In 2009, when a Fairfax, Virginia police officer shot and killed an unarmed man, the police department refused to identify the officer who pulled the trigger. When reporter Michael Pope asked a few questions, Fairfax County Police Public Information Officer Mary Ann Jennings became obstinate:

When asked why her department won't even release the name of the officer who shot Masters, Jennings got more obtuse. "What does the name of an officer give the public in terms of information and disclosure?" Jennings asked in reply, presumably rhetorically. "I'd be curious to know why they want the name of an officer."

Contrast Officer Jennings' response with the more recent shooting of Tri Truong Le by a San Jose SWAT team, as reported in the Mercury News the day after it happened:

The terrifying abduction of an 11-year-old girl began with a kidnapper's gunshots in the early-morning hours Friday as she was grabbed from her San Jose home. It ended almost five miles away and 12 hours later with a single shot, when a SWAT officer killed 42-year-old Tri Truong Le, the alleged kidnapper, during a gunbattle in a narrow staircase.

The girl, who was in the kidnapper's arms when the gunbattle started, was miraculously almost unharmed and recovering from the trauma at a hospital, police said.

The officer who fired the fatal head shot was identified by police Friday night as Mauricio Jimenez.

This is what it looks like like when the police have nothing to hide. A violent criminal kidnapped a little girl, and a daring and skilled police officer killed him to rescue her. It was a good day for the San Jose police, and officer Jimenez did something that his department is rightly proud of. This is what it looks like when the police are not afraid of the truth.

Martin Luther King's holiday seems to be as good a day as any to talk about how we should respond to police barbarism.

It's no secret that a lot of people with libertarian leanings aren't happy with the way the United States seems to be turning into a police state. As a reminder of the degree to which our cops have become militarized, check out the Cop or Soldier quiz at Radley Balko's place. I did pretty good, so see if you can beat me:

Some folks in the blogosphere have been saying that the emerging police state won't be stopped until the cops start getting hurt. Some have even suggested that it may be time for a violent uprising. I can understand where they're coming from -- it looks pretty bad to me too -- but then I know that some people in every generation have been certain that America was about to plunge into tyranny, and they've always been wrong. I think it's safe to assume that with a longer perspective, we'd see that our current time isn't so bad either.

(Then again, American freedom is going to end eventually. Nothing lasts forever. I sure hope that future generations will not look back on mine and ask, "Why didn't they shoot them while they still had the chance?")

Recently, some people on Twitter have been lauding this video, posted under the title "Police Brutality - Handled the Way It Should Be":

In the video, you can see some idiot run onto the field, and then then a bunch of uniformed security guards or cops tackle him and pin him down. So far, so good. But then the cop/guard on the right apparently starts to jab him with a nightstick. At which point people in the stadium rush the field to attack the cops.

I can't fault the sentiment. Although violence as a response to violence often isn't the wisest approach, there's certainly nothing morally wrong with using violence to stop violence. Resisting arrest is wrong. Defending yourself or others against police brutality is not.

However...

Watch the video carefully. The cop/guard on the right jabs the guy on the ground a few times. The other cop/guard yells at him. Then the mob attacks, and it looks like the yelling cop takes a beating. As for the cop who was jabbing the guy on the ground...he abandoned his buddies to the crowd and got away without a scratch.

This, in a nutshell, is one of the problems with trying to defeat the police state by violence. It never seems to work out the way it's supposed to. It's too easy to hurt the innocent, and too hard to make sure only the guilty are punished. And the kinds of people who attack or kill cops are not the kinds of people you want on your side. Back around the Days of Rage, the Weathermen killed a cop, but they didn't target a particularly bad one, just whoever was standing there when the bomb went off. The Symbionese Liberation Army claimed to be leaders of a black revolution, but they ended up killing a black school superintendent and a mother of four.

Fantasies of vengeance are commonplace and often make for entertaining fiction, but in real life, violent reprisals are rarely instigated by people who value freedom and respect human life. In the movies, we get a mysterious stranger in a Guy Fawkes mask who speaks eloquently of liberty, outwits the authorities, and strikes at the heart of a brutal state by blowing up empty buildings. In real life, we get Timothy McVeigh using a bomb in a truck to kill children.

It has been pointed out that my blogroll is deficient, so it's time for a few additions, corrections, and deletions.

First of all, one of my regular daily stops is the Honest Courtesan, written by retired call girl (and Nobody's Business guest blogger) Maggie McNeill. She's a good writer with mad research skills, and her blog takes a frankly libertarian approach in advocating for the rights of prostitutes and other sex workers. Also, now that she has declared me a Friend of Whores in her blogroll, I feel guilty about not having added her to the blogroll already.

(Marital tip: I told my wife about this right away. Being declared a "Friend of Whores" is really the sort of thing you want to get out in front of.)

I could have sworn I'd already added Eric Mayer at Unwashed Advocate (formerly Military Underdog), but he wasn't on the list. He is now.

I often thing Jack Marshall is very, very wrong, but his Ethics Alarms blog is usually thought-provoking and has been a continuing source of Things to Blog About.

I'm an on-again/off-again player of EVE Online, and one of the best blogs covering spaceship-to-spaceship combat is The Altruist, by Azual Skoll from Agony Unleashed.

Lindsey Beyerstein has stopped blogging at Focal Point (which I have removed) and is now blogging at Duly Noted.

What little I know about cryptography, I learned from Bruce Schneier's books, and I'm a regular reader of his blog Schneier on Security, which is about more than just computers.

WolframAlpha gets added to the resource page.

Marginal Revolution was listed in two places, but is now listed in one less place.

Pete Guither's Drug WarRant has moved, as have Norm Pattis, the Underdog Blog, and Seeking Justice.

Kip Esquire isn't blogging at A Stitch in Haste anymore, The D'Alliance is closed, and Jamie Spencer has stopped blogging at Austin Criminal Defense Lawyer. Woman of the Law is long gone. As is The Matlock Blog.

Blonde Justice hasn't blogged in about half a year, but she gets a pass.

BlogNetNews.com has been replaced by a squatter page. 

Over on the Twitter, retired call-girl Maggie McNeill is urging some of us bloggers to join her campaign to make every Friday the Thirteenth a day to speak up for the rights sex workers. She think's it's especially important to get support from outside the sex work community:

A number of advocates are working to respond to the lies, propaganda and misinformation wherever we find them, but we can only do so much and we're often outnumbered by the brainwashed zombie slaves of the "trafficking" witch-hunters.  Also, we're often accused of distorting facts to make ourselves look good, and no matter how assiduously we work to present a balanced view this is a natural and credible accusation against anyone who advocates for some issue which directly concerns her. That's why allies are so important; it's much harder for the prohibitionists to shout down people who don't have a dog in the fight, but merely support prostitutes' rights on moral grounds.

That makes sense, and although I don't have much time today, I have posted on the subject before, including a two-part series about how a deceptive Illinois law to protect prostitutes from exploitation will actually make things worse for them and how to really protect prostitutes. I also wrote a series about how the supposedly feminist idea of prosecuting the customers discriminates against men, confuses prostitution with slavery, and shows contempt for women's choices.

The problem is that I'm a middle-aged male, so when I stand up for the right of attractive young women to perform sex acts for money, oppponents can dismiss my arguments as self-serving. I think it's much more effective when sex workers speak up for themselves. To that end, I strongly recommend Maggie's blog The Honest Courtesan. It's straightforward and well-written, full of carefully researched arguments and (if you're into that sort of thing) salacious details.

(Maggie McNeill is also an occasional contributor to Nobody's Business.)

Over at Ethics Alarms, Jack Marshall writes:

Most of all, I do not understand the persistence of the myth that a college education can, does, or should qualify a graduate for good job, when it appears that a large percentage of students, if not a majority, leave the campus unable to write, think, or name the men on Mount Rushmore.

Mount Rushmore? That's old media...

