OED3: printed, or not?

’Tis sad news, indeed: the Oxford English Dictionary will probably cease printed versions and will make the upcoming 3rd edition online only.

The print dictionary market is just disappearing, it is falling away by tens of per cent a year, Nigel Portwood, the chief executive of OUP, told the Sunday Times. Asked if he thought the third edition would be printed, he said: I don’t think so.

Almost one third of a million entries were contained in the second version of the OED, published in 1989 across 20 volumes.

The next full edition is still estimated to be more than a decade away from completion; only 28 per cent has been finished to date.

It’s sad, in that the world will miss a beautifully bound piece of work. No more will we be able to heft a volume and see several pages of definitions and references for just a single word. The OED is the most researched word reference there is.

But it’s not just a large tome: it’s a large set of large tomes. It takes up a great deal of shelf space, it’s very expensive (Amazon sells it for $1300, but they’re out of stock as I write this), and it takes them more than 30 years to put out a new edition, once they decide to get started. It’s sad that it probably won’t be printed, but it’s not surprising.

With an online version, users can access entries quickly and easily from their computers — and these days, that means iPads, iPhones, BlackBerry devices, and others of that sort — untethered from the couple-of-dozen weighty volumes, however nicely bound they be. Updates can go in incrementally, so every time you access what’s there, you get the latest version, with whatever updates they’ve put in. And cross-references are right there, simple and quick. When puggle sends you to echidna, which sends you to monotreme, you can flip from one to another with a click — you don’t have to run to the shelf to pick up a different volume.

Of course, even the online version is expensive. £240 is about $370, and that’s the annual fee — four years of that, and you’ve paid more than what Amazon wants for the printed second edition. Of course, you’re also paying for the convenience of having it online, as I note above. But ten or twenty years of twenty-pound-a-month subscription fees really add up.

The official word of Oxford University Press is that another printed version is still possible. I’m sure they want to keep their options open as they test the waters with this announcement. And they’ll still print the other, smaller editions, which abound: the Compact OED, the Concise OED, the Shorter OED, the collegiate version, the pocket version, and so on.

It really is a sign of the times.

Dial telephones

I was listening to the radio program Science Friday last week^[1], and I noted something I’ve noted before: their phone number is 989-8255. That fact is certainly unremarkable to most people. I remark on it because the phone number I grew up with, in Florida, was 989-8582, which is amusingly close to that, albeit with a different area code.

One notable thing about my childhood phone number was how awful it was back then. In days of pulse-dial telephones,^[2] it took forever to call it. You’d dial 9, tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. You’d dial 8, tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. You’d dial 9, tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. You’d dial 8, tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.

I think you could grow a new finger faster.

Area codes, back in the day of dial phones and mechanical switching, were set up as three-digit numbers with a 0 or 1 in the middle — and phone numbers never had a 0 or 1 as the second digit, so the switching system could distinguish an area code that way. The best area codes — that is, the ones that were quickest to dial — went to the major metropolitan areas. New York City, 212; Los Angeles, 213; Chicago, 312; and so on. Places that didn’t matter, like Alaska (907) and Hawaii (808), got the crappy codes.

But now, none of it makes any difference. Calling any number is just like calling any other. And, of course, with computerized switching, there’s no longer a need to reserve special digits, so both area codes and phone numbers can have any digit in the second place.

But, man, calling home in the old days. 9, tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. 8, tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. ...

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^[1] On which day it was is left as an exercise for the reader.

^[2] Touch Tone, which was once an AT&T trademark for what’s known as DTMF (dual-tone multi-frequency signaling), was introduced in the mid-1960s, but wasn’t widely available until the ’70s. Even as recently as the early 1980s, AT&T charged an extra monthly fee for Touch Tone service.

Ripped from the headlines

Sometimes, topics for these pages come from the news. Sometimes they come from other things I’ve read, here and there. Sometimes they come from the past. And sometimes... sometimes they come straight from the day. Today is one of those days, and today the topic came by motorcycle.

On the way back from a hike on the west side of the Hudson, I crossed the Bear Mountain Bridge this afternoon, going through the E-Z Pass lane at the toll booths. In the other lane, paying cash, was a group of motorcyclists, maybe a dozen of them. As each paid his toll, he drove his cycle through and waited for the others; about half had gone through when I paid my toll in the fast lane, and crossed the bridge.

Soon after crossing the bridge, with cars behind me, I saw the group of bikers weaving their way ahead in the line, as we made our way down the very winding, narrow road. Damn!, I said, These guys are crazy!, as I watched in my mirror as they went into the oncoming traffic lane (against a double-yellow line, of course), to pass whomever they could. The road is full of blind curves, and they couldn’t possibly see anyone coming at them until the last moment. When the first three passed me, the third had to cut back in quickly to avoid a collision. Should he have failed, who might he have taken out with him?

