ouij

The Iranian protests seem to be spreading. Via the Twitter hive mind, there seems to have been a vast rally in the city of Isfahan:

WBEZ's This American Life has just produced a great show that seeks to explain the banking crisis in plain English. They start with the very basics---assets and liabilities-- and move on to discussions of toxic assets, the prospects of nationalization, and other fun stuff.

The second half of the show profiles a couple of guys who are actually trying to buy themselves some toxic assets, taking advantage of the current fire-sale on home mortgages.

Interesting radio. Download the archived MP3 of the show and play it for all your friends & family who really should know better about economics/finance.

(Via DCBlogs)

Apparently, the Hannah Montana craze is causing parents to do, well, crazy things. PennQuarter Living recounts finding a number of weeping 'tween girls on the Metro, unaccompanied by any responsible adult:

The eldest girl (who was 13) explained that they were on their way to the Hannah Montana concert at the Verizon Center and that they were lost. I offered to help them find their way, but demanded to know where their parents were. Apparently, tickets to the concert being scarce, their parents had bought them one way tickets on Metro and sent them to the concert unescorted.

I was shocked. What parent would send their sub-13-year-old daughters into Metro DC unsupervised? Surely, this had to be an aberration. But as I exited the Chinatown Metro to walk the girls toward Will Call, I saw several more groups of young girls trying to navigate the large crowd alone.

Unaccompanied kids, of course, aren't a shockingly uncommon sight on the Metro system during school days: school kids seem to take Metrobus and Metrorail unaccompanied at a very young age.

Which leads me to think: first, what is the actual risk that unaccompanied kids will come to harm on the Metro system? And, second, should they come to harm, who would be liable?

You know the story: Dad has a gun. Dad leaves the gun in a place where Junior has easy access to it. Junior finds the gun, plays with it, and ends up killing himself or one of his buddies.

Not pretty. Maybe if Junior had been unable to fire or operate the weapon, he might have been safer. To this end, there was a proliferation of trigger and slide locks, along with the public-service announcement campaigns to go with them.

There's only one problem: these locks are totally ineffective according to Engadget's Marc Weber Tobias.

The text (and that of a parallel report on in.security.org) is worrying enough. Most worrying, however, is the video on the Engadget page showing an untrained 11-year-old defeating several common gun locks in seconds with nothing more than an icepick and youthful charm.

(Incidentally, the acid test for lock security seems to be whether a lock can be opened by an untrained eleven year old. Here's a video of an untrained eleven year old girl picking a common pin tumbler lock at DEFCON)

The lesson here: gun locks do not, by themselves, guarantee child safety. If you have guns and kids in the same house, the better option would be to train the kids in basic safety yourself. Remember:



All guns are loaded.
Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
Never point a gun at anything you are not willing to destroy.
Keep your finger off the trigger until the gun is lined up on target.

Auntie Beeb is carrying a story about the U.S. Army's proposed Battlefield Extraction Assist Robot (BEAR). Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here's how the guy looks:


The idea is that the robot would be able to carry wounded soldiers off the field. The teddy-bear face is meant to be "reassuring." As the droid's developers Vecna Robotics, note: "A really important thing when you're dealing with casualties is trying to maintain that human touch."

Cute, right? That said, I don't know how I'd feel about a cute teddy-bear medical droid developed by a firm whose namesake is a powerful, evil undead necromancer.

Many, if not most of you who are reading this have met me in real life. You know my name. You know what I look like, how I sound. You probably know my taste in food and drink. Yet my proper name appears nowhere on the blog. I don't reveal my personal e-mail address. Those of you who haven't had the dubious pleasure of meeting me in the flesh know me only as ouij.

It's a weak form of anonymity, of course. So why don't I post under my real name? The easy answer is that LJ made me choose a username. I picked one that suited me, and went with it. It's short, sweet, to the point. .

The username abstraction probably has its roots in the utterly boring world of system administration: real names are both too long and too complicated to use as user names, so early on, sysadmins handed out user names. This had the happy side-effect of allowing users to make a "virtual" name for themselves. As one cartoon famously observed, On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog.

Safe in their online identities, anonymous Internet users feel free to write and think in ways that would expose them to ridicule--or worse--if expressed openly. Of course, that same anonymity shelters that most odious denizen of the Internet--the troll--who hurls his rhetorical Molotov cocktails, safely concealed behind his "handle."

