Steve Reads

Recall:

A third source, an official who works under ISI’s director, Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, informed tnr that the Pakistanis “have been told at every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs [i.e., high-value al Qaida targets] before [the] election is [an] absolute must.” What’s more, this source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: “The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq’s] meetings in Washington.” Says McCormack: “I’m aware of no such comment.” But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that “it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July”—the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

And now the New York Times tells us

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Friday, July 30 — Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who is among the 22 people on the F.B.I.’s most-wanted-terrorist list, was arrested Sunday, Pakistani officials said Thursday night.

What am I to make of that?

If you’d like to be convinced that this isn’t just a random conspiracy theory, see Josh Marshall discussing the same story:

Then, after you see that, remember that we noted in May and then The New Republic reported out extensively early this month, that this White House has been telling the Pakistanis for months that they wanted to see a big-time al Qaida leader — hopefully bin Laden — produced during the Democratic convention.

 . . . So I’d be very, very curious to hear whether when, oh say, CNN goes on about how this al Qaida guy has been hauled in they will mention at all, or with any consistency, that one of the most respected political magazines in the United States reported just weeks ago on the pressure the administration has been placing on the Pakistanis to serve up an al Qaida bad guy on this day.

Will they make the obvious connection? Or will they just ignore it?

This is just the latest, but perhaps the most blatant, example of how this administration has placed politics and, really, political dirty tricks above national security itself, and along the way persisted in defining political deviance down until tactics we used to associate with banana republics start to seem commonplace here.

And while we’re at it, this is yet another example of how truly important it is that we democratize the Middle East. Because once we have, some of them will be able to come back here and redemocratize us.

I’ve recently been thinking in a general way about game theory, specifically how one might model the interaction between a pitcher and a batter using it. There are certain strategies that make sense based on the current state of play — e.g., if there’s a man on second and no outs, often the batter bunts. But then the pitcher knows that the batter bunts in such a situation, so the pitcher responds appropriately. And the batter knows that the pitcher knows, so  . . .  and so on.

This shows up in biology, too. I need to find a good reference to it, but someone described for me the interaction between wasps and fig trees in the Middle East. The story goes something like this (again, forgive me if it’s off): a wasp wants to find a fertile fig in which to nest, but doing so kills the fig. So fertile fig trees are doing their best to pretend they’re infertile. Meanwhile wasps are doing their best to distinguish between fertile and infertile fig trees. It’s an arms race: the wasps that get selected for are those that can best distinguish between types of tree, and the fig trees that get selected for are those that can most convincingly pretend to be infertile.

I’m curious what game theory can teach us in these situations. Does the arms race ever settle down to some equilibrium? How does iterated play (e.g., the batter will face the same pitcher again) change things? I need to start reading some game theory and see where it leads.

If you look at the Sox versus the Yankees in their team batting statistics, the Sox are ahead in nearly every measure: batting average, slugging percentage, on-base percentage, hits, runs, and RBIs. They have more strikeouts than the Yankees, and fewer home runs, but the home-run stats are trumped by the RBI stats.

Looking at pitching, the Sox’s team ERA is below the Yankees’; the Sox get far more strikeouts; Yankees pitchers get many more hits than Sox pitchers; and the Yankees’ run count is almost identical to the Sox’s (487 for the Yankees, 488 for the Sox).

Maybe the difference is in unearned runs: of the Sox’s 488 earned runs, only 414 were earned; of the Yankees’ 487, 448 were earned.  . . . But that shouldn’t make any difference, should it? A run is a run, earned or otherwise. The Sox may have comparatively bad fielding, but where is that showing up?

I’m trying to find something in the numbers to explain why the Sox are eight games back. If anyone can help me dig through them, I’d love to hear what you suggest.

The New York Times has a pretty solid review of the debate over VoIP regulation. It’s an interesting question whether VoIP providers ought to be required to pay into the universal-service fund and so forth. The goal of the fund is to make sure that everyone has access to a telephone. So if more and more people move to VoIP over time, eventually maybe poor people will be the only ones left with traditional landlines. At that point, who will be left to pay the universal-service fee?

My question, though, is: how could they ever enforce a tax on VoIP services? If it’s completely peer-to-peer — which I hope it will be — it’s easy to imagine encrypted, undetectable VoIP. It’s just a stream of bits, and the only publicly-visible part of that stream is the header or the port that the VoIP app is connected to. One could easily change the port (just ask your friends to connect to port 10,394 or something), and the rest of the payload says nothing to outside observers. Is it even possible to regulate VoIP?

