02

1. 2004-02-09t07:20:13Z. RE: Economics. Elections 2004. Elections 2004: Dean. Fun. Politics. Politics: Bush. Politics: Bush: Meet The Press. Profanity. Science. Sex. Show Biz. Tech. Terrorism.
2. Snow Moment. RE: Life.
3. Zahra and Sima Memorial Service. RE: Martial Arts: Karate. Life. Politics.
4. 2004-02-14t14:38:54Z. RE: Bush. Bush: AWOL. Chicago. Comic Art. Faith. Food. Iraq. Love. Money. Presidential Election. Science. Sex. Show Biz. Tech. War Craft III. . .
5. 2004-02-17t17:20:56Z. RE: Bush. Comic Art. Faith. Family. Food. Fun. Iraq. Martial Arts. Money. Politics. Presidential Elections. Science. Sex. Tech.
6. 2004-02-29t06:53:54Z. RE: Bush. Comic Art. Faith. Family. Food. Fun. Games. Gay Marriage. Green. Haiti. Money. Philosophy. Politics. Presidential Elections. Science. Sex. Tech. Tech Crossroad. Terrorism. The Passion of the Christ. WarCraft. Yami.

2004-02-09t07:20:13Z | RE: Economics. Elections 2004. Elections 2004: Dean. Fun. Politics. Politics: Bush. Politics: Bush: Meet The Press. Profanity. Science. Sex. Show Biz. Tech. Terrorism.
2004-02-09t07:20:13Z

Economics

• I'm tired. Here's a look at minimum wage as copied directly from MetaFilter.com:
  • 'Minimum wage is San Fransisco is now $8.50. Minimum wage in New York City is $5.15 per hour. Minimum wages from around the United States.'
• If the poor get richer, does the world see progress?
• "Let's say 1 cookie equals $10 billion..." [Flash animation].
  • Simple explanations are the best. We don't need Bush's misdirection. He blames everyone but himself.
  • TrueMajority.org was founded by Ben Cohen, Co-founder, Ben and Jerry's ice cream.
• #28 - How to manage smart people. No, no, no. What we really need to know is how to manage managers.

Elections 2004

• BushRice04.org. A Republican wet dream comparable to the Democratic wet dream of Hillary Clinton running.
• Twenty-one Reasons Why Bush Will Win. But we won't let it happen, will we?
• John Kerry's on a role!
  • Maine: Kerry 45%, Dean 26%, Kucinich 15% (whee!), Edwards 9%, Clark 4%.
  • Michigan: Kerry 52%, Dean 17%, Edwards 13%, Sharpton 7%, Clark 7%, Kucinich 3%.
  • Wisconsin: Kerry 48%, Dean 30%, Kucinich 8%, Edwards 7%, Clark 3%.
  • Kerry also got Gephardt's endorsement.

Elections 2004: Dean

• It's one thing to have a campaign that never really took off, but falling from so high must be difficult. Poor guy.
• Dean tunes out as cable guy
  • Dean about Fox News. You, sir, are correct!
    • "Jesus, now I know why I don't have cable."
    • "It's all blather," he said. "I don't mind being at the end, but I just can't stand listening to this stuff."
  • Dean on the metric system. You, sir, are correct!
    • "We are attached to feet and so forth. ... I'm a doctor. I was trained and we do our calculations in meters. We don't use feet and inches and cubic inches and things like that."
    • 'Dean said he doubted Congress would present him a bill to mandate use of the metric system, given the American failure to adopt it during Jimmy Carter's administration.'
    • "We should have converted already. We should do it. I think there's going to be a lot of resistance, but it would be nice to have somebody explain to the American people why it would be easier and better for our businesses."
  • Hehe. Maybe now that Dean is falling he will go back to saying what's really on his mind.
• IdiomStudio.com. See Dean's "Yearrgh" speech as seen from the audience. It looks perfectly normal. America has an odd way of distorting things that I'm not very proud of. Neither Dean's "Yearrgh" or Janet Jackson's boob deserved the attention it got.
• Dean didn't go far enough. The money's gone. You can't move forward if you don't pay the paychecks.

Fun

• Kenya [animation]. Don't play this in front of a kid because then you'll be doomed to see it for ever and ever. (I learned that the hard way.)
• Escape the blue blocks [game]. I only tried it a few times and I think 18.697 seconds was pretty good.
• Uncle Patrick's Advice to Children.
  • I thought this link would be lame but I know exactly what he's talking about for some of the stuff.
  • 'Pajamas are indeed comfy, but society dictates we not wear them to school, work or the bowling alley.'
• http://dsankt.brisurbex.com/ "Sleep City". I don't usually include links to photo-blogs but this is more than the usual pictures of stuff you see just walking around.
  
• Stickee. Walk around their virtual company using browser windows. It looks like they made some of the online games for the CGI PBS kids show Jakers! The Adventures of Piggley Winks.
• Things We Will Never See On Star Trek. Star Trek humor lives on!
• A Frenchman plays song with horns attached all over his body [video].
• Throw rocks at boys [game]. Loosely based on a fashion line of a skewed version of the Grrls ideas. I can't believe that some people are actually bothered by this because boys have been menacing girls for years (Calvin's snowballs to Susie in Calvin and Hobbes is iconic), and girls have badgered boys too (The Kanker sisters are determined to marry the Eds in Ed, Edd n Eddie). It's called "funny".
• "My mother is insane. Like, one of those ladies you see on the local news insane. Since it's inevitably going to come up I'll get out of the way that I am too, but at least I take a full dose of my medication. I've been meaning to make this thread for about the last year, but the longer I waited the more interesting the situation became. Also, I'm incredibly lazy. Case in point, these pictures are about three weeks old. Anyway, lets take a tour of our house."
  • "The other side of the living room. My mom was big into glass paperweights for a while, though usually bottles and dishes are here thing. You see the disruption in the layer of dust on the chair there? That's where she fell a while ago when trying to climb over stuff to open the window just off the left of the picture. There's also at least two broken bottles back there somewhere that have fallen but there's no way to get back there to clean them up. I'm assured all this stuff in quite valuable, by the way. "
    
  • I don't know... The house looks perfectly normal to me. Very tidy.
• Man smokes with his eye. Ouch!

History

• A Visual Sourcebook of Chinese Civilization. I stumbled upon this link just a few minutes after reading a fascinating article about the 400 year reign of the Han dynasty.

Politics

• Rules for Being a Republican. Bwa-ha-ha-ha! Along the lines of: "Don't be an asshole, Vote Democratic". To be fair, here is it's opposite: How to be a Good Democrat.
• I've read George Orwell's 1984 a long time ago, and I've been very wary of Bush, the war hawks, and the Neo-Conservatives but I've never made the connection between the 2. In hindsight it is glaringly obvious. What frightening times we live in (and I'm not talking about terrorists). Related links
  • StudentsForOrwell.org
  • NewSpeakDictionary.com
  • American Newspeak
• US blocks Cuban Grammy nominees. WTF is this shit!?!

Politics: Bush

• CIA never called Iraq immediate threat
  • 'CIA Director George Tenet -- in a quickly scheduled speech at Georgetown University -- said that there was never consensus among CIA analysts that Iraq posed a short-term threat to the security of the United States and never faced political pressure to imply it was. "They never said there was an 'imminent' threat," he told the audience. "Rather, they painted an objective assessment for our policymakers of a brutal dictator who was continuing his efforts to deceive and build programs that might constantly surprise us and threaten our interests." '
  • Bring it on Bush. Attack the intelligence as strongly as you can so that the ghosts will finally fight you back. Isn't it obvious that Bush took objective intelligence reports, then interpreted and distorted them for his own political convenience? Bush and Powell took the intelligence and picked out only the nuggets of out-of-context info that they thought would convince the US and the UN to go to their pre-scheduled Iraq invasion.
  • Related links:
    • This Modern World: "Secret Agent Squirrel". Ha ha! Poor secret squirrel.
    • Now Hear This. Obviously the problem is that Bush got a lousy PowerPoint stacks during the PDFs (Presidential Daily Briefs) as mentioned in the Meet The Press interview. Ha ha! You have to laugh: it leads to true love.
• Pair Up For Peace Prize. Bush and Blair nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize?! Like, gag me with a spoon.
• The Boston Globe was one of the earliest sources to discuss Bush's military service years ago. Since the issue has resurfaced, they made a section on Bush's military service, with stories like this: "Bush's Guard service: What the record shows".
• The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill [Amazon] by Ron Suskind.
  • 'At its core are the candid assessments of former US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, for two years the administration's top economic official, a principal member of the National Security Council, and a tutor to the new President. He is the only member of Bush's innermost circle to leave and then to agree to speak frankly about what has really been happening inside the White House.'
  • The book has been out for a while but now some of Paul O'Neill's documents have been put online: An Experiment in Transparency.
  • Related link: "The Wars of the Texas Succession" by Paul Krugman. Reviews and summaries of American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush by Kevin Phillips, and The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill by Ron Suskind.
• Scalia Was Cheney Hunt Trip Guest; Ethics Concern Grows. Geez I can't believe this isn't so obvious. What if all defendants could fly their judges around on Air Force Two and take them hunting?
• Quotes From Either President Of The United States George W. Bush Or Senator/Chancellor/Emperor Palpatine From The Star Wars Movies. HA HA!
• Jobs Created By US Presidents
  
• Cheney's Staff Focus of Probe. What? Chenney's right hand men "a real possibility of doing jail time"?