They soon passed a few more cars and disappeared, and a couple of others dropped in behind me, ready to try their hands at it. Just as it seemed that they might go for it...

...we came around another curve and found a wrecked motorcycle leaking bike juice (Gasoline? Motor oil? Both?), and its driver coming out of the bushes — I couldn’t tell whether he was holding his shoulder, or just brushing himself off, but he seemed either uninjured or nearly so. His bike, though, was hopeless.

His compatriots behind me stopped for him, and the two who’d been ahead with him were found stopped further down the hill. The driver in front of me paused and told them what had happened, and they turned and went back up the hill. At least, I thought, they all stuck together with their bud.

It seemed that the wrecked bike was the only thing damaged. It seemed that no other car was involved, no other people hurt. It even seemed that the rider was OK. Given that, I couldn’t feel sorry for the biker. Was it OK that he wrecked his bike with his reckless behaviour? Could this have, maybe... just maybe, taught the lot of them something? Might they not be such lunatics in the future?

One can only hope. But I’m very glad no one was badly hurt.

Non-negative political advertising

We’re preparing for local elections, to be held, what, some two months hence? Not too bad, compared with the lead time we sometimes see. One hotly contested race will be the one for New York Attorney General, a position to be vacated by Andrew Cuomo, who will be running for Governor.

We have a primary election coming up in a couple of weeks to select the Democratic candidate for the November election (the Republican candidate is already selected, Daniel Donovan). There are five Democrats on the primary-election ballot: Richard Brodsky, Sean Coffey, Eric Dinallo, Kathleen Rice, and Eric Schneiderman.

I just got a clever campaign ad in the mail from Assemblyman Brodsky. The ad says, They hate Richard Brodsky, and shows pictures (with captions, in case you don’t recognize their faces) of Alphonse D’Amato, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh. It follows with, You’ll love him. The back of the ad tells you to go to Mr Brodsky’s web site to see other right-wingers who hate him, and liberals who support him.

I like the ad because it’s not blasting his opponents. It’s not direct enough for me, really — it’s not telling me where Mr Brodsky stands on any issues, and it’s not saying what he’ll do as Attorney General — but it’s a step in the right direction. It’s saying, in general, that he’s liberal, and opposes (and is opposed by) the right wing.

That’s a very good start.

The New York Times, on the other hand, criticizes Assemblyman Brodsky’s divisive style, and recommends Senator Schneiderman. I think I agree, but I have to look into it more before 14 Sept.

In any case, I like Mr Brodsky’s ad.

[Here’s more about the NY AG race, from the Times.]

Getting the user interface right

I’ve talked about user interfaces in these pages a few times before. The thing is, I’m not a user-interface expert. But, as with wine and art, I know what I like.

And, while not being an expert, I’ve often been called upon to design a user interface nonetheless, or, at least, an part of one. It’s what sometimes happens with programmers. I always hope that my UIs will be reasonable — I like them fine, and, as I said, I know what I like. But will they suit the general public? Qui sait?

My first general rule, and what I prefer when I’m using other people’s interfaces, is to make sure that the things one would most commonly need to do are quickly and easily accessible, and obvious. The same goes for the important things, which might be less common but which you have to get to quickly when you do need them. Second priority goes to a set of likely actions that will be used less often. Everything else can be hidden behind an Advanced button, selection, or tab.

This stuff’s especially important on mobile devices, which have smaller screens and more limited means of interaction.

What are the most common and most important things you’ll need to do right after you place a phone call? I think they’re these:

1. Hang up. You called the wrong person, or hadn’t intended to place a call at all.
2. Select between the handset and the speakerphone modes.
3. Switch to another program or view while continuing the call. Maybe you need to refer to an email message, or a calendar or address-book entry, as soon as the person answers.

I had occasion to place a call on someone else’s phone recently, and I realized that it was set up perfectly for this. The phone has two buttons, on the left and right, and the screen displays the functions that these buttons will perform. There’s a button that always activates the phone’s menu, and there’s another that always hangs up a call. One of the variable-function buttons is, while you’re on a call, labelled Speaker or Handset, and will toggle between them. Switching to speakerphone mode, which is what I needed to do, required a single button-press, and was instantaneous.

That’s one thing that bothers me about the BlackBerry’s UI when I’m making a call. To toggle speakerphone mode, I have to press the menu button, find Activate Speakerphone on the menu, roll down to it, and click it. That’s not terrible — I know where it is, and it’s easy enough to do it. But it takes several seconds, during which time I can’t hear the phone. A function such as that, which is one of the top three most likely things you’d need to do, should be even easier. It should be a single button, or a tap on a touch-screen.

