Colby Cosh rants today about Edmonton's civic leaders and their ideas for a new slogan. It reminds me of people naming companies these days. Very silly. But I wonder if Palo Alto's recent activities top Edmonton for silliness: the City Council is drafting rules about frowning. This is hardly a scoop -- Floyd McWilliams and LawMuse also blogged about this on Apr 21 and Apr 8.

Another antic I heard about recently concerned Palo Alto and extremely nitpicky noise regulations, applying not only different decibel limits to different zoned areas and different times but also to different frequencies. This is usually done with respect to noise from airports and leaf blowers, but in this case allegedly the city hired analysts to measure the noise level of skateboarders to see if skateboarding ever exceeds the decibel limit, which it didn't (barely). Somebody is so keen to get rid of local skateboarders that he's attempting to get the noise regulations changed to use frequency-dependent adjustments for the sound frequencies generated by skateboarders. I'll take bets that frequency-dependent adjustments will never lead to increasing the noise permitted at any frequency -- this is all about making regulations more stringent. Sorry I couldn't find exact references to the skateboarding hater.

Michael Moore is planning a new documentary about the Bin Laden and Bush families for release before the 2004 elections (link via Michael). It seems likely to be immensely popular but divisive and polarizing. Some hope it "works" in the sense that it discredits G. W. Bush sufficiently so that he isn't reelected. That may backfire depending on how it polarizes.

A Sunday Herald article (link via Michael) indirectly accuses US of plans to loot Iraqi antiques. While the article doesn't say anything outright, it implies that because the US administration met with a group of wealthy art dealers before the war so that the group could "offer its assistance in preserving the country's invaluable archaeological collections". Note that this is inconsistent with the other accusations being made that the US military is negligently not protecting certain sites, thus allowing random looters (locals/Iraqis) to grab these antiques. If there was some pre-war plan approved by the administration to benefit from Iraq's antiques, why would that looting have been allowed?

Update: Michael thinks these aren't inconsistent, that the US administration did not approve a plan to formally loot the antiques but may have hinted to these art dealers that the valuables would be unprotected, thus allowing these dealers to send in their agents. Still seems unlikely to me:

On Tuesday, Secretary of State Colin Powell vowed that the United States will aid in "recovering" and "restoring" the lost treasures. (ref)

Den Beste makes fun of the new French "pragmatism". Apparently the White House doesn't know what this means:

Colonna said Chirac had informed Bush of France's desire to "act pragmatically and case by case," especially on issues such as Iraqi disarmament, handling of sanctions, interim government, oil resources, administration and reconstruction.

The White House expressed puzzlement at the what Chirac meant by a "pragmatic" role for France.

"It was an interesting choice of words. I don't know exactly, literally, what to make of it. I think that's something that France can explain. I think that they may be seeking to find what role they may be able to play," Fleischer said.

Like Den Beste, I think "acting pragmatically" means "don't hold a grudge". From the same ABC News article, however: "It did not appear that Bush was ready to let bygones be bygones".

This Novell strategy article is amazing (link via Ditherati. Novell should fire their CEO Jack Messman. His contributions to the article:

In the short term, the advantage to CIOs is with NetWare, they have a more mature and robust operating system. Over time, that gap will diminish.

Great, so the CEO is telling customers that his company's software is only a short term advantage.

... an opportunity to answer the question as to what the migration path is for NetWare. Because people said, 'It's a dead-end path, so maybe I ought to switch.'

Now he's telling us his own customers consider NetWare a dead-end path.

... the non-Novell IT community's biggest misconception about the company was that it was " legacy and disappearing", which he blamed on the company's poor marketing.

Messman, don't you run marketing (since 2001 he has been CEO, president and chairman of the board)?

We were an engineering-focused company. We never listened to the customer.

Clearly.

Bill at work asked after my quilting, and I promised to get a picture of my recently completed quilt. I'm embarrassed it's not square, but other than that I'm quite happy with the effect on the wall. It's sparkly because of using several kinds of sparkly thread and glass beading.

The quilt started off pretty flat and rectangular, but it got bumpy when I added the thick threads through machine quilting (with thick threads in the bobbin). That quilted out a bit with the hand quilting, but it got worse again with a poor binding job I intend to redo someday. Let this be a lesson if you're a quilter - stop when your quilt starts getting unsquare and figure out why. Here are some more images of it:

• Large and medium resolution versions of exact same picture
• Detailed image from top center and bottom center
• Extremely detailed picture of bottom center, showing a bunch of quilting and beading. The quilting includes grey hand stitching parallel lines at top, silver hand stitching inside curve; machine stitched thick glittery thread straight across and thick variegated cotton yarn in the curve (both done in the bobbin of the machine).

The last extremely detailed picture is why I bought the camera I did (Minolta Dimage 3.2 megapixel).
Here are some more quilt picture links for Bill:

• Hexagonal baby blocks
• Iterated Function Set (and detail)
• Irish Chain
• Snowball
• Storm at Sea variation

As I discussed a couple days ago, my Mom thinks China is deterred from invading Taiwan at least in part through the pressure of the international community to respect sovereign boundaries. Dan Simon thinks "China is ... largely immune to American military pressure, because of its large army and nuclear deterrent." Ekr thinks China is completely held back by fear of American military retaliation -- that without the 5th Fleet in Asia, China would long ago have invaded.

Personally, I don't know enough to know why China hasn't invaded Taiwan. I don't know that much about military deployments or about what kind of things the Chinese government fears. But basic logic tells me you'd have to come up with a good reason why China is deterred from doing something it has clearly stated it wants to do ("liberate" Taiwan) if you assert that American might is not the reason.

Dan's comment was a throwaway in a much longer post mostly not about China, so he probably means that American military pressure has only certain effects on China. Presumably China can get away with a lot without fear of any US action, but knows where the lines in the sand (or sea) are drawn.

I had a great discussion with my Mom today on why as a Canadian (even though she isn't habitually anti-American), she has always opposed the war (even though she is glad it seems to be ending so quickly and cleanly) and therefore she is still glad that Chretien (even though she is habitually anti-Chretien) took a principled stand and kept Canada out of it. Basically, she fully supports a world governing body, and believes that the only legitimate reason to invade a sovereign nation is with the support of the UN. I think she and I agree that the UN ought to have done something about Iraq but she still feels that the US should not have acted without the support of the UN.

Part of what's fueling her position is that she talks a lot of foreigners, particularly Chinese but also many others. In her work she talks to them quite often about current events. Since she's Canadian, these people are quite ready to express their hatred of the US. Some of her Chinese students explained to her that the Iraqi ringleader in the famous footage of toppling the Saddam statue was an exiled Iraqi opposition party leader who had just been flown in from the US by the US armed forces in order to encourage "spontaneous" anti-Saddam demonstrations. Even though my Mom tends not to credit such conspiracy theories, she does take the stories as evidence of very strong anti-American feeling which is getting continually stronger to the detriment of global cooperation in future actions (e.g. potentially North Korea). Not only that, she says, but a unilateral US invasion only encourages other countries, such as China who might want to "liberate" Taiwan.

I have mostly seen anti-American sentiment expressed as extremely strong anti-Bush sentiment from Americans, but then again I'm not in the same situation as my Mom. I don't discuss current events routinely with foreigners and even if I did they might be uncomfortable expressing their hatred to a US resident on US soil.

I have an article in Network World Fusion! I didn't do all the work -- Quinn Daly did a significant amount of the work to get this article to press.

Just think of what developments like these could mean to victims of major natural disasters like mud-slides, earthquakes and hurricanes. From Tech Central Station:

In the past, the wounded were stabilized with first-aid and transported far to the rear to field hospitals for life-saving surgery. But now, recognizing the importance of early intervention, the surgical teams are being brought to the wounded... Special operations medics can carry enough equipment on their back to start intravenous lines, secure compromised airways, and do minor surgery in the field.