Politics: Bush

• "Meet the Press with Tim Russert". Interview with President George W. Bush. The Oval Office, February 7, 2004 [transcript].
  • I wish I saw the video of this but Bush sounds like he was fumbling and reaching a lot. Pretty gutsy for Russert to ask these questions right in the Oval Office itself.
  • 'Russert: Prime Minister Blair has set up a similar commission in Great Britain.

    President Bush: Yeah.

    Russert: His is going to report back in July. Ours is not going to be until March of 2005, five months after the presidential election.

    President Bush: Yeah.

    Russert: Shouldn't the American people have the benefit of the commission before the election?'

    • Oh I see. Time travels differently in different countries, and also whether the investigation is about the handling of 9/11, CIA leaks, or Janet Jacksons' boobs?
  • '[President Bush:] See, free societies are societies that don't develop weapons of mass terror and don't blackmail the world.'
    • So the US is not a free society I guess.
  • 'Russert: In light of not finding the weapons of mass destruction, do you believe the war in Iraq is a war of choice or a war of necessity?

    President Bush: I think that's an interesting question. Please elaborate on that a little bit. A war of choice or a war of necessity? It's a war of necessity. We-- in my judgment, we had no choice when we look at the intelligence I looked at that says the man was a threat.'

  • '[Russert:] Mr. President, this campaign is fully engaged. The chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Terence McAuliffe, said this last week: "I look forward to that debate when John Kerry, a war hero with a chest full of medals, is standing next to George Bush, a man who was AWOL in the Alabama National Guard. He didn't show up when he should have showed up."

    President Bush: Yeah.'

  • 'Russert: The Bush Cheney first three years, the unemployment rate has gone up 33 percent, there has been a loss of 2.2 million jobs. We've gone from a $281 billion surplus to a $521 billion deficit. The debt has gone from 5.7 trillion, to $7 trillion up 23 percent. Based on that record, why should the American people rehire you as CEO?'
  • 'Russert: But your base conservatives and listen to Rush Limbaugh, the Heritage Foundation, CATO Institute, they're all saying you are the biggest spender in American history.

    President Bush: Well, they're wrong.'

    • HA HA HA!
  • 'Russert: Tom Daschle, the Democratic Leader in the Senate, said that you've changed the tone for the worse; that it's more acrimonious, more confrontations, that you are the most partisan political president he's ever worked with. Our exit polls of primary voters, not just Democrats but Independents in South Carolina and New Hampshire, more than 70 percent of them said they are angry or dissatisfied with you, and they point to this whole idea of being a uniter as opposed to a divider. Why do you think you are perceived as such a divider?

    President Bush: Gosh, I don't know, because I'm working hard to unite the country.'

  • '[President Bush:] I don't speak ill of anybody in the process here. I think if you went back and looked at my comments, you will see I don't attack. I don't hold up people. I talk about what I believe in, and I lead, and maybe perhaps I believe so strongly in what we are doing around the world or doing here at home.'
    • Bush almost had a good sound bite here.
  • 'Russert: Two polls out this weekend show you --

    President Bush: See there, you're quoting polls.

    Russert: you're trailing John Kerry in both U.S.A. Today and Newsweek polls by seven and five points.

    President Bush: Yeah.

    Russert: This is what John Kerry had to say last year. He said that his colleagues are appalled at the quote "President's lack of knowledge. They've managed him the same way they've managed Ronald Reagan. They send him out to the press for one event a day. They put him in a brown jacket and jeans and get him to move some hay or move a truck, and all of a sudden he's the Marlboro Man. I know this guy. He was two years behind me at Yale. I knew him, and he's still the same guy." '

  • Related links:
    • NRO ON BUSH
      • 'Michael Graham: President Bush looks like he's afraid of Tim Russert. He's stammering and unsteady. For the first time, I've felt a twinge of fear myself about the November election.'
      • 'Kathryn Jean Lopez: A pundit-type just said to me: "If he loses this year, this will be the day he lost it." '
    • You Can Make It With Plato: Bush's difficult relationship with reality. I guess Bush is more like Plato than Aristotle. I like how for Bush ideas take precedence over evidence, hence we can ignore evidence about WMD or his AWOL stuff.
    • CLAIM vs. FACT: The President on Meet the Press
    • "Philosophy, Not Policy: Why Bush isn't good at interview" by Peggy Noonan.
      • 'What we are looking at here is not quality of mind--Mr. Bush is as bright as John Kerry, just as Mr. Reagan was as bright as Walter Mondale, who was very good at talking points. They all are and were intelligent. Yet neither Mr. Bush's interviews and press conferences nor Mr. Reagan's suggested anything about what they were like in the office during a crisis: engaged, and tough. It's something else.'
        • Amazing that Bush got to be President at all. Oh, wait, I forgot, he stole the election.
      • 'Speeches are the vehicle for philosophy. Interviews are the vehicle of policy. Mr. Kerry does talking points and can't give an interesting speech. Mr. Bush can't do talking points and gives speeches full of thought and assertion. Philosophy takes time. If you connect your answers in an interview to philosophy, or go to philosophy first, you can look as if you're dodging the question. You can forget the question. You can look a little gaga. But policy doesn't take time. Policy is a machine gun--bip bip bip. Education policy, bip bip bip. Next.'
        • Is Peggy desperate or was she high when she wrote this? So Bush makes his policies in machine gun fashion? No wonder they suck! I'm sure Bush writes all his speeches himself! LOL! What a joke. Kerry doesn't have the Presidential powers to get big money speech writers yet.
    • In Rare Talk Show Interview, Bush Defends Decision on War
    • The DNC comments on the interview

Profanity

• I don't know much about profanity: I have neither the knowledge of the linguistic and social origins of swear words or the ability to express myself poetically with obscenities. However it's a free country and it's my blog. I assume that "biatch" is a variation "bitch" (a la Snoop Doggy Dog). This clearly might have possibly led to "shiat" as a variation of a "shit". But the neat thing is that "shiat" may have led to "ass hat" as a variation of "ass hole"! I don't know but it sounds like a good theory. I love "ass hat" because an "ass hole" is a super-jerk but it say nothing about his intelligence. However an "ass hat" is a stupid asshole. EG: Dick Cheney is an ass hole but George W. Bush is an ass hat.
• A "scoundrel" sounds too much like a compliment. A "dog" is close but I don't like to insult dogs. The word "jerk" should be reserved for bad boyfriends. The word "bastard" has the perfect connotation but unfortunately its literal meaning is lame. "Toad"... hmm that might do.

Science

• For Science, Nanotech Poses Big Unknowns. Regular people need to get hip with nanotech, not just the science fiction people.
• Cox will recommend 'evolution' stay in curriculum
  • Score a win for science!
  • "I made the decision to remove the word evolution from the draft of the proposed biology curriculum in an effort to avoid controversy that would prevent people from reading the substance of the document itself. Instead, a greater controversy ensued." Kathy Cox, State Schools Superintendent of Georgia.
  • Related links:
    • Georgia official proposes striking word 'evolution' from curriculum
    • Carter slams Georgia's 'evolution' proposal
    • In a State That will Live in Infamy
      • 'And yet last week, as Georgia was pretending that the word "evolution" was too controversial to mention, scientists in China were announcing that they had documented how the SARS virus had twice evolved -- excuse me, had "changed biologically over time" -- as it migrated from animals to human beings.'
• The Invisible [videos with audio]. Gradually zoom in on everyday objects until you're at the molecular level.
• Spot the fake smiles. : ) I rated myself as so-so with spotting fake smiles but I scored 17 right out of 20. I don't know how other people did but it does say that most "people are surprisingly bad at spotting fake smiles". This test is one of many tests they have.
• WolframScience.com. Yummy! I love it when people place their entire book online. In this case it's A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram.
• Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctrow, a science fiction book is also free online.

Sex

• Rape in the military: Female troops deserve much better.
  • 'While the foundation has declined to release details of the incidents, it said some women felt that they had been doubly victimized: first by attackers in their own ranks and then by shoddy military treatment.'
• Kansas appeals court backs harsher sentence for illegal gay sex, says difference justifiable. Holy homophobes, Batman! Gay sex, under aged sex, and developmentally disabled sex? That's quite a span.
• NYPD: Dad Executes Paroled Sex Offender. Umm the sex offender may have been "innocent" for this most recent incident but, like Michael Jackson, he shouldn't have been alone anywhere near a minor.
• Texas Pharmacist Refuses Pill for Rape Victim. Dude: If you can dole out the drugs, then get a different job.
• Mass. court clears way for gay marriages
  • 'The Massachusetts high court declared Wednesday that gays are entitled to nothing less than marriage and that Vermont-style civil unions will not suffice, setting the stage for the nation's first legally sanctioned same-sex weddings by the spring.'
  • Way to go!
• Kiss.arrr.net. 'The Kiss is a place to talk about kisses. Specifically, it's a place to talk about those kisses that mattered'. Hmm... something romantic... Valentine's Day must not be far away.
• Central Park Zoo's gay penguins ignite debate
  • 'Bruce Bagemihl published "Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity" (St. Martin's Press), one of the first books of its kind to provide an overview of scholarly studies of same-sex behavior in animals. Bagemihl said homosexual behavior had been documented in some 450 species.'
  • 'But he added: "Infanticide is widespread in the animal kingdom. To jump from that to say it is desirable makes no sense. We shouldn't be using animals to craft moral and social policies for the kinds of human societies we want to live in. Animals don't take care of the elderly. I don't particularly think that should be a platform for closing down nursing homes." '

