More layoffs, amid rising CEO salaries

IBM’s working on another round of job cuts, this time on the services side of the business, completing what looks to be a trimming of on the order of 10% of its U.S. workforce.

Reports of deep job cuts at International Business Machines (IBM) come at a potentially delicate time for the company—just as it is hoping to secure money from the federal stimulus package. The company will lay off as many as 5,000 U.S. workers in its Global Business Services unit, transferring some of the work they performed to India, according to media reports.

The company’s been making big moves to several countries for a while now — some of the primary ones are India, China, Brazil, and Russia — and away from the U.S. As Business Week goes on to report:

Big Blue’s efforts to trim costs by sending work overseas are not new. For several years the company has been working to improve its efficiency through a combination of computer automation, business-process optimization, and job transfers from expensive locations to offshore. Chief Executive Sam Palmisano has said those plans are part of an effort to make IBM a “globally integrated enterprise.” Since 2003, the Armonk (N.Y.) company has hired approximately 90,000 people in India and more than 5,000 in Brazil to do IT and business-process outsourcing (BPO) services work.

In the meantime, the company has trimmed its U.S. workforce. According to its annual report, IBM had 398,000 workers worldwide at the end of 2008, up from 386,558 at the end of 2007. At the same time, U.S. employment has declined, to 115,000 at the end of 2008, compared with 121,000 a year earlier.

I agree with those who think that companies moving jobs out of the U.S. should not be eligible for any of the “stimulus” money. There has to be, along with the granting of the money, a commitment from the companies to the U.S. economy. I’ve long been a general fan of globalization, but it carries significant problems with it in the best of times — including the “race to the bottom” effect, where countries try to pull in business by offering cheaper and cheaper labour. In these times, which are closer to worst than to best, we can’t allow U.S. jobs to move overseas and then reward the companies doing that with government handouts.

And, of course, right in the middle of these two rounds of job elimination, we get the report of CEO Sam Palmisano’s compensation for 2008: just shy of $21 million, up slightly from just shy of $21 million in 2007. The cash part of that was $7.3 million — $5.5 million of which was a “performance-based bonus.”

By all reports, IBM did well last year, and expects to do well this year. Nevertheless, it’s appalling to see a company fire 10% of its workers because of an economic downturn, while giving its CEO five and a half million dollars as a performance-based bonus.

I’m not really picking on IBM, here; it’s just that it’s the company closest to my heart. But we have a systemic problem of insanely large CEO salaries, salaries far out of line with what the positions are worth, and not sufficiently tied to real measures of company success and overall economic well-being. We have to find a way out of this bizarre cycle of ever increasing compensation packages for top executives.

Certainly, at the least, we should demand that companies taking help from the government not be allowed to pay their CEOs so lavishly and send jobs to other countries. It’s a violation of basic ethics.

If someone is worth recommending...

...then it’s worth writing a good recommendation.

And here I don’t just mean a positive recommendation, though that, too, of course. I mean that you should spend some time writing it well. And I mean that you should check it for spelling, punctuation, grammar, and style.

For a case in point, look at this actual recommendation I got last year, for a graduate student we were considering:

[Name] is viewed in the technical and executive community as some one, who using her teachnical ability, and ability to understand the root cause of seemingly dirrerent positions teken by various inter related groups, is able synthesize a solution that enhances the design and makes various party comfortable.

That’s a copy-and-paste job, with the candidate’s name removed; all errors were in the original.

As it happens, and as you might guess, the author of that recommendation is not a native English speaker. Even so,

1. his spoken English is not that bad, so this is just carelessness, and
2. he could have — should have — had a native speaker check it.

So let’s correct what’s written, and have another look:

[Name] is viewed in the technical and executive communities as someone who, using her technical ability and her ability to understand the root cause of seemingly different positions taken by various interrelated groups, is able to synthesize a solution that enhances the design and makes various parties comfortable.

OK, now that the writing is tolerable... what does it say?

I certainly haven’t a clue. And that’s it, in its entirety.

A recommendation is meant to tell the reader — me, in this case — why he would want to give the candidate a position. What does she bring to my organization, my program, my project? What specific skills does she have that would benefit me? What do you know about her that you can tell me, that will make me jump out of my seat? Tell me one or two things that she’s succeeded in that are relevant to me.

But the example here is completely generic. It says nothing about what the writer knows about the candidate (just some vague thing about how she’s viewed in the community). It says nothing about what she’s done. It says nothing about how her skills match what I’m looking for. She has technical ability? In what areas? What has she accomplished with it?

It describes, in a bizarrely complex clause, some knack she has for understanding people’s ideas... but, again, it’s vague about it, and doesn’t say more.

And, in the end, what’s the only thing the author tells me she’s done? It says that she can “enhance the design” (of what?) and “make various parties comfortable.” What parties would that be? And comfortable? That’s like when your parents used to say that the friend of a friend whom your parents were trying to fix you up with was “very nice.”

What was I supposed to do with that recommendation? What I did was discard it. And then I sent email to some contacts of my own, who could give me some real recommendations about that candidate.

Not everyone is going to go through the trouble. If you’re applying for something and most of your recommendations are like that, your application will most likely go into the trash.

If you’re writing a recommendation, take the time to write one that will truly reflect well on the applicant, and that will be useful to the people making the evaluation. Say specific things, and make the personal connection — how you know the applicant and what you have seen that impresses you. Why would you hire her? Tell me that.

And if you wouldn’t hire her — if you’re writing a recommendation pro forma because you didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings by saying no — then, by &deity, don’t write it! Say no, please. Because a recommendation like this is worse than none at all, so in the process of not hurting her feelings, you’re hurting her chances.

If you’re soliciting recommendations, you’re in a tougher situation. You need to pick three or four people you can trust to do it right. Use your sense in making that selection. Maybe you can find a way to see some recommendations they’ve written in the past. Maybe you just have a gut feeling that they’d write good ones. Choose carefully. Then discuss with them what you want them to highlight, and what you think you’d like them to say.

They need to write it in their own words, and it has to be an honest recommendation, but that doesn’t mean you can’t help them craft it. Remind them of your most relevant skills. Remind them of the times you’ve worked together successfully, and point out the key elements of that success, and the value of it. Then let them go off and write.

And remember that each recommendation needs to be custom-written for the position you’re looking for. You may want different people writing references, depending upon where you’re applying. Does this or that professor have a close relationship with the school or company you’re hoping to go to? Pick the one who does, and take advantage of those connections. A recommendation means more if the reader knows and trusts the person making it. Don’t just use the same people and don’t try to recycle their recommendations. Even if this position may be similar to another, it probably won’t be exactly the same.

Finally, if your thesis advisor or previous employer isn’t one of those you’re getting a recommendation from, be prepared to explain why, in a positive way (don’t say why you didn’t get along, but say why the recommendations you did get are more relevant). The question might not come up... but if it does, you’ll need a good answer at the ready.

M[e/o]mento

When did “momento” become a common, if not accepted spelling of “memento”?

The word is not related to “moment”, but comes from the Latin memento, the command “Remember!” In English, a memento was originally a token to remind one of something that must be remembered (compare mnemonic, which comes to us from Greek). The card that your doctor gives you with the date and time of your appointment written on it is a memento, in the older sense. Nowadays, we use it as a synonym for “souvenir” (from the French verb souvenir, “to remember”), a keepsake that serves as a reminder of the past, rather than of the future.

But it’s most certainly spelled “memento”.

I remember noting that, when I first heard Billy Joel’s 1974 song “Souvenir” (from the Streetlife Serenade album), in which he clearly pronounces the word with an “o” sound (though I don’t know how he writes it):

A picture postcard, a folded stub,
A program of the play
File away the photographs
Of your holiday.
And your momentos will turn to dust,
But that’s the price you pay.
For every year’s a souvenir
That slowly fades away.

