Touring Stockholm

The IETF meeting in Stockholm is wrapping up today, and I’m about to take a few days to tour around before heading home. I’ll likely be little inclined to post here for the next few days — perhaps a photo or two, like the one below (taken from the Stockholm City Hall on Sunday afternoon, as the IETF meeting began; click, as usual, to enlarge), but nothing of substance until Tuesday evening or Wednesday.

So check back next week, and I’ll have posts about the conference and the touring. I also might not be approving comments between now and then, so if you send a comment, be patient and it will appear by Tuesday afternoon.

Stockholm's Gamla Stan (Old Town), viewed from City Hall

The War on Terror’s zenith of stupidity

The New York Times tells us about a sad — and silly — decision in the ever-sillier fight for homeland security:

Four years ago, when the federal General Services Administration unveiled its plans for a new border-crossing station here in northeastern New York State, the design was presented as part of the agency’s campaign to raise the dismal standards of government architecture. Even many in the famously fractious architectural community celebrated the complex — particularly its main building, emblazoned with glossy yellow, 21-foot-high letters spelling “United States” — as a rare project the government could point to with pride.

Pride, indeed! What could be better than taking an obvious entry point into the country and giving it the dual use of entry point and work of architectural art. Cool!

Of course, there’s a “but”:

Yet three weeks ago, less than a month after the station opened, workers began prying the big yellow letters off the building’s facade on orders from Customs and Border Protection. The plan is to dismantle the rest of the sign this week.

“At the end of the day, I think they were somewhat surprised at how bold and how bright it was,” said Les Shepherd, the chief architect of the General Services Administration, referring to the customs agency’s sudden turnaround.

“There were security concerns,” said Kelly Ivahnenko, a spokeswoman for the customs agency. “The sign could be a huge target and attract undue attention. Anything that would place our officers at risk we need to avoid.”

The Times correctly notes that what Customs and Border Protection are doing “is a depressing, if not wholly unpredictable, example of how the lingering trauma of 9/11 can make it difficult for government bureaucracies to make rational decisions. It reflects a tendency to focus on worst-case scenarios to the exclusion of common sense[.]”

Exclusion of common sense, indeed; that is the crux of it. This is not a secret building. It isn’t something trying to disguise itself as something else. We’re not trying to pretend that, say, some CIA office is really a dry-cleaning shop.

This is a major entry point into the United States, well known by all and used by many. Why on Earth should it not say “UNITED STATES” in large, yellow letters? How can anyone with any sense think that increases the threat? Anyone who should want to attack a border crossing knows where and what this is, regardless. And if there were any doubt, well, the Times helpfully includes a map to show us the location.

This has to be the “Ishtar” of Security Theatre — showing it at its worst, and most stupid.

“Send to a friend” abuse

I’ve started getting a few “419 scam” messages using the “email this cartoon” feature of the Dilbert web site as a vector. The 419 scam, also called the Nigerian scam, is that form of advance-fee fraud we see in email so much, where someone sends you a message claiming that he’s the son of the deposed Nigerian president, or some such, and promising free money if you will only help.

The Dilbert web site needs no introduction, I’m sure. Below the day’s Dilbert cartoon is a convenient “Email” button.

Now, the thing about the button is that it pops up a nice, convenient mini-window in your browser, and the window has fields for the sender’s name, your name and email address, and a “personal message”. You fill those in, you press “Send”, it sends the email... and then you can press a button to send another. If you do that, it retains what you put into all three fields. And there’s no CAPTCHA.

You can see how easy it would be to use this to send a boatload of identical messages. Once you get started, it’s a sequence of clicking “again”, pasting another email address into the destination, and clicking “send”. The scammers have seen that, too, obviously: I got one yesterday that looked something like this:

Subject: The Good Lord Loves You is sending you some Dilbert!

Your friend The Good Lord Loves You wanted us to send you this from Dilbert.com.

Message from The Good Lord Loves You:

[419-scam message goes here, something about a church and orphans and whatnot. And money; a lot of money.]

[Image of Dilbert cartoon goes here.]

Sigh. Leave it to the fraudsters to ruin “email” links for the rest of us.

On the other hand, as I tell all my friends: if you want to send someone a pointer to a web page... copy and paste the URL, and send them that. The email message comes from you, you can put your own personalization on it, and you haven’t given your friend’s email address to the web site.

Repeating that last point: please don’t give random web sites your friends’ email addresses. It’s not hard to send the email yourself.

Having one’s head in the cloud

Computer trends are interesting to follow[1]; they keep changing, and, as with clothing, the chic trends this year soon become passé, replaced by newer ones. It often seems that it’s really the words that change, while the actual trends continue pretty much intact. Some years ago, we liked “e-Utilities”, then “autonomic computing”, later “on-demand computing”, and now “software as a service” (SAAS or SAS, depending upon who’s abbreviating it). To be sure, at some level these aren’t all the same thing at all. And, yet, when it comes to describing a way of providing computer services as needed, in a sort of plug-and-play manner, it’s easy to make your project or product fit them all.

In that sense, they become buzz words, and as the operative buzz words change, we spin our project proposals or our product advertising to take maximum advantage of the “new trend”.

So with “distributed computing”, “cluster computing”, “grid computing”, and “cloud computing”, terms that have developed over the last years. Each is distinct from the others in some ways, but there’s a great deal of overlap. A turn-of-the-century distributed computing application that has the right profile could easily have morphed through the series, proudly calling itself a cloud computing application today. There’s a lot of fluff here.[2]

Eric Rescorla gives an opinion on cloud computing over at Educated Guesswork, and I agree with him that it’s a mixed bag. All of the mechanisms in the list above have some of the characteristics Eric talks about, such as the ability to draw on more resources only when they’re needed, avoiding over-provisioning the system all the time. You could actually say that it works autonomically, or on-demand... but never mind.

What I think is interesting about the emphasis on cloud computing, and putting your data and services “in the cloud”, is that we’ve come close to completing a circle. In the 1970s, we used “dumb terminals” that talked to “mainframe computers”, behemoths that sat in large data centers. The terminal was an input/output device, but was not itself a computer... so all the programs and the data lived and ran on the mainframe. We had central management of everything, and the only way to distribute the cost was to charge for use of mainframe resources — processor cycles, data storage, and so on.

In the 1980s, we developed personal computers and started using them seriously. The computer on your desk would run a “terminal emulator” that accessed the mainframe, but it also ran its own programs, starting to pull away from the central management. We did spreadsheets and word processing and that sort of thing without ever touching someone else’s computer. We still stored data in the data center — it had far more capacity, of course — but we no longer stored everything there. And, too, some of the cost was distributed to the users, who paid for their own computers and software.

In the 1990s, as the worldwide web developed, we did more and more on our own computers, and relied far less in the data center, to the point that many people in offices — and pretty much everyone at home — made no use of it at all.

Of course, no one ran everything on her own computer, either. The whole point of the web is to make it easy to find and retrieve things from other computers on the Internet, and over time, more and more services became available to us.

But we ran our own browsers and office software and email programs and lots of other programs. And, as a result, we had to manage all that software ourselves. Be sure to update all your software regularly, we’ve been reminded, to make sure long-fixed program bugs don’t bite you. Upgrade periodically to get new features, keep your anti-virus definitions up to date, and remember to back up your hard drive regularly, lest you have a disk crash and lose all.

