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I spot-check what I call "spam internals" by saving the odd occasional message to disk and then looking at its HTML source. Months and months ago I gave up on PopFile after it seemed incapable of learning past the 90% mark, which is not good enough for me—and it also couldn't handle the frequent spams consisting of a single big image and no words. Well, I think Bayesian filters may now be doomed, and we should have anticipated this: A recent spam I received contained two image tags and about 300 words all concealed by font color=3D "#ffffff" tags, apparently chosen at random from a dictionary that must have been purged of all "spam-like" words. I saved it, so that I can test it against some Bayesian filters should I choose to try them again, but if the utility that generated the spam is clever enough and chooses different words for each mailing, well, a filter that doesn't delete HTML tags and (now) all text in illegible colors will simply fail. Also, more and more spam I get uses forged headers. Authentication (or some entirely new protocol that checks headers somehow) is a must-have. Oh, and spammers are abandoning their domains more and more quickly. Since August first I have checked and banned over 750 spammer domains. Most seem to be used for a week or so and then abandoned. Some seem to be used only once. We're losing this war. Not sure what's to be done next. |
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It's beginning to look a lot like Worldcon, and Bill McIninch KA1MOM asked me the other day if I knew of any published SF writers who were also ham radio operators. On reflection, I realize the list begins and ends with me and George Ewing WA8WTE. Wasn't George O. Smith a ham? (He seemed to know something about high-power transmitting tubes, heh.) If anybody can add any names to the list, let me know. Bill is trying to coordinate a ham radio room at Worldcon 2004 and is encountering some skepticism from the concom. I'll probably add some house image links to the left margin later today. Check back eveningish if you're following the house project. Now I haveta get back to work... |
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Some (few) odd lots while I'm catching my breath here:
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They began framing the main level this morning, and we stopped by briefly after lunch to take a few pictures. Most of the main level will be framed by tonight, and tomorrow or possibly Wednesday they will begin setting the roof trusses. And at that point it should really start looking like a house. The most striking thing about visiting the house today was that we could look out from our front windows and see the view we'll have of Cheyenne Mountain. Wow—it's really going to be real, and there's only five or six months of work to go. |
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For the first couple of days after the Big Blackout on the East Coast, my daily spam count fell by at least a third. As the region gradually restored power and came back to normal, so did my spam count, and we're now rolling along as briskly as ever, with my usual count of about 600 spams in any given 24-hour period. I'm not sure what this tells us, except that the origin of spam may be more concentrated than we're being led to believe, and it's not all coming from Russia or China. I've also not yet seen a single copy of the SoBig virus, and I'm wondering what that means, since I seem to receive (and intercept) all the others. Crazy world, crazier business, this Internet stuff. |
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Today's entry will be a long one, but it may be the last time I can write at length until September 5. So crack a cold root beer and follow with me here. We seem to be zeroing in on the real problem underlying American health care: A solid majority of Americans pay little or nothing out of pocket for their insurance (getting it as they do through their employers) and consider it a sort of divine right to receive health care for "free." The consequence of this is that there's no inherent brake on health care spending, and there's a strong trend at both the state and federal level to mandate that certain things must be covered. Unlike other "needs" that might be funded by government (like the fantasy of bringing broadband to all American homes) there is no point at which we could finally say, "We're done." As long as there is money in the system, there will be medical research leading to new treatments and drugs leading to new demand for health care spending. It's hard to argue that this isn't a good thing. The kicker is that the health care money tide isn't lifting all boats, and few people understand that it's only because 40 million are without insurance (including many of those most in need of intensive treatment) that the rest of us can get our insurance as cheaply as we do. If everyone shared the cost of health insurance, everyone would pay more. This is not an easy sell politically. Most of my readers who have made suggestions at all (and the most popular answer is, unsurprisingly, "I have no answer") propose some variation on a