I love Bill Simmons; many thanks to Adam Gerard for introducing me to him. His column today, reprinted from 2001, is worthwhile if only for the timeless photo of Nolan Ryan beating the snot out of Robin Ventura (left). Ahhhh. Just gaze on that and smile. Ryan is the alpha male. His tribe will destroy Ventura’s tribe.
Linux superstar Miguel de Icaza links to a blog post telling you how to write your own Thomas Friedman column. Funny stuff.
Kevin Drum, via Laura Rozen, points to a Newsweek article describing the U.K.’s opposition to John Bolton’s involvement in the Libya negotiations:
But the London story is further evidence that Bolton and the White House have their work cut out for them. On several occasions, America’s closest ally in the war on terror, Britain, was irked by what U.S. and British sources say were efforts by Bolton to undermine promising diplomatic openings. Perhaps the most dramatic instance took place early in the U.S.-British talks in 2003 to force Libya to surrender its nuclear program, NEWSWEEK has learned. The Libya deal succeeded only after British officials “at the highest level” persuaded the White House to keep Bolton off the negotiating team. A crucial issue, according to sources involved in the affair, was Muammar Kaddafi’s demand that if Libya abandoned its WMD program, the U.S. in turn would drop its goal of regime change. But Bolton was unwilling to support this compromise. The White House agreed to keep Bolton “out of the loop,” as one source puts it. A deal was struck only after Kaddafi was reassured that Bush would settle for “policy change”—surrendering his WMD. One Bush official called the accounts of both incidents “flatly untrue.”
If this account is true, it calls into question not only Bolton’s abusiveness — which has gotten a lot of play in recent weeks — but whether he actively undermines America’s best interests.
Slashdot links to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s letter to Microsoft employees on the company’s neutrality towards a sexual-orientation anti-discrimination bill.
Ballmer makes some interesting points. I don’t know that I agree with one part of the letter:
On this particular matter, both Bill and I actually both personally support this legislation that would outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. But that is my personal view, and I also know that many employees and shareholders would not agree with me.
He can’t be implying that the company is forbidden from taking positions which might anger many of its employees and shareholders, can he? Because if that’s the position that a large corporation is required to take, then it would be very hard not to cross the line. Microsoft, for instance, was “one of the first companies to provide domestic partner benefits, or to include sexual orientation in our anti-discrimination policies,” according to Ballmer. Certainly this must have angered some employees — probably as much as it would anger some employees if Microsoft came out in favor of a statewide anti-discrimination bill. I don’t see where to draw the dividing line between policy advocacy and corporate-policy enactment.
Ballmer doesn’t mention one intriguing prospect: that it’s actually a competitive advantage for Microsoft to offer benefits and non-discrimination policies that other companies don’t offer. We ran into this in Pennsylvania, when the legislature passed a bill exempting state institutions from local human-rights ordinances that required domestic-partner benefits. CMU professor Scott Sandage wrote eloquently about what would happen to the state if it started to discriminate against gay people. Partly as a result, the governor vetoed the bill. Microsoft must see the advantage here: as long as the playing field hasn’t been legislatively leveled, Microsoft can get a broader class of applicants, and hence a better chance of getting good ones. I wonder whether Microsoft’s neutrality on the bill is quite deliberate.
Thinking a bit more about using a GPS with your laptop or mobile device, it occurs to me: it’s really pretty silly to have a separate GPS that you conect to your laptop. The GPS has a lot of wasted circuitry to do things like store map data, compute the shortest path between two points, display graphics on your screen, store waypoints and so forth. If we already have a laptop with us, the smarter idea is to use the laptop for as much of that circuitry as possible, and get a GPS that can carry out those functions that the laptop can’t. As far as I know, the only function that a GPS needs to be able to perform is locating my position on the earth right now; my laptop can do the rest. If the dude’s mobile WiFi router (not to be confused with The Dude — and by the way, I love the fact that the first google link when searching for “The Dude” is the IMDb page for The Big Lebowski; this fits quite snugly with my view of how the world should work) is only using GPS to identify its current coordinates, then it doesn’t need any UI, any route-calculation algorithms, etc.
