Ethel the Blog
Observations (and occasional brash opining) on science, computers, books, music and other shiny things that catch my mind's eye. There's a home page with ostensibly more permanent stuff. This is intended to be more functional than decorative. I neither intend nor want to surf on the bleeding edge, keep it real, redefine journalism or attract nyphomaniacal groupies (well, maybe a wee bit of the latter). The occasional cheap laugh, raised eyebrow or provocation of interest are all I'll plead guilty to in the matter of intent. Bene qui latuit bene vixit.

The usual copyright stuff applies, but I probably won't get enraged until I find a clone site with absolutely no attribution (which, by the way, has happened twice with some of my other stuff). Finally, if anyone's offended by anything on this site then please do notify me immediately. I like to keep track of those times when I get something right.

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"When they say, 'Gee it's an information explosion!', no, it's not an explosion, it's a disgorgement of the bowels is what it is. Every idiotic thing that anybody could possibly write or say or think can get into the body politic now, where before things would have to have some merit to go through the publishing routine, now, ANYTHING." - Harlan Ellison JOLLY OLD PALS Other stuff of mild interest to some: unusual literature scientific software blog physical oceanography glossary computer-related tutorials and texts Friday, September 08, 2000 ANOTHER FAILED BRIBE FOR THE WEALTHY The GOP failed to override a presidential veto of another of their phoney attempts at populist demagogery. I just heard some GOP hack practically weeping about how not passing the estate tax elimination would be the ruination of family farms and small businesses. Uh huh. Things are a bit different in the world where the sum of two and two is four. Just like with the supposed marriage tax penalty, the real issue is the utter intransigence of the GOP to consider any sort of legislative compromise. On the marriage tax issue, they insisted on a package for which up to 50% of the tax "relief" would have gone to those not being hit by the marriage tax penalty and refused to consider a less expensive version targeting those actually being penalized. On this issue, they vehemently refused to consider a compromise that would increase the already hefty amount that could be excluded from the estate tax. The facts, as listed by the folks at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, are: In 1997, the estates of fewer than 43,000 people - fewer than 1.9 percent of the 2.3 million people who died that year - had to pay any estate tax. The Joint Committee on Taxation projects that the percentage of people who die whose estates will be subject to estate tax will remain at about two percent for the foreseeable future. In other words, 98 of every 100 people who die face no estate tax whatsoever. To be subject to tax, the size of an estate must exceed $675,000 in 2000. The estate tax exemption is rising to $1 million by 2006. Note that an estate of any size may be bequeathed to a spouse free of estate tax. Each member of a married couple is entitled to the basic $675,000 exemption. Thus, a couple can effectively exempt $1.35 million from the estate tax in 2000, rising to $2 million by 2006. The vast bulk of estate taxes are paid on very large estates. In 1997, some 2,400 estates - the largest five percent of estates that were of sufficient size to be taxable - paid nearly half of all estate taxes. These were estates with assets exceeding $5 million. This means about half of the estate tax was paid by the estates of the wealthiest one of every 1,000 people who died. If the estate tax had been repealed, each of these 2,400 estates with assets exceeding $5 million would have received a tax-cut windfall in 1997 that averaged more than $3.4 million. Clinton's party offered a compromise wherein a $4 million exclusion per family would be provided for family farms and small businesses. This was rejected in favor of the aforementioned tearful rhetoric attempting to paint a picture of Johnny Hardscrabble's last $20 dollars being yanked from his hands by the evil gummint while his babies starve. That this ploy is so obviously transparent and groundless by even the standards of a party that's been limbo dancing underground for nearly a decade is a sign of their sheer desperation. What next? A proposal to rescind all taxes since the shortfall will be more than made up for by the generosity of the 1% charitable contributions of such wealthy saints as Dick "Headstart is a secret commie plot" Cheney? posted by Steven Baum 9/8/2000 07:36:53 AM | link ALCOHOLIC REPUBLIC W. J. Rorabaugh's The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition details how - between 1790 and 1840 - Americans drank like fish. And we're talking many gallons per person per year of hard liquor, mostly whiskey, rather than that candy-ass, wimpola, weenie lite beer (i.e. water) daintily sipped today by those who should be wearing dresses if they aren't already. So why straight whiskey instead of the aforementioned sissy drinks? To understand