Could we be seeing the start of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation?

What a friggin' waste of my time! It's now 6:22 pm local time and still no Rapture. It was supposed to start at 6:00 pm and I was all ready for it. I had my camera with a basic theodolite setup, and pointing directly towards a local church. Being in a typical American city, there are churches every few blocks, of course, so I was ready to slew the camera towards at least one more church as well.

In an effort to keep you up-to-date, Windypundit has sent its spy satellite (WindySat) to check out the Abbottabad compound in Pakistan to see if we could spot the downed Black Hawk helicopter. Sure enough! There it is. That black "X" shaped object to the left of the building.

The free market, combined with poorly written computer algorithms, means you might have to pay $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping) for a book about flies at Amazon. Read all about it at Michael Eisen's blog it is NOT junk.

At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus' resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.

The culminating event of this weekend uprising was their leader Jesus himself rising from his grave to lead his army into the city of Jerusalem in an effort to rebuild their ancient temple which had previously been destroyed. The followers of the Great Zombie Jesus refer to him as the "Messiah" which is an ancient Hebrew word for "Great Warrior" and "King of Kings". He was believed to be a direct descendant of a previous warrior, credited with leading great bloody battle campaigns, called David.

Then the sixth angel sounded: And I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God, saying to the sixth angel who had the trumpet, "Release the four angels who are bound at the great river Euphrates." So the four angels, who had been prepared for the hour and day and month and year, were released to kill a third of mankind. Now the number of the army of the horsemen was two hundred million; I heard the number of them. And thus I saw the horses in the vision: those who sat on them had breastplates of fiery red, hyacinth blue, and sulfur yellow; and the heads of the horses were like the heads of lions; and out of their mouths came fire, smoke, and brimstone.

Everyone is all aflutter about the news that Steve Jobs knows where you have been. Since that Earth-shattering bit of news, a lot of bloggers and reporters have pointed out how other software within the iPhone can do the same thing without the user realizing it, and how the Android devices do this as well. Greg Laden has a good summary of these articles in his post iKnowwhatyoudidlastsummer.

To be blunt, people being tracked in their everyday lives is nothing particularly new. I'm happy that this has made a splash in the mass media since it's a situation that has been increasing in prevalence without major notice until now. When I teach IT security, I always spend some time covering privacy issues as well, and have discussed tracking issues regularly for fifteen years now.

A common thought problem I would often give to my students is to plan a cross country road trip in such a way that they could not be tracked. Fifteen years ago this was an interesting problem that forced people to think about how they interacted with a variety of databases. Today, it's a more difficult proposition to even accomplish.

Even before the advent of modern smart phones, people have been automatically tracked. When you use your debit or credit card, the bank has a primitive tracking record of your movements. The more you use it, the better the tracking. So, before leaving on a hypothetical un-tracked trip, you need to remember to leave these cards at home. You will need to work with cash. If you don't want to tip your bank off to your trip, you need to collect the cash in advance, a little at a time. It may also be a good idea to give your cards to a trusted friend so there is local activity on them while you are away, electronically geo-tagging you to your home town.

You can't just leave your smart phone at home; you will need to leave any cell phone behind. Cell phones have been tracked since the very first cell phone. Cell phones work by having the towers (and thus cell companies) track the phones. When you first turn on your phone, it sends a message out. Any nearby towers receive that signal, which then talk to a computer at the company. The tower with the strongest signal (as well as reasonably bandwidth, consistent signal, and other factors) will be granted sole authority over your phone. This process is periodically repeated in case you move. The cell company must always know which tower to direct a call through to get to your phone.

Ten years ago the cell companies swore to us on a stack of their own quarterly reports that this tracking data was not stored in any reasonably permanent way due to the amount of data and cost of storage. I haven't heard much about this as the cost of storage has plummeted, but I was always leery of the argument since it was based upon no compression of data that is easily compressed anyway. After 9/11 there was a lot of discussion about phone companies not destroying data that had been previously been destroyed. The problem now, of course, is finding out what data is actually stored today since that information is considered national security.

The difference with a modern smart phone is the introduction of a GPS chip that can provide better accuracy of your location. Still, accuracy of tower-only location services has gotten so good that several years ago governments began requiring cell phone companies to upgrade all of their towers so they can triangulate your position (using signals from multiple towers) to better coordinate emergency response when you call 911. While this works great when you get into an accident and want the government to find you, but it also means you can be tracked at all times to a surprising level of accuracy.

So, you will need to stop your phone from even communicating with a cell tower even if it's not a smart GPS-enabled phone. You can turn it off, but I never trust computers that have to monitor for a key press to be truly "off". You can remove the battery (assuming that's an easy thing to do). You could tightly wrap the phone in aluminum foil, then drop it in a Mylar bag. Or, I suppose, you could drop it in a river and walk away, which is probably the most satisfying way to stop a cell phone from tracking you.

Now, ready for your trip? Not quite yet.

Does your car have a tracking device and cell phone secretly stashed away behind a door panel? If it does, it may not mean you have an enemy agent in a black helicopter tracking your every move, it may just mean you have OnStar, or a similar system, installed by the auto manufacturer. That system is, basically, a tracking device attached to a cell phone integrated with your car's computer system. You should be able to locate the fuse which powers that module and remove it, or, if you are really paranoid, dismantle the panel it's mounted under and chuck it into the same river as your cell phone.

