Just something light

I’m in need of light blogging today, so we’re just going to collect a few light things — some silly, some bizarre, some just... light.

• In the people with more time than sense category, we have a page of photos of dogs dressed up in lobster outfits. It doesn’t get much more bizarre. [Via BoingBoing.]
• In the people with no sense whatsoever category, we have an unfortunate incident in which a sister violently attacked her brother because he wanted her to cook with butter instead of margarine. [Again, via BoingBoing.]
• There’s this New York Times article about a woman in Concord, Massachusetts, who has convinced the town to ban bottled water. I have sympathy: there’s nothing sillier than paying those ridiculous prices for plastic bottles of water. But, what, you’d rather drive people to buy soda instead? OK, yeah: that’s sillier.
• And then you just have to love the headline on this article from New Scientist. The article’s just so-so, but when you have a headline like On the trail of Tutankhamen’s penis, all is right with the world.

Getting a charge out of your batteries

Here’s another cute gadget, shown to us in the NY Times Gadgetwise blog: Size AA rechargeable batteries with built-in USB plugs, so you can plug the batteries directly into your computer to charge them. And here they are on Amazon.

They’re very cute. Only, they have several problems, some of which are pointed out in the user reviews on Amazon:

1. The USB plugs are on the flimsy side. Amazon users say they break easily.
2. They’re bulky and awkward as USB devices, and you’ll often not be able to fit two of them into two adjacent USB sockets.
3. Because the plug takes up some of the bulk of the battery, the battery itself has something shy of 2/3 the capacity of a typical AA.
4. You pay a lot for the novelty: it costs a great deal more than other rechargeable batteries.

It’s interesting how many of the favourable reviews, including the one in the Times, downplay the drawbacks, saying that they’re worth it because they’re rechargeable... ignoring that other kinds of rechargeable AA batteries are higher capacity, more reliable, and cheaper.

Amazon is selling these at two for nearly $20. For about $20 (including shipping), you can get a USB charger and four batteries. And then a pack of four more batteries costs $10. These guys just aren’t worth the cost.

Also, before you count on charging your batteries with your computer, remember that it can take several hours to get a full charge, and most computers don’t power the USB ports unless the computer is running. So you might have to leave your laptop running overnight in order to charge the batteries, regardless of which USB solution you go for.

You’re probably best off with something like this, a compact charger that packs easily, plugs into a wall socket, and works on both 110V and 240V power, so you can bring it with you anywhere.

Clever use of technology

Here’s an amusing little device that Eric Taub writes about in the New York Times:

All of this is why a new product from Zomm may wind up hitting a nerve. A small electronic disc that fits on a key ring, the product, also called the Zomm, connects to a phone via Bluetooth. Separate the two devices by more than 30 feet, and the Zomm first vibrates, then flashes and then screams.

Mr Taub notes that one disadvantage of the device is that there’s no way to alter the 30-foot distance before the alarm goes off; depending on where you are, 30 feet could be too far. Indeed, it could be... but there’s a good reason the distance can’t be controlled. 30 feet is a familiar number: it happens to be the nominal range of Bluetooth. That means the device is just detecting when the Bluetooth connection with your phone fails, and it then screams about the failure.

And that means that it won’t know the difference between a connection failure that happens because you left your phone in the bar and walked out, and one that happens for another reason — perhaps your phone’s battery is low and the Bluetooth shuts off automatically, or perhaps you turn the Bluetooth off yourself, forgetting the Zomm device’s dependency on it.

What’s more, the Bluetooth range can be drastically less than 30 feet if there are interfering factors, such as walls, machinery, and even people blocking the way. It can also drop because of radio-frequency interference. Lend your phone to a friend at a party and walk across the room to get another drink... and even if you’re only ten or fifteen feet away, you may find yourself loudly embarrassed (unless, perhaps, you can use it as an opportunity to brag about your slick toy).

It is a clever idea, but, as Mr Taub points out, it’s expensive and impractical. Still, I do have to give it points for the cleverness.

Weekend hike: Popolopen Torne

Popolopen Torne is a rocky mountaintop on the west side of the Hudson River near the Bear Mountain Bridge ("torne" is a variation of "tor", a rocky peak or hill (American Heritage Dictionary)). The mountain’s peak is about 1000 feet above the Hudson River, and standing atop the craggy peak gives one gorgeous, 360-degree views of the Hudson River (to the east), Bear Mountain (to the south), and the surrounding forested valleys and hills (to the west and north).

The hiking trail is steep, and getting to (and from) the top requires scrambling over rocks. The descent is somewhat of a challenge — one needs to be sure-footed (and sometimes sure-butted) to avoid slipping on the steeply angled rocks.

The Timp-Torne trail combines with, and then branches off from, some of the many Revolutionary-War trails in the area, and it always amazes me to think that some of these trails were actually used by fully laden soldiers during the war, as they carried provisions and weapons, and sometimes pulled artillery with them.

I’ve pasted together a panorama from photos taken at the top; click the small version below to see it full-sized. It starts to the northeast on the left, and you can see the Hudson, the Bear Mountain Bridge, Bear Mountain, and the western valley. I’ll have to get another panorama in the winter, when the haze that’s ubiquitous in the summer is gone.

