The Conehead Economy

Economic growth is a good thing. (Well, there's some big questions over both the possibility and desirability of perpetual growth, but let's ignore them for now.) On average, economic growth means that more people can afford more things, which means they can live happier and healthier lives and not need to worry about starving to death.

Ah, but there's a trap hidden in that statement: on average. Average growth is a very different thing than real growth, especially if you measure average with the "arithmetic mean" that you probably learnt about in school. A toy example will show what I mean: suppose our toy economy consists of five workers: Homer, Moe, Apu, Barney and Mr Burns. In 2006, Homer, Moe, Apu and Barney make $30,000 a piece, and Mr Burns makes $3,000,000. In 2007, Mr Burns' income has increased by $1,000,000, while the others earn exactly the same amount. The result is that the average income increases from $624,000 to $824,000. Lo and behold, Mayor Quimby can crow that his Millionaire Friendly Policies has led to the average worker getting a 32% increase in income in just one year! Marvellous! Obviously a rising tide raises all boats.

Drawn out in detail like that, it seems so obvious that nobody could possibly be fooled by it. Lies, damned lies and statistics. But in fact, that is precisely what the miracle of American economic growth since the late 1970s is made up of. Only the numbers are different, the principle is the same: the vast number of Americans have seen virtually no economic growth, or even a loss of income, while the overall average is inflated by enormous gains at the top of the pyramid. There's been growth, and plenty of it, but only a relatively small number of people, the richest 1%, have seen much benefits.

As Ezra Klein writes:

In the past, I've called this "The Conehead Economy." Plenty of growth in the economic body, but all of it happening in the top percent. Were that to happen to a person, you'd see six inches of growth in their forehead and doctors everywhere would be puzzling over how to correct the grotesque deformity. As it is, the media trumpets the growth, the politicians backslap over the roaring economy, and everyone wonders why the average American seems so unhappy. [...]

Meanwhile, government policy is explicitly aimed at accelerating the income distortions. [...] But don't object, o' Democrats, lest you be accused of class warfare which, as we know, only happens when the middle class wants their wages to keep up with productivity, as they did in the last generation.

Lest anybody conclude from this that statistics are essentially dishonest, consider this: there are many ways to calculate the average. The method used above, the mean, is just one way of many, and while it has its uses, it is very vulnerable to being distorted by a few very high or very low values. When it comes to income, a better measurement of average is usually the median, which for the above toy economy works out at $30,000 a year, with zero growth on average. Not quite so useful a figure for either the economists or for Mayor Quimby's re-election chances, but it reflects better the actual experience of 4 out of 5 people.

A reminder

When it comes to politics, it's easy to spend all your time blogging about bad news. But it's important to remember that although politics can be dominated by venal, short-sighted and selfish motives, it doesn't have to be.

In 1978, the Principality of Liechtenstein was admitted to the Council of Europe, which gave it the right to nominate a judge to the European Court of Human Rights. Their nominated judge was the eminent Canadian jurist, the late Ronald St. John Macdonald, the only non-European appointed to the Court. MacDonald served on the Court for 18 years and was succeeded by the Swiss human rights lawyer, Mark Villiger. To quote James Wimberley:

Liechtenstein thus set a truly revolutionary precedent for staffing international bodies simply with the most qualified people.

Navy wren dead on floor

Accidents will happen. People can die from undiagnosed illnesses due to no fault of anyone. But in the case of Royal Navy Lieutenant Emma Douglas, there's a big question over responsibility for her death.

Douglas was an undiagnosed diabetic. After being ill for a week and vomiting blood, the medical officer on board the HMS Cornwall pronounced her fit for duty and sent her back to her cabin. A day later she collapsed with stomach cramps. But that's not why there's a question mark over her death: Douglas had not previously shown any of the symptoms of diabetes. But four days after being passed as fit for duty, and three days after collapsing with stomach cramps, Douglas was found collapsed on the floor of her cabin half naked. The duty watch sailor who found her described her as having "laboured breathing" to the officer of the day. Despite being known as a light drinker, her shipmates assumed she was drunk, and nobody checked on her for 24 hours -- by which time she was dead from diabetic keto-acidosis.

What I'd like to know is: is it normal for Royal Navy sailors who are vomiting blood to be pronounced fit for duty? Is it common practice for sailors supposed to be on duty to get drunk, and having drunk themselves into unconsciousness, are they normally left for 24 hours sprawled where they lie?

I think it says a lot about the British Navy culture that a sailor found unconscious on the floor is assumed to be drunk rather than sick.

Anarchy

Secret Service versus the candidates

Why isn't the Secret Service protecting Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama?

Among other duties, the Secret Service is responsible for protecting America's presidential candidates. But something strange has happened this electoral campaign: the Secret Service has started letting people into Clinton and Obama rallies without being screened for weapons or even given a visual check.

The story first broke when the Dallas police force publicly questioned the orders they were given to stop screening, but it's since come out that, this campaign, it's been standard Secret Service policy for all of Clinton's and Obama's rallies: set up metal detectors and screen the crowd, then at some arbitrary point stop and let everyone else in.

The Secret Service has admitted that this is standard procedure, although there's been no word on whether they apply the same procedure to Republican candidates. They certainly don't apply it to public appearances by Bush and Cheney, nor did they apply them during the 2004 presidential elections.

There have already been death threats against Obama. The Secret Service initially took them so seriously that he was given Secret Service protection earlier than any other candidate in American history.

Pledge of what now?

American schools have a pledge of allegiance? And teenagers -- rebellious, hormone-crazed teenagers -- stand for it without mass rebellion? WTF is wrong with you people???

One day during my high school years, I chose not to rise for the Pledge of Allegiance. A daily compulsion to demonstrate my patriotism seemed wrong on the face of it. My fidelity to the United States, the republic for which the flag stands, should be assumed. The next day, I made the same choice. And you can guess what happened next.

The school was very uncomfortable with my stance. In only a day or two, nearly all my classmates and teachers knew I was the guy who wouldn't stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. Because they had to enforce pledge-making every morning, teachers had, by and large, a bigger problem with my stance than my fellow students.

As a child in primary school (years 1-6) we were expected to salute the flag every morning. As a Jehovah's Witness (don't worry, I got better) I wasn't supposed to give my allegiance to anyone but Uncle God in the sky, so on the (rare) occasions I wasn't late I just stood at attention respectfully and didn't salute. I never got any stick from either my fellow kiddies or the teachers over it. As near as I could tell, the entire school, from the Head Master to the youngest Grade 1, felt the whole thing was a tedious and pointless exercise, but one that had to be done lest the entire British Empire instantly collapse. (In the 1970s, Australia was sleeping around with the flash Yanks but hadn't quite got up the nerve to tell England we wanted a divorce. We still haven't, but at least we're more open about the trial separation and the whole "seeing other countries" thing.)

But once I got to High School (years 7-12) all that changed. At least when I was at school, public schools (for the benefit of any foreigners, that is government-run schools) didn't do any such thing. The thought of getting a couple of hundred fifteen year olds to salute the flag seems ludicrous to my experiences. Although I guess the private schools that run army cadet camps probably manage it, although how many of the kids playing at being soldiers actually treat it seriously and how many are doing it just so they get to play soldiers and get out of school work for a while I'm sure I don't know.

The Deserter's Tale

Smoking Chimp reviews a book by former US soldier Joshua Key, who deserted from the army and ran away to Canada because of the things he did and saw in Iraq. His application for refugee status in Canada has been rejected and he faces deportation to the US. In his book, he says:

“My own moral judgment was disintegrating under the pressure of being a soldier, feeling vulnerable, and having no clear enemy to kill in Iraq. We were encouraged to beat up on the enemy; given the absence of any clearly understood enemy, we picked our fights with civilians who were powerless to resist. We knew that we would not have to account for our actions.”

“... the American military had betrayed the values of my country. We had become a force for evil, and I could not escape the fact that I was part of the machine.”