In an article in yesterday's Washington Post, Tom Grubisich frets that the Internet's anonymity--which he sees as a lack of "transparency"--is enabling "hate-mongers," allowing them to dominate and corrupt the ideal polis of the Internet. As a means of letting some "sunshine" into the Internet, Grubisich proposes some means of compelling people to post under their real (verifiable) names, except in those cases where Website administrator deems the poster worthy of "whistleblower" protection. The result, according to Grubisich?

If Web sites required posters to use their real names, while giving the shield of pseudonymity when it's merited, spirited online debate would continue unimpeded. It might even be enhanced by attracting contributors who are turned off today by name calling and worse. Except for the hate-mongers, who wouldn't want that?

I wouldn't, for one. Who judges when pseudonymity is "merited"? If Grubisich is suggesting that individual administrators are doing the judging, then I fail to see how his ideal Internet is any different from the Internet that I use every day. Site administrators and moderators--and I count myself among their number--are, if nothing else, human. There are countless blogs, message boards, newsgroups, etc. Each one of these is ruled by its own administrators. Not all of them are going to be upright and righteous. Admins can be petty and capricious rulers, shamelessly protecting their friends and harassing their enemies. No single standard of "merit" for pseudonymity exists other than what each administrator will permit. Absent any compelling reason to do so, why should they change to suit a newspaperman who's been trolled one too many times?

But let's imagine Mr. Grubisich's Brave New Internet comes to pass, with some presumably benevolent force compelling us to speak in our own names. What happens if our opinions put us on the wrong side of the government? Mr. Grubisich airly reassures us that our identities are protected by a "high legal bar from subpoena seekers." All well and good, the fact remains that under this regime, our the data that would reveal our identities would be retained by site administrators. What's to say that those administrators won't bow to public pressure to reveal our identities? Why should the state need a subpoena to compel them to do so? Recent history suggests that the State could appeal to administrators' "patriotic" sensibilities, and, when that fails, well, nothing stops them from seizing the data themselves by sheer extra-legal force. The chilling effect on free speech should be too obvious to merit further discussion. Would The Federalist have been written if Publius had been compelled to post as Madison, Hamilton, and Jay?

Mr. Grubisich complains that common Internet users have no way of being ignored and "frozen out" of the process. This is false. Internet users have been dealing with trolls since the early days of the Internet with common sense and basic decency.

First, and most importantly, we ignore the trolls. Just because a comment is posted does not mean that it deserves to be read. It is easy enough to know who the trolls are in any given community. Once spotted, it's a simple matter of instructing your software to ignore all traffic from them. Starved of attention, the troll rants and raves in his own private world, safely rendered irrelevant by the online community's disdain. As I've said many times before--a well-configured killfile is often your best defense against being trolled.

Second, we can drown the trolls out. The fact that some users insist on bringing down the tone in any given community should make us fight that much harder to keep the tone civil. If enough of us persevere in doing unto other as we would have them do unto us, we can easily overcome the minority of trolls. Calling for extraordinary help to combat trolls is surrendering to their brutishness. If Mr. Grubisich wants Big Brother to verify the truth and civility of online discusions, then, sadly, the terrorists have won.

Of course, simply ignoring the trolls was a lot easier when Internet discussions were truly decentralized on USENET: every user had his own killfile, which he could use to instruct his newsreading software not to download offending messsages. Unfortunately as discussions have shifted to more centralized forums--web-based boards and blogs--that individual filtering ability has not kept pace.

Surely this suggests the virtues of *less* centralization, rather than more? Users are their own best judges.

Here's Tony Blair congratulating the new President of the French Republic--in French, on Youtube. I love the Internets!

I've been turning off my radio a lot lately.

There's only so much grief and concern that I can take on my radio dial. I know this is how people grieve--even for strangers--but I must admit that I'm strangely detached from the public expressions of sorrow. I didn't know anybody involved in the recent VT bloodbath (though I could have easily done) so I tend to focus on the bare facts (such as they are at the moment) to get my head around what happened.

I'm shocked and amazed at how this all played out, and the sheer scale of the catastrophe--VT suffered more dead and wounded in a single day than the entire American occupation force in Iraq for that same day.

Several things keep bugging me, notably the time all of this took to transpire. Dozens of rounds fired; several reloads. Each round fired methodically. That all takes time--and I'm amazed that there was simply no way to get to the situation in time.

I'm even more amazed that the authorities chose to lift whatever lockdown or alert they had declared after the 7:15 shootings. This will emerge as a critical fact in the inevitable civil liability suit--and, mark my words, someone is civilly liable here.

