Stardate 20010524.9999 (On Screen): Another test entry.

Stardate 20010524.9999 (On Screen): A test entry. Did I get another stupid font tag?

Stardate 20010524.0735 (On Screen): We should preach abstinence! The way to keep them out of trouble is for them to not do the things which are dangerous! But they're going to do it anyway, and if they do they'll get hurt. So the thing to do is teach them not to get hurt and give them protection.

This argument applies equally to the question of giving condoms to teenagers, and giving survival kits to Mexicans trying to illegally cross the US border. I support the former. I guess I have to support the latter, though it makes me uncomfortable.

Stardate 20010524.0720 (On Screen): I think I'm glad this has happened. When I was in high school, I remember having a conversation on a bus with two girls from the UK who were complaining about the fact that our government was divided and deadlocked, since one party controlled the Congress and the other the Whitehouse. They contrasted this to the Parliamentary system, where one party always controls the legislature and the executive branch (because the legislature chooses the executive). I defended our system, mostly out of knee-jerk patriotism. I didn't know much then.

As I grew older, I came to realize the wisdom of their words. Indeed, there have been times when our government has been deadlocked in party politics and unable to react to things.

But when I was faced with a unified government whose policies I did not like, I realized the danger it represented -- and I've returned to my earlier view. A split government is more desirable. The reason is that when there are things which are truly important and necessary, the parties will come together and get them done. It's the ideologically-motivated government actions which get stalled. Which suits me fine.

In any case, this particular event means that the Republicans don't get to pack the federal court system with conservative judges. Now that the Democrats control the Senate (just!) then the judges that Bush nominates will have to be more mainstream. He certainly isn't going to be nominating raving pinko liberals, but he'll have to stay to the center. Of all the things the government can do, the one which scares me the most is the politicizing of the judiciary. That's always happened to some extent, but I think the temptation has been there to be more radical about it starting with Reagan. For the next four years, at least, we're free of this scourge. Of necessity federal judicial appointments will be bipartisan, because they'll be nominated by a Republican president but approved by a Democratic senate.

The politics of the US is about to get a lot more contentious.

Stardate 20010524.0700 (On Screen): Brian Clair is making a fundamental mistake. He's assuming that he is indispensable. He's correct that the collapse of the online advertising model means the doom of his site and those like it. He's not correct that this is some sort of catastrophe. He's also not correct that Something Must Be Done.

It will be a catastrophe to him; it's his job. But it won't be to me, or to the majority of web users. I just got involved in this same discussion on a news server I use; the owner of the site posted a similar lament about how the advertising model for the web was collapsing, wondering what could be done to reverse it. He was rather stunned when I posted that I was glad it was collapsing and that I intended to do everything I could to make that process move forward faster and become more complete.

Stardate 20010524.0615 (On Screen): It's been suggested before that we're actually living inside a big simulation. (It also figures highly in the denouement of Jack Chalker's "Flux and Anchor" series, which I recommend highly.) I actually was thinking about this the other day, and considering some of the digital aspects of the universe. The most prominent of these is of course the quantum theory: a photon's energy state isn't analog. It has distinct steps it can occupy and isn't capable of occupying any energy state in between.

What I was wondering is whether position might be quantized. Can the exact location of an object be represented in a finite number of bits? No, Special Relativity doesn't permit it. "Absolute location" is a meaningless phrase.

Can an object's position relative to another object be represented in a finite number of bits? That's tougher, but again I think the answer is "no". Take two planets rotating about two stars, and assume that the positions of the planets are granulized relative to their two stars. Then assume that the position of the stars are granulized (Geeze; that word's in FrontPage's dictionary! I thought I made it up) relative to each other, and to the center of the galaxy in which they exist, and essentially relative to everything. No matter how you add it up, you end up with a fixed frame of reference, and there can be no such thing. As soon as it's proved that there is a fixed frame of reference, Special Relativity falls down -- and someone has to explain why atomic bombs explode.