nationally funded catastrophic care plan. Most such plans require at least government-managed centralization of records, if not payment. Bill Roper described a very simple plan under which a "circuit breaker" value is set at a percentage of income for each individual or family, and all medical expenses beyond that value are somehow covered by the government, probably through a payroll tax. I recall such a system being proposed before, and the idea abandoned because it would encourage employers (especially employers of low-wage workers) to cancel their own health care benefits and push workers out into the government system. I would consider that a (first) step toward a fair solution (which gets employers out of the health care business entirely) but it's a very tough sell politically, quite apart from the need for new taxes to make it work. The most detailed proposal comes from Larry Nelson, who has worked in the health care business and knows more about it that most of us would ever want to, I suspect. I'll summarize Larry's excellent letter here by its main points:
As Larry points out, the system would work, operationally, and might be the best that we can do. However, it would still require that somebody, somewhere, make some really ugly decisions, like denying a dying 8-year-old an exotic but promising treatment listed at position #942. Decisions like this are made all the time in Canada and Europe, where heroic intervention is much rarer than it is here. The Europeans don't advertise it, but their national health systems often tell people, "Here's a scrip for as many pain pills as you want. Go home and get settle your affairs and get ready to die." I feel that such a limitation would make a system like this almost impossible to sell in a democracy, but without such limitations, we really haven't created a sustainable program. My own proposal is purely speculativeand a little gonzo, but I've never seen anything like it mentioned before. Here it is in brief:
Again, this is a YAWAJI (Yet Another Wild-Ass Jeff Idea) and it's not perfect. Some people are born with bad health and yet live long (expensive) lives. If they're never healthy enough to be generous, who pays for their treatment when they find themselves at the bottom of the stack? Doubtless there are other problems, and sheesh, I wouldn't want the job of selling this system to the American public, especially the elderly, who would probably demand a separate system. One final caution: The American health care system is the engine of worldwide medical progress, and if we take steps to choke back the money flood, medical progress will slow radically. If no system in the world is willing to pay for $80/pill wonder drugs, such drugs will not be created. The Europeans and Canadians give us very little credit for creating the pills that they demand at prices far less than Americans must pay. It'll be interesting to see what they say once the march of American medical wonders stops. 'Nuff of that. I begin a demanding freelance two-week writing project tomorrow, and until September 5 my entries here may be short and sparse. Don't stop writing, but don't despair if I don't answer, or answer very tersely. |
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I'm hearing a lot of interesting things about health insurance in the wake of the last few days' entries. One worth noting here (and one most people don't understand) is that individual health insurance policies are basically extinct. Insurers don't want to fool with one policy at a time; they all want to insure everybody at Microsoft or Xerox. You can get an individual policy if you want one, but all individual policies are subject to a pious fraud called "reunderwriting." What this means is that if you're healthy you can get a policy at a stated rate that doesn't sound too bad. But as soon as something happens and you make even one significant claim, they jack up your premium until you can't afford it anymore and cancel the policy. Basically, they're happy to take your money until you need the policy; then they toss you out on the street, uninsured and (given the long list of things that disqualify policy applicants these days) uninsurable. This is currently legal, but it is a type of fraud, and should not be. However, it raises perhaps the root issue of this whole discussion: Is health insurance really insurance? The idea of insurance is to spread risk around so that catastrophic events won't ruin any one individual, and rates are set according to the risk that a policyholder represents. The (usually) unstated assumption is that all or nearly all of the risk is under the policyholder's control. If you drive safely, you will only rarely get into an accident, and never when it's your own fault. There are two things about medical insurance that imply that it's something distinctly other than insurance: 1) Only a portion of the risk is under the policyholder's control, and 2) policyholders have no choice but to be in the risk pool. If you don't want the risk of being a rock climber or owning a trampoline, don't climb rocks and don't buy a trampoline. However, we're here, we're alive, and we have bodies. We're in the health risk pool whether we like