This is big. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was indicted by a grand jury on charges of violating election fundraising laws. This is the first time that a Congressional leader has been indicted. And it’s significant considering how hard it is to indict any politician, since they themselves write the laws under which they can charged–and they usually make it really hard to get caught. Which is why you have outright bribery and corruption easily spotted all over the place and rarely is anyone ever charged over it. I mean, who here really believes that Cheney’s relationship with Halliburton has played no role in its government contracts?

Naturally, Republicans are trying to call the whole thing a partisan witch hunt, claiming prosecutor Ronnie Earle, a Democrat, is simply playing politics. However, not only does Earle have a serious reputation, but 11 of the 15 politicians he has prosecuted in his career have been Democrats, including a sitting Senator, two Representatives, a state house speaker, an attorney general, and others–not exactly low faces on the totem pole. Not to mention the fact that it was the grand jury, and not Earle, that indicted DeLay.

All this comes on the tail of other corruption stories breaking on the Republican side of Washington, most notably the Abramoff scandal, in which the “super-lobbyist” is connected to several crimes and several top Republican figures. Josh Marshall is all over that one.

Meanwhile, Bush’s poll numbers remain around the 40% level, where they probably would have been for most of his term if not for 9/11, the Iraq War, hundreds of millions of dollars spent on campaigning, and other causes external to Bush’s own person or performance; Bush’s numbers have far more reflected events surrounding him than they do the president himself; with no new terrorist attacks or wars or massive PR spending, we get down to the base numbers he’s always been headed straight for. But now, after Katrina, after Social Security, after scandal and corruption galore, there’s just not much to buoy him artificially anymore.

Over at Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum pointed out a number of problems with advertisements on web sites:

• Ads that malfunction in a way that causes your browser to overload and use 95% of your system resources, effectively bringing your PC to a halt.
• Ads that malfunction and cover up parts of the screen they aren’t supposed to.
• Ads that flicker wildly for five or ten seconds before finally settling down.
• Ads that somehow disable the Back button on your browser.
• Related: ads that prevent you from leaving a site altogether, forcing you to shut down your browser in order to get further work done.
• Ads that decline to close even though they supposedly have a close button.
• Ads that prevent a site from loading just because the ad server is malfunctioning.

This above and beyond the usual things about ads that annoy people, such as pop-up and pop-under ads, moving ads using animated GIFs or worse, Flash animations, so that the periphery of so many sites look like crazed circuses.

However, when I read the article, I had to concentrate and imagine more than just a bit to accept this list. Actually, I have experienced maybe half of these things, but only while using my Windows machine, on the uncommon occasions where I surfed the web on XP. On my Mac, especially with the software package I’ve got, I don’t experience any of them. Not even the extra points I added about pop-unders and animated ads. It just isn’t an issue for me, at least not any more.

In case you’re wondering, I use Safari, which is not complete without Pith Helmet ($10 shareware) to complement it. What Safari doesn’t do, Pith Helmet does, blocking almost all ads and allowing you to tailor settings for each site. For example, I have plug-ins disabled so that Flash animations aren’t a problem. When I need or want to see Flash, I just go to the Pith Helmet menu and select site preferences, where you get a few dozen different settings related to cookies, scripts, plug-ins, animations, and security issues, tailored for that site. It’s actually a lot less complex than it sounds–left to itself, it does a brilliant job at stopping the advertising annoyances and making it much more comfortable and safe to surf the web. The $10 payment is on the honor system–you can turn off the infrequent fee reminders in the preferences–but I gladly paid the measly ten bucks for the great functionality.

That said, I have had some problems with Safari in terms of compatibility with sites–for example, Safari can’t see the formatting buttons on Blogger.com’s blog post editing page. But no problem–I have Firefox standing by, which resolves pretty much anything that Safari can’t handle–and Firefox itself has a lot of good ad-blocking features and extensions itself. In fact, if you’re using a PC or don’t like Safari on your Mac, go for Firefox and check out its extensions page for ad-fighting.

Just whatever you do, don’t ever use Internet Explorer, unless someone is holding a gun to your head. Out of principles if for no other reasons.

Now that the initial contract between Apple and the music labels for iTunes Music Store sales is expiring, and the experiment has been so successful, the music labels want to do what have have been doing for a long time: screw over their customers like they screw over their artists. The labels want to allow for pricing tiers, charging variably per song and album. Already they are making more from iTMS sales than they make from brick-and-mortar sales, given there is no need for CD production, casing, packaging or physical distribution, and Apple likely takes a lower cut of the price than music stores do.

Yes, Steve Jobs is making a lot of money off of the iPods, no mistake about it. And yes, keeping the price of music to a dollar a song and ten for an album is helping him sell more iPods so people can use the iTunes Music store with it. So he has a bias to keep song prices low, while he charges a premium for the iPod itself.

This is the argument made by Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr., who says that some music is more valuable than other music, and that mandating one price for all is “not fair to our artists, and I dare say not appropriate to consumers.”

While he’s right about Jobs, it has zero bearing on the pricing structure argument at large. So what if Jobs is making big bucks selling iPods? The music labels make far more selling music, even at current prices. And he is completely full of it when it comes to artists and consumers. What he wants to do is keep 99 cents as the rock bottom and charge more for hot songs. How is this “appropriate” for consumers, at least from the consumers’ point of view? As for artists, the labels give them next to nothing unless they are really big-time and able to negotiate–but on the whole, they rip them off royally, and there is no chance that the labels will give any but the most powerful artists a pay boost from higher iTMS pricing.

This is nothing but a naked grab for profits by the music labels, with no benefit for the artists and certainly no benefit for the consumer–quite the opposite.

Would you believe that comedy actor Don Adams’ funeral will be attended by a hundred heads of state and masses of journalists? No? Uh, would you believe dozens of heads of industry and scores of Inspector Gadget fans? No? How about two dozen boy scouts and a reporter from the National Enquirer?

Don Adams, a marine in WWII and of course best known as a comedy actor, passed away at age 82 on Sunday. He survived his daughter, Cecily Adams (“Moogie” on Deep Space Nine) by one year. Rest in peace.

On July 11, 1985, I set out on my second trip to Japan. I had gone once before in the summer of 1983, taking a wonderful 3-week trip along the Tokaido coast with a group led by my Japanese Language professor, followed by a month of homestays in Shizuoka. The second trip was by myself, and included a short internship in a Japanese company in Shinjuku, another homestay in Shizuoka, a new homestay in the Japan Sea coast town of Toyama, and further travel, particularly to Osaka, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Kagoshima.

When I arrived in Tokyo, I did the internship at a company called Sophia Systems, and first experienced something that was rather endemic on that trip: people seemed to think I knew what was going on when I didn’t. I should have asked more, but being young and less than industrious in some ways, I failed to ask. And so I muddled through a week or so working in this office without really having any clue of what I was doing there–what I was supposed to do, to produce. They set me up in an apartment building/dormitory in Kitano out near Hachioji, and every day I commuted in to Shinjuku with the other workers, to an office in the NS Building. At that time, West Shinjuku was only half-developed, some of the now-signature buildings not there, only empty lots in their place.