the great popularity of whiskey we have to consider, among other things, the shortcomings of other available beverages. To begin with, neither Americans nor Europeans of the period tended to indulge in refreshing glasses of water. This was not so much the consequence of an aversion to that healthful beverage as that the available water was seldom clear, sparkling, or appetizing. The citizens of St. Louis, for example, had to let water from the Mississippi River stand before they could drink it, and the sediment often filled one-quarter of the container. Further downstream, at Natchez, the river water was too muddy to be drunk even after it had settled. ... Water supplies were no better in the nation's largest and wealthiest cities. Washingtonians, for example, long had to depend upon water from private wells because of the deep-seated opposition to higher taxes to pay the cost of digging public wells. ... New York City was worse, for Manhattan's shallow, brackish wells made it certain that the drinker of water would not only quench his thirst but also be given "physic." It was this latter effect, perhaps, that caused New Yorkers to avoid drinking water and earned them a reputation for preferring other sorts of beverages. One resident who was asked whether the city's water was potable replied, "Really, I cannot pretend to say, as I never tasted water there that was not mixed with some kind of liquor." ... It was only after the improvement of public water supplies that temperance zealots embraced the idea of `Cold Water' as a substitute for alcohol. But what about the alternatives? Milk's bulk and the lack of refrigeration made transportation and storage difficult and supplies spotty, with beer having pretty much the same difficulties Tea was more expensive than whiskey, and given that it was imported and popular in England more than a little bit of xenophobia hindered its consumption. Coffee was (and is) more expensive than tea, although it was consumed in greater quantities than the latter. Wine was four times as expensive as whiskey and looked down upon by the common folk as a patrician folly. The only drink that rivaled whiskey was cider, in both its hard and soft forms. In addition to the lack of beverage competitors, the typical diet figured into the matter: The taste for strong drink was no doubt enhanced by the monotony of the American diet, which was dominated by corn. In the winter Americans ate dried, parched corn kernels; in the summer, roasted green ears; in the autumn, freshly boiled golden ripe ears dripping with melted butter But it was corn pummeled into hominy or ground into meal that was ever present at all seasons. It appeared on the table three times a day as fried johnny cakes or corn bread, Indian pudding with milk and sugar, or the ubiquitous corn mush. Ordinary bread was baked with flour compounded of corn and rye; bread made with white wheat flour was a luxury for the rich or for special occasions. Ah, the good ol' days but, alas, the precursors of the WCTU were around even then, as is evidenced by this jolly tune found in the 1831 "Green's Anti-Intemperance Almanack": The GROG-SHOP O come let us all to the grog-shop The tempest is gathering fast- There surely is nought like the grog-shop To shield from the turbulent blast. For there will be wrangling Willy Disputing about a lame ox; And there will be bullying Billy Challenging negroes to box: Toby Fillpot with carbuncle nose Mixing politics up with his liquor; Tim Tuneful that sings even prose, And hiccups and coughs in his beaker. Dick Drowsy with emerald eyes, Kit Crusty with hair like a comet, Sam Smootly that whilom grew wise But returned like a dog to his vomit And there will be tippling and talk And fuddling and fun to the life, And swaggering, swearing, and smoke, And shuffling and scuffling and strife. And there will be swapping of horses, And betting, and beating, and blows, And laughter, and lewdness, and losses, And winning, and wounding and woes. O then let us off to the grog-shop; Come, father, come, Jonathan, come; Far drearier far than a Sunday Is a storm in the dullness of home. Just gimme dat old time religion and dem old family values. posted by Steven Baum 9/8/2000 12:06:19 AM | link Thursday, September 07, 2000 THE INSIDIOUS DR. LEE? William Broad's "Are There Any Nuclear Secrets Left to Steal?" in the 8/3/00 NYTimes (section 4, page 1) offers some interesting tidbits. It is now known by just about anyone who's even remotely paid attention to the news over the last year or so that Dr. Wen Ho Lee, a scientist in the employ of Los Alamos National Laboratory, was fired a year ago and accused of stealing nuclear secrets and giving them to the Chinese. More accurately, he was accused of illegally downloading secret and confidential files to an unsecure computer. Hysterical cries about how those files contained the "crown jewels" of the nuclear arsenal have drowned out more mundane, pertinent facts. For instance ... ... his defense team later showed that the data Dr. Lee downloaded was classified as secret and confidential only after his dismissal from Los Alamos. And last month, a defense witness, John L. Richter, a former top nuclear weapons