Show Biz

• I was shocked to see a boob during the Super Bowl on 2004-02-01! I only tuned in to the Super Bowl for a few seconds and I caught the very worst part! Yes, I was disgusted as I saw Bush's dopy, smirking face. As far as Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" during the Super Bowl: it's no big deal. Accidents happen during live performances. Move on please!
• The Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson is coming out on the 25th of this month and it looks like different Christian groups are buying up thousands of tickets so people can see them. Maybe I should go over to one of these groups and snag some free tickets? Related links:
  • Gibson Film Gets Huge Marketing Effort
  • A Jewish View of Gibson's 'Passion'
  • Some Christians See 'Passion' as Evangelism Tool

Tech

• Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1: W3C Recommendation 04 February 2004.
  • Holy crap! It's been years since XML 1.0 became an official W3C recommendation in 1998.
  • XML 1.1 includes adaptations for Unicode since Unicode went from v2 to v4.
  • XML 1.1 also shows their nepotism toward Unix since now all XML processors must normalize line breaks as the Unix line break of #xA (LINE FEED). I like the explicit of acknowledgement of all the variations of EOLs (End Of Lines) including combinations of #xA, #xD (CARRIAGE RETURN), #x85 (mainframe NEL), and #x2028 (Unicode line separator). EG: #xD#xA for Microsoft and #xD for Macintosh.
  • The nicest change in XML 1.1 is an over all emphasis on name conventions. In 1.0 everything that was not permitted was forbidden. In contrast, in XML 1.1 everything that is not forbidden is permitted. Liberals!
  • This has got me working on my much neglected DOM and DHTML pages. You'll have to forgive the hideous state they're currently in.
• Arrgh! One of my reasons for moving from Chemical Engineering to Computers was to get away from Physical Chemistry. And yet my interest in programming, self-organizing systems, complexity theory seems to lead back to P. Chem! Painful indeed. Related links:
  • Can't Get No Satisfaction. By Brian Hayes.
  • Phase transition
  • http://fortnow.com/lance/complog/. "My Computational Complexity Web Log".
  • Where the REALLY Hard Problems Are
• Wi-Max is coming. Wi-Max (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) is based on IEEE 802.16. With its 30 mile (50 km) range it beats Wi-Fi's block range but Wi-Max is more like a T1 replacement than a Wi-Fi replacement.
  • Will Wi-Max make Wi-Fi obsolete?
  • Waiting For Wi-MAX
• Seven years jail, $150,000 fine if you don't tell the world your email and home address
  • Bill HR 3754, which demands that domain name registrants provide real personal information for display, is just plain wrong. This is a case where a politician, Lamar Smith of Texas, is setting point-haired policy without having thought the plan through.
• I was going to try out Microsoft FrontPage 2003 this week but this commentary fake ad makes me wary.

Terrorism

• US blamed for Sept 11 acquittal as German prosecutors appeal
  • 'In passing judgment, presiding judge Klaus Ruehle said it was for lack of evidence, not because the court was convinced of his innocence. He cited the refusal of US officials to release evidence from the alleged coordinator behind the attacks, Ramzi Binalshibh, as one of the major factors forcing Mzoudi's acquittal.'
• Two US Soldiers ask: "When will we stop dying so senselessly?", Jay Shaft, January 31, 2004
  • 'I want to talk about this and tell people how bad it really is in Iraq. It is a complete fu..ing slaughter and it is only going to get worse. The attacks in the last month or so have been meticulously well planned and executed. We are seeing a level of sophistication that the chain of command did not ever expect. Many of the officers knew that they were going to be dealing with well trained Iraqi army and militia units. There might or might not be outside support and insurgents, but I know the Iraqis are more than capable of messing up your day. These guys have been trained to fight guerilla style and they don t give up. We are in deep sh.t now that they have started to get more organized.'
  • 'I get really mad when they kill or injure one of my men, but I have to examine why the attacks are happening. I am there to lead and protect my men, and that means I have to be aware of what is causing the attacks and what would stop them. I have asked many Iraqis what it will take to get the attacks to stop. They all tell me that the US needs to do what they said they would do, and leave them to run their own country. The majority of Iraqis believed that the US would come in, get rid of Saddam, and then go right back home. You and I both know that is not going to happen anytime soon. We are going to be there for at least another year or more in a very large force. There is no way that Bush and his cronies are going to give up all that oil and contracting dollars.'
  • 'I want to say that I am extremely mad that Halliburton and Bechtel have better equipment than our own troops do. The contractors have fully armored Hummers and the best body armor. The have us escort them in our lightly armored Humvees and they ride in heavily armored vehicles. That is bullsh.t and every American needs to know about it. It s been in the paper recently about how bad the casualties have been from the older Hummers. Our vehicles don t provide adequate protection, and that is a fu..ing outrage that needs to be fixed.'
  • 'I am proud to serve my country and even die for it. I know the risks of putting on the uniform and accepting command. But damn it, if we are going to die, make it for something that really is helping to defend the US. I agree that we are dying senselessly for an idea of democracy in Iraq that the US government will never really let happen. I just want to be able to look back on my service with total pride and that is not really what I feel right now. I hate the ones in power that have made me question my sense of duty and honor. I get so confused about it and there is no one you can really talk to about that.'
  • Related link: US Soldier: "Sometimes it is a soldier's duty to tell the truth, no matter what": US Army high level commander on why he has chosen to speak out
• The 45-minute case collapses (Part 1): JIC alerted Blair three times over unsafe WMD claim. Ah but evidence is irrelevant isn't it?
• A Tragedy of Errors
  • 'Unfortunately for them, a political ideology can fail in the real world only so many times before being completely discredited. For at least two decades, in foreign policy the neocons have been wrong about everything. When the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse, the hawks of Team B and the Committee on the Present Danger declared that it was on the verge of world domination. In the 1990s they exaggerated the power and threat of China, once again putting ideology ahead of the sober analysis of career military and intelligence experts. The neocons were so obsessed with Saddam Hussein and Yasir Arafat that they missed the growing threat of Al Qaeda. After 9/11 they pushed the irrelevant panaceas of preventive war and missile defense as solutions to the problems of hijackers and suicide bombers.

    They said Saddam had WMDs. He didn't. They said he was in league with Osama bin Laden. He wasn't. They predicted that no major postwar insurgency in Iraq would occur. It did. They said there would be a wave of pro-Americanism in the Middle East and the world if the United States acted boldly and unilaterally. Instead, there was a regional and global wave of anti-Americanism.

    David Brooks and his colleagues in the neocon press are half right. There is no neocon network of scheming masterminds--only a network of scheming blunderers. As a result of their own amateurism and incompetence, the neoconservatives have humiliated themselves. If they now claim that they never existed--well, you can hardly blame them, can you?'

• The terrible human cost of Bush and Blair's military adventure: 10,000 civilian deaths
• Soldiers Record Lessons From Iraq: Unvarnished Tales Serve as Warning. Sort of like a tech support knowledge base eh?

2004-02-10t16:05:08Z | RE: Life.
Snow Moment

I had another snow moment this morning: my second one this winter. A snow moment is when you're just going along outside and then all of the sudden you notice how beautiful the falling snow is. Two things are required for a snow moment to occur. The first thing is that your mind has to be in a particular state: transient, fragile, beautiful, receptive.

The second thing is a good snow setting. The snow has to waft down in whimsical ways, not just drop. The falling snow has to have individual snow flake crystals visible even from a distance. The chill should be slight, a gentle breath on your nose.  The falling snow needs dark patches to serve as the backdrop: buildings, the underside trees, and patches of blue sky will do. The background should vary in distance: This way as you move your eyes around, sometimes you have a relationship with just a few flakes, and sometimes you see snow falling far a field.

When a snowflake falls on your eyelash, it should linger a brief moment before melting away. The drop of moisture upon your eye may be either a former snowflake or tear of joy. As much as you'd like the snow moment to continue, it is essential to let the snow moment pass before it becomes artificial.

2004-02-11t02:40:18Z | RE: Martial Arts: Karate. Life. Politics.
Zahra and Sima Memorial Service

Zahra and Sima Memorial Service

Mahmoud, my karate instructor from my college days lost his wife, his daughter, and around 60 other relatives during the earthquake in Bam, Iran on 2003-12-26. So last night he had a memorial service for the people state-side since the bodies were actually buried in Iran. I have a lot of baggage with him but I went last night and I actually had a good time.

Now I imagine most people don't go to memorials and funerals to have a good time, but I've actually come to appreciate funerals. For the grieving, the ceremony can provide a much needed catharsis. But the part that I appreciate the most is that funerals makes me think more about life than death. People making statements about the deceased usually talk about how that person lived. This is the essence of Bushido (The Way of the Warrior). Living with death in mind can help you live a better life even if you are not a warrior. The concept is very powerful and, while secular, is actually used by most religions. But why do people have to think about what people will think about them after they've died? What about thinking about what people think of you while you're alive? What about what you think of yourself while you're alive? And why reserve these kinds of thoughts for funerals? Why not ask these questions on a regular basis?

At the service they discussed the accomplishments, the social skills, and the character of the deceased. All those factors are attributed to a person but those factors are also largely affected by genes, environment, and luck. I appreciate character the most because while society can measure and appreciate your accomplishments and social skills, if you don't appreciate your own character, then the rest won't really matter to yourself.

As an introvert:

• Accomplishments seems so external unless done for internal reasons. Besides we miss our loved ones regardless of what they've accomplished.
• My social skills are polite and genuine but not gregarious. Just the other day I was in line at the grocery store. The guy in front of me was a socially skilled extrovert. He had people laughing and smiling not just in my line but in the next lane too! Boy, did I feel like a wall flower.
• I focus on my sincerity because it sucks to lie to yourself.

The church was almost full and after the service everyone headed over to the cafeteria to commiserate. It was great fun seeing people I haven't seen in a long time.

