Category: Interesting Reads

Dan Gilmor’s comment on the Floyd Landis Tour de France drug uproar

I agree with Dan here – I don’t care if athletes are using drugs.

But for the cycling world, Thursday’s announcement was a measure of achievement. Cycling is doing more to test its biggest stars at its biggest event than most other professional sports. The depressing news of Landis’ drug test is a reminder that the entire professional sports world should be doing more to catch cheaters.

The real story here is not what our media watchdogs and sports authorities say. It’s blatant, gross hypocrisy.

Right now I’m using a performance-enhancing drug, which I need to function well. It’s called caffeine, and is part of the coffee I drink each morning.

Later I’ll use a drug that helps me relax. It’s called alcohol, and it comes in the wine I’ll drink with dinner.

Drug laws are insane enough. Sports drug bans are beyond hypocritical, because they punish one kind of enhancement while pretending that all others are okay.

I don’t care at all if professional athletes use drugs. They have already been modified in all kinds of other ways — such as diets, blatantly unhealthy, that turn pro football linemen into people the size of large refrigerators.

As I said, I agree with him. I’m not bothered by professional athletes taking drugs and I’m not been bothered by college athletes getting paid. People complain that this will result in the biggest colleges always having the best athletic programs, but why is it so wrong for colleges when pro sports have it (NY Yankees, anyone)?

[tags]Dan Gillmor on Tour de France drug ruckus, Athletes and drugs – so what?[/tags]

The latest laser news

(via Engadget)
A co-worker pointed this out to me, as I missed it when perusing my Engadget news for the day – UC, San Diego researchers have come up with an improved method for finding flaws in tracks using lasers.

A team led by UCSD structural engineering professor Francesco Lanza di Scalea describes in the Aug. 22 issue of the Journal of Sound and Vibration a defect-detection technique that uses laser beam pulses to gently “tap” on steel rails. Each laser tap sends ultrasonic waves traveling 1,800 miles per second along the steel rails. Downward facing microphones are positioned a few inches above the rail and 12 inches from the downward pointed laser beam. As the prototype vehicle rolls down the test track delivering laser beams taps at one-foot intervals, the microphones detect any telltale reductions in the strength of the ultrasonic signals, pinpointing surface cuts, internal cracks, and other defects.

And let me just say, I find it freaky cool that there is even a scientific journal called Journal of Sound and Vibration. So naturally, I had to go look it up – here’s the skinny on the journal. Sadly, it appears subscriptions are roughly $1750 for 50 issues. That puts it slightly out of my price range.  Understand, I have no use for the journal, but I thrive on highly specialized knowledge that has no applicability to my daily life.
The article online does not mention specifically if the technology is based purely on lasers, or if there are any frikkin’ sharks involved in building the detector.

[tags]Lasers used in detecting train track flaws, Frikkin’ sharks possibly help find train track flaws[/tags]

Ancient ad gives sound advice

When I first saw this March 1940 advertisement from Popular Science magazine over on the Modern Mechanix blog, I thought it was a foreshadowing of my view of self. Then I realized it’s an ad concerning fire insurance. The thing is, the words of the ad (after the smart/dumb part) are still true today.

“For A Smart Man I’m Pretty Dumb”

“I never realized this until too late—every fire insurance policy states that a complete list of destroyed and damaged property must be supplied before insurance can be paid. I had insurance, but the fire we had caught me way off base. It’s too late now to make a complete list for insurance settlement.

“It would have been easy for me or my wife to make that list before we had a fire. There’s even a helpful booklet that lists things, room by room, and helps you remember articles that you might forget. The book is free. I . hope other families will be smarter than we were and get one of these books before it’s too late!”

MAIL THE COUPON
THE AMERICAN INSURANCE GROUP (Dept. 1119)
15 Washington St. Newark, N. J.

Without charge or obligation, please send me your Household Inventory Booklet.

[tags]Modern Mechanix, Insurance advice, For a smart man I’m pretty dumb[/tags]

Nation of fear

Salon has a good article about how the country has changed since 9/11. I’ve commented many times to many people that I think we have too much fear-based policy since the attacks, and not enough thought-based policy which is needed. The folks at Salon have said that and so much more in their article titled “Cityscape of Fear.”

