You can always climb Mt. Fuji (I have three times, but probably won’t again), but in Tokyo, the most popular mountain to climb is Mt. Takao, on the western outskirts of Tokyo prefecture, just beyond Hachioji. Takao-san-guchi Station is the last stop on the Keio Line, and drops you off not far from the cable car and chair lifts which can take you half way up the mountain.

However, if you are expecting a nature hike, understand that the exposure to nature is a bit limited by the fact that you are crowded by the thousands of other climbers on the trails. Mt. Takao is almost more of a tourist exhibit than it is a mountain hike–at least on the main trail, which nearly everyone takes. Sachi and I didn’t know about the other trails when we arrived, otherwise we probably would have tried one. The main trail was jam packed, mostly because it’s Golden Week, I presume.

Fuji is the same way–the crowding slows the hike down to a crawl sometimes. For Takao, I’d suggest trying the other trails. They lack the tourist shops and the other attractions, but it’s a lot less crowded and a lot more like nature hiking.

On the main trail, we noticed quite a few people bringing their dogs. Sachi loves Shiba Inus, so whenever we see one it’s time to stop and make friends.

That last one has a larger version when clicked. They are beautiful dogs; we’re getting one as soon as we find a place where we can have one–our current place doesn’t allow pets.

The walk up the mountain does have some spectacular views, which these photos don’t do justice to.

If the weather is clear enough, you can see Shinjuku (below) or Yokohama on the horizon.

Here’s a stitched-together panorama, with a larger version (2200 pixels wide) when clicked:

Sachi and I walked up the whole way, as (1) taking the tram up is cheating, and (2) there was an hour-long wait. Just past the top of the tram lines is a nature garden, which, most importantly, features monkeys. There are signs all along the pathway suggesting that wild monkeys can be observed, but either it’s a fake-out to get you to look, or they must not like the crowds. But pay 400 yen and you can get to see a whole bunch in a zoo-like setting.

They are fascinating creatures, even these Macaques, for their resemblances to humans in some ways–close enough but still alien enough to be engrossing. Here’s one picking at stuff on the back of its hand, allowing us to see it’s palm; note on the close-up the ridges and valleys of palm- and fingerprints.

Also in the garden were a lot of flowers, trees, and other plants; this one below (larger version on click) I thought exotic and beautiful, a stunning feature of the garden–until I noticed a whole bunch of them in front of our apartment building this morning, I had just never noticed them.

This blossom is a lot less attractive; Sachi noted it’s resemblance to a certain body part, which I will not repeat here.

Enough for tonight. I’ll finish up with the other photos tomorrow.

Well, the ID’ers are at it again, trying to cram creationism into Science classes by way of sabotaging the teaching of Evolution theory. This time, their false-front is called “academic freedom,” as in “academic freedom bills” which creationist legislators are pushing to get passed now. It’s all about the name of the bill, isn’t it? This one is like the “Patriot Act,” suggesting you’re not a patriot if you vote against it. We all know that the more strongly a bill is so named, the more likely it is not to have any relation to the name, and this one certainly fits the bill.

The problem is this case, of course, is that it’s not about academic freedom. It is not “academic freedom,” for example, to teach that photosynthesis doesn’t happen, or that the Earth’s atmosphere is primarily made up of oxygen. Instead, that kind of stuff is more accurately termed as “being wrong.” Now, the ID’ers are not claiming that photosynthesis doesn’t happen or that the Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t mostly consist of nitrogen. My point is that they would be arguing such drivel if they had happened to interpret the bible as having said so. They are not against Evolution because it’s wrong–after all, they have not argued against scientific theories that are far more likely to be wrong. They argue against it because it goes against the peculiar brand of science they have divined from scriptures written by people who knew even less about science than the least-educated people in the country today, people who were not even writing about science, but from whose words people today extract conclusions about the nature of the universe. They argue against Evolution because they want people to believe in their own product instead of what actually exists.

The argument is that these new laws don’t bring creationism into the classroom, but just like ID, that is a shallow pretense and is ultimately false. After all, what is being proposed is essentially to tear down Evolution in the classroom and teach that it is false–which is precisely the nature of the intelligent design scheme, which runs not on its own evidence but rather purely on the conjecture that Evolution is wrong–which they claim leads us to the conclusion that god created the universe.

They are, to their credit, becoming a lot more politically savvy about this. Creationism failed because it was a blatant attempt to implant one religion’s dogma into science classes. ID failed because it was a sloppy attempt to dress up creationism as a faux scientific theory; its origins were directly traced back to creationism, and as a “scientific” theory, it was laughable. This latest attempt is the creationists’ cleverest attempt yet, because it claims to do nothing but to allow teachers to challenge Evolution theory, which is what Science is supposed to do–challenge and test theories to see if they stand up.

That sounds legitimate, except for one small detail: it is even more a fraud than ID was. This is not about challenging Evolution theory in scientific venues to test its veracity; if it were, there would be no new laws necessary; anyone can challenge Evolution theory anytime they want, however often they want. ID’ers have been trying to for some time, and they came up against a teensy little problem: their challenges have to have the smallest shred of legitimacy or fact, and none of theirs have that. What these new “academic freedom” laws intend to do is not to challenge the theory, but to discredit it with false claims that have been disproved in that very peer review.