What’s more, the BlackBerry menu is busy and cluttered. Here’s what the menu looks like when I’m on a call:

Help

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End Call
Hold
Enhance Call Audio
Mute
Notes

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New Call
Call Voice Mail

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Activate Speakerphone

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View Address Book
View Calendar
View Messages

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Switch Application
Home Screen

Those are all things I’m likely to want to do, so that’s good. But several of them can be done in other ways (there are at least two ways to end the call, three ways to switch to the home screen, and two ways to switch applications; also, I can view my address book, calendar, and messages by going to the home screen and selecting them there). I’d prefer having Speakerphone and Mute as functions directly on the phone screen. But, oddly, there’s nothing on that screen to interact with, once you place a call.

The BlackBerry folks get so many things right. But they miss on some basics.

The pluperfect subjunctive

I just ran a quick errand, and former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin gave me today’s blog topic while I was out. He was on a radio show on WNYC, on the program Tell Me More. And he said this:

Well, you know, I think the Latino community has been pretty invaluable in this recovery. I mean, if they wouldn’t have came here and helped us to rebuild, we wouldn’t be where we are.

One has to wonder what tense that is, if they wouldn’t have came here and helped us to rebuild.

Properly, it should be, if they hadn’t come here and helped us, but the construction he uses is more or less a common error. If they hadn’t [x] we wouldn’t [y], is very easily turned into, if they wouldn’t have [x], we wouldn’t [y], because it sounds more parallel. But it isn’t, in fact. The conditional clause, correctly put in the pluperfect subjunctive, is "if [person] had [or hadn’t], followed by the past participle of the verb — in this case, come here.

Of course, Mr Nagin got the past participle wrong, as well: came is the past indicative, not the past participle. One would think that a mayor of a major U.S. city might know how to speak proper English, but, well, one would be wrong, wouldn’t one?

Alternatively, the sentence could be cast this way (my preference): Had they not come here and helped us to rebuild, we would not be where we are now. But that sounds a bit too hoity-toity, doesn’t it?

A businessman from the midwest is on a trip to Boston, and he’s been told that the first thing he has to do while he’s there is find a good seafood restaurant and eat some scrod. It is, he’s told, what Boston is known for.

So the guy gets into a cab on his first night there, and the cabbie says, Where to, Mac? The businessman replies, Take me to the best place to get scrod!

The cabbie turns to face him and says, Mac, I been drivin’ in this town for thirty-two years, and this is the first time I ever heard that used in the pluperfect subjunctive.

Travel visas

I just got a visa for travelling to China, for Huawei and for the upcoming IETF meeting in Beijing. With all the travel I’ve done, this is the first time I’ve needed a visa — I’ve always been to countries with which the U.S. has visa waivers — and it was strange to send my passport off to someone, trusting that it’d come back in short order.

It did.

On the web site of the Chinese embassy are instructions for applying for visas, whether an L visa (for tourists), an F visa (business, which I got), or some other. The instructions include an Additional Information section, which has this item:

4. Any person suffering from a mental disorder, leprosy, AIDS, venereal diseases, contagious tuberculosis or other such infectious diseases shall not be permitted to enter China.

This is standard, of course; we have similar rules (see the section Health-related grounds). Ours says that you mustn’t have a communicable disease of public health significance, you must have been vaccinated against certain diseases, you mustn’t have a mental disorder, and you mustn’t be a drug abuser or addict.

The U.S. version of mental disorder, though, is more specific. It addresses people with behaviour that may pose, or has posed, a threat to the property, safety, or welfare of the alien or others. I suspect that the Chinese rules are similar, but the web site is eliding the details. If the issue actually needed to come up, the full rule would be applied, and the filtering would be appropriate.

But I mused about this when I read it. Just taken on its surface, it would bar anyone taking anti-depressants, anyone on methylphenidate (Ritalin)... perhaps even anyone in treatment by a psychiatrist or psychotherapist.

I wonder what portion of the population that covers. I wonder what portion of the IETF participants.

He-he-he....

Doves? Not so much.

More stuff related to the Islamic Cultural Center planned in lower Manhattan: the delightful Dove World Outreach Center, in Gainesville, Florida, is planning a Koran-burning day on 11 September, though they have been denied a permit for it (and no surprise on either point). It is, of course, the Christian thing to do.

Well, not specifically. Religion is, by its nature, divisive, separating us (those who believe a certain way) from them (those who don’t). Lots of things are divisive, of course, but when what’s dividing people is a belief in what’s divinely, cosmically right and true, and when one’s scripture dooms them to eternal damnation and suffering, things get a bit hairy.

