First, a fairly spiffy recipe for hayashi raisu, a Japanese beef stew that’s served with rice. I don’t cook much Japanese food, because finding the ingredients can be a challenge, and I’m annoyed by the cultural snobbishness that prevails on a lot of English-language Japanese food blogs…

I made it the other night, and it turned out pretty decent. I used demi-glace, which I’d never used before and had a hell of a time finding locally. I think next time I’ll just use strong stock, made from concentrate. I was skeptical about how it was going to turn out right up until I added the roux and everything thickened up into a, well, stew. Yay for roux once more…

Next up, a very interesting look at the science of cast-iron cookware. I have three cast-iron skillets; one is merely five or six years old, and kind of crap (like everything made by Lodge), but the other two are excellent - vintage Wagner and Griswold from who-knows-when, probably at least fifty years old.

Not really food related, but you might recognize this from the other day, and it does involve a restaurant…

This article from the Independent caught my eye, as Georgian cooking is pretty much unknown in the United States… or at least the upper midwest, and the English-language Wikipedia is not terribly helpful. I may have to give this chakhokhibli recipe a try this weekend. If you didn’t tell me it was a Georgian dish, looking at the recipe, I could easily believe it was Italian, or Greek…

I can only remember a few of the people I knew from back then - Chebutykin is one of them, and one I’ve actually spoken to within, you know, the last decade. Some of the others, I remember their names, and not much more…

There’s one person I recall surprisingly well, considering that we never met, and never exchanged more than a few messages back in, oh, 1992 or 1993 or something like that.

Her BBS handle was “Scorpio”. I never learned her real name. She was 15, as I recall. I think she was very intelligent and articulate online, but that could just be, you know, revisionist history on my part.

I’m sure she had interests and hobbies and so on, and all the other things that make a well-rounded person human. I really don’t remember anymore.

At the age of 15, she had picked a career, and set her sights on achieving that goal - a goal not just of becoming what she wanted to be, but of becoming good - no, great - at it. Only thing was, she wasn’t completely clear on how to go about it - so she turned to a BBS for advice.

What can I say? Yahoo! Answers was years away, and it wasn’t like she could write Dear Abby - or any other advice columnist, for that matter.

You see, Scorpio wanted to be a courtesan when she grew up. Not just your run-of-the-mill call-girl, but the most skilled lover money could buy.

Apparently, her parents were okay with this, though we only ever had her word for this, of course.

What she needed was a strategy, she said. Should she hook up with older, experienced men? Or was there anything useful about the, erm, conjugal arts to be learned from fumbling around with boys her age?

We recommended she start off with people her own age, at least until she reached the age of consent. What else could we do? Hell, realistically, what else could she do? Run a personal ad in the newspaper? “SWF 15yo seeks experienced older man”? Yeah, that’s not going to attract any crazies.

That didn’t seem to be the answer she wanted, and the SysOp of the BBS in question made it clear they didn’t want anyone offering explicit tips or advice, so that was the last I ever heard of her.

I think about her every now and then, when I see a - sorry, but let’s be honest here - crack whore “working” the bus station downtown. I wonder how her story ever turned out - did she go on to become a skilled, expensive courtesan, like she wanted? Was it a passing fad that she grew out of? Did she settle down, get married, have kids? Did she wind up hooked on cocaine, or methamphetamine? Did she die from an overdose? Get killed by a john?

I have no idea.

For that matter, did she even exist at all? Law enforcement pretty much ignored the BBSes back in the day - the BBSes that weren’t connected to hacker/phreaker crews, anyway - but it’s not hard to see how her whole deal could have been a very, very early online pedophile sting. Throw a little “15-year-old” bait out there, and see who offers to, ahem, “teach her a thing or two”?

For that matter, I kind of wonder what - and when, and where - the first computerized pedo “sting” was. Anyone know?

Whatever became of “Scorpio”, I doubt the person at the other side of the keyboard even remembers the whole thing, from all those years ago. I don’t really know why I do, come to think of it. Maybe the strangeness of the whole thing made it memorable. Maybe I’m still grudgingly impressed by the idea that a fifteen-year-old kid would know at that age what she wanted to do with her life. I mean, hell, seventeen or eighteen years later, I’m not 100% sure what I want to do with my life…

…but I’m pretty confident that being a courtesan, however good the pay, isn’t on the shortlist.

“Back in the day”, I might add, was the misty days of yore when there was still “Dungeons and Dragons” and “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons” - and then later a second edition of the latter.

For people who’ve grown up on AD&D’s Second Edition - or the current incarnation, especially - ye olde red-box D&D must seem incredibly primitive. To be honest, it seemed incredibly primitive back in the nineteen-mumbles, and it was. Many of the game systems that came after were, in part, efforts to inject a small amount of realism into gaming, and the trend has continued into the computer era - Dragon Age: Origins shows how far we’ve come since the old TRS Forgotten Realms games of the 1990s.

I still can’t help but feel that a certain amount of realism is missing, though.

Oh, I get that it’s supposed to be a game, and it’s about fantasies and escapism and all that. I just think it would be interesting to envision a fantasy RPG where people had to play by, you know, real-world rules.

To that end, here’s a short excerpt from The Chronicles of the Third Adventure Club Corporation of Mount Tesla Academy, Volume Two:

As the school year kicked into high gear, the Adventure Club was eager to seize any opportunities to chase fame, glory, and riches that presented themselves. Hampered by a full slate of classes, ongoing financial problems, and Eric’s slower-than-expected recovery from the injuries he received during the Crossroad Kobold Massacre three weeks earlier, such opportunities were few and far between. Thus it was that the four healthy members opted to use the Founder’s Day holiday as an excuse to go adventuring.

As Founder’s Day fell on a Wednesday that year, and everyone had early-morning classes on that Thursday, there was no real opportunity to pursue a full-blown adventure. However, it was agreed that a brief excursion to the ruins of Castle Doom was possible. According to the latest issue of Adventurer’s Monthly, several small bands of low-level undead, Orcs, and undead Orcs were occupying parts of the ruins and squabbling amongst themselves for domination. Of special interest - seeing as how the Club had at this time less than 30 gold pieces in the treasury - was the note in the Monthly’s database that the average reported gross haul for a party of adventurers there was 338 gold pieces. With Eric still sidelined with injuries, this meant that the four healthy members of the Club stood to gain roughly 50 gold pieces each, before taxes, and that the Club coffers stood to grow by about 135 gold pieces, before taxes and expenses… assuming things went according to plan.

So it was that Alice, Bob, Chris, and Dave set out after classes on Tuesday afternoon, determined to make it to the castle ruins by nightfall. Before leaving, a brief Club meeting had been held, and the four had unanimously approved spending 3 gold 6 silver on provisions for the trip - 2 gold 4 silver for food, 1 gold for arrows for Chris and Dave, and 2 silver for torches for everyone.

At the city gates, they were briefly delayed by an argument over the state of their paperwork and equipment. Chris, the Rogue, was licensed to carry one sword, one bow, and one dagger or dirk, but the Ministry of Security officials attempted to argue that his dagger was in fact an unpermitted “poniard”, whatever the hell that is. Additionally, because of the drought, and the “code red: high” fire danger, no incendiary devices were allowed to be taken out of the city, and all the party’s equipment was inspected for contraband - each arrow had to be checked, to be sure it wasn’t a Flame Arrow, and each potion checked to make sure it wasn’t a phial of Greek Fire, et cetera. Further, each party member had to - in addition to signing the usual papers affirming that they carried adventure insurance - sign a sworn statement that they had not memorized any Demonic spells or incantations, any spells, prayers, or incantations which produced fire, sparks, or excessive heat (the drought, again), or any of about four-dozen prohibited spells capable of being misused for (deviant) sexual purposes.

The paperwork and other bureaucratic niceties out of the way, the Club members were allowed to depart, proceeding north along the Rough Trade Road towards the foothills of the Brokeback Mountains and the ruins of Castle Doom therein.

Because of the prolonged inspection at the gates by the Ministry of Security, the four adventurers were forced to make camp for the night at the edge of the foothills, still around ninety minutes’ walk from the ruins themselves. Though behind schedule, the biggest disadvantage faced by the Club was that their campsite had no source of water nearby; the original plan had been to camp at the shores of Red Rum Lake, just east of the castle ruins.

So it was that the party spent the night in relative peace, their spirits not terribly buoyed by a cold dinner of salted pork, hard biscuits, and rather bad - but cheap - wine, and Alice, in particular, somewhat miffed that she was unable to partake in the nightly bath to which she was accustomed.

The party arose at dawn and decamped after a quick breakfast of wine and more salty, chewy pig meat.

About a mile east of Red Rum Lake, the Rough Trade Road passes through a shallow valley that tends to flood in the spring. It was here that things went very, very wrong for the four members of the Adventure Club.

Because of the obvious potential for an ambush, the Club members voted to bypass the valley by cutting through the hills a fair ways to the south. What they could not have anticipated, of course, was surprising an Orc hunting party, foraging for food.

There were only seven Orcs, and they were just as surprised to see the Adventure Club as the Club members were to see them. The Club members recovered from their surprise first, but this did them little good, as the hunting party were already at arms. The Club was, however, able to adopt an ersatz defensive posture to meet the Orcs’ charge, which came in two ragged waves.

Alice, in something of a pissy mood over the way the trip had failed to go according to plan, struck the first blow, neatly caving in an Orc’s shoulder with a blow from her mace. Dave expertly turned aside a swing from another Orc’s club, then riposted with a cut of his sword that sliced the creature’s ear and cheek. Chris, the poorest-armored of the group, had fallen back slightly, and was able to disable a charging Orc with an arrow to the hip, while Bob parried the claws of a fourth Orc with his forearm.

The second wave of Orcs moved to the east, trying to help surround the Club members.

Alice knocked out her opponent with a heavy overhand blow to the head, then turned to face the group of three encircling critters. Dave blocked another blow from his Orc’s club, and landed a blow that cut open the creature’s bicep. Chris fell back again, and loosed another arrow, which glanced off one of the encircling Orcs and did minimal damage. Bob, for his part, ducked under a blow from his opponent and responded with a cut to the neck that felled the Orc in a shower of blood.

As the second wave moved in, Alice charged to meet them, trading a glancing hit on an Orc’s leg for a brutal hit to her abdomen which left her gasping for breath. Dave killed his opponent with a blow to the head, but took a club to the knee from behind and went down awkwardly. Chris, retreating toward a copse of trees to the west, loosed an arrow at the Orc fighting Alice which caught it in the eye, killing it instantly. Bob charged the Orc that had just downed Dave and delivered a terrific blow from his sword that nearly severed the creature’s arm.

The three surviving, conscious Orcs at this point fled, leaving the Club members to tend to their injuries. Chris was the only uninjured member; Alice diagnosed herself as having several broken ribs, Dave’s knee was unbroken, but had swollen to the size of a melon, and Bob had lost a lot of blood from the jagged cuts he suffered to his forearm. With their injuries tended as best as they could, they looted the corpses of the four fallen Orcs, netting the club two gold and eighteen silver pieces, as well as two pieces of primitive tribal jewelery that were later sold to a broker for, after fees, fourteen silver pieces.

With great concern at the condition of Bob’s injury, and considerable doubts about the fighting effectiveness of Alice and Dave, the Club members limped back to the city, their Founder’s Day adventure an unmitigated disaster.

Each party member received - before taxes - seven silver pieces from the disbursement of the loot, and the Club coffers grew by just over two gold pieces.

Bob’s arm became infected, requiring medical attention costing the club one gold and four silver pieces. Alice and Dave eventually made full recoveries, though Dave’s leg to this day grows stiff every time it rains.

The Orc whose arm Bob nearly severed lost his arm to the shoulder, following considerable infection. His clan hired an expensive Elf lawyer and sued both Bob individually and the Adventure Club collectively for physical and emotional trauma, as well as loss of income owing to the newfound disability. While the lawsuit was eventually dismissed as meritless, legal fees cost the Club five gold pieces, and the Club’s monthly adventure insurance premium increased fifteen percent. For the next two years, Bob’s dormitory at the school was egged on Founder’s Day, presumably by racial-rights activists, though no arrests were ever made.

Eric being Eric, he insisted afterwords that everything would have turned out differently had he been there to use his “awesome magical abilities”. Alice, whose dislike for Eric dated to his attempt to charm his way into her sister’s pants, reckoned that Eric would have screamed like a girl and fled when the Orcs attacked.

She’d eventually be proven right, as it happened - but that’s a story for another time.

Yes, I was bored this weekend, why do you ask?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not happy that Bedell wounded two guards and caused a great deal of mayhem and confusion. Nor am I happy about the people killed at Fort Hood recently. Or the people who died in Texas after Joe Stack plowed his plane into an IRS office there. Or the victims of the Holocaust Museum shooting, or any of the other incidents of late. I’m not one to celebrate pain and suffering, as a rule.

That said, a big part of me is happy, in a kind of abstract way, that these incidents have happened. And, in a way, a small part of me hopes that they continue to happen.

Okay, that’s not really true - a part of me hopes that what’s come so far is enough to get the government’s serious attention.

A decade ago, the two top priorities for federal law enforcement in this country were transnational criminal organizations - i.e. gangs - and domestic extremists. The former - especially drug cartels - were out of control and operating with relative impunity; the latter were a growing problem that the government had been slow to do anything about. Anarchists and anti-capitalists had just run amok in Seattle, the Animal and Earth Liberation Fronts were just starting to become household names in the United States, and Y2K (remember Y2K?) had more than quadrupled the number of anti-government militia members and fringe survivalists, many of whom were heavily armed and sometimes literally praying for a confrontation.

Domestic extremism was a big thing, back then. The top three criminal threats, according to some reports, were ALF, ELF, and Mara Salvatrucha.

Then 9/11 happened, and almost literally overnight, pretty much nobody cared about white extremists anymore. ALF and ELF and MS-13 stopped being important, and were replaced by al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas. “Terrorism” now meant “Islamic militants”. “Extremists” meant “supporters of militant Islamic groups”.

Nobody cared about domestic extremism, or anyone who wasn’t brown-skinned.

While the government wasn’t looking, the militias rebounded in size and organization, and increased their radicalization. Outlaw motorcycle gangs fought a protracted war for control of the Canada-US drug trade. The White Nationalist movement more than tripled in size. Eco-extremists expanded across the country and refined their tactics. Far-right political extremists became organized, radicalized, and embraced Teh Crazy before becoming reasonably mainstream. Mostly unnoticed by the government, members of all these communities went and joined the military, where they gained real-world marksmanship, leadership, and small-unit tactical experience that they were quick to share with their like-minded brethren outside the military.

Domestic extremism isn’t a priority for the government - or it wasn’t, very very recently. For almost a decade, it’s been nothing but “The War on Terror”, where “terror” means “crimes committed by Islamic radicals” and “Islamic radicals” means “brown people”. Domestic extremism has been neglected, along with cybercrime and everything else that involves non-brown people.

So, as much as I’m saddened every time a white guy commits an act of terrorism - or what would be an act of terror, were he brown-skinned - a little part of me is kind of happy, and hopes that this will be the act of terrorism that finally makes the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and the rest of the government remember that white men (and women!) can be terrorists, too - and that there are a lot more white domestic extremists in this country than brown ones.

The reason for this is simple - there has been a goodly amount of discussion in urban exploration circles on respirator (or gas mask) choice, and while this is a good thing, in that urban explorers are becoming more safety-conscious, nobody seems to be taking a particular interest in how to properly fit the damned things, thereby potentially negating the protection on offer.

So…

There are three kinds of fit-tests done for gas masks and respirators: The first is a basic “fit test”, using positive and negative pressure. This is the easiest to perform - you don the mask or respirator, use your hand(s), or a piece of plastic wrap or something, to obstruct the air inlet(s) and outlet(s), then either breathe in, or breathe out, and hold it for a count of ten. This pressurizes the inside of the mask, and tests the seal with your face. You’ll know within a couple of seconds whether the seal is good or not, as the pressure (or vacuum) will recede.

If these basic tests fail, one (or more) of three things is going on:

1, the mask is the wrong size.
2, the mask is defective.
3, you’re wearing it wrong.

You can try adjusting the mask and repeat the tests, but if you have to work to get it “just right”, you’re probably wearing the wrong size. Respirators are not a one-size-fits-all affair, no matter how much some of the manufacturers like to make you think otherwise.

For a lot of people, this is all the fit testing they’ll ever need to do, and this sort of test is probably perfectly adequate when you’re trying to protect against nuisances - dust, riot-control agents, or unpleasant but not-actually-dangerous odors, for example. If you’re hoping to use a gas mask or respirator to protect against actually dangerous substances, you’ll probably want to perform a more in-depth test.

The best type of test is what’s called a “quantitative fit test”. In it, you wear a specially-adapted mask with a chemical probe inside the mask, are exposed to a known concentration of a control substance for several minutes, and the instruments read what levels made their way past the respirator and filters. For obvious reasons, this isn’t really available to the dilettante.

No, the urban explorer - or other hobbyist - must rely on what’s called a “qualitative fit test”. There are some OSHA-mandated guidelines for this here, but the basic idea is to don a respirator and a chemical/gas cartridge (either an “organic vapor” cartridge, or a full-on NBC filter, if you’re using a gas mask), perform a variety of actions for several minutes while wearing the mask, and then expose yourself to an extremely strong scent for a couple of minutes. If you can detect the odor, you fail. It’s about that simple.

In professional circles, a variety of substances are used for this purpose; the most popular might be banana oil, which is sold for this purpose in little ampules. It is one of the strongest-smelling things I’ve ever run across. You can pick up some from time to time on eBay, or elsewhere online, fairly cheap; do not use this stuff in your house. Seriously. I’d say don’t even use it in your garage - find a vacant, foreclosed house near you, and use their garage, instead. Or use something else - if you have an asian grocery store near you, a jar of shrimp paste will probably work fairly well. If you have a full-face mask or respirator, there are a lot of other things you can try - an OC+CS self defense spray, if you happen to have an outdated can laying around. Failing that, I suspect that chopping up several onions might be a fairly decent ersatz test - if your eyes water even the slightest, your mask probably isn’t working as it should (or your filter(s) only protect against particulates). With half-masks, I suppose you could use perfume, aftershave, body sprays, or similar products that are easy to identify, even at very faint concentrations. (One suggestion I saw a while back was to use animal musk or urine, which are sold as “lures” for hunters. Great, I guess, if you’re a hunter, and have some laying around, but the stuff’s expensive, and harder to find than shrimp paste… plus I suspect that some of the urines may have enough ammonia to make your eyes water, if you use a half-mask.)

Whatever you use, if, after a couple minutes’ exposure, you still can’t detect the odor, your mask or respirator fits properly, yay. If you can detect the substance, then either your mask doesn’t fit so great after all, or your filter or cartridge doesn’t protect against whatever it is you’re using, suggesting it’s only a particulate filter. (Or is now only a particulate filter - the protection offered by other types of filters degrades with age, so most if not all of those old “NATO” gas mask filters being sold so cheap as “NBC filters” now are only effective against particulates, and sometimes questionable even for that application.)

Like I said before, this isn’t a substitute for proper “official” tests, administered by trained professionals certified in your city or country. But for non-professionals, it’s - purely in my opinion, mind - better than nothing, and more than adequate for your typical urban explorer, who will encounter nothing more hazardous than asbestos particles…

In today’s Saint Paul Pioneer Press, page “A2″ - the “Nation & World Briefing” - contains three advertisements which take up about half the page; there’s some lottery information, some contact information for the paper’s various departments, and then the following headlines:

SeaWorld orca show reopens with a tribute
Warming panel seeks new review
Dictatorial ‘cult’ in Iran criticized
Obama opts to extend Patriot Act
Ransom released for Greek ship
Smoot named social secretary
Colombia court blocks Uribe run
Standoff ends in Ivory Coast
Dugard suspects get phone tome
1 killed, 7 injured in dance team crash

Ten items in all, on page 2. The front page has three partial items, continued elsewhere, and page 3 has two items, and a half-page ad.

By contrast, the April 14th 1905 issue of the Saint Paul Globe had the following stories on page 2 - I’ve included the subheads, because some of them are interesting

Grand Jury to indict Edward Gottschalk on murder charges - Woman Testifies Before Body That She Saw Suspected Man Coming Out Rear Door of Butcher Shop Few Moments After Christian Schindeldecker Was Killed - Says Man Answering Description of Joseph Hartmann Followed Gottschalk a Few Moments Later

City to strike back at phone company - Business Men Threaten to Abandon Northwestern Service if Toll Boards Go

Real estate men favor better roads - President of St. Paul Exchange Declares Improvements Will Help City

Ohage is through - Will Ignore Smoke Ordinance If Amendment Passes

Bad man is sorry - Fails in Attempt to Wreck Depot Lunch Room

Hustle for trade - Chicago Commercialists Making Business Trip to Pacific

Practice on range - Guardsmen and Regulars to Shoot at Lakeview

Is deaf to Mork - Speaker Clague Finds it Impossible to Hear Him

Trivial cut fatal - Veteran Attorney is Victim of Blood Poison

Asks big damages - Father of Injured Boy Sues Soo for $25,000

Sheriff denies he ever milked cows - Mr. Miesen Insists He Knows Nothing of the Dairyman’s Art

Morgan speaks for wine room ordinance - Aldermanic Committee on Streets Postpones Consideration for Two Weeks

Tschida to sober up at workhouse - Tires of Being Entertained by Drunken Husband and Arrest Follows

League will hold its annual meeting - St Anthony Park Citizens Plan Additional Improvements for District

Heavy rail falls on leg of laborer - Street Railway Section Hand Sent to Hospital With Fractured Ankle

Pioneer settler of Rosemount dies - Michael Farrell Drops Dead While at Work in Barnyard

That’s sixteen items, each from two to ten paragraphs in length, and considered important enough to merit subheads. When you add in the twenty-five other items - most short one or two-sentence items like “Woman Cyclist Breaks Arm - Jeanette Rivet, 875 West Central avenue, while riding a bicycle yesterday afternoon collided with a team driven by W. Cunningham and was thrown to the ground. She was picked up with a broken arm and taken home in the police ambulance after being attended by Police Surgeon Doran.” - it’s quite possible that the one page of that 1905 paper contained more actual news than an entire daily newspaper 105 years later.

I believe it was also quite a bit more entertaining, as well. As proof, I’ll leave you with a copy of the “Bad man is sorry” story, a journalistic jewel the likes of which one no longer sees, much to the detriment of the population at large:

They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore…

Unfortunately, this has also brought out some anti-copyright activists - or more properly, some people who are masquerading as anti-copyright activists…

One such example is this not terribly insightful article at Public Intelligence, which tries to use some really inane sophistry to argue that the Microsoft document at the heart of the Cryptome takedown is not eligible for copyright, because:

“There must be something original in the work which is capable of making it a work of authorship. In fact, the word author comes from the Latin auctorem which literally means “one who causes to grow”. The word is a form of the Latin word augere which means “to increase”. An author is one who increases the sum of knowledge in a community by contributing an intellectual work which is able to be communicated to others within that community. Copyright is a means of recognizing the contribution that such a work makes by providing a set of rights which allow the creator to be the one who benefits from their own work.

Microsoft Online’s Global Criminal Compliance Guide does not do this. The Microsoft guide is a description of the ways in which the Microsoft Corporation retains your data, providing law enforcement easy access to some of your most intimate information, including private messages. The publication of such material is clearly protected under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, regardless of any copyright claims.”

That’s… just not how it works, unfortunately. I have great respect for the folks over at Public Intelligence - who among other things are basically what Wikileaks could be, if they ever return, pull their head out of their collective ass, and stop being spastic drama queens - but I think it’s clear that they’ve allowed their (well-founded) dislike of Microsoft to badly cloud their thinking on copyright issues.

The Microsoft “corporate spying document” - which, let’s be honest, is immensely boring tripe which maybe five people worldwide actually give a shit about - is, for purposes of copyright, a “literary work”, because it’s written. It’s as simple as that. You can’t copyright ideas or policies - though you might be able to patent them, but that’s a whole different story - but you absolutely can copyright documents containing them.

Trying to argue otherwise is just foolish.

By the confused pseudo-logic of Public Intelligence, surely no poetry should qualify for copyright, as poetry is merely an expression of emotion, and the Copyright Act says nothing about emotion, right? And, hell, photographs should be exempt from copyright, because they’re just frozen moments in time, and surely you can’t copyright time?!

If you want to hate Microsoft, hey, don’t let me get in your way. And if you want to hate on companies that abuse the DMCA, or abuse copyright claims in general as a way of asserting power over “the little people”, more power to you. But don’t be an idiot and suggest that there’s some retarded reason an original, written document produced by an evil corporate entity is somehow magically exempt from copyright.

Microsoft is bad. Serial killers are bad. Microsoft uses copyright laws in ways you disagree with. Serial killers use knives, guns, and ropes in ways you disagree with. Hate Microsoft; hate serial killers. Don’t hate copyright laws, knives, guns, or ropes.

It’s just about that simple.

I had to take my oldest cat to the vet yesterday, and, um… have a look for yourself:

There is a mid to left mid abdominal mass measuring 4.5cm deep X 7.5cm long X 6.5cm wide. It is of mixed echogenicity with large vessels going through it. There appear to be separate masses suspected LN near this mass…

You’ll forgive me, I trust, for being mildly upset at discovering that something like a sixth of my five-pound cat’s entire body mass is an inoperable tumor.

Sorry; just not in the mood to do much but mope. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe not…

I say “alleges”, of course, because Ivins was never actually convicted, or even indicted; he committed suicide before either had occurred.

Over the weekend, a lot of people on various websites have taken issue with parts of the investigation, the report, and its findings. Some of these folks lean rather heavily towards the conspiracy-theorist end of things, about which the less said, the better. Others have rather more reasoned and rational criticisms, and it’s some of these that need, I think, to be read with a fairly jaundiced eye.

Why? For the most part, they’re coming from people with axes to grind, or who represent special interests whose causes are furthered by taking umbrage at one or more parts of the investigation and its findings.

The article published Saturday by antipolygraph.org is a good case in point - it takes (great) offense not at the suggestion that Ivins passed a 2002 polygraph about his involvement in the case by using “countermeasures”, but at the claim that such deception was eventually identified after the fact. Obviously, as anyone who’s visited their site knows, this is what you’d expect - they exist, basically, to discredit or debunk polygraphy and other forms of scientific “lie-detection”. (Or should that be “scientific” lie-detection?)

Now, I doubt whether you can always detect the use of countermeasures to a polygraph, but I suspect quite strongly that you actually can, if they’re used badly. In fact, if you search around the web - or even elsewhere on the antipolygraph.org website - you’ll encounter anecdotal accounts of people who’ve “failed” examinations because they were accused of using countermeasures or deception techniques… techniques promoted by the website itself, I might add.

I’m not going to go into the details of polygraph countermeasures, but one of the basic ideas is to intentionally produce physiological responses at certain times, in response to certain “control” questions, to confuse or deceive the polygraph operator. There are no absolutes in interpreting polygraph results; everything is relative. Skew the reference samples, and, well… interpretation is going to be something of a challenge, I suspect; this is, after all, the whole point of using such countermeasures.

One of the things that the antipolygraph.org article seems to gloss over is the (potential) effects of Ivins’ mental condition on the polygraph exam. They mention that he was not on prescription anti-depression or anti-anxiety medication during the polygraph - and that even if he was, the effects of such medications on polygraph examinations have never been studied.

What I think they’re (intentionally) overlooking is the very real possibility that Bruce Ivins was, and I’m being very serious here, mentally infirm. Having read a lot of emails and transcripts and so on involving Ivins, and read a lot about his activities and behavior, I am pretty confident that he was not altogether mentally fit, and that his suboptimal mental state existed (well?) before 2002, when he was polygraphed. I mean, I’m no licensed mental-health effort, but some of Ivins’ actions and emails seem to suggest pretty darn strongly that he had at least mild schizophrenia…

I’m not trying to cast aspersions on the dead or anything, but I think it’s very possible that Dr. Ivins was crazy, to put it bluntly, and I’m very confident that mental illness is a very serious bar to an accurate and honest polygraph examination.

“Did you mail a letter containing anthrax spores to Tom Brokaw?”, the polygraph examiner asks.
“No, I did not”, responds Ivins.
“It was Thagmar the Magnificent”, thinks Ivins, of his alter ego who only appears after 5pm, when the drugs start wearing off.
No deception indicated, notes the examiner, because Ivins believes his answer is, in fact, true.

Or

“Did you send a letter containing anthrax spores to Tom Brokaw?”, the polygraph examiner asks.
“No, I did not”, responds Ivins.
“The USPS sent the letter”, thinks Ivins to himself, “I just put it in the mailbox.”
No deception indicated, notes the examiner, because Ivins again believes his answer is, in fact, true.

(It should be noted that the DOJ has never posited any reason why Ivins chose the anthrax-letter recipients that he did. Daschle and Brokaw are sort-of, almost explained by some sort of ill-defined animosity on Ivins’ part towards New Jersey and New York, supposedly, but there seems to be absolutely zero motive offered for choosing the National Enquirer, in Florida, as a target. With Ivins dead, voices in his head make as good an answer as any, I suppose.)

I also suspect that the DOJ could be telling the truth about the inexperience of the polygraph examiner who administered the test to Ivins in 2002. I also suspect that hindsight, in this case, really is 20/20. Would you necessarily expect that a leading expert in a government laboratory would be insane, delusional, or out of touch with reality? Would you look for signs of that? And if this world-renown expert prefaces the examination by adding that he’s thoughtfully stopped taking his anti-nervousness and anti-depressant medications so as not to affect the exam results, might that not affect your interpretation of those very results?

A couple years later, when that same subject has emerged as a leading suspect, and more information has become available about his erratic behavior, is it not plausible that you might look back at the original exam results and re-interpret them in a less-benign light? That plays right into one of the main assertions of the anti-polygraph activists, after all - that there is little science in polygraphy, but that it’s mostly a subjective art of interpretation, subject to human factors.

Look, I agree that “lie-detectors” of whatever stripe are inherently flawed and unreliable. But I can’t help feeling that antipolygraph.org are letting their animosity towards the DOJ and FBI color their interpretation of the Amerithrax report, in large part because it suits their purposes to do so.

The same is true of a lot of the other analyses and criticisms of the report that are out there, or will soon be. I’m not suggesting all these criticisms are unfounded - though I’ve seen at least one that is; rather, I’m suggesting - urging - that, as with most things in life, you consider the source, before deciding who’s telling porkies, and how far-reaching the “conspiracy” to “frame” Ivins was.

He implies rather strongly that it’s just a cultural difference between creative types on opposing sides of the big salty wet thingy east of Canada, but I suspect that’s not quite the whole story.

For starters, it’s not just a British thing - the (utterly awesome) Canadian comedy Corner Gas ended when it did explicitly because the creators wanted to quite “at the top of their game”.

I suspect that it has more to do with the attitudes and cultural norms of mass-media industry insiders in the U.S., and everywhere else. In the U.S., clearly, actual talent is not in any way a prerequisite to work in television, either in front of or behind the cameras. (Consider, urgh, “reality television”, if you would, one of America’s greatest cultural exports since, erm… partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil?) It’s all who you know, or who knows you, or - on particularly shallow days - what you look like, that counts. (”Hey, isn’t that that chick from that one thing?” “Yeah, I think so. Wow, she has an awesome… inability to act.” “Yeah, dude, but she’s freaking HAWT!”)

I mean, you go read about all the sitcom pilots being pitched to the various television networks, and they all read about the same:

“Whirling Blades of Spinning Death” (working title) is an adventure comedy written by John Doe (Night of the Living Breadmaker, Return of the Revenge of Zombie Lassie, The Secret Parliamentarian) about the efforts of a teenage Kendo champion, played by Sum Yung Gai (Hu Nu, Hu Nu 2, the voice of Mung Ou in ‘Brazing Sandals’) to balance his personal and professional lives in the notoriously xenophobic neighborhoods of northeast Philadelphia. Co-produced by Brad Imir (Adventures of a 31st-Century Jacobite) and Jo King (Hot to Trot: The True Stories of Polo Players’ Wives), “Whirling Blades of Spinning Death” (working title) co-stars Yuri Mann (I Was a Teenage Apparatchik, это хребтовая жидкость) and is directed by Dick Wagget (CSI: Moose Jaw) for AB-Negative Productions.

Trading entirely on names and reputations, in other words.

Whereas if you look at the information for upcoming British sitcoms, they read rather more like this:

Somebody with no experience whatsoever is writing an as-yet unnamed hour-long comedy, to air Mondays at 9pm on ITV, about the humour of life at modern public colleges. Co-produced by his mum and newsagent, it stars some very funny rising stars who crashed his 18th birthday party last year, one of whom plays a promiscuous lager-loutish ladette and one of whom is an introverted but ASBO-prone Jamaico-British nudist with a charming geordie accent. Shot on a budget of just 500 pounds and six cases of “real ale” per episode, this sure-fire success premiers 1 April and runs through 8 Never.

Jokes aside, it seems like name recognition and “connections” are far less important in the UK than - gasp! - actual talent. (Though there are exceptions, to be fair, they aren’t actually the stations’ faults; apparently the EU Constitution requires every television station to air a brace of programmes featuring un-photogenic middle-aged white men with abrasive personalities and ginormous egos. Now you know!) This at least is what I infer from the generally high quality of programming produced by people who are essentially nobodies, starring people whose (prior) great claims to fame largely involved school theatrical productions. (The EU Constitution part I admit I worked out on my own - but it does explain Gordon Ramsay and the douche-y conceited bloke from all those lack-of-talent shows.) Money could be a factor, here, as well - I imagine ITV would, if not kill, at least commit a number of felonies to get the kind of budget that NBC or ABC have, or even to just get a sizable chunk of their programming syndicated widely outside the country on a regular basis. Perhaps low budgets means you have to gamble on relative nobodies with talent, rather than hoping inexplicably big-name celebutants with at best middling skills will turn a cookie-cutter script written by well-connected hacks into the Next Big Thing?

This, I posit, means that, assuming you got your current television show on the basis of talent, rather than simply by being a middle-aged curmudgeon with poor fashion sense, you can rather safely quit whatever it is you’re currently working on in the expectation that you’ll get work elsewhere before too unreasonably long, and the the fact that there are more fish in the sea, as it were, means the network won’t be so super-duper desperate to keep their one lone show with any viewers that they’ll try to make you “an offer you can’t refuse”, which seems to be one of the things that causes American television shows to go on way past their prime. “Oooh, you’re offering me blockbuster Hollywood movie pay to keep doing a television role I’m already tolerably good at? Where do I sign?”

I’ve also noticed a tendency for the British to become rather more attached to the shows, as opposed to the characters. Kill off a popular leading character, and replace him or her? No problem. Hell, to a country that’s put up with the endless parade of actors playing the titular character on Dr. Who, having the odd popular character or three on Spooks, or Coronation Street, or Eastenders, or Robin Hood depart is no big deal. In America, this tends not to go over so well - just look at the current season of Scrubs. (Though that might have more to do with the decision to replace a popular, comedic, and slightly naive character with a cynical, sarcastic ice queen, something the average, IQ 60 American television viewer seems unable to cope with.)

I don’t want to sound particularly unpatriotic, but U.S. mass media is really only good at one thing: churning out a nigh-endless parade of more of the same old thing, over and over and over again. Oh look, another present-day police procedural. Oh look, another show about well-off promiscuous women in the present day. Oh look, another present-day office dramedy.

I’ve been trying to figure out the last historical show - drama, comedy, whatever - that’s aired on network television here in the States, and I believe - though I could easily have overlooked something - that it was either the U.S. incarnation of Life on Mars or That ’70s Show, depending on how you view Life on Mars. Either way, it looks like That ’70s Show was the last broadcast network show set in the past to last longer than one season; it ended in 2006, and there’s been one historical show since then?

My, how creative.

The Brits might like to quit while they’re ahead… the American media industry, on the other hand, should just… quit.

Because we’re not end-user customers of Qwest - we use a local ISP, instead - getting this fixed has been an absolute nightmare, thanks to Qwest. How much of a nightmare? Let’s see…

Last week, I again contacted our ISP, and explained the problems we’re having. They’d talked to Qwest, who denied there were any problems with our line, and said our ISP would have to contact Qwest while we were experiencing problems in order to troubleshoot the issue. That’s great, except that it doesn’t reliably start slowing down until six or seven in the evening, and support is 9-5, Monday through Saturday.

Monday was a holiday here in the States, and what do you know, we started having internet problems around 3pm. So I called our ISP, and they made me jump through the usual hoops - have you rebooted your modem, blah blah blah. Eventually they decided that it was time to contact Qwest… again.

So we had a conference call, with a Qwest representative, a tech-support person from the ISP, and myself. Qwest performs some diagnostics, and says that the noise level on our line is bad - worse than the minimum normally required for DSL service, in fact. So they schedule a service call for this morning.

Eventually, this morning, a technician from Qwest arrives, and begins performing tests. Noise? What noise? We have the lowest noise he’s seen in a week - 20db, or something like that. The wiring seems to be fine.

What’s the problem we’re experiencing, exactly?

Oh. Appalling transfer speeds, but only during peak hours? That’s not a line issue.

So he makes some calls. Line’s fine. Trunk’s fine. Router’s fine. Switch is fine. Distribution thingy is fine. Various other things are all fine. Oh, hang on…

Yeah, the DSLAM we were on is oversold. Like, dramatically. Yay, we found your problem.

Some conversations ensue, and we’re given a choice: Qwest can switch our 1.5Mbps ADSL service to another DSLAM that’s running at 70% capacity right now, but we’ll probably have the same congestion issues again in a couple months, as that line gets (over-)filled. Or, we can switch over to the sexy new VDSL technology, only available in a few select cities, which will offer 40Mbps speeds.

What would we like to do?

Oh, um, if we go with the VDSL, we have to drop our local ISP, buy a new modem, and the price will go from 35 to 109 USD/month, with a two-year contract.

We’ll stick with ADSL, thanks ever so much, even if it means having to suffer through this nightmare in a couple months’ time.

Gotta love Qwest, don’t you?

As we were waiting for the line to get switched over, I asked the technician, surely if you can see that a DSLAM is oversold and experiencing congestion when you look, remotely, can’t you, I don’t know, monitor proactively for this kind of thing? Sure, he said, but they’ll only do something about it when a customer complains.

So much for that whole “spirit of service” their commercials always talk about, eh?

How bad are the roads in the Twin Cities? Bad enough that the local newspaper is publishing haikus about potholes. Presumably, not fixing the roads is part of the “stimulus package” for auto alignment and wheel-repair businesses…

I shoveled the driveway and sidewalk yesterday morning, and hurt my back while removing several inches of built-up ice from the driveway with a crowbar. When one of my roommates asked why I was hobbling around like an invalid, I meant to say that I’d “gone Gordon Freeman” on the ice. What I actually said was that I’d “gone Gordon Ramsey” on it, leaving them with the brief impression that I’d melted the snow with a blistering series of dirty words… or had slipped and fallen, hit my head, and simply wasn’t making any sense at all.

In retrospect, crowbars work better on headcrabs than on ice…

Two interesting tidbits from Russia:

Russia is set to deploy combat aircraft to Abkhazia, the disputed territory on the Georgian border. Needless to say, this isn’t being well-received by Georgia, who probably have something of a vested interest in Russia not having ground-attack aircraft based just minutes from their border…

Also, Russia plans increased fines for manufacturers who make “inferior” quality products - fines as high as $16,000. Yeah, that’ll teach ‘em, right? What I find most interesting is that this apparently comes hot on the heels of Moscow’s elimination of mandatory quality certification of, among other things, food. It’s almost like some of Chicago Mayor Daley’s relatives are in Russia, or something, isn’t it?

Over the long holiday weekend, we had another compact fluorescent bulb catch fire. I’m really getting tired of this. Fortunately, this one was in the laundry room, and merely dripped molten ash and plastic goo on the concrete floor before we smelled smoke and came to the rescue.

Wikileaks, reportedly, have (finally…) hit their fundraising target of $200,000, proving that there’s a sucker born every minute. I’m not the only one who is completely unsurprised that they have still yet to return to service, but merely continue to promise to return… “soon”.

Intelligence relies greatly on the written word, and while everybody has their own idea of what formats should be used, and so on, there are a lot of more fundamental things that are somewhat universally considered “best practices” - the use of words of estimative probability, for example. There are some very good books that will teach you most of the fundamentals, but they all either leave it to the reader to put all the pieces together, or use samples or examples that are dated and don’t fully reflect modern practices.

If your job is to write, say, press releases, I can assure you that there are lots of classes, books, and resources that show you examples of successful, recent, real-world press releases. If you spend a lot of money to learn to write screenplays, you’re going to learn by looking at real, honest-to-goodness screenplays.

If you’re supposed to learn how to write intelligence reports, you’re given some vague guidance on what’s in vogue just at the moment, and kind of left to fend for yourself.

Strange, isn’t it?

Well, I recently came across a very good example of a modern intelligence report, courtesy of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Entitled Haiti: Health Risks and Health System Impacts Associated With Large-Scale Earthquake, the 14-Jan-2010 report is U//FOUO//SBU (For Official Use Only / Sensitive But Unclassified) and was published on the internet, probably on purpose. Obviously, you’d expect the DIA to do a good job, and they don’t disappoint - it’s short, sweet, and to the point; the one-paragraph summary tells you everything you need to know, the scope of the report is spelled out simply and clearly, there’s a note on sources from which the report was drawn, it (mostly) includes words of estimative probability, and it closes with succinct sections on “outlook, implications, and opportunities”.

If you need or want to write concise, user-friendly reports, you could do far worse than to emulate this. (You can download a copy right here (188KB PDF file).)

Is it a perfect intelligence report? Probably not. (I’m not sure there is such a thing.) It’s pretty good, though. There are certainly (much) worse examples out there to learn from…

One fundamental of intelligence writing that’s very hard to teach is the instruction to “know your audience”. Now, I don’t know who this report was written for, but after reading it, I’ve got a pretty strong hunch that it was written for reasonably high-level homeland security officials. Why? Well… see if you can figure it out.

Scalped tickets in the last row of the upper deck: $25
Uncomfortable seats that cram you together like sardines: Free.
One order of lackluster nachos: $6
One bottle of water: $4
Being violently ill the next morning: priceless

Seriously, one person had a sandwich, one person had two hot dogs, one person had a kielbasa, and I had nachos. We’ve all spent most of the day on the toilet.

Not doing that again anytime soon.

Oh, and the Minnesota Wild lost, too.

Are they? Yes and no.

The two most visible merchants of this amp are eBay merchants who sell them as “Bravo Audio” and “Indeed Audio”. They didn’t design the amps, despite what they’d like you to believe; they just resell ‘em for some Chinese factory somewhere. That factory didn’t design the amp, either; it’s a reasonably standard hybrid design popularized about six or seven years ago by a Korean DIY audio enthusiast called Sijosae.

This isn’t the first commercial product based on that design, which uses a single 6DJ8 or compatible dual-triode tube, buffered by a single field-effect transistor per channel. Previous incarnations include the (much larger) Xiang Rong Audio XR010, which is known in some audio circles as the Super Simple. My bad on the name, by the way.

Having built several amps based on this design, and having bought a “Bravo Audio” version on eBay last year - seen above - I probably know it as well as anyone does, meaning I’m at least marginally qualified to opine on its shortcomings and weaknesses.

Weaknesses? Yes, the original design has a few. Most notably is that it can experience noticeable bass roll-off, owing to under-sized coupling capacitors. The folks who built the Bravo/Indeed 6DJ8 amplifier apparently decided to correct for this by… omitting these capacitors altogether. I assume this was done to save money, but it might, as counter-intuitive as it sounds, actually make the sound worse.

Another major issue is the inadequate size of the power-supply reservoir/filter capacitor. The original design calls for 1000uf here, which is… way, way too low. I consider 8600uf to 12000uf to be ideal, and several others agree with me. The Bravo and Indeed versions of this amp use 10000uf capacitors here - rated at 25VDC, and manufactured by Rubycon. This is bad because A, Rubycon makes some of the lowest-quality capacitors in the world, and B, the nominal voltage of the power supply is 24VDC. Even a 5% variation - fairly normal in real-world circumstances - in power-supply voltage can exceed the capacitor’s rating. Not cool. Not cool at all.

It’s not too hard to replace the Rubycon capacitor with something from a better manufacturer, rated at 35VDC, but you really shouldn’t have to.

The amplifier dissipates 10-12 watts of energy as heat, most of this from the output FETs and the voltage regulators which supply the tube heater voltage. The heatsinks on these amps are laughably under-sized. (This is, in part, why mine lives on its side, in the hopes of slightly improved convection cooling.) I get that they had to make some compromises to make it small and cheap, but I can’t help think these amps are all doomed to die an early death from heat-related issues.

Aside from the crap capacitors, the Bravo and Indeed amplifiers use el-cheapo, literally generic resistors; there’s nothing at all wrong with that, but it’s a bit laughable in something marketed as an “audiophile” product, and belies the claims about ‘high quality components’. On mine, at least, the output devices are IRF630s. I assume these were chosen because they were available cheaply; the compatible IRF510 is a better part in this design, owing in part to its lower internal capacitance. Output capacitors are 1000uf Panasonics meant for power-supply, rather than audio, use. There’s nothing wrong with them, but, again, it’s slightly laughable in an “audiophile” product. The surplus Chinese 6N1 tube supplied with mine is serviceable, but highly microphonic; I’m using an inexpensive vintage General Electric 6DJ8 from 1964 in mine. I have doubts about the long-term survival of the volume potentiometer, and the input and output jacks, none of which inspire a great deal of confidence.

Audibly, it’s not bad, and I can see how people who don’t know what the design is really capable of would be impressed. It has a cheerful, reasonably neutral sound to it; noise is pretty much nonexistent, assuming your tube isn’t microphonic, but THD, as with most simpler tube amp designs, probably isn’t anything to write home about. Bass response is decent but unspectacular, and the craptastic power supply capacitor appears to negatively impact transient response in a pretty noticeable fashion; treble seems to be fairly rolled-off as well. This is not obviously objectionable per se, and probably somewhat favors classical or jazz music, those eternal favorites of die-hard audiophiles everywhere, but the design, properly implemented, is capable of so very much more…

Overall, the Bravo Audio 6DJ8 amp isn’t bad, but neither is it great. The design, while basic, can sound phenomenal when built using high-quality components of the right values; regrettably this product has been designed to be small and cheap, with quality pretty much an afterthought. For the price, it’s a decent enough basic headphone amp, serviceable but unspectacular. Mine is attached to my Debian desktop at home, where I primarily use it for watching movies, streaming moderate-bitrate music, and playing ancient 8-bit SNES games via an emulator, tasks it performs perfectly adequately. It’s not really “audiophile” quality, by any stretch of the imagination. If you need an inexpensive headphone amplifier - or preamplifier, I suppose - you could do worse, but as an introductory tube amp, such as it is, it leaves a bit to be desired.

There may be no new episodes of Better Off Ted just at the moment - save Better Off Ted! - but if you’re looking to get your comedic geek on - or your geek comedy on - well, I have a little something for you…

It’s the six 45-minute episodes of a BBC radio comedy called Double Science, which follows the lives and misadventures of the science department at a small British liberal-arts college as they attempt to cope with such stressful upheavals to their small and orderly lives as, say, actually having a boss who occasionally shows up for work… or actually having students… or having to wear pants.

You can download all six episodes here (230MB Rar file of six MP3s), and I strongly encourage you to do so - even if you don’t like the sciences, there are enough capers and shenanigans to keep you laughing out loud here.

As a sample of sorts, you can also download a short musical number from the first episode, The Science Rap, performed by the junior member of the department and his new boss, yo.

And, hey, if it turns out you like Double Science - which I think you will- maybe you’ll like Better Off Ted, too. View it while you can at abc.com or Hulu, buy the first-season DVD, or download it from, really, wherever you can find it.

Oh-a oh

They took the credit for your proud efficiency.
Worked over by machine and new technology,
and now I understand the problems you can see.

Oh-a oh

I met your children
Oh-a oh

What did you tell them?
Txtspk kld teh shrthnd str.
Txtspk kld teh shrthnd str.

Cellphones came and broke your heart.
Oh-a-a-a oh

And now we meet in an abandoned steno pool.
We hear the scritching and it seems so long ago.
And you remember the girls, how they used to go…

Oh-a oh

You were the first one.
Oh-a oh

You were the last one.

Txtspk kld teh shrthnd str.
Txtspk kld teh shrthnd str.
In my mind and in my heart, we can’t erase we’ve gone to far
Oh-a-aho oh,
Oh-a-aho oh

Txtspk kld teh shrthnd str
Txtspk kld teh shrthnd str

In my mind and in my heart, we can’t erase we’ve gone to far.
Cellphones came and broke your heart, put the blame on SMS.

You are a shorthand star.
You are a shorthand star.
Txtspk kld teh shrthnd str
Txtspk kld teh shrthnd str
Txtspk kld teh shrthnd str…

They do good work, and they provide a valuable service, don’t get me wrong. Thing is, they’re also really slow - expect to wait a month or five weeks to get your PCBs - they don’t offer any real options to speak of, and their prices simply aren’t competitive if you need more than one or two copies of the same PCB.

So, with that in mind, here are some recommendations for alternative fabrication houses that I’ve used.

First up on the list is Sure Electronics. They’re better known as internet (and eBay) vendors of assorted electronics components - LEDs and LCDs and switches and resistors and so on - but they do, in fact, offer a variety of PCB fabrication services. Prices start at $50 for five boards of sixteen square inches each, including shipping. (By contrast, supposing you had a 3×5″ PCB, you’d get two copies from BatchPCB for slightly more money.) They do good work and their turnaround time is pretty good, but their customer service leaves a bit to be desired and they insist on 12 mil (yes, 12 mil!) trace/space. If you can live with that, though, they are a pretty good deal, particularly on larger boards; on smaller boards, they’re usually beat on price by others….

Such as Seeed Studio. They have some slightly confusing PCB offerings, but their prices are excellent, their boards are great, and their turnaround time is about as good as it gets for China-based PCB fabrication. Their prices start at about $50, including shipping, for ten boards of 100 square centimetres or less each (near enough sixteen square inches), with shipping. (It looks like they’ve suspended their PCB offerings until late February, because of the Chinese holidays, FYI.)

Seeed offer a number of options, but still don’t offer the full range of choices a real board house does. If you want something a little different, my suggestion is to try MakePCB. They offer some very high quality boards at prices that are very attractive if you need more than a dozen or so, and offer choices like different board thicknesses, different copper weights, gold plating, and so on. They’re who I generally use to produce “production” PCBs for projects, and I highly recommend them. Their standard trace/space size is “0.2mm”, which is basically 8 mils.

Next on the list is OurPCB. They do good-quality boards with a reasonable lead time, and their support is pretty good. Their prices are quite attractive if you need larger PCBs in relative quantity - 100 twenty-square-inch two-layer boards for $290, for example, plus shipping. They do 6 mil trace/space as standard.

Golden Phoenix are the fab house in China that BatchPCB actually get their boards from. So, same quality, better turnaround, and good prices, though you’ll need to order a few boards from them (prices start at about $99 for 155 square inches, which you can actually beat in some circumstances at, e.g., Seeed). They require 7 mil trace/space. Their ordering process is not the most sophisticated thing in the world, but it works.

Yes, all these outfits are in China. That’s part of why they’re so cheap - not necessarily because their quality is crap (it isn’t), but because you get all the benefits of a competitive high-volume industry. If you need boards fast, they’re not the choice for you - but they’re excellent alternatives to BatchPCB, who are anything but fast, anyway.

A government commissioner in the UK bemoans England’s hostility to young people. Notably glossed over? Young peoples’ hostility to the world around them…

Wikileaks, if you haven’t noticed, are up to their usual mild incompetence and still begging for money which they claim desperately to need but refuse to give an accounting for…

There are worse ways to kill a few hours than by browsing through Notebook Stories dot com;

Two pieces of hard-hitting journalism from our friends at Pravda:

Russia willing to restore Soviet Legacy in Afghanistan; and

Most popular stress reliever turns 60… bet you can’t guess what it is!

And from the folks at Ria Novosti, a look at a suspicious Google translation error that seems to have strong political views…

Consider the wind turbine for a moment, if you would, the “green energy” source that nobody really likes. People in the energy sector don’t like them - they produce a random amount of energy at random times of day, which they don’t, for some reason, view as terribly useful. The more excitable environmental activists don’t like them, because they can and apparently do kill birds and bats. Anyone who lives within eyesight of one seems to hate them, because they’re ugly. And anyone who lives really close to one seems to really hate them, because they’re ugly and noisy, too.

Even the most gung-ho supporter of wind turbines, though, will probably concede, however grudgingly, that American energy independence probably shouldn’t rely terribly much on something that seizes up in the cold.

When I first heard about this on the local news, I thought that the recent ice storms we’d had were at fault - that the turbines had iced up, or something like that. That would be kind of sad, but we did have something like forty-eight straight hours of freezing rain, which isn’t quite a regular occurrence, even in this wonderful winter wasteland.

Instead, however, it appears that the problem is much more basic - the various fluids in these turbines just can’t handle the temperatures we get here.

To be fair, this does appear to be only affecting some unsurprisingly craptastic turbines manufactured in the People’s Republic of California, but that such equipment, incapable of handling relatively mild winter weather, could be sold to, you know, Minnesota, suggests to me that the wind-power industry has a long way to go before it can hope to be taken terribly seriously - someone, somewhere, should have recognized that this could be a problem. I don’t care who - the manufacturer, the owners, their consultants, some regulatory body or industry standards group - take your pick. It’s just an unbelievably boneheaded oversight that it makes you suspect that nobody really knows what they’re doing, which means you can’t help but wonder what else is being done wrong…

For a couple of weeks now, we’ve been having horrible problems with our home DSL connection, which is Powered By Qwest(TM). (Well, there’s your problem!, I hear you all shout. I know, I know.) From about 1600-2330 local time, we’re frequently unable to get even 20Kbps speeds on what should be a 1.5Mbps connection, and ping times can exceed four seconds to servers a few dozen miles away. Clearly, our DSL trunk or whatever it’s called is “congested”, a complicated technical term that basically means “oversold”. When we contacted our (local) ISP, they sympathized with our plight, agreed that it sounded like congestion, and said they’d contact Qwest, but said “the odds of anything being done about it are slim. Qwest is pushing fiber-optic internet service now, and considers copper-wire DSL service a basically unsupported legacy product they just don’t care about.” We’re doomed…

One of my roommates had a strange dream the other night; in part, this is notable because she very, very rarely ever remembers more than vague details once she wakes up. In the dream, she arrived at her old college campus to find a loud demonstration in progress; a new sculpture had been installed in one of the courtyards, replacing an older sculpture that had succumbed to the elements. The grass around the sculpture’s plinth was full of gopher holes, which the angry students thought was part of the “installation”, and while some were yelling that this was dangerous, the majority were upset by the “sexist and misogynistic overtones” of the holes. (Yes, she went to college in Minneapolis; why do you ask?) When her dream-self tried to point out that they were just gopher holes, a bunch of eco-activists denounced the exploitation of animals, and attempted to burn down the art department. (Psychoanalyze that!)

In something that resembles actual news, albeit obscure, Russia has announced plans to invest 330 million USD in the disputed territory of Abkhazia over the next three years. That might not sound like a lot, but that basically subsidizes the relatively small territory’s trade deficit for the next couple years, and between the outright cash and “economic investments”, should serve to greatly increase Moscow’s influence in (and by proxy control over) Abkhazia.

It’s easy to not care about that part of the world, but the timing is suspect, coming as it does amid an important election in the Ukraine, and the tensions over Poland, and it’s not hard to see this as a sign that Russia wants to increase its influence with as many of its neighbors as it can, and move as many polities into the “firmly pro-Russia” column as possible. It’s just like the Cold War, all over again - controversial missile basing issues in central Europe, a gently antagonistic ascendant Russia trying to increase its influence over its neighbors… Everything old is new again… again.

What I do know, though, is that it really doesn’t matter the least bit.

If people really wanted, they could virtually eliminate traffic deaths. How? By banning motorcycles, trucks, SUVs, and compact cars; by banning people from driving in the rain or at night or within forty-eight hours of a snowstorm. By banning people under the age of 25 from driving in groups of three or more. By banning people from driving with pre-teen children in their car. By banning people from having radios, iPods, or cellphones in their cars.

It would be grossly inconvenient. It would, in fact, be outright tyranny. It would work, though, sort of, because traffic fatalities are semi-random accidents. None of those things really address the causes of traffic deaths - they just eliminate conditions that increase their odds.

The same mentality really doesn’t work with airborne terrorism, though. We can ban brown people from flying, we can ban anyone who’s ever visited Yemen from flying, we can ban people from buying one-way tickets, and we can ban people from flying without luggage. That doesn’t really matter, because those sorts of preventative measures are extraordinarily easy to overcome, and may actually be detrimental. (Keeping in mind that we still don’t screen every piece of checked luggage, do we really want to force would-be terrorists to check luggage containing God-knows-what?)

Terror isn’t random, though - it’s deliberate. You can ban things left, right, and centre in the hopes of preventing it, but it won’t work. If the government decided that the only people allowed to fly were anglo-saxon single-mothers under the age of 30 employed by the federal government and pregnant with their second - not first or third or fourth - child, I guarantee that al-Qaeda or some other terrorist group would find and recruit just such an individual for an attack of some sort, because that’s what they do.

People like to say “the underwear bomber did this” or “the underwear bomber did that”, and this should have been enough of a red flag to prevent him from flying.

Lots of people pay cash. Lots of people fly without checked luggage. That doesn’t mean anything.

What could mean something is the cliched trifecta of crime: means, opportunity, and motive. Does the individual want to commit terror? (Motive.) Does the individual know how to carry out such a plan? (Means.) Does he or she have the chance to do so? (Opportunity.)

Some people think that just visiting Yemen is good enough reason to ban someone from flying, because they might have acquired dangerous skills or knowledge there. That’s pretty damned tyrannical, I think. Do you know what that kind of policy would look like, applied domestically?

Remember all the bitching about government repression at the 2008 RNC and DNC conventions? And at the 2004 ones? Imagine that the government had setup roadblocks at the state borders of Minnesota and Colorado several months before the conventions, and refused entry to everyone who’d ever used the internet.

In Yemen, there are people who can teach you how to make a bomb, and wage war against the West.

On the internet, there are websites that can teach you how to make a Molotov cocktail, and wage war against the State.

Really no difference, is there?

By that pretty outlandish standard, Abdulmutallab possibly shouldn’t have been allowed to board the plane. But hindsight is always 20-20, and the question really becomes “was there ample evidence beforehand that Abdulmutallab likely had the means, opportunity, and motive to commit an act of terror?” The answer to that is almost certainly “no”.

The intelligence community had uncorroborated evidence that he’d become radicalized. That’s motive, maybe. And, obviously, he booked a flight - that’s probably as good an opportunity as any. But did he have the means to carry out an attack? Nobody knew. So he’d been to Yemen. So what? If it was known and disseminated that he’d spend a fortnight at the compound of Ali al Baksheesh bin Yusef O’Pipebomber, regional Irish-Saudi bombmaker extraordinaire, then yeah, that would have implied a high probability that he posessed the means to make a jetliner go boom, and things might have been a little different.

But, you know what? It shouldn’t have fucking mattered, anyway. It’s supposed to be a reasonably free world, and people should be reasonably free to travel wheresoever they damn well please.

Barring spontaneous human combustion, which may or may not exist, human beings do not blow up aeroplanes. Bombs do.

The no-fly list is a joke. A sham. A charade. Mildly Orwellian security theatre. People are not threats.

If a mafia hitman wants to board a jet, let him. If some frothing-at-the-brain college student who hates America wants to board a jet, let him. If a mild-mannered business executive for a Fortune 500 company wants to board a jet, I say let him.

Just screen them all for weapons and explosives and other dangerous items, first.

Wait… that’s what we already do? Well, shit.

The underwear bombing was not an intelligence failure. It was an airport screening failure.

Nothing more, nothing less.

We put our faith in the screening system to detect dangerous items. Abdulmutallab beat that system by bringing a bomb on board the plane. It could just as easily have been someone else who the intelligence community had never heard of.

Improve the screening system, because that’s what failed.

U. K. Bansal, an Indian Home Ministry official, told reporters that the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba faction was thought to have acquired a number of the gliding parachutes.

“We have intelligence reports that LeT has purchased 50 paragliding kits from Europe with an intention to launch attacks on India,” he said

This is a very interesting statement. Paragliding is not particularly popular in the Indian subcontinent - hence the supposed purchases from Europe - and nobody seems to be mentioning how or where the terrorists are supposed to be receiving training in the sport.

This is also the sort of carefully-considered (or so one hopes!) statement designed in part to leave the subject - in this case, the LeT terrorists - looking over their shoulders. “We know what you purchased”, India is in effect saying, “we know where you purchased them, and we know why”. Assuming the intel is good, this is a pretty audacious bit of saber-rattling by India.

Is it carefully considered? Is the intel good? It’s hard to say, but:

“The Mumbai attack [where ten LeT gunmen sailed to Mumbai from Karachi, murdering the crew of a fishing boat en route], was the group’s first act of sea-borne terrorism,” said B. Raman, a former counter-terrorism chief in the Indian foreign intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing.

“It would be natural for them to plan another spectacular attack from the air. The warning has to be taken seriously.”

…this sort of thing doesn’t really inspire confidence. They committed one (quite spectacular) act of terror with the almost tangenital aid of a small boat, so it’s “natural” that they’d now attack from the air? That really doesn’t parse, for me.

LeT probably won’t try another seaborne attack, because like all modern Islamist terrorists they seem to have this bizarre drive to never do the same thing twice. They were quite successful in Mumbai, where they came ashore from a boat - so, because it worked well, they’ll never try it again. (In a certain twisted way, I kind of hope some Islamist militant group sets off a dirty bomb, somewhere, simply because that basically means that the world can then stop worrying about that particular oh-so-scary-sounding threat. With the intent to be sarcastic quite implicit, is the illness of a few thousand not worth the peace of mind of millions? No? Nevermind, then.)

(I’ve thought about this, and I’ve discussed it with people, and I still really can’t fathom this “it worked great, so let’s never do it again” terrorist mentality. Nor do I get why terrorist groups keep coming up with these grandiose plots involving lots of people and lots of room for human error. Look at the Mumbai massacre - ten guys, all kind of shenanigans, 300-something dead after several hours’ effort. Not that it wasn’t horrible and gruesome, but they could have achieved that in five minutes with three guys, a lorry, and a mortar. Line up on a long, straight street during a crowded rush hour, and start dropping a mix of explosive and incendiary rounds every hundred yards or so… but I digress.)

But their use of boats once doesn’t mean that using paragliders is a logical or “natural” inference to make. How would a paraglider attack work, exactly? I understand that in the past there have been concerns involving paragliders and ultralight aircraft and so on theoretically being used for either aerial surveillance (has nobody heard of Google Earth?) or to get people inside “secure” locations, like military bases and power plants and so on. It all seems very romantic and James Bond-ish, but, come on… what are LeT supposed to do, float around above a cricket match or something, firing Kalashnikovs at the people on the ground? Float over a - what, power plant or something? - and somehow manage to drop explosives down a chimney or smokestack or something?

I just don’t buy it. Even though LeT are one of the more competent terrorist organizations out there - by the standards of these groups, anyway - I just don’t see them getting fifty volunteers for a suicide mission (martyrdom is sexy; being captured and tortured… isn’t) trained as competent paraglider pilots. 9/11 was the only modern Islamist terror attack that required any degree of serious skill on the part of recruits, and it was very much the exception to the rule. 50 paragliders and associated equipment is also a relatively expensive outlay, by terrorist standards. (A single paraglider and harness runs upwards of 750 USD, and it’s probably more like 1000 USD once you add in the bare-essential bits and bobs. $50,000+ is one hell of an outlay for equipment for a hare-brained terrorist plot in that part of the world.)

So, you know, that really makes one wonder just what’s going on here. Only time will tell, if we’re lucky.

I requested a copy of the paper through the FOIA, and asked for the report to be provided in electronic format. Ironically, given the subject of the paper, it was eventually released as photocopies… some two years later.

I don’t know the exact date it was written - Mr. Rasmussen has never bothered to reply to my emails asking about the paper - but I think it was 2006 or early 2007. Given the changing nature of technology, it’s a bit dated in the “real world”, but I’m pretty confident that it’s still very relevant to the IC, which is still thinking - at a glacial pace, I might add - about making a decision about adopting new technology at some point in the future Real Soon Now.

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants isn’t a hugely exciting paper, but it’s been cited in a few public places, and deserves to be available to the world at large. If you have a professional or academic interest in this sort of thing, you can download a copy here (16pp, 5.5MB PDF).

Enjoy…

He’s Not the Messiah, He’s a Very Naughty Boy is a look back at the troupe’s most controversial - and perhaps enduring - feature-length film, Life Of Brian. It runs 56 minutes, is 51 megabytes in size, and can be downloaded right here.

Monty Python’s Wonderful World of Sound is a look back at the group’s audio production, particularly the records they produced, such as the wonderfully-named Contractual Obligation Album. It’s in two roughly hour-long parts which run just over fifty megabytes each; part one is right here and you can get part two right here.

If you like Monty Python, these new shows are probably the three best hours you’ll have with your MP3 player this week…