Here’s the Fox News argument presented by one creationist “Science” teacher:

Doug Cowan, a public-school biology teacher, said his colleagues are often afraid to speak out.

Mr. Cowan said he tells students: “I’m going to give you the evidence for Evolution and the evidence against, and let you decide.” For instance, he’ll mention Darwin’s observation that finches evolve different-shaped beaks to suit different ecosystems. Then he’ll add that you don’t see a finch changing into another species.

Asked what evidence he presents to bolster evolution, Mr. Cowan paused. “I don’t have any,” he said.

Mr. Cowan is obviously an idiot. First of all, if he has no evidence to bolster Evolution, then he clearly is not a Science teacher; that’s like a professor of Constitutional Law claiming he doesn’t have any evidence to bolster the concept of Freedom of Speech. Secondly, the claim that no one sees a finch spontaneously change into a giraffe in a sudden puff of smoke is just one of the many completely ludicrous “criticisms” of Evolution theory that has the honor of having been so plainly disproved that even creationists are loath to bring it up; Mr. Cowan apparently didn’t get the memo.

But even aside from that, Mr. Cowan is suggesting that it’s a good idea to have creationists masquerading as authorities representing Science in the classroom to follow a half-assed representation of a rock-solid theory upheld by a century and a half of testing and peer review with a rebuttal of plainly false creationist fabrications, and then “let the students decide.” Yes, let’s do this for all subjects. Let’s hire members of white supremacist groups to teach American History, give students a half-assed lecture about slavery, follow it with a rebuttal about how black people enjoyed slavery and were better off under it, and then “let the students decide.” Or let’s have Computer Science taught by Luddites who briefly introduce the Internet and follow it up with a scare lecture about how using the Internet will lead teenagers to be raped and killed by child molesters, and let the kids decide on that, too. Because this kind of teaching methodology will only lead students to make informed choices which are bound to be correct. Right?

Let’s not kid ourselves. This bill to introduce “academic freedom” is nothing less than a bald attempt to give creationists who have defrauded their way into becoming “science” teachers free license to sabotage the teaching of actual science so that the students will, they hope, be driven to accept creationism.

This new angle is building up to a regression of lies and scams, all leading back to creationist claims that when what we see with our eyes contradicts a specific interpretation of biblical stories, we should deny observed fact and instead accept the preferred biblical interpretations. I mean, really, who could believe that science-fiction claptrap about the formation of proteins in a primordial soup, followed by the formation of cells grouping into colonies, which then progressed into more complex forms which survived by being the best-adapted to changing environments? Baloney! After looking at all of the abundance of fossils, the chemical analyses, the structure of DNA, and all the rest of the evidence, it is so obvious that man was formed when a big guy with a white beard breathed on a lump of clay! I mean, come on, how clear can it be? All you have is a century and a half of piercing peer review and mountains of evidence; we’ve got a guy who may or may not have been a sheep herder four thousand years ago who claims he spoke to god!! Beat that, science bitches!!

Interesting. With my G4 PowerBook, not only had the battery been going bad, but WiFi had also been extremely weak. I had thought the latter was a problem with my WiFi base station and its firmware/software. But after Apple replaced the battery, WiFi reception went way up. I didn’t know they were connected like that.

Via Andrew Sullivan. Moyers does the best job yet in laying out what’s going on, what’s right and wrong about the Wright affair.

I know right-wingers have always dismissed Moyers as some kind of ultra-liberal. But then again, they do that with just about every intelligent, literate, sensible person who speaks from the left. It doesn’t keep him from being a wise man who hits the nail on the head almost every time.

I read a news article about the Romanovs just now, and I remembered something funny from more than a decade back. I had been working part-time at a movie theater in San Francisco, and we had displays up for the animated film Anastasia (that would have made it 1997). A couple with a young child were walking into the theater; the youngster saw the display and excitedly pleaded with his parents, “Mommy! Daddy! I want to see Anesthesia!”

True story.

Question: If a seal rapes a penguin, could that be accurately termed as bestiality? And no, the question is not academic. I mean, when I was growing up, we had both a cat and a dog, and anyone who has owned both species at the same time knows that this is nothing new–but that’s in captivity, without relief from the opposite sex. More like animal prison sex.

Money quote: “At first glimpse, we thought the seal was killing the penguin.” Photo art/kinky animal porn at the linked site.

The “event” lasted 45 minutes, after which the seal left twenty dollars on a nearby rock and swam away.

This via TPM:

I’ve just obtained a copy of another ad hitting Obama on the gas tax that Hillary just started airing in Indiana.

The last-minute ad, which went up late on the Friday before election day, says Hillary’s gas tax holiday would “save families $8 billion,” and adds: “Barack Obama says that’s just pennies.”

“He’d make you keep paying that tax, instead of big oil,” the ad continues.

Wow.

I mean, really. The gas tax idea has been almost universally exposed as petty pandering to voters, dangling money in their faces which evaporates before it gets to their pockets. Hillary refers to her “improved” version of McCain’s “gas tax holiday,” where she proposes paying for the tax cut by charging the oil companies with it. Therefore the claim that “He’d make you keep paying that tax, instead of big oil.”

Of course, it’s pure BS. Hillary is simply shifting the tax to an earlier point in the pipeline; do you really imagine that the oil companies won’t pass on the tax hike to consumers? It is doubtful that there would even be a hiccup in prices at the pump. The tax would still be there, and you would still be paying for it. Even pro-Clinton Paul Krugman is with Obama on this one.