“How would I react if foreigners invaded the United States and did just a tenth of the things that we had done to the Iraqi people? I would be right up there with the rebels and insurgents, using every bit of my cleverness to blow up the occupiers.”

(Quoted here.)

It's easy to forget that bad things happen in wartime not just because bad people go to war, but because war makes even good people turn bad.

Comparisons are odious

Especially when they don't support the myth that conservatives are better for the economy.



(Via Brad De Long.)

Speaking of PZ Myers...

Oh my, check out what he has to say about the latest in a long, long line of toxic evangelists here.

In the spirit of Oscar Wilde, I think I shall have to start using the term "demented goblin" at every opportunity.

Oscar Wilde: "I wish I had said that."
James McNeill Whistler: "You will Oscar, you will."

Devil toads and narwhals

PZ Myers reports on the discovery of the extinct Beelzebufo frog:

It means "devil toad," and it was a 10 pound monster that lived 70 million years ago, in what is now Madagascar. It's huge, and judging by its living cousins, was a voracious predator. If it were alive today, it would probably be eating your cats and puppies.

In other words, this was an awesome toad, and I wish I had one for a pet.

Who wouldn't want one of these little beauties? (Artist's impression, naturally.)

(Click image for full view.)

And new research into narwhals has solved the mystery of the narwhal's 8-foot-long tooth. It seems that the tooth is actually a high-tech sensor: it is filled with millions of nerve connections, and is capable of sensing changes in water temperature and pressure, and in particle density of the water.

Adventures in hypocrisy, part eleventy bazillion

Remember the Turkish invasion of northern Iraq that Turkey denied they made?

Seems that Junior Prez Dubyah Bush has something to say about that. Namely, that Turkey shouldn't ignore the will of the international community and that they better leave Iraq right now, terrorists or no terrorists. Pretty please. Or something like that.

Earlier, Turkey admitted that they had 10,000 troops battling the Kurdish terrorists. Naturally, the elephant in the room that the media doesn't want to mention is that northern Iraq has been under US and UK protection since the first Gulf War ended in 1991, and even today, the US is sheltering the Kurdish independence groups who have been committing terrorist attacks against Turkey.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said:

It's very important that the Turks make this operation as short as possible and then leave, and to be mindful of Iraqi sovereignty.

It would be nice to say that his words were received with peals of laughter, or even stunned silence, but such is the irony-free 21st century that they were probably accepted as self-evidently true. Some things never change.

I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq.
-- Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, primary architect of the US invasion of Iraq, speaking on 21 July 2003.

Diamond-coated Oscar madness

People with more money than sense can sometimes be amusing, and in the lead up to the Oscars the entertainment press is usually good for some Hollywood-silliness stories.

It seems that the latest fad amongst actresses is for diamond-dust facial scrubs.

The most crowded waiting room pre-Oscars is at the Beverly Hills clinic of celebrity skin specialist Sonya Dakar - where stars line up for her signature £1,000 facial.

Madonna is said to have headed there for a treatment last year which includes a diamond scrub (using diamond particles to exfoliate the skin), an exfoliating skin peel, green tea face mask and red-and-blue UV light therapy to prevent acne.

Diamond particles huh?

Even the oldest, toughest, most dried-out and sun-fried human skin is unlikely to be tougher than pumice stone, let alone the regular quartz particles you find on emery boards. Even Madonna's skin is unlikely to be harder than (say) a steel nail file (6.5 on the Mohs hardness scale, compared to diamond at 10). This is a good example of conspicuous consumption. Diamond dust is quite cheap: I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the diamond scrub contained less than a dollar's worth of diamond dust.

Wikilinks

Wikilinks is a website devoted to disclosing leaked materials, including confidential information, with the aim of discouraging unethical and illegal behaviour by corporations and governments.

The site currently includes:

• leaked documents showing that the US military in Iraq is equipped with anti-personnel chemical weapons in contravention of US-ratified treaties prohibiting the use of such chemical weapons in warfare.


• the suppressed auditor's report detailing the extent and details of the corruption by former Kenyan Prime Minister Daniel Moi, including the purchase of 10,000 hectares of land in Australia with stolen money.


• The use of psychologists by US forces at Gitmo while torturing prisoners (I'm old enough to remember the US roundly criticizing the USSR for doing more or less the same thing).


• Secret trust structures used for money laundering and tax evasion and to hide assets by Swiss bank Julius Baer.


• A leaked German report showing that some of the people in charge of former Stasi files are themselves ex-Stasi.

Just under two weeks ago, a US judge ordered that the Wikilinks site be shut down. Specifically, the judge ordered that the hosting company remove the Wikilinks domain name. Naturally, to those who understand how the Internet works, that's no barrier to accessing the site, domain name or no domain name. Even the New York Times didn't hesitate to describe the judge's action as "feeble":

The feebleness of the action suggests that the bank, and the judge, did not understand how the domain system works or how quickly Web communities will move to counter actions they see as hostile to free speech online.

The site itself could still be accessed at its Internet Protocol (IP) address (http://88.80.13.160/) — the unique number that specifies a Web site’s location on the Internet. Wikileaks also maintained “mirror sites,” which are copies of itself, usually to insure against outages and this kind of legal action. These sites were registered in countries like Belgium (http://wikileaks.be/), Germany (wikileaks.de), and the Christmas Islands (http://wikileaks.cx) through domain registrars other that Dynadot, and so were not affected by the injunction.

Fans of the site and its mission rushed to publicize those alternate addresses this week. They have also distributed copies of the sensitive bank information on their own sites and via peer-to-peer file sharing networks.

Yesterday, the judge rescinded his own order, lifting the ineffective injunction.

I have high hopes that this site will be around for a long time.

Holocaust idiocy

Totally without irony, Israel's Deputy Defence Minister, Matan Vilnai, threatened the people of Palestine with a holocaust (Hebrew "shoah"). Considering that Matan Vilnai was born in 1944 and has a B.A. degree in History, I find it inconceivable that he was not aware of the connotations of the word, even if he were not Jewish (yes, there are non-Jewish Israelis).

Meanwhile, here in Melbourne, artist Sam Leach has made a controversial self-portrait of himself in the same pose used for one of Adolf Hitler's famous portraits. Defending the painting, Leach stated:

Personally, as a white Australian, I inherit this Western European cultural tradition and the one of the products of that tradition was Nazism. In a nutshell, what I'm trying to say is that I think that we can't take for granted that Nazism can't happen again...

The president of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, Anton Block, replied by stating that Leach was:

deluding himself[.]

Well, certainly someone is deluding himself.

Microsoft cartoon figures

This is just weird. Microsoft has released a set of collectible cartoon action figures, aimed at developers who attend their training sessions.

(Click image for full view.)

Apparently Microsoft hope that by ascribing "heroic justice crusader" virtues to the toys, people will be attracted to their products:

Slick, quick, and with a fistful of super-style tricks, Windows Vista Sensei is the new karate-kid on the scene. Born in the United States and trained in Tibet, he acquired hardcore martial arts moves, and the wisdom to use these powers wisely. Once he'd perfected his signature preying-mantis kick, the bullies at school stood no chance.

The Anonymity Experiment

Can you live in a big city without leaving traces? Who is watching you and what you do?

2006, David Holtzman decided to do an experiment. Holtzman, a security consultant and former intelligence analyst, was working on a book about privacy, and he wanted to see how much he could find out about himself from sources available to any tenacious stalker. [...] When he put the information together, he was able to discover so much about himself—from detailed financial information to the fact that he was circumcised—that his publisher, concerned about his privacy, didn’t let him include it all in the book.

[...] Last year, 127 million sensitive electronic and paper records (those containing Social Security numbers and the like) were hacked or lost—a nearly 650 percent increase in data breaches from the previous year. [...] Last November, the British government admitted losing computer discs containing personal data for 25 million people, which is almost half the country’s population.