That said, most of us, certainly in America and lots of other places, accept people as neighbours and friends even if they be them — even if they don’t believe in the same cosmic reality as we do. Most of us don’t wish them ill, most of us don’t carry signs, wear t-shirts, and shout in the streets against our neighbours. And most of us certainly don’t defile their cultural artifacts.

Of course, we’re just talking about books, and there’s no harm really done by burning them, apart from the general distaste we have for the burning of books (and perhaps the small amount of air pollution generated). There’s no difference, here, between their burning Korans, the Westboro idiots and their equally hateful God hates fags message as they picket soldiers’ funerals, the jamming of a nail into a Catholic communion wafer, and other similar things.

These acts all say more about the people doing them than anything else, and the acts don’t harm the intended victims — unless they allow themselves to be offended.

We all just need to shake our heads, say What a bunch of nutbag fools, and then forget about it. Outrage fuels their hate. Apathy, and even pity for their small-mindedness, takes the wind out of their sails.

Bill Irwin, who lives in Gainesville, has blogged about this crazy church before, noting the signs and t-shirts they have, saying Islam is of the devil. While we’re here, here’s Bill’s note of support for the Islamic center.

Cloudy: more thoughts on cloud computing

My esteemed colleague (and occasional commenter here) Nathaniel Borenstein recently had an article published in TechNewsWorld, Is the IT Pendulum Winding Down?

Are we finally nearing a time when IT’s constant swing between centralized and distributed systems might be slowing to a stop? In the case of cloud computing, technology is now reaching the point where we can have our cake and eat it too. Cloud computing is new not because the technologies are new, but because this key combination of technologies has matured past a critical point.

I had something to say about cloud computing about a year ago in these pages. There, I imagined the shifts in centralization vs distribution as a circle, rather than as a pendulum, and I thought of cloud computing as having closed the circle, not as being somewhere along the pendulum’s arc, doomed by inertia and gravity to have the pendulum move away again.

And, so, I largely agree with Nathaniel. In circumnavigating things, we moved away from the centralized computing center because of the disadvantages of having all services in one place, and because of the new capabilities provided to us, first by personal computers and then by mobile and other distributed devices. As we closed the circle, we retained those new capabilities and figured out how to provide the central services in a distributed way over the Internet, getting the best features of each in the cloud.

Yet, I don’t think we can nestle our collective bum in that cloud and sit comfortably, claiming that we’re done. There are still disadvantages to what we have, and whether we can fix them without making another circle (or, if one prefers, pendulum swing) is questionable. I don’t think we can.

The problem is that the issues we need to address — at least the first set of issues — are not technological, but organizational. Here are some of the questions that come up, with no attempt to answer them, because, indeed, we have no idea at this point about what the answers will be.

Who owns the data we put in the cloud? What rights do we have to our data? What rights to the cloud providers have? How will that play out in courts of law?

How is the privacy of our data assured? What about privacy associated with the services we use? Every time we do a web search, every time we use a location-based service, every time we look up a person, send email, post a photo... we’re giving some organization in the cloud private information about ourselves. What rights do we have, and what don’t we have?

What about the long-term viability of our data? What about the services we depend upon? When the company that stores our stuff goes out of business, where do our files go? When the company is sold, what happens when the new owners change the rules (suppose we got free storage from the old company, but the new owners want to charge, and demand six months’ payment in advance if we want to see our data again)?

Even without ownership changes, what about when a service provider suddenly changes privacy or access rules, as Facebook has done several times? What happens when the Google/Verizon deal turns out to have a significant effect on access to the stuff we put on Google Docs?

It’s easy to say that, well, if you don’t like the new rules you can move your data and use someone else’s services. That might not be so easy in practice. Are you really going to spend time to move perhaps terabytes of data from one host to another? In the absence of any migration assistance? And what about if the old host’s rules restrict your access? Maybe the very reason you want to move is that you can’t get at all (or any) of your data any more, or your access is rate-limited.

On the other side, it’s very easy, now, to put a multi-terabyte hard drive on the Internet. And even on mobile devices, we can get a 32 gigabyte SD card for about $75, or 16 GB micro-SD for about $30. That’s around $2 per gigabyte, and that’ll fit into a mobile phone, portable media player, or digital camera. How long before that goes up to hundreds of gigabytes, in a card the size of your fingernail? Maybe we’ll soon just carry everything around in our mobile phones, and it’ll all be accessible over the Internet from there... automatically backed up on another memory card in the phone’s charger (which could also be on the Internet).

The cloud is giving us some great capabilities, as well as possibilities we haven’t realized yet. But I don’t think for a minute that we’re done.

