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Remains left by the Neandertals indicate much more than that, though. They are quite modern as hominids go, and were tool users and intrepid hunters. It isn't known how or why it was that they got displaced by an invasion of Cro Magnons (modern humans) out of Africa a hundred thousand years ago; that remains an unsolved problem. There are various guesses but no real evidence yet. Still, the evidence is strong that they felt considerable affection for each other. Neandertal graves often contain gifts of tools and flowers and foodstuffs, showing deliberate burials and even indicating some sort of ceremony. But analysis of the skeletons reveals more. This article describes a jawbone which was broken; the person it belonged to lived for at least six months without being able to chew -- and didn't starve. What did he (?) eat? Someone was feeding him. Why? Because they cared. But there was an even more remarkable case. A skeleton was found of a Neandertal who died as a teenager. He was horribly deformed and would never have been able to care for himself, and yet he lived nearly to adulthood. That couldn't have happened by accident. Lions don't do that. While the members of a pride cooperate and work together, if a lion is injured none of the other lions will attempt to help it; if it cannot recover it will die. If a lion cub is hurt, the tribe will abandon it. But Neandertals did; they cared for a baby which would never be able to contribute to the tribe; cared for him until apparently he died of natural causes. And his grave had flowers and offerings in it. That is a very human thing to do; it means the Neandertals were very much like us culturally, despite their physical differences. (discussion in progress)
(discuss)
The US economy went onto a war footing beginning in 1942. Factories which had been working to manufacture consumer goods like cars and refrigerators and stoves switched over to producing military goods. Some things like tires and gasoline continued to be made, but much of the output went to the government. Employment actually rose, and hours were long. Many dollars were issued as pay, but there were far fewer consumer goods to buy; if that situation was not rectified, the result would be runaway inflation. The purpose of War Bonds was not to raise money but rather to take cash out of the economy, cash which had been injected into it to pay for manufacture of war supplies. In a sense, it meant that the people doing the work were being paid with I.O.U.'s instead of with real dollars. With something like half the output of the US economy going into war production which was shipped overseas. this was necessary. For the moment, the US does not face that problem. While we are about to enter a war, our economy is not switching to a war footing. War Bonds now would actually have the effect of causing disinflation, since right at the moment there is plenty of product to buy. If War Bonds start soaking up substantial amounts of cash then there will be more product than cash to buy it, which will cause prices to fall. Disinflation is a bad thing to have happen; it puts companies out of business and can set off a recession. (discuss)
More losers:
Actually, I welcome this. Falwell and Robertson are now thoroughly discredited; any remaining political influence they might have had is now in the toilet. No important politician will be returning their calls any longer. The influence of the Religious Right collectively just took a hit below the waterline. Thank goodness! (I don't Thank God because of course there isn't one.) And decent Christians (yes, Virginia...) all over the US are rolling their eyes in sheer frustration. (discussion in progress) Update: Falwell has apologized. Fat lot of good that's going to do him.
The door on the pilot cabin has a lock on it; one of the things that the hijackers did was to lure the pilot out and then take over the jet. Presumably they would then have locked that door themselves. The passengers may have been able to overpower hijackers left in the cabin of the plane, but would have been no more capable of forcing that door than were the hijackers in the first place. But a jet is a tricky thing to fly; the hijackers who were flying it had never actually been in control of one. They had minimal training and were capable of handling it in benign conditions, but would not have had the ability to react to unexpected events that an experienced pilot could handle. What I'm wondering is whether, after regaining control of the cabin, the passengers opened one of the doors on the jet? That would cause the cabin to depressurize, and it would radically unbalance the jet for a while as the air escaped. It may have been enough to cause the hijackers to lose control of it and crash (which would have been the objective). If this is actually what happened, there may be enough information from the flight data recorder to reconstruct that. (discussion in progress) Update: Apparently my idea is untenable. So it goes. Update 20010915: They've found the voice recorder and it looks like it is in decent shape. Maybe we'll find out now.
It's also no excuse. I'm not sympathetic. The course of the struggle by the Afghanis against the USSR was changed by the introduction of high tech weapons by the US. The US could, if need be, begin to heavily support the opposition and turn the tide of the war against the Taliban -- and this may indeed be a tactic that the US ends up using. There's a lot the US could provide to the opposition which would seriously change the balance of the struggle. The opposition stronghold borders Tajikistan, and that nation has already granted the US permission to operate from within its borders. Think the opposition could find a use for a hundred thousand mortar shells? (discuss)
Usually, when the Fed wants to stimulate the economy it does so by manipulating interest rates. Early this year it engaged in the most rapid cutting of interest rates in its history, but usually there's a substantial time delay before that takes effect, if it does at all. The latency is generally considered to be nine months or a year, but of course if the results of this disaster do what is expected to the economy then the effects of the January cuts will now be nullified. But the Fed has a different way of stimulating the economy, and that's to pump up the supply of currency. The effect of that is more immediate but the Fed generally doesn't like to use it because it has a high chance of causing inflation. But when the economy actually faces disinflation because of people hording cash, that's the only answer. (Understand that this doesn't mean "hording paper bills"; you can horde cash in a bank account.) Facing concerns about a mass sell-off of stock next Monday when US markets are scheduled to open again, the Fed has pumped over a hundred billion dollars worth of cash into the economy to maintain liquidity. I've been wondering when they would come to this; I hope we don't regret it. (discuss)
This raises concerns, naturally, about our Fourth Amendment right to be secure against unreasonable searches without probably cause. I don't think it's a problem, actually. If it were not possible to go through life without being searched, then that would be unreasonable. But no-one actually has to ride on a jet, and it's clear now that there is a substantial danger for the passengers and for everyone else associated with not doing adequate security for jets. I don't see any constitutional issues here; if someone doesn't want to be subjected to this kind of security scan, let them take a train or a bus or a boat or a car. (Also, the security scan is not being done by the government; it's being done by the airlines themselves as a condition of buying a ticket. As such, the Fourth Amendment doesn't even apply, since it bans the government from performing searches.) (discussion in progress)
Update: More about our good buddies the Chinese.
Bin Laden's struggle against the US is Jihad. He has no goal; he's just piling up points in heaven each time he strikes a blow against us. There is no political objective to his campaign; the US couldn't appease him even if it were willing to do so. Moreover, he and his people do not live here. So in a sense, his struggle against the US isn't really "terrorism" in the technical sense of the word, although it uses some of the same tactics as a true terrorist campaign: unusual attacks, cells and so on. Even if the US were willing to negotiate, there's nothing to talk about. There isn't any common ground; there isn't anything the US could offer in negotiation which would satisfy him. So the US has to fight. But let's be clear that this will be a long struggle. It will be extremely difficult to wipe out his organization; it may take years, and in the mean time they are likely to launch further attacks against the US. Some of those may succeed and then there will be more crushed bodies on the streets of US cities. But even if we don't fight, his organization will do that anyway and they'll do more of it because their organization will be intact. The US will attack bin Laden's organization because there is nothing else whatever that the US can do to try to abate the threat. (discussion in progress)
The Taliban itself is responsible for most of that suffering, and has been for a long time now inflicting even more suffering on its own people.
We don't think that the Taliban had anything to do with the attacks; we think that they are giving aid and comfort to the ones who did it. That makes them our enemy. They've been claiming all along that bin Laden had nothing to do with it, but they have presented no credible evidence beyond their "Would we lie to you?" act. They claimed bin Laden had no means of communication and the next day he used a satellite phone to call a newspaper in Pakistan. I believe at this point that the US government really does have substantial evidence of the involvement of bin Laden not only in this bombing but in at least three previous bombings or bombing attempts. We've been "presenting evidence" to them for years, and no matter what we tell them somehow it never seems to be enough. One of the great aphorisms of politics and business is "delay is the deadliest form of denial." They're trying to get us to lose our will and go back to begging them for bin Laden so that they can keep refusing by claiming that the evidence is not yet strong enough. No. We're through begging. Now we're demanding. We want him and we won't accept any more excuses. We want his organization. We want it shut down. We aren't going to take "no" (or "later") as answers. "Killing our leaders will not help our people any. There is no factory in Afghanistan that is worth the price of a single missile fired at us. It will simply increase the mistrust between the people in the region and the United States." Actually, there's good reason to believe that killing the top command of the Taliban would substantially improve the lot of the people of Afghanistan, especially their women and religious minorities. But leave that aside. There isn't any trust left between our peoples, and it's their fault. We've tried to play square with them, and now that time is over. It isn't possible to reduce trust below zero, which is what we're at now. We don't trust them at all anymore, and we no longer care whether they trust us. And as to any possibility that an attack by us will increase antagonism by terrorist groups and cause them to retaliate, they're going to attack us again whether we retaliate or not. But if we retaliate effectively, we may wipe some of them out before they can do so. At this point we no longer have anything to lose. The Taliban are essentially trying to say "Let's let bygones be bygones. Friends now, eh?" No. That all changed Tuesday morning. They've had their chance. If they want to be our friends now, if they want us to trust them, if they want mercy, then it's time for them to earn it. They are no longer entitled to the benefit of the doubt. They've made their bed and now they can die in it. It's still not too late for them to prevent a catastrophe, but it's their decision to prevent it, not ours. Our course is clear. The time for talking is over; it's time for action now. They can take action, but if they don't, we will. They have only two choices: give us bin Laden or be annihilated. They may choose which they prefer, but they're running out of time to make that choice, and there will be no third alternative. (discuss) Update 20010914: They're still trying to claim that there's no way that bin Laden could have been involved. And their claim of cooperation is now exposed as an empty lie: if the US has evidence then bin Laden will be tried by an Islamic Court in Afghanistan. That's what they think. Update 20010914: Now they're threatening retaliation if they are attacked. I think we really are seeing a case of
Update: I gotta admit, this tops it: It is your patriotic duty to change your long distance service provider. (Simply amazing.) Update 20010914: That last site has changed now, and maybe some of you were responsible. At least two members of the crew have written to tell me that they did something about this, including writing letters not only to the owners of the page but to other companies who might care about them.
I'm sorry, but that's idealistic horseshit. Trying to run a foreign policy out in the open is like trying to play poker with your hand exposed. In a sense she's right: our fear of terrorist attacks would evaporate because we'd have a lot bigger and more important things to be afraid of if we ever tried to do something so unbelieveably stupid. The rest of her essay (on the left column, mirrored here) is equally misguided; it can be summarized in three words: "We deserved it." I recommend that she go in person to New York and tell that to
Update 20010914: Unfortunately, the report was false.
The designation "Mountain" comes from the fact that they are trained and equipped to operate in rough terrain. Although mechanized (as are all US infantry divisions now) they don't require it to the same extent that other infantry divisions do, and units of the 10th are capable of operating in mountains without mechanized support. All troops are trained to move on skis (skis to the 10th are like parachutes to the 82nd) and are also trained to climb with ropes and pitons; the 10th can move rapidly over terrain which would defeat any other unit except Airborne, and when they arrive they will be much more heavily armed than Airborne would be (because Airborne are light troops; the 10th emphatically is not). It should be noted that "division" is an organizational term, not a statement of size. In history, "divisions" have varied all the way from 2,000 men to as many as 35,000 at various times. US divisions tend to be very heavy (almost all the largest divisions in history were American). A "division" is generally the smallest organization in an army which is capable of operating on its own and which contains organically nearly everything it needs to fight. The next step down is the Brigade. US infantry brigades don't have organic scout or engineer units, and inadequate artillery, communications and medical. Most of those assets are held at the divisional level. The 10th Mountain Division has six infantry battalions, two artillery battalions, four attached air units (attack and transport helicopters), four support battalions (logistics), plus attached battalions to take care of administration, intelligence, signals and communication, engineering (sappers), medical, and air defense, There's also a battalion of Military Police, whose job is to protect all the non-combat elements and also to protect supply dumps and communications (i.e. roads in the rear) and to take care of prisoners and to keep the peace among civilians in captured areas. Military "engineers" are not the same as what I do as an engineer. They're responsible for replacing bridges, laying and clearing mine fields, using "special weapons", and taking care of demolition. Against an entrenched foe, it's not uncommon for engineers to lead the attack to clear fixed obstacles and clear intervening mines and let other units through. (To rapidly clear paths through a minefield at the front, they have special vehicles which can fire what looks like a rope to lay across it. It's actually plastic explosive, and when it goes off it detonates any mines near by, leaving a cleared road.) The 10th is not a unit you'd like to have standing on your border looking angry. The Taliban have nothing capable of opposing it. Now inevitably people will ask "If the USSR couldn't do it, why do you think that the US can?" Because the goals of the operations would be different. The USSR did successfull invade Afghanistan; the problem was that they tried to hold it, and that's where they failed. That would not be the goal of a hypothetical US operation. This would be "search and destroy": move in, find bin Ladin and his organization and annihilate them, and then leave again. We don't want Afghanistan -- we just want bin Ladin. If we are willing to accept some losses (and we are, I believe, at this point; no-one is expecting a bloodless war anymore) then this is something we are capable of doing. If I were the Taliban, I'd be afraid now, too. (discuss)
Long term winners: the National Rifle Association, the Defense Industry, Israel, Conservatives Short term losers: Insurance companies, Arab-Americans, Iranian-Americans, anyone from Asia who has dark skin, the stock market, stock brokerages, the broadcast networks Long term losers: airlines, the tourism industry, gun control advocates, anti-death penalty activists, the Palestinians, a balanced US budget, Liberals (discuss)
In particular, nothing will ever be found of the people who were on the jets or who were near (within a hundred feet of) the impact points. The violence of the impact would have destroyed their bodies, and whatever was left afterwards would have been incinerated in the resulting fire. Of those people there's nothing left but ashes, now spread all over New York City. I'm sorry to speak bluntly about this, but we have to be realistic. A human body is very easy to destroy, leaving no trace whatever. In this disaster, the number of "missing and presumed dead" (no trace ever found) will be vastly greater than the number of "confirmed dead" (i.e. people whose body parts are located and identified). (discuss)
Meanwhile, Congress is considering a formal Declaration of War under Article I, section 8, clause 11 of the Constitution. It may be surprising to learn that I have grave misgivings about that. It's not that I don't want the US to use military might to punish whoever is responsible for this and anyone who protects them or gives them aid -- I do. But this isn't like having a war with a nation. This is going to be a low level struggle for years with an occasional burst of activity, as the US seeks out and tries to annihilate a series of small cells and encampments all over the world. It may take upwards of ten years. The problem with it isn't starting it, it's ending it. How do you know when the war is over? A state of War has to formally end sometime, usually with an armistice or peace treaty; I don't like the idea of the US having a formal state of War indefinitely, and it's not obvious just who we'd sign such a treaty with. I would prefer something more limited: a renewable grant of power to the President to spend funds and use military might in this area, subject to consultation with Congressional leaders before any major operation: in other words, a slightly enhanced version of the "War Powers Act". (discuss)
Update: Three men have been taken off that train in handcuffs. I saw one of them; he was wearing a turban and had a full black beard. Update: There wasn't actually anyone worth having on the train. False alarm. I guess they are getting a little over-enthusiastic; I hope they didn't arrest that guy just because he was wearing a turban. The last thing we need in this country is for every Sikh to get pounded on.
But the real point is that the analogy of yesterday's bombing to the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (or the firebombing of Tokyo) is deeply flawed. Those were the final episodes in a war which Japan started. It's also a historical fact that the nukes caused Hirohito to order a surrender. Had that not happened and had the US been forced to invade Japan in November of 1945, vastly more Japanese would have died than were killed by the two nukes. I have studied that period deeply and I have no doubt whatever that President Truman made the right choice to drop the bombs on Japan, and that by doing so he saved both Japanese and American lives. The analogy to Pearl Harbor is, in fact, much better for several reasons. First, both were attacks made in peacetime. Second, both were made without warning. Third, Pearl Harbor did, and the WTC attack will, raise a righteous anger in the American people. (discuss)
This picture simply isn't believeable. It looks like something that was created with Photoshop, or like a still from a movie. It's not the kind of thing you expect to ever see in real life.
This one is the same way. It seems as if it was done with a miniature. It's almost as if our brains can't accept that this really happened -- or perhaps it's because we've seen this dozens of times in movies but never before in real life.
I can't find words to talk about this.
After the collapses yesterday, for a while I hoped that all that had happened was that the top part of each building had fallen off, leaving the structure beneath it still standing. Now I know that didn't happen. There's nothing left, simply nothing. It's all gone. Eventually the smoke and dust will clear and we'll get a picture of the site taken from the air, but I no longer need to see it. It's all gone. Now I know. (discuss)
Update: One of the excuses that that Taliban gave yesterday for their contention that bin Ladin wasn't involved was that he had no ability to communicate because the Taliban had confiscated all his equipment. So how did he contact a newspaper in Pakistan today to issue a denial?
I read something once which was discussing the San Andreas Fault, and it included an analysis of the effects of a major quake in San Francisco or Los Angeles. It turned out that with our economy being as distributed as it is, destruction of one major city would have rippling economic effects such as to cause an economic crash in fairly short order. This was not as dramatic as taking out LA, and the effects will be smaller -- but not imperceptible. There has been speculation that this may actually set off a real recession in the US, as opposed to the "slowdown" we're actually in. For all the pain going on economically now, the US GDP continues to grow quarter-over-quarter. This attack may result in an actual decline, the first in nearly ten years. (discuss)
Update 20010912: They're working out now more details of how the hijackings took place. It appears that the weapons they used were razor blades. The hijackers started killing stewardesses, and this caused the pilots to unlock the cockpit. The pilots were trying to save the lives of the crew and passengers. Certainly a couple of hundred people on the plane are important, but it's now clear that the jet itself is worth thousands of lives due to the fact that it is a weapon. From now on, protection of the jet itself must be higher priority than protection of the passengers and crew of that jet.
If someone crashed a jet into comparable buildings in London or Berlin or Paris and killed comparable numbers of people, would the Europeans still be opposed to the death penalty for those behind the plot? In the last two years the US has been taking a lot of guff from overseas about our use of the death penalty. I suspect that is going to stop now. Second is the entire issue of encryption and electronic snooping. One of the questions which is going to get asked is why it is that US intelligence agencies didn't pick up on this and prevent it. The answer is that it isn't possible to have perfect intelligence, especially in a free state with the kinds of privacy protections that we have in the US. Despite this event, we should not give the government more control over our communications and this should not argue against the free use of encryption. Third is that moronic missile defense. Please note that this attack was not carried out using ballistic missiles and that if the missile defense had been in place it would have been completely useless in preventing it. Given that if a rogue power wants to attack the US they clearly won't use a ballistic missile even when we don't have a defense against such, what is the point of building a defense against ballistic missiles anyway?(discussion in progress)
Update: Part of this is going to be that I'm going to leave my predictions up even if they're wrong. So I'll admit that earlier I made a comment about how the towers hadn't collapsed, just before they did so. I took that comment down, so I'm putting it back here. Update: OK, another prediction: I expect there to be upwards of 10,000 dead in this attack.
So far no-one has claimed responsibility, so I'm going to take this opportunity to speculate. I think it was Osama Bin Laden. I don't think that any of the Palestinian groups would be stupid enough to do this. After the Pearl Harbor attack, Admiral Yamamoto mused, "I fear we have wakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve." Whoever did this is about to experience that same feeling of dread. There will be no half measures on this one; the US will use whatever means are necessary to find and kill everyone even remotely involved in this attack, up to and including ground war. I expect public announcements from Palestinian groups very shortly denying involvement, just as they did after the Okahoma City bombing. If indeed it was Osama Bin Laden, this may lead to a war with Afghanistan as long as they continue to shelter him. We may be about to learn just how good an ally Pakistan is, since any such attack would have to be staged from there. In the mean time, don't be too surprised if all airlines are grounded for the next day or so until they find and plug the security hole that permitted these hijackings. (discuss) The top of one of the towers has collapsed. I think it was structural failure, not another impact which did it. Those buildings are well designed, but they aren't capable of sustaining arbitrarily large amounts of damage without failing. In the meantime, the FAA has indeed grounded all flights and at least one Palestinian group has already disclaimed reponsibility. The reason that I don't believe any Palestinian group is involved in this is that they are trying to drive a wedge between Israel and the US. A Palestinian terrorist attack on the US would not only completely firm up any cracks in that alliance, it would make the US an active participant in the struggle. That's the last thing that the Palestinians want or need.
After fifty years of running gambling in Las Vegas, the folks there have seen every kind of scam and cheat there is. They are constantly on the alert, and they've adopted the highest of high tech to protect themselves. With millions of dollars passing through the casinos every day, no degree of security is too high. The expenses involved are simple prudence. There was a time when people would stage fights in order to tip a gaming table over, to give others opportunities to grab chips -- now the tables are anchored to the floor with bolts. They change decks at the tables once per hour to make sure that cards don't get marked inadvertently (or deliberately). Whenever a dealer is relieved and walks away from the table, they always clap their hands and then spread them in front of us -- it's a nice flourish but it also makes it impossible for them to palm a chip and steal it. They're not doing it for us, they're doing it for the security cameras. Well, the online casinos haven't been around very long and they're still learning about scams the hard way. The casinos in Vegas have the advantage of physical presence; people have to walk in and sit down. Anyone in the world with a net connection can visit an online casino, though, from the comfort of their own home country. It's hardly surprising in this day of hackery that they've been getting swindled, is it? From crude extortion (Pay us or we're going to bring you down with a DDOS) to the sophisticated, they're losing a bundle to cheats. The most clever mentioned here was someone who actually broke into a casino's computer and reprogrammed it so that everyone playing slots or craps won every time. It took the casino a couple of hours to notice -- wasn't someone paying attention? And how did their computers get broken into, anyway? When you have a computer where illicit access by the public can cost you millions of dollars, no degree of security is enough. (And you'd think that even if they didn't know that, their insurance companies would.) In particular, the computer which serves the web site should be different from the computer which actually runs the game. The former is exposed and vulnerable, so all it should do is to serve text and graphics. It, then, should communicate requests for bets and plays to a second computer by a secure link through a firewall to a much more carefully guarded computer whcih actually contains the money. This isn't rocket science; this is something banks and other institutions have been doing for years. (discuss)
You're old when you won't bend over any more to pick up a penny because it's not worth it and it hurts too much. Matt's not old. He's just a baby! (discuss)
Now it may have been settled. In an extremely fortuitous find, a dinosaur was dug up with a concretion inside its rib cage which turned out to be its heart, fossilized. Extensive use of CAT scans later, they've reproduced a 3D model of it and the word is now in: it is much more like mammals and birds than like crocodiles and lizards. This agrees with more indirect evidence from bone cross-sections which suggested the same thing, but that was always open to much more doubt. This doesn't yet settle the ectotherm-endotherm debate but it strongly weighs in favor of endothermy. Ectothermic critters are usually called "cold blooded" which is a poor description. Endothermic animals are popularly known as "warm blooded" which is equally inaccurate. Ectotherms derive much of their body heat from external sources and their blood temperature tends to very quite a lot over the course of a day; endotherms create most of theirs from metabolism of food and have much better control over blood temperature. Endotherms can also survive in a much broader range of habitats, but ectotherms eat much less (on the order of a tenth as much per unit body mass). A big anaconda can get by on one good-sized meal (a monkey or a big parrot) per month, a level of food intake on which a panther of comparable mass would starve. On the other hand, the panther can hunt at night and is capable of actually chasing down its prey. Of course, it's just one species of dinosaur, but it's difficult to believe that one group could have a heart developed like this without most of the others being similar. Every mammal has a four-chamber heart; none of them are croc-like, and that's also true with the birds. This almost certainly settles the issue for the Ornithischians, and very likely also for the Saurischians. I have to say that I'm much more pleased with the image of active and alert dinosaurs than I am with slothfully dull ones spending most of their time laying in the sun. All the convincing bioengineering arguments about this I ever heard all argued in favor of endothermy; most of the arguments in favor of ectothermy seemed to come down to "But they're fucking LIZARDS for God's sake!" (discuss)
Another fun thing that can be done with HTML-encoded email is to embed "bugs" in it. That's an image reference to a small (sometimes invisible) image file on a server. Often the reference will have a ? parameter attached to it with some keynumber. The number will be generated uniquely for each email address that the spam is sent to, and what this does is to permit the server to associate email addresses with IPs, since the requrest for the image contains the IP from which it came; and it also gives that server the opportunity to set a cookie on your system which contains an ID for you. Thereafter, that company can tell what sites you visit and send you additional spam "appropriate to your interests". Fun fun fun! HTML-abuse in email has gotten so bad that Hotmail has instituted filtration to remove Javascript from email received by it. But some clever guys have shown a way to bypass that (the latest in a long line of ways of evading the filter), and it is insidious indeed: they have embedded JavaScript in the "From" line of a message. (Hotmail was already filtering the Subject.) Even better, it gets executed when you look at your mail box; you don't even have to open the offending mail message. The real answer here is obvious: Eliminate HTML completely; stop trying to filter it to let "innocuous" HTML through and stop "hostile" HTML; you're never going to be able to fill all the security cracks that way. (discussion in progress)
Alcoa Of those, only one third are actually what you'd think of as traditional smoke-stack industrial companies. Several of them are high tech (Intel, Microsoft, HP, Merck). But what the heck are Disney, Home Depot, McDonald's, Walmart, Citigroup and JP Morgan doing in a list of "industrials"? Maybe we need a new name for this. (On the other hand, there's a certain pleasing symmetry to having both Philip Morris and Merck in this list.) (discuss)
The idea is to try to attract Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers to come there instead of all us Boomers who too are busy dying of old age. But look at where they're going to run their ads: magazines like Bon Appetit, This Old House, and Metropolitan Home. Internet sites like Bloomberg.net; and radio sponsorship of NPR. Methinks someone has their head-wedged. I don't suppose they would have considered advertising on MTV, would they? Or maybe give Evan some money by advertising on Blogger? (He can use the help.) How many 23-year-olds read Metropolitan Home?(discussion in progress)
During the first six months of life, the primary job that the baby is doing is to learn how to parse phonemes. We don't pronounce sounds precisely alike; the goal is to figure out when two sounds are slight changes in the same phoneme or are actually different phonemes. This isn't trivial. There are sounds which in one language are different but which in another language may be the same. At age 4 months, all babies appear to be able to differentiate any sounds used in any language. At age 6 months they only are able to differentiate the sounds which are different in the languages used around them. This was proved with a very clever experiment which took advantage of two words in one of the American Indian languages which to them were distinct but to me as an English speaker sounded exactly alike. A baby from an English-speaking environment sat on its mother's lap in a room while a recording played one of the words over and over again, with the other one being interspersed once in a while. Whenever the second word was played, a moment later a light would go on to the baby's right and a toy monkey would bang cymbals together for three or four seconds. So the baby learned to associate the second word with the toy monkey. Careful analysis of film taken of the experiment showed clearly that after a while a four-month-old baby would turn its head and look at the monkey after the word was spoken but before the light turned on and the monkey started making noise; the baby was reacting to the word and anticipating the toy. When the same experiment is done with a six-month-old baby, however, analysis of the film shows that the baby turns only after the light turns on and the monkey starts banging. The baby is no longer reacting to the word; it's reacting to the sound, because it is not capable of differentiating the words. Clearly somewhere in there that baby learned that those two sounds really weren't different and ceased to be able to differentiate them. This is an essential step; it means that the baby has gone from hearing sounds to hearing phonemes. The first level parse has begun to work. The second step is learning to make the sounds of the phonemes. This is done by "babbling". Now that the baby has the ability to hear and differentiate phonemes, it uses a closed loop to make sounds itself and listen to them to get them right. It will repeat them over and over, hence "ba-ba-ba-ba". This exercises the muscles and gets them into shape, and also reinforces the neural paths which control those muscles and helps make them more versatile. They've alreadly been exercises by nursing, but the controls neede for speech are much more complicated. And in the course of this, if it should happen to luck into creating a word, any adult nearby will instinctively perk up and repeat that word back to the baby. This is so deep an instinct in adults that most don't realize that they do it. And of course, certain sets of nonsense syllables have been seized on by adults and given meanings, especially "mama" and "dada" and "papa". The vowel sound in there is the easiest one a baby can make because both the tongue and lips are relaxed. The voice is going continuously and isn't modulating. Any other vowel sound requires use of muscles, and most other consonants require modulation of the vocal cords and possible control of the soft palate. "Mama" is a movement only of the lips, "Dada" only of the tongue, "Papa" is a different movement of the lips. ("Dada" is slightly more difficult because the soft palate is closed and air doesn't pass through the nose. Equally, "papa" involves a more complicated movement of the lips. But "Mama" is more important anyway, which is probably why adults have assigned that most primitive sound to the mother.) So these are among the very first sounds a baby will make, and they get assigned meanings to the baby by how adults react to them; the baby learns rapidly that "Mama" makes its mother perk up and smile, while "Dada" does the same to its father. (A side note: one of the earliest brain centers which activates in a baby is the ability to recognize faces; this appears to be working nearly at birth, and a baby can recognize a face nearly before it can recognize anything else. A baby learns to specifically recognize a small number of important adults very early, basically its care givers, and also can recognize smiles very early.) This feedback from adults turns out to be critical. A study was done on families from four very diverse groups (I recall that three of them were Chinese, American and Inuit but I don't recall the fourth) and they found a consistent behavior by adults during the interval when babies were learning language. Whenever a baby babbles a sound near to a real one in the local language, adults will echo it back; it becomes a game where the baby makes the sound and then the adult makes it back again. Of course, this amuses the baby (which amuses the adult) and encourages it to keep experimenting, while providing a valuable baseline to compare its own sounds against those made by someone already fluent in the language. It amounts to error checking. "You're making a sound close to an important one, but this is what it really should sound like." Later on, when the baby is going into the next stage, adult feedback is equally important. The child next has to understand what phoneme sequences are important and actually make words, and again adult behavior is critical. The baby is constantly listening to how adults speak to each other, but that's difficult because it's complex. When adults talk directly to babies, though, they use short sentences constructed with simple words and syntaces, they over-enunciate, spoken slowly and somewhat more loudly, and repeat several times: "baby-talk", in other words. This was also found in all four of the cultures which were studied. Of course each time it will be said slightly differently, with the differences unimportant, and again this gives the babe valuable information about what is and is not actually information. The over-enunciation helps to delineate word boundaries far more than normal connected speech. Also, the simplified language eliminates most of the sophistication and complexity of adult speech and permits the baby to start learning the core parts of the language: short important words and simple grammatical constructions. All of which leads to the next stage: One-word sentences. The great leap is when the baby really begins to express itself by mastering a growing list of nouns. There are really two basic sentences that a baby uses heavily at this point: "Look, there's a ---!" and "I want ---!" and usually it isn't difficult to tell from context which the baby means when it uses a single word to fill in the space. Of those two, the former is far more important, because what it really is is the process of accumulating a dictionary. First, the baby points at something and the adult will say its name, in baby-talk. Later the baby will start pointing at things and saying the words it things refer to them, and the adult will echo those words back, pronounced correctly. (More feedback.) Verbs come next (verbs are a harder concept), and often they too are used in single-word sentences, as imperatives. The final achievement is two word-sentences with a noun and a verb; that's the summit and from there it's all downhill. The baby begins to learn adjectives and adverbs after that and the sentence structures get more complex, and within another year the child will be expressing complex ideas and will actually be able to carry on a conversation. The surprising part of the studies which have been done on this is the extent to which babies rely on adult feedback in this process, and the extent to which adults are driven to provide that feedback. The best guess is that this is indeed instinctive in adults, one of the many behaviors towards babies which are ingrained in us. It's an interesting question as to whether this is genetic, however, or learned behavior. After all, all of us who have learned language have had this done to us, and we have seen it happen as we grow up later, since there are always babies around. A child raised without this feedback will never achieve the same proficiency in language that one given this feedback will attain. Would such a person as an adult still give that kind of feedback to a baby? There are many interesting aspects to this process. Phonemes are not the same everywhere. I don't pronounce my words the same way that someone from South Carolina does, let alone someone from London. If a British couple come to the US and have babies here and raise them, the kids will speak with the local accent and not with the accent of their parents. Evidently they're doing their phoneme-learning not just from listening to their parents, but also from everyone else around them and are correctly determining that their parents are wrong. Another interesting fact about this process is that it can take place with two or more languages at once. A married couple who taught foreign languages at my high school ultimately decided to have kids, and since both Lauren and Clint were fluent in French, they decided to speak French to each other at home on even numbered days and English on odd numbered days. The kids grew up bilingual. The same thing happens with immigrants from other countries. The parents may never achieve any great degree of fluency in the local language, but their kids will not only learn their parents' language and speak it without accent but will also learn the local language and speak it, too, without an accent. It's clear that during this early process the baby figures out that there are two distinct sets of sounds going on and learns to distinguish them. Even more, the child seems to pick up the second language without help from the parents. It's all quite fascinating. Since facility with language is one of the few things which seems to differentiate us from all other animals, it's also important to understand. (discuss)
I'm an engineer; I've been one for twenty-five years. And in that time I've learned that marketing is more important -- and more difficult -- than engineering. Quality engineering is easy. This be heresy, but it's true. Quality marketing is rare, and if you analyze those corpses you find every one of them was killed by inept marketing. It's no accident that the two most successful companies in the PC industry right now are the two which have the best marketing: Microsoft and Dell. But when I use the term "marketing", I'm using it in a more general way than many might think. There's much more to marketing than advertisement and sales; marketing is the fundamental strategy which decides what a company will do and how it will do it. Companies which are driven by marketing will nearly always defeat companies which are driven by engineering. A lot of companies which have died early have begun with a cool engineering idea, and once they implement it then they start looking around for someone who might want to buy it -- and that's the wrong way to go about things. That's the classic form of engineering-driven business, and it nearly always fails. You begin by figuring out who your customer is going to be and what he needs, and then you figure