What’s worse, Hillary is lying about Obama with her numbers. Obama pointed out that in total, Americans would save no more than $30 total, assuming the “gas tax holiday” would work to full effect, which of course it will not. Hillary, who chides Obama for (correctly) pointing out that this comes out to just pennies a day, instead grandly claims that Americans will gain a windfall of eight billions dollars! Wow! That’s a lot! Until you divide that number by the number of Americans, when it comes out to being… $30. She’s calling Obama a liar because he’s claiming her tax cut, if it even worked, would net Americans the exact same amount of money she is claiming it will.

Hillary is testing an idea: are the voters in Indiana complete morons who will vote for anyone who promises a tax cut, no matter how obviously false the promise is? Unfortunately, she could be right in her assumption.

The ball’s in your court, Indiana: lying panderer, or truth teller? You decide.

Here’s a rather interesting pro-Barack video lasting five minutes, made almost in cartoon form. Hardly professional quality, but not bad, either. Sometimes over the top, there’s a lot of fun stuff in there as well. Via FSJ.

It’s all over the Japanese news today:

A local council employee in Japan has been punished after it was discovered he had accessed porn websites at work more than 780,000 times in nine months.

This is one of those stories that you just go, “Wow, what a perv” over. But something is fishy here: This guy would have had to do nothing but click on porn sites continuously for nine months in order to rack up the numbers they’re claiming. For the 177,000 hits in July, assuming an 8-hour workday, he would have had to open a new porn web site once every three seconds, non-stop, full-time. While this is not impossible, it is highly improbable, to the point where I cannot accept the clearly-implied conclusion.

My boss is dealing with malware on his computer which is automatically taking him to all kinds of spam and porn sites, and if you’re using IE6 with factory settings, then it is likely that closing one window will result in a large number more opening up. The windows open very quickly like this, and even if you hold down the shortcut keys nearly continuously, the right spam script will keep opening them up just as quick if not quicker. It’s quite something to witness, in fact.

What I can imagine is that this guy had such a malware infestation, which his anti-virus software missed and allowed to stay, and the guy, bored out of his gourd with meaningless make-work, spent maybe a half hour each day just playing IE6 Porn Pachinko, watching the windows open and close, maybe even making a game of it. Certainly not productive, but I’ll bet that he didn’t get any less work done relative to what was expected, or perhaps performed by his colleagues.

Surely the media is having fun with this, but there is no mention of any evidence other than the web hits for July and for the 9-month period, and the penalty (a demotion and a $200/mo. pay cut); everything else is pure conjecture. One can only guess that the papers figure this is attractive copy and everyone can have a laugh at his expense.

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One way you can tell a news story is brewing is if helicopters start to circle, like buzzards in the desert. As I exercised this morning, I first noticed the buzz over the music from my iPod, and then saw the helicopters, two or three of them, circling Ikebukuro Station. On the way to work, with little time to spare for distractions, I took a side route which bypassed the station so any potential traffic jam wouldn’t slow me down.

And sure enough, the story was there in the news tonight:

Bus plows into pedestrians on sidewalk at Ikebukuro Station

A bus ran onto a sidewalk at Ikebukuro Station in downtown Tokyo on Friday afternoon, slightly injuring three pedestrians, police said.

None of them were hurt badly. I am sure the cameramen on the helicopters were disappointed, despite circling over the area for more than half an hour.

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The reason I had no time to spare was that I had to go in to work, grab the boss’s computer, and along with my own, take it down to the Ginza. Not newsworthy, but worthy of pointing out: I love the Genius Bar feature at the Apple Store. Made an appointment last night in less than a minute, and walked in to the store, and saw a tech support person within a few minutes. Less than half an hour later, both computers were fixed. The problem with both: dead batteries. My boss’s had been dead for some time, he just never got around to changing it. The school picked up the tab for that one.

My own computer’s battery had gone from normally functioning to nearly dead within just a few weeks; leave it unplugged for five minutes, and suddenly the power goes out and the thing shuts down–and when I restarted, I had to always reset the clock, re-certify my email domains, and re-input all the passwords. Several times that happened when the power connected came lose when slightly jarred.

That they replaced–free of charge. Apparently, it is a symptom of recalled batteries. My original battery had worked fine for a year, then I got it swapped with a new one when a recall was announced; that worked fine until just a few weeks ago, and now I have another new free battery. Cool.

But the nice thing is having the option of going to the Genius Bar. It was not wholly clear that the problem with either computer was a bad battery–it could have been a power supply issue or something, and ordering new $150 batteries would have been risky. Calling tech support would have entailed the support person spending an hour running me through pointless tests, and then insisting I wipe the hard drive and re-install the entire system before they did anything. Not having the Genius Bar would mean shipping the computer off and not having it for a week or more.

But with the Genius Bar, it was a short, 1-hour jaunt to the Ginza, and access to free goodies that usually come with the personalized service. Had I asked them to replace the “a” and “s” keys on my keyboard–they’re getting pretty worn after three years–I am sure I could have gotten it. They replaced my command key cap last time I went.

