11.09.06
Useful Web site: Online alarm clock
Many times one has to remember to do something at a certain time, right? Check this out. Especially useful if you’re on, say, a computer at an Internet café and want to remind yourself of an appointment.
One drawback of sound-activated switch
In general the Clapper works great, just as I said. The other night, it’s true, I coughed twice in (apparently) just the right rhythm, and the light in the bedroom came on. But, so far, no problem. However: the second Clapper arrived today, for the living room floor lamp, and guess what: the thing won’t work with fluorescent bulbs. Nowhere does it say that on the package, in its write-up on Amazon, or in the instructions. But when you call the manufacturer to try to diagnose the problem (all three indicator lights steady on, lamp off, no response), that’s the first thing they tell you in the voice-mail “instructions and hints.”
So they clearly know it’s a common problem—probably increasingly common as people switch to fluorescents to save energy. Well, I’ll put it aside and will be able to use it (I hope) when I get an LED floorlamp someday.
UPDATE: I have discovered that the tremendous sneeze—”Ahhh” (tiny pause) “choo“—will trigger the light switch as well.
Bush, cornered
Glenn Greenwald points out how desperate Bush is getting: Congress didn’t pass the legislation that would retroactively legalize Bush’s continued criminal eavesdropping without a court order on American citizens. He’s scared. His only chance is to get the lame-duck Congress to pass the law before the new Congress convenes. But maybe some of the Republicans are now not so eager to bail out the President for his misdeeds, especially if the press corps has awakened (still to be seen).
Dan Froomkin quotes a reader
In today’s column, about George Bush:
White House Briefing Reader Brent Zenobia of Portland, Ore., writes: “I found his most telling admission to be that all those nasty comments he made about the Democrats during the campaign were suddenly inoperable — not that he regretted them, of course, but that he thought it was ridiculous anyone would take them seriously and of course he would say anything he had to to obtain the outcome he wanted. So much for Mr. Straightforward-Plain-Speaker, the public personality that was once the foundation of his approval rating (’someone we trust’). My religion teaches that lying is a particularly insidious sin, because the more you do it the more difficult it becomes to tell what’s real and what’s not. Bush evidently has lied so often that he no longer is able to see any ethical problem with it, and probably thinks everyone does it. Thus, if we’re dumb enough to take him at his word, then that’s our problem for being so gullible.
“How can people expect him to be a good faith partner for bipartisan cooperation when he himself admits that he will say anything to get his way, and never expects to be held accountable even if he’s caught in the act of lying as he was yesterday with the pre-election Rumsfeld comment?”
Republicans now hate each other
The Washington Post reports on the fingerpointing/backstabbing now underway in the GOP:
After minutes upon minutes of soul-searching, Republicans are now in recrimination mode. And the GOP’s various factions all agree: This wouldn’t have happened if the party had listened to us.
In the aftermath of the historic GOP losses Tuesday night, moderate Republicans quickly concluded that the party needs to be more moderate. Conservative Republicans declared that it should be more conservative. Main Street is angry at Wall Street, theo-cons are angry at neo-cons, and almost everyone is angry at President Bush and the GOP congressional leadership.
The party purges formally began yesterday, as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) agreed to step down before they were pushed. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) had already decided to leave Congress, but GOP insiders said Tuesday’s debacle should eliminate him from presidential contention in 2008.
By day’s end, Republican fingers had pointed at every conceivable Republican scapegoat: ex-representative Mark Foley of Florida and his scandal-plagued colleagues, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, presidential adviser Karl Rove, even Sen. John McCain of Arizona. Read the rest of this entry »
Hugh Hewitt: an idiot now and forever
Hugh Hewitt is the right-wing pundit and blogger who said that his job working in the Empire State Building in New York was as dangerous as service in Iraq because terrorists would target the Empire State Building (and, presumably, little Hugh himself). Glenn Greenwald points to more idiocy blathering its way out of Hugh’s mouth:
In the three weeks prior to the election, Hugh Hewitt was repeatedly insisting that Republican candidates were tied or ahead even when the consensus of polls showed those candidates were actually behind, sometimes by substantial margins. He wasn’t just predicting that the GOP candidate behind in the polls would win (there’s nothing wrong with being hopeful). He was doing something completely different — he was insisting that the GOP candidates who were behind in the polls were, in fact, ahead in the polls.
In response to e-mails he received, he condescendingly explained his “thinking” behind this outright distortion of reality:
I get a lot of e-mail asking me why I point to polls like the one favoring Steele when I discount some polls favoring some Democrats.
Because this question comes mostly from lefties, I will pause to explain in as uncomplicated a fashion as possible.
Polling methodology and models favors Democrats.
So polls that show Republicans tied or ahead I see as indicating a race in which the Republican is in the lead.Polls that show a Republican within striking distance I see as a poll indicating a dead heat.
It shouldn’t be that hard to grasp, even for a lefty.
So, like everything else in the world — from war zone reports to intelligence assessments and everything in between — polling data can be ignored and disregarded at will (when it’s unpleasant) because it is oh-so-unfairly biased against the Republicans. Hewitt took the data that he didn’t like, literally changed it in his own mind to make it more pleasant, and then embraced the fictitious data as his reality. And he expressly acknowledged doing so by insisting that data is biased. Read the rest of this entry »
The practical side of cognitive science: win quiz shows
Boston University’s doctoral program in cognitive neuroscience prepares students for a career in brain modeling, robot design, or biomedical engineering—or for winning cash on the television quiz show Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?. Researchers in my department, Cognitive and Neural Systems (CNS), seek to understand the brain’s mechanisms, including three cognitive systems that happen to be essential for a profitable performance on Millionaire: learning, memory, and decision-making. This summer—the start of my final year in the CNS Ph.D. program—I decided to apply my graduate skills to a decidedly practical purpose and auditioned for a turn in the show’s perilous hot seat.
I went to New York, where I passed a multiple-choice audition test. Two weeks later, I received the call to appear on the syndicated version of Millionaire, hosted by the empathic and playful Meredith Vieira. To prepare, I focused first on memory techniques, the subject of my doctoral dissertation.
The first technique I drew upon was priming. The priming of a memory occurs because of the peculiar “connectionist” neural dynamics of our cortex, where memories are distributed across many regions and neurons. If we can recall any fragment of a pattern, our brains tend to automatically fill in the rest. For example, hearing an old Madonna song may launch a cascade of linked memories: your high school prom where it was the theme song, your poorly tailored prom outfit, your forgotten prom date, the stinging embarrassment when you threw up in the limo.
Since the producers allow contestants unlimited time to work out answers (as long as they’re not just stalling), I knew that I could employ the most basic of priming tactics: talking about the question, posing scenarios, throwing out wild speculations, even just babbling—trying to cajole my prefrontal neurons onto any cue that could trigger the buried neocortical circuits holding the key to the answer.
I used priming on my $16,000 question: “This past spring, which country first published inflammatory cartoons of the prophet Mohammed?” I did not know the answer. But I did know I had a long conversation with my friend Gena about the cartoons. So I chatted with Meredith about Gena. I tried to remember where we discussed the cartoons and the way Gena flutters his hands. As I pictured how he rolls his eyes to express disdain, Gena’s remark popped into my mind: “What else would you expect from Denmark?” Read the rest of this entry »
NY Times struggles with science
Sometimes reporting on science is hard—you actually have to know stuff, as this post makes clear:
Just when we were beginning to think the media had finally learned to tell a hawk from a handsaw when covering global warming (at least when the wind blows southerly), along comes this article by the New York Times’s William Broad. This article is far from the standard of excellence in reporting we have come to expect from the Times. We sincerely hope it’s an aberration, and not indicative of the best Mr. Broad has to offer.
Broad’s article deals with the implications of research on climate change over the broad sweep of the Phanerozoic — the past half billion years of Earth history during which fossil animals and plants are found. The past two million years (the Pleistocene and Holocene) are a subdivision of the Phanerozoic, but the focus of the article is on the earlier part of the era. Evidently, what prompts this article is the amount of attention being given to paleoclimate data in the forthcoming AR4 report of the IPCC. The article manages to give the impression that the implications of deep-time paleoclimate haven’t previously been taken into account in thinking about the mechanisms of climate change, whereas in fact this has been a central preoccupation of the field for decades. It’s not even true that this is the first time the IPCC report has made use of paleoclimate data; references to past climates can be found many places in the Third Assessment Report. What is new is that paleoclimate finally gets a chapter of its own (but one that, understandably, concentrates more on the well-documented Pleistocene than on deep time). The worst fault of the article, though, is that it leaves the reader with the impression that there is something in the deep time Phanerozoic climate record that fundamentally challenges the physics linking planetary temperature to CO2. This is utterly false, and deeply misleading. The Phanerozoic does pose puzzles, and there’s something going on there we plainly don’t understand. However, the shortcomings of understanding are not of a nature as to seriously challenge the CO2-climate connection as it plays out at present and in the next few centuries. Read the rest of this entry »
What the Democrats did right
Read this article by Greg Sargent: the Democrats did right by ignoring the inside-the-Beltway pundits like David “Over the Hill” Broder and listening to those who argued for a direct confrontation with the GOP on the issues.
One key point that’s been all but lost in the post-election coverage is this: The Dem routing of the GOP on Tuesday represents a huge vindication for those who demanded that Dems counterattack aggressively in the face of GOP national security attacks and stop scurrying for cover every time Karl Rove promised yet another “escalation” in such rhetoric.
No, I’m not talking about Rahm Emanuel, who was lionized at length today in the New York Times for aggressively taking on the GOP over Iraq. Rather, I’m talking about those who pushed for a fearless, genuinely Democratic posture on national security issues early in the cycle, when it wasn’t anywhere near as obvious as it became later that doing so would produce victory.
Early on, anyone who suggested that Dems shouldn’t be afraid to call for a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq or to oppose President Bush on wiretapping or torture was subjected to a steady stream of withering scorn from allegedly in-the-know pundits. Those who backed Ned Lamont’s antiwar candidacy were dismissed by David Broder and others in the D.C. opinionmakers guild as crazy, extreme, beneath contempt. In one typical example last February, Marshall Wittman charged that opposition to Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program showed that “the Democratic Party is increasingly under the influence of modern day McGovernites,” warning: “Let’s get serious.”
It’s a good thing indeed that Dems didn’t heed the advice from Wittman and others that they get “serious,” now isn’t it? Read the rest of this entry »
Interesting investigation into Plan B stalling
A federal judge ruled the Center for Reproductive Rights could “subpoena more than three years of Plan B-related communications between the White House’s domestic-policy office” and FDA officials. The documents could “determine whether the White House interfered with the FDA’s handling of a request by manufacturer Barr Pharmaceuticals Inc. to allow sales without prescriptions.”
Poppy to the rescue
Maureen Dowd has it about right:
Poppy Bush and James Baker gave Sonny the presidency to play with and he broke it. So now they’re taking it back.
They are dragging W. away from those reckless older guys who have been such a bad influence and getting him some new minders who are a lot more practical.
In a scene that might be called “Murder on the Oval Express,” Rummy turned up dead with so many knives in him that it’s impossible to say who actually finished off the man billed as Washington’s most skilled infighter. (Poppy? Scowcroft? Baker? Laura? Condi? The Silver Fox? Retired generals? Serving generals? Future generals? Troops returning to Iraq for the umpteenth time without a decent strategy? Democrats? Republicans? Joe Lieberman?)
The defense chief got hung out to dry before Saddam got hung. The president and Karl Rove, underestimating the public’s hunger for change or overestimating the loyalty of a fed-up base, did not ice Rummy in time to save the Senate from teetering Democratic. But once Sonny managed to heedlessly dynamite the Republican majority — as well as the Middle East, the Atlantic alliance and the U.S. Army — then Bush Inc., the family firm that snatched the presidency for W. in 2000, had to step in. Two trusted members of the Bush 41 war council, Mr. Baker and Robert Gates, have been dispatched to discipline the delinquent juvenile and extricate him from the mother of all messes. Read the rest of this entry »
Why Ehrlich gets so little respect
Robert “What’s wrong with morons?” Ehrlich gets very little respect in Maryland, and Michael Steele is known in Baltimore as “an empty taxi.” And here’s part of the reason why:
Yusuf El-Bedwi is no fool. He knows politicians can play dirty.
He’s just livid at being tricked into playing dirty with them on Election Day. All because he’s homeless — and therefore, apparently, considered too unprincipled to give a damn about the integrity of the voting process.
“I might not have a home,” El-Bedawi told me yesterday, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t care about right and wrong. No one has the right to use me that way.”
But use him they did, along with at least six busloads of other poor or homeless Philadelphians who were hoodwinked into handing out deeply misleading voter guides in Maryland on Tuesday. The guides state that they were paid for by committees supporting Republican Maryland Gov. Bob Ehrlich, who was up for re-election, and Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, who was chasing a U.S. Senate seat.
Both men lost, so at least the sneaky trick didn’t do The Trick.
But in the process, people like El-Bedawi were not only played for fools in Maryland, but they didn’t get to vote right here at home.
El-Bedawi had been staying at a city homeless shelter on Ridge Avenue for about a week when, he said, some people who called themselves “election workers” visited to say they needed help on Election Day. They were offering $100 cash — plus breakfast, lunch and dinner — in exchange for distributing campaign literature at polling places. Read the rest of this entry »
Silver lining of the voting-problems cloud
USA Today has a good story: the problems encountered in Tuesday’s election show where the fixes are needed. And now that we have a Democratic Congress, something will probably be done. (The GOP is not interested in solving voting problems, since the problems typically affect poor and minority voters, the very group on which the GOP stomps, repeatedly, and thus does not want them to be able to vote.)
As a dress rehearsal for the 2008 presidential election, Tuesday’s experiences at the nation’s 183,000 polling places succeeded by failing.
Where voters encountered balky equipment, it pointed up the need to examine paper trails and other methods for verifying their votes.
Where voters weren’t helped by struggling poll workers, it illuminated the need for increased recruitment and better training.
And where they were misinformed or misdirected by automated “robocalls” and leaflets, it reignited calls for laws that would crack down on such practices.
All of those problems and more surfaced Tuesday in what state and federal officials said was a practice run for the 2008 election. And while none of the problems caused nearly as much trouble as the “hanging chads” of 2000, they laid bare the election system’s growing pains.
“There continue to be deep concerns about the patterns of voting in our country,” Chellie Pingree, president of the civic group Common Cause, said. “The level of problems that we heard about out there is still completely unacceptable.”
A hotline run by Common Cause received 16,000 calls. Another headed by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law got 20,000. The Justice Department received only about 250 calls and e-mails, down from 1,200 in 2004. Read the rest of this entry »
Bush loves flawed characters
Bush has a revealing fondness for people with serious character flaws—he’ll pick that sort every time. And, it turns out, Robert Gates is no exception:
President Bush’s pick to replace Donald H. Rumsfeld with former CIA Director Robert Gates is an odd one, considering it’s almost certain to revive festering questions about the Bush administration’s handling of pre-war intelligence on Iraq.
Gates is one of those longtime Washington insiders whose name is not likely to ring bells outside of the Beltway.
But he’s long been a major player in Republican national security circles, first as a Russian specialist on President Gerald Ford’s White House National Security Council in 1974, then eventually at the CIA, where he held a handful of senior positions before being tapped to be its chief by the first President Bush, in 1991.
And it wasn’t the first time he’d been nominated for the post — or his first dose of trouble in the spotlight. Read the rest of this entry »
The morning shave, with balm
The morning shave’s aftermath is slightly different today. Used the Simpsons Harvard 2 Best—its handle is shaped much like the Simpson Persian Jar pictured—with QED’s excellent Mocha-Java shaving stick. I’m becoming very partial to shaving soap in stick form: rub it against the grain of the wet beard and lather on the face. The Harvard 2 has a small knot, which works quite well for this sort of thing. I used the very inexpensive Feather razor, with a Feather blade. Fine shave, but the razor is too lightweight, I think.
The novelty was the aftershave treatment. Normally I go with a traditional bracing aftershave, but today I used a soothing balm: Taylor Luxury Herbal Aftershave Balm, an alcohol-free cream with honey and wheatgerm and avocado oils. Very pleasant, and my face feels different—but still very nice indeed. (One mark of a good shave is that you keep feeling your face afterwards because your skin is so smooth.)
AP reports on Tillman investigation
As everyone now knows, the US Army lied and covered up the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman as long as it could, then stonewalled investigations. But investigations proceeded anyway, and it’s starting to come out:
In a remote and dangerous corner of Afghanistan, under the protective roar of Apache attack helicopters and B-52 bombers, special agents and investigators did their work. They walked the landscape with surviving witnesses. They found a rock stained with the blood of the victim. They re-enacted the killings — here the U.S. Army Rangers swept through the canyon in their Humvee, blasting away; here the doomed man waved his arms, pleading for recognition as a friend, not an enemy.
“Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat (expletive) Tillman, damn it!” he shouted, again and again.
The latest inquiry into Tillman’s death by friendly fire should end next month; authorities have said they intend to release to the public only a synopsis of their report. But The Associated Press has combed through the results of 2 1/4 years of investigations — reviewed thousands of pages of internal Army documents, interviewed dozens of people familiar with the case — and uncovered some startling findings.
One of the four shooters, Staff Sgt. Trevor Alders, had recently had PRK laser eye surgery. Although he could see two sets of hands “straight up,” his vision was “hazy,” he said. In the absence of “friendly identifying signals,” he assumed Tillman and an allied Afghan who also was killed were enemy.
Another, Spc. Steve Elliott, said he was “excited” by the sight of rifles, muzzle flashes and “shapes.” A third, Spc. Stephen Ashpole, said he saw two figures, and just aimed where everyone else was shooting.
Squad leader Sgt. Greg Baker had 20-20 eyesight, but claimed he had “tunnel vision.” Amid the chaos and pumping adrenaline, Baker said he hammered what he thought was the enemy but was actually the allied Afghan fighter next to Tillman who was trying to give the Americans cover: “I zoned in on him because I could see the AK-47. I focused only on him.”
All four failed to identify their targets before firing, a direct violation of the fire discipline techniques drilled into every soldier.
There’s more: Read the rest of this entry »
Habaneros and tarantulas
It turns out that habaneros and tarantula venom target the same receptors (see story below). You know what I’m thinking, don’t you? Since the habanero oil turned out so well, what about tarantula oil? Besides, it would be fun to go into Whole Foods and ask, “Where are the tarantulas?” And where would they be? In seafood, so they would be chilled and moving slower? In the bulk bins? Hiding in the bananas, as is their wont?
As painful as a spider bite may feel, the molecular mechanism that underlies how venom produces that sensation isn’t well understood. Little is known about the molecular channels through which ions flow across the membrane of sensory neurons and thereby trigger a firing of electrical signals perceived as pain. Now researchers examining arachnid venom may have discovered a new tool to probe deeper into how ion channels work to produce pain.
David Julius and his colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, screened 22 different species of spiders and scorpions in search of molecules that activate sensory neurons and produce pain sensation. The researchers identified and purified three molecules in the venom of a West Indian tarantula species, Psalmopoeus cambridgei, that do so. When the researchers injected the toxins into the paws of mice, their limbs became inflamed and the animals reacted by licking them and flinching. Mice genetically engineered not to express the receptor, however, did not react when the toxin was administered, according to the study appearing in the November 9 issue of Nature. Read the rest of this entry »
Finding your best place to live in the world
I moved to the Central Coast in 1984 after working my way through the 1983 book Finding Your Best Place to Live in America, which took one through a series of choices and ratings on criteria such as economy, crime rate, natural hazards, natural beauty, cultural activity, and so on. It was a great little book, though now very out of date, and once I finished it I started looking seriously for a job out here. (I was living in Iowa City at the time.) I think this was a result of reading John Crystal’s book Where Do I Go From Here With My Life?.
Crystal’s recommendation is to first figure out where you want to live, then go there and talk to people in companies about what’s happening in the area: purely an information-gathering trip, not a job-applying trip. This gets you out of the clutches of the HR departments, for example. Then, with the information you’ve gathered, you can think about finding the right job in the area—the job with the most long-term promise.
At any rate, this came to mind this morning when The Eldest sent me this interesting article: Read the rest of this entry »
Move fast or lose the customer
Some interesting trends in ecommerce from a recent BBC story: if a company’s Web site pages take longer than 4 seconds to load, they’ve not only lost most of the potential customers, 75% say they will not return. Moreover, the experience with the on-line store shapes the user’s perception of the entire company.
Large companies can lay on more designers, programmers, and servers, but the mom-and-pop operations that have had a resurgence with the Web might face some hard times. I’m particularly sensitive to the issue because the sellers of shaving equipment and supplies are small operations—well, not Gillette, perhaps, but those who sell the stuff I buy: safety razors, shaving soaps and brushes, and the like. They need a high-performance template into which they can insert their own shops. I assume these must be available—or coming soon.
Full story: Read the rest of this entry »
Megs, napping on a rainy day
Megs was asleep, but as I approached with the camera, she awoke—well rested, I assume. As the weather’s turned colder, the Cozy Cushion, ignored for a while, has proven again attractive, and she now spends more time on this platform than in the hammock above. To the right are the glass doors through which the overcast, rainy day can be contemplated until eyes grow heavy…
