November 30, 2000:

I had a sobering realization last night, as I stood in the front yard waiting for Mr. Max to do his thing one last time before bedtime. Out in the east, Jupiter was rising in the constellatin Taurus, and I had this eerie feeling of deja vu. I first began tracking the planets in the sky when I was 12, in early 1965, after receiving a small telescope for Christmas at the end of 1964. Jupiter was then almost precisely where it is today, and in the intervening 36 years has gone around the sun three times. I clearly recalled, for one strange moment, the feeling of slack-jawed wonder that came over me the first time I found the Giant Planet in the field of that wretched little telescope. I was filled with enthusiasm to find the other planets and star clusters and nebulae and galaxies that I had read about in stacks of library books. I had to see them for myself, (pictures in books just do not cut it!) and thus began a life-long love of astronomy, telescopes, and that peculiar human attribute we call the "sense of wonder."

November 29, 2000:

November 28, 2000:

People read statistics like the average life expectancy in 1900 being 48 years, and are puzzled, thinking that this meant that few if any people of that era lived past the age of 50. This is radically wrong, as they would realize if they gave some thought to what an "average" is and how averages are calculated. The real factor in life expectancies in 1900 wasn't older people at all, but child mortality. Huge numbers of children died before the age of 5, and this pulled down the numbers by decades. Of those people who survived to adulthood, most lived well into their sixties, and many lived to be seventy or eighty.

This truth struck home with considerable poignancy as I researched my own family tree, in discovering how many infants and small children had died in our family a century ago. Two of my mother's sisters died before the age of eight, and most of the larger families had at least one child fatality, most of which had been forgotten as members of that generation passed away. It was encouraging to see that, even in the 19th century, my ancestors who had survived to adulthood were living reasonably long lives. My great-grandmother Martha Duntemann, in fact, lived to be 96, despite having been born in a farmhouse far from anything like medical care. My great-great-great grandmother Millizena Duntemann lived from 1814 to 1896, despite a hard rural girlhood in Germany, a steamship crossing to America in the steerage, and giving birth to eight known children.

November 27, 2000:

I was a little late catching on to this one, but here's my second-favorite headline stemming from our ongoing election hoohah:

Unpresidented

November 26, 2000:

Back in Scottsdale after three weeks, and still digging out. Carol and I hit a couple of stores on the way home from church, and I'm not sure if I was more bemused at the piles and piles of idiotic audioanimatronic creatures stacked up in our retail centers, or at the numbers of ordinary looking people (that is, not brain-dead yokels from Fish Guts, Idaho) who were going home with the damned things under one arm. Surely you've seen them: Billy the Big-Mouthed Bass singing Christmas songs now (over the summer it was "Don't Worry, Be Happy") and a turkey offering comments on Thanksgiving and life in general. The trio is completed with a lobster that lobs insults about, and I expect to see even more such between here and Christmas.

November 24, 2000:

In Chicago until tomorrow, and this afternoon the ladies were off at the Rockettes Ice Special or something at the Rosemont Theater, so I had nephew duty, and took Brian and Matt to see Red Planet. The movie got panned by virtually everyone, but I must disagree: It's dazzling. Perhaps the most realistic evocation of a Martian adventure I've ever seen, and I'm pretty sure I've seen them all. The problem, of course, is that the characters are forgettable, and the plot turns on a number of scientific points I consider pretty questionable. Solar flares are something the writers really need to study a little on, but worst of all (heh-heh) the writers have absolutely no idea what a "nematode" is (go look it up) and misuse the concept horribly.

November 23, 2000:

November 22, 2000:

November 21, 2000:

What bothers me about the Florida business is that we're going to be counting a class of ballots that have never been counted in previous elections: Those that have not actually been punched, or even partially detached, but only pressed on lightly enough to "dimple" (whatever that means) the little rectangle of chad still left snug in the hole. Furthermore, we only seem to be counting them in counties that lean overwhelmingly to one party—such machine "kickouts" are not going to be counted elsewhere in Florda. Why should any good citizen—even Gore supporters—consider this fair or just?

