1,000 dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be.

They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life . . . they come to his desk as a political liability, which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.

Powerful stuff.

Thanks to the Leiter Report.

What the Iraqi people want

Marc Lynch discusses the latest opinion poll from Iraq. Almost 92% of Iraqis now want the US occupying forces to leave their country.

But what is absolutely devastating for the US's claim of the moral high-ground is that that opinion is now held virtually across the entire country, by all the major ethnic groups: the presense of occupying troops is "strongly opposed" by 97.2% of Sunni, 89.7% of Shiite, and even amongst the US's strongest allies, the Kurds, 63.3% now oppose the US presence. In total, 84.5% of Iraqis want the US to leave.

Just a few months ago the situation in the north, Kurdistan, was relatively stable. But things seem to have changed: the number of Kurds who "strongly agreed" that life is "unpredictable and dangerous" increased from 16% in the last survey to 50%.

That was before Turkey's week-long attacks on Kurdish "terrorists" (or, if you prefer, freedom fighters). Civil war between Sunni and Shiites, British troops being driven out of towns, Americans committing atrocities, both Iran ("the bad guys") and Turkey ("our friends the good guys") taking a leaf from Israel's book and shelling and bombing Kurdistan...

If you did a survey, I wonder how many Iraqis would prefer to see "the Moustache" Saddam Hussein back in power? Under Saddam, Iraqis were relatively safe if they kept their head down -- now, there is no safety anywhere, and no sign that things are getting better.

What an ugly, ugly mess.

It's been said, "you break it, you fix it". I think Iraq is beyond fixing now. It is difficult to see any way out, whether Iraq remains a single nation or is partitioned into three (or more?) countries. Whatever happens, Bush has brought chaos and instability to one of the most critical, explosive areas of the world.

Thanks George.

US Congress report on Iran

Juan Cole analyses the recent Republican Congressional report on Iran's supposed nuclear weapons program, and finds a repeat of the distortions and lies of Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" propoganda.

Somebody should tell President Bush the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

Cole's blog has more details, but a number of points stand out:

• The Republicans have a lot of gall for complaining about the lack of intelligence about Iran's nuclear programme: it was Republican mastermind Karl Rove who leaked the information that Valerie Plame was working as an undercover CIA operative in Iran, attempting to find out more about their nuclear programme. This leak not only destroyed her usefulness, but lead directly to the deaths or arrests of Iranians who had been giving her information. Needless to say, Rove and his gang, who put short-term political revenge ahead of national security, have not been punished in the slightest.


• The report selectively quotes from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) only when they are critical of Iran, and ignores them when they point out that Iran has cooperated with them and given them access to sensitive facilities when asked. Iran is acting like it has nothing to hide.


• And then there is the misreprepresentation of Iran's programme as being able to enrich uranium to "weapons grade". That is untrue: Iran has publicly admitted to having a cascade of 180 centrifuges, and can enrich uranium to 3.5%, far short of the 80% or more needed even for an inefficient bomb. With existing technology, it takes a cascade of about 16 thousand centrifuges to get to 80% enriched uranium. Iran, according to all the evidence, is short by 15,820.

Cole has more detail -- it makes sobering reading to realise that, having successfully fooled some of the people over Iraq, the neo-cons are trying it again over Iran.

The difference this time is that Iran, unlike Iraq, actually has an army capable of fighting back against anything short of nuclear weapons, and a highly successful, battle-hardened ally in Lebanon. If the Bush armchair warriors decide that, having got one leg caught in the Iraq quagmire, that this is a good time to tackle Iran as well, there will be a lot of dead Americans and Israelis.

Get to the back of the bus

Wonderful news for those conservatives who want to roll back the clock to the glory days before the wicked Sixties: a god-fearing bus driver from Red River Parish in Louisiana has struck a blow for decency and conservatism by ordering nine black Elementary School students to the back of the bus, designating the front of the bus ("the special seats") for whites like himself.

Story here.

I'm shocked

You can knock me over with a feather.

As a Linux and former Macintosh user, I'm quite used to being sent proprietary, Windows-only file formats that can't be read except by specific, commercial software -- although it must be said that over the last few years, Linux software has become very good at coping with all sorts of secret file formats. It's been a while I've come across a file I wasn't able to open under Linux.

