I just figured out why our country is in danger

I just figured out why our country is in danger: Donald J Trump needs the office of the Presidency to stay out of prison. He is never going to leave. This is why I'm scared of Donald Trump becoming President.

What is a Privacy Policy, and Why Do I Need One?

Before the advent of cell phones and the beginning of the Era of Mobile, most people in the United States used landline telephones when making phone calls, with service provided by AT&T, otherwise known as Ma Bell, or its many parts, namely Southwestern Bell, Pacific Bell, or one of the other Baby Bells. Local calls on your landline were free, but for anyone who watches the television show Law & Order, you'd know that the police have access to information about you that even you don't have access to; very often you'd hear the homicide detective Lennie Briscoe mention to his Lieutenant during the beginning of a case how Local Usage Details, or LUDs, for a witness or suspect matched (or did not match) the initial statement made to the police concerning the witness or suspect's whereabouts and calls to the victim in the hours and minutes leading up to and around the time of the crime. During the course of an investigation, the police identify a person of interest, a request for Local Usage Details for a specific individual is communicated to that individual's phone company by an investigating officer, and in response, a phone company employee retrieves said records and hands them over to the police, whereupon a comparison can be made by an investigator as to the veracity of what the witness or suspect may have said. LUDs also give the police a general impression about the person's calling behavior, i.e., who he or she would try to contact.

LUDs are only available to the phone company or the police; if you ever wanted to see your own local usage details, you are simply out of luck. In preparation for this blog post, yesterday, on November 29, in the afternoon, I called my phone company and asked how I might go about obtaining a log of all the local calls I made from my phone. I told the agent that I was interested in switching from flat rate service, where all local calls are free, to measured rate service, where you are allowed 60 local calls per billing period (measured rate service is cheaper). The agent I spoke to said that I would need to keep track of the local calls I make. The agent said, "We don't keep a running record of local calls you make that is accessible in mid-billing period." If you are on the measured-rate plan, at the end of your billing period, the telephone company does provide a simple count of the local calls you made in the previous billing period. However, if you wanted a log of when local calls were made, and to what numbers, the phone company agent told me I would need to get an attorney and have my lawyer subpoena the phone company for the records. LUDs are not available to you or me, unless you are willing to obtain a court order, which involves either hiring an attorney, or spending a lot of time on research and at the courthouse trying to figure out how to do it on your own (if such a thing is even possible).

Something similar to the procedure we see on Law & Order occurred recently in the war between Paula Broadwell and Jill Kelley over CIA Director David Petraeus (all three of whom are married is scandal enough). As UC Hastings professor Dr. Elizabeth Hillman so eloquently put it:

You know girls, they get jealous, and sometimes they threaten each other on email.

As Dr. Hillman explains below:

When the US government decides it wants some information, and there is a law enforcement basis for getting that information, email is a very easy-to-get-into source of private data...the government just has to ask the Internet service provider, like Google, for instance, these were Gmail accounts in this case, that the information came from, they just have to ask, and the ISP generally complies, if they consider it a reasonable request...You only go in front of a judge if you have to get a warrant, and right now we have a dated scheme of privacy protections that are in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which is a 1986 law. Right now, the way it's being interpreted by the courts, if an email is older than 6 months, there's no need to get a warrant from a judge. In that case, the FBI agent has the authority to make the decision, subject to the support of supervisors, depending on the extent of the resources that would be devoted to that. Information, if it's older than 6 months, is deemed not protected in the same way that other communications would be.

In this Age of Technology, companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft have moved up right alongside Ma Bell and its many Baby Bells in terms of the amount of information they have about how you use their equipment to try and communicate with others. These companies, along with Internet Service Providers like AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable Internet, Verizon and many others, make the landscape more complex as to who has personal information about you, whether you have access to that information or not, and which information can be unlocked by a government agency requesting records and all the data associated with you. In many ways, Ma Bell's physical telephone network has evolved and been elevated from land to sky, expanding into "the cloud", as it were, encompassing the Internet and cell phone networks. Your usage of corporate products like free email and mobile devices can reveal so much more about you than a log of when phone calls were made and to what numbers. With these corporations in possession of such intimate information about you, your activities and behavior are very important when you understand under certain circumstances that information may be shared with other people. A privacy policy covers what happens with the information you entrust others with, and to a lesser extent, what will you do with the information people entrust you with.