[...]

It was strangely calming, standing in this dim room, watching the words and thoughts of strangers reveal themselves to me. I still had my hat on, but for once there were no surveillance cameras, so I sat down on a bench in the room and pulled out my notebook, grateful to finally be the observer rather than the observed. And then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her: a security guard standing in the room’s darkened corner—silent, motionless, watching.

Unlike some, I'm not ready to give up on privacy in the information age. I'm with this important essay by Bruce Schneier:

We've been told we have to trade off security and privacy so often -- in debates on security versus privacy, writing contests, polls, reasoned essays and political rhetoric -- that most of us don't even question the fundamental dichotomy.

But it's a false one.

Security and privacy are not opposite ends of a seesaw; you don't have to accept less of one to get more of the other. Think of a door lock, a burglar alarm and a tall fence. Think of guns, anti-counterfeiting measures on currency and that dumb liquid ban at airports. Security affects privacy only when it's based on identity, and there are limitations to that sort of approach.

Since 9/11, approximately three things have potentially improved airline security: reinforcing the cockpit doors, passengers realizing they have to fight back and -- possibly -- sky marshals. Everything else -- all the security measures that affect privacy -- is just security theater and a waste of effort.

[...]

There is no security without privacy. And liberty requires both security and privacy. The famous quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin reads: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." It's also true that those who would give up privacy for security are likely to end up with neither.

Speaking of privacy... I want this.

Three links

Three interesting miscellaneous links:

Can the Cavendish banana be saved from extinction? (No.) Can the fruit growers create a new variety acceptable to the American market? (Probably not.)

The town of Brattleboro, Vermont, has tabled a motion authorizing the local cops to arrest Bush and Cheney if they come into the town.

A leaked British government document shows that they intend to coerce the population into giving up their privacy.

Major security hole in encryption products

Professor Ed Felton has published research that demonstrates conclusively that disk encryption can be defeated quite easily due to a hardware leak: even when you turn off power, modern memory chips will hold their contents for minutes without any special actions. If you cool the DRAM chips they can hold their contents for hours. This is important because it allows an attacker to retrieve the encryption key from memory and use it to decrypt the hard disk.

This news doesn't make disk encryption useless. It will still protect your data in the event of casual theft, but it does mean that if you have sensitive data, and you believe you could be targeted by people wanting that data, you can't rely on disk encryption. At this time, there is no work-around, and the operating system you use is irrelevant. I expect that the eventual fix will be a circuit to fill the DRAM chips with random data when the computer is turned off.

Striking at the terrorists

Remember when the "War On Terror" was supposed to make us safer? Well, somebody forgot to mention to the US military that their supposed to be stopping terrorists, not sheltering them while they attack one of the US's NATO allies.

Turkey, fed up with Kurdish terrorists launching attacks while under the protection of the US military, has invaded northern Iraq. While this isn't a full-blown invasion, nor is it a border incursion with a handful of troops: it apparently involves thousands of soldiers. Turkey has publicly denied the invasion, a denial which is looking less and less credible every day. Why isn't this big news?

And a reminder that it's not just "Islamo-fascists" who are terrorists, like racists and conservatives would have us believe. Christian terrorists in Serbian have attacked and burned the US embassy in Belgrade, angry at Kosovo gaining independence.

Equality of the sexes

It's all too easy to forget that "women's liberation" hasn't even begun in some parts of the world, and that women aren't even given the dignity of being treated as second-class citizens.

In Saudi Arabia, an illiterate woman is set to be executed after she was tortured into confessing to using witchcraft to make a man impotent. And tribal elders in Pakistan decide that women shouldn't vote.

Here in the western civilized world (and I make no apology for using that term), there are people who want to roll back the clock and return to their imagined glory days where women knew their place. Childless old men like Pat Buchanan and macho wanna-be Patriarchs are trying to frighten European women with scare stories that if they don't give up their jobs, stay home, obey their husbands and have lots of babies, the terrorists will win and the Muslim Hordes will take over. It's the Yellow Peril redux, only now it's the "slightly off-white, not quite brown, Islamo-fascist Peril".

I believe that many feminists have well and truly lost their way, but don't imagine that means that feminism is no longer relevant or necessary. The forces of evil are still out there.

But it's not all bad news. Although the meme of sexism dies slow, it does die. When a religious school tried to ban a woman from refereeing a basketball match, her male colleagues boycotted the game:

The reason given, according to the referees: Campbell, as a woman, could not be put in a position of authority over boys because of the academy's beliefs.

[...]

"I said, 'If Michelle [Campbell] has to leave, then I'm leaving with her,'" Putthoff said Wednesday. "I was disappointed that it happened to Michelle. I've never heard of anything like that."

Fred Shockey, who was getting ready to leave the gym after officiating two junior high games, said he was told there had been an emergency and was asked to stay and officiate two more games.
"When I found out what the emergency was, I said there was no way I was going to work those games," said Shockey, who spent 12 years in the Army and became a ref about three years ago. "I have been led by some of the finest women this nation has to offer, and there was no way I was going to go along with that."

Isn't that something?

Why don't more conservatives go to university?

Why are most university professors liberal? Two academics, Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner, have done a study that suggests that most conservatives simply aren't interested in the sorts of things that attract people to academic careers. Matthew Woessner himself is an interesting counter-example: he's a fan of Fox New, Rudy Giuliani and Rush Limbaugh and usually votes Republican, and unlike most of the conservative students he has studied, has a deep interest in the scientific method. (Although he clearly doesn't apply it to Fox, Giuliani or Limbaugh...)

The Agonist has this to say:

What do you do when there are not enough laissez-fare loving, personal responsibility professing and family values fundies at your university? You make it more socialist:

The research led the Woessners to conclude that if higher education wants to attract more conservatives to the professoriate, it should smooth the way financially, offering subsidized health insurance and housing for graduate students

I've often thought that conservative politics simply meant "handouts for me, not for thee".

Read more here.

Last major music labels give up on DRM

The last two of the big music labels -- and of course the independent labels weren't stupid and arrogant enough to install spyware and rootkits on their customers' computers -- Warner Music and Sony BRM, have finally stopped trying to hold the tide back and have given up using DRM on their music downloads, at least for most of their catalogues. Warner caved to the inevitable in December last year and allowed Amazon to sell mp3s, and in January Sony BRM also announced that they are giving up DRM for music downloads.

This isn't quite the death of DRM for music, but it's close.

Another reason to hate Flash

There's a lot to hate about Flash video. And yes, I'm aware of the irony of saying this when I myself put Flash videos on my blog. If YouTube would use a decent format, I'd be onto it so fast your head would spin.

It's not a fully open standard, making it near impossible for anyone to create Flash applications that don't depend on Adobe. There are a zillion movie players for .avi, .mpg, and even a handful for .mov, there's only one player for Flash .swf applications. (In fairness, mplayer can, sometimes, play .flv videos. mplayer is awesome!) That's a warning sign of data obsolescence.

Specifications for the Flash formats are only released to developers on the condition that they don't create Flash players. Flash videos contain executable code, which is a serious security hole: it's only a matter of time before somebody creates a virus which runs through Flash, even on Linux. Most Flash applications are poorly written, with terrible user interfaces and buggy implementations: Flash sites frequently lock up my browser. You can't index or search Flash sites, or copy text out of them, and if you are blind and use a screen-reader, web designers who use Flash are giving you a big F-U. And if you're a movie creator, why on Earth would you be happy with the crappy, low resolution, compression-artifact-filled ugliness that is the typical .flv file?

I could go on, but I'll just link to one more reason to avoid Flash if possible: Adobe is now adding Digital Restrictions Management software to the format.

Finally, there's a classic suite of arguments against DRM that will be as true for online video as they were for music. DRM doesn't move additional product. DRM is grief for honest end-users. And there's no reason to imagine that new DRM systems will stop copyright infringement any more effectively than previous systems.