And then the other day, I received an email with an attached .mht file, and neither Kmail, Firefox, Konqueror or Mozilla seemed able to deal with it correctly.

That's not the shocking thing. The shocking thing is that .mht files are a standard, open file format, with a RFC from 1999 specifying the format: HTML plus external resources such as images, in a MIME encoding. It is simply a MHTML file. Essentially, it is a web page, plus all its images, sounds or other extras, in a single file.

Internet Explorer has supported MHTML in the form of .mht files for years; Opera has recently added support for it. Konquorer does something similar, except it puts the files in a compressed tar ball (.tar.gz or .tgz) and calls it a .war (Web ARchive) file.

As far as I can tell, this is a case where Microsoft has actually done the right thing, using a standard, open file format, and the Linux world is lagging behind. Shocking, but true.

Abstinence-only sex education

Jim Lippard reports that the main result of eighteen years of abstinence-only sex education in Timken High School in Canton, Ohio is that, last year, 65 of the 490 female students (or 13%) in the high school became pregnant.

And people are surprised at this?

Meanwhile, in liberated Afghanistan...

...the Taliban are effectively in control in the south, thanks in a big way to the War on Drugs.

What a mess Afghanistan is. In the 19th century, the Great Game was played out by Russia and Great Britain. In the late 20th century, it was USSR and the USA. Now it looks like continuing, between the US and UK on one side, and Pakistan on the other, and no doubt a more aggressive Russia will insist on joining again. Whoever wins, the Afghani people lose; and, with the expansion of religious Fundamentalism and extremism, so will the rest of us.

God for the fearful

PZ Myers points out that the old adage "there are no atheists in fox-holes" is not only wrong but, if it were true, would be an admission that religion is for the scared and fearful: make them terrified enough, and they will believe anything.

Legalised theft

I've written before about legalised theft by the US government under the guise of the "War Against Drugs".

Here is another example: a US Court of Appeals has ruled that if you get caught carrying around large sums of money, the government can assume it came from illegal drug trafficking and seize the money.

There are more details by Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars:

Gonzolez was not charged with any crime because there was no evidence of any crime, yet they confiscated $125,000 based on the civil forfeiture laws without showing any crime had been committed by anyone connected to the money.

Police laugh about shooting

On November 20^th 2003, Elizabeth Ritter was shot four times by Miami police, including once in the face. The officers involved laughed and joked about it, and their sergeant, rather than reprimand them, complimented them.

How very droll.

Only after a video tape of the laughing officers became public did the police department offer an apology.

Why TrackMeNot is a waste of time

In the wake of vast privacy breaches from AOL, and the possibility of others from Google, Yahoo and other search engines, some well-meaning coders created a Firefox extension called TrackMeNot.

TrackMeNot sounds like a good idea: while you browse the Internet, it runs in the background sending fake search requests to the major search engines, hiding your actual searches in a sea of fake ones. From the TrackMeNot website:

It hides users' actual search trails in a cloud of 'ghost' queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles.

Bruce Scheier explains why it is a waste of time. So does BoingBoing.

As it stands now, TMN is pointless. Any serious dataminer can easily separate the fake queries from the real ones. But even if the technical flaws in it were solved, it doesn't "hide" your searches at all -- it just gives the bad guys/authorities more reason to investigate you, which makes it not just pointless but counter-productive. The only way this tool could be genuinely useful would be if enough people used it that dataminers decided that all search data was suspect -- and that would require a large percentage, maybe even a majority, of Internet users to use it. And that isn't going to happen without an unholy army of virus-born 'bots, millions upon millions of computer trojans and viruses, firing off fake search requests from innocent third parties' computers. But that would be Wrong.

Smarter than the average bear

Bruce Schneier discusses the security issues related to bears in national parks, and quotes a park ranger:

There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.

"Dumbest" is perhaps unfair. As Scheier explains, the problem isn't dumb people, because even the dumbest person is smarter than bears, but that people are impatient, while even the dumbest bear is tenacious enough to spend hours solving a problem.

The end of the Wintel duopoly?