I would come in to the office and they would give me English translations to proofread. I did that for the time I was there, but not having been given instructions by my professor, who had set this up, and not told more than the basics by the people at the office in Tokyo, I just did the work and muddled along. Years later, my Japanese professor asked why I had not filed the kind of report she expected, and the only reply I could give was, you never told me what I was supposed to write about. I did what I could, commenting on what I could observe of the cultural differences, but it was not much. The main detail that sticks out after all these years was my ongoing race with the office ladies and the refreshments cart. I was uneasy being served by others, but they were uneasy having any of the office workers get things for themselves. I would usually wait until they were otherwise occupied, and then dash off for a drink before they could intercept me and insist on getting it for me–which they usually did.

After Tokyo, I went to the town of Iwata in Shizuoka Prefecture. The town is now famous for the soccer team Iwata Jubilo based there, but when I was there (both in 1983 and in 1985), it was just a countryside suburb of Hamamatsu City. The only event of note when I was there was that when I announced my plans to travel in Kyushu later on, my host mother insisted on arranging me to take a bus from Nagasaki to a transit point I forget the name of, on the way to Kagoshima.

From Iwata, I made my way to Toyama, where my professor knew the head of the local YMCA. In exchange for a homestay at the homes of a few students, I guest-lectured at the Y’s English school, which is to say I just stood up and talked, providing language practice for the students there. It was there that I learned about careers in language teaching, and that experience changed my life. At that point, I had just finished more than two years at a community college, majoring in Japanese Language, and had been accepted to U.C. Berkeley for the following January. But the idea of being able to spend a year in Japan, living and working, greatly appealed to me; I was much interested in applying and adding to what I had learned already. However, I did not make any serious plans to do so–it just appealed to me, and I mentioned that to the staff when I was there. More on that later.

While there, I again experienced the no-one’s-telling-me-anything malaise. During my stay, there was a YMCA event, a nature camp outing for mentally handicapped children. It was quite enjoyable and the children were sweet, but I was not given the slightest clue of what I was supposed to do. One evening, there was a long meeting I was asked to attend. However, the meeting was completely in Japanese–I was the only non-Japanese there–and there was no mechanism to translate for me. After about a whole hour of being unable to understand what was going on, I got tired of the uselessness of it all and wandered back to my room. I was later chastised for leaving the meeting, but I had a good excuse: there was no point whatsoever for my being there. Between that event and the internship uncertainty, I developed a feeling that it is assumed in Japan that you always know what’s happening, and no one tells you anything unless you ask, even when you might not even know to ask. I did experience that some times in Japan in the early years, but never figured out if it was just me, which it probably was.

After Toyama, I traveled down to Osaka. I forget what I planned to do there because I was not able to get it done; I had picked up some nasty bug from one of the kids at the camp, and was confined to bed for my few days in the city (I stayed at a youth hostel while there, mostly sticking to my bunk). Fortunately, the malady abated in time for my scheduled departure. From there, I went to Hiroshima. I had been there before in 1983, but had departed from my tour to meet a pen pal from that time. My pen pal had shown me the Hiroshima Atomic Park and the Peace Dome (the preserved remains of the domed building near ground zero), but that was it. I had not even been aware at the time that there was a museum on the site, and so I had missed it. This time around, I wanted to get the whole tour. I did, and I am glad I made the stop.

The museum is not a pleasant place, but then it is not supposed to be. Quite grim, but significant and sometimes fascinating, the museum displayed the story of the bombing through models, photographs, and exhibits of melted and twisted items, as well as other objects like the bank steps where the shadow of someone who sat there when the bomb went off is preserved. It’s a stop that should be required for anyone, but especially for Americans, whatever your opinion is about whether the bombing was justified. This is not something you can just find out about in a removed sense. Coming out of the museum, I was greeted with a scene of almost jarring discordance: break dancers were performing near the exit. This was the mid-eighties.

After Hiroshima, I made my way to Nagasaki, not just for the second atomic bomb park and museum, or for the historical tour regarding the city’s long past contact with the West. It happened to be O-Bon time in the city, and I got to experience the festival, from the parades and floats in the evening streets exploding with firecrackers, to the issuing of the candle floats in the water to memorialize the spirits passed. I believe I still have a primitive wooden mallet used to hit gongs in the parade that someone presented to me.

Leaving Nagasaki, I took the bus tour that my Shizuoka host mother had arranged. In our spotty communications, I had tried to impress on her that I needed to get from Nagasaki to Kagoshima by a certain time, that the hostel where I was staying only accepted visitors up to a certain hour. She insisted that I take the bus, saying it was the fastest way to where I was going–so naturally I assumed it was a transit bus. It wasn’t. It was a tour bus that made frequent long stops along the way, at tourist spots I neither understood nor was interested in in the slightest. So I spent much of the time looking at my watch and bemoaning the fact that the tour was taking me not only too much time, but was circuitously taking me away from any train stations where I could depart the bus and get back on schedule. I am sure that my host mother meant well, but she did understand well enough to know that I was on a tight schedule, and despite her ability to speak English just well enough, she never told me that it was a sightseeing bus or what exactly the sightseeing was about. I don’t know, maybe even she didn’t know.

FInally, the tour ended and I got on a train for Kagoshima and I believe I made it there on time. Kagoshima was fine, but dusty–the nearby volcano was pluming and there was ash everywhere. You would have to shake it out of your hair every time you came indoors. After Kagoshima, I went home via Tokyo and a four-day stay in Hawaii. It was the end of August.

It was a few weeks later that the Toyama visit came back to change everything I’d planned, setting me on a completely different path in life, but that story is for another post soon.

Let’s say it simply: science does not deny the existence of God. Science simply explains what we observe in the universe in a mechanical sense. It is fully possible to accept both science and religion wholly. Science only “contradicts” certain religious doctrines in the interpretations, and these details are when the doctrine attempts to use scripture to establish science. Historically, religion has always evolved to accept what science has found; where churches attempted to establish religious-based scientific dogma (the concept that the Earth was the center of the universe being the best example), they eventually changed the dogma to accept what science showed was true. It often took a great deal of time and they wound up cowing and punishing a lot scientists along the way, but it always happened. And so it will with evolution. It’s just a question of how long it will take the fundamentalists to “forgive” the scientists for reporting what they see.

I just realized that I have an anniversary coming up: my 20th anniversary of my coming to live in Japan. I thought I had let it slip past in August, but after checking my old passport, I found that it is instead coming soon: October 8th. I haven’t lived here for 20 years straight–I went back twice for a total of about five years to get my higher degrees. So I’ve lived here for 15 years, but it will have been 20 years since my first working visa became active, in a few weeks, give or take. Probably when that day comes, I’ll blog on the experience of getting here. Until then, I want to touch on some changes since the good old days–how things have changed.