Aug. 22, 2006 | Within a week after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, officials at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts set up a half dozen massive concrete freeway separators in a stately line across Josie Robertson Plaza, the complex’s main outdoor entryway. The security barricades, unsightly white slabs known as Jersey barriers, were intended to protect the center’s performance halls from a speeding truck bomb. Perhaps only the most unusually cultured of terrorists would want to hit Lincoln Center, which sits five miles north of ground zero on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — but in the tense aftermath of the attacks, no precaution seemed too much. Lincoln Center groundskeepers thoughtfully topped the Jersey barriers with colorful potted plants, a rehabilitation technique along the lines of pinning a tiara on Medusa. Almost five years have passed since the attacks. The barriers remain in place.

To appreciate how America has changed since 9/11, walk slowly through any major city. What you’ll see dotting the landscape is the physical embodiment of fear. Security installations put up after the attacks continue to block public access and wrangle pedestrian traffic. Outside Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, garish purple planters menace rush-hour pedestrian traffic. The gigantic planters have abandoned all horticultural ambition, many of them blooming with nothing more than trash and untilled dirt. “French barriers,” steel-grate barricades meant for controlling crowds, ring many landmark sites — including San Francisco’s Transamerica Building — like beefy bodyguards protecting starlets. Then there are the bollards, the cylindrical vehicle-blocking posts that are so pervasive you wonder if they’ve mastered asexual reproduction. In Washington, bollards surround everything. Not since Confederate Gen. Jubal Early attacked the city in 1864 has the nation’s capital felt so under siege.

Read more about what we are losing by letting fear run our lives and determine how we act. It’s a long article, but well worth the time it takes to read it. Terrorists win by spreading terror. They don’t win because they destroy some buildings or kill some people. They win because they change how we live and make us scared to live well. Don’t let the terrorists win. Stop fearing what they might do.

[tags]Cityscape of fear, How fear affects the nation[/tags]

Court ruling on Bush’s secret NSA wiretap program

This is practically ancient news, in Internet terms, but I wanted to make a comment here on the latest ruling on Bush’s secret NSA wiretap program. I haven’t read the ruling yet, so I’m a bit surprised by what I’ve seen of it so far. The ruling in short is that the wiretap program is unconstitutional *and* is illegal under the 1978 FISA act (see also Wikipedia’s entry for a more understandable guide to FISA).

Continue reading “Court ruling on Bush’s secret NSA wiretap program”

On the great importance of commas

(via Tingilinde)

After mistakenly putting an extra comma in a contract, Rogers Communications, Inc. of Canada may be spending $2+ million extra for use of utility poles in Canada.

It could be the most costly piece of punctuation in Canada.

A grammatical blunder may force Rogers Communications Inc. to pay an extra $2.13-million to use utility poles in the Maritimes after the placement of a comma in a contract permitted the deal’s cancellation.

The controversial comma sent lawyers and telecommunications regulators scrambling for their English textbooks in a bitter 18-month dispute that serves as an expensive reminder of the importance of punctuation.

Rogers thought it had a five-year deal with Aliant Inc. to string Rogers’ cable lines across thousands of utility poles in the Maritimes for an annual fee of $9.60 per pole. But early last year, Rogers was informed that the contract was being cancelled and the rates were going up. Impossible, Rogers thought, since its contract was iron-clad until the spring of 2007 and could potentially be renewed for another five years.

Armed with the rules of grammar and punctuation, Aliant disagreed. The construction of a single sentence in the 14-page contract allowed the entire deal to be scrapped with only one-year’s notice, the company argued.

Language buffs take note — Page 7 of the contract states: The agreement “shall continue in force for a period of five years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party.”

Slightly more information on the story in the full article.  Folks that think grammar and punctuation don’t matter can learn something here.  If you would like to try to get a better grip on this, perhaps you’d benefit from either Lynne Truss’ original book or her latest release?

[tags]On the importance of grammar and punctuation, Watch that comma, Comma costs millions[/tags]

Wal-Mart Image-builder resigns

(via Blue’s News)

Here is a case of someone saying something they shouldn’t have said.  And it comes from the kind of person you wouldn’t expect to say this kind of thing.  So, here are the comments made by the man Wal-Mart recently hired to help build a better image for the company.

“You see those are the people who have been overcharging us,” he said of the owners of the small stores, “and they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs.”

Wow.  Not the thing you’d expect to hear from someone trying to help build a better image for a company with as bad an image as Wal-Mart.  So, who is this outstanding symbol of good image and what did he do about it?