Now it's time to plan your route, and this is where things get complex.

If you live in a major city, especially Chicago or London, it can be difficult to find a route out of town where your license plate will not be recorded as you pass through an intersection. Many early red-light cameras would only take pictures when triggered by sensors, yet simple observation shows that such sensors are often triggered even when no one is running a light, such as when people turn right on red, or go over a sensor when turning left. In addition to that, many intersections now have cameras that simply record all traffic flow at all times. You need to avoid all such intersections.

The camera problem is made worse by projects such as the Chicago OEMC initiative which links private cameras into the Chicago Office of Emergency Management and Communications system for recording and monitoring. Even if you trust that your local 7-11 will destroy its security recordings, those same recordings may be saved by the government automatically.

On your trip toll roads, obviously, are a very bad idea. Even if you threw your toll authority Radio Frequency ID transceiver into the same river after your cell phone, cameras record every license plate passing through every toll plaza. By the way, if you ever want to prove your spouse was cheating on you, or they are a bad parent by working too late, you can subpoena their toll records for evidence.

Off the toll ways (and major expressways which may have traffic cameras, though the older systems don't have the resolution for picking up license plates), you need to be careful about any city, town or county you pass through with cameras. They are now so prevalent, you most likely need to do scouting trips to find a clear route.

Once you have arrived, you may be able to walk around anonymously for now. If it's in a big city, you can leave your car somewhere (Where? That's another problem) and use taxis. At the moment you don't really have to worry about automatic facial identification too much. While the technology is certainly impressive, unless someone has a good picture of your face and is specifically looking for you, such system won't be a help. They can find matches for specific people, but, as of yet, can't just identify all people passing in front of them.

One last piece of advice is to make sure you don't use your supermarket loyalty card when buying an apple in your destination city. Of course loyalty cards are a whole new privacy problem in themselves.

Ready for the return trip or do you just want to follow your cell phone into the river?

Rounding out the day's triple header of space related topics, I'd like to point you to the post MOON ARTS, PART ONE by Claire L. Evans. I've heard many, many little known anecdotes about the American space program, yet both of the stories there had managed to evade my notice until now.

"I saw for the first time the earth's shape. I could easily see the shores of continents, islands, great rivers, folds of the terrain, large bodies of water. The horizon is dark blue, smoothly turning to black. . . the feelings which filled me I can express with one word--joy."

"I looked and looked but I didn't see God."

"Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country."

Let me get this out of the way in the first paragraph: Terry Jones of Qur'an burning fame is a bigoted fool. He's a bigoted fool not because he burned his copy of the Qur'an, but because he hates people simply because they don't worship the same God he does in a similar enough way. What a tool!

The number of people (and legislators) over-reacting to this incident, however seems to have reached an intensity I haven't seen before. I'm hoping it will die down without any further stupid actions, but, baring another nuclear meltdown somewhere soon, I'm concerned it will not.

I know I'm preaching to the choir here about free speech, so I'll skip the lessons about the Heckler's Veto and importance of protecting unpopular speech beyond simply reaffirming that popular speech rarely needs protection in a democracy.

One element in this story that seems to have been neglected in the rush to ban such speech is that the original demonstrations over the Qur'an in Afghanistan were small and peaceful; similar to the kinds of protests I see in Chicago over immigration policies. The trigger that seems to have set off the violence and killings is President Hamid Karzai deciding to use the Qur'an burning in a speech of his as a political tool. It seems he wanted to show how much he cares about some of the fundamentalists in his country.

The reaction to that was, apparently, the Taliban deciding to cash in politically as well, and they joined one of the peaceful marches, broke off from the main group, and committed pre-meditated murderous acts. Their motive was, almost certainly, a political reaction to Karzai's stumping.

The incident in Afghanistan seems to have been far more about politics than religion.

Now we cut to the reaction in America. Senator Reid would like to start Congressional hearings to look into ways he can protect people in other nations by banning speech in America. Senator Graham would like to invoke wartime powers (in our Forever War) to directly ban speech which could "inspire the enemy". When can I expect politicians to start accusing each other of being soft on book burnings?

The reaction in America seems to be far more about politics than religion.

Let's pretend, however, that this really is all about religion and free expression. There seem to be a few different arguments out in the community about why this type of speech should be banned. They all seem flawed. The problem is that I'm not a Constitutional scholar, and may have some very wrong ideas about free speech, so I'll go over some of the common arguments I've been seeing and present my understanding of them even though I may be wrong. If anyone knows better, please enlighten me in the comments.

The most common argument I see is that America "restricts" speech anyway all the time, so we don't really have free speech, so why are you complaining about just one more restriction in the name of saving lives? The basic problem with this argument is that there is a difference between restricting speech and banning speech. As far as I can tell (not being a Constitutional Scholar) is that America only outright bans one type of speech, regardless of time or place. You cannot directly incite violence. Period.

Some commentators have latched onto this idea and simply accuse Jones of incitement and proceed to call for banning of such speech on the same grounds. I consider this to be a most insidious and worrisome argument. If Congress were to ban speech by broadening the definition of incitement, we could run head first into the problems of the Heckler's Veto, but I fear it would be used simply to ban speech the majority considers unpopular. I truly fear the majority in a democracy, for they can be more difficult to overthrow than a dictator.