Are Microsoft and Intel in trouble? The signs are troubling for the major players in the Wintel world, with Microsoft's earnings cut by 29%, Intel's by 90%, while IBM, Texas Instruments and Red Hat seeing some major growth.

PRM wars

Ed Felten discusses so-called "Property Rights Management" here. Worth reading if you want an early warning of the next stage in the battle over control and ownership.

I discussed this earlier.

Yahoo gets it, Google doesn't

Earlier, I discussed Google Inc.'s nastygrams to various media people ordering them to stop using the verb "google". It seems that Yahoo knows the value of the English language: they've put out the word that they want people to re-mix their brand.

Kicked off a plane

It was only a matter of time -- and frankly, I'm surprised it took this long. Brown-skinned Asians have been evicted from commercial airline flights in Britain after passengers refused to fly with them.

Needless to say, the fact that the men had been checked repeatedly by security was no match for the hysteria, fear and terror spread by the Blair government. ["Terrorist": one who acts in such a way as to spread terror.]

Airline to UK gov: no more security theatre

Irish airline Ryanair has warned the UK government to stop messing about with security theatre and to get their act together.

Last Friday, Ryanair threatened to sue for compensation unless airport security measures were returned to normal within seven days. The CEO of Ryanair, Michael O'Leary, described the new restrictions as "farcical Keystone Cops security measures that don't add anything except to block up airports" and "nonsense".

From The Guardian:

Mr O'Leary ridiculed the notion of searching five- or six-year-old children and elderly people in wheelchairs going to Spain. Such scenes, he said, would have "terrorists laughing in the caves of Afghanistan".

Of course the terrorists aim is to sow fear and confusion. Remember, you read about the terrorists' plans here and here first.

Reading the NY Times

It seems that the right-wing read very differently from the rest of us. Right-wing pundits have seriously accused journalists and newspapers such as the NY Times of treason for reporting the news. What's going on?

Thanks to this website, now you too can see the NY Times as wing-nuts see it.

[Requires Flash.]

Film makers eat their young

Stronger copyright laws are enabling film and documentary makers to eat their young: with the costs (both royalties and legal expenses) of clearing even tiny, fair use clips exploding out of control, it is harder than ever to create films and documentaries, and existing film studios are able to lay down legal minefields to prevent smaller, up-and-coming artists from creating films -- especially documentaries. At a time when the technological barriers to becoming a film maker are shrinking, the artificial barriers are growing ever larger.

LA Weekly has an article about some of the trials and tribulations of documentary makers. British documentary maker Adam Curtis has not been able to distribute his BBC miniseries in the USA because of the cost of copyright: from $1,500 per minute in Britain to at least $7,000 per minute in the USA.

Remember that copyright law was created in order to encourage, not discourage, the creation of new artistic works, and it becomes clear that existing copyright laws are not just broken but actively harmful and require a major overhaul.

"Copyright holders have become so aggressive, they've limited the creative process in all different kinds of mediums," says [film maker Kirby] Dick. "That's bad for artists and bad for the studios. I think they're shooting themselves in the foot."

All is not darkness and gloom. While many copyright monopolists are often greedy and grasping, there are others who understand that what goes around comes around. The BBC is apparently keen to release large amounts of their archived work for royalty-free use via the Internet. Now that will be very, very interesting indeed!

Footprints

How very Fortean...

Outside the office where I work, there are three elevators. There are a set of five perfectly clear white footprints (probably plaster dust) on the carpet, leading precisely from one set of elevator doors to the next, in a steady gait. Whoever it was, they stepped out of one lift and walked immediately into the next, without pausing or stopping or diverting in any way at all.

What are the chances that two lifts would be open on the same floor at the same time? I think it more likely that the footprints came from somebody who simply walked through the metal doors and floated down the elevator shaft.

A mysterious occurrence

How strange. This morning the drivers seat of my car was soaked, even though the door was shut and locked, and the window closed. It had rained, but only lightly.

It must be one of those wossnames, mysterious phenomena, like rains of ketchup or singing sandwiches.

Is this the sickest piece of tackiness ever?

National Collector’s Mint is releasing a limited edition commemorative coin to celebrate commemorate the destruction of the World Trade Centre. Made of gold and silver, with the silver "miraculously" recovered from the teeth of the victims a bank vault found under the rubble.