The things you never hear about

I understand that it's a big world, and it's impossible to keep up with everything happening everywhere.

But still, it's kind of creepy and shocking to discover that the Middle East's version of the Berlin Wall was (temporarily) knocked down a month ago, and nobody I know has heard anything about it. Described by one commentator as "the biggest prison break in the history of man", Joel Beinin, Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University, described it thusly:

About 3:00 am on Wednesday morning Jan. 23, well-coordinated explosions demolished the iron wall built by Israel to seal the southern border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt (the Philadelphi axis). Tens of thousands of Palestinians streamed across the border and entered the Egyptian side of the town of Rafah, which had been bisected by the wall, in search of food, gasoline, and other basic commodities which have been in short supply for many months in Gaza. The first wave of Palestinians to cross consisted of hundreds of women who were met with water canons and beatings by Egyptian security forces.

Read the rest of his op-ed here.

For that matter, most people I know didn't even know there is a Wall cutting off Palestinians from their own farms and jobs, or that it has already lead to the avoidable deaths of innocents.

Bad writing and poor grammar

One of the most pernicious myths about English grammar is that you should never split an infinitive. Linguists point out time and time again that the prohibition against splitting infinitives makes no sense in English, and that it was originally derived from Latin and French where it is impossible to split an infinitive.

An infinitive is a verb with the word "to". For example:

• We plan TO GO immediately home.


• At the time I intended TO INVADE only half of Poland.


• My auntie told me TO KICK the guy viciously.

And here they are again split:

• We plan TO immediately GO home.


• At the time I intended TO only INVADE half of Poland.


• My auntie told me TO viciously KICK the guy.

There's no doubt that sometimes splitting infinitives can weaken a sentence, but very often it makes it clearer and stronger. In case you still believe that infinitives should never be split, please read this and this and this.

But then there are still those who continue to spread the superstition that splitting infinitives is bad grammar, like the aptly-named "Lousy Writer". When I first came across his site, I had just spent a delightful half hour or so browsing the World Wide Words site. Compared to Michael Quinion's delightful prose, which has flow and rhythm, going to the Lousy Writer site is like having your eyeballs sand-blasted. I can't imagine taking the Lousy Writer's advice on style matters, or common English idioms.

There's at least one common construction where even the most rabid "Thou
Shalt Not Split Infinitives" mavens end up splitting their infinitives:

• An effective way TO more than DOUBLE your income is by mugging little old ladies.

On a related note, are you shamed by you English?



Click thumbnail for full-sized image.

I so have to get a t-shirt of this

Thanks to BoingBoing:



(For the benefit of anyone who has been living in a cave for the last thirty years, the person in the image is Fawlty Towers' Manuel, shown in the style more familiar from the iconic photograph of South American revolutionary Che Guevara.)

Taking back democracy

Sick of the Republican Party trying to block them from voting, students at Prairie View A&M University in Texas decided to take back democracy one street at a time: literally.

Faced with systematic efforts to disenfranchise blacks and Democrat supporters, such as putting polling places seven miles away from the voting precinct, more than 3,000 students took to the highway, blocking it as they walked the seven miles to the polling place.

Nice one guys!

Technical Virgin

The things that offend people, or that people are afraid will offend people (not necessarily the same thing!) often astounds me.

In 2006, actress and mother Melanie Martinez was sacked from her job of host of the PBS television program "The Good Night Show" because of two 30 second videos she had made over five years earlier. The videos, for the now-defunct "TechnicalVirgin.com" website, were send-ups of public service announcements for abstinence-only sex education.

Here are the two videos:

Boys Can Wait



Also viewable here.

I Have A Future



I'm amused (in that "have to laugh or else I'd cry" way) by this comment defending PBS:

But I think in her case she openly lied to her employers. Every job interview has that "prior history" question where if you did anything that would effect your job, it's best to say it then.

"Every" job interview? I've been to a couple of dozen job interviews (some of them were even successful) and I've never been asked if I'd done something that would make me morally unsuitable for the position. And for all we know, she did disclose the videos when she was hired. But if she didn't, it doesn't follow that she lied -- far more likely she just never imagined that they could possibly be an issue.

Deputizing the ISPs

One of the more insidious dangers coming out of the copyright lobby is the idea that ISPs must be made responsible for enforcing copyright law on their behalf by choking off infringing material. It's a rather bizarre concept, no different from the idea that the Post Office must scrutinize every piece of mail posted for signs of illegal activities.

In practice, not only would this a huge burden on ISPs, but it's also ridiculously impractical. Since infringing bytes aren't coloured differently from non-infringing bytes, the only "solutions" are to either non-selectively cut off entire avenues of communication, or make an expensive and ineffectual attempt to analyze Internet traffic, trying to detect infringing material. That sort of censorship is ripe for abuse and prone to errors. And let's not forget the privacy implications of having your ISP actively monitoring every packet of data you send.

Such is the influence of the copyright lobby that the idea is being taken seriously, so it is good to see that British bastion of middle-class respectability, the Guardian, slam the idea:

Some internet users are irresponsible, and their behaviour may even be damaging Taylor's clients. But in seeking legislative relief for this distress, governments need to strike a balance between the wider public interest and the demands of a particular industry to defend an increasingly obsolete business model. And though the record industry is important, it's an economic minnow compared with the IT industry.

An analogy may help to illustrate the point. Millions of people use the telephone network for questionable, illegal or unethical purposes. But we would regard it as unthinkable to impose on phone companies a legal obligation to monitor every conversation.

Who owns data?

Ed Felten raises a very important point about many of the debates we have about data portability: we start off by making a poor assumption, and that closes off options.

An example is the Internet storm over Facebook canceling well-known blogger Robert Scoble's account. Scoble had amassed a vast amount of data in his account, and got caught using software tools to export it. Facebook has a vested interest in locking people into their service (more users = more advertising revenue), and the way they have chosen to do this is to give people free accounts, encourage them to invest a lot of time creating valuable (to the users, if not anyone else) data, but prohibit them from extracting that data elsewhere.

Hmmm... I must update my Blogger backup script. It hasn't worked well since Google made the upgrade from Blogger version 1 to version 2.

The poor assumption that we make is that data -- facts -- must be owned by somebody. As Felten says:

Where did we get this idea that facts about the world must be owned by somebody? Stop and consider that question for a minute, and you’ll see that ownership is a lousy way to think about this issue. In fact, much of the confusion we see stems from the unexamined assumption that the facts in question are owned.

Once we give up the idea that the fact of Robert Scoble’s friendship with (say) Lee Aase, or the fact that that friendship has been memorialized on Facebook, has to be somebody’s exclusive property, we can see things more clearly. Scoble and Aase both have an interest in the facts of their Facebook-friendship and their real friendship (if any). Facebook has an interest in how its computer systems are used, but Scoble and Aase also have an interest in being able to access Facebook’s systems. Even you and I have an interest here, though probably not so strong as the others, in knowing whether Scoble and Aase are Facebook-friends.

How can all of these interests best be balanced in principle? What rights do Scoble, Aase, and Facebook have under existing law? What should public policy says about data access? All of these are difficult questions whose answers we should debate. Declaring these facts to be property doesn’t resolve the debate — all it does is rule out solutions that might turn out to be the best.

---

UPDATE: Chris Finke has an innovative solution to the Facebook problem, one which could (in principle) be extended to all similar such websites. His Facebook Scavenger extension for Firefox lets you capture copies of the data once it's in your browser.

The downside of proprietary data

Mark Pilgrim is a published author, Google employee and long-time Apple Macintosh user and programmer. In the Macintosh universe, he's part of the pantheon: although never an Apple employee, and not quite up there with folks like Andy Hertzfeld, he's nevertheless one of the minor demi-gods of Apple mythology. He also helped create one of the few Mac viruses (the MBDF-A), but co-operated with police on his arrest and paid restitution for the damage done.