it or not. More and more current research indicates that "driving safely" in terms of your body only helps so much. I've known two trim, althletic, non-smoking individuals who died of massive heart attacks at young ages, one (astonishingly) at 26. One of Carol's aunts, a gentle soul and lifetime nonsmoker, died of lung cancer. Should such people be driven to bankruptcy by uncapped health insurance premiums that can run as much as $1500-$2000 per month? No, I think we're dealing with something completely different here, and it would be better if we stopped thinking of it as insurance in the same sense as auto insurance or personal liability insurance. I think of it as leaning toward a sort of public utility like phones, power, and natural gas. There are similarities, especially the fact that no one should be denied utility access if they pay the bills. There are differences, and major ones, including the truth that some people need much more health care than others, and it usually isn't their "fault." The one great big huge difference is that there's no natural "lid" on health care costs in our system. Technology gets more complex, more subtle, and more expensive. Rates go up, and at this point in time, if you don't have a job or belong to a group that can insure you, you can't afford health insurance. Without any way to cap costs, I don't see the way out. And capping costs means that somebody somewhere in the system has to say, No, you can't have that nose job. Easy, huh? Then how about, No, you can't have cataract surgery. You're too old and won't live a whole lot longer. You're not totally blind. Don't read books. Listen to the radio. Yup. It's ugly. Too bad it's real. |
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Had a long talk on the phone (how archaic!) with Michael Abrash the other night, and we reflected at length on the pathological nature of the health insurance problem. Here are some points that came, directly or indirectly, out of that conversation:
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They poured the lower-level foundation slab this morning, and I took lots of still and video shots. (See the links in the left margin.) They were done by 10:00 AM, and the contractor said framing would begin tomorrow morning. Things happen quickly now, we've been told. We'll keep you posted. Other odd lots from all over, about everything:
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They say a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged—and I'd also say that a liberal is a conservative whose COBRA benefits have run out. It's been going on for a year or so now: People who lost their jobs in the Big Crash have gone through their 18 months of COBRA-mandated continuation of health benefits, and are now without health coverage of any kind. People who have held jobs for years have no idea what health insurance costs to individuals. (Hint: Coverage that might have cost $300 or $400 a month through COBRA costs from $1200-$1700 per month on the open market.) Once they find out, they basically go without and pray that nothing serious happens to them before they land another job. For the most part, the jobless who are burning through their savings trying to keep their houses are unable to spend what may be as much as or more than their monthly mortgage to keep health insurance. This is triply hard on the middle-aged unemployed, who are rampantly discriminated against by both insurance companies and employers, for much the same reason: The middle-aged and elderly cost more to treat and keep healthy than the young. The more middle-aged people an employer has, the more a health coverage plan costs the company as a whole. It pays—and pays big—to discriminate against fiftysomethings. This may be about to change, as the Boomers march into their fifties in indignant throngs. I've said it before, and I'll reiterate: Health care will be the issue to conjure with in 2004. It's also basically the only issue the Democrats have left with any kind of broad appeal, given how much of their agenda is set by increasingly narrow interest groups. The most interesting question, of course, is what sort of system we could create here to extricate health insurance from its problematic reliance on employers. It's not as simple as creating a "single payer" system run by the government. The Europeans and Canadians taunt us about how much more we here in the US spend on health care than they do—and won't admit the obvious: That their centralized health care is lousy health care, rationed ruthlessly and carefully designed so that there is no escape except to hop a jet for the US with plenty of cash in your pocket. (A routine appendectomy costs the uninsured $15,000 here—complications extra.) Good health care is in fact expensive, and you can only "prevent" certain obvious classes of illness. A lot of the most expensive medical conditions are weird stuff that just comes out of nowhere. The notion of "choice" in health care is mostly ludicrous: You get the plan your employer has, which is almost always an HMO. So divorcing health care from employment, however painful it might be, wouldn't reduce choice, and might even increase it, by forcing people to