As a tribute to the thousands who died, the inset of the Twin Towers on the coin is able to rise up like the world's most tacky erection: "The effect is dazzling - it is literally transformed into a standing sculpture of the Twin Towers!"


(Overheard at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: "Look Laura! It's risen again!" "That's nice dear, why don't you go show it to Mister Cheney like a good boy?")

And best of all, the coin has been discounted! The price "was to be set at $49.95. However, during this limited special release, this Gold and Silver clad masterpiece can be yours for just $29.95." And if you call now, you get a free steak knife.

Okay, I made up the bit about the steak knife.

You can see this "truly unique" piece of tat in all its glory here.

The gamble for Iraq

The New Yorker has published an essay by Hendrik Hertzberg about President Bush's Iraq gamble. The news is not good when even Thomas L. Friedman, one of the war's Number One supporters, writes "It is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are baby-sitting a civil war."

It is in the nature of gambling that the gamble may lose. The dice have now been well and truly rolled, and they have come up snake eyes. The war’s sole real gain--the overthrow of the murderous Saddam Hussein regime--is mocked by the chaos and suffering that have overwhelmed millions of Iraqis, whose country is again a republic of fear. The concrete losses are horrific: nearly three thousand American and "coalition" troops killed; thousands more maimed; scores of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead; a third of a trillion dollars burned through. So are the less tangible ones: the unprecedented levels of anti-Americanism throughout the Muslim world and Europe; the self-inflicted loss of America’s moral prestige; the neglect of real nuclear dangers, in Iran and North Korea, while chimeras were chased in Iraq. The neoconservative project of a friendly, democratic Middle East, with Israel and Palestine living side by side in peace, is worse than a charred ruin—it is a flaming inferno.

Hertzberg points out that sixty percent of the American public now oppose the Iraq occupation, and that the majority of them do so because it has harmed, not helped, the larger struggle against those who would hurt them.

(Alas that the American public has not quite worked out yet that the biggest danger comes not from terrorists, but from the wolves in sheep's clothing who claim to be protecting them.)

Hertzberg observes that the alleged terrorists arrested in Britain were thwarted, not because of the Iraq occupation or the War on Terror, but because of the old-fashioned virtues of "dogged police work, lawful surveillance, and international coöperation", and that it is precisely those virtues which have been hamstrung by the waste of manpower and materials in Iraq. As Hertzberg asks, "Why not change the game to one that relies less on gambling and bluff and more on wisdom, planning, and (in every sense) intelligence?"

Link via Echidne.

Windows 2012

A serious of startup messages from Windows 2012 has fallen through a timewarp and found their way to Mark Gibbs of Network World.

08:52 Welcome to the Microsoft Windows Horizon operating system. Today is July 10, 2012. The temperature outside is 105 degrees Fahrenheit, the wind speed is 40 knots gusting to 80 knots, the air pollution level is extreme and the UV level is dangerous. The Homeland Security Threat Level is red.

09:03 To log on, please enter your name and password. Thank you, your account is valid. Please touch the fingerprint scanner. Thank you, your fingerprint is recognized. Please look into the retinal scanner. Thank you, retinal scan passed.

Read more.

Pummelled by squid

Professional diver Scott Cassell and his partner Jacquie Cozens recently went in search of the Rojo Diablo ("Red Demon") Humboldt squid. These squid are aggressive, large predators which attack in packs and there have been reported cases of them devouring Mexico fishermen. Each tentacle has more than 100 suckers, each lines with up to 26 needle-sharp teeth, allowing the squid to attack its prey with more than 24,000 teeth at once.

There were more than 20 giant squid right below me -- not even ten feet away! Ranging in length from five to six feet, they hovered nearby just looking at me, studying me. My splash entry was like ringing a dinner bell. Suddenly, about 10 squid began to move in for a closer look. As they neared, they flashed from white to pink to bright red then back to white, all within a split second. It was beautiful! They looked like animals from another planet, totally unearthly.

