RIP Shelby, 1997-2008

Shelby was a puppy from my sister's dog Sheba, a Queensland Heeler/Border Collie mix. We don't know who the father was, but Shelby had a black tongue and seemed to have some Chow in her. She was born on February 7, 1997, and I adopted her a few months later. She was a smart dog--I took her to obedience training at six months, and she picked up the basics and retained them her whole life, though often when she wanted a treat she would go through the whole routine instead of responding to the specific command given. She had a strong herding instinct, and acted to police the behavior of other dogs.

In her early years her constant companion was my Shih-Tzu, Blossom, who I adopted from Shih-Tzu rescue in late 1996. Blossom was the top dog despite her smaller size, and the two of them would frequently wrestle and play. Shelby loved to go for walks or runs--I think she would be happy to run continuously until she dropped from exhaustion, given the opportunity. My father adopted her brother, Fox, and we'd occasionally take the two of them to hike on the trails at Squaw Peak. She had serious separation anxiety for the first few years, and I'd often come home from work to find the couch cushions on the floor with stuffing ripped out of them. I used to leave the doggie door open back then, and I remember one time I came home to find the backyard strewn with tiny fragments of foam from the inside of Blossom's bed. It took me a couple days to get them all picked up. Fortunately, she grew out of this habit and the only messes she made in subsequent years were when she learned to knock over the kitchen garbage cans or when some food items like a loaf of bread were left to close to the edge of the counter.

In August of 2001 I moved to a new house with a very large backyard and a fence around the entire property, including a gated driveway. I had a doggie door put in, and again used to leave it open. On August 11, I spent the night away from home, with the doggie door open, and on my way home received a call on my cell phone from a woman who said she had found my dog in the road in front of my house and had put her in a plastic bag by the gate. When I got home I found that there was a missing iron bar on the front gate that made a hole that Blossom had gotten through, and just outside of the gate was Shelby's collar. Shelby had apparently tried to get through the hole to follow Blossom, but was unable to fit, and pulled her collar off in the process--I found her waiting for me inside the house. From that point on, we've never left the doggie door open when we're not home. I also fixed the hole in the front gate and added additional fencing to separate the front and back yards--a defense-in-depth strategy that has occasionally still been tested by some foster dogs who were particularly small or efficient at digging under fences and gates and finding points of failure that I've fixed by burying bricks. Fortunately, no other dog has met Blossom's fate through an escape.

Shelby was somewhat particular about what dogs she'd get along with, which limited our options when we started fostering rescue dogs. Kat's dog, a very large German short-haired pointer named Oscar, stayed at her parents' house because Shelby didn't get along with him. Oscar ended up suffering from a degenerative neurological condition which deprived him of the use of his back legs, and he had to use a cart to go on walks. His condition deteriorated and he was euthanized in November 2007.

In December 2001 I adopted Otto, a rescue dog, who became Shelby's new closest companion and regular morning wrestling partner. In August 2002, Kat found an Australian cattle dog outside her work place, which we took to the pound, notified RESCUE about, and ended up fostering and very quickly adopting. She typically didn't get along with females or with dogs her size or larger, so we've mostly fostered smaller male dogs.

Shelby started to have trouble with arthritis in her back legs in 2005, and would have trouble getting up and going up stairs after walks, so we put her on medication, which was extremely effective. She would occasionally show some signs of weakness or pain in her legs after a long walk, but she'd quickly recover and be ready to go again.

On April 21, we awoke to hear her breathing heavily and whining downstairs. X-rays showed that her bowel was full of fecal matter, and an enema provided her with relief. Her white blood cell count was slightly low, so we treated her with a cycle of antibiotics to fight any infection, and she seemed fine after that. This last Saturday night, August 2, I let the dogs out at midnight to go to the bathroom, and they all came back inside for a treat, and everything seemed fine. But at about four a.m., it seemed like a repeat of April 21. Shelby was breathing rapidly and shallowly, whining, and didn't want to get up. She was having periodic spasms of her abdomen, and seemed like she couldn't get comfortable. We took her in to the vet, where her X-rays showed some fecal material in her bowel, but nothing like April 21. Her blood work showed a low white blood cell count again, and also a low platelet count. The doctor suggested that there was something else going on now, that could include tick fever, an autoimmune disorder, or internal bleeding. They had no one at the hospital overnight, so we took her home Sunday and were under instructions to immediately take her to a 24-hour emergency clinic if she showed any signs of bruising under the skin, petechiae on her gums, or blood from her nose, or if she showed difficulty breathing or otherwise seemed to be in distress. She devoured the canned food we bought for her at the vet when we got her home, and I slept downstairs with her.

I ended up waking up several times during the night. Sometimes I found her peacefully asleep, other times she was sitting up and acting uncomfortable, but she didn't seem as bad as she had the night before. She refused to drink any water I gave her. Monday morning we decided to take her in again, and since she still hadn't had a bowel movement, we asked the vet to give her an enema. Kat also observed that her abdomen appeared to be somewhat distended. The enema was successful, and when I spoke to a vet tech later in the day, she said Shelby seemed comfortable, but said the doctor wanted to take some more X-rays, and I gave my approval. At about 4 p.m. in the afternoon, Kat called the vet for status, and he said that the new X-rays appeared to show evidence of internal bleeding, and he had found that the fluid causing her distended abdomen was blood. He asked us to please come and take her to another emergency clinic that could do an ultrasound to locate the cause of the bleeding and take appropriate action. We got to the vet around 4:30 p.m. and it seemed like we had to wait forever to consult with the doctor and get her out of there. The doctor told us her prognosis was not good--most likely the cause would be found to be a cancerous tumor of some kind. It was after 5 p.m. when we left for the emergency clinic, just in time for rush hour traffic.

We arrived at the emergency clinic at about 5:45 p.m., filled out paperwork, and met with Brian, an emergency veterinary doctor. Brian told us the same thing as the other doctor--that her prognosis, given her age and likely cause, was not good. He said that his recommended action was to perform an ultrasound, and if the cause appeared to be a single tumor, to operate and try to save her in hopes that it's benign. On the other hand, if there were multiple tumors, he advised that surgery would not significantly prolong her life and would probably reduce its quality. We agreed with his recommendation, and Shelby went in the back for her ultrasound.

It was probably around 7 p.m. when we got the news that Shelby had tumors in multiple lobes of her liver, as well as some possible metastasis to her lungs.

We spent some time with Shelby, giving her attention and letting her know she was a good dog. She spent some time laying on her side and resting, but she would frequently whine as we touched her. But she was also alert enough to sit up, to wag her tail, and to walk around when asked. We made the decision to go ahead and euthanize, given her distress and prognosis.

The doctor's first attempt to administer "Sleepaway"-brand sodium pentobarbitol to a vein in Shelby's back leg met with resistance, so he decided it was best to set up an IV, which required Shelby going back into a back room. She didn't want to go with the vet tech, she sat down and pulled against her collar. Finally, when Kat went with her, she cooperated.

She came back to the room with her IV in place on her front right paw, and laid down on the blanket that was put down for her. We petted her and I rubbed her head with my hands and told her she was a good dog. The doctor slowly administered the drug, and she let out a big last breath with a sigh and dropped her head into my hands. The doctor reported that she was asleep, with a faint heartbeat. A few moments later, at about 7:55 p.m., she was gone.

Her absence is painful. The sound of her collar clinking on the water bowl as she drinks. Her standing closely behind Kat as she cuts vegetables waiting for a piece of carrot, broccoli, or lettuce. The sound of her 55-pound body hitting the wood of the hallway floor outside my home office as she lays down waits for me to return to the living room. Her vicious-sounding wrestling with Otto in the mornings. Her putting her head on my knee for attention (or, more often, for food). Her barking at Einzige (while wagging her tail) every time he comes to visit. Whenever Kat or I would go on a trip for work, she'd wait expectantly by the door each evening hoping that we would return.

She was a loyal, intelligent, loving friend, and we'll miss her terribly.

I've put up a few pictures from her life in a public Flickr set.

Is online journal publication shrinking the long tail?

Chris Anderson's book, The Long Tail, showed how the Internet has made it possible for business models that focus on small niche markets rather than mass markets to be successful. While a bricks-and-mortar bookstore will typically have at most a couple hundred thousand titles and make most of its money from bestsellers, Amazon.com can list millions of titles and makes a quarter to a third of its revenue from the "long tail" of books that are not in the top 100,000 sellers.

One might think that putting science journals online would mean that more obscure articles would get greater readership, but a study by James Evans published in Science argues that as more journals are published online, fewer articles are being cited, and those that are tend to be more recently published. While the ability to search online by keywords means that an author of a scientific paper is unlikely to overlook any published paper containing those keywords, it also means that authors are less likely to look at other articles published in the same issues or run into articles that may be related in the big picture but don't contain the selected keywords. Evans found that for each additional year of back issues available online, the average age of articles cited in that journal fell by a month. He predicts that for the average journal, adding five years of back issues online results in a drop in the number of articles cited per year from 600 to 200.

The concern here is similar to the concern about online social networks that become narrowly focused--that people are missing exposure to ideas that they might have previously come across, now that they can select more specifically the items they want. I'm not sure how seriously to take this concern. In my own case, I don't feel like the Internet is causing me to overspecialize, rather it's providing me with access to all sorts of information I wouldn't previously have run into. I don't feel like the Internet is in danger of subdividing into sections of compartmentalized information the way that Bill Bishop's book, The Big Sort, suggests people are forming physical like-minded clusters of neighborhoods. I wonder if Evans would have found different results if, instead of looking at journal citations, he looked at the role being played by electronic publications such as blogs and mailing lists, where I suspect there is increasing interdisciplinary cross-pollination.

(Via The Economist, July 19, 2008, p. 89.)

July's Pre-foreclosure Numbers

I bought my first house 10 years ago, in July, 1998. Prior to the purchase I was living in a nearby apartment complex, paying $435/month for a 2-bedroom, 1 bath. I (over)paid $86,500 for the house, putting 3% down, so my monthly payments, at roughly $600, were ~35% higher than my rent--a reasonable premium to me, considering I'd suddenly be living and building equity in "my own place."

Today, zillow.com says the house is worth about $192,000, and monthly payments at 3% down would come to just under $1300/month. By comparison, you can still rent that 2 bedroom apartment for around $600. Doing the same math again, I don't think I'd come to the conclusion that the "ownership premium" is really worth it. Would you?

You might be wondering what my little story has to do with July's notices of trustee's sales--which, at 6412, as you can see from the graph, were lower than June's. Bush's housing bailout bill recently became law, which may mean that we have just passed the peak for home foreclosures--and soon we may even see a stop to falling home prices. Great news for current home owners, but, as my personal anecdote suggests, not-so-great news for housing affordability in general. The bailout essentially is a subsidy to current home owners at the expense of future home owners.

Because it will prop up current prices beyond where they would have naturally fallen, housing affordability will remain low, encouraging the spawning of all sorts of new government programs to help address "the affordability gap" (or some such wealth-transfer justificationist nonsense)--making money cheaper than it actually is, which will in turn encourage sellers to raise their prices still further while at the same time creating homeowners out of people who probably aren't fiscally responsible enough to be ones. Is this sounding familiar, yet?

As a non-homeowner who is making twice what he made in 1998 but would have an extremely hard time justifying paying $1300/month to own a crappy house, I would have preferred if Congress could've just left well enough alone.

Bowl-a-Rama success

Yesterday we participated in the 6th Annual PACC911 Bowl-a-Rama on Arizona RESCUE's dog team. I bowled in the cat team's lane and brought down their average score, helping the dog team to another win--apparently Nintendo Wii bowling doesn't help train for the real thing. The event had a morning and afternoon session; RESCUE was in the morning session from 10-12:30. RESCUE came in second place for "loudest cheer," which added another $50 There were about 60 groups participating in the morning session which raised a total of about $122,000--of which RESCUE alone raised $42,000! Thanks to everyone who supported our efforts and to Lisa and Einzige for coming out to the event to cheer us on!

ApostAZ podcast #6

ApostAZ podcast #6 is up:

Episode 006 Atheism and Freethought in Phoenix- Go to atheists.meetup.com/157 for group events! Jim Lippard teases three cool books. "Squared" from Greydon Square's 'The Compton Effect'. Evolution Laments God of the Gaps. Saying Naughty Words. Bad reasons to be an atheist. Outro from 'Dream' Greydon Square's Album 'The Compton Effect'

Comments: The podcast gets better each time. I disagree with the idea that everyone who is an agnostic is just trying to be politically correct, or is fence-sitting out of non-rational reasons. John Wilkins and Paul Draper are two examples of philosophers who are agnostic because they have rational reasons for thinking that there is some balance between arguments for and against the existence of gods, that there aren't methods for weighing such arguments, or that there isn't sufficient evidence to conclude that gods exist or do not exist.

New Yorker article on magic

Via Podblack Cat, I read Adam Gopnik's fascinating account of magic as practiced by Jamy Ian Swiss, David Blaine, and with a few remarks from Teller and a visit to David Copperfield's private museum of magic. Gopnik discusses the history and psychology of magic, and the only false note I encountered was at the end, where he writes:

The magicians have the boys for a moment, between their escape from their fathers and their pursuit of girls. After that, they become sexual, outwardly so, and learn that women (or other men) cannot be impressed by tricks of any kind: if they are watching at all, they are as interested as they are ever going to be, and tricks are of no help. You cannot woo anyone with magic; the magic that you have consciously mastered is the least interesting magic you have.

That's a statement that seems to suggest that the general public can't be fooled by slick politicians using Machiavellian methods, that there's no such thing as effective marketing techniques, and that the methods of pick-up artists don't really work. But you really can fool all of the people some of the time.

Large Hadron Collider rap

Science writer Kate McAlpine (aka Alpinekat) has put out a YouTube video of "Large Hadron Rap." The LHC begins operation with a test on August 9, and the first protons are expected to circle the entire track in early September. The New York Times has the background on the LHC and the rap video.



(Via Podblack Cat.)

UPDATE (August 10, 2008): The Economist has a good article on what the Large Hadron Collider has the potential to discover--not just the Higgs boson, but supersymmetric particles with names like neutralinos (making up dark matter), and creating tiny short-lived black holes that will generate Hawking radiation and possibly win Hawking a Nobel prize.

World's largest horseshoe crab promotes creationism through motorcycle jump

Baltimore's Columbus Center Maritime Museum had the world's largest horseshoe crab model built for them--it is 68 feet long, 28 feet long, and has a 13-foot-high domed ceiling (apparently you can go inside it). The museum was in need of revenue, so it sold the giant horseshoe crab to the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum as it was under construction. AiG realized that the crab was too large to fit in their museum, and so they gave it to the Freedom Worship Church in Blanchester, Ohio. That church put the crab into a "scripture garden" and a "fossil courtyard," where it is used to argue for creationism on the grounds that the horseshoe crab has not evolved over time and exhibits evidence of design as "a true gift from God, with its blood being used as a clotting agent for disease in scientific research." And now it is going to be jumped over with a motorcycle for a fundraising event called "Crabfest," by Evel Knievel's former bodyguard, Gene Sullivan.

How could anyone fail to be convinced by that?

(Via the Wilmington News Journal, Ohio.)

Prosecution target for anthrax attacks commits suicide

Upon learning that he was about to be the target of a prosecution for the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people, U.S. government biodefense researcher Bruce Ivins killed himself on Tuesday with an overdose of Tylenol with codeine.

Ivins became a suspect after it was discovered that he had failed to report anthrax contaminations at his lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, in 2002. In late 2008, he was ordered to stay away from a social worker who had counseled him, Jean Duley, who would have testified against him at his trial. In Duley's application for a protective order, she said that Ivins had stalked her and threatened to kill her.

Ivins worked at the same lab where a prior "person of interest" in the case, Stephen Hatfill, also worked. Hatfill was cleared of involvement with the attacks and won a $5.8 million settlement from the Justice Department after he sued for harassment and privacy act violations. Hatfill also won a $10 million libel judgment against Vanity Fair and Reader's Digest for an article by Donald Foster which claimed that Hatfill's writings and travels connected him to the anthrax attacks.

Ivins' attorney claims that he was innocent, but if that were the case, wouldn't his response have been more like Hatfill's? Perhaps, perhaps not. Private investigator and former CNN reporter Pat Clawson, who was also a spokesperson for Hatfill,

said on Friday that news organizations and the public should be “deeply skeptical” about any notion that Dr. Ivins was the anthrax killer unless and until solid evidence is brought forth.

“Everybody is jumping to the conclusion that because this guy committed suicide, he must be the anthrax killer,” Mr. Clawson said. “That is a lousy premise. The pressure of these F.B.I. investigations on individuals is phenomenal, and it is quite likely that this guy cracked under that pressure but had nothing to do with the killings.”

Ivins was a church-going Catholic and a married father of two.

(Hat tip to Greg Laden.)

UPDATE (August 7, 2008): The government's case against Ivins includes tracing the strain of anthrax to his specific lab, the fact that he worked long periods alone in a secure lab that housed that strain and could not account for his activity, that when asked to provide spores from his laboratory to investigators he gave them different spores and then lied about it, that he sent an email to an associate after 9/11 saying that terrorists have "anthrax and sarin gas" and have "decreed death to all Jews and Americans," language similar to statements in threatening letters included in the mailed anthrax envelopes. All of the spores used in the anthrax attacks came from a single flask in Ivins' lab, RMR-1029. That's probably the most conclusive evidence that Ivins was behind the attacks.

Apparently Ivins also engaged in an "edit war" on the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority's Wikipedia page, repeatedly posting negative information there, and thought that the group had declared a "fatwah" on him. (Via The Agitator.)

Tough questions for McCain and Obama

Ed Brayton gives a summary of Radley Balko's list of tough questions for the candidates. It's a pity that our mass media is unlikely to ask any of them. (Yet kudos to Fox News for publishing Radley Balko's columns asking them--they seem to be a whole lot better on the web than they are on television.) Brayton quotes the questions for McCain about how serious he is about cutting corporate pork when he personally profits from it (the laws that mandate alcohol be sold through distributors like Hensley & Co, where his wife got her fortune) and how he reconciles his support for the drug war with the fact that his wife was permitted to avoid any criminal penalties for her prescription drug problems. For Obama, he selected as favorites how Obama plans to pay for his proposed civilian national security force, how he reconciles his support for the drug war with his own past use of marijuana and cocaine, and why he supported the farm bill and supports ethanol subsidies.

I think Ed clearly picked out the best questions Balko asked of McCain, but here are a couple other questions for Obama that I particularly liked:

In a speech to Cuban-Americans in Miami, you called the Cuban trade embargo "an important inducement for change," a 180-degree shift from your prior position. The trade embargo has been in place for 46 years. Did denying an entire generation of Cubans access to American goods, culture, and ideas induce any actual change? Wasn't the real effect just to keep Cubans poor and isolated? In communist countries like Vietnam and China, trade with the U.S. has ushered in economic reform, and vastly improved the standard of living. Why wouldn't it be the same if we were to start trading with Cuba?

In addition to the drugs, Cuba, and school voucher issues, you have also changed or revised your position in recent months on the war in Iraq, government eavesdropping and immunity for the telecom companies, and holding employers accountable for hiring illegal immigrants. Under some circumstances, changing or revising one's position can show admirable introspection — the ability to revise prior conceptions with new information. Some of your new positions are more conservative. Some are more liberal. But they do seem to have one thing in common: Should we be concerned that your shifts have been to those positions that give more power and influence to government? Are there any areas where you'd actually roll back the federal government?

Balko asked a question of McCain about the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA, also known as McCain-Feingold), which I think did serious damage to the First Amendment and protects incumbent politicians by prohibiting any corporation (including nonprofits) or by an unincorporated entity using any corporate funds from running ads critical or supportive of a candidate within 30 days of a primary or within 60 days of a general election. I agree McCain should be asked tough questions about his apparent disrespect for political speech, but I didn't particularly care for the specific question Balko came up with.

Expert tells China visitors to encrypt data as U.S. announces policy of laptop seizure

I saw two articles this morning which I think invite comparison. First, Phil Dunkelberger, CEO of PGP Corporation, says people visiting China should take laptops with no data, or encrypt what data they have:

Travelers carrying smart cell phones, blackberries or laptop computers could unwittingly be offering up sensitive personal or business information to officials who monitor state-controlled telecommunications carriers, Dunkelberger said.

He said that without data encryption, executives could have business plans or designs pilfered, while journalists' lists of contacts could be exposed, putting sources at risk.

Dunkelberger said that during unrest in Tibet in March, overseas Tibetan activists found their computer systems under heavy pressure from Chinese security agencies trying to trace digital communications.

"What the Chinese tried to do was infiltrate their security to see who in China the Tibet movement was talking to," he said.

...

Dunkelberger, whose firm serves many multinational corporations operating in China, said, "A lot of places in the world, including China, don't have the same view of personal space and privacy that we do in the United States."

"You've got to suspect that every place you're doing work is being monitored and being watched," he said.

Dunkelberger's advice is good as far as it goes. Of course, PGP Whole Disk Encryption won't help protect data in transit, and while PGP Email will protect the content of email messages, it won't conceal the source and destination. The threat described is one where traffic analysis enough can reveal a lot, and so you'd want to make use of a corporate VPN, some kind of proxy, or a system like TOR if you want to protect information about where your Internet traffic is ultimately going. PGP is a good company that makes great products; my employer uses PGP Whole Disk Encryption and Email products.

The second article, however, casts some doubt on the last part of what Dunkelberger says. It looks like the U.S., where the NSA engages in warrantless wiretapping with the assistance of the large incumbent telecoms (and a spineless Congress gives them immunity for violations of the law), the CIA spies on foreign visitors within the borders of the U.S. in conjunction with the FBI's counterintelligence division, isn't so different from other countries. It's now publicly admitted by DHS that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers have the right to seize laptops and other electronic devices from people entering the U.S. and hang on to them indefinitely in order to search them. Therefore Dunkelberger's advice should be taken by anyone coming into the U.S., as well--use blank laptops or laptops with encryption only. Some companies have begun to only allow employees to have a web browser and a VPN client on their laptops, and keep all data in the corporation, which can completely eliminate this particular governmental risk.

Foolish man attempts to rob liquor store

Kat's trip to work this morning was delayed by road closures due to the aftermath of a foiled attempt to hold up a neighborhood liquor store, Minute Liquors, owned and run by a Bulgarian immigrant couple of our acquaintance. The gunman who chose their store to rob made a slight miscalculation, since the store is directly across 16th St. from a Department of Public Safety facility. The robber came out of the store to face about a dozen officers, who were at the facility preparing for training when they were informed of a robbery in progress across the street. The armed robber was shot in the abdomen and taken to the hospital.

A librarian responds to a parental challenge

A parent complained about Sarah Brannen's book, Uncle Bobby's Wedding, about same-sex marriage, that was in the children's book section in the Douglas County Library system in Colorado. Librarian Jamie Larue wrote an excellent, kind, and thoughtful response to the library patron about why the library is not going to move or remove the book.

FFRF billboards are coming to Phoenix

It's official, the contracts have been signed and paid for--the Freedom From Religion Foundation's billboards will be coming to Phoenix. There will be five of them, all in central Phoenix, and both of the FFRF's designs will be represented. There's the "Imagine No Religion" billboard, pictured here in Denver, and another design that says "Beware of Dogma."

The billboards will appear starting September 1, and I'll post some photos once they're up. The billboard locations will be:

#1103 Cross streets: 3rd Ave & Van Buren. Located on 3rd Ave just north of Van Buren. Best viewing occurs while traveling northbound on 3rd Ave approaching Van Buren. At this intersection look forward and right. The sign is setback from a parking lot which makes for clear viewing and efficient picture taking. The Arizona State Capital, Phoenix City Hall, FOX News, and the Arizona Republic are all within a few blocks.

#1245 Cross streets: 7th St & Coolidge. Located just north of the downtown area on 7th Street. Best viewing occurs while traveling southbound on 7th Ave just south of Camelback Rd but just prior to Coolidge. The sign is on the east side of 7th Street.

#2005 Cross Streets: Jefferson & 13th St. Located just east of the downtown area and Chase Field on Jefferson Street. Best viewing occurs while traveling eastbound on Jefferson just after 13th Street. The sign is on the south side of Jefferson Street.

#2501 Cross Streets: 19th Ave & Fillmore. Located just west of the State Capital area on 19th Ave. Best viewing occurs while traveling northbound on 19th Ave just prior to Fillmore. The sign is on the west side of 19th Ave. This location is within a few blocks of the Capital Complex.

#2911 Cross streets: McDowell & 14th St. Located just northwest of the downtown area on McDowell Rd. Best viewing occurs while traveling eastbound on McDowell just after 14th St. The sign is on the north side of McDowell. The Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center is within a few blocks.

When these billboards have gone up in other locations, they've usually generated some protests and complaints, as well as competing billboards, such as this one in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania which accused atheists of hating America. That misses the whole point--the point is to let nonbelievers know that they are not alone, and to put them in touch with the FFRF and other local groups of people with similar opinions about the supernatural. One can certainly express disagreement with the sentiment (or the likelihood of a world without religion--I think it's unlikely that religion will disappear from the world as long as there are social groups of human beings on it), but a response that claims that atheists hate America or are engaged in persecution is to mistake reality for a caricature like the one depicted in Robby Berry's "Life in Our Anti-Christian America."

Funding for these billboards was a joint project of the FFRF and various Meetup groups led by some folks from the Phoenix Atheists Meetup group, which is now up to 411 members. There are plans for a followup billboard, for which funds are still being raised, which will advertise a website promoting a diverse set of groups of atheists, agnostics, humanists, brights, and freethinkers.

Dr. Jay Gordon's bogus anti-vaccine arguments

Orac at Respectful Insolence critiques Dr. Jay Gordon's argument that breastfeeding and eating less cheese is a better way to prevent communicable diseases than vaccination.

Dubious Documents of American History

At Rational Rant is an excellent three-part critique of a document that's been floating around the Internet which claims to support the case that America was intended by its founders to be a Christian nation. In fact, the document is a mish-mash of fabricated quotations and misinformation. Rational Rant has gone to the trouble of digging up the details and even comparing four different versions of the document.

"Dubious Documents": part one, part two, part three

Randy Pausch's "last lecture"

He actually did give at least one more lecture after this at another university, but this was his last lecture at CMU, given on September 18, 2007 for a series originally titled "The Last Lecture." Pausch was born October 23, 1960 and died today, July 25, 2008. You can read his story at his CMU web page, at least once the traffic dies down.

This lecture is on achieving your childhood dreams, most of which he did, and on enabling the childhood dreams of others. Pausch was the founder of the Alice Project, which is a 3D programming environment for teaching students.

UPDATE (July 26, 2008): I'm getting lots of traffic to this post from people searching for Randy Pausch's name and the word "atheist," apparently from people trying to find out if he was an atheist. His CMU web page thanks his church, so he belonged to one, whatever his religious beliefs may have been. He didn't say anything in his lecture to indicate what they were. As an atheist, it doesn't matter to me so much what he believed, as opposed to how he lived. That is in sharp contrast to several Christian sites which have condemned him for being a nonbeliever (which they don't know to be the case) or for failing to evangelize. These people strike me as angry believers looking for reasons to criticize someone who led a good life. One Christian writer criticized Pausch's talk by attempting to paraphrase it as "I lived a meaningless life following meaningless rules, so should you." The same writer says, "Yes, he lived a nice and successful life, but so what? Who cares? He will be forgotten as were many people before and after him. His impact on the world would soon disappear. Whatever he achieved in research will soon become useless." What nonsense! So what? Those who knew him and worked with him disagree. He will eventually be forgotten, as we all will, but it will always be the case that he did live and he did make a mark on the people around him and his time was not wasted. And he will be no more harmed by his nonexistence after his death than he was by his nonexistence before he was born.

I question the motivation of those who argue critically of those who have lived happy and productive lives, arguing that so much better are the lives of those who live miserable, angry, critical, and destructive lives, just so long as they accept Jesus before they die. Surely the universe they want to believe in is an unjust and immoral one.

Update on CMI-AiG lawsuits

Creation Ministries International has updated its website about its legal battles with Answers in Genesis of Kentucky. The latest addition reports that in April, AiG served CMI with a lawsuit in the United States trying to stop the legal action in Australia--even though one of the two contracts AiG is trying to enforce specifies the law of the Australian state of Victoria as the governing law and forum. CMI will be defending itself in the U.S. against the new action.

Shootings at South Mountain Community College

Kat saw multiple police cars on her way home and now we hear a bunch of helicopter action nearby, and it appears there has been a shooting incident at South Mountain Community College, with three victims and a suspect in custody.

UPDATE (5:08 p.m.): The shooting apparently took place at the campus Technology Center around 4 p.m., and the campus was quickly locked down, but the suspect had already left. The suspect was arrested at around 23rd Ave. and Grove, near his home. The news is reporting four victims admitted to the Maricopa Medical Center, two men aged 17 and 19, one 20-year-old woman, and one possible additional victim not confirmed. At least one male victim was aware and speaking as he was admitted, and the woman spoke with her father, Otis Williams, by cell phone after she was shot.

One news report claims the suspect was known on campus, and that was apparently why he was quickly apprehended.

Students are now being permitted to leave campus. Classes for the rest of today and tomorrow are cancelled.

UPDATE (5:22 p.m.): Apparently the suspect, a black male driving a white truck, drove home where his father persuaded himself to give himself up to police, which he did. Police and fire department officials were on site at the campus within about five minutes after the first reports of a shooting (both police and fire stations are quite close by).

UPDATE (6:04 p.m.): The ages of victims have been changed--the woman, a pharmacy student, from 22 to 20, and the 25-year-old male to 19. The 17-year-old has been identified as Christopher Taylor, by his brother Jay. A student reports that the shooter was one of two men who had been fighting in the computer center. The 19-year-old victim is reported in critical condition, while the other two victims are in stable condition. (Yet CNN reports that the woman was shot in the abdomen while the other two victims were shot in the leg. It describes the males as aged 17 and 25.)

The alleged fourth victim apparently didn't exist, and was incorrectly reported by one of the news reporters on the basis of watching people being brought in to the hospital. Or perhaps there was a 25-year-old shot in the leg and a 19-year-old who received more serious injuries?

UPDATE (8:24 p.m.): CBS News 5 reports that there was a long-running dispute between the shooter and one of the victims, and police say that the shooting was gang-related.

UPDATE (July 25, 2008): The shooter has been identified as 22-year-old Rodney Smith, a former SCC student and known as a regular at the computer lab, who came to campus to pick a fight with 19-year-old Isaac Deshay Smith, who was shot in the leg and was still in critical condition last night. The other two victims caught in the crossfire were 20-year-old Charee Williams, who was shot in the hip, and 17-year-old Christopher Lee Taylor, who was also shot in the leg. Five family members and friends of Rodney Smith were also taken into custody last night for interfering with the investigation and disobeying police officers. The most recent report does not mention gangs, but only a long-standing feud between the two Smiths.

UPDATE (July 26, 2008): Rodney Smith has apologized to his "innocent victims" in court, and it has been reported that Isaac Deshay Smith and two others were involved in a fight last year in which Rodney Smith was punched and kicked while lying on the ground and his jaw broken in two places.

P.Z. Myers has desecrated a cracker

P.Z. Myers has eloquently described what he did, after a bit of history from 1215 to the present. There's so much well-described in his article that I resist the urge to quote from it at all--go read the whole thing, "The Great Desecration," at Pharyngula.

UPDATE: Bill Donohue has used the occasion to issue yet another apoplectic press release.

UPDATE (July 30, 2008): The Confraternity of Catholic Clergy has demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the First Amendment in their condemnation of Myers' action. They seem to think it means that you can't make fun of a religion unless you're a member of it, and that everybody has to be a member of some religion.

Klingenschmitt: Intellectually dishonest or merely lazy?

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars reports on his recent exchanges on a religion law mailing list with former Navy chaplain Gordon Klingenschmitt, in which Klingensmitt repeatedly makes false statements and attacks straw men.

UPDATE: After reading more about Klingenschmitt, I'm going with dishonest.

Medical marijuana in California

There's an interesting article in the July 23, 2008 The New Yorker by David Samuels, "Dr. Kush: How medical marijuana is transforming the pot industry." It describes the current state of medical marijuana business in California, where the operators of small dispensaries, which are fully compliant with state law but not federal, are not prosecuted despite occasional fed harassment. That harassment will no doubt continue until either Raich v. Ashcroft gets overturned (it was a terrible Supreme Court decision) or the feds decide to decriminalize marijuana themselves, one of which I expect to happen in the next decade.

Oldest complete manuscript of Bible to be available online

The Codex Sinaiticus, a fourth-century biblical manuscript that includes the oldest complete new Testament and a partial Old Testament in Greek (the Septuagint), will be available online at http://www.codex-sinaiticus.net/ beginning tomorrow, July 24. The site is currently live with a few page images from the manuscript, which was written over 1600 years ago (between 330-350 C.E.). Tomorrow, you will be able to look at images of the pages, see the Greek text in a window next to it, and translation into another language in a window below that--English, German, Russian, or Greek (presumably modern Greek).

Mexican suicide aid

The New York Times reported Monday about Mexican pet shops selling pentobarbital, which is being purchased by international visitors for euthanasia purposes. The pet shops sell it for pet euthanasia, and were apparently surprised to hear that their recent sales have been for use on humans.

Car dealer strategies

A few years ago, people were using their homes as ATMs to purchase all sorts of consumer goods including cars. More recently, desperate home sellers were offering to throw in a "free" car with the purchase of a house. Now at least one auto dealer is offering to pay your mortgage.

This morning I heard a commercial for one of the local Phoenix Nissan dealers (one that receives frequent complaints from people who appear to not pay very close attention to what they are purchasing). The ad offers to make your mortgage payments for the rest of the year when you buy a car from them, even if your mortgage is as much as $2,000, without changing the sale price of the car. I suspect that means without lowering the sale price of the car below the point of profit.

It doesn't strike me as a sensible way to avoid foreclosure.

Nice article on Camp Inquiry

There's a good article on Camp Inquiry in the Buffalo News:

Deep in the Holland woods, D.J. Grothe wowed a group of kids at summer camp with a series of magic tricks. Seemingly impermeable steel rings were combined and separated again; rubber bands were melded into each other; coins vanished and returned in the unlikeliest of places.

Then, Grothe, national field director for the Council for Secular Humanism, did something even more amazing: He gave away the trick, detailing exactly how anyone can do magic.

It was another day at Camp Inquiry, where instead of swapping ghost tales or learning Bible stories, children take a critical look at claims of magic, the supernatural and even religion.

The camp's mission: Help young people "confront the challenges of living a nontheistic [or] secular lifestyle in a world dominated by religious belief and pseudoscience."

The unusual camp, now in its third year, brings together curious children from across the country to hone their skills as skeptics and critical thinkers.

Twenty-seven campers spent the past week following in the footsteps of Charles Darwin, digging up fossils and learning how to face moral dilemmas.

See the full article here. I'm glad to see it's not just a camp for atheists, but is open to theistic freethinkers as well:

Organizers don't specifically address faith or religion in their planned programming, which also includes a variety of art, music and leisure activities.

But the topics arise frequently in casual discussions among campers. Some profess to be atheists, others refer to themselves as secular humanists, and a few say they believe in a higher power.

Much better than Jesus Camp.

UPDATE: I originally referred to Camp Inquiry as Camp Quest, a different set of camps with similar aims. Thanks, Carol, for the correction.

UPDATE (August 9, 2008): NPR has also done a good story on Camp Inquiry.

Skeptics Society 2008 conference

The Skeptics Society has officially announced its 2008 conference, and the topic is not the one that was first suggested, war, terrorism, and security. Instead, this year's conference is on "Origins: The Big Questions," and is co-sponsored by the Templeton Foundation.

The conference will be held at Caltech on October 3-4, and the speaker lineup includes Sean Carroll (the Caltech theoretical physicist, not to be confused with Sean B. Carroll, the University of Wisconsin at Madison professor of molecular biology and genetics), Paul Davies, Stuart Kauffman, Christof Koch, Kenneth Miller, Nancey Murphy, Donald Prothero, Hugh Ross, Victor Stenger, Leonard Susskind, Michael Shermer, Philip Clayton, and Mr. Deity.

It's an interesting mix of speakers for the subject matter, and I suspect I will attend, but I'd really rather go to a conference that brought critical thinking to the subjects of war, terrorism, and security.

Best run city in the world?

A month or so ago, we got a mailing from the City of Phoenix, which bills itself as the "best run city in the world" on the basis of an award it won in 1993, telling us that our garbage and recycling pick up days would be changing. You can see that mailing here (PDF); the announcement is on the right hand side of the first page. The flyer states that pickup days will change the week of July 14, but notice that it doesn't say when or how they are changing. Instead, it says "Watch your mail for additional information." It didn't say to call in, and it didn't say to check the city's website. In fact, it says "Residents impacted by these changes will be notified through multiple mailings identifying the specific changes to their homes." That turned out to be false.

A week or so later, a second mailing came from the city. It also didn't say how the pickup days were changing, and it also said to watch for a further notification in the mail. It didn't say to call in, and it didn't say to check the city's website.

No further notification came. Everyone in my neighborhood apparently continued to put out recycling and garbage bins on the same days, and they didn't get picked up. Kat called today, and the person answering the phone for the City of Phoenix waste disposal said that they did no specific mailings, rather, they expected people to "get curious" and either look online or call them.

Well, we did indeed "get curious" as to why our garbage wasn't picked up, so I guess their expectation was valid. My initial assumption was that we had a new garbageman who didn't know my house was on his route, since I've had to call a few dozen times in the past about garbage and recycling not being picked up for that reason.

I've put out the recycling bin for pickup tomorrow--next to the full garbage bin that will be sitting out there until next week. So far, none of my neighbors have done the same.

Phoenix foreclosures spreading

The Arizona Republic is catching up with reality:

Foreclosures across metro Phoenix number 16,647 for the first half of the year compared with 9,966 during all of 2007 and 1,070 in 2006.
...
"It has become more of an equity problem than a subprime problem," said Tom Ruff, a real-estate analyst with Information Market.
...
Notice of trustee sales, or pre-foreclosures, also continue to climb. There were 35,111 pre-foreclosures filed in Maricopa County through July. That compares with 30,166 for all of 2007.

The article also notes that the median resale price for a home in Phoenix is now $210,000, down 30% from the peak in 2006.

More people are speculating about reaching a bottom. That would be nice, but we've still not seen a peak on preforeclosures, which set another record in June (6929, vs. 6416 in May). For comparison, the total sales volume in June was 5748 (and 5656 in May), according to the Arizona Realtor's Association. (These stats via Einzige, thanks!)

Did Diebold tamper with Georgia's 2002 elections?

Former McCain advisor and security researcher Stephen Spoonamore suggested at a press conference on Thursday that Diebold tampered with Georgia's 2002 elections for Governor and Senator, in which Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss defeated incumbent Democrat Sen. Max Cleland. Spoonamore was given a copy of a patch applied to Diebold machines in two strongly Democratic counties, DeKalb and Fulton, by Diebold CEO Bob Urosevich, allegedly in order to fix a clock-related problem. Spoonamore found that the patch did nothing to correct the clock problem, and contained two copies of the same program, but was unable to determine exactly what it did without access to the Diebold hardware. He has supplied a copy of the patch, which he obtained from a whistleblower in the Georgia Secretary of State's office, to the Department of Justice.

Netroots and telecom

There's a telecom panel at the Netroots Nation conference today on the subject of "Big Telecom: An Emerging Threat to Our Democracy?" The implied answer is yes, and it appears that every participant on the panel will be making that case. Here's the description of the panel:

Massive telecom companies control virtually all of our voice and internet communications these days—and new evidence shows a near-total lack of commitment to our democracy. AT&T has proposed filtering all content traveling on its network. Verizon tried initially to block NARAL's pro-choice text messages. Most telecom companies are fighting net neutrality. Can democracy survive an assault by those who control the tubes?

The panel members don't include anyone with any experience managing or operating an actual telecom network, but instead includes two people who have repeatedly demonstrated not only an ignorance of telecom law, technology, and policy, but who have misrepresented facts and failed to engage with the arguments of their critics, Matt Stoller and Timothy Karr (see posts on this blog in the "net neutrality" category). The closest person to a representative of a telecom is Michael Kieschnick of Working Assets, a company that is a reseller of long distance and wireless service on Sprint's network.

I agree with many of their positions--I don't think ISPs should be allowed to block websites on the basis of disagreement with content. I think ISPs should be transparent about their network management processes and filtering. Where I disagree with them is that they advocate that the FCC step in to regulate the Internet in a way that it has never had authority to do so before, and demand that network operators not be allowed to implement classes of service with different rates of charges, or even usage caps. Art Brodsky expresses the point which has also been made by Robb Topolsky of Public Knowledge, Timothy Karr of Free Press, and Matt Stoller:

In the name of "network management," some companies want to throttle down the use of legal applications, like BitTorrent which may, coincidentally, provide competition in entertainment programming. They want to impose usage caps across the board on all customers which would stifle innovation and curb the use of video (there's that anti-competitive meme again) without actually solving the problem of the so-called "bandwidth hogs." The way caps are being discussed now, they would only lead to higher prices and less usage for an industry that already charges more for less than most broadband providers around the world. Parts of our broadband industry may be the only sector in the world that wants to cut down the amount of its product it wants customers to use.

Brodsky's last sentence is clearly false--broadband is like a fixed-price all-you-can-eat buffet. All businesses want to maximize their profits by maximizing revenue and minimizing costs. When bandwidth is sold at a fixed cost in unlimited amounts, where a small number of users are consuming the majority of the service, it's in the business's interest to restrict those users or charge them more for what they consume in order to satisfy the rest in a cost-effective manner. The options are few--you can either restrict the "bandwidth hogs" in some way, charge them more so that they pay for what they use, or raise the price for everyone. These guys seem to advocate the latter approach, while I'm in favor of allowing all the options to be used in a competitive market. Where I disagree with Comcast's approach in issuing RST packets to block BitTorrent traffic is not that they did it, but that they were not transparent about what they were doing (and apparently didn't quite get it quite right--it should not have completely broken BitTorrent, but only slowed it down).

Brodsky's suggestion that Comcast has an interest in blocking BitTorrent because it provides competition in the entertainment space is absurd--they have an interest in blocking it because it's a very popular application which itself exploits Internet protocols in a way not anticipated by the designers in order to consume more bandwidth, getting around the congestion controls in TCP/IP by using multiple TCP streams. If BitTorrent traffic wasn't filling up the majority of Comcast's bandwidth, they'd have no interest in it, except when the MPAA and RIAA issue them subpoenas about their users infringing copyrights.

If the government prohibits the use of differential classes of service (which is already heavily used by private companies to give priority to applications within their enterprise which have requirements for low latency and jitter, such as real-time streaming audio and video, including Voice over IP) and requires that congestion be dealt with by building out infrastructure sufficiently that there will never be congestion no matter how many users max out their connectivity with BitTorrent, that will reduce competition by culling smaller companies out of the picture and making market entry more difficult. In any environment where a provider's upstream capacity is less than the sum of the capacity to every customer (and that's everywhere, today, and always has been), all-you-can-eat bandwidth is like a commons. The more that is available, the more the heavy users will consume, to the detriment of each other and the light users. Without setting caps and having tiered pricing or implementing technology that prioritizes packets and drops from the heavy users and from less-realtime-sensitive applications first (like BitTorrent), there are no incentives against consuming everything that is available.

I also think it's a huge mistake to have the FCC start regulating the Internet. FCC chairman Kevin Martin would no doubt love to place indecency standards and filtering requirements on Internet content. Once you open the door to FCC regulation of the Internet, that becomes more likely. And the FCC has been completely ineffectual at dealing with existing abuses like fraudulent telemarketing, illegal prerecord calls to residences and cell phones, caller ID spoofing, etc., already covered by statute and regulation. I'd rather see clear statutes that include private rights of action than entrust control of the Internet to the FCC. The FCC is a slow-moving bureaucracy, and AT&T and Verizon have the deepest pockets, the most lawyers, and the most personnel who have shuffled back and forth between government (including the NSA) and industry. That gives AT&T and Verizon the tactical advantage, and leads to less competition rather than more.

Which brings me to the warrantless wiretapping and telecom immunity issues, which Cindy Cohn of the EFF no doubt addressed on the Netroots Nation panel. I suspect I have little if any disagreement with her. I've long been a supporter of the EFF, as are many people involved in the management of ISPs. I strongly oppose telecom immunity for warrantless wiretapping, a complete abdication of Congress' responsibility to support the U.S. Constitution. But this shows the power of AT&T and Verizon. Not only did they get what they wanted, but the very infrastructure which was built to do this massive interception of traffic for the NSA and for law enforcement interception under the CALEA laws was built for them with assistance from government funds. All telecoms have to be compliant with CALEA (now including VoIP and broadband Internet providers), but the big incumbents who were most capable of affording it on their own got it at the lowest costs, while their competition was required to build it out at their own expense even if it never gets used.

But there are legitimate uses for deep packet inspection, for understanding the nature of the traffic on a network for management purposes, including tracking down security and abuse issues. Since it is in the hands of the end user to use encryption to protect sensitive content, I think use of DPI by network providers is reasonable for the purposes of providing better service in the same way that it's reasonable for a voice provider to intercept traffic for quality measurement purposes. It's also reasonable for interception to occur for "lawful intercept," but it should always require a court order (i.e., both executive and judicial branch approval) on reasonable grounds. The difficulty of obtaining wiretaps depicted in the television program "The Wire" is how it should be.

I've written a lot on these issues, much which can be found in this blog's Network Neutrality Index.

If any reader of this blog happens to have attended the Netroots Nation telecom panel or comes across a description of its content, please point me to it, as I'd like to see what was said. I don't have high hopes for the accuracy or reasonability of statements from Stoller and Karr, but I could be surprised, and the other panelists probably had interesting and important things to say.

(See my Blogger profile for the disclosure of my employment by Global Crossing, which is currently listed by Renesys as the #3 network provider on the Internet in terms of number of customers, ahead of AT&T and Verizon, behind Sprint and Level 3.)

UPDATE: The "Big Telecom" panel was live-blogged (dead, unarchived link: http://openleft.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=C865142FFB85E14AAD27045B9A342B15?diaryId=7032"). Stoller's anecdote about the Bill of Rights on metal is referring to Dean Cameron's "security edition" of the Bill of Rights, which was also promoted by Penn Jillette.

San Francisco's city network held hostage

The mainstream media has reported the arrest of the City of San Francisco's network administrator, being held on $5 million bond, as though he had secretly taken control of the city's network and servers and held them hostage, and implies that he has access to data stored on servers on the network. The reality, however, appears to be somewhat different.

Paul Venezia at InfoWorld has dug a little deeper, and found that Terry Childs, a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE, Cisco's top certification), was responsible for managing San Francisco's "FiberWAN" MPLS network, which he, though not the top network architect, built and managed himself. He has always been the only one with access, which he protected vigorously for fear that no one else around him was competent to do so. His paranoia seems to me excessive and misplaced--the risk of no one else having access is itself a single point of failure, and the fact that he originally refused to write remote configuration to flash, meaning that in the event of power failure the devices would not come back up and function properly without intervention, shows him to be a bit off.

Childs never "tampered" with any system or network device to take it hostage, he simply maintained control of what he built and refused to give others access to it. He never has had control of any servers or databases apart from the ones directly involved in managing the network, such as the authentication servers for the network. So the talk of data being stored on the network including "officials' e-mails, city payroll files, confidential law enforcement documents and jail bookings" appears to be irrelevant. Nothing has been done to prevent anyone from accessing any of those things or to gain unauthorized access to them; the network is still up and functioning normally, and Childs didn't have any special access to or manage or control the host-level access to the servers with that data. Now, he was probably able to intercept data transmitted on the network (necessary for troubleshooting), but if sensitive data was only accessed via encrypted sessions, even that risk wouldn't exist.

Childs' problem appears to be that he was overprotective, untrusting of the competence of his peers and management (perhaps with some justification), and placed technological purity and security over business requirements. Not unusual features for people with a very high level of technical skill.

Check out Venezia's article--it looks to me like he's got the goods on this story.

UPDATE (July 23, 2008): Childs gave up the passwords to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, after a secret visit arranged by his attorney, Erin Crane, with the mayor. Childs' attorney's statements are consistent with Venezia's article:

In her motion to reduce bail, Crane said Childs had been the victim of a "bad faith" effort to force him out of his post by incompetent city officials whose meddling was jeopardizing the network Childs had built. At one point, she said, Childs discovered that the network was at risk of being infected with a computer virus introduced by a colleague.

"Mr. Childs had good reason to be protective of the password," Crane said. "His co-workers and supervisors had in the past maliciously damaged the system themselves, hindered his ability to maintain it ... and shown complete indifference to maintaining it themselves.

"He was the only person in that department capable of running that system," Crane said. "There have been no established policies in place to even dictate who would be the appropriate person to hand over the password to."

The defense attorney added that "to the extent that Mr. Childs refused to turn over the password ... this was not a danger to the public."

Childs intends to fight the computer tampering charges:

Referring to the felony computer-tampering counts, Crane said, "Mr. Childs intends to not only disprove those charges, but also expose the utter mismanagement, negligence and corruption at (the Technology Department) which, if left unchecked, will in fact place the city of San Francisco in danger."

UPDATE (September 11, 2008): Venezia has a new story about the latest round of motions in the Childs case, where the prosecution has filed some apparently technically inept documents. I've also come across an affidavit supporting Childs' arrest from SFPD Inspector James Ramsey (PDF), which presents a very strong case that Childs was up to no good--he had set up his own racks of equipment including modems in a training room, was running his own mail servers and intrusion detection systems, and connecting his own personal equipment to the network. He had cut holes in a locked cabinet next to his cubicle to run cables into them, where he had placed a dialup modem and a computer to allow himself unauthorized access to the city network. The guy seems like a bit of a nut who was engaged in some highly inappropriate behavior meriting termination and criminal prosecution.

UPDATE (August 22, 2009): The judge in the Childs case, Superior Court Judge Kevin McCarthy, has dismissed three charges of tampering, leaving one count related to his initial refusal to give up the passwords, which has a maximum sentence of five years. Childs has served over a year in jail, due to his inability to raise $5 million in bail. He will appear in court on Monday regarding the final charge. Childs gave up the passwords to San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom after spending eight days in jail.

Another reason to hope Obama wins the election

Stephen Baldwin says he will leave the country if Obama wins. But will he stay away for at least four years?

Of course, he's just mocking his brother Alec's statement that he would leave the country if Bush were elected in 2000, which he didn't follow through on, either.

ApostAZ podcast -- Apostamini #1

The latest ApostAZ podcast is available, and it's an "Apostamini"--a short one. This one has a short commentary from me about The Amazing Meeting 6.

Contents:

Apostamini 001 Atheism and Freethought in Phoenix- "Squared" from Greydon Square's 'The Compton Effect'. Ingersoll's Vow. Amanda :). Pope George Carlin. Jim Lippard illustrates the cool points of TAM6 in Las Vegas (http://www.discord.org/). Greydon Square, "Dream" from 'The Compton Effect' album.

Moon transits earth

As seen from the Deep Impact probe, 31 million miles away.



(Via Bad Astronomy, where you can find more information and some related videos.)

Rock, Brock, and the Savings Shock

Via Long or Short Capital comes a children's story authored by FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair. The blog gives two versions of the story, first from the Amazon description of the book:

Rock and Brock may be twins, but they are as different as two twins can be. One day, their grandpa offers them a plan-for ten straight weeks on Saturday he will give them each one dollar for doing their chores. But there is a catch! Each dollar they save, he will match.

Rock is excited-there are all sorts of things he can buy for one dollar. So each week he spends his money on something different-a toy moose head, green hair goo, white peppermint wax fangs. But while Rock is spending his money, Brock is saving his. And each week when Rock gets just one dollar, Brock’s savings get matched. By summer’s end, Brock has five hundred and twelve dollars, while Rock has none. When Rock sees what his brother has saved, he realizes he has made a mistake. But Brock shows him that it is never too late to start saving.

And a second version based on Sheila Bair's recent urging that lenders freeze mortgage teaser rates and the government create a $50 billion loan program for mortgage holders in trouble to pay down their mortgages:

I think it is time to tell the real story of Rock and Brock. The one, where Brock puts his money into an FDIC insured savings account, while Rock asks his friend Kerimov to hook him up with some later-untraceable source of leverage, investing the proceeds in Russian oil assets. At the end of 10 weeks, Brock’s savings bank is kaput, wiping out most of his savings. Over the same period, Rock’s oil assets have doubled, which leaves him with enough cash to purchase the operating assets of Rock’s S&L, after negotiating a free put from the Fed. And a Ferrari Enzo.

Long or Short Capital is excellent for cynical and hilarious commentary on current financial events.

Man arrested for photographing cop

Scott Conover was arrested by a Johnson County, TN sheriff's deputy for taking his picture during a traffic stop--not his own, someone else's. He drove up to a stop in progress, slowed down, took a picture with his iPhone, and kept going. Officer Kenneth Lane went after him, pulled him over, falsely claimed that taking a picture of him was illegal and that he had to turn it over, and then arrested the guy, using two sets of handcuffs. The charge: "disorderly conduct, unlawful photographing, and pointing a laser at law enforcement officers"--all three of which were bogus.

More information, including a link to the officer's barely literate report, written four days after the fact, at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

UPDATE (August 9, 2008): Turns out there's more to the story, and it makes the cops look even worse. Conover was taking a picture of what was part of an ongoing campaign of harassment against him, by going after the patrons of his bar. In this particular case, Conover knew that the driver of the car was a woman who was acting as designated driver for her husband, and only the husband had been drinking, and so he followed to take pictures to document what was going on. And this harassment of his patrons began after Conover was a witness to deputies beating up a man outside of his establishment, and he made a statement supporting that man. Conover had also previously sued the sheriff's department and settled for an undisclosed sum.

Colorado initiative to define personhood as beginning at conception

Colorado voters will get to vote in November on a proposition that defines personhood as beginning at conception. This will have the implication that in vitro fertilization involves murder, as the process standardly involves the disposal of fertilized eggs. As right-to-lifers are also often advocates of IVF, this places them into a bit of a quandary. In my opinion, this should even have the implication that all frozen embryos need to be brought to term--it's surely wrong to freeze people and prevent them from living their lives without their consent.

Presidential Prayer Team asks your support for biblical marriage

The Presidential Prayer Team has called for supporters to "Pray for the President as he seeks wisdom on how to legally codify the definition of marriage. Pray that it will be according to Biblical principles. With any forces insisting on variant definitions of marriage, pray that God's Word and His standards will be honored by our government."

A piece of unattributed email has been going around in support of this proposition, with the following suggested Constitutional amendment to put that into effect:

Marriage in the United States shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women. (Gen 29:17-28; II Sam 3:2-5) Marriage shall not impede a man's right to take concubines in addition to his wife or wives. (II Sam 5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chron 11:21) A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed. (Deut 22:13-21) Marriage of a believer and a non-believer shall be forbidden. (Gen 24:3; Num 25:1-9; Ezra 9:12; Neh 10:30) Since marriage is for life, neither this Constitution nor the constitution of any State, nor any state or federal law, shall be construed to permit divorce. (Deut 22:19; Mark 10:9) If a married man dies without children, his brother shall marry the widow. If he refuses to marry his brother's widow or deliberately does not give her children, he shall pay a fine of one shoe and be otherwise punished in a manner to be determined by law. (Gen. 38:6-10; Deut 25:5-10) In lieu of marriage, if there are no acceptable men in your town, it is required that you get your dad drunk and have sex with him (even if he had previously offered you up as a sex toy to men young and old), tag-teaming with any sisters you may have. Of course, this rule applies only if you are female. (Gen 19:31-36)

For some reason Len Munsil's Center for Arizona Policy organization hasn't pushed this amendment in Arizona, instead preferring the unbiblical idea, not even widely recognized yet at the time of Charlemagne, that marriage should only be between one man and one woman.

Lippard-related crime update

Tredell County deputies have confiscated 175 marijuana plants from a barn on Lippard Farm Road in Statesville, NC. No arrests have been made in that case, but "charges are pending."

Come on, North Carolina. If you can grow tobacco, why not marijuana?

Ed Brayton on David Kupelian's latest foolishness

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars has a nice takedown of David Kupelian's article at the WorldNutDaily bemoaning how atheists are being allowed to publish books in these Christian United States. Ed shows that Kupelian has no idea what he's talking about when he writes about Christianity in American history.

Obama the Lightworker

Mark Morford at the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, back on June 6:

Barack Obama isn't really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway.
...
Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

Sorry, but this is crazy talk--and crazy talk of the sort that the religious right will grab a hold of, translate "Lightworker" into "Light bearer" into "Lucifer," and decide that Obama's the Antichrist.

Morford writes that he doesn't literally believe this, and warns up front that:

Warning: If you are a rigid pragmatist/literalist, itchingly evangelical, a scowler, a doubter, a burned-out former '60s radical with no hope left, or are otherwise unable or unwilling to parse alternative New Age speak, click away right now, because you ain't gonna like this one little bit.

But even on a non-literal level, I don't like it. The job of the president is to lead the executive branch of the government, not to be national daddy, mommy, or Messiah. Obama clearly has a lot of charisma and speaks very well, which is something that can be used positively or negatively--and more often than not it's the latter.

Network World covers biscuit cult death threat and firing

Network World has a good summary of the story of the firing of Melanie Kroll's firing by 1-800-Flowers. Kroll was fired after her husband Chuck sent a death threat to P.Z. Myers using her corporate email account, saying that if he didn't quit his job by the first of the month, he would "get [his] brains beat in." Chuck Kroll, presumably a conservative Catholic, issued this threat because Myers blogged in support of University of Central Florida student Webster Cook, who took a consecrated host from a Catholic church in Orlando, Florida. Cook was accused of a hate crime equivalent to kidnapping by Bill Donohue of the Catholic League. After receiving threats, Cook returned the magic cracker. Cult members believe the wafer has been literally transformed into the body of Jesus, while also retaining the properties of a cracker. This is not to be confused with Scientology, which believes that we are infested with the bodies of murdered space aliens, though both views seem to be on a par with respect to their reasonableness and quality of supporting evidence.

UPDATE (July 16, 2008): Melanie Kroll has been active in the comments at Greg Laden's blog, where she claims she was not connected to her company VPN when the email was sent. This is patently false, since otherwise her computer would not have been able to send the email through the company mail server from an RFC 1918 private IP address, which it did. It seems that she, like her husband, is incapable of taking responsibility for her own errors. She also writes this, by way of explanation for husband's behavior:

My husband went on to the drudge report site that he reads and clicked on a link and came across that man pz's notice and responded as he always does when he is upset. Was his text extreme yes it was, would he follow through, never.

So he always sends email to the authors of people who write things that make him upset, threatening to beat their brains in if they don't quit their jobs by the end of the month? That sounds like a very serious personal problem.

Analysts say 150 U.S. banks will fail in next 18 months

The New York Times says that some banking analysts (two of which are mentioned by name) predict that "as many as 150 out of the 7,500 banks nationwide could fail over the next 12 to 18 months." If that were to happen, that would likely exhaust the Deposit Insurance Fund of the FDIC, which will be spending $4 to $8 billion to cover the insured deposits of failed IndyMac bank. The Deposit Insurance Fund had about $52.4 billion at the end of 2007.

The worst case scenarios I've seen frequently discussed are hyperinflation and a Greater Depression. The way to survive the former would be to keep funds in more-stable foreign currencies and gold; for the latter it would be better to stay in cash and bonds (so long as none of the bonds default). A diversified set of investments is still your best bet, in my opinion.

UPDATE (September 12, 2008): The Economist (August 30, 2008) reports that the FDIC has 117 banks on its watch list, compared to 90 at the end of March, and reports that the drawdown on the Deposit Insurance Fund for IndyMac is sufficient to trigger a required funds "restoration" plan within the next 90 days.

Luskin's latest howler

Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute, writing at the Evolution News & Views blog (which accurately describes itself with its motto that begins "The misreporting of the evolution issue is one key reason for this site"), has outdone himself again.

Regarding a paper by Neil Shubin about Tiktaalik, Luskin complains that Shubin makes a comparison to the wrist bones of tetrapods, but never identifies any by name:

When discussing Tiktaalik's "wrist," Shubin says he "invites direct comparisons" between Tiktaalik's fin and a true tetrapod limb. Surely this paper must have a diagram comparing the "wrist"-bones of Tiktaalik to a true tetrapod wrist, showing which bones correspond. So again I searched the paper. And again he provides no such diagram comparing the two. So we are left to decipher his jargon-filled written comparison in the following sentence by sentence analysis:

1. Shubin et al.: "The intermedium and ulnare of Tiktaalik have homologues to eponymous wrist bones of tetrapods with which they share similar positions and articular relations." (Note: I have labeled the intermedium and ulnare of Tiktaalik in the diagram below.)

Translation: OK, then exactly which "wrist bones of tetrapods" are Tiktaalik's bones homologous to? Shubin doesn't say. This is a technical scientific paper, so a few corresponding "wrist bone"-names from tetrapods would seem appropriate. But Shubin never gives any.

As P.Z. Myers points out, Luskin apparently doesn't realize what the word "eponymous" means. The wrist bones that the intermedium and ulnare bones of Tiktaalik are homologous to in tetrapods? The bones that are "eponymous," that have been given the same names: the intermedium and the ulnare.

Carl Zimmer points out the same Luskin faux pas.

Cops and DUI

If you're the wife of a criminal defense attorney, you can get arrested for DUI even if you've not had a single drink. (This one was right here in Mesa, Arizona.)

If you're a cop, the expectation is that you won't get arrested for DUI even if you crash your car because you're so drunk you can't remember what year it is. Because if a cop arrests a cop for DUI, things get ugly.

Guillermo Gonzalez' new school

Guillermo Gonzalez, one of the proclaimed victims of oppression and infringement of his academic freedom in the film "Expelled," has taken a job at Grove City College, a Christian liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. The school has been under censure by the American Association of University Professors since 1963 for its failure to respect academic freedom. A report by the AAUP Investigative Committee concluded "the absence of due process [in the dismissal of professors at Grove City] raises...doubts regarding the academic security of any persons who may hold appointment at Grove City College under existing administrative practice. These doubts are of an order of magnitude which obliges us to report them to the academic profession at large."

More at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Bowl-A-Rama!!

There’s a saying in the non-profit world that people don’t donate to organizations, they donate to the individuals that represent them. Let me introduce you to two wonderful representatives of RESCUE:

Otto was saved from the euthanasia list in December 2001.

Fred was saved in August 2002.

Otto and Fred were both found on the streets of Phoenix and wound up on the kill list. They would not be with us if not for RESCUE. Otto and Fred are just two examples of the over 9,000 lives that RESCUE has saved thanks to donations. All of RESCUE’s cats and dogs are taken directly from the kill list at Maricopa County Animal Care and Control. If you have not donated to our largest fundraiser of the year – Bowl-A-Rama, PLEASE do so today! No donation is too large or too small.

If you are outside of Arizona and can spare $5, please make a donation, there is an informal competition to see who can get donations from the farthest place. Be sure to put Jim or Kat Lippard as the referrer.

Please help us help them!

Bush July 4 speech censors Jefferson

President George W. Bush gave a speech at Monticello on July 4 that said, quoting Jefferson:

On the 50th anniversary of Americas independence, Thomas Jefferson passed away. But before leaving this world, he explained that the principles of the Declaration of Independence were universal. In one of the final letters of his life, he wrote, May it be to the world, what I believe it will be to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.

Here's what Jefferson actually wrote:

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.

As Wonkette aptly notes, "Yeah dude, looks like you forgot the good part." (Though Wonkette incorrectly attributes the Constitution to Jefferson along with the Declaration of Independence.)

(Thanks to Scott Peterson on the SKEPTIC list.)

UPDATE (July 16, 2008): Roger Kimball has responded to this issue, and Ed Brayton points out what he's gotten right and what he's gotten wrong about Jefferson's views on religion. (Contrary to Dawkins and Hitchens, Jefferson was no atheist, nor even a deist. He referred to himself as a Unitarian, and Brayton calls him a "theistic rationalist.")