In a Mirror, Darkly

From a week ago Sunday on This Week, George Stephanopoulous interviews Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) and makes Santorum his bitch (emp. mine):

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let’s move on to another controversy you stirred up, the question of the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic church. You made a statement in July 2002 which has drawn a lot of fire.You said, in a publication called Catholic On-Line, When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While there’s no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.
You’ve reaffirmed that just a couple of weeks ago. Ted Kennedy, John Kerry say you have to apologize. Mitt Romney, Republican governor, says basically you don’t know what you’re talking about.Do you still stand by that statement?

SANTORUM: Look, the statement I made was that the culture influences people’s behavior. I don’t think anyone…

STEPHANOPOULOS: Isn’t that what conservatives used to say about liberals, when they used to say they were trying to excuse criminals?

SANTORUM: I think what I’m saying is that the culture of liberal sexual freedom and the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s had a profound impact on everybody and their sexual mores. It had a profound impact on the church.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you singled out Boston in…

SANTORUM: I singled out Boston in 2002. In July of 2002, that was the epicenter. We did not know…

STEPHANOPOULOS: That is simply not true. I went back and looked at all of these clips. We had stories in 1994, going back all the way to 1984 in Louisiana, in just about every archdiocese in the country.I just don’t understand why you stick by this, because we now know it was widespread. It was in every city in the country.

SANTORUM: Well, at the time, we did not know it was in every city of the country.

STEPHANOPOULOS: We knew a lot of that.

SANTORUM: It was — look at the press reports. It was the epicenter.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I have them right here.

SANTORUM: I think it’s taking it out of context…

STEPHANOPOULOS: Los Angeles Times, January 29, 1994, it cites instances of abuse in Santa Fe and Chicago, as well as Lafayette, Louisiana, and Camden, New Jersey. 1994.
SANTORUM: I understand that it was in other places. All I’m talking about, at the time, what everyone was focused on at the time was Boston.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you stand by it?

SANTORUM: Look, I will admit that Boston is — that using Boston at the time was appropriate. Now, I would not say it would be appropriate. I would say that Boston right now would — we’d say a whole lot of other cities in the country and a whole lot of problems.But if you read the article, that was one of about four or five things that I said…

STEPHANOPOULOS: I did read it.

SANTORUM: … and I talked about the problems within the church.I wrote the article in 2002. Ted Kennedy and John Kennedy wrote no articles in 2002 criticizing this church. I went out and talked to bishops. I went out and talked to cardinals. I was very concerned. I was offended and hurt by a church that betrayed me by not doing what they should have done, and I was angered by that, and I spoke out about it, and I spoke loudly about it. The senators from Massachusetts did nothing. They spoke nothing. They sat by and let this happen.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you’re standing your ground.
Let’s talk…
SANTORUM: And I’m standing my ground because I tried to fight to change the church.

...and perhaps a change of venue too?

"The White House dropped the phrase `war on terror' when polls showed no one thought we were winning it. They think they know how to make it more popular. They're going to stop calling it `war on terror' and start calling it `Shrek 3.'"--Argus Hamilton, comedian and columnist (Via Time magazine)

Swiped from Kos where is other amusing snarkiness.

If you immediately know the candlelight is fire...

... then the meal was cooked a long time ago.

I finally get it!

Who's Who

I was placed in Who's Who this week.

ohhh!!! ahhhh!!

I know this because the publisher called me and offered me, for the miserly sum of $900 + tax, the following package, exclusive to Who's Who members:

A leather-bound copy of Who’s Who 2006
A wood veneer plaque with my name and company logo laser inscribed! laser!
A 100 word biography and my photo in WW-2006
Other goodies.

Me:"I'm thrilled! I'd love to do this with the 'Deluxe Package'"

Salesguy: "Terrific! Let me just..."

Me: "Unfortunately, my participation in the Federal Witness Protection Program prohibits me from appearing in such compendium, especially those international in scope. You did say this was the Worldwide Who's Who, right?"

Salesguy: "Yes! yes! World wide. Did you say..."

Me: "ah, yes, well my hands are tied then"

…
I am such an ass.

Although I might go to the trophy shop and make a plaque now...

A Wag at Work

There is a case of Hienekin in the soda fridge at work this morning. On it there is a sign which reads, "Do not Eat before the All Hands Social tonight at 5pm"

Someone corrected the sign to read "Eat Drink"

A few minutes later some wag changed it to "Eat Drink Be Merry "

Currently Reading: When Genius Failed

If you liked Liar's Poker, go get WGF.

'nuff said!

Raw, Hot, Steaming Pile of Marketing (goodness)

It's rare, but once in awhile a co-worker says something so sincerely, so honestly and so fundementally at odds with anything rational humans would call productive that it borders on a Zen Koan.

For example, a co-worker sent this today, very sincerely beleiving it would get us to buy into his expensive $50 million (as yet unfunded) project:

"This is one more reason for projects like Solution Integrator, which add value to the customer centric business model, and make the partner centric business model more attractive to enterprise customers."

I'm.... quite stunned.

Students for an Orwellian Society

This is really beautiful.

War Is Peace
Oceania (commonly called the US and Britain) is at war with Afghanistan Iraq. Oceania has always been at war with Afghanistan Iraq.
Eurasia (commonly called Russia, Pakistan, etc.) is allied with Oceania in war against Afghanistan. Eurasia has always been allied with Oceania.
US Congressman Charlie Rangel has been arguing for a return of military conscription (“The Draft”) as—so he tells the public— a way of reducing war.
It's not easy to capture someone killed the year before—until you harness the power of Ingsoc. When you've got Ingsoc on your side, though, it's so easy that the US did it again.
Three cheers for Homeland Security drone patrols!
In order to fight terrorism, we must cause it, says Donald Rumsfeld.
It's okay that there were no “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq; that's not why we went to war. It's equally okay that there are so many of them in Oceania.
The Nobel prize committee has been considering nominating George Bush and Tony Blair for their prestigious Peace prize.
Just like in 1984's Room 101, the Miniluv operations in Guantánamo Bay were authorized to “exploit[] a prisoner's phobias, sometimes using muzzled dogs in interrogations.” Doubleplusgood!
According to the Bush administration, the Duelfer report which conclusively showed that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq actually justifies the war in Iraq.
“I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace.” — George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States
“Protecting [an] Islamic cultural center” involves fighting a war inside it, as the New York Times on the Web shows.

Picked up in the Infinitely Fertile Fields of Research of Lee.org

Responsible Disclosure

In an email conversation today on the this interesting article:

LAS VEGAS – The annual Black Hat computer-security conference has become a forum for experts to disclose vulnerabilities in tech products, often rankling the products' makers. But few companies go to the lengths that Cisco Systems Inc. did this week to suppress information about a flaw in its software that directs Internet traffic.
Cisco threatened legal action to stop the conference's organizers from allowing a 24-year-old researcher for a rival tech firm to discuss how he says hackers could seize control of Cisco's Internet routers, which dominate the market. Cisco also instructed workers to tear 20 pages outlining the presentation from the conference program and ordered 2,000 CDs containing the presentation destroyed.
In the end, the researcher, Michael Lynn, went ahead with a presentation, describing flaws in Cisco's software that he said could allow hackers to take over corporate and government networks and the Internet, intercepting and misdirecting data communications. Mr. Lynn, wearing a white hat emblazoned with the word "Good," spoke after quitting his job at Internet Security Systems Inc. Wednesday. Mr. Lynn said he resigned because ISS executives had insisted he strike key portions of his presentation.

XXX: It's irresponsible! Like yelling fire in a movie theatre or [...]
Mark: or "Jihad" in a crowded mosque...

Live Every Day as if Your Hair is on Fire

-Buddhist proverb

A followup thought from the previous post (below).

