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.

How to blog? METABLOGGING Blog Madness Blog Portal linkwatcher Monitor BLOGS (YMMV) abuddhas memes alamut apathy arms and the man baghdad burning bifurcated rivets big left outside boing boing booknotes bovine inversus bradlands bushwacker camworld cheek chess log cogent provocateur cool tools counterspin crooked timber delong digby drat fink drmike d-squared dumbmonkey electrolite eschaton estimated prophet ezrael fat planet flutterby! follow me here geegaw genehack ghost glare gmtplus9 hack the planet harmful hauser report hell for halliburton honeyguide hotsy totsy club juan cole kestrel's nest k marx the spot kuro5hin lake effect lambda large hearted boy leftbanker looka looking glass macleod maxspeak medley memepool metagrrrl mike's monkeyfist more like this mouse farts my dog norbizness off the kuff orcinus pandagon pedantry peterme philosoraptor pith and vinegar plastic portage q quark soup quiggin randomwalks rip post rittenhouse see the forest shadow o' hegemon sideshow simcoe south knox bubba slacktivist smudge submerging markets sylloge synthetic zero talking points tbogg twernt unknownnews vacuum vanitysite virulent memes whiskey bar windowseat tv wood s lot TECH Librenix use perl rootprompt slashdot freshmeat Ars Technica 32BitsOnline UGeek AnandTech Linux Today Tom's Hardware DevShed

"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, August 24, 2001 THE FIRST WIFE The funeral of Maureen Reagan was remindful of the GOP convention that nominated Bob Dole in 1996. During that circle-jerk, a white-haired old woman sitting in the first row was identified as the nurse who helped him heal from the major wounds he suffered in WWII. While she indeed was that nurse, that nurse also became Dole's first wife, an inconvenient fact that was somehow never mentioned by any of the speakers canonizing Dole for single-handedly winning WWII and going on to become an exemplar of morality and family values. The fact that the Gipper was the only twice-married President in U.S. history is another ugly fact usually swept under the rug. As a correspondent at Media Whores puts it: Consider the coverage of Maureen Reagan's funeral. Producers, confronted with the actual presence of Jane Wyman, pretty much ignored her. That left the RR worshipping cultists on the air to try and figure out who in hell she was. CNN's brilliant whore called her, "Maureen's birth mother", suggesting what? A sexless test tube? Proving Isaacson's all around inferiority to Fox, those dimwits kept identifying Maureen as Ron and Nancy's first born. Imagine the migraines sweeping through Freeperland when the feature length video of Maureen's life lingered over pictures of an alive and virile Ron with a beautiful Jane. His wife. His first wife, who dumped him. That Jane. If she has a manuscript under her bed, it'll never be published but damn, it would be a good read. One of my eternal joys is constantly reminding the local goose-stepping undergrads that their great moral avatar the Gipper was indeed married twice. After Jane left him, Nancy - the daughter of a far right-wing father - encountered Ron during a bed-hop and probably realized almost immediately which way the gravy train was heading or, more accurately, how easy it would be to steer this particular gravy train. posted by Steven Baum 8/24/2001 04:33:52 PM | link LIES, DAMNED LIES AND MISSILE TESTS The proposed National Missile Defense system shrub's using to piss off just about every U.S. ally is currently useless for its stated purpose and will remain so for a very long time, no matter how much money shrub throws at Boeing, Raytheon, TRW, Lockheed Martin and his other corporate paymasters. The only evidence that any of the tens of billions thrown at the system are doing anything other than buying vacation homes and luxury yachts for corporate bagmen is the series of tests performed over the last couple of years. And, as is pointed out by Thomas Halstead, those have been about as non-rigged as a traveling carnival: The flight tests conducted so far have incorporated homing beacons, unrealistic decoys and other techniques designed to create the appearance of success. But these aids to detection and target discrimination can provide no meaningful information to help a planner learn how to intercept a real missile. Later revelations of flaws in the test data or manipulated data go unreported. It's as though a baseball coach trained his outfielders with nothing but pop flies aimed directly at them. The latest integrated flight test of a missile interceptor took place July 14 and was immediately