Sunday God thoughts

The local church with the marquee-style sign has another new one:

GOD COMFORTS THE DISTURBED
DISTURBS THE COMFORTABLE

Hm. So God doesn’t leave anything alone. God’s a micromanager, but worse than that, an annoyance, a nuisance. Just when God’s comfort helps you out of the hole you were in, just when you get to a good place... he kicks into disturbance mode and spins you around again.

Is it a wonder that we have schizophrenics, given that?

Are you hip?

The New York Times Standards Editor, Philip Corbett, has something to say about the word hipster:

We try hard to shed our old image as stodgy and out of it. Perhaps too hard, sometimes.

How else to explain our constant invocation of the old/new slang hipster? As a colleague pointed out, we’ve used it more than 250 times in the past year.

The word is not new, of course. The O.E.D. dates it to the 1940s and helpfully equates it with hepcat. American Heritage offers this quaint definition: One who is exceptionally aware of or interested in the latest trends and tastes, especially a devotee of modern jazz.

Our latest infatuation with hipster seems to go back several years, perhaps coinciding in part with the flourishing of more colloquial (and hipper) blogs on our Web site. In 1990 we used the word just 19 times. That number rose gradually to about 100 by 2000, then exploded to 250 or so uses a year from 2005 on.

Then there’s the Brooklyn connection: our archive confirms that Kings County is the very center of hipsterdom. Ninety-six Times pieces in the past year that included the word hipster also mentioned Brooklyn, edging out even once-hip Manhattan, which had 87 overlapping mentions. Queens trailed badly with 33, while the Bronx merited only a handful and Staten Island just two.

In any case, hipster’s second life as hip slang seems to have lost its freshness. And with so many appearances, I’m not sure how precise a meaning it conveys. It may still be useful occasionally, but let’s look for alternatives and try to give it some rest.

Those of us in the New York City take no surprise in the ordering of the boroughs, except perhaps that Staten Island rated as many as two hip mentions.

Go, man, go.

Another racist leaves the airwaves

It seems that Laura Schlessinger (please don’t call her Dr in this context; it’s misleading) is leaving her radio show, the result of an incident in which she spewed a bad thing to call black people repeatedly at an African-American caller. She’s given us her opinion of homosexuals before (she thinks they’re deviant and that homosexuality is a biological error), and now it’s clear what she thinks of people with enough melanin, as she put it. I’ll certainly not miss her presence, though I have no illusion that she’ll stay gone.

But here are two things we should keep in mind about what she’s saying:

First, this is her justification for her use of the offensive word:

Black guys talking to each other seem to think it’s O.K. I don’t get it. If anybody without enough melanin says it, it’s a horrible thing. But when black people say it, it’s affectionate.

Right. I’m to believe that a woman with her education is that naïve? No, that’s too much of a stretch. She knows quite well that it does matter who says it, and in what context. A black man saying it to another black man on the street is one thing. A privileged white woman saying it is another. Someone saying it on a radio talk show is another, too. And a privileged white woman saying it on her radio show, well, that’s quite another. She damned well knows that; she gets it, and it’s disingenuous of her to say, What? What’d I do?

Second, she’s complaining that her first-amendment rights are being violated when people complain and sponsors pull their ads:

I want to regain my First Amendment rights. I want to be able to say what’s on my mind and in my heart and what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry, some special interest group deciding this is the time to silence a voice of dissent and attack affiliates, attack sponsors. I’m sort of done with that.

She has her first-amendment rights; she’s never lost them. Witness: she’s out on the street, free. She’s free to call people bad names again, today, tomorrow, next month. No one has arrested her, and no one will. The first amendment protects us from legal trouble. Congress shall make no law, it says, and that’s been extended to state legislatures and other contexts, with some limited restrictions.

The first amendment, though, doesn’t protect us from the social response to what we say, and it was never meant to. If you say hateful things and people hate you for it, that’s on you. The first amendment doesn’t guarantee that people will want to listen to you, that sponsors will want to pay to be associated with you, nor that your employer will want you to represent them such a manner.

You’re free to say what’s on your mind and in your heart. And you have to live with the social consequences of what you say.

Of course, Laura Schlessinger is well aware of that, too.

There’s number in numbers

With the recent exodus of several bloggers from ScienceBlogs, MarkCC, who writes Good Math, Bad Math, put together Scientopia, and a batch of science-related bloggers landed there. There are some good blogs on Scientopia, so go have a look.

In a post about fuzzy logic, Mark makes a common language blunder, which I want to pick on (on the language thing, not on Mark; this is a very common error):

When we say logic, we tend to automatically think of a particular logic: the first order predicate logic, which is the most common, fundamental logic used in both mathematics, and in rhetoric and debate. But there are an astonishing number of different logics for different purposes. Fuzzy logic is one particularvariation, which tries to provide a way of reasoning about vagueness.

Note: there are an astonishing number of different logics.

Different logics is plural. Many different logics is plural. Astonishingly many different logics is plural.

But a number of different logics is singular.

There’s even a clue to its being singular, right there in the phrase; can you find it? That’s right: a number, or in Mark’s original, an astonishing number. We use a singular article because it’s singular, and so it has to take singular verbs and modifiers, as well.

Of course, that also means we need to adjust the sentence structure a bit: But there is an astonishing number of different logics, each for a different purpose. Or we can change it this way, if we think the singular sounds odd and we want to keep the plural: But there are astonishingly many different logics, each for a different purpose.

At its basic level, number agreement ought to be the easiest thing to get right. But when things get complicated, that’s not the case, and a number of isn’t the only trouble spot. Compound phrases often cause problems as well, and often the answer is to use what matches the portion of the compound that’s in closest proximity.

Another trouble area is in phrases such as none of us: is it none of us is going or none of us are going? I prefer the former, but style guides differ. In the end, it comes down to what you want to emphasize — is it that there isn’t even one of us going, or that of the group of us, we’ll all be absent?

None of us know[s] for sure.

Mickey Mosque

I don’t know whether the rest of the country has to cope with the same lower-Manhattan mosque Islamic center news flood that we’re being subjected to here in the New York City area. I suspect so, because New York tends to feed the news, and anything to do with September 11th and the former World Trade Center site is always a fun topic for the media to grab onto.

Let’s consider a few things.

If you lost someone dear to you in the World Trade Center buildings, you get to be very, very sad about that. You get to have a share in the victims’ compensation payouts. You get my eternal sympathy, along with that of many, many others throughout the world.

You don’t get to tell other people what to do, and you don’t get to decide what’s done with the land.

The area is a chunk of real estate in lower Manhattan, some of the most expensive land in the world. It’s in a business area. It’s not a tomb; it’s not hallowed ground. It’s owned by people, and the city of New York has rules about how they approve construction projects. Those rules don’t include asking citizens and doing what they want, regardless of what a particular square of ground means to them, emotionally. We’re all sorry about what happened, but this is how it is.

If you’re a politician, and you’ve decided to stick this issue into your political witch’s brew, well, you don’t get to tell other people what to do nor decide what’s done with that land either. I could expand on that, and say that you’re a bottom-feeding scum-sucker who’ll feast on any misfortune or bigotry you can get your teeth into, but that seems unnecessary, so I won’t.

For my part, I’d just as soon not have anyone build any places for people to gather and spout nonsense about fantasy beliefs, ever again, anywhere. I don’t want to see land, money, time, and other resources wasted on mosques, synagogues, churches, cathedrals, or, for that matter, Fox News studios.

But, you know, I don’t get to tell people what to do or decide any of this either. None of us have any more say in what happens with this Islamic center, or anything else to do with that ten acres or the area near it, than we do about any other block of ground in the city.

So let’s all leave it alone now, and go find some real news to talk about.

[Here’s the New York Times editorial on the topic.]

4 > 5.5

Here’s a puzzle:

Why is it that 4 ounces of deliciously fresh tuna, marinated and cooked medium-rare on the grill,^[1] seems like enough... but a 5.5-ounce can of tuna seems meagre?

Why is that?

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^[1] And I don’t think for a minute that the zucchini sautéed with garlic had anything to do with it, either.

Blogging songs?

On the radio program Soundcheck today, they had singer/songwriter Jonathan Mann as a guest. Mr Mann started writing a new song every day on the first of 2009, and he’s continued it since — he performs each song, and posts a video of it to YouTube. (His web site is here, and his song-a-day project is here.)

This reminds me of my blogging goal of writing a post in these pages every day. In a number of ways, it’s similar, though Mr Mann not only writes, but also performs and makes the video. He, too, watches the news of the day, and often takes his material from news items (he recently did one on flight attendant Steven Slater, as did I; his is not safe for work). I’d say he’s more entertaining than I am: you do not want to hear me sing.

I like his approach, and I’ll be interested to see how long he wants to keep up the one-a-day pace.

His song for yesterday, day 591, is about the Tea Party nuts. You should definitely go have a listen to that one. Here’s the chorus:

And the hate builds up
And Glenn Beck cries
Ann Coulter rants and raves
And O’Reilly screams

You ain’t never gonna reason with these folks
They think that Obama was born in Kenya
Ain’t never gonna reason with these folks
They think Sarah Palin would make a great president
Ain’t never gonna reason with ’em

The IP is falling! The IP is falling!