Goddamn I say goddamn. Years ago I was in Chicago visiting my friend Matt, who gave me a placard which read, “Barack Obama for State Senate.” In the middle of it was this guy with a long skinny face and a big toothy grin who just looked too goofy for words. My friend Josh and I picked up the thread and started imbuing the guy with superhuman credentials: one of us would say, “Hey, you know who would have no problem nailing this chemistry problem set right now?” The other would ask (genuinely unaware of what was coming), “Who?” Then the first would yell, “BARACK OBAMA!” to which the other inevitably — and quickly — replied, “ . . . for state sen-ate,” making sure to emphasize the second syllable. This guy just turned absurd.

Well, I just now saw him deliver the keynote address at tonight’s DNC, and oh my god: the guy is an amazingly inspiring speaker of whom my friend Seth said, “That guy is going to be president some day.” I hope so. He’s astonishing. I’d vote for him. I hope his speech kicks his campaign for the U.S. Senate into high gear.

(And he’s got a blog.)

Sweet: Judge Richard Posner will take over Larry Lessig’s blog for a week at the end of August. That should be amazing. Enough intelligent people read Lessig’s blog, including a number of intelligent legal professors, that I’m sure the discussion will be fascinating. I’ve read a few of Posner’s books by now, and whether or not I agree with him — I largely don’t — I respect him a great deal.

I took the T (the Boston-area subway) three times today, and my bags were searched three times — twice at Haymarket and once at Community College, every time as I sat on the train. As I understand it, this contradicts the MBTA’s preannounced plans for the search, wherein they’d search you before you walked through the turnstiles and forbid you from getting on the train if you refused the search. In any case, I refused to be searched the first time ‘round, and promptly left the station without putting up any kind of a fight. The second and third times, I just went through with the search; it took almost no time, and consequently provided negligible security. A would-be terrorist would have had no trouble evading the T’s security, and of course a would-be terrorist wouldn’t bother riding the T. So this inconveniences innocent people and doesn’t do a rat’s ass to protect the Convention. If the goal is to protect the T itself from evildoers, then why aren’t they scanning the T every day?

Ahh  . . .  the next big move will be to have daily security checkpoints on the T. Because once power is given, it’s hard to take away — even if it’s just security theatre.

I got in a fight with about 10 people on a C&J Trailways bus this past week. I was going up to New Hampshire to meet a friend, and C&J happens to be one of about three mass-transit ways of getting there: either take Amtrak straight to my friend’s town, though the train is very infrequent, or take C&J to Portsmouth and have him pick me up, or take the commuter rail to Newburyport. C&J is the most frequent, so they’re also the most convenient.

A lot of things are annoying about C&J, but I think they could all be put under the category of “rules enforced for the sake of enforcing rules.” When you buy a ticket from them, they enter your name in a database. They justify it “for security reasons,” but one thing I’ve discovered repeatedly is that most people don’t really think about what security they’re getting. I’ve asked the C&J sales clerks what good providing my name does; they reply that if the FBI wants to know where I am, they can call C&J, and C&J can call ahead to the bus to pull over and wait for the feds to arrive. But if someone is really intent on blowing up a bus, won’t he just use a fake ID? The people who check my ID are even less savvy than the average bouncer, so the odds that I can get through with a fake are better than the odds of a teenager getting alcohol.

But I digress. The “rules for the sake of rules” example that led to the fight on Friday was the “no cell phones on C&J buses” rule. Apparently a lot of customers have complained about people using cell phones on the bus, so C&J has banned them except for quick calls to the people who are going to pick you up at the station. It’s a dumb rule, because it’s ignoring the reason that the bus company should care about cell phones: people having loud conversations and disturbing those around them. If I have a loud conversation with someone next to me, that’s just as disturbing to my neighbors as my talking on a cell phone is. And yet the C&J policy allows my in-person conversation while forbidding my cell-phone conversation. To me, any loud conversation is bad: on the bus, I want to read a book or talk with my seatmate, and I can’t do that if my neighbor is shouting.