designer at Los Alamos, testified that perhaps 99 percent of the downloaded information had already been made public and would not be that useful to a foreign country. Whatever the final disposition of Lee's case, the incident has highlighted the broader issue of what is classified and why. Predictably enough, those who would blame Clinton if they came up with a case of psoriasis are accusing him of - at the very least - being incompetent about guarding the precious nuclear secrets. (We'll ignore for now the looney tunes who think Clinton a Chinese agent.) The "smoking gun" pointed to by such people in this case is the public openness policy pursued by Hazel O'Leary when she served as head of the Department of Energy from 1993 to 1997. The goal of this policy was to declassify that which didn't need to be classified. This included quite a bit of material that had been classified over the years out of habit or policy rather than because of any sort of deliberation about the matter. As a matter of fact, the ninja masters who quadrupled the national debt in the 1980s can also take credit for instituting many programs for the automatic security classification of entire categories of official papers. That is, a review of a document's security status was no longer necessary to give it a security classification - all that was needed was for it to exist and to fall into any of many broad, general categories. What was and still is less well known was that O'Leary was also pushing a secrecy drive called "Higher Fences", i.e. The rationale was that the bag of atomic secrets had grown so large that protection would be ensured only if the most serious topics were set aside for stringent safeguarding. So it was that, long before the Lee case made Washington hypersensitive about lax security, a push was underway to put key nuclear secrets under a tighter lock So what happened with that program? In 1997, Dr. Narath of Sandia [National Laboratory] led an Energy Department panel that called for 137 topics to be raised from secret to top secret classification, which would increase protections and sharply cut access. But the Defense Department, which deploys the nuclear arms made and maintained by the Energy Department, balked, citing the added cost of building new storage facilities, computer networks and specialist cadres. Defense Department officials also expressed unwillingness to shoulder the added costs of providing top secret clearances. The price of a federal investigation for a top secret clearance is about $100, experts say, whereas a top secret clearance runs about $5000. If you did the math you'd probably find that the whole thing would have cost some very small percentage of what was being pissed away on the Star Wars missile defense programs during that period. Or, to put it another way, it would have cost a very, very small portion of the 15% of the military budget that even the Reagan administration admitted was routinely wasted through sheer incompetence, inefficiency and fraud. Buried in the Cox Report, amidst the vast overhyping of the Chinese threat and the tiresomely predictable attempts to blame Clinton for what happened in the 1980s, are some rational parts discussing the need to more carefully classify what really needs to be classified, but they got lost in the commotion deliberately engendered by a document that was meant mostly to be a political attack. Basically, if you attempt to classify everything then you not only devalue what truly needs to be classified, but you also weaken overall security, if only because it's harder to keep a million secrets than a hundred. One wonders how much of the material in Chuck Hansen's The Swords of Armageddon is still officially classified by one agency or another. Or how many of its 2500 pages and 340 diagrams the prosecutors would attempt to use against Dr. Lee if they were found in his possession. posted by Steven Baum 9/7/2000 10:05:39 PM | link THE P-WORD The author of one of my favorite reference books is the subject of a couple of recent news stories. Jesse Sheidlower has been named the principal American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Additionally, he not only uses Perl but was instrumental in getting it added to the OED. Sheidlower's recently been wrestling with the definition of one of my favorite phrases: Asked over lunch to describe a word whose definition had been giving him trouble, Mr. Sheidlower recounted the difficulty he was having defining the phrase "bitch-slap." Connotationally, it means to slap a person; specifically, it is to slap a person as a pimp would slap a prostitute. But, he said, one cannot use a simile in a definition. Can you bitch-slap a person anywhere or only in the face? he had wondered. With an open hand or the back of the hand? Can you bitch-slap a man or only a woman? Is it to hurt a person? No, it is to show social dominance. "So all of these things have to be taken into account," Mr. Sheidlower said. "And figuring out that this is what is going on takes thought and discussion." I also see that Sheidlower's been reading Lester Bangs' rockcrit classic Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung as part of his OED