Now, in the 2000s, we’re moving back. Keep your backups at someone’s Internet data center — they’ll give you lots of free space, and you can pay for more storage and features. Next, keep your data somewhere else in the first place, using webmail, using “virtual hard drives” on the Internet. Then run your software somewhere else, with things like Google Docs — they’ll take care of storing your data, making sure it’s backed up, scanning it for viruses, making sure the software that uses it is properly updated....

What, now, is the real difference between computing in the cloud — or on the grid or whatever, in what we’ve come to call “federated” systems — and computing in the data centers of the 1970s? Google is talking, with its announced operating system that ties heavily into the cloud, of moving your PC even further back to a not-so-dumb terminal that, through a web browser, gets all of its data and services from what amounts to a data center.

30+ years ago, the data center was a large room with many large, noisy boxes; today, it lives in smaller, probably quieter chunks all over the world. And the circle is very close to being closed.
 

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[1] Well, for some value of “interesting”, but bear with me here.

[2] Yes, “cloud”, “fluff”... sorry.

Driven to distraction

In Driven to Distraction: Drivers and Legislators Dismiss Cellphone Risks, the New York Times tells us of Christopher Hill, of Oklahoma City. Last September, at the age of 20, Mr Hill hit an SUV at 45 miles per hour and killed its driver... because, as he freely admitted, he was using his cell phone and didn’t see the red traffic light.

Later, a policeman asked Mr. Hill what color the light had been. “I never saw it,” he answered.

Despite that “[e]xtensive research shows the dangers of distracted driving,” despite that “[s]tudies say that drivers using phones are four times as likely to cause a crash as other drivers,” people continue to use their phones, hand-held or hands-free. They make voice calls, they text. They use other devices — CD players, MP3 players, GPS systems, and others — that seriously distract them from driving. Those distractions often result in horrific collisions that would never have happened if the drivers involved had been, well, driving, rather than playing with their electronics.

We’ve always had distractions in the car. Parents have dealt with their children, people have fiddled with the radio, smokers have lit cigarettes while driving for decades. But it’s just getting progressively worse as we adapt more technology to the car. More, and smaller technology.

Remember when the car radio had a large button to turn it on and change the volume, and six large buttons to select predetermined radio stations? Compare that to finding a CD (do you find the writing as small and hard to read as I do?), taking it out of its case, ejecting the CD that’s already in the player, putting it somewhere, and inserting the new one into a narrow slot. You may well have crashed before you found the “eject” button. And scrolling through songs on a minuscule iPod screen, or entering an address with the touch-screen of your navigation system may be even more challenging to attention that should be given to the road and the traffic around you.

Then here’s another thing: the studies don’t just show that handling the cell phone is dangerous. Sure, when you have to look at the phone to enter a phone number or find someone in your address book, you’re especially vulnerable. But even with a hands-free system and voice calling, just having a conversation on the phone is dangerous — almost the same danger, whether you’re holding the phone or not.

Having a conversation with someone who is not present, it turns out, is what’s far, far more distracting than you imagine. Partly, it’s that a passenger who’s present can help keep a watch, and will at the very least adjust the conversation to allow for traffic issues. And partly, it’s that talking with someone who isn’t there is cognitively different, engaging brain functions that need to be focused on the task of guiding your one-ton hunk of metal safely through the obstacle course around you.

And yet, the denial continues:

“It’s not as if you are going to be able to take this away from people,” [Joe Berry, Ford’s director of business and product development] said of phones and other devices in cars. “They simply won’t give it up.”

Mr. Berry compared the situation to eating unhealthy foods. “We, as people, don’t want to stop doing things that aren’t in our best interest,” he said.

Well, yes, but, you see, if you stuff yourself with doughnuts, and fried cheese dipped in mayonnaise, you aren’t going to suddenly become a missile capable of taking out a hapless family two lanes over.[1] If you want to eat yourself into your grave, that may be sad, but it doesn’t affect random victims on the road. This is very different.

You are going to take this away from people, if you can get legislators with the backbone to do what has to be done and executives to enforce the laws. They key is to stop listening to the whining about what people want to do, and to start holding them accountable for what’s not safe. People want to speed, too, and people do. But that doesn’t stop us from passing laws against it and giving out speeding tickets, does it?
 

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[1] Unless, of course, you should have a major MI while you were driving, but the timing isn’t likely to play out that way.

Reality, versus...

Remember the marquee-style sign on the church that I used to pass on the way to the office, back when I had an office to go to? Well, I still pass it often — not every day, but at least once a week — so I still see the sign. And this week, the sign says...

STEEP YOUR LIFE
IN GOD-REALITY

I found that interesting. They have actually acknowledged that there’s a distinction between “God-reality” and, you know, reality. There seems to be some progress there, I think.

Of course, they’re still promoting the alternative-universe God-reality over the real thing. Forget about reality, they urge, and come with us to... something else. Something comforting, but unreal.

I’m reminded, here, of Piers Anthony’s[1] “Apprentice Adept” series. The series involves parallel worlds, Proton and Phaze, situated in alternative universes and connected through a “curtain” through which only certain people can pass. On Proton, scientific rules apply, and magic doesn’t work. On Phaze, it’s all magic. In keeping with the religious message above, Phaze is a beautiful planet of sun and gardens and fields, while Proton is a dull place. Of course, anyone with a choice would want to be on Phaze.

Earth, though, wasn’t written by Piers Anthony. I’ll stick with reality, thank you. Real reality.
 

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[1] Yes, yes, Piers Anthony, I know; leave it off.

Platitudes

On moon-walk-anniversary day, Kenneth Chang lamented in the New York Times that President Obama spoke well of the Apollo missions 40 years ago, but gave no support to further space exploration today. Here’s Mr Chang’s lede:

The three Apollo 11 astronauts appeared at the White House today, and just as he had at a speech at the National Academy of Sciences in April, President Obama spoke in glowing platitudes of NASA’s past and said almost nothing of NASA’s future.

Note particularly that he “spoke in glowing platitudes”.

I do not think that “platitude” means what Mr Chang thinks it means.

A platitude is, according to American Heritage, “a trite or banal remark or statement, especially one expressed as if it were original or significant.” I refer to the things you get in Chinese restaurants these days as “platitude cookies”; it’s a decidedly negative characterization. The idea of “glowing platitudes” seems almost contradictory by definition.

I suppose Mr Chang may actually have meant it that way, implying that even the praise Mr Obama gave was silly and false, but I really didn’t get that sense of it. I rather think he meant it to be something like “glowing praise”, and used the wrong word.
 

On a non-language point, it’s interesting to look at the comments to Mr Chang’s piece. They’re mixed, with some hoping that NASA moves forward, and others glad to see that Mr Obama is thinking more of, say, heath care and the economy than of more useless space exploration.

I, of course, am in the former camp, and would love to see NASA missions creating moon bases, and going to Mars and beyond. But you knew that.

Is your wallet safe?

Recently, BoingBoing pointed us to an interesting article about a study involving “lost” wallets:

Hundreds of wallets were planted on the streets of Edinburgh by psychologists last year. Perhaps surprisingly, nearly half of the 240 wallets were posted back. But there was a twist.

Richard Wiseman, a psychologist, and his team inserted one of four photographs behind a clear plastic window inside, showing either a smiling baby, a cute puppy, a happy family or a contented elderly couple. Some wallets had no image and some had charity papers inside.

The results surprised me. First, 42% of the wallets were returned — surprising enough to someone from the New York City area. But then an amazing 88% of the wallets containing the baby picture came back, and only 15% of the ones with no picture at all did. That’s a hell of a difference! (It’s also important to note that none of them contained money or credit cards.)