Last Friday, one of the talk shows on my local public radio station aired a technology segment about the impending depletion of IP addresses:

Imagine what would happen if the United States ran out of phone or social security numbers. We would be unreachable, even unidentifiable! That is exactly what’s happening with IP addresses: those codes that identify each blackberry, iPad, and Website. IP addresses are set to run out in less than a year. Alexis Madrigal, lead technology writer for TheAtlantic.com joins us to talk about what this means in terms of the way we communicate in an Internet-driven world.

The trouble is that they got a journalist to talk about this, when what they needed was an expert on the technology. Mr Madrigal did a passable job of it, but he missed some key points, exaggerated some issues, glossed over some others, and organized the whole thing haphazardly.

First, we’re not about to “run out of IP addresses.” What will soon happen is that the last blocks of addresses in the current (IPv4, as we call it) system will be allocated. Mr Madrigal does get to that at some point in the conversation, but it’s not stated clearly, and the overall impression given is that well be running out of addresses altogether.

And its not an insignificant distinction. Your Internet service provider (ISP) most likely has plenty of addresses left, and enough to last well beyond the 2011 doom-date. That’s because your ISP has one (or several) of those large blocks, and will continue assigning addresses out of that space for a long time yet.

It’s also because your ISP is using dynamic IP addresses for most of its customer devices. That means that only active customers have addresses assigned, and those addresses are reused when they’re no longer active. Only a portion of a large ISP’s customers are active at any given time.

It’s also because your ISP generally gives you a single address, even if you have several devices in your house or small business. You use a “router” (more accurately, a switch) to connect those multiple devices (two desktop machines and three laptops, let’s say) to your Internet connection (to your cable or DSL modem), using a thing called network address translation (NAT).

Second, there are many (very many) blocks of addresses that are unused or sparsely used, and that could be reclaimed. Mr Madrigal mentions this as well, and it’s a very significant point. Unfortunately, it’s a political nightmare. It will be very difficult to actually do significant reclamation. Even getting back the address blocks for defunct entities will be hard. Grabbing ones back from live companies who see some value in hanging onto them will most likley be impossible.

And so, many Internet standards experts fear an uncontrolled market forming, something that we might look at as a “black market” in IP address blocks, complete with bidding wars and underhanded dealings. Luca Brazzi sleeps with the phishers? Well, something like that.

The shortage of address blocks, along with the broader issue of how many IP addresses exist in the IPv4 system, does put a real limit on the number of devices that will be able to connect to the Internet in the future we view as the “Internet of things”, a time when it won’t just be obvious computer devices, such as desktops and laptops, that will be on the Internet. The set of devices won’t even be limited to iPhones and BlackBerry devices. We’ll have temperature sensors, power meters, thermostats, household appliances, cars, and so on, all on the Internet, each with its own IP address.

At that point, NAT won’t be enough to take care of the problem. At that point, we’ll have to go to IPv6, which opens the IP address space from 32 bits (on the order of 4.3 billion addresses) to 64 bits (on the order of 18.5 billion billion). With another 64 bits for the prefix, we can have 18.5 billion billion blocks of 18.5 billion billion addresses each. That’ll keep us going for a while.

We just have to get the IPv6 deployment expanded. That’s not trivial, but it’s not rocket science either. It’s a question of when it becomes good business to do it. When there’s a real financial incentive to make the switch, the switch will be made.

A wing and a spat

Yesterday, I made a flippant reference to an incident on JetBlue on Monday, in which a flight attendant went postal.^[1] It does sound silly, but, really, the incident could use a little closer look.

The flight attendant, Steven Slater, got involved in a tiff with a passenger, who apparently disobeyed significant flight crew instructions (one violation) and hit Mr Slater with his bag (possibly an accident, or possibly assault, a second violation). Instead of apologizing for the whack, the passenger “cursed at” the employee.

That’s the point at which Mr Slater lost control, berating the passenger on the plane’s p.a. system, announcing his resignation to everyone, deploying an escape chute, and sliding out on it.

Haven’t we all wanted to do that, or something like it, at one point or another?

He was arrested at his home in Belle Harbor, Queens, a few miles from the airport, and charged with felony counts of criminal mischief and reckless endangerment.

“When they hit that emergency chute, it drops down quickly within seconds,” a law enforcement official said. “If someone was on the ground and it came down without warning, someone could be injured or killed.”

In a statement, JetBlue said it was working with the Federal Aviation Administration and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to investigate the episode. “At no time was the security or safety of our customers or crew members at risk,” the company said.

OK, I know the airline has to make quite sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen, and treating it too lightly might encourage other employees to behave in kind. Mr Slater should clearly be sacked, though that hardly seems to matter, given that he’d already said au revoir. But arrest him? Please, “reckless endangerment” seems quite a stretch. And the two quotes above are contradictory, one saying that someone could have been killed and the other saying that no one was ever at risk.^[2]

And why was Mr Slater arrested, and not the passenger, who, as I noted above, committed at least one infraction, and maybe two? By all accounts, it’s the passenger who was the truly nasty one in this incident.