Putting aside his checked past, Pilgrim was considered one of the Mac power-user evangelists, so it came an unpleasant shock to the Mac community when he finally discarded his Mac in favour of Linux. There were tears and predictions of doom. Those predictions turned out to be wrong, and Pilgrim is predicting that 2008 will be the year of Linux on the Desktop. (With the sudden expansion of notebooks running Linux, like the EEE, I think those predictions will finally be right. And not before time.)

Not long after jumping ship to Linux, Pilgrim discussed his experiences with long-term data storage, and his frustration with the difficulty of keeping data accessible over a time frame measured in decades instead of months or years. The bottom line? Long-term storage of data is like a series of migrations from data format to data format. Anything which makes that migration harder is going to hurt you. Companies like Apple who don't grok openness are constantly trying to lock people into their products, then change the products. Every time they do that, there's pain and inconvenience for users, and usually the loss of data.

Pilgrim's conclusion is that using open source software and, more importantly, open formats, goes a long way to reducing this problem. You will still need to migrate data from computer to computer (anyone think that the computers of 2028 will still be running Windows Vista?) but the pain will be less.

There’s an important lesson in here somewhere. Long-term data preservation is like long-term backup: a series of short-term formats, punctuated by a series of migrations. But migrating between data formats is not like copying raw data from one medium to another. [...] But converting data into a different format is much trickier, and there’s the potential of data loss or data degradation at every turn.

Fidelity is not a binary thing. Data can gradually degrade with each conversion until you’re left with crap. People think this only affects the analog world, like copying cassette tapes for several generations. But I think digital preservation is actually much harder, in part because people don’t even realize that it has the same issues.

[...]

So if you care about long-term data preservation, your #1 goal should be to reduce the number of times you convert your data from one format to another. You should also strive to increase the fidelity of each conversion, but you may not have any control over that when the time comes. Plus, you may not know in advance how faithful the conversion will be, so planning ahead to reduce the number of conversions is a better bet.

Open source software is not a panacea for this sort of data loss: as Pilgrim discusses, the open source photo-editing software Gimp uses a deliberately undocumented file format that no other application can fully read.

If you care about accessing your data in ten years time, then go read the rest of his conclusions. (And if you care about people accessing your data in 200 years time, print it out on good acid-free paper and deposit it somewhere dry and safe.)

The Unbearable Burden of Blogging

Well, perhaps not quite unbearable...

A big hello to Metro over at Metroblog, who liked my stuff enough to comment three times in one sitting and then promise to blogroll me. Don't worry Metro, if I steal your Avid Fans I'll let you steal some of 'em back...

That makes him, or will make him, the first blogger to blogroll me (hint hint Metro...) other than that reasonable conservative Jon Swift, but he'll link to anyone, even liberals and progressives. Thanks Metro.

More bloggage shall happen soon, but for now I'll just point folks at my other blog where I'm experimenting with Wordpress. Typical... here I am busier than a really busy guy who's just taken on two more commitments, and I've got fans relying on me to entertain and educate them.

If only I could use that TARDIS technology to be in two places at once...

Does the USA need a stupider motto?

Thanks to Terrifel from the Straight Dope message boards:

1956 was of course the worst year that the United States had ever faced. Wracked by turmoil and social upheaval, beset by enemies within and without, the nation thrashed about like a dying, constipated beast. Whole cities crumbled into ruin amid the chaos as American society teetered on the very brink of collapse. The horror of that time has made the name of Eisenhower synonymous with anarchy even to this day. My father would never talk about how he and his family survived those grim times.

Fortunately, in the very nick of time, legislators realized the true cause of the crisis: America's national motto wasn't stupid enough. Like all of the country's other woes, this disaster could ultimately be traced back to that most sinister of Americans, Thomas Jefferson. The same treacherous impulses that led him to betray his rightful King also inevitably prompted him to sabotage the fledgling nation by giving it the worst possible state motto: E pluribus unum. Not only was this an unforgivably pompous classical reference, its subversive message-- "out of many, one--" would result in a catastrophic tradition of escalating tolerance and unity that was doomed to tear the country apart in less than two hundred years.

Read more.

I think it is time to change the motto from "In God We Trust" to "Try And Stop Us". Or perhaps "Are You Looking At Me?".

I have my crash recovery back!

I tend to have a lot of browser tabs open. Not as many as some -- I work with one system administrator who regularly has 60-80 tabs open at once. But I'll frequently have a dozen or two.

So it's very frustrating when a browser crash or power failure knocks out all those tabs. Its not always easy to find them in your browsing history.

Some years ago, the Konqueror web browser introduced a Crash Manager that created a menu of any web sites you had open when the browser last crashed. Good stuff! You could open them all at once, or pick them one at a time.

Unfortunately, some time ago that feature was dropped from Konqueror as by default. I've missed it. A lot. Fortunately, Firefox now by default will recover from crashes by giving you the option to reload all your pages. Unfortunately, that's an all-or-nothing situation, and it doesn't help you if the crash was caused by one of those pages.

At long last, I've found how to put the crash recovery tool back into Konqueror. Its a two step process:

1. You need to have the KDE Addons package installed. On Fedora, a command like sudo yum install kdeaddons should work. Or use one of the graphical package managers like "Add/Remove Software".


2. In Konqueror, go to the Settings menu and choose Configure Extensions. Under the Tools tab, tick the Crashes Monitor checkbox.

Since I generally prefer Konqueror for 90% of the websites I visit, I think I'll be using it a lot more from now on.

Beer, glorious beer

In the mid-1990s, I went through a stage of making my own home brew beer. It was reasonably successful, but a lot of effort considering that I'm not a big beer drinker, so after a four or five batches, I stopped.

Fast forward to January 2006, ten years almost to the day since the last time I had brewed beer. While cleaning up my garage, I came across a dozen or so bottles of my home-brewed pale ale that I had forgotten about. I was under the impression that beer didn't age well beyond a year or two, so I started pouring them out into the garden. Being a little slow, I didn't notice until the fourth or fifth bottle that they still had a good head and they didn't smell bad. In fact, they smelled delicious.

After a nervous taste I soon learned that ten year old pale ale not only smells delicious, but it also tastes delicious. It had darkened in colour to a dark red-gold shade, and had a magnificent malt flavour. Those last half-dozen plus bottles went straight into the fridge, and I enjoyed them over the next couple of weeks.

Today I stumbled across what is surely the very last bottle of home brew. One last lonely stubbie of pale ale, bottled on 2nd of January 1996. If beer becomes magnificent after ten years, words fail to describe what it becomes after twelve. A process worth repeating perhaps?

The dissolute doctor

I stumbled across a blog -- alas, no longer being maintained -- from a British doctor, "Venial Sinner", who writes about the daily traumas of being a doctor in the British hospital system. Not a lot of humour there, except perhaps the gallows variety, but he writes good blog.

There's his frustration at seeing the only chance of identifying a mysterious disease disappear because of the interference of ignorant, judgmental, self-appointed god-botherers:

We have a single lead: an area of infective looking tissue on CT which we could biopsy and culture. Sharon cannot consent to the procedure; she does not currently have the capacity. In the morning, we spoke to her mother who agreed that the biopsy should go ahead all the same and that she would consent to this in place of her daughter (as the law allows).

That was the morning. By the afternoon everything had changed. Sharon's mother had some news. She had gone to the church and spoken with the Elders. The Elders has listened to the story, considered, and pronounced their verdict. Sharon had had no brain infection. God punishes those who live dissolute lives and Sharon had taken drugs. God does not like drugs. His punishment had been severe but he had heard the prayers of Sharon's mother and, being a good and merciful old chap, he had relented. Sharon would recover and all would be well. There was no infection and, ergo, there need be no biopsy. Sharon's mother, a devout Christian, swallowed it whole. She withdrew her consent for the biopsy immediately.