trumpeted by the Bush administration as an unqualified success. According to initial news accounts, the target, an intercontinental ballistic missile warhead launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, was intercepted high over the Pacific Ocean and destroyed on impact by an Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Reportedly, the EKV successfully identified and ignored an accompanying decoy before homing in on the warhead to destroy it. The evening television broadcasts showed cheering test personnel watching the "kill" unfold on their monitors. Now the truth about the test, the fourth successive failure to conduct a valid test of current missile-defense technology, is coming out. Less than a week after the test, it was revealed that the Raytheon X-band radar, the brains of the national missile defense system, had properly detected the target warhead and provided data before the interception, but that its data-analysis capability was then overwhelmed by the cloud of debris caused by the collision of target and interceptor. The radar would thus have been incapable of tracking any additional targets or discriminating between them and any decoys, an essential task in any real attack scenario. This is a major flaw. A missile defense system that can find and destroy only one target is no defense at all. More recently, the journal Defense Week reported that the X-band radar was able to detect and track the warhead, and distinguish it from the accompanying decoy, because of a beacon implanted in the warhead that emitted a stream of identifying radio signals. A Reuters dispatch reporting on the Defense Week story has been largely ignored by media outlets. So not only did they have to implant a radio beacon in the target in order to hit it, even after they did so the radar they used for tracking it was useless for tracking other targets. In other words, if the hypothetical "rogue state" attacking the U.S. doesn't put homing beacons on its missiles and doesn't send them one at a time at large time intervals, we might as well be firing sawed-off shotguns in the air at random. There's also the matter of the Coyle Report, a report on the missile defense program prepared for the Pentagon last year by its chief civilian test evaluator. After refusing to deliver the report to Congress for over eight months, the Pentagon finally released it after the continued insistence of Rep. John Tierney. According to Halsted: The Coyle report documents in detail the deceptive practices used, the failure of tests to provide meaningful data on which to base any deployment decisions and the failure to test against any realistic countermeasures an actual missile defense would almost certainly encounter. The report includes 52 recommendations for improving the testing and evaluation program, not one of which has been implemented. Regrettably, Tierney's release of the Coyle report has been largely met by silence in the media. And what did I hear from the supposed liberal media after the last test? From ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, the New York Times, PBS, NPR, etc? Every last one of them repeated unquestioningly the bullshit released by the Pentagon about yet another rigged test being a triumphant success. The only differences were that some outlets actually restrained themselves from going on to crow about how this should finally silence all those naysaying critics. posted by Steven Baum 8/24/2001 12:56:02 PM | link THE POOR LIL' SHRUB BRATS Recall the whining by shrub and his sycophants about how his daughters were singled out for harsh treatment when they got busted? They were certainly singled out, but not in the manner suggested. According to Jim Hightower in a recent newsletter (as excerpted in a Common Dreams piece by Dave Zweifel): "I called the county attorney's office and found that at the time of the Bush incident, the county attorney had more than 150 active cases of teens who had been arrested by the police for doing what Jenna and Barbara did. These kids were charged, as the law requires, with a Class B misdemeanor. The non-Bush teens not only were arrested, they were also hauled to jail, booked, and put in a cell until they could make bail, usually about a 12-hour ordeal. It's the routine procedure." Zweifel adds: That, of course, is not the way it went for the Bush daughters. Rather, when the city police, who had been called by the nightclub management, arrived to check on the report of the false ID, a Secret Service agent tapped an officer on the shoulder to explain who the women were. While the city police called headquarters to find out