This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. I try to keep this up
daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying. See also the monthly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column, 4,000 -
7,000 words, depending. (Older
columns here.) For more on what this page is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE.
If you have never read the explanatory material on that page, please do so.
If you got here through a link that didn't take you to the front
page of this site, click here for a better
explanation of what we're trying to do here.
If you are not paying for this place, click here...
If
you have no idea what you are doing here, see the What is this
place?,
which tries to make order of chaos.
If you intend to send MAIL to me, see
the INSTRUCTIONS.
Boiler Plate:
If you want to PAY FOR THIS there
are problems, but I keep the latest HERE. I'm trying. MY
THANKS to all of you who sent money. Some of you went to a lot of
trouble to send money from overseas. Thank you! There are also some new payment methods. I am preparing a special (electronic)
mailing to all those who paid: there will be a couple of these. I am also
toying with the notion of a subscriber section of the page. LET ME KNOW your thoughts.
.
I am dancing as fast as I can... Worldcon is in
Boston, but I'm here, slaving away. Alex and his fiancé were over and we had
a nice barbeque, and Dan Spisak was here to help with the column, so it
wasn't a dull day. Just lots of work.
More Marines dead in Fallujah.
Hundreds of Russians dead in a school. The Russians are descended from the
Rus who were Vikings, and are subject to berserker rage in which they no
longer care about the consequences of their actions against their enemies.
Communism tried to impose an intellectual discipline over that and partly
was successful. Whether that veneer of civilization will hold now is not
clear.
When the terrorists kidnapped a USSR officer some
years ago at about the same time that the American station chief in Lebanon
was taken, the KGB went in, kidnapped many relatives of terrorist leaders,
and began sending parts to back with requests for the return of their man.
They got him alive. Ours was of course tortured to death.
How
long the Marines will put up with Fallujah is not clear. History records
that Julius Caesar forgave his enemies several times until his Legions
decided they did not care to fight the same rebels over and over, and
slaughtered all the prisoners in one notable battle. Of course our troops
are far better disciplined.
It is not a safe world. I do not
think it is safe by our being in Iraq; but I am certain that being in Iraq
and playing games as we have in Fallujah is not a good idea. There needs to
be an example made: a community disarmed through block by block searches,
thorough disarmament. But whether we can do that now that we are not
"sovereign" is not clear. The ideal time to do it would have been just
before transfer of sovereignty: then the incoming government could both
blame it on the Americans, and threaten their enemies with our return.
Ah well.
Kerry, I see, has yet another position on Iraq: at
least he says it's a new position, but I wasn't able to figure out what it
was other than getting the troops home in four years. At what price he did
not say.
================
The column is done.
One Russian schoolgirl was shot in the
back 40 times as she ran away. Over 700 Russians killed in a week by
terrorists.
Anyone want to bet on Tehran or Damascus or even
Mecca surviving another year? Russians are not PC. They are Rus, old
Vikings. From the fury of the northmen...
Seen in another
discussion:
Unpaid Gurkhas for Sharon. That's the
US Marine Corps
The column is done and off. There are
workmen here to replace the kitchen counter tops. Others will ratproof the
dishwasher area. Others will -- suffice to say Chaos Manor is in the hands
of the contractors.
And we're coming up for air after doing the column.
There is a new edition of Ad-Aware. You will be told about it if you
update your current edition. My new one found 40 questionable cookies on
being run; I had run the old version just before installing the new and that
had found 12 or so since the last time I ran it. The data miners are out
there, and they have their tame Congresscritters to keep their nefarious
activities legal. Long Live Fritz Hollings! Although may I have my own ideas
about where he should endure this long life?
We were awakened at 0755 by Sable, who is
very good at telling us that (1) there are people in the back yard, (2) she
knows them and they're all right, and (3) she still thinks we ought to know
there are people in the yard. Mostly she talks about it. It's quite
different from the fuss she makes if there are people she doesn't know and
doesn't trust. Huskies don't exactly bark, although they know how.
Sable was raised her first couple of months in a house that had non-Huskies
so she does sometimes bark like a normal dog, but not often, and it still
sounds different. To the wolf breeds, barking is a big deal, and means they
are summoning help to deal with a situation they don't think they can
handle.
Her predecessor, Sasha, barked about four times in all his life, once on
the trail: back before leash laws, he ran ahead and around a bend, and began
barking furiously, clearly summoning help. I got around the curve to
discover him confronting a saddled horse; the Ranger had left it on the
trail. The horse wasn't much concerned, but Sasha had never seen one before,
and I am sure was thinking if I would help him pull down this thing we'd eat
for a month. I got him to realize that horses weren't game; given the
thing's size I am sure he was glad to hear it.