reading research as well as a previously unpublished Dashiell Hammett collection (although he might want to supplement the latter with Twists, Slugs and Roscoes: A Glossary of Hardboiled Slang). posted by Steven Baum 9/7/2000 11:06:54 AM | link Wednesday, September 06, 2000 SPECTATOR TO BE GILDERED The moribund American Spectator is being sold to notorious techno-babbler George Gilder. Gilder - who first rose to prominence with the publication of Wealth and Poverty (1981), a book that promised something for nothing and therefore couldn't help but get the attention of the Gipper and his handlers - plans to "revitalize" the magazine by extending its political slant to include high-tech issues. The magazine has been edited by Emmett Tyrrell Jr. - a man who fancies himself a modern day H. L. Mencken (thus implicitly advertising that he's never actually read Mencken) - since he founded it 33 years ago. Its glory years lasted from the early- to mid-90s after it started its campaign to convince the already converted that Bill Clinton is the anti-christ. The circulation rose from 30K to over 300K not long after it ran its "Troopergate" story, but has since dropped back to around 100K, apparently a sign that 2/3 of its readership eventually realized that even an infinite number of allegations are insufficient to bring down satan's chief earthly representative if none are any more substantive than a typical alien kidnapping story in the Enquirer. Probably the final nail in their coffin was when they purged David Brock for insufficiently kowtowing to the party line in his book about Hillary Clinton, wherein he stubbornly held to the apostate notion of mostly sticking to the facts. Other milestones on the way down included Tyrell having his power to do such things yanked by the board running the magazine after the $2.3 million he funneled to private detectives (in the so-called Arkansas Project) came up with diddly-squat about the Clintons, and having Richard Mellon Scaife - who had a hand in bankrolling most of the Clinton investigations in the 90s - pull his $600,000 a year support after an article about Vince Foster's death failed to finger Hillary as a bloodthirsty gun moll. It sounds to me like Gilder's peeved that Wired stopped featuring him every other issue a few years ago and he's going to start his own monthly compendium of tedious, self-serving dotcom babble, with about the only major change being swapping the libertarian axe-grinding for that quasi-rational melange of anti-Clinton knee-jerking that passes for conservative axe-grinding these days. I'll actually be sorry to see such a change, though, since I usually find any political publication inherently more interesting than even the best financial/investment oriented publications, with the only exception I can think of being the Economist, what with their trenchant limey wit and much more intimate than usual connection to reality. posted by Steven Baum 9/6/2000 10:37:58 AM | link HOTTER FIVES AND SEVENS A few months back I mentioned the Louis Armstrong Hot Fives and Sevens 4-disc box set from JSP, since it was the best available version of those seminal recordings from jazz titan Armstrong at the time (in addition to being available at a very low price). The quality of the version of those recordings then available from Columbia was vastly inferior. In the words of one of the reviewers: A note to those who haven't yet purchased any of Satchmo's Hot Fives or Sevens --THIS package is the one to get! Avoid the recordings on Columbia, which did a disgraceful job of remastering. I doubt Columbia's new box set coming out this month will be much better. Apparently and fortunately that reviewer's predictive skills were incorrect. Columbia has just released Armstrong's Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven box set. It covers exactly the same ground since Louis ain't exactly hitting the studio these days, but according to one knowledgeable reviewer and big fan: This greatest of all music in the history of the world has never sounded so good. In 1925 at the OKeh Chicago recording studio they had one acoustic horn with a mechanical diaphram and stylus cutting a disc matrix turning on a 78 RPM speed controled turntable. Many of these songs based on those same master records have been issued before on 78, 33 1/3, and CD, but they always sounded like 1925 records before. Now OKeh/Columbia/Sony have put out the same songs on these 4 CDs and made them sound like state-of-the-art 21st century recorded music. I can't believe it. I would have said it couldn't be done before I heard these 4 CDs. Jazz fans of the world owe OKeh/Columbia/Sony a debt of gratitude for issuing Louis Armstrong - The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings. Outstanding! Amazing! It sounds like the producers have done the same thing that makes the recent Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli The Classic Early Recordings 5-disc set such an unadulterated pleasure, i.e. they've searched the planet for the best available version of each tune and used state-of-the-art techniques to remove the noise without monkeying with the dynamic range of the music. And, to top off the value