Which is why I find the "cosmic background" disturbing, because it seems to me that that is a fixed frame of reference. It's the heat left over from the Big Bang, detectable now as residual radiation representing a temperature of a couple of degrees Kelvin, and we can measure our velocity relative to it by measuring the doppler shift in different directions. Am I missing something here? (Where was I going with this? Oh, that direction at 1488 km/s. Now I know where I am.) 

Stardate 20010524.0550 (On Screen): I think this is a really bad idea. We have a system now which supports debit cards (I've used one for years) but it uses telecommunications and a central database. When I buy something with my debit card, the transaction is confirmed with my bank in real time. That doesn't prove that my debit card is real (it could be a forgery), so it is still possible for someone to rip me off.

But on a more global level, that would be theft, not counterfeiting. Someone would be taking my money, but the total amount of money wouldn't change. When the electronic money becomes self contained, and when the system becomes widespread, then if there's a crack it would become a perfectly undetectable way to counterfeit, and the potential exists for a huge flood of new money to be introduced into the system, resulting in inflation and financial ruin.

The people trying to design this are going to do their best to make it invulnerable (though I'm always suspicious of any design-by-committee -- I've been in one of those industry standards bodies and I know how lousy they can be) but for something like this the certainty required is too high. There's just too much at stake. I think that the whole concept of electronic money which doesn't check a centralized database as its used is a bad thing.

Standardize on this and use it broadly, and you're setting yourself up for a single-point-failure which could take the entire economy out.

Stardate 20010523.1930 (Crew, this is the Captain): The server is running and works fine. I've upgraded the memory (from 64M to 512M) without managing to kill it. It's not doing much interesting yet; I've got a lot to learn. But so far things look good. (Wonder if this old dog can learn a new trick? What's a PHP? sob)

Stardate 20010523.1230 (Crew, this is the Captain): It's here! It's here! UPS just delivered the server! (Now everyone go away and leave me alone for a while.)

Stardate 20010523.0930 (On Screen): The single most critical battle of WWII in the Pacific was the Battle of Midway. And the critical decision of that battle was made by Admiral Frank Fletcher.

Midway was the battle where Japan wanted to finish the job they started at Pearl Harbor. At Pearl Harbor they had destroyed most of the battleships in the US Pacific fleet; at Midway they intended to destroy the carriers. Having done this, they hoped the US would capitulate and negotiate a peace.

What they didn't count on was that the Americans were reading the Japanese codes, especially a code known to the US codebreakers as "JN-25B". This was the Japanese flag code, and carried the top level information to the fleet. It was used to send out the Japanese Midway plan, and American codebreakers read that plan. The story of how the Midway attack plan was deciphered by the Americans is an exciting one but much too long for me to describe here. However, this permitted Admiral Chester Nimitz, CinCPac (Commander in Chief, Pacific) to move all his carriers into exactly the right position to attack the Japanese carriers. There were three, in two taskforces. One taskforce should have been Lexington and Yorktown (plus cruisers and destroyers), but "Lady Lex" had just been sunk at Coral Sea, and Yorktown was badly damaged in that battle. The other taskforce was Hornet and the legendary Enterprise (probably the single most celebrated ship in the history of the US Navy). (Saratoga, which probably was damaged more times without sinking than any other carrier in US history, was in drydock. Wasp was in the Atlantic delivering planes to Malta. Langley was obsolete and not suited for combat.)

The Enterprise/Hornet taskforce should have been commanded by Admiral William Halsey, but he became sick and had to report to the hospital (to his bitter disappointment). Nimitz asked him to suggest a replacement, and he named his old friend Admiral Raymond Spruance, who had never before commanded carriers but who had been Halsey's cruiser commander in the taskforce. However, Nimitz knew and respected Spruance, and accepted the recommendation. Since Admiral Fletcher was senior and also more experienced with carriers, he was placed in overall command. (Had Halsey been fit to serve, he would have been senior to Fletcher.)