There's his example of how modern medicine can utterly fail to cure patients, and in fact make their life even more miserable and the common problem of patients with medically unexplained symptoms.

On learning that the new Polish government was cracking down on homosexuals, and that the Party Boss had declared that "The affirmation of homosexuality will lead to the downfall of civilization. We can't agree to it.", Venial Sinner remarked:

Downfall of civilisation, you say? Goodness, sounds bad. Who’d have thought it? You start off by letting two men hold hands in the street and before you know it the whole of mankind is poised to plunge backwards into benighted barbarity.

Cheers doc, where ever you've got to.

More nonsense about Open Source vulnerabilities

Computer World is claiming that Red Hat Linux and Firefox are "more buggy" than Microsoft Windows.

That at least is the conclusion you are supposed to draw from the article's title, the summary and the opening paragraph:

Windows not that bad after all
By Matthew Broersma, Techworld

Secunia has found that the number of security bugs in the open source Red Hat Linux operating system and Firefox browsers far outstripped comparable products from Microsoft last year.

So they say. But if you read on to midway down the second page of the article, you get a very different picture:

Red Hat [Linux] was found to have by far the most vulnerabilities, at 633, with 99 percent found in third-party components. ...

Windows had only 123 bugs reported, but 96 percent of those were found in the operating system itself.

So let's see how that works. Red Hat Linux, which ships with multiple hundreds of third party applications, almost all of which are non-critical and don't even get installed, has about six vulnerabilities in the operating system. Windows, which ships with a handful of applications, has about 118 vulnerabilities in the OS. According to Computer World, an OS with six vulnerabilities is more buggy than one with 118 vulnerabilities.

Yeah, right. Sure it is. Just how much advertising does Microsoft do with Computer World?

The article goes on:

In the browser field, Firefox led the way with 64 bugs, compared to 43 for Internet Explorer, and 14 each for Opera and Safari.

However, in an examination of zero-day flaws - reported by third parties before a patch was available - Secunia found that Firefox tended to get more patches, sooner, compared to IE.

Out of eight zero-day bugs reported for Firefox in 2007, five have been patched, three of those in just over a week. Out of 10 zero-day IE bugs, only three were patched and the shortest patch time was 85 days.

You got that? The shortest time IE was vulnerable to known security bugs was nearly three months, compared to just over a week for Firefox.

But IE only looks as good as it does because ActiveX bugs are counted separately: IE had no fewer than 339 ActiveX bugs in 2007. If you include them in the count for IE, as you should, then you're comparing 382 for IE versus 64 for Firefox.

You almost -- almost -- have to admire the journalist's gall in trying to push a whopper of this size. Sadly, this sort of behaviour is very common: half-truths and deceptive statements in paragraph one, the actual facts buried deep in the article. That way you're not lying, because all the facts are there.

The people doing this know that there is a strong correlation between the number of readers and how close to the top of the article: for each extra paragraph you bury something under, you reduce the number of readers by a surprisingly large percentage.

I've written about the tendency of the IT press and security industry to make misleading if not dishonest comparisons between Linux and Windows before.

Don't mess with the geeks

What happens when a clueless US senator pretending to run his own MySpace webpage hires clueless web developers to do the job for him?

In an attempt to prove how 21st century he is, 70-year-old Senator John McCain hired web developers to create his MySpace page. Unfortunately, they hotlinked to the wrong person's files.

When Mike Davidson learnt that McCain was "stealing" his bandwidth, he decided to play a little joke on the Republican senator:

'I think the idea of politicians setting up MySpace pages and pretending to actually use them is a bit disingenuous, so I figured it was time to play a little prank on Johnny Mac.'

Davidson replaced the image referred to in McCain's profile. However, the new image was a lot less prosaic: it described a political about-face by McCain on the subject of gay marriage and a penchant for partnerships between passionate females.

'The only thing necessary to effectively commandeer McCain's page with my own messaging was to simply replace my own sample image on my server with a newly created sample on my server. No server but my own was touched and no laws were broken. The immaculate hack.'

McCain should consider himself lucky that the image wasn't redirected to Goatse Man.

The article is a little sensational, describing it as "the perfect cybercrime" despite admitting that no laws were broken -- except possibly by McCain, who I'm sure had no authorization to use Davidson's computer resources.

Speaking of hotlinking from MySpace, those of you running your own Apache webserver might find this little rewrite rule handy:


RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([a-z0-9]+\.)?myspace\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://collect.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=signout [redirect,last]


WARNING: I don't run my own webserver, and consequently I haven't actually tested this. No warranty is given. Use at your own risk. If it blows up your computer and eats your dog, don't come crying to me.

The jazz club versus the collections agency

SGAE, the royalty collection agency that operates in Spain, recently sued a jazz club for failing to pay royalties on music played. The club responded by stating that they only played royalty-free Creative Commons music, and magistrate Luis Sanz Acosta ruled in their favour.

The royalty collections agency's evidence was poor at best. Especially noteworthy was the recording they claimed was made in the jazz club but was actually recorded elsewhere. The judge was not amused.

What is especially satisfying is that the magistrate displayed a good understanding of "música libre" and the Creative Commons -- no doubt far better than the SGAE, which stands to lose financially if significant numbers of Spanish musicians drop out of their cozy little system. Monopolies never really understand the people who opt out.

For those who are unaware of how the royalty system works, it goes something like this:

The collections agency collects royalties on the musician's behalf, based on an estimate of how many times his or her work is played. Once the money is collected from (e.g.) the radio stations and bars, once a year the agency pays it to the musician, assuming:

• The royalty is more than a certain minimum amount.


• The agency can find your bank details, and don't confuse you with somebody else and pay your royalties to them.


• You have filled out all the paper work they insist on.


• They remember to actually make the payment.

If any of those conditions (especially the last) are not fulfilled, you have to wait for the next year's pay run to see a cent. If you specifically ask, they'll offer to try harder to remember to pay you next time. In the meantime, they get to collect the interest on your money for another year.

Naturally this does not apply to musicians who can afford more lawyers than the collections agency, but since musicians generally only get into such a happy state by collecting royalties, there are far fewer of them than outsiders to the music biz usually imagine.

Buy our product or we'll sue you

Two US companies have issues cease and desist letters to Microsoft, Apple, Real Networks and Adobe, warning them to stop not using their Digital Restrictions software.

That's right. Buy our product or we'll sue.

The manufacturers of the DRM software, Media Rights Technologies (MRT) and BlueBeat.com, claim that their product makes water not wet "effectively controls access to copyrighted material", and therefore failing to use their snake-oil product is illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act:

[The DMCA] makes illegal and prohibits the manufacture of any product or technology that is designed for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure which effectively controls access to a copyrighted work or which protects the rights of copyright owners. Under the DMCA, mere avoidance of an effective copyright protection solution is a violation of the act.

How's that again? If you fail to use DRM, that's the same as circumventing the DRM software that you would have used if you had used any.

(Or, to put it another way, if you give a sandwich to your friend without charging him money, you're guilty of being an accessory to theft, because your friend effectively stole from you the money he would have given you if you had asked for any, and therefore you assisted him in his crime. And if your brain hurts about now, you're not alone.)

That's a rather... unusual... interpretation of the DMCA. It's almost certainly a publicity stunt, and unlikely to go any further, but it isn't that far removed from media companies' efforts to outlaw open formats and mandate ineffective and restrictive technologies.

Would you invest in this company?

Anti-virus computer software company MacAfee has recently warned investors that they enter into legally-binding agreements without understanding those agreements.

Naturally McAfee didn't quite put it that way. Instead, they warned investors that their ability to "commercialise products" based on open-source software -- that is, software which other people have created and published under an open-source licence -- might be at risk if they are forced to obey the licence, since they're not sure what their obligations will be.