out what you're going to build to satisfy that need, and only then do you actually implement. Engineering gets involved in this process to the extent that it tells the marketing department what is possible within the constraints of the marketing plan, but engineering does notdrive this process; it's driven by marketing. Dell is a case in point. This article laments that Dell didn't get where it is by "technical innovation", which is true. It got where it is by marketing innovation. Dell built its entire business around direct sales, a fundamental marketing decision which then permitted it to optimize its business model in certain advantageous ways. Dell builds nothing for stock; it builds everything to order. What it builds is very good; Dell has a reputation for quality. But because it cuts out middlemen, because it maintains minimal stock of components and of finished product, all of this saves it money and Dell passes those savings on to its customers. That means that it was uniquely placed to capitalize on the PC business when it became a commodity, because commodity products mainly compete on price and no-one in the industry can build and sell a PC for less money than Dell does. So it can afford to sell its computers for a lower price than its competitors and has been ruining them all with a price war. Michael Dell is a genius; it's just that he doesn't happen to be an engineering genius. He's a marketing genius, and that's much more rare -- which is why it is much more successful. Engineering is easy; marketing is hard. (discuss)
The Academy could have given a vote of confidence to good taste: they could have given the award to "Junkyard Wars" (the US name for "Scrapheap Challenge") on TLC, which was a nominee in this category. Everyone on that show is just there to have a good time; no-one's life is destroyed by the experience and there are no cash prizes that I've ever heard of. They're competing because the competition itself is fun. But it's low budget and off-networt, so it must be trash. The winner of next year's Emmy in this category will be the upcoming show "Christians and Lions", coming to a big desperate network near you this fall. Look for it on your local network affiliate! (discussion in progress)
Apparently it's going a bit more mainstream, though. A Stanford professor has bought a club in Vegas and intends to use the profits from it (and they can be very profitable) to finance his research into heart disease. Somehow or other he managed to wangle a license to permit him to serve liquor while having full-nude dancers. Every other club in Vegas which serves alcohol is topless; all the full-nude places are alcohol-free. I wonder how he did that? But more than that, an exercise club in Los Angeles is now offering Aerobic Stripping. The instructor is a man but apparently all the participants are women, and it includes everything up to and including lap-dancing. (Who do they do it to? You need someone to sit on!) One of his participants is a 70-year-old woman. It's another step along the way. Folks, sex isn't evil. Once I had to take a business trip to Dallas. (Terrible place; why does anyone live there?) I had some time off and went to a natural history museum where they were showing some ancient artifacts, among which were what they called "fertility goddesses"; these were small statues which caricatured the female form, with tiny heads and exaggerated hips and breasts. The current theory is that these were idols or perhaps some form of magic; apparently it never occurred to anyone that they might be the earliest known examples of porn. Anyway, I was standing there looking at a display of these and a woman walked up with her 9 year old son, and said "Back then people only had sex in order to reproduce." It was clear from how she said it that she approved of that concept. I was flabbergasted, and couldn't stop myself from saying "Actually, they only had sex for pleasure. The reason they had fertility goddesses is that they didn't know why women got pregnant." (I was wrong, by way; they did know. But she was even more wrong.) She kind of looked fussed and quickly hurried away. There was no hope for her, but perhaps her son remembered later that not everyone actually agreed with his mom that sex is icky. Folks, that was only 20 years ago; there are still people who think that sex is dirty. I wa raised that way, and to some extent I find myself thinking that way to this day; it runs deep, even though I know it's wrong. It's part of my Calvinist heritage. But when stripping and lap dancing is being taught to 70 year old women who are having a great time doing it, maybe there's hope. My grandmother lived with a man without marrying him for a few years after my grandfather died. Considering that her father was a minister, that was quite a feat. Things do change; the world is getting more liberal. This is good. (discuss)
Apparently the point is to recover bodies and personal effects for the relatives of the dead. I'm sorry folks; I'm trying to be sympathetic here, but the mechanistic atheist in me says that this is superstitious nonsense. A lot of people have died at sea over the years and centuries. It's how things are when you live with the sea. Sometimes nothing returns. (discuss)
So what's his latest plan? To cut taxes again. Oh, that's good. Ever since Reagan, the Republican Party has been trying to cast itself as the party of fiscal responsibility. Reagan could pull that off because when he was still healthy Reagan could have sold sand to Gila Monsters, so no-one bothered asking questions like why it was that he was running among the largest peace-time deficits in recent history. He was still fiscally responsible because he was a Republican. He told us so. We exchanged "tax and spend" Democrats for "borrow and spend" Republicans. Myself, I prefer a balanced budget even if it involves higher taxes. What we really need now is to roll back some of those stupid tax cuts that got passed last spring. They were simply too deep. I'd prefer to see the government continue paying down the debt. That, in fact, is even more fiscally stimulating than a tax cut, because it decreases the demand by the Government on the pool of loan money, leaving more available for investment in businesses. And in the long run it results in a virtuous circle of improvements in government finances as the cost of paying interest in the debt declines, leaving even more money in the budget for other things. How about let's have two pounds of butter next year instead of one pound now, please? (discussion in progress) Update 20010910: Here's an article from the Washington Post about how nonsensical Bush's tax cut really was. It's scary reading; to justify the cut they made all sorts of false-to-fact assumptions.
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