And some people get it. Actually, most people get it. Despite the disgusting mess portrayed in the media, news and “entertainment”. In spite of them, perhaps.

And, so, thanks to Associated Press, I can offer up the following anecdote. One I believe to be much more in sync with the reality of the average person than the morbidity presented by the media.

Net-net, when you create a metrics system for a process, you are creating a feedback loop. Just like the feedback loops in physical circuits, the procedural feedback loop you create with metrics will amplify some signals and dampen others. The metrics you choose will determine which signals get amplified and which get dampened.

I'm trying to figure out why? Why is this possible? Why are systems with top secret information in them connected to the global Internet in any fashion whatsoever? Generations of infosec professionals understand “air gaps”.

Once known as red-black network architectures, the basic idea revolves around never providing a data connection between a secure network and any insecure and/or unsecured networks. Some implementations require a specific physical distance between any componenets of the two networks. For example, the policy might literally require six or more feet of physical separation between electonic components of the secure (black) network and any electronic equipment reachable over the insecure/unsecured (red) network, including the physical wires of the networks.

Yes, this can be an inconvenient arrangement. It drastically increases the effort required to move data between the two networks. That's the whole point! The problem is that it makes it just as difficult for the “good guys” to move information from from the red network to the black as for the “bad guys” to get data from the black network to the red. Information can still make the jump in either direction, but it requires a lot more effort, and physical access.

Unfortunately, accidents are inevitable in an environment of cars going over two hundred miles an hour. In this case, the tight confines of the track and the closeness of the cars to each other exacerbated the problem. It happens in much less restricted environments, too, though. Just ask Felipe Massa (use any Internet search engine with the phrase "Felipe Massa crash"). Luckily, you can ask Felipe. He took a suspension spring from another car in the helmet at high speed. His helment manufacturer saved his life.

Or Swede Savage back in the 1973 Indy 500, or Ayrton Senna in the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix. They both suffered mechanical failures on their cars at high speed. They both paid with their lives.

And it’s not just the pros that have to worry about it. I have flagged amateur and pro races since 2003 and raced as an amateur since 2004. I've seen more than one friend die due to injuries from an on-track incident. I've seen some die on-track of unrelated medical causes, and start the incident.

The point here is that there's a great tendency when these things happen to lament. And we should lament the truncation of a promising life, a young life. Our thoughts and prayers should go with those left behind. It is, after all, a tragedy.

To boot, what we do know about him may be even scarier than what we don't know about him. A rather unusual turn of events, but the ascension of BO to the leading light in the 2008 Democratic Party must be described, also, as a rather unusual turn of events. Much to the consternation of Princess Clinton.

We're talking about a man who selected as his mentors dyed-in-the-wool 1950's era Communists. A man whose wife couldn't find it in her self to be proud to be an American until her hubby was doing well in the primary elections. A man who spent 20 years in the church of one of the most virulent racists who's not a member of the KKK, electively. He may not have known Jeremiah Wright was a disgusting piece of shit when he joined the church, but if he couldn't figure it out in 20 years then do we really want his fucking finger on the fucking button that could fucking turn every fucking one of us into a fucking wind of fucking neutrons? What kind of fucking idiots are you fucking people?

If you can read this in English, thank a SOLDIER!

The print edition of USA Today issue for Monday, 30 July, 2007, had on the front page an article headlined Disabled worker cases at a record. This article describes the ludicrous waits that have become normal for workers appealing denial of their disability claims to the Social Security Administration. On the top of page 3, occupying about two-thirds of the “above the fold” area, is another article about deaths at railroad crossings.

In the former article, they describe waits for disability claim appeals that run from seventeen months to thirty-one months, depending on location. In the latter, they bemoan that about one person per day dies at a railroad crossing in the US.

The former article notes that sixty-five percent of disability claims are initially denied. Of those sixty-five percent, sixty-two percent are subsequently approved on appeal … for a total of over forty percent of the original claims. It also notes that due to the delays in the appeals process, compounded by the initial denial rate, no small number of people die while waiting for their disability claim appeal to run its course, two-thirds of the time resulting in a reversal of the original denial.

The latter article spends a lot of time whining about the 368 deaths in 2006 that occurred at railroad crossings. It doesn't mention the fraction of those deaths directly attributable to the vast stupidity of the drivers and pedestrians killed. Now, I would never claim that all of those killed took the eternal dirt nap due to their own stupidity, but I'd surely like to know the fraction. Because my experience and the news reports that I've seen make it seem like it’s a pretty large fraction of those 368.

But we’ve got some special interests that have a hair up their ass about one person per day dying at railroad crossings. I’d venture to guess that at least 250 of those people died because they’re fucking S-T-U-P-I-D.

But where are those same whiny assholes when some poor bastard dies penniless, and gets planted in a pauper’s grave, waiting for the SSA appeals process to rectify a decision that often had more to do with bureaucratic incompetence than the merits of the claim?

It’s just stupid.

These are the same idiots who whine incessantly about the death rate on the nation’s highways while they write the check for the next car payment for the brand new 300 horsepower sportscar they gave their sixteen-year-old child. Who will probably go out within a few weeks and contribute to the death of their passengers or some poor innocent bastard trying to get to work to feed their kids … again due to the stupidity of the child in question.

So, while I feel deeply for the families and relatives of the 368, I really have to wonder if those whiny idiots can actually ever get their heads out of their asses and see the forest for the trees.

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Lots of ideas came to mind, each more distasteful than the last. When we finally hit on the most terrifying option of all: they might want us to make up a foursome in golf!

The only redeeming value of this possibility would be that we’d have an entire bag full of implements we could use to escape the depravity.

My brother reckoned that a driver (wood) would be the best. I think a pitching or sand wedge would be best. That way, with the sharp angles on the wedge, you’d be most likely to be able to kill yourself before incapacitating yourself.

I mean. How much would it suck to try to bludgeon yourself to death only to incapacitate yourself before you could complete the job? You're lying there, on the ground, gurgling like an improperly maintained drip coffee maker with an upper respiratory infection, and your fucking right side is incapacitated. How the hell is a right-hander supposed to deliver himself the coup de grace with a dysfunctional right arm?

So, there you are. You’ve almost turned yourself into a vegetable, but your arm went into the shitter while you still had just enough cognition left to recognize your miserable state for the rest of your fucking miserable life. And you can’t even give yourself the one more whack upside the head it would take blissfully to submerge into a discognitive state.

All you can do is lie there. Toss out the occasional gurgle or wheeze. Stare at the intended implement of your doom, naturally lying just out of your grasp. Grasp just exactly how much it’s gonna suck to spend the next forty or so years contemplating the complete fucking mess you just made of your own escape from the terror that is golf.

I don't know where that quotation originates, but I ran across it today reading other stuff on the Web. I felt like it was appropriately Surly for this venue.

I think it's unprintably hilarious that they're that unprintably lazy. I mean, just how lazy do you have to be to screw around that much to avoid walking an extra twenty feet?

So one Christmas shopping day a few years ago, I'd done my bit to support the economy and was leaving the mall. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten where I parked. So I was wandering around the parking lot trying to remember where I left my rolling trash heap. After a few minutes, I noticed that I'd grown a mechanical tail, made up of drivers hoping to grab the spot I'm about to leave, and the people they're holding up in the parking lot by being assholes.

At that moment, it occurred to me Hey! There's some fun to be had here! So I saved my store logo shopping bags and a few small empty boxes for later mall parking lot hijinks.

Now, when I'm feeling in need of a lift during the holidays, I just drag out the old shopping bags and empty boxes and head for the busiest local mall. I park out at the end of the lot, take my bags, and wander the parking lot like I'm looking for my car to leave.

It's amazing how quickly I accumulate a following, and just how persistent some of those dunderheads are. I had one guy follow me around almost the entire mall parking lot for half an hour! He got angrier and angrier as I didn't find my car and leave. By the end I would not have been surprised to see his eyes pop out from the insane blood pressure he must have been experiencing.

I just laughed and laughed. You're getting angry because you're a lazy asshole. Riiiiiight. I did stay prepared to take cover behind the parked cars, though!

Reading Ms. Greenberg's comments as quoted in the article, I get a very strong impression that she's (a) completely out of touch with the rest of society, (b) convinced she's the only one who "feels", and, (c) a complete, indignantly self-involved asshole.

I was trying to make images that made you feel something, because we are so inundated with images in our culture that oftentimes people don't feel anything.

She calls it art. I ask you, what the hell is artistic about taking small children into a photography studio, intentionally antagonizing them by giving them candy and then taking it away, just so you can photograph their anguished expressions?

Unlike some overwrought simpletons out there, I don't have any problem with her doing these stunt photos. To equate this sort of thing with child abuse takes an unimaginable lack of perception and scale.

From the article it sounds like the parents of these kids are quite satisfied with the pay the kids received. And the parents, obviously, approved of the photos and the technique used to get them. But to call it art? That puts her in the same class of imbecile as that moron that put a crucifix into a jar of piss and called it art.

Maybe she's even worse. The crucifix in piss guy only seemed to want his fifteen minutes of fame. This ignoramus seems to think she's making some grand social commentary.

The photographer Jill Greenberg intended her images of sobbing babies to be a metaphorical commentary on what she sees as the evils of the Bush administration and the dangerous influence of the evangelical religious right. … I thought it would be interesting to do a series of powerful images that had these political titles.

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Well no shit!? You've got to be kidding! No effin' shit! Damn. I'd never never have expected that!

Now I see the what the bias in the media really is: stupidity. Huge, dizzying, stupefying piles of stupidity. Or maybe cupidity. But a wise person once suggested to me, and it's stood me in good stead for a long time, not to posit malice when stupidity is a sufficient explanation for whatever apparent evil has me confused.

It could be cupidity. But the stupidity thing is sort of the Occam's Razor of differentiating evil and stupidity. In the immortal words of Albert Einstein, Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Of course, ol' Bert is supposed also to have said [o]nly two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. Obviously a man with a fine-tuned sense of people.

So, to get back to where we started, stupidity. And the media. It occurs to me that among the current crop of media hacks, there must run a vein of stupidity unparalleled in human history. With the possible exception of the one running through Scientologists.

I mean, come on. These people get paid to observe and report on current events and politics and people and all of those other sociological sorts of things, and they're so obtuse that it surprises them that, OH MY GOD!, politics politicizes things! Holy shit!

These people must be singularly detached from, or ignorant of, well, just about everything, I guess. It should've been obvious to anyone with two active neurons to rub together and an even basic ability to observe. It's not like this is something new. I guess they don't have to read Julius Caesar in school anymore. Or history.

I have to wonder, though, if anyone over at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) actually left the building in the last twenty years? Do these people live in isolation someplace like the Congressional Bunker from the Cold War? Are they savants of some sort?

Yesterday afternoon, Associated Press released an article titled Patent fight rattles academic computing. In this article, they report that the USPTO awarded a patent to Blackboard, Inc., protecting the idea of making a Web-based educational institution work like a bricks-and-mortar school. Things like logging in to the institution and then progressing through different classes and such, the way a human in a physical school would. In other words, mimicing the real world in a virtual one.

As I write this, the front page of the USPTO web site contains an article titled USPTO Releases For Public Comment DRAFT Five-Year Roadmap for Continued World Leadership in IP Protection and Policy. The subtitle is "High Quality, Timely U.S. Patent and Trademark Reviews Head List of Objectives for Fostering American Innovation and Competitiveness".

Well, assuming they really want to "Foster American Innovation and Competitiveness", they're going about it in a really strange way. How the hell can anyone think that awarding a patent for something this bloody obvious in any way protects or promotes "Innovation and Competitiveness"? What the hell happened to the "novelty" and "non-obviousness" requirements for awarding a patent. Are the patent examiners really so out of touch with reality that they consider mimicing the physical world in a virtual one to be "novel", "original", or "non-obvious"? Do they even know what the words "novel" and "original" and "non-obvious" mean?

<chant>
U, S, P, T, O
Those idiots have got to go!
</chant>

If the Amazon.com "One Click" patent, and a devilish litany of stupid, absurd, or pointlessly obvious patents since, didn't convince you that the USPTO has some serious problems, then this one surely should. At least the Amazon "One Click" patent wasn't quite as obvious as mimicing the real world in a virtual one. How anyone, much less a patent examiner, could find that mimicing the real world in a virtual one has any novelty or "non-obviousness" whatsoever is way beyond my apparently limited capabilities to understand.

So, get on the horn to your so-called "Duly Elected Representatives" (DERs) and let them know just how stupid and absurd this situation has become. Let them know that you object not only to stupid, unoriginal patents like this one and "One Click", and all of the so-called "Business Methods" patents that the USPTO has gone so wild over the last few years. Let them know that you expect them to hold the USPTO accountable to improve the situation, and that you'll hold them accountable for any such improvment, or lack thereov, when the next election rolls around.

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Another news item indicates that there may be hope for the human race yet: "You Know Anyone Who Needs An 'Anti-Stupid' Pill?" If this works, quickly enough ... well it'll never be quickly enough to prevent a lot of us from a life of despair at the "Stupid Ether" in which we humans live.

I hope they're ready: "Bengals Fans Can Call 'Jerk' Hotline". From the article:

Cincinnati Bengals fans annoyed by bad behavior in the stands can now report it by cell phone. The hot line number should be easy to remember --- (513) 381-JERK. ... Fans using too much foul language will get a warning from stadium security ... could be ejected and have their season tickets and personal seat licenses taken away.

And just to reinforce the "Stupidity Factor", we have "Cops Gripe About Wacky 911 Calls". My favorite quotation from the story is "It's hard to remember the standouts because there's so many stupid things we get."

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Whenever a man cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct. — Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1826

Politicians never accuse you of "greed" for wanting other people's money, only for wanting to keep your own money. — Joseph Sobran

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. — H. L. Mencken

If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen. — Samuel Adams

We can afford to differ on the currency, the tariff, and foreign policy; but we cannot afford to differ on the question of honesty if we expect our republic permanently to endure … Honesty is not so much a credit as an absolute prerequisite to efficient service to the public. Unless a man is honest, we have no right to keep him in public life; it matters not how brilliant his capacity … The weakling and the coward cannot be saved by honesty alone; but without honesty, the brave and able man is merely a civic wild beast who should be hunted down by every lover of righteousness. … No man who is corrupt, no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty by the community. … "Liar" is just as ugly a word as "thief", because it implies the presence of just as ugly a sin in one case as in the other. If a man lies under oath or procures the lie of another under oath, if he perjures himself or suborns perjury, he is guilty under the statute law. … Under the higher law, under the great law of morality and righteousness, he is precisely as guilty if, instead of lying in a court, he lies in a newspaper or on the stump; and in all probability, the evil effects of his conduct are infinitely more widespread and more pernicious. — Teddy Roosevelt (on May 12, 1900, while he was still governor of New York)

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage. — Alexander Tyler, writing about the fall of the Athenian Republic in his 1770 book, Cycle of Democracy

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. — Martin Luther King, Jr.

A deep respect for Law requires intense skepticism toward every law. — Unknown

Why do I have to get the kind of government they deserve? — Anonymous Internet post

The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. — Tacitus

I mean, come on. If you need to test this one, do you also need to test the hypothesis about people liking sex? Just how obvious does something need to be to just be accepted and not wasting money on it? I’m a firm believer in the Scientific Method, but human psychology isn’t terribly amenable to it’s ministrations, anyway.

Especially when you get into the meat of the article and examine the tests they used in the study. The tests all involve value judgements (“is X good”), rather than judgements of fact (“is X red”). Actual people, who live in a society rather than a psychology lab, have realized the truth of this effect for a long time. It seems pretty damned obvious when you’re talking about subjective judgements like is that a smile or a smirk.

Of course what you want to see will influence the way you interpret what you see. Just like the fact that a truly unbiased report can never be given by a human. No matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, your interpretation of events, facts, sensory data, will always be colored by your prior experiences, your knowledge, even your mood. So why on earth would it be any different with desire?

I have to wonder how much money they spent on this study. I also must wonder how much of it was extorted from taxpayers.

Ironically, the next story on Yahoo! News was UFOs: True Believers and Truth Seekers Conference Begins. And that story linked to Duped and Clueless: How Easily We Fool Ourselves. The connections among these articles are left as an exercise for the reader.

And, just to pour a little fuel on the fire, this morning I found on Yahoo! News another gem: "It's not what you said .." (see links below). This article discusses

… a paper in the Journal of Memory and Language that reported on a group of experiments said to provide the first evidence of “analog acoustic expression” – people unconsciously modulating their voices in ways that provide an additional channel of expression understood by others.

It seems like while we’re working on trying to get kids in school back “into” science and math, maybe we ought to pair them up with some of these bozos doing this stupid research. They sure need some additional interaction with actual people, not their hermit-like large craniumed colleagues, but real, actual people.

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In the future, I may add the ability for readers to leave comments on the articles, but I need to work out some issues before doing that. I might never enable comment posting, but I’d like to and I’ll work to try to find a way to do it.

The pages also specify sizes as percentages. For example, the width of a cell in a table might be specified as “15%” rather than “150px” (150 pixels). This allows the pages to adapt more cleanly to differing screen resolutions, user-selected fonts, window sizes, and the like.

Finally, the pages request specific typefaces, but also provide reasonable alternatives for users that do not have those typefaces installed. If none of the requested typefaces exist on your machine, the browser will render the pages using the default typefaces you set for your browser. The following sections discuss the typefaces in more detail.