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I always regret not lugging my camera around with me. I would just buy a cheap 3- or 5-megapixel camera, except I expect there’ll be one in the iPhone I expect to buy in July (if my read of DoCoMo’s new mobile make-over is correct). But because I didn’t have a camera with me today, I didn’t get a photo of a Chinese restaurant near Shinjuku Gyoen-mae Station, named:

Chin Goo

I’ll get it next time.

Oh, wait, I forgot that someone must have photographed it and put it up on the web already; here it is via Google Image Search. Not a great photo, though, I’ll still snap my own sometime soon.

When I was a kid, my parents did not expose me to religion. I was not taken to church, temple, or shrine, nor presented with any religious text. I do not recall my parents acting hostile toward religion, certainly not faith or spirituality; my mother thanking god at the dinner table in a way that I found moving is not what I would call anti-religious. Never mind that it is a non-specific spirit-of-everything kind of god being thanked, we did not scoff at belief. Nor am I non-religious in the strictest sense; I am what some would call an atheist but what most would term an agnostic; I suspect there is something there but am unwilling to say that I know what it is. A fundamentalist might say I disbelieve in god; I would say that I refuse to disbelieve. I imagine various scenarios that I feel could be true, but always keep in mind that the context which gives sense to whatever might have created the universe is so far removed from my own context, that I probably cannot judge with any reliability what that truth might be. I can only imagine, and perhaps hope.

At best, you could say that I was raised fairly neutrally, never pressured one way or the other, and perhaps was even given a positive view of spirituality in general. So the reason I have such disrespect for so many religious organizations and people who call themselves “believers” comes from their own example.

I remember one of the first memorable exposures I had of religion–aside, of course, from the endless public displays that everyone takes for granted, from the ingrained linguistic quirks like bless-you-for-sneezing to the ubiquitous Christmas-related religiosity that permeates the culture toward the end of the year. That stuff is so thoroughly dissolved into American life that you can go through it almost without noticing. The first time religion ever smacked me in the forehead was when I was listening to the radio in my room one day. I stopped at a station, and stayed for a moment when I heard something bombastic-sounding. More than thirty years later, I can hardly recall it verbatim, but it went very much like this: after a minute of Jesus-this and god-that, the radio preacher stopped in mid-sentence, and said:

–Wait a minute! Wait, a, minute!! God is, yes, the lord is speaking to me right this second! God is speaking to me, he is telling me… that there are twenty people in the audience, twenty people… who have one hundred dollars apiece! And I am not going to stop talking until those twenty people have called in and….

I swear to god that’s what he was saying. I laughed. I wondered at the near-comic temerity of this joker, to think that anyone would seriously believe that the grand lord almighty was whispering facts about people’s wallets to some third-rate radio evangelist. But, perhaps not right then, but certainly over not too much more time, it struck me just as strongly that this guy would probably not be on the radio if some people didn’t believe and send him money, earnestly believing that he was indeed in contact with god and dutifully obeying the will of the creator by sending in a C-note to this Minister What’s-his-name.

And then images of people who always puzzled me came to my mind, about everyone from the followers of Jim Jones to the people who gave all their money and lived on some commune while their god-on-Earth messiah drove past in one of his many Rolls Royce sedans. These people always troubled me, because I could never wrap my head around what they were thinking. Give up everything and do what? Watch this obvious charlatan live in luxury while you labor in his fields, and you pay him for it? What a con! What rubes these people are!

It was not until some years later that a paradigm to help explain this crystallized in my mind. I was attending a junior college, and I could not fail to notice the large number of religions and cults that advertised, or tried to, on campus, more than almost any other venue I had witnessed. And it occurred to me that there was a reason, similar to the reason why the military was so intent on making their pitch to people of like age. It is an age ripe for shaping people to believe; a group perhaps more likely than almost any other to be filled with people trying to decide where to go in life, but more importantly, a group that was vulnerable emotionally, more easily gulled, often alienated and lost, looking for direction and guidance. In short, an audience ripe for predation. And religions were there, at the front lines.

I did not become so simple-mindedly iconoclastic that I believed all religion was like that. I saw enough good works being done to convince me that many religious people and even some institutions did indeed mean and do well for others, and stay true to good, core principles. It just depressed me that such institutions were so clearly in the minority, and such people were hard to find in pure form, or at least as pure as you would minimally expect from a philosophy that evidently preached something so far removed from what so many of it practitioners actually practiced in real life.

This was clarified somewhat for me when I came to know a young woman I worked with at a part-time job in college. The daughter of a fundamentalist minister, she was rather enthusiastic about her faith. I have mentioned her before in my writing; she was the one who calmly informed me that she knew science, evolution, and the countless people involved were wrong because she found a flaw in radioactive dating methods, divined after hearing a short lecture on the subject in her high school science class. She did not have bad intentions–far from it. But her conclusions were indicative of so many I have witnessed since, so overwhelmingly biased by her beliefs, so empty of reason or logic–and yet she firmly believed that she had used reason to find an independent truth that informed her of the nature of the universe.

I can very much respect those who see religion as a spiritual guide, gaining strength, inspiration, and wisdom from what it offers. I may not believe in what they believe in, and I can even actively disbelieve in specific beliefs of theirs while still maintaining respect for the person overall. Like I said at the start of this tirade, I realize I could very well be wrong (and even likely am) about what I suspect is the way the universe works.