Googling for “GPS card” brings up the AmbiCom card, so at least I know that such things are available. If you want to track your car after it’s stolen, this would seem to be the way to go.
If you’ve already got a card to work with your Verizon Wireless service, I can think of at least one cool hack that you could use, assuming the world is slightly accommodating. Since Verizon knows precisely where its cell towers are, and either Verizon or you can measure the time delay between you and a given cell tower, it seems like it should be fairly easy to get your current position when the GPS satellites are invisible to them — such as, for instance, when you’re inside a building. Barring that (I suppose Verizon makes it fairly hard to get the information I’m looking for), I can imagine a system involving two GPS cards: one in your portable WiFi router (sitting outside in the parking lot) and one in your laptop which is with you inside. The router outside can see the GPS satellites just fine, and presumably some device inside your laptop can time the delay (via a ping, say) between it and the router. If it takes x seconds to get a ping from you to the router, then you’ve just identified your location to within a circle of area πx2 sec2.
Just thinking out loud. Don’t mind me.
Speaking of snarky, Roger Ebert hated A Lot Like Love.
Later they Meet Cute again, walk into a bar, drink four shots of Jack Daniel’s in one minute, and order a pitcher of beer. No, they’re not alcoholics. This is just Movie Behavior; for example, at first she smokes and then she stops and then she starts again. That supplies her with a Personality Characteristic.
Still later, they sing together, surprisingly badly. The movie is filled with a lot of other pop music. These songs tend toward plaintive dirges complaining, “My life can be described by this stupid song.” At one point he flies to New York to pitch his dot-com diapers to some venture capitalists, and is so inarticulate and clueless he could be a character in this movie. To call “A Lot like Love” dead in the water is an insult to water.
I’d like to remind readers of Ebert’s 1994 review of the movie North:
I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.
I hold it as an item of faith that Rob Reiner is a gifted filmmaker; among his credits are “This is Spinal Tap,” “The Sure Thing,” “The Princess Bride,” “Stand by Me,” “When Harry Met Sally” and “Misery.” I list those titles as an incantation against this one.
North is a bad film — one of the worst movies ever made. But it is not by a bad filmmaker, and must represent some sort of lapse from which Reiner will recover — possibly sooner than I will.
Continuing through Daedalus, or, Science and the Future, I find this quote. It’s a take on the relation between life expectancy and religion that I’ve never heard before.
Far more profound will be the effect of the practical applications of biology. I believe that the progress of medicine has had almost, if not quite, as deep an effect on society in Western Europe as the industrial revolution. Apart from the important social consequences which have flowed from the partial substitution of the doctor for the priest, its net result has been that whereas four hundred years ago most people died in childhood, they now live on an average, (apart from the late war), until forty-five. Bad as our urban conditions are, there is not a slum in the country which has a third of the infantile death-rates of the royal family in the middle ages. Largely as a result of this religion has come to lay less and less stress on a good death, and more and more on a good life, and its whole outlook has gradually changed in consequence. Death has receded so far into the background of our normal thoughts that when we came into somewhat close contact with it during the war most of us failed to take it seriously.
In the future-retrospective portion of Haldane’s essay, it’s fascinating to see the way that he looks at eugenics. His take is fairly optimistic, though it does have its frowny bits; the ocean’s permanent change in color from blue to purple is one fairly humorous and dry angle.
It’s interesting also that there was a time when massive genetic meddling was kosher. Nowadays I suspect Haldane would be laughed off the stage, and his idea that only eugenics would save us from the too-frequent mating of lesser humans decried as racist. It may or not be racist, and it may or not be idealistic. But it’s certainly worth discussing, and modern scorn for the very idea is only going to delay it, not block it altogether. And my own scornful observations of present-day America lean me in Haldane’s direction: I’m not sure that the best people are breeding. Plus Haldane’s view of reproduction outside of the womb is a fascinating answer to the question — which we’re facing now — of what to do when the death rate exceeds the birth rate. I’m told that the American population would actually be decreasing were it not for immigration.
Historically, I’m also curious how we got from the world Haldane inhabited — in which eugenics could even be a going concern — to the one we live in now. I’d posit that it had something to do with horror over World War I, but Haldane fought in that war. Maybe World War II — which brought industrial production and destruction of humans to its apotheosis — sealed the deal.