Book: IBM and the Holocaust

My former IBM colleague and friend Nathaniel Borenstein has recently left IBM. He’s also recently read a book that he’d reserved for when he was no longer working for the company: IBM and the Holocaust.

The book talks about the part IBM played in supplying Hitler’s regime with technology and machines, which helped enable the rounding up of the Jews in Germany, and the transportation of them to concentration camps. What Nathaniel writes in his blog is disturbing enough; I’ll have to read the book myself to see the full extent of it.

As I read what Nathaniel wrote, I thought, How awful the company’s leaders were then, to participate in that. Surely they knew what Hitler was doing, and how IBM’s technology was helping him do it!

But, I added, mentally, that was then, and that was Thomas Watson, Sr, and much has changed since. It’s a different company now, and we can’t blame the current leaders for what happened in the 1930s.

Nathaniel had similar thoughts, writing, But the war has been over for 65 years. Nearly everyone involved in IBM’s shameful activities is dead, of course. Why should we care today? What does it have to do with today’s IBM? He goes on to explain:

It must still have some relevance, because IBM is still stonewalling. Mr. Black dug through archives and libraries throughout the world, but over a hundred requests for information from IBM were denied. Typical responses claimed that IBM has no information relevant to that era — this from a company with legendary archives and full time archivists on staff! I can only conclude that today’s IBM is actively hiding something — something even worse than what I’ve summarized above.

He asks IBM to hold itself accountable, to be open about what happened, to set free the information and records about those years. Go read what he has to say, read his suggestions; I agree with them all.

Nathaniel has confidence that the IBM of today is a good company and will, eventually, be willing to be open about this. So do I. What do my readers who are still working for IBM think? Are you willing to work toward that?

Evil toys

The Los Angeles Times reports about a planned lawsuit against McDonald’s, seeking to make them remove toys from kids’ meals:

Weeks after a Silicon Valley county in California became the first in the nation to ban toys from McDonald’s Happy Meals and other food promotions aimed at children, a public health watchdog group called on the fast food giant to remove the playthings from all its meal packages.

Citing toys aimed at promoting the latest Shrek movie, the Center for Science in the Public Interest said that the plastic promotions lure children into McDonald’s restaurants where they are then likely to order food that is too high in calories, fat and salt.

The group’s litigation director says, with steaming hyperbole, McDonald’s is the stranger in the playground handing out candy to children. No, that’s a very inapt metaphor. McDonald’s is no stranger, and it’s the parents who are buying the meals for the kids. Children of the ages that these toys appeal to are not going by themselves into McDonald’s, and are not themselves ordering food.

Libertarian blogger Amy Alkon doesn’t like what the group is doing on two counts: she knows that it’s the carbs, not the fat and salt, that’s bad for the kids (would that it were that simple and straightforward, one way or the other), and she doesn’t like the laws and the courts interfering with our lives this way. On that latter count, I have to agree with Ms Alkon, especially when she says this:

My neighbor, likewise, does not feed her kids McDonald’s. I’ll have to ask how many times they’ve had it. I bet it’s fewer than five times in their little lifetimes. Yes, parenting...still practiced in some corners of the USA. For everybody else, there’s litigating against the free market.

Similarly, the food industry, according to the L.A. Times, urges parents to take responsibility for what their kids order. And yes, that’s absolutely the point: parents need to be in control of this, and the way they’re asking the courts and the legislature to help them is betraying a lack of control — perhaps a lack of willingness to exert control. The foods they don’t want their kids eating will still be there, with or without the plastic toys, and they will still have to have the strength to say no to their children.

But there is a part of this that I sympathize with: I don’t like the way companies market directly to children, in a way that they didn’t when I was a child.

There was a time when most of the marketing was aimed at the parents: buy this for your children, take your children there, and so on. But more and more, we’ve started aiming it directly at the children, encouraging them to tell their parents what they want them to buy and where they want to be taken. It’s not entirely new, of course, and the toys have been there all along — there were toys in sweet breakfast cereals marketed for children when I was young (I used to empty the box on the kitchen table in order to get at the toy sooner), and Cracker Jack boxes have had a prize in them since at least the War of 1812.^[1]

That it’s been done for a long time doesn’t make it right, and the increase over the years has made it worse. I wouldn’t mind prohibitions against marketing to small children. Companies will clearly do it, because it works, and free-market forces won’t stop it. Legislation may be the only way.

But toys in the boxes? Nah... they’re fun, and they’re harmless. Except when they’re choking hazards....

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^[1] Yes, yes, I’m being silly. It was actually 100 years later.

Abuse of “hate crime” prosecutions

The New York Times, yesterday, told of a disturbing trend — a trend of abuse of hate crime laws by prosecutors. The situation amounts to being an unintended, but probably predictable, consequence of misguided legislation (I’ve given my opinion of the whole hate crime concept here, here, and here).

But in Queens since 2005, at least five people have been convicted of, or pleaded guilty to, committing a very different kind of hate crime — singling out elderly victims for nonviolent crimes like mortgage fraud because they believed older people would be easy to deceive and might have substantial savings or home equity.