My privacy policy for all users of my blog is, I will never share unique, identifying information about you with anyone, unless law enforcement presents me with a subpoena. However, since my blog is hosted with Google, if the government wanted information about any of my visitors, I would imagine they'd skip me and go straight to the source, to Google. Which leads me to my final, unsettling point. All our privacy concerns and handwringing over privacy policies may be moot, because everything we do and say may already be in the hands of the government. After 9/11, according to Wikipedia:

A January 16, 2004 statement by [Mark Klein, a retired AT&T communications technician] includes additional technical details regarding the secret 2003 construction of an NSA-operated monitoring facility in Room 641A of 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco, the site of a large SBC phone building, three floors of which are occupied by AT&T.

According to Klein's affidavit, the NSA-equipped room uses equipment built by Narus Corporation to intercept and analyze communications traffic, as well as perform data-mining functions.

According to Frontline:

The Patriot Act took our proposals to update surveillance authorities, and then it doubled or tripled those, and it took our proposals to update privacy protections for e-mail and such and took those out. So many of the same issues we had discussed at great length during the Clinton administration, had proposed in many instances to Congress, but my concern was it was an unbalanced package. It was all surveillance and no updating to protect civil liberties.

And when you say it took your proposal, the guts of the Patriot Act, in terms of electronic surveillance and wiretapping and eavesdropping, what did it do?

The Patriot Act did various things. Some of it was updating from a telephone-era language to Internet language. So before the wiretaps affected devices, but maybe we couldn't do wiretaps with software. Well, that didn't make sense anymore in the Internet age -- hardware, software, they should be the same.
...
What was your reaction to the warrantless wiretapping program that the president conceded existed?

This was enormous news. When The New York Times told us about the NSA wiretap program, for people like me, it was as though there was this alternate universe. We had thought we had a legal system and we knew what the moves were, and it turns out that the NSA was doing something entirely outside of that.

And yet the president says, "I authorized that." As a lawyer, as somebody who specialized in information technology and the law for a quarter of a century, what's your bottom-line take on this?

I was outraged. I tend to be fairly level in the way I approach things, and I had a sense of outrage that they would just disregard the law. The law said the exclusive authority for wiretaps were these other statutes, and the president looked at exclusive authority and said, "Except when I feel like it." It was as though the lessons of Watergate had been forgotten. It was as though the lessons of centralized executive power and the problems that come with that had been forgotten. And now the president just said, "I think I can do it my way."

So you're saying the president violated the law?

My view is that the president violated the law, yes.

How to Make and Receive an Anonymous Donation

A couple of months ago, I came across the following letter to Dear Abby, seeking advice:

Dear Abby: Many years ago I shoplifted a $30 item from a department store. Now I'd like to clear my conscience and make amends, but how?

I want to remain anonymous, so I can't send a check. Sending cash by mail seems unwise, and even with Google I have been unable to find a corporate address for an appropriate division. Can you help?

Anonymous in the USA

~

Dear Anonymous: Because you have made an honest effort and haven't been able to come up with an address to send the money, try to find out if the department store sponsors an activity for charity and donate to that. Or, alternatively, give the money to a charity of your choice, which may salve your conscience and do a good deed at the same time.

Abby's answer seemed like a good faith effort to placate a restless soul wishing to right a past wrong, by suggesting that, if direct reparation was not possible, the guilty party could always settle a karmic debt through indirect reparation, by doing good works or giving to charity. As much as we'd all like to think we have been unfairly persecuted, picked-on, held to a higher standard than anybody else, or made to be the butt of jokes and the target of undeserved abuse or ridicule, few of us can say that we have never been nasty ourselves, bullied someone, screwed someone over in a way that makes you cringe even now, or teased someone mercilessly for a reason that society now very much frowns upon. Wherever you go, people are people, but we as human beings all know the value of a dollar, or at least are familiar with the concept of money and a unit of currency and what it can buy. If you have wronged a party in the past financially, you may think back with some shame about how you'd like to assuage your guilt, without fully owning up to the misdeed, or, better yet, express your sorrow and regret, without publicly identifying yourself. Perhaps you want to save yourself public embarrassment, or avoid having a target painted on your back, or you may want to prevent the people around you, who have stood by you in the past, from losing face. What to do? Make an anonymous donation with bitcoin ("btc" is the shortened form)!