The researchers’ hypothesis for the reason for the difference is evolutionary — an innate predisposition to protect children. They don’t explain the difference in return rates for the wallets with the other sorts of photos, though. In any case, they offer some advice:

Whatever the scientific explanation, the practical message is clear, said Dr Wiseman. “If you want to increase the chances of your wallet being returned if lost, obtain a photograph of the cutest baby you can find, and ensure that it is prominently displayed,” he said.

That’s amusing enough, I guess. But the whole study just cries out for a bunch of follow-up questions. Of course, there’s the obvious one of varying the ethnic identity of the people in the photos. Make the baby white, black, south-Asian, east-Asian, and so on, and see what changes. Make the family photo show different races, different types of dress. Include interracial and same-sex couples. Within that last, does a pair of men inspire a different rate of return from a pair of women?

Would the presence of money change things? Would the money outweigh all the photos equally? Would there be a difference between Edinburgh and, say, New York City? (I should think so, but....) Assuming that there is, would the relative return rates still be the same, nonetheless? Maybe not; maybe New Yorkers prefer puppies or grandparents to babies.

I’d then want to try it with different sorts of work IDs. Strew some wallets about that indicate that the owner is a teacher, a lawyer, a plumber, a car salesman, a firefighter, a waiter, or a banker. What do you think? I wonder where a computer geek falls.

Or try different medical specialties. One might think an obstetrician’s wallet would be more likely to be returned than that of a proctologist. How would cardiology compare with oncology? Would a neurosurgeon do better or worse than a dermatologist in the wallet-borne sympathy vote?

I think this is a fascinating way to study our unconscious preferences and prejudices, and I hope this is just the start of a batch of these studies worldwide.

Well, yesterday we wanted to find out just how honest the people in our audience were. Are they as honest as they like to say? We chose a lady from the audience and gave her ten $10 bills, each one in a separate envelope, each one marked with her name and address. We asked her to drop them around the studio to see how many would be returned. Well, we found out how honest people are: the lady cut out with the hundred dollars.

— George Carlin, “Daytime Television”
from “Take-Offs and Put-Ons” (1967)

Stuff we don’t need

Every so often, I look through one of the “high-end” catalogues, seeing what places like Williams Sonoma or The Sharper Image have to offer those with far too much disposable income and far too little sense. Really, I mean: who needs a $3000 espresso machine at home? Who really wants to spend more than $25 a pound for Italian sausage?

But beyond the price, we get to the things that don’t have to exist at all. Whether or not one would spend $3000 on one, there is utility in an espresso machine, and, for a fifth the price, a nice piece of Italian sausage is a beautiful thing. But... well, here:

Many years ago, I was over at a friend’s house and he showed me something he’d just bought that day, a real find, as he saw it. It was a “fruit ripener”, he told me. You put fresh — but unripe — fruit in it, and in a day or two, it ripens nicely. Cool!

Hm. OK, so... it consisted of two plastic bowls. You put the fruit in the one with the flattened bottom. You up-turned the other and used it as a cover. And they didn’t seal, so they allowed some air to flow. The literature that came with the overpriced contraption said that it concentrates the natural gases that the fruits themselves produce, accelerating the ripening process.

Indeed, and so does a paper bag, loosely closed. Which is what we all used before someone figured out how to make big money selling cheap plastic bowls for far more than they’re worth.

I’ve recently run across two other things of that nature, things that made me scratch my head and say, “We need this why?”

The Avocado Pitter/Slicer

When it comes to pitting and slicing avocados, this is the perfect tool for the task. One end of the handy device deftly pits an avocado, while the opposite end creates perfect uniform slices of the fruit’s tender flesh.

Yes, just halve an avocado, and put this baby to work on it. It’ll have the pit removed and the avocado neatly sliced in a jif — assuming, of course, that the avocado’s still decently firm. And that it happens to be exactly the uniform size that the gadget is made for. The slices will also be “perfect” and “uniform” only until the blades get bent in the dishwasher or the drawer.

See, once I’ve got a nice, firmly ripe avocado halved, I can pit it and slice it in seconds without this. I use a magical device called (are you ready for this) a knife. I can even be flexible about it: a paring knife works, a slicing knife works, a chef’s knife works. Even a cleaver can do the job, if it must. Press the knife into the pit and twist it out. Peel the skin away. Slice up the flesh. Couldn’t be easier.

Of course, it’s not so easy to peel the skin away neatly if the fruit is over-ripe and softening. But, then, I don’t imagine this device works very well on such an avocado either.

The Corn Zipper

This tool quickly, safely strips an ear of corn: A pair of extra-sharp teeth slides between the kernals[sic] and cob to remove several rows of at a time.[sic] Simply grip the barrel handle, rake the corn from end to end and watch the kernels drop into a bowl.

This device at least appears to be a one-size-fits-all sort of thing, able to work equally well on different sized ears.

But this is basically a special-use knife, and, as with slicing avocados, I use a regular kitchen knife for this job as well. A paring knife works fine, but I prefer the heavier chef’s knife here. What I do is this: I simply grip the knife’s handle, rake the corn from end to end, and watch the kernels drop into a bowl. Sound familiar?
 

The main problem with these special devices is that they take the place of more general tools, yet they each only have one, specific purpose: you might be able to find something else to do with the avocado slicer, I suppose, but it won’t peel an apple, chop basil, slice an onion, or remove the corn from a cob. These guys soon wind up at the back of your kitchen drawer, unused.

Also, they don’t age well if you do use them. The avocado slicer’s blades will likely become bent, over time; the corn zipper’s blade will dull. When my knives get dull, I sharpen them. You usually can’t sharpen these kinds of things.

Learn how to use a knife well, and you can skip all these extra gadgets. And that’ll let you save up for that overpriced espresso machine you’ve been coveting.

The Tap Dance Kid, and other thoughts

In the mid-1980s I saw a musical on Broadway called The Tap Dance Kid. I enjoyed it a lot — I liked the story, the characters, the songs, and the dancing. It’s not a very well known musical, it got a poor review in the New York Times (Frank Rich liked it much less than I), and it ran for less than two years.

It’s the story of an African-American family, centered around a pre-teen called Willie. Much of it is the standard sort of story: Willie wants to do one thing with his life, but his father thinks that frivolous, and demands that he aim higher, follow the family business, or some such. The Jazz Singer is one version of the story that’s been done a few times.

In this case, Willie wants to be a dancer — a tap dancer, in particular. His father, William, is a lawyer, and would like Willie to be one too. He looks down on the dance idea, and on Uncle Dipsey, Willie’s mentor.

In some versions of this story, the father is just being obstinate, insisting on his vision of his son’s success over the son’s own. The Jazz Singer has that, but adds cultural tradition to it. Whether it was Al Jolson, Danny Thomas, or Neil Diamond, the son was more than just “wasting his life”, but also abandoning the family and its heritage.

So it is in The Tap Dance Kid: William wants Willie to meet the former’s standards in life, of course, but he also wants his son to show the world, as he did, what a black man can do. And so it’s doubly disappointing to him that Willie is going in a direction that’s not only frivolous, but also stereotypical.

William’s disappointment comes through in the story’s climax, the powerful and moving “William’s Song”. He starts by berating Dipsey before he addresses his son:

Who ever heard of a grown man named “Dipsey” before?
Every day of your life, every moment you live, you lose!
You’re going nowhere, but you go too far,
Telling my son he’s gonna be a big star,
Shining, shining, sure:
Shining shoes!