Mr. Young, 74, a former mayor of Atlanta and a former United States representative to the United Nations, apologized for the comments and retracted them in an interview last night.

Well, that’s one way, I suppose.  But really, why would he say this?  I mean, he had to have a reason, right?  Context matters, I’m betting.  It was probably mis-interpreted.  So here’s what he had to say after the fact.  The clues that all was not as it seems.

“It’s against everything I ever thought in my life,” Mr. Young said. “It never should have been said. I was speaking in the context of Atlanta, and that does not work in New York or Los Angeles.”

OK, so he doesn’t think Jews, Koreans or Arabs are bad all over – it’s just the Jews, Koreans, and Arabs in Atlanta.  Damn, that’s some serious foot-in-mouth disease he’s got going on.

[tags]Wal-Mart, Image-building, Hating on the foreigners[/tags]

Sad news to LotR fans – hobbit in Indonesia not a hobbit

It’s just a developmental abnormality, it seems. At least, that’s the argument being made by skeptics who don’t believe the hobbit find represents a new species (the Homo floresiensis if you don’t know already).  So still no proof one way or the other, but here’s a view from the disbelievers.

The bizarre “hobbit” bones unearthed a few years ago in Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores were billed as a rare find–a new species of human, Homo floresiensis (ScienceNOW, 11 October 2005). But a few critics weren’t buying. Now in a report released today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the skeptics lay out a detailed case arguing that the leading hobbit specimen, a one-meter-tall, 18,000-year-old skeleton with a brain the size of a grapefruit, was merely a diseased Homo sapiens.

“This is not a new species,” says co-author Robert Eckhardt of Pennsylvania State University in State College. “This is a developmentally abnormal individual.”

The team uses several lines of evidence to challenge the hobbit’s novelty. For example, they point out that elephants apparently colonized the island twice. Because even early hominids presumably had better travel skills than elephants, humans probably also arrived on the island more than once; lack of isolation would have prevented the evolution of a new dwarf species, they say.

Full argument in the ScienceNow article.

[tags]Indonesian hobbit not a hobbit, Developmental abnormality explains apparent hobbit find in Indonesia[/tags]

Improving security via watching people?

(via Stupid Security)
Here is a security move that I want to praise.  Rather than the other senseless screening precautions we’ve seen, such as by name (which resulted in Sen. Ted Kennedy having difficulty flying), we now have preliminary work being done to identify people for greater inspection based on how they are acting.  I know that this is one thing customs agents do to help pick out which travellers need to be screened more carefully.  And this is a smart way to work on improving security.  Yes, these will be times when the wrong people get picked out due to issues like race or attire, but in general, this is a good way to increase efficiency of inspection.  But it was an important part of the identification and capture of Ahmed Ressam in the attempted millenium bombing of LAX.  Much like insurers use actuarial tables, identifying people by suspicious behavior generally works if the identifiers are well trained, and incorrect identifications tend to be minimally intrusive.

This is a good move by the government, and I hope more of this kind of thing is used in the war on terror (which, by the way, is a term I don’t like even though I get why it is used).

[tags]Behavior assessment profiling, Intelligent airline security procedures[/tags]

12-year-olds on a plane

(via StupidSecurity)
I missed this when it happened, but last week on Thursday, a 12-year old boy managed to get on an airplane without a passport, without a ticket, and without being screened by airport security.  This is what the heightened security in the UK gives travellers for security?

The boy was discovered by cabin crew and turned over to airport police. Officials said they could not explain how he got aboard the plane, especially in light of security checks imposed last week after authorities foiled an alleged plot to bomb jetliners leaving Britain.

[tags]UK airport security win? 12-year-old on plane without ticket[/tags]

Google’s flash of insight

(via Dan Gilmor’s blog)

I’m stealing Dan Gilmor’s whole post.  It’s only interesting because of his comment on the situation:

————–

The Independent: To google or not to google? It’s a legal question: But the California-based company is becoming concerned about trademark violation. A spokesman confirmed that it had sent the letters. “We think it’s important to make the distinction between using the word Google to describe using Google to search the internet, and using the word Google to describe searching the internet. It has some serious trademark issues.”

There’s a great idea: Force people to stop reinforcing your brand. Sounds like Google has too many lawyers…

————–

[tags]Google working to stop people from using term Google[/tags]