But we’re far too quick to go arresting people lately, especially with regard to anything involving air travel. We need some perspective.

Then we have this:

The episode is the latest round in what is seen as an increasingly hostile relationship between airlines and passengers.

Uh-oh. There’s that unattributed passive voice that NY Times standards editor Philip Corbett often complains about. Who sees it that way, exactly? Let’s be specific, here. The examples they give are a couple of the sort that we can expect every now and then. I haven’t been hearing of a spate of bloodletting on airplanes, and we all know that luggage gets damaged here and there. An occasional case of employees involved in a theft ring isn’t surprising either.

I dare to think that an increase in complaints posted to the Internet might simply be due to more people posting things to the Internet over time, what with the ubiquity of Twitter, Facebook, and various blogs. And let’s be realistic: when someone creates a web site called airlinecomplaints.org, what do we expect to see there, in large quantities?

But here’s a telling statement:

While JetBlue’s flight attendants are not unionized, a spokeswoman for the Association of Flight Attendants, Corey Caldwell, said anxieties were common on planes. “Anyone who has traveled since Sept. 11 understands that being in the cabin is stressful these days,” Ms. Caldwell said.

Hm, and whose fault is that? It’s more stressful than it needs to be, because of our overreactions to imagined threats. We’re dealing just fine with idiots who attempt to detonate their shoes and their underpants, without a need to be either overbearing (the flight crew) or rebellious (the passengers). Everyone just needs to recognize that the stress is self-generated, and calm down and lighten up.

I do a lot of travelling by plane, and that’s how I see it. I’m not stressed. It’s all OK. There’s no reason for either side, here, to let its collective blood pressure get out of control.

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^[1] OK, not “postal”, exactly; he didn’t pull out any weapons. I’m taking some liberty here.

^[2] We could take it as creative wording: maybe the only people “at risk” were airport employees, who might have been on the ground, but who aren’t “customers or crew members”. Still....

Flight notes

I’m visiting the Huawei “mother ship” this week — not the corporate one in Shenzhen, but the U.S. one in Plano, Texas. Meeting my co-workers, getting some projects started, that sort of thing. It’ll be a cool week.

Well, a nifty week; it’s certainly hot here. Of course, it was hot in New York, too, when I left.

I flew out here yesterday, and, so, for today, just a couple of notes related to flying:

1. It sure is flat out here, and it’s interesting to watch the landscape below from the air. It was a clear day, with just scattered, fluffy clouds, and I had a window seat (full flight; I usually take the aisle), so I could see the ground all the way.
2. US Airways has put advertising on the tray tables. Icko. We really need advertising everywhere? This is a good reason to avoid that airline, in my opinion.
3. That said, I suppose I could have been on JetBlue.

One nail in Prop 8’s coffin

After a busy IETF meeting and a nice few days off in Bruges and Brussels (photos forthcoming, when I get time to sort through them), and a break from both news and blogging (I’ve written somewhere in these pages about being out of touch with the news when I’m travelling), I have a few moments to write. I thought I’d mention what was one of the most significant news items I missed last week:

A U.S. District Court has tossed out Proposition 8, that vile, homophobic ban on same-sex marriage in California.

Proposition 8 cannot withstand any level of scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause, wrote Judge Walker. Excluding same-sex couples from marriage is simply not rationally related to a legitimate state interest.

Indeed, and well said. And one has to laugh at things like this:

But Andrew Pugno, a lawyer for the defense, said Proposition 8 had nothing to do with discrimination, but rather with the will of California voters who simply wished to preserve the historic definition of marriage.

The other side’s attack upon their good will and motives is lamentable and preposterous, Mr. Pugno said in a statement.

Preposterous? Right, they really just want an old-married-couples’ club. They don’t want those people to be able to join, but that’s not discrimination, not at all. Oy.

Nothing is settled yet, of course; this will clearly be appealed. The Ninth Circuit will have to weigh in — they’ll almost certainly uphold this decision. And then it’ll go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Maybe we can hope for a Scalia resignation before that happens.

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Update, 19 Aug: The delays continue. Here is Thom’s blog post (see his comment to this entry) from yesterday.

So, what was I doing on Monday, the day the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied my right — you may argue that it merely delayed it, again, but the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., accurately noted that a right delayed is a right denied — to marry the man I love, the man with whom I’ve spent the past seven years, and the man I intend to be with until the day one of us stops breathing? What sinful, un-American civilization-destroying immorality was I indulging the day our hopes were dashed again?

Go read the whole thing.

It’s the Netherlands; coffee isn’t the plant of interest