This advice was given to me in grad school by my advisor and was one of the few things he said that actually turned out to be useful. Birthday 41 is next week and, to be frank, I didn't expect to live this long so my expectations of additional years is 0. I've been clinically dead twice and, after the last time, I've always tried to live with the expectation that if I need to get something done, I'd better do it sooner rather than later. Much sooner. It's a philosophy which really helps prioritize the important things and helps brush away the seemingly important but long term trivial (e.g. filling out forms at work vs. actually fixing people's security problems). It also encourages a higher level of risk taking than average, leading me to travel to around the world, quit jobs I don't like, ignore people who waste my time etc.

It's good advice and I highly recommend it. There is never a guarantee the sun will rise tomorrow.

There is also an interesting paradox here with religion, although I may be conflating personality with religious tenants. I'm an atheist and don't believe in an afterlife, so it would seem that my priority should be extending my lifespan at all costs. Instead I've opted for the "enjoy it while you can" model, which has led (immodestly said) to a richer more interesting life than the alternative.
OTOH, many Christians I know, who are as certain of the afterlife as they are of the sunrise, tend to go to greater lengths to avoid some risks and are strong advocates of life extension/digital uploading etc. in order to keep living as long as possible. Given that Heaven is supposed to be.. well... heaven, I've never understood the mania to avoid death. I went to UMass with an astronomer/born-again who spent hours each day trying to eliminate any possibility of consuming food she might have been allergic to, biking 50 or 60 miles and in general going to great lengths to extend her human life as long as possible. And I never got a very convincing reason why. She didn't think she was going to Hell, that much was certain.

Dunno. I'm not saying one way is better than the other in general, I am saying I know what works for me.

Universal Remote Watch

I'm turning 41 next week and my son has gotten me something cool for my birthday, a watch with a universal remote control!

I've always wanted to control the universe and now I can do it from my watch! How cool is that?

Now THIS is something to brag about...

??? This just raises all sorts of terrible questions

One of the TOP 8 Flatulence sites for New Zealand

On the Beat with the Grammar Police

From the WaPo:

Heir CutsThe Congressional Budget Office recently found that, contrary to what we've always believed, only a couple of dozen or so farmers would benefit from repeal of the estate tax -- dubbed the "death tax" because of its painful effects on the dead.

"painful effects on the dead"

?????????

Yelling Fire in a crowd

"It's interesting that people laugh when you say, 'My probation officer doesn't let me have candles or fire-related objects anymore' to a room full of financial services people."
...
" but it's more interesting when you say it to a room full of developers and a third or so nod knowingly..."

Agreeing with people I don't like.

I'm always somewhat suspicious when I agree with people I don't like, and this view of Michael Savage leaves me with an uneasy feeling that I've missed something. Like when I agree with Derbyshire...

The Savage Nation vs. the Bushbots

"What makes Bush a conservative?" Savage asked when I got him on the phone the other day. "On the economy, Bush has got more governmental workers than anybody before him. He's ballooned the government."
As regards the so-called "war on terror," Savage points out that you can't win a war when you're afraid even to name the enemy.
"He's never mentioned Islamofascism," said Savage.

...

As for the rest of the radio talkers, "They may as well work for the Republican Party. There's nothing interesting if you can predict what a man's going to say by just going to the GOP Web site."
He's certainly got that right. Listening to an endless rehash of Karl Rove's talking points, leavened by a few Teddy Kennedy- is-a-drunk jokes, is not very entertaining.

I read something recently which, while I can't verify, seems true, i.e. there is more diversity of opinion in the left side of the blogosphere than on the right in part becuase the right needs to follow the approved talking points to keep the sharade going. The left is free to throw stones at everything or (in exceptionally rare cases) actually propose new, innovataive ideas. Not that I've seen many of those from the left but, to be fair, I haven't seen them from the right either.

Book Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Eh.. In for a penny, in for a pound and all. I read it on the plane from Seattle to Atlanta. A qucik read, very dark, lots of deaths, waaaay too much hype.

