I Affirm and Aver the Following is Poo

Paranoia Inducing Bar Code

2009-07-13T23:34:49Z

I got a new toy. The three-letter bar code prefix caught my eye. . . .

Wait -- How did they know?!?

The Wife and I got a kick out of this . . . because we're not paranoid.

A Little Dante Goes a Long Way

2009-07-13T01:19:29Z

The industry has always tried to make Americans think that government-run systems are the worst thing that could possibly happen to them, that if you even consider that, you're heading down on the slippery slope towards socialism. So they have used scare tactics for years and years and years, to keep that from happening. If there were a broader program like our Medicare program, it could potentially reduce the profits of these big companies. So that is their biggest concern.

That's a quote from Wendell Potter interviewed by Bill Moyer. Wendell worked as an executive at Cigna, a big health care insurance company. He was assigned to discredit Michael Moore's Sicko, a movie he said "hit the nail on the head." Why? "They (insurer executives) were afraid that people would believe Michael Moore." Wendell started to see problems in the way his company did business, and has decided to join the push towards national coverage by exposing the industry shenanigans.

Why?

One of the books I read as I was trying to make up my mind here was President Kennedy's "Profiles in Courage."

And in the forward, Robert Kennedy said that one of the president's, one of his favorite quotes was a Dante quote that, "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, maintain a neutrality." And when I read that, I said, "Oh, jeez, I-- you know. I'm headed for that hottest place in hell, unless I say something." (Emphasis mine.)

Watch or read the entire interview. Then grab a pitchfork. Grab a torch. Listen for and join the nearest mob.

I hope it's time.

Microsoft Nova's Their Bing

2009-07-09T03:25:03Z

Ah, you can't get away from Microsoft's promotion of their new search engine Bing, can you? According to Patrick Cox of PRI's The World in Words podcast, Microsoft's Chief Exec hoped the name would "verb up," presumably to become a verb much as Google has over the years.

They might not have chosen wisely, though. Cox continued to note that Bing has many different meanings in Chinese (presumably Mandarin), but the meaning of "the fourth tone . . . means 'sickness.'

"It actually gets worse," Cox continues. "If you add another character to it, du -- so it would be bing du -- that means virus."

Nice one, Redmond. Is this another example of subtle truth in advertising like Wall Mart's Assterisk, or a complete oversight boner? Either way, it's Puerto Rico's Chevy Nova all over again: It doesn't go.

Shermer!

2009-07-06T04:54:16Z

Skeptic magazine editor Michael Shermer (The guy from the Baloney Detection Kit video) lays down the skeptical, scientific approach in this Scientific American article:

The principle of positive evidence applies to all claims. Skeptics are from Missouri, the Show-Me state. Show me a Sasquatch body. Show me the archaeological artifacts from Atlantis. Show me a Ouija board that spells words with securely blindfolded participants. Show me a Nostradamus quatrain that predicted World War II or 9/11 before (not after) the fact (postdictions don’t count in science). Show me the evidence that alternative medicines work better than placebos. Show me an ET or take me to the Mothership. Show me the Intelligent Designer. Show me God. Show me, and I’ll believe.

New Nigerian/Russian Oil Conglomerate In The Hood

2009-06-28T23:29:44Z

According to the BBC, "Russia's energy giant Gazprom has signed a $2.5bn (£1.53bn) deal with Nigeria's state operated NNPC, to invest in a new joint venture."

What would call such a joint venture? Why, Nigaz, of course.

I shit you not.

Your Baloney Detection Kit

2009-06-25T18:46:52Z

Michael Shermer gives the 12-point rundown on questions everyone should be asking all the time. BTW, his books Why People Believe Weird Things and Why Darwin Matters should be required high school reading.

Let's Just Say You Pray For Someone's Death

2009-06-24T19:46:22Z

It's a simple prayer, along the lines of "bountiful and loving God, please take (X) into your heavenly bosom. Tomorrow would be great."

Now, I'm not one to think prayer does anything much, really; but what if it works? What if that someone were to die tomorrow? There is legal precedent here. Back in the late '70s, a man was convicted of manslaughter when he told his friend to "Drop dead." Thing is, the friend had a heart condition; the verbal assaulter knew of the heart condition; and the court reasoned that the verbal abuse could have been judged sufficiently stressful to induce cardiac arrest. (Sorry, pre-web ancient story. No immediate linkage.)

So let's take that reasoning to the faithful.

To the faithful -- especially to leaders of the faithful's faith -- pray is real. Prayer gets results. Therefore, when one prays for the death of the President, that someone is using, under the terms of his or her faith, a weapon just as powerful as any gun or knife. Since threatening the life of the President is a crime worthy of a federal investigation, I say these people get visits from the appropriate authorities.

As many separate visits as known public imprecatory prayers.

Triumph of the Nerds

2009-06-21T18:33:17Z

John Hodgman grills the President on his nerd cred.

I Seek Your Advice

2009-06-20T02:43:47Z

Tomorrow is the memorial for Nellis, the friend I mentioned earlier. On my trip to California last month, a friend of a friend liked my tee-shirt so much she up and got me another one, sensing I would be the perfect person to wear it. Big drinker that he was, I think Nellis would have loved it.

I'm not so sure, though, about how appropriate it would be to wear this shirt to the rememberance for a man who killed his liver and himself at age 44 with heavy drinking. It's a black tee-shirt with this written in large letters on the back:

The liver is evil.
It must be punished.