Now, Willie, I don’t want you thinking I haven’t any feelings.
I don’t want you thinking I haven’t got my dreams.
I only want what’s best for you,
’cause we’ve got better things to do
Than dancin’... like a monkey with a ring through its nose!
Dancin’: every time a curtain opens
Another door is gonna close behind you.
And I won’t have that; I just won’t have that!

[Listen to an excerpt from “William’s Song” on Amazon. And as I write this, I see that the out-of-print CD is going for $180! Yow! If I ever need some extra cash, I suppose I could sell mine.]

I thought about The Tap Dance Kid and William’s line about shining when I was recently in Boston: there was a shoe-shine station in the hotel, off by a side entrance. Most of the time I passed, it was unattended. A few times, it was attended, but without a customer — the gentleman attending it, a black man who seemed to be in his 50s, his sparse hair graying, was reading a newspaper. But once, there was a customer.

I had an uncomfortable reaction to the scene. There was a black man kneeling at the feet of a younger white man, the former buffing the latter’s boots as they made small talk. There were sepulchral echoes of a slave past going through my mind.

But what of that? I felt uncomfortable? The man seemed at ease with his job, and perhaps he liked it very much. Perhaps he enjoyed working in a nice hotel and having a chance to talk with many different people throughout his day. I didn’t ask him, and I wouldn’t have known how to do so without having it come across disrespectfully. Am I being like William, expecting this man to represent all African-Americans... and denigrating[1] his job in the process?

Worse, am I showing up as the white man looking to “save” the black man from... from what? From being part of an image that sticks in my mind and makes me uncomfortable? From something I imagine him to have risen above, when I don’t know the first thing about him or about his work? How arrogant of me!

I don’t know how to conclude this entry, so maybe some commenters can provide a coda.
 

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[1] It’s the word that came first to mind, and I then realized that it has a particular connection here, in its obsolete sense of “to make black.”

For a different sort of man

Ever hear of a magazine called Men’s Journal? I hadn’t, until I was in the barber shop a month or so ago. As I waited my turn (and wondered whether the guy ahead of me hadn’t already finished — he hadn’t), I glanced at the mag on the top of the pile, there on the table next to me. Under it was the expected assortment of Sports Illustrated and its brothers, but on top was something I’d not seen before.

I didn’t actually pick it up and leaf through it: the cover alone told me that it was not for me, that the “Men” in the title were of a different sort than I am.

Here were its highlights, approximately in order of prominence:

• Alaska’s First Dude — Hard-Core Snowmobiling with Todd Palin
• Gourmet Blood Sport — How to Kill and Cook a Wild Boar
• The Secret Mission that Defeated the Taliban
• The NASA Workout

I’m sure there was lots more inside, too. And not a word of it of any interest to me.

Tranquility

40 years ago today.

Approach

40 years ago tomorrow.

Carnivals!

You’ve all probably read, by now, about the study that shows that people who swear in response to pain tolerate it better:

The study, published today in the journal NeuroReport, measured how long college students could keep their hands immersed in cold water. During the chilly exercise, they could repeat an expletive of their choice or chant a neutral word. When swearing, the 67 student volunteers reported less pain and on average endured about 40 seconds longer.

Although cursing is notoriously decried in the public debate, researchers are now beginning to question the idea that the phenomenon is all bad. “Swearing is such a common response to pain that there has to be an underlying reason why we do it,” says psychologist Richard Stephens of Keele University in England, who led the study. And indeed, the findings point to one possible benefit: “I would advise people, if they hurt themselves, to swear,” he adds.

Interesting.

In other news, the Carnival of Education seems to be off for the summer — no announcement of it, but I haven’t been able to find it for the last three weeks.

Oh, God damn it! Shit!

Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:

• Skeptics’ Circle #115.
• Carnival of the Liberals #95.
• Carnival of Mathematics #54.
• Math Teachers at Play #11.
• Carnival of the Godless #121.

Gun control doesn’t work?

Today’s guest blogger, while I’m paying attention to presentations at CEAS, is frequent commenter Ray.

Oh, wait... lookee here (on page 51 of the associated report), where we find that for the year 2008/2009[1] the number of murders by gun in the U.K.[2] was a whopping 38, down from 53 in the previous year.

I expect it’s just a coincidence that the U.K. has strict laws concerning gun ownership.

Let’s see, since the population of the U.S. is around five times that of the UK, that number is equivalent to 190 gun-related murders in the U.S. Hmmm... that number doesn’t jibe too well with the typical reported annual U.S. rate of around 10,000.

I expect it’s just a coincidence that the U.K. has strict laws concerning gun ownership.

 
Ray, thanks for filling in with a topic so dear to my heart!

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[1] According to the report, “estimates are derived from interviews carried out between April 2008 and March 2009 (BCS year ending March 2009).”

[2] It actually covers only part of the U.K., and doesn’t include Scotland and Northern Ireland. That doesn’t change Ray’s point very much, though: it changes the approximate factor from 5 to 5.6, which changes 190 to about 210. The order of magnitude is the same: we still have about 50 times the per-capita gun-murder rate here as there.

NYC sales tax, and taxable sales

Last Friday, I heard on the radio that the proposed ½% increase in New York City’s sales tax has been approved, making the total sales tax in the city 8.875%. The announcer on the radio said that the increase will bring the city an additional $60 million a month.

That means that people spend, on average, $1.2 billion a month on sales-tax–eligible purchases in New York City. That’s staggering, at some level. Though, I suppose when you consider the population of the city — more than 8 million in the five boroughs — and others in the area who buy things in the city, plus visitors... it doesn’t really come out to that much per person.

When I think of it that way, I wonder that it’s not more.

One lump, or two?

This morning I’m heading to California for a brief two days at the Conference on Email and Anti-Spam — I’m on the program committee again, which means I had to got to peer review some of the papers.

Yesterday morning, I got a note from the airline:

From: [the airline]
To: [me]
Subject: It’s time to check-in
 
Dear Barry Leiba,
 
Ready for your upcoming flight? Save time and check-in online now whether you are traveling with or without baggage. And don’t worry about reconfirming your flights - you’re all set!

It’s nice to know that I’m all set, but....

Sometimes, as English evolves, phrases morph into single words. Sometimes they go through an intermediate hyphenated stage first. “Today” and “tomorrow”, for example, each used to be two words: “to day” and “to morrow”. Then they were hyphenated: “to-day” and “to-morrow” took us into the 20th century. And now they’ve bonded, and no one separates them any more, except perhaps to be quaint and harken back to an older time.

Some words remain separate, never joining. “A lot” is always two words; there’s a lot of “alot” about, of course, but it’s unequivocally wrong. That may change some day, but I hope it doesn’t happen on my watch. “No one” is another that stays separate, and if you write it as a single word you’ll perhaps forgive me for thinking you’re talking about Herman’s Hermits.

But there are words that confuse us, because sometimes they stick together, and sometimes they travel separately. But words aren’t done to taste, as sugar in tea. The rule for many of those is that when they’re verbs they remain separate, and they can become one word or be hyphenated only as modifiers or nouns. “I use my everyday dishes every day.” When I see a sign that says something like, “Good food, everyday!”, I want to find a saw (to fix that saw?; sorry).