But what I cannot respect is a person who allows themselves, intentionally or not, to abandon something so clearly as important as faith: reason. I can feel compassion for such a person, I can even like them in many if not most ways. But once a person abandons any semblance of reason, and claims that the unseen trumps the seen, that the word trumps the fact (all too often followed by the claim of compassion trumping the act of compassion), I find myself getting up to leave the room. Not to be flippant, but you simply cannot reason with such people, and it is almost always a waste of time to try. It is one of the few prejudices I have which I am proud of. For as nice and deserving of love as these people may be, they are loons that should not be allowed near social administration or heavy machinery.

I am not talking only about people who think the universe is only six thousand years old when any first-year science student can prove them wrong in any number of easily demonstrable and reproducible ways. I also refer to people who answer reasonable arguments with scripture where the scripture used clearly has no relation to the discussion at hand beyond that imagined by the person delivering it. I also refer to people who faithfully believe a religious speaker when he says that the world will end tomorrow, and then believes just as much if not more two days later when the preacher comes up with some half-assed excuse as to why the universe not ending proves he was right all along–this being an extreme example of a kind of spiritual fraud that happens on a smaller scale every day. I also refer to people who do not see clear contradictions within their own beliefs and actions–not small, iffy, or difficult-to-spot contradictions that anyone could miss, but huge glaring ones, like Jesus loves you with the greatest of all joyful love, and is the ultimate epitome of forgiveness and mercy, and died for your sins and is dying for your sins all the time–but will send you to suffer unimaginable agony for a literal eternity in the fires of hell if you say his name the wrong way or pray to a different god, even if you do nothing but selfless good works every moment of your life.

You know. The obvious contradictions.

My threshold for suffering people like this is low enough when they are well-meaning. It only gets worse when they see their conclusions as not only so self-evident, but so overwhelmingly important that they feel the need to impose them on others. Fewer but more galling still are those who revel in the humble superiority all of this makes them feel, and you can see it going to their heads. Worse still are those who come from this supposedly loving state of holiness to espouse actions that will harm and even kill others. But it is difficult to judge if it is worst of all to see people who may or may not believe, but consciously use the emotional control inherent in the religious community to work believers in ways that allow for the gathering and use of influence and power, a use which seems to universally trend towards abuse as it is used in larger and larger contexts.

This is why I believe in what I call the inverse-square law of spirituality: just as the intensity of light falls off by the square of the distance, so does spirituality when removed from the individual. The farther spirituality is removed from being an individual’s journey through life and is used to influence others, the darker its effects become. I would include reason in the equation of spirituality as well: reason is not the antithesis of belief, it is integral to its healthy development.

So when I see people abandoning reason in their religion and then applying it to affect others, I start to get nervous.

It was almost exactly ten years ago that I first started working at Lakeland College, in our building on Shokuan Boulevard in north-eastern Shinjuku. The school had been there only a few years when I arrived; it was a building with a very small footprint, albeit nine stories tall, and served us well for those years.

But we found it necessary to move, and that process has just begun to end. After months of planning and working things out, the move was completed today; the new building stands full of bare-bones furniture nearly swamped in boxes that will have to be unpacked over the next week, as we make the new building home.

I had to do a lot of work on this myself, mostly in the form of planning the layout. Using Adobe InDesign, I made a to-scale map of the building and every component to be in it–I measured every nook and cranny of every room, along with every piece of furniture to bring it all together. Then I had to figure out other stuff, like how much room should each seat comfortably have for the occupants to work and still be able to push out from the desk, and have people walk behind them, while not taking up so much space as to fill up the building too soon. The color of flooring at the entrance, which furniture would go to which room, how to deal with a mold problem in the basement, and dozens of other issues had to be dealt with. Walls torn down, walls installed, wiring completed–it’s been a huge headache.

But it’s almost finished. We have worked on a tight budget, so we were not able to completely re-outfit everything; as raw as some parts of the building must be, we are getting it done. Our first semester may not look pretty, but it’ll work, while we get everything filled in and fixed up over time.

When I went in to work today, the old building was just an empty shell:

Since our old phone number remains active until tomorrow, we have had to keep a staff member in the empty room, answering phones left on a trolley cart. For some unknown reason, we were not able to keep our long-held phone numbers, despite only moving a kilometer away, and still in the same area code–hell, even the same neighborhood. But that’s the phone company for you.

I’d love to show off the new building, but it’s little more than a sea of boxes right now. Here are a few shots of the new faculty room.

A wider composite shot–I need to get a wider-angle lens for my camera… :

Tomorrow I go in to test computer networks and unpack boxes. Wheee!!

You may have heard about how McCain, and now McClinton both support a “gas tax holiday” for this summer, and argue that Obama is “out of touch” with regular Americans because he opposes the “tax cut.” The problem: the tax cut is so limited, in fact nearly worthless, that it works only as an election-year gimmick, not an actual solution to any problem. The tax stands at 18.6 cents per gallon, where gas costs $3.60 on average in the U.S. today. Let’s say that your gas tank holds 15 gallons and you pay the average price; you will save only $2.79 on a $54 refill. Wow! What a savings! That should fix a lot of people’s financial problems!

Truth is, you could probably save more money right now just by going to one of those web sites that finds the lowest gas prices, and save ten to fifteen cents per gallon that way. In my old ZIP code, there is a 23-cent-per-gallon difference between the highest and the lowest gas prices at stations within just a few miles of each other.