contract individually with group plans, who might compete (to some extent) on rates. The very touchy issue of "community rating" (that is, charging one monthly rate to all comers, irrespective of age or medical history) will have to be faced again, and the young and the healthy may have to have their noses rubbed in the fact that they must contribute to the health care of the ill and the old, because there but for chance (and the passage of a few more years) go they. Can this be done without nationalizing health care a la Canada? Of course. Will it be done? Probably not. Too many people (lawyers, doctors, and insurance companies most of all) stand to lose way too much in the bargain. Blood will flow in hospital halls when America chooses to face the problem, and how we eventually solve it will tell a great deal about who we are as a people. |
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Back to the topic of groundedness. (See my entries for July 9, 2003 and following.) The screwiness of actors is legendary, and the news is full of their incessant marriages and affairs and divorces, drug habits and booze binges and other out-of-control behavior. Some of this is doubtless because actors (being more visible than certified public accountants) get more press and see their flaws exposed to far more public scrutiny. On the other hand, I'd lay odds that people in theater/movies are significantly unhappier and more lost than the bulk of humanity. (I know a couple of obscure people in theater, and their unhappy lives map to those of their famous cohorts with peculiar precision.) I'll venture a SWAG here: Actors (including both men and women; the word "actress" now being obsolete) pretend to be other people for a living, and thereby weaken their sense of their own identity, and thus part of their groundedness. I witnessed a very mild demonstration of this back in 1998, when I took a minor part in a local children's theater production. I was actually not an actor but a puppeteer. I built an animated robot head out of Meccano and worked its levers while sitting under a card table, watching the stage action on a small TV set by my knees, to which a video feed of the stage was beamed wirelessly. A voice actor provided the robot head's voice, so I myself wasn't actually pretending to be anybody else. My main job was keeping the goofy thing working (moving parts! Arrgh!) and doing a sort of crude lip-synch with its mechanical jaw to the creature's lines, read from offstage. It was great fun and I'll post some pictures someday, though maybe not of when they dressed me up as a rosy-cheeked pirate to fill an empty position in a dance ensemble. What's pertinent here was the way the cast, who were ordinary people from many walks of life and not really actors at all, began flirting with one another wholesale at rehearsals, raising the level of sexual tension in the group to a degree that floored me. None of them would say a lot of those things in "real life"—but while backstage they were pretending to be other people, and a lot of inhibitions loosened up in a very major way. "Backstage romances" and affairs are legendary, and my one experience backstage showed me very clearly how quickly it all can work. And this was a show targeted at fourth graders—I hate to think how it might have gone had it been A Streetcar Named Desire or Pippin. A far more serious example of the effect of theater on grounding came up in John Cornwell's excellent book The Hiding Places of God, now out of print but originally published in the UK as Forces of Darkness, Forces of Light. (Used copies appear on Bibliofind now and then—it's beautifully written and I encourage you to find it if you can.) In one of the final chapters, Cornwell describes the horrifying experience of a confused young man who was literally seduced into partaking of an "experimental theater" troupe that included a systematic destruction of the young man's groundedness that led to something bordering on schizophrenia. He was coerced to give over his identity to an alternate identity that was completely without moral moorings, reveling in obscenity and blasphemy. Yes, I know, that's not really theater. Calling it "theater" was a ruse, but in Cornwell's description the mechanism was much the same: The young man was made to act obscenely until he couldn't tell which him was the real him. (He was only marginally stable to begin with, which I'm sure was why he was chosen by the troupe.) Still, it's worth recalling that theater was held in very low regard in centuries past, and you have to wonder if the off-stage behavior of marginal personalities who took up acting was behind theater's black reputation. I'll also point up perhaps Heinlein's subtlest novel, if not necessarily his greatest: Double Star, in which an actor plays a deceased ruler so well that he becomes that ruler. What, then, is "self"? I've wondered sometimes if our groundedness is all that stands between being ourselves and being someone completely other. It would be worth safeguarding that groundedness, then, if we value what we've worked so hard to make of ourselves. More later. |