I was on the phone with my father last night, and we spent more than an hour and twenty minutes chatting. We realized that such a long call was going to cost maybe six or seven dollars on his present calling plan, and a lot less on a plan he is considering joining. I myself pay maybe 8 cents per minute calling the U.S. This is all in contrast to what we used to pay 20 years ago. Or more accurately, what I had to avoid paying in Japan. Back then, KDD was it–the only long-distance carrier, period, and calling the U.S. cost a few bucks every minute. Calling from the U.S. wasn’t cheap, either, but it sure was by comparison. So we had a system: I would call via the operator, making a collect call, saying that Quincho was calling for Malachi. Those names belonged to our dog and cat, respectively. So when my dad got a call from an international operator saying that the dog was calling the cat collect from Japan, he knew I wanted to talk. So he would tell the operator that the cat was out, but would call the dog back in 15 minutes. The code was necessary because the operator would not let us hear each other, and would relay only limited messages. But it was enough so that I knew my family was home and I would be getting the call back soon.

That was back in the days when people actually used public phones. When the phones in Japan were red, yellow, green, pink, and I think pale blue, and you needed a scorecard to figure out what the colors meant. Back when you had to pay a 70,000 yen non-refundable deposit to get a phone line, instead of signing up for a cell phone. There was no email, no voice-over-IP, no instant messaging.

So one of the things I want to do this week is to be an old fart and tell you about how I had to walk for miles in the snow to get an English-language magazine, and how there was only one bilingually-broadcast English-language movie on TV each week, and it was usually Death Wish III with Charles Bronson and we were grateful for it. And believe it or not, the last sentence was actual truth. So sit right back down, you young whippersnappers, and get ready for some nostalgia.

Not too long ago we had the case of Terri Schiavo (which some right-to-life die-hards are still carping on) and the question of whether or not she was aware. The family videotaped her, and then the right-to-life people heavily edited that video so that random actions appeared meaningful. Terri seemed to look at her mother or a balloon and smile and laugh. She seemed sentient, she seemed there.

Of course, it was all an illusion. But we humans have the predisposition to see human qualities in just about anything. Even those who saw Terri without the benefit of video editing claimed to see life in her, and I am sure that would have been true even if many of these people were not politically or emotionally biased in favor of seeing that life. In the end, the autopsy proved that Terri had indeed been long dead, with most of her brain atrophied into nothing. No higher reasoning. Not even the ability to see–which belied the idea that Terri was tracking faces or balloons or anything at all with her eyes. They were just random movements with no sentience behind them. But so many people believed otherwise, not because of logic or reason or truth, but because we ourselves imbue human life into what we see, be it weather, machines, or people who are in a vegetative state.

Most of all, however, we seem to do this with animals, and so I come to my prime example for the day. This touching set of photos came via Taiwan, concerning a type of bird I have come to be familiar with in this area: the Barn Swallow. I was initially interested because of the photography–it can be hard to catch birds in such poses, and this set was extraordinary. But it was even more exceptional because of the apparent subject matter: the mourning of one fallen swallow by others, who seemed genuinely distraught by the death, and even appear to be trying to revive their friend, grabbing the still body with their claws and calling out loudly. A textbook case of human grief and denial upon a confrontation with death. If you go to see the photo series, you will see to what I am referring.

Captions for the photo series: Here his mate is injured and the condition is fatal. She was hit by a car as she swooped low across the road. Here he brought her food and attended to her with care and compassion. He brought her food again, but was shocked to find her dead. He tried to move her….a rarely-seen effort for swallows! Aware that his mate is dead and will never come back to him again, he cries out………. He stood beside her, saddened by her death…. Finally aware that she would never return to him, he stood beside her body with sadness and sorrow .

Or so it would seem.

When I first saw the photo set and read the captions, I was inclined to see what they saw. But I am a skeptic by nature, and so immediately I questioned it–though I did not stray too far from the assumption. I doubted that the birds were truly feeling the emotions that the narrator was implying, though I did think that perhaps the dead swallow may have been young enough that it’s mother was still concerned with its upbringing, bringing about a concerned response. The more I saw of the photo series, however, the more I began to doubt that–the birds were doing an unusual amount of grabbing on to the corpse.

In the end, I did not know what to think–until I read the comments, which eventually involved some people who know quite a bit about birds, who explained what was really happening. The swallows were not mourning their dead companion. They were trying to mate with it. I know that can sound sad or even disgusting (though the combination of the photos and the human commentary in light of the reality can be comical), but you’ve got to remember: these are birds, and not the most intelligent of birds, either. I can see a dog mourning, perhaps, but birds are far less advanced. Not to say that I don’t love them, they’re beautiful creatures. But let’s accept them for what they are, and not mistake them for what we are.

After Katrina, right-wing blogs started attacking New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin because he didn’t arrange a complete bus evacuation with only 29 hours’ warning. There still isn’t a public answer to why that didn’t happen–there might have been many reasons not to, like not enough time, not enough drivers, no way to bus people with special needs–but that didn’t stop conservatives from harshly criticizing Nagin. In part, undoubtedly, it was because Nagin made that famous radio call in which he criticized Bush for having press conferences when he should have been sending buses and other assistance. Then the photo of the flooded school buses came out, and the wingnuts jumped all over that gleefully, as if to say, “we’ve got art!”

When Rita came storming in, you can bet any number of mayors in the storm’s potential path wanted to do anything to avoid being burned in effigy like Nagin was. After all, they had several days’ warning that the storm was coming in full speed, unlike with Katrina, not to mention they had the hard example of Katrina to set a fire under them to do something, anything, and fast. But that leads to other problems.

Now, the people who flamed Nagin for not busing people out almost certainly had no idea what they were talking about, the kind of logistics involved, what is necessary to do the job, and what dangers and drawbacks there might be. They didn’t much care, their goal was not to be precise or logical, it was to attack politically. But as a result, public pressure now is decidedly on city officials to bus people out who can’t get out by themselves–probably in many if not most cases doing so without having thought the idea out thoroughly. And in the process, we may have discovered another possible reason why it was ruled out in New Orleans, in addition to all the other reasons: it can kill people.

In Texas, near Dallas, a bus carrying 45 elderly people from a nursing home in Houston burst into flames. It appears that the brakes caught fire, and then the oxygen tanks of some of the passengers exploded. It is estimated that 24 people on the bus died in the incident.

Was it really necessary to resort to such means to make these people safe? In the gridlocked traffic, these people had already been on the bus overnight. Had all the safety implications been thought out, or had politicians simply been afraid of accusations of not using buses and ignored such issues? Was the busing, without proper equipment, really necessary? After all, many of the people who had decent shelter and yet perished in New Orleans did so because the rescue efforts which should have come within 48 hours took five days. It may have been wiser to have them take local shelter, and then evacuate when the hopefully-now-alert rescue operations could bring them out with less risk.