As I floated there transfixed, a large squid moved to within two feet and flashed again. Mesmerized by the strobe effect, I didn’t see that another squid was rushing in from my left. Bam! It hit me with a tentacular strike that felt like being hit with a baseball bat square in the ribs. Shocked by the power of the strike and unable to breathe because of a cramp in my chest, I turned to see what had hit me and saw four more squid headed toward me. The first came in so fast that I could barely track it with the camera, and then Bam! It struck the camera, which in turn struck me in the face. I was starting to feel like I was in a barroom brawl.

After five attacks of equal ferocity, the magnificent monsters decided I was inedible and had no further use for me. With a few blasts from their massive jet funnels, they disappeared into the depths within seconds. Dazed and excited, I realized the entire ordeal lasted less than one minute. After dangling in the water for 30 minutes looking for any signs of their return, I surfaced and climbed into the boat. I later discovered bruises on me the size of oranges, as well as several scratches in my anti-squid armor suit. The system was working, but each attack left its mark — and this was just the first dive of dozens yet to come.

Oh man oh man oh man, I wanna get me some of that anti-squid armour! You never know when you'll find something like this baby in your bath-tub:


See here for the full story and some wonderful photos. One small point though: squid aren't "magnificent mollusks". Oops.

[Update, 18:53pm. Oops is right, only it is my oops. Squid are classified in the phylum Mollusca, which makes them mollusks as well as cephalopods. D'oh!]

Thanks to Pharyngula.

Hezbollah to Syria: pull your head in

Juan Cole is reporting on Hezbollah's snub to Syria:

[...] Hizbullah declined to adopt the position of Syrian President Bashar al-Asad in accusing the reformist politicians of standing against Hizbullah and the resistance in Lebanon. (Bashar has a feud with the 14 March group, but Hizbullah joined it in a national unity government.) Husayn al-Hajj Hasan, a Hizbullah member of parliament said, "we reject the idea of considering the 14 March group to be agents of Israel and America."

In an emotional speech in Beirut Thursday morning, shown on LBC, Saad Hariri said that the 33-day long Israeli campaign against Lebanon had inflicted profound damage on the country. He went on to say that it was painful to find a sibling Arab leader adding insult to injury by instigating division and infighting among Lebanese. Hariri was referring to Tuesday's speech by Bashar al-Asad of Syria in which he accused Hariri and other members of his coalition of being agents of foreign powers and urged Hizbullah to stand up to them. Hariri said that Lebanon had seen nothing from Syria but hatred, hypocrisy and lies. He accused Syria of trading for its own advantage on the blood of Arab children at Qana, in Gaza and in Baghdad. He said he sympathized with the suffering masses of Syria who labored under a tyrannical regime that denied them the possibility of free elections. He reminded Damascus that steadfastness in the face of Israeli attacks was a famed Lebanese product, stemming from Lebanese national unity. (Asad had said that the 14 March group was a product of Israel.)

This is a good sign for Lebanon, and further evidence that Hezbollah is becoming a responsible, serious player in the region, not merely a tool of Syria and/or Iran, and is trying hard to avoid a disasterous return to the civil war. Looks like Syria is rapidly becoming irrelevent.

Selling ice to Eskimos

And oil to Iraqis.

A good measure of the incompetent handling of the Iraqi occupation is the news that not only is Iraq suffering from major fuel shortages, but that they are getting worse, not better: Iraq has had to double the amount of money it spends on importing oil and related products.

Created in Squid's Image

Helmut from Phronesisaical discusses the incredible discovery that Mankind was Created in Squid's Image!

There are more fascinating upheavals in science according to PZ Myers at Pharyngula.

Random bag searches

Security consultant Bruce Schneier discusses New York City's random bag searches on subways, and why they are a pointless waste of time. Recently the US Supreme Court ruled that the searches are legal, on the basis of some exceedingly dubious reasoning, and Scheier discusses that too. Especially of interest is one of the reader's comments, which points out that Customs has found its ability to do its job seriously hampered by the ineffective and dubious "anti-terrorism" programmes foisted upon it. It seems quite likely that, at least in more excitable nations such as the USA, the end result of many of these "security" measures will be less, not more, security.

A plan comes together

David Malki of Wondermark has a scoop on the background of the British terrorist plot:



Click image for the full details.