The Dark Star Gazette

Useful Things I Learned This Weekend

2009-03-15T19:19:00.000-07:00

1. World of Goo is a very cool game.

2. An hour playing with World of Goo will give you a better intuitive feel for stress analysis and the effects of resonance in a structure than ten hours reading a textbook will.

3. The ramshackle buildings you wind up with in World of Goo remind me of a lot of some source code I've seen.

4. The Wii Internet Channel's a pretty good browser (being Opera and all), but it doesn't have the horsepower to play an NPR podcast.

5. An electric crock pot turned on "high" can crack a Corian countertop.

6. You can make an effective trivet using a 12" piece of ceramic tile and five of those sticky-back felt tabs you put on chair legs. You really only need four tabs, at the corners, but the fifth in the middle is belt-and-suspenders.

7. If important work e-mail's going to arrive, the most likely time is right after you've mixed the catalyst with the self-etching primer and started spraying.

8. Just a hunch, but I'm guessing the "answer e-mail while wearing latex gloves half covered with catalyzed primer" scenario didn't figure prominently in Blackberry usability testing.

Sealing the trailing edge

2009-03-08T22:41:00.000-07:00

The stripper arrived about a week ago. I put the traling edge wedge from the rudder in the portable spray booth, now pressed into service as a fume hood. (As it turns out, the the stripper doesn't seem to give off a lot of fumes, but I was taking no chances with stuff capable of removing epoxy.) I didn't need to strip the rudder's skins because the epoxy adhered much better to the trailing edge than it did to the skins.

Stripping was a matter of brushing the epoxy on, using a disposable paintbrush, waiting a while for it to bubble or show signs of softening, and then cleaning it off. The stripper dissolves in water, but it took a while to find a suitable scraper. I eventually settled on a green Scotchbrite pad, which did a pretty good job of taking off epoxy without itself dissolving. I went through three coats of stripper. The epoxy came off just fine--in fact, it came off pretty well with the first coat--but I'd also primed the wedge. To make sure the fuel tank sealant adhered well, I also wanted to strip as much of the primer as possible, so the sealant would be gripping aluminum on both sides of the bond. Except for a couple small patches, almost all the primer came off with a combination of the stripper, scrubbing with the Scotchbrite pad, and a bit of wet/dry sandpaper.

The intervening week was a busy one with no opportunity for workshop time, and we were out of town this weekend. When we returned this evening, I mixed up the batch of sealant. If you've never seen the stuff, looks like sticky, somewhat runny black tar that gets into absolutely every place it shouldn't. You can remove it with MEK or acetone, at least before it cures, but it's a challenge to keep it under control. It won't stick to the non-sticky side of packing tape, though, so I put a piece of packing tape the length of the aluminum angle. After squirting sealant between wedge and skin on top and bottom, assembling the trailing edge, and clecoing it to the aluminum angle, I spent a fair bit of time with paper towels cleaning up all the sealant that oozed out and trying mighty hard to get the sealant off the aluminum instead of spreading it further.

Also, to ensure the trailing edge came together fairly tightly (without the wide gap I ended up with before), I decided to clamp a second piece of aluminum angle along the narrow space between the rivet holes and the very trailing edge of the rudder. You can see that here.

The next step is to wait. The sealant has a 30 minute working time, but it'll need to stay there at least 48 hours to cure properly before I can mess with trying to rivet the trailing edge.

Disassemble, reassemble

2009-02-25T20:53:00.000-08:00

I spent some time last night taking apart the rudder's trailing edge.

The process of drilling out rivets is pretty simple. If you haven't seen one before, a rivet has a broad head and a cylindrical body. You drill partway down the body, use a pin punch to pop off the head, and then push the rest of the body through the hole. The tricky part is you don't want to make the hole any larger, or the rivet you put in there when you reassemble the thing won't hold properly. I usually have a problem with the drill bit trying to walk a bit off center when I start drilling, so I use a center punch to make a starting dimple in the center of the head. It's not perfect, but it helps. I also check often while drilling.

After a lot of careful drilling, I eventually managed to drill out all the rivets without enlarging the holes. Here you can see the wedge that goes between the trailng edge skins. What you can't really see in the photo is that the wedge has dried T-88 epoxy on it. (So do the skins, but not as much.) The web site for the epoxy manufacturer says you can remove dried epoxy using a suitable paint remover. So there's now a quart of Certified Coatings Sure Strip paint remover on its way from Aircraft Spruce.

By the way, Aircraft Spruce was most helpful with this order. According to the epoxy maker, "suitable" means the paint remover must contain methylene chloride. I couldn't tell from the Aircraft Spruce web site whether Sure Strip contains methylene chloride, but the folks at the Aircraft Spruce order desk went into the warehouse, pulled out a can, checked the contents, and called me back to confirm that it does.

Follow-up on the rudder

2009-02-23T09:21:00.000-08:00

I heard back from tech support this morning. They recommend drilling out the rivets, cleaning it up, and redoing it with fuel tank sealant. It'll be a pain, but I agree with them.

So now I need to order some sealant. Proseal at Aircraft Spruce is tres expensive, $78 for the smallest quantity, but it turns out Vans has it, or a newer incarnation of it, in 3.5 oz quantities for around $16. Horray for Vans!

I'm still working out how to clean the epoxy off the aluminum parts.

Rudder issues

2009-02-21T15:19:00.000-08:00

I'm having rudder issues. One of the more ticklish bits of building this particular airplane is the trailing edge of the rudder, one of the last things to touch the air as the plane goes by. You have to get it straight, and ideally you need to have it nice and, well, together. The trailing edge consists of two rudder skins and a wedge-shaped piece of aluminum that all meet at a point. The instructions say to put fuel tank sealant or some kind of glue on the wedge, glue it all together, clamp it, leave it alone for 48 hours, and then go through the ticklish process of riveting it so it comes out nice and straight.

Now, this is the second time I've built this rudder. The first time around, I got it all finished and hung it on the wall of the workshop to get it out of the way. (I was in a rather small workshop at the time; space was precious.) A few weeks later, the string I'd used to hang it broke, the rudder took a catastrophic fall, and the trailing edge got crunched rather badly. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I ordered new parts.

I recently finished the rebuild, and it was time to do the trailing edge again. The last time I did this, I used fuel tank sealant and had a whole bunch of the stuff left over, that I wound up tossing because, let's face it, how often are you going to use fuel tank sealant around the house? (Fuel tank sealant comes in two parts. Once you mix them, it'll eventually set. I ordered a small quantity, but it came in a container where you had to mix the whole thing, and the whole thing was enough to do a whole fuel tank and quite a bit more than I needed. You can store mixed sealant in the freezer for up to about six months, but at the speed this project's progressing, six months won't cut it.)

So this time I tried T-88, an epoxy used in aircraft construction. Here you can see it clamped together so the glue will set. That little aluminum bit at the left is a test piece. All seemed to go reasonably well. I gave the glue a full week to set and the test piece seemed pretty solid, so I started working on it. That's where I ran into problems.

Here you can see a shot of the new trailing edge, on top, and the old one on the bottom. The epoxy separated as I set the rivets. It turns out T-88 on aluminum just doesn't have the peel strength fuel tank sealant does. When I tried peeling the test piece apart, I was able to pop it as well. I've written the tech support folks at the kit manufacturer to find out how serious a problem this is.

The trailing edge itself came out pretty straight. It wasn't perfect, but there weren't any major problems. I've contacted tech support about the width of the trailing edge. We'll see if I need to drill out the rivets and redo it.

Driving in the Rain

2009-02-06T18:28:00.000-08:00

This is not a rant. OK, it's sort-of a rant, but actually it's an attempt to turn a rant to productive use. In the interests of improving the general level of rain driving skills in Southern California, please consider a few thoughts from someone who's lived in places where serious, heavy rain is a regular occurrence.

1. Use your headlights. Seriously, it's not about you being able to see. It's about other people being able to see you and not run into you. By turning on your headlights, you're also turning on your tail lights, side lights, and all the other things that make your car a mobile Christmas tree, improving the chances that traffic coming your way will stop in time.

2 Be predictable. This is basic defensive driving stuff. The people around you may be hydroplaning, might have fogged up windshields, or might be totally freaking out because there's precipitation falling from the heavens. Use your turn signal when you change lanes. Don't weave. Don't make quick lane changes except in an emergency. Basically, pretend you're surrounded by a bunch of jumpy, freaked-out psychotics armed with two ton chunks of plastic and steel and don't do anything to startle them.

3. Drive in the wheel marks of the car in front of you. The wheels of the car in front of you are doing a bang-up job of clearing water off the roads. You can see those wheel marks on a wet road as a somewhat more dryish patch. The tires throw the water to the sides, and then the water gradually flows back where it was before. That means that, for a window of time, there's a somewhat more dry patch of road. By driving in that dry-ish patch, you reduce your chances of hydroplaning.

4. Drive towards the middle of the road. Most of the big puddles will be towards the edges of the road, because that's how we slope roads. Drive towards the middle to avoid them.

5. Allow extra stopping distance. Your brakes don't work as well when they're wet. And even if they do, your tires have less friction on a wet road. And even if they work well, you might find out, at the wrong time, that you're hydroplaning. Allow yourself some extra stopping distance.

6. Try not to hit the brakes in the middle of a curve. In a curve, your tires are already doing what they can to hold your car on the road. Hitting the brakes might be just what it takes to get them sliding instead of gripping. Try to slow down before you get to the curve. Once you're in it, if you need to slow down further, take your foot off the gas and coast. Use the brakes in the curve as a last resort.

7. If you're hydroplaning, try not to steer or brake. If you're hydroplaning, your car wants to go straight ahead. Your front tires aren't gripping well, if at all, so steering can send you into a spin. The best thing to do, if the road and traffic will allow it, is to take your foot off the gas and coast till the wheels grip again. (The faster the car, the more likley it is to hydroplane. By slowing down, you give the water more time to get out from under the tires, so the tires can grip the road again.) If you have antilock brakes, they should still work to slow the car, but not as well as on a dry road--see "allow extra stopping distance" above. If you don't have ABS, and you have to use the brakes, use them with caution and remember that you might have to pump them. Sometimes you'll hit a large puddle on only one side of the car. That'll tend to pull the car in the direction of the puddle, because of the friction from the water. Correct as you would for any other skid, steering away from the puddle to keep the car moving straight ahead.

Driving in Flood Waters

And now a word for the aspiring Captain Nemos out there--and I count myself a proud member of your ranks.

First off, let's talk about why driving in flood waters is usually a bad idea.

If it's not a bad flood, your car's likely to be hydroplaning a good bit of the time. Also, you can get water up the tailpipe, which will toast the engine pretty darn quickly. As you drive forward through the flood, a bow wave will build up ahead of the car, and water will start sloshing through the engine compartment. That sloshing water can short out the ignition wires, stalling the engine. Also, a car's door seals are designed to keep out rain, not flood water, so she'll start taking on water, which means, at a minimum, you're going to have to replace the jute that glues the carpet to the floor, you'll need to worry about rust, and you might soak the computer (which is often on the floor under one of the font seats).

If it's a bad flood, the tires might leave the road surface. A car will float, at least for a few minutes. During that time, the front wheels become rudders and the drive wheels act like paddle wheels, but minus the paddles. Congratulations, skipper: your vessel will doggy paddle along at maybe 5 miles per hour until she stalls, sinks, or gets swept away by the current to a nasty fate somewhere downstream.

So, it's usually a bad idea to drive through flood waters. However, if you should find yourself in this situation, here are a few things to keep in mind.

1. Consider whether bailing out is the better answer. If the car's in danger of getting swept away, you mght be better off abandoning it. After all, chances are good you can swim better than a car can.

OK, Cap'n Nemo, you've decided to hang with the car. Let's talk about driving in this new environment.

2. Downshift. You need to keep water out of the tailpipe, which means you need to keep lots of exhaust bubbling out. Hybrid drivers (and I'm one) don't have a lot of choices at this point, but folks with non-hybrids should downshift (that's "L1" if you're in an automatic) to keep the engine revved up.

3. Watch the speed. The last thing you want to do is slosh water up onto the ignition cables and stall the engine, because then water gets into the tailpipe and it's all over. (As an aside, if you do stall it, but you manage to coast to a dry-ish area, drying off the ignition cables may be all you need to do to get it started again.)

4. If the wheels leave the road, don't panic. You'll feel it if it happens. Keep the engine revved up and doggy paddle to the nearest relatively dry area. Remember, though, not to rev too much because once those wheels grab again, you don't want the car to suddenly launch itself into something. Once you're back on solid ground, make an appointment with your mechanic, cause you'll probably need it.

You can find more rain driving tips here.

Airlines "Hedging" Fuel Prices

2009-01-21T12:43:00.000-08:00

During a lull at work, I was skimming the financial headlines and came across an opinion piece with this provocative headline: "The perils of plunging oil prices: UAL's effort to fight fuel costs backfires". The piece goes on to talk about how airlines' heading strategies are backfiring now that oil prices have dropped, so they're suffering financial losses and having to lay people off.

What's odd here is that hedging shouldn't backfire. Hedging is a method of reducing risk, kind of like insurance, but if you're a clever airline on a tight budget you can often do it for no out of pocket cost. For instance, an airline might decide it can afford jet fuel when oil's $100 per barrel but no more, so it might sign a forward contract, a contract with a supplier to pay that price for jet fuel--no more and no less--for the next two years. True, if oil drops below $100, the airline may be upset that it's locked into the $100 price, not the lower market price, but those are losses it's already figured into its business model. At least theoretically. Or if it wants to to limit the range of fuel prices, it could set up a collar (or, more accurately, a costless collar): pay someone for the right to buy fuel from them at the $110/barrel price (buy a "call" option), and finance it by selling someone else the right to sell fuel to the airline at the $90/barrel price (sell a "put" option). If oil goes above $110/barrel, the airline's covered, and it oil goes below $90/barrel, the airline has to buy it at $90, so the airline's locked into the $90-110 price range.

A look at United Airlines' quarterly report for the quarter that ended September 30, 2008 reveals a somewhat different story:

Aircraft Fuel Hedges. We have a risk management strategy to hedge a portion of our price risk related to projected jet fuel requirements primarily through collar options. The collars involve the simultaneous purchase and sale of call and put options with identical expiration dates. In order for the Company to obtain more favorable terms for a portion of its hedge positions, the Company also entered into collars with additional features. These hedge positions include extendable collars, referred to above, and collars that include twice the amount of put volume as call volume. Gains and losses derived from the Company’s hedge positions are not accounted for as cash flow or fair value hedges under SFAS 133. The Company’s hedges that are classified either in Mainline fuel expense or nonoperating income (expense), based on the nature of the hedge instruments.

(emphasis added) This looks more like speculation than hedging. Twice as many "put" options as "call" options? No wonder they're getting hit. Using the collar example above, for each person they've paid for the right to buy fuel at the higher price, they've sold two people the right to sell them fuel at the lower price. And the price of oil dropped way below that lower price. (In reality, probably no fuel is changing hands. Instead, they just settle up the amount of money each party would have gained or lost if it had traded fuel. Financially, the net result should be pretty close, give or take some taxes.)

more on prop 7

2008-10-22T20:33:00.000-07:00

The prior research and discussion on Prop 7 continues, both on this blog and in the comments here. Here's where things stand now.

1. I've managed to convince myself that Prop 7 will not affect the legal status of distributed power generation (such as rooftop solar) that's operating under a net metering program.

Net metering is a program where you hook your rooftop solar up to the grid. You pay your utility company for the amount of power you use minus the amount you generate. Under net metering, if you generate more than you use, the utility doesn't have to pay you for it unless you have some sort of separate contract with them.

I was concerned that Prop 7's language would interfere with distributed generation. It turns out it still might, but not the part of distributed generation that's part of net metering. The Energy Policy Initiatives Center has a useful article (pdf) on California law governing Renewable Energy Credits. Section 5, along with its footnotes, gets into distributed generation. It points out that distributed generation through net metering is governed by a separate set of laws, not by the part Prop 7 changes. That's what the exclusion from the definition of "Retail Seller" of generation consistent with Section 218(b) is all about in Public Utilities Code section 399.12(i)(4)(A).

Now, if you want a contract where you get paid for generating more than you use, that may well put you in the category of being a photovoltaic producer under 30 megawatts, so Prop 7 may have some implications for you.

2. It's still not clear what effect Prop 7 has on producers under 30 megawatts.

There are basically two arguments that prop 7 locks out producers of less than 30 megawatts. I think I may have cleared one up, but the other's still murky.

2.a. Must an "in-state renewable electricity generation facility" be a "facility"?

The first argument goes something like this: to be an "eligible renewable energy resource," you must be a "solar and clean energy facility" and you must also be an "in-state renewable electricity generation facility" as defined in the public resources code. The public resources code § 25741 defines "in-state renewable electricity generation facility" as "a facility that meets all of the following criteria" and then gives a list of criteria. It also contains a definition of the word "facility" in § 25110, which the text of prop 7 (official pdf, unofficial HTML version) changes to specifically include "solar and clean energy plant", a term that means a plant of 30MW or more. So the question is whether an in-state renewable electricity generation facility must be a "facility" as defined in § 25110, or whether the word "facility" there is just the generic, English word "facility" without the statutory meaning. If it has the statutory meaning, then to qualify for the renewable portfolio standard, your solar or clean energy generator would have to generate at least 30MW.

I haven't been able to find a court case, a California Public Utilities Commission decision, or a California Energy Commission decision that addresses that question. However, the California Energy Commission publishes a set of guides for energy producers interested in the Renewable Portfolio Standard. One guide (pdf), in particular, covers what energy generators are eligible to participate in the Renewable Portfolio Standard. The current definition of "facility" is restricted to transmission lines and thermal power plants (which must have a capacity of at least 50 megawatts), but the eligibility guide says that solar photovoltaic generators are eligible and doesn't give a minimum size. So I can't point to chapter and verse, but it seems likely that the CPUC and CEC are using "facility" in its common meaning in this case, rather than as the defined term.

2.b. Is a "solar and clean energy plant" the same as a "solar and clean energy facility"?

When the "no on prop 7" folks put in their ballot response that prop 7 excludes renewable energy producers of less than 30 megawatts, the "yes on prop 7" folks took them to court. Peter Wall was kind enough to get a copy (pdf) of the ruling, which he posted to his blog. The associated legal whitepaper (pdf), which appears to be a moderately-edited legal brief, goes into more detail about the arguments. Essentially, the argument boils down to the fact that, to be eligible under the renewable portfolio standard, prop 7 requires that you be a "solar and clean energy facility" and an "in-state renewable electricity generation facility." But it doesn't define "solar and clean energy facility." It does define "solar and clean energy plant," however, and that definition sets a 30 megawatt floor on its size. It also defines "facility," but it does it over in the Public Resources Code, not in the Public Utilities Code where it uses "solar and clean energy facility."

In the court case, the folks against Prop 7 argued that Prop 7 made the two terms the same, that a "solar and clean energy facility" is a "solar and clean energy plant", blocking out producers under 30 MW. The folks in favor of Prop 7 argued that they're different. The court found "each of the party's interpretations has some support in the initiative's text." Personally, I'm not convinced either way by the arguments, so this one's still murky.

3. And now, two rants.

3.a. Rant the First: For cryin' out loud, California, fix your defined terms!

When you write a contract, it's common practice to capitalize defined terms. For instance, you might say something like this:

"Facility" means an thermal power plant which produces electricity and has a capacity of at least 30 megawatts.

And then when you use the definition, if you mean the defined term, you capitalize it, and when you don't mean the defined term, you leave it lower case to indicate the word takes on its ordinary meaning in common written English:

The Commission will consider the application of any facility, but it will approve an application only if it is submitted by a Facility.

This is something California does not do. Which means when they pepper the Public Utilities Code and the Public Resources Code with the word "facility," there's no way to know whether they mean the common term or the defined term. I mean, come on, all you'd have to do is distinguish between "Solar and Clean Energy Plant" and "solar and clean energy facility" and that whole issue 2.b. would just go away.

3.b. Rant the Second: Could we please raise the level of information here?

The amount of time it's taking to get hard info on this initiative is really adding up, and a big part of the problem is the "yes" and "no" campaigns. The "no on 7" web site is mostly conclusory statements with nary a link or cite to supporting data. I can't even get on the "yes on 7" site because it's flash-only, and flash is giving my browser indigestion right now. The Union of Concerned Scientists' "no on 7" page is marginally better, but it still doesn't provide the raw info necessary to really assess this complex set of changes. And there are rapidly approaching limits to how much time I can spend analyzing this stuff. It really shouldn't be necessary to spend hours digging for primary sources to cut through the crap.

prop 7's giving me fits

2008-10-21T12:52:00.000-07:00

During a slow period at work, I decided to research some of the initiatives that will be on the ballot in the November election. Proposition 7 is causing some consternation. That's the one that increases targets for renewable energy, but it also does a number of other things. One of the questions I find most troubling is whether it blocks or tilts the playing field against small energy producers. See, I eventually want to be able to put solar panels on the roof, use what I need, then sell the rest back to the power grid. And even more importantly, I want everyone else in sunny California doing the same thing, because that means fewer transmission lines, fewer fossil fuel and nuclear plants, fewer distribution losses, and eventually a more resilient grid. The Prop 7 opponents say small renewable generators don't count towards the power plants' renewables quota, while the proponents say the proposition doesn't rule them out. The news reports haven't actually quoted the language at issue, and I can't find the Sacramento County Superior Court ruling by Judge Michael Kenny (in which he reportedly refused to take sides). So I decided to dive into the language of the proposition itself.

Let's start at page 121 (page 42 of the PDF), section 399.11(a). It discusses the intent of the law: "to attain the targets of generating 20 percent of total retail sales of electricity in California from eligible renewable energy resources by December 31, 2010" (plus 40% by 12/31/2020 and 50% by 12/31/2025) (emphasis added). That term "eligible renewable energy resources" also shows up in the definitions of "renewables portfolio standard" (section 399.11(g) at page 122) and "renewable energy credit" (section 399.11(h) at page 122). Basically, if it's not from an eligible renewable energy resource, it doesn't count for the renewables portfolio standard and you can't get a renewable energy credit from it. The renewables portfolio standard governs what portion of renewable energy the utility (technically, any "retail seller", defined in section 399.11(i)) has to buy (sections 399.14 and 399.15). I think renewable energy credits are the currency of the carbon trading system. (Section 399.13) As a result, what constitutes an eligible renewable energy resource is crucial to this whole question.

An eligible renewable energy resource is, with a few exceptions related to hydroelectrics and waste incinerators, a "solar and clean energy facility" that meets the defintion of "in-state renewable electricity generation facility". (Section 399.11(c).)

Now we're getting somewhere.

An "in-state renewable electricity generation facility" is a kind of "facility." (Section 25741.) A "facility" includes a regulated "solar and clean energy plant." (Section 25110, as amended, at page 124) And a "solar and clean energy plant" is an "electrical generating facility using wind, solar photovoltaic, [or] solar thermal . . . technologies, with a generating capacity of 30 megawatts or more" (plus small hydro of under 30 MW). (Section 25137, at page 125.)

As a result, it's entirely plausible to me that my rooftop solar of less than 30 MW would not be a "solar and clean energy plant", so it wouldn't be a "facility", so it wouldn't be an "in-state renewable electricity facility", so it wouldn't be an "eligible renewable energy resource", so it wouldn't count for the "renewables portfolio standard" and I couldn't get a "renewable energy credit" for it. Interestingly, when I searched on some of these terms looking for definitions in California law, I came across the California Solar Energy Industries Association's site which has a similar analysis, though they bolster it with some of the intent language.

Now, counter-arguments exist, and I'm sure they came up in the Superior Court case, but since the folks who drafted California's Public Resources Code put all the defined terms in lower case, it's tricky to tell what's a defined term and what's not (and where the boundaries lie), leading to this kind of ambiguity. And frankly, the whole thing cuts too close to the line for my tastes, so as much as it galls me to do it, I think I'll most likely be voting against this proposition. And if some wrong-thinking commentator interprets that vote as a vote against renewable energy in general, well, I guess I'll just have to point him or her to this blog entry.

[Added 10/22: See the comments for more discussion. Also, see the follow-up post here.]

AIG and Mark to Market Accounting

2008-10-01T09:16:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting article here on the link between AIG and under-capitalization in the European banks. The author points out that AIG's insurance on defaults allowed European banks to operate with much less capital than regulations would normally require, hence the chaos in Europe when AIG was on the skids (and the big federally engineered bailout of AIG).

There's also an interesting collection of quotes here about the proposal to give the SEC the power to suspend mark-to-market accounting. The comments are also a great read. Favorite quotes:

"Suspending mark-to-market accounting, in essence, suspends reality." -- Beth Brooke, global vice chair at Ernst & Young LLP;
"As a former MBS derivative trader...... all I can say is that not requiring traders to [d]o MTM is essentially a license to print your own bonus...to say the least, this is not what an already opaque asset class needs at this time!" -- comment by Anonymous;
"If the credit markets have seized up because nobody knows who holds the toxic waste on their balance sheets, how is hiding it and pretending it isn't there going to help?" -- comment by IrvineRenter.

OK, that's enough bad news for now. If the federal government's debating suspending accounting rules, the accounting equivalent of pulling the covers over your head, then I can do the literary equivalent. Off to find some good news.

just sayin'

2008-09-30T19:01:00.000-07:00

Mortgages had one key advantage over junk bonds: they were rated AAA by the major credit-rating agencies. The U.S. government felt that home mortgages were important and it subsidized them, not only allowing taxpayers to deduct interest payments, but by implicitly backing the payments on mortgage bonds.

Salomon stripped these mortgages into pieces in the same way First Boston had stripped junk bonds. Salomon created a trust . . . transferred a pool of mortgages into the trust, and then created a structure to separate the mortgages into different tranches. . . . These strips of mortgages were generally known as Collateralized Mortgage Obligations, or CMOs, and the different varieties had fantastically colorful acronyms . . . In most cases, the wilder the name, the riskier the bond. The riskiest versions were sometimes just called "nuclear waste."

-- Frank Partnoy, Infectious Greed at 103, describing the creation of Collateralized Mortgage Obligations in the early 1990's.

As average investors learned about the losses, they became upset with Wall Street, and bankers briefly became pariahs, as they occasionally do. . . . The bankers didn't seem to care about all the fuss. They knew it would go away soon, as it always did. Instead, they disclaimed any responsibility, and blamed investors for making stupid bets and for failing to supervise their investments.

-- Frank Partnoy, Infectious Greed at 137-38, describing the climate in December 1994 and early 1995 as news began to spread of major losses due to derivatives trading, especially losses in Collateralized Mortgage Obligations due to the Federal Reserve's increase in interest rates on February 4, 1994.

For more than a decade, a massive amount of money flowed into the United States from investors abroad, because our country is an attractive and secure place to do business. This large influx of money to U.S. banks and financial institutions -- along with low interest rates -- made it easier for Americans to get credit. . . . Easy credit -- combined with the faulty assumption that home values would continue to rise -- led to excesses and bad decisions. Many mortgage lenders approved loans for borrowers without carefully examining their ability to pay. Many borrowers took out loans larger than they could afford, assuming that they could sell or refinance their homes at a higher price later on.

-- President George Bush, Address to the Nation, September 24, 2008, describing the economic crisis of 2007-2008.

As we all know, lax lending practices earlier this decade led to irresponsible lending and irresponsible borrowing. This simply put too many families into mortgages they could not afford. . . . A similar scenario is playing out among the lenders who made those mortgages, the securitizers who bought, repackaged and resold them, and the investors who bought them. These troubled loans are now parked, or frozen, on the balance sheets of banks and other financial institutions, preventing them from financing productive loans. The inability to determine their worth has fostered uncertainty about mortgage assets, and even about the financial condition of the institutions that own them. The normal buying and selling of nearly all types of mortgage assets has become challenged.

-- Treasury Secretary (and former CEO of Goldman Sachs) Henry Paulson, Statement to Congress, September 19, 2008, describing the economic crisis of 2007-2008.

Mortgage and asset-backed securities include residential and commercial whole loans and interests in residential and commercial mortgage-backed securitizations. Also included within Mortgage and asset-backed securities are securities whose cash flows are based on pools of assets in bankruptcy-remote entities, or collateralized by cash flows from a specified pool of underlying assets. The pools of assets may include, but are not limited to mortgages, receivables and loans. Additionally, the Company’s mortgage-related trading positions consist of loans purchased as non-performing loans, equity interests in commercial properties and asset-backed securities that are backed by mortgage loans or other assets.

It is the Company’s intent to sell through securitization or syndication activities, residential and commercial mortgage whole loans the Company originates, as well as those acquired in the secondary market. The Company originated approximately $0.5 billion and $2 billion of residential mortgage loans for the three and six months ended May 31, 2008, respectively, compared to the $17 billion and $32 billion for the three and six months ended May 31, 2007, respectively. The Company originated approximately $2 billion and $4 billion of commercial mortgage loans for the three and six months ended May 31, 2008, respectively, compared to the $19 billion and $32 billion for the three and six months ended May 31, 2007, respectively.

-- Lehman Brothers, Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, July 10, 2008.

Lehman Brothers reported a preliminary net loss of approximately ($3.9) billion, or ($5.92) per common share (diluted), for the third quarter ended August 31, 2008, compared to a net loss of ($2.8) billion, or ($5.14) per common share (diluted), for the second quarter of fiscal 2008 and net income of $887 million, or $1.54 per common share (diluted), for the third quarter of fiscal 2007. The net loss was driven primarily by gross mark-to-market adjustments stemming from writedowns on commercial and residential mortgage and real estate assets

Net revenues (total revenues less interest expense) for the third quarter of fiscal 2008 are expected to be negative ($2.9) billion, compared to negative ($0.7) billion for the second quarter of fiscal 2008 and $4.3 billion for the third quarter of fiscal 2007. Net revenues for the third quarter of fiscal 2008 reflect negative mark-to-market adjustments and principal trading losses, net of gains on certain risk mitigation strategies and certain debt liabilities.

During the fiscal third quarter, the Firm is expected to incur negative gross mark-to-market adjustments on assets of ($7.8) billion, including gross negative mark-to-market adjustments of ($5.3) billion on residential mortgage-related positions, ($1.7) billion on commercial real estate positions, ($600) million on other asset-backed positions and ($200) million on acquisition finance positions. These mark-to-market adjustments were offset by $800 million of hedging gains during the quarter and $1.4 billion of debt valuation gains. The Firm is also expected to record losses on principal investments of approximately $760 million.

-- Lehman Brothers, Press Release filed with Current Report on Form 8-K, September 10, 2008.

I thought the symmetry was striking. What does it all mean? I dunno. You decide. I just blog here.

Oh, here's one more:

Turmoil in the credit markets has pushed Libor—the London interbank offered rate—to an all-time high, according to the British Bankers' Association. . . . Libor . . . [is] the rate at which banks lend to other banks that need temporary funds, by way of the London interbank market. This benchmark is significant because it represents the rate at which the world's most preferred borrowers are able to borrow money, and it's also a widely used reference point for short-term interest rates. . . . After the rejection of the bailout bill by the House of Representatives, banks hoarded cash, driving Libor up to 6.88 percent.

-- U.S. News & World Report, The Low-Down on Libor: Why its Surge Signals Despiration in the Credit Markets, September 30, 2008, noting that more than half of U.S. adjustable rate mortgages are tied to Libor.

sub-ocean methane leaking

2008-09-26T08:49:00.000-07:00

I'm surprised this news hasn't gotten more coverage: there's preliminary news that, as the permafrost is melting, methane that was previously trapped beneath the Arctic Sea is bubbling to the surface and escaping to the atmosphere. Methane is about 20 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide. It's not yet clear just how much methane is escaping, but it does raise the concern of a positive feedback loop, where more methane escapes, warms the climate, causing more permafrost melting, more methane escaping, and so on.

One More Question

2008-09-25T14:27:00.000-07:00

Mr. President, there's one more question that's been bothering me. In a free market, I would expect assets to move to the entity best equipped to extract the most value from them. For instance, I would expect banks to hang onto their mortgages, because banks are in the best position to make sure that the mortgage holder makes payments on time. If the bank sells the right to receive mortgage payments to someone else, and the mortgage holder defaults, won't that someone else have to go back to the bank to harass the mortgage holder into paying up, or to seize and sell the house? It seems to me that having to go back to the bank would increase transaction costs, making the right to payment worth less to that someone else than it is to the bank. So the bank shouldn't normally be willing to sell that right in the first place.

Yet, according to your speech, mortgage securitization, selling that right to get payments, is a big part of the mess we're in. A really big, $700 billion size, part. That means a lot of banks have been selling mortgages that basic economic theory says they shouldn't be able to sell. And it wasn't a fire sale, because they were doing it in a period of rapid economic growth. What's going on?

The only thing I can think of is that someone was either fibbing or asleep at the switch. Maybe the people buying the securitized mortgage debt didn't know how to value it properly, either because they had bad information from the sellers or because they simply weren't financially sophisticated enough to value it, despite the accredited investor safeguards we have in place. Or maybe that debt was being repackaged into securities designed to skirt around laws and regulations that would normally prevent purchasers from buying that kind of debt.

In any case, I'd really like to know. Preferably before we commit to giving these people $700 billion of our tax money. After all, if they're not savvy enough to value the mortgage debt properly, are we confident they'll use the money wisely? And if they were fibbing, then we'll want to keep an extra close eye on them, maybe closer than what a few members of a bipartisan panel can keep.

Follow-up: if you're not sure what I'm talking about, you can find a readable summary of mortgage securitization, complete with "chicken parts" analogy, here.

The Bush Economy Speech

2008-09-24T21:08:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. Bush,

Thank you for taking time out of your busy day to explain to us why your administration is proposing this $700 billion Troubled Asset Repurchase Plan. I feel it is the least I can do to respond to some of the points you have raised.

First, you mentioned a number of questions that you knew many Americans have tonight: "How did we reach this point in our economy? How will the solution I've proposed work? And what does this mean for your financial future?" I would like to add two more: How will we prevent this situation in the future? And why is the solution you have proposed the appropriate one?

I couldn't help but notice that your discussion of how we reached this point in our economy did not touch on some factors that are probably significant. You mention large amounts of foreign investment, easy credit, a faulty assumption that house prices would continue to increase, and a large number of mortgage defaults triggered by an oversupply of housing. But you did not discuss the role of deregulation in creating a complex, intertwined financial system, in which no one knows the size of the Credit Default Swap market, an issue that led to the government's $85 billion line of credit to American International Group.

You also did not address the role of the credit ratings agencies and their failure to properly rate this mortgage debt. Nor did you touch upon the role moral hazard plays, in which a free market, hands-off philosophy only during good times allows financial companies to keep their profits but encourages them to take on too much risk, on the belief that the government will bail them out. Finally, you did not provide your thoughts on whether compensation packages that reward chief executive officers for short term gain, coupled with severance packages that do not take into account the long term financial position of the company, create an incentive for too much risk.

In fact, Mr. President, your discussion of how to avoid this situation in the future was limited to Mr. Paulson's suggestion that the Federal Reserve (not the SEC?) "take a closer look at the operations of companies across the financial spectrum and ensure that their practices do not threaten overall financial stability" and that Congress consider "other good ideas," but with the stern caution that they must "ensure that efforts to regulate Wall Street do not end up hampering our economy's ability to grow."

That last caution was enough out of step with the rest of our address that it seems necessary to address some of its implications. In justifying this deviation from your normal inclination against intervening in the markets, you said that "these are not normal circumstances" and that "the market is not functioning properly." Mr. President, I put it to you that, by the time a company has grown "too large to fail," it is already operating outside the free market system--by definition. Once it has reached that size, the market forces that apply to that company are already not functioning properly.

You also did not address why the solution you propose is the correct one. You made a case for quick action, painting a gloomy picture of the consequences of inaction and noting that the government's top economic experts are warning there must be immediate action. But from there, the primary justification you offer for this particular economic rescue plan is to say "after much discussion, there is now widespread agreement on the principles such a plan would include." I cannot help but note that the news reaching us taxpayers does not portray anything approaching "widespread agreement" from Congress.

Why are you confident that $700 billion, spent primarily to buy bad debt from financial institutions, is the appropriate fix for this problem? What will be the long term effect on the economy of raising the debt ceiling? Is it appropriate to delay addressing those "good ideas" to prevent this problem in the future until after spending the money, rather than building provisions into the contracts with the firms that will receive the money, or at least building in additional latitude such as the ability to obtain a significant voting block of stock?

Finally, I understand there is only so much you can fit into a fifteen minute appearance, and you no doubt had good reasons to limit your talk to fifteen minutes. In the future, however, may I suggest asking your speech writers to include a good sound bite. Here's a good starting point: "we have nothing to fear but fear itself."

Conjugal

2008-09-10T13:28:00.000-07:00

Cory Doctorow has a wedding ring designed by Bruce Schneier. It's a secret encoder ring, naturally. Now they're looking for an encryption algorithm that can use the ring. I hit a slow patch at work, waiting for some documents to arrive (which means it's going to be all the worse when they actually do arrive), so I spent a few minutes on one. I'm going to post the short version of the algorithm at boingboing, but here's the long version, implemented in Perl. (I deliberately avoided using Perl tricks to keep it clear.)

Update 9/10/08: you get better results if you calculate the advance a bit differently. Start with 1. If ring 2 has a dot above, add 2; if it has a dot below, add 1. If ring 3 has a dot above, add 6; if it has a dot below, add 3. I'm still experimenting with the advance, though.


#!/usr/bin/perl -w

# Calculates how many positions to advance a ring to get to the desired letter
sub calcAdvance {
    my ($pos, $newPos) = @_;
    my $advance = $newPos - $pos;
    if ($advance < 0) {
 $advance = $advance + 26;
    }
    return $advance;
}

# Ring1 is inner-most, Ring3 is outer-most.
#
#                A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
my @ring2Dots = (9,9,0,0,3,3,9,9,0,0,3,3,9,9,0,0,3,3,9,9,0,0,3,3,9,9);
my @ring3Dots = (2,2,2,0,0,0,1,1,1,2,2,2,0,0,0,1,1,1,2,2,2,0,0,0,1,1);

#
# The Conjugal Encryption Algorithm.
#
# Initialization using the crypto key.
#
# Start by aligning all the "A"'s.
my $ring2Pos = 0;
my $ring3Pos = 0;

# Then initialize the ring.
my $key = "congratulations";
while ($key ne "") {

    # 1. Get the next character of the key
    my $keyChar = substr ($key, 0, 1);
    $key = substr ($key, 1);

    # 2. Rotate rings 2 and 3 together so the A on
    #    Ring 1 aligns with the key character on 
    #    Ring 3.
    my $advance = calcAdvance ($ring3Pos, 
          ord (lc ($keyChar)) - ord ("a"));
    $ring2Pos = ($ring2Pos + $advance) % 26;
    $ring3Pos = ($ring3Pos + $advance) % 26;

    # 3. Calculate an advancement amount.
    #    a. Start with 1.
    #    b. Look at the Ring 2 letter next to the A of Ring 1.
    #       If there's a dot above, add 9.  If there's a dot
    #       below, add 3.
    #    c. Look at the Ring 3 letter next to the A of Ring 1.
    #       If there's a dot above, add 2.  If there's a dot
    #       below, add 1.
    $advance = 1 + $ring2Dots[$ring2Pos] + $ring3Dots[$ring3Pos];

    # 4. Advance Ring 3 that many letters.
    $ring3Pos = ($ring3Pos + $advance) % 26;
}


# Generate some useful output
my $plaintext = "Wishing you a happy life together!";
print $plaintext, "\n";

# Skip whitespace and punctuation when encrypting.
$plaintext = lc($plaintext);
$plaintext =~ tr/a-z//cd;
print uc($plaintext), "\n";

#
# Encrypt text.  Initialization vector omitted for clarity.
#
my $cyphertext = "";
while ($plaintext ne "") {

    # 1. Look at the letter on Ring 3 adjacent to the A on Ring 1.
    #    Rotate Rings 2 and 3 together so that same letter on
    #    Ring 2 is adjacent to the A on Ring 1 (and some different
    #    letter on Ring 3 will now be adjacent.)
    my $advance = calcAdvance ($ring2Pos, $ring3Pos);
    $ring2Pos = ($ring2Pos + $advance) % 26;
    $ring3Pos = ($ring3Pos + $advance) % 26;

    # 2. Calculate an advancement amount.
    #    a. Start with 1.
    #    b. Look at the Ring 2 letter next to the A of Ring 1.
    #       If there's a dot above, add 9.  If there's a dot
    #       below, add 3.
    #    c. Look at the Ring 3 letter next to the A of Ring 1.
    #       If there's a dot above, add 2.  If there's a dot
    #       below, add 1.
    $advance = 1 + $ring2Dots[$ring2Pos] + $ring3Dots[$ring3Pos];

    # 3. Advance Ring 3 that many letters.
    $ring3Pos = ($ring3Pos + $advance) % 26;

    # 4. Get the next character of the plaintext.
    my $plainChar = substr ($plaintext, 0, 1);
    $plaintext = substr ($plaintext, 1);

    # 5. To encrypt this letter of plaintext, find the
    #    plaintext on Ring 1 and write down the matching
    #    cyphertext on Ring 3.  (To decrypt, look at
    #    the cyphertext on Ring 3 and write down the matching
    #    plaintext on Ring 1.)
    my $ring3CryptoPos 
 = (ord ($plainChar) - ord ("a") + $ring3Pos) % 26;
    $cyphertext = $cyphertext . chr ($ring3CryptoPos + ord ("A"));
}

# Print the cyphertext.
print $cyphertext, "\n";

more on inverting the pattern

2008-08-14T21:43:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a bit more about inverting the pattern, moving from a blog-like pattern of lots of talking and not much listening to something with more listening and less talk, or at least more meaningful listening.

Broadcast media is not the answer. A radio or TV station is basically the same thing as a blog, still a monologue where the speaker is hoping listeners will tune in. There might be more listening, but only because there are fewer speakers.

If you look at the pattern of a typical conversation, it's a group of people with only one person talking at a time. It happens that way because if two people try to talk at once, they interfere with each other. And it's usually considered bad form for one person to monopolize the conversation. With blogs, though, there's really no limit to the number of people who can talk at once, so there's a lot more talking. But with all the talk, who has time to listen and evaluate?

So what would it mean to bring a conversation-like pattern into the Internet? One example might be Internet Relay Chat: when one person types, everyone on the channel sees it. Another example, which I like even better because it moves a little more slowly, allowing the opportunity for greater depth, is a computer bulletin board. The modern version would be a web forum. Unlike blogs, where the blog's author holds most of the conversational power, the participants in bulletin board systems or forums [1] all have roughly equal power, so there's more room for the give-and-take that makes for conversation.

[1] Apologies to the classics purists, but I just can't bring myself to write "fora".

inverting the pattern

2008-08-12T22:10:00.000-07:00

Blogs are all about talking, but they're rarely about conversing. They're more like monologues within earshot of one-another, and sometimes another person will tune in and change their own monologue in response. Twitter's basically the same thing, which isn't too surprising since it's really a form of blogging.

I wonder, though, if there's a way to invert the pattern. Instead of everyone talking and hoping someone listens, is there a way you could reverse it so there's much more listening going on than talking? What would such a thing look like? And would people use it?

Al Gore's speech

2008-07-22T21:36:00.000-07:00

This post was originally going to be an analysis of Al Gore's energy challenge speech and some of the criticism of it.

If you view the speech as a logical or rhetorical argument, it has its share of problems. For example, when talking about the falling price of silicon for solar cells, Gore says, "the same thing happened with computer chips--also made out of silicon. The price paid for the same performance came down by 50 percent every 18 months--year after year, and that's what's happened for 40 years in a row." This conclusion doesn't follow: the price per unit of performance for computer chip drops because transistors keep getting smaller, but making the features on a solar cell smaller will quickly run out of steam because you're fundamentally limited by the amount of sunlight per unit area. Even if you increase efficiency by 50% every 18 months, and in a few years you get darn close to 100%, you still hit the limit imposed by the sun. That's not to say that solar cells won't get cheaper, but microchips' cost per unit performance is not the right model. Also, Gore has the annoying habit of not citing his sources, even in the transcript, which makes the speech very hard to fact-check.

The criticism is worse. It opens by saying "Al Gore wants you to do as he says, not as he does" and spends fully a third of its length calling Gore a hypocrite. But that doesn't follow either: the validity of Gore's contention that we need this energy challenge, and the underlying reasoning he presents, have nothing to do with his personal energy consumption habits. It could just as easily come from, for example, T. Boone Pickens. The next third of the criticism is devoted to an argument that says, essentially, it's impossible because we're not doing it now: renewables are a tiny percentage of our current energy production, therefore it is unreasonable to expect that they could reach 100% in ten years. But at its core, this argument is a simple assertion that change is impossible, which we know by experience to be false. Finally, two thirds of the way down, the criticism brings up a scientific paper that denies human impact on global temperature change, which is at least fodder for debate. (More background on that paper here and here.)

But you know, my heart just isn't in the analysis. Deep down, the reason is that I missed the last Apollo project and want one I can be a part of. And this is a cause I can get behind. It's big, it's inspiring, it'll create some fantastic spinoff technologies, and it'll produce great results. Even on the (exceptionally remote) chance that the IPCC is wrong and the paper the criticsm cites is right, that anthropogenic global temperature change is an illusion, it's extremely hard to deny that much of U.S. foreign policy is driven by a dependence on foreign oil, that even if we tap all our domestic sources they won't meet our demand, and that shifting to domestically produced renewables would give us a ton of new flexibility in foreign policy. So, yeah, I hope this thing takes off. And if it does, I want in.

redundancy and unexpected interdependency

2008-07-13T10:57:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago, the office network went down. Not surprisingly, we couldn't print or get to any electronically filed documents. Maybe a bit more surprisingly, the phones also went out because we've moved to fancy new Cisco network-based phones, and they took voice mail--which is now e-mail-based--with them. And so did the fax machines, because when faxes come in they get scanned and e-mailed to us. The net result was that we were almost dead in the water. Fortunately, the Blackberries stayed up, so we could use cell phones and could still send e-mail through the Blackberry server.

These sorts of unexpected interdependencies are cropping up more and more often as we begin to link one network to another, and as traditional network technologies shift around. I've already written about how my (now former) cell phone's alarm clock stopped working when the phone couldn't reach the cell network. There was a radio discussion today about an issue with digital TV: many people put battery-powered analog TV sets in survival kits so they can get news if there's a natural disaster, but (1) the set-top converter boxes that we'll need to use once HDTV becomes standard require wall power to run, which would make those analog battery powered TVs useless, and (2) many radio stations no longer have a news department, acting more as satellite feeds for a central office, so your transistor radio may not be able to pull in anything useful, either. Oh yeah, and many folks are moving away from conventional land-lines at home and going to VOIP phones or cell phones exclusively.

The classic way to deal with system failure is through redundancy: if the TV network goes out, you still have radio, which can get you much of what you need, or maybe you still have telephone. And so forth. The problem is that redundancy only works where you can stop a failure in one system from propagating to other systems. That's one reason most software doesn't have a redundant design: it's very hard to predict how far the effects of a failure will propagate through software, so it's generally not cost-effective to make it redundant. As our networking capabilities become more sophisticated, we're getting to the point where it's becoming harder to figure out what effect a failure of one network will have on the other networked systems we use.

The right way to do this, from an engineering perspective, is to take these sorts of problems into account when designing the systems, and then to periodically test them to make sure we got it right. That's not going to happen, at least right now, for social and economic reasons. The second-best approach would be to invest time and money into developing the design and evaluation tools necessary to either constrain the effects of a failure, so they don't propagate to other systems, or to at least be able to predict the likely failure modes and how far they'll propagate. We might eventually do that, but it'll take time. What's most likely to happen is the same thing that happened in structural engineering a hundred years ago: we may well see a series of unexpected, unforecasted failures, and they'll likely continue until we implement one of the first two approaches above.

switching antivirus software

2008-07-06T16:36:00.000-07:00

For a couple years, now, I've been using AVG Free edition. And for the last month or two, they've been pressuring me to upgrade to version 8. When I install new software, I often skim the End User License Agreement. In this case, here's what I turned up in the EULA for AVG Free 8.0:

6. Miscellaneous.

. . .

b. Privacy.

i. You acknowledge that AVG Technologies collects certain information regarding the users of the Software, including certain personally identifiable information. You hereby consent to AVG Technologies' collection and use of such information, and agree that AVG Technologies' collection and use of such information will be governed by AVG Technologies' Privacy Policy, currently published at www.avg.com, as AVG Technologies may revise the same from time to time.

ii. BY PROCEEDING TO INSTALL THE TOOLBAR, YOU ACKNOWLEDGE AND ACCEPT THAT, UPON ITS INSTALLATION, THE TOOLBAR WILL MODIFY VIA THE SETTINGS OF YOUR BROWSER THE "DNS ERROR PAGE" AND "ERROR 404 PAGE". . . .

I'm not too thrilled with the idea of my antivirus software communicating personally identifiable information back to the manufacturer based on a privacy policy they can change at any time. Based on the language in this agreement, I don't see any restrictions that would prevent them from changing the privacy policy in such a way that they could return any contents of my hard drive that they chose to. I also don't really like the idea of a toolbar redirecting DNS and Error 404 pages. The intent is probably to allow them to redirect to a "we didn't find your web page, but here are several similar pages" search engine that provides revenue to AVG, but (a) they don't make that explicit in the agreement, and (b) I don't know what effect such a redirection would have on Firefox, especially in odd situations like running a search while there's no wireless network connection, something that happens fairly frequently when our wireless cuts out.

Net upshot: I'm giving Avast Free Edition a try, instead. I've been running it on a desktop machine that I use occasionally for games, but this'll be the first time on the laptop I use frequently. The only difficulty I ran into is that Avast doesn't automatically uninstall AVG, so you need to do that manually via Add/Remove Programs (off the Control Panel). Also, Avast has a spinning logo in the tool tray, which is cute (the logo spins while it's doing its thing), but I find the movement distracting. However, the EULA was clean. Now we'll see how the program works.

Off-Shore Oil Drilling

2008-06-21T16:30:00.000-07:00

I've been sick for the last few days, which has left me with the dangerous combination of being grumpy and having some time on my hands. Which brings me to the topic at hand.

President Bush has called for drilling in the outer continental shelf. Specifically, he has said the following:

In the short run, the American economy will continue to rely largely on oil. And that means we need to increase supply, especially here at home. So my administration has repeatedly called on Congress to expand domestic oil production. Unfortunately, Democrats on Capitol Hill have rejected virtually every proposal -- and now Americans are paying the price at the pump for this obstruction. Congress must face a hard reality: Unless Members are willing to accept gas prices at today's painful levels -- or even higher -- our nation must produce more oil. And we must start now. . . .

First, we should expand American oil production by increasing access to the Outer Continental Shelf, or OCS. Experts believe that the OCS could produce about 18 billion barrels of oil. That would be enough to match America's current oil production for almost ten years.

What's interesting about this statement is that the Department of Energy ran a study on drilling in the OCS just last year. The study looked at the current restrictions, which expire in 2012, and mapped out the cases where drilling is allowed and where the restrictions are renewed and no drilling takes place. It found that

access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030. Leasing would begin no sooner than 2012, and production would not be expected to start before 2017.

So if we suppose that Congress ends the restrictions in 2008, a good first guess is that'd accelerate the timeline by about 4 years across the board: no production sooner than 2013 and no significiant impact on prices before 2026.

The reason there's no significant impact on prices is that OCS drilling would increase domestic oil production by about 7%, but oil prices are set on an international basis. In other words, the amount of increased production domestically wouldn't be enough to have a significant impact on global oil supply. Let's assume that oil would increase supply and therefore lower prices in the U.S.. In that case, the oil companies would have the choice of selling at a lower price in the U.S. market or at a higher price to the international market. Past behavior suggests that the executives directing those companies would feel constrained by a fiduciary duty to their shareholders and would therefore sell on the international market. As a result, the domestic prices would rise to meet the international prices. Now, we could impose laws that prevent the oil companies from selling that crude overseas, which might artifically drive down domestic prices, but those sorts of trade restrictions seem out of character for Mr. Bush's administration. So the most likely result is that a goodly sized chunk of any oil drilled here will feed China's demand for it.

Earlier in the speech, Mr. Bush said, "In the long run, the solution is to reduce demand for oil by promoting alternative energy technologies." It is not clear what time frame "the long run" represents, but there are already interesting developments on the alternative energy horizon, particularly in storage of electricity. For example, Zenn Motor Company and EEstor have announced plans to ship an electric car in late 2009 that will go 80 MPH and have a range of 250 miles and that a properly equipped charger could recharge in a few minutes. Similarly, A123 Systems is currently selling a new lithium ion battery technology with dramatically better energy density. (You can currently buy their stuff in certain lines of Dewalt cordless power tools while they work on the long battery life necessary for plug-in hybrids. They are also currently selling plug-in conversions for the Toyota Prius, though at $10K they're currently a little pricey for my budget.) It's also possible--today--to produce biodiesel from algae (rather than, say, corn), something you don't need arable land to do. (Hmm. I wonder how much land you'd have to devote to algae production to remove a billion tons of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere, since bamboo ain't gonna cut it.)

In the meantime, higher fuel prices are having an impact on demand. Amtrak ridership continues to set records, and high gas prices are sending it way up. And Ford is scaling back production for gas guzzlers due to decreasing demand.

Bottom line? Maybe drilling the OCS is not an effective answer either to Mr. Bush's short term goal of increasing supply (beyond insignificant levels) or to his long term goal of reducing dependence on foreign oil.

I tawt I taw a bomber

2008-04-27T17:57:00.000-07:00

While cooking dinner, I happened to glance outside just now and saw an airplane silhouette that looked, well, unusual. A quick check with binocs confirmed it: round tail, four engines, big, and not moving all that fast. A B-17 maybe? A few minutes later, it turned and flew over the house, making that distinctive, rumbling big radial engine sound that only World War II warbirds make. And an H-tail. Not a B-17, but a B-24 Liberator. Probably taking people out for rides on a beautiful flying day. Pity there was no camera handy.

The Park and Supergenius Criminal Masterminds

2008-04-25T23:25:00.001-07:00

So I've started reading The Park, about a trailer park full of people with superpowers. The idea's got a ton of potential, maybe even for some social commentary. And it looks like the villain just showed up.

Which has got me thinking: why is it that so many supergenius criminal masterminds want to rule the world? "What are we going to do tonight, Brain?" "The same thing we do every night, Pinky, try to take over the world." I mean, say you do take over the world. What do you get? The massive headache of running the whole friggin' world, that's what. And guess who everyone's going to blame the next time there's a war, or a recession, or some government agency muffs disaster relief?

So I'm thinking the really clever supergenius criminal masterminds--you know, the ones a cut above the Wile E. Coyotes of the world--they're not in it for the money or the girls or the private 747 with the jacuzzi tub and reporters and NORAD interface, 'cause there are a lot easier ways to get those things. And they're probably not in it for the recognition, either. Let's face it: a good PR firm will take you a lot further for your dollar than world domination will.

So what is it? Resume padding? The sheer challenge of the thing? The belief that they can run things better than anyone else?

Hmmm. Considering how well things sometimes run, maybe there's something to that last possibility.

the learning curve continues

2008-04-05T13:36:00.000-07:00

We moved in last weekend and are getting the new place up and running.

Today's adventure involves the sprinkler system. Since the rains have mostly stopped, our landscape's been dying, which made getting the sprinklers working a high priority. One of the manifolds that controls one of the sprinkler stations is gushing: not merely leaking, but leaking a whole awful lot of water whenever it turns on. So one project for today was to fix or replace the manifold.

I made the mistake of taking the advice from one of the guys at Home Depot who recommended replacing it with a new one. I also learned that replacing one of these beasts involves shutting off the water, cutting the pipes that connect it to the system, and assembling and gluing in the new manifold. So I bought all the parts necessary to do that. The operation started smoothly enough: I assembled the new system, dug around the old one, and cut it off. Only then did I realize that the pipes on the old manifold are a different distance apart than the pipes the new manifold is designed to fit. So, lesson #1: be careful when taking advice from Home Depot.[1] Lesson #2: check the sizes before cutting any pipes.

That left me (us) in a quandary: I had to shut off the water to cut off the manifold, now the pipe's cut, and as long as there's no manifold I can't turn the water back on. At this point, I was in over my head. So we ran a quick web search looking for a plumber who could solve the problem. Lesson #3: plumbers don't necessarily do irrigation, even though both involve pipes. We eventually found an irrigation person, who may or may not be able to make it here before Tuesday morning. In the meantime, he recommended gluing a cap on the supply pipe. So I've done that, and now I'm waiting for the glue to set up before I turn the water back on. Hopefully it'll hold. I guess we'll find out around 3:30 or 4:00.

So much to learn.

Update: at 4:00, I turned on the water and the cap held, so the situation's stabilized until someone who knows what he or she is doing can fix the problem.

[1] The advice from the ex fireman who used to do plumbing work on his days off and now works in the plumbing section turned out to be very helpful for getting the washer and dryer working, so I'm not saying it's all bad, just that caution is necessary.

new thermostat

2008-02-10T20:24:00.001-08:00

When installing a new Honeywell digital thermostat to replace an old Honeywell round thermostat, keep in mind that the wire labeled "H" on the old thermostat may, in fact, be the "R" wire. Especially if whatever machine printed the "H" on the thermostat just happened to miss ever so slightly and cut off the top of the letter. And you also have a "W" wire, and the instructions don't seem to account for having both a "W" and an "H."

OK, so pretty obvious. But if you don't figure it out, you can spend an hour puzzling over why the fan won't come on.

Trust me on this one.

worst painter evar

2008-02-10T20:04:00.001-08:00

I am not a good painter. For some reason, no matter how hard I try, I end up with drips and runs. When it comes time to paint the airplane, my choices will likely boil down to sending it to a paint shop, paying the paint shop extra to teach me how to paint right, or giving up and going for the polished aluminum look.

Anyway, one of today's big jobs was to "do something" about the shower pan in the master bedroom. The shower pan was pretty beaten-up, with dark spots and a rough finish that was going to accumulate more dirt. I was able to clean it pretty well, using a concoction of household chemicals I'm not eager to face again, but the pan was past the point of looking good.

Since we intend to remodel that bathroom in a few years anyway, we opted to try one of those do-it-yourself refinishing kits, which is essentially a two-part epoxy paint, where you put on your goggles and respirator, play mad chemist mixing stuff from can A with stuff from can B, ventilate the hell out of whatever it is you're painting, and the paint fuses with the surface with chemical vice grips closely related to the glues Burt Rutan used to build Space Ship One.

Anyway, after attacking the shower pan with the barrage of household chemicals I mentioned earlier, I spent today sanding it with 400 grit sandpaper, vacuuming it, and then going over everything with a tack cloth. Shower pans, you see, are specifically made so stuff like dirt and soap scum won't stick to them. Which is why the paint has to use such fearsome chemistry. So you sand the pan to roughen up the surface, and then you make sure those little chemical vice grips end up grabbing onto the rough surface instead of bits of dust you accidentally left there.

Here's a picture of the work in progress:

Anyway, it came out looking a lot better than it had before I started, but there are still more drips and runs than I'd like. I'm debating whether I want to let it harden, sand them out, and put on another coat.

RV-7A meet Toyota Prius

2008-02-10T19:48:00.000-08:00

One of today's tasks was transporting the horizontal stabilizer for the airplane that's under construction, a Van's RV-7A, to the new house. The horizontal stabilizer is the horizontal part of the tail. On an RV-7A, both sides of the tail form a single unit. A rather long single unit. And like most airplane parts, it's extremely strong, but only in the ways that it needs to be strong, which means I really wanted to move it myself rather than letting guys who are used to moving furniture do it.

Now, the last time we moved this thing, we put down the top on the convertible and tied the stabilizer across the seats, with one end on the dashboard and the other hanging over the back of the car. That worked OK for moving it less than a mile late enough at night so there'd be no traffic, but it wasn't going to cut it for moving the thing twenty miles at highway speeds.

After puzzling over it for a bit, I decided to try it in the Prius. Amazingly enough, it just fit:

With room to close the hatch, even! With the front seat reclined, and the back seat dropped, one tip of the stabilzer's about an inch from the dash, and the other comes right up against the tailgate. Mission accomplished!

where did the time go?

2008-01-21T21:00:00.000-08:00

Coppertop claims her old watch is dying: it's running slow, losing time.

I know better.

In the far future, people will have wildly advanced technology. But time, as they say, will still be money. People will be willing to pay quite a bit for a well-placed extra few minutes here, or an hour there. But time, like the other spacial dimensions, can neither be created nor destroyed. So where do you get it?

Easy. Mine it. From the past. From around the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, when people are so distracted by all the social changes that they'll barely notice it. They'll just chalk it up to being busy. Take just a few milliseconds out of every second, or even a good chunk of each second during peak demand periods. Squeeze it there in the past, stretch it out here in the future, and sell it at premium prices.

When you look up at the clock and wonder where your day went, well, now you know. Some future person with cash to burn is enjoying an extra few minutes lingering over drinks, or some desperate student who hasn't been born yet just scored another hour to cram (or fritter away trying to cram) before a final that hasn't yet been planned for a subject that doesn't yet exist.

Somehow, in all the mining, they missed Coppertop's watch. It's not losing time; it's keeping it just fine. It's the rest of us that are losing it.

working on the master bath

2008-01-20T22:34:00.001-08:00

We made more house progress today. The previous owner had removed the doors from the master bathroom, probably to make access easier. We discovered one of the doors in the garage and the other stored in the shelves built along the garage's ceiling. Coppertop cleaned both of them and we re-hung them today. I spent a good bit of time trying various miracle cleaning products on the stains in the shower (and occasionally releasing some really nasty fumes when two products that are never supposed to be used together accidentally came into contact.) After much scrubbing with Lime-Away, Soft Scrub, soap scum cleaner, and whatever else I could think of to try, the stains are somewhat better but still not great. We may decide to put down epoxy paint as a temporary measure until we can afford to do some serious work on the bathroom.

We also met the neighbor on one side of the house and briefly exchanged pleasantries.

Much progress, but much more remains to be done.

so what DO you put in a time capsule?

2008-01-20T22:13:00.000-08:00

Long Views has an article entitled How Not to Do a Time Capsule, on a time capsule containing a 1957 Plymouth Belvedere. At the end, Kevin Kelly makes this observation:

One conclusion from this mishap is that time capsules should attempt to preserve not popular items, but things that have no fans, no enthusiasts, no one to care for them. You should stuff them with artifacts that people currently find dumb, stupid, worthless, and insignificant. That’s the stuff that won’t be saved, and will therefore be of prime interest in 100 years.

Fair 'nuff. I remember reading that there are no bread recipes that have reached us from the middle ages because bread was so common that everyone knew how to make it by heart, so they didn't bother to write it down.

But it got me thinking: what stuff today is "dumb, stupid, worthless, and insignificant"? (Ooh, and Kevin scores a point for using a serial comma!) Even further along those lines, what are things we consider dumb, stupid, worthless, or insignificant that won't wind up in the city landfill in good enough shape that future archaeologists can't just excavate them from there. Given these criteria, what would you put in a time capsule? I've been brainstorming a list:

A package of disposable ballpoint pens.
A package of disposable razors.
A coffee maker, filters, half a pound of vacuum-sealed, ground beans, a measuring scoop, and instructions.
A copy of the 2008 IRS Form 1040 and instructions.
A package of chewing gum.
A gift card to a store. Bonus style points if it's one that doesn't expire.
A credit card.
A 6-pack of major-brewery beer, in bottles. And a 6-pack of microbrew for comparison.
Several packages of seeds for garden flowers or vegetables (especially if it's a long-duration time capsule.)
A map of the area.
The yellow pages.
A box or bottle of dish soap or laundry detergent.
A new toothbrush and full tube of toothpaste.

Because of the landfill criterion, the inexpensive cell phone you get for free when you sign a 2 year contract didn't make the list.

a weekend working on the house

2008-01-13T21:37:00.001-08:00

We spent a lot of time this weekend working on the house. Right now there are a couple goals. One is to make it feel clean and cozy for when we move in; the other is to get some of the remodeling-type work done that'll be especially inconvenient if there's furniture and the two of us in the way.

Saturday morning, I met our general contractor and our decorator first thing in the morning. We're trying to figure out what the 5-year plan for the house is and prioritize the work that needs to be done. A bit later, my parents came to the house and were a tremendous help with cleaning and taking care of odd fix-it jobs. I replaced a second outdoor faucet that'd been leaking, something ever so much easier to do in the daylight. The master bathroom had both a curtain on a rod and an enclosure for shower doors, but the doors themselves have gone AWOL. My dad and I removed the enclosure. We also removed several grab bars that the previous owner had mounted around the house, changed the toilet seats in a couple bathrooms, and removed the washlet, which, all-in-all, seemed a better solution than trying to teach guests how to use the thing. (If you're interested, I can cut you a great deal on a washlet. Remember, Clean is Happy!) We measured the whole house to lay out a floorplan, which will feed into a master plan for remodeling and decorating over the next several years. My mom also cleaned the ovens (go mom!) and did a ton of clean-up around the kitchen.

Today, Coppertop and I were there again. I climbed up into the attic and discovered the gas to the furnace had been shut off, which is why the furnace wasn't working yesterday. I turned it back on and re-lit the pilot, leading to a much warmer day of housework. We changed the seat on the remaining toilet, re-caulked the shower pan in the master and the holes left by removing grab bars, got the shower somewhat cleaner where we'd removed the door enclosure, polished the chrome in the bathrooms, and tried but failed to clean the shower pan itself. I'm not sure yet how we're going to deal with that shower pan. We also put in new shower heads, replaced an outlet cover, cleaned and polished the outsides of several cabinets, and changed several more burned-out lightbulbs.

After cooking tonight's dinner and preparing the ingredients for tomorrow night's dinner[1], we're both pretty much pooped. But at least the house is coming along.

[1] Tommorw's dinner's homemade pizza. A busy schedule means we had to measure out the ingredients and prepared the toppings tonight.

adventures in plumbing

2008-01-06T21:56:00.000-08:00

Today's big housing adventure was dealing with a leaking outdoor faucet.

One of the hose faucets has a worn-out washer that's leaking. To replace the washer, you need to turn off the water to the house. It turns out the new place has a quick shutoff valve (which I finally found in a cabinet in the garage), but after some experimentation it became clear that valve shuts off the supply to the house itself, not to the outside faucets. A call to Parental Tech Support (thanks, Dad!) turned up the right answer: shut off the main valve to the house, which is under the rectangular cover marked "water" (as opposed to being under either of the round covers also marked "water.")

The faucet itself is stuck behind the sort of over-sized geranium you only get in Southern climes. Trying to damage the plant as little as possible, I removed the nut at the top of the faucet and discovered I couldn't get access to the washer that way. That triggered another Parental Tech Support call, which resulted in my removing the entire faucet.

At that point, I could see the washer but couldn't figure out how to get it out of the faucet. So it became necessary to replace the entire faucet. Which meant I needed to buy a faucet. Which meant I needed to wash the crud off my hands from messing around with the plumbing. Which meant I needed to turn on the water again. Which meant I had to put the worn-out faucet back on the pipe or suffer a geyser as soon as the water came back on.

So, faucet back on and geranium looking a bit the worse for wear, Coppertop and I headed for a quick trip to Home Depot. Quick because it was getting dark and starting to rain. Long story short, we got back after it'd already gotten pretty dark and the rain was coming down pretty hard, but I wasn't going to put off replacing the faucet because removing the old one and putting it back on had left it leaking worse than before. So Coppertop, who hates rain, bravely volunteered to hold the flashlight while I installed the new faucet. It was a damp job, but the new faucet seems to be holding up well, I now know how to control the water to the house, and we were still able to clean up, change clothes, and make it to dinner on time.

the ambiance of a spa in your own private retreat

2008-01-01T20:42:00.000-08:00

Oh, the things you learn.

In the new house, there is a funky electric toilet in the guest bath. After some research, we've determined that it's an older model of a Washlet, a device the Toto company created "to help you create the ambiance of a spa in your own private retreat." The "clean is happy" link (which is not cube-safe in many work environments in the U.S.A.) is most enlightening.

All of which is great, but if we want to keep this thing around we may have to put a laminated instruction sheet next to the remote (yes, the toilet seat has a remote) so guests know how to use it. And having an instruction sheet for your toilet seat strikes me as being right up there with putting instructions on a box of toothpicks.

how do you build a 500 year house?

2007-12-30T22:03:00.000-08:00

We closed on the house and are now immersed in choosing a fridge and tiles for the kitchen and figuring out what work we can do on it with a very limited budget. All of which got me sidetracked thinking about building for the ages.

Suppose you wanted to build a house, in Southern California, that would last for 500 years. How would you do it? You can't use wood--the termites would eat it. Metal's likely to corrode. The materials that seem to stick around for 500 years are things like stone and maybe brick. (Nijo Castle is a brick structure that's around 500 years old.) But SoCal is an earthquake-prone area. Over a 500 year span a serious earthquake will occur, and stone and brick seem rather brittle. I wonder how durable flexible concrete is.

Also, how do you handle the mechanicals? For example, what do you use for plumbing? Clay pipes, maybe? And what about power? The grid might not even exist any more in 500 years. You could use solar, but then you're faced with power storage problems so the lights stay on at night, and batteries wear out pretty quickly.

Also, what about heat? Passive solar? Or fireplaces (and buy a whole lot of wood to keep yourself warm)? And for sewer, would it be septic, municipal, or some combination of both?

One approach might be to put most or all of the mechanical systems in a foundation and then build the rest of the house out of more flexible materials like wood. There are pagodas in Japan that have been around for 500 years, but they get rebuilt every 20 years to the same plans. Putting the complex stuff in the foundation might make the rest of the structure much less expensive to replace, to the point where you (and future generations) could afford to do it periodically.

Maybe the most successful approach would be to be famous enough that for the next 500 years people are interested in keeping your house around regardless of how you built it. That's kind of cheating, though, since if it's a museum it's no longer being used as a house.

Overall, a 500 year house is an interesting thought experiment.

the down payment

2007-12-24T08:25:00.000-08:00

We've been house hunting for a few months now. We finally found one we really like, but buying it's a stretch. Not a dangerous stretch, but a stretch nonetheless. I just got a reminder of that fact this morning when I wired the down payment to escrow. We saved that money and built it up over something like ten years, and in the blink of a fax the vast majority of it's going to go poof.

That'll take some getting used to.

In any case, if all goes well, we close on the 26th, or the 27th at the latest. Wish us luck!

blog reviews

2007-12-23T21:20:00.000-08:00

Don't blog about your work. That's the rule. Blogging about work is a bad scene, especially if your co-workers clue in to the fact you have a blog. So I've been avoiding writing about work. Trouble is, the last couple months work's about all I've been doing. Except buying a house, which I'll probably get to in a post or two.

But in the meantime, here's a review of some favorite other blogs. These are the ones I tend to read pretty consistently even when life is crazy, sort of a core list.

Making it Up As I Go Along. A good friend writes it. It's a good way to stay in touch.

Schneier on Security. All sorts of security stuff--mostly computer- and network-security, but sometimes you'll see stuff like the scandal a few years ago when people figured out how to pick a kryptonite lock using a ball-point pen.

Inky Circus. A totally rockin' science blog. They comb the web for fun science-related stuff and present it in a wonderfully irreverent way. Not fun science-related stuff as in the latest news about brane theory. Fun science-related stuff like DNA-shaped dog chew-toys and using hamburger shrinkage to measure done-ness.

Long Views. The blog of the Long Now foundation. These folks are planning to build a clock that will run for 10,000 years, chiming every millennium or so and, far more interesting to me, a library that'll last equally as long.

Unreasonable Rocket. A father/son team is building a rocket. More precisely, they're building a lander to compete in the X-Prize Cup Lunar Lander Challenge. How cool is that?

There are several others blogs I follow, but on most of them the traffic's too high, so they get dropped off the list as my free time decreases. Unfortunately, I rarely have time for a 50-entry blogroll like the A list boggers do.

still noisy creatures

2007-11-10T19:21:00.000-08:00

Yes, indeedy, humans are noisy creatures. Tonight, one of our neighbors in one of the apartments across the street (I can't tell which apartment) has decided to play Night Club. He/she/they have the music cranked full volume. Loud enough that it's coming right through the closed windows and doors in the front of our house and reflecting off the apartment behind us through the back windows, too. Coppertop's had to put on a headset designed to block out aircraft noise so she can concentrate. And it's not one of those cute little ones for being a passenger in a jet, mind you. These are a set of David Clark's designed as hearing protection for pilots of propeller aircraft. I'm not normally one to call the cops on a noisy neighbor, but this is the closest I've come in a while.

rebuilding a city from vacation photos

2007-11-04T16:08:00.001-08:00

Dear Digital Archaeologist,

I'm so excited! I think I just caught a glimpse of your future work!

Many people take photos using digital cameras. Once they do, they need some way to share them, so over the last few years we've seen the rise of photo sharing sites like Flickr. Sometimes, we see people collaborate in a self-conscious way, like posting images from around San Diego during the wildfires and tying them to a map. Often, though, the coordination is unconscious, such as several people taking pictures of a historic landmark like the Statue of Liberty.

Now, for the first time, a group of researchers has written software that pulls together those pictures to build a three-dimensional representation of the landmark. The principles are fairly simple--they've been known to the technology of computer vision for some time--but there are some tricky parts like dealing with obscured images and calculating backwards to find out where the photographer was standing when taking the photo. The researchers are already talking about trying to recreate entire cities digitally using these uploaded photos.

Is this one of the things you do? Collating photos from our age, figuring out which ones occurred at about the same time, and using them to rebuild maps and three dimensional representations of our cities? Or is that just the start? Are you doing far more sophisticated analysis, such as using the sun's angle to tell time of day and then discerning daily traffic patterns based on where people stood when taking the images or having their images taken? Or discerning the chemical composition of our air by using photos to assemble an absorption spectrograph of sunlight passing through the atmosphere? Or estimating cloud cover based on shadows?

Of course, I've assumed those images survive intact. You might instead be so far in our future that you're happy to be able to assemble a single coherent image by combining the fragments from a thousand different disk sectors, trying to fill in the gaps in bit-rotted jpeg files.

In any case, I wish you well. I hope this message--or most of it, anyway--reaches you in good health. And if you're a grad student, best of luck to you on your thesis work.

Sincerely,
False Data

e-mail culture and the company observer

2007-10-14T19:53:00.000-07:00

I've been working at a law firm just long enough, now, to notice some of the odd cultural differences. One of the bigger ones is e-mail. Every place I've worked before, e-mail was something you used for lower priority messages, things that didn't need to get handled right away. You generally knew when the person on the other end would get into the office, so you could send them e-mail, say, on a Saturday when you were thinking about it and figure they'd get to it Monday morning.

Not here, though. You see, they issue everyone Blackberries. And that means everyone's plugged into e-mail constantly. And that, in turn, means that they treat e-mail just like a phone call. If you e-mail someone at some unfortunate hour of the night or day, they tend to get back to you right away. And that means it's poor form to dash off a message on Saturday just because that's when you happened to think of it.

This will take some getting used to. I guess I'll have to start e-mailing those Saturday inspirations to myself, instead.

don't write like my brother

2007-10-14T19:38:00.000-07:00

The Car Talk guys often sign off with "don't drive like my brother, 'cause if you do, the end of your dipstick might fall off."

I was refilling Snardblott, the Pen of Doom tonight. As I held the adapter and twisted back the plunger to suck up ink, there was a sudden kerplonk, and the entire nib fell off into the (formerly) full bottle of ink. Not just any ink, mind you, but a jar of Noodler's Blue-Black. Which comes in tall, skinny jars. And is almost, but not quite, permanent.

Needless to say, a messy episode ensued. After cleaning up what'd already dribbled, I wound up pouring about half the ink into an empty jar. (Always keep your empty ink jars, 'cause you just never know when you might need one.) Then, after scratching my head for a bit, and wondering why I let the lady at the store talk me into using a non-threaded Waterman adapter when the old, worn-out adapter of the same size had threads on the end, I hit upon the bright idea of using a pair of bamboo chopsticks to fish the nib out of the jar.

Now, I'm pretty decent with a set of chopsticks. Back in college, I used to play the "pass the ice cube" game with the best of them. But I'll tell you, trying to fish a nib set in a round, smooth, cylindrical housing, immersed in inky blackness, through the neck of a tall, skinny jar, is not a challenge I'm eager to tackle again in the near future. I eventually got the sucker out, but not before picking up several blue fingertips for my trouble. And the old trick of washing your hands with shampoo doesn't take this stuff out--as I said, it's nigh permanent.

And to think just a couple days ago I was about to try one of Noodler's bulletproof inks, the ones that are permanent and will stand up to pretty much anything short of dissolving the paper out from under them.

google links and e-mail marketing

2007-09-27T18:31:00.000-07:00

I saw this interesting sponsored link come across gmail this evening:

A sponsored link for "e-mail marketing"? I guess it's a good thing there's a "report spam" button, but isn't that kind of like putting the humidifier and the dehumidifier in the same room and letting them fight it out?

Red Bull Air Race

2007-09-22T23:06:00.000-07:00

The Red Bull Air Race had its penultimate race today. My video clips seem to be giving Google indigestion, but here are some still images.

computer security and end users, part 4

2007-09-20T19:56:00.000-07:00

This is part four in a conversation with Meteorplum. I will post additional exchanges if and when they occur.

From False Data:

I think I need to make an implicit assumption explicit. I'm assuming that, if you don't take steps to educate users, they'll tend to do that which is most convenient. Since I've also assumed that education is expensive, and that we probably want to minimize the amount required to operate a computer, I'm trying to make security convenient for the end user. That's the real reason behind much the design I sketched out for the password wallet.

For example, the wallet's designed to allow the security department of the service to which the user is connecting to choose the "password" the user uses when connecting to that service. That way, we don't have to worry about users choosing secure passwords, because they're not choosing passwords at all (except the master password, as I said--that's going to be one weak point in the system. But I think we have a better shot at helping someone pick and remember one strong password than to pick and remember many.) In fact, if I were the security department, I wouldn't use a password at all. Instead, I'd probably do something like issue a private key to the user and keep a public key for myself. Then the authentication process would involve having the user digitally sign a randomly-generated message. (I'd also include a second set of keys so the user could verify that it's actually my service.) Now, getting someone who knows nothing about public key cryptography to use a system like that means that, ideally, the person shouldn't see the key exchange at all. Instead, he or she unlocks the wallet using the master password and it does the rest. (You could also use a one-type pad, along the lines of the bank system you described, if you wanted even stronger security.)

The wallet's a hardware implementation because laptops are just too bulky. It needs to be portable. In fact, it should probably go on the key ring to remind users to treat it like any other set of keys. Additional factors, like biometrics, are optional.

You could implement a clunky version of the wallet using Password Safe on a USB key, but few people would use it because it's confusing and adds additional login steps, with all that copying and pasting and such.

SecureID is worse, because you have to have a separate fob for each service you want to log into (one for the company VPN, another for a different company, and so on), and those things are just too bulky to put more than one on a key ring. And the whole timing issue of having to wait for the number to change and dealing with clock drift between the fob and the server just add to the inconvenience. (You should hear Coppertop's commentary when she has to use one.)

I'm pretty much convinced that convenience is key.

You also mentioned that "the other externality, which is actually not external at all, would be lost productivity on the users' end." One thing to keep in mind is that the losses may not fall uniformly on the users. For example, suppose my home system gets infected and starts pumping out stock pump-and-dump spam. The loss to me, personally, is probably fairly small--a sharp reduction in the apparent speed of my home computer, but that's not such a big deal if all I'm using it for is web, e-mail, and word processing. Other people, though, might suffer significant financial losses because of the stock scheme (even if they don't participate in it--for example, the company that's the subject of the scheme is going to have its stock price bounce around unpredictably). Or an ISP might suffer higher capital costs because it has to buy more filtering equipment to deal with the extra spam. It will try to pass that cost along to its subscribers--which might not include me--in the form of higher fees. Now, that ISP's users might also get infected and send spam my ISP's way, but there's no guarantee the losses will be symmetric.

We seem to both agree, though, that in general users have poor information about the security of the system they are using and lack information linking the consequences of their choices to the software they chose. The "security tax" idea I considered but am not crazy about is one way to communicate this additional cost to the user. Another would be an independent rating lab, like Underwriters Laboratories or Consumer Reports, but for software security. A third mechanism might be to address the problem the way we do it in construction, by establishing "building codes" for software.

computer security and end users, part 3

2007-09-20T19:47:00.000-07:00

This is the third installment in the conversation with Meteorplum:

From Meteorplum:

My general feeling about externalities is that the industry just doesn't keep good numbers (by active or passive omission) on the cost of security flaws. M$ certainly now has enough data to say what the cost is for every bug they fix and patch (engineering, data transfer, PR). There may even be a way of using historical data on bug rates and estimate the amount of additional original engineering time (which includes QA, dammit!)/money it would've cost and compare that to the post-ship costs.

The other externality, which is actually not external at all, would be lost productivity on the users' end. However, users rarely associate this loss with the appropriate software responsible for the problem. And as Schneier pointed out, they often blame themselves--or worse yet, get blamed by "security experts"--for not having done something that ought to be done automatically (or at least would have to be an opt-out item).

It seems like the only times average users realize that security problems with their hardware/software have direct costs on them are when they lose money directly through some form of fraud (411 scams and the like) or through identity/data theft (credit card info and worse). And of course, it is way too late by then to secure that information; that horse is out of the barn. Time to get a new horse and think about some sensible locks (or at least start using the crappy ones that the cut rate contractor installed).

I'll address three of your points briefly, then end with a couple of ideas of my own, though not elaborations on the car/driver model. (I should note that I listen to the Security Now podcast with Steve Gibson and Leo Leporte, and that's influenced me as much as Bruce Schneier, so I'll be referencing stuff that they've talked about, as well as my own spin on their ideas.)

Patching
This is incredibly convenient for the software/hardware maker and user, no question. The problem is doing it automatically and online. Patching is essentially a backdoor process, and the chain of trust is pretty fragile, in my opinion. Just look at the recent stealth patch M$ did to Windows Update [see here--ed]. I totally understand why a bunch of engineers would think "of course we need to to automatically patch the app that manages the patch process, otherwise how can we make sure it's always working as well as possible?". The problem is that if there is any validity to a user's choice to manually update, then nothing should be automatically updated. And of course, there is no guarantee that a given "critical" patch does not itself cause problems, not to mention any number of corporate IS departments which would not take it kindly to stealth software rollouts, no matter how benign the reasons, if they cause configuration problem down the line.

But the most egregious problem with patching is that it is vulnerable to two kinds of attacks:

1. Reverse engineering of the patching mechanism to allow malware to insert itself into the software to be patched.

2. "Man in the middle" attacks where a third party pretends to be the source of the patch and either delivers an unwanted payload viz. #1 above or uses the "trusted" connection to the user's machine to insert other software.

If the objective is to secure the patching process, then it would actually make sense to start using serial numbers on software. That way, requests for patches and the patches themselves could be encrypted using serial numbers, so that both the user and the software provider can be authenticated. The other way is to forget patching altogether and have providers make full installations of updated versions available by physical or online delivery after an authenticated request (mailing in a reg card, secure login, etc.). I know that sites can be spoofed, but that's a problem now, so this wouldn't change anything there.

Password/Wallet
Assuming that this is linked to anonymous mode while using Google, an additional check for a strong password would be to feed a potential candidate *to* Google and see if it returns any results. I just tried "rumblefingertag", which returned no results, though it doesn't have any non-alphas or digits. ("rumblefinger" returned six results and a suggestion of "nimble finger"). While it is conceivable that dictionary attacks might go as far as generating every possible two-word combination, three or more would strain hardware and software for at least the next couple of years.

The possibility you mentioned about the password wallet thing already exists in the form of SecureID fobs as part of initiatives to shift to two-factor authentication. I had one from AOL and employees had a secondary security screen when logging into their work accounts that required entering the current, six digit number from the fob. This number would change pseudo-randomly every thirty seconds, so even if my password got hacked, they would still need the current fob number. PayPal/eBay has rolled out a similar feature where you can get their SecureID fob for $5 and link it to your account. Thereafter, you have to add the current SecureID number to you password to login, or else you get a longer set of authentication questions (first pet, mother's maiden name, etc.). They're using VeriSign's implementation of OpenID as the back end, and VeriSign is selling their own fobs (though at higher prices). There is also discussions of making the SecureID software available as cell phone apps, turning a truly personal and ubiquitous object into the source of the second factor.

This doesn't obviate the need for using good passwords (and keeping them secure) but it goes a long way towards making online transaction more secure without introducing highly complicated bits of tech. On a similar front, Karin gets a page of (probably pseudo-random) numbers from her/our bank for online transactions. Whenever she's doing a online funds transfer, she has to enter one of these numbers, which is only usable once. Each sheet only has something like 25-30 numbers, and I don't know if she gets a new sheet at regular intervals of if she has to request new numbers when the old ones start to run out, but this is a slightly old fashioned way of providing a second factor for authentication that is even lower tech than the fob.

As for having a separate device that manages this, I'm not sure if I see it as a need or as a convenience, but I can imagine something like a USB key/thumb drive that's encrypted and contains hardware/firmware that acts like a SecureID key. The decryption key can be entered using software (assuming some sort of universal support under a TPM-like configuration) or hardware like these new USB drives that can be unlocked by typing in numbers on their built-in keypads (like those combo locks on car doors). The key would contain a list of passwords, and the built-in SecureID-like software/hardware would generate the required numeric authentication credential.

Granted, this would make the "master" password a weak point, but this would be true for any system which allowed for a single "master key" of any sort.

computer security and end users, part 2

2007-09-20T19:42:00.001-07:00

This is the second part of an e-mail conversation with Meteorplum.

From False Data:

1. Did you deliberately misspell your handle on your comment? The link is correct, but you're listed as "Fales Data".

No, but I'm sorry I didn't think of it--it would've been clever. It was
just a simple typo, though.

2. How do *you* think the burden of securing PCs could be shifted?

Too much regulation too early can kill an industry, so I'd be very
careful about creating a licensing scheme, at least for users, unless
it's absolutely necessary. That says we'll be most successful if we
consider the root causes of the problem before designing a solution,
just as we would have to look the threat model before proposing a
security regime.

One of the main reasons PCs are insecure is inadequate software
engineering, partly because we don't know how to do it well (compared to
our ability to engineer large structures like bridges or cruise ships),
partly because too many engineers have excessive egos (example:
resistance to code reviews and religious objections to languages that
limit buffer overruns), and partly because it's cheaper to skimp on QA.

The possibility of it being cheaper needs more investigation. Real,
honest-to-goodness qualitative research.

For example, it might actually be cheaper for society as a whole to have
bad QA--maybe the cost of dealing with security issues is less than what
it would cost us to prevent them in the first place or to educate users
(along with the lost opportunity costs that come with a licensing
scheme) to avoid them. If so, then we shouldn't even try to change the
status quo until our engineering know-how improves enough to shift the
cost structures.

Or it might be the case that it's overall cheaper to fix the security
flaws than to live with them, but that end users are not the ones
bearing most of the cost of security issues. That would be a classic
externality: the end user makes the decision of which software to buy,
enjoying the lower up-front cost that comes with insecure code, but
someone else has to bear the higher cost of the break-ins.
(Technically, the higher cost will eventually trickle down to the end
users one way or another, maybe because an ISP has to charge higher
rates because it has to have more routers to deal with virus scanning,
but that trickle-down may be so far removed from the original purchase
decision that it can't influence the end user's original choice of
software.) If this is what's going on, then the market-based solutions
Schneier's libertarian readership often advocates aren't likely to work
very well, if they even work at all.

Education is expensive. You have the up-front cost of teaching stuff to
people, and a lost opportunity cost because they're learning whatever it
is you're teaching them instead of things that might be more relevant to
their lives--little Janie's learning how to choose a good password or
how to patch her system instead of studying biology or civics.
So you don't reach for education unless it's less expensive than fixing
the problem you're trying to educate people around. And I'm not at all
convinced that's the case.

My gut says at most we have an externality going on, but more likely
people are just poorly informed about the actual cost of software.
Maybe we should start charging a "poor security" tax on the software's
purchase price so their purchase decisions better reflect the quality of
the code. (The fly in the ointment here is trying to fix the problem
without killing the open source movement. Without some very careful
legal footwork, a "poor security" tax might prevent anyone from
distributing free software.)

Assuming it's not overall economically cheaper to have shoddy code, I
put a lot of the blame in the software engineering camp. For example, a
lot of problems happen through buffer overflow attacks. In this day and
age, I can't think of any good excuse for having a buffer overflow bug.
We have programming languages that make buffer overflows extremely
unlikely. I don't care if your program will be 10-20% slower because you
wrote it in Java or used std::string and std::cin instead of
scanf--Moore's law will deal with the slowness eventually, or you can
find a place to cut algorithmic complexity--bottom line is you shouldn't
be using tools that are going to create a security flaw if you screw
up. Of course, if you're writing control code for an aircraft system or
nuclear plant you might not have the option of using one of the more
complex languages, but in that case you adjust your design, coding, and
QA style appropriately because bug reduction and security are even more
important.

Next problem: patching systems. If you solve the engineering problem, a
lot of this issue goes away (as it should because patches inevitably
create a window of opportunity for attackers), but let's assume there's
a transition period where manufacturers are still pushing out patches
every other week, or every week, or (shudder) every day.[1] I think
Microsoft has a good idea here: users shouldn't have to know anything
about how to patch their system beyond allowing it to install the
patch. If it's an operating system you're patching, the version of the
OS on the shrinkwrap DVD should be incapable of accepting a network
connection, or of making one to anywhere except the update distribution
site, until it has checked at least once for updates. And for goodness'
sake, it shouldn't have to reboot every time it installs a patch,
because that annoys users and keeps them from patching. While it's true
that automatic patching can create a security vulnerability, if someone
commandeers the auto-patch system to push out a trojan, the proper way
to deal with that issue is to fix the software engineering process so
there's no need to patch in the first place. It's not to use manual
patching, because manual patching requires user training which, as I
said, is expensive.

Next: configuring systems. I like the OLPC folks' approach here, that
it's a fundamental design principle that an operating system should, by
default, have a secure configuration. In other words, a user should not
have to lock down the operating system. If anything, the user might
have to unlock parts of the operating system. Also, I'm not yet sure
about this, but I'd also consider limiting the ability of software
manufacturers to disclaim consequential damages from any configuration
changes their software makes that reduce security.

Next: bad choice of passwords. You could solve this problem if users
don't get to choose their passwords. Of course, with today's
infrastructure, if you give them a password they're just going to write
it on a sticky note next to their monitor, but we can solve that issue.
Give each person one hardware password wallet. They unlock it using a
master password (which you can drill into them that they never, ever
give away with no exceptions--that's a concession I'll make to
education.) Then individual services can issue and change passwords,
which are probably actually public/private key pairs, to their hearts'
content and the user never sees them because they go in the wallet. The
wallet should have the ability to back up its contents, and it probably
should let the user share passwords for individual services even if the
individual service wants to prohibit password sharing, because otherwise
the user will have an incentive to take the greater risk of sharing the
master password.

Next: the Lost Laptop problem. Not an educational problem for end users
but for IT departments and manufacturers. Laptops should ship with
encrypted filesystems.

Last but not least, social engineering attacks. It might be necessary
to use an educational campaign to address these attacks. We can also
cut off some of these problems through infrastructure changes. An
attack like "I'm the CEO and I've lost my password wallet, could you
please unlock X for me?" won't work if it's trivial to get a new wallet
and restore it. "I've lost my master password" won't work if everyone
has to use their master password several times a day, so everyone knows
that everyone else inevitably remembers their passwords.

[1] Remember that the number of bugs, and therefore down-time, is
proportional to the number of changes. Bug fixes can introduce bugs.
The more the code changes, the greater a chance of introducing a bug.
The more simultaneous patching there is, the greater the chance of
introducing an interaction bug.

computer security and end users, part 1

2007-09-20T19:36:00.000-07:00

Meteorplum and I have been having an interesting e-mail exchange, prompted by a provocative article Bruce Schneier posted, in which he compared insecure end-user computers to a public health hazard and suggested requiring ISPs to provide technical support. I posted a very brief comment, and the next day our exchange began. With Meteorplum's permission, I'll post it here.

From Meteorplum:

1. Did you deliberately misspell your handle on your comment? The link is correct, but you're listed as "Fales Data".

2. How do you think the burden of securing PCs could be shifted?

I'm thinking something along the car/driving model myself, with some form of mandatory PC user education/course and a test. It doesn't prevent anyone without a license from buying or using a PC, but they'd be fully on the hook for what the PC did if they don't have a license. In home environments, parents would be liable for their children's (mis)usage unless the kids are themselves licensed. Libraries and internet cafes will certainly change their policies to something akin to car rental agreements. I can certainly foresee much opposition, but no less so than early car owners (and some current gun owners).

realizing just how far out of touch I am

2007-09-20T19:25:00.000-07:00

I'm slowly realizing just how far out of touch with current events I've become. For example, I'm only now learning about the propellant explosion at Scaled Composites that occurred back in July. I've been following progress at Scaled because they're one of the companies leading the charge for significant technological progress in space travel. And because Burt Rutan's work is, well, just plain cool. Now, I have sort of an excuse--July 27 was the day after the bar exam, so I was slowly crawling out of my little legal foxhole and beginning to pick up the many things that fell on the floor during the studying process--but it's not a very good excuse because I learned about Japan's Kaguya lunar probe mission on September 14, the day they launched it. So now I'm faced with the need to figure out how to better plug into current events in the space industry. And probably in the rest of the world as well. I guess I have a lot of learning to do.

Do they make Cliff Notes for current events? (I guess there's Google News, but somehow it lacks the breadth of coverage that I'd like to have.)

getting to the desktop while away from home

2007-09-10T10:53:00.000-07:00

While traveling, one of the problems I frequently run into is the inability to do more than access a web site from a remote application. For instance, I might drop into a coffee shop with Internet access only to find out they've locked down everything except port 80.

I now have a partial solution to the problem. We have a home Linux server with sshd and vncserver installed. Based on this post, I've configured our setup to allow ssh connections on ports 22 and 80 and tunneled VNC over those connections. I've also put a copy of porta-putty, a portable ssh client, on a USB thumb drive so I can run it from a borrowed machine for those times when I don't have my own machine available. (In that case, I can connect a web browser to http://localhost:5801 and get the Java-based VNC viewer.)

Here's how to do it:

Configuring Access on Ports 22 and 80
First, make sure you have sshd installed on your Linux server. Most of them already do. Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config. Uncomment the "Port 22" command, and just below it add "Port 80". Note that you can't run both a web server on port 80 and sshd on port 80, which is fine for us because this host handles internal stuff like e-mail and printing--for security reasons, any web pages are on a different host.

You may have to allow firewall access to ports 22 and/or 80. On our slightly older Fedora machine, you can set the firewall permissions via System->Administration->Security Level and Firewall. Allow TCP connections on port 22 (which it probably already does if you installed sshd) and 80 (where you'd normally have web access.)

If you have an external hardware firewall, you'll also need to set up any necessary port forwarding for those ports to reach your server.

Configuring Porta-Putty
Next, get a copy of portaputty and unpack it onto your USB drive or, if you're a bit more cautious, put it in the hard drive folder you use as a master image for your USB drive.

Run putty.exe. For the host name, type the name you use to connect to your Linux server from the Internet. Leave the port at the default 22. Then give this session a name in the "Saved Sessions" box, something like "Server (22)."

Click on Connection->SSH and check "Enable Compression." (I suggest leaving "Don't start a shell or command at all" un-checked so you have a convenient way to launch the VNC server manually. That way, you can bring up the server only when you need it.)

Click on Connection->SSH->Tunnels. Put "5901" in the Source Port box and "localhost:5901" in the Destination box and click "Add." Then put "5801" in the Source Port box and "localhost:5801" in the Destination box and click "Add."

Click on Session and click "Save."

Now create a second configuration that's identical except that it connects on port 80. Change the Port to 80, change "Saved Sessions" to something like "Server (80)," and click "Save."

Using It
To use the arrangement, first launch putty.exe. Depending on whether you have access on port 22 or port 80, double-click the appropriate session name to open the connection.

Once the ssh terminal starts and you've logged in, run vncserver to launch your VNC server. Remember that VNC changes the port number based on the display name: if it puts your display on :1, then it'll use ports 5901 and 5801, but if it puts you on :2 it'll use 5902 and 5802, etc. The port forwarding above assumes you'll always get :1, so it's a good idea to verify that's where VNC did, indeed, put your display.

If you're running putty on a machine with a VNC viewer installed, launch the VNC viewer and connect to localhost:5901. You should then be able to enter your password and get a VNC display.

Otherwise, if all you have is a web browser, launch the web browser and connect to http://localhost:5801. (Note: 5801 for http, 5901 for VNC viewers.) The VNC server will feed your browser a VNC viewer in the form of a Java applet. Wait a moment for Java to load, and then you should be able to log in and run.

One caveat: So far, I've been testing from inside our network by bouncing the connection through the router. I haven't had time yet to retreat to the local firewalled coffee shop for a test from there. I'll post a follow-up if further testing requires any configuration changes.

factfinding excursion to Anza-Borrego for Sunrise Powerlink

2007-09-08T21:56:00.000-07:00

The Sunrise Powerlink is a controversial project to send a 500 kilovolt transmission line to San Diego. Part of the line's proposed route would go through the middle of the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. Because the proposal's so controversial, it's hard to get solid information amidst the chaff. So Coppertop and I decided we'd figure out the power line's proposed route and then head over to the desert and see where it goes for our selves. And take pictures along the way.

It's the off season for the park right now, and with good reason: temps were in the 100F range, and the desert isn't especially exciting now what with the lack of rain and high heat. Apparently wildflower season is February. Also, the rangers recommended against hiking due to the heat, and against driving on the dirt roads due to our lack of four wheel drive, their surplus of ruts and rocks, and the unlikelihood of anyone else being on those roads to give us a lift if we broke down. So we drove a number of highways that intercept the proposed paths and took pictures along them.

OK, hopefully this'll work correctly: if you want to follow along, you can find a Google Map here.

California Highway 78 and County Highway S3
You can get a real sense of the vastness of the desert landscape here.

(map)

Along Highway 78 (33° 8'35.98"N, 116°16'28.22"W)

There is an existing transmission line that goes through the park, along with some distribution lines, but they're much lower voltage and made of wood, not the steel towers necessary to carry a 500 kV line. You can see some of the poles to the left of the road in this shot.

The park, at least in this area, seems to become flatter as you move East.
(map)

Mid-way to Highway 2

You can see the foothills begin to build as you move west. It was around this point that it started becoming hard to imagine steel transmission line towers interrupting that sky view.
(map)

Highway 78 and County Highway S2

Here's what you see when you get to Highway 2.
(map)

County Highway 2 approaching CA-79

We're now moving north, approaching CA-79.

Mountains and big sky in the background, existing power line in the foreground.
(map)

County Highway 2 at CA-79

Finally, we've reached CA-79. This is one of the two existing substations we saw, and the distribution lines converging on it.
(map)

report from the front lines: Operation Japan Trade proceeds apace

2007-09-02T23:52:00.000-07:00

To: Directorate, Operation Japan Trade
From: False Data
Re: Report from Front Line Operations

As I compose this message on a Toshiba computer while reading about Toyota Motor Corporation's successes in automobile sales and the increasing United States trade deficit, a cursory inspection would seem to show a retreating trade position. However, I am pleased to report significant advances in the Grand Plan of Operation Japan Trade.

The integration of Starbucks into the Japanese economy is nearly complete, and integration into the nation's culture is making significant strides.

Furthermore, Eddie Bauer now has a strong presence.

However, the Directorate will be justly proud to learn of the success of its most audacious move: please note the popularity of the recently-introduced Krispy Kreme:

With strides such as this, it is only a matter of time before the Directorate can declare Operation Japan Trade a resounding success.

Please Enjoy Japanese Public Toilet

2007-09-02T05:32:00.000-07:00

The meaning of the word "enjoy" gets stretched a bit by tour guides. "Thanks to hydroelectric power, we enjoy electricity in our homes." "Please enjoy this promotional video." However, the architecture of some of the public restrooms is surprisingly enjoyable.

Here's one in Tokyo shaped like a fountain:

I think I may have posted it earlier, but it's the one that got us looking at others, and started a running joke of "collecting" them. Also in Tokyo:

In the mountains, somewhere around Nikko:

and Kegon Waterfall:

In Takayama:

Finally, this one's only semi-public. It's actually an outhouse attached to the farmhouse I wrote about earlier:

Except for the outhouse, which has a plank and a hole, inside a public toilet you'll find a commode that's either the more familiar western-style sit-upon variety or the Japanese style which is set in the ground and you squat over it. Sorry, I don't have a picture of the commode itself.

Soap for hand washing is fairly rare as are hand drying facilities which, when present, are inevitably electric hand driers rather than paper towels. (They have a high pressure hand drier here which is considerably more effective than the "press button, wipe hands under warm air" variety common in the U.S.)

Kyoto

2007-09-02T05:18:00.000-07:00

Ah, Kyoto, my other favorite city in Japan. A thousand years of history in one glorious jumble. It's a shame we had only a day to tour the city--it's like trying to tour Rome in a day. I would much rather have had two weeks and a small library of Japanese history books to properly appreciate the city.

Only an hour to visit Nijo Castle! They don't allow photos (or sketching) inside, but I could get pictures of parts of the outside of the castle.

And of the surrounding garden:

The castle features the famous "nightingale floors," floors purposely made to chirp as you walk over them to deter assassins and spies. For the mechanically inclined, here's a close-up of the mechanism that does the chirping when there's pressure on the floorboard above:

Then it was off to the shrine and temple grab bag. Kitano Tenmangu:

Kinkakuji, the Golden Pavilion:

(Yes, that's gold leaf.)

Heianjingu:

and the garden around it:

Sanjusangen-do, filled with a thousand and one golden statues of the Buddhist deity Juichimen-senjusengen Kanzeon:

too bad they don't allow pictures inside.

And finally Kiyomizudera Temple:

where we stopped for a much-needed shaved ice.

parking in Japan

2007-09-01T05:37:00.000-07:00

Travel in Japan has given me a whole new appreciation for parking. In this country, you may not purchase an automobile unless you can present a certificate showing you have a place to park it, so you see some pretty amazing parking jobs, and some rather tiny cars. (A Toyota Prius is a large car here.)

For instance, consider this parallel parking job. That's a foot deep trench between the rear wheels.

This structure is a vertical parking lot.

It holds one or two cars per floor. There's a turntable at the bottom to rotate the car to the proper position and an elevator to lift it to the floor with the parking place.

They typically rent out spaces by the month, about 2,000 yen per month (around $200) in Kanazawa. More in Tokyo.

Or how about this arrangement to let you put four cars in two spaces?

As I mentioned, the cars are also smaller. Some of them extremely small. There are two classes of general passenger cars, the normal-sized ones and the "lightweight cars" which have an engine smaller than 1000 cubic centimeters. You can recognize the lightweight ones by their yellow license plate. A Honda Fit, which is one of the smaller cars available in the U.S., is too big for the "lightweight" class. Here's a lightweight van next to a tour bus for comparison:

This is what one looks like close-up: very small wheelbase and tall seating position (so you can see over the other traffic).

They're not much bigger than a motorcycle.

unexpected interdependences, or why a mobile phone makes a poor alarm clock

2007-09-01T05:36:00.000-07:00

When I travel, I often don't carry a travel alarm. Instead, I generally rely on my mobile phone's built-in alarm clock feature. During this trip, I discovered that's not such a good idea because of unexpected interdependences in technology.

You see, my phone sets its current time from the cellular network, which is handy because it means the phone's clock is usually very accurate. But the phone is not an international model. So when I turn on the phone here in Japan, it gets stuck looking for a cellular network, which it's never going to find because the network is on a different set of frequencies. So there's no way to get to the alarm clock function because the phone's stalled on the network search. And there's no way to manually set the time. Rather than degrading gracefully to let me use the other functionality, the phone's basically a very sophisticated electronic paperweight.

My old Palm Pilot has an alarm clock feature as well, but I've been hesitant to use it because, to make sure I wake up at the right time, I'd need to change its clock to local time. But Japan's on the other side of the international date line from the U.S. I have no idea what happens if I advance the clock, make an entry, and then upon returning to the U.S. reset the clock to what the Palm Pilot will believe is the previous day.

So far, we've been using wake-up calls at the hotels, which are an automated system at the places where we've been staying. They've been working out pretty well, but that's a heck of a lot of technology to rely upon, and the tour guides are sticklers for punctuality.

Maybe next time I'll just bring an old fasioned mechanical wind-up alarm clock.

Kanazawa

2007-09-01T05:13:00.000-07:00

Kanazawa was interesting but not the knockout that Takayama City was. We visited Kenroku Garden, one of the most famous Japanese-style gardens in Japan.

Notice how this island is shaped like a turtle (with a heron perched on the turtle's head . . .):

Originally, this garden was the private garden of the shogun who controlled this area. It costs about five million dollars a year to maintain it.

Next was the a pottery studio that has been making kutani pottery for five generations.

We visited a former geisha house, now a museum, and wound up the tour with a shop and manufacturing facility that makes and uses gold leaf.

. . . where they treated us to tea with (real) gold flakes in it.

This place is known for, among other things, having a million dollar bathroom: the ladies' side is picked out in gold leaf, while the mens' is in platinum leaf.

damp day, but cool stuff

2007-08-31T21:00:00.000-07:00

Note to self #1: when traveling, remember to waterproof your leather shoes. Or at least put water-friendly sandals in the little bag they let you take with you on the tour bus.

Note to self #2: the night after taking over 130 pictures, remember to recharge the camera's battery. We had just enough juice for another thirty pictures or so.

The next day in Takayama City dawned with another rainstorm and a rather damp trip to the farmer's market.
The next stop was a traditional gassho-style house, the Toyama family's farmhouse.
No hardware is used in the construction of the house. Instead, they join all the beams and other parts using carefully cut joints and wooden wedges and use rope in certain other areas. The steeply-sloped roof handles the two meters (six feet) of snow the area sometimes receives. The house has a straw-thatched roof that must be replaced every forty years or so.

After touring this large farmhouse, we went to Shirakawa village, a historically-preserved village full of this style of house.

The next stop was Gokayama, the heart of the paper-making industry, where they've been making mulberry-bark paper for three hundred years or so. We got a chance to try our hands at making paper (just the easy part of turning pulp into paper, not the hard part of preparing the bark and making the pulp.) Unfortunately, that's about the time the camera ran out of juice. They mentioned that paper-making is a dying art and they're trying to find new uses for washi paper, which has me thinking about structural applications. (Hey, if they can make paper sculptures, wallets, and purses, it may also be strong enough for some very interesting structural uses.)

Takayama City is now on my list of favorite cities in Japan

2007-08-30T21:00:00.000-07:00

We traveled to Takayama City first by Shinkansen, the bullet train.

I'm having some problems posting videos from the train. I'll try to get them up in a few days.

Later, we changed to a local train that wound its way through mountains and valleys for two hours to get to the city.

The city itself is small, but they've preserved the old town beautifully.

Twice each year, they have a festival parade that's apparently quite famous, with over a hundred thousand people coming to attend (and hotel space for about a tenth of that.) It's sort of the exact opposite of the Rose Bowl. For the Rose Bowl parade, they make the floats the day before out of flower petals, so they're the most ephemeral things you could imagine. In contrast, many of the parade floats for the Takayama festival are three hundred years old or more. We saw a few of them in a museum, where they rotate several of the floats through:

That night, we had a fantastic dinner of mountain vegetables and a bit of meat cooked at a gas burner at the table using locally made miso. One nabe dish:

and one sukiyaki:

Mt. Fuji, Hakone, and culture shock

2007-08-29T06:43:00.000-07:00

Today's trip was to Mount Fuji and Hakone. Mount Fuji is a volcano that hasn't erupted in 300 years, which is roughly a blink in geological times. It's usually cloudy, but we got a glimpse of the north slope.

At altitude, though, we were in the clouds:

which later turned into a rainstorm preventing a planned cable car trip.

By the end of the day, we landed in a hot spring resort in Hakone. This evening, culture shock started settling in, or at least that's what I'm calling it. No one particular thing precipitated it, it's just that feeling that you get when you realize you're on a boat and far enough out to sea that you have no hope of swimming to land if the thing sinks. It's one of those adjustment processes I'll have to get through.

Tokyo, at least, and much of the rest of Japan seems very western on the surface, but there are some profound cultural differences. I used to think the breakdown was along the lines of convenience versus presentation, where the U.S. is more focused on convenience while Japanese culture values presentation more. Now I'm beginning to change my mind. I think the real difference is that U.S. culture places a strong value on flexibility, while Japanese culture more strongly values order. For example, trying to find a coin laundry in Japan has proven exceptionally difficult, unless you want one associated with a hotel, in which case it's most likely available only to hotel guests. Similarly, getting a doggie bag from a restaurant here is pretty much unheard of (and if you ask for one you're likely to get an excuse along the lines of it being a hot day, and they don't want to endanger you with possible food spoilage--translation: you're bucking the trend and they have no idea how to deal appropriately with the request.) As long as you go with the flow, things flow beautifully, but if you (say) would rather not pay 60,000 yen (around $60 U.S.) for the hotel buffet, and would rather make your own arrangements for dinner, or you simply didn't have dinner reservations, you may have a lengthy search for available food that goes beyond Cup Noodles.

a long day trip to Nikko and Kegon Waterfall

2007-08-29T06:32:00.000-07:00

Miscellaneous pictures of a long day trip to Nikko and Kegon Waterfall.

We ended up at Sinjuku station and headed back to the hotel from there. Here's my picture from Shinjuku. It probably expresses the feeling of the place better than a clearer one would.

activities around Tokyo

2007-08-29T06:10:00.000-07:00

More pictures and other updates. A few days ago, we helped Coppertop's mom get her new computer set up, so she's no longer running Windows 98. That evening, the town celebrated a harvest festival, with children pulling (and riding, and drumming on) a carriage through town.

The next day, it was a visit to Tokyo Tower, a three hundred meter landmark.

Here's the view from the observation deck looking down through a window in the floor:

We also swung by the Imperial Palace. We couldn't go inside, but here's what the gate looks like:

Then it was a temple and shopping area:

For some reason, these tours seem to like shopping.

That evening, we went to Akihabara, Tokyo's electronics town, a place where you can buy anything and everything electronic. There are stores specializing in capacitors, others in coax cable, and others in antique recording equipment. We eventually found one called Sofmap which has a large selection of used personal computers. After much searching, we found an inexpensive, good quality one suitable for Coppertop's seven year old nephew (and his family.) We paid them 1,000 yen--about $10--to deliver it in order to avoid having to carry the thing on the crowded trains. We're currently on a tour outside Tokyo, but the current plan is to set it up when we get back.

the science museum

2007-08-25T03:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's tour gave us only 45 minutes at the museum, so we returned there today to explore further. My very weak command of the language meant I caught about half of what was going on, but we both enjoyed ourselves.

Japan's one of th world leaders (if not the world leader) in robotics, so the robotics demonstrations were a definite high point. They had huge crowds for Asimo:

The robot moves fairly quickly and reasonably fluidly, though it has an odd knees-bent gait. When it runs, it's really more of a fast walk, because there's never a time when both feet are off the floor simultaneously.

One of the more interesting robots was the Hull / Halluc 2 combo.

This robot is more of a remotely piloted vehicle. The operator gives it commands telling it directions to move and/or turn, it provides force feedback depending on how close it is to obstacles, and it makes its own decisions about how to move its wheels or legs to move the body in whatever direction the operator wants. The insect-like design gives the robot tremendous flexibility in how it moves: rolling on wheels, walking with its wheels, or flipping its legs around and walking on its axles as this clip shows:

blogging access

2007-08-25T03:09:00.000-07:00

We're in Japan now. Internet access has been a bit of a challenge, making blogging difficult, but I'll try to post when I can.

Yesterday, we took a half day tour of downtown Tokyo. Highlights included a man-made island and the city's museum of the future (sort of a science museum--more on that next post.)

Here's a restaurant in a TV network building on the island:

and their miniature version of the Statue of Liberty:

This fountain, believe it or not, is a public toilet:

Traffic around here is crazy. Here's what it looked like in the train station yesterday (Friday, since we're a day ahead of the U.S.A.):

a very long day paddling

2007-08-22T17:38:00.000-07:00

The day before yesterday, we took a slow day of it, just hanging around
the beach, partly as recovery from the day-long travel to Waimea canyon,
and partly to get ready for yesterday's activities.

Yesterday was a seventeen mile kayak trip. There's a highway that runs
almost all the way around Kaua'i. The remaining few miles, the part you
can't cross by car, is wonderfully unspoiled, with rugged cliffs and
canyons, wild goats, and vegetation that ranges from lush to beach
scrub. That was the stretch we were kayaking.

The kayak company's about half-way around the island from us, and
check-in was 6 a.m., so we were up at 4 a.m. We drove there, checked
in, and then caught the van to the drop-off point, which was back the
way we'd just come, some distance past the condo. They put us two to a
kayak, gave us a lesson in how to paddle, how to brace to keep yourself
from tippng over, and how to get back in when you do tip over, and we
launched.

Most of the early part of the trip covered a stretch of water that, in
the winter, can see 40-60 foot waves. (It's too dangerous to run the
tour in the winter.) Over the years, they'd carved out caves in the
rock. Conditions were mild enough that we were able to explore some of
the caves, which were stunning. One in particular was like paddling
into a cathedral, with brilliant sunlit fountains cascading from a hole
in the ceiling, and a large, round, watery room. Another was a big,
round, open hole with a lava reef in the center, sheltered from the
ocean swells outside.

The usual pattern was paddle for half an hour or so, then take a break,
then paddle some more. After twelve miles or so, we stopped on a beach
for lunch. The beach is a state park accessible only by boat. It has
running water for showers and a sink, fed by a stream on top of a
cliff. After lunch, we hiked up the cliff and played in a small
waterfall there, where you could sit on a rock and get a massage from
the falling water.

After lunch, the wind that had been pushing us along had mostly died
down to a light breeze in the other direction. By that time, we'd
crossed over to the dry side of the island, the terrain had changed to
low scrub and sandy beaches, and we were all feeling the "burn" in our
arms and shoulders. We eventually landed after seventeen miles on a
large sandy beach were we were treated to a double rainbow in the
setting sun, macadamia nut cookies, and tuna poke (think sashimi bits
with heavy seasoning).

We finally made it home around 9:30 p.m., utterly exhausted. I managed
to pack for the flight to Japan and then crashed hard.

Waimea Canyon

2007-08-19T23:33:00.000-07:00

Well, the $10 camera has officially died. I tried a new battery yesterday but no joy. That probably means no camera for the kayak trip on Tuesday, but till then I'm using a film camera and borrowing digital pictures from friends.

Here's a picture of the farmer's market from yesterday:

Today's excursion was a long trip around the island to Waimea Canyon, a large canyon that somewhat resembles a scaled-down Grand Canyon. Here's a view from an outlook over the ocean.

Here's the canyon itself. Notice the red color in the walls. The red mud apparently stains so well that some local companies use it to die T-shirts.

Here's another picture of the canyon's outlet. Clouds roll through here frequently enough that you have to wait for a break to snap a picture.

On the way back, we stopped at a beach with a children's pool. They'd piled rocks on the beach to create two pools, a larger one for bigger kids, and then, within it, a smaller one for the little kids. The pool-within-a-pool design worked very well, letting ocean water in through the rocks but ensuring there were very few waves in the little pool.

competitive farmers' market shopping

2007-08-18T17:22:00.000-07:00

First thing on the agenda this morning was to stop at the farmers' market. The market here is totally unlike the normal laid-back atmosphere you find everywhere else. The merchants arrive early, but there's no shopping until 9:30. So a crowd of people waits just at the entrance to the market, strategizing about who's going after the greens, who's headed for papayas first, and so on. As soon as 9:30 arrives, the stampede begins. By 9:45, we'd made all our purchases and were ready to head onward.

Unfortunately, the digital camera may have died during snorkeling today (see below), so my pix of the market didn't survive, but the setting is breathtaking: it's in a field at the foot of a tall, jagged mountain, surrounded by greenery. Some merchants were local artisans, selling shell necklaces, clothing and pillowcases, pottery, and sculpture. Most, though, were selling farm produce, including one fellow with what had to be 30 pound jackfruit. (I sampled some. To me, it tasted a bit like lychee.) He said all the fruit came off a single tree in his back yard. Considering how much cleanup is involved with most fruit and nut trees, I guess if you have a jackfruit tree your only option is to sell the fruit preemptively before it drops--or to learn every jackfruit recipe in existence and have a lot of friends over for feasts.

After the market, we rendezvoused at the "secret beach" from yesterday. I decided to risk the $10 camera on a snorkeling trip. I tried to make sure the zip-lock bag was water tight, but it turned out later it wasn't, so unfortunately the camera got soaked. It's drying now. Once it's thoroughly dry, I'll try a new battery and see if it still works. If it doesn't, I won't be able to post pictures till I meet up with Coppertop, since she has the fancy digicam. Most of the reef was covered in brown algae (fertilizer runoff from the adjacent golf course, perhaps?), but highlights of snorkeling included a spiny sea cucumber, at least two species of nudibranchs, and not one but two large sea horses.

a trip to the secret beach

2007-08-18T01:40:00.000-07:00

This morning, we hiked down to a different beach (which we've jokingly named the "secret beach," because of the winding and steep hiking path, which follows an old dirt road, to get there.) As you can see, we mostly had it to ourselves when we first arrived. Looking left:

. . . and right:

I spent most of the morning sitting on a beach towel, staring out at the ocean. Which is not a bad way to spend a morning after all that bar study, though a beer would've definitely improved the undertaking. Anyway, this little guy dropped by to beg some food:

(Unfortunately, we didn't have any food, so the bird was disappointed.)

Later in the day, a couple of us headed out to do a bit of shopping. It was mostly groceries, but I also cashed in the gift certificate from winning the "halfway to Hawaii" guessing game. We also stopped by the top of a gorgeous waterfall, but I forgot the camera so didn't get a picture of it.

Hopefully I'll have more pictures of the activities tomorrow, but the camera's been acting strangely. The AAA battery may be dying.

sunset tonight

2007-08-16T22:53:00.000-07:00

Here are some pictures from tonight's sunset. I suspect I'm pushing this little camera's CCD pretty hard, but let's see what comes out.

a morning at the beach

2007-08-16T20:25:00.001-07:00

So far, the pace of this trip's been pretty slow. This morning, there was an outing to the beach, but Kaua'i is so beautiful even such a mundane outing is pretty special. Here are some the best pictures my $10 Innovage Keychain camera from Walgreens could produce.

The drive there (through the car window):

Here's the beach, with a lagoon suitable for snorkeling.

Sorry, no snorkeling pictures, because my Waterproof Camera Enclosure (a zip-lock bag) had a hole in it. I have since replaced said Waterproof Camera Enclosure. Here are the surrounding mountains:

all volcanic rock, of course:

(It looks like the camera has some issues with high contrast images.) There's a hiking trail along the beach. Here are some pictures of the hike:

off to an auspicious start

2007-08-15T23:26:00.001-07:00

We're thinking about calling it the Missed Disaster Tour. I'm in Hawaii now. Yesterday, a hurricane rolled through this place. After I got here today, an earthquake off Peru caused a tsunami advisory for the whole Pacific (thankfully canceled a few hours later.) Can't wait to see what tomorrow brings. Random graffiti on a stall in the men's in LAX proclaimed "death to America, judgment day 8/10/07." Probably just random bluster. Or maybe it was more of the Missed Disaster phenomenon in operation. I sure hope it was one of the two--I sure didn't notice a Judgment Day, and missing Judgment Day would be a bigger nightmare than the "wait, you mean the final was TODAY???" one.

Other random notes from the trip:

United offered food on the flight--if you paid extra for your (cold) meal. They also offered an upgrade at check-in: five extra inches of legroom if you paid an additional $60. I think market segmentation has gone a bit far in this area.

On the other hand, I came in second in a contest to guess the exact time we'd cross the mid-point in the flight. (In the interests of full disclosure, it was more by luck than by skill.) And the rental agency was out of economy cars so they bumped me up to ta compact, which turned out to be a silver Chevy Malibu. A silver Malibu was my first car, many years ago, so it was interesting to get a chance to drive its descendant. The handling's about like I remember, maybe not quite as snappy without the 350 V-8 but it definitely has that American Car feel to it.

Oh, and dinner was exceptional: salmon glazed with Hawaiian shoyu sauce, Maui onions, and pineapple. Kudos to Mary's mom.

bar exam observation

2007-07-25T17:57:00.000-07:00

700 people in a room all typing on their laptops sounds like rain. 700 people filling in bubbles on a standardized test form sounds like 700 stressed-out people. Tomorrow's a rain day again.

Vulcan lawyers

2007-07-14T20:35:00.000-07:00

Having spent time programming computers, and having spent time studying the law, I am now absolutely convinced that Vulcans would make terrible lawyers: they're far too logical to do the job. (Not to mention they'd probably give the world's most boring opening statements.)

Al Gore Jr.'s Arrest

2007-07-10T19:18:00.000-07:00

I've mostly been ignoring the media (and pretty much anything else outside of studying, which is making me a very dull boy right now.) So someone today was telling me about Al Gore Jr.'s arrest.

Gore . . . blah blah blah . . . arrest . . . blah blah blah . . . prescription drugs . . . blah blah blah . . . in a Toyota Prius going 100 miles per hour . . . wha--wait, back up. What?

I am shocked! Shocked, I say! A Toyota Prius can go 100 miles per hour? As a new Prius owner, I demand to know why I wasn't informed of this fact sooner! I kinda figured they topped out around 80 or 85. A most newsworthy item, indeed!

Disclaimer: My head's full to the tippy-top with obscure bits of criminal law, criminal procedure, and real property right now, and I've spend the last two months trying to think like a lawyer at dangerous speeds. Don't expect anything resembling rationality.

a bit of perspective

2007-07-02T17:04:00.000-07:00

We have a simulated written test tomorrow: three essays in the morning, and a performance exam after lunch. I'm supposed to be preparing, but there are so many more fun things to be looking at. While trying to get a bit of context in President Bush's commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence for obstruction of justice in the Valerie Plame leak, and comparing it to what happened with Oliver North (and the folks who were pardoned in Iran-Contra), I discovered that Wikipedia has an interesting list of federal-level scandals going back to the Declaration of Independence.

practice performance exam

2007-07-01T21:29:00.000-07:00

I just took a practice performance exam. This one went so well that I spent a few minutes afterwards scanning the want-ads for programmer positions. If work in the real world feels anything like that, I'll be back in engineering so fast you'll hear the sonic boom.

Yech.

Enough whining. Time to get back to focusing on the goal. If I can't dive into this thing gracefully, then I'll at least do a damn cannonball.

community property

2007-06-30T18:36:00.000-07:00

Community property has to be the hardest subject I've covered. It's not that the concepts are difficult--in fact, they're usually straightforward--it's that reading this area of law is like sifting through the debris from the wreckage of a thousand marriages. Every little rule is a tombstone, a crater left by another marriage that exploded.

For example, normally either spouse may buy or sell community property. So you can spend your wife's salary to buy the family groceries, for example. But there's this lovely little exception: a spouse cannot sell personal property used in the family dwelling--furniture, furnishings, etc.--or clothing without the written consent of the other spouse. Imagine the scenario that gave rise to that gem of a rule.

Alright, back to slogging through this stuff. I'm coming up on what happens when one spouse tries to sell the family home. Yay.

back at it

2007-06-27T22:08:00.000-07:00

I took a day off to rejuvinate and it's made a big difference. Now I'm back at it, trying to soak up some subjects for the first time. We just had wills and trusts in two days. Today was a review of professional responsibility. Still in the lineup: community property and agency & partnership.

hitting the wall

2007-06-22T10:41:00.000-07:00

I'm hitting the wall in studying. It's a lot like training for a marathon--sometimes you hit a wall and have to back off. I'm getting to that point now, where my study time is quickly becoming a lot less efficient.

Last night, I finally quit at 9:00, so after a quick e-mail check I wound up surfing the net. If you're an Ask a Ninja fan or a Mythbusters fan, there's a hilarious crossover on the Ask a Ninja site, along with a Scooby Doo-style music video reposte.

simulated MBE

2007-06-18T21:18:00.000-07:00

We took a simulated multistate bar exam today. It's a six hour, 200-question multiple choice exam with some of the most devious multiple choice questions I've ever dealt with. It covers six subjects: real property, torts, criminal law and procedure, contracts, evidence, and constitutional law. Needless to say, we were all pretty drained by the end of it.

However, inspired by the gentle lovingkindness that is the MBE, I offer the following for your consideration:

Questions 1-20 are based on the following fact pattern:

Debbie owned Blackacre in fee simple in state X, where she operated Killemex, a chemical factory that produced deadly nerve gas. Blackacre was separated from Whiteacre, a private religious school, by a piranha-infested non-navigable stream with a bridge in which the common owner had granted both parties express easements, promptly recorded, with a covenant making each 50% liable for repairs. Blackacre also had an electric fence along what had once been the edge of the stream, but accretion had moved the stream slightly towards Whiteacre.

Debbie received a fax from Supplemex, an out-of-state chemical suppler, saying it would provide "your requirements, up to 100 tons, of Upyournosic Acid, at $250/ton, F.O.B. state Z, firm offer." Debbie tried to accept but her fax machine was broken.

Congress has just passed a statute that provides books to all schools, private and public. At the same time, the legislature of state X had just passed a statute granting a 10% sales tax rebate to all alien-owned out-of-state businesses selling product in state X. The state legislature ordered the newspapers not to publish the rebate, but the newspapers learned of it by searching through garbage a state legislator had placed at the curb for collection. Debbie was both a strong Atheist and someone who objected to paying taxes. Upon reading of the two statutes, Debbie suffered severe emotional distress and forgot to lock the gate to the factory as she left for home.

As Debbie drove across the easement and turned onto the main road, Walt exclaimed, just as he had done habitually every single day for the last ten years, "Look at that! That yellow car made an illegal right on red!" As Debbie drove home, she became angrier and angrier at the thought of the tax rebate her competitors would receive and the books that would go to Whiteacre. She became so enraged that she stopped to purchase a cigarette lighter with which to burn down her own house.

In the meantime, 50 schoolchildren, noticing the gate was unlocked, swam across the piranha-infested stream onto Blackacre. Due to a manufacturing defect in the electric fence (which had been installed by an independent contractor), they were not electrocuted. They soon began enjoying a game of "superheroes" on the factory grounds. Little Danny opened a valve to a nerve gas storage tank in an attempt to frighten little Paula, whose back was turned at the time. Fortunately a defective batch of Upyournosic Acid which Killemex had previously accepted in shipment from Supplemex had rendered the nerve gas in the tank inert, but the liquid stained Paula's shirt a bright green.

When Debbie learned of the children on the factory grounds, she abandoned and renounced her plans to burn down her house and instead created an oral contract with Peter to remove the children. She told Peter "time is of the essence: I want them off the property by tomorrow morning" and in exchange offered to convey a 50% undivided interest in Blackacre "to Peter for life, remainder to Peter's widow, but if Blackacre should ever not be used for National Defense purposes Debbie and her heirs shall have the right to reenter and retake Peter's interest." Peter agreed, began removing the children, and immediately applied for and received six mortgages on his interest in Blackacre, only the first and last of which were recorded.

reviewing con law

2007-06-17T20:33:00.001-07:00

How can such a little tiny Constitution have so many moving parts?

Never give up! Never surrender!

2007-06-13T19:43:00.000-07:00

Civ Pro and Cal Civ Pro from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., nonstop high speed lecture. My head's spinning. It's going to take a while to get all this stuff straight. If this process has been a marathon, we're in the final uphill stretch, and I'm mostly running on determination. Never give up! Never surrender!

expect sporadic to nonexistent posting

2007-05-30T22:08:00.000-07:00

Wildly busy studying for the bar. Expect sporadic to nonexistent posts till some time in August unless I can figure out a way to reign in this schedule.

three days into the PMBR six day

2007-05-16T11:17:00.000-07:00

When I was young, we had a German Shepard who loved tennis balls. She was a champion tennis ball catcher and could carry two or three at a time. One day, my parents came home with a whole shopping bag full of dead tennis balls. We dumped them out on the living room floor. There were so many tennis balls bouncing everywhere that she couldn't catch any of them because everywhere she looked there was another tennis ball!

That's roughly what this bar review process feels like.

I'm in the midst of the PMBR 6-day. In the morning, we take a two hour practice exam from 9-11, one subject per day. In the afternoon, from 12-3:30, we go over the fifty multiple choice questions on the practice exam, which essentially amounts to a capsule review of the subject in 3.5 hours. The review goes quickly enough that I've abandoned trying to take notes using pen and paper and have switched to the laptop. After 3:30 and my head's cleared a bit, I start reading the outline and reviewing the next day's subject.

The process seems effective, at least in teaching test taking skills for the MBE: I've gotten better at sniffing out answers that look right but feel wrong, and the class covers techniques to boost your performance on each subject. As for the substantive law, well, it's giving me a new appreciation for how much of it we didn't cover in class. The PMBR folks do give you a huge pile of flash cards when you sign up, but I haven't cracked them yet. The next couple months are going to see a serious attempt to soak up a lot of law.

checking out new news sources

2007-05-14T07:16:00.000-07:00

I've been a bit frustrated with the mainstream U.S. news sources since so few of them carried the allegations about serious construction defects in the rebuilt New Orleans levees. So I've been looking for alternate news sources.

So far, I've come across one very interesting possibility: the Jurist: Paper Chase. A group of students at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law put it together. They have a wonderful blog-like tendency to link back to primary sources and contextual information. It hasn't made my "recommended reading" list--I want to read it for a while longer to see how consistently they deliver quality--but it's definitely worth checking out.

If you have any suggestions for good, high-quality news sources, please leave them in the comments.

is altering a DOI scientific finding fraud?

2007-05-09T19:53:00.000-07:00

Several news outlets, including NPR, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and the Houston Chronicle are carrying articles on activities by Julie MacDonald, former deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Interior. The reports allege she altered scientific reports:

Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., said MacDonald's resignation was “no gift to the country. She wandered around the department for three years changing documents and ... making determinations based on her beliefs.”

(from the Union-Trib, emphasis added). That got me thinking: would willfully altering scientific reports for endangered species determination constitute fraud?

Here's the federal definition of fraud, or at least one of them, 18 U.S.C. § 1001:

(a) Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully—
(1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact;

(2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or

(3) makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry;
shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years . . .

So you'd need to (1) be in the context of a "matter" that is within the jurisdiction of the executive branch, and (2) knowingly or willfully, (3) falsify a material fact or make a materially false representation. I'm not entirely sure what a "matter" is, and don't have time to research it right now, but let's assume it's at least something fairly serious.

Here's a portion of the Endangered Species Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1533(b):

(b) Basis for determinations
(1) (A) The Secretary shall make determinations [of whether a species is endagered] solely on the basis of the best scientific and commercial data available to him after conducting a review of the status of the species and after taking into account those efforts, if any, being made by any State or foreign nation, or any political subdivision of a State or foreign nation, to protect such species, whether by predator control, protection of habitat and food supply, or other conservation practices, within any area under its jurisdiction; or on the high seas.
. . .
(2) The Secretary shall designate critical habitat, and make revisions thereto, . . . on the basis of the best scientific data available and after taking into consideration the economic impact, the impact on national security, and any other relevant impact, of specifying any particular area as critical habitat. The Secretary may exclude any area from critical habitat if he determines that the benefits of such exclusion outweigh the benefits of specifying such area as part of the critical habitat, unless he determines, based on the best scientific and commercial data available, that the failure to designate such area as critical habitat will result in the extinction of the species concerned.

(emphasis added). It looks to me like this law requires that the secretary have "the best scientific data available" when making decisions under the endangered species act. The secretary doesn't have to follow the scientific data--economic impact can come into play--but the scientific data must be the best available. Which, in turn, suggests it's "material" to the decision, as the fraud statute requires.

And that makes me wonder: if someone "willfully" or "knowingly" alters that scientific data, something a jury would have to decide, has that person run afoul of § 1001? Note that I'm not saying Ms. MacDonald has. In fact, the news reports are vague enough that I can't even tell exactly what she was altering. But it does raise an interesting question.

where I disagree with Joel Spolsky

2007-05-08T17:32:00.000-07:00

Joel Spolsky is a very bright guy who has some strong views on how to design forum software to build communities. Scientific American's Blog has been revamping its comment system. I don't know whether they're consciously trying to follow the Spolsky design or if the current setup is just a temporary stop on the way to something else, but the current system incorporates enough Spolsky-esque features that it's become an interesting place to observe how the design works. And I think I've seen a few problems.

The first issue is not having a preview button. Here's what Joel writes:

Q. Why don't you show people their posts to confirm them before you post them? Then people wouldn't make mistakes and typos.

A. Empirically, that is not true. Not only is it not true, it's the opposite of true.

Part one: when you have a confirmation step, most people just click past it. Very few people reread their post carefully. . . .

Part two: the lack of the confirmation step actually makes people more cautious. It's like those studies they did that showed that it's safer, on twisty mountain roads, to remove the crash barrier . . . . You're better off, statistically, just scaring the bejesus out of drivers so they creep along at 2 miles per hour around the hairpins.

The first problem here is that it assumes that people use the confirmation feature (or an optional preview feature) to fix typos, but with the software that supports blog comments, that's often not the case. Different blogs support different feature sets. Some, like this one, will let you put hyperlinks in comments, add italics for emphasis, and properly support paragraph breaks. Some require you to manually insert paragraph breaks using the appropriate HTML tag. Some let you use block quotes, like the text above, while others don't. And most won't tell you what feature set they support. As a result, without at least the ability to preview your comment, you're writing blind: you take your best guess at what features that blog supports and hope it comes out OK.

The second problem is that some people misinterpret this comment to say you shouldn't have a "preview" button. Notice that Joe's writing about a "confirm" button, something everyone would have to click. A preview button's not the same: it's optional. Some people do proof their comments, and for them, being able to see the comment in preview form is useful because it rearranges the text. It's like printing out your document and proofing it with a red pen: because it's been rearranged, you'll see things you might not have seen the first time around. Not giving them a preview button makes it harder for them to write well even when they're willing to take the time to do it.