And this month, Queens prosecutors charged two women with stealing more than $31,000 from three elderly men they had befriended separately. The women, Gina L. Miller, 39, and Sylvia Johns, 23, of Flushing, were charged with grand larceny as a hate crime.

These are clearly not hate crimes by anyone’s understanding of the term, and the situations don’t even remotely dovetail with what was intended when the laws were passed. But, with the complicity of some judges, prosecutors in Queens have figured out how to use them to their advantage.

The prosecutors’ reasons for twisting the law this way is that the system is, as they see it, too lenient on hucksters. The prosecutors would like stiffer sentences for people who bilk people — particularly old people — out of their savings. The problem, of course, is that the prosecutors don’t get to decide that, and if the laws are, indeed, too lenient, then it’s the legislators who have to fix the problem.

But the prosecutors have figured out a work-around, by getting the thieves prosecuted as hate-criminals.

And they’re not abashed about it. Quite the contrary, they’re proud of their novel approach. And can one blame them? Who doesn’t support stricter punishment of these nasties?

Led by Ms. Kane, who runs a specialized elder fraud unit, the efforts have made the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, a leader in finding new uses for hate crime laws, prosecutors in other jurisdictions say. Scott Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys’ Association, said he had not heard of another office using hate crimes as Queens does.

Neither had Kathleen B. Hogan, president of the State District Attorneys Association. But she looked into the efforts after hearing about it from a reporter, called it an epiphany and said she would suggest it to the group’s committee on best practices. Some New York prosecutors, who asked not to be named because they did not intend to criticize colleagues, said that while the approach intrigued them, they were waiting to see if convictions were overturned on appeal before considering it.

Ms Kane adds, We don’t have a whole lot of tools. We should utilize what the legislature has given us. Basically a direct admission that this is at least something of a stretch.

I see it as more than a stretch: it’s evidence that these sorts of laws are wrong-headed. Except in cases of fairly minor infractions, where it might actually be useful to take them more seriously when there’s a hate motive behind them, we should be concerned with the crime. Nasty crimes deserve vigorous prosecution and severe penalties on their own merits. Cheating people out of their life’s savings, beating people to death, setting fire to buildings, and so on... these are things that don’t need nor benefit from having hate crime attached to them.

Abuse of these laws, though, threatens the system. And the abuse is more likely to spread than to stop.

The ethics of refills

While we’re talking about Panera... something came up in conversation recently, and I’d like to pass it by my ethics board readers.

When one buys iced tea (and other drinks) at Panera, one gets free, self-served refills. The question is how far free refills should go. I think we’ll all agree that if I buy a sandwich and an iced tea, and refill my tea halfway through eating my sandwich, that’s fine. And I think we’ll all agree that if I bring my own cup into the store, go back and fill it with tea without paying, and leave, that’s not OK.

But how long can I hang out and keep refilling without crossing an ethical line? Is it ever OK to leave and come back, and still get a refill?

If you have a general rule, or any thoughts on the matter, please post a comment. To give some, ah, food for thought (perhaps some cream of broccoli soup in a bread bowl), here are some scenarios, each pushing things a bit further. Where does one draw the line — realizing that buying another cup of tea only costs about a buck and a half, so we’re not talking about a huge issue here — between ethical and unethical behaviour?

In each case, I order an iced tea and...

1. I drink it in the store, then get a refill and immediately leave.
2. I use the Internet for half an hour, getting two refills while I sit there.
3. I use the Internet for three hours, getting many refills while I sit there.
4. I use the Internet all day, getting countless refills. The store never gets very busy, so I’m not preventing anyone from finding a seat.
5. I go to a store next door for five minutes to pick something up. I come back and get a refill.
6. I go for a one-hour walk, coming back to the store. When I return, I order a sandwich and refill my tea.
7. I go for a one-hour walk, coming back to the store. When I return, I refill my tea and use the Internet.
8. I go for a one-hour walk. As I walk past the store again, I drop in, refill my tea, and keep going.
9. I go for a one-hour walk. I walk past another Panera, drop in, refill my tea, and keep going.
10. I go home. I come back later that day to pick up a loaf of bread, and, having brought yesterday’s cup, I refill it.
11. I go home. I come back the next day for a sandwich, and, having brought yesterday’s cup, I refill it.

I have my own thoughts, of course, but I’d like to hear yours. My friend had a fine suggestion for resolving it: go to the person taking the orders, with your Panera cup, and ask... then let them decide. But let’s assume that you have to make the choice yourself; how do you choose?

Free Internet access

About a week ago (I’m behind, but I’m catching up) Xeni, at BoingBoing, reported on a Starbucks announcement that they’ll be giving free WiFi in the U.S. starting in July:

We’re very excited to announce that coming July 1st: Free. 1 click. No registration WIFI at all US locations!

The BoingBoing post has a comment thread filled with Starbucks sucks stuff^[1], so check that out if you’re so inclined; I recommend avoiding the noise. Other comments note that WiFi is often free in libraries, so one doesn’t need Starbucks for it. More on that later.

