I'm sorry, I have to say this. I'm sure you would never make this error, but I've seen it made. It really drives me nuts when people write something like "The interpersonal drama in issue 37 really peaked my interest".

• I'm sure most people know what 'to peek' means -- to look furtively, to peer through a crack or a hole. "He peeked curiously through the shades." Thankfully, I rarely see "this really peeked my interest" -- and if I do see that I assume it's simply a spelling mistake or typo, not an indicator of sloppy English thinking.


• We also usually know what 'peak' means as a noun. As a verb, it is related: it means to reach a maximum. So why isn't it right to say that "the interpersonal drama peaked your interest"? Because the verb 'peaked' doesn't take an object. This sentence would be complete as "The interpersonal drama peaked." Or to be clearer, "In issue 37, the interpersonal drama peaked." Got it? It's the subject of the sentence that reaches its peak, not the object. The phrase "peaked my interest" tacks an object onto a verb that doesn't take an object and is meaningless. Worse, it causes confusion. As a reader, I can't tell if your interest was aroused and may have grown after issue 37, or if your interest was at a maximum in issue 37 and declined thereafter. It's an important difference.


• The word we need here is "pique". It means to prick, to arouse, to excite (among other things). This verb takes a subject, the "interpersonal drama" for example, which is pricking, arousing, exciting something. What is the interpersonal drama piquing? It's piquing one's interest -- the object of the verb. So the correct sentence is "The interpersonal drama really piqued my interest." Sadly, this meaning seems to only be used in the context of interest or curiousity. I did look around and find that one's prospects can be piqued by a change in the situation, and one's career can be piqued by a trip abroad.


• What if you really do mean to say that your interest reached a maximum? Just make your interest the subject of the sentence. For example, you could say "My interest peaked when the interpersonal drama intensified in issue 37." Just remember that implies the maximum, that after issue 37 your interest declined. That's because 'peaked' also means to dwindle away. If you mean that your interest began to grow after issue 37, then you must use 'pique'.


• Another interesting meaning of 'piqued' is annoyed. When a person is 'piqued', we can tell what the word means in this context because the subject is a person, not a quality which can increase or decline or be aroused. But you'd better not say "I was piqued by the interpersonal drama in issue 37" unless you mean that it annoyed you.

This matters to me because English (or any other language, for that matter) is full of subtlety. "Pique" implies either aroused or annoyed, and "peak" (as a verb) means maximized, and the language is richer for having all these meanings. We can communicate with each other more effectively if we understand and make use of these subtleties. Language is already ambiguous enough without choosing the wrong spelling.

Definitions taken from Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary.

Update: With sophisticated understanding of word meaning, we can have fun. The article about a man's career piqued by a visit to the Spice Islands is a cute pun because it makes me think of 'piquant' which means 'spicy'. A poem with the title "Piqued" could have three meanings. Is the poem about somebody who is annoyed? Or is it about somebody who is aroused? Without either a subject or an object in the title, the meaning is left ambiguous. Perhaps it's even a homonymic reference to 'peaked' as well, since the poem says "I was once a strong man... the clock has kept on ticking, ticking | and, I cannot stall the decline of me." Well that's a good example of somebody who has peaked. Whether or not the author intended all meanings in the title I can enjoy the wordplay. Or look at this quilt, which uses peaked points (a specific technique in quilting which creates triangles like peaks) but the quilt is named "Piqued", a reference perhaps to emotions either inspired by or having inspired this quilt. And this work is just beautiful -- I've never seen a poetic work that was created simply by highlight certain meanings from two words a dictionary and using those two words together in a bittersweetly ambiguous phrase.

The Agitator posts on why he's leaning more to the left these days. Among other things:

But I think my growing sympathy for the left grows largely from my belief that the right right now poses a greater threat to freedom than the left. Since I discovered my libertarianism, I've always justified my votes for Republicans on the grounds that I thought there was less chance of a worst-case Republican scenario coming to fruition than a worst-case Democrat scenario. That is, I thought there was a greater likelihood that our economy would degenerate into European socialism than that we'd become a police state, or an almost-theocracy. I still don't think the latter has much chance of happening, but the former certainly does, if it hasn't started to already.

He may be right, but I'm not sure there's a whole lot of evidence for that. I at least am not hearing anything from the Democratic party these days. So it's easy to see concrete actions by Republicans or Republican-directed offices and see the limitations on freedom, then a combination of wishful thinking and criticism from Democrats leads one to feel that Democrats don't limit freedom as much.

On much of the rest I agree -- the Patriot act is scary, an increasing number of crimes are being federalized, etc, and I don't like any of that.

It's always been difficult to identify the real loonies. Now cell phone headsets are so innocuous you might not be able to see them. Somebody with long dark hair and a dark shirt or coat might seem to be talking to themselves, but if you look real closely you might see the thin black wire dangling from their ear to a clip on their front before disappearing into a pocket. But who knows if it's really on? Maybe he is just talking to himself. Dummy cell-phone headsets would give the San Francisco street schizos a whole new credibility.

Ahh, the good ol' days (ref):

One time, a group of us were standing around in the atrium of ArsDigita HQ, and Philip was holding court. (As you may know, Philip is a talented public speaker with an exceptional ability to entertain an audience.) This time, Philip was describing how cool it would be to have a koi pond suspended from the ceiling of the atrium, so you could see the fish swimming from beneath and from all sides. Brian Stein replied, "You know what would be even better? A solid-gold trash can, burning cash 24/7." I don't think we would have laughed so long and hard if Brian had not struck a chord.

To be honest, I don't think I directly experienced those particular good ol' days. Working at Microsoft in 1996-1999 was fine, but it was also in this period that the famous "shrimp vs. weenies" phrase was in common use (possibly originated by Mike Murray in 1993-94, ref). Then joining a startup in 2000, just as the boom was crashing down, getting a minimal amount of VC funding in the nick of time a year later, there's obviously not a lot of money to throw around in those circumstances. I've travelled around the world on computer industry business but stayed in a Hilton or equivalent luxury hotel only once, and flown first-class only once (on Microsoft's tab, due to somebody else's reservation, and I hear he got in trouble for providing our group with first-class reservations). Still, I'm not complaining, it's a fun business and a lucky way to see a few far-flung places even without daily shrimp cocktails.

David Gelernter suggests that the next great American newspaper will be on the Web (link via Oxblog). However, with this attitude, it won't be David himself who successfully produces or designs it:

The web is a medium young readers can manage. Young people don't read newspapers; chances are they don't even know how. But they know how to play with computers. (Possibly this is the only thing they do know. Or almost the only.)

The other assertion that made me snort in disgust was that "The tycoon who founds America's next great newspaper will help save the computer industry too." David justifies this statement because he believes the next great American Web newspaper will require so much more computing power and storage space that it will drive consumers to upgrade their computers. As if.

The Protato (amaranth protein genes spliced into a potato) is one of those issues that have the precautionary principle proponents up in arms. I've been looking around for some facts, and some commentary.

The Facts:

• The Protato was invented in New Delhi by Indian scientists working for the government.


• It was created by inserting one gene from the amaranth plant, another native American plant.


• This food might be given poor children as part of the government's free midday meal program for schoolchildren.


• It contains substantially more lysine. A lack of lysine can affect brain development.

The Commentary:

• Biochemist Govindarajan Padmanaban... hopes Western-based environmental groups and charities will not demonise the project in the same way as they did AstraZeneca's golden rice. "I think it would be morally indefensible to oppose it." (GENET)


• "Padmanaban who as director of India's prestigious Indian Institute of Science had signed a secret deal with Monsanto which even his fellow scientists of the Institute knew nothing about. ... genetically engineered potatoes will in fact create malnutrition because they will deny to vulnerable children the other nutrients available in grain amaranth and not available in potato. ... India is nutritionally better off without the pseudo solution to hunger offered by Datta & Padmanaban and the biotech lobby." (Hartmut Meyer on GENET)


• Greenpeace: "Years were spent in a lab trying to lever protein into potatoes, while cheap, protein-rich pulses grow abundantly all over India" (via Guardian. Devinder Sharma said the same thing: "What this country needs is pulses. They contain 20%-26% proteins..." [So what if cheap, protein-rich pulses grow all over India? They are either not cheap enough, not protein-rich enough, or not well-enough distributed, or else there wouldn't be a malnutrition problem.]


• Sharma again: "[India] is saddled with over 50 million tones of wheat and rice whereas some 320 million people go to bed empty stomach". [And the relevance is... ? How is this an argument against a protein-enriched potato?]


• Guardian: "New Delhi ... is also believed to have one eye on the £116bn global potato market." [That seems like a good thing to me. Why shouldn't India export potatos on the world market? That trade will benefit both India and the purchasers of the protato and may eventually pay for its development.]


• Suman Sahai of Gene Campaign ... says the team's goal is far more worthy than, say, creating crops resistant to a company's own weedkiller. "If you're going to use GM at all, use it for this," she says. "India's problem is that we're vegetarian, so pulses and legumes are the main protein source, but they're in short supply and expensive. The potato is good because it's cheap." (GENET).
  
• "since regular potatoes have very low protein, 30% more is still very low protein. 30% per cent more of not much is still not much." (Metafilter)

OK, first there are the economic issues that the commentators tend to ignore. There is malnutrition. The existing food distribution system is not solving the problems of these starving people. The existence of pulses that would be even better for their diet is not a reason to argue against a lesser improvement as long as it is still an improvement. Arguing that people who are malnourished should simply diversify their diets is irresponsible stupidity. These people wouldn't be malnourished if they had the ability to diversify their diets. And as Suhai pointed out, it can be hard to get enough protein in vegetarian diets. The potato is not only cheap it's also easy to keep and cook.

We've already tried various "natural" schemes to get extra protein to malnourished children. "None of the various schemes to provide such [protein-enhanced with peanut flour] bread to malnourished children since the 1960s has survived." (GENET).

Next point seems to be that this GM food is unnatural and constitutes a change -- and according to the precautionary principal change is always bad. Don't forget, the potato is not itself indigenous to India, or for that matter, Europe. It came from America. That importation caused a much larger change in agriculture, diet and the environment than the importation of a foreign gene into the potato genome.

Is 30% more than not much still not much? The potato arrived in Ireland a few hundred years ago and became popular in time to feed a growing and impoverished Irish population. Irish families subsisted on the outcome of their hand-tilled potato fields and nearly nothing else. While this wasn't a very balanced diet it did allow survival. Potatos with even a little extra protein and amino acids ought to be even better as a subsistence diet for the extremely poor.

Update: Found another link with some sensible commentary: "The nutritional value of potato proteins is high because its amino acid composition is balanced, containing the right amounts of lysine and methionine. It is not clear that the increased essential amino acid content is the result of the increased protein content or not."

The Underground Grammarian describes crackpot schemes to improve readings scores:

Like all cockeyed social notions, the plain English movement invites us to look around and see who's going to make a profit from it. A paranoid observer might think to detect a massive conspiracy. And here's how it goes: First we start providing the schools with lots of taxpayers' money to support research into quaint and curious innovations in teaching children how to read. This results in some extraordinary gimmick, and a very profitable one, not only for some professionals of education who are paid to cook it up but especially for that massive educational-industrial complex that makes and sells at high prices books and flash cards and sets of gadgets to go with every new fad. These people, of course, would like to see as many new fads as possible, because each one makes all the old stuff obsolete. What the gimmick is, is not important; for a while, and in some schools still, it was the weird notion that reading would be better taught without reference to the sounds of letters but rather through identifying whole words as symbols of something. The latest gimmick seems to be speed reading, which will make it possible, at a stiff price, to read a complete gothic romance in three minutes and forty seconds, thus ensuring a steady market for gothic romances. A well-trained keypunch operator could go through sixteen of them on her lunch hour, provided of course that she ate something like a sandwich or a slice of pizza. Speed reading does require the use of at least one hand.

Let the gimmick be whatever it is. Think of your own, if you need an example, something like printing vowels in different colors or providing new and tricky shapes for certain letters. These, of course, have been done, so you’ll have to stretch a bit; and, when you do come up with something that seems unspeakably zany, keep your mouth shut. If you mention it in public, it won't be long before someone offers to fund it. It's best to avoid offering the occasion for sin. But enough. Let's say we have a gimmick.

Now we experiment, being careful to use methods and controls that would make a first-year chemistry student blush and stating the problems and the expected results (those we call "outcomes") in the silliest possible jargon. Don't worry, we'll "prove" the efficacy of our gimmick (remember the new math?). As a result, or outcome, although we'd rather not use that word in the singular, more and more students in the public schools will read less and less.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that this means that our gimmick has failed. Pay attention. This means that the gimmick has succeeded. Remember, we have taken the role of dentists handing out lollipops to ensure that there will be no falling off of customers. Now that things are worse than ever, we view with alarm the "reading problem" in the schools. It's time for a new round of grants, projects, experimental proposals, expensive consultants, packets of materials, instruction booklets, sets of visual aids, more teachers, carpeted classrooms, air conditioning, just about anything you can imagine. It's all good for the education business, and if it seems to have been exaggerated, just you go footing around yourself and find anybody anywhere who proposes that we can teach reading (or anything else) better by spending less money.

The problem is not only researchers doing silly studies with negative results. The real problem is that any zany reading-improvement scheme is likely to work initially. The teachers who pick up a new scheme are the most likely to be dedicated, caring teachers who want to find a way to make their students read better. The extra attention from the teacher is likely to improve the students reading skills. The student is likely to be aware that something unusual is going on and may try harder. At least, the student will benefit from a temporary increase in attention because something new, wierd, different is being tried.

This extends to other learning of course (math, writing, history or whatever) and beyond. Zany schemes arise frequently in software management to improve software quality or programmer productivity. After discussing "Extreme Programming. one day, Ekr suggested "Butthole Programming". A practitioner of Butthole Programming (BP) may only write code when one thumb is shoved up his butthole. BP improves code quality because with only one hand on the keyboard, the BP practitioner can't write as much code. As we know, more code means more bugs. Therefore, BP means less bugs.

I wish I could recall where I read recently that many productivity studies in many industries suffer from the problem that the productivity increase is often the result of the study being done, not the new technique. Workers who are in the midst of being studied while performing a new technique just tend to do better overall, unless the new technique is truly a bad idea.

I went to a very small school in rural Ontario for grades 6 through 8. There were only eight girls in my class and sixteen boys. Most of the kids were white, rural Ontario natives, living in small towns or on farms. There were four who stood out in my class as being possibly wierd, to my memory. The first was a Jehovah's Witness and he was required to sit out during music class and participate less in activities relating to Christmas and Easter. Then there was Wilma, an old-order Mennonite, who had to wear a dress every day, even during gym class when she wore shorts underneath her small-print floral dress and ran fiercely around the field hockey field wielding that curved hardwood stick like a weapon. I was quite odd too -- I don't think there were any other kids from a different province who were bookworms and atheists. I "talked funny", "like a dictionary". Finally, there was Corey, the black kid, the only kid who routinely got better marks than me in class. He stood out more because he was at the top of the class than because he was black. Although he was the only non-white kid, Corey was in many ways perfectly normal. He was certainly better integrated into the classroom social structure than I was, or than that poor Jehovah's Witness.

I've been thinking about Corey lately because I just finished reading "Losing The Race" by John McWhorter. This book discusses the black American cultural distrust or emotional distance from reading books and enjoying intellectual activity and achievement. Black kids apparently may get teased for "acting white" if they enjoy books or intellectual pursuits. It's a well-written book that focuses on reasoned arguments, and I enjoyed it. In this entry, I'm not so much making a comment on the book as riffing off the thoughts it triggered.

"Losing the Race" made me wonder how much different Corey's experience would have been had he grown up in the US, instead of Canada. He was adopted by white parents (who had two of their own kids, plus three other adopted kids of various shades) who clearly valued education, but what would have happened had he been immersed in American black youth culture? I'd like to think he would have excelled anyway. He was motivated (which I wasn't during those years, at least not motivated enough to actually work to get A+ grades since I was getting A grades without trying). He was proud of his intellectual achievement, and perhaps a little jealous of his status. As an interloper, an outsider, a loser who yet constantly threatened his previously undisputed top-of-the-class position, I suspect Corey didn't like me. That's too bad, because I always kind of liked him, and wish I knew what he's doing now. I thought we might have something in common that I didn't find in any other kid in my class -- certainly not my best friend, Jenny. Although Jenny was terrific and I needed her social skills advice desperately, in our graduation speeches (we each wrote a speech about a classmate) she claimed she liked me even though I read encyclopias. That wasn't true, by the way -- I merely consulted encyclopedias, and browsed them from time to time. Heh.

That school had caring and dedicated white teachers, both male and female. There was one main teacher for each of the four grades. I remember Mrs. Rose Marigold, the fifth-grade teacher, pink and fluffy-haired and maternal. Mr. Wilson was the sixth-grade teacher who was wierd and threatening, but he took us all on a riverside night-time hike and mass sleepover associated with reading Tom Sawyer, which was way cool. I remember the music teacher, who was an erratic and shrill disciplinarian but truly loved music and dragged the entire school through a full musical production every year. The eight-grade teacher Mr. Siddall was the coolest because he treated the eighth graders almost as adults, or so we felt, which combined with being the oldest in the school, meant that eighth-graders ruled. There were a few other teachers but remember this was a very small school. Despite that, we had a fair number of activities: basketball and volleyball teams which competed against other local schools, an arts publication that I wrote a couple stories for and drew a couple pictures for, and the yearly musicals. There was a bare idea of both remedial and enrichment classes in this school, I can recall once or twice going to talk to somebody who was supposed to provide enrichment services for our school as well as several others but it was really rather useless. The only student in my class who was involved in notably enriching activities was Corey. In eighth grade he took ninth-grade math to get a leg up on high school the following year. We both however competed in the province-wide yearly math contests for top math students, where I probably did better than him.