The punch-out balloting system is an abomination and must go (there are many far better alternatives) but in the meantime, I think people have to realize that the definition of a cast ballot is a punched ballot, and to demand the discernment of a tiny dimple in the middle of a tiny piece of cardboard is an invitation to subjective judgement that should have no place in a fair election. Courts love to talk about "intent" without giving us any objective way to define it, and so my guess is that Gore will be declared president on the basis of ballots that may or may not actually have been cast at all.

November 20, 2000:

This from Slashdot: Honda (those car guys in Japan) have built a bipedal walking humanoid robot after 25 years of R&D. The Honda Web page for Asimo the robot is still Japanese-only, but you can dope out what it takes to download and play the video clip with little difficulty. Note that the Web page is highly Microsoft-centric, and you'll need IE5 to display it correctly.

Asimo (doubtless derived from major robot-guy Isaac Asimov) is about four feet tall, and looks like an astronaut in full EVA gear. He can walk forward and backward with equal alacrity, and can step from side to side as well. He swings his arms, and has so many joints and pivots that I cannot imagine how they keep all that stuff coordinated. Yet they do, and the clip is a must-see. Truly, it looks like a short guy in a robot suit, a sort of dynamic Turing test for walking two-legged robots.

November 19, 2000:

In my ongoing attempt to locate recordings of a couple of old summer camp songs ("To Be Alive" and "Easy Come, East Go") I revisited ToadNode and IMesh, neither of which I had touched in some time. ToadNode (a nicely implemented Gnutella clone) was pretty much hopeless. No matter what I searched for I got no response. I can only assume that the system is choking on its own overhead and losing my queries entirely. I downloaded and installed the new release of IMesh, and found to my dismay that it has been redesigned from a UI standpoint, and all the clever little ladybug icons were gone, except for a highly stylized remnant forming the main IMesh logo. IMesh is now advertising supported, and has a banner on the bottom. The presence of the banner doesn't bother me much (anyone who spends any time at all poking around the Web had better be an ace at ignoring banner ads) though I wonder what mechanisms have been installed on my system to swap new ads in periodically. (Time for a trip up to Opt Out!) Nonetheless, the songs remain unfound.

The lyrics to "To Be Alive" are available on the Web, implying that it's "traditional" and in the public domain, and if anyone knows of a recording I'd appreciate a pointer. "Easy Come, Easy Go" is a title that has been applied to a number of songs over the years, but the chorus of the one I'm looking for runs like this:

Easy come, easy go, through summer and through snow;
Up and down, all around the universe I go.
And I'll walk upon your water, move mountains from your path--
With a smile for my companion, I'll teach you how to laugh!

November 18, 2000:

I went looking for a song on Napster last night, and discovered that Napster throws out all search query words shorter than three characters before it performs a search on its database. The song I wanted was that old campfire standard, "To Be Alive," but only the word "Alive" was entered into the query, so I was getting any and all song titles in which the word "alive" appeared. Nor can you enclose a precise string in quotes for a query--that seems to confuse the system completely.

November 17, 2000:

Here's an interesting piece of trivia that might win you some bar bets: Has there ever been a negotiable American monetary instrument with a face value of $3? You bet! Phony as a $3 bill, perhaps, but genuine as a $3...coin!

It's a gold coin, and it wasn't in circulation very long, nor was it popular even in its heyday. There was a $2.50 gold coin throughout the 19th century, which was close enough in value to the $3 coin to make the $3 coin seem unnecessary. The woman on the obverse is supposed to be an "Indian princess" but most numismatists seem to think it presents the conventional figure of Liberty wearing an Indian (hence American) headdress.

In its history, the United States has issued a number of coins that 99% of humanity has forgotten. (Paper money, compared to coins, is a fairly recent thing, but it has its mysteries too.) Here's the complete list:

Under $1: 1/2c, 1c, 2c, 3c, 5c, 10c, 20c, 25c, 50c

$1 and up: $1, $2.50, $3, $5, $10, $20 (all but the $1 coin were gold—and there was a $1 gold coin too. Tiny little thing!

Fine print: Proofs of a $4 gold coin (the "Stella"), and both a $50 and a $100 gold coin (the Half Union and Union) were designed and considered, but never released into general circulation.