“It’s time to check-in,” fails, here. We have a verb, so it should be “check in”, two words. You check in at the check-in desk, take your purchases to the checkout counter to check out, log in from the login screen, and back up your hard drive with a backup program. There was a good turnout for the parade because so many people turned out.

And that last example shows how you can be sure: it’s in the past tense. We’d never be tempted, there, to use “turnedout” or “turned-out”, would we? With a present- or future-tense sentence, you might want to say, “I’d better backup my hard drive tonight,” but you’d never go for, “I backedup [or, perhaps worse, backuped] my hard drive last night.”

And with that, I’m off to California to talk more about how to fight spam.

Remember to back up your hard drive. Every day.

Branding on the web: a variation

I’ve written about top-level domains here and here, and noted there that people are increasingly using search engines to find what they’re looking for, making the use of domain names for branding ever less important. An interesting case study for how branding works is Snickers, a candy bar made by Mars, Incorporated.

Of course, Mars owns mars.com, and you can get some information about Snickers there. Mars also owns snickers.com, and, no surprise, that will also lead you to (far more) stuff about Snickers.

Going by what I wrote in these pages about TLDs, when ICANN opens things up, it’s possible — maybe likely — that Mars will also grab .mars and .snickers, and they could even register .candy and set up snickers.candy and other such domains.

But now I recently saw the banner on the right at my local gas station (click to enlarge; sorry, it's a poor-quality picture from my BlackBerry). There’s a depiction of a Snickers bar, but where the Snickers logo would be it tells you to “Do your part to BAR HUNGER”. The rest says, “Join the Snickers brand in providing at least 3,000,000 meals to those in need,” and it shows the Feeding America logo.

Want to know more? Sure... do you expect to go to snickers.com or mars.com for it? Think again:

Learn more at facebook.com/snickers

Not satisfied with what their own web site can do with it, they send you to social networking. You can become a Facebook friend with the Snickers brand, and work through that.

Is this, perhaps, the real future of web branding?

Two-faced security

A few weeks ago, I got a text message on my mobile. It said it was from my credit card company (and it had the right one). It said they had to talk with me urgently about my account, and I should call a given phone number as soon as possible.

In other words, it sure looked like someone was phishing for something... except that they did have the credit card brand correct. Chance, perhaps?

I did what you should do if you get one of those: I ignored the phone number in the message, pulled out my credit card, and called the customer service number on that. I told them what I got. They confirmed that it was from them — it was legitimate. They had flagged my account for unusual activity because of two charges from that morning, and they wanted me to confirm that I had my card with me, and that I had, indeed, made those charges. I did so, and all was well.

I’ve since logged into my account on their web site, and what do I see?

Clicking on the “Learn more” link gets me to a page that warns me about phishing scams. Among other things, it says this:

Text message verbiage varies, but may direct users to a web site or phone number, and usually contains something that claims to require immediate attention.

Ignoring the incorrect use of “verbiage”, this warning is telling me that these fraudulent messages do... exactly what their legitimate message did.

I call this “two-faced security” — security that on the one side warns me to beware of fraud, and on the other side encourages me to do exactly what the fraudsters would like. And I see it all the time.

The legitimate message should, in fact, have told me to do what I actually did. It should not have given me a phone number at all, but should have told me to call the number on my card. It should have given me instructions for finding the correct number out of band ("Go to our web site..."), in the event that my card was missing. We all know that the first thing I’ll have to do when I call the customer service department is give them my account number, possibly along with other personal information such as my name and address. If the “customer service department” I’ve called is actually the phisher’s, taken from their text message, that’s not good for me.

Of course, they go on to tell me what they’re doing to protect me:

[We are] serious about account safety. That’s why we’re requiring all Account Online users to create security questions. We may periodically ask you to answer those questions in Account Online as a quick identity check. That way, when you drop in to do business, we’ll know it’s you.

If you’ve been paying attention here, you’ll know how well those questions work... or don’t. But even apart from that, there’s a problem: as I said above, giving the account number is the first thing we’re used to doing when we call. Name and address next. By the time we get to the “security questions”, and realize that the bad guys haven’t asked them, it’s too late. Security doesn’t come from noticing the absence of something, because we’ll never notice until the horse is out of the barn.

The way to thwart this sort of attack is

1. for us to learn not to trust anything that’s sent to us, and use only contact information we’ve received separately, which we already trust, and
2. for our banks, credit card companies, and other institutions to stop training us to violate number 1.

On Francis Collins and double standards

PZ Myers gets at least one thing absolutely right as he joins the criticism of the appointment of Francis Collins as head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Dr Myers dismisses Dr Collins as a “lovable dufus with great organizational skills who’s [sic] grasp of the principles of science is superficial.” He goes on to add that his pushing of Christianity can’t be a reason to reject him, because “we’re in big trouble when we start using a religious litmus test for high political positions.” And then...

Oh, wait...we already do that. You know if someone with equivalent prestige and administrative credentials was even half as vocal about atheism as Collins is about Christianity, there’s no way she would even be considered for this appointment.

Sigh.

That is so true. We have our own “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” policy for atheism, these days.

It used to be the case that one’s religious beliefs fairly rarely came up in public discourse. JFK’s Catholicism was notable, but only because he was the first Catholic to hit the presidency. But that Catholicism wasn’t paraded in front of us weekly, he didn’t cross himself at the end of every speech, and no one really worried about our getting a Catholic Attorney General, as well, when brother Robert was appointed and confirmed.

It used to be the sort of thing one did privately. Religion was one of the topics polite people didn’t discuss with others who might be of different persuasions.

But now, public figures are held under suspicion if they don’t say, “God bless,” enough. According to several surveys, people would sooner have leaders who are Moonies than ones who are atheists — atheism is the single worst characteristic from the point of view of the “average voter”.

PZ Myers is absolutely right about that: atheists who speak out about it remove any hope of entry to high political positions. And that puts our country in big trouble.

Inventions we really need

Forget overhyped  cryptographic advances, and never mind laser weapons; we don’t need those sorts of things as much as we need a different kind of invention — one born in the minds of Mel Brooks and Buck Henry in the mid-1960s.

We need the Cone of Silence (see video here).

But we don’t need it to keep our conversations private, no. We need an enforced Cone of Silence on others, those who do not understand “indoor voices”, those who have no idea how to talk so that they can be heard clearly across the table, but not across the room.

Those such as the young woman facing us in the photo to the right (no larger version this time; you don’t need to make out her face).

I snapped the pic with my BlackBerry on Friday afternoon at the wonderful Black Cat Café in Irvington. It’s a small place, and a quiet one, usually. There were six people in the cafe at the time, making it about one third full, and you could hear not a peep out of five of us. But the sixth, the woman in the photo, was holding forth long and loud, projecting as to fill the Metropolitan Opera House with sound. It didn’t help that she was facing into the room.

For that, we need the Cone of Silence. Just picture it in the photo above, as in that video with Maxwell Smart and the Chief.

Ahhhhhhhhhh...

Logistics: do it wrong or do it right

I do love going to see the Independence Day music and fireworks at West Point. But I have to say that it’s really a logistical problem.

First, of course, there’s the minor silliness of the “security checks” at the entrance gate. Of course, as it’s a military facility, we expect security checks, but when you think about allowing tens of thousands of people to spend the day picnicking on the grounds, you wonder how they can really check them all with enough rigor to make it worthwhile.

And that’s the point: they can’t, but they want to make a show of it. So a show they make. Two separate checkpoints have guards looking at your driver’s license, proving only that you’re able to get something that looks passably like a driver’s license. No information is recorded — they don’t have a record that I, in particular, was there.[1] Nothing was scanned, nothing was looked up. Public Enemy Number One could wander in there, and as long as he had something that looked like a driver’s license, bearing something that looked like his photo, he would pass.

The second guy who checked my ID also looked in my trunk, and in the trunks of half of everyone else who came through; his partner peered into the trunks of the rest. I just had picnic trappings in there, but he didn’t look in the bags, and he didn’t look under the trunk floor. I could have had machine guns in the canvas bags that actually held collapsible chairs. I could have removed the spare tire and filled the well with explosives. He would never have seen them.

OK, so one gets through the security checks — and I must add, as a positive note, that the guards are very pleasant and friendly about it — and one parks, pulls out one’s picnic stuff, and walks over the Trophy Point. One surveys the lawn.

And one finds that it’s not so much a “lawn”, at this point, as it is a sea of tarps and blankets, nearly all of them unattended. Last time, I got there at 4:00. This time, a little before 2:30. I couldn’t tell the difference. Word has it that people arrive early in the morning to stake out their areas. They then leave and go about their day, coming back only shortly before the 8:00 start time. Some of them don’t even put out blankets or tarps, but just use “caution tape” to box out a prime parcel of turf.

Even at 2:30, there was nothing to be had but an area with its view partially obstructed by a tree. At least the tree provided shade for the day. I would have thumbed my nose at those stuck out in the full sun... except they weren’t there, and were probably enjoying the pleasant shade somewhere less crowded.

Finally, the people who don’t bring chairs, and prefer to sit on their blankets, really get a bad deal. When they do find a spot, it’s behind the claims of loads of other groups. At first, it all works out, but as the others begin to drift back in, the first thing they do is unfold their chairs and sit in front of the people who’re down on the ground. The blanket people can’t see a thing. And there’s no way they can tell in advance where the safe places are, because there’s no telling when the chair folks up front will return.

Contrast this with Wednesday’s visit to Shakespeare on the Sound, in Baldwin Park in Greenwich, CT. They had cops milling around and keeping an eye on things, but you barely noticed them. Of course, that’s a normal difference between a public park and a military academy, so never mind that.

It’s the next difference that struck me, as I passed the sign to the right, which you can click to make bigger, but it should be perfectly readable at this size; it says, “No Blankets/Chairs before 4:00 pm”, and adds that “Anything left before 4:00 will be held at park entrance”. Right. You can’t stop on the way to work in the morning and claim a spot. I suppose you could try coming by at 4 and dropping stuff off, then be back for the 7:30 performance. But 4:00 seems a fair time to allow people to start arriving, and at that point you might as well get there to stay.

They had another great setup, which I didn’t photograph: there was an inner circle marked off, closest to the stage, and it was labelled “Blankets and LOW Chairs Only.” Outside that marked area was another sign that said, “High Chairs Allowed.” Excellent! Give the people who will be low to the ground a chance to see. Someone is thinking.

It just doesn’t seem that hard to get some of these things right.
 

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[1] Well, they do now.

The Interplanetary Internet of Tomorrow

After writing my post about DTN and the Interplanetary Internet the other day, I started thinking about what possibilities we will have opened up, after deploying an Internet in outer space:

Slide 8 from INET2001 presentation

 

It’s sad to say that this is the first thing I came up with:

Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2019 17:49:31 +6600
From: miss yolande conte <missyolandeconte_11@bigitn.mars>
Subject: Miss Yolande Conte.
 
Miss Yolande Conte.
 
In brief, my name is Miss Yolande Conte, I am 24 years of old and daughter to the late former President of Mars Colony of Guinea, Lansana Conte, who died on 23 December 2018, after a long illness, aged 74 years. In fact, I am the only family that knows the money he transferred off world to the Global Security Company House on Titan. he deposited the sum of ($ 6 million United States dollars
 
My father told me this Secretly that he deposit ($ 6 million United States dollars before his untimely death, now he is dead, I would like to seek your cooperation to help me move this money to your Planet for the continuation of my education and investment., I give you 20% of the total money if you can help me.
 
If you are interested indicate me as a trusted partner. Can I trust in this transaction? If you receive this letter, please send me an email indicating your interest to assist me, so that we can finalize everything and please respond to my private email address/ missyolandeconte1@hotmail.mars
 
Respectfully,
Yolande F. Conte.

On racial awareness

On Monday, Miss Incognegro wrote about having black dolls to play with as a child, what it meant to have a doll that looked more like her, and the idea of being “color blind”. It’s a good post; go read it, and, while you’re there, look at yesterday’s post, too, about watermelon.

Miss Incognegro ended Monday’s post with the question, “What are your childhood memories and recollections about race and racial awareness?”, and I commented on that in the blog entry. I think it’s worth repeating it here, so what follows is what I said there — my comment followed one by a black man called Jovan.

 
From a white guy looking at it from the other side: Like Jovan, I grew up in a racially mixed environment — a few years ago, a friend looked at my high school yearbook (1974), and was surprised to see all the different-coloured faces, among the teachers as well as among the students. My father always taught me that everyone’s the same... or, really, that everyone’s an individual, and you judge each person for what s/he is, and the shade of skin makes no difference. I internalized that at an early age.

I started my life in Brooklyn, but we moved to south Florida when I was quite young, and that’s where I grew up. Realize that “south Florida” is not “the South”, but that other parts of Florida are, so I sporadically had glimpses of what that meant. It was the early 1960s when we went there, and, while it was unknown where I lived, I did see “Whites only,” and “No coloreds,” signs in other parts.

I’ve always been skeptical of people who say they “don’t notice” skin colour. Of course we notice it, just as we notice hair colour and style, and choice of clothing. The question isn’t whether we notice it, but what it means to us. The difference never meant anything to me, because of how I was brought up, and I often “didn’t notice” in the sense that the race of someone often didn’t really stand out for me, until someone pointed it out.

I’ll share one particular story that stays with me. My family had black-and-white TVs only, and the first program I ever saw in colour was the Star Trek episode “The Ultimate Computer” (so I can even tell you the date, thanks to IMDB: 8 March 1968, so I would be 11 in a month). I went to a friend’s house, and it was the first time I saw the colours of all their shirts (references to “red-shirted guards” didn’t mean much to me before that). The episode was about a scientist [Dr Richard Daystrom, right, played by William Marshall] who invented a computer system that could run the whole starship by itself. The Enterprise got to test it out, and, of course, there were some bugs in the system that they had to work out.

As the episode progressed, I heard occasional mutterings, grunts, and grumbles from my friend’s father, a middle-aged man from the deep South. Finally, about halfway through, the scientist said something and my friend’s father said, “Huh. This is ridiculous! They’re making out like he’s as smart as they are.” I replied, “He’s smarter! He’s the scientist!” I was quite impressed by scientists, you see. And friend’s dad burst out with, “But he’s a n*!”

So. Yes, now it was pointed out. Of course Dr Daystrom was a Negro, as we’d have said at the time, but what difference did that make? I didn’t know what to say, and, as a not-quite-11-year-old I had the sense not to say anything. So we watched the rest of the show. And I don’t remember spending any time around that friend’s father after that, but I’d have felt very strange if I had.

What makes me feel sad is that, while we’ve come a very long way in the 41 years since then, there are still people today who would respond as my friend’s father did.