Anyway, Starbucks has supposedly been offering free WiFi for some time now, to people who get a Starbucks card and use it to pay for their coffee. That deal has some disadvantages, though, including that you have to click through their setup/login system, and that having a Starbucks card basically means you’re buying your coffee in advance, so you’re paying for your WiFi by giving them your coffee money ahead of time. The New York Times article about the change also says that the free access was limited to two hours, which I hadn’t known.

But the bottom line is that Starbucks is behind the curve, at least in my area. On the point about libraries, Starbucks is not competing with libraries. There’re certainly people who just need a WiFi connection and will go where they have to in order to get it. For them, a library might be fine. But in most cases, libraries aren’t what one is looking for, and they aren’t are as readily available as cafes.

What seems to have broken things open where I live is the Panera chain, which is competition for Starbucks. Panera expanded into these parts within the last year or two, and immediately came with free WiFi in a market that was used to having to pay for it. Very quickly, the places that had been charging, such as Barnes and Noble, switched to free WiFi also, in apparent response to the competition. Atlanta Bread Company went one better and provided WiFi that’s not only free, but that just works — no click-through, no registration or login.

So I can already go to a number of comfortable places to get on the Internet. Starbucks? OK, well, it’ll be nice to have one more choice. But as I said, they’re behind. More so than I.

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^[1] Those folks need to get with the program and remember that it’s K-Mart that sucks.

Barcelona, photos and comments

I’m back from Barcelona long enough, now, to have

1. sorted through the nearly 2000 photos I took, and
2. gotten my brain back out of vacation mode for now.

A selection of my favourite photos are posted in a Picasa album (and click the thumbnails here to go to these specific shots). It also feels fitting to post this to these pages on the summer solstice.

The album doesn’t truly give the flavour of walking around the city, though, either in the old town area or elsewhere. How many photos of building architecture; building decorations; narrow alleyways full of shops; arrays of tapas, fruits, or pastries; and beach scenes could I put in there that would hold the interest of someone who wasn’t there to see it all live?

What I enjoy most about visiting a place is walking around it and admiring things like those in the list above. People out on their balconies or standing in their shop doorways fill out the scene. It’s all part of the memory of the visit, the long walks, and the good food, but it makes choosing which photos to share with the world a challenging task.

And how many photos can I include of any one thing? Casa Batlló (pronounced, approximately, bahy-YOH), for instance, a house designed by architect Antoni Gaudí, could have taken the entire photo allocation all by itself. On the other hand, it’s something that you must see in person to really fathom. Gaudí’s designs are at once practical, sensual, and fantastic. His design of Parc Güell (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) goes along similar lines, and it’s fascinating to see what he did with the local stones to create paths and passageways.

A third major Gaudí landmark in Barcelona is the Sagrada Família church (Holy Family). Never finished by Gaudí, nor finished since his death, it’s still under construction and is probably the single biggest tourist attraction in the city. In the current stages of construction, there’s little to see inside for the 12€ entrance fee, and yet one is drawn to pay it and go inside anyway. For another 2.50€, one can wait in an hour-long queue and ascend an elevator into one of the towers — frustrating to waste time in the queue, but worth going up.

The coast provides endless beaches along the Mediterranean Sea, and many restaurants are on or overlooking the beach, serving tapas, paella, fideuà (similar to paella, but made with thin noodles instead of rice), and, of course, beer, wine, and sangría. For breakfast, don’t miss the delicious xuxos (pronounced choo-cho), a sort of cream-filled croissant rolled in cinnamon sugar.

Barcelona is in Catalunya, the local language is Catalan, not Spanish, and most of the spellings in this entry are the Catalan ones. There’s a very strong Catalan identification in the city: the Catalan flag is flown in addition to, and sometimes instead of, the Spanish flag; signs, advertisements, and such are often in Catalan only; and it’s very clear that the locals consider themselves Catalonians. At the airport, the first language on the signs is Catalan, the second is English, and Spanish comes third. There’s even a separate top-level Internet domain, .cat, which they use in preference to the Spanish .es (see, for example, the Casa Batlló link above).

Catalan feels like an odd mix of Spanish, French, Italian, and aspects all its own, and the spelling uses the letter x a lot, the Catalan ch. Sometimes it’s discernible, after some thought — nou mon means new world, forn de pa is bread bakery, and a mobile phone ad that says parla a totes hores sense sorpreses is pretty easy. On the other hand, this sign, in Parc Güell, was decipherable mostly because of the silhouette of a dog (gos) at the top of it:

Els orins i excrements de gos fan malbé la gespa i les plantes. Utilizeu els pipicans i els espais per a gossos.

Carnivals!

Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:

• Math Teachers at Play #27.
• Carnival of the Godless #144, posted nearly a week late.

Failure to seek (and see) common ground

The people who oppose abortion and those who support the right to decide what to allow to grow in one’s body have few, if any, places to compromise. If I want to allow a woman to terminate an unwanted pregnancy and you consider that to be the killing of a baby, we can’t meet in the middle. There’s no common ground there.

There is, though, common ground elsewhere, if we look for it. Essentially, no one favors abortion, in that no one thinks it’s a beautiful thing that people should do regularly. Both sides of the abortion issue want to reduce the number of abortions. One side wants to reduce the number to zero, but the other side also wants it reduced, not by legislating it away, but by reducing the need for it.