Now we'll see the cheap political posturing begin. The gun control lobby (plus most of the European press) has already begun to paint this in lurid colors. It seemed to me that all the illustrations over all the articles by gun-control writers featured prominent outlines of assault rifles--as if the shooter walked in and sprayed everybody with three or four bursts of automatic fire. In response, the gun lobby will turn out with rallies and calls for more armaments everywhere. Both sides will wrap themselves in the mantle of grief. All I see is a cynical manipulation of the news to suit their ends, and a stubborn refusal to debate or discuss the particular facts of the event.

God, please give the victims and families the peace to grieve--alone, if need be. They have already seen enough ugliness without having to be made props in someone else's political sideshow.

When the Times runs an idea that has been on at the top of bash.org for what seems to be years:




<Donut[AFK]> INSULT
<Eurakarte> RETORT
<Donut[AFK]> COUNTER-RETORT
<Eurakarte> QUESTIONING OF SEXUAL PREFERENCE
<Donut[AFK]> SUGGESTION TO SHUT THE FUCK UP
<Eurakarte> NOTATION THAT YOU CREATE A VACUUM
<Donut[AFK]> RIPOSTE
<Donut[AFK]> ADDON RIPOSTE
<Eurakarte> COUNTER-RIPOSTE
<Donut[AFK]> COUNTER-COUNTER RIPOSTE
<Eurakarte> NONSENSICAL STATEMENT INVOLVING PLANKTON
<Miles_Prower> RESPONSE TO RANDOM STATEMENT AND THREAT TO BAN OPPOSING SIDES
<Eurakarte> WORDS OF PRAISE FOR FISHFOOD
<Miles_Prower> ACKNOWLEDGEMENT AND ACCEPTENCE OF TERMS

I think I am also going to use this as a prop if I am ever made to give a presentation on Civil Procedure

The most egregious example of ivy-league whining I have seen in ages ran in yesterday's WaPo:

She graduated Phi Beta Kappa, has published in top legal journals and completed internships at leading institutions in her field. So when the Yale law student interviewed with 16 firms for a job this summer, she was concerned that she had only four call-backs. She was stunned when she had zero offers.

Though it is difficult to prove a direct link, the woman thinks she is a victim of a new form of reputation-maligning: online postings with offensive content and personal attacks that can be stored forever and are easily accessible through a Google search.

Yes, that's right. She suspects she didn't get the job she wanted because she was thoroughly flamed on AutoAdmit.

My own feeling here is that she got what was coming to her. The internet is a big, scary place. Those of us who live here have to live by our wits and our reputations. In WaPo's story, the Yalie in question feels that troll posts about her womanly virtues (or lack thereof) caused potential employers to shun her--thus leaving her with a mound of debt and no big-city firm job with which to pay it off.

She should have known--or quickly figured out-- that AutoAdmit is a notorious trolls' nest. I have avoided it at all costs, even in my deepest moments of law school application angst. The application process does strange things to otherwise good people: it makes us angry, irritable, cynical. It strips away our self-esteem and self-regard. Its capriciousness and arbitrariness make us capricious and arbitrary in its own image.

I have thus noticed that any gathering of potential law students quickly degenerates into a pissing contest: What was your LSAT? Where'd you go for undergrad? Where are you applying? You applied where?? You'll never make it--you're better off in the third tier!

To this bitter brew of self-loathing and one-upmanship, sites like AutoAdmit add the relative anonymity of the Internet. What emerges is a perfect storm for trolls. Trolls are vicious, aggressive, and obstreperous. Meanwhile, the emotionally-vulnerable user population cannot help but feed the trolls.

Of course, this isn't new. But law students are, as a whole, not as technically competent as they should be. Where, in other fora, the eventual remedy would be to killfile the worst trolls, law students stupidly continue to expose themselves to their withering attacks.

Does she have a cause of action against anonymous trolls? Possibly, especially if we can be convinced that the troll posts against her were provably libelous. According to the article, the statements would probably have been considered defamatory per se, since the allegations seemed to be of "moral turpitude," and/or "loathsome disease." But even if we grant that the statements were defamatory per se, can our Yalie flambeé prove that those statements were the proximate cause of her failure to gain employment? I'm not sure she can. (I am tempted to make a lame joke about the impossibility of making the plaintiff whole, but I will refrain from doing so).

In any case, there is a lesson here for all of us. Don't hang out where you're likely to be trolled. Nice girls shouldn't hang out where their reputations might be damaged later. And if they do, they should be prepared to deal with the repercussions.

Good news, and free, too. Connecticut & Rhode Island Avenues, NW.