Maybe I’m wrong here. Maybe this was a freak accident and taking dozens of people with oxygen gear onto a normal bus is considered safe. But I’d be interested in knowing a definitive answer, just as I’d be interested in knowing if Nagin and the city planners had good reasons for their actions, or if they were indeed derelict and inept. But I do know one thing: if I were a family member of one of those people who died on that bus, I would stop at little to find the answer to that question. Politics should not dictate evacuation measures.

Update: a New York Times article gives a lot more detail. The bus was privately owned and operated, hired by the nursing home to move the patients, but the patients were moved at the urging of local fire officials, who told them to transfer the patients due to flooding concerns; it is still not clear whether the city or the nursing home decided to move the patients out of the city instead of finding local shelter. And while there are regulations about moving oxygen containers on aircraft and trains, there may not be any regulations at this time about doing so on buses–though I would expect that might change after this event.

In the next day or so, I will remove the notice I’ve had up for the past few weeks, in which I note possible problems in the comment system, and offer an out-in-the-open email address for those who have had problems posting comments. Having that email address, tempcomments@blogd.com, right up there like that, has revealed many things to me.

First, no one has had problems making comments, it seems. Three people used the address to send me friendly, complimentary asides, which was nice. But the purpose for which the address was created appears to have been less a need than I thought, so good news there.

Second, I apparently have been the big winner or one of the big winners in no fewer than twenty-one European and one New Zealand lotteries over the past eight days, netting me prizes worth 14,803,903.78 Euros, 11,650,950.00 Dollars, and 850,950.00 Pounds Sterling, along with the chance to win millions more. All I have to do is pay out tens of thousands of dollars for authorization fees, clearance payments, and little odds and ends like that. Amazing the money you can make in eight days just by creating an email account and publishing it on a blog page.

Third, I have discovered a Japanese matchmaking site that has used the temp comments address to inform me twenty-four times that, and I quote, “$B!z%A%c%C%H$G$O$I$s$J%j%/%(%9%H$K$bEz$($^$9!#(BNO.I don’t veceive your mail.” Nice of them to say so, because I was not aware that they did not veceiving my mail, and that my H$G$O$I$s$J%j was H$K$bEz. Gesundheit. (note: that’s supposed to be garbled, it’s not an error.)

And finally, I have received urgent and heartfelt greetings from SALIM IBRAHIM, a merchant in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, who has been diagnosed with Esophageal cancer. He has only a few months to live, so he wants to give his significant $25 million fortune to charities in Bulgaria and Pakistan (where else?), but requires me to funnel it through my bank account first, in exchange for which I can keep 20%. He is earnestly joined by Eric Kamara, Dr. Mike Umeh, Kennet Cavender, Kaditi Musa, Mark Edward, Ahmed Yousf, Richard Wilford, Alfred Green, Doris Brown, Pedro H. Gozanlex, Roland Martin, and Mario Wolf, who similarly have one kind of personal crisis or another and need to use my bank account to transfer funds. Most are so urgent that THEY USE NOTHING BUT CAPITAL LETTERS TO ASK FOR MY ASSISTANCE IN TRANSFERRING MONIES. Apparently, my email address was given to them by the Bank of Senegal. So for the next few weeks and months, I will be the conduit os MILLIONS IN US$ MONIES from nations such as Sierra Leone, South Africa, Holland, the U.A.E., Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Senegal, and the United Kingdom.

Thank goodness that none came from Nigeria, because those guys are total frauds.

Intelligent Design (ID) has been forwarded as a “scientific” theory to show that evolution is incorrect and that the universe and life in it was created by an intelligence which coincidentally would greatly resemble, oh, say, “God,” not that we’re saying that “God” created the universe. Maybe it was someone else.

The thing is, as I’ve said before, ID isn’t really science. It pretends to be, but it doesn’t fulfill some of the basic requirements, such as any kind of structured hypothesis with evidence or data of any sort which can be tested and verified. ID simply claims evolution is flawed, ignores scientists explaining how those claims are incorrect, and then forwards an alternate explanation without actually working out how A got to B got to C. Essentially, it says “evolution is wrong and so we’re right.”

There most certainly is not any process in ID that I’ve heard of which takes any kind of evidence or data, and, through scientific analysis, show that randomness could not have been the cause of all things. ID says that there is too much structure, too much organization, but if that’s the case then you should be able to make that case through statistical analysis, through some reproducible mathematical construct based on some kind of evidence which shows the thesis to be true, or even likely. This is not, however, presented, and to my knowledge, nothing solid is. Only general statements of “that can’t be” and “this must be” based upon common-sense applications of half-understood scientific knowledge. Essentially, ID is based on a feeling, not evidence.

It is the half-understanding of science which I’d like to focus on. Science is not about what you think or believe, it’s about what you can show and what you can prove. Somehow, a lot of people including those who would propose ID, have gotten the impression that all you need for a scientific theory is an idea, and then claim that it’s better than everything else. This, I think, is the result of faith-based thinking: just believing is good enough, the argument is one of philosophy and opinion, and not hard fact.

That’s the difference between religion and science: one is about faith and belief, the other is about observation and evidence. Religion is about faith, and as such, should require no proof. That’s supposed to be what faith is, at least in part. So why do religious people so readily make claims to proof, why do they eagerly search for, accept, and forward to others “proof” of God? Is that not a sign of weakness of faith?

It is the eagerness, this need to prove what is believed which leads people who claim to be following science to accept and forward shoddy scientific “proofs” that evolution is wrong and that an intelligent designer, a creator, is inevitable. People who claim faith is their most valued quality consistently are pushing forth ‘proofs.’ This doesn’t add up.

One experience I had is an excellent example of this. Not too long ago, I told this story, but it is especially relevant in this discussion so I will tell it again. Some years back, when I was working at a movie theater in San Francisco, a young woman (a preacher’s daughter and fundamentalist) confided in me that she had proof that radioactive dating, which she referred to as carbon dating (many people do), is wrong, and therefore the world is only 6,000 years or so old. Her proof came in the form of a conclusion she made after hearing a single lecture in a high school science class. As she told it, her science teacher lectured on the process of radioactive dating, explaining that first a scientist estimated the age of an object, and then tested it to determine the age.

She immediately saw the flaw in this: if a scientist makes a guess as to the age of an object and then plugs that number into the equations to determine the age, that means the result of the test is biased by the scientist’s guess. Therefore radioactive dating is flawed, and therefore her beliefs were in fact correct. Despite having what she believed to be definitive evidence to disprove radioactive dating, she did not present her evidence for review, in this case by the science teacher; instead, she ignored the teacher and went along her way, confident in her rightness.

Her analysis mirrors what we see with ID today. Her conclusion was based upon a cursory understanding of the subject matter, and was supported not by active evidence proving her point, but rather the denial of a different set of ideas which she disagreed with. It was presented as if it were a logical and scientific basis, ‘proof,’ if you will, for believing what she believed, and disbelieving whatever may have challenged that. She passed it on to me as evidence that I should believe, that I should have faith in God, and not so much in science, which was obviously not on very firm ground.