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They've been running utility mains to the house and finishing up the periphery drains, so there's been no obvious changes that I could photograph in the last week or so. This should change by midweek next week, when the lower level slabs will be poured and framing will begin. In the meantime, I've decided to design a small generator into the exterior plan, given that most of the eastern part of the country was without power for most of yesterday, for reasons that still seem obscure. Honda makes good auxiliary generators for residential use, and with a couple of gallons of gas can keep a modest home running for a few days, as long as you don't use the electric range too much. (We have a gas grill, so that angle is covered.) The fragility of our heavily interconnected national power grid system is something few have said much about, and I confess I know so little about how it all works that I won't say much more than what I already have: That we should strive for "loose connections" in civic infrastructure far more than we do. Whether crackpots of some stripe were behind yesterday's East Coast debacle or not, you can bet that the crackpots were paying attention. |
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Finally saw The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen earlier today, and it was solid good fun, mostly because this sort of "steampunk" SF cinema has been rare for many years, and last had its heyday in the early-mid 1960s, when Jules Verne and H. G. Wells film adaptations were all the rage. The premise is audacious: In 1899, a mysterious operative under Queen Victoria gathers a strike force of "extraordinary" individuals, all of whom are themselves characters in Victorian fiction. We meet Alan Quatermain ("King Solomon's Mines"), Tom Sawyer (as an adult, now working for the US Secret Service), the Invisible Man, Dr. Jeckyll, Dorian Gray, Captain Nemo, and a woman who might fairly be called the Bride of Dracula. The mood/cinematography is dark and slightly creepy, and the action unrelenting, which is an odd combination that works far less well than its creators probably hoped. Something is exploding in every other scene, and the gunfire and wildly improbable fights are almost continuous. With that said, however, the film has marvelous touches. Captain Nemo is portrayed as Verne intended him: As the disaffected Indian Prince Dakkar, super scientist and morally ambiguous seafarer, who lives and travels in the Nautilus, which here is sleek, fast, and studded with statues of Hindu deities. (Lapses did occur: Watching the massive Nautilus nonchalantly cruise the canals of Venice was an unintentional—or perhaps intentional—howler.) The treatment of Rodney Skinner as the Invisible Man is very slick: Skinner can't change back and become visible, so he merely slobbers his face with white greasepaint and wears stylishly modern sunglasses. Less impressive is Mr. Hyde, who comes off as part Incredible Hulk (without the green pigment) and part Hunchback of Notre Dame, especially in the early scenes where he's bounding around the rooftops of old Paris. Of course, the centerpiece is Sean Connery as Quartermain, and he carries an indifferent script and several indifferent actors to what I consider a reasonable success, for an adventure flick. I didn't anticipate any of the plot twists, and I found the Tom Sawyer character unaccountably likeable. The film lacked any kind of tension leading to a climactic scene; it was just one explosion after another until it was all over. Many small excellent touches (including minuscule details like Masonic symbols that you'll miss if you're not attentive) but as a whole it didn't gel well, and I think that the promised hook to a sequel in the last scene will not be needed, as I don't think LXG is making the money a sequel would require. That's OK; I'm not a big fan of sequels, which almost always fail to live up to the promise of their predecessors. The first one was more than enough value for my $5. Cautiously recommended: See it if you love that sort of thing; skip it if you're just looking for a way to fill out an empty evening. |
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Some odd lots in many categories:
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I've been reluctantly following the latest SCO vs. Linux thing and scratching my head, wondering what those guys were smoking. SCO is suing Linux because they claim Linux contains some source code for which SCO holds the copyright. Now, they refuse to say what source code is in Linux, claiming that if they reveal what was infringed, the Linux community would just fix it. Huh? I thought that was the idea. Removal of infringing material is what such suits are for...unless something else is going on entirely. This morning's Wall Street Journal suggests that something is. (See "Portals" by Lee Gomes on page B1.) Since SCO began its FUD attack on Linux, demanding payment from anyone using Linux under threat of lawsuits, SCO's stock has risen sevenfold—and Computerworld reports that SCO's backers are cashing out of SCO stock as fast as they can. Microsoft bought licenses, probably seeing this as an opportunity to keep SCO's attack on Linux alive a little longer. IBM, however, is fighting back with a strong legal defense and a countersuit, and sooner or later, some judge or another will force SCO to reveal what's inside Linux that shouldn't be, so that the Linux community can remove the infringing material and replace it...in about half an hour. The whole business sounds fishy as hell to me. I've never been particularly worried about Linux's prospects for the future, and my next book, in fact, is likely to focus on it. What worries me is the fact our legal system allows this kind of nonsense. The rule of law is suffering terribly here, and nobody seems to care. |