Many things changed the following year when we all got bussed to the township high school. Now there were over a thousand students in grades nine through "OAC" year (equivalent to a thirteenth grade, a now-defunct extra year of high school unique to Ontario -- stands for Ontario Academic Credit and supposedly prepares students for university). Now my poor social skills really crippled me, because the students in the smaller school had truly been kind and tolerant. Maybe the class was just too small for anybody to tolerate actual meanness. In high school however, with many more students, particularly thirteen-year olds in the throes of teenage crises, anxious to establish their roles in a much bigger social environment, I experienced real cruelty. (Wilma and the Jehovah's Witness did not come to high school. Wilma had to quit school altogether due to her Mennonite church rules.) Corey did not, I believe, experience cruelty (although nor did he perpetrate it).

Interestingly, both Corey and I were relatively short yet capable basketball players, at least capable enough to make the school teams. We both had no fear, dribbling the ball right under the tall guards and getting bruises as those kids came down from the rebound with their elbows out and into our faces. We both continued to get high grades, although Corey now savvily downplayed this. He made his way into the truly popular crowd. I made friends with Nathan (where are you, Nathan?) who was as geeky and excluded as me but shared a love of science fiction. I also made friends among a group of serious Christians who found me, again, odd (atheist) yet acceptable, and they even gave up on trying to convert me. I guess I benefitted from some of the high moral standards inculcated in these exceedingly Christian student group members, although I recall their high moral standards and spirit of acceptance didn't extend to gays. We knew one likely homosexual teen from another high school -- one of these extremely Christian kids declared he wouldn't let that homo into his house and another was sure his parents wouldn't either. So real social exclusion was for geeks, like me, despite the cachet of making the basketball team, and gays.

I was the only girl in the computer science class in grade ten, moreover I was taking it a year early. The teacher was a gentle intelligent Indian (from India, not native). He bemusedly recognized that I was the best programmer in the class by far, getting me involved in programming competitions and extracurricular projects. He also recognized that as the only girl in the class I was a serious distraction, when I finished the hour's work in the first 20 minutes and then hung around chatting with whoever else wasn't programming. "Lisa, why don't you let the guys get back to work?" I guess when there are no other females around at all, and when the popular kids aren't there to see you do it, it's OK to talk to the geek girl. I had my first taste of socio-sexual power in grade ten, when I was fifteen. OK, so "socio-sexual power" is vastly overstating it. I got the second-highest score in the year's math competition in the entire county. The awards ceremony was an evening affair with dinner in Waterloo. I was sick and tired of being "the geek" but didn't know how to break out of the pigeonhole I found myself in, so I considered not going. Instead, my mom advised me to wear a low-necked top and short skirt. I remember exactly how the top and skirt looked because that evening I received the first positive attention ever -- from seventeen year old boys, no less! It was just me and a couple guys having a mature conversation, with them appearing interested in what I was saying and showing approval in their smiles and genial tones, but this was entirely new for me -- the first time that attention was paid by boys to me at the same time that other girls (even geekier!) were present. The popular girls and boys had been flirting for years, but not me. This evening clearly made a big impression on me -- for the next few years I still achieved high grades in school, but now I also cultivated short skirts (previously non-existent in my wardrobe which consisted mostly of corduroy pants) and low-necked or tight shirts. This didn't change my popularity at my high school but it worked somewhat with people who didn't have pre-conceived notions of me.

Back to Corey. Although I now never interacted with him, and we probably didn't have many classes together, it was impossible to ignore him. In grade twelve he ran for student body president. His campaign was supported by many and it was really clever. He was still the only black student in the entire grade, and at times the only black kid in school. In this nearly uniformly white atmosphere, he appropriated the slogans of black civil rights activists: huge dramatic posters with "Black is Back" and "Black Power" were strung in our hallways and cafeteria. I believe most high school students had no awareness of the symbology behind these slogans. It was simply a campaign to remind everybody that Corey was the obvious, best candidate for the job, so obviously it didn't need to be stated explicitly -- and as a reminder that he was cooler than anybody, since coolness was the real winning characteristic in high school elections. When the election finally came, it was no contest -- he won handily.

So what am I saying? I guess I'm saying a certain level of discrimination is normal. Kids just do it to certain other kids. I minded at the time, I don't now. I found more of "my own kind" eventually, in youth orchestra, then in university. It's one of the challenges we might have to face. What Corey did with his high school life was good - whatever challenges he faced, though they weren't the same ones I faced, I know all teens find the teen years difficult. He succeeded in school and on the basketball team, developed leadership skills and went on to university. In the meantime he wasn't cruel, at least not to me. What you start with matters, and so does what you're given, but what you do with your life matters so much more.

The message in this comic (where an Indian programmer, I think, educates a dumb white American sales guy) passes for enlightened. But it's simply not true that globalization lowers the standard of living for Americans while raising it for less prosperous countries. The most common outcome of any specific example of globalization (e.g. reducing garment import taxes decreases consumption of US-made garments) is for a small set of US workers to lose their jobs or change jobs, while every US consumer benefits from lower costs of goods. Lower costs of goods is generally understood as an increase in standard of living.

I'm morally opposed to the bumper stickers police fundraisers hand out when people donate. These bumper stickers say something simple along the lines of "I support North Podunk Police". This is purely concern for the police officer on the street, of course. When I'm pulled over by a police officer for speeding (or, as last time, having one broken brake light), I would hate for that officer to suffer from any conflicting feelings by noticing that I donate to his pension fund.

This seems like a fascinating conference (link via Ole).

I've only started hearing about commercial establishments that ban photography recently. Apparently Starbucks does so (Instapundit mentions this and Lessig suggests the obvious counter-attack, and a long discussion can be found here) but I noticed Macy's forbids photographs too. Oddly enough I went into Macy's several weeks back to try on dresses for the Black and White Ball. I had my friend Brian take about 20 leisurely digital photos of me with different dresses on (so my boyfriend could check out the dresses without coming all the way into San Francisco -- I fully intended to buy a dress from Macy's if I chose one from Macy's, but I didn't, I bought a dress from a boutique). On my next visit to a Macy's I then noticed the "no photography" sign at the street entrance. Since it was two different Macy's they might have different policies. I wonder how long this policy has been there, and how cheap digital photography affects it one way or another?

After a bit of search, Comments on Lessig's blog point to many, many other commercial spaces banning photography:

• Fry's Electronics
• Lenox Square in Atlanta and other unnamed malls
• a camera store(!)
• Toys R Us
• McDonalds
• Harrod's
• "any mom & pop fish or vegetable market in San Francisco's Chinatown"
• Crate and Barrel
• Apple retail stores
• Giant Foods Grocery
• In N Out burger

In addition there were some governmental locations mentioned (NY subway, a state government building, many museums). And, no surprise, strip clubs ban photography. But Starbucks is the one that has bloggers up in arms! There's a downloadable "Photographer's Rights" flyer that relates to this issue.

I agree with so much of this, from Colby Cosh from May 27:

How are markets like science? Science existed for a good long while before, at some point, science became an object of study in itself, resulting in a "revolution" within Western civilization. People became aware of the power and methodology of science more or less simultaneously. Markets, similarly, have always existed, but only recently became an object of study. Adam Smith was the Francis Bacon of markets. The Market-istic Revolution is still ongoing, and it is as important as the Scientific Revolution. There are a lot of people who still don't, and won't, get that. I believe that, at some future time, the authority or credibility of the market as a means of organizing a certain kind of social activity will be taken for granted, much as science's authority or credibility is now taken for granted by those hostile to it. Science is bogusly criticized for not being able to arrive at all possible truths--deemed useless or inferior (or challenged as a quasi-religion) because it is, at any given stage of history, incomplete or imperfect. Similarly, because there are some kinds of social ordering which the market cannot handle, it is sometimes written off (and very often as a quasi-religion) on similar grounds. We will one day--I am certain of this--feel the need to teach economics as a basic subject in schools, as we now teach science.

Colby thinks that's obvious, but I'd have to say only to people who think similarly. There exist a number of people who refuse to treat economics with anything like the seriousness they afford to science (and you rarely find the other way around).

An article I wrote has been published in Czechoslovakia, under the name Lisa Dusseaultova. Sorry it's just an image, not the article -- Xythos developers in Brno scanned this in for me.

From Kunstler's online memoirs:

The main difference between the person I was before and the one I became after is that I came to understand how much I was responsible for what happened to me in all aspects of my life, and responsible too for how I felt about what happened to me. In fact, I learned that mostly things don't just happen to us. We make choices to act, or to not act, and that makes all the difference in the world. Here you are in the world. What will you do?

Lileks reviews Lifeforce today:

I have a crick in my neck from ducking the chunks it blew.

Yet it's a long funny review -- sometimes the worst movies are the best for a rant. See also Ekr's review of Shaolin Drunken Monk if you haven't already.

An unlikely event like this (link via Sullivan) makes you wonder if our probability estimates are wrong. Then again, given enough chances, unlikely events are eventually likely to happen.

From Ask Cecil:

The rear wall ... is parabolic in cross section when viewed from above, and the porcelain finish is conducive to laminar flow. The principles of fluid dynamics tell us that a fluid striking a smooth surface at an oblique angle will tend to flow along that surface. Assuming the source of the fluid is near the focal point of the parabola... the fluid will run straight down the wall with little or no splashing.

He is, of course, discussing a urinal, in response to a question about where to aim. I'm glad to hear that considerable Science goes into the design of these. I only wish equivalent Science went into making sure that toilets flushed reliably, but judging by the homes I've lived in, that isn't yet entirely successful.

Mark Steyn, interviewed on Enter Stage Right, illustrates Canadian anti-Americanism:

The other day The Ottawa Citizen had a letter from a Vancouver lady objecting to any Canadian participation in continental missile defence on the grounds that an intercepted nuke could wind up scattering contaminated debris over the Canadian countryside. The logic of her position is that she'd rather that nuke continued on its way over the border and took out Dallas or St Louis. Say what you like, but that 's consistent.

And Natalie Solent fights UK anti-Americanism, pointing out that the British Margaret Drabble's hatred of airplanes painted with vicious faces doesn't justify the feelings it aroused given the RAF has also followed that practice.

Today I've been following links to blogs I don't usually visit (in between working). The Agora caught my attention due to the sentence

Palin is to educational TV what Jean Sebelius is to 20th Century classical music: an unlikly person to take a form that has failed to live up to its seemingly infinite potential, and astound you with a presentation of a vast subject in a simple and intimatly human performance.

I feel compelled to pay attention to the aesthetic opinions of a man who can make that kind of comparison.

More non-serious stuff: Psycho Kittens. These made me laugh so hard tears came out of my eyes. I'm still giggling remembering them.

A link containing Science for Terence and Ekr.

The US government has now increased its official estimate of the oil reserves in Alberta. (Link via Colby Cosh)

At a briefing on this year's EIA International Energy Outlook, EIA Administrator Guy Caruso ... raised Canada's proven oil reserves to 180 billion bbls from 4.9 billion bbls, thanks to inclusion of the oil sands - also known as tar sands - now considered recoverable with existing technology and market conditions.

My dad has had a little to do with this recent technology. This is a perfect example of what I've discussed before (unfortunately links back to this blog archive are not working).

The Remote Fart Machine. Link courtesy Ami Simms.

Ekr and I have discovered a simple new toy recently: MegaMagz or GeoMags. They're clearly fun for adults, to the point where he and I fought over them one evening soon after getting a small set. Adults can figure out how to make hinges or rotational joints, maximizing the magnetic attraction by the careful arrangement of the balls and bars in certain alignments, maximizing rotational momentum and so on. Yet they're also fun for kids below the suggested lower end of the age range. We gave a set to a 3-year old on his birthday and he immediately constructed a stick out of several short bars, then discovered that his magnetic stick was able to pick up a ball bearing just by getting near it. He named this his "finder stick" and started rolling the steel bearings under the couch so he could then stick his "finder stick" in there to retrieve them. Last week we gave a set to a 4-year old for her birthday and now her mother tells me:

[She] has suddenly discovered that magnets can not only stick things together, but can attract and repel each other. She's been walking around with pieces of the magnetics set you gave her, building things and showing everyone how it works, for a day and a half.

I guess the age ranges they put on toy boxes are completely arbitrary. Sure a three year old can swallow a ball bearing -- but they can also get into far more dangerous stuff. Better just to teach them judgement and motor control by that age and then deal with the occasional mishap (like when I was three and I stuck a bean up my nose and couldn't get it out) with as much calm as you can muster. Somebody on Epinions has similarly ignored the age recommendations -- she recommends Magz and talks about how her four-year-old plays with them.

In a lovely essay on being persecuted by the number 7 (link via Colby Cosh), George Miller presents (among other things) the concept of recoding to remember more stuff. There are some nice illustrations of how this works:

It is a little dramatic to watch a person get 40 binary digits in a row and then repeat them back without error. However, if you think of this merely as a mnemonic trick for extending the memory span, you will miss the more important point that is implicit in nearly all such mnemonic devices. The point is that recoding is an extremely powerful weapon for increasing the amount of information that we can deal with. In one form or another we use recoding constantly in our daily behavior.

Many people on the Internet love to play "Let's you and him fight". This is a game where somebody with nothing to lose eggs on aggressive behavior on the part of somebody who has something to lose. On the Internet it frequently takes the form of urging legal battles. Penny Arcade recently posted a funny satirical comic on the Strawberry Shortcake character by American McGee of American Greetings. PA was asked to remove this comic from their site by lawyers for American Greetings. So of course loyal Penny Arcade readers boiled into a frenzy suggesting boycotting American Greetings cards and other products (they're a huge company), suggesting petitions, getting the ACLU and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund involved and "raising awareness" (=="ranting").They even got Scott of PVP into the action for some reason asking him to post on the subject (which he did but in a dampening fashion). Meanwhile PA took down the comic and went on with their lives which is the only sane thing to do when a couple random dudes might face legal action. I guess that's why organizations like CBLDF exist but they also need to choose their battles.

An interesting graphic from David Isenberg shows how voice is already there on the Internet. The text accompanying the chart says that by 2006, 50% of voice calls will go over the Internet. That will only come true through user behavior changes if voice calls over the Internet become as easy, or easier, than picking up the phone and dialing. There are of course costs with traditional voice calls but I can't imagine that accounts for 50%, to the point of making users switch to something unfamiliar, daunting and less accessible than a phone with 12 buttons.

The other way for calls over the Internet to become easy is for the regular phone to remain our voice call appliance and to work the same way it does now, but for the phone companies to route over the Internet. I don't know as much about that business to know how it will work, but something tells me entrenched interests will resist that.

A friend of mine is being asked to wear one of these dresses as a bridesmaid. It's the white one. Whoever heard of bridesmaids being made to wear white? I consoled her with images from the link Ekr posted a few days ago to www.uglydress.com. It could be so much worse.

A cool bit of email fiction. At least, one really really hopes its fiction, because it bears an all-too-sinister relationship to reality. To get one of the in jokes: Building 7 does not exist (at Microsoft).

An ex-Microsoft employee writes:

Digging in against open source commoditization won't work - it would be like digging in against the Internet, which Microsoft tried for a while before getting wise. Any move towards cutting off alternatives by limiting interoperability or integration options would be fraught with danger, since it would enrage customers, accelerate the divergence of the open source platform, and have other undesirable results. Despite this, Microsoft is at risk of following this path, due to the corporate delusion that goes by many names: "better together," "unified platform," and "integrated software." There is false hope in Redmond that these outmoded approaches to software integration will attract and keep international markets, governments, academics, and most importantly, innovators, safely within the Microsoft sphere of influence. But they won't .

The Agitator, past couple days posts, reminds me of high school. So smoking regulations have pushed people outside to smoke? There was a U-shaped semi-protected area between two buildings and the walkway between them where all the high-school smokers congregated to puff. Since there was no overhead shelter it was frequently miserable (this was in Canada where it is miserable 10 out of 12 months), but since high school was all about being cool even if it meant being cold, they all stood out there without coats. Of course the smokers were highly segregated from the non-smokers. You couldn't be friends with smokers during school hours unless you were willing to stand with them in the smoke, in the cold.

Next, the star of the "bomb reality movie Cancun" (I assume in this context bomb means bad) says "I'd rather be known for this instead of being smart or something." Well, so did all the girls in high school. They'd rather be known for anything instead of being known for intelligence -- whether that was excessive drinking and puking, slutty behavior, or getting in trouble with teachers.

I don't know what's been reminding me of high school so much lately but I find vivid memories popping up: eating Vachon snack cakes (Jos Louis, Caramel), the girl whose extreme posture turned size C breasts into a shelf-like protuberance making her very popular, the student council president election for one of the only black kids in the entire school where his campaign posters ran on reverse racism: "Black is Better". I don't miss high school, but I guess you can never leave it behind.

Wish I could be there: a Presence panel at Networld+Interop next week. It includes a couple friends so I'll try to get the low-down.

Throw away the Internet to improve security? Well, that would do it, but it's as drastic as cutting out your eyes to reduce glare. The article is really stupid -- e.g. SMTP already has a certificate infrastructure in S/MIME, and there's no need to rip out IP (see IPSec).

Rescorla is soon to give a talk at Usenix entitled The Internet is Too Secure Already which points the finger not at the user (it's pointless to blame them) but at the incentive structure which encourages people to spend too much time making sure that systems are impregnable against high-end attacks. The field is full of papers perfecting stuff that's already really good rather than fixing the stuff that's really bad. Usually the real problem is we don't have a deployable, usable system which integrates the good-enough cryptography into our applications and networks. Companies may now finally be willing to pay for that, which they haven't in the past, out of their own needs and new government regulations (like HIPAA).

Update: I previously said that Ekr already gave this talk but he's in fact going to give it in August.

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.