In short, the McCain/Clinton proposal is nothing more than hot air; Obama has got to be respected for speaking truth on this one, in contrast with Clinton’s jumping on the McCain publicity-stunt bandwagon:

Mr. Obama derided the McCain-Clinton idea of a federal tax holiday as a “short-term, quick-fix” proposal that would do more harm than good, and said the money, which is earmarked for the federal highway trust fund, is badly needed to maintain the nation’s roads and bridges.

In 2000, Mr. Obama supported a bill in the Illinois legislature to suspend most of the state’s 6.25 percent gasoline sales tax. But he later opposed making the reduction permanent, arguing that the state needed the revenue and that the measure had saved consumers little.

Mrs. Clinton, of New York, has also taken varying stands on the issue of gas taxes. In her 2000 Senate campaign, she spoke against repealing the federal gasoline tax, calling it “one of those few taxes that New York actually gets more money from Washington than we send.”

At a meeting with voters in North Carolina on Monday, Mr. Obama said lifting the gas tax for three months would save the average consumer no more than $30, a figure confirmed by Congressional analysts. Mr. Obama has previously dismissed Mr. McCain’s proposal as a “scheme.”

“Half a tank of gas,” Mr. Obama told his audience. “That’s his big solution.”

Well-put. Naturally, the Liberal Media™ will probably report that Obama is costing you money and how Clinton is successfully pulling for the little guy. Because the media is now far less about reporting facts than it is about branding images for profit.

Update: I was thinking of adding this when I wrote the above post, but couldn’t think of a way to phrase it succinctly and convincingly; Krugman, in a rare moment of not baiting Obama, put it extremely well:

if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers.

Forgive me the omission.

Remember the recent “Pwn to Own” competition, where it was claimed that Windows security was so much better than Mac security, because the Mac was cracked nearly instantly on day 2, but the Windows machine lasted until day 3?

Well, people are learning the hard way that these competitions don’t necessarily reflect real life:

Hundreds of Thousands of Microsoft Web Servers Hacked

Hundreds of thousands of Web sites – including several at the United Nations and in the U.K. government — have been hacked recently and seeded with code that tries to exploit security flaws in Microsoft Windows to install malicious software on visitors’ machines.

Could it possibly be that this Windows flaw was not used at the competition because it was worth a lot more in the real world than it was in a hacker’s competition? Um, duh. Were such hacks not so valuable on the black market, the Windows machines at the competition probably would have been hacked immediately. That doesn’t mean that Windows is more secure–precisely the opposite, in fact. Mac hacks are relatively valueless enough that hackers would rather use them to get a free laptop. Windows hacks are valuable enough to sell to people who want to do serious harm.

So far, Mac security woes remain almost completely on the hypothetical level: reported vulnerabilities, proof-of-concept malware, and hack-purely-for-show demonstrations, which are almost the only examples used to claim that Mac security ain’t so great. The only other examples are social-engineering trojans which depend on tricking humans into circumventing the OS security, and even those number at two, possibly three.

Windows security, on the other hand, comes up short in the real world: tens of thousands of pieces of malware, worldwide virus and worm threats, attacks causing disruption and a great deal of time and money spent on containment and repair, and countless attacks on personal machines. Just this last week, my boss told me that his browser became completely useless because every time he tried to go to a web site, porn and other spam links were substituted; his security software (kept up-to-date) somehow missed it in screening and could not repair it, and so now he’s going to have to reinstall the entire OS and all his software. Many of my students who use Windows have reported similar problems, and I have had several friends over the past few years tell me about malware wiping out their Windows systems.

I know tons of people who own Macs, and despite none of them running any security software, none have ever reported any such problems.

So, when you read those editorials about how Windows actually has “better” security than Macs, understand that such reports do not always do not in any way reflect real-world situations. Maybe this will change at some point in the future, but sure as hell not yet.

RIM, which makes the BlackBerry, is reportedly developing a touchscreen version of their device which is code-named “AK,” for “Apple Killer.” Right away, you can guess that it probably will be nothing of the sort. I am pretty sure that when Apple designed the iPhone, while they may have been aiming to make a device that was far better than other devices, they were not focused on making a “BlackBerry killer,” or a “Nokia killer.” If they had, the iPhone would probably be a lot worse than it turned out to be.

Any time you design something based upon trying to beat someone else, you usually wind up short, because you’re basing your design on something other than the user’s actual needs or desires. If RIM were smart, they would simply hire the best engineers and tell them, “forget every other device; simply start from scratch and make the best communications device you can imagine.” Which is what I imagine Jobs told his design team.

Instead, they probably went to the engineers who were stuck in BlackBerry mode and told them, “imitate the iPhone, but make it better!”

Long story short, I’m not selling my Apple stock any time soon.

Say that three times fast! But hopefully, don’t catch any. I haven’t had any so far, but my dad just reported getting IM’ed by a spammer. Googling it, I found people who said they’d been IM-spammed on Skype frequently, to the point they were getting new spams every few minutes.

This was so inevitable, I am surprised I didn’t see it coming. Given the open directory of Skype, and the fact that many people will leave their settings open to it, and the fact that spammers gleefully crap all over and ruin any resource they think they can squeeze a fast buck out of, I am in hindsight frankly amazed that this hasn’t already become epidemic. Maybe it’s because so many people aren’t using Skype yet. We just recently used Skype to hold a conference between our Japan campus and our home campus in Wisconsin, and almost nobody there had even heard of Skype before.