Well, here's a thought. Maybe they could read the licence and find out? There are poor quality licences that are ambiguous and incoherent, but the GPL is not one of them. And despite McAfee's wishful thinking that the GPL has never been tested in court, it has, successfully. The reason the GPL rarely makes it to court is because the infringers generally settle out of court and promise to obey the GPL.

It really shouldn't be that difficult for McAfee and others like them. If you want to use open source software in your products, then you have to follow the rules in the licence you have to use that software. That's no different from closed-source licences you might get from Microsoft or any other software company. If McAfee warned investors that they might not be able to use Microsoft's software in their products without obeying the agreement they have with Microsoft, everybody would laugh at them. But put open source in there, and suddenly folks are bewildered -- do they have to obey this agreement or not?

I'm not the only one wandering if McAfee's comments indicate that they are infringing the GPL. Zdnet's Dana Blankenhorn also suggests they're asking to be sued.

McAfee also raises the specter of open source software infringing other copyrights or patents. Naturally it is difficult to tell whether open source software infringes, but that's because recognising infringement is very difficult. Every sizable software project will invariably infringe patents, because the software patent system is seriously broken. Whether software infringes patents has nothing to do with whether you can see the source code or not. It isn't even a barrier to whether patent holders will find out about the infringement. If McAfee were honest, they'd warn their investors that to the extent they licence closed-source software from third parties, they are at greater risk because they have less ability to recognise patent infringement.

Refuse to be terrorized

As the clock ticks over to 2008, now is the moment to say enough is enough. It is time to refuse to be terrorized any longer. Repeat after me:

I am not afraid.

Watch this video:



or see it directly on YouTube.

(While I like the video's message very much, I fear that the dry recitation of statistics and facts will not grab people's emotions in the same way that fear-mongering does. But I am encouraged by the fact that there are people who are refusing to be terrorized.)

And from here:

I am not afraid of terrorism, and I want you to stop being afraid on my behalf. Please start scaling back the official government war on terror. Please replace it with a smaller, more focused anti-terrorist police effort in keeping with the rule of law. Please stop overreacting. I understand that it will not be possible to stop all terrorist acts. I accept that. I am not afraid.

Thanks to Bruce Schneier and Bex from the Argonist. See also what the terrorists want.

A new blog

There is a lot I like about Blogger. I've been using it since June 2006, and I'm mostly happy about the way it works.

But not completely happy -- there are a few things that are irksome, such as:

• No satisfactory way to get a cut tag into long posts. And I have a tendency to write a lot of long posts -- at least long enough that I need cut tags.


• No way of removing or renaming the images you have uploaded. At this time, the only way to delete an image is to delete the whole post.


• No good way of backing up your blog. I had a good, simple script using wget but since Google changed the layout of Blogger, it no longer works so well (or at all).


• Google seems to have a very flighty attitude to making Blogger available to third party applications. The original Blogger 1.0 API does not work with Blogger 2.0; the Blogger 2.0 Atom API is now being deprecated in favour of yet another API. No wonder I haven't been able to find an Linux app that can successfully communicate with Blogger.

So I have decided to experiment with another blog, over on Wordpress. That doesn't mean I'm abandoning Blogger for Wordpress immediately, or at all.

Family walking on all fours

National Geographic has an article about a Kurdish family where five out of the nineteen siblings in one family walk on all fours instead of upright.

Scientists who have studied the three sisters and two brothers insist that it is not a hoax.

Uner Tan, a Turkish neurophysiologist, has studied them and believes they are "evolutionary throwbacks" to our ancestors. A team of German scientists led by Stefan Mundlos believes they have found the precise gene which has knocked out their ability to walk upright.

It's not clear what they mean by "the" gene that controls bipedalism: walking on two legs successfully requires many features, both anatomical and mental, and knocking out just one of them will cause the whole system to break. To take an extreme example, it's hard to walk upright if you have no legs. Less extreme example: the move to bipedalism would have required changes to our hips and backs. Our backs are still not completely evolved to suit our upright stance, which is why people are prone to back problems. Comparing us to our cousins (gorillas, orangutans, chimps and bonobos) shows that we have significantly longer legs than they do, relative to our body-size. The evolution of bipedalism would have required all these features to evolve more-or-less in lockstep (albeit presumably in fits and starts), and it isn't credible that there is a single gene that controls them all.

Nevertheless, certainly there could be a single gene -- or many single genes -- that the lack of could disable bipedalism. If you remove the accelerator cable from a car, the car won't move, but that isn't to say that the accelerator cable is the thing that makes cars move forward.

After studying the family, the British evolutionary psychologist Nicholas Humphrey pointed out that the genetic mutation alone wouldn't be sufficient to cause the lack of bipedalism. He gives equal credit to a family that was accepting of the children's strange gait, and making no efforts to cajole them into standing upright. Sensible, so far. But then he goes on:

"This is for real," Humphrey said. "You only have to look at the calluses on the hands of the young man [Huseyin] to see he's been on his hands for a very long time."

Why single out Huseyin? Don't the other four siblings have calluses on their hands? And walking on your hands is hardly the only way to make them callused.

I don't have any specific reason to expect a hoax, but calluses on the hands of one of the five siblings is hardly a reason to give the all-clear. Nevertheless, in the absence of any specific reason to expect a hoax, I think it is worth treating it as genuine.

The behavior could potentially reveal much about our own evolution, Humphrey says.

"Here we've got a living example of how it might be for a member of our species to walk on four legs," he said.

Most experts assume that the quadruped ancestors of humans walked in a similar way to apes such as gorillas and chimpanzees.

But the Turkish brothers and sisters walk on only their wrists or the heels of their hands, with their fingers held off the ground, the researchers say. This position appears to have saved their fingers from damage; the sisters, for instance, engage in both crochet and embroidery.

Chimps, our closest living relatives, use their whole hands and fingers for walking.

"Chimpanzees basically wreck their fingers by walking on them," Humphrey said.

[...]

"I think this new evidence, suggesting that [early-human ancestors] walked on their wrists, is much more plausible and interesting," Humphrey said.

I question this completely. Chimpanzees wreck their fingers? Chimps have very good manual dexterity, I'd need to see some support for this astounding claim before accepting it.

But even if correct about chimpanzees, Humphrey's claim that the siblings walk only on the heels of their hands isn't supported by the evidence available. The article has one photo of four of the siblings walking. In it, you can clearly make out just two hands on the ground, and in both of them, the people are clearly using their entire hand, fingers and all.

(Click image for full view.)

The photographic evidence contradicts Humphrey's claim, and calls into doubt Uner Tan's conclusion that this is a viable model of pre-bipedal human movement.

If you try it for yourself, I'm confident you'll find that it is impossible to do what the researchers claim. With the heel of the hand, or the palm, flat on the ground, it is virtually impossible to bend the fingers back far enough to keep them off the ground. There's maybe a couple of millimetres give in the finger joints, and it is quite tiring. There are basically three ways of hand-walking: with open hands flat on the ground; on closed fists; or on the knuckles of the fingers, as apes do when knuckle-walking. I do not believe there is any evidence at all, either in anatomically modern humans or any plausible ancestor, for a mode of quadrupedal walking where the fingers are held up off the ground.

There is no doubt at all that human development is complex. The five siblings in question all display a range of congenital deficiencies, include mild mental retardation and lack of balance. It is absolutely possible that whatever genetic damage the five siblings have -- and it might be as little as a single gene -- could lead to them doing the "bear crawl" into adulthood.

But I am extremely skeptical that this gives us any insight into human evolution. For Uner Tan to describe this as "backward evolution" is as absurd as it would be to describe Tay-Sachs disease as backwards-evolution, or sufferers of Huntington's Disease as "evolutionary throwbacks" to an otherwise unsuspected ancestor. The siblings are clearly broken. They're not a throwback to "primitive Man". The most one could say is that, possibly, early pre-bipedal ancestors of human beings may not have had the gene which the siblings are missing. But that's not the same thing: if you rip out the computer chip from a modern Ford Fiesta you don't get a Model T Ford, you get a broken Fiesta.