Interestingly, there has never been a $2 coin. Most of the oddities on the list had their (few) days in the sun in the 19th century; our coinage has been remarkably consistent (many would say boring) since 1900. The reason for them might surprise you: Coins were not cranked out by the billions in 1840 (and very early on coins were struck literally by hand, one at a time!) and merchants rarely had as many as they needed to make change. It was useful, then, to be able to make change in as few coins as possible. Besides, prior to 1855, pennies were as large as half dollars, and keeping a pocketful was hard on the pockets.

November 16, 2000:

At the risk of turning this into Jeff Duntemann's Dream Log (which would be a death worse than Fate) I'll relay another one I had last night, which I think is worthy of note. First, some background: Most people I've spoken to about dreams admit to having the species of dream in which you wander around your grade school, high school, or college (sometimes in your underwear or worse) looking for a particular class. As you search and fail, your head fills with the panicked awareness that you haven't been to class in a long time, and if you can't find it soon you're going to fail, and thus not graduate, and thus spend the rest of your life flipping burgers at McDonald's and living under a bridge. I have had these dreams since before I can remember, and have them three or four times a year without fail.

Well, last night I had the dream again...only this time, I found history class!

It was great. I beat the monster at its own game. I dreamed I was at DePaul University (from which I graduated summa cum laude in 1974) and couldn't find history class. All the usual panics invaded my head, including the Jeff-specific one in which I attempt to calculate the number of years since I had last been to class, and fail. (I cannot do math in my dreams, though I periodically make the desperate attempt.) But this time, I turned a corner, entered a room, and there was history class. I was there. I was safe. I would graduate. A woman named Joy who works at Coriolis was there, and she told me she could get me the notes of the classes I had missed. (That would now be 26 years' worth of classes, which would be a lot of notes.) All Would Be Well, as Lady Julian would doubtless say.

I woke up feeling wonderful, like I had finally cracked some difficult problem, and it made me wonder: Just what inner victory had my subconscious finally achieved at 2:35 AM last night? Was it a problem I had been chewing on all these years that the dreams have come upon me? I may never know, which is irritating, but at least I'll be waiting to see if the dream ever recurs. Once you find history class, do you ever lose it again?

November 15, 2000:

November 14, 2000:

Want to read the Third Secret of Fatima? I've got it right here. It's not a secret anymore, and the odd thing about it is that nobody much seems to care. It made no particular splash in the press when Pope John Paul II revealed it in June, and although the fact of its release was reported in some of the news media, I don't ever recall seeing the actual text reproduced anywhere.

Now, having read the text, I think I know why: With all due respect to the Blessed Mother, I can't for the life of me figure out what it's supposed to mean. Unlike the other secrets of Fatima, which promised war and other clear apocalyptic consequences if we didn't pray and repent, the Third Secret is a vision most obscure, involving martyrdom for some religious of the Church, but not much else. One can read it in a great many ways—in fact, one can read it as a punishment of the Church hierarchy, from the Holy Father on down. But in fairness, one could read it in a million other ways as well. As Famous Religious Secrets go, it's rather thin gruel.

So here it is. Be the first on your block to scratch your head over the Third Secret of Fatima:

November 13, 2000:

People today talk about Prohibition as though it were some sort of anomaly, a regrettable twitch in government that was due to Christian fundamentalism, fallout from World War I, or evil spirits. Read history, and you might choose Option 3, heh-heh. Prohibition may have been regrettable, but it certainly isn't inexplicable. History hasn't done a particularly good job of depicting how horrible alchohol abuse was at the turn of the century. Immigrant laborers and many other members of the poor and working classes had a terrible tendency to drink themselves to a stupor (and more than a few to death) while abusing their families and breaking various laws. There's still plenty of alchohol abuse today, but I don't think it holds a candle to the situation in 1910, when the Temperance Movement was really picking up steam. I think that people today live generally more satisfying lives than they did, on balance, in 1910, and that makes all of the difference. If we could somehow fill the spiritual vacuum that besets many people (of all classes; substance abuse is not confined to the poor) addiction would probably vanish into the noise.