We ought to create an infrastructure such that teams of these kinds of medics and more can be dropped within eight hours anywhere in the world. Now that would be worthwhile. The article also mentions some war-proved advances in bandages and clotting. The technical descriptions make me shudder, particularly the thought of zeolite crystals sprinkled on an open wound. But hey, it's nice they can be used for more than just metaphysical healing.

PMStyle has a post on how wireless kills some bad meetings, with an entertaining list of meetings. He forgot one: the review. This can be the meeting where you review somebody's code, somebody's specification, or the famous "post-mortem" review meeting where blame gets assigned for any failings the last project had. Now wireless doesn't get you out of these reviews, but it's not so bad. After all, you can have a lot of fun at most review meetings -- you're usually there to criticize the specification or code, which can be entertaining. And wireless can help you dig up more information to damn the stuff being reviewed. "Did you know that all the functionality you have been coding for the past three weeks is provided by a free library I just downloaded? Oh, I guess you didn't, too bad you wasted all that time." Does it ever make you think of Mao's communist party criticism meetings?

Confirmation bias may be one of the most pernicious effects in social or democratic decision making, turning a crack into a chasm whenever people feel differently about a complicated or emotional issue. On Light of Reason Silber has a lengthy post on this (link via Kleiman). CalPundit Kevin Drum says that frequently one hears complaints that "all the other guys are biased".

I've been noticing this recently myself -- I recently had a discussion with somebody quite anti-Bush who believes Bush has gotten a free pass from the press until recently. However I also recall Clinton haters who believed that Clinton got off too lightly. More generally, the shouts about a "liberal media" or a "corporate controlled media" show a perception that any evidence we don't like disturbs us and tends to make us look for conspiracy. This speaks to Kleiman's point that there is an "eagerness to attribute differences in perception to ill-will".

What to do? Kleiman suggests that he looks for disconfirming evidence, rather than confirming evidence. Silber and Drum both look at antiwar and prowar information sources, and Silber argues persuasively that a responsible person ought to look for and disseminate information on what's going on, rather than evidence that they were right. It's been suggested that scientists should "discard a pet hypothesis every morning before breakfast" to get used to not holding unconfirmed opinions so close to the heart.

So far so good, but I worry about a fragmentation of our news sources making confirmation bias worse. Now that we bloggers have lists of blogs we like and visit frequently, are we in an ever-increasing spiral of confirming our own biases? The filtering function of blogs means that there's an amplification of the tendency to notice only confirming information. I don't intend to point a finger only at blogs. For example, Canada now has the National Post (right wing and more pro-American) allowing the Globe and Mail to potentially be more left wing -- and allowing Canadians to confirm their own biases via their preferred national paper. We have increasing numbers of sites like IndyMedia and Reason and most of us don't visit both. An explosion in news sources may be a good thing overall, but its worthwhile being aware of the dangers too.

Here's an even worse thought, in its way. Taking a public stand is known to increase one's commitment and increase one's desire to remain consistent with that commitment (Cialdini, Influence). Bloggers, anti-war protesters and people who write letters to the editor are all ordinary people taking very public stands. This can be good -- it increases the participation in public discourse. But it can also be bad, making these very people extremely reluctant to change their views. For example, the environmentalist and peace movements both do a great job of getting people active and on the record for supporting the environment and peace. Once people are on the record -- even if it's only a letter to the editor exhorting better recycling in your community, or attending one peace rally -- these people are now less likely to notice information that indicates that a particular invasion might be justified, or that certain kinds of recycling are a waste of resources.

Update: An interesting paper on confirmation bias in anti-biotech sentiment suggests that the structure of the Internet worsens confirmation bias -- people may avoid clicking on links that could disconfirm their position. Too bad the report writer didn't try to disconfirm that hypothesis itself, e.g. through testing.

Catching up on my Colby Cosh reading, I find this gem:

Like most protests, it is--by the kindest interpretation--a self-involved, essentially childish exercise, a dumbshow designed to appeal to wholly ignoble collective sentiments.

Yes, it is a premise of democracy that if plenty of people agree with you, you're quite likely right. But it is a premise of liberal democracy that we will use rational persuasion and balloting to resolve issues. No one has yet explained to me what marching and shouting has to do with that...

Buttafly says something similar:

I figured this [SF protest] would be the perfect opportunity to hear a summary of the anti-war position to help me make up my mind once and for all. About 20 yards and 10 minutes into the protest I realized that it wasn't going to happen. I wasn't going to be able to consider the merits of the anti-war arguments because none were being made.

Even reasonable people who are against war (Sorenson in SFGate) may not like or approve of anti-war protests:

Marching in San Francisco to stop a war in Iraq is a fine, fine example of wasted energy. Protest marches, like petitions, are exercises in futility.

I saw a April Fool war protest in San Francisco last week - the sign that caught my eye was "More Blood for Oil" then "Gays for War" or something like that. It was a surreal little parade and not immediately obvious. At least the small crowd (30?) waited for street lights and didn't obstruct traffic or destroy anything as far as I could see. Apparently one happened in Portland too, better photographed.

Gonzo was a character on the Muppet Show. Gonzo also means beserk, or kamikaze, almost. Now there's gonzo journalism, gonzo marketing and gonzo programming. What came first, the muppet name or the word? I must know. Merriam-Webster doesn't know, but A Word A Day says "Perhaps from Italian gonzo (simpleton) or Spanish ganso (dull or fool, literally a goose)." It also says that Bill Cardoso coined the word in 1971 and Hunter S. Thompson was the first to use it.

Pedantry has a couple posts about how differently two media sources will spin the same war information. That's definitely true. What's sad in addition is that each part of the population only registers those articles that confim its biases.

Natasha has advice on passing as a Canadian overseas.

I watched Shaolin Drunken Monk with Ekr last night. He applies "a ridiculous amount of math" to gauge the plausibility of the plot.

Last weekend I read "Hubbert's Peak" by Deffeyes when I was in Canada. This book explains the prediction by King Hubbert that world oil production would peak around 2003 because oil discovery and oil production can be fitted to a logistic bell curve. I don't have the book with me any more but a fair amount of the material from the book is also available online through the previous link. I also discussed it with my Dad who is also a petroleum engineer but who isn't afraid of economics.

Deffeyes is a fine petroleum geologist and an entertaining writer, too. He does a great job of explaining how oil discovery has matured in the last century, and why previous predictions of oil production peaks were wrong -- a natural history of oil, as David Isenberg puts it in his review. For example, around 1910 people were predicting the US would run out of oil in 5-10 years. However, petroleum geologists found new ways to identify where oil could be found, drilling technology was improved, and US production made it through that "crisis" and several more. Deffeyes explanations of oil discovery and drilling technology are quite interesting.

In the late 50s, King Hubbert noticed that conventional oil discoveries in continental US had peaked, and he calculated that since oil production followed oil discoveries by about 11 years, that conventional oil production would peak in 1970 or shortly thereafter. He was right, and conventional US oil production does follow a logistic bell curve. Then Hubbert applied this analysis to world oil production and predicted a peak of I think 1999. Deffeyes uses Hubbert's analysis with additional information on offshore reserves (which Hubbert could not have predicted since offshore drilling wasn't technically feasible then) and predicts that world oil production peaks around 2003.

Hubbert's peak analysis seems basically to be sound, but a naive understanding of the analysis leads to very poor forecasts and planning.

1. The justification for choosing a logistic curve is still a little weak. Ideally, to justify this model you'd like to have a number of natural resources for which production peaked and descended back toward zero while demand still existed. That's very hard to find, because most resources (gold, silver, copper) have not peaked in production. Other resources have peaked in production (coal in some areas) but only because the resource was replaced by more effective resources and demand massively declined.
2. One of the earliest and best examples is Pennsylvania coal production. This peaked and declined far enough in the past that we can see the roughly symmetrical bell-shaped production curve quite easily. This is shown in Deffeyes' book with numbers, but I sketched a rough example.

   

   Some other historical peaks:

   • US continental conventional oil production
   • Canadian continental (Alberta) conventional oil production
   • UK sector North Sea oil production
   However, note that we don't yet have the full tails for most of these curves and we can't yet say they're symmetrical. Possibly the Pennsylvania coal production curve was so nicely symmetrical by accident - other coal reserves were found in other areas, transportation became cheaper, and/or demand was reduced in such a way to make the tail neatly symmetrical.
3. The symmetrical tail seems to show most clearly only when the geographical production region and the type of oil are closely defined. When one kind of oil and one location is cheaper than other kinds of oil from other locations, clearly we pump that oil until we run out and need to move to other types and other regions.
4. Even if we agree that an unfettered locally-limited carefully-defined oil production curve would be a normal distribution, oil production isn't unfettered -- it's currently limited by cartel quotas and regional unrest. That would imply a flattened peak, which doesn't tell you where the mid-point of the peak is unless you know how much it has flattened.
   
5. Technological advances can only have one effect - to slow the decline if not reverse it. Improvements in extracting oil from reserves that had previously been considered tapped (which Deffeyes explains has happened several times) may make the curve look more like this.
   
   This slow decline being borne out by data as we get more examples of peaking production.

So although it's tempting to make plans based on a 2003 world oil production peak, don't do anything drastic. Canada/Alberta offers an example why. Conventional oil production from Alberta peaked in a classic Hubbert curve in about 1976. Heavy oil production took over, however, and that kind of oil peaked in 1984. National oil production dropped 5 to 6% from its peak in 1984 but since then has gone up again because tar sands oil extraction is now economically feasible. So Canada experienced a drastic and sudden increase in economical oil reserves when tar sands entered the picture: an increase of 315 billion barrels, or roughly one sixth of total world conventional oil reserves. If you add these curves together they look more like this.

Deffeyes puts some of this into perspective in Hubbert's Peak. He does acknowledge the future of natural gas and does a good job of comparing that energy source to oil given today's technology. However, he doesn't look at the big picture the way Julian Simon did and Bjorn Lomborg does now. Even if you disagree with Simon and Lomborg, we should at least agree that what's important is the service provided by energy, more so than an individual energy source. I say "service" because I mean that if we want our homes heated, it doesn't matter what energy source provides that heat or how efficient it is as long as we can afford it (including externalities). So, will world energy services peak when oil production peaks? That's extremely doubtful, given that we have many other energy sources and are getting increasingly efficient at using them.

The next part of the bigger picture, again discussed by Simon and Lomborg, is technological improvements. You can't predict where or how the real technological improvements will change the situation. Deffeyes believes that tar sands and oil shales don't count as oil reserves because it's too costly to extract the useful oil from them. Yet the kind of technology my father works on is bringing tar sands extraction costs to a level that is nearly competitive at today's oil prices. Twenty years ago we suddenly had a lot more oil in existing "reserves" because we discovered that we could shoot steam into existing unproductive wells to force more oil up the well. I don't know what's next, and neither does Deffeyes.

A final note on Deffeyes is his typical disregard for economists. He pooh-poohs the idea that oil discovery responds to economical incentives (higher oil prices), arguing that you can't wring oil from a stone no matter how incentivized you are. However, that's taking too limited a view. Development responds to incentives in one way or another, sometimes in unexpected ways. While you can't always predict quite how people follow incentives you have a pretty good idea what the result will be. Who knows -- maybe someday we will be able to wring oil from stones.

Update: I had to rewrite this today after talking to my Dad and getting a more nuanced view. If you saw this earlier Sunday a.m, it's a fair bit different now.

It always amazes me that charity in the Bay Area is so focused on the Bay Area. Today I have a concrete example. San Jose magazine (a very glossy high-ad-content free magazine) frequently publishes articles on charity and in the April issue (not shown on their site yet) they ask four women what their favourite charities are. Their combined list is:

• Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara
• Santa Clara City Library Foundation
• "arts organizations" such as San Jose Rep
• "women's issues" such as Planned Parenthood Mar Monte
• Santa Clara Medical Alliance
• Los Gatos Rowing Club
• Commonwealth Club
• Emergency Housing Consortium
• Land Trust of Santa Clara County
• Hakone Gardens

All of these are local; only the Commonwealth Club (of California) has some ability to reach residents of other states.

So where's African AIDS issues? Middle East womens' rights? Education in Africa or India? Third-world food aid or clean water programs? Why don't any of these issues even make their collective radar, while gardens and museums and rowing clubs in one of the richest metropolitan areas of the world are? I suppose I'm reasonably pleased that Santa Clara is opening a 80,000-square-foot Central Park library in 2004, but I know the kind of people who will benefit from it -- people like me. I don't need the help. Others do.

This is hilarious -- how to be outright subversive within the massive protest marches.

''Protect Islamic Property Rights Against Western Imperialism! SAY NO TO WAR.''

I no longer live in Seattle, but I still read The Stranger from time to time, it's better than SF's alternatives. This article on being a supporter of the war in the overwhelmingly pro-peace Capitol Hill area is a nice example of how broad The Stranger can be. It also makes a case for supporting a quick victory even if one was originally anti-war:

Understand that the invasion of Iraq has become an ineluctable situation. It would be senseless to extricate ourselves now even if we could. Until things get better, they are going to get worse--there will be more American prisoners of war and more executions; we will lose more helicopters in sandstorms; chemical warfare seems almost a foregone conclusion--and increasingly we are in a race against time: The military will have to accomplish its objectives before the peace movement (which will gain momentum as casualties pile up) accomplishes its objective of obscuring them.

A Capitol-Hill resident, ex drama student, Stranger-article-writing guy under the age of 23 is hardly the stereotypical warmongerer, now is he?

Nicholas Kristof's NYTimes editorial today addresses the same issue as in my next-to-last posting.

We doves simply have to let go of the dispute about getting into this war. It's now a historical question, and the relevant issue, for hawks and doves alike, is how we get out of this war... Creating a postwar Iraq that is free and flourishing is also the one way to recoup the damage this war has already done to America's image and interests.

Ekr now has his own blog. This is Ekr.

From SkyNews, via Command-Post:

During a question and answer session at the end of his speech [French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin] refused to answer the question: "Who do you want to win the war?"

Hoping the US will lose is a stupid position for Westerners, even if you always opposed the war and always will. A loss for the US will first involve the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, both armed forces and civilians. On the other hand, a quick victory for the US has the least loss of lives overall of any reasonable scenario, and any humanitarian should now hope for that outcome. Is it worth it, even to the French, to see so many Arabs die just so that the US superpower gets a bloody nose?

Last week I was at the IETF meeting in San Francisco (making my way through protesters in between meetings). This week I'm at the Information Highways conference. For two Internet-related conferences, the two are as different as night and day, where the night is overcast and the day is rather summery.

IETF had a couple thousand 100% authentic geeks, whereas Information Highways seems to have a few hundred marketing and public relations and purchasing agents. IETF had working groups, emphasis on working, while this conference has "by invitation" breakfast presentations. My presentation later today will include dessert, presumably so people will listen to me.

I'm not entirely knocking this IH conference, you understand -- I'm all in favour of my company being able to market its products in a comfortable environment in which experienced IT people are disposed to hear how useful our stuff could be. It's just not quite my natural milieu!

Security exploit found in IIS 5.0 WebDAV-related code. Of course it has nothing to do with WebDAV as a protocol, it's a typical buffer overflow error.

.NET saves boy down a well. The graphic says it all.

Did you know that the iCal online calendar functionality in Mac OS X can store your calendar on a WebDAV server? Not just Apple's server (which you have to pay to use now I think) but any WebDAV server.

Sadly, it's not compatible with the way Microsoft Exchange does calendaring over WebDAV. The calendaring working group at the IETF long ago rejected the idea of using WebDAV to do any calendar access interoperability despite obvious implementor support.

It's really hard to tell from this if Microsoft is embracing XML or choking it.

I talked to a CIO Magazine editor a couple weeks ago, and here's the outcome of that chat, a short editorial. I guess I come across as pretty serious. It's a little unfortunate that I also come across as not believing in Xythos WFS: "[Lisa] still tells people about free and more feature-rich alternatives to her own employer's products." The truth, as always, is more nuanced. There are free alternatives to WFS and there are alternatives with different feature sets.