Fortunately, there are steps you can take. Blocking spammers is useless, as they generate hordes of accounts and you’d be blocking them all day and night. Instead, go to your settings, and under “Privacy,” set it so that only people you have authorized can send IM’s or anything else. Spammers then can still pester you with unlimited requests to show your details or add them to your contact lists; under “Notifications” in your preferences, you can stop the sound from playing when that happens. On the Mac, that’s the extent you can stop them, but on the Windows version, you can also block pop-up windows or system tray notifications when they do that. Hopefully, they’ll add that to the Mac version soon.

You might wonder if spammers would bother to attempt to be added to your contacts list, as few people would fall for such a transparent scam, especially more than once. But remember, few ever buy stuff from spammers–but since spammers automate their spew and can send millions out per day, they don’t care if only one person out of a thousand is stupid enough to fall for it–that’s all they need, and they are likely to get it. Witness Nigerian bank account scammers, where you get emails from someone wishing to use your bank account to transfer X million dollars, and you get to keep 10~30%. This has become so famous it’s literally a joke–but they keep sending them, in large numbers, especially to email addresses found on web sites. Someone must still be falling for it. Hard to believe that someone so stupid could survive even daily life, but there you are.

I am trying to think of a non-Internet analogy to describe spammers, but am coming up blank. Where else in the history of the world has there been a small group of people who invade, defile, and nearly incapacitate large public forums, and yet get away with it so regularly that everyone simply accepts them as a force of nature or something? I mean, advertising in general is kind of like that, but not to nearly the degree that spammers have become a destructive force on the Internet.

Sachi and I are watching Japanese TV and a live picture of the Olympic torch run through Nagano. While there are some pro-Chinese groups, there is a very large pro-Tibet contingent in the crowd. People are throwing stuff at the torch bearers (the security includes runners with clear plastic panels to deflect projectiles), and at least a few people have tried to rush the runner. Unlike in European cases, the Japanese police are pretty good at riot control, and are successfully keeping the more active protesters from stopping the run. Japan Probe showed a preview of what the security would look like, and it was pretty accurate.

I know we shouldn’t respond to liberal-baiting by right-wing media loons, but I think that in this election season, there is a value to pointing out to people who consider themselves ordinary Americans exactly how sick and depraved the conservative side of things can get.

Case in point: Rush Limbaugh, while playing “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas”–an obvious, racist reference to Hillary winning the Democratic nomination–stated on air that he dreams of, hopes for race riots in Denver to sink the chances for a Democratic win in November.

The dream end of this is that this keeps up to the convention and we have a replay of Chicago 1968 with burning cars, protests, fires, literal riots, and all of that. That’s that’s the objective here. … Riots in Denver, the Democrat Convention would see to it that we don’t elect Democrats.

The fact that he called the riots an “objective” is what spurred many to understand that he was calling for, trying to instigate riots; with his “Operation: Chaos” history, the impression was that Dittoheads would descend upon Denver and spark the riots themselves, then blame blacks and Democrats for the violence. Rush denied this, insisting that he only expected blacks to riot and prayed for such an outcome, not that he would try to instigate such an outcome (which, after all, would be a felony offense).

When a caller confronted him with this the next day, he claimed that his conduct on the show demonstrated “nothing but love, care and concern for people,” then proceeded to call the woman he was talking to a “mush head.” Defending himself on his racist-toned Denver riot fantasy, he claimed that it was Al Sharpton who was reprehensible and responsible:

The fact is that the Democrat Party has members in it that have already said, ‘There will be riots,’ or something to that effect. Al Sharpton. He was throwing down the gauntlet to the superdelegates: ‘You take this election away from Barack Obama, and there’s gonna be trouble. There’s going to be trouble in Denver.’

Because, as we all know, if Al Sharpton warns of “trouble in Denver,” that has to mean race riots and nothing else, like a contested convention that could be harmful to the party. Reportedly, after making that statement, Sharpton then went straight to Sylvia’s Restaurant in Harlem and ordered an “M.F.’ing iced tea.”

I searched the web for any independent source of the Sharpton quote, and could find nothing at all. Rush either picked up on some stealth report of Sharpton’s words, or twisted Sharpton’s words so far out of context that it would not be possible to find the actual quote, or just made up the attribution out of whole cloth.

Whatever the case, whether Sharpton said there would be trouble or not, Limbaugh is showing the same propensity he did when he jumped on an L.A. Times article about the film archetype “magic negro” to launch a weeklong racial tirade against Sharpton and Obama. The pattern is to take a marginal statement out of the media and use it as cover for allowing his racist attitudes to take flight. It’s not him who is racist, you see–he’s just commenting on racial matters that someone else brought up.

Remember also that Limbaugh, while outrageous, is not some fringe loon–he popularly represents a mainstream Republican caucus. If you’re considering voting Republican, consider carefully the company you keep.

Anyone who thinks they know about Obama’s pastor and that he reflects badly on Obama should feel obligated to see him outside the context of a ten-second video clip. Here’s an excerpt from the upcoming broadcast:

Just watching that excerpt should be a good start for anyone who thinks that Wright is some anti-American loon. Go ahead.