how to proceed in this unusual case, the Secret Service moved Jenna and Barbara out of the bar and into an SUV waiting outside. The police, however, warned the Bush daughters not to leave until they checked with their supervisor and they got Jenna to turn over the false ID. According to Hightower, who filed a freedom of information action to see the reports, the officer wrote that "Jenna started crying and stated that I do not have any idea what it is like to be a college student and not be able to do anything that other students get to do." "Well now, Jenna, let's see," Hightower says. "One thing that other students would have gotten to do is go directly to jail and made to make bail before getting out. But seeing as how you and Barbara are Bush kids, the police brass instructed (the officers at the scene) to turn you loose without even writing a ticket, telling the officers that your case would be handled by the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission." That commission, Hightower tells us, has never before handled a case like this, and besides, it just happens to be composed entirely of members appointed by former Gov. George W. Bush. Yep, those poor girls were certainly singled out - for particularly soft treatment for an offense whose punishment was significantly increased in a "git tuff" bill signed in Sept. 1999 by - you guessed it - daddy. posted by Steven Baum 8/24/2001 11:12:46 AM | link MY STRUGGLE A front page story in the Wall Street Journal on July 30 carried the headline "Oil giants struggle to spend profits amid shortage of exploration sites." It seems the oil boys can't figure out what to do with $40 billion in excess cash. Four days layer, the Washington Post carried a story detailing how the House of Representatives - that pack of bleeding heart soft touches led by Dick Armey et al. - felt the pain of the oil giants and passed legislation including $33.5 billion in tax breaks for the industry, with much of the largesse of the GOP with taxpayer dollars going towards the costs of exploration. This is so wrong in so many ways one just doesn't know where to begin. posted by Steven Baum 8/24/2001 09:49:04 AM | link FOLLYGRAPH Seeing how the "lie detector" or "polygraph" is back in the news via the media feeding frenzy over Gary Condit, it's a good idea to ponder the scientific basis of this tired cliche of both screen and "reality". A Counterpunch item provides the necessary grist for the mill: In the past 85 years, the polygraph hasn't changed much from the Marston prototype. The secret of the polygraph is that their machine is no more capable of telling the truth than were the priests of ancient Rome standing knee-deep in chicken parts," says Alan Zelicoff, a physician and senior scientist at the Center for National Security and Arms Control at the Sandia Labs in Albequerque, New Mexico. Zelicoff gave us this view in an article in the July-August edition of the `Skeptical Inquirer.' Zelicoff writes that the polygraph administerer is a kind of confidence artists or modern day mesmerist who tries to seduce (or scare) his subject into believing in the power of the machine to catch them in the most minute inconsistency. "The subject, nervously strapped in a chair, is often convinced by the aura surrounding this cheap parlor trick, and is then putty in the hands of the polygrapher, who then launches into an intrusive, illegal and wide-ranging inquisition." Zelicoff writes. "The subject is told from time to time that the machine is indicating deception. It isn't, of course. And he is continuously urged to clarify his answers, by providing more and more personal information." At an arbitrary point, the polygrapher calls off the testing, consults the spools of graph paper and makes an entirely subjective rendering on whether the subject has given a "deceptive response." "Every first year medical student knows that the four parameters measured during a polygraph - blood pressure, pulse, sweat production, and breathing rate - are affected by an uncountable myriad of emotions: joy, hate, elation, sadness, anxiety, depression, and so forth," says Zelicoff. "But there is not one chapter - not one - in any medical text that associates these quantities in any way with an individual's intent to deceive. More importantly, dozens of studies over the past 20 years in psychology departments and medical schools all over the world have shown that the polygraph cannot distinguish between truth-telling and lying." It's a scam. The high-tech equivalent of a rubber hose for eliciting confessions from both the guilty and the innocent. Just because a handful of graph