Asterix turns 50

This week has marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of the first Asterix cartoon.

For those of you who don’t know: Asterix is a warrior in an old Gaulish village, the only village around that hasn’t fallen to the Romans. The Romans, of course, keep trying to correct that, but the Gauls aren’t having it. In the cartoon, the Gauls mostly have names ending in -ix: Obelix, the menhir salesman; Getafix, the druid and potion maker; Vitalstatistix, the chief of the village; Dogmatix, Asterix’s dog; Geriatrix, the village’s eldest resident; Cacofonix, the bard.^[1] The Romans tend to have names ending in -us, like Superfluous, Ignoramus, Cantankerus, Arteriosclerosus,^[2] Caius Fatuous, Marcus Ubiquitus, Gastroenteritus, and, my favourite, Goldendelicius.

The cartoon is written and drawn by Albert Uderzo, now 82, and was written by René Goscinny until his death in 1977 — at age 51; his cartoon characters will soon be older than he ever was. Goscinny managed some clever wordplay and good wit in the writing, and that’s been continued by Uderzo. It’s also been successfully brought into the translations, which are of excellent quality, far better than one might expect from a comic-book series. Asterix has been translated into over 100 languages, including Esperanto, Latin, and ancient Greek.

There have been films, both animated and live — the live ones star Gérard Depardieu as Obélix.

There’s a theme park, outside of Paris.

If you’re not familiar with Asterix do check it out. The 50th anniversary is a good excuse.

Links:
The official Asterix site (English main page).
50 years of Asterix, from the official site.
Asterix and the golden jubilee, an article from the UK Guardian (thanks to Ray for the pointer to that).
 

---

^[1] Those are the names from the English version; the original French names are sometimes different (for example, the bard is Assurancetourix in French, which basically translates to “travel insurance”), and they turn into other names in other languages (the bard is Troubadix in the German version).

^[2] Of course, these names, too, vary by language. The French version of Arteriosclerosus is called Pamplemus — “Grapefruit”.

Gimme an "F"!...

Many of you have probably heard about the Governator’s playing with steganography — specifically, an acrostic:

Of course, everyone’s buzzing about whether it could possibly have been accidental, as his staff claims, or whether it just had to be intentional. My opinion: I think it was intentional. But, opinions aside, let’s take a look at it for a moment, without trying to pull out actual numbers (there are plenty of folks posting statistical analyses that do have numbers, so you can look for those if you like).

The chances, of course, of writing some text that spans seven lines and happens to have the first letters of each line spell “Fuck You”, are exceedingly, vanishingly, teeny-tiny. Really, really, really, really small. Even more so if you consider capitals, and the paragraph break between the two words, forming the “space”. Minuscule.

But not zero. It is possible, however unlikely it may be, for it to happen by chance.

But back up and consider that there are many combinations that might have appeared there and been thought noteworthy. It could have said “kiss ass”, for example, or “eat shit”. It didn’t even have to take all seven letters: if it said “bite me”, and the first or seventh letter were unrelated, we’d probably still hear about it and wonder if he’d meant to do it. We’d even wonder about “x no way x” (substitute your favourite irrelevant letters for the x’s).

So the chances of getting something that we’d notice and put in the newspaper are, while still not at all high, not as tiny as it seems when we look at the single phrase that did show up.

And, in fact, the chances that there’d be something sensible there at all, even if it were, say, “tadpole” are actually pretty good (especially if you consider incomplete strings, like the “no way” example). This is what sucks the bible-code lunatics in, when they think they can find secret messages from God hidden in the bible. On the surface, it seems to us that “discovering” a convoluted pattern that we can make sense out of in light of something we know (or would like “evidence” of) means something. In fact, it means only that we’re good at artificially finding meaningless patterns.

How likely is it that “1 2 3 4 5” will come up in tonight’s lottery drawing, in that order? How likely is “37 12 83 7 22”? Exactly the same (both very, very unlikely). Yet we perceive the former to be “impossible” — if it should ever show up, we could be sure of a fraud investigation, and a likely re-draw — while accepting the latter as a normal “random” set of lottery balls.

If we should fairly and thoroughly shuffle an unarranged deck of cards, what’s the probability that we’d end up with the four aces on top? What’s the probability that the top four cards, in order, will be the jack of hearts, the three of spades, the seven of hearts, and the ten of diamonds? The former is actually much more likely than the latter (because the order doesn’t matter... 24 times more likely, 1 in 270,725 vs 1 in 6,497,400), but we’re inclined to think otherwise. We do not have a good intuition about probabilities, and we overemphasize what appear to us to be “obvious” patterns.

Of course, there’s a difference between playing with the layout of bible text until we can find some pattern that we interpret to be a fuzzy message about the JFK assassination... and straight out seeing “fuck you” as an acrostic in something someone wrote yesterday. Yeah, I think Governor Schwarzenegger (or his staff) was having some fun. And my sincere thanks to the Governor for making today’s blog topic easy.

The world is black; the world is white

There’s perhaps nowhere that companies want to be more careful about how a message comes across than in advertisements. In general, ads are carefully scrutinized to ensure that they cause no offense and make people think positively about the product or service they’re touting, and there’s a long history of ads that were rescinded because they violated those points in one way or another.

That’s why I’ve been pleased with ones like a billboard I saw this week. It was a credit-card ad, the normal sort of thing that reminds you what you can buy with the card. In this one, a black woman was showing off her new clothes to a white man, and the implication from the context was that they’re a couple. Nothing’s made of it; it’s just there.

A few years ago, a provider of satellite television service ran a TV ad depicting a family that had switched from cable to their satellite service. The family was very happy with the change. The family: white mother, black father, and a brace of bi-racial kids.

Nothing’s made of it; it’s just there.

What’s great about this is exactly that the ads are presenting it as unremarkable. When I was a child, in the early 1960s, seeing a black and a white holding hands certainly was remarkable. It was unusual enough that even if you thought it a perfectly acceptable situation, as we did, you noticed it, you pointed it out... you remarked on it. And no company would have even considered putting an interracial couple in one of their ads.

Now, one sees such couples on the streets — of major cities, at least — every day. My early training still has me noticing, though I don’t remark on it any more, unless there’s a particular reason to. The simple fact that they’re interracial is no longer a reason. And, so, the ads are just reflecting reality.

But, significantly, that such couples and families are being used in ads means they’re reflecting a reality that’s sufficiently socially accepted that conservative advertisers aren’t afraid of its putting customers off. It’s OK, now, to have an interracial family advertising your service on prime-time television. It’s fine, today, to display an interracial couple above the commuters at a major-city train station.

Yeah, that warms my heart.

And now a child can understand
That this is the law of all the land
All the land

The world is black, the world is white
It turns by day, and then by night
A child is black, a child is white
Together they grow to see the light
To see the light

— David Arkin, “Black and White”

Philadelphia, across the Schuylkill

Meetings in Philadelphia this week. It’s rainy, so it’s good we’re inside... but here’s a photo from when I arrived at the train station on Sunday.

Zinfandel is not white

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve served zinfandel wine at home, brought it to someone else’s house, or suggested it in a restaurant, to have someone express surprise. They often comment that they’d prefer red wine, or, if they’ve already seen the colour, that they didn’t know zinfandel was red.

We went through a period, in the U.S., in the 1980s and ’90s, when the insipid swill called “white zinfandel” was the most popular wine around. You’d look around you in a restaurant, and on most tables you’d see glasses with that characteristic barely-pale-pink liquid that a friend used to call “Kool-Aid”. It’s not really a rosé, and not anything resembling a decent white. White zinfandel was to wine as “red delicious” is to apples, as “Wonder” is to bread, as McDonalds is to food. Ubiquitous. Bland. Boring. But consistent.

Happily, the popularity of the “white” garbage has waned.

Zinfandel is a grape variety grown in California — you won’t find it in French wines, nor Australian, nor Chilean... though it is related to a Croatian grape (and, in fact, Croatian wines are quite decent and inexpensive; it’s an unsung wine region). And the zinfandel grape produces a robust, deep-red, wonderfully flavourful wine that I very much enjoy.

Zinfandels can be pricey, but there are some inexpensive ones that are really quite good. Pepperwood Grove, Ravenswood, and Rosenblum all make tasty, reliable zinfandels that go in the $10 range in New York — and go with lots of good food.

On remembering passwords

Terry Zink, a spam-fighter at Microsoft, recently blogged about remembering passwords. His problem, a problem most of us share, is how to strike a balance between using distinct passwords for different services, and remembering myriad passwords:

Why do I say this? While we should always use good passwords (like letter/number combinations, nothing obvious like “123456” and “password”), it’s completely unrealistic to have different passwords for every site if you have a very wide reach on the web. Consider myself:

• I have an online bank account from back in Canada
• I have another online bank account (which I opened when I moved to the United States)
• I have a third online bank account
• And I opened up a fourth online bank account! In truth, I did this to get the free $100 for opening an account, but now that it’s open I think it’s kind of convenient to have since the bank is not local
• I have an online trading account
• I have an online retirement account from back in Canada
• I have an online retirement account when I moved to the United States
• I have a Facebook account
• I have a Twitter account
• I have Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail accounts
• I have a login to my work computer
• I have a login to my Mac computer at home
• I have logins to two or three discussion boards which I participate in every once in a blue moon
• I have logins to a couple of websites (including this one) on which I write articles
• I have logins to a bunch of bill payment sites like electricity, rent and car insurance
• I have logins to online websites which I use to buy things

In total, I must have close to thirty different sites at which I login to. How in the heck am I supposed to remember 30 different usernames and passwords? On at least 1/3 of these sites, I have forgotten the password and I have to reset it nearly every single time I return to the site because I login maybe once a month. It’s so frustrating! I know that using different passwords is good advice, but how realistic is it? Humans cannot remember that many different combinations of things without resorting to some memory tricks. Even then, it is still difficult.

There must be a better way.

It depends upon what you think the threat model is. For most people, the threat model is that a bad guy will find a password remotely (through guessing, phishing, or whatever), and will use it to access something as you. For most people, the threat model does not include physical access to your computer, breaking into your house or office, or any such.

So, for most people, writing the passwords down in a book that you keep in your desk is fine. Using one of the many “password-keeper” applications is fine. It’s not a question of having to memorize them all.

Let me repeat that: Most people should write their passwords down in a list. There may be one or two key passwords that you don’t write down, that you’re confident of remembering. But for the pile of others... write ’em down.

Also, the threats against all the things you have access to are not equivalent. If someone breaks into your email account and can then get access to your bank from there, that’s bad. If someone breaks into one of your discussion-board accounts and can post a message pretending to be from you, that might be briefly embarrassing, but it would be obvious quickly, and doesn’t cause any real loss.

And you can group things: perhaps you consider Facebook and Twitter “equivalent”, in the sense that if someone gets into your Facebook account and that means they can also access Twitter, you think that’s OK. I’ll refer to them as being in the same “trust group” for you, and you can use the same password for both of those. Probably you can use the same password for all the blue-moon discussion boards (putting them into a common trust group). The online vendors can all share a password, as long as they don’t have your credit card saved.

But if you have the vendors save your credit card information, you probably do want separate passwords. That way, if someone who breaks into your L.L.Bean account they can’t also go rob you blind at Land’s End and Amazon.^[1]

The questions I ask myself when I’m creating a password for a new service is, “If someone breaks into this, could he then get access to other things (or vice-versa)? And if so, would that be a problem?” If the answers are “Yes,” and “Yes,” then I use a new password. Otherwise I may reuse a password, putting this new service into the same trust group as some other services.

As a commenter on Terry’s entry points out, there are also various suggestions going about that tell you how you might use a seed phrase to generate unique passwords that are easy for you to re-derive at will, but that attackers are unlikely to be able to use to figure out all your passwords if they’re able to steal one.

I haven’t taken to that, but I might try it in future. In any case, I do have my passwords tucked away for a forgetful day.
 

---

^[1] U.S. law does limit your liability for credit-card fraud — in most cases your liability stops at $50, and you often wouldn’t even be on the hook for that. It can still cause you lots of problems, and it’s in your best interest to minimize the exposure.

Carnivals!

This is about a week old now, but it’s so incredibly stupid that I just have to put it here. You’d think it came out of The Onion, but there’s an AP version of it in the NY Times. From the Daily Mail version:

A father missed the birth of his first son after being arrested for groping a nurse on the way to the delivery room. Police said Adam Manning sexually assaulted the nurse as she wheeled his wife into the delivery room. The 30 year old had told the nurse she was “cute” then reached round to grab her breasts.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:

• Skeptics’ Circle #122.
• EduCarnival V2 #9 (continuing the misnumbering).
• EduCarnival V2 #9 (for real; the numbering is corrected).
• Math Teachers at Play #17.
• Carnival of the Godless #128.

Some geek humour

Three engineers and three accountants are travelling on business together. They’re going by train, to save money (guess whose idea that was). They get to the train station and the accountants go up and buy three tickets, but the engineers only send one to the counter, and only buy one ticket. As they go to the train, the accountants ask the engineers how they’re all three going to travel on only one ticket. “Watch,” is the reply.

They settle into their seats, and as the train is about to depart the engineers all get up and go into the same bathroom, stuffing themselves in. By and by, the conductor comes along saying, “Tickets, please.” The accountants surrender their tickets, one by one. The conductor gets to the bathroom, knocks on the door, says, “Ticket, please,” and the door opens a crack and one ticket comes out. The conductor moves on.

The accountants are impressed.

On the way home, aiming to use the engineers’ trick, the accountants buy only one ticket. But the engineers buy none, and the accountants are again puzzled. “We can’t all fit in one bathroom!”, they say. “Watch,” is again the reply.

They board the train and get their bags settled, and then the three accountants cram into one bathroom, the three engineers into another. As the train starts to move, one of the engineers leaves his bathroom and goes to the accountants’ bathroom, knocks on the door, and says, “Ticket, please.”

Faulty logic: False Dichotomy

It’s time for number two in a series of posts on faulty logic. Today’s fallacy:

False Dichotomy

We like things to be black or white, tall or short, here or there. We like to consider two sides to every story.

Unfortunately, there aren’t always two sides. Sometimes there’s only one; more often, there are multitudes. Many facets on the stone. Nooks and crannies in abundance. Things are usually not either black or white, but multicoloured. As it’s hard to argue a case with so many variations, we narrow the scope, and argue one side against another.

The trouble comes because we tend to define the two sides in a lopsided manner, revealing our biases and mischaracterizing one side or the other. If you’re not “pro-life”, what are you? Anti-life? Of course not: it’s a false dichotomy.

Either you supported the invasion of Iraq, or you’re on the side of the terrorists.
Either you want to stop hurting our children with vaccines, or you don’t care about the children.
Either you believe in God, or you’re an amoral robot.

False dichotomies, all. (And, of course, the examples I chose themselves form a kind of false dichotomy, by implying that only certain people — characterized here as “people who disagree with me” — argue from false dichotomies. But it’s not true: we all fall into this trap from time to time. More significantly, we all go this way purposefully sometimes, as a rhetorical technique.)

It’s important to learn to recognize the false dichotomies when we see them — they’re not usually laid out as clearly as above, but are imbedded within the argument. To tease it out, look for any too-succinct characterization of your interlocutor’s opponent. When she removed the complexity, she likely removed a lot of the reality, as well.

In the current health-insurance debate^[1] we’re seeing a lot of false dichotomies that are manifested as flat characterizations of “the alternative”, as though that were the only possible alternative. I’m inclined to say that if we don’t go to a single-payer system, what we’ll have will still be broken. That’s my stand, so it’s right, of course... but it’s a false dichotomy. There certainly are alternatives that can be set up to work. Others say that a “public option” will give us socialized medicine (whatever that really means). Another false dichotomy.

Here’s a good set, through a chain of faulty reasoning: a public option for insurance becomes “government-run health care”, leading to “health-care rationing” for the elderly and disabled. When I see a chain of reasoning like that, my Skeptic Sense tingles, and I start breaking it down. In this case, we have the claim that either the government stays entirely out of health insurance or we end up with government-run care. There’s the first false dichotomy. The next step is that if the government runs health care, it will have to focus on saving money, not on giving care. There’s the second problem: does anyone really think that private health insurance isn’t trying to save money as well? Now, with the government needing to save money, they will withhold care from “hopeless cases”. Those are all presented as black-and-white choices, when, of course, they’re not.

If we can pull apart the fallacies, we can get to the things we really do have to solve. How do we make sure people who need care get it? How do we pay for it? How do we manage it? There aren’t simple answers to these, and false dichotomies only get in the way of working through them.

The same is true in other domains. Breaking things down into alternatives makes them easier to argue. But if we’re not careful in how we break them down, we actually block reasoned, productive arguments.
 

---

^[1] We’re not really arguing about health care; we’re arguing about what to do about health insurance. Discussions of the quality of care certainly enter into it, but the real point of the issue is how to pay for the care we need.

[This page intentionally left blank.]

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Sync sinks

Synchronizing information between two devices is a tough problem (and doing it among several is harder still). It’s not so bad when the devices are similar, and are using the same software — say, keeping browser bookmarks in sync between two instances of Internet Explorer on two Windows machines. Or keeping two Lotus Notes replicas in sync.

But when you’re trying to synchronize calendars and address books between your primary computer and a mobile device, such as the BlackBerry, well, it can be a nightmare, for a number of reasons.

I used to sync a Palm V with Lotus Notes. I switched to a BlackBerry 957 when they came out, and then to various other BlackBerry “smartphones”. When I left IBM and stopped using Lotus Notes, I started syncing my BlackBerry Curve with the MacOS applications (iCal, Address Book, and Stickies), using PocketMac SyncManager. And now, RIM has come out with its own BlackBerry Desktop Manager for MacOS, released early this month.

In one way or another — generally in multiple ways — they’ve all sucked had serious problems.

When you’re syncing data among instances of the same program, you mostly have to deal with conflicts — situations where a piece of data is

1. changed on multiple instances between synchronizations, or
2. present on one instance and absent on another (was it added or deleted), or
3. confused, in some way, so that the sync software is... well, out of sync.

But when you’re syncing unlike programs on unlike devices, it becomes lots more complicated: you also have to deal with different database formats, which don’t always store the same things. You have to deal with data attributes that don’t match, fields that don’t exist, fields with differing lengths, and so on.

I won’t go into all the details of the problems I had with the various Lotus Notes syncs; I’ll just say that they affected both the devices and Notes itself. I would frequently wind up with corrupted calendar entries in one place or the other, and sometimes both would be corrupted at the same time.

PocketMac would sometimes turn certain address-book entries into sorts of zobmies, entries on my BlackBerry that I could neither change nor delete, and which hid the correct entries with the same names. The only way I could find to get out of this was to clear the entire address-book database, and re-sync.

Nevertheless, it was with a great deal of optimism that I installed RIM’s new BlackBerry Desktop Manager. What was not to be optimistic about?: it was written by the Research In Motion folks themselves, and it syncs with the well known Mac applications, iCal, Address Book, and Mail Notes. Oughta work.

Um. Not so much.

First it has some very basic problems, just with the program, even without considering the synchronization. I start the program and configure it to sync the device calendar to MacOS iCal, setting up some of the options there (sync only certain of my Mac calendars, sync so many days in the past and so many in the future, ...). I configure it to sync the device address book to the Mac’s Address Book, and the device’s notes database to Mail Notes on the Mac. It retains those settings from sync to sync while the program is running, but when I quit the program and re-start it, the settings for the address book and calendar are lost, and I have to set them up again. Oddly, the settings for the notes are retained.

The settings for the notes are retained. But the first sync each time I start the program causes duplication of each one of my notes — Mac Mail and the BlackBerry each get two copies of every note. I have to delete the duplicates and sync again, to make everything OK.

I don’t have that problem with the calendar or the address book, but... both of those applications on the Mac have features that don’t exist on the BlackBerry. For example, the Mac Address Book has a check-box in each entry to say that this entry represents a company, and that changes the interpretation of the “name” field. That’s convenient, when I want to put in my car repair shop, or my fuel-oil company. So I have — well, had — a number of entries with that box checked. They synchronized without incident, the first time.

On the second sync, it turns out that because the BlackBerry doesn’t have a similar indicator, the software considers this to be a synchronization conflict, and asks me to resolve each one — that is, to tell it whether to use the record from the Mac or the record from the BlackBerry. If I tell it to use the one from the Mac, the conflict will simply recur on the next sync. Eventually, I told it to use the records from the BlackBerry. That lost the “company” indicator, but permanently got rid of the conflicts.

I shouldn’t have had to do that. With software that’s explicitly written with knowledge of the two applications, it should be programmed to remember what it did. It should store in the synchronization database the fact that something had to be adjusted to be copied to the device, and it should maintain that adjustment from sync to sync, not bothering me with the details, and not considering it a conflict.

Of course, this is release 1, and it’s possible — dare I say, likely — that they’ll fix these problems. So I can only wait. And, to tell the truth, this software is causing me fewer synchronization problems than I’ve had with any other.

Now, since I’m a standards geek, I’ll note that there’s an attempt at standardizing synchronization, through the SyncML standard developed by the Open Mobile Alliance. I’ve done some work with SyncML in my job, but it’s not a good answer for my BlackBerry issues. It’s meant to sync devices through a SyncML server. The only vendor that supports both the Mac and the BlackBerry is nexthaus (here and here), and they don’t sell a SyncML server, so I’d have to get that from someone else. Or I could use a free service, if I don’t mind having them store (and have access to) all my data. And, of course, there’s no guarantee that nexthaus has no bugs in their implementations either, nor that the servers aren’t also buggy.

Or I could use the open-source OpenSync framework to write my own server (and my own Mac and BlackBerry clients, for that matter)... if I had the time, and if I didn’t mind working through the inevitable bugs in my own code (at least I’d be able to fix them).

I’ll sit tight and see what RIM does. Its bugs are tolerable, and maybe that’s the best I can hope for, because data sync, like math class, is tough!

Do you deserve dessert?

Today: two common words that look similar, but are very different... and a third that many people don’t know.

A “desert”, accent on the first syllable, is a place that supports little or no life, usually because it has little rainfall. We think of deserts as dry, sandy places. The Sahara (right). The Mojave. But there are places under permafrost that are deserts, and even areas in the ocean with no life. The word comes from Latin deserere, “to abandon”.

A “dessert”, accent on the second syllable, is the last course of a meal, usually (in the U.S., anyway) sweet. Cake (left), pie, ice cream, fruit. Sometimes, especially in Europe, cheese. This word comes from old French desservir, “to clear the table” (note the double “s” in the French, matching the double “s” in English).

Everyone knows those words, right?

Now, a “desert”, accent on the second syllable (pronounced the same as the sweet stuff), is something that is deserved. We rarely use this word any more, but it comes from a different French word, deservir, “to deserve”, and ultimately from Latin deservire. Here, note the single “s” in both French and English.

I say we rarely use it any more, because, while it dates from the late 13th century, the only usage that remains today, for most of us, is in the phrase “just deserts”: that which is justly deserved. Basically, “what you have coming to you,” usually with the connotation that you won’t be happy about it — punishment, rather than reward.

The phrase is not “just desserts”; it has nothing to do with food, sweet or otherwise (unless, I suppose, you deserve dessert, as the title of this post queries).

How many of you knew that? Don’t lie, or you’ll get your just deserts.

Pseudoscience on television

“It is regrettable,” says a fellow skeptic in a private conversation, “that more popular, network talk shows — especially those marketed towards women, which also bugs the crap out of me — tend to publicize pseudoscience.” In fact, it’s more than that they publicize it, but that they actively emphasize it. They focus on it. And the implication, inferred from the consistent pairing of the theme (pseudoscience) and the target audience (women), is that women tend to be credulous.

Women sit home and watch daytime television. All My Children. Montel, Jerry Springer, Judge Judy, The View. Oprah. With nothing better to do between swabbing Mop-n-Glo on the kitchen floor and swabbing dribble off the baby’s chin, women just stare at the TV, dewy-eyed and heart-warmed by stories of how they might be swept off their feet by a Libra who will use crystals to remove toxins from their bodies and set up the best feng shui for their living rooms.

OK, so maybe it’s just that I don’t know women who sit home watching daytime television, but the women I know are not credulous dew-eyes who get sucked in by Oprah and her ilk. On the other hand, it’s very clear that these TV shows are marketed primarily to women. So what’s going on here?

Is it just that daytime TV, in general, is marketed to women because women have traditionally been the ones who’ve been home to watch it? And these fluffy programs go on during the day because they certainly aren’t decent fodder for Prime Time (not enough explosions, which appear to sell car ads). Then, the appearance that we’re shoving superstition and pseudoscience at women is just a matter of collateral damage?

But, then, why do these shows exist in the first place? The TV networks must think that women are suckers for this garbage, or they wouldn’t have put it on to start with. Or maybe they think we’re all suckers for it, but it doesn’t sell enough car ads, so our prime-time exposure to it is limited to D-list outlets like Syfy and the ironically named Discovery Channel and History Channel (do click those links for shining examples).

Oh, and Larry King (tonight’s [schedule change] Friday night’s show will feature Suzanne Somers using her extensive medical training to talk about cancer treatment). How’d he wind up in prime time?
 

---

Update, 24 Oct: I updated the Larry King link to point to the transcript of the Suzanne Somers show.

Limp telephones

There’s a new series of TV ads for Progresso soups, in which people are depicted talking to kitchen staff using soup-can telephones. The image to the right (click to enlarge) comes from this ad in the series.

Didn’t the people who put the ads together ever actually do this in grade school? Doesn’t everybody know that you have to pull the string tight for it to work? You won’t hear a thing with the string limp, as it is in that image you see there.

Yes, I know it’s just a silly advert. But, well, how hard would it have been for them to get it right?

I ask you....

Judging Proposition 8

The lawsuit in California that’s challenging the constitutionality of the odious Proposition 8 — the ballot proposition that passed last November, which prevents same-sex couples from legally marrying in the state — has drawn U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn Walker to adjudicate. Initial feedback is good for the good guys: Judge Walker is challenging the Prop 8 supporters to show actual harm that same-sex marriage will cause to heterosexual families.

A federal judge challenged the backers of California’s voter-enacted ban on same-sex marriage Wednesday to explain how allowing gay couples to wed threatens conventional unions, a demand that prompted their lawyer to acknowledge he did not know.

The lawyer for the Prop 8 side tried to turn it around and claim that there might be harm that we can’t yet see, saying that “it is not self-evident that there is no chance of any harm, and the people of California are entitled not to take the risk.”

Judge Walker isn’t having that. He’s refused summary dismissal of the suit, and insists that the Prop 8 side has the burden to show harm, and to show that it doesn’t unconstitutionally violate the rights of same-sex couples. The case is scheduled to be heard in January.

The general counsel for the groups that devised Prop 8 sums it up this way:

What really is happening is the voters who passed Proposition 8 are essentially on trial in this case, and they continue to be accused of being irrational and bigoted for restoring the traditional definition of marriage.

Damn right!

New technique for comment spam

The other day, I left a comment on this post at the 360 blog — a math-related blog run by some math professors in Rochester, NY. I went back the next day to see if there were responses to my comment, and I found that a few hours after I posted it, someone had re-posted the same comment, adding the line, “Sorry... forgot to say great post - can’t wait to read your next one!” Click the screen-shot on the right to enlarge it, and you’ll see what it looked like.

Now, I didn’t post that second one, and there are a few clues to that:

1. I wouldn’t re-post the whole comment, just to add that line.
2. I wouldn’t say the added line, in any case: it’s too trite.
3. In a few ways, the added line isn’t up to my standards of punctuation.

   [You might not know any of that, but the last two are more obvious.]

4. My photo isn’t there on the second comment.
5. You can’t do it in the screen-image, but if you had put the mouse over my name in the two comments, you’d see that the first one correctly links to these pages, while the second one had a link to somewhere else.

And that link to somewhere else was, of course, the point of the second comment. Someone — undoubtedly some automated process — plucked the most recent comment off their blog entry, appended the extra line, and re-posted it with the same name, but with a different link. It’s link spam. But it’s link spam using a technique I haven’t seen before. It’s actually quite a clever idea.

My comment was acceptable to the target blog, as seen by its presence there. So by using my name and repeating the content of my comment, the spam comment was expected to pass muster. And it did — in fact, it bypassed the blog’s moderation queue, because I’m a known commenter. They added an innocuous line that was unlikely to override the other good points and trigger suspicion, but which provided a semi-plausible excuse for the re-posting.

Of course, they weren’t actually logged in as me, so they didn’t get my profile photo (and they couldn’t easily fake that, because the system would require them to register an account in order to have a photo there).

What they’re doing is one of the sleazy aspects of the business that’s come to be called “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO). The legitimate part of the business involves giving people advice on designing their web site to maximize the likelihood that the site will show up as one of the top “hits” when someone searches for their business’s name, or for related search terms. The sleazy part involves using techniques like link spam to artificially push their site up in the search results. Because Google uses the number of links to a web site from other sites as a factor in gauging the site’s popularity, and, therefore, likely relevance to a search, it’s in the SEO folks’ interest to pump up the number of links to their clients’ web sites.

Every time they manage to get a link to a client’s site into a comment on someone’s blog, they get one more tick mark from Google for it. They’re one step closer to pushing the client’s site higher in the search results.

And I’m having none of it. Just as email spammers give a bad name to companies that use email marketing appropriately and responsibly, these link-spammers give a bad name to responsible SEO consultants who do their work by helping their customers design good web sites.

Amazing, tiny music players

On the right is a Samsung YP-T9 MP3 player. I got one a couple of years ago, to go with a programming project I was working on. It’s got 2 gigabytes of memory in it (newer models have up to 8 GB), and it’s tiny: it’s about 84 mm high, 42 mm wide, and only 11 mm thick. To put that in perspective, it’s a little smaller than a business card (90 mm x 50 mm), and about as tall as a stack of six U.S. quarters.

After using it to hold podcasts of This American Life for some time, I decided to put the podcasts onto my BlackBerry (in which I now have an 8 GB microSD card), and to fill the YP-T9 with music. It has about 500 songs on it. The latest model will hold around 2000 songs.

I find that completely amazing. It’s amazing that we can now fit a high-quality music player with 2000 songs, an FM radio, a voice recorder, and a decent-sized screen and buttons for accessing all of this... in a package that’s smaller than a business card and about as tall as a stack of six quarters.

Turn on shuffle mode, and that little thing will give you around 150 hours of music before you have to listen to the same song a second time. You get to pick the songs. And we don’t degrade the quality when we put stuff on there, the way we did when we made cassette tapes from our record albums, years ago.

Man, you have to love technology!

Here’s one feature I wish these players had:

Most of them have some sort of “shuffle mode”, where they’ll play songs in a random order. That works great for most popular music, but isn’t good at all for classical. I want to be able to group “tracks” together, so that they’s always played as a block when the player is shuffling. That way, I could shuffle my classical music, but still hear all four movements of Mozart’s 40th symphony together.

Do classical-music fans not use MP3 players? Or do they just turn off shuffle mode?

I Thawte I saw a CAcert

Around three and a half years ago, I posted an item in these pages about public key infrastructure.^[1] In it, I mentioned two certificate authorities from which one could get free certificates for personal use: Thawte and CAcert. (You can also get free certificates from Comodo, ipsCA, and StartCom.) For somewhat arbitrary reasons — mostly because Thawte seemed better situated, and its root certificate was already set up in Windows as a trusted signer (CAcert is not) — I settled on that one, and have been using a Thawte certificate.

Unfortunately, it seems that Thawte is getting out of the “business” of issuing personal certificates. I got this email yesterday:

Important Thawte® Personal E-mail Certificate Holder Notice

Thawte Personal E-mail Certificates and Web of Trust are being discontinued

Dear Barry Leiba,

Over the past several years, security compliance requirements have become more restrictive, while the technology infrastructure necessary to meet these requirements has expanded greatly. Despite our strong desire to continue providing the Thawte Personal E-mail Certificate and Web of Trust services, the ever-expanding standards and technology requirements will outpace our ability to maintain these services at the high level of quality we require. As a result, Thawte Personal E-Mail Certificates and the Web of Trust will be discontinued on November 16, 2009 and will no longer be available after that date.

Deciding to conclude these services was a difficult decision for us to bear, specifically because of the community that has been built around these products over the years.

To express our gratitude and sincere appreciation for being a part of our Thawte community, we would like to offer you up to $100.00 off the purchase price of our SSL and/or code signing certificates.

If you would like to take advantage of our offer, please forward this email to our sales department. Their contact details are listed at the foot of this message. Please note that this offer expires on November 16, 2009.

We have also made a special arrangement with VeriSign regarding replacing your personal email certificate. VeriSign’s exclusive offer to you is for a FREE 1-year replacement personal email certificate - a $19.95 value. This offer will be open for 2 months after the service is discontinued and will no longer be available after January 16, 2010. Simply follow appropriate link below to request your certificate.

Interestingly, their web page for requesting new certificates hasn’t been updated yet. And you can still request one for another month, though I’m not sure why you’d want to: according to their FAQ page on the matter, all outstanding certificates will be revoked on that date, so any certificate you get now will only be valid for another month (or less) anyway. It’s not like you can grab one at the last minute and be OK for another year.

I think I shan’t take them up on their VeriSign offer. I’ve already revoked my Thawte certificate and have gotten one from CAcert instead (and that’s the one you’ll see on my business-related web page now, in its right sidebar).

Of course, I say that I’ve been “using” a certificate only in the loosest sense of “use”. I rarely have any need to digitally sign email, and no one ever has cause to send me encrypted mail. At least, that’s the case with the way we do email today. I’d still like to see this technology used more, but it remains a curiosity.

Why it’s no more than a curiosity is mostly covered in the PKI entry. The short answer: it’s too cumbersome and confusing to get certificates, to give them to people who need them, to manage them (they expire annually, and need to be replaced with new ones), and to deal with the error conditions when something doesn’t work right.

I know what I’m doing, and the process for replacing my Thawte certificate with the CAcert one was not trivial for me, and didn’t work right away. I had to “install” the new certificate into multiple programs, as well as into the MacOS “keychain” (theoretically, they should all get it through the keychain, but...). After installing it, I had to tell some of the programs to use the new certificate instead of the old one. One program didn’t allow me to choose, and insisted on using the Thawte certificate, so I actually had to delete it from that program’s certificate list (that was before I did the revocation, so maybe it would work correctly now, when it saw that the certificate it wanted to use was revoked). Deleting the old certificate is a bad idea, if you might have encrypted mail or files that need it. And then I had to remove the public version of the old certificate from my web site and put the new one there.

But another reason that all this is just a curiosity is that there’s no compelling reason to use this stuff anyway. That is to say, there are plenty of good reasons that we should be using it, but we lack the critical mass to make any of that matter. If no one expects my email to be digitally signed, nor cares whether it is or isn’t, then it doesn’t matter that I can do it. If no one wants to send me encrypted mail, it doesn’t matter that they can.

My bank should be sending my online bank statements to me, encrypted and signed. Instead, I get plain-text mail that tells me my statement is ready, and I go log into their web site to get it. I should be sending instructions to my financial advisor, encrypted and signed. Instead, we use the phone, or I go to the company’s web site and log in.

And the web sites don’t even use my certificate to identify me, though they could, and it would be better than the username/password system. But it’s still too hard, three and a half years after I last ranted about it, to make digital certificates work for general users. We haven’t gotten anywhere.
 

---

^[1] While you’re reviewing that, go back and (re-)read my series on digital signatures. Hm. I wonder how old these pages have to get before it’s worth re-posting selected old items.

Can they use those logos?

I was having a burger the other day, and I looked up at the TV above the restaurant’s bar. It was playing a campaign ad for Jon Corzine.

That’s the big New Jersey gubernatorial campaign: incumbent Jon Corzine is being challenge by sleazebucket Chris Christie, and both sides are running hugely negative attack campaigns — politics as even more disgusting than usual. Several of Governor Corzine’s ads use quotes from the newspapers to blast Mr Christie; there’s an example over there on the right, from the ad I saw (click to enlarge).

Earlier in the ad, they took other New York Times quotes, simply tagging them as being from the Times. But for this one, they used the logo. Did they get permission for that? I doubt it. I’m not a lawyer, but I also doubt that it’s covered by fair use.^[1]

It’s unlikely, of course, that the Times would sue Mr Corzine for it, but that fact doesn’t make the use proper.

Lots of people who put together business presentations like to stick in a slide or two with company logos all over them, to represent the companies that use the technology or products or services described, who belong to the subject organization, or whatever. There’s an example on the right (click it to go the page whence it came, as long as the page continues to exist).

Again, they almost always do not have permission to use the logos. Such permission isn’t given lightly, at least not by big companies, and it’s a very different thing to use the company’s name, and to use its logo. IBM, for instance, is very picky about the use of the logo, requiring it to be rendered just so, in the right size, with the right colours, against the right background, and so on. Even employees have to apply for permission to use it except in certain pre-approved manners (as with company-distributed PowerPoint templates).

I’ve always refused to use slides like that — sometimes to the scoffing of my colleagues, who preferred the snazzier, logo-filled slide to my mundane list of names.

Am I just being too much of a good Do-Bee? I don’t think so. I think companies have a right not to have their logos used in someone’s advertising, sales pitches, or even technical presentations.
 

---

^[1] This, on the other hand, is.

Faulty logic: Confirmation Bias

In “On being a skeptic”, I said that skeptics look at evidence and make rational judgments based on the evidence:

We don’t say, “Bullshit!”, and we don’t say, “It’s a scientist saying it, so it must be true.” We look at the evidence.

I note that non-skeptics — or those who style themselves as a different kind of skeptic — also put forth “evidence” and claim support from it. But their evidence turns out to be faulty, and, often, the fault is in their reliance on one of more logical fallacies. They’re using faulty logic, which is generating faulty evidence, which is supporting... not any judgment they might make from what they see, but what they’ve already determined they want to believe.

The series so far:

1. Confirmation Bias (this post)
2. False Dichotomy
3. Appeal to Authority
4. Argument ad hominem
5. Appeal to Popularity
6. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc

I thought I’d have a look, in a series of posts, at some of the common logical fallacies. I’ll start with the one that’s perhaps the hardest for us to avoid, one that most of us have to work hard not to fall into ourselves:

Confirmation Bias

Simply put, confirmation bias is seeing what you want or expect to see, and ignoring what contradicts it. When you get stopped at a traffic light, and you say, “This light is always red when I come to it,” that’s probably confirmation bias. When I blogged, a couple of years ago, about how I seem to see 11:11 or 1:11 on my clock more often than I statistically should, that was confirmation bias. I know about confirmation bias, and it’s still hard for me to see 11:11 on the clock and not think, beneath my smile, “See: there’s something to this.”

But to those who aren’t aware, or who deny it, confirmation bias is a huge trap. It’s what makes us remember all the stories about bogus remedies that “worked”, because we forget the times when they didn’t. It’s what makes us certain that prayer works, because we ignore all the cases when it doesn’t. When we expect to see God everywhere, confirmation bias has us see Jesus and Mary in cheese sandwiches, wall plaster, and cow patties. When we think a psychic can really see things, or that astrology is predictive, we find sense and truth in their vague, equivocal statements through confirmation bias.

That’s where the scientific method comes in. Science has us control a study, record all observations, and then see if there’s really support for our thesis. Record the state of the traffic light every time, and see if it’s really red more often than not. Record the time whenever you look at the clock, and see how much 11:11 really does come up. Show people a bunch of random images, and measure their inclination to find Jesus in them... then see what else that correlates to.

It’s also important to remember that confirmation bias fools even the wary, sometimes in subtle ways. Its biggest danger is that it leads us to confirm our hypotheses, rather than to truly test them with counterexamples. When we design studies, we must make sure we take that into account, putting in sufficient challenges, as well as supporting cases. For example, if our hypothesis is that plant X is only found near water, we can’t test that hypothesis by only looking near water; we also must look where we don’t expect to find it, to make sure that we don’t find it there.

Want some real examples of confirmation bias? Here’s an item from the NY Times a year and a half ago, about the taste of wine:

But assuming for the moment that it’s true that most drinkers prefer the cheap stuff, why does anyone bother buying $55 cabernet? One answer is provided by a second experiment, in which presumably sober researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the Stanford Business School demonstrated that the more expensive consumers think a wine is, the more pleasure they are apt to take in it.

The researchers scanned the brains of 21 volunteer wine novices as they administered tiny tastes of wine, measuring sensations in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain where flavor responses apparently register. The subjects were told only the price of the wines. Without their knowledge, they tasted one wine twice, and were given two different prices for that wine. Invariably they preferred the one they thought was more expensive.

Note that the study isn’t working on subjective reporting: their brains are actually responding differently, depending upon how much they think the wine costs. This is really wired into us.

And this item just appeared in New Scientist the other day. This one is subjective, but still interesting.

Sixty people in turn were shown the same video clip on the same television. Half were told to expect clearer, sharper pictures thanks to HD technology: an impression backed up by posters, flyers and the presence of an extra-thick cable connected to the screen. The other half were told to expect a normal DVD image.

Questionnaires revealed that the people who had been led to expect HD reported seeing higher-quality images. “Participants were unable to discriminate properly between digital and high-definition signals,” says Lidwien van de Wijngaert at the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands, who carried out the study with colleagues from Utrecht University.

In fighting confirmation bias, double-blind tests, randomized data, and peer review are your friends.

Carnivals!

You’ve probably heard that Condé Nast is closing down Gourmet magazine. Sigh.

But, hey, editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl says she’s planning to write a book about the years she spent working for Condé Nast. Who knows where that might take things.

Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:

• Skeptics’ Circle #121.
• EduCarnival V2 #7. (They’re insisting on skipping number 5, so I’ll be consistent with their numbering.)
• EduCarnival V2 #8.
• Math Teachers at Play #16. (And these folks are insisting on using 15 twice, so I’ll renumber here as well. Some math teachers they are, eh?)
• Carnival of the Godless #127.

Pudding proof

There’s an advertisement I’ve been hearing on the radio in the mornings: it’s for a local business, and it’s voiced over by the business owner himself, common for local ads. He tells you that his business is a good one, but says that “the proof is in the pudding,” and you should come in and see for yourself.

I’ve heard that phrase quite often, recently, for some reason. Only, it’s the wrong idiom. The proof is not in the pudding.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

The wrong version doesn’t even make any sense, though, of course, few people actually try thinking about the standard phrases they use. That’s why one hears things like, “It’s his stock and trade,” which should be “stock in trade.” It’s why one sees people expressing support for someone’s position by writing, “Here, here!” (It should be “Hear, hear!”, as in “Listen to this guy!”) And it’s why one comes by the most nonsensical one of all, “I could care less,” rather than “I couldn’t care less.”

“Proof”, here, doesn’t refer to the more common meaning today, of “evidence”, but to an older meaning, a test of quality. We seldom use the word in that sense now as a noun (it does survive, at least for a little longer, as a photographic proof sheet (test sheet), and as printer’s proofs), but we still see it as a verb when we proof the yeast for bread-making, and when we proofread text — those of us who don’t rely overmuch on the spelling checker.

The sentence as a whole is one of the many that come to us through the truly marvellous book Don Quixote, but there are earlier references to similar adages, and Cervantes undoubtedly was using an already established saw, which, then, of course, was translated.

I’ve written before about what a great book Don Quixote is. But don’t take my word for it: read it; the proof of the pudding is, after all, in the eating.

Make that a double

One of my car’s tail-light bulbs burned out a little while ago, and I replaced it. To the right is a photo of the package I got.

Note that it contains two bulbs — or, it did until I used one of them.

Now, given that my car has almost 180,000 miles on it and just passed its tenth birthday, you can imagine that I’ve replaced others of its tail-lamps, and, indeed, I have. According to my records, I’ve replaced two bulbs before. (That’s all? My, but these guys last a long time!) Each time, I bought a package that contained two bulbs. Each time, I put the package, with the second bulb, somewhere on the shelves in my garage.

If your garage is like my garage, you’ll know that they’re hopelessly lost in there somewhere. Perhaps they became food for a mutant breed of spider. Maybe they’re just hiding in some cranny, to be found by anthropologists in the year 2525. In any case, they’re not likely to find their way into my car.

Do the manufacturers do this on purpose? Do they know that 92.7% of them will disappear into the abyss, and have they planned it that way? “Hey, if we package them in twos, we can sell nearly twice as many! And people won’t mind, ’cause they’re cheap enough that we can get away with it.” (Note the price tag: three dollars for the pair.)

On the other hand, when I buy household bulbs I get them in packages of several — four, usually, or six — and I know where all of them are. This time, I’m stashing the car bulbs with the household ones. The spiders won’t get them there, and when next I need one...

...I have only to remember that I did this.

[Title stolen borrowed from David Sedaris, from my favourite essay in his book Me Talk Pretty One Day. Very funny book. Go buy it.]

Asking too many questions

Suppose that when you started your car today, it displayed a question on the dashboard: “Should I advance the timing by 4 degrees?” The car wouldn’t go until you responded. What would you think?

What if you were having a house built, and the builder sent you a text message: “Should we put your floor joists 16 inches on center? I need an answer immediately, or my workers are going to another job.” Would you know how to respond, without asking any questions back and risking losing the day?

How about if you tried to visit a web site, and your browser responded with a popup that said, “There’s a problem with the site’s certificate. Should I accept it anyway?”

Oh, you say that last one happened to you just this morning... or yesterday, or last week? Indeed. It’s happened to us all, many times. So many times that we just say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” and we click “Accept” without really thinking.

But why on Earth are we programming these things this way? Why do our computers persist in asking questions that 99-point-some-number-of-nines percent of the users have no hope of understanding, much less answering correctly?

“What should I do with this certificate?”
“Program XYZ wants to access the Internet on port 3271. Should I let it?”
“There was an error reading the preferences for this program. What should I do?”

We should never ask a user a question that most users are not qualified to answer.

No one would program a car or a toaster or a microwave oven to ask such questions. No builder or plumber or doctor would ask such questions without sitting down with you and explaining the options and the reasons. Why do we accept this stuff from our computers?

It’s because, however familiar we’ve become with computers, they are still mysterious things that work by some kind of magic, and magic words and mumbo-jumbo are still thought of as part of how they operate.