The two taskforces launched the single most effective air strike made by the US to that time, and through a combination of courage, skill, impeccable timing and incredible luck managed to destroy three of the four Japanese big deck carriers. The fourth then launched a counterstrike which found the already damaged Yorktown and hit it with both bombs and torpedoes. Fletcher had been commanding the battle out of Yorktown and was forced to leave it, moving to the cruiser Astoria.

At which point there was a serious problem. One of the reasons that a taskforce commander operated from a carrier was that it was big enough to have the facilities on board needed for command of a battle. The admiral's staff was large and critical; no admiral controls a battle in a vacuum. Astoria didn't have the facilities (including in particular enough radios).

On the other hand, Spruance had never commanded carriers before. He was a good, experienced admiral but his experience had been in cruisers and destroyers. Fletcher was more than a hundred miles away from Enterprise and Hornet (which is why the Japanese never found them) and joining them wasn't an option. What to do?

In my opinion, Fletcher made the decision which won the Pacific war: he turned over command of the battle to Spruance. This was not an obvious decision to make but on retrospect it was absolutely correct, because Spruance did a superb job. Admiral Spruance proceeded to find and destroy the last Japanese big-deck carrier, and later destroy or severely damage several other Japanese ships (including at least two heavy cruisers). The Japanese retreated. Midway was saved, but that's not as important as two other things:

1. This was the high point in the Pacific war for the Japanese. Until that point they had held a superiority in both quality and quantity. After that, they never again had a superiority, and in 1943 when the next generation of American ships (including the superb Essex-class and Princeton-class carriers) started to go into service, as well as the new American planes (especially the Lightning, Corsair, Avenger and Hellcat), the Japanese began to be progressively more and more inferior, and the naval battles more and more one sided. They were never able to match American production, and their head start was lost at Midway. Ultimately, at the Marianas the Japanese air forces were destroyed, and at the Phillipines their surface fleet was destroyed. After that they were helpless.

2. It lead to Spruance sharing field command of the Pacific fleet with Halsey, in an unprecedented arrangement where they took turns. Halsey commanded the last half of the Solomons campaign, Spruance at the Marianas, Halsey again at the Phillipines, and Spruance at Iwo and Okinawa. Halsey was in command at the end of the war when the Japanese surrendered, though Spruance would have commanded during the invasion of Japan had it been necessary. Spruance's performance at the Marianas and at Okinawa was superb; Halsey tended to make big mistakes (though fortunately none of them really resulted in catastrophe).

Fletcher himself fades from history a few months after this. He was competent but simply wasn't as good as either Spruance or Halsey. He served through the end of the war but not on the front line. (He was given command of the North Pacific theater, a backwater where no important actions took place.) It is rare in history for a top commander to have the courage to yield command when he is not wounded, knowing full well the effect it might have on his own career. Fletcher was an uncommon man.

Why am I discussing all this? The article referenced above claims that Gil Amelio saved Apple. It's not yet obvious that Apple has been saved, but it is clear that it was in deep trouble and is now in far better shape than it was four years ago. I believe it is indeed true that Gil Amelio saved Apple by his decision to purchase Next and bring Steve Jobs back into the company. On a technical level, BE would have been a better choice for an OS than NextStep (once Apple proved beyond any doubt that they were incompetent to create their own replacement internally for the obsolete "classic" MacOS), but on the more important level of management, Jobs was more of an asset than Agassiz. Now it is not true that Amelio voluntarily yielded command to Jobs, so in that sense his actions are not quite the same as those of Admiral Fletcher's, but the effect was the same.

Much as I am contemptuous of Jobs as a flaming liar (don't get me started) I do not think there is anyone else who could have turned the company around the way he has. Jobs's ego will certainly never let him publicly acknowledge the debt Apple owes to Amelio, but the Mac Faithful should hoist a beer to him the next time the Reality Distortion Field wears off.

Stardate 20010523.0850 (On Screen): This has to be the strangest campaign promise I've ever heard. "Free plastic surgery for all"? And I thought the Americans fielded crack-pot candidates.