I’ve explained my reasoning to their bus drivers before. I was on a C&J bus a while back, talking quietly with my parents in a seat near the driver. After I got off the phone, the driver told me that from now on I should stay off the phone. I asked, “Did any passengers complain?” He replied, “That’s not the point, sir. The point is that our policy is not to allow long cell-phone conversations.” I said, “I thought the point was that I wasn’t supposed to disturb other passengers.” He just glared at me.

And that’s what upsets me: the blind adherence to rules when the basis for those rules has fallen away. No one seems to remember that banning cell phones is a means, not an end. The same behavior crept out this time around with my fellow-passengers. An old woman across the aisle with a permascowl on her face and a diamond ready to emerge from her backside said to me, “Pardon me, can you read the sign?” as she pointed to the space above the driver. Before I could say anything to her, she yelled to the driver, “Can you please remind this man of the policy?” I leaned in and asked her, “Excuse me. I can hear everyone’s conversation for five seats around me. Why is a cell phone any worse?” She said, “That’s the rule.” I said, “But it’s a bad rule.” Here a ton of other people jumped in, one person telling me that it wasn’t up to me to decide which rules are bad; this is up to C&J. The most charitable interpretation of this statement is reasonable: C&J has to balance the needs of customers in a way that I don’t, so my opinion is likely to be less considerate than C&J’s. But I returned to the point that I was making: I’m not really inconveniencing anyone, because everyone was already talking loudly enough for me to hear them.

Basically everyone returned to the point that this is the policy. There’s no way to argue that, and obviously I wasn’t going to convince anyone that I was right in this heated atmosphere. The guy next to me backed me up, and I gave him my email address so that we could email C&J and carbon-copy one another.

The most absurd part of it is the justification that the old crotchety woman gave for why the bus company bans cell phones: “In other countries, people use cell phones to set off bombs. That’s why they ban them here.” This is a classic case of someone internalizing a rule and forgetting the reason for it. E.g., have you ever asked a moderately observant Jew why the kosher laws are the way they are? I’ve heard the argument from cleanliness (increased risk of trichinosis back when the laws were promulgated), the argument from cruelty to animals (eating milk and meat at the same time is an insult to the cow we’ve just slaughtered), and a ton of others. Steven Pinker provides lots of citations from Talmudic scholarship where various rabbis have back-justified the laws in various ways.

In all these cases, I find that people are just trying to find excuses for a rule that may have lost relevance or rationality long ago. Fundamentally, I think people want to believe that their leaders are just and put out reasonable rules. It really upsets me to see people not considering why the rules are the way they are. But it happens over and over again.

So there I sat on the bus for the next hour or so, simply fuming over the argument. I’m looking for another way to get up to New Hampshire, but particularly within the next week it’s going to be even harder to get there without C&J: Amtrak and the commuter rail aren’t running through North Station while the Convention happens at the nearby Fleet Center. C&J is the only game in town.

I saw a really terrible baseball game today, as the Sox beat the Yankees with a two-run homer by Bill Mueller in the bottom of the ninth. The Sox made four errors throughout the course of the game, and walked in either one or two runs (my memory’s a little fuzzy) with bases loaded. Their pitching fell apart until Alan Embree (a very reliable middle reliever) came in and fixed up Curtis Leskanic’s mistakes. Pitching picked up in the eighth and ninth innings, defense didn’t suck as much, and offense finally woke up: Mueller’s homer was off Mariano Rivera, apparently widely held to be the greatest closing pitcher of all time; the guy’s ERA was 0.91 going into the game, and he had 35 saves this season. Of the 56 games in which the Yankees led going into the eighth inning, they had won every one — until this evening.

The Sox didn’t deserve to win. They sucked. The Yankees weren’t playing astonishing baseball, but they definitely sucked less than the Sox did. Whether or not we clinch the wild-card spot, we don’t deserve to if we play this badly. It’s pitiful.

Talking about it with my friend Seth tonight — who got me into the game to begin with, by patiently explaining everything that was happening on the field — we couldn’t figure out why the team this year is so much worse than it was last year. We have amazing hitters in Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz and Johnny Damon. We have Pedro Martinez, Curt Schilling and Tim Wakefield pitching very well, with Bronson Arroyo delivering inconsistently and Derrick Lowe not really living up to his glory days. They’re just not delivering in clutch situations: when Pedro collapses, he collapses badly; when the fielding is off — and the Sox have a ridiculous number of errors this year — it leads to unearned runs every time. (I’ll have to dig up the stats on unearned runs across teams.) When the batting is off, the number of strikeouts is sky high. (I believe the Sox have the highest number of K’s against their batters of any team in the AL, though I’ll have to check that.) It’s like the pieces should fit together, but never quite do.