• Kathy K. Seeing Kathy made me feel twentysomething again. She was glowing and looked fabulous. Her husband was pretty cool too. You missed out big time Hakan!
• Debbie S. Debbie was there with her growing up fast daughter Kali. Debbie's SO Jeff was there too. On the other hand it wasn't too long ago that Debbie came over and visited with us.
• Ray P. Ray was this little waist-high blonde kid with a smarty-punk attitude when I first met him and now he's a respectable handsome man! Ray was a natural karate talent who was fun to watch. He's gotten back into karate and he'll be fun to watch again. Ray's mom was there and it was good to hear his brother was doing well and his dad was doing a lot better. We both wondered where Rambod (Ray's evil twin) was.
• Ralph C. Ralph looks slick with his cane and his razor sharp fresh buzz cut. I couldn't resist running my fingers over that.
• Bob P. Bob was still doing the lawyer thing.
• Titus Y. Dude! You weren't there! I'm sure you had a good reason but we missed you.
• Angel. Angel looked exactly the same and he's still teaching a mix of martial arts.
• Youngsters. There were gobs youngsters. An organization needs to have a stream of new people otherwise the organization dies from the eventual attrition.

It is fun to hang around people who are into something. It is curious to hang around people who believe in something and haven't yet seen it in a larger context. It is somewhat uncomfortable to hang around people who are still in something when you know they know what they do is a shell.

I also had fun with the rank thing. Some people hang on to an artificial concept of rank and they hope that others abide by it. But most people can see beyond that. People respect skill. People can recognize talent. People appreciate persistent effort and experience. People should be able to tell between actual knowledge and fluff. People should know when people are genuinely respectful. These are all parts of what I consider to be "true rank". Your rank does not matter: what matters is that you have a feel of your true rank. Do not imagine yourself as super special because of your rank. Nor should you imagine yourself as a lowly peon because of your rank.

I was all hyped from hanging around the karate setting. I was in yellow alert, with my eyes bright, my body chemistry pumped, my movements swift and sure. After the cafeteria gig our little circle went over to have some food. I got that urge to get into a bar fight again. It must have shown because after we sat down, a busty girl who was leaving when we arrived, came back to settle something with the bill, and she definitely gave me flirty moment. How fun after being married for 10 years! Of course, I immediately assumed a more "married" demeanor.

I thought we were having desserts and coffee but I got tricked into buying ribs. The ribs were good though. The guys are all smart, broad-minded, good-hearted, and handsome fighters. (They're all like me! Ha ha!) However, I'm the only Democrat in the group and it's always fun to talk about politics with these guys.  I think we reached a break through in defining the crux of how our opinions differ.

The simplest example is over the metric system. The metric system is the dominant system for measuring used by every country on the planet except for the US. Every scientist and engineer will agree that the metric system is superior in every way to the American units of measure. Adding decimal math is much easier manually and digitally than math with fractions.

• Democrats:
  • Converting to the metric system is worth the effort.
  • American industries are already halfway there: we just need to complete the job.
• Republicans:
  • Converting to the metric system is unnecessary.
  • American industries would find it too expensive.

Here are other issues in a compact form:

2004-02-14t14:38:54Z | RE: Bush. Bush: AWOL. Chicago. Comic Art. Faith. Food. Iraq. Love. Money. Presidential Election. Science. Sex. Show Biz. Tech. War Craft III. . .
2004-02-14t14:38:54Z

Bush

• Robin Williams ridicules Bush. I wish they included more jokes. All they had was this:
  • "Bush is complaining about a lack of intelligence, which seems sort of redundant."
  • "They say they don't know if Iraq had any WMDs -- well, all they have to do is ask Cheney for the receipts."
• Censor 'Scooby-Doo'? Words fail
  • 'The Bush administration has decided that people with bad hearing have bad judgment, too, and need special guidance from the federal government. So the U.S. Department of Education is declaring about 200 television programs inappropriate for closed-captioning and denying federal grant requests to make them accessible to the hearing-impaired. The department made its decisions based on the recommendations of a five-member panel. Who the five members are, only the government seems to know, and it isn't saying. But the shows they censored suggest a perspective that is Talibanesque.'
  • WTF!! This fucking sucks!
  • 'The government is refusing to caption Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, apparently fearing that the deaf would fall prey to witchcraft if they viewed the classic sitcoms. Your government also believes that Law & Order is too intense for the hard-of-hearing. So is Power Rangers. You can rest easy knowing that your federal tax dollars aren't being spent to promote Sanford and Son, Judge Wapner's Animal Court and The Loretta Young Show within the deaf community. Kids with hearing problems can forget about watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, classic cartoons or Nickelodeon features. Even Roy Rogers and Robin Hood are out. Sports programming took a heavy hit, too. The government has decided that people with hearing problems don't need to watch NASCAR, Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, the National Football League or Professional Golf Association tournaments.'
  • 'How imperiled the nation might be if The Simpsons and Malcolm in the Middle reached into the living rooms of the impressionable hard-of-hearing. Or, for that matter, Scooby-Doo.'
  • 'The NAD [National Association of the Deaf] is lobbying Congress to change the policy. Some networks and sponsors are stepping in and providing captions for some of the "inappropriate" shows. But the government's dismissive treatment of 28 million Americans defies words. "We are outraged the department has taken paternalistic steps to exclude deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals," Mr. Brick says. "Such censorship is offensive and insulting." '
• Cheney's future at stake after leaking of CIA agent's name.
  • Dig, dig, dig! There's tons of dirt!
  • 'But recent polls conducted by the White House have suggested that growing unpopularity of the taciturn ex-businessman and powerful administration hawk threatens to sink the president. '
  • 'The leaking of an undercover agent's identity is a serious crime under US law. The hearings are leading justice department investigators towards the vice president's office, according to a source familiar with the investigation. "Three of the five people who are targets work or worked in Cheney's office," the source said.'
• U.S. Military May Run Out Of Money
  • 'The military will have no money to pay for the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for three months beginning Oct. 1 because the White House is declining to ask Congress for funding until December or January, well after the presidential election.'
  • What's that you say? Bush is putting politics ahead of good policy?

Bush: AWOL

• 'Bush and I were lieutenants'
  • 'George Bush and I [William Campenni] were lieutenants and pilots in the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron (FIS), Texas Air National Guard (ANG) from 1970 to 1971.'
  • 'In the fighter-pilot world, we have a phrase we use when things are starting to get out of hand and it's time to stop and reset before disaster strikes. We say, "Knock it off." So, Mr. Kerry and your friends who want to slander the Guard: Knock it off.'
  • Dude, no one is slandering the Guard. We don't even care if he used the Guard to duck out of the Vietnam War. After all Clinton did it (but he also wasn't President during open war). We just want to know the specifics of Bush's apparent long leaves from the Guard.
  • Liars for Bush. This guy points out some bald faced lies by Campenni.
• Ex-officer: Bush file's details caused concern
  • 'Two forms in Bush's publicly released military files -- his enlistment application and a background check -- contain blacked-out entries in response to questions about arrests or convictions. Bush acknowledged in biographies published in 1999 that he was arrested twice before he enlisted in the Air National Guard: once for stealing a wreath and another time for rowdiness at a Yale-Princeton football game. The nature of what was blacked out in Bush's records is important because certain legal problems, such as drug or alcohol violations, could have been a basis for denying an applicant entry into the Guard or pilot training. Admission to the Guard and to pilot school was highly competitive at that time, the height of the Vietnam War. '
  • 'In an interview that aired Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press, Bush said he fulfilled his Guard commitment and offered to make his records public. Host Tim Russert asked, "Would you authorize the release of everything to settle this?" Bush replied, "Yes, absolutely." Since then, White House officials have released only documents concerning whether Bush fulfilled his service obligations. White House statements have not addressed the release of any papers that could show disciplinary actions, medical exams, legal scrapes and the like.'
• Press Briefing by Scott McClellan
  • The astonishing thing about this is the tone. It is evident that the Press is doling out very little patience and respect for the current administration but they are doing it in direct proportion to the administration's degree of credibility: very little.
• Bush moved to Alabama unit without Air Force permission
  • 'George W. Bush left his Texas Air National Guard assignment and moved to Alabama in 1972 even though the Air Force denied his request for a transfer, according to his military records. In fact, Bush did not even ask for an official transfer until nine days after he moved to Alabama in May 1972. '
  • 'Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense for personnel and a Navy flier in Vietnam, said a pilot losing his flight status was a serious matter. "We spent $1 million to train him to fly," Korb said. "You're supposed to be ready to fly if we need you. If you didn't show up for your flight physical, good heavens!" '
• Chasing George W. Bush and the F-102. Pictures of the planes themselves.

Chicago

• Ah our beloved Richard M. Daley, da Mayor of Chicago. First of all there's this truck scam and Daley is mad that he didn't know about it. Then over the next few days, some people quit, some people are fired, and Daley even fired his cousin! (Sun Times and Tribune) That's how you clean up shop. Unlike Bush's administration where no one is accountable and investigations never really get anywhere. (Of course it's because Bush himself is... oh never mind, I'm getting of topic.)
  
  And I love how Teflon Daley immediately judos onto another topic which his main political base probably finds to be much more important: The property tax assessment system. Daley said that "we need to change the unfairness in the system and take the mystery out of the way the Cook County assessor's office values homes and apartments."
  
  See?! There's nothing wrong with being king if you do it right and you do it smartly. I would love to be photographed with The Mayor but I would be embarrassed to be photographed with Bush.

Comic Art

• Spider-Man Comic Archive. Scans of every Spider-Man comic book.
• Science fiction, comics pioneer [Julius Schwartz] dead at 89.