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Another interesting item Pete Albrecht (see yesterday's entry) brought to my attention is Shadows, a program that calculates sundial traces for a particular location, and then prints out the pertinent lines so that you can draw them or engrave them on a more permanent platform for your very own (and completely unique) sundial. The program can generate several different kinds of sundials, including horizontal sundials, vertical sundials, polar sundials, and a few others I don't quite understand. Shadows is free and easy to use, although it's from France and uses metric measurements. You select a city from a list, or (if your city isn't listed) enter your latitude and longitude, and the program takes it from there. It would make a great school project, as you can paste the printed sheet on a piece of cardboard, cut the gnomon (the pointer that generates the shadow) out of another piece of cardboard, glue it to the dotted line, and you're there. Fine stuff. |
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At the urging of my fellow Lane Tech Astronomical Society alumni Pete Albrecht, I picked up a Phillips ToUCam, which has become the instrument of choice for do-it-yourself CCD astronomy these days. Pete has taken some completely awesome Mars photos with it in the last few weeks, as shown in the examples above, which he sent me a few days ago. These were taken with a Meade 12" "goto" telescope, which admittedly is a nice piece of gear compared to my own junkbox creations—but the resolution of the photos may well depend on the camera and the image processing software far more than the telescope itself. The magic may lie in "stacking" multiple images taken movie-camera style by the CCD, and using sophisticated software to extract the latent resolution in the many images, no single one of which exhibits high resolution at all points. People out there are doing amazing things with this $80 Web cam, even with relatively small telescopes, and I'm going to give it a shot later this month, as Mars approaches its most favorable opposition in 60,000 years. With only an 8" scope working on a pipe-threads mount, I won't expect results like Pete's, but I'm actually very interested in seeing just how well some high technology on the imaging side can make a decidedly low-tech scope perform. |
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About a week ago I began an experiment: I started with a fresh junksender.txt file, and banned (as I always do) those spammers with domains that are not identifiably free email sites or knucklehead companies with open relays. The idea was to see how quickly my spam capture rate would return to "normal," as I've experienced it now for some time. My junksender.txt file had almost 2500 domains in it, but my suspicion was that most of them were long abandoned, and I could tell that Poco Mail was taking longer to bring down the mail, especially in the morning, when it amounts to almost 200 messages at once. Astonishingly enough, it's taken only about a week. In that week's time I have accumulated 279 banned domains, which appear to generate virtually all the spam I get that isn't from the free email sites like yahoo, msn, eudoramail, etc. (I got 12 messages from michidole.com in a single afternoon!) Mail comes down a lot more quickly now, and I suppose I need to do this every six months or so. I'm still picking up six or seven new banned domains per day, but a check against the "old" (and huge) junksender.txt shows that they are in fact new domains that I had not banned before. I expect a few of the old ones to show up here and there in the future, but in the aggregate, it seems like domains are used for a short while and then abandoned, presumably after enough ISPs ban them that response rates go down. And if you've ever wondered whether anyone actually buys all those penis enlargement pills that seem to drive the bulk of all spam, the answer is clearly yes, as a recent Wired online article demonstrates. Pretty scary, huh? |
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My Evans Data project was delayed for a week, so I changed this entry from what I posted earlier this morning. I won't be going into hiding until August 15. In the meantime, some odd lots:
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Much has been made over the past ten or fifteen years over the collapse of liberal religion. I honestly don't like the terms "liberal" and "conservative" when applied to religion, because they hide a more useful axis: that between the cultic and the communitarian. Cultic religions are those based on secrecy and obedience, usually accompanied by a detailed plan for living secular life (including what you eat, when, how, and how often you have sex with your spouse, and so on) enforced by the threat of (literally hellacious) divine punishment. Communitarian religions emphasize openness, tolerance, service to others, and life within human society rather than apart from it. Those religious jursidictions that are growing are the cultic; the communitarian groups are suffering badly. There are cultic and communitarian elements in all religious groups; as with politics, the axis is imprecise at best. The Mormons are far more cultic than they will admit; you need an ID to get into church! There are many cultic elements in the Eastern Orthodox culture, from the iconostasis to an appalling equation of eating and spousal sex—including identical restrictions on both that basically make six months out of the year off-limits to sex. The cultic elements of Islam and Orthodox Judaism get a fair amount of press. I'll be upfront: I'm a communitarian, but I'm not a crackpot—a distinction upon which much hangs. More on that shortly. Liberal religion is best typefied by the Episcopalian church, but there are liberal Lutherans (primarily ELCA), Methodists, and Presbyterians as well. The Unitarians may or may not even be a religion, as they themselves gleefully point out; it's part of the mystique. All of them are losing membership in droves, and I've often wondered why. One reason may be a strange parallel to the decline of the Democratic Party: A collapse of the middle, due to the unrestrained insanity of the left wing. Only part of the decline of the Roman Catholic laity is due to the birth control thing. A fair bit, perhaps more than half, is due to the excesses of the church's left wing and how it transformed music, church architecture, and the Mass after Vatican II circa 1960. Faced with ugly churches, mostly unsingable hymns, and the vanishing of any sense of reverence from worship, otherwise receptive Catholics simply lost interest and drifted away. Most never resumed church attendance; the rest went to more cultic groups to regain at least some of what was lost. There is a middle ground, but (as in politics) most of the energy is expended pulling on the two ends of the rope. It is possible to retain beauty, reverence, and a numinous worldview without howling for the infidels (mostly those who disagree with "us") to roast in Hell—and without reducing Jesus Christ to "a great teacher among other great teachers" and elevating the (liberal, of course) self to the highest authority. As with politics, I have little sympathy for the extremes. The middle is where it's at—but the middle is thinning out pretty seriously these days. The middle should boot the extremes, but the middle is also the place where the laity's passions are directed elsewhere, to making a living and raising children. I don't know where it will all end, but the topic has connections to the issue of groundedness (never thought I'd get back to that, huh?) and I'll pursue it further as time allows. |
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It was my old Clarion friend George M. Ewing, WA8WTE, who introduced me to the concept of weaselrats, those strange invisible creatures who haunt the collective unconscious, stealing writers' ideas and giving them to other writers, usually before the first writers can do anything with them. Well, the weaselrats are at it again. George sent me a note a few days ago suggesting that UFOs are actually time machines from our own future. Wow. In my Diary notes file from back when I was reading Where Is Everybody? on the Fermi Question, I wrote, "suggest that UFOs are time machines full of future Earthmen and we really are still alone." (See my June 17, 2003 entry for more on the book and the Fermi Question.) It's one of physics' profound weirdnesses that time travel is far more possible than FTL (faster than light) space travel. Admittedly, it's not easy—you need vast quantities of highly condensed matter to do it—but there's nothing to suggest that it's impossible. George went on to ask why there weren't already dozens of novels with this theme, as it's pretty obvious once you think of it. I dunno. In Poul Anderson's flawed but still interesting The Avatar, a race of super-advanced creatures builds these Tipler machines (I hope I remember that right) which are furiously rotating cylinders of neutronium. Skim past them at just the right angle and you go somewhere else in space and time. This was fifteen or twenty years ago, and I don't know whether Poul's math was dead-on, but he was using the idea for space travel and only incidentally was the time-warp element involved. But what George and I both mean are ordinary, garden-variety flying-saucer UFOs as vehicles from our own future. Maybe there's something really bad scheduled to happen in 2012 (when all sorts of really bad things are supposed to happen, according to the Mayas, the Egyptians, and most New Agers) and the saucers are our distant descendents, sent back here to try and figure out how to fend off the catastrophe. Maybe they're trying to prevent us from doing the sort of genetic engineering that allowed some mega-villain to craft a race of big-eyed Grays from abducted Oklahoma hog farmers. So who's going to write this and get rich? (Or has it been written already?) I have a new rule of not writing additional novels until I sell my previous ones, so it won't be me. |