Her analysis was all wrong, of course, and could easily be poked apart, by either a quick check or a thorough review. First, she had assumed certain things without trying very hard to understand them or make sure she had it right, primarily whether a scientist’s preliminary estimate is in fact plugged into the equation that determines the age of the object. She heard there was an initial estimate of age, did not hear what it was for, and so assumed it must have been part of the test that determined real age.

In fact, the initial estimate is used by scientists to determine which type of radioactive testing should be attempted, as different tests are applied when testing for certain age ranges. Carbon dating, the most commonly known, can only determine an object’s age if it less than perhaps ten thousand years; if the object is older than that, carbon dating cannot give an accurate reading. For older objects, different tests are performed, which reveal the age of an object within different time frames.

Therefore, the initial estimate of an object’s age is needed simply to determine which test has the best chance of correctly identifying the object’s age; it is not plugged into the final equation. And if the wrong test is chosen and the object is not of an age within the test’s range, the test will not give a false positive–it will simply show that the object is younger or older than the test can determine, prompting the scientist to apply a different test. Like a mechanic who sees a nut to unscrew from a bolt, estimates its size, and chooses what seems to be the correctly-sized wrench to use to remove it. If the mechanic guesses wrong about the nut’s size, it does not change the actual size of the nut; the initial estimate was not ‘plugged into’ the action of trying the wrench on the nut. The wrench simply does not work, and the mechanic knows to reach for the next-largest or -smallest wrench.

Second, my young friend did not scrutinize her conclusion; she did not test it or attempt to shoot holes in it–something that any scientist worth his or her salt will do to their own theory in anticipation of others critiquing it. She did not consider the improbability that a set of scientific tests which tens of thousands of highly intelligent and trained scientists base their careers upon could be so easily and completely disproved by a high school student after listening to a single lecture. She did not go up to her science teacher and explain the discovery, even though this could have led to a scientific revolution, or at least a more accurate Science class which would not mislead other students. She did not allow her theory to be put to any test or challenge; she did not fully explore the possibilities.

These are quite similar to elements one observes within the ID paradigm. Take the arguments on this page, which promises to “refute evolution in one minute flat.” The first argument: the universe could not have been created from nothing. How do they know? The formation of the universe began before the current laws of physics existed, and we cannot know the laws which governed pre-formation, or even if “nothing” existed before the formation of the current universe. The second argument is that life cannot arise from nothing. However, experiments have shown that a mix of gases existing on primordial Earth, when interacting with energy as in lightning, can cause amino acids, the building blocks of life, to form; it is not too much to ask that in the immense soup of chemicals that proteins, and later, self-replicating genetic material could have formed. While this has not been demonstrated, it has been far from proved wrong, and current laws of physics do not at all forbid this. The third argument is that mutations are destructive and it is impossible for one creature to turn into a “completely different kind” of creature. The first idea ignores the fact that some mutations are indeed beneficial and there are specific examples (one being the evolution of antibiotic-resistant microorganisms), and the second idea ignores the progression through intermediate forms adding up to larger changes, not to mention that basic structures can change size and appear very different without changing much in their underlying structure.

Do a search on the Internet, and you’ll find many such sets of “proofs” which really amount to one thing: people without much real scientific understanding claiming proof, more often than not, by claiming to poke holes in evolutionary science. They always end up being very wrong about the claims of error, and never produce proof of their own contentions.

My young friend was earnest in presenting her proof, and probably this is true with most people who subscribe to ID. They see something which disputes a theory they don’t fully understand but which seems to contradict their own beliefs, and because they want to be able to say their beliefs are true, they accept, support, and forward the new “theory” without the kind of questioning that is necessary to the process they claim to follow. Like another old friend from San Francisco who was a smoker and believed in research that “proved” smoking does not cause cancer–without questioning the research or the fact that it was funded by the tobacco industry, she wanted to believe, so she accepted what was set before her, like so many of us so often do.

This is why you have to question authority, question information you receive, and test it as far as you can to determine its validity. This is skepticism, this is reason. Is it a show of weak faith? Perhaps, but were have been given both faith and reason, and I don’t think it was intended for us to ignore either one.

When challenged with scientific evidence which contradicts fundamentalist concepts of the way the universe is, some will just say that God created those contradictions to test our faith. I would counter that perhaps God created fundamentalism to test our reason.

Hmm. Can’t seem to locate my copy of Startide Rising, so for today I’ll blog on a different Good Read. This one is by a science fiction writer not too many have heard of: Philip José Farmer. The book: To Your Scattered Bodies Go.

The basic plot is a startling one: after dying, every human that ever lived awakens on the banks of a great river. Everyone who dies after the age of five is there. You’re there. But we don’t appear on the river chronologically, resurrected immediately after we perish on Earth. Instead, every human from every age, from the Neanderthals to the 21st century (supposedly the Earth is destroyed in 2008, so better get ready!) is resurrected upon the River at the same time. Everyone awakens unclothed, hairless, with perfectly-formed bodies at the peak of youth–with absolutely no clue as to what happened or why we are there. There are no buildings (at least at first), no signs of civilization except for two things: everyone has a large metal “grail” or closed container attached to their wrists by a transparent strap, and regularly spaced along the length of the river are 50-foot-wide, 5-foot-tall “grailstones,” mushroom-shaped constructs with holes along their tops. At any given location, there is a majority of people from one time and geographic location on Earth; a minority from another time and place; and a remainder of peoples from any number of times and places.

Naturally, as everyone awakens at once, having just died, most people completely freak out. Waking up young, nude and shorn on a riverbank is not what most people expected in an afterlife.

The story follows the perspective of Sir Francis Richard Burton (the British explorer, not the film star), from his death to his premature awakening in a preparation area, to his awakening on the river and his adventures thereafter. He quickly teams up with a Neanderthal named Kazz, a young American writer named Peter Frigate (who happens to be a Burton biographer, not to mention the avatar of author Farmer), a woman named Alice Hargreaves, who was the model for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and an alien calling himself Monat Grrautut from Tau Centauri, claiming to be the one who destroyed the Earth.

Soon, many facts about the River world become apparent: the River stretches from one pole of the world to another; there is a riverbank on each side a mile or two deep before unclimbable mountains bar one from traveling north or south. That’s all the world is, unending river valleys, spiraling and winding throughout the entire world; to go north or south, one must circumnavigate the globe along the valley to reach the next valley over. There are few if any natural resources.

There are also no farms, and aside from fish in the River, no natural source of food. The grails, however, when placed in depressions in the grailstones, are granted three meals a day; at set times, energy flares like lightning shoot up from the stones, and any grails set into them are suddenly filled with a meal and other treats (the first filling providing clothes and other amenities). Only the owner of a grail is able to open it. It soon becomes clear that the world is an artifact, constructed for the purpose of resurrecting all of humankind and keeping them alive–for a reason completely unknown. The makers, whoever they may be, do not show themselves or give any clue as to who they are or what they want.