Another place where I'm not so sure the forum design translates well to blog comments, at least where the blog has a registration system, is in showing the existing comment:

Q. Why don't you show me the post I'm replying to, while I compose my reply?

A. Because that will tempt you to quote a part of it in your own reply. Anything I can do to reduce the amount of quoting will increase the fluidity of the conversation, making topics interesting to read. Whenever someone quotes something from above, the person who reads the topic has to read the same thing twice in a row, which is pointless and automatically guaranteed to be boring.

The problem here is that blogs generally sit on the open Internet, and text on the Internet is effectively permanent. How can something so ephemeral be permanent? Because disk drive inventors are busily doubling the size of storage every year and a half, so people archive everything. Some year in the near future, you'll be able to fit the entire contents of today's world wide web in a device the size of a USB flash drive. (Don't believe it? Doubling every 1.5 years means a 100x increase in storage capacity every ten years. So today's 2GB thumb drive may be a 200GB unit in ten years, and a 20,000GB unit ten years after that, and so on.) And, thanks to archiving, that copy of the web will contain each and every one of your blog comments from X years ago.

Archiving means conversations are not like that fluid conversation you have in the corner coffee shop where everything you say vanishes into the air. A better model might be a debate between two people writing letters to the editor in a national newspaper: that's the kind of potential those comments have to come back and haunt you, at least in today's society. Hopefully one day society will shift and people will lighten up about holding others to their written word, but it's not a sure thing. So if you're going to have a registration system that encourages people to use their real names, you should also give them the tools they need to write in a way that will withstand the test of time.

Now, I'm not saying Joel is wrong. Like I said, he's a smart guy and knows a lot about software design. But at least in these areas, I think programmers need to give some careful thought when they're putting together a blog's comment system.

but what about the science?

2007-05-08T08:04:00.000-07:00

I wound up responding to a comment on another blog that asked about the science behind global warming. It's true: there's a lot of hype out there, making it hard to find the solid information. So, partly as a public service, partly so I can find these links more easily in the future, and maybe a teensy bit because finals are making me a touch grouchy, here are some useful starting points for solid information.

"I am totally convinced that there is something unusual happening with Global Climate. . . . What I am not convinced about is the science behind the 'causality'."

The IPCC's Working Group 1 reported on this issue. Their Summary for Policymakers (pdf) targets policymakers (as you might expect) rather than scientists. As a result, it has some technical jargon but not too much and is pretty clearly written.

If you want more details and really want to get in to the nitty-gritty, Working Group 1 has now released most of its full report. The summaries come out first, then the report rolls out, with revisions as they go. The report's pretty large, but it includes citations to the scientific literature. That means if you want the details, you can go through the report, find the citation, then go to the nearest university library and track down the papers in their journals and continue your research from there. In some cases, you can find the papers through Google Scholar, but getting the full text tends to be hit-or-miss. On the other hand, Google Scholar does a pretty good job of showing you which other papers cite the paper you're searching for, so you can see how others have commented on the paper.

What is that I can do personally that will at least stop the situation from becoming worse if not reverse it?

The IPCC's Working Group 3 is reporting on mitigating greenhouse gas effects. They have released a preliminary version of their Summary for Policymakers (pdf), but neither the final version nor the full report is out, yet. Keep an eye on the IPCC's main web page or the WG3's page to see the updates come out. Eventually, the full report will probably be available at the IPCC's publications page, where you can currently find the 2001 assessment. (Note to self: it might be very interesting to compare the 2001 assessment against the statements in the reports out of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.)

The second half of this question comes in two parts. First, the IPCC report shows most of the greenhouse gas emissions come from the energy sector, which suggests energy conservation is something someone can do personally. Transportation is another area to consider (in other words, think twice before buying the gas guzzler.) Second, the U.S. is entering a presidential election cycle, which means We the People might have a shot at steering the debate or changing policy.

What do scientists think the impact of global warming will be? What does it mean to me?

The IPCC's Working Group 2 is tackling this question. You can find their Summary for Policymakers here (pdf--everything's pdf, I guess because of the pretty color graphs). This one is probably also still early and will see some revisions. Watch the IPCC front page for the rest of their report to come out.

finals time again

2007-05-07T11:15:00.000-07:00

Finals time again.
Flash cards stay the outdoors' call.
The world in 3x5.

unsafe at any (clock) speed?

2007-05-03T23:05:00.000-07:00

Bruce Schneier has posted an essay which he wrote for Wired in which he faults the IT industry for insecure products:

If the IT products we purchased were secure out of the box, we wouldn't have to spend billions every year making them secure.
Aftermarket security is actually a very inefficient way to spend our security dollars; it may compensate for insecure IT products, but doesn't help improve their security. Additionally, as long as IT security is a separate industry, there will be companies making money based on insecurity -- companies who will lose money if the internet becomes more secure.
Fold security into the underlying products, and the companies marketing those products will have an incentive to invest in security upfront, to avoid having to spend more cash obviating the problems later.

One of the comment writers points out the parallel to the automotive industry: several years ago, cars were unsafe because manufacturers didn't have an incentive to make them safe. Then came some government regulation and popular attention (including Ralph Nader's book, Unsafe at Any Speed) and one sea change later the manufacturers are now competing with each other on safety features.

The same seems likely to happen in the IT industry. Either the industry will fix the problem itself, or there's going to be a big enough security breach that there'll be government regulation and a lot of popular attention.

Could the industry fix the problem? Completely fixing it seems out of reach: a 100% provably secure computer would be somewhere up there in price with a 100% provably safe automobile. Improving the security seems doable, though.

It'd probably take a paradigm shift in the way we write software and build networks. Back in the old days, people wrote software as unstructured code (sometimes derisively called "spaghetti code" because if you tried to trace how the code worked, you wound up with paths that looked like a plate full of spaghetti.) Unstructured code is too complex for a programmer to grasp--it has too many interacting parts--so programmers would hit a "wall," a point where the program got too large and they couldn't keep it working. It might be at 30,000 lines or, in my case, a much smaller 5,000 lines, but everyone eventually hit it.

Software engineering solved that problem by developing structured programming, a way of programming that breaks the program into fairly neat bits. It's kind of like the difference between writing this blog post as one long run-on sentence, and writing it in individual paragraphs made of separate sentences: breaking it into coherent paragraphs and sentences makes it easier to understand because you don't have to try to absorb the whole thing at once.

But structured programming brought with it some major changes. People had to write new programming languages, and they had to think about programs in a whole new way in order to use this new technique. Also, programs got a bit bigger and a bit slower, because structured programming eliminates some of the shortcuts you can take with the unstructured stuff.

I think we need that same kind of shift in IT security. We need to go from unstructured security to structured security. There must be a new way, a set of patterns, to think about designing programs, operating systems, networks, and networking protocols that makes them inherently more secure. I don't know what it is, but it will probably require new programming languages, or at least libraries, new operating systems, and new patterns of building networks.

Hopefully, someone's working on it right now. And hopefully they'll finish it soon. Otherwise, there's likely to be some political scrutiny and a book on the way that'll lead to a sea change in the IT industry.

IPCC's models have underestimated the rate arctic sea ice is melting

2007-05-01T08:53:00.000-07:00

Satellite photos show that arctic sea ice is melting faster than the IPCC's computer models predicted.

Arctic sea ice is melting at a significantly faster rate than projected by the most advanced computer models, a new study concludes.

Scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) found that satellite and other observations show the Arctic ice cover is retreating more rapidly than estimated by any of the eighteen computer models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in preparing its 2007 assessments.

The IPCC's assessments are pretty scary. The front page of their web site links to the PDFs. The Summaries for Policymakers are probably the most readable unless you want to tackle the underlying science.

The article goes on to say that "experts" (it doesn't specify which ones) currently speculation that the models underestimate the effect of atmospheric greenhouse gases on the Arctic, leading to the rather large discrepancy. It does not discuss what effect revising this estimate would have on the models' overall predictions.

no, wait, it really is a genuine advantage

2007-04-28T18:08:00.000-07:00

I previously wrote about MS Genuine Advantage. Turns out I had to risk installing it after all. As I was working on a paper, which is due Monday, Word crashed. It helpfully pointed out that it had crashed due to a known problem, and that an update to fix the problem exists. But the update's only available if you've installed Genuine Advantage. So, there were a few tense moments while the software examined the machine I need to use to take finals in two weeks and decided that I had, indeed, gotten a genuine copy of Windows when I paid two grand for this laptop. Now it's installing the fourteen security updates and patches it wouldn't install because it wasn't sure.

In other words, Microsoft seems to have made the decision that it's better to have insecure versions of its operating system floating around the Internet, acting as potential infection points for spam zombies, than to make the patches available. They also appear to have decided it's acceptable to risk crippling their customers' machines if Genuine Advantage screws up.[1]

Normally, I favor OpenOffice. Version 2.2 is pretty good stuff. But sometimes you need to send a Word file to someone--PDF won't cut it--and you need to know exactly what it'll look like when that person opens it. So for this job I'm tied into Word. And there's certain Windows-only software I need to run, so I'm tied to Windows. So, unfortunately, I guess Microsoft's decided correctly.

At least for now.

[1] Word just crashed on me. Why should I have any confidence Genuine Advantage will be more reliable?

it's a blur

2007-04-25T13:34:00.000-07:00

We're approaching the end of the semester. I've barely had time to figure out which way is up, much less to blog. Some time after Monday, I hope to have a series of blog entries on net neutrality and the AT&T / BellSouth merger drawn from a section I've contributed to a paper. May also post some lighter stuff once I have a chance to catch a breath. Until then, full steam ahead!

going green

2007-04-19T23:34:00.000-07:00

The NY Times has a great article by Thomas Friedman called The Power of Green. In it, he argues (convincingly, I think), that being green is patriotic and an excellent investment opportunity.

Well, I want to rename “green.” I want to rename it geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic. I want to do that because I think that living, working, designing, manufacturing and projecting America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century. A redefined, broader and more muscular green ideology is not meant to trump the traditional Republican and Democratic agendas but rather to bridge them when it comes to addressing the three major issues facing every American today: jobs, temperature and terrorism.
. . .
The notion that conserving energy is a geostrategic imperative has also moved into the Pentagon, for slightly different reasons. Generals are realizing that the more energy they save in the heat of battle, the more power they can project. The Pentagon has been looking to improve its energy efficiency for several years now to save money. But the Iraq war has given birth to a new movement in the U.S. military: the “Green Hawks.”
. . .
The only way we are going to get innovations that drive energy costs down to the China price — innovations in energy-saving appliances, lights and building materials and in non-CO2-emitting power plants and fuels — is by mobilizing free-market capitalism. The only thing as powerful as Mother Nature is Father Greed.

And so on. It's a long article but definitely worth a read.

a new bluebook signal

2007-04-16T19:40:00.001-07:00

Dear Bluebook Editors,

I would like to propose a new addition to the Bluebook's list of citation signals. As you know, see is among the most popular support signals, indicating helpful cases, law review articles, and other sources of information which support the author's point with only a small logical step required. But see also plays an important role showing sources that disagree with the author's point and thereby promoting healthy and vigorous debate. In addition, these signals serve the valuable secondary role of allowing authors to demonstrate they are widely read and erudite, easily able to rattle off a string of supporting and disagreeing authority.

I propose the addition of a new signal: don't see. Don't see would introduce authority that disagrees with the author's contention, and that the author has read and considers so poorly reasoned that the author advises the reader to avoid it. Obviously, use of an explanatory parenthetical would be strongly recommended.

Consider the benefits of don't see. It serves the purpose of making authors appear erudite because it allows them to show they have read every source, even the junky ones. More importantly, what could foster the give-and-take of vigorous academic debate and a full airing of the issues better than citing an author's work with a don't see signal? In fact, don't see would promote a veritable democracy of ideas: currently, an author must discriminate against those sources the author considers poorly reasoned by omitting them because the required order of authorities leaves no room for the author to tell the reader which of the listed sources the author considers helpful. This new signal would allow the author to list sources the author regards as poorly reasoned or unhelpful, allowing the reader could make up her own mind about them.

I hope you will give serious consideration to including don't see in the next edition of the Bluebook.

Sincerely,
False Data

I found a new word

2007-04-16T10:01:00.000-07:00

I came across a word I hadn't seen before: recondite. So I looked it up. It means concealed or not understandable to the person of ordinary knowledge or understanding. I guess that makes it a self-descriptive word, in the same family as "pentasyllabic." Unless, of course, I'm a person of extraordinarily poor knowledge and understanding, which is certainly possible. (After all, how would I know?)

I think we need a verb form of recondite. It comes from the Latin verb recondere, which suggests the English verb form "to recond," as in to make obscure except to the Mensa and academic audiences. It'd imply intent, so you could complain about someone who likes to recond his papers.

Confusing English preposition use …

2007-04-15T14:20:00.000-07:00

English is my second language and the use of prepositions is one of the most confusing and somewhat annoying things of English language, at least to me. You say:

I want to do it this weekend (no preposition before “this weekend”)
You have time for yourself over a weekend. (“over” before “a weekend”)
You work in the weekends of April. (“in” before “the weekends”)

How confusing …. Would anyone here be able to explain which prepositions -- no-preposition, over, or in -- that I need to use with what types of conditions associated with “weekend”?

Finally, a weekend?

2007-04-15T12:53:00.000-07:00

All the sudden, it seems like that I’ve got some time that I can use for doing what I want to do this weekend. If you feel what I just said sounds strange or funny, you are probably one of those lucky people who has time for yourself over a weekend.

I spent lots of time to do my SAS programming work in the weekends of March and April. The place that I work has a programmer-shortage, we have had so many tasks to complete, and I program SAS to some extent. Thus, I ended up taking a programming task though I have never been trained as a programmer. The task turned out to be more complicated and time-consuming than I thought. In addition, I had my own priority tasks to complete at the same time. Well, I ended up spending several weekends to do this programming work. An advantage to work on the programming task over the weekend is that I was able to pick the False Data’s brain. Thank you! You are a wonderful programmer and helper and soon-to-be a legal expert! The task was mostly done last night after the midnight.

So, what am I doing on Sunday? I cannot come up anything that I feel like to do though I know there are many things that I have to do. Therefore, here I am, just blogging … how productive I am …

angry students stage bluebook burning

2007-04-14T13:50:00.000-07:00

I'm in the midst of figuring out the proper way to cite an ad in the Journal of the American Medical Association that warns doctors about prescribing Accutane to pregnant patients. This article, obviously an April Fools joke that got slightly mis-dated, does my heart good.

Sources close to the students say the impromptu protest began the night before 1L Ames briefs were due. 1L Jim Johnson was attempting to figure out the proper citation in Massachusetts state court for a government report co-authored by three different agencies and posted on the Internet as an MS Word document.

When not a single one of his Hastings floor mates proved able to assist him, Johnson walked the short distance to Gannett House where he began throwing stones at the windows and shouting "Come out, you [expletive], and Bluebook this [expletive] [expletive]."

The Bluebook's citation system is irregular, occasionally contradictory, and a general mess. It should take no more than 15 pages to express a flexible, uniform citation system. Time for an overhaul, I say.

hey ISPs, consider taking on spammers

2007-04-13T08:53:00.000-07:00

Schneier on Security has a link to an analysis that suggests there are only a few big spam operations on the Internet, rather than a whole bunch of little ones. Essentially, the analysis looks at the variations in the amount of spam each day. If there are a whole lot of little spammers, all spamming in different directions, any given Internet Service Provider should see fairly constant incoming spam. But a lot of ISPs instead see wide variations in the amount of spam, suggesting there are a few big spammers and one day they're spraying Canada, the next they're going after China, and the day after they're hitting the U.S.

Why's that interesting? Well, the CAN-SPAM act, which, unfortunately, seems to be about the best we've got to work with, normally limits enforcement to the FTC or the state attorneys general. However, § 7(g) lets an ISP sue a spammer in federal court:

(1) ACTION AUTHORIZED- A provider of Internet access service adversely affected by a violation of section 5(a)(1), 5(b), or 5(d), or a pattern or practice that violates paragraph (2), (3), (4), or (5) of section 5(a), may bring a civil action in any district court of the United States with jurisdiction over the defendant--

(A) to enjoin further violation by the defendant; or

(B) to recover damages in an amount equal to the greater of--

(i) actual monetary loss incurred by the provider of Internet access service as a result of such violation; or

(ii) the amount determined under paragraph (3).

Their damages will be $25-$100 per individual spam message, up to a max of $1,000,000, which the court may triple in the case of certain aggravating factors (like the defendant's doing it willfully or knowingly.) The court also has discretion to award the ISP attorney's fees.

Now, the FTC and attorneys general have bigger fish to fry than going after spammers, but ISPs feel this pain every day. It might not be worth their while to stamp out a bunch of little individual spammers around the Internet, but if it's only four or five big operations, that prospect starts looking a lot more interesting.

more on military commissions act and citizens

2007-04-13T08:31:00.000-07:00

Back in October, I wrote a short post about the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and its impact on citizens. I had a chance last night to ask my Representative about it, but it's hard to give a good answer in a group setting, so I sent a follow-up e-mail. We'll see what comes of it. In the meantime, I wanted to expand a bit on the reason why I raised the issue in the first place.

§§ 949a(1)(A) and 948d(c) of the act say one way to be an Unlawful Enemy Combatant is for a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or other competent tribunal under the President's authority to determine that you're one. The sections do not limit their scope to alien unlawful enemy combatants.
§§ 948c and 948d(a) limit the jurisdiction of a military commission to alien unlawful enemy combatants.
§ 948a has separate definitions for "unlawful enemy combatant" and "alien," suggesting they're separable concepts.
I could not find anything in the act that specifies whether or not the jurisdiction of a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, as opposed to a military commission, extends to non-aliens.

So the act talks about two different judicial bodies, a Combatant Status Review Tribunal and a military commission. How do we know they're different? For one thing, the act spends a lot of time defining a military commission but very little defining a Combatant Status Review Tribunal. For another, tribunals usually have three people (hence the name) but the act says commissions have at least five. § 948m(a). Combatant Status Review Tribunals decide whether or not you're an unlawful enemy combatant, and their answer is "dispositive." § 948d(C).

The act says they decide whether you're an "unlawful enemy combatant," not whether you're an "alien unlawful enemy combatant," but the military commissions only have jurisdiction over alien unlawful enemy combatants. So we have this odd situation where a Combatant Status Review Tribunal can find you're an unlawful enemy combatant, but if you're a citizen you're still outside the jurisdiction of the military commissions. Why?

Now the kicker. In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court's plurality said the executive branch can hold a citizen indefinitely only if the citizen has a chance to rebut the charge of being an "enemy combatant" before a neutral decisionmaker. So my question to the Representative is whether Congress, in the Military Commissions Act, handed the executive that neutral decisionmaker in the form of the Combatant Status Review Tribunal.

It'll be interesting to see how she responds.

bubbles

2007-04-12T10:48:00.000-07:00

I keep waiting for Zubbles to be available. For my nieces and nephew. Honest. I personally would have no interest whatsoever in, say, filling a bubble machine with brightly colored bubbles and running it on the front porch. Anyway, the wikipedia entry now claims availability in 2008.

In the meantime, I came across a recipe to make your own pink and blue soap bubbles using pH indicators. You can also find bubbles that glow gold under black light. And a bubble machine to go with. There are even machines that'll blow smoke-filled bubbles.

But nothing yet that's brightly colored.

Follow-up: there's even a wind-powered bubble machine along with directions to make your own.