We have to make that unacceptable. We’re at a point where we ask the users a million questions, and the “correct” answer is almost always “yes”. But the consequences of saying “yes” when it’s the wrong answer are serious: your computer gets infected with a virus, you wind up on the wrong web site, your account number and password get stolen.

We need to get to the point where we ask the users very few questions, and the correct answer is almost always “no”. We teach people that, and get them used to saying “no” if they aren’t sure what to do. And then the system fails safe: the consequences of saying “no” when it’s the wrong answer are that you remain secure.

After that, we stop asking the questions altogether. Sure, some people will want to put their computers into “expert mode” and continue to get the questions, continue to make the decisions for themselves. But most people, that 99-point-some-number-of-nines percent of the users, will have safer, more secure computers, because they won’t be trained to say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” and to click “Accept” without having any idea what they’re accepting.

We should never ask a user a question that most users are not qualified to answer.

Corollary: Every security-related question is in that category.

Is carrying a gun risky?

I honestly do wish the press — even the science press — would stop reporting on preliminary studies and incomplete results. Or maybe the fault is with the scientists who talk to the press about such results, and the publicity departments of their research organizations, which put out press releases.

New Scientist, which offers a mixed bag of good science reporting and stuff that the editors should have thrown in the rubbish bin, has just given us one in the latter category: “Carrying a gun increases risk of getting shot and killed”.

Packing heat may backfire. People who carry guns are far likelier to get shot — and killed — than those who are unarmed, a study of shooting victims in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has found.

It would be impractical — not to say unethical — to randomly assign volunteers to carry a gun or not and see what happens. So Charles Branas’s team at the University of Pennsylvania analysed 677 shootings over two-and-a-half years to discover whether victims were carrying at the time, and compared them to other Philly residents of similar age, sex and ethnicity. The team also accounted for other potentially confounding differences, such as the socioeconomic status of their neighbourhood.

The result? Well:

Overall, Branas’s study found that people who carried guns were 4.5 times as likely to be shot and 4.2 times as likely to get killed compared with unarmed citizens. When the team looked at shootings in which victims had a chance to defend themselves, their odds of getting shot were even higher.

Anyone staring at these pages for a while will know that I dislike guns. I’d love nothing more than to be able to take that result at face value, and to quote it far and wide. I’d love to have a definitive study showing such statistics.

This is not that study, and these results are useful only to prompt further study. As they stand, we can’t conclude anything from them.

The article itself does point out some of the problems, but many readers will miss them. First, this is not a randomized trial, nor even a review of other scientific work. They started with people who were shot. The article points out that practicality and ethics make it difficult to assign people to groups, but perhaps a study that selected people at random and then looked at what happened to them would have a better chance. As it is, the methodology here makes confirmation bias likely.

Second, while they attempted to control for factors such as age, sex, ethnic background, and socioeconomic status, they have not controlled for some major factors, not least of which involve the attitudes and behaviours of the subjects. We can’t say this enough: correlation does not imply causation. Even if we accept that they have shown a high correlation between carrying a gun and being shot, there is no sense in which they’ve shown any cause. Again, the article does note that, but not in so many words, and only in passing.

It’s entirely possible, for example, that the causation is exactly the other way around. It’s possible — I have no data to support this; it’s just hypothetical — that the people who were carrying guns were doing so because they often go places where they’re likely to be shot.

Third, they studied a city in the northeastern U.S., which has a certain view of guns. The results could be very different in, say, Dallas, where the gun culture is very different. Geographically diverse studies would be needed to account for regional differences in how we think about guns, and in the laws that regulate them.

None of this is to say that the work isn’t good, isn’t useful. It’s just that we can’t deduce anything directly from it. The value of studies like this is that they uncover apparent correlations and show us things that we can then go off and study more rigorously.

Unfortunately, it’s likely that many people will read reports of studies like this and won’t understand the limitations on interpreting the results. And in this case, trumpeting this study at the NRA’s gates would be a mistake, because its so easy to shoot it down (if you’ll excuse the metaphor).

On the other hand, I look forward to future studies that pursue the questions this one raises.

Instant DNA scanning?

While we’re talking about Sunday’s All Things Considered, consider this thing: an item about Plummers Island, a small piece of ground near the banks of the Potomac River. It seems that some folks have catalogued what they call “DNA bar codes” for all the plant species on the island.

Why they call them “bar codes” isn’t clear, and the metaphor doesn’t seem right to me. I might say “DNA fingerprint”, or, perhaps, as a computer-security type, “DNA digest”. In any case, the point is that they’ve taken, from the full DNA sequence, a “marker” that is sufficient to uniquely identify each species. Which, when you think about it, is very cool.

What’s more, they’re looking at doing it super-quickly, even on the fly:

"We have to sequence that DNA to actually identify the plant," Kress says. "We’re not there yet in terms of me picking a leaf off the ground and telling you immediately from its DNA bar code what that is. We would have to take it back to the lab, sequence it. But technology is heading in the direction where we expect [that] what now sits on top of a desk as a DNA sequencer will eventually fit in the palm of your hand."

Within a few years, Kress imagines kids wandering through forests around the world with portable scanners that could analyze a sample of any plant, check it against the DNA database, and know within a few seconds what species they’re looking at.

Now, what that makes me think about is Star Trek tricorders. I remember how cool I thought it was, when I was 10, that Mr Spock could walk around with a hand-held device, supported by a strap over his shoulder, press a button on it, have it make a modulated whistling noise for a moment, and then announce whatever was appropriate about the surroundings. He could tell us the composition of the rocks and the air, the nature of the plants and animals in the area, the number of humanoids hiding nearby.

“Fascinating,” he would often say, as he operated his tricorder and looked at the readings.

And now, John Kress, Smithsonian Institution botanist, tells us that before too long, we’ll be able to do that — at least a little of that.

Fascinating.

Feeding America

On Sunday’s All Things Considered, NPR had two items about fresh food.

First, they talked with Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, who pushed for buying local produce at farmers’ markets:

Resources from the [U.S. Department of Agriculture] have boosted the number of farmers markets across the nation by about 13 percent over the last year, Vilsack says. Even so, he adds, the effort to eat nutritiously has to go beyond farmers markets.

"It has to be more institutionalized in the sense that you have a supply chain that is reliable, and that large purchasers — large institutional purchasers — can do the same thing." Like schools, for example. "We are very interested in inserting greater opportunities for people to be able to purchase nutritious fruits and vegetables."

It’s hard to imagine the large supermarket chains buying more expensive produce from local farmers when they could buy it cheaper from Mexico or California. Vilsack says the future of local produce might look more like independently owned and operated grocery stores. "Just like any other small business in a small town," he says, "if you have to pay a few pennies more, you know that’s OK because that money is staying in the community."

Then they talked with the Cato Institute’s Sallie James — the Cato Institute is a libertarian organization that pushes free enterprise, and Ms James is an agricultural trade policy analyst there. She says that local markets can’t feed enough people, and cost too much for poor people to afford to shop at anyway.

"It may well be that if we did away with production subsidies that we may see a different breakout of production patterns in America," she says. "But certainly that suggests that, for efficiency reasons, agriculture depends on economies of scale." Farmers markets, for all the attention they’re getting from the Agriculture Department, can’t handle that level of demand, she says.

"You throw enough money at something, of course it’s going to thrive," James says. "It’s not front-page news that the Agriculture Department invests a lot of money in promoting farmers markets — we see more farmers markets.

"What I’m suggesting is, it’s not the best use of money. There is absolutely very little wrong with encouraging people to eat healthily. But what the problem is here, is poor people having access to fresh fruits and vegetables."

How do you do that? Walmart, James says.

"You allow Walmart to come into urban areas and provide cheaper fresh produce to people," she says. "The reality is they have a very good distribution network. They can get fresh produce into rural and exurban areas very well."