Sable, on the other hand, has seen horses most of her life, and on the
free run in the unleash dog park she likes to drift toward the water trough
near the farm where there are horses. Those horses, being separated
from an unleashed dog run by no more than a railed fence and a low chicken
wire fence presumably to keep tiny dogs out, are entirely uninterested in
dogs and pay them little attention, which is fine by Sable because she just
wants to watch them.
Anyway, the workmen came, and we now have kitchen counter tops and a
sink. No dishwasher yet, but tomorrow they ratproof the dishwasher
compartment. Of course we had a gas leak yesterday afternoon, and the Gas
Company man found a leaking pressure relief valve, which he bypassed but we
ought to get a new one so the Sears people are coming to do that. How do
families without a home manager survive? Roberta has spent full time
managing this place for weeks now; if I had to do all that I would never get
any work done (or the place would slowly settle into the muck).
===
I have been paying the bills, and I find that two of my telephone lines
have $8 per month AT&T bills tacked on, and the other two do not. One of the
lines that pays AT&T is on one which we NEVER call out; it's reserved for
incoming calls and almost no one has the number. The basic Pacific Bell
(well SBC now) bill for this phone is $16 or so, but then there is an $8
AT&T bill for nothing I can think of. I don't even know who to call to ask.
Does anyone understand telephone bills? It's clear to me I need to abandon
AT&T on this line, and probably on the other line (it's the FAX line) that
gets socked with an AT&T monthly charge. But do I call AT&T or SBC?
Sigh.
Incidentally, of the $8 a month AT&T charges me for doing NOTHING, $2.00
of that is a "statement fee": they charge me for sending me a bill. I hate
them.
More casualties in Iraq, mostly because we showed weakness at Fallujah.
The Russians understand that, and Putin said that Russia showed weakness,
but will not do so in future. Kipling was not a Russian poet, but perhaps
someone has translated The Grave of The Hundred Heads.
Meanwhile, The American Conservative has one of the silliest articles I
have seen in a while, with a scenario about the Iranian Guard charging the
US Army and Marines and killing about 400 in a few hours. I don't know what
Claude Salhani has been smoking. His bio says he is a UPI editor and
journalist. I suppose this is what we can expect from UPI. His thesis
that Israel may bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities (as they did the Iraqi
some years ago) isn't out of line; his notion that the Iranians might be
crazy enough to order their Revolutionary Guards to attack American forces
in Iraq is at the edge of feasibility although Iranians are usually not
quite as crazy as Arabs; but his picture of the subsequent battle is a pipe
dream of an Ayatollah. I doubt the fly boys would let the Revolutionary
Guard get close enough to our troops for them to kill 400 of them in a few
hours, but if they did close with the Army and Marines they would regret it
rather quickly.
I suspect we have some military people who pray for something like this,
anything better than being there in the heat day after day with nothing to
fight while suicide bombers creep up on them. A charge of Revolutionary
Guards might be a relief.
On the other hand, Pat Buchanan's reminder that at the time he labeled
his column "Fallujah: High Tide of the American Empire" is a fair cop. Our
retreat in the face of barbarism in Fallujah was a severe error: better had
we gone in and disarmed the city before transfer of sovereignty. The new
Iraqi government would benefit twice: from the elimination of a threat, and
they could blame it all on us.
Well, that didn't happen, just as we STILL do not make our food subsidies
to Iraq dependent on it being quiet in the area. If every village
faced the idea that if an American is killed in that province we stop
feeding them for two weeks, the resulting tranquility would be marvelous to
behold. Of course we won't do that.
Incompetent Empire. We need to decide just what the hell we are doing
over there, and start doing it. Begin by making it clear we don't intend to
feed people who won't stop the attacks on us.
========
Today's LA Times says half the work force is functionally illiterate.
Roberta Pournelle's reading program has yet to
fail to teach anyone to read who finishes the program. Now admittedly many
of those were in reform school and had no choice but to sit through the
lessons, but oddly enough THEY LEARNED anyway.
Adults learn, too. Chinese and Armenian kids in public schools learn. The
program works. So we know how to teach kids to read.
There are problems we can't solve and those we won't solve. Illiteracy is
one of those we won't solve. Instead we have nonsense like No Child Left
Behind.