November 12, 2000:

Just got back from my 30th high school reunion. I missed the first big reunion that Lane Tech's Class of 1970 held (20th, ten years ago) but it looks like most of the guys who attended that one had had their fill of reunions, so the turnout for this one was less than half of those who attended the 20th. Nonetheless, Carol and I went with Tom Barounis and his wife Diane, Tom who had been my locker partner for all four years there. The food was lousy, and the hotel itself was so-so, but we had a fine time talking to the four or five guys in attendance that we had known back when we were fidgety teenagers in Chicago's largest high school.

I found it supremely interesting that I could look at a 48-year-old guy and know that it was Len Kosiba, even though I hadn't seen him since he was 17. The human machine is extraordinarily good at recognizing faces, and I don't think we have clue one as to how we do it.

November 11, 2000:

I don't record my dreams that often, since they're pretty dull stuff for the most part. But last night I woke up giggling, and this one might be worth reporting:

I dreamed I was in a residential neighborhood somewhere, watching a crew of people digging up these smallish (about five foot long) dinosaurs out of the ground and stacking them like cordwood. They were obviously dead but not yet reduced to bones—if anything, they looked mummified. It seemed like an odd thing for them to be doing, so I asked an old guy who was sitting on his porch and watching them. "Meat-eaters," he said, with a sour grin. "Lots of them. Last year they brought one back to life. Put rats right into perspective!"

November 10, 2000:

November 9, 2000:

Best headline I've seen so far about this whole sorry mess we're in:

SWEATING BALLOTS

November 8, 2000:

I stayed up until midnight last night reading Adolph Holl's intriguing The Left Hand of God, with one eye on the TV, hoping to come to closure on politics before the night concluded. Ahh, well. So I crashed until 7:30AM this morning, and scrabbled for the remote to see who the new boss was...and discovered that we still don't have a new boss. In a sense, this is a public service announcement to stylish cynics who claim their votes don't matter: Dudes, if you live in Florida they matter now more than at any moment in history.

What I find notable (and others have already commented on this, but it's worth repeating) is that there is no martial law, no troops in the streets, no curfews, no riots, no demonstrations, nothing but a gorgeous Arizona morning (sorry about Texas, Governor) full of ordinary people getting their kids dressed and fed and bused and heading off to work. We do not have "big man" government here—in a very real sense the President doesn't matter that much, especially with the opposition party in control of the legislature. Gridlock has its virtues, and in truth, whoever nails the White House this time may be more careful of certain things next time. Gore lost whole states over his gun control stance, and Bush should have chosen a pro-choice running mate. (Or, seeing Florida's pivotal status, a Jewish one...) See what I meant in yesterday's entry? Close races push candidates toward the center, and the next races may be even closer.

And if in fact Bush takes the White House by virtue of taking Florida after the recount, Ralph Nader will have handed it to him. Nader acts like a doof sometimes, but he has a point: With this kind of divided electorate (which I feel will be ever more the case in the future) third parties matter more than ever before—just not the way that they think they do. Third parties are almost always on the extremes, and what they do is push their closest adjacent parties toward the center by handing votes to their adjacent party's polar opposites. It's a wonderful piece of game theory.

November 7, 2000:

It's 9:15 PM on Election Night, and I'm taking a break from the leather couch in front of the TV (a position I take almost never) to ask the question: Why have so many elections come in so close to a dead heat? Answer: Because they can. I will postulate a new political theory here: That in electorates where there is a high degree of personal freedom, high degree of education, and high availability of information, those electorates will tend to divide along the margin necessary to win. In other words, where 50.1% wins, the electorate will increasingly split clean down the middle. If it took a higher percentage to win elections (say, 60%) you would see elections split at 60%. Count on it: Popular landslides will become rarer and rarer, and the country will see more and more squeakers.

In my view, this is not good. I like consensus, and I would prefer a president that 90% of the public wants, rather than 50.1%. The other 49.9% matter equally, from a statistical viewpoint, and yet their opinions count for nothing once the win has been made. This bothers me, but I have no good solution right now.

For lawmaking it's another matter. My solution here: Require that 50.1% of both parties vote in favor of a law for that law to pass. (This wouldn't work for candidates, only for votes in lawmaking assemblies.) This would mean that consensus between Democrats and Republicans would be required to get anything done, which I think would be a fine thing...and no one would be howling "minority rule" like they always do when people propose requiring a supermajority for anything.