Addendum, later that evening: I've been mulling details about in my head for the last few hours, and stumbled upon a great big freaky coincidence too wild to just shrug away. That shirt? It was given to me by, as I said, a friend of a friend. She met me and, as she said herself, was not a minute later strangely driven to give me the shirt, something she had somehow gotten off another perfect stranger. It was as if struck by a whim one knows not how to describe.

She had arrived for a dinner party with our hosts in California, so it must have been around 6:30 (we ate a bit early that night, and drank well into the eve).

I just checked my calendar. This was the 15th of May. Nellis died that night, at 6:30.

I think I'll just sit for a while.

Party On, Nellis

2009-06-17T18:57:41Z

Just learned of some Suckage. Nellis (aka C. from another post) died last month. I've been out of touch with the group, and only just learned of it 10 minutes ago.

Allow me to share his rememberance, and to quote a tidbit not everyone can boast:

Nellis was a mainstay of Seattle fringe theater and sketch comedy for many years. If you went to a show or after-party in the early 90’s, you saw, heard of, met and/or drank with Nellis. He created and wrote the wildly popular “Star Drek”; Leonard Nimoy attended a performance, and Nellis actively encouraged the rumor that Shatner had as well.

Because of its incredible run and Paramount's desire to revive the franchise, Star Drek was given the ol' Cease and Desist. A pity, but not nearly as sad as the passing of its creator.

Suckage.

". . . The evidence made not the slightest difference."

2009-06-17T05:24:53Z

Found a follow-up to something interesting I heard last year about how people cannot be told the truth if the truth disagrees with their preconceptions.

The same sort of issue — the persistence of misperceptions in the face of evidence — has also been intriguing Brendan Nyhan, of Duke University, North Carolina, and Jason Reifler, of Georgia State University. And they have published two fascinating papers providing the results of experiments that they conducted into whether it is possible to correct such errors of fact.

Their conclusions are not a cause for optimism.

I had heard about their study when I was writing my Deist Miasma series, but they were still working on questions I found too fundamental to include before the answers had been found. This new study found what I had suspected all along:

First, correcting a misperception doesn’t really work when the original misperception fits snugly with the subject’s ideology. Second, and worse still, attempting to correct errors often produces a backlash, with the error becoming more firmly believed. (Emphasis mine.)

Lesson: It really doesn't matter that you are right on the facts; people who don't like the facts simply won't listen.

Hate Crime or Endgame?

2009-06-13T03:56:34Z

A few months ago, I had to go to court to help sue some poor woman. She cut me off on the freeway. Her car paid the price of her misjudgment. My employer had to sue her, though, not because she was a bad person, not at all, but because her car insurance carrier was being a douchebag. It refused to pay up for the damage her sudden move caused.

Why didn't the employer just sue the insurer? Ah, here's the thing: the carrier has no standing in court. We had to sue the driver so the judge would rule and determine once and for all that she was at fault. This ruling forces her insurance carrier to pay for 100% of the damage instead of dicking around with offers of half compensation.

I felt sorry for her, being dragged into court for an accident that happened so long ago; but that's how the legal system works.

I've been thinking about this recently as more and more people note how Bush-like President Obama has been acting lately. He decided not to release photos of prisoner abuse. Most lately, he has reversed his opposition to the Defense of Marriage Act using, once again, very hate-filled language.

I can't help but remember that this guy, unlike so very many presidents before him, actually understands the law. He knows the constitution. He knows our court system.

Most importantly, he knows that once the court rules, that ruling carries the weight of law.

So -- please, bear with me here -- he knows that if his defense of the silly, stupid and hate-filled DOMA is struck down, especially if it is struck down when his defense used as its support the same language that Bush used, that language can never be used again to support similar Acts. This takes all the arguments W used off the table as viable reasons to deny folks rights.

As per the torture photos, the court has already ruled against W. Why then would Pres. Obama use the same lame defense? He must know it has failed once, and that it is likely to fail again. Again, I'm just speculating here, but that might be the idea. Once the court repeats its ruling, he has no choice but to release the photos. Once the court strikes down DOMA, his administration has no choice but to dismantle its provisions.

And what does that gain him? Perhaps . . . everything.

Think back to when Pres. Clinton approved the Strategic Defense Initiative crap, the Star Wars boondoggle. That denied Candidate Dole a very persuasive weapon. He could not accuse Clinton of being "soft" on defense. No, Clinton didn't exactly fund the stupidity very well; but that doesn't matter. He didn't kill the project seen by so many blathering righties as essential to the defense of the realm.

The court will rule against Obama just as they ruled against W. In a few years, when the campaign gets rolling, though, no silly challenger will be able to claim the President "weakened America" or some other such crap about capitulation or whatever by releasing the photos. That political ammunition will have been taken off the table by someone else, someone who will probably be labeled an "activist" judge. The same will probably happen when the court rules against DOMA. Another hot-button right-wing staple will be denied the next 'Pube-Licken hate monger (should the next 'Pube-Licken indeed choose to monger hate -- oh, who am I kidding. Of course he will!)

This does indeed suck for everyone, myself included, who thinks DOMA sucks balls and those torture pics should be everywhere as a means of showing FAIL.

Remember, though, how heated the fringe is getting. The telly, intertubes and radio rhetoric is amping up. Sci-fi writer Elizabeth Moon (e_moon60) noted on a recent Texas drive the tone of radio call-in show hosts and participants. I highly recommend a quick glance. Scary.