Faith

• Mel Gibson says his wife could be going to hell. Hehe.

Food

• When Faith Is Toast
  • 'A group of anti-Atkins guerrilla fighters, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which advocates vegetarian diets, got hold of the New York City medical examiner's report on Atkins's death and went to town with it. They raised all sorts of questions: Why the heart condition? Why was he so obese? Did his diet contribute to his heart problems? In other words, could you really eat fat and lose weight at the same time -- and stay healthy? After all, 72 is not that old.'
  • I don't follow the mantra of "eat less, exercise more", instead my mantra is "exercise a lot and eat a variety of stuff (including some fun stuff) when you get hungry". Just eat and live on naturally. Unless you are a cook or something like that, your life should not revolve around food and your mind should not dwell on food. I'm too busy living my life.

Iraq

• UN now backs elections in Iraq.
  • 'The United Nations has opted to support calls from one of the main leaders of Iraq's Shiite Muslim community for early elections. The move to back Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's insistance on one-person-one-vote over the US plans to hand back sovereignty took place amid heavy security in the wake of two recent suicide bombings that killed nearly 100 Iraqis.
    
    In a nod to Sistani's rising influence, UN diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi announced the decision after a two-hour visit to the reclusive cleric's home in the holy Shiite city of Najaf, 90 miles south of Baghdad. Mr. Brahimi said that Sistani "is insistent on holding the elections and we are with him on this 100 percent because elections are the best means to enable any people to set up a state that serves their interest."
    • In other words: The Bush "plan" sucked!
  • 'Sistani has refused to meet with US officials, including Bremer, and demands that an elected legislature - rather than the US-picked Iraqi Governing Council - approve a temporary constitution still being drawn up.
    
    Sistani's calls for direct elections, which he has been making regularly since last June, seemed largely to fall upon deaf ears until he mobilized followers for massive demonstrations last month in the southern city of Basra and in Baghdad. But when tens of thousands of angry protesters marched through the streets chanting "Yes, yes to elections; no, no to selection," followed by Sistani's statement that the protests could turn violent if elections were not held within months, everyone listened. '
• Pentagon eager to wash hands of Iraq mess it created
  • 'A year ago, testifying before Congress, Wolfowitz predicted that securing postwar Iraq would be an easier job than the United States and its allies faced in Bosnia or Afghanistan. After all, the deputy secretary said, there's no ethnic tension in Iraq. The immediate reaction of virtually everyone who knew even a little bit about Iraq and its long-simmering tensions, repression, bloodshed and just plain bad blood among Kurds and Turkomen in the north, Sunni Arabs in the middle and Shiite Muslims in the south, was: Say what? Not since President Ford prematurely declared Soviet-dominated Poland a free country has a public official stuck his foot so deeply and so publicly in his mouth.'
    • Ha ha!
  • 'Rumsfeld and his key aides, meanwhile, are running for cover. In one recent high-level meeting, Rumsfeld looked at Secretary of State Colin Powell and said, "Jerry (Ambassador Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian in Iraq) works for you, right?" Powell looked as if he'd been struck by lightning. Bremer and every other U.S. official in Iraq reports directly to Rumsfeld and the Pentagon. Rumsfeld demanded and got complete authority over the military, over the civilian authority in charge of rebuilding the country, over the administration's $87 billion Iraq budget, over every line of every contract let. And suddenly he forgot that Bremer works for him?'
    • Ha ha!
  • ' "Iraq is now a contaminated environment and Rumsfeld and his people want out," said one senior administration official. "They can't wait for July 1 when the CPA (Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority) turns into the U.S. Embassy and the whole mess they have made becomes Colin Powell's." '
    • Ha ha!
• Conservative U.S. anchor [Bill O'Reilly] now skeptical about Bush
  • ' "I was wrong. I am not pleased about it at all and I think all Americans should be concerned about this," O'Reilly said in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America."
  • "What do you want me to do, go over and kiss the camera?" asked O'Reilly, who had promised rival ABC last year he would publicly apologize if weapons were not found.'
    • BWAH-HA-HA! Best laugh all day so far!
• Powell Scolds Hill Staffer At Hearing
  • 'Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, a retired four-star general known for his even temperament, paused yesterday during a congressional hearing to berate a Hill staffer for shaking his head as Powell offered a defense of his prewar statements on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.'
    • BWAH-HA-HA! It just gets better!
  • 'Powell was recalling for the panel his review of the prewar intelligence. "I went and lived at the CIA for about four days to make sure that nothing was," he began, when he paused and glared at a staffer seated behind the members of Congress. "Are you shaking your head for something, young man, back there?" Powell asked. "Are you part of these proceedings?" '
    • I feel sorry for Powell. It's a shame that he ever got mixed up with this Bush crowd.
• Contract Sport: What did the Vice-President do for Halliburton?
  • 'Advocates of privatization, who have included fiscally minded Democrats as well as Republicans, have argued that competition in the marketplace is the best way to control costs. But Steven Kelman, a professor of public management at Harvard, notes that the competition for Iraq contracts is unusually low. "On battlefield support, there are only a few companies that are willing and able to do the work," he said. Moreover, critics such as Waxman point out that public accountability is being sacrificed. "We can't even find out how much Halliburton charges to do the laundry," Waxman said. "It's inexcusable that they should keep this information from the Congress, and the people." '
  • 'The Hatch Act, for example, forbids most government employees from giving money to political campaigns. Halliburton has no such constraints. The company made political contributions of more than seven hundred thousand dollars between 1999 and 2002, almost always to Republican candidates or causes.'
  • 'There are some hundred and thirty-five thousand American troops in Iraq, but Gardiner estimated that there would be as many as three hundred thousand if not for private contractors. He said, "Think how much harder it would have been to get Congress, or the American public, to support those numbers." '
• U.S. Says Files Seek Qaeda Aid in Iraq Conflict
  • 'American officials here have obtained a detailed proposal that they conclude was written by an operative in Iraq [Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian] to senior leaders of Al Qaeda, asking for help to wage a "sectarian war" in Iraq in the next months.'
  • 'The document would also constitute the strongest evidence to date of contacts between extremists in Iraq and Al Qaeda. But it does not speak to the debate about whether there was a Qaeda presence in Iraq during the Saddam Hussein era, nor is there any mention of a collaboration with Hussein loyalists.'
    • There may not have been a link between Iraq and Al Queda before the invasion but now there might be.

Love

• Secrets of Super-Happy Couples: Twelve ways to keep your relationship thriving. My sweet wife sent me this link. ^_^
  1. Fall in love all over again
  2. Remember the good times
  3. Help your partner feel more loved and secure in your love
  4. Don't make unilateral decisions
  5. Be present
  6. Pay attention to your physical appearance
  7. Boost your compatibility
  8. Do not place blame
  9. Plan for sex
  10. Fact-find -- don't mind-read
  11. Fight fair -- and by appointment only
  12. Prepare for checkouts
• Barbie and Ken Break Up. Alas! Mattel can make more money if they let Barbie date other men. That's when you go steady for too long without ever popping the question.
  

Money

• Reaction to Comcast-Disney Offer Mixed
  • ' "Therefore, while there could be merits in combining content with distribution, we do not believe these are overwhelming, as we have seen with a company such as Time Warner which has yet to really show the inherent benefit of marrying content and distribution," Jill Krutik, an analyst at Citigroup Smith Barney wrote in a note Wednesday.'
  • 'Combining content, such as Disney's ESPN network, with distribution, like Comcast's cable subscribers and high-speed Internet customers, could make sense, but Disney has shown it is able to find customers for its content without owning its own cable system or satellite television network.'
  • I don't like the feel of this merger. Comcast should get content from many content providers. Disney should distribute its content to many distributors. I don't see any real benefits for this merger. Plus there's the whole loss of branding: The names of "Comcast" and "Disney" tell people exactly what they do. Comcast won't lose much but Disney would dilute has decades worth of branding.
• Watching the Jobs Go By
  • 'The broader problem is not just in schools but society as a whole: There's a tendency in U.S. intellectual circles to value the humanities but not the sciences. Anyone who doesn't nod sagely at the mention of Plato's cave is dismissed as barely civilized, while it's no blemish to be ignorant of statistics, probability and genetics. If we're going to revere Plato, as we should, we should also remember that his academy supposedly had a sign at the entrance: "Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here."
    