Delay Tolerant Networking

New Scientist reports on networking from space. If you grew up with the Gemini and Apollo NASA programs, as I did, you remember that they used to have scheduled communication times when they could contact the astronauts. Without the Star Trek concept of “sub-space radio”, which seemed to work pretty much all the time except when the plot demanded that it not, NASA had to catch communication as catch could.

But in those days, much of the data came back with them physically. That’s no longer true, and craft such as the International Space Station will stay up there for a good, long time. What they give us has to come back in the same way we get most of our data now, the way you’re getting this: the Internet, or, more precisely, a network similar to the Internet.

And the article gets the central points right: the key to the system is an experimental protocol called Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN).

While the Earth-bound internet uses a protocol called TCP/IP to allow distant machines to communicate over cables, the ISS payload uses delay-tolerant networking (DTN), which is being developed to cope with the patchy coverage in space that arises when spacecraft pass behind planets or suffer power outages.

If data passing between computers using TCP/IP goes missing, the two keep communicating until everything has been sent. But in space such to-ing and fro-ing of data is impractical.

DTN circumvents this problem by commanding each node in the network to store information until it can find another node that can receive it. Data is relayed in a chain and should only need to be transmitted once.

DTN got its first live space test last fall, but it’s the culmination of a number of years of research anchored in the IETF — actually in a sub-organization called the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), technically independent of the IETF.

The work started in a group rather fancifully called the Interplanetary Internet Research Group (ipnrg), and is now in the more down-to-Earth, but no less lofty, Delay-Tolerant Networking Research Group (dtnrg), co-chaired by my DKIM working group co-chair, Stephen Farrell. Meanwhile, the ipnrg continues as the Internet Society’s Interplanetary Internet Special Interest Group (IPN SIG), which Stephen also chairs.

Of course, the “interplanetary” aspect of all this is compelling to those of us fascinated by space exploration and astronomy. But DTN also applies to the Earth-bound Internet in many ways. The dtnrg’s charter talks about some of it:

The Delay-Tolerant Networking Research Group (DTNRG) is chartered to address the architectural and protocol design principles arising from the need to provide interoperable communications with and among extreme and performance-challenged environments where continuous end-to-end connectivity cannot be assumed. Examples of such environments include spacecraft, military/tactical, some forms of disaster response, underwater, and some forms of ad-hoc sensor/actuator networks.

Among the challenges to be addressed are: large delay for transmissions resulting from either physical link properties or extended periods of network partitioning, routing capable of operating efficiently with frequently-disconnected, pre-scheduled, or opportunistic link availability, high per-link error rates making end-to-end reliability difficult, heterogeneous underlying network technologies (including non-IP-based internets), and application structure and security mechanisms capable of limiting network access prior to data transit in an environment where round-trip-times may be very large.

And, indeed, the DTN Architecture document, RFC 4838, addresses issues from transport and routing to network management and security.

If space be the final frontier, we’ll be taking the Internet there with us.

Scientists, versus “normal” people

At Educated Guesswork, my IETF colleague Eric Rescorla notes how his ears “pop” when his car is moving fast and he closes the sun-roof:

I noticed the other day that if I’m driving my car on the freeway and close the sunroof my ears pop.

Now, Eric’s a scientist, so what’s the first thing he does about this?

He develops a hypothesis, of course:

After a bit of thinking, I concluded that what was going on was the Bernoulli effect: the air flowing over the sunroof lowers the pressure of the interior of the car. Then when you close it you get a sudden pressure change back to ambient pressure.

And next? Well, one has to test one’s hypothesis, right?

Initial experiments confirm this: my Polar 625SX [heart-rate monitor] has a built-in barometric altimeter. I repeatedly opened and closed the sunroof and watched the altimeter and readings seemed to consistently differ by about 75 feet. Obviously, there’s some uncertainty here because the road isn’t totally flat; if you wanted to be really sure you’d go over the same sections of the road again and again with the sunroof open and closed and measure the difference. Still, since I’m not exactly publishing this in Nature, it seems good enough for now.

Tom Lehrer, in his preamble to his song about Lobachevsky, notes that, “some of you may have had occasion to run into mathematicians and to wonder, therefore, how they got that way.” The same is true of any sorts of scientists. We’re a strange lot, to those who don’t see a need to contemplate an explanation for every little oddity we notice.

Some years ago, our work group at the office was planning to order some pizza to be delivered for a working lunch. The co-worker who organized the order came to me and said that she was going to order some set of large and small pizzas, depending upon how much folks wanted to eat. She asked me how many slices I wanted.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “It depends whether they’re slices from a large pizza, or from a small one.”

“I’ll figure that out when I have the count of slices. How many do you want?”

“But,” I persisted, “they’re not the same size. I don’t know, until I know the size of the slices.”

She rolled her eyes. “Just tell me how many slices you want.”

I said two, but I thought (and probably said aloud) that I might want more if one or both of them were small.

When my colleague left, I went to the white board. Let’s see... a large pizza was 14 inches across (7-inch radius), and is cut into eight slices. A small pie was 12 inches (6-inch radius), cut into six slices. So, for the large:

π × 72 / 8 = 19.24 square inches per slice

...and for the small:

π × 62 / 6 = 18.85 square inches per slice

A slice from a small pizza is only 2% smaller than a slice from a large pie. In other words: they’re about the same, close enough as not to matter.

Of course, my co-worker knew that intuitively. I had to be the mathematician, and work it out with a dry-erase marker.

Carnivals!

Today we have the Independence Day edition of the bi-weekly web carnival roundup. Yesterday was a beautiful day, here in New York’s lower Hudson Valley, with a bright blue sky and friendly white clouds. We added the requisite red in the form of wine, at Trophy Point on the West Point campus of the U.S. Military Academy.

Here’s a short video clip I took of Sergeant First Class Mary Kay Messenger singing some Broadway tunes (“Matchmaker, Matchmaker”, from Fiddler on the Roof, in the clip) with the West Point Band:

Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:

• Skeptics’ Circle #114.
• Carnival of the Liberals #94, including “Health care: U.S. vs Canada”.
• Carnival of Education #229.
• Math Teachers at Play #10.
• Carnival of the Godless #120.

New employment

This is one of those rare posts that’s just personal information, without redeeming matters of general interest at all: I am once again employed.

I’ve just started work as an Internet standards consultant for Huawei Technologies, a Chinese networking and software company. Huawei are very serious about participating in the development of Internet and industry standards. I’ll be representing them in my work in the IETF and other standards groups, and it was for them that I went to the OMA meeting last week. I’m working with their software research group,

It’s the part of my job that my previous employer had been backing away from for some time, and it’s particularly gratifying to see a company that’s increasing its emphasis on it — gratifying because I think it’s important to the Internet and the computing industry as a whole, as well as being a good investment for the company.

Huawei thinks so too. This is from the Technology page of their web site:

Standards
Huawei understands the significance of standards in the technology industry, thus we participate in various standards and specifications groups. Through active participation in these groups, Huawei has been making continuous contribution to the telecoms industry. We are committed to realizing the vision of network convergence, where communications and networking services are genuinely merged together.

I’m looking forward to the work and the collaboration.

Declaration of Independence screen saver

Colonial Williamsburg is basically a theme park about colonial days in America, the time in the 18th century before and around the establishment of the United States. It can be somewhat kitschy[1], but it can also provide a good bit of education about U.S. history.

Their web site has lots of good information, along with some computer wallpaper, ringtones, and screen savers (you might have to click on “Screensavers” after visiting the link). Appropriate to this weekend, check out the Declaration of Independence screen saver.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

They are words to live by, indeed.
 