Beyond incitement, though, I can't think of any other speech that is outright banned in America. There is a variety of restrictions, but not a banning of speech beyond incitement. I suppose libel would be the speech with the most restrictions that is not outright banned. Even so, as I understand it, there are situations where libel is allowed, or perhaps isn't legally called libel in America. I know it's nearly impossible to stop someone from knowingly lying about a public figure, such as a celebrity or politician. I wonder if this blog is enough for me to be considered a "public figure". I imagine there are legal debates going on right now about how that definition is changing in the new media.

Another form of speech that seems to be cited as heavily restricted is when conspiring to commit a crime. In this case it is not the speech that is illegal but the conspiracy. From what I have read, the speech is the evidence used to prove conspiracy. The situation and intent is all important here as Rod Blagojevich has been trying to prove. If you say the words in jest, they are not evidence of a conspiracy.

That leaves the various "time and place" restrictions. The thought experiment generally cited is the classic "yelling 'Fire!' in a crowded theater". The speech "Fire!" is not banned in America. The time and place of that speech makes creating the ensuing dangerous panic illegal.*

The other time and place restrictions such as getting your bullhorn out at 3:00 am in front of a hospital are, just like the "yelling fire" example, not banning speech, but placing reasonable restrictions on speech. The same speech is allowed in most places at most times. Saying you want to restrict burning holy books just like America restricts people from yelling "fire" is not at all the same. You can yell "Fire!" outside of the theater, or even inside when the theater is not crowded. Banning book burnings is not a time and place restriction.

In conclusion, let me reiterate a point I've made before. It's just a friggin' book! It's paper, ink and some binding material. The words and ideas within cannot be destroyed by burning a copy of a book. I once suggested the correct reaction to such situations was to burn the holy books of as many religions as possible all at once to demonstrate this fact as well as show that it's not just about religious penis envy.

I now realize, however, that's so 20th century. We should instead organize a mass deletion of holy e-books. I want to not just delete them, however, since I know that all of the words will still exist. We need to destroy those magnetic bits so they can't be reconstructed. On PC's it will be easy to download software to overwrite that Bible with random electronic signals, utterly destroying that copy forever. In other e-book devices you may need to erase that Qur'an then upload new, larger books in its place, then delete that and repeat enough times to make the original words vanish into digital oblivion.

Buddhavacana, Norse eddas, the Four Books of Confucianism, the Book of Enoch, the Tabula Cortonensis and many, many more. Let's get digital copies and erase them en masse! Mash those Holy Ones and Zeros together with such a fury that even the NSA couldn't put them back in any semblance of order. Grab your old book reader loaded with all these texts and turn on that giant electro magnet you built years ago but never had a use for! Listen to that glorious buzz as the memory chips are hopelessly cleansed of Bronze Age rituals and misogynistic rules!

What the world needs now is a Holy E-Book Demolition Party! Can you still book Comiskey Park?

---

*By the way, I think it's time for the scholars to update that thought experiment. Yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater today would, most likely, just result in a head full of popcorn and getting yelled at to sit down and shut up. The fire codes are so good (not saying they couldn't be improved at all) that most people would no longer be panicked by such a statement barring secondary indications of a conflagration such as smoke and a fire alarm going off. Perhaps we can use "Yelling 'Muslim!' in a crowded Tea Party Convention".

A depressing story about a group of thirteen-year-olds who allegedly strong armed another thirteen-year-old to rob an iPhone contained what I considered to be a strange additional fact in the case. An 18-year-old "was charged with disorderly conduct after police said he was present at the time of the robbery and did nothing to stop it."

For almost a decade we have had heavy-handed rights abuses all in the name of keeping people safe from threats which kill far fewer people than traffic accidents do each year. We allow the files on your laptop to be perused with no cause. We take for granted that people can be detained indefinitely without being tried or even accused of a crime. The United States now condones tortuous acts, which we ourselves once prosecuted others for, as normal. We think it's OK to listen in on private conversations of anyone without any judicial review at all. The American public accepts all this, and more, in the name of safety.

After reading some of the comments from GW's recent NBC interview, I understand better the unconstitutional responses to 9/11 America is still suffering under. When questioned about the use of torture Bush's response was:

"I will tell you this: using those techniques saved lives. My job was to protect America. And I did."

We really need to make it more clear when we hire a president just what the job description is. Maybe we need to publish it in the want ads of various newspapers around the country before we accept any applications. Right at the top should be the oath they will be expected to take:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

I can understand when the newly hired president recites that oath that maybe they would forget the details. After all, inauguration day is a big event and they have parties to go to all afternoon and evening. You get a little drunk and wake up the next morning unable to remember everything you did or said the previous day.

With all of the bat-shit crazy, radical fear mongering about how illegal aliens will destroy our great Christian nation, Denver may actually pass a ballot initiative welcoming them with open arms. Or tentacles, maybe. The Wall Street Journal has an article all about it. (Sorry, it may be behind a pay wall.)

Ballot Initiative 300 would require the city to set up an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission, stocked with Ph.D. scientists, to "ensure the health, safety and cultural awareness of Denver residents" when it comes to future contact "with extraterrestrial intelligent beings or their vehicles."

Jeff Peckman (no relation to Walter Peck, as far as I know), who is the mastermind behind the initiative considers this to be a jobs program. Once the aliens (who he is sure have been visiting Earth for some time already) know they are welcome in Denver, they will show themselves and all of the great engineers and scientists of the world will come to the city so they can start to work out how the alien technologies function. Why is Denver the best location for this ambassadorial effort? According to Mr. Peckman:

The city is perched a mile above sea level, so why wouldn't travelers from a distant galaxy stop here first?

They face an impassioned opposition led by Bryan Bonner, who dismisses the unidentified-flying-object buffs as delusional if not outright frauds.

One thing about Mr. Bonner: He spends his spare time crawling through spooky spaces, deploying remote digital thermometers, seismographs, infrared cameras, electromagnetic field detectors and Nerf balls in pursuit of evidence of the paranormal. He is, in short, a ghost hunter.

And he has rallied his colleagues at the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society to fight Initiative 300 as an embarrassment to science--and to Denver.

Yes. The voice of reason and sanity is coming from ghost hunters who spend their time, when not fighting the alien hunters (the people looking for ET, not the Minuteman Project people, that is), taking pictures of EMF fields and trying to create lens distortions in their out-of-focus photos. The basic premise of their argument is that hunting for UFOs is obviously stupid while ghost hunting is obviously smart.

Mr. Bonner, the ghost hunter, is fighting back with his own website asserting that "Peckman and his 'little green people' are not representative of the people of Denver."

"Little green people," Mr. Peckman responds with outrage, is a "racial slur."

You just can't make up stuff like this.

Christie Wilcox writes one of my favorite blogs, Observations of a Nerd, and is hoping to win a $10,000 scholarship for her graduate studies. She's an excellent blogger and scientist. Over the past week she had some great articles on evolution which you should check out.

Two cops have filed a libel suit against the Chicago Police Superintendent, Jody Weis, because they were investigated for beating a handcuffed teenager.

Though Weis never identified Meuris and Vanna by name to the news media, he published their names in an internal communication sent to others in the Police Department, said their attorney, Daniel Herbert.

How is an investigation of officers to take place if no one is allowed to mention their names in any internal communications? This would be a laughable, frivolous suit if it weren't for the message being sent by the officers.

I just spotted an article about a women hit by a Chicago Police vehicle this morning. (This site often changes the text of their articles several times. Here's how it reads as of 16:30 CDT):

A woman in her 60s was injured this morning after she was struck by a Chicago police vehicle in the Albany Park neighborhood, officials said.

The accident happened about 6:17 a.m. at the intersection of Kedzie and Montrose Avenues, said Chicago Police News Affairs Officer Darryl Baety.

The police vehicle was responding to a "high priority" call involving a sexual assault in progress, Baety said. Baety did not know if the vehicle's emergency lights were activated.

The woman sustained lacerations and bruises to her head and was taken to St. Francis Hospital in Evanston, Baety said.

The woman's condition was not available.

Chicago Police News Affairs Officer Darryl Baety's pants are on fire.

A sex offense 4546 Kedzie. 4546 Kedzie, at the McDonalds.

Caller says the police were out earlier for a male Hispanic who was naked and, uh, exposing himself out in front of the McDonalds.

The guy is back. He's standing near the bushes on the side of the building, keeps coming back.

The caller, [caller's name], would like to speak with you; says she can point him out.

A minute or so later the officer involved in the accident called in to report it and request an ambulance "ASAP".

Today, October 23, is a good day to celebrate the birth of the universe. The question is just how many candles do we need for the cake?

I really enjoy studying history. I've moved around time and the globe delving deeper into Mycenaean influences beyond Greece and studying the nuances of one particular commander who has been maligned in the Battle of Gettysburg. Every time I think I might find some historical event boring, I run into some fascinating element that grabs my attention.

Mark's review of Michael Lewis's The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine sounds interesting. I generally find finance and economics difficult to read about, but I may give the book a go.

From the sound of it, the author and I seem to have a couple of similar arguments about what is wrong with the efficient market. One premise I like to start with is that efficient markets require free and open knowledge of the marketplace. This is the reason corporations and, pretty much anything you can invest in, have reams of information regularly produced and distributed as mandated by the SEC.

In business school, intro finance courses spend most of their time explaining how to read all of these reports. (If they went beyond that, I must have fallen asleep by that point in the lectures.) In theory, this is what keeps everyone in the marketplace aware of what is going on, and allows the efficient market to work. I believe this system has been running into trouble for a couple of reasons.

One is touched upon in your description of what Lewis calls fraud. Even when it isn't called fraud, fudging the numbers in quarterly and annual reports seems to be standard operating procedure these days. If you can't hide the numbers anymore, just spin off a new corporation and hide the numbers there. Much of this seems to be legal, though I would still call it fraud. The purpose is to deceive investors and cloud the reality of the marketplace. You can't do this forever, but people can become millionaires or billionaires in a very short time, so the deception doesn't need to hold for too long. In this respect corporations, and to some extent the markets they are traded in, become like a game of musical chairs. The last investor standing loses. The last investor is often the one who thinks their investment is long term.

"Short term thinking" goes beyond simply not seeing that your investment isn't good in the long run. Short term thinking can be a money-making trading strategy that investors can keep using in the long run. The concept of day trading is based upon catching (very) short term trends. Buy (or short) a stock in the morning, perhaps because you anticipate a reaction from a news item, then sell in the afternoon before the long term impacts can be digested by the market. This sort of very short term view, it seems to me, is starting to become more prevalent in the markets.

I don't mean that there are more and more day traders, but that the entire market is now looking for shorter and shorter returns on investment. When you chat with traders and ask them about their long term investments, you often hear statements like "Sure this is long term. We may even keep it more than a year!" Technology, in particular computer networking, allows for the rapid dissemination of information and traders are treating every week, or even day, as if that were the day quarterly statements for an investment came out. The actual quarterly and annual reports are increasingly becoming nothing more than when you happen to update some of the numbers in your trading model instead of being an indicator of whether you want to keep the investment or not.

As the investment horizon is shortened, this way of thinking must start to become part of the corporate culture as well. After all, ultimately the management of a corporation is working for the investors as represented by the board of directors. Since wealthy individuals need to diversify their investments (to protect against the unpredictability mentioned by Lewis) very few individuals have controlling interest in any major corporation anymore. Large investment funds have replaced the individual and now have the influence to affect corporate management.

Something else I was taught in graduate business school, way back in the ancient mists of time, was that top corporate management was mainly supposed to concern itself with the far future of the firm. They were to think 10 to 20 years into the future, or even beyond. Wealthy individual investors in the past often shared this view and often hoped to maintain their investment for decades. This culture became so ingrained that business schools taught that top managers should shun any short term projects.

Do you think that there's an investment fund out there today that is capable of thinking of a corporate investment beyond 1 year? Beyond 5 years? Probably not, and, under the free market, they are correct to focus on the short term. Any long term investment will wax and wane over time and anyone who is interested in becoming a millionaire this year will ask why the fund failed to sell before any drop and buy before any gain. The fund will only grow if they pursue a (winning) short term strategy, and the corporations will only get investment funds if they deliver on short term promises. The large-fund controlled board will hire management that can deliver. The market works, so to speak, just not the way that is best for the future.

So yes, I see the fraud (legal and illegal) as a major impediment to the efficient market, but I also see the market working against its own future by an obsessive (valid?) focus on short term returns and trades as enabled by modern computer networks and databases and encouraged by the efficient market itself.

I think we should become fund managers who get paid for transactions. You do have the windyinvestments.com domain reserved, right? The more transactions we make the more money we earn. We need to be sure to tell our clients to never hold onto an investment for more than a week or so...

Of course we probably don't have the seed money for this. With the kind of money we could put together we wouldn't be called fund managers, we would be called loan sharks. Charles Ponzzi had a way around that, but it's only legal if you are deemed to big to fail by the government.

Attorney General Eric Holder has announced, as expected, that the Department of Justice will not let Proposition 19, which would legalize marijuana in California, stop them from waging the War on Drugs Which Are Less Harmful Than Alcohol and Nicotine in their never ending effort to fill up prisons across the nation. I expected that response from the Feds.

I'm guessing that many of you don't know this, but 2010 was named The Year of Biodiversity by the UN sometime before the year began. I am hoping, though, that you at least know what biodiversity is. When asked to define biodiversity, a recent survey in England, a country known to be more environmentally aware than the US, the number one answer was "some kind of [laundry detergent]".

Now we know for sure. The Matrix was originally developed using Linux. Oh sure, it looks all loving and caring now, but plug that box into the Internet, let it read all about socialism and soon enough humanity will be hunted down in our sewer-submarines and end up plugged into Linux controlled wet squishy cocoons while we dream about hot chicks in black leather beating up cops and jumping from building to building.

As all computer geeks know, it's very difficult to wipe out a virus, and I mean eradicating it completely from the world. The fight against real-world viruses, the kind that attack humans and animals, is much, much more difficult. Viruses have evolved into the most abundant type of biological entity on the planet.

It's still October, but it's not too early to get into a Thanksgiving atmosphere. Jimmy John's is suing Halsted Street Deli (a local sandwich shop here in Chicago) over the names of two sandwiches. Jimmy John's uses the sandwich names "Turkey Tom" and "Hunter's Club" while Halsted Street Deli uses "Tom Turkey" and "Hunt Club".

I saw this photo of lightning striking the Statue of Liberty and was impressed. It's a really cool photo taken by photographer Jay Fine, but what impressed me was that it took less than two hours and only 80 shots before he got the photo he wanted.

Here's yet another tragic story of an elderly couple terrorized by gangs of local thugs in Chicago.

With her husband already asleep, 84-year-old Anna Jakymek was just turning out the lights when she heard loud noises at the back and front doors about 11:30 p.m.

Her initial thought was that her 89-year old husband had fallen out of bed, but she realized something else was happening when she looked into the front room.

"I see maybe 20 guys come in and see the door knocked open," she said.

The intruders were members of the Cook County sheriff's police gang crimes narcotics unit executing a search warrant at the home on the 5600 block of South Kilbourn Avenue.

They had a warrant for a 23 year old Hispanic male suspected of dealing coke and meth. What they found was an elderly Russian couple who had come to America to escape from the oppressive Soviet Union where people had to live in fear of their government. The Cook Country Sheriff's Police weren't sure if that was just a clever disguise, though, so instead of apologizing for their mistake they trashed the home anyway looking for the couple's stash of drugs. They found some aspirin.

"I didn't believe it was the police. They broke everything. I told them they should have rung the bell."

After mouthing off to the cops like that I'm surprised she wasn't arrested for obstruction and resisting arrest. The police were understandably aggravated since the couple had no pets. With nothing left to break, and nothing to shoot at, the cops left.

...the officer explained they had misinformation, but said his job was over, and he was leaving. They left a copy of the warrant, but he absolved himself of any responsibility for the raid or the damage...

Cook County Sheriff, Tom Dart, is positioning himself to run for Mayor of Chicago. I wonder if he'll be commenting on this incident. I also wonder if his opponents will push for a comment, or if they will just fear being labelled "soft on crime".

"As soon as we entered the home, we knew this couple was not involved in the activity alleged"

But they still decided to trash the house anyway.

I've always been a bit wary of extremely overt flag-waving patriots. Maybe it's just a reaction I have after watching the hoards of people forced to wave Soviet flags while at gunpoint, or the coerced crowds joining in the celebrations of Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution by furiously whipping little Chinese flags to and fro.

"He said, 'please stand for the pledge.'  Of course, we were all standing anyway because the judge had just come in - it's a matter of courtesy. I remained standing with my hands by my side," Lampley said.

The attorney told WTVA News he waited for everyone to finish the pledge. Lampley said when it was over the judge asked him to say it. He refused, and that is when the judge held him in contempt.

In graduate school I had the most trouble staying awake in finance lectures. I always thought finance had to be just about the most boring topic ever.

I see some [foreign investment funds] looking for returns of 20 or 25% at a time when fellatio is close to zero.

I guess I was just doing finance wrong.

The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed by Roger Scruton, an English philosopher, titled "Memo to Hawking: There's Still Room for God". (Sorry, it's behind a paywall.) He attempts to refute Hawking's premise that no God is needed to create a universe from nothing.

Immanuel Kant, who believed that Newton's laws of gravity are not merely true but necessarily true, argued that we humans lack the ability to comprehend the universe as a whole, and thus that we can never construct a valid argument for a designer. Our thinking can take us from one point to another along the chain of events. But it cannot take us to a point outside the chain, from which we can pose the question of an original cause.

If Mr. Hawking is right, the answer to the question "What created the universe?" is "The laws of physics." But what created the laws of physics? How is it that these strange and powerful laws, and these laws alone, apply to the world?

The laws of physics are not physical objects that need to be created. They are a set of explanations for how the universe works. Perhaps Scruton is confused by the word "law". The common usage for the word is that laws are man-made rules. (I'm sure the lawyers reading this have a much more precise definition...) Physicists use the word as a way of describing limitations they place on how the universe can work. In effect, the physicists are the "creators" of the laws, but only insomuch as they were the ones to write them down after figuring them out.

I first saw the Powers of Ten short on Carl Sagan's Cosmos. (If you don't know who Carl Sagan was, please don't tell me. It will just make me feel terribly old and sad.) Way back in the ancient mists of time the Museum of Science and Industry setup a kiosk looping the video and I stood watching it over and over for as long as I could. That video had a big impact on how I viewed the universe and science.

The New York Times science section has a fascinating article about why so many humans love hot peppers. Theories about why we like certain foods often involve evolutionary motivations for good health. In the case of hot peppers it has been suggested that by reducing blood pressure, and even providing some level of pain reduction, we evolved not just a tolerance, but a liking for hot peppers. The problem with this theory is that humans are the only mammals who seek out hot peppers to eat. Birds eat them, but they don't have the same neurological receptors to feel the heat, so to them hot peppers are just another fruit.

My son was quite impressed with an in-law who grew up in Mexico and ate habanero peppers whole, so my wife suggested a father-son gardening project. The first year only one plant survived the woodchucks and deer. But what a plant -- it produced a bumper crop of killer orange habaneros. Nothing ate them. In my mind I still see that plant dangling its little orange heat grenades in front of the deer and growling, "Bite me, Bambi."

The fact that capsaicin causes pain to mammals seems to be accidental. There's no evolutionary percentage in preventing animals from eating the peppers, which fall off the plant when ripe. Birds, which also eat fruits, don't have the same biochemical pain pathway, so they don't suffer at all from capsaicin. But in mammals it stimulates the very same pain receptors that respond to actual heat. Chili pungency is not technically a taste; it is the sensation of burning, mediated by the same mechanism that would let you know that someone had set your tongue on fire.

Breaking news:

New computer simulations have shown how a glass slipper, as described in Grimm's Cinderella, could have been created using a unique combination of quartz-rich silicates found only in northern Germany. When heated to just the right temperature, as was available in primitive furnaces of 14th century middle Europe, the model demonstrated that glass could have annealed by chemicals from nearby dung fires forming a unique matrix. Early cobblers could have used this glass to construct a slipper durable enough to be worn by a young stepdaughter destined to become a princess.

The actual headline I read was Computers show how wind could have parted Red Sea. The first line of the article reads "New computer simulations have shown how the parting of the Red Sea, as described in the Bible, could have been a phenomenon caused by strong winds." It's a summary of an actual scientific article from the journal Plos One. Normally I just ignore crap like this, but it's shown up in the top ten most read articles on the BBC for more than 24 hours now, and Plos One is an up-and-coming journal that has some level of respect in the science community.

Here's something you don't see everyday in the news:

A worker at Arlington Park racetrack has been arrested and charged with having sexual conduct with a horse.

The horse's name was "Buzz My Bell". Given that, and the fact that she was prancing around naked in public, I think she was just asking for it. Besides, how do they know it wasn't consensual?

Google had a bit of an embarrassing security problem recently. An engineer did a very creepy thing and spied on teenager's Google accounts while interacting with the teens online. Apparently no laws were broken but Google, obviously, fired the engineer. Google's statement about the incident underwhelmed Greg Laden:

Sorry Google, we are not impressed. We'd like to see an independent investigation, possible prosecution, and who knows, maybe some new laws and regulations.

The idea that we should have some new laws to make systems such as Gmail more secure is an bad idea.

Because users see technology and security as a block box they are often blindsided when there is a failure or breach of trust. Greg is right that the response from Google is inadequate for most users. The response was fine for me. After all, I understand what happened and it didn't surprise me. The problem is that the response didn't address the trust that was broken with most of its users who don't understand the systems inside that black box.

I dislike, however, the suggestion that new laws and regulations should be put in place to prevent such problems in the future. Making it illegal for system engineers to open data files without permission may decrease the number of incidents, but probably wouldn't be effective at stopping such practices with just legal punishment as a deterrent. Making it impossible for engineers to see data will mean a fundamental change in the way such systems operate. Security is always a trade-off against usability and expense. Having the government choose that balance point and force it upon Google and other service providers is the wrong response.

I've always tried to address such issues with user education. Users often have a black-box mentality and think that such issues are somehow automatically taken care of by the system. Users (especially managers) need to be aware of just how much power system administrators have.

I worked as a sysadmin at a college when email was first introduced to staff. I taught users the old IT adage that email was the electronic equivalent of postcards. Every employee of the post office who touches that postcard can, if they so desire, read the message. I also made it clear that I had access to anything they stored on the server (including email) and even conducted security workshops showing them how easy it was for people like me to defeat the simple encryption used in the software of the time. I tried very hard to build the trust with my users that I wouldn't abuse that power, but wanted them to know what was possible.

Google lost some trust from its user base. The response from Google was "Why would anyone trust such a system?" In one respect they are right. Users should never have trusted such a system. I don't, but that's because I understand some of what is going on inside the black box after clicking the "send" button.

Perhaps Google should be leading an effort to upgrade the security of email and other messaging services, but by working with users rather than working under new government regulations. Email protocols were not designed for security. Of course the basic protocol of the Internet (TCP/IP) was not designed for secure transactions either, yet I'm confident that my online banking transactions are secure because of an end-to-end protocol called SSL/TLS*.

Users can already make their email secure using a similar system (called PGP) if they wish, but few people know how. Perhaps Google should lead the effort by streamlining the user interface and popularizing such a system. Google would need to educate the users and work with them to figure out what level of security is needed and how much effort users would be willing to put into such a system to make it work. Users may have to maintain special keys, for example, to communicate with recipients on different email systems. While Google can make that process easier, it will still require some effort on the user end to gain that extra security. There is always a tradeoff.

Pushback against such encryption, however, would come from governments. Governments around the world, for example, freaked out once they realized they couldn't snoop on people's Blackberry accounts. The United States government fought the introduction of PGP when it was first introduced claiming it was too dangerous to allow the technology out of the country. (Because of our government's insistence that PGP not be provided on the Internet I had to download my first copy from an overseas server.) The US government would certainly resist any pervasive end-to-end technology that would prevent them from reading email.

Government involvement in this issue seems like a bad idea. It would force providers to choose a level of security that people may not need once they understand that email is just a digital postcard. Any government solution would also build in a government backdoor allowing them access to any secure system. In this case I really would like the government to not get involved.

---

* I'll provide a brief introduction to the concept of end-to-end encryption below. Anyone not interested in how this stuff works should stop reading now.

Transactions can be made secure on an inherently unsecure system by introducing an additional protocol (set of rules) above the unsecure layer providing a "session" that encrypts information before the unsecure protocol and only decrypts that information after the data goes beyond the unsecure protocol at the other end. Hence it's an "end-to-end" system and doesn't rely upon unsecure devices in the middle of the route taken by the data.

For example, the Internet uses an unsecure protocol called TCP/IP to get information from one computer to another, let's say from your home computer to your bank. Rather than redesigning the unsecure protocol it is better to add an end-to-end encryption/decryption system "above" the unsecure protocol. When your computer talks to the computer at the bank it uses a system called Secure Sockets Layer / Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) to accomplish this.

The green lines represent information that can be read since it is not encrypted (plaintext) The red lines represent the encrypted information (ciphertext) that no one can read. We don't really know what is happening to the information in the blue lines, but we don't care since it's already been encrypted.

If you are not using an encrypted email client (most of the world does not) your message may still be encrypted in the same way as your bank information, but that is not end-to-end for an email message since there is a third party involved (the email recipient). Your message may be encrypted below the email client as your bank password was, but it will be decrypted before it gets to the email server where it is stored unencrypted, until the recipient asks for it from their email client. This means your email cannot be read by anyone eavesdropping somewhere in the Internet (what is called a man-in-the-middle attack), but it can be read by anyone with access to the file on the email server.

A program such as Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) can work with an email client to encrypt a message before your computer sends it to an email server. Your message will stay encrypted, even on the email server, until a similar program decrypts the message at the email client on the other side. This allows for end-to-end encryption even when messages are stored on servers awaiting delivery and the messages will stay encrypted in all locations other than at the sender's and recipient's email programs.

Just a quick note to point out something that really annoyed me this morning. Chicago cops are protesting at police headquarters.

Before the marchers stepped off, several hundred officers were gathering in front of police headquarters, carrying signs including "More police/No Weis!!", "Simply resign" and "Free Cozzi," referring to Officer William Cozzi, who was convicted of beating a handcuffed patient in an incident that was caught on videotape.