    In 1957, the Soviet launching of Sputnik frightened America into substantially improving math and science education. I'm hoping that the loss of jobs in medicine and computers to India and elsewhere will again jolt us into bolstering our own teaching of math and science. '

Presidential Election

• A Good Laugh.
  • By Jay Leno:
    • "Today, one critic in the LA Times said the problem with John Kerry is he looks like he's thinking too much. Well, at least that's one place President Bush has got him beat."
    • "You know about the fight that's going on now between Kerry's people and Bush's people over the military service? Do you know about this? Kerry is saying that Bush never showed up for his National Guard duty. That's what they're saying. Yeah. And now Bush is on the attack. He's accusing John Kerry of ducking time in the National Guard by hiding out in the jungles of Vietnam."
    • "Tuesday, John Edwards won the South Carolina primary. You know his basic stump speech. This whole point is, John Edwards keeps saying there are really two Americas -- one where he tries to hide a Southern accent, and one where he tries to emphasize it."
  • By Conan O'Brien:
    • "Both John Kerry and Wesley Clark are making campaign appearances with the men who saved their lives in Vietnam. That's what they're doing. Meanwhile, President Bush is going to campaign with a man who once took a math test for him."
• Edwards is everything Bush falsely claims to be and more
  • 'Bush, on the other hand, skillfully portrays himself as "one of us," a "true American" with "family values," someone with "common sense" who "knows the value of hard work" (not that he ever engages in it). His resume is mainly a list of bailouts from his father and his father's friends. No matter, he gets elected. Add to that incumbency and $200 million and you have quite the home field advantage in 2004.'
  • 'Then there is John McCain, who had a much better resume than Bush and stood upon principles Bush didn't even know existed. If there ever was a military candidate to defeat Bush, it was John McCain with his Purple Heart, Vietnam vet and POW experience. No matter, Bush won.'
  • 'Edwards can defrock Bush because he is everything Bush falsely claims to be and more. Edwards is the trusted neighbor, the high school football player of working-class roots who put himself through college to become an immensely successful lawyer and U.S. senator whose integrity and intelligence are highly regarded by liberals and conservatives alike.'
  • 'The clincher for me was imagining each of the Democratic candidates toe-to-toe with Bush on the debate stage. When the astute, optimistic, hard-working, unifying Edwards takes the stage, Bush will clearly be seen as the arrogant, lazy, cynical, divisive, never-had-to-earn-it, class clown phony that he is. Edwards is the perfect foil for the Bush facade.'
• Tennessee, Virginia go to Kerry; Clark quits. Kerry will eventually be the Democratic candidate for the Presidential Election 2004. Now we still have to use the primary process to refine the arguments, the presentations, the issues.
• Links tough on Kerry's win:
  • Kerried Away: The myth and math of Kerry's electability.
  • False Positive
• Wesley Clark to endorse Democratic front-runner John Kerry
• Photo of Kerry with Fonda enrages Vietnam veterans. Pretty lame actually. UPDATE 2004-02-16: Apparently the photo of Kerry was doctored, so the story is even lamer.

Science

• Did you ever wonder what it would be like to pop a water balloon in space? No, but I have wondered about sex in space.

Sex

• Committee Approves Porn Magazine: H Bomb will feature nude pictures of undergraduates
  • 'In early December, Katharina C. Baldegg '06 and Camilla A. Hrdy '05, the two students who proposed the magazine, met with [Assistant Dean of the College Paul J.] McLoughlin to begin the approval process for H Bomb.'
  • ' "It's a sex magazine that will hopefully be run by students of all sexual orientations and backgrounds," Baldegg said. Baldegg said she expected the magazine, which will also include art and fiction articles, to garner a lot of attention. "I guess student porn is sort of an underground thing," she said. Only students of the College will be posing for the magazine's photographs and they will all be 18 or older, Baldegg said.'
  • Gee, we didn't have school approved porn when I was in college!
• Where time stands still: Hihokan - Erotic Museums in Japan [NSFW]. More funny and strange than anything else.

Show Biz

• The Star Wars Trilogy on DVD [on 2004-09-21]. It's about time. All we've been able to get on DVD are the crappy episodes I and II.

Tech

• Microsoft Warns Windows Prone to Hacking
  • ' "This is one of the most serious Microsoft vulnerabilities ever released," said Marc Maiffret of eEye Digital Security Inc. of Aliso Viejo, Calif., which discovered the new Windows flaws. "The breadth of systems affected is probably the largest ever. This is something that will let you get into Internet servers, internal networks, pretty much any system." Maiffret said some computer systems that control critically important power or water utilities were vulnerable. Maiffret predicted hackers will try to unleash a damaging Internet infection within weeks. Unlike earlier vulnerabilities that spawned such attacks, hackers can exploit the newly disclosed flaws to break into susceptible computers using dozens of methods, making any defense far more difficult.
  • ' "The race will be on," agreed Marcus Sachs, a former White House adviser on cybersecurity. '
  • 'Toulouse said Microsoft took months because it wanted to ensure that a single repairing patch solved any related problems. "We really took the steps to make sure our investigation was as broad and deep as possible," he said.'
  • 'Microsoft's disclosure occurred just days before a presidential advisory council submits recommendations to the White House about ways technology companies should respond to major software vulnerabilities that could affect national security. The 54-page report, obtained by The Associated Press, cautions that "long delays in remediation can result in prolonged risk to end users." '
  • Microsoft was right to not announce this security hole until they got the patch up. However, if it were a Linux hole, the hole would have been announced immediately so that the entire Open Source community could work on the problem right away.
• Well-Designed Weblogs: An Introduction and Well-Designed Weblogs Volume 2.
• Running notes from Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks
  • 'All geeks have a todo.txt file. They use texteditors (Word, BBEd, Emacs, Notepad) not Outlook or whathaveyou.'
    • EXACTLY RIGHT. My personal rolodex and to do lists are need much more flexibility than is offered by any pre-made system like Outlook, MSN, Yahoo, etc.
  • 'Power-users don't trust complicated apps. Every time power-geeks has had a crash, s/he moves away from it. You can't trust software unless you've written it -- and then you're just more forgiving.'
  • 'Text files are portable (except for CRLF issues) between mac and win and *nix.'
  • 'Geeks write scripts to take apart dull, repetitive tasks. They'll spend 10h writing a script that will save 11h -- because writing scripts is interesting and doing dull stuff isn't.'
    • Hehe. I've done that.
  • 'All geeks back up. They've all learned the lesson. They do it instead of backing up. Synching is the new backup. Spread stuff as widely as possible -- that way the nuke won't get it all.'
  • 'Geeks have boilerplates for invoices, etc. '
  • 'Edd Dumbhill: Ideas rot if you don't do something with them. Don't hoard them. I blog them or otherwise tell people. This is a way to look organized, "That guy has lots of ideas, what a genius."
    • Yep, that's part of why I blog.
  • 'You only have to be right once -- people google for some idea and find your ramble about it and are impressed.'
  • 'Making stuff public is like having your parents come to stay -- you clean everything up. '
    • Yes a public web site and blog makes me organize things much more neatly than I would just for myself.
• Google spurns RSS for rising blog format [Atom]. Ah, the dangers of monopolies.
• WorldOfEnds.com.
  • 'All we need to do is pay attention to what the Internet really is. It's not hard. The Net isn't rocket science. It isn't even 6th grade science fair, when you get right down to it. We can end the tragedy of Repetitive Mistake Syndrome in our lifetimes -- and save a few trillion dollars' worth of dumb decisions -- if we can just remember one simple fact: the Net is a world of ends. You're at one end, and everybody and everything else are at the other ends.'
• Intel Says Chip Speed Breakthrough Will Alter Cyberworld
  • 'The invention demonstrates for the first time, Intel researchers said, that ultrahigh-speed fiberoptic equipment can be produced at personal computer industry prices. As the costs of communicating between computers and chips falls, the barrier to building fundamentally new kinds of computers not limited by physical distance should become a reality, experts said.'
  • ' "Before, there were two worlds -- computing and communications," said Alan Huang, a former Bell Labs physicist, who has founded the Terabit Corporation, an optical networking company in Menlo Park, Calif. "Now they will be the same and we will have powerful computers everywhere." '
  • 'With this breakthrough, Intel researchers said, they have shown that it should be possible to build optical fiber communications systems using Intel's conventional chipmaking process without resorting to either the exotic materials or hand-assembly techniques that are now the standard in the fiberoptics networking industry.'
• BPL (Broadband Power Line) technology is arriving
  • Combined with the previous story, it is evident that the dream of ubiquitous, hyper-fast Internet connectivity, is well on its way.
  • The electrical utilities will now compete with the telecoms not only because of the Web but also because phone services can also be done over the Internet with VoIP!
  • Sault Ste. Marie makes high-speed power play: Internet piped over electric grid Utilities challenge telecom firms
  • FCC moves ahead with powerline broadband rules
  • UPLC.UTC.org. The United Power Line Council of the United Telecom Council.
  • Broadband Power Line Tutorial
• Open Source Is Fertile Ground for Foul Play and its Slashdot.
• Odd... MetaFilter.com has been down all day Thursday. And now Friday.