But no one can escape one fact: they have been given a second chance at life. And a third, a fourth, and more: if a person is killed on the Riverworld, they are again resurrected the following morning–somewhere else along the River, at random.

Farmer takes this grand concept and uses it well; we meet a host of people, from ordinary to famed to pretenders to fame (if someone declares they are Jesus and no one knows them, who can dispute it?). Societies quickly form, miniature nations, often in line with the majority society resurrected at that point of the river. Naturally, many of them are brutal, and “grail slavery,” where one is held in bondage while masters hoard the lion’s share of your grail offerings, crops up almost everywhere. There is great suffering and chaos, wars and attempts at power and empire–and the ever-present question of, who created this place and why are they allowing this to happen?

Sir Richard Burton is determined to find out, and vows to travel to the head of the river at the pole of the world, a daunting task even if the world were not filled with territoriality, greed, and violence. And dogging him all the way is no one other than Hermann Göring, of all people. Along the way, we meet all kinds of people, in this book and the sequels, including King John of England, Cyrano de Bergerac, Odysseus, Tom Mix, Jack London, Ulysses S. Grant, and Baron Von Richtoven, among many others.

To Your Scattered Bodies Go is the first in a series of five novels by Farmer, and is followed by The Fabulous Riverboat, where Samuel Clemens is aided by a Mysterious Stranger to find the resources necessary to build a powerful steamship to ply the great river; The Dark Design, catching up with Burton and his accomplices; The Magic Labyrinth, a climax where the pole is reached and the answers to the Riverworld are discovered; and Gods of Riverworld, the post-climax novel (Farmer was probably as enticed by another assured paycheck as he was encouraged by the fans for this one) where Burton and company find themselves having everything they want, and discover that it’s not all they thought it would be.

The book series is a fascinating adventure into a variety of cultures, customs, philosophies and personalities. Unless you have a specific personal distaste for some element of the general storyline, the books are easy to get hooked on, prompting you to get your hands on the full set and see what happens and what it’s all about. It might reassure you to know that Farmer does in fact give you all the answers in the end; it’s not just some tease where the writer abandons you after you’ve committed yourself. You learn who built the world and why, and a lot more. It stands as one of my more unusual favorite book series.

From the famed urban-legend-debunking site Snopes.com, come a few unfortunate domain names. All of them took on unintended meanings when they were represented as domain names without spaces between the words. See if you can spot the unfortunate double-entendres from the original organization names:

• PowerGen Italia, an Italian battery company
• Who Represents? a talent agency lookup site
• Experts Exchange, a site for people to discuss programming
• Mole Station Native Nursery, a nursery site from Australia

Any suggestions for other unfortunate domain names?

A news story from yesterday cleared up something that many suspected but hadn’t been reported yet, as far as I am aware. On this blog, I argued (mostly in the comments section, with conservative visitors), that it doesn’t take the National Guard four to five days to get into New Orleans. One visitor, citing his own experience with military logistics, claimed that four to five days was not excessive considering all the planning and organization that had to be done, and all the obstacles that storm damage would cause, and therefore we could not fault Bush for the storm damage. I responded that when a state of emergency had been declared three additional days earlier, before the storm hit, the NG had that much time to get everything together; I also pointed out that just a day or so after the storm ended, caravans of buses took people from the Superdome in New Orleans to the Astrodome in Houston in under ten hours, so clearly the obstacles didn’t present that much of a delay.

Turns out I was right, despite my lack of logistical knowledge:

Two days after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, President Bush went on national television to announce a massive federal rescue and relief effort.

But orders to move didn’t reach key active military units for another three days.

Once they received them, it took just eight hours for 3,600 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C., to be on the ground in Louisiana and Mississippi with vital search-and-rescue helicopters. Another 2,500 soon followed from the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas.

“If the 1st Cav and 82nd Airborne had gotten there on time, I think we would have saved some lives,” said Gen. Julius Becton Jr., who was the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under President Reagan from 1985 to 1989. “We recognized we had to get people out, and they had helicopters to do that.”

Five days. Two days to announce the effort (as he ended his vacation), and another three days to get the order out. And it only took eight hours for the first forces to get there; from reports of the majority of troops arriving by the fifth day, the main land forces were clearly not far behind.

Maybe Bush was just too fuzzy from his vacation fog. Or maybe he resented his five-week vacation being cut short by three days and decided to just kick back in D.C. till his vacation time was up. Or maybe Bush didn’t want to waste money on moving the rescue effort until he was ready to go in with it for a photo op. Of course, neither of those is true, but the reality is even worse. No wonder he took the “bold” move of accepting responsibility–he knew that eventually, reports of when the NG got activated would reach the public.

So it wasn’t the storm damage. It wasn’t that a state of emergency hadn’t been declared, as the White House dishonestly claimed. It wasn’t because the NG wasn’t ready to move, we’ve seen many reports about how troops from around the country were ready to go, and just awaiting orders to do so. It was Bush not responding fast enough, not pressing the relief efforts as he should have, not giving the orders that he should have. That’s not responsible for everything that happened, but it is for a great deal of it. The disorder in New Orleans was greatly due to the fact that the local officials foolishly believed that federal assistance and NG troops would be there within 48 hours, which was supposed to happen. The NG could have gotten there even faster, as it turns out. Now we know why they didn’t. You can’t argue that it was the governor’s fault, because not only had Blanco asked Bush to send everything he had, but Bush had the authority, all upon himself, to get the Guard moving and into Louisiana.

You might argue that it was someone or something else in government that caused the delay, but that won’t wash. Bush was in charge, and regardless of whether he accepts it, the responsibility was his. If there were problems, they were in his house, and they were his to fix. But frankly, I find it impossible to believe that Bush moved quickly and something else failed to click. Why did it take him two days just to announce the rescue effort, when it should have been in place by then? Either he was not aware that he had the authority to make things move, or he himself waited for two days, doing nothing. Can’t palm that off on someone else. And for the three days following, was Bush completely unaware that the guard troops weren’t moving? Didn’t he get a clue when two days after he made the announcement, nothing was happening? After all, if there’s one thing we know about Bush, it’s that he knows the National Guard. He was in it, remember? No, you can’t say that Bush tried his best and someone else screwed up. At the very least, he should have been briefed on all progress, and therefore known what was and was not happening. This was nothing less than his responsibility, and he sat on his hiney for five days while people suffered, starved, drowned and died.

Of course, I am certain that the Republican-controlled probe to investigate the delay (a independent, bipartisan committee was rejected by the GOP) will get down to the bottom of this.

Bush said the other day: “It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces, the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment’s notice.” Can you believe that? Again, he’s blaming the fact that local government officials were in charge for what happened. Amazing. He’s also trying to grab powers for the federal government here, away from the states where it has resided; what happened to states’ rights? How about the Posse Comitatus Act? Look, it’s not hard to figure out, folks. A challenge of this scale requires the President of the United States to get off his ass and do his job without dawdling for five full days. Or perhaps I am mistaken on that.