This language quickly turns to action. A man in Philadelphia kills three police officers just hours after logging into a white-supremacist Web site run by a former Ku Klux Klan leader. His posts from the past show an "increasing belief in a coming economic and political collapse" brought by "a Jewish conspiracy" and overt race hatred. Dr. Tiller's killer likely, it seems, did not act alone. Heck, his killing might just be the first in a coming wave of violence against doctors. Finally, Faux News itself has members questioning whether the DHS memo on unrest in the right-wing community might be dead-on target in the wake of the Holocaust Museum killings.

The lunatic fringe is shaping into a very real and present danger to our country's continued existence. I am not using hyperbole here. These are the Timothy McVeighs of our future acting out in ways that might bring those long-threatened WMD right to our doorstep. Most of them served in the military, after all, and might be able to go all Colonel Jack D. Ripper on the country. Never underestimate the damage a lone nutjob can do, let alone one with backing.

If I'm right about these very, very unpopular decisions being tactical moves, the next presidential candidate loses the ability to use these decisions against him. Yes, he also loses the good will of his own base; politics is a crushing business of playing the odds. However, consider the worst case scenario. If Pres. Obama loses this next election, what's to stop the next president from pandering to these "people?" This loss would spell Game Over for same-sex marriage rights, and perhaps herald a return to the W policies on torture and, well, everything else. We would be then well and truly screwed.

I hope I'm ~~right~~ correct.

The Height of Alabama Style

2009-06-06T18:48:51Z

Lenny sent me this gem. He gravitates toward the redneck humor, even when it pokes fun at rednecks . . . like himself. From the email:

This was taken in front of the Gardendale, Al abama , Wal-Mart, where the young lady was shopping at the Flea market.

Look closely. . . .

A top made from a bottom!

Something I've Wanted to Do

2009-06-06T06:49:25Z

. . . but have had no tech chops to execute. It's here!

I got the idea from a toy we had 20+ years ago in (IIRC) 1981. It was a simple wand with a keyboard. Enter the message, wave the wand, communicate over distance. I tried to hook it to my bike wheel, but refused to crack the case and destroy the toy (we weren't very affluent; wasting a cool toy was frowned upon by all). Had I done it, and found a way to trigger the next spurt of data other than the roller ball clicking on either side of the wave, that simple message maker would have been on the wheels.

Ah, well.

Marriage Defined Biblically

2009-06-04T01:32:14Z

Via richie73.

ATTN: Birdwatchers!

2009-06-01T22:35:42Z

I have a problem. In the last hour, a friend dropped off a load of firewood. I got to chopping this cherry branch from a freshly-pruned tree. Before I chopped, though, I noticed a hole in the wood with hairs on the walls of the hole. Squirrel's nest, I thought.

I guestimated the depth of the hole and let fly with my chop saw. I got really lucky, chopping only the bottom 2 or 3 millimeters of the hole off. Surprise! No squirrel there, but a bunch of nested hair and an egg!

I took the hairs out a bit to see if there were more eggs and -- movement! It turns out the egg is the unhatched sibling to a little guy that is probably going to get pretty hungry pretty soon.

I think it would be cool to raise the little guy. Sadly, I suppose we could replace the branch, but it now has a massive hole in the nest, and my grubby hands inadvertently besmelled the hairs, so I need to find out what he eats to keep him alive.

Here's an egg shot for identification:

Bigger! Bigger!

I live in Seattle proper in the Pacific Northwest of the Continental United States, for those of you scrambling for the bird guides.

If you know a bird expert online, please link. The faster we can get him or her identified the greater his or her chances of growing older!

Much thanks in advance!

Addendum, Later that Day: I'll spare the bird haters of the LJ world and put the rest of this saga under a cut, with a single teaser:

Two of the Three

That above pic shows two of the three little guys from a nest I found in this hole:

Like I mentioned above, this was firewood. I could have easily chopped through the fledglings within, but no, I only chopped the base. In fact, here's a picture of the base of the nest:

Those three are the luckiest birds alive.

I had no idea how deep the hole was or what was inside. An inch or two in another direction (which, now that I look at the two firewood pieces side by side, would have made for a more even cut) and I would have been cleaning the gore from my 12" chop saw. Not a pretty thought.

Here's the nest piece, after I started pulling a bit of the nesting material out (before I realized the little guys were still there):

I tried to get shots of the contents before I had to empty the nest, but no go. It was too long a tube, and I was afraid to pull the nesting material any further before I had a place for the chicks to rest. Instead, I took that first shot of the egg and posted it, along with an all-call to birdlovers. While I waited for the intertubes to work their informational magic, I high-tailed it to my friend's house to see if there weren't some angry or confused parents wondering what the hell. Sadly, he had cut the nest's branch last weekend; it's doubtful the folks (who he hadn't seen about) would have known to look on the ground. These guys are orphans, or at least abandoned.

Many thanks to mactavish who identified the likely breed by the egg pic. Looks like I had a nest of White-breasted Nuthatches*. A borrowed bird book seemed to confirm this; the WBNH likes to nest in abandoned woodpecker burrows.

Since they hadn't probably seen a feeding in days, I took a chance and gave them (at first) some water:

Drink up!

After doing some later reading in the bird book, I took a chance and ground up some bird feed with a mortar and pestle with lots of water, then sucked some of this into the eyedropper:

Though they have been named (by The Wife), we won't be keeping them. I'd love to, but I know nothing about raising them fit to release into the wild. Also, we live in a cat heaven. I'd feel terrible if they died under my care, or got gobbled by a neighbor's cat. Since another commenter recommended it, I'll be taking them to Lynnwood (about 40 minutes away) in about 15 minutes, where they'll have at least a fighting chance. Oh, and the most helpful person I talked to mentioned something about raising wild birdies being illegal in the state, so . . . .

Still, those three are about the luckiest chicks around.

*Addendum, Still later: The attendant at the PAWS wildlife shelter seemed to think they might be Black-capped Chickadees. Those eggs look very similar. She should know. Also, the chickadees are far, far more common in town than the nuthatches, especially the black-capped ones.

End of an Era

2009-05-31T21:43:17Z

Ten years ago, I unpacked a crate from California, did some modest assembly, and rolled the contents to the corner of the old Electric Vehicles NW parking lot to take this picture.

Fresh out of the crate.

That is a 1999 EMB Lectra, one of the first production electric motorcycles with features that I considered essential for both safety and personal reasons -- an alternating current propulsion system with regenerative braking, an onboard charging system, a clean and attractive appearance, and (most importantly) batteries that didn't spew acid on the rider in an accident. It also had to keep up with traffic, even on steep slopes.

I rode that bike for a couple thousand miles until poor design quirks and a lack of support (brought on by the manufacturer's assimilation into a heartless, evil company) finally killed my hope of getting it running again.

Though my lack of Mad Skillz with a soldering iron might have prevented me from fixing my bike, there are others with such skills. One such electrical engineer won the lottery, in that he knew my sister from work and heard about an available electric bike. He got my address from my sister and emailed me, asking how much I wanted. I replied:

I'm asking nothing ($0.00) for the bike, only that it go to a home where the goal is to get it running again (something I don't have the tech chops or inclination to try). I've poked around with soldering irons before, but never on something this unfamiliar to me. Also, sadly, my eyes just ain't what they used to be in cramped quarters.

Which led to this picture, taken yesterday after all the paperwork had been finished.

Goodbye, Old Pal

I started following the progress of electric vehicles in the late '90s when I joined The Electric Vehicle Discussion List, a well-established listserve email spewer forum that keeps like-minded electric gear heads in contact. I noticed a few trends even then that I felt would kill any chance electrics might have.

First, there is no one type of electric enthusiast, but they can (with some exception) be divided into opposing camps based on their preferences. The most stark divisions can be drawn between the Slugs verses the Smokers, Golf Carts v. Dragsters, between those that drive gutless electrics in traffic sometimes to deliberately slow traffic and those that must under any circumstances be the power on the road. This division exists in the gas car arena, I know; but in the realm of electrics it has real consequences. You see, there aren't that many electrics on the road. Therefore, any time someone gets behind an electric that is holding up traffic, the negative impressions that person gets are institutionally transferred to all electrics. Imagine the hurdle this creates for someone trying desperately to market a decent, road-worthy electric car or motorcycle.

As you might have noted, I am not in any way sympathetic to the Golf Cart crowd. Why? Because it is an avoidable pitfall. The electric technology was at one time limited to creating golf carts. That was just fine in an era where all cars were restricted to golf cart speeds, as was the case at the turn of the century.

A Detroit Electric Drives from Seattle to Mount Rainier, circa 1919.

When you share the road with horse-drawn carts and wagons, no car should try to zip past at too fast a speed. Horses get spooked. Go back in just about any old paper a hundred years and catalog the deaths and injuries caused by runaway horses. It was far more common than one might imagine. Horses also forced some municipalities to pass what are now called Blue Laws for cars, requirements that noisier vehicles go no faster than 10 mph, and be escorted ahead by folks walking and carrying lanterns to warn horses of the vehicle's approach. That was no stupid law in the 1800's. That was simple self-preservation.

Cars have forced the horses to the pasture, to the park and to Amish country. Speed limits are a bit higher today. Therefore, the cars should be able to travel at or above these speed limits. In some cases, electrics travel waaaay over the limits.

As well they should.

There's another division in the electric ranks, one that involves appearances. Some people feel so strongly about weening the planet off of petroleum that they feel driving any available electric is better than not, even if it means driving really, really funky-looking cars that simply scream Mad Scientist on the Road. While I understand where these people are coming from philosophically, I also feel that they are Simply Not Getting It. If you really, truly, sincerely want electric cars to become universal, you've got to sell the concept. Any real estate agent can tell you the value of "curb appeal," the concept that shoves to the forefront the notion that the house must look good, that first impressions count. It applies to cars as well.

You see, the curb appeal of a car extends the interest others might have of the car. What the Mad Scientists of the electric world don't seem to understand -- what evidence would, in fact, suggest they deliberately reject understanding as valid -- is that, to become universal, electrics must be embraced by people the Mad Scientists overtly hate. Yes, those jerks who drive big, ostentatious cars and are always cleaning them in a loving if not erotic fashion and who spend way too much of their available income tricking them out -- that should be your target demographic. Why?

Simply, because they have money. Make the electrics shiny and cool, and they will come.

All of which brings me to the last point; when building an electric for market, iron out the major bugs before it hits the showroom (or owner's garage).