War Craft III

• I've been trying to stop playing WarCraft III by Blizzard.com but I'm not having much success. I've tried keeping the CD on the shelf (so the temptation to play would be more than a click away) but somehow the CD has once more reattached itself to the machine. Maybe I'll try to go back to limiting myself to no more than once or twice a week.
• Why would I want to cut down on playing WarCraft? Is it a matter of ROI (Return Of Investment)?
  • Unlike sports, there is no health benefit.
  • I'm not doing much socializing online: There are only a few lines of typed exchange per game and I only occasionally play against the same people.
  • I'm not using WC as a jumping board to get into the technology: I already work in computers.
  • I might be gaining some insights and intuition at making real time strategic decisions.
• What about the opportunity cost? The loss of time with my wife, kids, family, and friends? Or time I could have spent on explorations, blogging, house work, exercise, martial arts, spiritual exploration, politics, etc?
• Is it sufficient to do it merely because I like it? Just for the fun of it? Perhaps, perhaps. But perhaps I should spend fewer hours on it and not play so late. When I'm playing and I see that it is 4 AM I know that I shouldn't have done that. Is it less a pleasure (like food and sex) and more like a vice (like alcohol, drugs, and gambling)? There is the opportunity cost mentioned above but WC3 does not make kill my brain cells, make me drive under the influence, steal, or cost anything.
• As it stands I'm pretty happy that I've regained my rank of Level 12 in Random Team. That puts me in the top 3.40% of all the 235,407 players who play RT 3v3 on Azeroth, the US East Coast server. For those of you who are ranked higher then that: yes, I can hear you laughing. But let's see how well you play with a toddler on your lap. Plus my cable connection gives me a lot of disconnects. And I haven't customized my hot keys. And yeah RT is not as true a measure as Solo but I think RT is more chatty and more fun. But bottom line: I don't put in the 6+ hours a day that some of the high level people do.
• Things I've liked doing with the Undead race lately:
  • Death Knight and Crypt Lord combo. The key thing is not just that the DK can heal the CL but that the CL can raise Carrion Beetles which the DK can heal himself up with Death Pact. Plus the CL's Impale spell is like the Death Lord's Sleep and Carrion Swarm spells combined (plus I love the visual of everybody getting tossed into the air), and the CL's Spiked Carapace is like the Lich's Frost Armor.
  • Fiends and Necros combo. I know they're different upgrade paths but it's a nice combo.
  • Fiends plus Abominations and Statues. A very rounded strategy.
  • Mass Wyrms. I've never lost a game where I've managed to mass Wyrms. It can however be countered:
    • Destroyers v Wyrms. Wyrms can't injure Destroyers because of their spell immunity.
    • Fiends and Banshees v Wyrms. You need a team to do this but it is soo sweet to Possess their Wyrms.
  • Ghouls and Aboms. This if fun provided my team mates have ranged units shooting over my shoulder.
  • Quick mass Gargoyles. This can be countered but if they don't have anti-air, this can be lots of fun.
  • Quick mass Necros. This can be countered but if done right, it's a game winner.
    • Destroyers v Necromancers. Devour Magic makes Skellies yummy.
    • Air v Necromancers. Air leaves no corpses for Necros to use.
  • Banshees. The die very easily but Curse is so powerful: it's like evasion for your army. Anti-magic shell has become soo lame. Possession is in theory good but I've only pulled it off very well once.
  • Many Shades ASAP. I should do this every game. If you have a Shade tagging the enemy (or even your allies), then not only do you get strategic intelligence, but (I love this), your team's heroes get experience for the kills by the tagged team.
• Other WarCraft issues lately:
  • Humans have 2 unique units in the game. Tanks are very hard to kill and they destroy towns very quickly. The Archmage's Mass Teleport spell is potentially the most powerful spell in the game.
  • No way will I get involved in World of WarCraft, Blizzard's their upcoming MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) no matter how good it looks because I want to have a life.
• Yes, yes my WarCraft web page has not been worked on in an embarrassingly long time. No apologies because I'm busy.

2004-02-17t17:20:56Z | RE: Bush. Comic Art. Faith. Family. Food. Fun. Iraq. Martial Arts. Money. Politics. Presidential Elections. Science. Sex. Tech.
2004-02-17t17:20:56Z

Bush

• Most Think Truth Was Stretched to Justify Iraq War
  • 'Barely half -- 52 percent -- now believe Bush is "honest and trustworthy," down 7 percentage points since late October and his worst showing since the question was first asked, in March 1999. At his best, in the summer of 2002, Bush was viewed as honest by 71 percent.'
• "The Real Man" by Paul Krugman
  • 'In fact, those 27 photos grace one of the four most dishonest budgets in the nation's history -- the other three are the budgets released in 2001, 2002 and 2003. Just to give you a taste: remember how last year's budget contained no money for postwar Iraq -- and how administration officials waited until after the tax cut had been passed to mention the small matter of $87 billion in extra costs? Well, they've done it again: earlier this week the Army's chief of staff testified that the Iraq funds in the budget would cover expenses only through September.
    
    But when administration officials are challenged about the blatant deceptions in their budgets -- or, for that matter, about the use of prewar intelligence -- their response, almost always, is to fall back on the president's character. How dare you question Mr. Bush's honesty, they ask, when he is a man of such unimpeachable integrity? And that leaves critics with no choice: they must point out that the man inside the flight suit bears little resemblance to the official image.
    
    There is, as far as I can tell, no positive evidence that Mr. Bush is a man of exceptional uprightness. When has he even accepted responsibility for something that went wrong? On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that he is willing to cut corners when it's to his personal advantage. His business career was full of questionable deals, and whatever the full truth about his National Guard service, it was certainly not glorious.
    
    Old history, you may say, and irrelevant to the present. And perhaps that would be true if Mr. Bush was prepared to come clean about his past. Instead, he remains evasive. On "Meet the Press" he promised to release all his records -- and promptly broke that promise.
    
    I don't know what he's hiding. But I do think he has forfeited any right to cite his character to turn away charges that his administration is lying about its policies. And that is the point: Mr. Bush may not be a particularly bad man, but he isn't the paragon his handlers portray. '
  • 'Still, we may be on our way to an election in which Mr. Bush is judged on his record, not his legend. And that, of course, is what the White House fears.'
    • There is no meat to Bush. People merely want to believe that the President who was in office during 9/11 would represent us all.
• POST TOASTED! Did George Bush serve in the Bama Guard? Ancient, vague memories can't tell us
  • 'Finally! Finally, someone had reported serving with Bush! But there was one small problem with [Bill] Calhoun's claim. His account contradicted the basic chronology of the case--a timeline that has been clear and unchallenged for the past four years. [Mike Allen] Allen and his editors [at the Washington Post] --hopeless incompetents--seemed ignorant of the story's simplest facts.'
  • Liars!

Comic Art

• Cathy Gets Engaged!
  • God freaking damn! It's about freaking time! She and Irving are finally engaged! The build up has been incredible but we've been so used to Cathy disappointments that we're still shocked: Almost as shocked as her mother!
  • Related link:
    • Cartoonist Discusses Cathy's Engagement
    • Getting On With It At Last

Faith

• Children to study atheism at school.
  • 'Children will be taught about atheism during religious education classes under official plans being drawn up to reflect the decline in churchgoing in Britain. Non-religious beliefs such as humanism, agnosticism and atheism would be covered alongside major faiths such as Christianity or Islam under draft guidelines being prepared by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, which regulates what is taught in schools in England.'
  • " 'The whole thing is terribly biased in favour of religion right now - it's all about encouraging an identification with religion,' said Ben Rogers, author of the report for the Institute for Public Policy Research thinktank. 'There are huge numbers of people who are atheists or whose families are atheists and who are coming into a class where their family's view is not acknowledged. You should be able to have a conversation about ethics that doesn't collapse into a conversation about religion.' "
  • Excellent! This sound perfectly fair to me. Government cannot avoid religion but it should not favor particular religions.

Family

• Once upon a time my wife and 2 kids were in the car this morning when 5 year old Connie asked for some assistance singing the "10 Days of Christmas". Julia said that it's really the "12 Days of Christmas", but yes we can help. So Julia started singing it. Julia is much better at singing than I am and she has a much larger repertoire, but the "12 Days of Christmas" is one of the songs that I actually know better than she does. So of course I eagerly jumped in too.
  
  It was a jolly time and we were going along swimmingly, but when we got to the 11th day of Christmas,  nearly 3 year oldYork suddenly shouted out: "Shut up!"
  
  Julia and I started laughing, but Connie was distraught about the interruption in the song. So we immediately jumped back in and finished the song strongly. Everything ended up just fine.
  
  The End.

Food

• Is This Man Obese? It seems that Atkins was not obese when he died.

Fun

• D&D 30th Anniversary Details
• Buy 867-5309 Jenny's New York Phone Number. Oh it's that number from the song by Tommy TuTone.

Iraq

• Rebel assault routs Iraqi security forces in Fallujah, killing at least 20 and freeing prisoners
  • 'The same security compound was attacked two days earlier by gunmen just as the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, Gen. John Abizaid, was visiting the site in Fallujah.'
  • 'The attackers freed 75 prisoners held at the station, killing the guards and shooting open the cell doors, police Lt. Col. Jalal Sabri said. The prisoners were criminals most arrested for murder or theft and none of them were suspected of involvement in the anti-U.S. insurgency, Sabri said.'

Martial Arts

• I just finished the 12 week course "Introduction to the Rapier" at the Chicago Swordplay Guild. It's been a blast! There are many aspects to it but the thing about it that hit me is that it is much more satisfying to skewer a person than it is to pull a trigger and kill someone. Swordsmanship requires more athleticism, more training, and more skill. I've joined the Guild itself and will continue to practice with all manners of weapons.
  
  From left to right: Back row: Phil, George, Jim, and John. Front row: Ashley, Jain, and Nora.

Money

• It's Good Business
  • 'The real shame in this whole thing is that there's a chance that innovation could have prevented it. This was highlighted in a Los Angeles Times column by James Flanigan who compares the supermarkets with Wal-Mart and Costco. The supermarkets are pointing to Wal-Mart as the bad guy because their labor costs are lower, which allows them to offer lower prices. However, equally successful Costco pays higher wages and benefits than either Wal-Mart or the supermarkets. Even union leaders hail it as the best in the retail industry. Costco's employee turnover is 20% -- one third of the industry average, a factor that some industry experts state could save 20% on labor costs for every 10% reduction in turnover. Plus Costco is refusing to follow the other corporate fad of offshoring jobs such as call centers.
    
    Why? CEO Jim Sinegal says it's not altruism, "It's good business." Costco developed a strategy that fosters higher employee productivity and yields enormous customer satisfaction and loyalty. Sinegal also states, "I don't see what's wrong with an employee earning enough to be able to buy a house or having a health plan for the family. We're trying to build a company that will be here 50 years from now." Which highlights another ingredient in this stew: Wall Street's short term mindset. Because Costco makes 1.7 centers per dollar of sales compared to 2.5 cents for the supermarkets and 3.5 cents for Wal-Mart, Wall Street considers this a shoddy performance. Bless Sinegal for staying the course.'
  • 'The bottom line is always important, and the bottom line here is that perhaps what's wrong with supermarkets isn't employees' salaries but rather the lack of creative thought in management, and, very probably, a management team whose compensation is based on short-term Wall Street performance rather than a more long-term human, and humane, approach.'
  • So Costco.com  has good ethics. So does Levis.com. That alone gives me brand loyalty. People, Planet, Profits.