Reading J.B.S. Haldane’s somewhat amusing and somewhat alarming paper Dædalus, or, Science and the Future (thanks for posting it, Cosma), I’m reminded — as I have been a lot recently — that no matter how long we think cheap oil will last, it will run out eventually. I’m told that U.S. oil production hit its peak in the 70’s, and has been declining continuously since then. Foreign oil production will face a similar peak in the next couple decades. Or so I hear. But regardless of the details, we know that the supply of oil is finite, and we know that no more is being produced today. We’re using it up, so whether it’s a matter of centuries or decades, we’re going to run out of it.
So the next questions for me are:
In any case, the idea would be to make money off the electricity, or better yet to store it up for my own use once cheap oil runs out.
Friend Seth pointed me to IE7, a very very neat hack for site designers. It’s a large chunk of Javascript that you add to your site to make it render properly in Internet Explorer. Those of you who don’t design websites may not know just how many hacks designers have to go through to get their sites to load in IE, but it’s excessive. IE7 tries to patch that as elegantly as possible: insert a small chunk of HTML in your pages’ headers, and you’re done. IE7 injects itself in the DOM if you happen to be running IE; the rest of the world doesn’t see a difference.
Oddly, I notice a big processor spike in Firefox when I visit the IE7 site itself — indeed, it crashes the Ubuntuized version of Firefox. The IE7 code should be passing Firefox by altogether, but it appears to be causing some wigginess.
I’ve got IE7 running on this site now. All y’all Windows playas out there: could you take a moment, load this blog in IE, and let me know how it works? In particular, I’ve never been able to get the menus at the top of the screen to work properly in IE; with any luck, IE7 will get them going.
P.S.: I filed a bug against Ubuntu. I tested the same page in the stock version of Firefox (the one you download directly from mozilla.org), and it didn’t have the same problem.
P.P.S.: Looks like the 1.0.4 release of Firefox in Breezy Badger fixes whatever the problem was; Dean’s page now loads fine (and with lower CPU usage).
Wow, Tampa Bay is actually looking really good tonight, behind Scott Kazmir. Good for them; maybe they’ll be more interesting this season, when the Sox play 228 games against them.
. . . in New York City. I think it’s fair to say that Google is the hottest tech employer on earth right now, and New York City is (for me, anyway) one of the best possible places to live.
I’m not nearly qualified to apply for these jobs; check-check it:
- University Degree in Computer Science or a closely-related field (MS or Ph.D. a plus).
- Strong C/C++ programming skills, demonstrated by 3+ years of professional experience.
- Substantial knowledge of UNIX/Linux or Windows environments.
- Extensive experience designing and programming large scale, distributed systems, machine learning, information retrieval algorithms, network programming, linux kernel and/or developing large software systems.
- Several years of software development experience.
- Enthusiasm for solving interesting problems.
- Fluency in English.
You can see right away that I’m not qualified to apply: I’m only interested in boring tasks, and I only speak Walloon.
Oh yeah, and also: I haven’t done any of the stuff that they need me to have done. I’d feel like a virgin in a roomful of porn stars. (If the stories I’ve heard about Google’s office environment are true, the comparison is more apt than you’d think. Stories that would melt your ears, people.)
However, if you happen to be working in the software industry, and you think you’re competent, you should apply. Google rocks. You’d get my undying respect. And I’d wear my Google T-shirt (left) with me every time I saw you. Every time.
It’s fun to be snarky, even about subjects you know nothing about; it’s just fun to watch others get demolished. I’ll admit it. That’s why we have so much fun hearing about Winston Churchill’s devastating retorts, for instance. Here’s possibly the most devastating of them all; for all time, it makes it impossible to take Ramsay MacDonald seriously:
I remember when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum’s Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the programme which I most desired to see was the one described as “The Boneless Wonder”. My parents judged that the spectacle would be too demoralising and revolting for my youthful eye and I have waited fifty years, to see the The Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.
On an elevated plane even above this is the Academic Snark, where tremendously educated people destroy other tremendously educated people. And among all academic snarkists, I give Not Even Wrong the award for Best Academic Snark, at least until someone presents a better one to me. Not Even Wrong is out to take down pseudoscience, but specifically string theory. Peter Woit is a math professor at Columbia, and like a lot of other people whom I’ve read (and I hasten to add that I claim zero expertise in this subject), he thinks that string theory is bullshit. His blog features slam upon slam against string theory, and my favorite thus far is today’s series of quotes on the subject. I don’t understand the mathematical objects he’s discussing, but I find the quotes hilarious from a Pure Snark perspective.
See, this is just insanely cool. Some dude set up a mobile WiFi router that grabs his Verizon wireless-Internet service and makes it available to everyone within range of the mobile router. Then he got cooler, connected a GPS to the device, and got standalone Google Maps working with it — so that, for instance, he could view satellite images of (the area around) his car as he drove around. Then he attached a webcam to the router. The possibilities built off of this are endless; one good idea would be to track the vehicle if it’s stolen (and get satellite photos of it via Google Maps, plus photos of the neighborhood around it via the webcam; this could turn into an episode of Cops).
The main virtue of the guy’s approach is that it’s cheap; I’m pretty sure that if you already have a laptop, you can do this yourself right now. I think it involves iptables/ ipchains; I’ve been sitting next to Adam Rosi-Kessel on a train when he’s gotten Net access through his cell phone and given me some of it using this method. But if you don’t want to lose your laptop when your car is stolen, I’d use this guy’s (highly elegant) hack.
Many thanks to my friend Britta (right) for the link.
Josh Marshall links to a Washington Post article on Colin Powell’s opposition to John Bolton becoming U.N. ambassador. I doubt that most of the United States is watching, but it’s funny to see President Bush asking Congress to “put aside politics” and confirm Bolton. This obviously has much more to do with Bolton’s merits than it does with politics: Republicans and Democrats alike oppose his nomination, Bolton’s former boss is fairly public about his opposition, and Republican Senator Chafee appears to be one of the major stumbling blocks. I doubt the G.O.P. strategy of labeling Democrats obstructionists will work this time.
I really dislike Tom Friedman, not so much for his writing — which is execrable — but because he seems to traipse through the world with the naïve glee of every free-market fetishist you’ve ever met. He’s not a contentless simplifier like David Brooks, or an outright liar like Bill Safire; lying would be a step up for Friedman. Friedman is dangerous because what he says sounds so plausible; if you took him at face value, all his globalization nonsense — “Globollocks,” as the Crooked Timber people label it — would seem totally reasonable. I suspect that a great many people do take him at face value. Yet Friedman seems so blithe about the world around him. When I imagine him taking notes about the wonders of globalization for his books, I see a man walking briskly through Calcutta, head down staring at his Palm Pilot, noise blocked out by his iPod earbuds, as legless beggars grab his feet. He shakes them off and keeps walking.
With that preface, I give you Matt Taibbi’s latest salvo against Friedman, brought to you via Crooked Timber. Taibbi is, to me, most famous for having written about “the mixed-metaphor madness of Thomas Friedman,” which contains gems like this:
“Grapes of Wrath,” March 12. Perhaps my favorite Friedman piece of all time. He begins with the delicious image of listening to the Battle Hymn of the Republic on his car stereo, and then moves on to his central idea: This war is a “gut call,” and his gut “has told [him] four things.” First: This is a war of choice. Second: Reconstructing Iraq will be more difficult than we think. Third: We ought to take our time there once we’re in. And fourth: The majority of the world still hopes to avert war.
Unwittingly, Friedman has led his reader on a tour through the four chambers of his stomach. He has literally revealed to the world that he is a cow. It would take a genius on the order of Shakespeare to invent a character capable of writing such a thing.
If you have a moment, read both of those Taibbi columns. They’re hilarious.
eWeek reports that there’s another Win2K security vulnerability. This wouldn’t be all that interesting, except that it seems entirely gratuitous: like equipping a car with a bag of glass shards and then reporting, regretfully, that the shards may be used to impale the driver.