The Lectra had assembly and manufacturing issues even before it left the crate. Someone at the warehouse had bolted a metal washer directly to an aluminum piece and left an orbital scratch right where the handlebars were mounted. It came out with some polishing, but really pissed me off. A piece of cardboard or gasket material between the washer and the aluminum would have prevented this. It was obvious no one had thought to unpack an re-assemble the bikes to see what they would look like after shipping.

Other problems became obvious, like battery and charge management. Batteries need to be treated well if they are to last. Automotive batteries last as long as they do simply because they aren't asked to do very much, just start the car and help run the accessories. Electric drive batteries are asked to do the impossible, to power the drive at high amperage, then to sit for some time before they can be recharged. Worse, they are strung together and charged as a unit. This means that when a battery for whatever reason starts to fail, its failure drags the whole pack down to its level. Think of a chain -- it is only as strong as its weakest link.

This happened on the Lectra. One battery got progressively undercharged, and might have reversed, causing the last fatal blow. Yes, I could have balanced the pack; but how? According to the owner's manual, I was supposed to take the bike to the dealer to have the pack balanced. . . except there were no dealers. They had started shipping bikes before they had a support network in place.

Other design oversights started popping up almost immediately. I started burning out stop lights simply because they Lectra didn't have a way of shedding regenerative power when fully charged. At $10 a piece, that got expensive. I had to remember not to regen on a full pack.

The cooling fan was in the way, mounted right where the shop manual told me to place the jack to lift the rear wheel. Since every bike needed periodic chain tensioning, I was constantly pulling the fan. I finally realized that it doesn't come on very often, and pulled it off and left it off.

Speaking of chain tensioning, the Lectra had a pretty nifty way of getting the tightening done . . . but no tool to do it correctly. According to the manual, one was supposed to stick a ratcheting wrench into the little hole and use the ratchet as a lever. Problem: The hole was in an aluminum cam, and ratchets are steel. Since the hole was round and ratchets are square, one pressed corners into the hole causing ugliness. I built my own tensioning tool to prevent further manufacturer-recommended damage.

Furthermore, every time one tightened the chain, one shortened the rear brake cable, something not mentioned in the manual at all. I noticed my range starting to suffer, but figured it was my driving. Then, after a tightening, I smelled smoke. The cable had finally tightened enough to exert constant drag on the brake. I had to borrow wrenches from a (thankfully!) nearby firetruck to loosen the cable. Had that truck not been there, I would have missed work.

Those weren't the only problems I had, but I'll spare you the laundry list. Suffice to say that all of these listed design/documentation problems could have been avoided had EMB spent more time testing and perfecting their bike. They focused, it seems, all of their time working on the drive system, and I think they got that part right. When it came time to attach that system to a finished bike, it seems they ran into problems that they tried to fix on the fly, leaving the owners to point out -- and fix -- those problems. Bad PR. No biscuit.

These above hurdles are not insignificant. They are faced by every company rolling out a product. Every company faces oversights, some larger, some smaller. The larger ones can cripple a product and even bring down a company. Recall problems on the Evinrude RAM ficht outboard engine, for example, forced that company into a rival merger.

When the industry itself is largely undefined, the problems faced by any company are compounded by the fact that no one around can alert them to problems. The learning curve is vast and steep.

Which dismays me every time I see the same mistakes made by someone selling electric vehicles. Had the makers/importers done some homework, they could have avoided the mistakes or simply abandon their windmill tilt altogether. It's no wonder that the list of bankrupt EV manufacturers is so very, very long.

10 Things You Didn't Know About the Orgasm

2009-05-25T17:22:29Z

Mary Roach giggles her way through her TED talk, noting upsuck, Kinsey's ejaculate measurements (and how they affected the carpet), and sow vibrators for pig farmers unwilling to mount the sow themselves.

Sneezing For Fun!

2009-05-24T20:14:27Z

6_bleen_7 turned me on to a great online game, Sneeze. You get one sneeze in each level and must infect a growing percentage of the population to continue.

Infect wisely!

Ignoring the Perenial Gale: Why The Kindle May Soon Be Kindling

2009-05-20T06:17:22Z

Okay, folks, I'll be honest; I've been waiting for a device like Amazon's Kindle for quite some time. Small, portable, readable, and -- perhaps best of all -- connectable directly to the internet for content. It's cheaper than a laptop, uses less power (I assume), has a direct-light readable screen, and could solve one of the nagging problems faced by the newspaper industry today: It could lower the high cost of printing papers.

According to an episode of On The Media, however, Amazon might be trying to get too greedy with its new-fangled reader.

Some background material is in order. Joseph Schumpeter, an economist of the Austrian school, coined the term "creative destruction" to describe technical progress in an industrial age. Essentially, new innovations reduce the manpower, raw material, energy and time requirements of the old way of doing things -- no matter if "old" is measured in minutes or millennia -- thus driving competition and, in the process, freeing up human and physical capitol for use doing other things. From the Wiki:

The opening up of new markets and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as US Steel illustrate the process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one ... [The process] must be seen in its role in the perennial gale of creative destruction; it cannot be understood on the hypothesis that there is a perennial lull.

—Joseph Schumpeter, The Process of Creative Destruction, 1942

For examples, think of any big household name in business and industry, and you will probably think of a destroyer of old business. For thousands of years, Bibles and other sacred texts were hand copied by scribes in monestaries up until Gutenberg perfected the Western version of movable type. This started a revolution in printed material that dominated up until the present day, and allowed for people to disseminate their ideas far and wide for relatively little expense. Gutenberg lead to Hearst, to Pulizter, to all the big names in publishing.

Just over a hundred years ago, L. C. Smith jumped on another gale and turned his shotgun machine works to work making those new-fangled typewriters. His machines and those of his competitors retired scribes almost altogether and created another lost anomaly, the steno pool, enormous warehouses of typists copying text for letters and other document needs. Next, consider Xerox and their copiers that reduced and eventually eliminated the steno pools, which were obviated still again by Microsoft and others which, along with the cheap printer, made copying a master almost a thing of the past.

My point in all of this? With each technical leap, the profits of the succeeding company/technology came from the losses of the companies/technologies that preceded them. When IBM came out with an affordable adding machine, business needed fewer humans adding and balancing the books, leaving a single bookkeeper able to do the computational work formerly performed by many others.

In a nutshell, creative destruction leads to job losses in the near term.

Well now we have the probable losses of most of America's news industry. Yes, yes, I know, we still have radio and television. Have you ever noticed, though, how most of television news is comprised of sensationalized non-news filled in with follow-ups on stories originally found in the local newspapers? When you remove the least expensive news to produce, the written word, you raise the base price of any given news story and thus reduce the number of news stories folks are will to consume.

This might have disastrous results, according to May 8's OTM. They first covered testimony before congress on the future of news gathering. This section struck me: David Simon, creator of The Wire, noted that aggregating bloggers don't do anything to enrich the reporting they disseminate, and thus are leading to a weakening of news gathering in general. Arianna Huffington disagreed:

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Actually, if you look at, for example, Voices of San Diego, which is a not-for-profit site that is exposing precisely what you are talking about, local corruption, and actually having real impact investigative journalism, that is happening around the country.

DAVID SIMON: The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore zoning board hearing is the day that I will be confident that we've actually reached some sort of equilibrium. You know, the next 10 or 15 years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption. It is going to be one of the great times to be a corrupt politician, all right?

Then OTM brings up the Kindle, the device that could distribute newspaper content to subscribers, thus reducing the printing costs all newspapers face without entirely giving up the newspapers' revenue source. The story following the testimony delves into the Kindle with one enthusiastic apologist, Paul Saffo, technology forecaster and Visiting Scholar in the Stanford Media X Research Network. He's optimistic. Brooke Glalstone, however, finds a flaw:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Some people have criticized the Kindle because basically what you've purchased is locked onto your device, but you don't own the content. You can't lend it to a friend, unless you hand over your Kindle.

PAUL SAFFO: Nothing new ever comes into our lives without a hidden curse. And all the convenience of having it in electronic form comes with that price. And -- it troubles me greatly.

Those of us who remember when we could share books with friends will be bothered by this for the rest of our lives, and a younger generation that grows up with the idea that you buy things and you use it once, and if you want it again you buy it again, aren't going to be bothered. (Emphatic rage mine.)

Wait. Did he just say that younger kids have no problem buying things twice?!? On what planet his he living? This planet, the one called Earth, is peopled by enthusiasts not of multiple payments, but of absolutely free digital stuff. To claim that, when it comes to the printed word, these thieving generations that made Napster, Kaaza and Pirate Bay household words would abandon all old habits and just chuck a few bucks toward Amazon is laugh-out-loud ridiculous.

Notice I didn't claim the kids would be hucking their bucks to the newspapers, but to Amazon. Here's another fly in the Kindle ointment I should mention, the deal Amazon is offering to newspapers for the privilege of saving their industry:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, you testified about your negotiations with Amazon regarding the Kindle electronic reader. Could you tell us about that?

JIM MORONEY (of The Dallas Morning News): Somebody was bringing up the Kindle as the solution we should all be focused on. And I love the Kindle. I read books on it all the time. My problem is that after negotiating and negotiating and negotiating, the very best deal we could get from Amazon was to split revenues for whatever price we decided to charge. We could get 30 percent of that money. They get 70 percent.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Wow.

JIM MORONEY: I could have probably lived with that, but there was another clause in there that they would not give me relief on, and that said that they have the right to re-license my content to any portable device, not just an Amazon-owned device, any portable device. In essence, I was giving them a complete licensing agreement for nothing for all of my content, period.

I'm sort of – that’s - give away my future, you know. (Again, emphasis mine.)

30 percent of revenues and no rights to other media. That's insane.

What is Amazon doing here? Exactly what the record labels and the movie industry did with music and movies, quashing a fair chance for anyone who isn't a complete moron to get decent content -- by giving a fair share to the content producers, not the content distributors -- without stealing it. In less than a year, someone will slap together a hack (if is hasn't been done already), a Kindle-esque reader without the troublesome tendencies for giving unreasonable chunks of cash to Amazon. In the process, of course, the content will have to be stolen, because of course Amazon will have locked up willing (and desperate) newspapers into exclusive contracts that prevent anyone from getting the content any other way.

The recording industry created Napster by quashing digital downloads at any price. Television and movie executives likewise created wide-spread movie piracy because they didn't listen to folks who got sick of the endless commercials and silly "Piracy is Theft" ads. Sadly, sadly sadly, Amazon seems to be joining the list of companies so hell-bent on endlessly profiting from the work of others well beyond a reasonable level that theft will prove the only alternative. They are attempting to do what no one has ever been able to do ever before, to create a creative lull buttressed by contract law alone that will feed them profits without effort on their part.