Politics

• Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World. Some people will just eat up this Neo-Conservative crap.
• Power and Population in Asia
  • 'The Asian "population explosion" was actually a "health explosion" -- it was fueled almost entirely by declining mortality due to dramatic improvements in life expectancy. That same "population explosion" has been defused by ongoing changes in childbearing patterns.'
  • Lots of nice charts and graphs.

Presidential Elections

• It's time to get back to the issues.
  • "A few questions for John Kerry" by George Will. George Will is one of the few Conservative writers that I actually respect. He always comes up with some very good questions.
  • Time for Clarity. 'Now, with the nomination seemingly within his reach, the Massachusetts senator must begin to more fully explain where he stands on the major challenges facing the country.'

Science

• Scientists develop new hydrogen reactor. 'The reactor is a relatively tiny 2-foot-high apparatus of tubes and wires that creates hydrogen from corn-based ethanol. A fuel cell, which acts like a battery, then generates power.'
• After Packing M&M's Together, Scientists Like What They See
  • 'The research is a more complicated version of a long-studied problem: how tightly identical spheres can be packed together. Neatly stacked, as in a pyramid of oranges at a grocery store, the spheres occupy 74 percent of the available volume. Arranged randomly, however, the spheres fill only 64 percent of the space. In the new research, the scientists considered spheroids -- spheres stretched into cigar shapes or squashed into M&M shapes. Stacked neatly, the spheroids still take up 74 percent of the space, just like spheres. But in random arrangements, computer simulations and experiments with M&M's showed that spheroids could be packed much more densely, filling up to 71 percent of the space.'
    
  • 'If the spheroids are deformed in a second direction, into ellipsoids (in other words, stretched or squashed so the M&M shape is no longer circular when viewed from above), then the maximum packing density increases to 77 percent, more tightly than the simple neat stacks.'
  • Ha ha! We dealt with stuff like this all the time in Chemical Engineering.
• Astronomers Spy Massive Diamond
  • 'If anyone's ever promised you the sun, the moon and the stars, tell 'em you'll settle for BPM 37093. The heart of that burned-out star with the no-nonsense name is a sparkling diamond that weighs a staggering 10 billion trillion trillion carats. That's one followed by 34 zeros.'
  • 'The diamond is a massive chunk of crystallized carbon that lies about 300 trillion miles from Earth, in the constellation Centaurus. The galaxy's largest diamond is formally known as a white dwarf, or the hot core of a dead sun.'
• Scientists: Hard heads a key to survival: Clubbing heads may have been part of mating rituals. This explains things like The 3 Stooges and the shape of Linus's head (from The Peanuts).

Sex

• Husband calls foul after seeing wife on porn site. So some of the spam I get about wives in porn is true?
• Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtle Porn [NSFW, .mov]. Freaky but funny stuff.

Tech

• IPAddressWorld.com. Show's the IP of the computer you're on.
• Windows Source Code Leak
  • Hmm. Seems like more attacks against Microsoft than usual in the past several days.
  • Profanity, partner's name hidden in leaked Microsoft code
    • 'Dunham and others spent hours looking for clues in the code, a mix of assembler, C and C++ programming languages. The leaked Windows 2000 code contained 30915 files and a whopping 13.5 million lines of code, he said. And the Windows NT breach had 95,103 files and 28 million lines. Both were available as zip files being exchanged readily on the Internet, Dunham said.'
  • Windows Source Leak Traces Back to Mainsoft
    • 'Because Mainsoft used only select portions of the Windows source for MainWin, Microsoft may find itself more worried about the egg on its face than possible exposure of its flagship operating system; Windows 2000 served as the foundation for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.'
  • We Are Morons: a quick look at the Win2k source
    • 'In the struggle to meet deadlines, I think pretty much all programmers have put in comments they might later regret, including swearwords and acerbic comments about other code or requirements. Also, any conscientious coder will put in prominent comments warning others about the trickier parts of the code. Comments like "UGLY TERRIBLE HACK" tend to indicate good code rather than bad: in bad code ugly terrible hacks are considered par for the course. It would therefore be both hypocritical and meaningless to go through the comments looking for embarrassments. But also fun, so let's go.'
    • 'In short, there is nothing really surprising in this leak. Microsoft does not steal open-source code. Their older code is flaky, their modern code excellent. Their programmers are skilled and enthusiastic. Problems are generally due to a trade-off of current quality against vast hardware, software and backward compatibility.'
• The Next Move in Programming: A Conversation with Sun's Victoria Livschitz
  • Brilliant stuff. Really looks at the roots to go beyond the present. She proves what I've believed that programming right now is low-level: like working in the sewers. Eventually programming will become easier, more high-level. It has to be that way to do anything of complexity the complexity must be encapsulated and hidden from the bosses/users, and yet the complexity must be uncompromisingly correct and well designed.
    
  • "And here's what's really sad -- the overwhelming majority of so-called "successful" development projects produce mediocre software. Take almost any corporate accounting application, and you'll find it poor in quality, unimpressive in capabilities, difficult to extend, misaligned with other enterprise systems, technologically obsolete by the time of release, and functionally identical to dozens of other accounting systems. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on development, and millions afterwards on maintenance -- and for what? From an engineering standpoint, zero innovation and zero incremental value have been produced."
  • "The correlation of the size of the software with its quality is overwhelming and very suggestive. I think his observations raise numerous questions: Why are big programs so buggy? And not just buggy, but buggy to a point beyond salvation. Is there an inherent complexity factor that makes bugs grow exponentially, in number, severity, and in how difficult they are to diagnose? If so, how do we define complexity and deal with it?"
  • "I can see two reasonable ways to create complex programs that are less susceptible to bugs. As in medicine, there is prevention and there is recovery. Both the objectives and the means involved in prevention and recovery are so different that they should be considered separately. "
  • "Having said that, these technological advances are still inadequate in dealing with many categories of bugs. You see, a "bug" is often just a sign of recognition that a program is behaving undesirably. Such "undesirability" may indeed be caused by mechanical problems in which code does something different from what it was intended to do. But all too often the code is doing exactly what the programmer wanted at the time, which (in the end) turned out to be a really bad idea. The former is a programming bug, and the latter a design bug, or in some exceptionally lethal cases, an architectural bug. The constant security-related problems associated with Microsoft's products are due to its fundamental platform architecture. Java technology, in contrast, enjoys exceptional immunity to viruses because of its sandbag architecture."
  • "I don't believe that future advances in software engineering will prevent developers from making mistakes that lead to design bugs. Over time, any successful software evolves to address new requirements. A piece of code that behaved appropriately in previous versions suddenly turns out to have deficiencies -- or bugs. That's OK! The reality of the program domain has changed, so the program must change too. A bug is simply a manifestation of the newly discovered misalignment. It must be expected to happen, really! From that vantage point, it's not the prevention of bugs but the recovery -- the ability to gracefully exterminate them -- that counts. In regard to recovery, I can't think of a recent technological breakthrough. Polymorphism and inheritance help developers write new classes without affecting the rest of the program. However, most bug fixes require some degree of refactoring, which is always dangerous and unpredictable. "
  • 'Q: What about the notion of complexity as the primary reason for software bugs? Do you have any concrete ideas on how to reduce complexity?

    A: Well, I see two principal weapons. One is the intuitiveness of the programming experience from the developer's point of view. Another is the ability to decompose the whole into smaller units and aggregate individual units into a whole. Let me start with the programming experience first.

    Things appear simple to us when we can operate intuitively, at the level of consciousness well below fully focused, concentrated, strenuous thinking. Thus, the opposite of complexity -- and the best weapon against it -- is intuitiveness. Software engineering should flow from the intuitiveness of the programming experience. A programmer who works with complex programs comfortably does not see them as complex, thanks to the way our perception and cognition work. A forest is a complex ecosystem, but for the average hiker the woods do not appear complex.'

  • "Object-oriented programming allowed developers to create industrial software that is far more complex than what functional programming allowed. However, we seem to have reached the point where OO is no longer effective. No one can comfortably negotiate a system with thousands of classes. So, unfortunately, object-oriented programming has a fundamental flaw, ironically related to its main strength. "
  • "In object-oriented systems, "object" is the one and only basic abstraction. The universe always gets reduced to a set of pre-defined object classes, some of which are structural supersets of others. The simplicity of this model is both its blessing and its curse. Einstein once noted that an explanation should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. This is a remarkably subtle point that is often overlooked. Explaining the world through a collection of objects is just too simple! The world is richer than what can be expressed with object-oriented syntax."
  • "Processes are extremely common in the real world and in programming. Elaborate mechanisms have been devised over the years to handle transactions, workflow, orchestration, threads, protocols, and other inherently "procedural" concepts. Those mechanisms breed complexity as they try to compensate for the inherent time-invariant deficiency in OO programming. Instead, the problem should be addressed at the root by allowing process-specific constructs, such as "before/after," "cause/effect," and, perhaps, "system state" to be a core part of the language. I envision a programming language that is a notch richer then OO. It would be based on a small number of primitive concepts, intuitively obvious to any mature human being, and tied to well-understood metaphors, such as objects, conditions, and processes. I hope to preserve many features of the object-oriented systems that made them so safe and convenient, such as abstract typing, polymorphism, encapsulation and so on. The work so far has been promising. "
  • "Hierarchies and collections are pretty much the only tools we've got to define how things relate to each other and how they should be organized into manageable structures. Hierarchical aggregation fits well with the fractal nature of many organic and artificial systems, and it is intuitively obvious to most people. Plus, the