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[1] It’s one of those places where the staff tries to stay in character as colonial types, pretending not to know about wrist-watches and cell phones, and such. It’s the kind of place spoofed by South Park’s episode called “Super Fun Time”.

Volunteer Ambulance Corps

I tried a new adventure this week: I did a ride-on shift with the Ossining [NY] Volunteer Ambulance Corps. Some background:

I play volleyball with a paramedic at the O.V.A.C., and when I was at IBM I worked with two volunteer Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs). I’d often said that I admire people who do that sort of thing, devoting their time to helping people. When I told my volleyball teammate that I’d been laid off, she suggested that it might be an opportunity to look at something completely new... like taking EMT or Paramedic training.

The idea struck a spark, but it took a few months for me to get around to setting up a ride-on, where I’d really get to see what they do.

For those who don’t know the difference: EMTs have a relatively brief training period, and are only authorized for basic life support (BLS) tasks: CPR, giving oxygen, splinting, that sort of thing... and, of course, transport. Paramedics have significantly more training, and they can perform advanced life support (ALS) tasks, such as running IVs, giving certain medications, and using the defibrillator. Ossining has two ambulances — one with two EMTs and one with an EMT and a paramedic — and a “fly car” — an SUV that a paramedic goes alone in.

The protocol at Ossining is that whenever possible, either both ambulances or the two-EMT ambulance and the fly car go to a call. That ensures that there’s a paramedic there, so ALS is available. And if the paramedic decides that ALS isn’t necessary, the EMTs take care of the situation and, if necessary, the transport, leaving the paramedic available for the next call.

On my day, we had an extra EMT with us, one who is just finishing his paramedic training. I rode in the “bus” with my paramedic friend and two EMTs.

The shift started at 8 A.M., but it wasn’t until a little before 10 that we got our first call. After that they came pretty steadily, with just short gaps... six calls for us, all told (and a couple of calls we didn’t go to because we were busy — the fly car took those).

The calls varied in scope:

1. A worker felt strange, enough so that the crew called us. The paramedic asked some questions, did some basic exam. Blood pressure high, nothing else obvious. EMTs transported him to the hospital.
2. A woman cut her leg. EMTs cleaned and bandaged it, no transport needed.
3. A man with a history of emphysema complained of shortness of breath. Nothing immediately urgent, so EMTs gave oxygen and transported him.
4. A woman fainted at her workplace. Vitals were normal when we got there, but paramedics gave her a saline IV and we took her to the hospital. Very nice (new) emergency department. Not crowded, not hectic.
5. A woman was in an auto accident, complaining of neck/back pain. No ALS needed, but the other bus was busy, so we transported her.
6. A man thought he was having a heart attack at his workplace. He looked pale and ashen when we arrived, high blood pressure and tachycardia (rapid heartbeat). Paramedics gave him aspirin, nitroglycerin, and saline, monitored him (EKG, BP, oxygen level) in transit — his stats went back to normal.

And that was the day. No traumas, nothing very challenging,[1] but a variety of things that let me see these folks in action.

Two things struck me, in particular. The one I completely expected is that the paramedics and EMTs are well trained, competent, and effective. The area covered is small enough that we were just a few minutes from every call. Everyone knew just what to do, and did it with confidence.

The other thing was less obvious: they have a practiced, easy “bedside manner”. One of the most important parts of what they have to do is to make the patients feel calm, safe, and relaxed. Think about it: you’ve collapsed at work and the ambulance has come for you! You’d have to be agitated, frightened. And the EMT talks with you calmly, the paramedic has a soothing manner with you. It’s OK. We’ll get you to the doctor, and you don’t need to worry. I could see the difference that made.

I’ve asked my volleyball teammate to let me know when the next EMT class is. I’m going to learn to do this, as part of giving back to the world.
 

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[1] I actually felt a little odd at the start of the day, in that I knew that if we didn’t get any calls I’d wind up spending the day watching dumb stuff on TV... but that it was kind of weird to hope that a few people would get sick or injured so that my day would be more interesting.

Woody, on meaninglessness

I’ve always loved Woody Allen’s movies. Not all of them equally, of course, but most of them are at least amusing, and some are true masterpieces. Annie Hall, of course, the one that won the Academy Award for Best Picture (1977), is at the top of the list. My other favourites are Hannah and Her Sisters, Manhattan, and Play It Again, Sam.

Mr Allen has a new movie out, called Whatever Works, and Terry Gross recently interviewed him on her radio show, Fresh Air.

His movies, almost all of them, display a depressed angst, a kind of existential difficulty that’s hard for some to take. As he points out, his movies aren’t autobiographical... and yet they certainly reflect the man’s own philosophy and internal troubles.

Here’s a transcript from 6:38 into the audio:

Terry Gross: So, may I ask, what are some of the real problems that making movies distracts you from?

Woody Allen: Well, they distract me from the same problems that you face, or that anyone faces. You know, the uncertainty of life, and inevitability of aging, and death, and death of loved ones, and mass killings and starvations, and holocausts and... not just the man-made carnage, but the existential position that you’re in, you know, being in a world where you have no idea what’s going on, why you’re here, or what possible meaning your life can have, and the conclusion that you come to after a while that there is really no meaning to it, it’s just a random, meaningless event. These are pretty depressing thoughts, and if you spend much time thinking about them, not only can’t you resolve them, but you sit frozen in your seat, you can’t even get up to have your lunch.

Wow.

Indeed, should one so internalize the struggle to find meaning, and collect all the troubles of the word under one’s hat, one might indeed find oneself unable to function. For most of us, though, it doesn’t come to that.

Because Mr Allen really does have it there, in what he says: there is really no meaning to our individual lives. The are, indeed, just random, meaningless events, from a cosmic point of view. From a universal vantage point, our meaning, our purpose, is to be part of the life-cycle of the Earth. There’s no more nor less to it.

And then, one day a very unusual thing happened in the village: a little baby boy was born. A boy named Oblio. Now, don’t get the wrong idea: the being born part wasn’t unusual. Little kids were being born all the time in that village. What was unusual was that Oblio, unlike any of the other babies born that day, or any other day, had no point! He had no point at all.

Of course, that doesn’t mean our lives need to be meaningless, purposeless, pointless.

Woody Allen responds to his existential angst by “distracting” himself with filmmaking. All the things he has to deal with in that endeavour, he says, leave no time to think about the disturbing stuff. But, really, can anyone but him say that filmmaking is, for Mr Allen, a distraction? Surely, it’s his purpose. He entertains us with his films, and he has a fulfilling life from that. Filmmaking is Woody Allen’s meaning.

It’s not, though, a meaning imposed from on high. It’s one he has developed himself. In looking for a meaning, he’s found one, or created one for himself. In lamenting the meaninglessness of life, and its randomness, he’s made his less random and more meaningful.

How is it we are here, on this path we walk?
In this world of pointless fear, filled with empty talk

— Michael Pinder

And so it is with us all. We all fulfill our natural purpose, the cycle-of-life part. But we each make our own “higher purpose” in what we do while we’re in that cycle.

The three famous people who died last week, Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson, made it their purpose, as does Mr Allen, to entertain. Some decide their purpose is to help people, and they become teachers, firefighters, and physicians. Some lead, some provide services, some make things that others use; those are their meanings. For me, it’s my work with computers and the Internet. Our natural “purpose” provides us with the intelligence to develop our own, individual meanings of life.

And that’s the point.