Stardate 20010522.1155 (On Screen): This is being advertised as a potential "cure" for Alzheimer's disease. While this is amazingly good news, it's important to understand what this could, and could not, do. If it works as advertised, then it will stop the progression of the disease.

What it won't do is to reverse existing damage. Nerve cells which are dead won't come back to life. A person who is already severely handicapped by the disease won't get better; it's just that they would stop getting worse.

Stardate 20010522.1145 (On Screen): The Khmer Rouge took over in Cambodia and imposed increasingly draconian measures on its population, until there started being wholesale executions, the now notorious "killing fields". As much as a third of the population may have died. The world stood by and watched, and did nothing. Now we're seeing an equally extreme group impose progressively draconian measures in another country, indicating that they also will stop at nothing. Will the world stand by and watch again?

Yup.

Stardate 20010522.1120 (On Screen): An interesting addendum to my essay on beautiful women: it seems that if you take any random 32 faces and use a computer program to digitize them and average them, you end up with a face which is perceived to be "attractive". I'd be interested in seeing what they look like.

Stardate 20010522.1110 (On Screen): It's nice to see that someone in the Linux community is finally waking up to the essential difference between Linux and Windows for desktop use: applications. No matter how good Linux itself is, it has never had and never will have the rich variety of applications available for it for desktop use which Windows has, and thus will never become a serious threat to Microsoft's lock on the desktop. (There will be users. There will never be very many.)

On the server side it's a different matter. But the requirements on a server are much different. In particular, servers run a much more narrow selection of applications, often only one. And Linux makes perfect sense in such an environment if the few apps required are available for it. My Qube 3 will be running Linux, using Apache and SQL and a mail program and PERL -- but my desktop will continue to run Win2K.

Stardate 20010522.1040 (Crew, this is the Captain): The Qube 3 server shipped yesterday from San Jose, and UPS has scheduled delivery for tomorrow. (I can hardly wait!) Once it arrives, log entries here may be more scarce for a couple of days while I mess with it.

Stardate 20010522.0825 (On Screen): "Attention please. This coming Friday, all the burglar alarms in Santa Camino will be deactivated from 3:00PM until 4:00PM. Thank you very much."

Stardate 20010522.0820 (On Screen): With great fanfare, Motorola has announced the new 7440 PPC chip -- and it's completely useless to Apple. It's physically smaller and uses less electrical power, which doesn't matter in a desktop computer (but does matter in embedded, Motorola's main market for the PPC). The L3 cache was removed, which means it will be slower per clock-rate than the 7450. It will max out at 700 MHz, where the 7450 already goes 733 MHz.

With friends like Motorola, Apple doesn't need enemies.

Stardate 20010522.0810 (On Screen): Yet again, the advertisers have confused what they want as also being what we want. (Everybody wants to look at advertising!) The idea here is that someone is going to go to Radio Shack and get a free device to connect to their computer. Then, if the computer is turned on during broadcast of a TV, the TV program will be able to generate a small burst of modulated sound (and boy is that going to be annoying) which will be picked up by the new device which will store it. If you're connected to the Internet, your browser will pop open with a web page of their choosing. Wow! And if you aren't connected to the Internet, then the next time you do connect the page will open first thing.

The typical connect-time for one of these devices is going to be about two days. Then it's going to be dissect-city. I wonder whether these can be modified for better (unauthorized) uses (just like the last toy from these wizards)?

I thought crazy dot-com ideas died last year. Is it 1999 again without someone telling me?

Stardate 20010522.0745 (On Screen): I'm not a big fan of movies, but I love reading movie reviews. I objected strongly to some online hype about the upcoming movie "Pearl Harbor" recently, and I've been watching its progress. There's a great big alarm bell going off now: the movie will premiere this coming Friday and there are no reviews. The studio hasn't prescreened it for anyone. This is always a danger sign; it means that they know they have shit and they want to try to get as many people in for the first weekend as they can before word spreads. I have never heard of a good movie which was released without prescreenings. As I write this, the Rotten Tomatoes page for "Pearl Harbor" has only one review of it, and that one is negative. I predict a final "Tomato-meter" score of less than 20%. And considering how they dishonored the men who really fought and died at Pearl Harbor, I hope they lose a pile of money on it.