Yup. Chicago cops are seriously pissed off that one of their own wasn't allowed to beat up a citizen who was already handcuffed to a wheelchair. They are so upset about losing their rights to beat handcuffed wheelchair bound citizens they need to picket Superintendent Jody Weis, who did nothing to stop the evil federal government from prosecuting the fine upstanding officer who did the beating.

Others have said sweeping personnel changes at the start of his tenure sent the wrong message. But his handling of Cozzi, who beat a suspect handcuffed to a wheelchair, rankled officers the most.

A female demonstrator who said she was an 11-year veteran of the police department but who declined to give her name, was wearing a yellow T-shirt reading: "In case of emergency, run like hell!"

"We don't run away, we go to," she said.

Yes, the heroism of officers like William Cozzi has been documented.

Don't you understand? If police become afraid to beat up people in wheelchairs it will be the end of civilization! Gangs of criminals will roam the streets beating people up with no fear of being locked away for their crimes!

This just in:

International terrorists, no longer content with blowing up buildings, are now targeting parking lot lights in home center stores. This is a dangerous new development. Obviously Al Qaeda is jealous of our well lit parking lots and feel they can bring America to her knees by darkening our shopping experience one lamp post at a time.

Vinny Gambini once said:

It's a procedure. Like rebuilding a carburetor has a procedure. You know, when you rebuild a carburetor, the first thing you do is you take the carburetor off the manifold? Supposing you skip the first step, and while you're replacing one of the jets, you accidentally drop the jet, it goes down the carburetor, rolls along the manifold, and goes into the head. You're fucked. You just learned the hard way that you gotta remove the carburetor first, right? So that's all that happened to me today. I learned the hard way. Actually, it was a good learning experience for me.

Last Friday someone accidentally dropped a nut while crews were mating the space shuttle Discovery to it's main tank. The nut went down the carburetor, rolled along the manifold, and went into the head. They were fucked.

Exactly why terrorists attacked the United States nine years ago is still debated. One fact that is clear, however, is that the United States is a special and unique place in the world.

A new opera, called 'u' premiered in Holland a couple of nights ago and I was unable to attend. If anyone managed to see it I would be interested in a review. I missed the invitation to the event since it was sent to Klingons on Qo'noS, an M-class planet orbiting the star Arcturus and I was stuck in Chicago.

I was reading yet another story about the good old fashioned book burning organized, then cancelled, by Pastor Terry Jones. President Hamid Karzai was quoted as saying:

"We have heard that in the US, a pastor has decided to insult Korans. Now although we have heard that they are not doing this, we tell them they should not even think of it.

"By burning the Koran, they cannot harm it. The Koran is in the hearts and minds of one-and-a-half billion people. Insulting the Koran is an insult to nations."

It sounds like he has read Fahrenheit 451 and even managed to understand the premise that burning a book cannot destroy the ideas within the pages. Yet he still considers the act an insult to the book. Protesters around the world burn American flags (which doesn't matter since that act cannot harm the ideals of the US Constitution) angry that the US government didn't take away the liberties of the Koran burners.

[Note: Ken neglected to provide a title for his first post, so I made one up. -- Mark]

Classical mythology is, perhaps, far more ingrained in Western society than my co-blogger Mark may realize. From a scientific perspective it would appear that the only contribution is to naming conventions for some astronomical objects and some of our technology. From a literary and anthropological perspective, however, I don't think you should underestimate the impact. It is from this perspective that, I believe, a high school English teacher would be motivated.

Actually, I remember that part of freshman English. I received a crappy grade on homework writing about Greek mythology in a modern setting. At the time I didn't understand the poor grade, but much later realized that it was because, apparently, I took the idea too "frivolously." (I wrote a mock weather forecast using some of the myths as inspiration and included hand-drawn satellite weather maps.)

Notwithstanding that experience, as I studied anthropology and literature I began realize the huge impact that classical mythology exerted on Western culture. The stories really are repeated over and over in all sorts of books, television shows and movies. The Hercules and Xena shows were heavily based upon such mythology for example, sometimes using plot lines almost verbatim and are obviously more than influenced by the classical myths. Other times the stories are there, but hidden better in a modern retelling such as with The Godfather, Jaws, or Star Trek.

From an anthropological perspective the influence is even greater. Pauline Christianity (what 99% of the world just calls "Christianity") is based in large part on Greek and Roman mythology since the disciple Paul was using it in a (very successful) effort to convert the Roman world from polytheism to monotheism. He took the Jewish messianism movement and merged it with Roman beliefs to found his version of Christianity which is a fundamental, pervasive part of Western culture.

Classical mythology is not history in the same sense as the writings of Josephus are; they are not a record of specific historical figures and events. They are, however, an influential part of our cultural history which still exerts a great deal of cultural influence to this day. I would even say it could be called a religion even if it isn't very actively practiced anymore. (The Hellenic Polytheistic Reconstructionism movement has, apparently, been enjoying a bit of a surge recently, so it could even be termed a current religion.)

I'll take Mark's word as Gospel that the new Clash of the Titans movie sucks and will studiously avoid it. I'm not sure it's fair to blame it on the original stories themselves, though. Nor would it be wise to hope that those stories never be used again in modern culture. After all, I often enjoyed Xena: Warrior Princess. And not just because of the outfits worn by the protagonists.