I’m still dreaming that they’ll pull it together, but it’s just a dream.

P.S.: How is it that Rivera’s ERA is up to 1.41, when I swear that it was below 1 before this game? Is it really possible that this one game — in which Rivera allowed three runs in one inning — knocked him over the edge? Let’s see: if I’m reading the stats right, he has allowed a total of 8 runs in the 51 innings he’s played. Before this game against the Sox, that was something like 50 innings (maybe 49 2/3, but I’ll say 50) and 5 runs. That’s 1 run per 10 innings, or .9 runs per 9 innings — so his ERA would have been around .9. 8 runs in 51 innings is 1.41 runs per 9 innings.  . . .  Wow, so I guess that does work out. I feel an odd kind of schadenfreude here, because one of the announcers during the game said that Rivera was about to hit some record featuring an ERA below 1 and total saves above a certain number. Looks like we denied him that by playing shitty baseball. Figure that out.

Waking up to the last few tracks of Abbey Road — namely “You Never Give Me Your Money,” “Sun King,” “Mean Mr. Mustard,” “Polythene Pam,” “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window,” “Golden Slumbers,” “Carry That Weight,” “The End,” and “Her Majesty” — is a recipe for a good day.

Here I am, awake just after 5 a.m. because of this putative West Nile. While I wait for the Tylenol to kick in, I’m playing around on my computers. And it occurs to me: while I don’t have the deep Linux knowledge that Adam Kessel, Ken Shan, or Dylan Thurston have, I feel pretty damned solid in what I know. Within the last few months, I’ve reached a decent level of confidence wherein if I dig myself into a hole, I can normally dig myself out. I still ask a fair number of stupid questions, but they’re stupid questions about more complex topics. And I think the total number of stupid questions has gone down (though Adam, Ken and Dylan are the best judges of that, given that I’m their disciple).

Nowadays I’m also doing a lot more Linux admin as part of my job(s), so I’ve been forced to answer a lot of my stupid questions on my own. Google is invaluable for this: I’m convinced that among all the solvable Linux questions, every one is solvable through Google. And Google will tell you when a problem is unsolvable.

So yay me. Within two years, maybe I’ll be something of an expert. (Adam, Dylan and Ken will still be two years ahead of me, however.)

I’m right now in the middle of removing all the GUI stuff from the machine that serves stevereads.com, and I’m moving all that GUI stuff over to another machine. This should result, I hope, in fairly substantial speed gains on this site; graphical stuff takes up all the memory and CPU. Let me know if you notice any oddities after the change; you shouldn’t, but I thought I’d ask.

I am just inordinately pleased with my new cell phone. Now I just wish that cells were hackable; certain parts of the UI are just a little ungainly, and I’d like to be able to change them. In time — maybe with the widespread adoption of VoIP — I think we’ll see hackable Linux phones. Kind of like iPods hacked to run Linux. (Hat tip to Chris Rugen for the link.)

I spent the day largely staring at the ceiling as I lay in bed with some god-only-knows-how-high fever and profound muscle aches. Well, I was in bed all day except for a nice interval laying on the floor of the bathroom, expecting that I would soon be pukin’. Fortunately that didn’t happen, though I am now intimately familiar with the cobwebs underneath the shelf on which we keep our soaps, unguents, daubs and poultices.

After filling myself with Advil, I spent an hour in bed waiting for it to work. It didn’t, so the next trick was Tylenol. That did the job, and the fever broke a few hours ago. It was now time to watch a movie, because when I’m sick I don’t have the concentration for a book. (Why is that?) So I popped in the Amélie DVD and realized again why that’s one of the greatest movies I’ve ever seen. The cinematography is lavish, the set design striking and rich and saturated with color, and the pacing pitch-perfect. Not to mention that Audrey Tautou obviously wants to marry me. I mean, anyone with eyes can see that.

That significantly brightened my day. There’s a point in Amélie where our favorite little sprite turns to the camera and smiles right at us. I assert that it is impossible not to smile right back at her.