It is Sable's second birthday although the
nation has better reasons to remember this date. Niven came over this
morning and we took a 2 hour walk up the hill to the Tree People and around
and down. Hot, and Sable was panting a good bit, but there's water here and
there such as at the Tree People, and all is well. I think we have our next
novel picked out.
I am not sure there's much worth saying about the anniversary. We know
how to prevent airplanes from being hijacked and used as cruise missiles. We
also have a pretty good idea of the resources of the enemy: they don't have
many, else they would be here and used. They have killed 1,000 US troops,
but that's because we put them where they could be harmed. Recruiting agents
to come to the US and do harm to us, getting people competent enough to
carry out the mission but also willing to try, is not easy. The Palestinians
have learned that if you get someone worked up to be a martyr you need to
send them fast: no time for elaborate plans.
But the terrorists have managed to cripple the airline industry with the
TSA, and make travel a burden to be endured rather than something to be
enjoyed. But it is notable how few incidents there have been since the Big
911.
==========
We saw Vanity Fair last night, and I have to say the movie is better than
the book. Thackeray was probably more sympathetic to Becky than he let on,
but he is still a creature of his culture. Witherspoon does the part in an
interpretation that probably Thackeray wouldn't much care for, but she does
it extremely well. I also prefer this ending to Thackeray's.
CBS bet its reputation on the authenticity
of forged documents, and when that bluff was called, doubled the bet. And
has now lost.
The documents were KERNED and supposedly written in 1984. CBS kept
yammering that they COULD have been done by a Selectric, or an IBM
Executive. But they couldn't have been because nothing in those times could
do kerned text.
The frantic defense reminded me of Alger Hiss who spent a fortune trying
to show that the FBI MIGHT HAVE BEEN ABLE to forge the pumpkin papers. CBS
never showed that the Texas National Guard unit had an IBM Executive
typewriter or anything with Times New Roman typefacing ( I had a Selectric
and many type balls for it, but not a Times New Roman).
But CBS kept doubling down on this bet and now it's just plain
impossible.
"CBS's last hope had been to show that Colonel
Killian -- whose wife
maintains did not type -- prepared the documents on an IBM Selectric
or Composer. Those probabilities took a dive now that experimental
attempts to reproduce the document on such equipment have failed.
Worse, Computer Science Professor Robert Cartwright of Rice
University (hat tip: Hugh Hewitt) shows that the variable letter
spacing based on the adjacency of letters found in CBS's documents
was computationally impossible on any mechanical device available in
1973. Modern word processing processing programs, like Microsoft
Word, contain information in the font definition which, for example,
tuck a small "i" under the overhang of a capital "T". No mechanical
typewriter then available could do this.
... in 1971, even the most powerful available computer systems were
not equipped to produce documents like the Killian documents. In
Fall 1971, I entered graduate school in Computer Science at
Stanford. I soon gravitated to the Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory, which had the most powerful time-sharing system (a
PDP-10) on campus. In either 1972 or 1973, Xerox gave the Stanford
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory a prototype xerographic printer
called a "Xerox Graphics Printer (XGP)". Two similar prototypes were
given to the MIT Computer Science Department and the Carnegie-Mellon
Computer Science Department. The programming staff at the Stanford
AI Laboratory was thrilled with the gift because it was the first
opportunity that computer science research community had to develop
software to support printer quality type-setting. The three Computer
Science Departments cooperated in developing the word processing
programs to support the XGP. I wrote my first published research
paper and my doctoral disseration using the XGP in Spring 1976. It
would take another decade before comparable word processing systems
were available to most computer science researchers on minicomputers
running Unix. It would take nearly another decade before they were
widely used on personal computers.
The typed text in the "Killian memos" is kerned (check out letter
combinations like "fo" and "fe"), but the (IBM) Composer text is
clearly not. Kerning is a computationally complex task beyond the
capacity of any mechanical typewriter--even one as expensive and
elaborate as the IBM Selectric Composer."
Interesting that it was blogs that nailed CBS and very quickly. How are
the mighty fallen..
The New York Times
September 13, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Those Discredited Memos
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
Washington — Alert bloggers who knew the difference between the product of
old typewriters and new word processors immediately suspected a hoax: the
"documents" presented by CBS News suggesting preferential treatment in Lt.
George W. Bush's National Guard service have all the earmarks of forgeries.
Heh.
=========
From Ed Hume:
Remember, all ye swabs...
September 19 is International Talk Like a Pirate Day
CLICK HERE for
a Special Request. 
