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 15, 2000 YES MEANS NO Even though the Gore camp had agreed months ago to whatever debate schedule the Commission on Presidential Debates was going to propose, the Shrub spin machine attempted to paint Gore as the intransigent one after he said no to their limp counterproposal to the CPD debate plan. They even ran a TV ad bashing Gore for this, in perhaps the most entertaining reality inversion in which they've yet engaged (although I wait with bated breath the "slick" moves that'll no doubt go hand in hand with their increasing desperation). Chief Shrub doublespeakperson Karen Hughes said after the announcement that both camps had agreed to the CPD debates - in that increasingly well-practiced manner in which the mouthpieces for Shrub feign forward motion while furiously backpedaling - that they were pleased that Gore had agreed to the debates, but that several key points were still being hammered out today. That is, she continued chanting the Shrub camp motif about how they were just trying to save the poor, stupid American people from "the canned and stilted formats that have been the case in past presidential debates." Hughes went on to say that her and the other Shrub string-pullers - who pop nitro pills and antacids like candy every time their man attempts to go off-script - think the American people deserve more than a bunch of memorized 30-second soundbites. Although the locations and times have been agreed upon, details like the debate formats (town meeting, etc.), moderators, how the audiences will be chosen, etc. are still under heavy negotiation. (In the matter of choosing audiences, for some reason I'm reminded about a debate about nuclear weapons between George Schultz and English historian E. P. Thompson in England in the mid-1980s where the State Department flew over enough people to fill the audience to ensure at least a favorable local reaction.) I can hardly wait to hear how Gore's being intransigent again for not wanting to debate on Rush Limbaugh's show with his audience, or how America demands an informal format wherein Shrub and his old frat buddies get together for a kegger chat with pledge hopeful Gore (hilariously hijinks ensue). Despite their public bleatings about how they're finally glad to get the show on the road in spite of intransigent Al's continual roadblocks (i.e. their wholesale retreat from their own stance of a week ago), the Shrubbers continue to whine about various details, for instance the first debate's being staged in Boston near the JFK Library. That's right, the debate's being not in but just near that library will apparently cast a pall of bad mojo over Major Mumblemouth, not to mention all the "subliminable" messages the ultra-liberal books therein will broadcast to the audience several buildings over. Although the CPD itself is not above criticism - for instance their demand that a candidate have over 15% in an accepted poll in order to be invited - they do have an informative site, particularly their debate history section, although I wish their subsection on the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates included the actual transcripts rather than a pointer to where you can buy video reeanactments of them. They also have subsections for most of the debates from 1948 on, although only the more recent ones feature transcripts. posted by Steven Baum 9/15/2000 09:23:20 AM | link Thursday, September 14, 2000 NEW FEATURE! WOW! While looking through my half-finished list of books mentioned herein last night, I thought - what the heck - let's add another half-finished list of software mentioned herein. And there'll of course eventually be a list of albums mentioned herein. Links to all such lists can be found under the clever heading "LISTS" near the top of the column to your right. Mr. Bigplans additionally has an ambitious scheme to provide backlinks from those lists to the blog entries in which they appear, although Mr. Slackass will probably scotch those plans, so to speak. posted by Steven Baum 9/14/2000 11:19:19 AM | link CATHARSIS? If I were still capable of cathartic moments, the combination of Ray Charles, a bottle of 1998 Hermitage Road Shiraz, and the following excerpt from Monday's Alamut might very well have me catharting, cavorting and careening around the neighborhood: Read Thoreau. Then ask yourself why he never got laid. Read Thoreau. Then ask yourself why he died at 45. Read Thoresau and then ask yourself why you read Thoreau. If I were [the gentle reader is asked to supply his or her own interjection here], I'd put some long and serious thought into this but, as it is, I'm grabbing the corkscrew and opening another bottle. Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever the fuck you are. posted by Steven Baum 9/14/2000 12:09:52 AM | link Wednesday, September 13, 2000 RAY CHARLES IS GOD Although the famous syllogism (i.e. "god is love, blah blah blah ... Ray Charles is god") is pretty damned convincing all by itself, the Rhino box set Genius & Soul: The 50th Anniversary Collection offers proof of nearly mathematical precision that Ray is indeed a deity inhabiting some unearthly realm. From "Confession Blues" by Ray's early group the Maxin Trio on the first disc to his version of Paul Simon's "Still Crazy After All These Years" on the fifth and last disc, the gems in this collection deliver nearly as much sensual pleasure as Caligula Night down at the local bordello. The packaging is also a marvel to behold, from the gold-embossed black motif (or is that a theme?) of the box and everything therein to the fat, juicy 76 page booklet chock full of photographs of and prose about the man Ray. There's even a braille overview of the collection on the back cover of the booklet. The booklet contains its fair share of gems as well. In the foreword by project instigator and director James Austin we read: Upon my first meeting with Ray, I brought him Rhino's Charlie Parker anthology. He clutched the double CD tightly as if he had a gold brick from Fort Knox. His response to my gift was "You know, you couldn't have brought me money and had it be better than this. Charlie Parker is my man. I love his dirty drawers." Then we read about the easiest and sweetest deal that Ahmet Ertegun, Ray's long-time producer at Atlantic Records, ever made: I eventually heard from Ray Charles' agent that Swing Time's owner, Jack Lauderdale, may be interested in selling Ray's contract. He had been unable to score any significant success, Ray couldn't get gigs, and Jack wanted out. Ray Charles become an Atlantic artist. After a few albums with Atlantic's house musicians and arrangers, Ertegun went along with one of Ray's suggestions and quickly discovered the key to huge success with him: let him arrange and produce (Ertegun admits that even though he was listed as producer Ray deserved most of that credit) his own material. Next David Ritz favors us with 36 pages of Ray on Ray condensed down from 8 hours of interviews. Some excerpts: "Some preachers got on my ass. Said I was doing the devil's work [therefore proving that satan's got soul]. Bullshit. I was singing what I'd always sung. Keeping the spirit but changing the story so it related to the real world - man, that came natural to me." "With Hank [Crawford] around, I was getting more arrangements done, but on this one particular night we'd run out of arrangements. Man, we'd run out of tunes. It was 1 a.m. and the owner said we needed to play another ten minutes, so I just started jamming and told everyone, including the Raeletts, to follow me. That jam become "What'd I Say." By the crowd reaction I knew we had something. The crowd went wild. We stormed into New York a few weeks later and cut it. Before then, everyone was laughing at me for playing electric piano. After "What'd I Say," those same cats were running out scrambling to buy electric pianos of their own." "Had me a driver who'd always hear me humming `Georgia on My Mind.' Cat said, `You hum it so much, why don't you record it?' `Can't record it,' I said, `cause I don't even know the words.' `Well, the words are easy enough to find.' He was right. Man, he didn't know how right he was." "I've been singing `Take These Chains from My Heart' for 35 years and the goddamn thing still breaks me up. Brother, these are some sad songs." "Now that's [`Busted'] a song that takes me all the way back to Greenville. I got it off Johnny Cash, but put it in a blues bag. I know you're tired of me harping on lyrics, but lyrics are the key. Tose lyrics hit me hard. No matter how much money I got, when I sing `My bills are all due and the baby needs shoes and I'm busted' - baby, I am busted." "Some of the verses [of `America the Beautiful'] were just too white for me, so I cut them out and sang the verses about the beauty of the country and the bravery of the soldiers. Then I put a little country church backbeat on it and turned it my way." "Went down to Willie's [Nelson] ranch in Texas and cut it [`Seven Spanish Angels'] right there in his studio. Singing with Willie is just as easy as talking with Willie. Hung out for a couple of days, just to play chess with Willie. If he'll only admit I'm the better chess player, we'd be all right." If you can't snag this box set - which, by the way, has a list price of $70 and I snagged for $30 - then try pretty much any single disc you can get. You can usually find several for less than $10 at your local CD emporium. The man exudes taste, so it's almost a dead solid cert you won't choose wrong. posted by Steven Baum 9/13/2000 10:29:36 PM | link O.U.P. GOODIES In the interests of balance, a similar list with blurbs from the latest offerings of the Oxford University Press: The Genius of Science: A Portrait Gallery - Abraham Pais Now, in The Genius of Science, Pais offers us insightful portraits of twelve of our century's most distinguished physicists, all of whom he has known personally. We meet, among others, the famously taciturn Paul Dirac; Max Born, who coined the term 'quantum mechanics'; Wolfgang Pauli, famed for his exclusion principle and known as the conscience of twentieth-century physics; Mitchell Feigenbaum, inventor of chaos theory; and John von Neumann, one of the most influential mathematicians of the century. Other scientists profiled include Res Jost, Isidor Rabi, Viktor Weisskopf, and Eugene Wigner. In addition, because their work is so relevant to the others discussed, Pais has included chapters on Einstein and Bohr, in each case giving the essence of the man's character and scientific achievement. Are We Hardwired?: The Role of Genes in Human Behavior - William R. Clark and Michael Grunstein Using eye-opening examples of genetically identical twins who, though raised in different families, have had remarkably parallel lives, the authors show that indeed roughly half of human behavior can be accounted for by DNA. But the picture is quite complicated. Clark and Grunstein take us on a tour of modern genetics and behavioral science, revealing that few elements of behavior depend upon a single gene; complexes of genes, often across chromosomes, drive most of our heredity-based actions. To illustrate this point, they examine the genetic basis, and quirks, of individual behavioral traits--including aggression, sexuality, mental function, eating disorders, alcoholism, and drug abuse. They show that genes and environment are not opposing forces; heredity shapes how we interpret our surroundings, which in turn changes the very structure of our brain. Clearly we are not simply puppets of either influence. The Thelonious Monk Reader - Rob van der Bliek, ed. Ranging in date from 1947 to 1999, these 39 pieces feature the work of some of our best jazz critics, including Leonard Feather, Ira Gitler, Nat Hentoff, Andre Hodeir, Gunther Schuller, Martin Williams, and many others. The book spans Monk's childhood and early recordings with Blue Note and Prestige, his Riverside period and the critical recognition that followed the release of Brilliant Corners, and his fame and fortune during his Columbia years. Readers will find colorful descriptions of Monk's eccentric lifestyle as well as thoughtful commentary on his unorthodox piano technique, which was marked by off-center accents and idiosyncratic voicings, broken rhythms, alternately dense and stripped down chords, and creative use of silence. The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and The Destiny of Games - Ashis Nandy Cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British, says Ashis Nandy, defying history, in this delightful book. He treats us to meditations on the history, philosophy, and results of the game, as well as intriguing psychological profiles of some of its greatest players. He also extends his analysis to the modern urban-industrial ethic and mass culture. Beyond Engineering: How Society Shapes Technology - Robert Pool For instance, Pool explores the reasons why steam-powered cars lost out to internal combustion engines. He shows that the Stanley Steamer was in many ways superior to the Model T--it set a land speed record in 1906 of more than 127 miles per hour, it had no transmission (and no transmission headaches), and it was simpler (one Stanley engine had only twenty-two moving parts) and quieter than a gas engine--but the steamers were killed off by factors that had little or nothing to do with their engineering merits, including the Stanley twins' lack of business acumen and an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease. posted by Steven Baum 9/13/2000 02:08:42 PM | link C.U.P. GOODIES While looking for something at the Cambridge University Press site, I couldn't help but peruse their list of recently released goodies. Here are a few of them along with bits of the accompanying blurbs: The Cambridge World History of Food - Kiple, Kenneth F. and Ornelas, Kriemhild Coneč, eds. Ranging from the eating habits of our prehistoric ancestors to food-related policy issues we face today, this work covers the full spectrum of foods that have been hunted, gathered, cultivated, and domesticated; their nutritional makeup and uses; and their impact on cultures and demography. It offers a geographical perspective on the history and culture of food and drink and takes up subjects from food fads, prejudices, and taboos to questions of food toxins, additives, labeling, and entitlements. It culminates in a dictionary that identifies and sketches out brief histories of plant foods mentioned in the text--over 1,000 in all--and additionally supplies thousands of common names and synonyms for those foods. The Crime Drop in America - A. Blumstein and J. Wallman, eds. Violent crime in America shot up sharply in the mid-1980s and continued to climb until 1991 after which something unprecedented occurred. For the next seven years it declined to a level not seen since the 1960s. The