paper chock full of wiggles looks more scientific than a pair of brass knuckles doesn't mean it's any more accurate than reading tea leaves or pondering one's navel as an mechanism for establishing the truth. It would be just as effective to hook up a geiger counter or a Van de Graaff generator, and a whole lot more dramatic. posted by Steven Baum 8/24/2001 09:10:40 AM | link Thursday, August 23, 2001 COLOSTOMY ROCK Having just seen (or was it a nightmare?) the Monkees latest reunion schtick on the Tonight Show a few nights back, and listened to Peter Tork make a joke about groupies throwing Depends these days instead of panties, I'm wholly appreciative of the following rants from John Strausbaugh's book Rock Til You Drop (from excerpts appearing in the Observer): The Rolling Stones didn't make rock anymore after the mid-Seventies; they made stadium events. By the 1990s, the Stones' brand of colostomy rock had become not an isolated freak show but a regular - and popular - feature of the summer concert season. Every year, ancient rock bands rise up from their graves and rule the nights again. Lynyrd Skynyrd, Jethro Tull, Yes, the Allman Brothers: pale ghosts of their youthful selves, they have become their own nostalgia merchandise. There can be only one motivation: as the Rutles declared, 'All You Need Is Cash'. I find this terribly dispiriting. When Eddie Van Halen needs to be careful how he moves onstage because of his hip replacement surgery, Eddie should sit down and become strictly a studio musician. When bands calling themselves Little Feat or Jefferson Starship are made up almost entirely of ringers and replacements and include none of the talents that originally made those names so recognisable, they should stop calling themselves Little Feat or Jefferson anything. When Pete Townshend decides in his mid-fifties that he wants to record a six-CD rock opera (Lifehouse) made up entirely of songs he wrote 30 years ago, the best of which he and his band already played to death during the 1970s ('Baba O'Riley', 'Behind Blue Eyes', 'Won't Get Fooled Again'), and that he is now going to rerecord in wimpy old-man's versions, with insipid string orchestrations laid on top for a false air of gravity... someone should say, 'No, Pete, that's a bad idea' and lead him by the elbow back to the old folks' home - where Eddie, Mick, and the rest of the geezers might have a good laugh and remind him of the lyrics to a certain song he wrote decades earlier, famously addressing precisely this topic of ageing. ... Were you, for instance, a Fleetwood Mac fan? I never quite got their massive appeal myself. To me, Fleetwood Mac - the mid-to-late-1970s edition of Fleetwood Mac, 'Rhiannon' and all that - was just Abba with a decent drummer. Be that as it may, if you were a fan of Fleetwood Mac in the 1970s, why on earth would you want to see them reunited as middle-aged has-beens in the late 1990s, performing a nostalgia stage act of 25-year-old hit songs? How could you look at the once-svelte Stevie Nicks and not cringe to see her overweight and stuffed like a sausage into some girdle or corset torture device so constricting she literally could not move in it, her pancake make-up thick and hard as china, her hair a straw fright wig, her once fetchingly crackled voice a scary croak? Or how about the middle-aged Eric Clapton? Were you still thinking Clapton was God by, say, 1980? How about after the easy-listening Miller Beer commercials? How about after his son died and he wrote that hideously mawkish song for him and then would not stop playing it everywhere he went, year after year? Reminds of a true tale about Clapton about 15 years back. Michelob was just rolling out a new commercial campaign featuring Clapton droning some tune about the night and all its mystery and glamor, when they found out he'd just entered alcohol rehab. The campaign lasted just a bit longer than the classic "from those wonderful folks who brought you Pearl Harbor" campaign for Honda. When I want to listen to Clapton, I get out my 4 CD Cream set, or the "Layla" album with Duane Allman. With Dylan I spin "Blood on the Tracks" or "Desire", the last good albums he made before he joined the "religion of the month" club. I don't touch any Little Feat that doesn't include Lowell George, who died in 1978. And as for Fleetwood Mac, I won't rush madly for the radio to turn it off if they're being played, but the only album (a vinyl album, that is) I have of that band includes Peter Green in the line-up, and doesn't include either Lindsey Buckingham or Stevie Nicks. posted by Steven Baum 8/23/2001 03:06:03 PM | link ME NO