The vulnerability? When you preview a file in Win2K, it converts strings that look like email addresses into hyperlinks, so that you can click on them and email the owner of the file. But Windows doesn’t check for dangerous strings when it does this conversion, so when you click on the link you can execute arbitrary code.
Windows is full of these gimmicks. I doubt that anyone really needs to be able to click on every email address, but that’s what they’ve got set up. I’d prefer a trivial loss of convenience (rather than making it clickable, why not just make it selectable?) to a sizable loss of security.
Assuming that we leave the clickable email address in, shouldn’t there be a stronger email-address checker? I’m sure that most bits of Javascript code don’t constitute valid email addresses. Shouldn’t the text-to-mailto converter be stripping out a large number of characters, thereby rendering most bits of code useless?
. . . Wait a second. It’s even worse than I thought. It’s not that the link could execute malicious code as soon as you click on the link; it’s that the code executes as soon as the file comes up in the preview pane. I just don’t understand why this would happen: why would the code inside the link execute automatically? I can see converting text to a link, but why execute the code? This goes beyond mere oversight, into what looks like brazen stupidity.
Update: After talking about it with Seth, it’s — at one level — not all that stupid. I was puzzled why the file-properties pane would ever need to execute any code. The reason — which I didn’t understand — was that the properties pane is basically running an IE control, so it needs to render HTML and Javascript and so forth. Additionally, IE allows URLs beginning with ‘javascript:’ in the background-image CSS property. The third, and I think final, bit is that the IE control was running unsandboxed: whereas code running inside your browser can’t normally do much damage to your machine (like changing or deleting files), the file-properties pane had no such protections.
So it was my misunderstanding, and some rhetorical license, that led me to call it “brazen stupidity.” I’m sorry about that; I should look more closely next time. It’s actually not stupid to need to execute code in that pane; it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do when that pane is, essentially, a small web browser.
It is strange, on the other hand, that Microsoft didn’t sandbox that chunk; I’m curious whether they designed it with no sandboxing, or whether that was just oversight in the implementation.
Finally, I can’t think of any good reason to allow Javascript code in the background-image property. The CSS2 spec doesn’t disallow Javascript code there — it just says that the value of the background-image property must be either ‘none’, of type ‘URI’, or inherited from the parent — but I can’t think of a good reason to allow code there. It seems smarter just to turn off that ability altogether.
I feel really bad for Nomar Garciaparra, most famous as a Red Sox shortshop and now with the Cubs. He tore his groin muscle last night, and he’s more than likely going to be out for the entire season. This comes after an injury-prone final season with the Sox and an even more injury-prone last season with the Cubs. I feel bad for the guy: his career may well be over. If I were negotiating for him in forthcoming years, the only reason I’d pay him much money is the faint hope that he’ll recover and be better than ever. He’s been disappointing these past few years.
But I hope he gets better, of course. And in any case, I hope his obvious pain from last night is over.
P.S.: Bob Ryan has a sad eulogy for Nomar’s career.
Today was my first full day wearing shorts since last August or September. It was 81 degrees. I made iced coffee.
I went into Central Square to hang out with my lovely friend Bijoyini. (She’s really quite lovely. The lovelimeter is really off the charts with her.) I sat outside the 1369, still in my shorts.
I said goodbye to Bijoyini. I walked up to Harvard. I was comfortable. I browsed a bookshop. I sat around talking with people on my cell.
And then, in the space of 10 seconds, the temperature dropped 15 degrees and the wind went to 20 mph. I got on the T.
By the time I got to Davis Square (two stops on the red line), it was down to the 50’s, raining hard, and still windy. Weather.com tells me that it is now 48 degrees Fahrenheit with rain showers and 18-mph winds, and that it feels like 41 degrees. Tomorrow the high hits 53. The 10-day forecast (which I don’t trust past the third day, but still . . . ) has us never breaking the 60-degree mark.
::Shakes fist at sky:: WTF, Boston?
Woo-hoo! Bernie Sanders may run for the U.S. Senate. Bernie is Vermont’s Congressional rep, and was a Socialist mayor of its largest city, Burlington. I’d love to see a Socialist (sorry, “Independent”) in the Senate. And I’m pretty sure Vermont would elect him. Nice.