Japan’s Kaguya lunar orbiter is sending back some incredible photos, including this photo of an earthrise.

Here are many other photos (click the HDTV tab).  Here’s a post (by NASA) discussing the lunar missions of Japan and China.

As usual my head is abuzz with the social media explosion and the impact technology has on my world. While communication has always been a part of the technology, folks that barely own computers are becoming familiar with Linkedin, Facebook, myspace, and twitter.  iPhones are being advertised so deliciously on television ads that my lust can barely be contained, not to mention the tiniest of notebook computers making an appearance with the cutest of jingles. Sometimes I am not sure If what I am doing makes sense for my business. Sometimes I worry that I waste my time with my focus on all this geeky technology and social media web 2.0 stuff.

I am no expert, but as usual I know enough to be dangerous, and to provide a lively conduit to my less technologically focused comrades. A less kind way of saying that is that I am obsessed with technology and communication but that I have people in my life who keep me from completely disappearing into the matrix. I love social connections technology provides, and I have for as long as I can remember. I went from devouring Asimov and Heinlein as a child and dreaming about connections within world to almost going broke networking coffeehouses with chat and email and online information in St. Louis prior to the web explosion.

One of the reasons I ventured out on my own in recruiting is that I could experiment with stuff like this and the stuff that is still being developed. I have had a lot of success with the social media in recruiting, and love the heck out of it. There is truly a dizzying amount of activity, and it promises to be a wild ride as we venture even more into interactivity and robust network applications. It can be a distraction, but I have found that as long as my online activities drive me back to the telephone (or my bottom line) I am okay. It is hard to focus and be that disciplined with all the fun, crazy stuff happening out there, but recruiting success (like most of life) really is about discipline and focus. I know I have to stay balanced, and a tool like twitter is very dangerous for us folks easily distracted by shiny bits, but it is also a way to find people, and that is what I do for a living. I guess it is always all about the results, and I should just let those decide if my geeky methods are helpful or harmful.

I believe that life is always enhanced by connection, which is partly why I love being a recruiter. And though I know that a lot of folks scoff at meaningful connections through a computer or a mobile device, for me it goes without saying that the lines between the virtual world and that of my own back yard are now so blurred as to be almost indistinguishable. I have had countless virtual world interactions that changed my life, made me money, or led me to find new friends or business contacts, so there is no debate on the value to me. The challenge for me lies in finding a balance. The dizzying real time feeds of email, tweets, chat and mobile blogging are as necessary to me as my morning cup of joe, but I have to work to find a way to stay grounded, centered and balanced in my approach, otherwise I might go crazy. So I am working on it. I think it is funny that I try to do 20 minutes of sitting meditation each morning, and then I go off to work, but it does seem to help me keep my balance.

Recruiting efficiently has a lot to do with doing effective research. That is why I think my methods might be interesting to people that are not just recruiters. Here is an example of how I use twitter. Think of it as a constant explosion of 140 character thoughts into space. Steams of consciousness from an unidentified number of consciousnesses. Random thoughts, pointers to pictures and articles and interviews and what someone had for dinner. Dizzying, right? You can follow people and see, in real-time, their streams on your screen. Entertaining, fun, pretty pointless though, right? Wrong.

Enter tweet scan, a real-time twitter search. For example, I will search for St. Louis tweets, and what do we find? An ever growing and surprisingly active list of folks using twitter here in my home town. Coolio! I am seeing denizens of the web that I never realized were there. But wait, what is that? Oh, a tweet from someone I might know, who knew that guy was on twitter. Man I need to get back in touch with that guy, uh, wait, holy cow. He is tweeting that he is hiring people, and is having problems. He needs me!

Uh, sorry guys, I gotta run. Right there is some potential business popping its head up and, as a rhino, I need to charge right after it. But isn’t it amazing how such a seemingly pointless tool can help you do what you need to do?  Or at least it can if you know how to use it.

On Feb. 28, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore. submitted House Congressional Resolution 305 for consideration to the House of Representatives: “Recognizing the importance of bicycling in transportation and recreation.” I assume that this resolution is a perfectly valid reaction to this boneheaded statement by one of Bush’s appointees.

I don’t think Blumenauer’s resolution has any chance of passing, because it suggests that some money now going for highways should actually be used to encourage people to use bicycles for their transportation needs.   God forbid that we actually encourage such a perfectly sensible mode of transportation.  You know the arguments, prevents obesity, uses no fossil fuel, cheap, is perfect for urban commutes.  I’ve previously posted on some of the many reasons to use a bicycle for commuting.  There are, indeed, many reasons for doing so, especially in an urban area where many commutes are fewer than five miles.  BTW, what would a bicycle-friendly city look like?  Here’s one version.

I learned of Bluemenauer’s resolution by reading Andrew Leonard’s article in Salon.com, “Life and death and bicycling.”  Just because you use a bicycle doesn’t mean you are “green.”  Leonard includes a Sierra Club test to see how “green” you are.  I am a rather cool 92 out of 100, a very green cyclist! 

I do want to publicly thank Representative Blumenauer for bringing some much-needed attention to bicycles as a serious mode of transportation.   His resolution is chock full of statistics that should (but likely won’t) wake up those who don’t yet take bicycling seriously.   I’m pasting in, below, the full text of Bluemauer’s resolution on the importance of bicycling (here’s another place to read the full resolution):

Mr. BLUMENAUER (for himself and Mr. OBERSTAR) submitted the following concurrent resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure

Whereas a national transportation system conducive to bicycling produces enriched health, reduced traffic congestion and air pollution, economic vitality, and an overall improved quality of living is valuable for the Nation;

Whereas by dramatically increasing levels of bicycling in United States cities tangible and intangible benefits to the quality of life for cities and towns across the country will be realized;

Whereas we now live in a Nation with 300 million people, and that number is expected to grow to 365 million by 2030 and to 420 million by 2050 with the vast majority of that growth occurring in urban areas with limited ability to accommodate increased motor vehicle travel;

Whereas since 1980, the number of miles Americans drive has grown 3 times faster than the United States population, and almost twice as fast as vehicle registrations;

Whereas one-third of the current population does not drive due to age, disability, ineligibility, economic circumstances, or personal choice;

Whereas the United States is challenged by an obesity epidemic, 65 percent of United States adults are either overweight or obese, and 13 percent of children and adolescents are overweight, due in large part to a lack of regular activity;

Whereas the Center for Disease Control estimates that if all physically inactive Americans became active, we would save $77 billion in annual medical costs;

Whereas over 753 of our Nation’s Mayors have signed onto the climate protection agreement of the United States Conference of Mayors urging the Federal Government to enact policies and programs to meet or exceed a greenhouse gas emission reduction target of a 7 percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2012;

Whereas the transportation sector contributes one-third of the greenhouse gas emissions in the United States and passenger automobiles and light trucks alone contribute 21 percent;

Whereas bicycle commuters annually save on average $1,825 in auto-related costs, reduce their carbon emissions by 128 pounds, conserve 145 gallons of gasoline, and avoid 50 hours of gridlock traffic; (more…)

This is an interesting concern. I’ve been following the issue from sources like this and this. It turns out the Microsoft is planning to finally pay full regard to the standards board that was in place before Microsoft joined the web.

Internet Explorer has been a very forgiving browsing environment, and therefore has been enabling shoddy design practice for a dozen years. Now the chickens may be coming home to roost as IE 8 (might) follow established standards and require correctly coded pages that will look and behave the same in all browsers.

The problem they have is to decide whether they can afford to initially alienate all those Microsoft-only website developers by implementing the international standard with their next release. It is the socially responsible thing to do, but there will be whining. Badly coded web pages will look as bad in IE8 as they already do in all the other browsers.

“The free market–the invisible hand–will take care of everything.”

I’ve addressed this topic of the free market as alleged panacea several times before.  I’ve referred to this blind faith in the market as unsubstantiated.  I’ve mockingly referred to the common belief in the wisdom of the invisible hand as a belief in the Fouth Person in the Holy Quartet.  Why mock?  Because stark shortages of critically important natural resources loom in every direction.   And yet we’re in denial. You deny the denial?  Then how is it that we tolerate, this year, big U.S. metropolitan areas like Raleigh-Durham and Atlanta had only a few weeks left of their municipal water supplies?  We tolerate that we are drawing down unreplenishable water sources throughout the desert southwest.  Intelligent civilizations don’t deny such dangers.  They consciously deal with their problems.

I’ve just read a well-phrased description of why the modern version of the free market can’t save us from our problems regarding impending shortages of essential natural resources.  The following quote is from a new book available free on-line from Population Connection: PLAN B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, by environmental analyist, Lester R. Brown (2008).

Now with the economy as large as it is, the indirect costs of burning coal—the costs of air pollution, acid rain, devastated ecosystems, and climate change—can exceed the direct costs, those of mining the coal and transporting it to the power plant. As a result of neglecting to account for these indirect costs, the market is undervaluing many goods and services, creating economic distortions.

As economic decision-makers—whether consumers, corporate planners, government policymakers, or investment bankers—we all depend on the market for information to guide us. In order for markets to work and economic actors to make sound decisions, the markets must give us good information, including the full cost of the products we buy. But the market is giving us bad information, and as a result we are making bad decisions—so bad that they are threatening civilization.

The market is in many ways an incredible institution. It allocates resources with an efficiency that no central planning body can match and it easily balances supply and demand. The market has some fundamental weaknesses, however. It does not incorporate into prices the indirect costs of producing goods. It does not value nature’s services properly. And it does not respect the sustainable yield thresholds of natural systems. It also favors the near term over the long term, showing little concern for future generations.

Dick Cavett once said: “It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.”  Plan B 3.0 is the kind of information that those rare people ambivalently clamor to hear.    It’s clearly written and well documented.  There’s nothing shrill in Lester Brown’s book; just the facts—lots of facts that paint a dire picture.  Over and over, humans are overexploiting precious resources, and the situation is getting dangerous in many ways.  What’s at stake?  You name it.  Oil, food, water, forests, health, fisheries.   On the topic of fisheries, did you know that there are essentially no cod to be caught in the North Atlantic Ocean any more?   Gee, how did that happen?  Why didn’t the “free market” protect the North Atlantic Ocean?

Brown argues that we need to dramatically change the way we live and consume.   He argues that the “free market” is not a cure, unless we first make the true costs of over-exploitation visible and force purchasers to pay the full price.   We need to “Get the market to tell the ecological truth.” For example, the true cost of a gallon of gas is not $3/gallon, but more like $12/gallon. (more…)

Here’s a composite photo of the Earth at night, published by NASA:

The brightest lights correlate with the densest populations. No political boundary lines are visible, of course.  

I once had a framed poster of this sort of image in my office.  One of my co-workers asked: “Did they take that amazing photo in one shot?  “No,” I explained.  “The earth is round, so only one side could be taken at once (at most) and only half of the earth is dark at the same time. 

For higher resolution versions of this photo, visit the NASA site.

There are hundreds of other terrific satellite photos to view at the NASA site, including this false color composite of the Island of Hawaii, (explained here).

The NASA site includes many shots of many other places on Earth.  Lots of geography through photography, as well as evidence of human impact on this small planet.  It’s well worth a long visit.  Here’s the home page for NASA’s Visible Earth collection.

Those guys who send out spam by the bucket-load are really busy these days.    In the past month alone they have tried to sneak more than 9,000 of their fake comments onto this site.  These “comments” are attached to links to various sites selling drugs, loans, pornography and you name it.  The spammers hope that those who run legitimate blogs will not notice that these comments are not sincere.   If they can succeed in getting even a few websites to approve their comments, the appearance of their links will enhance their own site’s credibility on search engines like Google.   Hence, a vigorous and healthy spam industry.

Thank goodness I don’t have to deal with the great majority of these fake comments.  We use sophisticated software to keep out most of this spam.   A few hundred per week slip through, however. 

I thought it might be fun to share, without the attached links, the types of comments you have been missing:

Good comment. It brought light to an old idea I had.

I can not agree with you in 100% regarding some thoughts, but you got good point of view

This article sounds well, but how everything is related together

amazing stuff

Man i love reading your blog, interesting posts !

Thanks for what you said. It seems I have thought the wrong way… until now. Hope this helps also.

Try the Strait Back Golf Shirt, It’s made to help with posture on & off the course. Good luck

Ångström also postulated that an incandescent gas emits luminous rays of the same refrangibility as those which it can absorb.

Since then, most research has focused on absorbing external crash energy with crushable panels and reducing the motion of human bodies

This article sounds well, but how everything is related together?

great website

Great work. I am going to pass this along.

Man i just love your blog, keep the cool posts comin.

We do many inefficient things.  Why don’t we simply do those things differently, in a more efficient way?  Often, we don’t change things because we’ve done them a certain way for so long that it would take too much time and psychological effort to do them in new ways, even though the new ways would be easier and more inefficient in the long run.

The QWERTY keyboard is a great example. We could rearrange our keyboards, which would cause us to struggle with our new configurations for a few months or years, but then we’d all be better for the change.  We don’t do this, however.  It would take too much initial effort.

Scientific theories are quite often strained by the discovery of new evidence that doesn’t fit the theory, yet we cling to the old inadequate theories.   This is another tendency toward path dependence.   For example, until the 17th century, “epicycles” were used to explain the perceived retrograde motion of planets and stars.  Epicycles were finally discarded in response to Kepler’s work.   Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn pointed out that scientific progress does not occur smoothly, but rather in the form of periodic revolutions that that he termed paradigm shifts. The fact that scientists tend to hold onto old unworkable theories longer than they should can be seen as another manifestation of path dependence.

It would make a lot of sense to simplify the spellings of many words used in the English language.  We don’t do this, however.  It would take too much time and effort in the short run, even though it would be well worth our while in the long run.  And shouldn’t we all switch over to a universal language, so everyone could understand everyone else?  Esperanto, anyone?

We don’t have the determination to make many long-term improvements due to the time and energy it would take to make the short-term change.

I thought of path dependence yesterday when I drove past the campus of St. Louis University, a large Jesuit college in St. Louis, Missouri.  I attended the St. Louis University school of Law.  I know many people who have received fine educations from St. Louis University.  I know that many of the people associated with University are good-hearted people who do wonderful things for the community.  On the other hand, St. Louis University is a school based upon an unsubstantiated belief that a bloody crucifixion occurring 2000 years ago “saved” humankind.  What does my well-reputed school of law have to do with claims that a man/God visited Earth to save his wretchedly undeserving children?  Many people would say nothing at all. The Law School is attend by many students who don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus. It could be argued that the education provided by the St. Louis University School of Law could equally be provided by a university that didn’t make any claim that a man named Jesus rose from the dead.  After all, I attended law school for three years and never once heard Jesus discussed in any law school class.  So, why is it that a law school that teaches nothing about Jesus is considered to be a Jesuit law school?  Good question.  I consider it to be another manifestation of path dependence.  The buildings and administration of an existing Jesuit college simply made for a good foundation for the Law School.  The Jesuits would argue that the SLU School of Law is as good as it is because it is Catholic.  They would hear some good arguments that this is not the reason from some of the many fine law schools that are not Catholic, however.

Speaking of law, the legal principle of stare decisis holds that an ongoing legal dispute should be decided a particular way solely because a previous and similar case was handled that way.   (more…)

I want to share with everyone a passage from the opening of the movie The Gods Must be Crazy. This silly 1980s movie provides a very oversimplified, idealized image of African Bushmen, but at the same time gets its label of modern westernized man spot-on. This excerpt from the film’s opening narration always makes me pause and consider the needless complexity of modern life:

“…Here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead, he adapted his environment to suit him.

So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labor-saving devices. But he didn’t know when to stop.

The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier, the more complicated he made it. Now his children are sentenced to years of school, to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat.

And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings, now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment.

For instance, if it’s Monday and 8:00 comes up, you have to dis-adapt from your domestic surroundings…and re-adapt yourself to an entirely different environment. 9:00 means everybody has to look busy. 10:30 means you can stop looking busy for 5 minutes…And then, you have to look busy again. Your day is chopped into pieces. In each segment of time…you adapt to new circumstances.

No wonder some people go off the rails a bit.”

Re-reading this part of the script really gets my mind a-brewing, thinking about all the wasteful, stress-inducing things we do to make life “easier”. More on this soon.

Just a heads-up.   We are switching over to a faster and higher-capacity server, but that will necessitate an interruption in service.   It might only be a few hours, but I’ve been told that it could take as long as 24 hours for this site to once again become available everywhere in the world.  

The switch-over will take place in the next day or two.  

If you try to visit this site and you can’t find us, then, don’t necessarily assume that we’ve been shut down by the Department of Homeland Security.  

Bear with us as we improve this site. I realize that the comments function was not working this morning. That has now been fixed. Also, posting capacity was down for awhile. Those problems have been ironed out.

We’re making lots of changes here, most of them to the backside of the site. These changes (I am told by Nick Smith, our website designer) will make our site faster and easier to use. Last night, Nick upgraded this site to the newest version of WordPress, adding dozens of new plug-ins. We now have the capacity for podcasting and we will soon have the capacity to host our own videos.  We are considering numerous other changes that will improve navigation.

There are a few features that will appear (and, perhaps, disappear) on the home page in the next couple of days. We are trying out a few things and mulling them over.

If anyone has any comments on the usability or technical issues with this site, I would really appreciate your feedback, so we can address the situation.

Is there a better way to spend the money we are currently spending in Iraq?

The January 18, 2008 issue of Nature reports that Congress is telling NASA that NASA needs to dig up $60 Million in funding for a planet-hunting telescope out of its general budget, money that simple doesn’t exist (this article is available on line only to subscribers).  NASA is outraged. Congress will not provide any additional funding. The stated purpose of the project is undeniably worthy according to scientists.  Because of the attitude displayed by Congress, however, other NASA projects are also endangered, including “missions to study dark energy, gravity waves and X-ray astronomy.”

The thing that struck me on reading this article is the tiny amount in controversy regarding this NASA project, relative to enormous size of the Iraq budget.  We spend $275 million per day to do the things we do in Iraq.

This makes me wonder? How many other worthy science projects are not getting funding because of Iraq expenses? It would be interesting and depressing to see people raise their hands in response to this question:  How many of you have had federal funding denied on worthy projects because of the “lack of money in the budget.”  We need to constantly call “lack of money” for what it is. It’s not lack of money.  Rather, we’re spending that money on Iraq.

It’s not simply that we are pissing away money on the “War on Terror”  (BTW, it’s not a war and it’s not about terror, though it pretends to be).  And this “war” effort is even worse than a simple misallocation of money.  We are causing massive political damage by doing the things we are doing in Iraq. People around the world hate what we are doing in Iraq and have no respect for the reasons we utter for pursuing this “war.”  The great majority of Americans now agree with the people around the world (those people we used to scoff at when they doubted our intentions and methods).

How many worthy projects will never be funded? And how many unfunded humanitarian projects are not being funded because of the “war”? What could that money have accomplished?  What about new cures for malaria, TB, cancer and dozens of other diseases that take the lives of millions every year?  What about funding new methods of conserving, generating and storing energy, to lessen our dependence on oil?  What about new improved methods of birth control, to reduce the demand for abortions, which, in turn, might put somewhat of a damper on the culture war that is tearing the U.S. apart?

Dollars and hours are fungible, which means that the Iraq “war” is utterly immoral, especially so in that it has accomplished none of its stated objectives; further, it’s failed to accomplish those objectives at horrific cost.  We can see much of the carnage and destruction, but there is equal amount of damage that we can’t see.  This invisible damage consists of things that we could have done with the time and money we have squandored on Iraq.  Iraq is, and always was, a domestic issue.

All of these unfunded projects must be viewed in the context of the hundreds of thousands of people killed and wounded and the millions that have been displaced in pursuit of the misbegotten so-called “war.”

You know that life is out of balance.

If you are looking for a provocative film that allows you to feel this problem, I have a classic video to recommend.  I just saw it tonight for the first time: Koyaanisqatsi. The 1982 film was directed by Godfrey Reggio.  Ron Fricke provided the memorable cinematography and Philip Glass provided the haunting music.

In a documentary that accompanies the current version of the DVD, Reggio explains:

[T]hese films have never been about the effect of technology, of industry on people. It’s been that everyone: politics, education, things of the financial structure, the nation state structure, language, the culture, religion, all of that exists within the host of technology. So it’s not the effect of it’s that everything exists within [technology]. It’s not that we use technology, we live technology. Technology has become as ubiquitous as the air we breathe.

The title of the film comes from the Hopi language. At the end of the film, Reggio provided a multi-part definition based on the Hopi etymology: 

1. crazy life; 2. life in turmoil; 3. life out of balance; 4. life disintegrating; 5. a state of life that calls for a different way of living.

I really do enjoy these displays of gadgetry. Quite clever. I just wish I could read the little notes at the end of each episode–I assume I’m missing a good joke.

Scientific American has just published a comprehensive article on how to switch the United States substantially over to sunlight. The headline: “By 2050 solar power could end U.S. dependence on foreign oil and slash greenhouse gas emissions.”

The cost of this immense clean-energy-producing plan would be $420 billion. That’s a HUGE amount of money. Where could we EVER get that sort of money? Oh, yeah. The U.S. has already spent that much on the Iraq debacle. For the amount of money that we’ve wasted in Iraq, we could have already funded a great way to wean ourselves from mideast oil.

Now, specifically, what could $420 Billion buy if one spent it wisely? It’s an incredible investment that would pay for itself over and over. Here are the highlights of the plan, according to the Scientific American article:

Solar plants consume little or no fuel, saving billions of dollars year after year. The infrastructure would displace 300 large coal-fired power plants and 300 more large natural gas plants and all the fuels they consume. The plan would effectively eliminate all imported oil, fundamentally cutting U.S. trade deficits and easing political tension in the Middle East and elsewhere. Because solar technologies are almost pollution-free, the plan would also reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants by 1.7 billion tons a year, and another 1.9 billion tons from gasoline vehicles would be displaced by plug-in hybrids refueled by the solar power grid. In 2050 U.S. carbon dioxide emissions would be 62 percent below 2005 levels, putting a major brake on global warming.

The plan would include photovoltaic farms, pressurized caverns for storing the solar power, concentrated solar power (using numerous mirrors to focus the light as heat) and long-distance direct current transmission systems (because most of the solar power would be produced in the desert Southwest, far from major cities.

I remember when the FBI unleashed their “Carnivore” internet monitoring system in the 1990’s. Everyone was up in arms because the FBI could listen in to all email and run it through filters to store a database of all emails containing suspicious phrases, or from specific addresses. The controversy got so big, that they renamed it to the less aggressive DCS1000. Then they went to a third party snooping system (off the shelf) to do the same thing.

However, there is now a new system to watch what all potential internet miscreants are saying and viewing. Here’s a ZDNet article about it with plenty of source references. In brief, they monitor and record all traffic through a “pipe” (an internet node) for which they have a warrant to sniff for one particular suspects traffic. Unlike Carnivore, this new system stores the address information and keywords from all traffic on that pipe. This new system is like getting a warrant to monitor the trunk line from a local telephone office and record all calls because a suspect usually places calls from a phone in that area. And the press recently got upset that specific phone lines were being monitored without proper warrants!

I’m interested to see what mainstream media coverage this invasion of privacy might get.

I have a box before me, the determination of the disposition of which is at hand.

“Huh?” you may well ask.

I need room, and gotta choose stuff to throw away. This box is from my first job out of school, when I was as an industrial robotics designer. I designed and built electronic panels, composed communications protocols, programmed device controllers and their supervising computers, and pulled some all-nighters in rural factories. When the consulting company for whom I worked folded, I kept an archive of all the development I’d done. It came in handy a couple of times, when I had to go back and fix something.

However it is now decades later. The machines I designed and built have not only been retired, but the factory itself has been closed. I recently found this box containing detailed math derivations, design drawings, user and maintenance instructions, and the complete programs written for computers and other devices that you can’t get any more. The code is both stored on disks for which you’d have a hard time finding a drive, and as hard copy on a roll of thermal paper that is darkening on the ends. Antique? The code required line numbers!

This is a piece of my life I hold in my hands. But nothing in the box has either practical value or aesthetic appeal. None of the interesting stories that I could tell about those days are captured by the contents of this box. So why am I loathe to dispose of this obvious waste of my ever-waning free space? Might it be a reflection of my own mortality?

Then I remember that people hold on dearly to ideas that are long superseded, a topic oft covered on this site. Having now publicly posted the idea of this box, I may now have an easier time discarding the physical box itself. I probably won’t go the way of the box as long as I keep learning.

Dangerous intersection is now more than 1 1/2 years old.  We currently have a couple dozen active authors who have contributed 1,500 posts on 60 categories.  These posts have drawn almost 7,000 comments.  Many of these posts (I’m guessing perhaps one-third of them) make reference to news of the day, and will age quickly.  There are many other posts that may be of some value months or even years after they were written, however.  Our authors work hard to embed useful quality links in their posts in an effort to inject lasting value into their posts.

Quite often, I run into a topic that has been addressed in some detail by a previous post.  Tracking down those older posts can sometimes be a challenge. The Dangerous Intersection website, which is built upon WordPress, includes a search function that often works fairly well in digging up previous posts and comments.  On other occasions, however, the algorithm of that simple search function pulls up too few or too many search results to be useful.

On those occasions, I have turned to the exquisite “Advanced Search” function of Google.  Google’s Advanced Search allows you to focus on the content of a particular website.  You can do this by inserting the URL of that website into the “Domain” field. For instance, if you wanted to search only content found on Dangerous Intersection, merely insert http://dangerousintersection.org/ into the Domain box.

At that point, you can continue to fine-tune your search in many additional ways.  See, for example, the top four fields on the advanced search screen.  You can request Google to return only those results that contain each of the words you enter, or an exact phrase, or all those results containing at least one of a string of words.  You can also ask Google to exclude content containing a word or words that you designate.

You can fine-tune your search request in other ways too.  For instance, you can request content within certain date ranges or limit your search to content found in certain parts of a webpage (e.g., only in the title).  For more assistance in using Google’s advanced search, see the Google Help Screen for it’s Advanced Search.

I offer this information regarding Google advanced search for those of you who might want to search for information on this site (or on any website) where the simple search feature offered on the website itself doesn’t quite get the job done.

Check out this video.

Isn’t this exciting? This new technique is called seam carving.

Seam carving is an image resizing algorithm developed by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir. This algorithm alters the dimensions of an image not by scaling or cropping, but rather by intelligently removing pixels from (or adding pixels to) the image that carry little importance.

The importance of a pixel is generally measured by its contrast when compared with its neighbor pixels, but other measures may be used. Additionally, it’s possible to define (or autodetect) areas of high importance (faces, buildings, etc.) in which pixels may not be deleted, and conversely, areas of zero importance which should be removed first. From this information, the algorithm detects seams (continuous lines of pixels joining opposite edges of the image) which have the lowest importance, and deletes those. This shrinks the image by one horizontal or vertical line, depending on which direction the seam ran.

Seam carving can also be run in reverse by adding (interpolated) pixels along the lowest energy seam.

With this technique, it’s now possible to scale pictures by a large amount, while still retaining details. In normal Image scaling, scale factors greater than 2 or less than 0.5 usually result in visible image quality degradation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seam_carving

For more scientific details go to Shamir’s website and take a look at the paper. And if you just can’t get enough, there’s also a larger version of the video on the website for downloading (I recommend this, the quality is much better and you can see more details).

On Bill Moyers’ Journal, Bill Moyers discussed this multifaceted issue with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. 

This video is well worth watching for many reasons.  The introduction includes a clip of John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech to Southern Baptist preachers to answer their opposition to a Catholic president.  Kennedy’s understanding and articulation of the wall between church and state is inspirational. 

Watching this video, I learned of the “You Choose” site within youtube.com, where you can watch the candidates speaking on issues, side by side.  For instance, here are the candidates’ positions on energy independence. (check out Barack Obama’s position on energy in a speech he gave in Detroit.  In my opinion, he is one of the few candidates that “gets it.”).

Jamieson and Moyers spend substantial time analyzing the “avalanche of misogyny” aimed at Hillary Clinton, some of these attacks Bible-based, many of them verging on pornographic (here’s another site documenting these attacks).  Here’s a sampling of the discussion between Moyers and Jamieson:

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON:  [U]nderlying many of these assertions is the assumption that any woman in power will, by necessity, entail emasculating men and, as a result, a statement of fundamental threat.

So, why shouldn’t you vote for Hillary Clinton? Well, first, she can’t be appropriately a woman and be in power. She must be a man. Hence, the site that says Hillary Clinton can’t be the first woman president; Hillary Clinton’s actually a man. But also explicit statements that suggest castrating, testicles in lockbox. She’s going to emasculate men. It’s a zero-sum game in which a woman in power necessarily means that men can’t be men.

BILL MOYERS: And you can’t use your uterus and your brain. That’s the old argument, right? You can’t be caring and tough. That’s the old argument against women, right?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Well, and at one time there was actually an argument that if women became educated, they would become infertile. There was also, for a long period of time, serious penalties for women who tried to speak in public. And the residue of this is a language that suggests that women in power cannot be women and be in power. And as a result, as Hillary Clinton certifies herself as being tough enough to be president, competent enough to be president, these attacks say then she can’t be president because she’s not actually a woman. And you can’t trust someone who is that inauthentic. So underlying this and underlying the vulgarity and underlying the assertions of raw sexual violence is deep fear about a woman holding power.

They want to know what to do about all the left-over turkey today. How do I know this? I check Google Trends. 

Google has many other new functions in the works.  To explore what Google is in the process of developing, go to Google Labs.  There is a lot to consider.  For instance:

Google Sets will extrapolate from a group of items you enter, to give you additional items that “belong.”

Google Mars lets you explore Mars via detailed maps.

Google’s latest search ideas.   New ways to run searches.

Listening to a talk show at work yesterday, I heard some fall-out from the recent suicide of the young girl who had been “duped” on MySpace.  When I first learned of this tragedy, I ran through a series of thoughts about the dangers posed by the interfaces we use these days, which put us often too early and unprepared into contact with things in another era we would simply have had no opportunity to encounter.  This girl was a casualty of the wavefront of experience that comes now in new forms and through media that never before existed.  

I never once thought it was her fault.

How could you?  She’d been deceived.  Inexperienced, unwitting, she invested a bit too much, and it put her over the edge to discover that what she thought was “real” was in fact a deception.

History is full of examples of people committing suicide over things with only marginal reality.  Especially among adolescents.  We’ve learned in the last decade a great deal more about brain development than ever before, and one of those things is that adolescence is the time of some of the most intricate and fragile growth–physically–within the brain.  The hormone storm that is unleashed at the onset of puberty, the growth spurts visible in every other part of the body, the physiological changes of emergent sexuality and secondary sexual characteristics, all have their equivalent in cognitive development.  It makes perfect sense after the fact, but for a long, long time we blithely assumed that adolescents were more or less just like adults.  Instead we find that, because of the rapid and complex changes they are going through, teen-agers who appear out-of-control, impulsive, overly-sensitive, clueless, clumsy–in short, borderline insane–really are all those things and it is the responsibility of the adults around them to set guidelines and provide aid to get them through this period to the other side and (hopefully) “normality” and sanity.  (When this fails, we have all manner of screwed up adult.)

Which is why holding a teenager responsible for not behaving like an adult is absurd on its face.

And consequences of this journey can run the gamut from perpetual clumsiness to neuroses to schizophrenia to manic-depression to suicide.

It is one of the challenges of our new awareness of these things to take actions to mitigate the worst effects and to do what we can to ensure a healthy mind in the emergent adult.

Something like this tragic suicide occurs, though, and when we listen to what comes after we discover how unlikely that is for some people.  Many people emailed this talk show to express their opinion that the dead girl “got what was coming to her.”  It was somehow her fault.

When we tease through this senseless reaction, we come to the bottom line opinion that what she was doing on MySpace was something she shouldn’t have been doing, something that is to some people Bad.  In fact immoral.  Evil.  That she reaped the rewards of an inappropriate indulgence.

This is pathetic.  But rather than condemn it outright, maybe we ought to take a look at this and see where it comes from.  This echoes similar responses to other events, like rape.  “She shouldn’t have been out that late, she shouldn’t have been with Those People, she shouldn’t have been dressed Like That.”  We’ve heard all this.  After enough of it, you’d think the poor rapist had absolutely no choice but to attack That Female.  It was all her fault, she brought it on herself.

Blaming the victim.

This happens to men, too, but in less obvious ways.  (more…)

I needed to change the battery in one of our smoke detector tonight.  This reminded me of an incident that occurred in 2001.  It’s an illustration of the value of smoke detectors.  The story also has a nice twist at the end.  Afer the incident, I wrote the following email to friends and family. 

I’m writing today because I’m alive and able to do so because of an incredibly important and inexpensive gadget: a smoke detector.

Yesterday morning, at about 5:45 am, I was awakened from a deep sleep by the Battery-powered smoke detector located in the 2nd floor hallway, outside of the bedroom.  It was only after being awakened that I smelled the smoke.   I blasted out of bed and scrambled to find a fire in the upstairs hallway bathroom we are renovating.  The bathroom is only 10 feet down the hall. I was home alone (JuJu and Anne have been out of town while the bathroom is being renovated).

I grabbed a fire extinguisher and sprayed the fire (the fire was the size of a roaring campfire when I hit it the first time.  The flames were the only thing I could see in the bathroom—all else was thick black smoke.  I ran downstairs to call 911, then grabbed a second extinguisher, which turned the fire into a small glowing area.  The fire department showed up a five minutes later and helped figure out (through lots of smoke) that an old permanently-installed bathroom space heater was the problem. 

That heater, originally installed in the bathroom wall in 1920, was due to be removed this week as a part of the renovating we are doing.  It was turned OFF during the renovations.  The removal of plaster, however, loosened up the heater.  It must have just fallen forward to a facedown position in the middle of the night, for no apparent reason.  It didn’t occur to the carpenter or me to find the breaker or remove the heater.  We were going to let the electrician do that this week, along with a lot of other electrical work.  Unfortunately, the heater switch was a mercury switch, so the “innocent” possibility that the heater might fall off the wall in the “off” position was actually quite dangerous.  The switch stayed in the OFF position, but the blob of mercury (inside the switch) rolled onto the contacts and heated up its massive coils.   That ended up igniting the fire.

I’m writing because, yes, I’m so very happy that the house suffered only minor fire damage, including minor smoke damage.  More important, this seemed like a good opportunity to remind everyone how important, cheap and simple it is to change the batteries in your smoke detectors.  (more…)

What it was like to practice law 25 years ago without the use of any computers

It’s amazing to think that I’ve been a lawyer since 1981, which is more than 25 years ago.  The years are certainly going by quickly, which is a bit disconcerting. I currently work with some lawyers who were not even born when I became a lawyer.  I’m not bothered by my age (51), since I am healthy and I’m able to do essentially anything I want (racquetball, cycling, hiking).  In fact, I’m not really able to complain about anything at all.  My life has consisted of a string of fortunate occurrences, combined with some hard work.

The point of this post, though, is that I sometimes think back “only” 25 years ago to recall the role of computers in the law office back then.  The description is short and simple: there were no computers in law offices in the early 1980s.  This was true of most law firms in most cities. In the 1980’s, I worked at a medium-sized law firm that employed about 40 attorneys. There were no blackberries, no cell phones, no laptop computers and no desktop computers.  Back then, if you wanted to see a fancy gadget, you might look for a typewriter with a tiny LED screen that had a memory that could store a few pages of text.  The secretary (only special secretaries had access to these fancy machines) could type in a document, which would be stored in that modest memory, such that corrections could be made, and the document could be reprinted without rekeying the entire document.  That was as close as you got to a computer in most law offices in the 1980s.

Instead of computers, we had secretaries, lots and lots of secretaries, who transcribed attorneys’ dictation.  We dictated our documents onto small handheld tape recorders.  We would turn these tapes over to secretaries, who would type out the documents and bring them to us of our review and signature.  These documents were typed out on electric typewriters (almost none of them being those fancy LED typewriters described above).  As a result, if you found a mistake in the printed out letter, you often had to ask the secretary to retype the entire letter.  If it was a multipage letter, this could require the secretary to spend an hour or two (or even most of the day) typing the entire letter, just because you forgot to insert a paragraph in your dictation.  Many an attorney who needed to make a change in a document received the evil eye from his or her secretary; this was good incentive to think things through as well as you could prior to turning tapes over to secretaries. In fact, if you noticed that you forgot to include a paragraph in a document, your best strategy was to look to see whether the secretary herself had made some major mistakes that would require the letter to be retyped anyway.  Only then would you bring it to her attention.

If you find it tedious to think about running an office without computers, consider that letters were the shortest and easiest documents to retype.  I worked in a law office that specialized in litigation.  The documents we needed to produce included 20-, 30-, or 40-page legal pleadings.  Sometimes those documents would include appellate briefs that could run in excess of 50-pages.

During the past 15 years, more and more lawyers have been keying in their own documents, bypassing the need to hand dictation tapes to secretary.  In the 1990’s, attorneys keying in their own documents was frowned on by management; it amounted to attorneys doing “secretarial work.”   Eventually, attitudes changed, however.  Having access to a desktop computer has made life more bearable for many attorneys, who now have immediate access to the various drafts of documents.  Tiny changes can be made repeatedly, with no need to apologize to a secretary. In fact, I often create long summaries of documents without any use of the keyboard.  I’m doing it right now, using voice activation software (Dragon version 9).  One particular bright spot for me was that law firms have finally broken away from WordPerfect and moved to MSWord.  I know that there are some lawyers who will disagree, but WordPerfect 5.0 doesn’t bring me any warm memories.  Though many people became proficient at using it, it always seemed crude and clunky to me.

We did not have any such thing as a scanner at any of my law firms, until five years ago.  Therefore, every important piece of information was preserved in hard copy, if at all.  Sometimes, those critical pieces of paper were misplaced or lost entirely. This made it critically important to keep track of those important copies.  It’s so different now; I scan every important piece of paper that comes into my office, so that it is easily available and always available to me.

Until about 10 years ago, all communications were by telephone or written letter sent to the United States Postal Service. If something was extra important, it could be transmitted by fax, though most pleadings and letters were entrusted to the postal service only.  What’s missing in this picture?  E-mail.  Somehow we got along without any e-mail.  As I recall, most lawyers were not using any form of e-mail for business use until the mid-1990s.  In fact, most lawyers did not have any computer on their desks, even in the mid-1990s.

We’ve certainly made up for not having e-mail by the way we have overused e-mail in current times.  It used to be a curiosity to actually do business through e-mail.  This is not the case anymore, however.  Now, it seems that a typical day involves sending 30-50 e-mails and receiving 50-100 e-mails (admittedly, many of these e-mails received our mass mailings that could be quickly reviewed and deleted).  The upshot is that several hours of every working day involve sending and receiving dozens of e-mails, many of those containing important attachments.  Admittedly, much work is done through the exchange of these e-mails, and it is sometimes done extremely efficiently.  Most phone calls still require the exchange of pleasantries prior to getting down to business-this is often gratifying, although it does slow you down any keep you from getting home earlier at night.  Just imagine the difference in time of sending 10 e-mails versus making 10 phone calls.  Further, after every important phone call, responsible attorneys document that communication.  Who did you talk to and on what case?  What was said and by whom?  When you communicate through e-mail, all of that is automatically documented and therefore retrievable.

Computers have played yet another big role in the modern law office.  In the “old days,” to get a copy of a pleading, you had to physically go to the courthouse.  Even if you wanted to find out what was in the court file, you had to call a court clerk or traveled to the courthouse yourself and flipped through the legal file.  That is sometimes still the case.  On the other hand, many courts report their filings to a network that allows access by attorneys.  If I want to find out if a defendant was served in a particular case, I am often able to look that up at my desktop.

How did we ever get along without Outlook?  This situation is extremely hard to imagine now, even though I practiced as an attorney through that time period.  Nowadays, I’m always setting up meetings and alerts which guide me through every day and every week.  In the “old days,” paper calendars ruled.  In fact, if one were to have lost his or her paper calendar, it could’ve been a disaster, since there was simply no backup to that little book.  Now, Outlook tells me what to do, when to do it and where to go in real time.  It’s a super-charged calendar.  Yet I remember, even 5 years ago (and for some attorneys still) that many people resisted the move to an electronic calendar for fear of “losing the data,” as though paper calendars can’t be lost.

Litigation practice is littered with deadlines.  That is the nature of the practice, and these deadlines drive many lawyers to a state of high anxiety. Many of these deadlines involved filing pleadings.  In the “old days,” filing a pleading meant getting to the courthouse while the doors were unlocked and finding a clerk to stamp in your pleading to file it.  That is still the case in some courthouses, although the trend is to implement electronic filing.  This is a terrific idea that allows lawyers to electronically file pleadings from their own desktops in PDF form.  The system has been adopted by almost all federal courts, and state courts are now coming aboard as well.  The system means that you no longer have to drive anywhere to file a pleading on time.  In the “old days,” pleadings were occasionally lost.  Sometimes these important filings were lost under suspicious conditions.  That situation is now impossible with electronic filing, where pdf copies of all file documents are available 24/7 to anyone willing to pay the modest cost of accessing the documents.

Research has been totally transformed by computers.   In the 1980’s law libraries consisted entirely of books.   Often, critical volumes of books couldn’t be found, because they were removed by other attorneys who wanted to work in the privacy of their office.  If you wanted to do research at night, you needed to do it at a physical law library.  We often spent time at law school libraries, because no law firm actually had the space for all of the hard-copy books that are required to do a thorough job.  Things have changed dramatically, of course.  Now, any attorney with a laptop and a subscription to a legal research database has access to an entire law library’s worth of paper books.   Further, the ability of copying and pasting speeds forward the assembling of information necessary to create a brief.   Attorneys used to hover over copy machines as much as clerical staff.   That’s no longer the case.

During the last several years, remote accessing of one’s own law office network has become commonplace, allowing attorneys to work “at their desk.” It matter where they are in the entire world. This is a mixed blessing, of course.  It used to be that you simply could not do much work when you are on vacation (other than spending long hours on the telephone).  Now, it can sometimes be hard to justify staying away from the laptop and burning away vacation hours on work projects.  In fact, it is rare to hear of an attorney involved in litigation who has actually gone on vacation and not done a significant amount of work during the “week off.”

The bottom line is that an attorney at the top of his or her game in the early 1980s was essentially married to a secretary who kept track of hundreds of pieces of paper, cranked out all necessary paperwork, and did all the filing and scheduling.  Today’s lawyer can do much of that work (though certainly not all of it) without a secretary.

Have computers and improve the quality of life for attorneys involved in litigation?  Absolutely.  Is there a cost?  It seems so, although it is worth it.  The cost is that we now pour much more information through our heads in a given day simply because we can do this.  Many of the hassles and inefficiencies of only a couple years ago allowed us some time during each day to slow down a bit because we had to slow down a bit.  Now, everything is instant, which allows for the possibility of making instant progress (or lots of instant errors, if you’re not careful).  Therefore, the practice of litigation now seems sped up and seems as though everything has higher stakes, minute by minute.

Do the risks mean that I would go back to the old days of practicing law without a computer?  Not on your life.  Case closed!

How long should you let them string you along unproductively before hanging up and trying again?

The trick to using tech support over the phone is to quickly size up whether the alleged tech support expert on the other end of the line actually knows anything.  If not, think of a reason to end the call.  Any reason.  Then call back and you’ll likely get another person.  My recent experiences confirmed the wide disparity in competence among those who allegedly do tech support.  I’ve learned my lesson, I think.   I need to stop being too patient.  I’ve renouced my willingness to sit there waiting for the “expert” to flip through endless knowledge base screens, for instance.

This weekend was a long weekend, tech-support-speaking.  I needed to help my mother install a router and help her set up her new HP notebook computer.  I assumed that these tasks would take about an hour, so I allowed myself three hours.  As it turned out, it took about six hours.  Plus, I had tech support issues of my own when I got back home. Things often aren’t what they purport to be when it comes to upgrading and improving one’s gadgetry. 

The Linksys router came with lots of warnings: “Insert CD-ROM first.”  So that’s what I did.  I put the disk into my mom’s old desktop computer and followed the instructions meticulously until I came upon a screen that requested a lot of information I didn’t have or didn’t understand.  By that point, the router was already broadcasting all over the house, so I tried to skip the screen, although the software would not allow it.  Therefore, I exited the program, which caused the broadcasting to stop.  I then called Linksys tech support. 

If there is one thing more difficult than talking to the tech support person you can’t understand (because he pronounces words differently than you do) it’s dealing with the tech support person who talks so softly that you can’t hear him at all PLUS has a heavy accent.  That’s the sort of fellow I was dealing with on Saturday.  He tried his hardest, but it became obvious that he had no idea what he was doing.  He told me to unhook all the cabling, then go to the company website and follow the easy instructions.  The problem is that the unhooking of the cabling meant that I did not have Internet access any longer.  After about five minutes, he clarified himself that I should look up the desktop computer the way it was before I ever bought a router and then log on to the Linksys easy install portion of its website.

By the time it became clear that he was not competent, I had been on the phone with him for 30 minutes and my patience was running thin