puzzle of why this has happened has bedeviled criminologists, politicians, policy makers and average citizens. Numerous explanations have been put forth, from improvements in policing to the decline in crack cocaine use. The authors of this timely and critical book explain and assess the plausible causes and competing claims of credit for the crime drop. The Genetic Inferno: Inside the Seven Deadly Sins - Medina, John What makes us react or feel the way we do? If you have ever asked yourself this question, then let gifted writer John Medina take you on a fascinating tour of the questions involved in the quest to understand the biological basis of human behavior. By describing the gap that exists between a human behavior and a human gene, this captivating book both clarifies and debunks ideas about the genetic roots of behavior, from the genes of divorce to the tendency to eat chocolate. Using Dante's The Divine Comedy as an organizing framework, The Genetic Inferno explains each of the "seven deadly sins"--lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride--in terms of twentieth century genes and brains. The Dating Game: One Man's Search for the Age of the Earth - Lewis, Cherry How old is the Earth? At the end of the nineteenth century, geologists, biologists, physicists and astronomers were all looking for a clock that would provide an answer to this greatest Time question of all. Here is the story of one man's vision in developing a geological timescale that would finally lead to an accurate date for the Age of the Earth. Despite scientific opposition, financial hardship and personal tragedy, Arthur Holmes, perhaps the greatest geologist of the twentieth century, fought for fifty years to convince the geological "establishment" of an Earth of great antiquity, a fight that eventually transformed the moribund "art" of geology into a dynamic science. The Last Tasmanian Tiger: The History and Extinction of the Thylacine - Paddle, Robert The most complete and up-to-date examination of the history and extinction of one of Australia's most enduring folkloric beasts--the thylacine, otherwise affectionately known as the Tasmanian tiger. It challenges conventional theories explaining the behavior and eventual extinction of the thylacine, arguing that political farming interests, negligent captive breeding programs, and a deeper intellectual prejudice about the inferiority of marsupials finally resulted in the extinction of this once proud species. Quantum Computation and Quantum Information - Nielsen, M.A. and Chuang, Isaac L. n this first comprehensive introduction to the main ideas and techniques of quantum computation and information, Michael Nielsen and Isaac Chuang ask the question: What are the ultimate physical limits to computation and communication? They detail such remarkable effects as fast quantum algorithms, quantum teleportation, quantum cryptography and quantum error correction. Smart Structures: Analysis and Design - Srinivasan, A.V. and McFarland, D. Michael Smart structures and structural components can sense a change in temperature, pressure, or strain; diagnose a problem; and initiate an appropriate action to preserve structural integrity. This text provides the basic information needed to analyze and design smart devices and structures. Among the topics covered are piezoelectric crystals, shape memory alloys, electrorheological fluids, vibration absorbers, fiber optics, and mistuning. A final chapter explores biomimetics and design strategies that can be incorporated at the microstructural level deriving inspiration from biological structures. Wavelet Methods for Time Series Analysis - Percival, Donald B. and Walden, Andrew T. The analysis of time series data is essential to many areas of science, engineering, finance and economics. This introduction to wavelet analysis "from the ground level and up," and to wavelet-based statistical analysis of time series focuses on practical discrete time techniques, with detailed descriptions of the theory and algorithms needed to understand and implement the discrete wavelet transforms. Droooooooooooool. Must .... obtain ... all. posted by Steven Baum 9/13/2000 10:46:34 AM | link METASCHTOFF Some fairly old metalinks I've been sitting on (i.e. forgetting about) for a while: Book-a-Minute (via Latte) 100 Top Brit TV Programmes with the really spiffing marvey thing being that "Are You Being Served?" didn't make it (via Pith and Vinegar) Confused UK Vigilantes Target Doctor, after which reading I'm swearing off being occasionally pedagogical (via Looka!) "Euclid's Elements" Online (via Kestrel's Nest) International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRI) (via a New Scientist Interview via Kestrel's Nest) The Thurber House, a place I visited as an undergrad at Ohio State (via Hotsy Totsy Club) posted by Steven Baum 9/13/2000 10:29:28 AM | link A QUAINT, DEPRECATED DOCUMENT The Olympic Charter provides an interesting contrast to the strongarm and other questionable tactics of the IOC. Contrast, for example, the following breathtakingly starry-eyed passage: Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind. Blending sport with culture and education, Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy found in effort, the educational value of good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles. with their efforts to keep athletes from keeping personal journals during the Games. For those who want more dirt on those who've turned the Olympian ideals into crass greed and corruption, you can't do much better than Andrew Jennings, who IOC uberfuhrer Samaranch had arrested and jailed in Switzerland in 1994 for daring to allege that the great man and his toadies were corrupt. Jennings has written three books about the IOC and Samaranch, although only The Great Olympic Swindle is still in print. His site has some excerpts about the Russian mafia taking over the International Amateur Boxing Federation, which oversees boxing during the Olympics. Sure this will corrupt the IABF (or corrupt it more), but isn't it about time the boxing amateurs caught up with the pros in that regard? There's a section on the IOC spending $2 million on spin doctors to massage their bruised public image in 1999. This was undoubtedly done on the grounds that it's both cheaper and easier to spin bribes than to simply not take them. There's also a section replete with photographs showing Samaranch with his old chum the Spanish dictator Franco (who, I've heard, is still succeeding in his valiant attempt to remain dead). Still, despite all the scandalous corruption amongst the management and the high-performance pharmacopia being ingested by the athletes, I'm sure that all doubt as to the true value and wonder of the Olympics will vanish once I view the first hour of Official Olympic Programing. I have no doubt that I'll have tears running down my face after 5 full minutes of tape-delayed competition, 20 minutes of commercials, and 35 minutes of up close and personal profiles of the athletes, most of whom will undoubtedly have had to live through the death of someone they knew at some time in their tragic lives. That they can valiantly move onward and excel on the fields of competition while the rest of us can only weep and gnash our teeth in the darkness can't help but teach us all something about how to be better human beings. posted by Steven Baum 9/13/2000 09:35:09 AM | link SUBLIMINABLE "Putting