One thing you have to give the Bush administration: they’re so slick sometimes they make “Slick Willie” look like a talentless ametuer. Yes, they were off their game in the first few days after things blew up in the post-Katrina debacle. They got a lot better very fast, but by that time, things were already too far gone. No amount of Rovian maneuvering could dodge responsibility for what happened.

So Bush is taking a new tack: first, he’s trying out the political trump card of “accepting responsibility.” Sometimes in the past, when politicians have taken this move, it gives them a way out. When the FBI move on the Koresh compound in Waco, Texas turned disastrous, Janet Reno immediately accepted responsibility, and offered to resign if the president asked it of her. She received a great deal of respect for doing that, because she did in fact put her reputation and her career on the line. Clinton himself received far less respect when he too claimed full responsibility a short while later; it had too much of the “hey, that worked, so me, too” feel to it. Reno’s claim felt genuine; Clinton’s rang less true.

Bush’s claim is about as fake as a breath mint on top of a heap of steaming wet horse manure. Now, if on September 2nd, say, when people were experiencing hell in Louisiana and elsewhere and the fact of the government screw-up was just dawning, had Bush taken responsibility then, that would have been gutsy. But he didn’t. He waited another two weeks, and before claiming “responsibility,” he tried blaming the Democratic mayor of New Orleans and the Democratic governor of Louisiana. And when that didn’t work, he tried the old “now’s not the time,” “let’s not play politics,” and “let’s not play the blame game” tactic. When that didn’t work, he removed Michael Brown from the rescue effort, and when that didn’t work, he fired Brown. And still it didn’t work.

That’s when he “accepted responsibility,” stunning the nation–after all, Bush always refused to take responsibility for anything, refused to admit that he’d ever made a mistake. And probably a lot of Americans took his claim of responsibility seriously, and credit him for it. Which they should not, of course. An immediate claim when the feces were still flying into the rotating blades would have been worthy of respect, but only after blaming everyone else and trying everything else?

When you’ve tried every last out and come to realize that you’re going to be seen as responsible no matter what, “accepting responsibility” means nothing. It is not a “get out of jail free” card. It does not mean that he gets to avoid criticism now. If anything, it is the last affirmation that all the criticism heaped on him is justifiable and true–which, when you think about it, is part of what “being responsible” is really all about.

The second move Bush is making is to act like a Democrat. He cares about the poor. He cares about minorities. He cares about inequalities. Really? What a set of solid brass cajones does he have to have to make that claim? After five years of tax cuts for the rich, inaction on poverty, massive corporate welfare and handouts, cuts in social services and no raise in the minimum wage–after five years of the rift between the poor and the rich growing more and more and more massive, Bush suddenly decides he’s a Democrat? The phoniness of all of this is shown up just by a single recent act he took: to suspend the Bacon-Davis Act for the rebuilding after Katrina, and as a result, slash the wages of the people in the region who might otherwise use the good wages to buy homes and cars and rebuild their lives as well. Bush is pushing people under, people who are trying to keep their heads above water. If he cared about inequality, he’d raise their wages, not cut them.

And the uber-slick Rovian Bush is back. He wants to take care of the poor. He’s leading the nation in prayer. He’s got the guts to take responsibility. He’s going to spend $200 billion on the reconstruction, and make sure that we beat poverty while we’re at it. And no tax hikes to pay for it, either–we wouldn’t want to hurt Americans with such a thing. Instead, we’ll simply “cut unnecessary spending” (read: Democratic programs, mostly for the poor), and pile the rest on to the already-crippling deficit. Heck, that thing’s so big and bloated already, who’ll notice more?

Certainly we don’t want all that money ending up in the hands of the poor–they don’t know how to spend it right, like rich people do. The “recovery account” handouts news has the right wing appalled at Bush’s pledge to give a $5,000 check to each adult evacuee to help go find a job. Already right-wingers are outraged, and rumors of the New Orleans poor going out and blowing it all on designer handbags are already making it into the right-wing blogosphere.

$5,000 isn’t chicken feed, but if your home is gone, your possessions gone, your property swamped and worth nothing, your job gone and you’re in a strange new place in the midst of a jobless “recovery,” $5,000 will not last very long. And if you do the math, you’ll see that even if a million people get that handout, it still will only be a few percent of the total Bush plans to spend.

I have a sneaking feeling that Bush hasn’t changed one iota, that this is nothing but another Rovian ploy, slicker than ever. Think about it. Who’s going to get the lion’s share of that $200 billion? Where will the money really end up? Just ask yourself: where did it end up in Iraq?

After all, the Bush people are hardly new at this.

Well, this is a brilliant idea. Japan Tobacco is holding a promotional screening of the movie Sin City, and I suppose appropriately in relation to the film’s title at least, they are inviting 150 heavy smokers to watch the film while smoking their hearts out. In fact, smoking will be required during the screening. This is apparently in reaction to the recent restrictions against smoking, in a country which is still the most smoker-friendly of the industrialized nations. However, as we have seen with Christians in the U.S., no group feels more persecuted for minor restrictions than the constituency which is the largest, most powerful, and least imposed upon.

But this screening should get awards for sheer lack of common sense for a few key reasons. First of all, smoking is prohibited in movie theaters for reasons other than the lovely aroma the practice produces; theater smoking was among the first to be banned for the very cogent reason that the upward trails of smoke obscure the image on the screen. Now imagine everyone smoking. Wall-to-wall smoke trails, and an ever-increasing smoke cloud gathering directly in the path of the light from the projector. Yeah, that’ll look good.

But the second reason is a real kicker: this film will likely be screened in one of those pocket theaters, packed with seats in a small space. Now, smoking rooms get pretty dense with smoke even when you’ve just got people seated relatively sparsely. But a room which is mostly seating, filled with no one but chain smokers for more than two hours? In a room not designed with ventilation to handle heavy smoking?

Forget whether or not the film will be visible to the viewers. They’ll be lucky if anyone in the theater is conscious by the time it ends.

A friend at work recently asked for a recommendation for a good book, and I thought it might make for a few good entries to mention novels I think would be generally enjoyed. If you’re looking for something good to read and haven’t gotten to these ones yet, given them a try. A caveat: I basically read science fiction. However, I will suggest only books which I believe do not require you to be a science fiction fan.

Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, by Orson Scott Card, tops my list. It’s right up there with Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead, also by Card. While I disagree rather sharply with his politics, and do not like all of his writings, Card at his best is something you do not want to miss.

Pastwatch is set in the future at a time when the world is recovering from environmental disaster, and technology is advanced so that anything in the past can be observed. Beginning crudely, without sound and with blurry vision, and developing to audio-visual devices with highly accurate and perceptive capabilities, the Pastwatch machines allow observers to watch the lives of people centuries and millennia gone. The purpose is akin to the old saying that those who have no past have no future; the Pastwatch project is supposed to map the development of mankind in the past, discovering where we have been for the benefit of those to come.