But then there’s the excellent and interesting movie Memento, which spells it right. The movie is about a man who has trauma-induced damage to his short-term memory, and it’s done with the scenes shown in reverse order so that we, as he, don’t “remember” how we got where we are.

And I saw an advertisement that spells it “momento”, the other day, which prompted me to write this.

For what it’s worth, a Google search on “memento” gives about 8 million hits, while “momento” yields 245 million. That would seem to be a 30-to-1 demonstration that spelling is not the Internet’s long suit. But also, the “o” list includes a large number of businesses and domain names that are spelled that way, as well as hits from web pages in other languages (“momento” means “moment” in Spanish and Italian, for example). So I’m not sure what the Google stats tell us.

Richard Dawkins’s coinage meme (pronounced “meem”), by the way, is related not to memory, but to mimicry; it comes from the Greek mimema something that’s imitated.

Carnivals!

My flights to and from San Francisco offered GoGo, an in-flight wireless Internet service (of which I did not partake). They played an advertisement for it on the television screens, at the beginning of the flight. It’s easy to use, the ad said. Simply turn on your WiFi, once you’re told it’s OK to use electronic devices. Fire up your browser, as is usual with these things, and follow the instructions. And pay, of course. But the strange bit came at the end of the ad:

Just remember: cellular, bluetooth, and other wireless devices may not be used in flight.

Say what?

Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:

• Skeptics’ Circle #108.
• Carnival of the Liberals #87.
• Carnival of Education #215.
• Carnival of Education #216.
• Carnival of the Godless #113.

Interestingly, both Carnivals of Education this time have screwed up the numbering. That’s probably because many of the hosts don’t post the sequence number, and they’ve gotten confused. So, Educator Blog calls it both the 207th (in the title) and the 178th (in the subtitle) at the same time, while Uncomfortable Adventures says hers is the 214th. They are, in fact, the 215th and 216th, respectively.

Jurors searching

The New York Times recently had an item about problems with juries in the Internet age. There’ve always been issues with (non-sequestered) jurors talking with people outside the jury, and giving or receiving inappropriate information. But now, clearly, where pretty much any news and information are just a click or two away, and are available to many on their handheld devices, it’s become more difficult to handle.

Last week, a juror in a big federal drug trial in Florida admitted to the judge that he had been doing research on the case on the Internet, directly violating the judge’s instructions and centuries of legal rules. But when the judge questioned the rest of the jury, he got an even bigger shock.

Eight other jurors had been doing the same thing. The federal judge, William J. Zloch, had no choice but to declare a mistrial, a waste of eight weeks of work by federal prosecutors and defense lawyers.

“We were stunned,” said a defense lawyer, Peter Raben, who was told by the jury that he had been on the verge of winning the case. “It’s the first time modern technology struck us in that fashion, and it hit us right over the head.”

It might be called a Google mistrial. The use of BlackBerrys and iPhones by jurors gathering and sending out information about cases is wreaking havoc on trials around the country, upending deliberations and infuriating judges.

It’s certainly a problem when jurors read news and opinions about the trial or about the principals in the trial: it can unfairly prejudice the jury. The comments of a news analyst may sway a juror. Information about a defendant’s past — information that the judge has deemed irrelevant, and excluded from the trial — may sway a juror. Information about the political leanings of the plaintiff may sway a juror. Even finding out that one of the involved parties belongs to the “right” church — or the “wrong” one — may sway a juror.

Beyond that, the rule in America is that juries are supposed to use only the information presented at the trial in making their decision. If the trial is about, say, money laundering, even if a juror looks up information about money laundering, unrelated to the details of the trial, it’s considered a problem. Education about technical points of a trial... is not allowed. In fact, even obtaining such education from another juror is not allowed. If I know something myself, I will obviously use that knowledge as I decide. But if I try to explain what I know to other jurors, I’m stepping outside the boundary, and it might result in a mistrial.

I have mixed thoughts about that. On the one hand, those sorts of rules are part of what enable idiotic convictions, as in the Julie Amero case (and here). On the other hand, whatever I might know about a particular issue, I’m not an expert witness. Lots of people would “educate” their fellow jurors with questionable knowledge.

The Internet version of that could be an article in Wikipedia that might have just had a dubious update made to it, bogus information that would certainly cause confusion, or worse. And talking about “worse”, there are a lot of web sites out there that look authoritative, that try to present themselves as being authoritative, but aren’t. A juror could really be led astray by that.

So, while it bothers me — a lot — that we’re trying to keep juries relatively ignorant, I think it’s necessary.

Got visa?

I’m at the IETF meeting in San Francisco this week, and a big topic of discussion, as has been for the last several U.S. meetings, is the difficulty of getting travel visas to the United States, especially (but by no means exclusively) for our technical contributors from China.

At the previous IETF meeting, in Minneapolis, we had at least 50 Chinese participants who couldn’t attend because they couldn’t get visas. I don’t have the numbers for this time, but it’s a bunch. And I talked with an attendee from a Chinese company who’s here on a Canadian passport and who said that almost no one from his company coming from China with a Chinese passport was able to make it.

People from other countries are complaining about it too. Some say it takes too long to get a visa — 3 or 4 months in some cases — and some are just denied.

These are not terrorists. These people are threats to no one. They have good jobs back home, in high-tech companies, and they’re coming here to do collaborative work with people from all over the world. There’s no good reason to deny them travel visas.

Because the IETF’s participants come from all over the world, the meetings move around, and the organization tries to divide every six meetings this way: three in North America, two in Europe, one in Asia. And as a result of the ongoing visa problem, they’re shifting more of the North America meetings into Canada. For 2010, two U.S. meetings had been planned, but it’s just been announced that the one in November 2010 will be held in Canada or Asia instead. Many participants are calling for an elimination of U.S. meetings entirely, in favour of Canada.

And the IETF has let the U.S. Department of State know. If they continue to refuse visas for legitimate business meetings, organizations like the IETF will move more and more of their business to other countries, resulting in significant revenue loss — both from the meetings themselves and from collateral tourism — for the host cities in our country. And it will not happen through the State Department’s ignorance. They know.

Hiding addresses in email messages

A friend of mine sent a note to me yesterday, with a question about email. It seems that he’d sent some “amusing” thing to a bunch of people and... well, let’s let him tell it.

Here’s what my friend said, somewhat edited:

Dear Dr Email,I sent a mailing to my “cats” email group within the last couple of days, in which — and I’m usually very careful about not making this mistake — I forgot to use BCC, and exposed all their email addresses to each other. One of them subsequently sent something to at least one of the others, who commented on the exposure to me.

It’s an easy mistake to make, and it seems like an obvious thing, but I’ve not seen anything about any email software with an option to warn you if you’re sending To: more than a specific number of people. 10 would be a good default; some people would want more or fewer. That would be useful.

Dr Email, do you have any comments on such an option?

— Bill the Cat        

Dr Email agrees that such an option would be very useful, though he himself would turn it off. He vaguely remembers seeing something like it before, but perhaps that was in some utopian dream, and not in any actual, extant email client.

And Bill is certainly right about being careful about this: one should never send email to a group of people who don’t know each other, without hiding their email addresses (unless, of course, one is intentionally introducing them, for legitimate reasons). The way to do this is to put the email addresses in the BCC field, rather than in To or CC. If your email program doesn’t give you a way to do this, stop using it and get another.

Dr Email would turn Bill’s suggested option off, because the last time he sent email to more than ten people and didn’t want them to see each other’s addresses was when he recently told people he’d been laid off and has a new email address, and the time before that was, like, never.