Everybody's been talking about the DPRK night-sky photo lately. Well, here's NASA's full-globe night sky photograph: [it was Astronomy Picture of the Day for 27 Nov. 2000]





Click on the image to get a HUGE, 2400-pixel image. You will note that it is possible to make out individual railroad lines and highways in the more developed parts of the world. The River Nile burns white-hot, as do the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. The Mekong Delta burns hot. Japan is an incandescent strip--and there's this island off Japan. No, wait, that's the Republic of Korea, with the lights of Seoul burning. To its north, a void.... until the lights of whistle-stop railroad towns of Heilongjiang province in the Peoples' Republic of China can be made out.

Seeing things from this distance certainly puts the smaller Korean Peninsula image into context. It also reminds us of a lot of other things in the world: Notice how dark Sudan is, and how there are almost no lights on, at all in Somalia, save for a few in what I presume to be Mogadishu.

So Senator Allen has done the "right" thing and apologized to S.R. Sidarth following his infamous macaca remark.

Predictably, the campaign's strategy is to put the blame for the incident on "scurrilous attacks by our opponent and his leftist allies."

The President was in Virginia to campaign for Senator Allen, raising money and reinforcing Allen's GWOT credentials.

So, issue over, apparently. The Senator's sorry, and besides, as a supporter put it, "God forgives us for our mistakes. If he can do it, so can the media and all those offended."

Let's admit, for argument's sake, that Allen is as dumb as he claims to be, and that "macaca" was something he came up with on the fly. While the arrangement of those syllables might be a coincidence, his actions are anything but. Let's go over it again: at an all-white rally, he singled out the only non-white person in attendance for ridicule. He called him a "macaca," and welcomed the American-born, Fairfax-resident, UVa-attending Mr. Sidarth to "America and the real world of Virginia." That's not a mistake, folks--that's a well-calculated bit of race-baiting in front of a sympathetic crowd for cheap applause.

Remember again that Allen's mother, of Euro-Tunisian extraction, had a better-than-even-money chance of having heard and used the term, with full offensive force. Maybe the Senator didn't know what a "macaca" was--but he certainly knew what it meant.

But none of that is relevant. I have every confidence that the Allen campaign will draw on the old "martyrdom" line to great political effect. Who the hell cares what a bunch of macacas think about anything, anyway? Especially when they're scurrilous and leftist.

Virginians can console themselves after Senator Allen's macaca remarks that he's not the only Republican Senator running for reelection with a penchant for foot-in-mouth disease. El WaPo reports on the many follies of Montana Senator Conrad Burns:

In a moment of unusual candor for a veteran senator fighting for his political life, Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) offered this blunt self-assessment a few months ago: "I can self-destruct in one sentence," he told supporters. "Sometimes in one word."

It seems Burns has spent a good part of the summer testing his theory.

A new video released this week by his Democratic challenger, Jon Tester, shows Burns, 71, joking to a crowd in June about how a "nice little Guatemalan man" fixing up his house might be an illegal immigrant. "Could I see your green card?" Burns tells the crowd he asked the man. "And Hugo, says, 'No.' I said, 'Oh, gosh.' "

This is the same Senator Burns who called Arabs "ragheads" seven years ago. "He won reelection a year later," the Post notes, drily.

Perhaps the most beautiful thing to me about Senator Burns' anti-immigrant remarks is that at least a few of them were spoken in the context of work being done by immigrant laborers at his own house. The Senator thus neatly illustrates the great American hypocrisy on immigration: while he is perfectly willing to benefit from the large flow of immigrant labor (the nice Guatemalans who fix up his house), he is equally willing to denounce those same laborers as threats to American economic and national security.

If Burns goes down in the upcoming elections, it's likely going to be because of his connections to the Abramoff affair, rather than his rather injudicious public remarks. Again, as in the case of my own favorite macaque-fancier, I believe [white] voters will be charmed by his "frankness" and "candor," just as they were when he decried the evil influence of ragheads on the price of oil.

The internets are abuzz with the latest "dirty tricks" to come down the tubes. It would appear that Joe Lieberman's campaign website has been ha4Xx0r3d!

From the placeholder page:

UPDATE ON THE ATTACK ON THE LIEBERMAN CAMPAIGN WEBSITE

STATEMENT FROM SEAN SMITH: "For the past 24 hours the Friends for Joe Lieberman's website and email has been totally disrupted and disabled, we believe that this is the result of a coordinated attack by our political opponents. The campaign has notified the US Attorney and the Connecticut Chief State's Attorney and the campaign will be filing a formal complaint reflecting our concerns. The campaign has also notified the State Attorney General Dick Blumenthal for his review."