That’s where we should all be putting our efforts: on something on which we can agree, and on which we can work together.

If we work on ways to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, we’ll reduce the number of abortions. We’ll still have a fight about the ones that are left, but we’ll have accomplished something good, and everyone will be happier.

That’s the point at which my mind starts to boggle: I see the anti-abortion side not only failing to take action to help in that reduction, but actively impeding efforts toward it. Many want abstinence-only education, and refuse to teach young, sexually-active potential mothers and fathers how to prevent pregnancy. Many refuse to use contraception, and won’t allow its use in their families. Many work to block the availability of contraception to others.

Such is the case for a new morning after pill, ulipristal acetate, which can prevent pregnancies up to five days after intercourse, compared with three days for levonorgestrel (marketed as Plan B), and which is more effective than the alternative drug. The right-wing anti-sensibility groups are, predictably, rallying against approval of the new drug, called ella:

With ulipristal, women will be enticed to buy a poorly tested abortion drug, unaware of its medical risks, under the guise that it’s a morning-after pill, said Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America, which led the battle against Plan B.

Plan B prevents a pregnancy by administering high doses of a hormone that mimics progesterone. It works primarily by inhibiting the ovaries from producing eggs. Critics argue it can also prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the womb, which some consider equivalent to an abortion.

Women who were truly concerned for America would see the need to prevent unwanted pregnancies in their daughters, and would understand that abstinence-only education doesn’t do that. Instead, though, these people hold onto the ludicrous concept that two cells that happen to have united are now, though still microscopically small, a person, and must be given every protection available. They maintain that anything that interferes with the process of forming a viable human, once a penis has touched a vagina, is wrong.

And, of course, holders of those sorts of moral views don’t find it sufficient to hold the views themselves; they must impose them on everyone.

In doing so, they are actually increasing the number of abortions that will be performed. Yet they know they’re right, and they’ll fight to the ends of the Earth to force the rest of us to comply.

Their intransigence amazes me, but what also amazes me is how easily the rest of us can let them beat us down. If they want to work with us on common ground, that’s great, and I’ll welcome it. Otherwise, we need to be as vocal as they are; we need to stop allowing fanatics to tell us what to do.

So-called experts

The New York Times recently printed an article about a data leakage related to iPad accounts. It’s only a small concern, some say, not a big one:

Even in the wrong hands, e-mail addresses are of limited use beyond sending junk e-mail or attempting to pull people in with so-called phishing attacks, security experts said. What is more, e-mail addresses can be easy to guess. Members of the military are permitted to use only unclassified addresses on devices like the iPad.

But experts said that ICC-ID numbers could, in the right hands, be used to get other information, like an iPad’s location.

There’s something very curious about the what is more sentence: how on Earth could anyone guess the email addresses of over 100,000 AT&T iPad customers? No matter; I agree that the exposure of email addresses is, while regrettable and a public-relations difficulty, not a severe problem.

There are, though, two language-related things I have to say about the text quoted above.

The Times frequently uses the adjective so-called to denote a term of art, one with which readers might not be familiar. It always strikes me as odd. So-called has a connotation, at least a mild one (and sometimes not so mild), of illegitimacy. Look at the title of this post, for example. If I were to refer to the so-called experts who made the quoted statement, I’d be very strongly giving the impression that I, at least, did not consider them to be experts.

In the context that it’s used here, it’s not so strong. Yet I still have the feeling that the writer is saying, The security experts I’m quoting call them ‘phishing attacks’, but that’s such a silly term, isn’t it?, or something of that nature.

But he is not: he is using it to acknowledge that you, the reader, might not have heard the term before, and this is, in fact, what it’s called. Perhaps the Times style guide suggests so-called for that purpose, but I would prefer one of these:

1. [...] attempting to pull people in with ‘phishing attacks’ [...]
2. [...] attempting to pull people in with what are called ‘phishing attacks’ [...]
3. [...] attempting to pull people in with attacks known as ‘phishing attacks’ [...]

The other item is the pairing of in the wrong hands in the first paragraph with in the right hands in the second. The problem is that they both mean, essentially, in the wrong hands — that is, in the hands of a malefactor — and the second is focusing, by saying the right hands, on malefactors with sufficient skill to pull the trick off. But the opposition of wrong and right confuses the matter, making it appear that the second paragraph is referring to the good guys, rather than to particularly skilled bad guys.

My guess is that a copy editor would have caught this, and that the article suffers from cutbacks in copy editing.

You can’t do that on stage any more

To every president since John F. Kennedy, [White House correspondent Helen] Thomas, 89, was known for posing questions in the kind of tough and provocative manner that could make press secretaries gasp and her colleagues cringe.

And it appears that her tart tongue may have finally ended her career. Ms. Thomas said on Monday that she was retiring, effective immediately, after an uproar over her recent remarks that Jews should get the hell out of Palestine and go home to Poland, Germany and America and everywhere else.

So reports the New York Times, and so ends Ms Thomas’s long career. One can say that it was time for it to end anyway, one can agree with her or dis-, and one can suggest that however much she wanted to make that point, she could have — and should have — found a more politic way to say it.

One can say all that, yet one has to come back to the point that she’s entitled to her opinion, and it bothers me that voicing her opinion has cost her job.

But wait, you say. What she said was vile and offensive, you say. Also, you add, this contradicts what you wrote in these very pages when Don Imus said some offensive stuff on the air. How can you type out of both sides of your fingers?

The latter point first: this is not the same as the Imus flap. Mr Imus said what he said on the air, while he was working, as a representative of his employer. His employer (temporarily) sacked him for it. There should be no surprise there, and it’s not what happened with Ms Thomas.

Helen Thomas made her comments outside of work. She said what she said as an individual, not representing her employer, and clearly not reflecting her employers’ viewpoints.

It’s also different to what recently happened with President Horst Köhler of Germany, who resigned after saying things about Afghanistan that were interpreted in a way that was embarrassing to Germany. In his role as an official German statesman, Herr Köhler was always on the job. Everything he said was representing his employer — his country. It would be silly to say that something similar is true for Helen Thomas, or for any other private citizen.

On the former point, I don’t care, for this purpose, how vile and offensive anyone thinks her view is. If she wants to say it, she can say it. You and I don’t have to like it, nor do we have to like Ms Thomas. But we have to accept that a cost of our freedom to speak our minds is her freedom to speak hers.

Consider these pages: I say things here that I stand behind, but that many people disagree with. Strongly. I’ve talked, over time, about prosecuting and imprisoning the President of the United States^[1], about God as a delusional fantasy, about support for same-sex marriage and women’s right to choose abortion, and about defenestrating screaming children from airplanes.^[2]

If my employer should disagree with my views on some of these things, should my job be at risk? I’m not attributing any of this to my employer, and I’m not writing this as part of my job. I have a right to voice these views, even if some folks out there find them vile and offensive — and, yes, I know that some do.

It should be no different for Helen Thomas, and her forced retirement is a bad precedent.

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^[1] The previous one, of course. But you know that.

^[2] Yes, I’m exaggerating. I really only want to drug them.

Empty streets

Yesterday morning at 8 a.m., I looked out the windows of my hotel (the photo at the right is from Tuesday afternoon), both the window in my room and the one by the elevator. And I saw no one out on the streets. No one.

8 in the morning in a major city, the weather was good, and the streets were empty.

I guess that’s what happens when people don’t have dinner until after 10 p.m.

Barcelona

I’m at the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group meeting in Barcelona, followed by a bit of vacation. These pages may be emptier than usual for the next week, though I’ll try to post here and there. Here’s a photo from the apres-meeting reception last evening.

We’re going to the zoo, zoo, zoo...

I paid a visit last weekend to the Bronx Zoo, my first in a number of years. I have very mixed feelings about zoos. On the one hand, many of them work for the animals, through their support of habitat-sustainability programs and efforts to protect endangered and threatened species. On the other, I question the ethics of capturing and imprisoning animals for our amusement. There have also been cases of multiple animal deaths in some zoos, calling their treatment of the animals into question.

I was surprised first by the cost of admission. I don’t remember what it cost the last time I was there, and perhaps I got spoiled by the free admission to the National Zoo in Washington, DC, but the sign over the ticket booth shocked me: $27 per adult for the Total Experience. Below that, it said that General Admission tickets are also available, and they turned out to be $15 each. We went for that.

Our first stop was the Zoo Center building, which includes a rhinoceros. And it kicked things off to a bad start: a solitary rhino lay supine on a concrete slab, while visitors snapped flash photos of its profile from a short distance away. The animal looked severely depressed, if I may anthropomorphize, and it was certainly a pitiable sight.

Let’s go see the butterflies! They won’t be crammed into a too-small, too-dark enclosure. They’ll be fluttering around, doing what butterflies do. Ah, here it is, the Butterfly Garden. What? Not included in the general admission, this is $3 extra per person.

Next stop, the gorillas. Ho!, but here, again: the Congo Gorilla Forest, home to gorillas, mandrills, and okapi, is another $3-per-person additional charge.

We began to think that the Bronx Zoo is now a pay-by-the-animal place. And we were unhappy.

Fortunately, it got better after that. It turned out that those first two places we went were the only extra-charge animal exhibits in the zoo, apart from the Children’s Zoo section. So we got all the bad-experience stuff hitting us at once. The giraffes, zebras, ibexes, nyalas, red pandas, birds, and lemurs, as well as the lions and tigers and bears, were all freely accessible, and the day wound up being pleasant after all.

I have to wonder, though, about the cost of a family visit. Remember that this is in the Bronx. There are affluent areas of the Bronx, but there are also many poor families there. Two adults bringing three kids for a Total Experience, plus parking, comes to $130... and that’s before the inevitable and overpriced sodas, hot dogs, ice cream, and whatnot. Wednesdays are pay-what-you-like days, but not everyone has the ability to go on Wednesday, and $150 or more for a day out with the kids is unaffordable for many Bronx residents.

Training for police officers

In a very welcome move, a New York City police department task force recommends giving their officers more training in how to handle reports of sex crimes.

There’s a part of me that wonders why this is necessary: it should be obvious that victims reporting crimes of any sort should be taken seriously, should not be subject to belittlement or counter-accusations from the police officers, should have their allegations fairly, competently, and thoroughly investigated, and should be comforted as victims of violations. But it’s also clear that crimes of violence require more sensitivity, and that rape and other sex crimes are especially touchy.

But going beyond normal sensitivity to victims, the handling sex crimes by police officers — especially, though not exclusively, male police officers — is subject to another sort of problem: denial. There’s an appallingly strong tendency to blame the victim (for her manner of dress, for going out alone, for being drunk, for not resisting enough, for otherwise asking for it), to disbelieve the victim (she’s lying, she consented and then changed her mind, it wasn’t really rape, and so on), to refuse to investigate the report aggressively, and, in general, to discourage the victim from proceeding.

As anyone who follows the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit television series knows, the New York City police department has specially trained detectives assigned to investigate these crimes. The trouble is that cases often don’t get to them. There aren’t enough SVU detectives, for one thing. And then, often, reports are not taken or are not followed through; the victims give up out of embarrassment, fear, or frustration; the cases are not properly classified as sex crimes; or, out of negligence or apathy, paperwork doesn’t make it to the SVU.

The good news is that the police department does seem to care about fixing the problems, and appears to be taking steps in that direction. I’m skeptical, but we need to assume, for the moment, that they will take action. If they do, it will be a good thing.

Carnivals!

You might think that trained TSA screeners would be above making fun of each other’s wee-wees. And you might think that a trained TSA screener would be able to let such adolescent teasing roll off. But you’d be wrong on both counts. Oh, and you how know those full-body scanners aren’t supposed to really reveal anything, um, untoward? Yeah, not so much:

A Miami International Airport federal security screener has been arrested for allegedly using a baton to beat up a co-worker. The source of their conflict, police say: mano-a-mano ribbing about the size of the screener’s genitalia.

Screener Rolando Negrin’s private body parts were observed by his Transportation Security Administration colleagues conducting training on the airport’s full-body imaging machines. A year of joking culminated on Tuesday night [a month ago], when Negrin attacked the co-worker at an employee parking lot, according to an arrest report.

Negrin stated he could not take the jokes any more and lost his mind, said the report, made public Thursday. He is charged with aggravated battery.

Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:

• Carnival of Mathematics #66.
• Carnival of the Godless #143.

Pre-need... battery changing?

I recently had cause to call for cable TV repair service, and during the (brief) time I was on hold I heard part of a cycle of recorded tips for callers. In one of the tips, they noted that if you’re having trouble with your remote control, you should try changing the batteries — most of the time, the problem turns out to be weak batteries. They go on to add...

We also recommend changing the batteries periodically, to ensure uninterrupted use of your remote control.

Um. Yeah, really? I find it entirely adequate to change the batteries when they’re weak, and see no need to do it prophylactically. It’s not like it’s a smoke detector, or some such. If I find the batteries to need changing, I can change them then. What’s the point of doing it pre-need, other than to use up more batteries by changing them when they’re still good?

Invaders gone — an update

A week ago, I wrote about a colony of wasps that had taken over the gas grill on my deck. I invited suggestions on how to get rid of them. Apart from what were posted as comments there, I got two other suggestions.

One was to freeze them with a CO₂ fire extinguisher, an interesting idea. If I knew exactly where the nest was, under the tarp-like cover, I might have been able to pull it off. Even not knowing that, the fire extinguisher might have had a broad enough effect to work. And it’d be pretty dramatic.

The other suggestion was to put a tray containing gasoline or kerosene below the nest, allowing the vapours to waft up toward it. The vapours would, the suggestion went, kill the wasps.

The latter suggestion had two advantages over any other I’d gotten. It was something I could do with the information I had: I could easily use the broom to slide a tray under the grill from a distance, I did know the approximate area in which to put the tray, and I didn’t have to target the nest precisely. And it was easy to try, with nothing lost if it didn’t work. So I gave it a shot.

I got an aluminum take-out-food tray, poured a half inch of gasoline into it, and put it on the deck a couple of feet from the corner of the grill. I stood back and used the broom to gently nudge the tray beneath that corner of the cover. And the action didn’t disturb the wasps at all — no sentinels came out to check on things. Nice.

To test the situation, I then bashed the side of the cover again with the broom. That brought them out for investigation, as I retreated inside the sliding glass door. I put the broom away and left the tray undisturbed for several days.

Yesterday, I checked on the wasps, and in an initial check it seemed that the gasoline thing worked. There were a bunch of dead wasps in the pan, and when I smacked the side with the broom, no wasps came out at all. All was quiet.

When I was ready to clean things up for real, I went back out and bashed the grill more thoroughly, all around. Nothing. So I wheeled it back into its place, took the cover off, and found the nest. It was a hornet nest the size of a baseball, under one of the side shelves, and it was abandoned. I knocked it off and cleaned the area, and then ran the grill for ten minutes to heat it up fully.

I have the use of my grill again, and it cost nothing but a few ounces of gasoline. Neat!

All-you-can-eat data?