There are two main things that I find interesting about this debate:

1. That it’s actually cheaper to ship food from across the country than it is to get it locally.
2. The claim that Walmart can sell produce at a lower price than grocery chains can.

On point 1, I note that, while my local markets are selling tomatoes from New York and New Jersey, the supermarket chains (A&P, ShopRite, and Stop & Shop are the primary ones where I live) are shipping them in from elsewhere. During New York’s apple season — which we’re entering now — we’ll get Macintosh, Rome, Cortland, Empire, Jonathan, and other tasty varieties at the local markets.^[1] Yet, the chains continue to sell the Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, and Granny Smith varieties that are shipped in from Washington — more than 2500 miles away.

Part of the reason for this involves long-term contracts. Local produce is available only during certain seasons, but customers demand the same items throughout the year. When they’re out of season locally, the supermarkets will have to have them shipped in... but they can get better prices if they negotiate year-’round supply from far away. The famers’ markets, on the other hand, will not have tomatoes when they’re not in season here.

And you know what?: It’s just as well. The shipped-in tomatoes are not worth buying; I’d rather get them canned. The local, in-season tomatoes are luscious and delicious. Apples are more flexible, and the Washington fruits are fine... but the local varieties give us much more choice, and different flavours.

We used to accept the absence of out-of-season items, but we’ve been trained otherwise by the availability of shipped-in produce... to the point where many people are so used to the bland Red Delicious apples that they prefer them to the tastier varieties.

To the second point, I wonder why Walmart should be able to bring in fresh produce at a lower price than, say, A&P. Beyond that, though, when I go to some of the smaller markets, I find that not only do they cater more to the local demographic — carrying items like tomatillos, jicama, and plantains in areas with a large Latino population, for example — but their prices are also better. A large bunch of wonderfully fresh cilantro will be half the price that A&P charges for a smaller, less fresh bunch a few miles up the road.

Can Walmart beat those local markets, and still provide the variety the communities demand?

And, if they can: what happens when Walmart becomes the only place in town, as has largely happened with its original discount-store market? Low prices are good, but lack of choice is not.

And, of course, the Cato Institute doesn’t want to see subsidies or tax incentives, preferring free-market economics. Should the Department of Agriculture (or the state equivalents) be involved in affecting how we get our food, and where we get it from?
 

---

^[1] Unfortunately, no one seems to grow Rhode Island Greenings around here any more, and it’s gotten hard to find the Northern Spy in recent years.

Sunday math-geek humour

A local tavern is offering well-formed formulas at a quite reasonable price:

VWRAP: Virtual World Region Agent Protocol

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has this week chartered a new working group to work on standardizing one piece of the virtual world... um... universe. The working group is called Virtual World Region Agent Protocol (vwrap), and the chairs are me and Joshua Bell, of Linden Lab (no, not that Joshua Bell).

In earlier discussions of standardizing virtual world protocols, we looked at several of the different types of virtual worlds out there, considered the consequences of incompatible avatars, objects, and attributes, considered what it would mean to render an avatar from one world that teleported into another, and so on. And we considered the security/privacy implications of all of it. We decided that the first step needed to be a more constrained environment, biting off just one piece of the sandwich.

VWRAP is aimed at that: Linden Lab and others have started us off with a proposed protocol that will work for worlds that are designed like Second Life. It will allow virtual-world regions to be created by different vendors, virtual-world services to be provided from different domains, all put together into one world.

I’m looking forward to playing with this, and seeing what standardized virtual-world protocols can do for us. I think it’s going to be an interesting working group.

The Twighlight Zone turns 50

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space, and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call... the Twilight Zone.

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the airing of the very first episode of The Twilight Zone. That episode, “Where Is Everybody?”, was one of the show’s best, an excellent beginning to an excellent series.

In commemoration of the day, here’s a list of my other favourite episodes, just for fun:

• “Time Enough at Last” (season 1, episode 8)
• “And When the Sky Was Opened” (season 1, episode 11)
• “What You Need” (season 1, episode 12)
• “The Hitch-Hiker” (season 1, episode 16)
• “People Are Alike All Over” (season 1, episode 25)
• “A Stop at Willoughby” (season 1, episode 30)
• “Eye of the Beholder” (season 2, episode 6)
• “A Most Unusual Camera” (season 2, episode 10)
• “A Penny for Your Thoughts” (season 2, episode 16)
• “Twenty Two” (season 2, episode 17)
• “Long Distance Call” (season 2, episode 22)
• “The Silence” (season 2, episode 25)
• “Two” (season 3, episode 1)
• “The Shelter” (season 3, episode 3)
• “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” (season 3, episode 14)
• “The Hunt” (season 3, episode 19)
• “To Serve Man” (season 3, episode 24)
• “Living Doll” (season 5, episode 6)
• “Ring-A-Ding Girl” (season 5, episode 13)
• “The Encounter” (season 5, episode 31)
• “The Bewitchin’ Pool” (season 5, episode 36)

[Note that they experimented, in the fourth season, with hour-long episodes. I think it didn’t work, and none of the fourth-season shows are among the best, as I see them.]

You like Skype; I like Skype; everybody likes Skype!

When I worked for IBM, I didn’t use Skype. As with many large companies, they don’t allow the use of software on company computers unless the lawyers have approved the terms and conditions — the end-user license agreement, EULA — and the company lawyers didn’t approve the Skype license. It didn’t matter much to me: I had a Cisco IP telephone on my desk, and software on my computer to control the phone. I could make and receive calls from my computer as though I were at my desk.

As soon as I left, though, I installed Skype. I’d heard a lot about it, and I wanted to try it. But beyond just trying it: it lets you make free calls to U.S. toll-free phone numbers, and that made it very useful to use for conference calls. I could use a headset — including my Bluetooth headphones — on calls, giving me good sound and a nice, hands-free situation.

And then it got better: I found that for about five dollars a month, I could use it for unlimited calling in the U.S. and Canada, plus get a telephone number for people to make incoming calls to. I went with it. And I love it.

It’s nice to have the same phone number available wherever I take my laptop. It’s nice to use a headset, but I can just use the microphone and speakers built into the Macbook, and they work fine. I’ve always had good sound in both directions. I’m not using minutes on my mobile phone, and my calls aren’t cutting in and out because of a flakey mobile signal. Of course, I do need an Internet connection, but that’s ever easier to find. When I need to make international calls, I can do that at a much lower rate than I’d get on my mobile phone. And for international colleagues who are also on Skype, it’s free (Skype-to-Skype calls are always free).

EBay bought Skype in October, 2005, but little seemed to change with the acquisition. The Skype software and services remained branded as “Skype”, rather than having “eBay” plastered all over things. And everything continued to work nicely. For Skype users.

Not so much for Skype management, which was hampered by control from the eBay mother ship. And not so much for eBay itself: by straying so far from their core business without an apparent plan for managing the expansion, eBay did not do well with the purchase. From the New York Times:

EBay acquired Skype in 2005, outbidding Google and Yahoo in a deal that has come to be viewed as one of the worst technology transactions of the decade. Including payouts to Skype’s founders, the price ultimately topped $3.1 billion. EBay later wrote down $900 million of Skype’s value, after it became clear that the company was not a good fit with eBay’s main e-commerce and online payment businesses.

So, as that article tells us, eBay is selling Skype off, to some “private investors”. Good for Skype.

Except that more trouble started looming, as the original Skype founders filed intellectual property claims against eBay in British court, and have just filed a new lawsuit in California. The suit names eBay, as well as the new investment groups to which eBay is selling Skype.

So, where things will go is uncertain. Skype is said to be working on replacing the parts of the program in question in the lawsuit, which would allow them to continue even if they lose... but a large award for damages could crush them financially, even if they’ve dealt with the intellectual property issue for the future. I haven’t looked at the details of the suit, so I have no opinion on who’s right.

I just hope Skype continues, win or lose. I like Skype.
 

---

[As to the title: see here.]