You see, when Dr Email sends mail to a bunch of people, it’s as part of a conversation that they’re all participating in. They all know each other’s email addresses already, or should, and they’re expected to be able to reply to the whole list, continuing the conversation.

When Dr Email does send “funny” or “interesting” things to folks, he sends them as individual messages to one, or two, or a few friends, usually with some personalized greeting on each. Because he doesn’t appreciate nor have the time to read arbitrary mass-mailings, even from the closest of friends, he doesn’t think to send them himself. He might say, relevant to this instance, that he avoids sending cat shit to people.

Perhaps Bill the Cat should set up a proper mailing list, to which people could subscribe — and unsubscribe. That would avoid the problem entirely, and could, should Bill want to allow it, permit others to post their cute cat stories as well. Or Bill could join a Google or Yahoo! or Facebook group for cat lovers, and encourage those in his cat group to do so as well.

Alternatively (or in addition), he could write his own blog, including all the silly cat stuff he likes. His cat friends could read it at their leisure, safe and anonymous, all.

A witch! A witch!

His Bizarreness the Pope, Benedict XVI, has been visiting Africa of late. His trip has had a number of high points, such as these:

1. A deadly stampede of people vying to see him.

   LUANDA, Angola (AP) — The Portuguese news agency LUSA reported that two people were trampled to death in a stampede at a sports stadium on Saturday, before Pope Benedict XVI addressed young people.

2. A truly deluded pronouncement that condoms actually make the AIDS problem worse

   On the flight from Rome to Africa, Benedict had renewed the church’s objection to the use of condoms as a prevention against AIDS, going so far as to say the precaution actually “increases the problem” of H.I.V. infection.

3. Instructions that believers should be dissuaded from other beliefs in witchcraft and sorcery.

   On Saturday, at St. Paul’s, he addressed the accommodations of faith by some Africans who mix their Christianity with animism living “in fear of spirits, of malign and threatening powers.”

   The pope asked rhetorically: “Why not leave them in peace? They have their truth, and we have ours.” He then answered that there was no injustice in presenting the ways of Christ to others, granting “them the opportunity of finding their truest and most authentic selves” and offering them “this possibility of attaining eternal life.”

What I find... oddly amusing... about that last one is that the witchcraft stuff bothers Benoit Seize not so much because people are being mistreated and killed as a result of accusations that they’re witches, but because he worries that belief in witchcraft is drawing them away from Jesus Christ. Why not leave them in peace? Why, because then their superstition will displace our superstition, and we can’t have that.

[Shakes head in wonder....]
 

“I am not a witch! And this isn’t my nose; it’s a false one.”

What colour is my hat?

In his TierneyLab blog in the New York Times, John Tierney recently posted an old puzzle, of a kind of which I’m not fond. It goes like this:

Three wise men are told to stand in a straight line, one in front of the other. A hat is put on each of their heads. They are told that each of these hats was selected from a group of five hats: two black hats and three white hats. The first man, standing at the front of the line, can’t see either of the men behind him or their hats. The second man, in the middle, can see only the first man and his hat. The last man, at the rear, can see both other men and their hats.

None of the men can see the hat on his own head. They are asked to deduce its color. Some time goes by as the wise men ponder the puzzle in silence. Finally the first one, at the front of the line, makes an announcement: “My hat is white.”

He is correct. How did he come to this conclusion?

The answer depends, as is conveyed in this version of the story by calling them “wise men”, on the assumption that the men are all ideal subjects for the puzzle — they they all use perfect reasoning:

1. If the third man, who can see both other hats, say two black hats, he would know that his own hat was white. Otherwise, he could not be sure — he’d have a 2/3 chance of having a white hat if he saw one black and one white in front of him, and a 2/3 chance of having a black hat if he saw two whites.
2. Because the third man said nothing after being given a moment to reason it, the others can assume that they do not both have black hats.
3. Now if the second man sees that the first has a black hat, he knows that his own is white, and should say so, since his reasoning is also perfect.
4. Because the second man also said nothing, the first man knows that he has a white hat.

I don’t like these kinds of puzzles because they require assumptions. You have to assume that the men are all perfect, that the second man, for instance, would understand the information the third man’s silence conveys. You have to assume that they have the right sense of how long to wait before making an inference from the others’ silence. What if the first man announced that his hat was white just as it dawned on the second man that the first man’s black hat and the third’s silence told him that his was white?

People’s opinions of these sorts of puzzles differ. Some feel that they show an ability to “think outside the box”. Some, like me, just consider them trick questions. Sometimes I get them, and sometimes I don’t... but I always dislike them, either way.

Like this one, which I remember from an old episode of All in the Family:

Archie: Edith, did I tell you about the guy who bowled three hundred and one?

Edith: Whaaaat?

Archie: Yeah, I know a guy who bowled three hundred and one.

Edith: But Archie, the most you can get is three hundred.

Archie: Well, this fella bowled three hundred and one.

Edith: Oh, no, Archie, that can’t be.

Archie: You don’t think so. Edith?

Edith: No, I don’t. It’s impossible.

Archie: Well... did you ever see anyone who bowled three hundred... and lost?

Church Windows

You wouldn’t think it, but the unassuming little church to the right (click to enlarge) houses some of the greatest art treasures of the Hudson Valley.

The church is the Union Church of Pocantico Hills, and it’s the small, neighborhood church that the Rockefeller family attended when they were at their “country home”. When you’re a Rockefeller, you can spend lots of money on anything you choose. And what the Rockefellers chose was to spend money making their church beautiful. In particular, to buy stained-glass windows for it.

They commissioned the windows, actually. From Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall; maybe you’ve heard of them?

Matisse was a friend of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and he did the rose window at the request of her son, Nelson (maybe you’ve heard of him, too: he was the U.S. Vice President for a while, under Gerald Ford). It was the last piece that Matisse did before he died.

The Chagall windows were done at the request of Nelson’s brother David, in memory of their father, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. They’d initially planned only the largest, The Good Samaritan (the one visible on the right side of the photo), which opposes Matisse’s rose window. In the end, though, Chagall did eight smaller windows, as well, four on each side of the church.

Read David Rockefeller’s recollection of the commissioning of the windows in the link above.

And they’re beautiful. I love the colours and the designs. Chagall is a favourite of mine, in general, and I stop and visit these windows once or twice a year.

You can, too: they’re open for viewing from April through December, church schedule permitting. If you’re in the area, they’re worth a stop. And you can take a walk in the nearby Rockefeller State Park Preserve.
 

---

[Classical music fans may recognize this entry’s title as the name of a set of pieces by Ottorino Respighi. Best known for his Pines of Rome set, Respighi wrote a number of thematic pieces for orchestra, including Fountains of Rome, Church Windows, Brazilian Impressions, and Ancient Airs and Dances.]

ee–k!

Employee.

Addressee.

Nominee, attendee, escapee.

We like the –ee suffix. We took it from the French, where it (actually ée) is a feminine suffix, for which the masculine form is é. The woman one is about to marry is one’s fiancée, and the man one is about to marry is one’s fiancé — pronounced alike, as fee-ahns-AY.

But for most of the rest of those sorts of words, we’ve anglicized the ending, using the double-e version exclusively, omitting the accent mark, and pronouncing it like the sounds of the letters “e” themselves.

A few may still say dev-oh-TAY, but we’d consider them affected. And no one says em-ploy-AY — when Anna Leonowens does, in The King and I, she corrects herself.

Your servant? Your servant?
I’m sure I’m not your servant,
Although you pay me less than servant’s pay.
I’m a full and independent employ–AY!
... Employ–EE!

Mr Hammerstein had to make it rhyme, you say... see.

We like the suffix so well that we freely use it, turning pretty much any part of speech into a description of someone who does something (attendee, devotee, escapee) or to whom something is done (grantee, nominee, addressee).

The abandon with which we use it sometimes tends toward the comical, and sometimes we mean it that way, as with stuckee. Sometimes, though, it just gets silly, or awkward. Sometimes it can be grating.

Mentee is one of those, commonly accepted now, but... somehow irritating. One thinks there should be a proper word for “someone receiving the advice of a mentor,” and we’re using this one because we can’t think of the right one just now. But there isn’t one. I like acolyte, myself, which American Heritage defines as “a devoted follower.” But I only use that jokingly, because it carries a connotation of greater subservience, or at least greater deference than is appropriate for the case of a mentor and her subject.

So we’re the stuckees of “mentee”. But there’s one we can still resist, the one I dislike the most:

Delegatee. There is no point to this one; there never was a point to this one. There is a proper word for this. A person to whom you delegate (del-uh-gayt) a task is your delegate (del-uh-git). We don’t need to make up another word.

And for the last word, I’ll leave it to American Heritage, which so often has wonderful “usage notes” that make it my favourite dictionary. They come through again here, with one in the entry for –ee1, this from the third edition:

Usage Note: Reflecting its origins in the French passive participle ending –é (feminine –ée), the suffix –ee was first used in English to refer to indirect objects and then to direct objects of transitive verbs, particularly in legal contexts (as in donee, lessee, or trustee) and in military and political jargon (draftee, trainee, or nominee). Beginning around the mid-19th century, primarily in American English, it was often extended to denote the agent or subject of an intransitive verb; for example, standee, returnee, or attendee. Although the pattern is very common and a number of these coinages, such as honoree, deportee, and escapee, have become widely accepted, in general they retain an informal character as jocular nonce words.

On disposable cups...

I flew to New Orleans last week, and on the way there I got a can of tonic water from the flight attendant. “Tonic water, please,” I said, proffering, as always, my own travel cup, “and ice in here.”

“How ’bout if I give you a cup with the ice?”

“Well,” I answered, “it’s that I was hoping to save the cup.”

“I guess I could do it this way,” she said, and she scooped ice with the cup she’d been using for the purpose, and carefully put the ice into my cup while keeping her cup from touching mine. Then she went to her cart to prepare the drinks for others in my row. And I was pleased that she’d avoided wasting a disposable cup.

When she returned, she handed me a cup of tonic water, and the can with the rest. She noticed my puzzled look, and asked what was wrong.

“No, it’s OK,” I answered, “It’s just that I was hoping to save the cup, you see, and I have my cup here.”

“Oh, bless your heart!”, she said. “Well, just this once, it won’t matter.”

Yeh, well. We try to be “green”, we do, but... most people don’t get it. They often think it’s “a really great idea” that I have my own cup, which I do to reduce waste. But it never prompts them to do the same. And, yes, it does matter, every time. We should be avoiding most disposable items when we don’t need them, saving them for when we do.

Anyway, I think “Bless your heart!” is what southerners say when they really want to say, “Bite me, you annoying person!”, but their southern politeness forbids them.

La primavera

There are still a couple of days until it’s official (the vernal equinox is Friday), but these guys came out over the weekend, and reached their peak in yesterday’s bright sun (click to enlarge).

The Beatles “live on”?

On NPR this week, the featured This I Believe essay is by a twelve-year-old girl called Macklin Levine, from New York City. She calls her essay “The Beatles Live On”, and it starts like this:

I believe in The Beatles. Although they don’t exist anymore, their music is very much alive, even to a 12-year-old like me. As old as the songs are, you can learn a lot about yourself from the lyrics. Listening to them with others and singing along has been important to me and to my family.

Listening to The Beatles was always important to me, too. When I was young, I had two record albums that my parents gave me, and that I played over and over, never tiring of them. One was the soundtrack album of My Fair Lady; the other was Meet the Beatles, their first recording on Capitol Records. “LPs”, we called them then, and these were both in mono sound, not stereo.

Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you,
Tomorrow I’ll miss you,
Remember I’ll always be true.
And then while I’m away,
I’ll write home every day,
And I’ll send all my loving to you.

But wait; what was that that Macklin Levine said? “As old as the songs are,” eh, what?

No, no, no, these songs are not old. You’re mistaken, Macklin. Yip Harburg’s songs are old. Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, their songs are old. Not The Beatles!

You’re giving me the same old line,
I’m wond’ring why.
You hurt me then.
You’re back again.
No, no, no, not a second time.

Ah, but, yes... yes... perspective, Barry, perspective. That album just turned 45 years old. That album is 33 years older than Macklin. It’s likely older than Macklin’s dad, who died too young. But it all seems timeless to me. It seems such a short time ago that I put that record on the player for the first time, at the age of seven.

Little child,
Little child,
Little child, won’t you dance with me?
I’m so sad and lonely,
Baby take a chance with me.

Sigh.

This reminds me of a flight home from Paris. There was a young woman in the seat next to me, who was reading a book. When she took a break from it I asked her what she was reading, and she showed me the cover: Slaughterhouse Five. Kurt Vonnegut. “I loved that book,” I said. “I read it in high school.”

“Oh,” she replied, genuinely surprised. “I didn’t know it was that old.”

The Beatles don’t exist anymore but their music will live in everyone forever. I believe in The Beatles because their music brings people together, and gives us hope.

I don’t know that I agree that they don’t exist any more. Is there a difference, really, between them and their music? As long as their music is here, don’t they still “exist”? They don’t make new music, of course, and two of the people are dead. But are The Beatles really the people? Or is it the art that’s the real essence, the real existence?

In any case, their music certainly does still bring people together.

Oh, please, say to me,
You’ll let me be your man.
And please say to me,
You’ll let me hold your hand.
Now let me hold your ha-a-and,
I wanna hold your hand.

Video evidence

The Supreme Court has been asked to hear a case about a man who was subjected to a Taser because he sat on the ground, cuffed and crying, and wouldn’t stand up and walk to the arresting officer’s car. The situation was recorded by the officer’s dashboard camera, and posted on YouTube.

The focus of the article is about how video evidence affects our perception of the events differently from, say, witness testimony. This is from a part of the article that refers to a different video, from another case:

Three law professors accepted that invitation and made it the basis of an interesting study published in January in The Harvard Law Review. They showed the video to 1,350 people, who mostly saw things as the justices did. Three-quarters of them thought the use of potentially deadly force by the police was justified by the risk Mr. Harris’s driving posed.

But African-Americans, liberals, Democrats, people who do not make much money and those who live in the Northeast were, the study found, “much more likely to see the police, rather than Harris, as the source of the danger posed by the flight and to find the deliberate ramming of Harris’s vehicle unnecessary to avert risk to the public.”

Video creates a danger, the study said, of “decision-making hubris” by judges.

The implication is that people will see what they want to see in video evidence — that what they see in it will support their existing bias.

I find to the contrary with respect to the video in the case under petition now.

The video shows what is either appalling police brutality or a measured response to an arrested man’s intransigence — you be the judge.

Given how I feel about Taser use, well documented in these pages, you might think I’d howl “Appalling police brutality!” And I might do, if I were considering verbal testimony, where I was asked to believe what the officer had to say about the situation.

But the video shows things clearly. Far from being aggressive, unreasonable, and brutal, the officer is calm and respectful, and is trying to cope with a difficult situation. He is talking with Mr Buckley, trying firmly but calmly to get Mr Buckley’s cooperation. Consequently, I have respect for the officer and for how he’s trying to handle things. I think he believes he did the right thing, and I’m sure he’s supported by his department’s policy.

Yet I still think he’s wrong.

Mr Buckley is clearly no threat to the officer, and the only real problem here is that it’s wasting the officer’s time. Allowing someone who’s obviously genuinely upset the time to calm down and collect himself is a humane thing to do. Of course, no one wants to sit around with a crying man waiting for it to pass. But it will pass, and undoubtedly more quickly without the electric shocks, which can only serve to make things more tense and upsetting.

And then there’s the fact that calling for backup was all that was really necessary. When the second officer arrived, the two together easily moved Mr Buckley to the car, and that would have worked without the three Taser shocks — clear demonstration that the use of the Taser was unnecessary.

What the video did for me was show me that the officer was not being an insensitive power-freak. The video did not, in fact, support my bias, but demonstrated quite the opposite. It’s very clear to me that, at least in this case, having the video is crucial to understanding the situation and being able to judge it fairly.

And it’s also still very clear to me that the police must not be allowed to use Tasers in these sorts of situations.

Carnivals!

Latest plush-toy recall:

Voluntary safety recall of Plush Uterus due to potential choking hazard for children. Recall participants will receive a 15%-off online coupon code. Consumers may either return for refund/exchange, or opt-out via email if the uterus is not accessible to children. Please notify gift recipients.

And I bet you didn’t even know you could get a plushie of that, eh? Happily, you can “[l]ook for a redesigned, kid-safe uterus plush in Spring 2009.”

Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:

• Skeptics’ Circle #107.
• Carnival of the Liberals #86.
• Carnival of Education #213.
• Carnival of Education #214.
• Carnival of the Godless #112.

Ounces?

This airport announcement was repeated periodically, as I waited for a recent flight:

[By order of the TSA,] liquids, gels, and/or aerosols weighing three ounces or less may be carried through the screening checkpoint.

Do you see what’s wrong with it?

No, I mean besides the stupidity of the useless restriction, the security theatre.

The three-ounce restriction has nothing to do with weight; it refers to volume. It’s a limit of three fluid ounces, not of 3/16 of a pound. Three fluid ounces of shampoo, toothpaste, and deodorant spray do not weigh three ounces each — they don’t all weigh the same amount at all.

Of course, the confusion comes from our use of the word “ounce” for both. If we measured liquid volume in liters and weight in grams, like the rest of the world, we’d make it a limit of 100 ml, and no one would be confused.

We also wouldn’t have to remember strange and arbitrary groupings: 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, 1760 yards in a mile, 16 ounces in a pound, and so on. With metric measurements, it’s easy: multiples of 10; you just move the decimal point.

Why, oh, why can’t we switch to the metric system, like the rest of the world?

Or we could go back to cubits.

Another type of diversity

In the H.G. Wells story, War of the Worlds, Martians attack the Earth and things are pretty hopeless. We have no match for their sizzling death ray, and they look about to slaughter us entirely. Ulla!

But then they get a common virus, one that people on Earth shake off all the time. Keeps us home sick for a couple of days, worst case. Wiped the Martians out completely.

Sorry for the spoiler, but I think most of you already know the story.

The point is that they didn’t have any immunity to it, so it spread from Martian to Martian like... well, like their death ray... and killed them all. A lack of diversity did them in: they had no individuals who could cope with the virus.

We see that on the Internet all the time.

No, not Martians: viruses, and lack of diversity. Nearly everyone uses Windows, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat. Nearly everyone is vulnerable — they lack immunity to computer viruses and other “malware” that attacks those ubiquitous programs.

Here’s where F-Secure, an antivirus software vendor in Finland and home of my favourite antivirus blog, recommends diversity:

Do note that while we are recommending users move away from Adobe Reader, we are not recommending any particular replacement.

So, we’re not recommending Foxit. We’re not recommending Sumatra. Or PDF-Xchange, CoolPDF or eXPert PDF.

Instead, we recommend users to find their own Adobe Reader replacement.

This way we get more heterogeneous userbase, which is a good idea security-wise. Nobody wants to repeat what happened with the great IE —> Firefox switch. As 40% of users switched to Firefox, about 40% of the attacks switched to target Firefox.

Monocultures are bad.

They’re right, of course, but there are negative points to their advice too.

Avoiding the most popular programs is certainly a way to avoid most of the attacks, and Apple has been using that advice in its Mac advertisements. PCs get viruses. Macs don’t. It’s accepted as truth. But it’s simply the fact that not enough people use Macs for it to be worth the time to develop malware for them. It’s easier just to target the 90% who use PCs and Windows.

But that has a dark side. How many Mac users run antivirus software? Most don’t, right? After all, Macs don’t get viruses, so why bother? Why pay money, why take up disk space and processor cycles with it? And then, when someone does write and spread a Mac virus, aren’t Macs like the Martians in War of the Worlds?

On the other side of the battle — fixing the holes that the malware exploits — it’s also likely that the more popular software will have developers focusing on fixes, both because they’re used to it and have people assigned to it, and because the consequences of exposure are more serious, more widespread.

Then, too, there’s a lot of help out there on the Internet for users of popular software. How do you configure it, what are some of the common problems with it, how do you work around difficulties, is there someone to walk you through things when you need that? You’re much less likely to find a network of experts to help you with software that few people use.

Certainly, people who are likely to be reading F-Secure’s blog are probably equipped to deal with these sorts of issues. The average Internet user is not, and I’m not sure I’d suggest that the average Internet user go looking for a rarely used alternative to Adobe Reader, or to the web browser, or to word processing software, despite the real advantages of software diversity.

Google re-prices employee stock options

According to this AP article, Google offered to reset the strike price on employee stock options to just over $300 — a more recent and more realistic price than the $500 or more than some of them had been set at — and more than 15,000 employees took them up on it.

In case you aren’t sure how stock options work, here’s the quick version: options are issued to you at a particular strike price (also called exercise price, as they do in the AP article). The strike price usually matches the market price on the day of issue. There’s normally a vesting period (you can’t exercise your options before they’re vested) and an expiration date (if you don’t exercise them before they expire, you lose them). Any time after the options have vested and before they’ve expired, you can exercise them — buy the amount of stock the options allow, for the set strike price.

Obviously, if the market price of the stock is higher than the strike price, exercising the options can be a good deal. If you get options for 2000 shares at $50/share, and five years later the stock is worth $150/share, you have a bargain on your hands. If you’re allowed to immediately sell the stock (you might be required to keep it for some period, according to the terms and conditions) you can triple your money immediately — you’ll make $200,000, less expenses and taxes. If, on the other hand, the stock is only worth $25, you would not exercise your options, because you can buy the stock on the open market for half as much (assuming, as with Google, that it’s a publicly traded company; there are other factors in effect for options on private stock).

The beauty of stock options from the employee’s point of view is that in the worst case, they’re worth nothing, and in the best case... well, they have the potential for open-ended value (which is the reason they expire, to avoid being a liability to the company forever). They also encourage you to stay (because of the vesting period, and because you usually lose your options if you leave the company before you exercise them), and they give you an added incentive to help the stock price.

The beauty of stock options from the company’s point of view is that they can give you an award that makes you feel good, but that doesn’t actually cost the company anything until you exercise them, and that only happens if the company’s done well in the interim. Not only that, but there are advantageous tax and accounting rules that make stock options appealing... though some of those rules have become less advantageous in recent years.

But here’s the thing: those rules also make it a complicated matter to re-price options that have already been issued. And it has a significant effect on the accounting for the options. The company took on a big financial liability for doing this.

Of course, the options don’t have much value for employee morale or retention if their strike price is much higher than the current market price. People who were happy to get a nice award when they were issued are often cynical when they see that they have options that are worthless now, and will most likely be worthless until they expire. It can actually be worse to have employees with those kinds of stock options than not to have given them the options in the first place.

So that’s why they did it, despite the liability, the complications... and the grumbling from shareholders who didn’t get the same deal on their stock. I have to hand it to Google for this one: they did right by their employees here.

The bottom line of capital punishment

I’ve frequently commented in these pages about my opposition to capital punishment — on moral grounds, on fairness grounds, on avoidance-of-error grounds. I haven’t, before now, considered economic grounds, but a number of state governments are now looking at that aspect:

Mr. O’Malley, a Democrat and a Roman Catholic who has cited religious opposition to the death penalty in the past, is now arguing that capital cases cost three times as much as homicide cases where the death penalty is not sought. “And we can’t afford that,” he said, “when there are better and cheaper ways to reduce crime.”

Lawmakers in Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska and New Hampshire have made the same argument in recent months as they push bills seeking to repeal the death penalty, and experts say such bills have a good chance of passing in Maryland, Montana and New Mexico.

The high cost — in dollars — of death-penalty cases has come up many times, of course, but it’s only recently that it’s been a factor in such legislation.

Capital cases are expensive because the trials tend to take longer, they typically require more lawyers and more costly expert witnesses, and they are far more likely to lead to multiple appeals.

But it’s worse than that. Here’s a point that really shows the irony of spending all the money and time it costs to go after a criminal’s life:

In New Mexico, lawmakers who support the repeal bill have pointed out that despite the added expense, most defendants end up with life sentences anyway.

The numbers in Maryland since 1978 bear that out:

• Death penalty sought in 162 cases.
• 56 of the cases (about 35%) got it. But...
• ...most of those were overturned and changed to prison time.
• In the end, 10 stuck (6%). 5 executed, 5 waiting.

Even if there were no other reasons to oppose the death penalty, this would be compelling.

Of course, those who like capital punishment say that “such measures are short-sighted and will result in more crime and greater costs to states down the road. At a time when police departments are being scaled down to save money, the role of the death penalty in deterring certain crimes is more important than ever, they say.”

But the fact is that study after study has shown that capital punishment — or the threat of it — is not an effective deterrent.[1]

So there we go: help the economy by joining the rest of the civilized world in eliminating the death penalty.
 

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[1] Take, for example, Decker and Kohfeld, Criminal Justice Review, Vol. 15, No. 2, 173-191 (1990):

This study examines the effect of the death penalty on the murder rate. A 50-year time series is employed for the period 1930-1980 for the five states with the largest number of executions during this period: Georgia, New York, Texas, California, and North Carolina. Taken together, these five states accounted for 40 percent of all the executions performed during this period. Incorporating a lag structure for the effect of executions, as well as several theoretically relevant explanatory variables for homicides, the study identifies no deterrent effect for executions. Several different policy-relevant analyses are performed, all with the same result. Neither the existence of the death penalty, its imposition, nor the level of imposition explains significant amounts of the variation in homicide rates in the 50-year period, 1930 to 1980.

Or, more recently, Hjalmarsson, American Society of Criminology, 2009-02-03:

The vast majority of death penalty studies use geographically or temporally aggregated data. Such aggregation can make it virtually impossible to identify small amounts of variation in homicides due to executions. Therefore, this study uses data that is disaggregated down to daily and city levels to test whether executions have a short-term deterrent effect. Little evidence is found that Texas executions deter Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston homicides from 1999 to 2004. The analysis also does not consistently support the hypotheses that the deterrent effect should be more evident for local executions or executions that received local newspaper coverage.

Gmail and IMAP and BlackBerry (Oh, my!)

When I was employed, I ran my own mail server and my own BlackBerry Enterprise Server, and I had things tuned pretty much exactly as I wanted them. My incoming mail got some custom processing that looked the sender’s address up in my address book and assigned the message a category. Filters written using the Sieve standard used those categories, along with other information, to do custom spam filtering, to sort the mail into mailboxes, and to decide which messages went to my BlackBerry.

I was a very happy email user.

Now that I’m on my own, I’ve decided not to run my own server and all that software, and I’ve switched to Gmail and the T-Mobile BlackBerry server. The cost is the same (Gmail is free, and I was already paying T-Mobile for the BlackBerry service). The function is not.

Surprisingly, though, I’m mostly still happy.

First, the good part: While I don’t like the Gmail “conversations” view for everything, it turns out to be very nice for looking at some types of email conversations. In particular, I like it for mailing lists, and that’s a good proportion of what I need to read. Some other mail works well with that model also. And for the mail that doesn’t, I have it both ways, because Gmail supports IMAP. So I use my familiar email program (I use Mulberry, but Thunderbird, Outlook, Apple Mail, Eudora, and many other programs support IMAP as well) to do the things I can’t do in the Gmail web interface. Gmail has fixed the significant bugs in their IMAP server implementation, especially with the addition of the Advanced IMAP Controls feature in Gmail Labs. It’s all pretty smooth.

On the negative side, though, the Gmail filters leave something to be desired. They don’t support the Sieve language, and the way filters are defined is tedious. And even though Gmail has an integrated contact list, there’s no way to connect the Gmail contacts with the filters, so I can’t easily say, for example, “take any message that comes from someone in my ‘friends’ group and give it the ‘Friends’ label” (which has the effect of putting it into a “Friends” IMAP mailbox).

To get the mail to the BlackBerry, I set T-Mobile up to connect to Gmail for me, grab my mail, and send it to the BlackBerry. T-Mobile does this using POP3, and here’s where the problems arise. Except for messages marked as spam or put directly into the trash, Gmail presents every message to POP3 clients — not just messages in the Gmail Inbox, but also messages that are hidden from the Inbox (given other labels), including those in Sent Mail (that is, the messages that I, myself, sent).

That means that absolutely everything, including my own outbound mail, gets sent to the BlackBerry. That’s the part I’m not happy with. It’s manageable (I do use a separate address for my mailing list subscriptions), but it’s annoying. I want to have a way to put low-priority mail under some label that doesn’t make it go to my BlackBerry. I certainly do not want to have the mail I send copied to the BlackBerry (if I should want certain outbound messages to go there, I could BCC myself to make it happen).

So there’s an email geek’s review of the normal, un-customized services. It mostly works well, and I’m mostly happy. And, actually, I’d have been very surprised if I were fully pleased. The most significant things that Gmail could do better are these:

1. Add an “Advanced POP Controls” labs feature that would let me hide selected labels from the Gmail POP server, just as the “Advanced IMAP Controls” feature lets me do with IMAP.
2. Create some integration between the filters and the contacts, especially allowing me to match addresses to contact groups.
3. Allow me to write filter scripts in Sieve and upload them to Gmail.

J’ai rêvé de...

I took a nap yesterday, and had a dream. I almost never remember dreams, and this seemed an odd and amusing one to remember. I dreamt about Frank Sinatra.

I was walking down a street toward a 40-ish Sinatra. I didn’t know where I was, nor how I got there, but it was Frank, no doubt; I said, “Hello, Mr Sinatra.” I said, “I’m Barry, and I’m so pleased to meet you,” and I extended my hand. He looked puzzled as he took my hand, but then he smiled and said, “I’m pleased to meet you, too,” and he shook it.

Frank Capra came running out, yelling, and I knew I’d stumbled onto a film shoot. “And I’m honoured to meet you, as well, Mr Capra,” I said, but then I turned back to Sinatra, who was now asking what I was doing here.

I told them I was from 2009, and they looked at each other with a look that said they’d be calling the security folks over any second. “Here,” I said, “What year is it now?” 1958. “What month?” September.

What could I tell them? Sinatra has already made Pal Joey, and he was divorced from Ava Gardner. Should I tell him he’d make Ocean’s Eleven and The Manchurian Candidate? Should I warn him about the kidnapping of his son? No, that would be five years, still, and maybe I should stay away from things about his own career.

The easiest thing would be the presidential election, but that was still two years on. “John F. Kennedy will be elected president in 1960,” I should say. Of course, Sinatra himself was involved with that, wasn’t he? I’d have to say more. “His vice president will be Lyndon Johnson, senator from Texas, and Richard Nixon’s running mate will be U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. When Nixon loses, he’ll tell the press, ‘You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around any more.’ ”

I was on a roll, in my mind. “Kennedy will appoint his brother as Attorney General. Dean Rusk will be Secretary of State, and Robert McNamara will be Secretary of Defense. And John Junior will be born just after the election.”

I should tell him, I thought, about Fidel Castro coming to power... that was only a few months away. The Bay of Pigs invasion... he could stop that, maybe. The Cuban Missile Crisis. And by all means, don’t let Kennedy go to Dallas in November ’63!

But could he change anything? Or would telling him about this stuff in advance only make things worse? I started thinking about all the science fiction stories about attempts to change history.

In the end, all I could manage was, “The pope’s going to die soon, and John XXIII will replace him,” looking over my shoulder as the security guards escorted me away.

New to the blog-roll

There are two new blogs over on the left, under “Blogs I Read...”.

Altmode is a new blog by an occasional commenter here, my friend and colleague Jim Fenton. Jim’s a Distinguished Engineer at Cisco, and lives in the San Francisco Bay area. He has an internal Cisco blog where he writes about work, and has finally decided to start an outside blog to talk about other things. He’s not sure how much he’ll be inspired to write, but there are a couple of things out there so far, and I hope he keeps it up and writes regularly.

Terry Zink’s Anti-spam Blog is one of the many MSDN-based blogs by a Microsoft guy. Terry works on anti-spam as part of the Exchange Hosted Services team, after Microsoft’s acquisition a few years ago of Frontbridge Technologies. Of course, as with all these blogs, what Terry says there are his own comments, not officially tied to Microsoft. He sometimes has interesting things to say about spam and the fighting of spam.

Go check them out....

Blasphemy Day?

Hm.

There’s a Facebook group called “Blasphemy Day International” that’s advocating the 30th of September as Blasphemy Day, “a national day to promote free speech and stand up in a show of solidarity for the freedom to mock and insult religion without fear of murder, violence, and reprisal.”

The MediaWatchWatch blog says, “Blasphemy is a joyous, funny, socially progressive, and profoundly moral act.”

Characteristically, PZ Myers is promoting it, adding, “I only have one reservation. Every day should be Blasphemy Day.”

You all know, of course, how I feel about religion. You might think I’m whole-heartedly in favour of this. Up with blasphemy! Down with religion!

I’m not.

As I’ve said before, my own opinion of religion as fantasy and superstition is one thing. Insulting my friends and neighbours is another. And this just strikes me as gratuitous insult. Mocking and insulting people may feel joyous to some, but it’s not funny, not “socially progressive”, not “profoundly moral”.

Everyone must, of course, have the right to say what they like. The ads on the buses are fine, though I wish they were unnecessary — I’d like things to be back as they were when I was young, and people kept their religion to themselves, mostly. Of course we must all be free to write opinions, draw cartoons, and say whatever we want to say for or against religion, “without fear of ... reprisal.”

Organizing a day when we encourage people to “mock and insult” others is not the way to do that. It will have quite the opposite effect, steeling “believers” against the attack. This isn’t productive, and it’s not the way to treat our friends and neighbours, most of who will be targets of Blasphemy Day mockery and insult.

Shall we next have “Laugh at the Badly Dressed Day”? “Kick a Cripple Day”?

I’d love to live in a world where everyone saw things in a way I consider “sensible”. This is not that world. And I’m not going to turn it into that world by shouting insults to people who don’t agree with me.
 

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Update, 10 Mar: In the comments, Natalie Jones gives a perfect explanation of what this is really all about, and why it’s necessary. Go read that comment.

National Grammar Day

Yesterday was National Grammar Day, co-founded and co-sponsored by the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar (SPOGG).

Yesterday. And here go I, a day late and a proverbial dollar short, posting a language thing on what was yesterday’s tomorrow. But at least today has that tenuous relationship to National Grammar Day, and, anyway, every day should be Grammar Day, n’est-ce pas?

Usually, apostrophe catastrophes just make one shake one’s head — or one’s index finger, accompanied by a “for shame” cluck or two. Or, for those of us particularly sensitive, they make us run down the street screaming and tearing out clumps of our hair. In any case, they aren’t usually actually confusing. We might have to read the text twice, but we know what’s meant when a sign says, “We have fresh tomatoe’s!”[1]

But a local restaurant, in one of its print ads, tell us this:

Private Room’s Available!

Now, this one really is ambiguous! Once we get past the insistence on capitalization, if we take the ad as it’s written we see a contraction, and we think that they have one private room, and it is available for our use (modulo, we presume, scheduling questions). That is, “[Our] private room is available.”

But we know from experience with these things what the more likely case is: they probably have more than one of these rooms, and they’re offering them all. The apostrophe is probably wrong.

I suppose that even in this case, the difference matters little. Still, is these small issues of ambiguity that vex some of us so; that make us go off the deep end; that break our camel’s back and make us snap like twigs; that evoke the longest string of arbitrary metaphors to be seen in some time.

Beware the apostrophe.
 

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[1] Or, &deity protect us, “We have ‘fresh’ tomatoe’s!”, adding highlighting-by-quotes to the stray apostrophe; oop, ack!

Psst! Don't buy from those people!

Via BoingBoing, we get this item about a guy with an "alternative" to kosher salt:

Retired barber Joe Godlewski says he was inspired by television chefs who repeatedly recommended kosher salt in recipes.

“I said, ‘What the heck’s the matter with Christian salt?’ ” Godlewski said, sipping a beer in the living room of his home in unincorporated Cresaptown, a western Maryland mountain community.

My first thought was that this is silly, that Mr Godlewski is a bit of a nutter, and that I didn’t have anything to say about it. Mostly harmless.

But then I thought again. It’s not harmless.

There’s nothing in Christian dietary laws that would point to any inspection or blessing of salt in order to make it acceptable. And the culinary preference for “kosher salt” has to do with its coarseness, not is blessedness or its “Jewishness”.

The only reason to create a “Christian” version is to encourage people — presumably Christian people — not to buy from Jews. And that’s not harmless.

What Mr Godlewski says is this:

“This is about keeping Christianity in front of the public so that it doesn’t die. I want to keep Christianity on the table, in the household, however I can do it.”

And he plans, if this is successful, to introduce other products like rye bread, bagels, and pickles. It’s no accident that those are also mostly associated with Jewish producers. It’s not just about “keeping Christianity in front of the public”, but specifically about pushing Jewish products aside.

Of course, he has every right to produce his products, and people can and will choose what to buy.

Personally, I’ll continue buying from Christians and Jews alike, as well as from Muslims and Hindus and non-believers. Just not from silly bigots.

Portrait of a Pillock

Is it “prejudice” to dislike someone you’ve never met, based on the stuff he puts on his car?

My working definition of prejudice involves judging someone based on insufficient or irrelevant information. Inferring things about someone’s intelligence, for instance, from his ethnic background, religion, or skin colour, qualifies — these are irrelevant to a person’s intelligence. On the other hand, inferring things about someone’s intelligence from the things he says and writes about, well, that’s perfectly relevant, and doesn’t constitute prejudice at all.

