Geoff Arnold

Back to basics

After my recent rant about the lamentable state of the US cellphone market, I calmed down. What am I really looking for? I've already got a decentadequate digital camera; I've got a Bluetooth mouse, so I don't need to use my phone as a remote control for my PowerBook (plus I won't always be using my PowerBook - more in a week or two). I need a basic cellphone that has decent battery life, good signal reception, good audio, and an easy UI. I use the WAP! portal! to! My! Yahoo! a lot, so decent GPRS (EDGE) is a plus. Oh, and I'd like a usable hands-free solution, rather than that earbud-on-a-string that always seems to get tangled in my seatbelt.

So today, after my Nokia 3650 spontaneously powered off for the umpteenth time, I picked up a Motorola V551, along with a Motorola Bluetooth headset. Let's see how it goes. I've noted one annoyance already: Motorola and Apple don't agree about Bluetooth, so to use iSync I'll have to get a cable. And when I select silent or vibrate mode I'd like a really clear indication of this in the external display. But on balance, I like it. It feels right; menus are mostly clear; the multimedia stuff is ignorable; the screen is dazzling; predictive text entry is a little easier than I'm used to; IM and email is a snap. The battery claims are impressive; we'll see what reality is like.

Oh, yes, I did have one more criterion: that the price be low enough that if the perfect phone comes along tomorrow I won't feel like a schmuck.

Busy, busy, busy

Five days without a blog entry... unthinkable! But I've actually been very busy, catching up with my reading for the Philosophy of Mind course I'm taking this semester at Tufts.

Now you have to understand that the last time I was in school was back in 1977, when I was at the University of Newcastle-on-Tyne in England. 28 years on and 3,500 miles away, things are a little different! This class meets twice a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays. Before each session, we go through a selection of readings on the topic for the day and submit our comments (which are assessed as part of the grading). We post the comments by 9pm the day before the class to an on-line Blackboard discussion board, where we can (and do!) all read and comment on each others' submissions. And finally a streaming video of each class is posted to the Blackboard about a week after the class.

One thing that I've been worried about is how occasional business travel might disrupt class work. It looks as if the web-based tools will definitely help. I can see it now: reading the next selections at FL350 BOS-SFO, comments and dialogue via Blackboard from the Holiday Inn in Palo Alto.... Not ideal, but feasible. We'll see.

Feeling fated...

This semester I'm going back to school. I've signed up to take Dan Dennett's Philosophy of Mind course at Tufts, and the first classes are this week. I knew that it was going to be a challenge to fit classes and work into my schedule; I hadn't counted on the weather.

The first class was scheduled for Monday, but with the blizzard last weekend everything (including Tufts) was closed. So the next session was this afternoon, Wednesday, 4:00-5:15. Coincidentally, we're having another winter storm today. We've only had about 7 inches so far, but after the blizzard that felt like nothing. (Note the overconfident attitude.) So after finishing up a work (phone) meeting, I set out to drive the 12 miles from Brookline to Medford.

It was a nightmare. Even a major artery like Route 9 was deep in slush. Every time I touched the brakes I felt the ABS chattering to try and get a grip on something, anything. I'd only gone a couple of miles, and it looked like I would be lucky to average 10 MPH.

And then I cautiously stopped at a red light at the bottom of a hill, and looked in my mirror, transfixed, as a car slid down the hill towards me, obviously out of control. Somehow the driver managed to scrub off some speed by steering into the snowbank at the side of the road, and stopped inches behind me.

I pulled off onto a side street, called Tufts to explain that I wouldn't be at class, and then drove home very carefully. It's important to keep your priorities straight.

A brilliant "what if" from Juan Cole

Imagine if Bush was blessed with a modicum of foresight, and had told the truth about a war against Iraq back in 2002. In The Speech Bush Should have Given, Juan Cole describes what such a speech might have said - about the costs in dollars and lives, about the geopolitical issues, about the reasons. Money (ouch!) quote: "A war against Iraq will be expensive. It will cost you, the taxpayer, about $300 billion over five years. I know Wolfowitz is telling you Iraq's oil revenues will pay for it all, but that's ridiculous. Iraq only pumps about $10 billion a year worth of oil, and it's going to need that just to run the new government we're putting in. No, we're going to have to pay for it, ourselves. I'm going to ask you for $25 billion, then $80 billion, then another $80 billion. And so on. I'm going to be back to you for money more often than that unemployed relative that you don't like. The cost of the war is going to drive up my already massive budget deficits from about $370 billion to more like $450 billion a year. Just so you understand, I'm going to cut taxes on rich people at the same time that I fight this war. Then I'm going to borrow the money to fight it, and to pay for much of what the government does. And you and your children will be paying off that debt for decades."

Dial 999 (or 911), then hop in the shower

I know that multiply-resistant pathogens are a significant risk in hospitals, but even so, this BBC story seems to go a bit far: "Patients should bring their own medical wipes and scrub up before coming to hospital to cut MRSA, say advisors. They should ask relatives to launder their clothes and make sure their visitors have washed themselves properly before entering the ward. The Patients Association's 10-point code also advises patients to collect their own rubbish."

I can see it now: "Dearie me - it looks like you're having a heart attack. Why don't you pop upstairs and have a quick shower, while I wash my hands, call an ambulance, and pack a few bin liners."

Colour-blind, gender-blind

James Wolcott describes: "watching Senator Joe Lieberman [...] drone his support for the nomination of Condi Rice as Secretary of Clueless, arguing that we should celebrate the breakthrough confirmation of an African-American woman for such a powerful post, even though her being African-American and a woman were irrelevant to her qualifications. Then why bring it up? I suppose it's progress of a sort when a duplicitous incompetent can be promoted regardless of race or gender [...] but it ought to make for a muted celebration." Indeed.

(Via Jon, who manages to be amused by it - no small achievement.)

On being a True Believer...

James Lileks, on how owning the latest gear from Apple makes you... well, better: cool, more hip, just a superior kind of human being. But as he admits "On the other hand, I must be honest. Those of us who are true Apple devotees will buy almost anything they make. We know it, and we don't care. If they came out with an iPod RiceGrain that was implanted under your skin and played six notes, I'd buy it."

The future of flying... :-)

Virgin A380 Floor Plans....

But what if the shoe were on the other foot?

Marty Lederman has once again taken aim at Heather MacDonald, self-appointed apologist for administation policy about Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. In a recent item in Balkinization, he writes "Let’s be very clear about this: The DoD General Counsel (who’s recently been renominated for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit) concluded that threats of killing a detainee’s family members, and waterboarding, and forced nudity, and the use of dogs to induce stress, etc., not only did not violate the UCMJ, but are ‘humane’! There is no indication in the public record that Secretary Rumsfeld or any other high-level DoD official ever contradicted or overruled these legal conclusions — and every indication that Rumsfeld agreed with them."

And while it's a point that has been made before, let me repeat: would Ms. MacDonald regard such policies as "humane" and "legal" if they were applied to captured US troops by another power - North Vietnam, say, or perhaps Iran? (Arguing for a difference between regular troops and "terrorists" won't wash - most of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib had not been legally classified, and the presumption should have been that they were therefore covered by Geneva.) Such an acknowledgement is unlikely to be forthcoming any time soon....

(Via Sully.)

Rant: PO'd at stupid US cellphone companies

For the last year or two, I've been using a Nokia 3650 cell phone. It's quite a nice unit - BlueTooth, a decent screen, Java, a few cool apps (including remote control of my PowerBook), a basic camera, international roaming via GSM - but it's getting a little long in the tooth. Recently it's taken to powering off spontaneously, which is a little tedious. So it's time to look for a new phone.

There are lots of really cool phones out there these days.

• 3G phones like Motorola's gorgeous A1000
• the latest version of Nokia's intriguing Communicator, the 9500
• Sony Ericsson's cool S700 and amazing P910i
• The "Imate" family, such as O2's XDA IIs and XDA II mini (sold under various other names)
• the Treo 650, where palmOne finally got it (mostly) right
• even HP, with their iPaq 6315 - like the Imate, this include WiFi

I'm sure I've missed some. But they all have one thing in common: none of them are available from my phone company. I'm with AT&T Wireless, now merged with Cingular, which makes it unquestionably the biggest GSM provider in the USA. And what do they have for phones? Crap. Or, rather, vanilla, with a few teasers like the Motorola V3 RAZR. I suppose I could switch to T-Mobile, just to get the Treo 650, but the odds are that next time I'm in the market it will be their turn to be behind. Do I really have to buy an unlocked phone? (I know: I'm cheap. But why not?) Don't the US providers want my business? Do they really think that Blackberry has sewn up the high end market? (It hasn't.) Or do they only care about the 12-25 year old market? (Dumb.)

What's wrong with the US market? Why are all the exciting wireless innovations happening in Japan and Europe? And how much would an unlocked O2 XDA IIs cost me....?

(I didn't bother to take the time to hyperlink all of those phones and companies. You know where to find them. One of my favorite sites for drooling over unattainable gadgetry is Mobile Phones UK. Please wipe the saliva off your keyboard afterwards.)

A few more storm-related pictures

After the snow finally abated, I went out to clear off my car before our ploughing service arrived. (Yes, we have a two-car garage, but my - presently non-running - Miata occupies my space, so my Cougar lives outside.) Opening the door revealed a nice drift to be dug out. The wind had been so fierce that some of the driveway was clear of snow, while other parts had drifts sculpted into sand-dune-like shapes. Fortunately, the town had done a decent job of ploughing the streets around here.

A little storm-related item: Boston.com just reported that the retired Boston Globe columnist David Nyhan died today, while shovelling snow. He was 64, and had left the paper (taken the package) at the time of the New York Times takeover. I always enjoyed his irreverence, especially his ability to get under the skin of Boston's powerful religious lobbies.

Snow pictures

I was wandering round the house this morning with my camera, looking for shots that might capture the feel of this snowstorm without actually requiring me to expose myself to the elements! I took a shot out of the front door - notice how the snow is drifting in the porch, and around the tree by the road. Then looking out of a side window, I saw this downy woodpacker, covered in snow, pecking desperately into a branch. I hope he found some food.... (As usual, click thumbnails for the full-size images.)

UPDATE: Just as I was finishing this blog entry, my wife spotted what looked like newspapers at the end of the front path, and prevailed upon me to go out to retrieve them. For some reason the lyrics from Al Stewart's song "Antarctica" drifted into my mind: "The hopeless quest of Shackleton, The dreamlike death of Scott". Nevertheless I donned boots and coat and plunged into a snowdrift almost up to my waist, while my wife attempted to take pictures of me.

Will this storm beat the blizzard of '78

Since they're forecasting snowfalls of 20 to 30 28 to 38 20 to 30 inches in Boston before this storm winds down, I thought I'd see what it would take to break the records, especially the famous "blizzard of '78". Here's the data from the NWS:

Most Snow in 1 Day     Most Snow in 2 Days       Most Snow in 3 Days

21.0  Jan 20 1978      27.1  Feb   6-7 1978      27.1  Feb   5-7 1978

20.0  Jan 24 1945      21.4  Jan 20-21 1978      25.8  Feb 24-26 1969 

19.3  Feb 16 1958      20.7  Feb 24-25 1969      22.8  Jan 22-24 1945

19.0  Feb  7 1978      20.0  Jan 24-25 1945      21.7  Jan 18-20 1978

15.0  Feb 20 1934      19.7  Mar   3-4 1960

14.3  Feb  4 1961

13.8  Jan  7 1977

A blunt warning from the weatherman

When severe weather threatens, I usually visit our local National Weather Service website and open up the discussion page. This is where the forecasters exchange information: where they talk about how the computer models are converging (or not), the range of possibilities, and how - and why - they come up with an overall forecast. Lots of little details that don't make it into the forecast you hear on TV, using lots of jargon. But this afternoon, the discussion begins very simply: "Probable top ten snowstorm/blizzard for portions of sne is at hand and whereever you are this evening around 7 PM we recommend you be prepared to stay there through at least noon tomorrow". "sne" is Southern New England, and we're talking about a storm that will be among the 10 biggest on record for this area. 20 to 30 inches of snow and blizzard conditions, from late this afternoon through into Sunday. Cape Cod may get in excess of 30 inches.

How should one cope with such a situation? It seems very simple. I'm about to cook up a big pot of stew - beef, root vegetables, mushrooms, celery, red wine, onions, garlic, and herbs. Comfort food for a wild and wintry night. Now, where did I put the potato peeler...?

Thought-provoking piece on reframing the gay rights question

How many of you, in supporting gay rights, have used the argument that discrimination is unfair because being gay, like being black, isn't a question of choice? And yet, an it harm none, why shouldn't we be defending the right to a freely-chosen life? Excellent piece over at Shakespeare's Sister: Reframing Gay Rights: "A wise start to reframing this argument is to leave behind the repeated invocations of the standard and tiresome fare, ‘It’s not a choice.’ If Liberals are to be true to their words that my rights end where yours begin, then we must acknowledge that whether homosexuality is a choice or not has no bearing on whether we defend the rights of gays and lesbians. The whole point of a free country is allowing people the freedom to make decisions for themselves as they best see fit, including whether to choose a partner of the same sex. A same-sex relationship does not infringe upon anyone else’s rights, so whether it’s by design or choice shouldn’t make a dime’s worth of difference to any Liberal intent on protecting the freedom and rights of all Americans."

(Via Terry - get well soon.)

Must-see 3D iMax: Aliens of the Deep

Over at Boing-Boing, Xeni Jardin is waxing lyrical about James Cameron's 3D iMax film: Aliens of the Deep. Quote: "I still can't get one of these deep, deep, deep-sea creatures out of my head -- shown here. Looked like a giant diaphanous curtain of glass, rippling through the water. Amazing. And amazing because it is real, and alive, and not a product of CGI." I can't wait to see it, even if I will have to wear dorky cardboard 3D glasses.

So many T-shirts, so little time

Just stumbled across J!NX, a delightfully bizarre collection of l33t T-shirts. I can imagine wearing at least half of them to work.... Favourites: Computers are fun and useful, Your skill in Reading has increased by 1 point (one for the Fellowship, I fancy), It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue. (how I spent the early 1980s), and neurochemistry hacker. Very cool. (Even the gross and edgy stuff.)

On Apple, BMW, and Minis

Like many Mac users, I've dismissed talk of Apple's miniscule share of the personal computer market by (a) pointing out that many of those PCs are just glorified 3270s/VT100s/Wang word processors/cash registers, and (b) invoking the "BMW argument": what market share does BMW have - and does that stop them from being a really important, cool, desirable brand? So now Apple goes and releases a couple of down-market products, and various people are asking, understandably, "is Apple blowing its BMW model?". Frank Steele has a nice response: "Perhaps BMW could create (or purchase) a second brand that sold cars that were not quite so expensive. Maybe comparable in price to other cars, but maybe a little smaller, and fun. [...] But what could BMW possibly call such a company?"

(Via Oren.)

Nerd? Moi?

Blame Alec.

UPDATED:

Blame Kevin.

Pure self-indulgence

Grocery shopping on Sunday, I picked up a little sample cup of some white frozen stuff. Walked down the aisle, tasted it... and literally ran back to grab a couple of pints of it. Probably a New England thing. Usual disclaimers, etc. 'Nuff said.

Review: Iain M. Banks: "The Algebraist"

Back on December 10, I reported that I'd acquired a new Iain M. Banks novel, The Algebraist. As I noted on my books page, Iain M. Banks is at the top of the list of authors I will buy sight unseen.

So how come I'm only reporting on it now?

This is an odd book. It's fairly long (544 pages), and I found myself reading the first 300 pages relatively slowly. Huge amounts of detail, a back story stretching over billions of years, a wide variety of alien species for whom conventionally anthropomorphic thinking was unhelpful.... Over a couple of weeks I read on, fascinated, but only able to absorb one or two chapters at a sitting. And then on December 25th we flew out to Seattle, and after we returned I got sick, and the great grey tome sat there, unread.

As I surfaced from the flu, I hesitatingly picked up the book, and started back in. Fairly quickly, I found things changing. The tempo picks up, then becomes almost giddying as armadas of starships battle and needle-ships corkscrew through one wormhole after another, ricocheting around the universe like badly aimed fireworks. An underlying pattern on a galactic scale emerges, and is purposefully erased. Characters and plotlines are abruptly trashed. And as the deus ex machina recedes, the book ends on a wholly unexpected note. If the first 300 pages took me 10 days, the last 250 zipped by in 5 or 6 hours over two days.

I really don't know how to judge this book. (I note that other reviewers have felt the same way.) Fundamentally it falls between two stools. There's a taut, 300 page space opera in here just begging to get out: simplify the back story, eliminate half the characters and three quarters of the species, and let it rip. But there's also a 1,200 page epic here, balancing the thoughtful and detailed preamble with a more complex and challenging quest for the central character and better resolution of some of the secondary themes. In either case I'd also want more autonomy for our human hero, rather than feeling that he's simply dragged around the galaxy by forces larger than himself. It's hard to identify and empathize with supercargo.

Overall, I'm really glad that I read the book: there are more ideas here than most sci-fi writers can achieve over a lifetime. But it's frustrating. And US fans of Banks' work will have to buy from the UK; there's still no US publication date set as far as I can see.

Quick review: Lemony Snicket

On a whim, the "Fellowship" gathered this evening in Burlington to eat Korean food and see Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. The food was good (after a certain sharp-eyed person spotted shrimp in a supposedly vegetarian appetizer, thereby saving two allergic people from a horrible experience), and the film was sheer magic. From the spoof introduction to the mind-bending credits, the whole thing was delightful. Excellent performances from Liam Aiken and Emily Browning as Klaus and Violet, Billy Connolly as Uncle Monty, and Jim Carrey as Count Olaf; the best, however, was Meryl Streep's tour de force as Aunt Josephine. I had not read the books; I had no idea what to expect; I haven't laughed so hard in many, many films.

Not waving, but dialling....

OK, I admit it: the only reason to blog about this was because I couldn't resist using this subject line. As CNET reports, Samsung is launching a motion-sensitive mobile phone: "Samsung said the phone is also able to recognize and translate more complex movements, including dialing numbers drawn in the air using the handset or recognizing an 'o' or an 'x' drawn in the air as a yes or no command. " I imagine they'll use "gumby" clips from Monty Python in the TV ads...

(Via L'Inq.)

Illogic

From Reuters via Yahoo!: "White House spokesman Scott McClellan said [...] that 'based on what we know today, the president would have taken the same action' -- war with Iraq -- in order to 'confront a threat posed by Saddam Hussein."

Since we know today that Saddam Hussein possessed no WMDs, what exactly was the threat that he posed? Does McClellan realize how stupid he sounds?

All the news that's fit to gloss over....

The number of people who believe that Saddam Hussein's Iraq actually possessed weapons of mass destruction must by now be in single digits. However the fact that the US has finally abandoned the search for WMD still seems newsworthy - after all, wasn't a war launched on the strength of that falsehood, resulting in thousands of deaths and years of bloody chaos? But as Salon reports: "If you missed this bit of news, that's because in our town's newspaper, a little publication called the New York Times [...] it was buried inside on A10 in a 240-word news brief." (My emphasis.)

(I can't wait to see how Daniel Okrent, the NYT "public editor", explains this one.)

Creative commies

Like many others I was both outraged and amused at Bill Gates' absurd comments about intellectual property and communists. I've now updated my blog template to change the Creative Commons link to use one of Robert Corr's nice buttons. Pass it on....

More Java cores than you know what to do with

After publishing a skeptical and rather petulant piece about Azul last October, El Reg decided to give Azul's CMO, Shahin Khan, his own soapbox this week. He certainly waxed lyrical "If you could count CPUs the same way that you count memory, some problems would simply become uninteresting and others would transform in a qualitative way. And completely new possibilities would emerge. [...] No need to plan capacity for each individual application. Let all of your users share a huge compute pool and plan capacity across many applications."

Well, maybe. Remember that Azul is planning to ship up to 1,200 cores in a single rack, but these core will be specialized Java™ engines. Now I'd love to see Java take over the world and remove the need for any other kind of operating environment, but for the next few years, while we're waiting for this brave new world, systems like Azul's are going to have to coexist with mundane Solaris and Linux boxes. In other words, it's a co-processor, an "applications accelerator". And ever since the days of "intelligent Ethernet cards" (anyone remember the 3C505?) I've observed that such co-processors are doomed to be overtaken by general-purpose processors. The only obvious exception is in the area of graphics. Not only are the specialized processors not that much faster than their general-purpose brethren; the cost and complexity of the software needed to manage the co-processor usually eats up all of the savings. In the case of the 3C505, I remember that the host driver to manage the on-board TCP/IP stack was roughly as complex as a TCP/IP stack!

Don't get me wrong - I think that multiple core are absolutely the way to go. Various companies - Sun, IBM, even Intel - are realizing that the best way forward is to simplify their pipelines to reduce the size and complexity of their cores so that they can stuff more cores on a chip. Designing around Java byte-codes rather than RISC ops doesn't save all that much.

Will Azul prove me wrong? I'm not holding my breath....

Carrier on Flew

I've just come across a lengthy post on the Internet Infidels DB by Richard Carrier, which goes into considerable detail about the Antony Flew debate.
Key quotes:
"It bothers me that Flew has not [...] even bothered looking for critiques of Schroeder, much less considered them. He told me so--just as he told me he has not kept up on current science, even of biogenesis, much less cosmology."

"[Flew] thinks that life started with a DNA molecule (that is false--no biologist today believes that), and that the smallest possible replicating DNA molecule is so complex that it could not have arisen by chance (that is also false--or at most remains unproven--even assuming life did begin with a DNA molecule)."

"It is still unclear to me why or how Flew's imagined Deity thus accomplished the origin of life if it was (essentially) physically impossible, without supernaturally interfering in the natural order of the universe (since Flew insists he does not believe his Deity does that). This is one of several contradictions in Flew's overall position that bothers me. Flew's conclusion makes more sense as resulting from a fine-tuning argument, not an impossibility-of-life argument, yet he tells me the fine-tuning argument isn't what impressed him. I can't make sense of this.".

Carrier's other comments are extremely interesting, and will have me re-reading some of Flew's earlier work. (As for probabilities and protobiont sequences, see Ian Musgrave's excellent tutorial.)

[UPDATE] Richard Carrier has now updated his piece on SecWeb about Flew's "conversion".

"Antony Flew has retracted one of his recent assertions. In a letter to me dated 29 December 2004, Flew concedes: 'I now realize that I have made a fool of myself by believing that there were no presentable theories of the development of inanimate matter up to the first living creature capable of reproduction.'"

Flew inaccurately blames Dawkins for this. According to Carrier, he goes further: "Flew also makes another admission: 'I have been mistaught by Gerald Schroeder.' He says 'it was precisely because he appeared to be so well qualified as a physicist (which I am not) that I was never inclined to question what he said about physics.'"

Sad, but c'est la vie. If Flew does indeed feel that "I am just too old at the age of nearly 82 to initiate and conduct a major and super radical controversy about the conceivability of the putative concept of God as a spirit,", perhaps it would have been wiser if he had resisted the temptation to publicise his recent series of statements and retractions.

In the circumstances, Carrier's conclusion, though harsh, seems to be justified: "Flew has thus abandoned the very standards of inquiry that led the rest of us to atheism. It would seem the only way to God is to jettison responsible scholarship. [...] Theists would do well to drop the example of Flew. Because his willfully sloppy scholarship can only help to make belief look ridiculous."

Charity cards

It's that time of the Christmas/Hannukah/Solstice/New Year season when we go through all of the cards that we've received: updating addresses, reading individual or round robin letters, noting people to be added to the list or those who have not responded for a few years. If you ignore the commercial material, about half our cards are from people in the US, with most of the rest from the UK; there are also a few from Australia and Europe. And as I read through the cards, one thing struck me. More than two-thirds of the cards from the UK and Europe were "charity" cards, purchased to support organizations such as Unicef, Save the Children, Shelter, Scope, Oxfam, React, and so on; even Cats Protection got a look-in. Only a couple of the US cards were of this kind. It seemed like an odd cultural difference.

2004 - the Questions

Here are the questions to which these were the answers:

• Why did my wife cause our Scandinavian vacation to be cancelled?
• How did my mother's surgeon describe the tumour on her colon?
• How did my daughter announce that she was expecting her first child?
• What eyesore did we finally get rid of from the basement this December?
• What was my visit to Seattle at Easter notable for?
• What was "The Project"?
• What was the paradox in distributed computing that had me scratching my head all year?
• What was the best new music of 2004?
• What changed my life in 2004?
• How am I spending my Christmas?
• What's my answer to Jim Waldo's challenge: "Is there a notion of object which is independent of the language in which one is programming?"
• What was the greatest fun I had with my blog all year?

It's going to be an odd election in Iraq....

As River reports, "technically, we don't know the candidates. We know the principal heads of the lists but we don't know who exactly will be running. It really is confusing. They aren't making the lists public because they are afraid the candidates will be assassinated"

An election in which the voters don't know who the candidates are? That sounds weird enough. But then there are the voter registration cards:

[O]n all the voting cards, the gender of the voter, regardless of sex, is labeled "male". [...] Why is the sex on the card anyway? [...] Some are saying that many of the more religiously inclined families won't want their womenfolk voting so it might be permissible for the head of the family to take the women's ID and her ballot and do the voting for her. Another theory is that this 'mistake' will make things easier for people making fake IDs to vote in place of females.

Apparently there's a brisk trade in voting cards: the going rate is around $400. But at least River's family has received voting cards. In many places, election officials are refusing to carry out voter registration because of death threats.

Looking for the plus-three-sigma customer

A reference in Marion's blog sent me off to a fascinating piece by James Governor: Why Sun Software Licensing is Like a Hermann Miller Chair. He starts with the counter-intuitive fact that some customers are reported as saying that our flat-rate pricing for JES is "confusing". Governor makes the point that the confusion comes not the pricing model but from its unfamiliarity. He cites Malcom Gladwell, who argues in his new book, Blink, "that it's a mistake to rely on the first impressions of customers who are inherently biased against the unfamiliar" and that "focus groups hold back, rather than encourage innovation."

Like Governor and Gladwell, I'm skeptical about the use of focus groups in the early stages of developing radical product and business concepts; I see more use for them in refining and evolving well-defined products. Rather than focus groups, I prefer the "voice of the customer" approach: standardized, semi-scripted interviews with an opportunity for open-ended responses. In addition to supporting the usual statistical analysis, VoC encourages what I call "the plus-three-sigma customers" to speak their minds. These are the folks who are out ahead of all the other customers - and usually ahead of us too! They're the ones who aren't confused by the unfamiliar, and who tend to be impatient with groupthink. To return to Governor's piece, they're the folks who would grab that ugly Aeron chair and and see at once how to build their workspace around it. They're our natural collaborators in exploiting innovative and contrarian technologies.

Nothing left but dust, and fundamentalists...

I'm glad Alec checked out the Reality drama at the Creation Museum, so I don't have to. Too much for me in my flu-weakened state :-)

(Via CIDOMLB.)

Sleeping with the enemy (metaphorically, I hasten to add)

Regular readers will know that I often pick up blog-worthy items from Andrew Sullivan. Why do I read him? I mean, he's a pompous right-wing blow-hard... but he did turn against Bush in the recent election, he's done the right thing on Abu Ghraib while others have ignored it, and... oh, I don't know, maybe it's that gay chic thing, you know? "Queer Eye for the Political Guy".... And then Terry nails him with a directness that jerks me out of my composure.

It starts with Sully's "QUOTE FOR THE DAY: 'I'd much rather be doing this than figthing [sic] a war,' - helicopter pilot Lt. Cmdr. William Whitsitt, helping the survivors of the south Asian tsunami. Earth to Whitsitt: you're a soldier.

This earns Sully a swift rebuke from Terry: "having been to a war, and having helped people, I'd rather be doing the latter than the former. If Sullivan wants to question why... I'll be more than willing to hand him a rifle, a flack vest, and a Basic Load, and take him for a couple of long walks in Falluja."

Apparently Sully caught a ton of flak for this piece, and he had the good grace to include a couple of responses on the front page and the feedback section. Sully bleats pitifully that his "point is that the military is primarily about fighting and winning wars" - but does that mean that a soldier has to prefer killing to helping?! Does Sully want a soldiery composed of amoral robots with no compassion or humanity?

(Why did that last point remind me of Rumsfeld? Anyway, from now on Sully has to earn my readership.)

The Return of the King

I've been laid low for the last 48 hours with flu, but curiously that hasn't meant that I've been stuck in bed. In fact I've found myself sleeping for 4 hours getting up for 2 or 3, and so on. I've tried reading, but that doesn't work, so I've mostly been watching the bonus features on the The Return of the King (Extended Edition) DVD. I'd watched the film itself on Thursday, with some friends, and now I find that dipping into the various documentaries is exactly the right speed for my fevered brain at 4 in the morning. Among the high points:

• Home of the Horse Lords, about the horses in the film - their selection and training, and the extraordinary actor-horse relationships that developed. The dedication of the equestrian extras. The breathtaking work of the stunt rider who doubled for Gandalf on Shadowfax. Stunning.
• In the sequence about the world-wide premieres of RotK (towards the end of The End of All Things), the Norwegian event was unexpectedly special. It was held in a sports arena, with a huge screen, and before the film was shown 200 volunteers reenacted the key scenes from the first two films.
• The Abandoned concept material about a version of the battle at the Black Gate in which Aragorn would battle Sauron. WHAT?! How could they even think of betraying such a key element of Tolkien's vision by rendering immaterial evil as concrete? Fortunately, sanity was restored.
• The documentary material on Cameron Duncan, a teenage New Zealand film-maker who succumbed to cancer while LotR was being filmed. Peter Jackson introduces a tenuous connection with the film (to do with the closing song), but he didn't need to do that. After pulling off such a stupendous achievement, he's entitled to put anything he wants in the DVD extras.
• Odd things, like the fact that the scene with Sam and Frodo on the stairs (when Frodo sends Sam away) was shot in two sessions a full year apart.

So that's how I'm spending my time. Well, that and watching Tottenham's 5-2 win over Everton.