In essence, lulls are vacuums. You know how nature feels about those.

150 Years of Climate Change

2009-05-13T23:20:55Z

"Thus, the bold and beautiful speculation has been made an experimental fact."

So said John Tyndale almost 150 years ago. What speculation did he demonstrate as fact? Global warming:

On 10 June, Tyndall demonstrated his experiments before a packed meeting at the Royal Institution, with Albert the prince consort in the chair. "To the eye, the gas within the tube might be as invisible as the air itself, while to the radiant heat it behaved like a cloud which it was almost impossible to penetrate. Thus, the bold and beautiful speculation has been made an experimental fact. The radiant heat of the sun does certainly pass through the atmosphere to the Earth with greater facility than the radiant heat of the Earth can escape into space."

Notes Mike Hulme, founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, UK:

"Many people think the greenhouse effect is a late 20th-century invention. Yet the physical basis for anthropogenic global warming was established six months before Darwin published On the Origin of Species," says Hulme. "Unlike Darwin, Tyndall's findings didn't cause a revolution in thinking. It was a long, slow process before people recognised the implications."

More than any researcher responsible for making us aware of the possible consequences of our accumulating carbon release, Tyndale's forgotten name deserves the recognition he has so far failed to receive.

The Dawn of Newspaper Suicide

2009-05-12T18:21:00Z

Via bollox:

Old school tech and hair dates the first noose slung by the papers themselves in a prescient television news story.

Trekkies Decry New Star Trek Movie as "Fun, Watchable"

2009-05-05T23:32:40Z

Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

A "fun, watchable" Star Trek movie? What next, one has to ask?

Love the Onion.

Acceptable Forms of Suicide

2009-05-05T05:09:04Z

This one isn't easy for me to write simply because it involves people I know personally, people who, for one reason or another, are killing themselves in ways our society finds somewhat acceptable.

I guess the emphasis should be on the qualifier "acceptable." Allow me to explain.

Almost two weeks ago Friday, I was lunching with a friend, Lenny. He got a text from his wife saying she felt poorly at work, and was thinking about heading home sick. On the top of things, this would hardly warrant comment, except that she is a diabetic, and the reason she felt poorly was that her blood sugar spiked to over 600. After some texting back and forth, she announced she would be heading home.

Think about this for just a moment. A normal person's blood sugar hovers around 100. Hers was high enough to drive a normal person just to the brink of insulin shock, the point where the pancreas simply gives up its supply of insulin and the person slips into a nice little coma. . . and she was driving home. (She later called Lenny a bit remorseful, after getting home safely and realizing what could very well have happened on that drive.)

I've got to say, Lenny took this pretty well. His wife has been gaining weight and denying the very real health impact this weight gain has on her diabetic condition. She's now up to the most powerful insulin medical science has available, delivered with a portable insulin pump (decorated, ironically, with a colorful jelly bean skin). This means that if her condition worsens, as it at this rate surely will, no medicine available will help her digest the increasing carb load to which she subjects herself.

Yes, increasing. She is eating herself to death.

When I first saw that insulin pump and its candy coating, we were lunching at a pizza joint enjoying the all-one-can-eat buffet. I even commented on her consumption, noting that I didn't think pizza crust was the best food doctors recommend for diabetics. (It really, really isn't.) Her eyes glazed over just a bit when I said this. Lenny later told me she has been told again and again by friends, family, health care providers and anyone else who knows that her favorite foods, all carbohydrate-rich "comfort" stuff like rice, breads, pizza, cookies, et cetera, we causing her spikes in blood glucose and weight gain. She has consistently responded by eating more of the same.

In fact, between receiving those dire texts Lenny related the last time they had visited the pho place. Her lunchtime order: A medium chicken pho, an extra side of rice, a full order of teriyaki chicken (with its own rice and salad), and a side order of gyoza. She dumped the rice into the soup (apparently because rice noodles don't pack enough carbs on their own) and ate the whole thing at one sitting.

I was stunned.

I told him she wasn't going to last at that rate. He told me he knew that, and that she would continue until a major health complication gave her a wake-up call.

Some background is in order. I mentioned Lenny had stayed home from work on this fateful day years ago because his wife "is a diabetic, and occasionally needs help watching the kids when the disease obstructs her vision." That obstructs her vision thing is key. Essentially, she has for a few years now woken up blind for a few days at a time.

From what I've heard, she's already had more wake-up calls than I could personally tolerate. Burying your head in the pillows and slapping the snooze button won't stop the alarms from sounding.

It's something of which Lenny is acutely aware. The trouble is, he can't say anything. Or do anything, really. If he says anything, he's the bad guy. If he does anything, like organize an intervention or threaten to leave her if she does nothing, he's worse. He then becomes the bad guy who picks on his wife or is willing to abandon her in her time of need. He can only support her and hint and hope those hints are not completely ignored.

And watch his wife commit suicide.

The Wednesday after that lunch, I visited an old work friend in the hospital. Check out his eyes from a few weeks ago:

Old Yellow Eyes

You are seeing what happens to a person when their liver shuts down and refuses to process the bloodstream's waste. Why would a person's liver shut down? I found out about C. from this email:

I thought you would like to know that our friend (C.) is in the hospital for alcoholic hepatitis. He went in last week and in very poor shape. He had gone in for a similar problem in January and was told that he needed to stop drinking. He didn't.

Later emails told a more dire story of a coma (from which he emerged a week before I visited) and imminent death in 72 hours. He pulled out of that, thankfully, but now is looking down the barrel of at least 6 months of recovery and subsequent rehab. . . if he survives. After all, a man with a martini tattoo on his shoulder does not go gently into that good rehab.*

So we have here two very different people killing themselves in two very different ways. What conclusions can we draw? Well, first of all let's note that there really isn't anything anyone can do in our society to help them until they seek help themselves. It's like the old joke: How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one, but the bulb has to want to change.

At this point, Lenny's wife doesn't seem to sense the urgency. When I visited him, C. seemed to accept his fate, but only time will tell if that urgency remains. After all, this is one of the three people I personally know who topped the all-time drinkers list. One is already dead. The other, last we heard, followed a crazy drug-addled girlfriend down to South America and was, again last we heard, begging anyone who got the message to come down to Panama and bail him out of jail. (I take it Panama has very different laws than we have here. You can't get out until someone comes to vouch for you. Ah, poor Cracky.)

I wonder, though, if that will change, if we as citizens will be allowed our own self-destruction in the name of Happiness's Pursuit. I'm not so sure.

In Victorian times, anyone could wander into the local apothocary and pick up some laudanum, essentially an tincture of opium. One could also buy opium by the gummy hunk. We still use opiates, of course, but have learned that their destructive addictive qualities far outweigh the need for people to get them unsupervised. Later in history, Sigmund Freud himself marveled at cocaine's theraputic qualities, including the enticing possibility of using it to help morphine addicts break their opiate addictions.

Consider also transformative technologies, like the driving of cars. When cars first put their rubber to the road, anyone who could afford the car could drive it. Anyone. Remember Paper Moon when a very young Tatum O'Neill drives around? Perfectly legal. Then people started to die in traffic accidents (more than they did with rampaging horses, which was all too common). States started to license drivers and impose penalties.

Later, driving drunk penalties got stiffer and stiffer -- not, ironically, as the incidents of drunk driving increased, but as the awareness of drunk driving increased through agencies such as MADD. Lenny himself had a grandfather that killed a pedestrian while he was driving drunk. He had to pay a $35 fine for that oopsie, but it didn't hurt his later career as a law enforcement officer (once he got out of prison for bootlegging -- those darned revenuers!)

Never mind drunk driving, one cannot today in most states ride a car without a seat belt, or a motorcycle without a helmet. What changed? Probably the cost of caring for people after accidents. We have gotten very good at patching people together, but not altogether that good at paying for the patches. The insurance agencies get to pay today, but several folks (like C.) are too poor to have had policies and rely upon charity or the state to pick up the tab.

I say this a day after taking yet another call from a well-meaning employee contracted by my health provider. He calls a few times a year to check up on me. I answer an internet poll customized by that contractor, a questionaire that asks how much I weigh, what I (generally) eat, how much I (generally) drink, whether I own a gun -- essentially probing into my lifestyle, comparing elements in that lifestyle that involve risk to the health care provider, and then -- here's the insidious part -- suggesting I change my lifestyle to reduce risk.

Why, for example, do I own a gun? Don't you know they kill people? Sure, I answer, but not as many people as swimming pools. According to Freakonomics, a ground-level swimming pool kills 100 times the children as a gun kept loaded at home:

In a given year, there is one drowning of a child for every 11,000 residential pools in the United States. . . . Meanwhile, there is 1 child killed by a gun for every 1 million-plus guns. . . . The likelihood of death by pool (1 in 11,000) versus death by gun (1 in 1 million-plus) isn't even close. . . . (Levitt, Freakonomics, HarperCollins, 2005, pp. 149-150)

Yet the questionaire never asked if I had a pool. Interesting. The questions keep coming, and then they find in my lifestyle some room for improvement. If I agree to meet some improvement goal, my out-of-pocket expenses won't be increased.

Knowing people like C. and Lenny's wife, I can see why insurance companies are taking these steps. I guess. That doesn't really take the sting out of it, though.

But let's go further down the speculative hole. Here's a question: You see a TV news segment about a woman who, instead of simply watching what she eats, now is a hundred pounds heavier than she was a decade ago and must rely on a $5,000 insulin pump to keep her alive. If (as it happens) her husbands employer's health insurance policy picked up the tab, you as a viewer might marvel at technology's progress to improve our lives.

If (as it may happen under a state-sponsored health care system) you see that woman as a drain on society's resources, as too selfish to take care of herself, as a glutton and evidence of society's decline, you might just entertain thoughts of contacting your lawmaker and raising a ruckus over allowing such outright waste of the taxpayer's treasure. Hey (you might say), there's nothing wrong with getting fat, but when it affects your health, it affects the taxpayer. That's when it must stop!

Lifestyle risk management: At what point do choices we make today become simply too expensive for society to allow? It's one of the vexing elements of any necessary state sponsorship of health care I can see coming, but cannot see how to stop.

*Addendum, June 17, 2009: I have learned 30 seconds ago that C. didn't make it. He died on May 15.

The Next Foreclosure Wave -- Ready For A Riding!

2009-05-05T01:51:25Z

Eschaton brings us the new wave. Looks like we are right now in the very lowest point of the trough, with a wave of potential foreclosures looming right before us.

Pay close attention to the second bar graph in the graphic and consider what it represents. I mean, freakin' hell, people, an over 80% increase in mortgage payments by mid '11?