But what about a middle ground? Can I validly infer things about someone’s intelligence based on stuff that other people wrote, and which he chooses to display? It’s his choice, of course, so it’s information that’s relevant to something. If a guy likes to display stupid and offensive things... on his car, maybe... does that make him stupid and offensive?

Take the idiot who drives the vehicle to the right, which I saw on the road the other day.

I say “idiot” very freely, but see here:

1. His license plate frame says, “HONDAS R LIKE TAMPONS / EVERY PUSSY HAS ONE”.
2. On the upper left of his rear window is a sticker depicting some large utility vehicle, with the legend “Sorry About Your Tiny Penis”.
3. In the upper middle of the window is a sticker that says, “Shut Up Hippy”
4. The upper right sports one saying, “My Other Ride Is Your Girlfriend”.

I considered leaving his license plate visible, figuring that he’s proud of what he has to say, but I decided not to post it on the Internet without obscuring the plate number.

But I suspect that if you look up “asshole” in the dictionary, they’ll have a picture of the driver.

Leiba’s Lament

On This-Page-Intentionally-Left-Blank day, Beth mentioned “Leiba’s Lament” in a comment, and I said that I might have to explain that in a post some time soon.

First, a bit of background.

Some 25 years ago, or so, Mike Cowlishaw (and here’s his IBM web page) developed a software distribution system called TOOLS[1], which was widely used internally for many years. Under the TOOLS system, users could place data files on virtual disks, optionally grouping the files into packages. The disks could be public or private, and other users — any users, for public disks, and authorized users, for private ones — would retrieve the files when they needed them. The system kept a catalogue of the packages and files, and the catalogue could be searched.

One feature provided by the TOOLS system was forums, a kind of conferencing system. Forums were special files placed on TOOLS disks, and users could use the system to append entries, much as one comments on a blog or places a response into a Lotus Notes teamroom today. The forums have now been moved to network news servers, but in their heyday on the TOOLS system they provided a wildly popular place to have discussions, ask technical questions (and get quick answers, often), and the like. Some forums saw activity only rarely; some got hundreds of appends a day.

The TOOLS disks were arranged according to broad topics — IBMVM and VMTOOLS for discussions and software related to the VM system; IBMPC and PCTOOLS for the same about PCs, and so on. The IBMTEXT disk was filled with forums about document preparation and publishing software: Document Composition Facility (DCF) and SGML, Book Master and Book Manager, Print Services Facility (PSF), and the like.

We called those discussions of the publishing software “IBMTEXT1”, because there were other forums on the same disk, which we grouped as “IBMTEXT2”, devoted to discussing language and writing. Those forums had names like WORDS, ENGLISH, WHOSAID, and a bunch of others that included the infamous NITPICK, which was dedicated to the merciless trashing of anything written less than perfectly. The discussions in the IBMTEXT2 forums were often of uncertain business value on the surface, but they became easily justified when one realized that they provided a place to practice writing properly, to discuss proper writing, and, especially if one was not a native English speaker, to ask questions about correct English usage.

In the summer of 1992, in the middle of a discussion of something else, an IBMer from Dublin made a comment about how a language tool represented “a dipthong”, which prompted a participant from Hursley to reply thus (the quotes here are mostly verbatim, but I’ve changed the attributions a little to protect people’s anonymity):

- WORDS FORUM appended at 14:26:39 on 92/06/11 GMT (by ZZZZZ at WINVMC) -
Subject: Egad - I just saw a small child here in our suburban office
Ref:     Append at 18:28:17 on 92/06/10 GMT (by XXXXXX at DUBVM1)

BTW, what exactly is a 'dipthong'? I suspect it isn't a scanty
bathing costume. Have you spelled it correctly?

Bosco

That Bosco was being sarcastic was missed by at least three participants, who each quickly (within an hour and a half) and “helpfully” followed up with definitions of “diphthong” (note correct spelling). To those, I responded thus:

- WORDS FORUM appended at 18:19:41 on 92/06/11 GMT (by LEIBA at WATSON) -
Subject: Dipthong (was: Egad - I just saw a small child...)
Ref:     Append at 14:55:12 on 92/06/11 GMT (by XXXXXX at AUSVM1)
         Append at 15:18:55 on 92/06/11 GMT (by XXXXXX at DUBVM1)
         Append at 15:46:38 on 92/06/11 GMT (by XXXXXX at WINVMC)

Oh, sigh.  I suspect that Bosco knows (and knew) very well what a
"diphthong" is; you three have simply missed his sarcasm.  Whither goes
the world, when wit and rhetoric are lost unless accompanied by some
accursed icon or other?

From:  Barry Leiba, Watson VM Systems                 LEIBA    at WATSON

Bosco replied the next day, with this append:

- WORDS FORUM appended at 12:30:51 on 92/06/12 GMT (by ZZZZZ at WINVMC) -
Subject: Dipthong (was: Egad - I just saw a small child...)
Ref:     Append at 18:19:41 on 92/06/11 GMT (by LEIBA at WATSON)

>                                                           Whither goes
>the world, when wit and rhetoric are lost unless accompanied by some
>accursed icon or other?

I echo Leiba's Lament. Well said, Barry.

Bosco

At that point, “Leiba’s Lament” entered the IBMTEXT lexicon, defined by the excerpt that Bosco quoted. Real IBMTEXTers almost always eschewed smiley-faces, frowny-faces, and other sometimes bizarre icons (and in more recent times you would never see any of us use abominations such as “LOL” and “ROFL”). As Beth said, WDNNS icon.[2]
 

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[1] TOOLS was developed and ran on the VM operating system, and eventually became the VM/DSNX product. The system is stil around today, but for most of its uses it’s been replaced with web servers and browsers, wikis, blogs, RSS/Atom feeds, news readers, and the other modern conveniences we’ve all come to rely on.

[2] WDNNS, another item in the lexicon, stands for “We don’t need no stinkin’ ...”. It’s a reference to the movie Blazing Saddles, wherein a Mexican bandit, claiming to be a lawman and challenged for his badge, says, “Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges.”[3]

[3] The line in Blazing Saddles is actually itself a reference to the Humphrey Bogart movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The original quote in that movie is, “Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges. ”

George Ivan Morrison

Van Morrison performed at Madison Square Garden last night.

As you can see from the not-very-good photo over there on the right (click to enlarge it), We weren’t terribly close to the stage. All the same, we could see and hear well... and it wasn’t too loud — in fact, the volume was just about right.

He did two sets, playing for almost exactly two hours, with a ten-minute break between. The first set was an anthology that included most of the hits, the songs everyone wanted to hear. “Moondance”, of course, “Domino”, “Wild Night”, “And It Stoned Me”, “Brown Eyed Girl”. The second set consisted of a live performance of the entire Astral Weeks album, his first hit album, which just turned 40 a couple of months ago. He came back on for a few more songs, finishing the night with his first hit single, “Gloria”.

He came on with quite a band (though not all played at once): two drum kits, one with congas; three guitars, plus a bass guitar, and Morrison himself played guitar in many of the songs; piano and organ; a string bass, two cellos, a viola, and two violins (one featured at center stage); a sax and a trumpet. He also had two women singing with him in the first set and the encore, and they added a gospel tone to his usual rock/jazz mix in some of the songs — especially in a great cover of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb”.

Nice concert. The only flaw: they had two lights at the back of the stage that were usually pointed up, but that sometimes shone directly in our eyes and made it hard to look at the stage.

Well, it’s a marvelous night for a moondance
With the stars up above in your eyes
A fantabulous night to make romance
’Neath the cover of October skies
And all the leaves on the trees are falling
To the sound of the breezes that blow
And I’m trying to please to the calling
Of your heart-strings that play soft and low
And all the night’s magic seems to whisper and hush
And all the soft moonlight seems to shine in your blush