Someone I might like to vote for

... providing his views are compatible with mine. I certainly like his attitude:

Schmidt commends Hackett for his service, but believes Hackett should "stand with the president" by "supporting the Iraqi war effort and our troops that are over there," her campaign manager Joe Braun said. (Through Braun, Schmidt declined to speak with Salon.)

When asked to answer that charge, Hackett is blunt: "The only way I know how to support the troops is by going over there." He doesn't hesitate to criticize Schmidt's support of the war: "All the chicken hawks back here who said, 'Oh, Iraq is talking bad about us. They're going to threaten us' - look, if you really believe that, you leave your wife and three kids and go sign up for the Army or Marines and go over there and fight. Otherwise, shut your mouth." (Emphasis added.)

Schmidt is one of those republicans who is patriotic to the president, not the country. I like seeing one of them called on it. The Hackett/Schmidt election is Aug 2nd.

Reasoning by Analogy

One of my pet peeves is reasoning by analogy. Don't get me wrong, it's often a useful pedagogical tool and has some place in science and argument. My problem is that people use it too freely and often grossly overextend analogies and come to strange conclusions.

For example, in Reason this week there is an mildly interesting article on creationism:

So what "speculations" do creationists wish to destroy? In his talk, "Fossils, the Flood and the Age of the Earth," Dr. Tas Walker, a former Australian mining engineer, takes a whack at old Earth geology. Walker says that Noah's Flood is needed to produce fossils. Why? The conventional explanation for how fossils form is that, say, a dinosaur dies, falls into a swamp or ocean, and sinks to the bottom; there the bones are covered by layers of silt and eventually turn into stone.

Walker says that this scenario is very unlikely. He illustrates his point with the humble example of what happens to a dead fish in an aquarium. Dead fish don't sink; they are eaten by other aquarium denizens, leaving nothing to fossilize. As further evidence, Walker adds that nature documentaries showing the bottom of the oceans do not find it littered with the bodies of dead fish waiting to be fossilized. The only way to fossilize a dead fish in an aquarium is to dump a bunch of concrete on it before it's eaten. QED, Noah's Flood was the moral equivalent of dumping concrete on all the fossilized animals found in rocks today.

Since it doesn't happen in my fish tank, it must be impossible even if you have trillions of organisms over millions of years...

He should be made to wear an asshat.

odor of sanctity

From TJIC, Chief Potantate of Research for TJICistan:

google on the phrase "odor of sanctity":
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22odor+of+sanctity%22&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:unofficial

Rogue catholic priests; people who believe in The Matrix (and speak ofdying as "leaving this space-time continuum" ; Medieval swedishsaints...and a George W Bush campaign speech.Yowza.

Left unanswered is why Travis was pursuing this line of inquiry...

Econometrics of Airports

Adding to my list of "Things the Market tends to Screw-Up because people don't make rational choices".

Airport Delays
Take airports like Atlanta, Washington-Dulles, and Newark, which are dominated by a single carrier. If the tragedy of the commons theory bore out, then these airports would be less tardy, because a dominant carrier has an incentive to take into account the delays that it causes by crowding the runways. That's why the solution that economists always offer for the tragedy of the commons is to give one entity an exclusive property right. Yet Atlanta, Dulles, and Newark are among the top 10 tardiest airports in the country. In a study of more than 65 million flights over 12 years, economists Christopher Mayer at Columbia Business School and Todd Sinai at Wharton business school recently found only a small correlation between the dominance of a single carrier at an airport and the length of flight delays.

Mayer and Sinai's study also identified the real culprit: the deliberate overscheduling of flights at peak periods by major airlines trying to increase the amount of connecting traffic at their hub airports. Major airlines like United, Delta, and American use a hub-and-spoke model as a way to offer consumers more flight choices and to save money by centralizing operations. Most of the traffic they send through a hub is on the way to somewhere else. (Low-cost carriers, on the other hand, typically carry passengers from one point to another without offering many connections.) Overscheduling at the hubs can't explain all delays—weather and maintenance problems also contribute. But nationally, about 75 percent of flights go in or out of hub airports, making overscheduling the most important factor.