Seriously, though, in the context of qualifying for a job, what does knowing the faces on Mount Rushmore have to do with anything? Still, Marshall's got a point about the mixed-up priorities of some universities. Read the whole thing.

One of the themes I keep hitting over and over here at Windypundit is that SWAT raids for drug crimes are a bad idea. Of course, I think the whole War on Drugs is a bad idea, but fighting that war through an endless series of armed home invasions is a plan that will only lead to carnage and tears.

It's simple statistics. The more times you send armed teams to break into people's homes, the more times people will get killed. It's the inevitable consequence of such a policy. No amount of propaganda and posturing can beat the math. So sometimes the victim is a 92-year-old grandmother, sometimes it's a mother with her baby in her arms, and sometimes it's a United States Marine.

But last Wednesday, on January 4th, police in Ogden, Utah raided the house of Matthew Stewart, and something unusual happened: The cops lost the gunfight. Stewart is a military veteran, and unlike the aformentioned Marine, when the SWAT team came through his door, he apparently didn't hold fire. Officer Jared Francom was killed, and five other cops were wounded. Stewart is still alive.

When cops win the gunfight and kill an alleged offender during a drug raid, there's usually a complete news blackout while they "investigate." Months may pass before they even release the name of the cop who pulled the trigger, if they ever do. In this case, however, the roles are reversed, and it's a cop who's dead, not a lowly civilian, so the law enforcement establishment has gone into high gear. Weber County Attorney Dee W. Smith has already announced that he will seek to have him executed.

I guess the investigation proceeds a bit faster when the deceased is someone the cops care about, and the shooter isn't a cop.

(By the way, if you've been following the excesses of the War on Drugs, you probably won't be surprised to learn that the police officers conducting this raid were part of a multi-jurisdictional task force. In this case, calling it a "task" force must not have sounded macho enough to the commander, so it's something called the Weber-Morgan Narcotics Strike Force.)

Other than the reversal of victim and shooter, however, the shooting of officer Francom was a pretty typical drug raid death. By which I mean it was completely unnecessary. From media reports, the raid appears to have been executed to serve a search warrant for a marijuana grow operation. Not only is that an inherently non-violent activity, it's not even the sort of thing where a criminal could dispose of the evidence if the cops moved too slowly. There was no point in turning this into a violent incident.

DEA Agent Charge Frank Smith doesn't see it that way:

"It's not a legalization issue, it's not an immigration issue, it's a public safety issue. If someone is willing to shoot it out with police, who is self-medicating on marijuana, what's to say he's not willing to walk out his house and start shooting his neighbors?" Smith says.

Well, there's the fact that he didn't walk out of his house and start shooting his neighbors. From all the reports I've read, he didn't start shooting until armed cops invaded his home.

Agent Smith is doing a little something called "moving the goalposts." This was originally an attempt to serve a search warrant. It should have been one swift assault with, at worst, a dead dog or two. Instead, it turned into a clusterfuck, and the Weber-Morgan Narcotics Stike Force has gotten a cop killed. So now Agent Smith is trying to reframe this as if taking out a violent threat to the community was what they planned all along.

Smith says the shooting case will be reviewed and he hopes lessons will be learned to prevent a tragedy like this from ever happening again.

I doubt it. Police departments have been doing raids like this for decades, and they keep getting people killed.

To head off a few objections, note that I'm not saying Stewart was a good guy. For all I know, he's an evil fuck who's been waiting for a chance to kill a cop. Maybe he saw the raid team coming and decided to try to kill them. That still wouldn't change the fact that it was a bad idea to send cops charging into his home.

With one officer dead, four others wounded, and a suspect who is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison, this raid has caused an awful lot of misery. And if this is a typical year, there will be another 40,000 raids in the War on Drugs.

So expect more dead bodies.

The title is not about Mitt Romney winning the Iowa caucus, it's about Rick Santorum coming in second. I explain my reaction over at Nobody's Business in this post. If nothing else, watch the three minute video in which Santorum explains why freedom is bad and ask yourself if this is the guy you want to have the power to detain Americans without a trial.

It's not too early to start drinking, is it?

This is kind of awesome: New Year's Eve party at Mala Restaurant in Wailea, where the audience got to hear "Come Together" as performed by Steven Tyler, Alice Cooper, and...you won't see this coming...Weird Al:

Note that Weird Al is the only one who knows all the words.

There are worse ways to start the new year.

2011 was kind of a busy year for me, especially during the latter half of the year when -- after 10 years in the part-time consulting racket -- I returned to full-time employment. It really cut into my blogging time, and I want to thank all of my loyal readers for sticking around. In any case, here at Windypundit, 2011 was the year in which:

• I argued that bloggers shouldn't tone it down. (In that post, I responded to Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik's call for less vitriolic speech by pointing out that "A dozen guys like Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann--or a thousand bloggers like me--couldn't begin to do as much harm with words as Sheriff Dupnik's SWAT team could do in one bad day." A few months later, they had that bad day.)
• I wrote about keeping the balance between insensitivity and despair when writing about the kinds of issues I cover.
• I discovered that Chicago had a real criminal defense blogger in Marcus L. Schantz.
• Chicago had a bit of snow.
• I reviewed a few episodes of The Chicago Code (episode 2, episode 3, episode 4).
• I explained how flat legal fees are a form of trial insurance.
• I explained one reason there's a blogging gender gap.
• I discussed the math behind drug-sniffing dogs.
• I discovered street terrorism.
• I argued that SWAT shootings are inevitable.
• Like everyone else, I had some thoughts about Fukushima.
• I explained why it's hard to decide who to vote for.
• For some reason, I was almost shocked that big media companies are scumbags.
• I promoted a couple of local businesses.
• I argued for strict liability for wrongful imprisonment.
• My co-blogger Ken complained about the Qur'an-burning reaction.
• I found the coolest geek website ever.
• I ran into some costly geese.
• Sprint annoyed me again.
• Chicago didn't get a space shuttle.
• I complained about a Stalinist feature of American criminal trials.
• I discovered that even best-case immigration is annoying.
• I offered a defense of some street photographers.
• I responded to the horrifying contention that there are no innocent civilians.
• The Weird Al-Lady Gaga battle exploded.
• I was so angry at the world that I totally missed it when my co-blogger Ken posted this for Easter.
• Rogier van Bakel, Rick Horowitz, and I launched the new Nobody's Business blog.
• I blogged about the scandal that Obama is afraid to confront.
• I bravely spoke out in favor of killing Osama bin Laden.
• I explained that Trump is crazy.
• My cat Dozer died.
• I gamed the Alexa blog rankings. (Back down now.)
• I explained libertarian compassion.
• I complained about unnecessary seizures of computers.
• I posted a compilation of clips from porno movies.
• I proposed a model jury instruction on reasonable doubt.
• Joel Rosenberg died.
• The TSA...did what they do best.
• I drove to Avalon and back.
• I argued that Caylee's law would probably do more harm than good.
• I explained why the iPad is more futuristic than the space shuttle.
• I got a new kitten.
• I learned the two of my nemeses have teamed up.
• I explained a point of etiquette to Wayne LaPierre.
• I denounced the idea of a debt ceiling.
• I won a lawsuit.
• I reviewed Declaration of Independents.
• I met Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie.
• I fell for a Paul Krugman parody.
• I paid some medical bills.
• I wrote one last 9/11 post.
• I called out the University of Wisconsin Threat Assessment team.
• I found the flaw in the new iPhone 4S.
• I went on yet another beep hunt.
• I explained why Jana Svrzo might not be a psychopath.
• I discovered that some people don't know why you shouldn't let your kids lick lollipops from strangers.
• I revealed the conspiracy against Lindsay Beyerstein.
• I did some math about GPS tracking.
• I joined the call for a national conversation on law enforcement.
• I wanted to emulate the DEA in a plan to stop auto accidents.
• Business Insider paid me a compliment.
• I'm still confused about the mortgage crisis.
• I owned the #1 and #2 Google search result for "Obama's left testicle".

Happy New Year everyone!

This is a great explanation of how and why the Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R.3261) is going to do a lot of damage to the Internet:

And this is what you can do about it. Make waves. Talk to people. Tell your congresscritters to vote against it.

If you want to know more, you can read more about SOPA at Wikipedia, you can see its progress at GovTrack, and you can find out more about your representatives at places like Project Vote Smart and OpenSecrets.

That's right! When it comes to search engine optimization, I can now claim to be one of the giants. Thanks to this post, Windypundit now owns the #1 and #2 Google search results for the phrase "Obama's left testicle".

I'm reading Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner. It's an account of the collapse of the subprime mortgage market at the beginning of our current economic mess. The book tells the story at an odd level of detail: It doesn't give a lot of details about the characters and institutions involved, but neither does it present a broad economically-informed description of what was going on.

For example, mortgage originators were making bad loans to unqualified borrowers and then selling bundles of these loans as mortgage-backed securities to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and a host of investment banks. The book emphasizes over and over that these loan originators had a poor incentive to produce high-quality (or at least honestly-described) mortgages because they knew they wouldn't be holding on to them. This is an obvious agency problem, and I couldn't understand from the book why the investors weren't on the lookout for it.

Yet about 2/3 of the way in, the authors mention that under the terms of the securitization agreement, the originators had to buy back all loans that were materially misrepresented and all loans where the borrower defaulted early in the loan's term. In other words, the purchasers had sought to protect themselves from agency risks by requiring the originators to shoulder substantial default risks. In that case, why didn't the originators pay more attention to the quality of the loans?

As it happens, according to the book, the loan portfolios were so toxic that the originators would have gone bankrupt if forced to buy them all back, which would have cut off the flow of new loans, so the investment banks didn't force them to take a loss. But that just raises more questions: Could threatening bankruptcy really have been the originators' plan for protecting themselves from the consequences of their poor loans? How did the investment banks not see that coming?

So far, when it comes right down to it, I've reached two conclusions:

(1) Unscrupulous sociopaths can make a lot of money in the financial markets, especial during the manic phase of an asset bubble.

(2) I've got to figure out how to get a piece of that.

Update: Not directly connected, but I've just noticed that Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is available as a Kindle download for only $0.99. It's a classic work about asset price bubbles and other types of craziness. And it was published in 1841. If nothing else, spend the 99 cents (or just get it free here) to read the extraordinary story of the seventeenth century Dutch tulip bulb craze.

I'm not naming any names or spoiling any books, but here's a plotting tip from a longtime reader: If you want us to be surprised that one of your characters is a bad guy, don't have him quoting Friedrich Nietzsche the first time we see him.

It's not subtle foreshadowing. It's giving the game away.

I spend a day away from the internet and come back to find out that Vaclav Havel died.

Update: Oh, but there's good news too. Kim Jong Il is also dead.

I generally find anti-gay bigotry disturbing, but sometimes it's also kind of amusing. I know that's wrong -- that gay people face real threats of discrimination and violence -- but some anti-gay nonsense just makes me want to point and yell, "I didn't know they still made people like you!"

Which brings me to Rick Perry's culture-war campaign ad:

Aside from the fact that he's a bit mixed up about school prayer, this is just plain embarassing. It's like that older relative who keeps calling black people "colored" because he doesn't realize times have changed. I immediately flashed back to an infamous Sid Davis classroom film called Boys Beware about the dangers of homosexuality. The whole thing is about 10 minutes long, but here's a taste:

At its most basic, Boys Beware is vile crap that conflates homosexuality with predatory pedophilia. Yet it's so disconnected from our current day and age that I can't really get angry about it. I mean, it features a homosexual man who prowls the streets trying to seduce young boys by -- I'm not making this up -- taking them fishing at the duck pond. I guess there weren't a lot of gay dance clubs.

(Boys Beware's odd style is pretty typical of Sid Davis's social guidance films: The subject is alarming, but it's shot with what Ken Smith in Mental Hygiene: Better Living Through Classroom Films 1945-1970 described as "a trancelike style, stripped of anything even remotely approaching drama or human emotion." You never even hear the actors speaking; the narrator just describes what they're saying. I suspect's that's because Davis couldn't afford synchronized sound.)

And how can you not love the line "You never know when the homosexual is about"? If I were gay, I'd wear that on a T-shirt.

I don't really have a point here, except that to me, Perry's anti-gay attitude seems like something from another era. I hope it seems that way to most other people too.

Here's something I never thought about before: It's time to stop using pennies.

Aside from its actual subject -- the uselessness of pennies -- this video is also worth watching because it's a terrific example of how to make an argument. It's clear, it's concise, and in four minutes and 31 seconds I went from not thinking about pennies to being completely convinced they should be eliminated. They fail as money.

And frankly, the nickel doesn't look to good either. Let's just drop the last digit from prices and be done with it.

(Hat tip: Alex Tabarrok)

Over at Reason, they're boasting because Business Insider chose Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie for its list of the only pundits you need to pay attention to between now and the election.

I'm happy for Matt and Nick, but I want to draw your attention to something else that caught my eye. Go ahead and follow either of those links and look at the picture that Business Insider used of Matt and Nick.

Actually, let me just include it here:

Now I happen to think that's a pretty good picture of Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie. It's in the classic Reason tradition of making them look slightly goofy, yet they're still identifiable, and it shows them in the very act of punditry. Kudos to the Business Insider photo editor.

I do have one problem, though. Take another look at the photo. Notice anything...familiar about it? Think you might have seen it before?

I'll give you a hint: In the background you can see the logo of the Heartland Institute, which held a book signing event for Matt and Nick at Jaks Tap here in Chicago a few months ago. You can even check out my post about it, which starts with a similar photo. A very similar photo.

A few days ago, at the conservative Illinois Review, an unnamed author who I assume is editor Fran Eaton got excited about some basic science in a post titled "Biology Textbook Author Asserts Life Begins at Conception":

When does life begin?  At conception?  When the fertilized egg begins to multiply cells?  When the zygote embeds itself into its source of nutrition?

A growing number of scientists are beginning to assert that life can begin nowhere else but at conception, because at the moment when an egg is fertilized, it is either a human, a squirrel, an elephant or a dog. At that moment on, then, is when human life should be protected from planned destruction.

Actually, this is not some new trend that is getting support from "a growing number of scientists." I'm pretty sure that biologists have never disputed the fact that fertilized eggs are alive -- at least not since 1651, when William Harvey figured out that all animals, including humans, come from eggs -- nor is there any doubt that a fertilized egg is of the same species as its parents. Fertilized human eggs have been human life since as long as scientists have known where babies come from.

In referring to an article at LifeNews.com by biologist Gerard Nadal, Eaton describes it as reporting Professor Scott Gilbert's "findings." But the quote is from the 9th edition of Gilbert's Developmental Biology, which is one of the standard textbooks in the field. I doubt that Gilbert is reporting any novel findings.

Here is the quote:

Traditional ways of classifying catalog animals according to their adult structure. But, as J. T. Bonner (1965) pointed out, this is a very artificial method, because what we consider an individual is usually just a brief slice of its life cycle. When we consider a dog, for instance, we usually picture an adult. But the dog is a "dog" from the moment of fertilization of a dog egg by a dog sperm. It remains a dog even as a senescent dying hound. Therefore, the dog is actually the entire life cycle of the animal, from fertilization through death.

I don't have a copy of the book handy, but that doesn't sound like a scientific conclusion. Rather, it sounds like a scientific definition. It sounds like Gilbert is describing what his book is about, and why it is an important field of study. He's making the point that a thorough scientific study of life isn't only about what an organism is, it's also about the changes that organism underwent to become what it is.

Eaton finishes with this conclusion:

Gilbert says a dog's life begins at fertilization and ends at that dog's death. How soon can we expect him and other scientists to define a human's life cycle the same?