Stardate 20010522.0715 (On Screen): I suppose to people in Texas this is a new concept, but it's not unprecedented. The Colorado River hasn't flowed into the Gulf of California for decades. it stops several miles short, and the old courseway is dry.

This has had interesting ecological effects. The Gulf is very long, and so there used to be (two hundred years ago) a gradient of salinity, with a series of ecologically interesting areas with different salt levels. However, without the flow of fresh water at its head, now the entire gulf is at the same salinity level (that of the open ocean) and those places are dying.

Not that it's going to change; the only way to fix it would be to tear down Los Angeles and San Diego and Phoenix and Tucson and Las Vegas and move everyone to Oregon where there's plenty of water. Somehow I think the Oregonians would take a dim view.

The Colorado River is the most managed river on Earth, rivaled only by the Jordan river. At the border between the US and Mexico there is a dam whose job is to regulate release of water into Mexico to satisfy treaty requirements. There's also a huge nuclear plant there. Its entire electrical output goes into a desalinization plant right next to it, whose job is to extract salt so that the water given to Mexico is usable for agriculture.

The Rio Grande has many things in common with the Colorado: it's the main source of fresh water flowing through a desert, and it supports a lot of cities and a lot of agriculture. Demands for fresh water there have been rising and will continue to rise, but the source (the river) is finite. The situation of it not reaching the sea now is probably temporary, caused by a rain shortfall, but there will come a time when it is a permanent condition. And it won't be the last river for which this happens.

Stardate 20010522.0605 (On Screen): In the course of this, when the original confession took place the guy who had hosted the Kaycee Nicole web log took it offline. But the whole thing was still in the Google cache and someone else retrieved a lot of the entries. They're now back online, in case you want to look closeup at the pathology of the web. And that, too, is pretty scary. You can run but you can't hide.

Stardate 20010522.0540 (On Screen): As if it were possible, the Kaycee Nicole story just took a turn for the even more weird. Far more details have been revealed. Many people were involved in this for months and got badly hurt, but my involvement in it started last Friday and until now I simply was treating it as an intellectual problem. But now I too am feeling the "sick to my stomach" feeling so many others have been having.

It turns out that Kaycee Nicole was created by a teenage girl, and the identity was taken over by her mother. It is the mother who created the cancer story. The pictures were stolen; it turns out they were those of a local basketball star whose name was Julie and she was originally picked by the daughter. The woman in the pictures knew nothing whatever about it, but has now been informed, and she truly is the in the first rank of victims here. (She may have grounds for a private lawsuit.) For her this must be like taking a step into the Twilight Zone.

The mainstream press is now on the case and you should soon see national coverage of it. When that happens I'll provide links. I also understand that there are legal investigations going on. At the very least there's suspicion here of mail fraud. I have no idea what other crimes may have been committed, but that will certainly also come out in due course. The story as already known is too spectacular; the reporters aren't going to rest until they've found it all out.

In some ways, to me the most scary thing about this is not that someone could perpetrate a hoax of this magnitude for such a long time, but rather that the whole thing could be unraveled by people online in such a short time. The identity of the hoaxer and the source of the pictures and a lot of other critical information about the whole thing were discovered in just a couple of days by perhaps fifty dedicated amateurs using online search engines. The real name of the woman in the pictures was found in just four days. It is true that certain clues had been left behind by the hoaxers, but the real point is just how much this says about how much information is now publicly available about us all online.

Stardate 20010521.2010 (On Screen): Veho ergo sum.

Stardate 20010521.1450 (On Screen): I think this is a good thing. The problem with having what amounts to a museum of vandalism is that it encourages more vandalism. People doing that kind of thing are motivated by glory; it is fame they seek. And if you can get your picture on the cover of the Rolling Stone then you're more likely to do it again. Each entry in the Attrition database is a trophy for someone, which he can show to his friends and say "See! I did that!"