"We call on Ned Lamont to make an unqualified statement denouncing this kind of dirty campaign trick and to demand whoever is responsible to cease and desist immediately. Any attempt to suppress voter participation and undermine the voting process on Election Day is deplorable and has no place in our democracy."

For their sakes, I hope that their IT team is more capable than the City Manager of Tuttle, OK, who painted himself as the victim of a vicious h4x0r in March of this year.

People are already beginning to speculate about the identit(y | ies) of the attacker(s), if indeed there was an attack.

Because, you see, there's still a chance that the whole thing might have been engineered by the Lieberman Campaign to play for martyrdom ahead of the Connecticut senatorial primary. Another theory is that someone in the Lieberman campaign might be acting to sabotage that campaign "for the good of the Party."

Of course, there is the chance that someone connected to the Lamont campaign (or perhaps merely sympathetic to it) actually did compromise/vandalize the Lieberman website.

If this incident were deliberately engineered, it bespeaks a kind of desperation not seen in recent political memory--an almost incredibly pathetic move. If it's sabotage by an embedded Party cadre, it raises the spectre of trust: whom can a candidate trust to hire, these days? And if it was an opposition attack, then it means that the democratic (or indeed Democratic) process has begun a slide into thuggery and away from sophistication.

None of these things speaks well for a Democratic party that dreams of taking the reins of government. The fact that the activists are murdering each other--electronically, anyway--should wake Democrats up from their dreams of government to confront their own very real problems of discipline, governance, and leadership.

Penny Arcade has some musings on upcoming gangsta-sim Saint's Row which got me thinking about how 'gangsta'-ism plays out among the yooof of today.

The amusing thing to me is that here in NoVA it is entirely possible for a bunch of affluent, suburban, melanin-challenged gangsta-reenactors to encounter the real, machete-wielding thing.

I see something very sad here, a double exploitation that would be comical if it weren't so tragic. On the one hand, the producers of "Gangsta" glorification are cynically exploiting the marketplace, glorifying some pretty deplorable things because, as they'd be the first to tell you, they just gotta get paid. On the other, Gangsta's consumers are living vicariously, swaggering about and frontin', but never really having to face any of the real-life conseuquences of being a gangsta. Listen up, kids: it ain't so hard out here for a pimp if you 're not actually poor. You ain't ghetto if you can leave. And the only reason that you can safely idolize the thugs is that you don't actually have to live in the same neighborhoods as them. Because maybe if you did, you would quit thinking thug life were so great and start thinking about ways to get up and out.

The Onion: Bush Grants Self Permission to Grant More Power to Self

The amusing thing is that this is actually cited (albeit along with several cartoons) in Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing over on El WaPo.

Frankly, I'm not a fan of presidential "signing statements." It makes a mockery of the separation of powers to allow the President to treat laws passed by Congress as if they were treaties negotiated with some alien power.

It was just another day in Washington, as the Rayburn House Office Building was placed on lockdown after someone had heard gunshots. The media went into its predictable hysterics while heroic congressional staffers continued to answer phones and crank out letters.

After a through investigation, it was determined that the "gunshots" came from a workman's pneumatic hammer. Who would have thought that the United States House of Representatives (which, thankfully was not in session) could be menaced by such a weapon of mass destruction?

It's a scene right out of Quake (or perhaps a new Congressional Quake mod): gunfire! nailguns! alarms! flashing lights! I can almost imagine Speaker Hastert running around, firing rockets everywhere, and shouting i R no. 1 on t3h s3rV3r, ph33r m3!!

iD should sieze the PR opportunity and send all the Members free copies of Quake.

ESPN has an interesting article online that attempts to estimate the number of Barry Bonds’ homers that can be attributed to performance-enhancers. Everything hinges on the testimony of “Game of Shadows,” naturally. Using its reasoning, Bonds’ “juice-adjusted” numbers come down to a career HR total of 616 or so, no asterisk.

The findings are contestable, of course, but the methodology seems quite interesting, nevertheless.

I also think it rather interesting that Bonds’ contemporaries have not been subjected to the same withering statistical/historical analysis. The cloud of steroid suspicion is vast, but in this case, Bonds gets most of the attention because we have unusually-detailed allegations against him. Were similarly-detailed data available on, say, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, etc. I wonder what the findings would be.

Some people continue to insist that Bonds is being unfairly singled out for abuse--for a number of reasons, his race being among them. Why pick on Bonds, and not anyone else?

I contend that Bonds is an exceptional case in more ways than one:
( How? )