I finally ordered the camera I've been thinking about for 8 months last month, and it finally arrived Thursday night. I've hardly had time to play with it, as I hardly have time to do anything this spring other than work and book. But I did manage to take this lovely tea rose image while I was testing out the camera's close-up ability. Click here for full picture.

The camera itself is a Minolta DImage Xi 3.2 megapixel.

At the IETF, I officially work on authoring and instant messaging protocols. I've also been getting interested in some of the more general notification (including instant messaging and presence notification) architecture challenges. Instant messaging and presence are so useful in themselves that people are willing to have an account on a buddy list server, start a separate client and hold open a connection to the server. However, there are many other kinds of notifications users might be interested in getting on their computer or on various devices, and it's not going to be feasible to do them all with new client software, new protocols, new servers and services, and still be managable.
I have finally documented some of the notification architecture issues in a requirements draft for server-to-server notification aggregation.

Brian pointed out this gem of a quote from Ashcroft (ref):

"Quite simply, the illegal drug paraphernalia industry has invaded the homes of families across the country without their knowledge."

Were you worried about an invasion by the drug paraphernalia industry? I wasn't. The article goes on:

"Organizations advocating the legalization of marijuana accused Ashcroft of grandstanding."

I don't think you have to be pro-marijuana to find that grandstanding. Last quote:

"Surely he has something better to do with his time."

Like, have a smoke, and relax, Ashcroft.

Today's NYTimes editorial by Kenneth M. Pollack scares me.

Saddam Hussein believes that once he has acquired nuclear weapons it is the United States that will be deterred. He apparently believes that America will be so terrified of getting into a nuclear confrontation that it would not dare to stop him should he decide to invade, threaten or blackmail his neighbors.

America has never encountered a country that saw nuclear weapons as a tool for aggression. During the cold war we feared that the Russians thought this way, but we eventually learned that they were far more conservative. [...] Only Saddam Hussein sees these weapons as offensive — as enabling aggression.

It's the uncertainty that's so difficult. What's really going on? Does Saddam truly threaten my life and the lives of those like me in Western countries? Are we in greater or less danger if US invades Iraq? What are the costs in human lives on both sides if US does invade Iraq? With so many lives hanging in the balance, it's depressing that we either do not have experts that know the answers, or they're not getting through. So many reasonable-sounding people have such divergent opinions.

One last post for today's prolific blogging: my polygeek percentage. I think my stupid alliteration in the previous post should count extra points for geekistry, but oh well.

You are 50% geek

You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator. Normal: Tell our geek we need him to work this weekend. You [to Geek]: We need more than that, Scotty. You'll have to stay until you can squeeze more outta them engines! Geek [to You]: I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain, but we need more dilithium crystals! You [to Normal]: He wants to know if he gets overtime.

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

One big X-factor in the different outlook towards US invasion of Iraq, among people I've discussed it with, is the prognoses for US soldiers and Iraqi civilians (few people mention Iraqi conscripts). On the one hand, we've got articles calling an invasion a "cakewalk". On the other side, articles predicting a million deaths. I wonder about cause and effect, too. Do people's preferences for peace affect the pessimism of their prognoses? Or does opting for an offensive arise from optimism toward the outcome?

Microsoft is shipping a new IM product called Threedegrees (link via Ditherati). The name alone, not to mention some of its functionality, reminds me of the six degrees of separation web site based on the sociological theory of the same name outlined for one in the movie of the same name and related to the game of the same name (and there's even six degrees of "blogeration"). Does anybody else remember the six degrees site? A bunch of my friends entered their info into that site about five years ago, it linked us all together and to some people we didn't know, it didn't do anything useful for us, and it seems to have died.

Anyway, MS threedegrees uses peer-to-peer and IM to get people together online together more. It comes from a team developing products "aimed at the "Net generation," or young people between the ages of about 13 and 24". I'm hurt. I'd like to think I'm the Net generation but I'm not in that range (one guess which end). I was BBSing in 1988, wasn't I? I had my own personal Web page in 1992. I mudded extensively in 1991. I know the Net, damnit! Ok, end rant. Fine, so there's a generation with statistically noticable comfort levels using the Net for more communication. Apparently "the computing habits of the age group [...] is radically different from people who did not grow up with the Internet". Pretty interesting.

The Straight Dope message board has a thread on "shrinklits" of movies. OK, well they're not rhyming like the original and excellent shrinklets. But they can still be funny.

IMHO, the shorter the better. Here's one of the shorter ones:

LEAVING LAS VEGAS

HE: I'm going to drink myself to death.
SHE: Okay.

The End.

And another:

American Pie

High School Senior Guys: Hey, we should all try to get laid before graduation!

*guys get laid*

So true.

Dan Simon posts a very complex blog entry today on anti-Israel feelings linked to anti-Iraq-war. Today's NYT editorials has Amos Oz on the same subject: "My objection to the war on Iraq is severely tested each time I hear these loathsome voices."

There are a lot of pro-peace activists who take reasoned positions. But those who do not (not just the ones who link in anti-Israel positions but also ANSWER) really make the movement look bad.

Drezner's blog entry on French and German attempts to dominate the EU foreign policy goes farther than I did. Drezner wonders whether their aggressive behaviour will destroy the EU.

Drezner summarizes the arguments that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) doesn't know how to do economics. That's important, because their predictions on global output are an important part of their calculations of global warming to 2100.

Actually, I'm finding Knowledge Problem has a wealth of links and information about oil and the war, including sources from Tech Central Station to Asian Times to Canada's National Post. I like it.

This table from the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics is pretty amazing.

TABLE 1
World Reserves and Cumulative Production of Selected Minerals: 1950-1980 (millions of metric tons of metal content)
Mineral	1950 Reserves	Production 1950-1980	1980 Reserves
Aluminum	1,400	1,346	5,200
Copper	100	156	494
Iron	19,000	11,040	93,466
Lead	40	85	127
SOURCE: Repetto, p. 23.

So that's what "known reserves" means, huh? That we have no clue how much aluminum, copper, iron and lead really exists? I wonder about oil?

So which countries' positions on the war are "all about oil"?

It would, of course, be nice to have Germany and France and Russia and China with us. But these nations have their own interests, and we certainly shouldn't give them a veto over U.S. policy. It's telling that anti-warniks who are so ready to infer dark U.S. motives in our clash with Saddam -- oil! -- don't mention the real interests that might explain the German and French stands. Oil and other lucrative contracts -- yes, weapons deals -- as well as their large Islamic populations.

This pieceis from David Reinhard, in The Oregonian. Link via Knowledge Problem.

Steve Mallet posted an interesting piece on the limits of community: <=150 people. I played around with this number, wondering what relationship it might have to the well-known six degrees of separation. If I know 150 people and each of those know another 100 that I don't know, and so on, does that "explain" six degrees of separation?

Of course, these are stupid silly numbers, but I calculated that if about 62% of my contacts' contacts are people not already on my contact list, then within six degrees of separation I've got the whole world covered.

BBC World News last night mentioned briefly that US congress members were calling for various punishments against France and Germany, such as boycotting the Paris air show, in revenge for those countries leadership not supporting the US position.

I'd already noticed a bunch of bloggers and others showing their displeasure by not buying French wine or cheese (1, 2, 3 and 4, for example). That's freedom of choice, or expressing your freedom of speech through consumer decisions. It even seems reasonable to me for one individual boycotter to suggest to others to boycott as well. But it seems childish, peevish and petulant for US lawmakers to call for sanctions on French water or wine. Shouldn't it be OK for your allies to disagree with you? When I invite friends over for dinner and they disagree with my views on religion or politics, I don't withhold dessert.

Today's Friedman NYTimes editorial claims that if the US invades Iraq, US must remain to clean it up.

Let's start with the Bush hawks. The first rule of any Iraq invasion is the pottery store rule: You break it, you own it. We break Iraq, we own Iraq — and we own the primary responsibility for rebuilding a country of 23 million people that has more in common with Yugoslavia than with any other Arab nation. I am among those who believe this is a job worth doing, both for what it could do to liberate Iraqis from a terrible tyranny and to stimulate reform elsewhere in the Arab world. But it is worth doing only if we can do it right. And the only way we can do it right is if we can see it through, which will take years. And the only way we can see it through is if we have the maximum allies and U.N. legitimacy.

Why is this necessarily so? Why not take a large job and split it up according to an efficient and effective division of labor, among volunteers who have different skills and assets? Invading a country, stabilizing it and rebuilding it are very different tasks. The US Marines and Air Force may be best at the first, but not at the second or third. In fact, the best people to rebuild Iraq are more likely to be non-American than American. Iraqis themselves probably distrust the US more than, for example, Canada or Britain. It's a good cop, bad cop routine.

I'm a big fan of full follow-through, if there must be a war in Iraq. However, if this is indeed an international effort, then other countries besides the US must be involved in the follow-through. To be fair, Friedman's article is all about gathering a broad coalition to rebuild Iraq. I only question the assumption that rebuilding must be "owned" by US.

Fox News published an article by Wendy McElroy (link via Rob). The article is also published on ifeminists.com. McElroy implies most other feminist groups are apologists for Saddam Hussein. Three groups are mentioned: the Feminist Majority, the National Organization for Women (NOW), and Women's ENews.

It's a little hypocritical to ignore a set of outrages because it isn't convenient for your political position, but that doesn't make Feminist Majority into apologists for Saddam. It seems they have a button for "Help Afghan Women" because they have resources in Afghanistan, several programs in place to rebuild there. That's not wrong. It's true they have 6 articles on Afghanistan in recent global news and one article covering an anti-war mission to Iraq -- nowhere mentioning the rights of women in Iraq. But just because a group decries one crime doesn't mean they condone another. It may be hypocritical, but not evil.

On the other hand, I have a harder time forgiving NOW for this press release:

A U.S. invasion of Iraq will likely entail similar dangers to the safety and rights of Iraqi women—who currently enjoy more rights and freedoms than women in other Gulf nations, such as Saudi Arabia.

But I will point out that's four months old -- the Fox anti-feminist article should have dug up recent material or given up. The more recent press releases from NOW are somewhat more sane, opposing war because of domestic economic costs, for fear it will increase terrorism, and fearing "devastation of cities, towns, villages in Iraq, the loss of lives, the effect on the environment" (this is from their only press release press release since Jan 1 mentioning Iraq). It seems enough information has come out in the last four months about women in Iraq so that groups are no longer claiming they're better where they are

The third group criticized by McElroy was Women's ENews for publishing this article by Yasmine Bahrani. It's much more balanced than McElroy lets on. E.g.

"Thus, while many Iraqi women long for the basic rights that are denied them under Saddam, they have reason to be wary of the future as well... Iraqi women's concerns about the future regime are not theoretical. In fact, they have reason to mistrust Iraq's "opposition" movements, such as the Iraqi National Congress, because they have failed to include women members in key positions."

Really, it seems to me McElroy's article was written last November or December (only one article referenced was written after Oct 31 and none after Dec 31 2002), and held back until now. Perhaps McElroy waited until support for the war had grown enough to make this article seem reasonable?

To be clear, I'm happy to take potshots at both sides here. Both McElroy and the NOW press releases in particular paint the world in exaggerated black and white.

I'm not the only one who thinks Germany and France incompetently managed their opposition to US involvement in Iraq. John Bono (link via Instapundit) points out that they've even alienated Greece. The numbers in Spain suggest that if Germany and France had made Aznar feel loved, he might have gone along with them and with his own people in opposing US intervention. Instead, Germany and France made Spanish leaders feel irrelevant, with predictable results.

Spain's leaders may be on the side of the US in going to war on Iraq, but the Spanish people, or at least 74% of them, are not. I looked this up wondering what general public opinion was like in Europe, given that the EU country leaders differ so greatly. I also tried to look up polls of Italians, but couldn't find numbers.

There's no way Germany should have been surprised that other Euro nations weren't following their anti-American-intervention lead. It's natural for any regime to most fear the country that most threatens their sovereignty:

• Clearly Germany and France (G/F) fear US imperialism as the force that most threatens their influence and power. They don't fear each other greatly today, because of the potential to cooperate and magnify their power (particularly if they can speak for the EU). Furthermore, neither country is so much bigger than the other that one can dominate the other.
• Smaller Euro countries don't fear American intervention in Iraq as much as G/F do. Instead, these smaller Euro countries are more likely to fear G/F because the foreign policy sovereignty of each of these small countries is threatened most by G/F attempting to speak for the European Union.
• China unsurprisingly does fear US intervention in Iraq at least as much as G/F (more so since China can realistically fear that it may one day be invaded to liberate downtrodden subjects). G/F should have looked to China as an anti-American ally, rather than being embarrassed by attempting to speak for other Euros.
• We can even look on Germany's opposition as a "regime", one whose power is most threatened, obviously, by Schröder's party. No wonder Angela Merkel is more annoyed at Schröder's party speaking for all Germans, than by US threat (see linked editorial for quote by Merkel). Again, Germany's ruling party should not have been surprised.

Update: Steve sees even more in this - EU leaders jockeying for position ruling the EU eventually.

From a guy looking for work in IT:

The quick assessment from the agency was: Personality OK, Technical skills, Not. But that’s OK right? I work in IT where the majority of the job involves explaining a missed deadline to a client and to do that you need people skills not technical skills!

Hmm. Perhaps his willingness to miss deadlines as long as he can explain them is part of his joblessness.

I was talking with my Mom about US vs China. In China, naturally, US is seen as having imperialist aspirations to dominate more and more of the world -- to have US-approved regimes worldwide. That led to a discussion of how US is damned if it does, damned if it doesn't, because worldwide criticism of US doesn't seem to depend on what US does. America is either aggressive or isolationist. Isolationism is mostly thought of as a phenomenon from between the two world wars, but not uniquely.

• Remember there was some fear Bush would be isolationist?
  

  Oh, I thought you meant some band. The Taliban in Afghanistan! Absolutely. Represssive. --GW Bush

  European scholars tsk'ed at the 2000 election and its lack of foreign policy issues (although this particular paper goes on to explain that the American people are not as isolationist as the American Congress and foreign media believe). Stephen Brooks marked "neo-isolationism", which he explained rather as public indifference rather than an active desire to disengage, from the end of the Vietnam War.
  

• Remember right after September 11, 2001? Newspaper articles were published about the fear that this would push US into a new isolationism.
  

• Remember the World Criminal Court? In 1998 European media characterized the US as isolationist, pure and simple -- over the World Criminal Court issue as well as treaties such as land mine restrictions.
  
• Just a few years earlier, in 1995, Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot were pushing isolationism.

Both "isolationist" and "imperialist" are code for "the US is not consulting our opinion". One is applied to action, one to non-action, but what really stings is to be ignored.

This wide-ranging interview with Christopher Hitchens is pretty interesting. The interviewer says "[Hitchen's] scorn for lowest common denominator thinking, whether from the left or the right, is as entertaining as it is jarring." Hey, that's what I aspire to as well. Some excerpts:

There are several arguments for attacking Iraq. One is the violation of the convention against genocide. If you sign the genocide convention, you have to punish people who commit genocide, and Saddam certainly has done that. I think the strongest case is the responsibility to rescue the Iraqi people from a bastard regime.

A decent respectful hypocrisy and diplomacy means you can’t say we’re doing this to put the Saudis back in that box, teach them a lesson, to change the ways of the Middle East. So they do have to come up with arguments that aren’t as good. I just hope they don’t start believing their own propaganda.

People say, “I think Jesus is my best friend.” No one responds as they should to that, which is to say, “You should be locked up, that’s utter crap.”

Al Gore had allowed himself to become a humble, hollowed-out, humiliated figure. I didn’t want a zombie to be the president of the United States.

And now Gore and wife say that Bush is picking a fight with Iraq? Fuck them. I really mean it. I have nothing but contempt for them. We are risking people’s lives, and all they can be is flippant.

Do unto others? Last night, as I went to bed, after hearing some UN debate on NPR, reading so many blog entries on justifying war, and Virginia Postrel's book discussing what "natural" rights might be, I found myself questioning why I might it justifiable to overturn the leader of another country. I heard Chinese and Russian representatives to the UN defending sovereignty. What business of ours is it to "free" a people from the leadership that grew out of their own culture?

I do find it hard to simply declare things as "wrong" and go out to right those wrongs, even though I'm not a moral relativist. This is trite, but I guess I fall back on the golden rule. Do I want to be left alone by the UN and other countries, no matter what my country of residence does to me? No. If I was jailed for criticizing government policies or for marijuana possession, I would want other countries to pressure my jailors effectively to behave better. If the country I reside in forced me to wear a chador or leave my job, I would want real help from the international community to assert my rights. That doesn't even cover the proven danger Iraq poses to others besides its own citizens. The golden rule doesn't always make it clear what action to take, but in this case doesn't it suggest some effective action beyond proven ineffective UN resolutions?

Yesterday I accidentally stumbled into an anti-war rally in Palo Alto. I didn't wade in but I still noticed how quirky it was. I'm not the only one: the Mercury News reported on it.

• "Palo Alto neighbors Marcia Croft and Margaret Schmidt, both in their late 50s, said they haven't done this since college."
• "An organic espresso bus parked cater-cornered from the plaza sold several hundred cups of organic macchiatos, lattes and cappuccinos made with soy milk."
• "People carried balloon animals twisted into circular peace signs. Children scribbled peace slogans on the pavement with chalk."

The Merc also says "The suburban rally had a diverse turnout, indicating anti-war sentiment is resonating with an audience much broader than activists living in large cities." Maybe so, but there could be another reason: this was as much picnic and street festival as rally. It looked fun to me.

Holy Cow! A British socialist, wrote a Guardian article in favour of war on Iraq! (link via Insta)

It's a good article, by Julie Birchill. She is much harder on the "it's all about oil" argument than I am:

"It's all about oil!" Like hyperactive brats who get hold of one phrase and repeat it endlessly, this naive and prissy mantra is enough to drive to the point of madness any person who actually attempts to think beyond the clichés. Like "Whatever!" it is one of the few ways in which the dull-minded think they can have the last word in any argument. So what if it is about oil, in part? Are you prepared to give up your car and central heating and go back to the Dark Ages? If not, don't be such a hypocrite. The fact is that this war is about freedom, justice - and oil. It's called multitasking. Get used to it!

My other favourite quote is a concise explanation of why a socialist may be in favour of this particular war:

If you really think it's better for more people to die over decades under a tyrannical regime than for fewer people to die during a brief attack by an outside power, you're really weird and nationalistic and not any sort of socialist that I recognise.

You might think by now I'm in favour of the war. I'm not sure, actually -- it depends on the follow-through. I'm only certain that a lot of the arguments made about it are stupid. I applaud Julie Birchill for combatting that stupidity.

Although Canada is still the US' largest trading partner, Mexico is now the US' biggest international phone call partner. According to email from Brian, for which I can't find the source, Mexico accounted for 5,193.1 million minutes in 2001, and Canada for 5,105.9. That wasn't the case before 2001: "According to the Federal Communications Commission, Mexico is the second most frequently called international destination by consumers, and receives 14.3 percent of all international call traffic from the United States. The most frequently called country is Canada and receives 15.2 percent of total U.S. international call traffic." (ref). Here's a good article on "telegeography".

Canada is not yet supplanted as largest trading partner because in 2000 Canada traded with US to the tune of US$411 billion, while Mexico accounts for US$261.7 billion , the next largest (ref 1, 2). However, if Canada/US trade continues to grow at 7-8%, and Mexico/US trade at 25 - 30%, Mexico will be the largest trading partner in 2004.

I'm back from New York, sorry for the unexplained hiatus.

This month's Scientific American has a new food pyramid (link via Rob), to replace the overly simplistic "Fat is Bad" 1992 official pyramid. Most American fat consumption seems to have been replaced with products that were high in either refined grains or potatos (rice crackers, pastries, pasta, low-fat potato crisps) or high in sugar (soda, fruit-"based" snacks, sweetened yogurt...) I can't be the only one that gained weight on that kind of diet.

The new food pyramid is wacky too. It shows white rice, white bread, potatos, pasta and sweets (high glycemic index) at the top of the pyramid, meaning "use sparingly", and plant oils at the bottom. Surely they don't recommend eating a greater quantity of plant oils than any of the high glycemic index carbs? People would be drinking cups of canola oil to achieve that. I suppose I'm being obtuse, though it *is* difficult to understand whether they recommend getting more calories out of oil than out of high glycemic index carbs, or whether they recommend taking "a serving or two" of plant oil at each meal knowing that servings of plant oil tend to be small.

Anyway, I always knew ants-on-a-log were good for me, no matter what "they" said, because my mom fed me those. You know -- a long piece of celery (eat vegetables in abundance) filled with peanut butter (healthy nuts and legumes, also containing plant oil), and a few raisins (2/3 servings of fruit) dotted along the top for fun.

Tech Central Station has an article on a subject I've posted before: how oil and economics really intersect. For example, If the US gets 10% of oil from Saudi Arabia, and reduces its oil consumption by 10%, it does not eliminate its consumption of Saudi Arabian oil. It only reduces it by 10%. Oil is a commodity. The only way to not consume Saudi Arabian oil is by embargoing oil from that country. That wouldn't be very effective, because it would mean that only countries without an embargo would benefit from very-slightly-cheaper Saudi Arabian oil. Supply and demand are difficult to trick.

Embarrassingly enough, also in TCS today, Glassman suggests that "If Arianna [Huffington] is really concerned about U.S. use of Saudi oil or even foreign oil in general, she could support exploration in areas of the United States such as barren stretches of Alaska or off all three of our major coasts. Or she might try to encourage her friends to sell their 10,000-square-foot houses in Bel Air and live in apartment buildings. Or get them to stop flying in fuel-guzzling private jets." None of these things would significantly reduce use of Saudi oil (although it's true that changing SUV behaviour matters even less).

When a country allegedly sponsoring terrorism exports livestock, why doesn't anybody suggest reducing our consumption of meat? Because it would be riduculous, that's why.

Last weekend I was busy because my sensei's sensei came to Mountain View for an intensive, three-day, eight-hour total kata seminar. Somebody took a nice picture of Hanshi Miki adjusting my position. Boy was it hard to hold this kind of position (Shito-Ryu style cat stance or "neko-ashi-dachi") while he adjusted the angle and position of everybody's hands, arms, shoulders, spine, legs and feet.

I am fated not to have a digital camera.

In September 2002 I packaged a digital camera (technically, not my digital camera, even worse) to bring to Canada in my checked-in luggage. By the time I looked for it a day after arriving at my parents' house, I couldn't find it. Optimistically, I thought it would be around there or at home somewhere but of course six months later it hasn't shown up at either house. I believe it was stolen from my luggage. My biggest fan however unsupportively suggests I lost it, though I fail to see how.

Well, I had already been thinking of getting a smaller model anyhow. Digital cameras have reached a point where for a price I'm willing to pay, I can get a high quality digital camera that I can carry everywhere. Now that, I would really use. In August I was discussing this with a friend who passed on a news article about new smaller Nikon and Casio models. I thought about this a lot. OK, in fact, I dithered, undecided, comparing features and prices randomly and unproductively.

I went to Good Guys and looked at cameras with the intent to buy. But I couldn't decide by the time my biggest fan unsupportively decided he was ready to leave, so I gave up for the time being.

A month or so later: I decided to stop dithering. I went to my biggest fan for help deciding, but he unsupportively suggested I decide what features were important to me before comparing cameras with those features. Fine! I decided size was crucial - it must fit in my laptop/messenger bag (peewee timbuk2 size) and stay there without me constantly regretting the space it takes up. But quality was also crucial - 2 megapixels with reasonable ability to take close-ups of the things I make. Three models seemed to basically fit my requirements: the Minolta Dimage X, the Canon Powershot Elph, the Casio Exilim EX-S2 or EX-M2. Maybe the Nikon Coolpix 2500 as well, but I never had the covetous craving passion for that one that I did for the Dimage or Exilim, despite its swiveliciousness.

I dithered some more. Would the MP3 player capabilities of the Exilim be useful to me, enough to justify the extra cost? Hmm.

Finally decisive, I ordered a Exilim EX-M2 through a vendor (Tristate Camera) found through Pricewatch. Tristate offered the EX-M2 for about $50 less than Amazon. Great! Only two days later, I got a call from Tristate saying the price was actually $50 higher because of Casio's Christmas packaging deals which included some thingy. On principle, I cancelled the order.

I looked at Amazon's listing for the Exilim, since I trusted Amazon not to bait-and-switch. However they didn't have it in stock at the moment, and I didn't want to buy something that might be in stock at some unspecified future date. I wanted reasonably quick, though not instant, gratification. I was hoping to bring a new digital camera with me to use at Christmas.

Christmas shopping was upon us and we headed to Fry's Electronics for various purchase. They had the Exilim EX-M2. After dithering more about whether I really wanted it, with my biggest fan still unsupportively hoping I'll hurry up and get it over with, I asked the sales guy to get me one. The only one they had left was a pre-opened model. Honestly, I didn't want anybody else to have already touched this camera. Somehow it seemed too personal. Would you buy underwear somebody had bought, then returned? However unreasonably, that's how I felt. I walked away.

Over Christmas, I did some serious rethinking. Maybe I didn't want an Exilim at all, with or without the MP3 capabilities. I wanted closeups to be high-quality, and I found out about the Dimage Xi, which has 3.2 Megapixels, compared to the mere 2.1 Megapixels of the Dimage X, and reputedly very fine opticals. It was somewhat more expensive of course, and the highest price I'd considered paying. But at this point I was willing to pay more to avoid any possible disappointment. I decided to get it. I ordered the Dimage Xi through Amazon. Only after emotionally committing the order, if not actually committing it, did I notice that the order was actually being filled by Office Depot. The date was December 29. The order was going to ship in 1-2 days.

Over the next few weeks, I periodically called home just before returning home from work. You see, I didn't want to sit in the train wondering the whole way if the camera was going to be there, and face disappointment at home. Two packages did arrive, but they were the other two things I had ordered from Amazon the same day as the camera.

Finally, today, I checked Amazon's status: order still there, not yet shipped. It said to call Office Depot for shipping information. I did and discovered that they had cancelled the order, although Amazon didn't know it yet. Apparently they don't stock it any more, and their response to that is simply to cancel the order. I checked a different page at Amazon which claims both that the camera order is ready for shipping 1/1/2003, and that a complete refund has been applied for that order. I don't think I've received the refund yet.

Looking through the Amazon site, they now appear to have taken down the useless offer to order from Office Depot, and instead they have a hopeful "in stock soon" offer for the Dimage Xi. "Order now to get first in line."

I don't know if I can handle the disappointment again. If camera manufacturers did a better job of stocking cameras rather than creating scarcity, and retailers didn't screw around with availability and packaging, somebody would have had my money three months ago. Now they'll just have to wait.

I did enjoy the editorial today by David Brooks about a lack of class consciousness, particularly class envy, in Americans.

Time magazine survey that asked people if they are in the top 1 percent of earners. Nineteen percent of Americans say they are in the richest 1 percent and a further 20 percent expect to be someday...

[Americans] always had a sense that great opportunities lie just over the horizon, in the next valley, with the next job or the next big thing. None of us is really poor; we're just pre-rich...

Every few years a group of millionaire Democratic presidential aspirants pretends to be the people's warriors against the overclass. They look inauthentic, combative rather than unifying. Worst of all, their basic message is not optimistic. They haven't learned what Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt and even Bill Clinton knew: that you can run against rich people, but only those who have betrayed the ideal of fair competition. You have to be more hopeful and growth-oriented than your opponent, and you cannot imply that we are a nation tragically and permanently divided by income.

However, Income mobility *is not* that much higher in the US. Although it's the classic location for a rags-to-riches story, other developed countries have similar income mobility. In addition, at least one very pessimistic economist has argued that many American adults remain stuck in poverty (see also this course plan which is practically a rebuttal). Anyway, it's all very confusing and there don't exist very many international comparisons of income mobility.

So is the reluctance of Americans to penalize the rich based purely on a hopeful and/or egalitarian outlook, rather than on a real economic difference? David Brooks' point may still be valid, but now I wish some economist/sociologist would link American attutides to income mobility to their actual opportunity for income mobility.

Colby Cosh posted a blog entry I wish I had wrote. It's about how the knee-jerk reaction to enact a measure "if it even saves one life" can so easily go astray. The example is regulations on commercial cigarettes to prevent accidental fires from being started.

Colby and I aren't the only ones frustrated with this (a, b, c). Unfortunately we are probably outnumbered. People who want to save one more life want us to have more signage and helmet laws, have automatic external defibrillators in every plane and firetruck, change every TV and radio so it can be turned on automatically in emergencies, and all get immunized for meningococcus.

My most loyal fan (who complained when I referred to him as "a reader" last week) points out that the oil/war objections typically overlook who is supposed to be benefitting. They also don't specify exactly what oil they're talking about although it's usually assumed Iraq's oil.

First possibility: Bush could be after the oil in Iraq for the benefit of American oil companies. Well, since France, Russia and China already have potential deals in Iraq, American oil companies may have the least to gain. Although the leader of the exiled Iraqi National Congress has promised oil contracts to US companies if US puts the exiled group in power, the benefits here would be far greater for non-American oil companies. I don't believe for a second that existing oil deals with F/R/C would be scuttled. Anyway, if helping American oil companies were Bush's aim, he could do so vastly more efficiently by giving the money that a war would cost to the American oil companies. Another way of benefitting American oil companies is by affecting the price of oil to keep it unusually high, but this is typically considered unacceptable and politically stupid because consumers (voters) suffer. Rather than see conspiracy in US actions, why don't protesters see at least as much venal conspiring in the F/R/C positions? They're the ones making oil deals with Saddam.

Second possibility: Bush could be after the oil in Iraq for the benefit of the American oil consumers. This one doesn't make a great deal of sense, because US already trades food for Iraq oil. Low prices benefit American oil consumers, but this extended saber-rattling is adding a risk premium of $5-$15 onto the price of a barrel. If Bush just wants to keep the price of oil down, he could ignore Iraq. Finally, note that keeping the price of oil down benefits Europeans at least as much, because in most European countries the price of oil is inflated by taxes. The only way Bush could help American oil consumers without helping global oil consumers would be by subsidizing imported oil.

Third possibility: Bush might wish to protect the oil in and around the Arabian peninsula (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia) from future Iraqi agression, in order to benefit American oil companies. Would this really benefit them? It depends on how many deals American oil companies have in the area. If the entire Arabian peninsula were taken offline, the price of oil would definitely go up, and this would presumably benefit American oil companies rather than disadvantage them. Again, this would benefit any oil companies working in the entire region, not just American companies.

Fourth possibility: Bush might wish to protect the oil in and around the Arabian peninsula from future Iraqi agression, in order to benefit American oil consumers. However, Europe depends more on Gulf oil than US does. So really, Bush would be helping oil consumers worldwide if his plan worked.Krugman believes this is what Bush is doing according to a recent NYT editorial.

If you believe in one of the latter two scenarios, then just perhaps, Bush is defending people as well oil from future Iraqi agression -- Kuwaitis, Israelis, Kurds, possible American and European terrorism targets. It's impossible to tell if his motivations are limited to oil. How would one prove this?

Most Canadians (all my relatives) think that the US plans for Iraq are all about securing oil supply (ref: "Outside Exxon and other oil company offices in St. John’s, protesters performed a "die-in" to highlight the connection between war and oil "). I guess the Canadian National Post likes to be contrarian. In this article debunking the "no war for oil" and no blood for oil catchphrases, there's the standard stuff about how the US already trades food for Iraq oil, and wouldn't stand to gain much directly from an Iraq freed from sanctions because Russia, France and China are much more heavily invested in Iraq oil fields. In addition, there's an interesting point about the essential inconsistency of the oil --> war position:

What makes the "no war for oil" school of thought so weird is that many of its adherents are also advancing the theory that war would be too expensive. The White House estimates the direct costs of a conflict in Iraq would be about $80-billion. But according to Yale economics professor William D. Nordhaus, the real price tage would be as much as $2.5-trillion once the cost of nation-building is imputed. Would the United States get a good return on this 13-digit "investment"? Let's assume Iraq's liberation leads to a long-term oil supply expansion on the scale outlined above, and that the price of crude falls by, say, 10%, as a result. Given the value of U.S. oil imports, that would translate to just $22-billion in annual savings. No profit-seeking CEO would accept this miserly rate of return for such a controversial enterprise.

I'm always dubious when I see arguments against a course of action that are inconsistent with each other. If it's the course of action itself, war, that is so objectionable, go ahead, oppose the war. But a bunch of motivation and cost arguments against the war that are inconsistent with each other weaken the basic position to me. I guess most people don't compare arguments to that extent -- they just see a long list of arguments arrayed against something and are overwhelmed by sheer numbers.
Here are some of the cost-based anti-war arguments, together with their top price:

• Washington Post, Michael Dobbs, $200 billion. This article was reprinted in other places like MSNBC
• ABC News, John Cochran, $100 billion
• UK Guardian, $1.9 trillion in the headline, but buried in the article is that the direct military cost would only be $140 million. Cites study by American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Anne McFeatters, $200 billion
• Kansas.com, Siobhan McDonough (AP), $1.9 trillion

Now the articles on how the war is all about securing oil supply:

• Washington Post, Dan Morgan and David B. Ottaway
• MSNBC, and again
• ABCNews
• UK Guardian, Zahra Naqiv, Comment
• "Oil is the obvious motive for US interest in Iraq", Straight Goods (Canadian), by Linda Quaig, originally published in Toronto Star

Now that I've reviewed some of these more carefully than before, I'm really struck by how the oil arguments can go either way. For example, one of the MSNBC articles argues that the US should want to avoid war with Iraq, to avoid a spike in oil prices to $40-$60 per barrel. That would hurt already weakened airlines and could even "push the country into recession". Even the Guardian reports that "A prolonged disruption of world oil markets could cost the U.S. economy up to $778 billion, the researchers estimated. On the other hand, Iraq's huge oil resources could satisfy U.S. needs for imported oil at current levels for almost a century and otherwise benefit the economy by $40 billion. "A ZNet article: "Ironically, while the US and western countries would like to see lower oil prices, on the flip side of the coin higher oil prices mean more income for US oil companies and boosted investment returns for oil-related mutual funds.

So, oil is a consideration for many world players (like France and Russia who are on the security council, and have planned deals in Iraq on hold due to sanctions), but there's no doubt that for the US at least, it's not a simplistic cowboy equation of "let's go in there and get that durned oil". Even Krugman, normally bitterly anti-Bush, and my favourite left-coast liberal weekly alternative news mag The Stranger, recognize that it's not that simple.

Now this is what I'm talking about. From the NYT editorials:

Scientists are as much victims of fashion as ordinary mortals are — a fact illustrated by the rich history of junk science and false alarms of the last 30 years. Recall a few instances:

In the mid-1970's, many climatologists warned of an ice age that would severely diminish agricultural productivity by the year 2000.

In 1972, the United States banned DDT, only to find out, years later, that the evidence of the pesticide's harmful effects on human beings is inconclusive. In the meantime, millions of people — 1 in 20 African children, for example — have died of malaria, as Europe and the United States remain reluctant to support controlling mosquitoes with DDT.

And let's not forget the dire warnings about natural resources. In the 1970's, we were told that there would be essentially no oil left by the 1990's.

Science retains its alarmist streak today. The scuttlebutt among the scientists I know is that they have a better chance of getting a government or private grant if they indicate that their research might uncover a serious threat or problem. Media fascination with bad news is partly to blame, along with the principled gloominess and nagging of nongovernmental pressure groups. But government itself has played its natural part.

The point is not to be cynical about science fads but to know enough to choose wisely when it comes to supporting pure science, along with research that can give us beneficial technologies.

— Denis Dutton, Department of Philosophy, University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

It's so much harder to make money in science or media telling people things have gotten slightly better. It's either "much better" which causes inflated expectations and then disappointments, or "slightly" to "much worse" which of course is dismaying.

I love good news: Optimism, new laws, multiple political parties and a successful money conversion in Afghanistan. Though there's still much to do. At Kabul University, "only two of the university’s five donated laptops can be plugged in at the same time. Still, he says it gives Kabul’s professors a chance to learn how to use the computers and get the basics, like Microsoft Word and Excel. There is no internet access."

I was talking about fear yesterday -- that rational or irrational fears or anxiety govern so many of the activities of people I know, and seem to motivate much activism. I found fear.com, where people can vote on what they fear & add new fears, but it doesn't seem to have the big fears I've seen among acquaintances:

• Fear that we'll destroy Nature
• Fear of food (allergens, additives, GM)
• Fear of medications (pharmacophobia)
• Fear of doctors (one of mine) and dentists
• Fear of traffic
• Fear of joblessness

Since we all fear different things to different extents, obviously some of this is irrational. If it were rational, then the biggest fear of each demographic would correspond to the biggest danger for that demographic, e.g. the 20-40 age group would all fear traffic more than food.

A professor Rosenau argues that fear has been key to success in preventive medicine and that we suffer less fear today. Rotenburg points out that some anxiety can increase performance. But I guess what most strikes me is how much fear, anxiety and pressure we continue to feel even when our lives are pretty easy. I'm sure those whose lives are truly hard feel more fear and pressure, but it's surprising that the baseline for angst is so high.

A great discussion on Instapundit on surfing in class. I don't really know what the fuss is about, but at least some people understand that it's just like any other potential distraction: playing solitaire, sleeping, doodling, reading a novel, knitting (all of which I've done in class). It's not fundamentally new, not even the ability to instant message your classmates, it's just electronic for a change. And certainly what matters is results. If you don't have the discipline or skill to pass your classes, surfing just isn't going to make that much of a difference once you're used to it. A minor temporary problem is novelty; kids who have already learned not to read books in class haven't yet learned not to read Web sites. I expect one semester to be more than enough for a student to figure out how much attention they need to pay to pass.

Similar discussions are going on here and therewith respect to IM/chat at the workplace and in meetings. I just met a technical journalist with years of experience looking at new technology, yet he had trouble believing that IM can actually help productivity. I don't know, the fact that I conduct almost all communication with my east coast developer via IM and he's a productive member of the team -- well it seems to work for me.

I think I mentioned, but it's worth mentioning again, the IETF had its first experiment with official chat rooms duplicating and augmenting the real meetings, although of course IETF meeting attendees have messaged each other privately during meetings for years. The feedback at the end (much of which took place during the chat room mirroring the huge plenary meeting) was very largely positive. Of course a few people complained that attendees may be distracting themselves. But isn't that their lookout? When attendees actually whisper to each other, the complaint is only that they may disturbing those who want to hear. When there's no worry of disturbing others, why is there now a new complaint?

Of course these new activities can provide a positive function augmenting the in-person event, but even as unredeeming an activity as solitaire may not be entirely worthless. I once thought for a while about how to handle a 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm weekly anthropology course in university. I was interested and wanted to learn, but knew I had a history of falling asleep during class. Rather than change my schedule, take pills or jack up on coffee, I just brought along knitting to every single class. With something to keep my hands busy (I can look away from my knitting 80% of the time or more), I paid more attention, proving this to the professor with relevant questions once or twice. And at the end I had a sweater, too.

I wish I could do this in more meetings, unfortunately I seem to have to educate each new set of colleagues that this helps me pay attention.