LAZY In case anyone's wondering if I've just been sitting around drinking beer and grilling peppers for the last month, I've added over a hundred pages to my Glossary of Physical Oceanography, including some really nasty looking sets of equations. If you're into such things, it's spiffy; if you're not, then you bloody well should be. I'm at about 450 pages (as I'm currently typesetting it), and will feel confident about it being "reasonably complete at a first cut level" at around 650 pages. The increasing level of detail is going to require a name change, though, from "glossary" to "dictionary" or "encyclopedia." posted by Steven Baum 8/23/2001 10:31:17 AM | link THAT'S GOOD EATIN' The New Mexico peppers are in season, and it's time to prepare those suckers for use throughout the year. First, grab yourself 5-10 pounds (or more, we've gone through about 20 already) of those nuggets down at your local grocery or farm market. Take 'em home, wash them off (ours have been a touch on the sandy side), and fire up your grill. A charcoal grill is preferable, but a gas grill is an acceptable option. Get it going nice and hot and spread a layer of the peppers on the grill. In a few minutes, the side of the peppers facing the flame should be turning pale and papery. In a few more minutes they'll be turning darker, eventually black. You don't need to blacken them, but rather grill them until the skin gets papery. You'll know what I mean when you see it. Turn the peppers so all sides get papery, and once you've got the batch finished grilling, put them all in a paper bag for a few minutes. Then take them out of the bag, pull off the skins (this should be easy at this point), slice the remaining "meat" in half, and remove the seeds. Get a cookie sheet and lay down a sheet of wax paper. Spread the processed peppers on the wax paper. Keep going until you've processed all the peppers, adding more layers of wax paper as needed. Put the cookie sheet and its contents in the freezer overnight, and pull it out the next day. Separate/break up the frozen pepper meats and put them in freezer bags. Pull them out and use them throughout the year as your recipes or imagination requires. This method will also work with other pepper varieties, e.g. poblanos, etc., as long as they have a sufficiently thick meat. That is, it won't work very well with habaneros. One serving suggestion is to grill some chicken breasts however you usually do such a thing, and when they're finished put a few strips of the peppers on them, a layer of cheese on top of that, and put them in the oven (or even back on the grill) for a few minutes to let the cheese melt. Yummy. Enjoy. posted by Steven Baum 8/23/2001 10:05:53 AM | link HARD WORKIN' PREZ Once the shrub finishes his current 30-day "working" vacation, that'll bring his total vacation days to 52 with a little over half the year finished. Contrast this with the average eight days of vacation most U.S. small business employees receive each year, according to Evan Woodward's Vacation Starved over at Tom Paine. Americans work two months more each year than Germans in total hours, and two weeks longer than Japanese workers. Europeans and Australians typically receive six weeks paid leave each year, and I haven't noticed either place sinking into "third world" status. The next time shrub or anyone in his junta starts yammering about "rolling up our sleeves", I'm reaching for my rocket launcher. posted by Steven Baum 8/23/2001 09:45:32 AM | link

Comments? Archive LISTS Books Software uPORTALS cider crime lit drive-in fake lit hurricanes os scripting sherlock texas music top 100 weirdsounds wodehouse LEISURE abebooks alibris amazon bibliofind bookfinder hamilton powells all music guide best used cds cd bargains second spin raven's links ampol arts & letters atlantic art history attrition bibliomania bitch bizarre bizarro bloom country bob 'n' ed bob the angry flower callahan chile pepper classical music cnnsi crackbaby cult films culture jamming discover disinformation dismal scientist electric sheep espn exquisite corpse feed fine cooking fishbowl fluble fried society fry and laurie hotel fred hotendotey hypocrisy network jerkcity last cereal leisure town logos london times mappa mundi miscmedia mp3lit mr. chuck show mr. serpent national geographic new scientist no depression not bored obscure store onion on-line books parking lot is full pearly gates phrase and fable probe red meat rough guides salon Simpleton sluggy freelance spacemoose spike straight dope strenua inertia suck superosity tawdry town too much coffee man toon inn verbivore vidal index yes minister you damn kid