I was listening to the iTunes podcast of Bill Moyer’s Journal, and he was discussing the idea of separation of church and state, beginning by reporting on the Pope’s concern that the United States was becoming a “secularized” society, as if that were some form of evil, like creeping fascism. I griped internally that it never fails to tire me when religious people try to force religion into the public square and down our throats. But in an effort to see things from both sides, I then reflected on the idea that maybe they see people like me in the same light: trying to shove my secularism and science down their throats.

But when I got through, I came out with the conclusion that secularism and science are appropriate as a public standard whereas religion is not. The principle behind that is the ultimate fairness of the neutral starting point: we begin at zero, with no pre-standing biases or beliefs–a level playing field, in other words–and work from that point forward.

Secularism is very close to, if not the embodiment of, that fair and equal starting point; nobody gets an advantage, all are treated equally. In contrast, having religious faith be a public standard is far from that; it disrespects those who choose not to have a belief in religion. And let’s face it, in most cases, people who say they want “faith” or “belief” in general to be the standard really want their faith, to the exclusion of all others, to be that standard–which is why Christians became furious when a Hindu was allowed to give the invocation in the U.S. Senate. And it’s not just other religions; when it comes down to it, any other sect tends to become the enemy just as easily. In which case it is not just the atheists and agnostics who suffer, it is every religious sect aside from the dominant one who suffers. Not a level playing field, by far. Thus, secularism is the best safeguard for the freedom of all beliefs, including religious beliefs.

Resentment against such fairness comes from the propensity of individuals to consider their preferred state as the starting point, instead of a truly neutral environment. A person of faith might actually consider a state of religious faith to be the “neutral” or fair environment from which to build; their bias could preclude them from considering the idea that others may not share their views, or that such people are by nature evil or at least lacking any sense of morality. But intolerance is not a good benchmark for equality, and thus the “equal” or “fair” judgment of such people falls somewhat short.

It’s kind of like arguing with militant smokers, who will not accept that a room with clear air is a fair starting point, instead insisting that the starting point is that you do what you want and I do what I want, and if you want me to stop smoking, then we negotiate from there–if I even feel like negotiating.

Again, I have to consider the idea that maybe my starting point of a blank slate is unreasonable, and I have tried to work that out. The answer I come away with is that the blank slate can always be fairly applied, whereas the “everyone is doing whatever they want” starting point, or the “my way is the natural way” starting point can easily be shown as unfair by applying it to any number of situations you would naturally recognize as unfair (e.g., you want everyone to have privacy, but I want to photograph you in the shower; shall we start from there?).

The more reasonable approach to the injection of religion into public affairs is to say that “my religious faith is part of who I am, and I cannot leave it behind when I act in public.” The pope expressed this when he warned of the dangers of secularism:

“Is it consistent to profess our beliefs in church on Sunday, and then during the week to promote business practices or medical procedures contrary to those beliefs? Is it consistent for practicing Catholics to ignore or exploit the poor and the marginalized, to promote sexual behavior contrary to Catholic moral teaching, or to adopt positions that contradict the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death?”

This claim is reasonable only up to a certain point: when it stops being about what the person of faith does related to their own private lives, and starts being about what other people choose to do. When your faith begins to impede on the free choice, beliefs, and actions of others, you have crossed a line that cannot rightly or fairly be crossed.

The pope skimmed very close to the line of being objectionable (and crossed the line when he touched on abortion); he held back only by saying that it was wrong to promote actions or ethics the church found unreasonable, or to commit actions that could universally be regarded as wrong. Okay, as far as that goes, I agree; I would not expect a Christian opposed to abortion on religious moral grounds to promote abortion for the sake of secularism. It is, however, a completely different matter if that same person tries to ban abortion for those very same reasons. Not promoting is a personal choice; banning is interfering with the choice of others, which clearly crosses the line.

And that line is defined by a neutral starting point: neither one person’s Catholicism nor another person’s Atheism is the defining standard from which we must move forward, nor is anyone else’s belief system. It must be a neutral starting point. What likely ires many militant religious people is that a neutral starting point, to them, seems like Atheism. That’s why they tend to see Science as some Atheist plot; in order to stay true to scientific principles, you must begin from a neutral, objective starting point–which is also why Science is appropriate as a subject in public schools, free from interference by “faith” or religion: Science teaches us only what is observable and demonstrable. If the real, measurable, observable world comes across as an “attack” on your religious faith, then that shows up a problem in your religious beliefs, not a problem with the fairness of the science curriculum in our schools.

And it is no reason for me to surrender the precious and invaluable gift of secularism (a gift to those with religious faith as much as it is to everyone else) just because those with “faith” cannot bring themselves to play fair.

She won by 9 points, and barely even that. Despite almost every media outlet reporting a ten-point spread (only about one in ten reports mention a 9-point spread, and then only as a question, as if it’s not really clear), the fact remains that Hillary won by almost exactly 9.1%.

So why is everyone reporting 10%? Because of double-rounding. Clinton got 54.55% of the vote in PA, and Obama got 45.45%; that’s just a hair’s breadth from the midline for both numbers, but just barely enough so that Obama’s number is rounded down and Hillary’s is rounded up. Since the media uses the rounded numbers to calculate the distance between the two, it comes out with the 10% figure–despite that number being wholly inaccurate.

Although with how the media has behaved in recent years, it surprises me not at all that their math sucks, too.