This would change the nature of American politics radically. How? You tell me. Don't forget that email:

November 6, 2000:

I finally got my 4-port router here, and installed my first in-house network, between the two machines here on my desk. (See the November 2 entry.) It went remarkably well, considering the reputation networking has for cantankerosity. The router is the LinkSys EtherFast Cable/DSL Router model BEFSR41. It's a little blue thing about the size of a modem, and can do both 10 Base T and 100 Base T. You plug up to four machines into the back via RJ45 patch cables, plug another patch cable from it to your cable or DSL modem, and you're pretty much there. The only configuring I had to do was fire up a Web browser and bring up the router's built-in configuration page. (HTML in ROM...what a thought.) I typed in my ISP's DNS addresses and selected DHCP, and I was there.

Sharing of my broadband connection worked immediately and without incident. But getting folder sharing and printer sharing to work took me another hour or so. After much rebooting and tooth gnashing, I realized that I had not uninstalled the Black Ice personal firewall from the Dell box, and Black Ice was dutifully keeping the little Compaq from connecting. With Black Ice out of the way, everything worked fine. It certainly wasn't the router's fault, nor that of Black Ice. Both were doing the jobs they had been created to do. (The router also contains firewall software, which Steve Gibson's Shields Up tester seems to think is as good as Black Ice. It won't keep the CIA out, but then again I'm basically a boring guy—and we keep our personal data on a separate machine without a Net connection.) We just seem to set our diverse technologies at each other's throats now and then—probably more often than we realize.

November 5, 2000:

Two days left. The politicking is driving me nuts! Last night at suppertime I picked up the phone, hoping it would be from Carol (who is in Chicago this week) and it was a granny from some union telling me to vote for Al Gore because he would save my Social Security benefits. (Wait...I thought he invented Social Security! No, sorry...) I took a deep breath and told the poor granny that if she was going to interrupt my supper to stump for a candidate I would damned well change my vote from Al Gore to George Bush and she should tell her boss that telemarketing was backfiring on them and that if Bush won on a razor's edge it would be their fault. And I hung up.

It was a lie, of course (I don't talk about my own voting habits) but if they feel they have the right to interrupt my supper, I feel I have the right to play mind games with them. I loathe telemarketing. And I'm glad I don't watch TV much, because it's been nonstop sound bites and other political lie anthologies here for days and days. Most tired of it, very depressed about the viability of democracy under circumstances like this, where the guy (or the initiative) with the biggest money pile usually wins.

November 4, 2000:

Although he didn't realize it, my 17-year-old nephew made me blush the other day. I was coaching him by phone on how to auction some concert tickets he had bought and now couldn't use. I know that some auction sites won't auction concert tickets because of scalping regulations, and we were discussing the restrictions. Auctions for drugs, body parts, and other contraband would be removed, as would software from certain vendors. Oh...

"And used underwear. You can't auction used underwear," he told me helpfully.

Used underwear? Why in hell would anybody...oh. Yeah. Right.

November 3, 2000:

My friend Pete Albrecht and I were commiserating on the phone the other day about the plans of our high school, the venerable Lane Tech in Chicago, to shut down all their shops. Back in the late sixties, I learned how to machine metal, work in hardwood, and handle most common shop tools at Lane—without jeoparidizing my college-prep education. I learned trigonometry, analytical geometry, algebra, English literature, Spanish, biology, chemistry, physics, computer programming, and lots more, and still had time to get my hands dirty. The big lesson I took away is that school subjects are not slices of cheese in a package, to be stripped off and eaten or not eaten as desired. They form a synergistic whole, and had I not taken shop, certain facets of mathematics would not have come alive for me. You don't develop a skill by reading about something. You develop a skill by doing it.

Much is at stake here, not least of which is the quality of American engineers. I ended up being a liberal arts geek and thus have no engineering credentials, but I know what engineering is, and within certain limited domains I can do it. (Pete, on the other hand, is a mechanical engineer and an international expert in diesel engines.) What we're seeing in today's engineering shops, alas, is that engineers are being shooed away from the workbenches, where lower-paid technicians take the first physical cuts at new designs.

November 2, 2000:

November 1, 2000: