Java Script Helped me a lot yesterday:

Every modern programing language makes it easy to display a message box with a question and a few stock answers (yes, no, cancel, etc.). And this is wrong. Every programming language should make it easy to display a question with the answers appropriate to the question. Programmers get lazy and try to fit the stock answers – somehow – to every situation. That's how I got this awful message box from Mozilla Firefox:

A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. Stop the script now or continue to see if the script will complete.
The message box offered me these two alternatives: OK and CANCEL.


I wish my choices had been: STOP and CONTINUE.

Why am I in bed with Windows?

Last night I suspected I needed to shut my Windows laptop down and reboot, to fix a problem. So I clicked SHUTDOWN and went off to do some other things. I figured I would give the PC a little rest in its "off" mode

I came back an hour later. Windows had not turned the PC off. It wanted to tell me that the MIM program, about which I care not, did not want to stop. So I had to turn it off manually. I then waited ten minutes and finally decided that Windows was not shutting down properly. I had a blue screen, and power was still on. So I pressed the On/Off button. Ten seconds later, power went off. I rebooted. Windows insisted on running a disk check because of the manual shut down. It found no problems, but it took a good eight minutes to check my whole disk.

Then the laptop came up and desired me to install some windows updates. I checked them out to decide what to do, knowing that if I took the updates, I would probably have to reboot again. After I rejected these updates, Adobe Flash and my anti-virus program both requested updates. Oh, F*** them! I just wanted to do some work.

Hey, thanks for listening!

Google Image search:

I occasionally use Google's Image Search, but for me, it's mostly a curiosity. However, I just used it to solve a serious problem. For the jewish holiday of Sukkot, we build a Sukkah, a temporary structure, to eat in, and -- maybe -- to live in, for a week. The structure consists of aluminum poles (8 and 12 feet long) held together by three-way pipe joints. Several of my joints are "frozen" -- the holding screws cannot be coaxed to turn -- so I decided to buy some more.

Web sites that specialize in sukkah materials will sell the joints to me for $15 apiece. I suspected that was much too pricey, so I went to an enormous hardware store to find my joints. At the hardware store, I discovered that what I want are not plumbing joints and not electriccal joints, and not normal hardware store products. My only hope was to find them on the web. I did a series of image searches. I needed to find a picture of the joints I wanted, because I had no idea who might sell them, or what to call them.

The winning search was: pipe structural fittings "allen wrench" .
(I might have used "joints" but I did not think of that.) The picture popped up at The Diamond Aluminum Company, which sells these joints and the same pipes for do-it-yourself construction projects.

My best playlist ever:

Most Tuesday mornings, I produce a classical music program on WPRB radio from 6 to 8:30 a.m. (Eastern time). You can hear me all over the world. We are on the air at 103.3 FM in much of central Jersey (etc.), but also: You can catch us online at http://www.wprb.com/listen.php, where we offer three easy to record (and even time-shift) audio streams.

I try to put together programs with a lot of variety, good music and good performances. Sometimes I feel that I have created an exceptional playlist. But election day was different: I'm sure I produced my best playlist ever, and now, I'm going to tell you all about it.

My great challenge, which I was unable to solve for days, was: what is classical election day music? I had no idea. But Tuesday morning at 5:20 a.m., I found a theme for my program. No matter who you wanted to win, you felt great pain at the thought of loss; you wanted revenge on the other guys; and you dreamed of unalloyed victory. So that's what it says right in my playlist: WHOEVER WINS: THE PAIN! THE VICTORY!! THE REVENGE!!! I selected music for pain, for pure vengefulness, and for the delight of victory. Here's what I played:

Overture: la forze del destino (Verdi): Fate and vengeance personified in music.

Dissonance quartet, k. 465 in C, 1st mvt (Mozart): Those dissonances were great for the theme of pain.

Ride of the Valkyries (Wagner): On to victory!

der Freischutz, overture (Weber): That free-shot, the bullet that will go wherever it is aimed; great for revenge.

Vallee d'Obermann (Liszt): This music personifies despair. Great for the pain theme.

A song: Ich grolle nicht, from dichterliebe (Schumann): Some of the words: I'm not complaining, even if my heart breaks.

Don Giovanni, overture (Mozart): Revenge!

Funeral march: 1st mvt of symphony #5 (Mahler): The pain.

Requiem, excerpts (Verdi): I played the 'Dies Irae' (day of wrath, day of anger!) and lacrymosa. I used an explosive performance, in which the vengeance of 'dies irae' jumps out of your speakers: The philharmonia orchestra and chorus, conducted by carlo maria giulini .

The Anfortas Wound, from Harmonielehre (John Adams): After a long period of agonizing writer's block, Adams wrote the first movement of his Harmonielehre. After that, he wanted to depict the pain of his writer's block, and he chose to illustrate in sound, the pain of being pierced in the testicles. Very appropriate for my program.

Don Giovanni, cenar teco m'invistasti'. D.G. descends into hell (Mozart):Revenge. I got a little carried away here. I told my listeners that near the end of this music, they would hear the wails of the election loser as he descended into hell. But of course, it was only Don Giovanni wailing. Sorry about that.

A song: Belsatzar, op. 57 (poem by Heine, music by Schumann): Belshazzar curses God, and he doesn't get away with it.

After all that, I felt it was time for a little healing, so I concluded the program with the last movement of Beethoven's 9th.

Please feel free to re-create his program whenever you need it.

Save Energy: Burn Leaves!

Now that I've got your attention, I want to ask: how much energy do we waste by burning leaves? In my little town, I've watched leaf blowers push leaves off of streets and out of parking lots. The blowers burn gasoline of course. Why is it necessary to waste gas to tidy nature up in this way? We have laws limiting the use of water on lawns; why not limit the use of leaf blowers to actual necessity? Many leaves decompose just fine when left on their own.

Full Disclosure: I HATE it when somebody turns on a leaf blower, while I'm trying to record my novel.

How Detectable is Voting Fraud?

Today's timely posting is by a guest author, JG Fellow.

Today, we are holding elections. On November 5th, we will likely be debating the existence of fraud. I believe that we have the tools demonstrate the likelihood that such fraud has taken place. Throughout the elections, via Pollster.com, I have watched the results of every single state and national poll. I have been struck by the stability of the results over the last two weeks. To be sure, two polls of the same state may vary, but there are few states where the projected winner is uncertain.

Based on this wealth of data, we know what to expect on November 4th, but we are, by no means, certain to get it. Pollsters occasionally miss biases, or run in herds. We witnessed this in the New Hampshire Democratic Primary this year. But New Hampshire stood out as an exception. Most state's primary results followed the pre-election polling.

So how do we evaluate those results that differ from our expectations? How can we tell the fraudulent from the unexpected? By examining the results at the voting precinct level. It is certainly possible to falsify election results. But while it is possible to lie, it is very difficult to lie well. It is incredibly difficult to generate a fake set of data that continues to look real upon scrutiny. How do I know this? Experience.

Both professionally and personally, I have performed hundreds of Monte Carlo simulations. This is a process whereby you define some rules and roll some dice. If I roll a 6, David Ortiz hits a home run. If I roll a 1, unemployment rises. I have simulated baseball, basketball, football, car accidents, occupational injuries and even terrorist activity. The tragedy of my experience is that I can always find some level on which my generated data fails to replicate reality. While my hitters may meet my expectations, Mariano Rivera ends up as an average pitcher. While the average cost of a car accident is correct, the chance of a $10,000,000 car accident is too high. The first, second and third test of my data may look reasonable, but there will always be a fourth, fifth or sixth.

I have faith in my fellow Americans, and even more faith in checks and balances. But most important, I have faith that such fraudulence could not be done in secret. I would urge major news outlets to work with statisticians to validate the reasonability of the outcome of this election, and I look forward to today with no fear that a crime shall go unwitnessed.

Somebody Else's Risk (2):

Ender left a good comment on my post about Somebody Else's Risk. There's an interesting counter-argument to my posting: you could say that since I believe myself a good programmer, I SHOULD take on these life-risk programs, because I will do them better than the other guy. At the time, I instinctively mistrusted this argument. After the many years that have passed since then, I think I know why. It's the nature of computer products that every good one is duplicated many times. People rush to fill every perceived niche to overflowing, whether it's an operating system, blogging software, or an email system. Each time I decide to take the risk of writing software where people's lives are at risk, I am ADDING one more approach to all the others. I'm not doing it instead of someone else, and there's little risk that the software I contribute to will be so good that it chases all the inferior ones away. And the bugs I leave in my software may affect some unlucky person.

Writing software, or doing any work, where the quality affects people's lives, is simply a grave responsibility that has to be taken seriously.

Supernatural Cleaning Methods:

Joyce Wadler has written a delightful piece in the New York Times about getting ghosts out of houses, called Supernatural Cleaning Methods. As you read it, I think you will suspect that you are enjoying it almost as much as the editor who wrote the subheadings.

She wanted a divorce:

When I was twelve, I read a thin book of funny letters that people had written to lawyers. I remember exactly one letter from this book. Unlike everything else in it, this one caught my attention enough to make it come back to me, every dozen years or so:

I want a divorce. I'm not sure my husband is the father of my children.

Well, duh. Who could be that dumb? At age twelve, I knew the facts of life better than she did. Now why did this letter stick in my mind? Setting aside the possibility that the entire book was fiction – a possibility that never occurred to me in my youth – the letter always bothered me. There had to be some other explanation. Nobody is that dumb.

Perhaps the letter kept coming back to me as a demand that I must solve its puzzle. Well, I think I've solved it. The only fault of the woman who wrote the letter is that she did not have the capability of expression by writing*. I will explain by rewriting her letter, and then I will explicate. I'm adding exactly one word:

I want a divorce. I'm not sure my husband is only the father of my children.

In other words, the woman suspects that her husband is also the father of other women's children. Definitely grounds for divorce! I feel much better now.


* By the way, in 1974, when I needed to hire a hardware designer, I read many resumes, including one that ended thus: I also have the capability of expression by writing. We didn't hire him, even though he was able to design hardware.

Somebody Else's Risk:

Throughout my forty-six year software development career, I have tried to avoid working on products that can kill people if the software has certain kinds of bugs. I deeply sympathize with the programmer of the Three-Mile Island alarm detection system, who failed to anticipate how the alarm terminal would work when the software was overwhelmed by hundreds of concurrent alarms. (The terminal printed a stream of question marks, rather than any sensible error message.) Some years later, I interviewed this fellow for a job; I think he's a good programmer and a nice guy. But an unanticipated disaster really put his work on the spot.

In the current financial crisis, I've been reading complaints about how people must have underestimated the most extreme (very unlikely but real) risks that their deals created. But I believe that most of these people understood the rare risks. They also understood that these risks were other people's risks. (I believe that most of the financiers who brought us to our current crisis are still better off than 99.9% of the US population. For them, this disaster is mostly 'other people's disaster'.)

The bottom line of this meandering introduction is that it's praiseworthy to be concerned, in your work, about risks to others that you may create; but an awful lot of people don't worry about other people's risks. That's human nature, and it's very hard, as China with its tainted milk supply is discovering, to do much about it. And now, my story:

In the 1970's I worked on a computer system, one of the first of its kind, to automate Electro Cardiogram analysis. This work came to me, I didn't choose it. I worked at it carefully, always worried about the chance that my software would cause someone's EKG analysis to produce a false negative. (A cardiologist always reviewed the results of the computer analysis, but you never know: what if the doctor was distracted that day?)

One customer came to us with a special request: that we program our computer to receive EKG data from some old EKG machines the customer already owned. We did not like those machines because the data they produced was very noisy and led to many incorrect results. We pointed this out to the customer. Our customer contact felt that this was our problem. He worked for a big company that manufactured many high tech products, and he brought in the company's top trouble-shooting team to figure out why our analyses, using his machines, were poor. The troubleshooters argued convincingly that there was nothing wrong with our software. The culprit was the noisy data coming out of the old EKG machines. The customer paid us for our work, and then, holy s—t! He set up a service bureau to process EKGs using his noisy machines.

I and my coworkers felt that whatever happened would not be our fault, but the situation really bothered us. Our name, and the prestigious name of the guy who developed the analysis program, stood behind this faulty service bureau. Who was going to die by relying on the quality of our work? I wondered if we had a moral obligation to try, somehow, to expose this faulty service bureau. Any such action could produce nasty litigation, and could only be a desperate last resort. But what should we do?

Our salesman nosed around the industry, talking to cardiologists and other EKG service bureaus. He reported that the poor quality of the analyses by this worrisome service bureau was obvious to everyone. They were getting business, but only of a special kind: medical schools and some hospitals used their system for training purposes, to get people used to processing remote EKG analyses. We breathed a great sigh of relief.

Lefties Rule?

Here's a picture of my new PDA, the Nokia N800. You can easily see most of the “real” buttons on this device. A few more are not quite visible at the top left edge. I've found a game I like to play on this machine that requires quick reflexes. The game is controlled by pressing some of the “real” buttons. I play moderately well, but the buttons I must use are a problem because they are very close together; I often press a wrong one by accident. But here's the real problem: Why was this PDA built for lefties? If the buttons were all on the right, my better hand would play more skilfully. I'm sure the guy who designed the N800 package is a lefty.

Big Foibles

Last July, I blogged about the silly efforts I always make to avoid picking out a thin towel at the fitness club; I prefer newish towels with thick nap that will dry more efficiently. I regarded my efforts to select desirable towels as mere foibles, because it was unlikely that there was any variation in the towels at all.

Well.

Today I casually grabbed what was obviously a “thin” towel. It lay flat, without the thick fold I always prefer. I knew it looked thin, but my tired mind said “for goodness sakes, what difference does it make?” And you know what I got? An old, thin towel. Almost napless, a pitiable thing to dry a wet body. From now on, I'm going to follow my own advice.

The Entrails of Vacuum Cleaner Bags:

An earring disappeared inside our home, and shortly afterwards, the whole house was vacuumed. I spread out a set of newspapers and emptied the vacuum bag over them. Then I went carefully through the ash, sifting – unsuccessfully – for that earring.

I've hardly ever done that before, but examining vacuum cleaner detritus struck me as a most natural activity. My father did it every the time the vacuum was emptied, when I and my brother were young, because we were little devils about putting small things in inappropriate places. I don't know what he found, but it sure was enough to keep him looking.

Ladies (and men) with Earrings and Earbuds:

From time to time, I uncover some problem in this universe, and I'm pleased when my proposed solution creates new jobs, new work for people, and even new professions. I've done this before, and I might be about to do it again:

My concern is directed to those who love to wear lovely, dangly earrings. People, I hate to be the one to point out the obvious, but your earrings clash hideously with the cheap plastic cords that hang from your earbuds! Have you ever thought about how this clash demeans your excellent jewelry?

The next time you buy earrings, insist on matching earbuds and cords. Color coordination is everything these days, and despite whatever you've been thinking, earbuds are jewelry. I'm serious about this! As a confirmed geek, I hate to see any aspect of electronics detract from anyone's appearance.

Should I join GRUG? Or how about a RUG?

Noblestar has just invited me to join GRUG. Or, they suggest, I might even want to join a local RUG. I think these acronyms are right up there on the embarassment scale, so I hasten to share them with you. I guess they are memorable, anyway. "GRUG" is the Global Rational User Group, and the acronym makes sense when you consider that 'Rational' is a valuable tool for developing complex software. In this case, I plan to remain one of the Global Rational User Non-Group Egalitarians. Just see if I don't.

Construction; and flipping the ticket:

There's a lot of construction at the local University. I saw a sign today on a road that's normally two-way. It said: Warning: One Way Traffic Ahead. Drivers approaching the sign were laughing about having to guess which 'one way' the University had in mind, because there was no arrow.

And speaking of finding our direction, here's Frank Rich on Oct. 4, about how convenient it might be for the Republicans to flip McCain and Pailin, to get more votes. If you don't believe what I wrote about Sarah Palin last Thursday, please believe it now.

Shopping While Jersey:

Dear New York Mayor What'sYourName: I know that this is a difficult time for New York City. You can no longer count on a great flow of dollars from your Wall Street minions. You must want us New Jerseyans to come into New York and spend whatever we can. I specifically remember mayor Giuliani asking us to help out after 9/11.

But I'm also staring, in infinite sadness, at the “no standing” ticket for $105 dollars that was just mailed to me, for picking up my wife next to one of your fine stores. Your zealousness in enforcing parking regulations for brief stops is most shortsighted. My wife and I have lost almost all interest in shopping New York. We will spend our money in New Jersey, where most stores have places to park. Too bad for you! We are disgusted.

Palin in 2012 or 2016:

The pundits are trying to assess how well Sarah Palin did in the debate tonight, but I say: that's not the point. She has just shattered a glass ceiling, and American politics will never be the same. Whatever you think of a woman's credentials for high office, Palin reminded us that television just loves a pretty face. If Palin had more experience and understanding, just put her on TV and she would blow away most men in a presidential race. I'm not the only person who's figuring this out. Palin can spend the next four or eight years in training. She'll still look good, too. She, and a few other pretty women – smarter and more experienced women, I hope – will be the new candidates for president in the coming elections. I just hope and pray that their “TV faces” won't be their best qualifications.

Millionaires of our part of the world, Unite!

This would be an awfully good time for all those executives of Immense USA Companies -- who've earned millions of dollars per year in return for destroying our economy -- to get together and pool some of their dough into funds for rescuing people who can't pay their mortgages. These wonderfully rich people have at least a few weeks to act on their own before people who are losing their mortgages start to feel really nasty.

The failure of the first bailout vote in the House was blamed -- at least in part -- on people's visceral anger against giving these money-suckers any more money. But why should those rich people appear so awful to the public eye? Why aren't they forming very visible organizations to use some of their wealth to rescue some of their, ahem, victims?

Filthy rich people, where are you? Can't you afford to be generous right now? How long do you propose to ponder the question? You may not have a handy $700 billion among you, but you can make a difference.

Greatest Error Messages:

Technologizer had an article on what are claimed to be the 13 greatest error messages of all time. Some of my favorites are missing from the list, of course. The web 404 error is claimed as the most important error, since its ubiquitousness accompanied the world-wide spread of the web itself. I would put this message as a close second:

?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

That's what the control terminal at Three Mile Island displayed when the software was overwhelmed by error messages of a melt-down. I imagine the terminal operator shouting, "Can you be more specific?"

Here are two other messages that Technologizer somehow missed:

"Cannot execute as a child of Basic." (A mainframe error message to a programmer. Reported by Steve Weintraub.)

"There is an error somewhere between the beginning and the end of your program." (a Fortran Compiler message. Most developers know that this particular error is ALWAYS true, it need not be stated.)

Sue Zahmen:

In the 1940's and '50s, we used to send short messages across country for free. I'm talking about Ma Bell Telephone, not ham radio. When I learned about this communication medium, I was so traumatized that I've remembered it ever since. My aunts, stealing from the telephone company!

My two aunts had just flown across country for a visit. We picked them up at the airport and brought them home. Now, they wanted to advise family back on the west coast that they had arrived safely. Long distance calls cost real money in those days. But here's what they did: they placed a collect call. There was a certain etiquette to collect calls that the phone company required. You told the operator your name, the person you wanted to call, and the number to call. Then, while you remained online listening, the operator placed the call and asked, “Do you wish to accept a collect call from X?”

You were required to keep your mouth shut during this interchange. Shouting “It's Edna, I'm okay!” over the operator's question was right out. But my aunts used a well-worn tactic: They told the operator they wanted to call a fanciful person, a made-up name. That way, the people at the other end knew that everything was okay, and they refused to accept the collect call.

You might think that this made-up name was a signal agreed-upon in advance, but no. During the long flight, my aunts were expected to think up a name that would surprise and delight their relatives back west, while also, in some manner of word play, suggest that they had arrived okay, together. I blush to tell you the awful name they asked for on this occasion.

Toss the Pasta Sauce!

Bruce Schneier explains what's really wrong about having the TSA screen for jars of liquid, knitting needles, and the like. His post begins with a TSA agent finding a jar of pasta sauce in Schneier's luggage. He confiscates it and tosses it into a bin full of similar jars of liquids. Schneier does not even bother to state the obvious: if those jars were explosive, tossing another explosive jar into the mix ought to be catastrophic; but no one thinks for a moment that there's the slightest danger.

Schneier moves on to a surprising conclusion. Check him out.

Apple iPhone developers need a Union:

I could stud this blog entry with links, but I won't; you can easily check my facts if you wish. Apple opened the iPhone to third-party applications, making their phone terrifically different from all the other lame phones you can buy. Hundreds (maybe thousands) of developers are preparing apps for the iPhone. Some apps are amusing, some are useful. Some are free, some can make money for their developers, and -- of course -- for Apple.

But there's a catch. To keep the iPhione clean from viruses, malicious apps and disgusting content, Apple has to approve each app. I personally would not risk a few hundred development hours when Apple has the right to tell me "thanks but no thanks" at the very end of the process. But hundreds of software people have taken that risk, and reports are multiplying of what appear to be wholly unjustified rejections by Apple. And there's a common theme: if you want to know for sure why Apple rejected your app, so that you can fix it maybe, you're out of luck. Stare at those tea leaves, you might learn something.

Apple third party developers: you need to join together. Make a guild, or a union, to negotiate with Apple, to tell the whole world when Apple is unreasonable. You need clout. Or you need to forget the iPhone, and get a life.

The Prophet of Panamindorah:

Today I'm recommending an audio book to you that I am greatly enjoying. It's the first in a series. The series is: The Prophet of Panamindorah, and the first book is Fauns and Filinians. The author, Abigail Hilton, has imagined a wondrously complex world for the settings of her tales. It sprawls over time and place, even touching down in Florida. Her world is full of imaginary creatures that are fascinating for the listener to imagine. The action is fast and furious, and a sizable handful of characters comes alive in the constant political infighting and intrigues that pepper her tale. It's a really fun read. Click the picture above to hear the promo. Here's the Web Page for Book 1 at PodioBooks. And here's the author's Panamindorah website.

Thank you, Mr. Garbage Man!

My home 'office' has a plastic antistatic mat. It's old, it has been crumbling, and it was time to replace it. I got it out of my room and contemplated how to get rid of it. It was enormous, 45" by 53", and pretty thick. If I just dropped it at the curb, garbage men would never notice it, and it would kill grass.

With difficulty, I rolled it up enough to stick it into an empty garbage can. The plastic mat stuck out way above the top of the can, but at least it was in there. Garbage men are finicky; they know what they are supposed to pick up, what to ignore. Would they take it?

They did, at the first opportunity. Thank you, Mr. garbage man.

Password Problems:

This morning, during my regular radio broadcast, I tried to log in to Google Mail, but my password was not accepted. I tried several times, watching what I typed carefully, in mounting frustration and worry. I knew I was typing the right password! I prepared to tell Gmail that I had forgotten my password; I even made sure I could log into my backup email to receive a message from Google about my password. But then common sense set in. I had no idea what was going on, so I decided to wait until I got home, even though I badly wanted access to my email.

At about the same time, I noticed something else bizarre. I always enter data into a “playlist”, about each piece of music I play. Some of the radio station keyboard keys were producing funny characters with accent marks, instead of the normal punctuation I expected.

Eventually I put two and two together. I was unable to enter my password because the keyboard was in some weird foreign language mode. If I had managed to tell Google a new password, it wouldn't have worked at home. I saved myself a day's frustration by refusing to overreact and “fix” my password right away. And now, I'm reminding myself that passwords can fail due to keyboard issues. To see if I'm experiencing such an error, I can try entering the password in my login ID field, because that field does not have a mask, so I see what I type.

And that brings me to a topic I've mentioned before. It's not so great that password fields mask your input. Unless someone is standing over your shoulder or watching nearby, you are better off seeing the password you type, for many reasons. We almost never have that option.

Baseball: neutral site

Today, I have a few outrageous suggestions for Major League Baseball. First, it's time to do like football, and play the World Series at a neutral site, in a stadium that has either mild fall weather or a dome. The current playoff schedule has pushed the game dates too late, to a point where bad weather can ruin a good competition, washing away the players' pitching and fielding skills. And by the way, team fans will travel to see the series, just as football fans travel to the Superbowl. Using a neutral site will also improve publicity and ratings. Imagine a world series between, say, Milwaukee and Washington, played -- fortunately -- in Los Angeles.

Playing the series at a neutral location eliminates travel dates. The series can be played in seven straight days, or maybe with one rest day after game four. The current format, with two rest days, over-emphasizes good front-line pitching. To get into the playoffs, a team needs a good complete staff, but winning the series requires maybe three fine starters, a closer and two setup pitchers. Fewer rest days will make the series a whole-team affair. I really want to see the hide-bound leaders of basball wake up and make this change.

Fire the Boss ...

John Dvorak's blog pointed to a column by Robert X. Cringely. It's a fascinating column that intelligently covers several topics, but eventually it focuses on how to improve an IT organization while cutting it. His solution is to fire the (likely incompetent) boss.

Cringely reminds me of a time in my career where I and my boss audited a large software organization. We eventually brought a lot of bad news to the vice president of software development at that company, including the fact that the programmers were a C+ group. (He had thought they were A- at least.) His organization was not producing, and hardly anyone realized how far behind schedule they were. He asked us how to improve his organization. We couldn't bear to tell him: he had to go. This was just one more case where you could only improve the group from the top down.

Imagine a really fine programmer coming to interview at this company. They desperately want to hire him, to improve their staff. But he sees that if he takes a job here, he'll be working for incompetent management. He sees that his coworkers won't be very competent, and their work will make his own work more difficult. He could hardly miss all the signs we saw. He won't take the job. When an organization is a mess, you can't fix it from the bottom up.

I just offered Ed Felton Five Dollars:

Ed Felton has a fascinating new argument about the value of privacy. He looks at situations where people are willing to give away their privacy for very small compensation. Traditionally, experts argue that such actions show that people don't value their privacy. Ed argues differently: If you know that your birth date is readily available, you will probably be willing to sell it to someone for very little. Ed says that if people sell their personal details readily and cheaply, they are showing that they believe their private details are already poorly protected, and thus worth little.

I wonder how Ed values his privacy, especially where security is involved. So I just offered Ed Felton five dollars for the right to publish information about a specific time period when his house will be unoccupied. (You'll see my offer among the comments to his argument.) I'm making a sincere offer, and I really don't know whether Ed will go for it.

I Gave Blood!

In my life, I've given over eight gallons of blood. But for the last five or so years, I was on a “permanently deferred” list, for alternately failing and passing one of their precautionary blood tests.

Many medical tests are quantitative. You run a test that produces some sort of score, and people decide that a certain score is a pass or fail. They set the scores to minimize either false positives or false negatives, whichever is most awful. In the case of keeping the blood supply clean, false positives are less serious. The blood bank doctor who stopped me from giving blood was frank about this. My test was borderline, but two borderline fails and I was out.

About five years went by, and I passed the test yet again. I started thinking – after all this time, maybe the test has become more precise. I applied to the blood bank again to be allowed to give blood. The doctor agreed that the test had become more accurate and was happy to retest me one more time, and I passed.

Today was the glorious day when I went to the familiar blood room, and observed all the procedures that had stayed the same, and all the procedures that had changed. It was a triumph for me, but also a day of great nostalgia. I have only a few more years to give blood before I'm too old, but I might get to the ten gallon mark.

Here's one of the things that has changed since I last gave blood: Afterwards, the technician placed the usual bandage over the spot where she had drawn blood. She said “Be careful to bend your elbow as little as possible. There's no inflammation there now, but if you bend it a lot, there will be.”
I whined, “How do you remember not to bend your elbow?”
“Oh,” she said, “I just told you that to make me feel better.”

The Intelligently Designed Game of Spore:

Will Wright's game of Spore will be released this Friday and Sunday. The game has had great publicity, and it will rank among the most popular computer games for years. Spore features a faux simulation of evolution, incorrect in many respects; yet it will give its players a sense of how evolution can work. In the game, a few simple rules govern how creatures can evolve. Hordes of people have been tinkering with the game's initial evolution machine, and they have produced a prodigious variety of creatures.

Now here's what interests me:

Kids who are anti-evolutionists will play this game. Children of proponents of Intelligent Design will play this game. Anti-evolutionist grown-ups will play this game. How will it affect their perception of evolution? If you do not believe in evolution, what will you say about this game?

You might just diss Spore, or even try to ban it. Or you might claim that what happens in this game is actually a form of Intelligent Design. But there's no getting around the fact that the game will familiarize people with evolution. And once you get the hang of it, there may be no going back. And don't forget, Spore will be taught in the schools -- informally, even though it's not part of the curriculum -- it's going to be the main topic of discussion for a lot of gamers, for months.