Not that I expect its end to substantially cut down on the amount of vandalism, but it may diminish the rate of growth a bit.

Stardate 20010521.1330 (On Screen): "The court of appeals has thus gravely, indeed in its own view perhaps fatally, constricted Congress' power to address that serious problem," Acting Solicitor General Barbara Underwood wrote in court papers. I would argue that it's the Bill of Rights which restricts Congress' power to address a lot of serious problems.

That's the price we pay for freedom. We could have the most safe and secure nation on Earth, protected by marvelous laws and an overwhelmingly effective law enforcement establishment. All we'd have to do is rip up the Bill of Rights and about half the constitution, and give the government the power to do anything whatever that it liked. I think I like the current state of affairs better. I don't want the government to be all-powerful. (And neither did the people who wrote our constitution.)

I think what I dislike about Underwood's statement is the implicit assumption that Congress should always have the ability to address any serious problem. (Of course, she's a lawyer and has an obligation to make the best case she can for her client. So I don't hold it against her.) Sorry, I don't agree.

Stardate 20010521.1130 (On Screen): I remember a few years ago when the CD was still brand new that my brother mentioned to me that they were talking about making it so that CDs could also be used to contain computer data. And with extreme foresight, I stated "It won't ever become popular. What could you possibly need to sell which would require 650M of storage space? Legal libraries, maybe. Nothing else!" (Man, I should be a stock broker with vision like that. Four years later I bought a CD drive so I could play "The Seventh Guest".)

So I ran into this article and decided to try to be just a bit more clear sighted this time. What would I do with 650G of HD space? That may soon be coming. This computer already has in excess of 70G of space; what if I had ten times that? First, RAID would become standard. My first reaction is "How would I back it up?" RAID would help. But I think what we're going to see is external disks which are temporarily connected to the system solely to make snapshots. Something like that exists now, though at nothing like the size you'd need. These drives (or the USB versions) really don't make sense for normal use but they are marvelous backup devices. I own three 10G USB ones which I do use for archiving.

When disk space this large becomes common, I think one use in particular will be increased use of online video. But beyond that I really don't know what I'd store in that much space. (But I'm sure that by the time it comes along I'll find something.) Sorry, my crystal ball is just as cracked now as it was back then.

Stardate 20010521.1045 (On Screen): You know, I'd take Michael Tiemann's opinion a lot more seriously if his company (Red Hat) had actually ever made money. (I guess I just don't Get It™.)

Stardate 20010521.1000 (Crew, this is the Captain): Why do we seem to value beautiful young women more than anyone else, despite the fact that this seems to be ethically wrong?

Stardate 20010521.0700 (On Screen): It's a promising sign when kids are more open minded than their parents. I think the quoted "Of COURSE we hate homosexuality" comment indicates more about the reporter than it does about the students of this school, frankly.

For all the problems that school busing caused in the US, I knew it was working when I started seeing interracial groups of teenagers hanging out together. (In Boston, no less!)

Stardate 20010520.1350 (On Screen): If I had to pick the first black man to be the President of the US, Al Sharpton sure as hell wouldn't be it. (But I'd vote for Colin Powell. In a minute. If he ever runs, he can be certain of my vote.)

Sharpton is forever discredited for me because of his antics in the Tawana Brawley affair. But this is far from the only such thing. Every adult citizen over the age of 35 who hasn't been convicted of a felony has the right to run for President. But they don't have the right to demand I vote for them, and I wouldn't vote for Sharpton even at gun point.

The problem is that Sharpton is the anti-King. Martin Luther King Jr. tried to heal the divide between the races while also working for the improvement of the lot of blacks and other minorities. He wasn't an unflawed man, but he was a very good man, a man motivated by love and conscience. Sharpton, on the other hand, is divisive and uses his public platform to sow discord and hatred. As long as he breaks no laws, he has a First Amendment right to do this. But I don't have to respect him for it.