I think that's backwards. Dr. Nadal was't quoting Gilbert's book as evidence that scientists have changed their minds, he was using the quoted passage to show that his own pro-life position is based on science that is so widely accepted it's in a textbook. Here's part of Nadal's conclusion:

We are human for our entire life cycle. We are whole and complete in form and function at every stage of our development, for that given developmental stage. The prepubescent child is fully human, even though they lack the capacity to execute all human functions, such as abstract reasoning, or reproduction.

In the same way, the early embryo is alive and fully human, though it has not yet executed all human organismal functions.

Except for the overloaded use of the word "fully," that's certainly how I'd expect a biologist to see it, especially a developmental biologist who studies organisms' entire life cycles. I really don't think it's a controversial idea. Eaton is missing the point if she thinks this is some new breakthrough. No one seriously doubts that fertilized eggs are human life.

Or so I thought. You see, just to be sure, I decided to do a little Googling, which lead to the National Abortion Rights Action League's answer to the question:

DOESN'T LIFE BEGIN AT CONCEPTION?

That's a question each person must decide for him- or herself. These issues involve matters of personal, moral, religious, and scientific beliefs. This is an area where politicians should have no role.

Here NARAL is using the word "life" to mean something more than just biological life. That's not exactly unjustified -- there's plenty of etymological support -- but it seems to me they're evading the question.

The Pro-Choice Action Network also has an evasive answer to the same question:

There is no scientific consensus as to when human life begins. It is a matter of philosophic opinion or religious belief. Human life is a continuum---sperm and eggs are also alive, and represent potential human beings, but virtually all sperm and eggs are wasted.

This is technically true, and I think it's the same point Nadal was making in his article. Human life doesn't begin at birth. It doesn't even begin at conception. The unfertilized human egg was alive, and it came from a woman who was alive, and she grew from a living egg, which came from a living woman...and so on, going back maybe 100,000 generations until you reach the predecessor species from which humans evolved. Human life extends back continuously over millions of years.

But that's not what people mean when they ask, in the context of the abortion debate, "Does life begin at conception?" That's because they're not really asking the right question.

Professor Scott Gilbert has been out of the office, but he found the time to dash off a quick note when I asked him to comment:

Thanks for sending this on. One can't help people taking quotations out of context. Creationists do it all the time. We also call a human a human when that person is dead, even if they are not a person anymore. We don't eat humans, we bury them. But the dead can't vote or inherit. So calling a dog a dog even as a zygote is kind of obvious. Even a dog sperm is a dog sperm and not a human sperm. But (unless your a Monty Python fan), that don't make the sperm a person.

(Professor Gilbert also suggests reading an op-ed he wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer.)

Nadal stumbles into this when he argues that we consider both prepubescent children and embryos to be human life, even if neither is capable of performing all human functions. He's right on the biology of course, fertilized human eggs are human life, but he's not properly addressing the moral issue, because when it comes to morality, function matters.

Here in the United States, the legal and clinical definitions of death are specified in terms of brain activity. A person's body can be kept alive by machines, and that's certainly human life -- blood is still flowing, the metabolism is still processing nutrients -- but if the brain has irreversibly ceased to function, we pronouce the person dead.

Or consider that having consensual sex with an adult is not generally considered an immoral act, but having consensual sex with child is a crime. The reason we make this moral distinction is because even though a child is fully human, we don't believe they have the mental function to make decisions about their sexuality.

Similarly, a person's rights depend on their behavior, which is another aspect of how they function. Obey the law, and you remain free. Rob a bank, and you go to jail. Try to kill someone, and you can be killed in self-defense, or executed after a trial.

The rights we grant people, and the respect we show to them, do not depend solely on the scientific fact that they are human life. We usually make the distinction by discussing not when a fertilized egg develops into human life, but when it becomes a person. That's a harder question, and one that science can inform but not fully answer. 

Over 40,000 Americans die every year in traffic accidents. This is a terrible tragedy. But I have a simple plan that will completely prevent all 40,000 of these deaths.

The key to my plan is to note that these 40,000 accidents are a result of 40,000 careless people driving cars. So all we have to do to eliminate these accidents is to make sure these 40,000 people aren't allowed to buy cars. Of course, the greedy auto makers insist on pushing their cars on everyone in the country, so some regulation will be required.

We need to impose strict production limits on U.S. auto manufacturing (and importing) to reduce the number of cars produced each year by just over 40,000, thus completely ensuring that irresponsible drivers are unable to obtain cars, which will completely eliminate all automobile deaths. This plan can't possibly fail.

What's that you say? You think my plan is completely stupid?

Well then, smartass, what does that mean for the DEA, which uses the exact same plan to prevent misuse of the prescription drug Adderall:

The DEA gets involved. It's an arm of the Justice Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration. Its job is to make sure, to the extent you can, that drugs don't get diverted into illicit use, drugs of abuse or potential abuse like amphetamines, the way these are.

And so it, every year, sets a ceiling on how much on the raw material, the active ingredient for a whole bunch of drugs, including these, can be made. So it's an overall aggregate amount of raw material that the DEA regulates.

Sigh, naturally, the people who were diverting the drugs before are simply continuing to do so now. On the other hand, the people who actually need Adderall for their health and sanity are having trouble finding enough of the drug. And naturally, the price of this now-scarce drug is rising, pricing some patients out of the market, and forcing them to do without any medication for their condition or switch to less effective drugs.

(Hat tip: Radley Balko)

For whatever it's worth, I've started writing a series of posts about Occupy Wall Street over at Nobody's Business.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

The last few years have been a bit difficult. Between my parents getting sick and dying, my consulting work drying up, and the ongoing recession, by this time last year things were looking precarious and about to get worse. But now my life is settling back into order and things are starting to look up again.

So on this Thanksgiving, I'm thankful for all my friends who stuck with me through a difficult time, and all the new friends I made along the way. You made a difficult time much, much easier.

Thank you.

I haven't had much to say about the Occupy Wall Street protests, mostly because I don't understand the Occupy Wall Street protests. I think that's because the protesters don't understand them either. That's okay, because building a consensus is a process. and it takes time. There's nothing wrong with that. Here at Windypundit however, I like to talk about ideas and policies, and I can't discuss what I can't understand.

Which brings me to this, which I understand all too well:

That's UC Davis police Lt. John Pike pepper spraying some students who are just sitting on peacefully on the public sidewalk at their school.

Some people have tried to explain this by pointing out that the protesters were blocking the sidewalk and had to be removed, but that doesn't justify using pepper spray. Police have been arresting peaceful protesters forever, and the way to do it is for 2 to 4 police officers to approach each protester, pick him up, and carry him off to the wagon for transport.

What officer Pike did is a chemical variation on what is sometime euphemistically called "pain compliance," which means hurting people until they do what you want. When used to control a violently resisting offender, it's a legitimate escalation step in a police use-of-force policy. When used against non-violent people sitting on the ground, it makes you look like a dickhead.

I wouldn't normally have written anything about this incident because, well, nobody out there seems to care. I don't mean you, my faithful readers, I know you care. But somehow the news media and the American public don't seem to mind that our police forces are routinely doing things that make them indistinguishable from violent street gangs.

Oddly, I was moved to write by, of all people, Brian Tannebaum, who actually took a break from his usual rants about legal marketing to write an impassioned call for a national conversation on law enforcement. That Brian would sound impassioned about anything as nebulous as a "national conversation" is a sign that his cynicism has been shaken.

It's almost a daily exercise, watching video of law enforcement conduct that raises eyebrows. The responses are always the same: 1) The video doesn't tell the entire story, 2) We don't understand the "adrenaline" that causes police officers to beat the living crap out of suspects after they are securely in custody, and 3) So what, the guy's a criminal anyway.

We as criminal defense lawyers, civil libertarians, and yes, even some prosecutors and judges, watch these videos and know that there is a large segment of the country that finds this conduct just "part of the job."

And then something like this pops up.

Brian, in turn, seems to have been inspired by Alexis Madrigal's brilliant commentary in the Atlantic, in which he points out that Pike isn't necessarily an innately evil person. He was probably following orders:

Then came the massive and much-disputed 1999 WTO protests. Negotiated management was seen to have totally failed and it cost the police chief his job and helped knock the mayor from office. "It can be reasonably argued that these protests, and the experiences of the Seattle Police Department in trying to manage them, have had a more profound effect on modern policing than any other single event prior to 9/11," former Chicago police officer and Western Illinois professor Todd Lough argued.

No one wanted to be Seattle and police departments around the country began to change. "In Chicago for example, paramilitary gear such as that worn by the Seattle Police was quickly acquired and distributed to officers," Lough continued, "and the use of force policy was amended to allow for the pepper spraying of passive resistors under certain circumstances."

[Emphasis Madrigal's.]

I knew as soon as I read George Washington University Professor Amitai Etzioni's ridiculous bootlicking CNN op-ed (via a tweet from Radley Balko) that I wanted to write something about it. As often happens, Scott Greenfield beat me to it with a biting response to the legal issues. Still, let me give you a taste:

The Supreme Court is about to hold hearings on whether the police need a warrant to attach a GPS tracker to a suspect's car and trace its movements while it is in a public space...

The intense debate the case has already elicited among legal scholars, civil rights and libertarian activists, and those particularly concerned with public safety and national security is largely focused on the question: what would the Founding Fathers have said about the case? As I see it, at least equal weight should be accorded to the question: How well are our public authorities doing in their dealings with criminals?

Yes, because police expediency is such an excellant way to decide what our rights should be. In fact, it would really speed things along for our overworked police forces if young black males would be so courteous as to report to the nearest prison when they turn 16. Thank you for your cooperation.

Basically, Etzioni seems willing to give police whatever power they want, as long as they say they need it to protect us. As is usually the case when someone makes this argument, Etzioni seems unwilling to consider that giving police this power might come with a significant cost, that the cost might include significant abuse by the police, and that the giving the police this power might not actually make us safer.

It's a common enough way of thinking. But what got my attention is Etzioni's depressing misuse of science, statistics, and logic.

According to national statistics for 2010, less than half (47%) of violent crimes committed in this country are "cleared" (that is, suspects are arrested, charged, and turned over for prosecution) and only one out of five (18%) criminals who commit nonviolent crimes (such as burglary) are caught and tried.

Etzioni offers no context for these numbers. Is a 47% solve rate bad? Or is it an all-time high? Crime rates have been falling since the 1990s and if clearance rates are not unusually low, it's not clear that we need to grant police such a broad privacy-destroying power.

For obvious reasons there are no such statistics available for terrorists, and the fact that there was no successful attack in the U.S. over the past 10 years tends to make us complacent.

However, if one takes into account that there are many millions of people in the world who hate us and wish us harm (and at least a few right here in the U.S.), we should maintain our vigilance. As one terrorist group once put it, "You have to be lucky all the time. We only have to be lucky once."

Etzioni likes the statistics when they are in his favor (the low clearance numbers, which imply a large number of criminals roaming around) but when the statistics cut against his argument, as with the low terrorism rate, his response is to downplay the statistics and warn us not to get complacent.

I get the feeling this is due more to intellectual laziness than dishonesty, since Etzioni is actually wrong on the facts when he asserts that there has been "no successful attack in the U.S. over the past 10 years." Thirteen people died in the shooting attack at Fort Hood in 2009, and twelve more people have been killed in smaller incidents that are considered terrorism. (Five more died from the anthrax mailings after 9/11, but that's technically just outside the 10-year boundary.) It averages out to about three domestic terrorism deaths per year.

As to what is reasonable, it obviously changes with the circumstances. Given that criminals can use freely all the new technologies -- including of course GPS trackers, smartphones and spyware -- it seems eminently reasonable that the police should also be able to use some of these, especially in public spaces, in which people have no expectation of privacy (or at least should not have one).

Huh? Criminals also smoke crack. Does that mean we should let the cops smoke crack?

The proper question is not whether police have the same technology the criminals have, it's whether Police have the right technology to do the job. For example, cops have been arguing for years that they need better weapons because the criminals have better weapons. That makes some sense, because one of the best ways to counter an opponent's weaponry is with weaponry of your own. But it's not clear that criminals are doing anything with GPS systems that the police could counter with GPS systems. What's the logic for demanding GPS parity? This seems like lazy thinking.

Moreover, often some such surveillance is needed before a tip or lead can be developed to the point that it meets the standard of probable cause.

The counter-argument that if the police are allowed to proceed, we shall be all tracked seven days a week, round the clock does not withstand minimal criticism. At most, the GPS data tells us that someone drove a car to certain places. Who lives or works there, what happened, etc. etc., all remain to be investigated.

Again, Etzioni is speaking out of both sides of his mouth. If we don't need to worry about cops having our GPS data because it's so useless, then why do cops want it so badly? The obvious answer is that knowing where a person travels in a day or a month tells us a lot about that person. That's why the cops want it.

And then Etzioni says something really stupid:

If the police put GPS devices in all the cars on the road, or even only in one out of every thousand, cops would be buried under an endless flood of data points -- among which suspects would be lost.

Um...no. Not at all. Not even a little bit. This one really bothers me, because I've encountered this misconception before and it's seriously wrong. Etzioni is trying to sound smart by talking about things he doesn't understand. Modern internet-scale computing routinely solves these kinds of problems.

I got curious and did some of the math. Assuming we can store GPS latitude, longitude, altitude, timestamp, and transmitter ID in five 64-bit fields, and that we want to get a GPS fix every 10 seconds for all 309 million Americans, that works out to about 99,000 gigabytes per day, or 3 million gigabytes per month, equivalent to the data bandwidth used by 11 million iPhones. Using prices from Amazon Web Services, I estimated that it will cost $150,000 per month to transfer the data, and if we to retain the data for a year, that will cost 36.3 million gigabytes, the storage rental will eat another $2 million per month.

Computing cost is harder to estimate because it depends on what sort of data processing we're planning, but assuming that a large Amazon server instance can process 1000 samples per second, we'll need 30,900 running server instances, which will cost us $8.9 million per month. Now that's a heck of a lot of servers, but it's not unheard of. Large sites like Yahoo and Facebook are probably using that many servers, and Google is widely estimated to operate 900,000 servers.

Retrieving the full year of data for any single person would probably take a minute or two (mostly transfer time) and with that many servers, we could retrieve tens of thousands of records simultaneously. If you want to be able to answer geographic questions  -- "Who was within 500 yards of the crime scene on the day in question?" -- you'd probably need twice as much storage for the geospatial index. On the other hand, you could also save space by eliminating duplicate GPS data from when people aren't moving. Call it a wash.

There are lots of other costs, including programming and management, but I think we can safely say that the cost of handing the data would be less than $150 million dollars per year. And if we cut our sample rate from every 10 seconds to every minute, the cost scales down to only $25 million per year. The government could contract this out, and depending how you classified the work, it might be considered a small business.

The thing is, my datacenter calculations are just a diversion, because if Etzioni had given it a little thought, he'd realize we already have a working example. When you call a mobile phone, the cellular network has to know which antenna to use to connect to it, and since the network can't know in advance when the next call will come, it has to be constantly tracking every phone. So at this very moment our national cellular phone networks are using 250,000 cellular antenna sites to track over 300 million mobile phones in real time. It's not as accurate as GPS, but it's just as much data, and it's fast, cheap, and reliable.

At the same time, the police should be required to file reports after the fact about their use of GPS trackers. If it turns out that they are employed too often or to track people who are, say, political activists, the police should be reprimanded and if they persist, elected officials (say, a city council) should set limits on the use of this and other crime-fighting technologies and punish those who abuse them.

Or, we could set the limits and punish the abusers right now. Keep in mind, the argument isn't about whether the police should be able to track bad guys with GPS, it's only about whether they should be able to do so without a signed warrant from a judge.

If the data ran the other way -- if most criminals were neutralized and we did not have to be concerned about terrorists -- reasonable people who seek to deny the police the use of GPS trackers without probable cause might have a much stronger case.

"If the data ran the other way"? What data is he talking about? There is no data. The only data he presents is the low clearance rate. He offers no evidence that any part of this low clearance rate is due to the inability of police to use GPS trackers without a warrant. He simply takes the police at their word that this is a tool they need.

Personally, I'm against this kind of big-brother system even if it would produce a substantial increase in clearance rates, because I think the government would use it to do more harm than good. But even if you don't agree with me, don't you think we should make the police prove they need this power before we give it to them? Make them gather statistics about how many bad guys got away without GPS tracking that would have been caught with it. Make them show us the math. My guess is, they can't.

I've got to get the word out about Lindsay Beyerstein.

I first encountered Lindsay a few years ago at Magikthise, her original personal blog. (That name sounds like one of the lesser-known Bond girls, but it's actually a geek reference to a character -- a philosopher, your basic working thinker -- in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.) Lindsay is a liberal, not a libertarian, so I don't always agree with what she has to say, but I like the way she says it. She's smart, she's intellectually honest, and she's a good writer.

Recently, however, I've made the disturbing discovery that Lindsay is the victim of a widespread campaign to wipe her presence off the internet. Surprisingly, the campaign is not the work of the nefarious Koch brothers, as you might expect. It's much more insidious than that. The conspiracy to silence Lindsay is orchestrated by none other than her own publishers!

It all started with Focal Point, Lindsay's brilliantly-named blog at big think. Ever since this new blog came online, the original Magikthise home page has redirected to it. Fortunately, this first attempt was not completely successful, and Lindsay's classic Magikthise posts can still be found at the Magikthise archives.

The next attempt to silence Lindsay was much more effective. It came when the progressive magazine In These Times set her up with a new blog called Duly Noted. It sounds great, doesn't it? Her posts would be appearing alongside those of key progressive figures such as Noam Chomsky. What could possibly be wrong with that?

It was only when I tried to add Duly Noted to my feed reader that I tumbled to their clever plot. You see, the feed link on the Duly Noted home page doesn't link to Lindsay's blog feed at all. Instead, it subscribes me to the main In These Times feed, and the main In These Times feed doesn't include Lindsay's posts. It was a fiendish trick. A nefarious rip-off. A blatant bait-and-switch to hide Lindsay's writing from the world.

Finally, just yesterday I uncovered yet another attempt to suppress Lindsay's voice. She wrote a piece about how and why unemployment is a feminist issue, and it's gong to be the cover story of the Fall 2011 issue of Ms. magazine. As we've seen before, this at first sounds like a terrific career milestone for Lindsay: A chance for her work to appear in the magazine of the feminist movement.

But once again, Lindsay has fallen into trap, as you can see for yourself at the preview page for the next issue of Ms. Lindsay's story "Jobs, Jobs, Jobs" is featured prominently in the image of the magazine's cover, but it doesn't name Lindsay as the author. Next, check out the table of contents below. The article is listed, but Lindsay's name appears nowhere on the page. Most baffling of all, clicking on the name of the article in the table of contents doesn't take you to Lindsay's article.

Admittedly, there may be an alternative explanation. If you explore the Ms. magazine table of contents more thoroughly, you will soon discover a shocking truth: None of the article titles are linked to articles. The entire page is nothing but dead text.

This invites us to consider the possibility that there is no conspiracy to silence Lindsay Beyerstein's promising young progressive voice. Perhaps it's just another case of the sort of tragic ineptitude that results when old media publications like In These Times and Ms. try to make use of that new interweb thing all the kids are talking about.

I'm not sure which would be worse for Lindsay.

Update: Lindsay's Duly Noted blog now has its own proper RSS feed.

I'm pretty sure the anti-vaccination crowd is seriously deluded. Some of them are so scared of vaccines that they prefer to give their children immunity to diseases the old fashioned way: By giving them the disease itself.

The usual way to do that is with a "pox party": Wait until one child in your circle of anti-vax fanatics gets the chicken pox, and then bring all your kids over so they'll be infected too. It's okay, you know, because it's natural.

But what if you don't have any friends who have the disease? Via Radley Balko, the AP's Erik Shelzig reports:

Parents fearful of vaccinations are being warned by a federal prosecutor that making a deal with a stranger who promises to mail them lollipops licked by children with chickenpox isn't just a bad idea, it's against the law.

Jerry Martin, U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, said he was spurred by reports this week by KPHO-TV in Phoenix and WSMV-TV in Nashville about people turning to Facebook to find lollipops, spit or other items from children who have chickenpox.

"Can you imagine getting a package in the mail from this complete stranger that you know from Facebook because you joined a group, and say here, drink this purported spit from some other kid?" Martin told The Associated Press.

If you're thinking this might be a good idea, let me see if I can change your mind. Maybe you're not daunted by the fact that it's illegal. (It's a crime to send chickenpox through the U.S. mail for the same reason it's a crime to send anthrax through the U.S. mail.) And maybe it doesn't bother you to intentionally infect your child with a disease. And maybe you're not going to concern yourself about other people who might catch the disease from your deliberately disease-ridden child. Heck, maybe you don't even mind the fact that doctors say it won't work -- after all, they're the ones who wanted to vaccinate your kids, right?

In that case, let me see if I can still head you off by telling you what I think the U.S. Attorney is hinting at when he dropped the word "purported" into that sentence: When a stranger on the internet sends you lollipops so that your child will lick them, it's because he jerked off all over them. And now he's jerking off at the thought of your child licking them.

I know that's a disgusting thought, and probably only a handful of perverts are sick enough to get off on something like that. But by now, every single one of them has a website offering free lollipops.

At about the time that Brittany Norwood was beating and stabbing Jayna Murray to death inside a store in a shopping mall, two employees in the Apple store next door heard sounds of the struggle coming through the wall.

The Apple Store employees were closing up for the night. One of them heard strange sounds from the other side of the wall: grunts, thuds, hysterical screams.

"Talk to me. Don't do this," a voice said. "Talk to me. What's going on?"

"At that point, there was some more sounds, kind of, screams, yelps, yells," Jana Svrzo, a manager at the Apple Store in Bethesda, said Friday, testifying on the third day of Brittany Norwood's murder trial in the killing of her Lululemon Athletica co-worker.

The screams faded. Then Svrzo heard low, quiet tones.

"God help me," Svrzo recalled hearing. "Please help me."

After hearing all that, Svrzo and the other employee, Ricardo Rios, didn't do anything about it. They neither called the police nor investigated it themselves.

I heard about all this from Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms, who has this to say about it:

We need to agree on the proper treatment for people like this -- self-centered, fearful slugs who can't summon the fortitude and decency to help a fellow human being in peril even when it only requires a phone call. They are not quite criminals, but they are significant contributors to the evil in the world, the kind of citizens who accept the benefits of society but won't lift a finger to contribute to it.

...

I don't want to hire someone like Svrzo. I don't want her as a neighbor or a friend. If I'm an independent service provider, I don't want her business; if I'm a banker, I don't think she's trustworthy enough to get a loan. Her conduct is unacceptable in a cooperative society, and the one constructive thing she can do now is to serve as a living lesson to others that there are minimum standards to participating in civilization, and consequences of failing to meet them.

That would have been my reaction too, except that I've seen stories like this before, and I've learned to be skeptical. I can't rule out evil as an explanation for her behavior; it's entirely possible that Jana Svrzo is exactly the kind of psychopath who wouldn't bother to help a woman being beaten to death. However, given what I've read so far, I feel the need to point out that you don't have to make that assumption to explain what happened. Inaction that at first seems inexplicably callous sometimes turns out to be rather ordinarily human.

My guess is that the most critical factor in explaining her inaction is this: Until that day, I'm pretty sure that Jana Svrzo had never heard someone being beaten to death before. In fact, I'm willing to bet that she had never even seen a serious fight. And now we're supposed to assume that she should have been able to figure out what was going on just by how it sounded? Through a wall?

That doesn't sound possible. At least not unless she had reason to be familiar with the sounds of close-in personal brutality, perhaps from growing up in a violent family. Otherwise, all she heard was some strange sounds.

Well, then, what about the cry for help? According to the news story, she heard a variety of noises -- variously described as grunts, squealing, and screams -- and while this was going on, she heard someone say "Talk to me. Don't do this," and then "Talk to me. What's going on?" And later she heard a different voice say "God help me," and "Please help me."

Again, knowing what we know now, it's pretty obvious that something bad had happened. But it's not hard to imagine other scenarios which Svrzo would have had to consider. She heard two people in a room, some noise, and one of them asked for help. Isn't it possible that she was asking the other person for help? If you've never witnessed a violent crime before, what would be your first guess?

It's really easy to misunderstand novel situations like this and make a dangerous mistake. About 20 years ago, I was in my kitchen, and I happened to glance out into the parking lot, where I noticed one of the other residents of our condo was kneeling next to her car, like she'd dropped her keys and they'd skittered underneath it. A few minutes later, I happened to glance out again, and she was still there, and I wondered what the heck that silly woman was up to...and then I put it together: She was elderly, she was overweight, it was winter, and the ground looked wet. She had slipped on the glare ice and couldn't get up.

I didn't realize what had happened the first time because she wasn't lying down like an injured person -- in fact, she wasn't injured at all, she simply didn't have the strength to pull herself up by her arms when her feet had no grip on the pavement. This was many years before I had to help take care of my parents (and my own knees still worked like they're supposed to), so I'd had no experience with people who had infirmities. I had no way of recognizing what had happened from one brief glance.

Once I saw her again and realized she probably wasn't in that position voluntarily, my wife and I went down to help her. She was fine. No big deal.

But had I not glanced down at her a second time, things might have ended less happily. She was down on the ground between two cars where it was hard for someone to see her, so she could have been stuck for long time in the freezing cold. She might even have died from exposure. And if I told people that I'd seen her there on the ground, they'd think I had let her die on purpose.

One of the things that affects how people react to a situation is their observation of how everyone else is reacting. I used to work across the street from a housing project, and whenever there was a loud bang, I'd look to the reactions of the residents to determine if it was a gunshot or something harmless, because they could tell the difference.

Svrzo called over co-worker Ricardo Rios, but according to his testimony, he couldn't make out much of what he was hearing. So both of them heard something strange, but each of them saw that the other wasn't too alarmed. They reinforced each other's decision to do nothing.

If my wife had glanced out the window at our fallen neighbor and decided that she was just fiddling with something on her car, she might have laughed at my ridiculous concerns, and she might have convinced me. Later, when our neighbor's lifeless body was discovered, we'd both look like callous psychopaths to people who hadn't been there.

I think there's a fair chance that Svrzo also thought that if something was really wrong, someone else would provide help. After all, how often do any of us find ourselves in a situation where we have the opportunity to save someone from serious injury or death? (In 47 years, it's only happened to me once that I know of, and I'm not sure anything bad would have happened if I hadn't been there.) The noises Svrzo was hearing were coming from another store in the mall. Surely if anything bad had happened, another person in the store would have helped, right?

There's a saying -- I've seen it used with respect to medical diagnostics: "When you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras."

The point is that when faced with a mystery, the most likely explanation is probably going the correct explanation. When a patient presents with flu-like symptoms, your best bet is to assume he has the flu, at least until you learn more.

Based on Svrzo's actions, she obviously knew something wasn't right, but what are the chances that anything in her life experience could have prepared her for this? You and I and everyone we know will probably go through our whole lives without hearing anyone being murdered. I'm assuming she's no different in that respect. So on that terrible night, she heard some strange hoof beats, and she decided it was probably just horses. Because, really, what else could it be?

By now, some of you are probably sputtering that I'm just making stuff up. That I can't possibly know what was going through her head. That I wasn't there.

True enough. But then again, neither was anyone else who is criticizing her. They read the accounts of what happened, and they consider the facts, and they reach the only conclusion that makes sense: That she's a callous narcissist.

What I'm trying to do is point out that there may be another way to fit the facts to the known range of human behavior. Of course, in doing so, I might be making the same horse-or-zebra mistake that I think Svrzo made. Psychopaths are pretty rare, but the ordinary failures of human cognition are not, so I'm guessing this is an ordinary failure. But I could be wrong.

I decided to write this post for a couple of reasons. First of all, there are a couple of lessons we could learn, the most important one being: If you need help from strangers in a strange situation, don't just ask for help. Tell them you've been attacked and tell them what you want them to do. Be very specific. Not "Help me!" but "Help! I've been stabbed! Get me an ambulance! Somebody get me an ambulance!"

No, I'm not blaming the victim. Jayna Murray was severely wounded and probably had no idea anyone could hear her. I'm just saying that if you or I ever find ourselves in need of emergency medical help, it's something we would do well to remember.

(Here's another example of the kind of thing I'm talking about: Somewhere I read about an incident in which a doctor choked to death in the middle of a medical conference dinner, surrounded by dozens of other doctors. It sounds at first like gross incompetence, but really, how many doctors have ever seen someone actually choking to death before? This is why if you're ever unable to breath because you're choking on something, you should make sure you put your hands to your neck and make a face like you're gagging, so people understand what you need.)

Another lesson is that if nobody else is taking charge of the situation, it may be that you're the one who has to take charge. If my speculation here is correct, then Jana Svrzo is not the villain that some people have made her out to be. But if something different had triggered in her brain, if she had decided that, you know, maybe she should call the police, just to be safe...then Jana Svrzo might have been a hero. And Jayna Murray might still be alive.

Wouldn't it be cool to be the hero? You can't be one though, unless you take action.

Finally, Jack Marshall had this to say:

...the societal condemnation of individuals who allow another human being to be harmed when they have it in their power to summon assistance is appropriate, and should occur informally, like most enforcement of social behavioral norms.

Well, there's some evidence that people may be taking things much further than Jack intends. I Googled Jana Svrzo, and I find a blocked Twitter page, a missing LinkedIn page, an inactive flickr stream, a missing Facebook page and, well, you get the idea. There seems to be only one Jana Svrzo out there, and she seems to be hiding from something.

I'm guessing that people are harassing her. If she's the narcissistic bitch that some people think she is, then in a sense she has it coming. (Although, really, if she's that narcissistic, she's not going to be the least bit bothered by what other people think.)

But if she's just an ordinary person who made an understandable mistake under terrible circumstances...let's not make this any worse than it already is.

It looks like Google has decided to screw up Reader with a new design:

I guess they wanted it to have a more modern-looking design, and I suppose it looks nicer, but it's kind of goofy from a usability standpoint. The biggest problem is that everything is, well, bigger. They're following the modern web design trend of separating things on the page with space rather than graphical components.

The thing is, though, nobody visits a web page for its use of space. You visit a web page for its content. Now, your enjoyment of the content is affected by how it's presented, of course, but the presentation should enhance the content, not hinder it or overwhelm it.

So what's the content of Google Reader? Links to other content. Users of Reader want to be able to scan through dozens or hundreds of items to see what looks worth reading. That means a good page design for a feed reader should present as many links as possible, so users can scan them easily for something of interest. The new design simply doesn't display as many links as the old one.

And here's another thing they could do instead of filling the page with space: Let us see the full names of the blogs we're reading. The column on the left can't be resized, so I'm going to be left reading "Marginal Revolut..." and "Technology Liber..." I can't remember if the old page design occasionally cut something off, but it's certainly become more of a problem now.

Oh, and the scrollbar is slightly narrower, making it slightly harder for me to click. And the scroll thumb -- the part that moves up and down -- doesn't appear until my mouse is over the scroll bar, which means I can't position the mouse vertically until I've got it positioned horizontally.

It's like one of those weird buildings, where all the architecture critics ooh and aah over how swirly and unconventional is, and no one seems to be noticing that the offices are cramped, there aren't enough bathroom stalls, and the roof leaks.

It happened again a couple of nights ago. I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. As I took care of business, something was nagging at me, but I was groggy enough that it didn't quite rise to the level of a conscious concern. As I lay back down in bed, however, it finally pushed through the fog: I was hearing a quiet beeping sound. Some electronic device somewhere in the apartment wanted my attention.

Thus began the Beep Hunt.

It's one of the more annoying tasks of the wired life. I have a lot of electronic gadgets, and many of them are smart enough to let me know when they need attention. But few of them do it well.

The first time it happened was 20 years ago, when a pager battery got critically low in the middle of the night. It freaked me out. I started awake with an adrenaline rush and ran out into the living room to track down the strange noise. I guess that's an old animal reflex -- a strange and unexpected noise in the night could be a threat, so I responded in full fight-or-flight mode, ready to defend my family against the mysterious intrusion.

(Some of you kids may not know this, so I should explain that a pager at that time was a special-purpose one-way communication receiver. It works kind of like those things some restaurants use to tell you when a table is ready, except over much longer ranges. Someone who wanted to talk to you would call a special number you had given them. A computer would answer, and they could punch in a phone number where they could be reached. The computer would then send out a radio message to your pager, telling you the number. This was before widespread inexpensive cellular service, so you'd have to find a land-line to call them back. These were one-way devices because without a cellular antenna network, the signals had to go out over a small number of dedicated commercial antennas which used 1000-Watt bursts to broadcast the page over hundreds of square miles. Nothing you'd want to keep in your pocket could generate enough power for a return signal.)

This beep wasn't a bad one. It was a long oscillating beep that happened every few seconds. They aren't always that easy.

As far as I know, your brain uses three basic factors to figure out where sounds are coming from. First, there's the relative volume difference between the ears, which works best when the sound is coming from one side and the other ear is hidden from the source by your head.

Second, there's the different arrival time of the sound at your ears. As with the volume difference, it doesn't work so well with sounds that aren't far to one side because the sounds arrive closer together.

Third, there's the way the sound waves interact with the structure of your ears. Your ear will attenuate different frequencies of sound in different ways depending on the direction from which the sound strikes your ear. This works best when the sound is complex, consisting of many frequencies, each attenuated a little differently, such as the rustling noise of an animal creeping through bushes -- which would often have been a life-or-death concern for our ancient ancestors.

(Modern video games use a mathematical model of the human ear to simulate this attenuation in order to give you better directional cues for sounds. Warning systems for fighter pilots use a similar mechanism to make the sound easier to distinguish.)

Your brain has to pick the beeping sound out of a cacophony of other noises -- everything from outside traffic and air conditioning to the sound of blood flowing through your head -- so it helps if the sound is loud. It also helps if there's a lot of information for your brain to analyze, which means that longer or more repetitious sounds are easier to localize. It's especially helpful if you can turn your head and change the way the sound strikes your ears.

Thus, the easiest sounds for your brain to localize are long, loud, complicated, and repeated frequently. Of course, the easiest sound for a cheap low-power electronic device to generate is a quiet beep at a single pure frequency, and it helps power consumption to keep the duty cycle low by using a short duration sound delivered at a long interval. In addition, I think many devices are designed to emit a discrete and unobtrusive sound, in order to be less annoying. Of course, that only makes it more annoying when you don't know what's beeping, and you have to hunt for it.

My procedure for finding a beep is tiresome but fairly straightforward. First I stand sideways in the hallway of our condo, very still, with my back to the bathroom, waiting for the beep. This maximizes the sound difference from either end of the hall. If it comes from my left, it's either the kitchen or the living room. If it comes from my right, it's either the bedroom or my office. If neither, it's probably something in the bathroom behind me.

This last time, it came from the office/bedroom direction, so I move to stand still at that end of the hall, with my office to the left and my bedroom to the right. It was coming from the office. I walked in and stood between the two desks, and quickly figured out it was coming from the VPN phone I use for work. Now I was close enough that it actually sounded like it was coming from the phone, and the display said something about incoming voicemail. I hit a couple of buttons and the sound stopped. Despite the message, I had no voicemail.

(When I first walked in, I noticed two of our cats sitting by the phone. It could be that they were curious about the noise, but I suspect that one of them may have stepped on a button. It wouldn't be the first time one of our cats was responsible for a disturbing noise in the night.)

This wasn't a bad one. It probably took me less than a minute. The worst beep hunt I ever had was caused by a failing battery in a UPS that emitted a pure beeping tone for one second every hour. The tone was so pure and high-pitched (which also makes it hard to locate) that even standing a few feet away, I couldn't be sure where it was coming from. I had to find it by relative volume in different locations, which is kind of hard to compare when the beeps are that far apart. It took days to figure it out.

I have to admit, I'm pretty excited about the iPhone 4S. I've had my iPhone 3S for a couple of years now, and although it's been pretty cool, it was beginning to show its age. Some of the newer apps are a bit sluggish on my less-than-leading-edge hardware, and my phone doesn't have the iPhone 4's WiFi hotspot feature, which I'd find pretty useful. By the time my contract ran out this summer, the tech rumor mill was saying Apple would have a new phone out in October, so I decided to wait.

I'm not normally an early adopter of anything, so when Apple made their announcement on Wednesday, I thought about it for a few days before deciding I was going to buy the new phone. Finally, this weekend, I took the plunge and visited the Apple online store, and promptly stumbled on a defect that even the design wizards at Apple were unable to eliminate. In the otherwise elegant and powerful iPhone, I had discovered a glaring problem. A fly in the ointment. A monkey in the wrench.

The problem, simply put, is that you can't use an iPhone as a mobile phone without having to involve a mobile phone company. Apple's iPhone may be one of the design and technology sensations of the modern world, but they depend for their functionality on one of the most despised industries in the modern world. It's like buying a Lamborghini Murcielago supercar and discovering that you're only allowed to drive it on gravel roads.

(Mobile carriers aren't as bad as they used to be. When I first started using one, I remember I wanted to change some feature and when I called the company, they told me that the change would require a $35 "programming fee." Their network computers could follow me all over the country and stream audio to my phone in real time, but changing a field in the database was so difficult that I'd have to pay for it.)

The new iPhone works with any one of three carriers: AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon. I used to have Verizon before I switched to AT&T for my iPhone, and I'd love to go back -- they were great to work with and I had good connectivity -- but they use CDMA technology which (for reasons beyond my comprehension) doesn't allow users to talk and surf the web at the same time. That could be a problem if I'm going to be tethered and online for hours at a time.

As for Sprint, well...let's just say I have a history with those fuckers.

So that means I'm stuck with my current carrier, AT&T.

Picking out the iPhone at the Apple site was easy, and even linking the purchase to my AT&T account seemed to work just fine. The problem came when I tried to arrange shipping. You see, I have a rental box at a nearby UPS Store. Everything I buy online gets sent to that address so I don't have to choose between staying home all day or having the package left in the hallway where anyone can steal it.

It turns out that this offends AT&T. Even though I had the UPS box listed as my default shipping address for the Apple store, the ordering system wouldn't let me ship the phone to the UPS box, and a chat with Apple support confirmed that AT&T would only allow them to ship the phone to the billing address on my mobile account. It didn't even matter that this was the exact same address to which they had successfully shipped the iPhone I was currently using.

I suppose there's some security rationalization for this, but it's not much security, since all I had to do was visit the AT&T site to change my billing address to the rental box and then go through the purchasing process again. I'll change it back after I get the phone, so my bills arrive at home again. It was a useless and annoying waste of my time.

I realize this is not a huge problem, but I thought it deserved attention -- perhaps some sort of prize for Special Achievement in Bad Customer Service. I mean, think about it: AT&T has figured out a way to screw with me that (a) is completely gratuitous, (b) hits me before I even have the product in my hands, (c) affects a product I'm actually buying from someone else, and (d) only really hurts their returning customers.

It's a pity the folks at Apple have to work with losers like this.