due to the sheer intrinsic quality of this set, it's currently available for quite a bit off the list price, so even those of Scottish ancestry shouldn't feel overly much pain about parting with those shiny pennies. It bears repeating here that Armstrong was at his best during the period these recordings were made. The combination of his physical playing skills and musical inventiveness were at a level that most jazz musicians and historians consider not having been equalled since. Armstrong deserves to be known for the sum of his considerable talents and not just as that pleasant old guy who performed soothing tunes like "Hello, Dolly" and "What a Wonderful World" late in his career. John Fordham's entry about Armstrong in his Jazz on CD (3rd Ed.) begins with a summation of Armstrong typical of such things: Louis Armstrong revolutionized the sound of jazz. His boldness, melodic audacity, technical range and spontaneous sense of structure was in a different league even to the work of a vigorous but more static performer such as his boss King Oliver. Armstrong's solos developed like well-told stories, full of sub-plots, diversions and grand finales, often with an integrating motif characteristic to the tune recurring with minor variations in chorus after chorus. He also played with equal fierceness in all registers and with astonishing volume - testified to in the now famous account of the Oliver band's early recording session in which Armstrong had to be distanced from his partners to avoid upsetting the sound balance. Armstrong's arrival had a lot to do with the transformation of jazz into a soloist's music in the later 1920s. Not only did the players of other instruments copy his phrasing, arrangers copied it for orchestras too, which did much to accelerate the evolution of polite dance outfits into the roaring big bands of the swing era. Four recent books offer much more about the great man from both others and himself: Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life by Laurence Bergreen and Jenny Minton Louis Armstrong, in His Own Words: Selected Writings by Louis Armstrong and edited by Thomas D. Brothers The Louis Armstrong Companion: Eight Decades of Commentary edited by Joshua Berrett Satchmo by Gary Giddins This year is the centennial of Armstrong's birth, with many commemorative events already having already taken place and more to come, not the least of which are many web sites easily located via your favorite search engine. posted by Steven Baum 9/6/2000 09:00:42 AM | link Tuesday, September 05, 2000 CAPSAICIN GAP A recent Reuters item got the old drool glands going, especially seeing how I've got a coupla plants worth of those red habaneros growing nicely this year. Guwahati, India - The hottest chili on earth is Indian. Four Indian scientists have discovered that a type of chili grown in the country's northeast has the highest Scoville units of pure capsaicin - a measure of hotness. Called the Tezpur chili, after the area where it is grown, scientists say the pepper has beaten Mexico's Red Savina habaņero, widely acclaimed as the hottest chili in the world. Tezpur lies on the banks of the river Brahmaputra about 180 kilometres from Guwahati, the main city of Assam, which is better known for its flavoursome tea than its chilis. "The Tezpur chili was rated having 855,000 Scoville units ... the Mexican chili contained 557,000 Scoville units of pure capsaicin," one of the scientists, who asked not to be identified, told Reuters. The scientists work in defence laboratories in Guwahati and Gwalior. But, putting culinary concerns aside for the moment, this doesn't bode well for the safety of the commonweal. Given that our military spending is all the way down to only slightly more than the rest of the world combined, India could combine this with their nuclear arsenal and their billion plus population and ... well, let's just say that we could all be wearing Madras shirts and eating curry in less than two shakes of a lamb's tail. And if you don't think they're planning something, then why the hell are they being tested in "defence laboratories" and why the request for anonymity? My lack of god! Isn't anyone thinking of the precious children!!! posted by Steven Baum 9/5/2000 10:59:00 AM | link THE THIRD BROTHER Not many people are aware that Ronnie and Reggie had a third brother who, being the white sheep of the family, moved to the United States to avoid being tainted by the infamy of his brothers. Seymour changed the spelling of his last name and settled in Minnesota. There he worked on developing supercomputers for others until he finally started his own company in 1972. Unfortunately, he died in an automobile accident in 1996, although at least one person claims to have witnessed a willful attempt by a twelve foot long hedgehog to force him off the road. Whatever the real circumstances might have been, you now have the opportunity to obtain a momento of this great man's life's work for pennies on the dollar, although I've heard it on good authority that the electricity bill alone reaches over $10K per month. posted by Steven Baum 9/5/2000 10:23:04 AM | link

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