But if you think that this book is going to be all about time machines, time warps, causality loops, and paradoxes, you’re mistaken; Card’s science fiction is less about technology and science, and more about people–their motivations, their histories, their ways of seeing and understanding who and what they encounter. Science is well in the background, humanity is in the forefront. Card also defines history most sensibly as the story of people, and uses the characters in his novel to show how the individual and the way each of us looks at the world in turn shapes the world. One of the characters in the novel, for example, named Tagiri, watches a woman from an ancient time at the time of the woman’s death, and sees a sadness, the cause of which she feels compelled to discover. So she works backwards through the woman’s life, seeing effect first, and searches for the cause. This not only teaches her a new technique for learning the story of a life, but leads to a grander search: the source of the woman’s sadness was that her son was sold into slavery, which becomes a new focus of her own line of study–and, in time, a focus of the novel itself.

While the strongly character-driven story is this novel’s most potent feature, it is not the only one. Another is the review of history and the intriguing possibilities of what might or might not have happened if Christopher Columbus had acted differently. Card’s thorough research shows, and not just in the lengthy bibliography in the back of the book, but in the detail in his telling of history, and his fascinating speculation as to what might have been, where the world might have become radically different had one person moved in this way or that.

And what must-read book would be complete without stunning twists? Card has two of them in this story, fascinating events which turn the story in new directions and send chills down your spine as you consider the ramifications. Well, for me, at least they did. You’ll have to decide that for yourself when you read it.

Next time: Startide Rising.

A few things I’ve observed. First of all, about referral spammers (read this post for a definition of that). Recently one firm which figured out how to get past the filters has been hammering the site steadily. But what’s interesting is that they consistently hit two specific entries–both of them about spam. I’ve noticed this before in the past: when spammers hit you, they more often than not target entries in the blog which talk about spam (as they will with this post, no doubt). One can only imagine that this is their sick, twisted way of giving you the virtual finger–complain and we’ll target you. Swell people, these blokes.

My visitor count is going very high so far this month, perhaps 20% higher than usual lately. I thought it was the high-volume spammers, but a closer inspection of my logs shows they’re using a single IP address–not responsible for the increased number of unique IP hits. Strange. Sometimes I have no idea why more people start coming–though I suspect it has to do with breaking thresholds in Google listings somehow (don’t ask me how that works, though I suspect chicken entrails are involved).

And finally, you may have noticed my special note in the side bar and above the comments area mentioning the trouble I’m having with the TypeKey comment system (if you are reading this well after publication, the note is probably long gone). In order to assist in figuring out the problem, I published a temporary email address for people to contact me if they had trouble with the comment system. Well, I got one or two such emails… and now a lot of spam. For those who don’t know, posting your email address on a web page, any web page, is a glaring invitation to get spammed. Spammers have automated programs that continuously read web pages and harvest any and all email addresses from them (which is why I never require commenters to leave an email address).

What’s more interesting is that the scam spammers, and not the ad spammers, seem to be the ones who use this most. As with my experiment a while back, the published email address garners not so much ads to buy things, as it does more emails from Nigerians with millions to route through my bank account, and European lottery officials informing me that I’ve won millions, and so just pay the processing fees and the check will be in the mail. Specifically, after only just a few days of life, the email account has received three Nigerian emails, one European Lottery email, one spammer trying to trick me into putting a “reciprocal” link on my site, and one more trying to get me to advertise for them on my site. So once again: don’t publish your email address on any web site unless you really, really like Nigerians.

This guy deserves a Nobel Prize or something. He created a free, slap-together do-it-yourself product that serves a dual purpose: reducing the efficiency of telemarketers while, at the same time, making fools out of them for your sheer delight.

Have you ever received a robotic telemarketer call? The kind carefully designed to fool you into thinking you’re having a conversation with someone in your neighborhood, and you don’t realize for a while that it’s a recording and they’re selling something? This guy (whom I found via Engadget) took that idea, juiced it up, and aimed it right back at the telemarketers.

Here’s how it works: You start with a pre-recorded conversation with a variety of statements, questions, and generalized utterances. The TeleCrapper 2000 then waits behind your Called ID service with a list of numbers identified as telemarketers. When the phone rings, the Telecrapper 2000 scans the Caller ID against the list. If it’s one of them, then the TeleCrapper 2000 picks up after the first ring. It plays the recorded script’s first line, then waits for an answer. The TeleCrapper 2000 can detect the silence at the end of a telemarketer’s statement, and so it can realistically answer shortly after they finish saying something. The TeleCrapper 2000 then plays the next recorded line, waits for an answer, and so on, and so on. When you hear the conversations it has, it is amazingly realistic, and you can imagine it fooling just about anybody. (Unfortunately, it’s more than just the average person can wire together; hopefully, someday someone will sell a ready-made version of it.)

The idea of this, as I mentioned before, is twofold: first, it completely wastes the telemarketers’ time by engaging them in a protracted, fake conversation with zero benefit to them. Some of these people go on with the TeleCrapper 2000 for quite some time, even after the TeleCrapper 2000 reaches the point where it runs out of material and just loops the same four or five replies over and over and over again.

The second purpose is that it gives you a great deal of entertainment and sheer joy. You can record, listen to, and share the conversations the telemarketers have with your computer, and laugh yourself silly. The creator of this product, who will surely be rewarded handsomely by God, has put up a dozen or so of these recorded conversations on his web site; scroll down to the very bottom of the page and listen to them. Probably the best of this guy’s list is #5, which was turned into a Flash animation on this site. But #9 was a hoot, because the robotic conversation was based on accusing the caller of being “Chris,” and the caller was in fact named “Christy” (another called was “Crystal”). #11 was outright hysterical; the robot conversation simulated a confused old man, and trapped the caller into a seemingly endless three minutes of pure, hilarious nonsense.

But that has nothing on the conversation numbered 12, in three parts, where first the caller is fooled for 3 or four minutes, then believes that he’s talking to a deranged old man and tries to make fun of him with the office listening, not realizing he’s trying to cruelly tease a machine on an endless loop, sounding like a complete fool. Then he calls back and tries again, this time seriously attempting to get the woman of the house before it spins off into absurdity again.

The maker states his desire that many people will do this, and share their own recordings over the Internet. I hope they do.

I tell you, I haven’t laughed this hard in years.

Conservatives out there are saying that New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is criminally irresponsible for not having gotten the Superdome people on buses and evacuated all of them before Katrina hit; at the same time, they defend Bush, saying that he got the National Guard and other relief to New Orleans as fast as could be expected.

If you run into somebody arguing thusly, present this simple argument:

Nagin had 29 hours warning before stormfall that a mandatory evacuation would be necessary. Bush took 4-5 days to get the National Guard in the city.

How can you fault the mayor of a city for failing to evacuate 30,000+ destitute civilians in school buses in 29 hours, and at the same time say that the President of the United States was not slow when it took him four to five days to get the same number of highly organized and well-equipped soldiers in military vehicles into the same city?

Somehow, the math simply doesn’t work out. You can’t have it both ways.