(Unlike modern cars, biological organisms are astonishingly good at continuing to work with bits missing. As fragile as living things are, we're also incredibly resilient.)

Update, January 3rd: More information here.

The war on the unexpected

Bruce Schneier has a good name for the faux-war on terror the cowardly Chicken Littles have created: the War on the Unexpected. Anything different or unexpected must be a threat:

We've opened up a new front on the war on terror. It's an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it's a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested -- even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats.

This isn't the way counterterrorism is supposed to work, but it's happening everywhere. It's a result of our relentless campaign to convince ordinary citizens that they're the front line of terrorism defense. ...

The problem is that ordinary citizens don't know what a real terrorist threat looks like. They can't tell the difference between a bomb and a tape dispenser, electronic name badge, CD player, bat detector, or trash sculpture; or the difference between terrorist plotters and imams, musicians, or architects. All they know is that something makes them uneasy, usually based on fear, media hype, or just something being different.

The full article is well worth reading, and contains many links to actual cases of the most awe-inspiring stupid security "threats". None of the examples quoted above are made up.

In recent weeks:

• Concert-goers to an open-air concert in Perth were told that picnic blankets and rugs were prohibited as they were a security risk. Adding a note of the surreal, the tickets warned patrons not to bring "crocodiles or spears" to the concert.


• A blind calypso musician and his band thrown off a plane after another passenger complained they had been in high spirits earlier but were now sitting quietly.


• An orthodox Jew on a train was arrested after passengers panicked on seeing him praying while sitting next to a man wearing a turban.


• A Florida bomb squad called in to blow up a typewriter.


• Police evacuate everyone within a mile radius of some fake dynamite taped to the side of a house.
  
  (The comments on that story are interesting: in summary, it seems that the cops simply followed the Department of Transportation's guidelines, which seem to be massively over-cautious compared to the guidelines offered by the Department of Defense and usual practice for disarming known high-explosive bombs.

Earlier incidents in the war on the unexpected:

• An Australian pub patron thrown out by bouncers for reading a book called The Unknown Terrorist.


• A Canadian firetruck racing to a fire in New York was stopped at the US border for eight minutes while border officials checked the firefighters' IDs and the truck's licence plates.


• In 2005, a man in the UK who fell into a diabetic coma on a bus was shot twice with a Taser gun by police who feared he may have been a terrorist.

Are we feeling safer yet?

Copyrighting the pyramids

How crazy is this? Egypt has announced that they are copyrighting the pyramids, and intend charging royalties to anyone who copies them.

Zahi Hawass, the charismatic and controversial head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the move was necessary to pay for the upkeep of the country's thousands of pharaonic sites.

"The new law will completely prohibit the duplication of historic Egyptian monuments which the Supreme Council of Antiquities considers 100 per cent copies," [Zahi Hawass] said.

...

However, the law "does not forbid local or international artists from profiting from drawings and other reproductions of pharaonic and Egyptian monuments from all eras - as long as they don't make exact copies."

"Artists have the right to be inspired by everything that surrounds them, including monuments," he said.

Asked about the potential impact on the monumental Luxor Hotel in the US gambling capital of Las Vegas, Mr Hawass said that particular resort was "not an exact copy of pharaonic monuments despite the fact it's in the shape of a pyramid".

If the copyright only applies to exact duplicates (that is, the same shape and materials inside and out) one wonders that the point of retroactively copyrighting something created more than four thousand years ago? Are there really that many people making exact life-sized duplicates of the Great Pyramid of Giza?

Another study criticising voting machines

Over the last decade or so, the American political machine has become rotten to the core with vote fixing, secret counting, lost votes and other "irregularities". (Those with long memories of infamous political bosses like William Tweed will see this corruption as a return to normality after a half century of relative honesty and transparency.)

As Bruce Schneier reports, more and more US states are realising just how bad the electronic voting machines are. Like California before them, Ohio has just published a massive study on voting machines and found that they are insecure, untrustworthy, vulnerable to malicious software and operator fraud, and easy to undetectably hack using simple tools.

Colorado has decertified most of it's electronic voting machines. California seems to be ready to do the same, and surely Ohio can't be far behind. In 2006, New Mexico changed to a paper ballot system. Unfortunately for every politician who understands about the risks, there's another who is either ignorant, in denial, or actively pushing for insecure voting systems ("all the better to make sure the right person wins, my dear").

In related news, it seems that Diebold -- not the worst of the bad bunch at all, merely the first to be caught -- is re-thinking their voting machine business.

And in other news, former staff at Sequoia Voting Systems printing plant have gone public with claims that in 2000 they were ordered to send inferior quality punched cards to West Palm Beach (Florida), purposely misprinted, so that the cards would fail and Sequoia could push it's more profitable touch-screen voting machines to the states.

Testing airport security

You're probably familiar with any number of ad hoc experiments where some journalist, law-enforcement officer or random clown successfully smuggles a gun or knife onto a plane, demonstrating the weakness of airport security.

These sorts of anecdotes make powerful memes, but what does the scientific evidence say about airport security?

According to a recent study by the Harvard School of Public Health, there's no evidence that X-raying carry-on luggage, taking off shoes and confiscating small items has prevented any hijackings or attacks.

The TSA defended the searches, claiming that they confiscated 13 million prohibited items in one year, "most" of which were cigarette lighters.

Bruce Schneier responded:

This is where the TSA has it completely backwards. The goal isn't to confiscate prohibited items. The goal is to prevent terrorism on airplanes. When the TSA confiscates millions of lighters from innocent people, that's a security failure. The TSA is reacting to non-threats. The TSA is reacting to false alarms. Now you can argue that this level of failures is necessary to make people safer, but it's certainly not evidence that people are safer.

The report in the British Medical Journal points out that widespread screening for threats to public health are usually only enacted if there is clear evidence that they work -- otherwise they do nothing to improve health and safety, but merely waste a lot of time and money for no gain:

With $6.5 billion spent globally on airport protection each year, the public should be encouraged to query some screening requirements – such as forcing passengers to remove their shoes, the researchers said.

"Can you hide anything in your shoes that you cannot hide in your underwear?" they asked.

The Silly Season

The Christmas/New Year period is traditionally known as the Silly Season. This year, the entire month of December has been not just silly but crazy. Not only have I been very busy at work with my normal doing-two-jobs-for-one-pay duty, but on top of it all we've moved offices.

Consequently my rostered day off went down the toilet. I've put in a lot of late nights, up to and including after midnight, in the period just before we moved, and Mrs. Impala and I spent most of a weekend painting the new office, thanks to the old tenants who decided that "make good" actually means "oh, nobody will notice that we haven't sanded down the repairs to the plaster, or repainted, or actually cleaned the carpet".

At least, the real estate agent didn't.

In no particular order, some things I have learnt:

• Catching a taxi in the city at 1am on a Friday night is not easy. There's a chronic shortage of taxis, and a chronic oversupply of drunks and clubbers.


• People (and by people I actually mean a group of five drunken twenty-something baboons men) will actually step out into the middle of the road and try to stare down on-coming traffic, forcing the taxi to come to a complete stop. Eventually, due to some variety of random Brownian motion, they eventually staggered around enough to leave a car-sized gap between them, otherwise I'm sure I'd still be there two weeks later.


• Having even a mildly sprained back really, really sucks. My heart goes out to those with serious back problems.


• My room in the new office is the one room that isn't detectably air conditioned, so while everyone else is complaining of frost bite and wearing woolly hats and gloves, I'm melting into a puddle. Why am I not surprised?


• After stripping the server room of all unessential servers and equipment, we were left with no fewer than thirteen servers. Thirteen. For a company of about a dozen staff.


• When Melbourne has rain in December, it REALLY rains. And when it does, traffic slows to a complete stop.

I'm hoping that with Christmas just around the corner, things will settle back down to normal soon.