Such an odd movie. It’s really pretty candyish, but like early Beatles albums it’s the most nourishing candy around. And almost 47,000 IMDb users think it’s the 25th best movie ever, ahead of Vertigo, Taxi Driver, Chinatown, Touch of Evil, Metropolis, etc., etc. It tapped a very important nerve. In part I think it’s that the movie is pure joy, and is such joyous filmmaking. And on a nasty day like today, it’s just what I needed.

I’ve been watching a number of my friends who are married or dating people, and I’m just really not sure that this is something I want. There is a phenomenal load of bullshit involved in most dating. People play stupid games with one another, say shit they don’t mean, lie, bait, torture, manipulate, say one thing when they mean another (which isn’t quite lying; more self-deception in a lot of cases), and on and on. I just don’t know that it’s worth it. Most people would be awful boyfriends or girlfriends or husbands or wives. Most people do relationships badly.

I’m sure eventually I’ll find someone who will knock me off my feet, and it will seem absurd that I was ever not dating her. In the meantime, I’m at a place in my life where I don’t really find myself wanting to date anyone. I feel like I can stand back and take stock of what’s available. And from where I’m standing, it looks pretty bad.

It really pleases me to see that Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz of the Sox have the highest and second-highest slugging percentages in the A.L., respectively. Manny would actually have the highest slugging percentage in baseball if Barry Bonds weren’t playing.  . . .  I don’t get it: how does Bonds have a .786 slugging percentage at the same time that he’s been walked 137 times?  . . .  I guess the answer, looking at those numbers, is that he’s had 69 at-bats where he wasn’t walked, yet still managed to hit 24 home runs, 14 doubles, and 38 singles. That’s just ridiculous. Does that mean that if he’s not intentionally walked, he’s virtually certain to get a hit?

Something about that math doesn’t work right. He had 206 at-bats, and 137 bases-on-balls. That seems to leave (206 — 137) = 69 at-bats when he could have made a hit. Yet the stat sheet says that he had 76 hits. That’s consistent with his batting average, since 76/206 = .369. But how could he have gotten 76 hits in only 69 opportunities?

Via Crooked Timber: The New Yorker has a hilarious piece on Vice President Cheney’s recent suggestion that Vermont Senator Pat Leahy intercourse himself:

At this point, according to observers, both statesmen decided — by seemingly unspoken mutual consent — to abandon the gutter patois of the common carnival worker and to resort instead to an eminently more quotable (but, to those not versed in the vagaries of hip-hop idiom, more confusing) exchange of viewpoints.

“Oh, it’s like that?” Mr. Cheney queried.

“Whut? Whut?” Mr. Leahy shot back.

“Once again,” Mr. Cheney replied (quite obviously quoting a lyric from Ice Cube’s 1990 album, “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted”), “it’s on.”

As a quick-thinking senatorial aide switched on the Senate’s public-address system and cued up the infamous “Seven Minutes of Funk” break, Mr. Leahy and Mr. Cheney went head-to-head in what can only be described as a “take no prisoners” freestyle rap battle.

Most of the rhymes kicked therein cannot be quoted in a family publication, but observers gave Mr. Cheney credit for his deceptively laid-back flow. Mr. Leahy was applauded for managing to rhyme the phrases “unethical for certain,” “crude oil spurtin’,” and “like Halliburton.”

SO cool: courtesy of my friend Adam, I just played around with Knoppix: a fully functional Linux distribution on one CD. It goes through, detects all your hardware, launches GNOME or KDE, etc., etc. I imagine it would be great if you’re trying to diagnose problems on a Windows machine: pop the CD in and reboot, just to make sure that the same problems (say, lack of network connectivity) wouldn’t happen under Linux. If they do happen, it’s probably a hardware problem, and you can check out the Linux logs to get more precise debugging than you could get under Windows.

It’s also really user-friendly. I’d highly recommend that any of the Linux-doubters in the room go take a look at it.

You really have to go watch The Daily Show’s coverage of the possibly-delayed 2004 election. It really is the best news on television.

Looks like the New York Times has finally offered up its stories as RSS feeds. It’s about time. For a long while now, those feeds have only been available to Radio Userland users. But the Boston Globe, which the Times owns, has had its own RSS feeds for a while, so it was probably just a matter of time.

Now if only these papers would put the full text of their stories in their feeds  . . .