A moment for slipshod poetry

My clock radio woke me the other morning with a ho-hum news report about how the cool, wet weather of late has been amenable to the spider population. But what really got my attention was the newsreader's wrap-up quip, "You are usually no more than three feet away from a spider." Well, super. Try to use the snooze button effectively while dwelling on that concept.

But of course that got me thinking about whether the statement was actually true, and who came up with it. From what I can find on the internet, the factoid has been disseminated in part by a children's video. Not exactly National Geographic, but aren't I usually within three feet of a spider anyway (i.e. at least twelve hours a day)? Probably. I get seven hours of spider-proximity just from sleeping, because you know darn well there's a spider somewhere under the bed. Might be really small, but she's there. If there's a spider anywhere in my cubicle at work, then that settles that.

Now some people exaggerate the statement, saying you're never more than three feet away from a spider, which is ridiculous. I think there's people that work in semiconductor fabrication clean rooms who are often quite a fair distance from any spider.

And now this, with no segue whatsoever:

You're never very far from a spider
You're always quite near to a bug
If you're feeling blue
And lonely too
There's a spider around for a hug.

We're entirely surrounded by spiders
They're lurking within every nook
Think you're feeling great?
Consider legs of eight,
And give those bedsheets a look!

When UPSs go bad

I used to have an apartment at the end of a power-line spur. Outages and interruptions were so frequent that I invested heavily in uninterruptible power supplies for my computers, ISDN modem, etc. Since then I have watched the units fail one by one as their sealed lead-acid batteries wore out. It seems the best one can reasonably expect from a unit's batteries is five years, with two to five years being the range.

Besides the low-battery warnings, there are two interesting hallmarks of failing sealed lead-acid batteries in UPSs. One is the sulfurous odor, probably caused by leaking battery acid or sulfuric acid vapor. Reeks like bad eggs until you unplug the unit and replace the batteries. But a second, very unexpected hallmark that goes hand in hand with the odor is a reading on the carbon monoxide (CO) detector. From a unit in the hall outside the computer room I was getting constant readings of around 10 parts per million (ppm) with a peak at one time of 32 ppm CO before I unplugged the failing UPS. What I'm not sure of is whether the reading was from actual CO or from another vapor that was causing a false positive. I suppose CO is conceivable from the standpoint that sulfuric acid can slowly combust materials is comes in contact with.

So if you ever see your carbon monoxide detector acting up, keep in mind that there's things in your house besides the furnace and stove that can be the cause.

Parallel Universe

South Korean gymnast Yang Tae-Young has filed an appeal with the International Court of Arbitration for Sport, essentially asking that he be bumped up from bronze to gold in the men’s Olympic gymnastics individual all-around. Y’all are probably at least passingly familiar with this brouhaha; an Olympic judge had assigned the incorrect “starting value” for Yang’s parallel bars routine, shorting the athlete a crucial tenth of a point.

A couple comments are in order. First, you always get this crap with the “judged” sports. Sports that you can count goals, measure with a stopwatch or yardstick are intrinsically superior in my mind. Given that, who besides the Olympic judges should be blamed for not responding to the error promptly? How about the South Korean coaches? In retrospect they say that they registered a timely protest, but there’s no apparent evidence of this and it sounds like “I’m trying to save my job here” type butt-covering.

Next: a prediction. How will the “International Court of Arbitration for Sport” rule on this issue? I don’t feel like I’m sticking my neck out in saying that they’ll rule in Yang’s favor. Why? Because the institution has the word “Court” in it combined with either “International” or “World.” Simple rule of thumb there: If it’s some sort of “world court,” it exists mainly to try to shaft the United States.

Of course I think that Paul Hamm should lock that medal away somewhere secret and safe. Especially given that if you really insist on revisiting Yang’s routine and redoing the scoring, supposedly the athlete paused four times on the parallel bars, a two-tenths deduction. So says Hamm’s coach Miles Avery. So give Yang the tenth he was shorted but then deduct the two tenths he wasn’t shorted but should have been, and Hamm is still golden. Why would any ruling body go back and correct one judging mistake and not the other? Any sane one, that is?

Count every vote!

Of course, until you realize that some folks are voting twice. The New York Daily News says that some 46,000 New Yorkers are registered both in NYC and in Florida, and has verified that at least hundreds (possibly thousands) are guilty of double voting in at least one presidential election. As you would expect, this is illegal under the laws of both states, but since the states themselves don't cross check voter registrations with one another the practice goes unprosecuted.

A couple big eyebrow-raisers:

Of the 46,000 registered in both states, 68% are Democrats, 12% are Republicans and 16% didn't claim a party.

Nearly 1,700 of those registered in both states requested that absentee ballots be mailed to their home in the other state, where they are also registered. But that doesn't raise red flags with officials in either place.

A fifty-six percent edge, Democrats over Republicans, in the double-registrants! For a supposedly "progressive" party, those Democrats are downright conservative when it comes to preserving the tradition of Chicago-machine style vote fraud! And this proffered justification is illuminating:

Edwin Peterson, 66, a registered Democrat in Palm Coast, Fla., and St. Albans, Queens, attributed his dual vote in the 2000 election to his distrust of the party running the Sunshine State.

"That was a situation where Florida is so messed up with the Republicans, you don't know if your vote is even going to be counted," Peterson said. "It's been like that forever."

So this guy is willing to break the law and undermine the system on his own suspicion of the other party's ill-intent. I'm fine with these people gleaning comfort from such rationalizations -- once they've been heavily fined or jailed. Otherwise these shenanigans will continue and expand.

Worst phishing this month

Phishing attacks have gotten cleaner and more subversive as 2004 crawls by, mainly with less of the broken English that was an immediate tipoff in years past. They still mostly trawl for eBay and PayPal account access, but plenty of crooks try to masquerade as humongous banks as well. I received this laughably-bad phishing email today despite the spam filtering; its subject line:

SunTrust Important Update! UrgRANDOM LETTERS

Speaking of bad movies

Following on the heels of my last post, I'd like to ask allied bloggers what movies they have actually walked out on, i.e. left the theater before the movie was done. Understand that there are plenty of awful movies I have sat all the way through, such as Jurassic Park 3 which heralded the much-renowned Summer of Woe (2001). But if I understand beforehand that a movie could be pretty bad, then part of the point of going is to experience the badness with friends -- and thus we're far less likely to actually abort the viewing. No, a walk-out movie for me is one I am not seeing with a group and is bad in a way that was totally unexpected.

Here are the three movies that drove me from the theater:

(1) Tango and Cash (1989)
(2) Robin Hood - Men In Tights (1993)
(3) The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps (2000)

In every case I was with at most one other person. Two of the movies are of that untouchable caste, what writer 3xHAR terms the "unfunny comedy," which has no grace to salvage it.

So then -- what movies have you walked out on?

AvP

Take two superior monster-movie concepts, Alien and Predator, and roll them into one. Usually, that would be a leg up on the way to a passable, profitable film. Alien vs. Predator, released last week, is probably not that film.

If AvP had managed to generate any advance buzz, it didn't reach me. And by the time I got to the theater, it was starting to generate a "who died?" type of odor. So why still go? Why did I go to The Day After Tomorrow, or Troy? Probably the same lure that compels one to drive past the neighborhood that the tornado went through. Plus I was given a free movie pass, so at least this time I wasn't paying to waste my time.

To put it bluntly, the movie was crap even before the first line of dialog was uttered. A corporate satellite is snapping infrared photos of the earth, which at the downlink station triggers one of those full-screen blinking, beeping warnings like "Anomalous Thermal Signature." Uh huh. The corporation's computers are familiar with every "non-anomalous" infrared pattern on the entire planet, so that's how it can flag this one so the plot can stagger, robotically, on to the next contrived scene in Nepal. There, the movie's heroine is ice-climbing a full week's journey distant from civilization. Despite this alleged Nepalese remoteness, the heroine gets a cell-phone call. Now, aside from the absurd notion that the Himalayas are dotted with cellphone towers, she takes the call without much difficulty since she already has a receiver bud in her left ear. So apparently she has been getting these cellphone calls out in Nepal with some regularity.

I'll hand-wave some of the blah-blah here. The heroine is hired by the big corporation to "guide" an expedition to the "anomalous thermal signature," emanating from a pyramid (!!) buried under 2000 feet of ice on an island, apparently in the antarctic. What is the purpose of the expedition? No one says. The guide lady argues that people will need two weeks' training in order to work safely in the antarctic environment, but we are told there's insufficient time for such training, and anyway it's "worth the risk." What, exactly, is worth the risk to their health and safety? Again, given that no purpose nor tangible benefit has yet been explained, no-one knows. After losing the training-time standoff, the guide insists that the expedition adhere to three rules. I will not recount them here since all three rules are broken within five minutes and never mentioned again anyway.

A few cursory scenes later, the expedition nears their drilling site, which on the surface bears an "abandoned whaling station." The whaling station was neither mentioned nor alluded to until it appeared out of the October antarctic darkness (again, remarkable), but nobody seems surprised. We are told that the whaling station is "directly over" the pyramid. This is flatly contradicted a few minutes later, when we are shown that the station is actually offset from the pyramid by about 3500 feet, which the digging team will drill toward at an angle. Allegedly, the spookily mysterious thing about the whaling station was that everyone there suddenly disappeared in 1904. "It was a big mystery at the time," says the heroine. You might think that since the disappearance has never been explained that it might still be a big mystery, but you would be overestimating the curiosity of these explorers and scientists by at least a factor of ten. To me, the most mysterious thing about the whaling station is why it was constructed two thousand feet above sea level. You'd think dragging whales a mile up the side of a glacier for processing would be inconvenient, to say the least.

Anyway, this level of stupidity persists for the duration of the movie. The entire drilling team has laser-sighted machine guns. People run around in the antarctic without jackets or hats. An archaologist informs us that Aztech timekeeping was "metric." A couple minutes later, he saunters past a statue of an oversized extraterrestrial being without even arching an eyebrow. The entire screenplay is written such that the cast seems to have little curiosity about their environment and even less regard for their safety. Inevitably, this apathy filters down to the audience.

The Dem perspective

Time for a survey of reasoned, levelheaded assessments of the State of the Union from the Party of Nuance & Sophistication [TM]. John Kerry:

There's nothing conservative about a certain attorney general from somewhere who stomps on the civil rights and civil liberties of Americans. (August 2004)

I don't understand why Kerry feels he has to use weasel words like "certain" and "somewhere." Maybe he himself thinks that he's so full of crap that he might actually be sued. Kerry again:

Don't tell us disenfranchising a million African Americans and stealing their votes is the best we can do. (6 July 2004)

Is there some ghost army of klansmen, skinheads and southern bubba sheriffs encircling people's homes each November? Quit making excuses, put down the clicker, get off your butts and vote!

Teresa Heinz Kerry, responding to a pro-Bush heckler:

They want four more years of hell. (2 August 2004)

Poor Teresa, living as a billionaire in the "hell" of modern America. Think she'd be willing to trade that hell for the bliss of working at Home Depot under President Hillary? Don't hold your breath. More Teresa fearmongering:

We don't have to fear being hung from a lamppost or shot or sent to jail. Not yet. Not yet. And please God, not ever. (5 August 2004)

Michael Moore warns us in Fahrenheit 9/11 to watch out for politicians who foment an environment of perpetual fear to gain power. Thanks to Moore, I'm on to Teresa's ploy! And we have Ted Kennedy to further clarify things:

The only thing we have to fear is four more years of George Bush. (27 July 2004)

Yes, says Kennedy, I know that terrorists recently killed three thousand of your countrymen, but your fear of the Islamofascists is really quite provincial. The only rational fear is of George Bush.

Howard Dean, on the escalation of the terror alert level:

Isn't it unusual they might choose two days after the Democratic national convention, when John Kerry was in the middle of his bounce? (3 August 2004)

But then again, raising the alert level during the convention might've seemed "unusual" too. So too raising it just before the convention. Any earlier, and it would have looked "unusual" coming right after the John Edwards for VP announcement. Here's a better conspiracy: Isn't it unusual that we never see John Kerry and Mister Ed in the same place at the same time?

Consistent with the theme that we have no rights anymore and may soon hang from lampposts, Al Gore announces the "Bush gulag":

... certainly not responsible for the policies which set up the Bush gulag and led to America's strategic catastrophe in Iraq. (24 June 2004)

So talk to me about how the Republicans are extremists and out-of-touch with ordinary Americans. The Democrats have allowed their John Birchers out of the corner and adopted their rhetoric into the mainstream. Now what can the Democrats do when they're really upset about something?

Fahrenheit surprises

I watched Fahrenheit 9/11 over the weekend with a couple friends and my wife, on the condition that I not have to part with any money to do so. I was somewhat surprised because I expected the movie's presentation of propaganda to be more effective. To put it another way, I didn't think it would be boring, and yet it was. Bowling for Columbine was more entertaining, both in terms of getting a roomful of people riled up and presenting interesting characters for the camera. Fahrenheit suffered from an abysmally low caliber of argumentation plus camera subjects and commentators who were tedious when they weren't outright unpleasant.

But my wife's reaction surprised me the most. A day later, she was still miffed at Michael Moore and went on her own rant right in the middle of our kitchen. I paraphrase here:

I'm angry! [Moore] pissed me off! I wanted to be challenged. I wanted to have some reason to think that maybe I'm just conservative scum. But instead it's la-la-la, let's play a song. La-la-la, show a little film. The audience is not four years old! I could have made a better anti-conservative documentary. [Moore] doesn't respect me. He thinks the viewer is an idiot.

And then she demanded to know why I wasn't angry too. But I've been witnessing Moore's schtick for some time now, while she just got her first look. And when you're just talking about some filmmaker, it's difficult to stay angry forever.

Paging Dr. Dean

In my last post I criticized the misplaced media carping over the intel that just bumped the country up to "orange" again. I also slammed Howard Dean for the baseless allegation that the move to orange was a political ploy. Friday saw this story from Reuters, which begins:

Al Qaeda member Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan e-mailed contacts in Osama bin Laden's network while in custody as part of a sting operation by security agencies, a Pakistani intelligence source said Friday.

A series of arrests in Britain this week resulted from Khan's capture in Pakistan early last month.

A high alert for U.S. financial institutions against a possible al Qaeda attack was also prompted by information gathered from the Pakistani computer engineer, according to intelligence and government sources.

If true, this is just confirming what I wrote last week, i.e. it wasn't just old data.

For its part, the New York Times is already slithering away from the "old data / political motivation" thesis, so this editorial position August 3rd:

The Times reports today that much of the information that led to the heightened alert is actually three or four years old and that authorities had found no concrete evidence that a terror plot was actually under way. This news does nothing to bolster the confidence Americans need that the administration is not using intelligence for political gain.

morphed into this new stance only two days later:

The administration was obviously right to warn the country that Al Qaeda had apparently studied financial institutions in three cities with the idea of a possible attack.

So while the editorial board of the Times bends itself into pretzels trying to craft a consistent position out of their silly reporting and Howard Dean's crackpot allegations, this Reuters story swings in like a wrecking ball.

Was there no-one on the Times editorial board able to foresee how shaky that position was? Is their perception of the world that skewed?

"Old data?"

The Breaking News Headline on the ExecPC homepage this morning read "U.S. relied on old data in raising terror alert," and the story is courtesy of (who else?) the New York Times. So ask yourself, what does the writer want you to think about this issue? It was just a couple days ago that Howard Dean made the charge that going to Orange alert was a political move. Bush is trying to scare the country into keeping him in the White House, y'see, so he has Tom Ridge dredge up some ancient threat data to justify jacking up the color bar. It's not stated outright, but this is another notion destined to become gospel among the Michael Moore disciples.

The only part of the story that's "old" though is this lame conspiratorial mindset gripping the political opposition. You might think that the extensive bipartisan commission reports that have been published in the last few weeks -- the ones flatly stating that no, absolutely no pressure was exerted on us by the executive branch to slant intelligence or reach a predetermined conclusion -- well, you'd think that might give the news writers and talking heads some pause. Might get them to think that their prejudices have caused them to produce some really, really silly copy in the last couple years and they oughta' cut it out before someone outside the blogosphere notices.

And what of the merits of this "old data" claim? Would it change the reader's outlook a bit if we point out that there has been a flood of new information since the recent capture of al Qaeda communications engineer Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan? Even the Times story notes:

His capture led the CIA to laptop computers, CD-ROMs, and other storage devices that contained copies of communications describing the extensive surveillance.

Well, if it's actually old data combined with new data, might that change your opinion a wee bit?

And just when does old data expire and lose all of it's usefulness, anyway? Take for example the two years of old data that piled up before al Qaeda went ahead and bombed the embassies in Africa. Maybe should've used some of that "old data," huh? And the CIA reached back to 1998 info to prepare the briefing memo cited in the Condi Rice testimony, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike inside US." Well, that old data got people running in circles, screaming "Bush knew, Bush knew!" Uh huh. So on the one hand some old data is proof of a nefarious Bush plot to plunge the country into war, but this other old data isn't even good enough to combine with new data to raise the threat level?

Granted, I am to some extent conflating Times writers with conspiratorial kooks, but you get my drift.