a single frame in amongst many others with a message that will register subconsciously if at all" is as succinct a definition of "subliminal message" as can probably be found. So what does Cheney have to say about a GOP ad currently in the spotlight that does just that: "I think it's a bit of a stretch to suggest that somehow this is a subliminal message." Right. War is peace. Love is hate. Up is down. Words are meaningless. On the bright side, given Shrub's continued pronunciation of the word as "subliminable", he's got one hell of a bright future on "Hee-Haw" should the voters decide that he wasn't born to run things. Another Post story tells of the qualifications needed to appear beside Alfred E. Shrubman on the airport tarmac: A suitable family must make between $35,000 and $70,000 a year, itemize its taxes and have no children in day care, no children in college, no one attending night school, no children younger than age 1 and no substantial savings outside of 401(k). The various qualifications eliminate all but about 15% of families in that income bracket from the Shrub tax cut. And it's no coincidence that the other 85% are the ones who would benefit most from Gore's tax cut plan. Shrub plans to spend $1.6 trillion on tax cuts over 10 years, while Gore's offering only a $500 million bribe. Even the lower number is based on the usual pie-in-the-sky projections over the next decade. Would that either candidate had the wherewithal to explain, using the analogy of an individual's huge credit card debt, the economic benefits of paying down one's debt instead of putting another SUV on the card. posted by Steven Baum 9/13/2000 12:43:43 AM | link Tuesday, September 12, 2000 ELEMENTARY PARTICLES Come November the event of the century of the week in the literary and probably political worlds will almost undoubtedly be Knopf's publishing of the English translation of French novelist Michel Houellebecq's controversial and big selling novel Les Particules Elementaires (The Elementary Particles). A plot summary (further condensed from a summary in Emily Eakin's article Le Provocateur in the 9/10/200 NYTimes Magazine section): a pair of half-brothers named Bruno and Michel are palmed off to grandparents at an early age by irresponsible parents. One becomes a self-loathing, sex-obsessed psychiatric patient who is rarely satisifed, while the other becomes a chronically depressed molecular biologist who commits suicide. So just where did Houellebecq find such a plot? The following paragraph offers a subtle clue: He was born on the French island of Reunion, off the coast of Madagascar, in 1958, the son of a mountain-guide father and a physician mother. Like the parents of his ill-starred protagonists, Houellebecq's own were hippies, committed neither to each other nor to child rearing, and at the age of 6, Michel was shipped off to a grandmother southwest of Paris. He has no idea where his parents are today -- or even if they are alive. Okay, so the guy's blowing off some cathartic steam about his parents, but otherwise this sounds like nothing more than yet another book full of typical French pomo nihilism. So why is Knopf giving it a print run (40,000 copies) of the sort almost never seen for a foreign novel? What's going to make it notorious isn't the plot or the characters but rather Houellebecq's assessment of blame for the lives of his characters and, of course, for his own. All together now: IT WAS THE FAULT OF THE 60s!! But it's a bit more complicated than that as Eakin details: "The Elementary Particles" takes pains to ensure that we don't see Bruno and Michel merely as products of bad parenting or dumb luck. Rather, they are victims of a culture awash in post-1960's values. Over the course of the novel's 272 pages, Houellebecq catalogs a daunting number of alleged scourges -- the free market, New Age mysticism, legal abortion, skyrocketing divorce rates, materialism, debauchery -- and lays them at the door of counterculture idealism. According to the novel's freewheeling historical logic, the 1960's begat not peace and prosperity but selfishness, misery and violence. "In a sense," muses Bruno in a characteristic aside, "the serial killers of the 1990's were the spiritual children of the hippies of the 60's." For those fortunate enough to have avoided a criminal fate, the book implies, loneliness is the reward. So there'll be a slight problem for those wishing to gleefully point to the book as a scathing indictment of the failed liberal social policies of the 60s. That is, there will be if the parts blaming the free market, materialism and skyrocketing divorce rates aren't willfully ignored to focus on the more ideologically correct suspects. In other words, the usual predictable sources should have no problem calling this book "the Darkness at Noon of our generation." There are some additional problems along those lines due to Houellebecq holding eccentric opinions about some topics that won't make him overly popular with the "60s were doubleplusungood" crowd. For instance, Stalin wasn't really such a bad sort since he "killed a lot of anarchists," and, as for democracy, "liberty is equivalent to suffering." The "moral microscope of our time" label could also be tarnished by his "self-loathing, sex-obssessed psychiatric patient" character being based mostly on himself. Wishing to continue her interview with him over dinner, Eakin was told that, "I don't really want to go out. I just want to have sex." When this didn't gain his objective, he continued with, "We have reached the limit of talking. There are things only people who have had physical relations with me get to hear." So it's not really just a load of French pomo nihilism nonsense, but rather a load of French pomo nihilism nonsense by an author just clever enough to know which controversies will sell best. Houellebecq's got a real career ahead of him as the French Jerry Springer. I'll undoubtedly snag it after it hits the remainder bins which, by the way, shouldn't be taken as an editorial comment since I obtain well over 90% of my books used or from the remainder bin. posted by Steven Baum 9/12/2000 10:49:52 PM | link IT'S CALLED LYING, DAVE In ex-lefty and now fire-breathing righty David Horowitz's most recent column at Salon, he makes an amusing attempt to simultaneously speak out of both sides of his mouth. The goal of his latest column is to shore up the GOP faithful who, according to Horowitz, are soiling themselves over the evaporation of Shrub's supposed 15- to 20-point lead in the polls over the last several weeks. He avers that jumping to dire conclusions (or, preferentially to me, off of very tall buildings) over the future of the race or state of the campaign because of the current poll results would be to "succumb to wishful thinking or to a misreading of the pre-convention polls, which showed Bush in the lead." He then, surprisingly enough, fesses up to doing just that in a previous Salon column entitled Why Gore can't win, wherein Dave jumped through various paralogical hoops as well as in and out of his own arsehole while attempting to explain why Gore will have to simultaneously turn left and right (therefore either imploding or splitting in half right down the middle) to have even a ghost of a chance of winning the election. His pseudo-mea culpa in his own words goes like this: As someone who made that mistake on the eve of the Democratic Convention (and in a Salon column no less), I am willy-nilly the pundit on the spot to explain why this should not be a cause for concern. This happens to be even truer than would otherwise be the case, because I had a ringside seat at the Republican Convention, weeks before Gore's surge in the polls. As a result, I had reason to know that as far as the Bush team was concerned, the polls showing their candidate ahead were inflated and would shortly be brought back to earth. Just for the record and so nobody gets as confused as Dave either is or wants his readers to be, I'll also supply the key paragraph from the previous column to which he's referring: There have been more than 200 polls taken since the end of the primaries and Bush has led in every one of them except five. Two of those five were ties, and all of them were taken in March. Since March the race has remained basically static with Bush decisively ahead. Barring a major screw-up by the Republican candidate and his campaign, can Gore change this? In my view he cannot. That is, Dave thought or, at least, wanted his his readers to think, after reading the first column, that there was just no way that Gore could make up for 195 out of 200 polls showing Shrub in the lead. But wait a minute! Now Dave is telling us that, being one of the high mucky-mucks privileged to the hot poop known only to the inner circles of the GOP, he and the rest of the GOP high priests knew at least as early as the Republican Convention that the polls would show a "dead heat" after Labor Day. In his own words: As a result, I had reason to know that as far as the Bush team was concerned, the polls showing their candidate ahead were inflated and would shortly be brought back to earth. So, in other and much plainer words, Dave knew during the Republican Convention that the poll results were inflated and that the race would be a dead heat by Labor Day. And yet, knowing this full well, he still deliberately wrote a column crowing about how he truly believed that Gore wouldn't catch Shrub in the polls. To put it simply, he was either lying in the first column or is lying in this one. There is another possibility, but I know Dave's way too smart to get so completely confused about so simple a matter. He could have saved everybody a whole lot of head scratching by simply saying, "Ignore that column behind the curtain. I knew all along this would happen, and I only lied like a rug to keep y'all in an exuberant mood. The important thing to remember is that I wasn't under oath at the time like that Stalinist son of a bitch who turned the U.S. into a Gulag during the 90s." I used to enjoy reading Dave a whole lot more than I do these days. Even though we're at nearly opposite ideological poles, he's always been fairly witty, vicious and usually clings more or less tenaciously to a reasonable approximation of reality. He's gotten noticably worse during this campaign season, to the sad point where he's basically just saying anything, piling bullshit on top of bullshit, apparently expecting to find a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow instead of only a big, steaming pile. Or, if he's just being cynical, he's assuming his readers are either complete morons or pathologically incapable of noticing how completely he reverses himself from column to column. posted by Steven Baum 9/12/2000 04:31:59 PM | link SPITTING IMAGE Another precious and oft-repeated myth of the political right gets its well-deserved comeuppance in Jerry Lembcke's Media Myth: Vietnam Vets and Spit, one of many interesting and provocative stories to be found at TomPaine.common sense. That's right, all those tearfully repeated stories about the filthy hippies spitting on those returning from Vietnam are every bit as genuine as the yearly stories about Tasmanian tiger sitings and, unlike the latter, even cloning ain't gonna make the former eventually come true. Lembcke's article tells how even after his book - The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam - rebutting the myth was published in 1998 various media outlets including the New York Times and U.S. News and World Report continued repeating the mythology. There's even a perverse game of one-upmanship going on amongst the mythologists, with spit not being even close to a trump card: In a November 11, 1998, Veterans Day story, James Collins claimed his plane from Vietnam was met at Clark Airforce Base north of San Francisco by "thousands of protesters throwing Molotov cocktails." Like many of the stories, Collins's had details that were factually wrong (e.g. there is no Clark Airforce Base in the Bay Area) or too implausible to be believed. A year earlier, the same Telegram and Gazette reporter, George Griffin, had profiled another local veteran who claimed he arrived home at Boston's Logan airport and was greeted by anti-war protesters: "I got tattooed with eggs and bags of urine and shit," he said. There are many more less obviously implausible tales that still fail the reality test, e.g. a Nov. 2, 1998 NYTimes story about a businessman organizing a bicycle tour of Vietnam who was moved to do so after hearing a story about a Vietnam veteran who'd returned on a stretcher with a bullet in his leg only to have college kids rush up and pour rotten vegetables all over him. Given the standard security measures at the time, it would have been nearly impossible for a group of obvious hippies to infiltrate a military base en masse to do such a thing. You also might expect to have heard something about this supposed flood of abuse in the media of the time. And to anticipate the tiresomely obvious standard objection, it transcends all non-hallucinogenic bounds of reality to conceive of a media conspiracy ubiquitous and powerful enough to cover up "thousands of protesters throwing Molotov cocktails." Lembcke actually looked through the media of the time: Had a small number of spitting incidents really occurred, there would have subsequently been press attention to them and security at locations where GIs returned from Vietnam would have been tightened. In fact, there are no reports of such incidents happening. A search of newspaper stories about demonstrations, marches, and rallies where hostile encounters may have occurred produced no reports of activists spitting on veterans. Reports filed by demonstration observers working under the sponsorship of the Bar Association of New York City during the 1970s, likewise, contain no evidence that veterans were mistreated by protesters. Ironically, the newspapers themselves are troves of evidence that relations between veterans and anti-war activists were mutually supportive and that thousands of GIs and veterans had joined the opposition to the war by 1970. Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) was the largest of all the organizations for vets of that generation and its activities are richly recorded in the pages of the very newspaper that Holson, Haberman, and Kifner now write for. And that raises interesting questions about the apparent suspension of disbelief that surrounds current journalism on the war period. Why are these tales believed by people who should know better? Thus the battalions of returning Vietnam vets who got pelted with spit, dog shit, molotov cocktails, railroad ties, bulldozers, etc. can now join the nation-founding militias of the American Revolution in a charge (of mythic proportions) up Surreality Hill. To paraphrase Tolkien, the tale has not only grown but was born in the telling. posted by Steven Baum 9/12/2000 02:01:00 PM | link IS SHATNER IN IT? A friend of mine recently received a strange birthday gift in a pizza box: a copy of Leonard Nimoy's 1968 album "Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy." He mentioned this in one of the "discussion groups" we have on the porch at Duddley's Draw after a hard couple of hours worth of ultimate frisbee, and my first reaction (okay, second, with the first being "why don't I ever get neato birthday presents like that?") was to offer to play it for him at my library-house since he doesn't have the facilities to do vinyl. So we listened to the thing after a few beers and during a few more beers (and, believe me, the beer thing really, really helps with the appreciation thereof), noting especially the fine, lilting tones exhibited by Nimoy on "Highly Illogical" and "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins." I should explain that the "two sides" in the title refers to one side being warbled in the Spock persona and the other in the Nimoy persona, although given that Nimoy has written books called both I Am Not Spck (1975) and I Am Spock (1995), the tunes blur together in a manner similar to his pair of personalities. (To keep y'all coming around, I'll mention that I'm working on making an MP3 of at least "Highly Illogical". I've got all the necessary hardware and software, and the motivation should show up any year now.) Anyhow, moving on to what inspired the title of this entry, just last Friday (on a marvelous trip to Austin) I picked up a copy of George Gimarc and Pat Reeder's Celebrity Hi-Fi: Over 100 of the Most Outrageous Celebrity Recordings Ever. It contains, amongst descriptions of many other horrifying marvels, a mention of the abovementioned Nimoy album (one of five he recorded at around the same period). There's also a companion CD containing selections of the best of such celebrity songbirds as Bette Davis, Ted Cassidy (a..k.a. Lurch), Joe Pesci, Mamie Van Doren and Anthony Quinn. And, by the way, the answer to the question you're all asking is "Yes, the book and CD were inspired by the classic Golden Throats CD series from those eternally useful, entertaining and clever folks at Rhino." The real pleasures of the book are found in the vicious bastard prose of Messrs. Gimarc and Reeder. For instance, they go on to review Nimoy's third album, the classic "The Way I Feel" (1968), as follows: This time capsule of preachy, psychedelic folkiness sports a laughable sixties utopian cover featuring flowers, butterflies, peace signs, and Nimoy in turtleneck and long gold necklace. It also contains some of the worst singing in this or any other galaxy, particularly on "I'd Love Making Love to You" (which he moos like a visitor from the Planet of the Singing Cows) and on "Sunny" (his strained gargling is somewhere between Bill Cosby's version and Moms Mabley's). There's also his you-gotta-hear-it-to-believe-it take on "If I Had a Hammer." Halfway through, the backup singers start humming "America the Beautiful," as Nimoy boldly declares, "Well, I have a hammer! It's the hammer ... of JUSTICE!" Good thing we didn't have a hammer when we played it. Nimoy's recording career petered out after 1970, when whatever drugs the executives at Dot were taking finally wore off. He later starred in a successful tour of "Fiddler on the Roof," but if he sang like this in front of a crowd, we're amazed they didn't push him off the roof. "Star Trek" is one of a small group of TV shows that have - for reasons too terrible to contemplate - inspired several cast members to hit the recording studio, with other examples being "Bonanza", "The Brady Bunch" and "Batman." Other gems originating from the "Star Trek" universe include - starting with the most famous example - William Shatner's album "The Transformed Man" (1970) (with his version of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" from that disc available on the first Golden Throats compilation), a 1991 Nichelle Nichols album called "Out of This World" (which includes an ode called "Gene" to the Great Turd of the Galaxy), a 1976 spoken LP by Roddenberry with tracks like "Star Trek Philosophy," a 1976 Grace "Yeoman Rand" Lee Whitney 45 RPM disc called "Disco Trekin'" and a 1991 CD by Brent "Data" Spiner called "Ol' Yellow Eyes is Back." A recording that really doesn't count, since it was done before the first "Trek" series got off the ground, is George Takei's singing of the "Gong Song" on a cast LP of "Fly, Blackbird" in the early 1960s, although he did inspire the title of this entry seeing how the first thing he asked the authors when they contacted him about the book was, "Ooh, is Shatner in your book?" And, according to the authors, Takei wasn't the only person who asked that question. Other gems uncovered by the authors include tunes by Bette Davis: A typical single is "Mother of the Bride," the bone-chilling 1965 ballad in which Mother Goddamn wails and sobs like a crazed banshee as her little girl walks down the aisle. Tony Perkins: The high point is Perkins' big, rafter-ringing ballad, "Never Will I Marry." When the "eh-eh-eh" kicks in on the shrieking high notes, he sounds just like John Raitt with his finger in a light socket. and Ken "Festus on Gunsmoke" Curtis: The tunes include an ode to Hawg Haggen (Festus' grandpa), a ballad for an ugly girl that Festus nevertheless loves "harder'n a goat could butt a stump," a great kiss-off tune called "Phooey on You, Little Darlin'" and homages to Dodge City, mules, and Festus' "pokin' clean" hometown (poke your head out the car window, and you're clean out of town). Finally, if you doubt the sincerity of the authors, they state in their preface that they genuinely like and enjoy many of the albums they verbally brutalize in the book, and even guarantee that they've listened to each and every one all the way through, most many times over. The book is most entertaining, and if you get both it and the CD you'll undoubtedly be the life of any party (no guarantee implied). posted by Steven Baum 9/12/2000 10:03:00 AM | link Monday, September 11, 2000 SCREWING Witold Rybczynski is the Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the Wharton School in Pennsylvania. He is also a Professor of Real Estate, although fortunately for us his literary skills and knowledge of technology and history far surpass what you'd expect from someone involved in real estate. He's demonstrated his considerable chops in books about why American cities are the way they are ( City Life : Urban Expectations in a New World), the historical development of the idea of a home ( Home : A Short History of an Idea), the construction of his own home with hand tools ( The Most Beautiful House in the World) and the life of the man who designed Central Park and the grounds of the U.S. Capitol ( A Clearing in the Distance : Frederich Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century). He's just recently favored us with another book, wherein he seems to be going the Ken Burns route of ostensibly doing more and more with less and less with each succeeding project (stay tuned for the 100 hour series "The Pet Rock" on your locale PBS station). Reviewer M. R. Montgomery hits the nail on the head (so to mispeak) when he notes in a review of Rybcyzinski's latest - One Good Turn : A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw - that one of the engrossing features of Rybcyzinski's books is his penchant for peppering his books with interesting and amusing digressions, e.g. a discussion of the history of the art of divination done by examining freshly slaughtered livers in Beautiful House. Montgomery's review - The Turn of the Screw (do they pay these guys extra to come up with pretentious literary puns as titles?) - tells how Rybczyinksi traces the screwdriver back to 18th century France when the word "tournevis" (literally "turnscrew") first appears in print. As for more pragmatic matters: The two earliest uses Rybczynski could locate were to assemble bits and pieces of suits of armor and, more deviously, to attach the matchlock firing mechanism to the wooden stocks of the earliest firearms. Rybczynski rises to greater heights while pondering the screw sans the driver, tracing its helical form back to classical Greece where it was both studied by mathematicians and applied to more tangible matters, e.g. a primitive odometer and a helical water pump. He further elucidates the myriad clever uses of the screw for making precise adjustments and movements, and ... ... argues convincingly that the application of helical adjustment is one of the core principles of the Industrial Revolution. The metal-turning lathe, first invented (believe it or not) to mass-produce screws in the 1700's, allowed the manufacture of all kinds of precisely sized parts for everything from steam engines to chronometers. Refinements in machine tools in the 19th century allowed the mass production of interchangeable parts for consumer goods and articles of war. The rifling inside a gun barrel (the grooving that imparts spin, and thus gyroscopic stability to the bullet) is a helix, and the machine that rifles the barrel is controlled by helical devices. He goes on to offer a theory as to why different cultures have evinced different rates of scientific progress: He notes at the conclusion of the book that science did not develop in cultures unfamiliar with the screw. In China, for example, where astrology did not evolve into astronomy or alchemy into chemistry, he writes, ''They didn't know screws at all: the screw is the only major mechanical device that they did not independently invent.'' One Good Turn is another good example of a subgenre I've encountered and enjoyed before, i.e. books about ostensibly limited scientific or technical topics that aren't as limited or dull as they might first seem, and that serve as springboards for digressing into and theorizing about other topics or issues. Another example I've recently obtained is Robert Multhauf's Neptune's Gift : A History of Common Salt, although the technical level on this one is a bit higher than for One Good Turn. Someday I'll have to make a list of similar books. Right, I'll put that on the project metalist so it'll get done in 2048 or so. posted by Steven Baum 9/11/2000 11:39:12 PM | link SPIKING THE GUN MYTH Garry Wills - if he hasn't already earned the eternal enmity of the religious and the reactionary with such books as Papal Sin (most Popes have been egregrious sinners and modern Catholic doctrine is intellectually contemptible), A Necessary Evil (obsessing about how all gummint is evil is historically and intellectually indefensible) and John Waynes's America (the Duke deliberately avoided military service in WWII to further his movie career and lied about his college football prowess) - will certainly get them frothing at the mouth for favorably reviewing Michael Bellesiles' Arming American: The Origins of a National Gun Culture in the 9/10/2000 NYTimes Book Review. Bellesiles spends 603 pages detailing the actual history of the gun in this country rather than the dreamy-eyed, rose-colored-glasses version perpetrated by many of the same crowd that spins equally factual tales about how the Founding Fathers were all doctrinally-pure Protestants who'd feel downright warm and snuggly at a Christian Reconstruction revival meeting. Bellesiles searched through over a thousand probate records from the frontier sections of New England and Pennsylvania from the years 1763 to 1790. Did he find the gleaming silver and gold firearms hanging proudly in droves over the mantels of each and every house populated by God's chosen people in the New World (as proudly featured in NRA propaganda and Mel Gibson films)? Not quite. He found that only 14 percent of the men owned guns, and over half of those were unusable. Bellesiles was genuinely surprised to discover this and, doubting his findings, he examined many other kinds of evidence to ascertain the truth. And was is it? That ... ... individually owned guns were not really in hiding; they were barely in existence. Before the Civil War, the cutoff point for this study, the average American had little reason to go to the expense and trouble of acquiring, mastering and maintaining a tool of such doubtful utility as a gun. The musket was the gun of the time, and it was an imported item that cost two months pay, rusted easily, and wasn't easily repairable by blacksmiths equipped to shoe horses and make plows. It was also not accurate beyond a few hundred feet, frequently misfired, and was cumbersome to reload. A foe could easily cover the musket's effective firing distance in the time it took to reload and assail the musketeer with knife, club or ax. And what about the sacred hunting thing? The same factors that made the musket ineffective for self-defense made it practically useless for hunting. Scare the rabbit with one inaccurate shot (which threw out dense smoke), and all game would be gone by the time you got out ball and powder and deployed them properly. Besides, most Americans were farmers, with no time to maintain expensive guns for hunting when domestic animals (chickens and pigs) were the easily available sources of protein. That is why no American factories were created to make guns. And what of the holy militias worshipped as the last, best hope to save our nation then and now? Bellesiles deflates the myth of the self-reliant and self-armed virtuous yeoman of the Revolutionary militias. Washington hated to see militiamen come into his camp. They destroyed camp discipline, morale and hygiene (disease often kills more than does the enemy in war). Their high desertion rate infected the regulars. TO those advocating reliance on them, Washington responded: "The Idea is chimerical, and that we have so long persisted in it is a reflection on the judgment of a Nation so enlightened as we are, as well as a strong proof of the empire of prejudice over reason." Militias were ill-trained, undisciplined and they could not face the bayonet. (Washington's regulars had to learn from European drill instructors how to do that.) The advocates are right about the militias being the same then and now, although not in the way they think they are. The myth of the nation-founding militias is every bit as real as "Red Dawn." So what is the reality behind the present obsessive need for guns by a goodly percentage of the populace? The mythology of the gun would be elaborated and drummed into Americans, during the second half of the 19th century, by massive advertising and by popular celebration in dime novels and Wild West shows. Bellesiles is apparently writing a second volume detailing this period. posted by Steven Baum 9/11/2000 10:25:24 PM | link GOOD KNIGHT When it comes down to the nitty gritty, the decision to axe "The General" wasn't exactly made more difficult by his getting blown out in the first round of the NCAA tourney each of the last two years. It's amazing to see the amount of vehement support still given to someone whose public behavior would, if replicated by the children of those supporters, get them slapped across the room. In the final analysis, it's quite difficult to support someone for their supposed "character building" qualities when the largest facet of their public persona is that of a child having a temper tantrum. This brings back memories of my first year at Ohio State when Woody Hayes took a swing at a Clemson linebacker who'd just intercepted a pass that guaranteed he'd lose the 1978 Gator Bowl. He was fired the next day, although they'd been putting up with Hayes tantrums similar to those exhibited by Knight for several years before that. Appropriately enough, both Knight and Hayes made ESPN's 10 Most Infamous Moments of the Century list. As for the list, I'd definitely rank Ty Cobb's attacking a crippled fan higher (or is that lower?) than the fiasco at the end of the Cal/Stanford game, if only for sheer bravado. After all, when someone yelled to Cobb that his victim was missing a hand and three fingers after he'd been thrashing him for a few minutes, Cobb replied, "I don't care if he has no feet." posted by Steven Baum 9/11/2000 03:38:59 PM | link REXEC REXEC is a decentralized, secure remote execution environment for computer clusters that is the latest descendant of research done for the NOW and Millennium cluster projects at Berkeley. The system architecture is designed around three types of entities: rexecd, a daemon running on each cluster node; rexec, a client program run by users to execute jobs; and vexecd, a replicated daemon that provides node discvoery and selection services. The key features of REXEC include: decentralized control that (a) gracefully scales system overhead as more cluster nodes are added and more applications are run and (b) avoids single points of failure; transparent remote execution that allows processes running on remote nodes to execute and be controlled as if they were running local via (a) propagating and recreating the user's local environment on remote nodes, (b) forwarding local signals to remote processes, (c) forwarding stdin, stdout and stderr between the rexec client and remote processes and (d) local job control that controls remote processes; a dynamic cluster membership service that discovers nodes as they join and leave a cluster using a well-known cluster multicast address; the decoupling of node discovery from the selection of nodes on which an application should be run; a well-defined error handling and cleanup model for applications wherein, in the case of an error on a rexec client, in any of the remote processes, or on any of the TCP connections between the rexec client and any of the remote rexecd daemons, the entire application exits, all resources are reclaimed, and a textual error message is printed to the user; support for parallel and distributed applications by allowing users to launch and control multiple instances of the same program on multiple nodes, and by providing a set of hooks allowing parallel runtime environments to be built; and authentication and encryption of all communications between clients and daemons via SSLeay. The system is currently installed on an 85-node, 200+ processor cluster of SMP machines running Linux with the 2.2.5 kernel, and is freely available for use elsewhere on similar clusters. posted by Steven Baum 9/11/2000 02:59:53 PM | link RUBBERHOSE Several months back I extolled the virtues of the Steganographic File System package. I've just encountered a similar package called Rubberhose that transparently and deniably encrypts disk data in a manner similar but not identical to the methods used in StegFS. Rubberhose is a deniable cryptography package that lets someone not wanting to disclose plaintext data corresponding to their encrypted data show that there is more than one interpretation of the latter. Rubberhose works by initially writing random characters to an entire hard drive or other dynamic storage device. This random noise is indistinguishable from the encrypted data to be stored on that disk. If you have a 1 GB drive and want to have two Rubberhose encrypted portions of 400 MB and 200 MB, it assumes that each aspect (as the encrypted partitions are called) will be 1 GB and fill the entire drive. It will keep doing this until the drive is really filled to capacity with encrypted material. It breaks up the pieces of each aspect into small pieces and scatters them across the entire 1 GB drive in a random manner, with each aspect looking as if it is actually 1 GB in size upon decryption. Each aspect has its own passphrase that must be separately decrypted, and if a hard drive is seized neither mathematical analysis nor physical disk testing can reveal how many aspects actually exist. Internal maps are used to locate where the data is stored amongst the random characters, with each aspect having its own map which can only be decrypted via its specific passphrase. As such, a Rubberhose disk only be written to after all the passphrases have been entered. Everything is works on a "need to know" basis, i.e. each aspect knows nothing about the others other than when to avoid writing over the top of another. Other features of Rubberhose include: a choice of cryptographic algorithms including DES, 3DES, IDEA, RC5, Blowfish, Twofish and CAST; compatibility with several filesystems including UFS, ext2fs, FAT and FAT32; time-based passphrases, e.g. configuring it to demand re-entry of a passphrase after a given amount of time or to lock out users after a specified amount of idle time; anti-passphrase-cracking features, e.g. an internally generated passphrase is generated upon the creation of each new aspect that is encrypted with the user passphrase for that aspect; a design ensuring that if one block of data in an aspect is decrypted, then it cannot be used to decrypt the remaining blocks; frequent block-swapping to confound disk surface analysis based on the intensity of block use and contiguous block prediction; and "whitening code," i.e. code for the prevention of plaintext attacks that perturbs the encryption process in a non-predictable way such that some bits in an encrypted block are flipped and some aren't. One can't help but admire the motives as well as the skill of those who designed and built this package: Rubberhose was originally conceived by crypto-programmer Julian Assange as a tool for human rights workers who needed to protect sensitive data in the field, particularly lists of activists and details of incidents of abuse. Repressive regimes in places like East Timor, Russia, Kosovo, Guatemala, Iraq, Sudan and The Congo conduct human rights abuses regularly. Our team has met with human rights groups and heard first-hand accounts of such abuses. Human rights workers carry vital data on laptops through the most dangerous situations, sometimes being stopped by military patrols who would have no hesitation in torturing a suspect until he or she revealed a passphrase to unlock the data. We want to help these sorts of campaigners, particularly the brave people in the field who risk so much to smuggle data about the abuses out to the rest of the world. posted by Steven Baum 9/11/2000 02:10:35 PM | link

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