AT&T has announced that they will end their unlimited mobile data plan next week. It doesn’t sound like the result will be bad, though: the outgoing unlimited plan is $30 per month. The new plans are $15 per month for 200 megabytes, and $25 per month for 2 gigabytes — both with reasonably priced options to add more if you exceed the limit.

This all comes with some meaningless estimates about what you might be able to do with that much data:

The lowest-priced data option is called DataPlus and will cost $15 a month. It gives mobile phone subscribers access to 200 megabytes of data each month enough to send and receive 1,000 e-mails without attachments and an additional 150 with attachments. The plan would also offer access to 400 Web pages, the ability to post 50 photos to social Web sites and watch up to 20 minutes of streaming video through the mobile phone.

That’s working with averages, of course, and it all depends upon how big the attachments, photos, and web pages are. The picture I posted to these pages this past Sunday is 50 kilobytes, the version you get if you click on it is 270 kilobytes, and the original on my computer is 1.4 megabytes. Google’s home page is about 120 kilobytes, the IBM home page is currently about 870 kilobytes, and this page of photos is almost 3 megabytes, because the guy who did it doesn’t understand the difference between posting thumbnails and using HTML to scale the full-sized pictures. It’s all wildly variable.

What’s more significant are their figures on the numbers of current customers that fit into the options they’re offering. They say that 65% of their customers use less than 200 megabytes per month on average, and 98% use less than 2 gigabytes. Of course, “on average” means that some of those customers exceed the new limits during some months, but even in that event, a 200-megabyte customer who has to pay the $15 overage to get another 200 megabytes is no worse off than before. And when she uses less than the limit, her data bill is cut in half.

This seems like a fair fare, I think. The only part that strikes me as ridiculous is the $20 per month extra charge for tethering. If it came with some extra gigabytes, it would make sense. If you had to pay extra to tether your computer on an unlimited data plan, it would make sense. But, well, 2 gigabytes is 2 gigabytes, whether you use it directly on your iPhone or you use your iPhone as a modem.

The Europeans are used to limits, and paying for what they use. AT&T is starting to change the model here. Will the other companies follow? I still have an unlimited data plan on my BlackBerry, through T-Mobile. I wonder if that will change over time.

Stan Rogers

Stan Rogers, Canadian singer and songwriter, died in an airplane fire on this day in 1983, while returning to Canada from a performance in Texas. He was only 33 years old.

Stan’s music was classified as “folk”, and tended toward maritime style, stories of farmers, and times out of Canada’s past. “Northwest Passage”, “The Field Behind the Plow”, and “Lies” are among his best-known songs.

Since Stan joined the too-long list of musicians who left us before they should have, his younger brother Garnet has been reminding us of Stan’s music, as well as giving us his own style, more rock-and-blues oriented.

Listen to “Lies” here, and read it here:

At last the kids are gone now for the day
She reaches for the coffee as the school bus pulls away
Another day to tend the house and plan
For Friday at the Legion when she’s dancing with her man
Sure was a bitter winter but Friday will be fine
And maybe last year’s Easter dress will serve her one more time
She’d pass for twenty-nine but for her eyes
But winter lines are telling wicked lies

All lies, all those lines are telling wicked lies
Lies, all lies. Too many lines there in that face
Too many to erase or to disguise, they must be telling lies

Is this the face that won for her the man
Whose amazed and clumsy fingers put that ring upon her hand
No need to search that mirror for the years
The menace in their message shouts across the blur of tears
So this is beauty’s finish, like Rodin’s “Belle Heaulmière”
The pretty maiden trapped inside the ranch wife’s toil and care
Well, after seven kids, that’s no surprise
But why cannot her mirror tell her lies

All lies, all those lines are telling wicked lies
Lies, all lies. Too many lines there in that face
Too many to erase or to disguise, they must be telling lies

Then she shakes off the bitter web she wove
And turns to set the mirror, gently, face down by the stove
She gathers up her apron in her hand
Pours a cup of coffee, drips Carnation from the can
And thinks ahead to Friday, ’cause Friday will be fine
She’ll look up in that weathered face that loves hers, line for line
To see that maiden shining in his eyes
And laugh at how her mirror tells her lies

All lies, all those lines are telling wicked lies
Lies, all lies. Too many lines there in that face
Too many to erase or to disguise, they must be telling lies

— Stan Rogers, “Lies” (1980)

Sucks and the City

Two years ago, I saw the (first) Sex and the City movie, and wrote in these pages about how I thought the men who dissed it on principle were being silly.

Today I saw the new movie, Sex and the City 2. In terms of being completely horrible, it’s everything the first movie wasn’t. Badly written, stupidly acted, and inanely costumed, even by SatC standards, it has nothing going for it. It’s just about the worst movie I’ve seen in a couple of years.

The dialogue is stilted and dumb, and the writers took every opportunity to stick in every tired one-liner joke they could dig up. As Miranda is about to be driven off for a day of shopping in Abu Dhabi, she shouts out the car window, “Abu Dhabi doo!”

Oy.

I’m saying this as a fan of the TV series, and as someone who enjoyed the first movie: if you haven’t already seen the new one, give it a miss. If you absolutely must see it, at least wait until you can rent it and watch it at home. It’s cheaper that way, and gives you the option of turning it off when you’ve had enough.