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The canonical ideological spectrum running from left to right, liberal to conservative, is actually pretty useless. Apart from a handful of cartoon archetypes among my friends and correspondents, nobody is purely one side or another. Most, in fact, are a lot like me: An unpredictable mix, and one that changes regularly, too. I'm left-leaning in certain areas (I'm an antitrust hawk, for example, and ever more so as I get older) but I'm also a "wise-use" environmentalist, which is enough to get you branded as a right-wing monster in lefty circles. It is to laugh at the silliness of it all—and a major reason I don't talk much politics on this forum. Left and right merge at their extremes to the same obnoxious absolutism. Only the issues are different—and less different than most of us think. (Both lefty feminists and right-wing fundies want to prosecute pornographers, while those of us in the middle would rather law enforcement go after muggers and crooked pols.) Far more useful, I think, is a spectrum running from grim absolute certainty on one extreme to cheerful nihilism on the other. Certainty is the Original Sin behind all ideology, right or left. Once someone has clearly sold themselves to certainty, they become deadly dull, and mostly unpleasant. All axes are vulnerable to this, even libertarians, among whom are some of the most unpleasant ideologues I've ever met. As usual, I'm somewhere in the middle, though I lean toward uncertainty in that all of my positions are carefully hedged by the right to change my mind when I get better data. I was pleasantly surprised to find a beautiful elucidation of this position in a fine little book called The Anglican Vision, by James E. Griffiss. It's a short description of Episcopalian theology and history, but the passage below really has a much broader application:
This doesn't mean that we plunge into heedless activity without reflection, as the certain all too often accuse. It means that we think everything through, with the full foreknowledge that "thinking it through" can very well turn up empty. Or, to put it another way, knowing is a statistical exercise, especially when nuanced issues are under the microscope. Interestingly, I've come to lean more in this direction as I've gotten older. When I was a younger man I was much quicker to seize a position and defend it without further reflection. After having had my nose rubbed in certain obvious stupidities back then, I got a lot more careful where I planted my flags. And now, at age 51, I generally don't plant them at all, but wave them carefully, certain that the flags will inevitably change as I grow in experience and wisdom. |
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Yahoo
posted a
news item indicating that a group of French researchers had turned up
an interesting flaw in the 802.11 Wi-Fi standard: If a marginal user connects
to a Wi-Fi hub at one of the low bit rates (1 or 2 Mbps) the entire hub
drops to that speed, forcing close-in users to communicate at the lowest
bit rate common to all users. The study indicts the CSMA/CA (Carrier Sense
Multiple Access/Avoidance Collision) technology that governs who connects
to a node as the culprit, but my readings of the standard don't show that
as an inevitable consequence. I'm going to have to set up some tests here
to see if that is in fact the case. I can see how it might be, especially
on cheaper hardware on which the vendors took some shortcuts—but the
interesting thing is how we could go this long without such a limitation
becoming common knowledge.
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Niklas Zennstrom, the creator of the beleaguered file sharing network KaZaa, has a new idea, and it's killer: He's going to use peer-to-peer mechanisms to create a global VoIP (Voice over IP) telephone network. The idea is to cut the traditional telephone networks out of the loop entirely, and make calls directly from sound card to sound card, governed by a P2P app using some of the distributed search machinery developed for KaZaa. The problem with such PC-to-PC VoIP phone calls is knowing the IP address of the other end of the line, especially for dialup users, whose IP addresses change each time they log in. Zennstrom's idea is to create what amounts to a distributed VoIP phone book the same way he created a distributed index of sharable files among KaZaa users. Zennstrom (the "Z" in "KaZaa") hasn't said a great deal about how it will work, but telecomm experts seem to think that it can be done. If he pulls it off, it will be a very big deal. Most of the people in the tech industry these days have broadband connections, so this would cut my long distance costs pretty close to zero. I'm watching this one carefully. You should too. Monitor Boardwatch for updates. |
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August 30, 2003:
