Christopher Hitchens sees for himself.

I am somewhat proud of my ability to “keep my head,” as the saying goes, and to maintain presence of mind under trying circumstances. I was completely convinced that, when the water pressure had become intolerable, I had firmly uttered the pre-determined code word that would cause it to cease. But my interrogator told me that, rather to his surprise, I had not spoken a word. I had activated the “dead man’s handle” that signaled the onset of unconsciousness. So now I have to wonder about the role of false memory and delusion. What I do recall clearly, though, is a hard finger feeling for my solar plexus as the water was being poured. What was that for? “That’s to find out if you are trying to cheat, and timing your breathing to the doses. If you try that, we can outsmart you. We have all kinds of enhancements.” I was briefly embarrassed that I hadn’t earned or warranted these refinements, but it hit me yet again that this is certainly the language of torture.

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“if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture”

This is going to be a really educational thread…

Tell me what new music or artists you’re listening to these days.

For the purposes of this discussion, “new” is defined to mean:

1. The artist/band started publicly releasing music (or alternately made their major label debut) after January 2005;

or

2. The artist/band started publicly releasing music (or alternately made their major label debut) after January 2003, but you only heard about them in the last year.

(From Whatever » Re-Hipify Me: A Weekend Assignment, over at John Scalzi’s site.)

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Re-Hipify John Scalzi

Via the Bad Astronomy Blog comes this graph from a Gallup Poll of US beliefs.

Now a number of bloggers have commented on the party political differences that are highlighted by the survey. However, I want to ask a different, rather simpler question.

Do I know any of you?

More specifically, is there anyone that I know - someone who reads this blog - who actually falls into the category “God created humans as is, within the last 10,000 years.”. Because if the answer is “yes”, I’d really love to exchange email with you.

I know that people with these ideas exist - I’m confident that Gallup isn’t simply making up the numbers - but I simply haven’t ever (knowingly) met any of you. And I’d love to learn more. Do you take medicine? Do you use computers or fly on airliners? How do you reconcile your trust in science with your anti-scientific beliefs? Do you keep the ideas in different mental compartments, or do you find them genuinely compatible? I’m honestly interested in your answer. Puzzled. Incredulous, even. But definitely curious.

{{This article was retrieved (or, possibly, scraped) from the blog of Geoff Arnold.}}

Do I know any of you?

I discovered the rather strange online video site Jaman today. It’s a streaming (or download-to-rent) service, which has a large library of movies and short subject material from “the long tail”. The films range from silent classics to recent gems such as “Conversations with Other Women”, which I saw recently. In addition to pay-to-rent items, there are also quite a few free (ad-supported) treasures: cult schlock like “Bad Girls Go To Hell”, quirky short subjects like the strange Greek film “Single Bed”, and documentaries like “Farewell Routemaster”. It’s a long tail indeed….

{{This article was retrieved (or, possibly, scraped) from the blog of Geoff Arnold.}}

Farewell Routemaster (and other interesting fare)

Amazon just developed a blog widget that provides access to the samples for their MP3 music. I thought I’d use it to show you some of the music I’ve been adding to my collection. One track per album:
Amazon.com Widgets
Click the play button to get things started; then you can browse the list of songs. Select a song to see the artist and album info.

I still buy the occasional physical CD, and there are a few things that I can only get at iTunes, but these days I’m buying most of my music from Amazon. It’s not just that I work for them (which I do), or that the prices are good (which they are). It’s mostly the convenience of browsing. The feature that lets you play all of the clips from an album is incredibly useful: that’s the main reason why I bought the first Chicago album, for example. Everybody knows the big hits - “Listen”, “I’m A Man” - even if you’ve only heard them at the start of a “Greatest Hits” collection. Anyway, I’d forgotten what an impressive album that first release was. I bought it when it first came out, along with the second Blood, Sweat & Tears album, and I was blown away by the aggressive fusion of jazz, rock, and blues.

Anyway, let’s see how this MP3 widget thing works. I might start using it for my “random 10″ postings (which have fallen off recently - mea culpa).

{{This article was retrieved (or, possibly, scraped) from the blog of Geoff Arnold.}}

By way of an experiment… Recent music

Casualties in Afghanistan now exceed those in Iraq (and they’re growing).

By the Pentagon’s count, 15 U.S. and two allied troops were killed in action in Iraq last month, a total of 17. In Afghanistan it was 19, including 14 Americans and five coalition troops. […] Even when non-combat deaths are included, the overall May toll was greater in Afghanistan than in Iraq: a total of 22 in Afghanistan, including 17 Americans, compared with 21 in Iraq, including 19 Americans, according to an Associated Press count.
The comparison is even more remarkable if you consider that there are about three times more U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq than in Afghanistan.

This story was linked to by Juan Cole as part of his reporting of a major guerilla offensive in Afghanistan. But he didn’t quote from it, possibly because AP is running around harassing bloggers and trying to rewrite the “fair use” doctrine. My old friend John thinks that we should boycott AP; I’d prefer to smother them with love, and generate so many trackbacks and pingbacks that it looks like a DDoS. Atrios just tags them as the “wankers of the day”, which seems a fair compromise.

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While we were looking the other way….

(Scooter’s “Jumping All Over The World”. H/t to the Pub Philosopher.)

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Mental health break

First George Bush senior, now John McCain:

I would have to say that the Constitution established America as a Christian nation.

Since calculated pandering would presumably be more deliberate and less incoherent, I guess he really is as ignorant as he sounds.

(H/t to Jim Lippard.)

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Another ignorant fool

Yesterday evening I completed my trifecta of PZ events by attending the meeting of the Seattle Skeptics (otherwise known as the Society for Sensible Explanations). PZ Myers was the guest speaker, and after we’d socialized and eaten he educated us about the evolution of eyes. Rather than trying to summarize, I’ll point you at the posts by PZ himself and PvM (at Panda’s Thumb). Hopefully PZ will post the slides to his site; I definitely want to get another look at some of the diagrams, and to check out the links he mentioned.

The Seattle Skeptics seem like a nice bunch; I think I’ll get involved.

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PZ on eyes

It’s not just me.

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Bored with ORD

One legacy of my time with Sun Microsystems, during which I did a lot of travelling, is a healthy balance in MileagePlus, the United frequent flier program. Obviously such an asset is valuable only if there are opportunities to redeem the miles for tickets, which in turn requires that United actually keeps flying where I want to go. So today’s reports from PlaneBuzz caught my attention. Among the likely moves:

1. Culling the B737 fleet (94 airplanes) by Fall 2009.
2. Selling off 7 B747s by Fall 2008.
3. 25 percent staff cuts by Fall 2008.
4. Death to TED (quickly but painfully).

Obviously such changes will be accompanied by schedule and route cuts. Now one of the most frustrating things about the state of the US airline business is the grotesque inefficiency - in terms of fuel and airport slots - of flying so many segments with small planes. Twenty years ago, the SFO-BOS red-eye was a TWA L-1011, stopping in JFK. Today, there’s a swarm of 737s and A319s on the route. If the price of fuel isn’t sufficient, we need to find some regulatory or tariff-based mechanism to make it much more expensive to fly 300 people in three A319s than in one 777. All of this is a roundabout way of saying that if United is going to park the old 737s rather than its 757s and 767s, this might be good news. And hopefully there will still be enough 777s and 747s to let me use my miles in creative ways.

{{This article was retrieved (or, possibly, scraped) from the blog of Geoff Arnold.}}

United untied?

There was a pretty good turnout for PZ’s talk last night at the Pacific Science Center, and a significant proportion of the attendees (including yours truly) continued the discussion over beer at McMenamins.

I hadn’t realized this until a UW grad student pointed it out to me, but PZ’s talk was sponsored in part by the Forum on Science Ethics and Policy, which hosted the session by Nisbet and Mooney last October. The similarity and difference was striking. Both PZ and Nisbet/Mooney argue that scientists need to change the way they behave in public in order to communicate more effectively. The difference was that Nisbet/Mooney want scientists to deliberately frame the issues to achieve a particular effect, while PZ simply wants them to drop the mask of cool, cautious, measured objectivity and be themselves: let the excited, passionate, human side of science come through. Drop the weasel words. Be advocates. Be positive. And focus on the beauty of science, of the sheer delight in solving elegant puzzles and discovering the extraordinary. Forget about importance. (I’m reading Carl Zimmer’s “Microcosm” right now, and the highest accolade that he bestows on experimental work is “beautiful”.)

During Q&A, I asked PZ what he thought had changed over the last 15 years, from the days when discussions of atheism and creationism were largely confined to alt.atheism and talk.origins on the Usenet. He gave the “endogenous” answer - a bunch of atheists got uppity, and eventually broke through into the cultural mainstream. Obviously that’s a part of it, but I strongly believe that we were reacting to a bunch of “exogenous” changes: a significant rise in fundamental religionist activity which provoked our responses. Everything from creationists in schools, to ten commandments in courthouses, to pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions, to religious takeovers of military institutions, to Terry Schiavo. Yes, of course some of it had been going on for years - battles over prayers and “moments of silence” at school events, abortion rights, and so forth - and some of the increase might simply be explained by greater media attention (what happens in Kansas doesn’t stay there any more). But I’m convinced that there was a shift. Some of it was a consequence of the cynical exploitation of religious groups by the Gingrich and Rove Republicans. 9/11 undoubtedly had an effect.

The bottom line is, I think, that there was a great deal of stuff for atheists to get angry about. I’ve written about this before, in my review of Hitchens’ “God Is Not Great”. I wrote then:

But suppose that an old friend came to me and asked, “Why are you so fired up about atheism and religion these days? I remember you 15 years ago, and back then you were posting on alt.atheism, and having fun roasting creationists on talk.origins, and reading books on the philosophy of religion. But you didn’t talk - and write - about it all the time, and you certainly didn’t publically define yourself by your disbelief. So what happened?”

Instead of trying to explain all of my reasons, I think I’d simply give them Hitchens’ new book and say, “Read this. He puts it better than I ever could. I merely experience the occasional (but increasingly frequent) feelings of frustration, impatience, outrage, and even anger. Hitchens is an unequalled exponent of the art of the rant: he says what I feel, with passion, intensity and wit.”

Indeed.

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A good time with PZ

Two brief items about time and my recently completed circumnavigation.

For years, my timepiece of choice has been the Citizen Skyhawk. It’s a solar-powered marvel, with only one flaw: its multiple city feature doesn’t accomodate the Indian time zone (IST=UTC+5:30). When I was at Hyderabad Airport last week, I stopped by a watch store and asked if, by any chance, Citizen now had a watch that could handle Indian time. They showed me a Navihawk: an earlier design, no longer sold in the USA, without solar power, but with full support for IST. I bought one in a heartbeat: highly recommended for those who visit India regularly.

The Navihawk was a hit; the iPhone less so. I disabled data roaming on my travels, for all the well-documented reasons; I also found that very few of the roaming carriers would send out the signal needed to automatically set the time. This shouldn’t have mattered: the iPhone allows you to set the date, time, and time zone by hand, so everything should just work. Well, no. Despite my best efforts, the world clock and alarm functions were totally confused. I had planned to rely on the alarm function, and so I hadn’t bothered to pack a separate alarm clock. Eventually I worked out that the most reliable (but awkward) technique was to use the count-down timer. I’m surprised at how buggy this part of the iPhone software is; I can only assume that Steve Jobs has never travelled abroad with his iPhone. Please fix it, Apple.

{{This article was retrieved (or, possibly, scraped) from the blog of Geoff Arnold.}}

Time travel

I’ve just arrived back in Seattle after my circumnavigation. The day started out uneventfully: I drove from Oxford to Heathrow, dropped off the car, took the shuttle to Terminal 3, checked in, and flew through security. What’s wrong with this picture? I thought Heathrow was the airport we all hated…

The flight to Chicago aboard an aging United 767 was long, a bit tedious, but mostly harmless. I could tell that I was back in the mediocre arms of the US airline industry, because the food was crap and you had to pay $5 or 3 Euros for a miniature alcoholic beverage. This particular 767 configuration did have seat-back video screens in coach, but (a) the screens were incredibly small, (b) the screen was fixed in place, and thus unviewable if the person in front reclined their seat, and (c) the IFE wasn’t working properly in my seat row anyway.

After watching postage-stamp sized snippets of various movies over the shoulders of those in front of me, I sat back and read “Into The Darkness”, Peter Zimonjic’s graphic but confused assemblage of survivors’ stories from the 7/7 bombings in London. (It would be greatly improved by the addition of three diagrams showing the positions of the trains and where each of the characters was.) My other book was Stephen Fry’s elegant tutorial on versification, “The Ode Less Travelled”. Unfortunately I had not brought along a notebook and pencils, and so I was unable to carry out the exercises that he directed his readers to perform before reading any further. Furthermore he also encouraged us to read the examples out loud, repeatedly, in order to appreciate the “stress-timed” nature of spoken English. Richard Feyman may have lived by the precept “What do you care what other people think?”, but I am rather more inhibited.

So I slept. This was a good preparation for the chaos that was Chicago O’Hare. It started well, with a landing in strong, gusty cross-winds that had many passengers squeaking in fear and prompted me to have a delightful chat with the captain about how nicely he’d handled things, which led on to discussions about trends in oceanic flow management (there’s been a widespread slowdown of Mach 0.02-0.03 to save fuel; we were cruising at M0.77 rather than the earlier standard of M0.8). Then immigration, and getting our bags, and clearing customs: all fairly mundane.

And then things started to go downhill. The baggage handling system for rechecking luggage through to domestic connections was broken, so everybody was forced to lug their bags to their domestic departure terminals. International travellers tend to have more baggage than most, and this completely swamped the inter-terminal rail service. I had to wait for three trains before I was able to board one. When we got to United’s Terminal One, none of the staff there were ready for the influx of bags, even though the system had been down for hours.

Next, security… We’re all used to the arrangement where a serpentine queue feeds into separate queues for each x-ray/metal detector. Only in Chicago would they think of having several TSA staff “tapping into” the serpentine queue at different points, so that nobody knew whether to wait for particular official or go further down the queue. The mood of the mob was not improved by the fact that only half of the x-ray units were open, despite the fact that the lines were all overflowing. Most of the TSA staff were as confused as we were, and kept asking each other who was in charge.

During my trip I visited ten airports: Seattle, San Francisco, Beijing, Singapore, Hyderabad, Bangalore (two different ones!), Frankfurt, London, and Chicago. Obviously the worst was the old Bangalore airport, which none of us will miss. That aside, Chicago clearly gets the wooden spoon. And it wasn’t just a problem of volume: Beijing, Singapore, Frankfurt and London all handle plenty of traffic. The sad truth is that US commercial aviation - the airports, the airlines, the planes they fly, the ATC that guides them - is in a pretty shabby state: a suicidal business model leading to underinvestment and decrepitude.

Here’s an interesting nugget. In India, I flew from Hyderabad to Bangalore on Kingfisher, one of the recent arrivals on the Indian scene. Even though the flight was only 90 minutes, on an ATR turboprop, the staff served everyone a three-course meal. How come? (Particularly when United cabin staff can barely manage a beverage service in that length of time.) I think what’s happening is that the Indian airlines haven’t got any elaborate fuel price hedging plans, and so fares are pretty much determined by a “fuel cost plus” calculation. But there are several carriers competing on every route, and since price competition is impractical in an era of volatile oil prices, they have to compete on service. What a concept!

Anyway, I eventually boarded the 757 to take me from Chicago to Seattle. It was late, it was oversold, the in-flight entertainment system was broken, and one of the toilets needed last-minute repairs. There was no Indian-style three-course meal for us; we were given the opportunity to buy $5 boxes containing various ill-assorted snack products. Mine contained, inter alia, a can of tuna, a jar of hummus, various kinds of crackers, a bar of chocolate, some raisins, and a yellowish slab in a plastic wrapper, labelled “Edam style cheese food product“. The ingredients were listed as “Cheddar cheese”, followed by various chemicals designed to create the illusion of Edam. If I were a resident of Edam or Cheddar, I would consider a lawsuit.

Never mind. I’m home.

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Heathrow works, Chicago sucks

I’m blogging from a Starbucks n Oxford, grimacing at the expense of the T-Mobile WiFi. Never mind. Herewith a random collection of observations about the last couple of days.

• Bangalore was cool. The staff in the Amazon Bangalore office were very welcoming, and presentations and meetings went very well. I have a bunch of action items!
• The IT conferences (on Java and Startups) and the ACM meeting I attended were full of energetic, ambitious people.
• The new airport at Bangalore isn’t as pretty as the one at Hyderabad. It was functional, but barely. Most shops were empty of stock, the WiFi didn’t work, and everything seemed to happen 15-30 minutes behind schedule. The road from the city to the airport was… well, it was a typical Indian highway. Leave plenty of time….
• I’d forgotten how much I hate Lufthansa’s long-haul service - especially the 747-400 fleet. Uncomfortable economy seats, minimal pitch, no real in-flight entertainment, and indifferent and poorly-timed service. The house magazine claims that they are replacing the economy seats with new ones, with seat-back video. Maybe. I’d settle for the nice leather seats from the A-321 that flew me from Frankfurt to Heathrow.
• I’m flying back to Seattle on Tuesday, and I’ll be in the office on Wednesday. Phew!

{{This article was retrieved (or, possibly, scraped) from the blog of Geoff Arnold.}}

In Oxford