If you have wronged me financially in the past, and would like to make an anonymous donation to me, you may send it to this address:

13TwEVYFgdDMsoXrwzbpDrV9ipXznpE8ZJ

This represents your new bank account number, and Wikipedia says your bitcoin address is a string of characters that will always start with a '1' or a '3', and will usually be around 33 characters (34 in my case). Here's how to get your own bitcoin address account number and start accepting donations: download and install the bitcoin client software on your computer. Once you're up and running, you now have something akin to a live, active bank account on your computer, in the form of a bitcoin digital wallet that keeps track of bitcoin coming in and going out. You are now part of the bitcoin network. You can get free bitcoin here.

There are of course many other reasons, besides crushing guilt, atonement and redemption, for why you'd want to conceal your identity when giving money to someone. An editorial in the Riverside Press-Enterprise says it best:

Federal Judge Morrison England Jr. ruled in Sacramento that contributors to the campaign for Prop. 8 in 2008 should not be exempt from campaign disclosure rules. Prop. 8 supporters filed suit in 2009, claiming that releasing donor names behind the $43 million campaign would subject contributors to retaliation and harassment, thus chilling free speech. Prop. 8 made same-sex marriage unconstitutional in California, and is the subject of a separate, ongoing legal battle.

Hot-button issues can generate angry disputes and bare-knuckle politics, certainly. And no one should face intimidation and threats for political views. But the First Amendment guarantees free speech, not freedom from the consequences of speaking out. People who want to express strong views on public issues — even by way of campaign donations — should not expect any shield from objections by those who disagree.

We live in a world where donating to the wrong political cause, which also happens to be deeply unpopular in your area, may result in serious consequences to your business, your livelihood, your income, family, and may be a possible detriment to your social state and emotional & physical health. To make things more interesting, the Supreme Court recently ruled, by a narrow majority in Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission, that limits on corporate speech (i.e., money spent by corporations in furtherance of some political cause or in support of a political figure) are unconstitutional. So we also now live in a world where, at least for the foreseeable future, corporations, just like you, are entitled to their opinions, and are allowed to say what they want, within reason (more on this later). We live in a nation where money is speech.

There's nothing wrong with a point of view, unless that point of view can get you in trouble. Whether it be reporting a crime to the police, but fearing retaliation, blowing the whistle on corporate financial fraud, or saying something contrary to what everyone else believes, there is the idea in this country of your basic right to freedom of speech, but just watch what you say. A recent article by James Temple makes the point that:

The Federalist Papers, which sought to encourage ratification of the Constitution, were written under a pseudonym. Unidentified sources were critical to the Washington Post's Watergate scoops, and the New York Times' publication of the Pentagon Papers.

And the promise of anonymous speech online allows people dealing with disease, depression, sexuality questions and countless other life challenges to seek out information and support, without necessarily revealing their situation to bosses, ministers or parents.

"The United States was founded on the presumption that anonymous or pseudonymous speech was a part of civic discourse," said Michael Froomkin, professor at the University of Miami School of Law, who has written several papers on this issue.

Of course, there are limits to what you can say anonymously. If you publicly defame someone, or even imply that somebody in an official capacity has committed a crime, that person can petition the court to force the forum wherein you posted your anonymous comment to reveal your identity, so that person can sue you for libel or slander, as was reported last month in the Los Angeles Times:

The commentator, Almostinnocentbystander, had wondered on the newspaper's popular Huckleberries Online blog if $10,000 missing from the Kootenai County Republican Party might be stuffed in local GOP chairwoman Tina Jacobson’s blouse, prompting Jacobson to file suit against "John Doe" for defamation.

U.S. District Judge John Patrick Luster in his ruling Tuesday rejected the idea that freewheeling Internet commentators necessarily have the right to hide behind the 1st Amendment — not even under the special privilege that often attaches to newspapers’ anonymous sources.

“While the individuals are entitled to the right of anonymous free speech, this right is clearly limited when abused,” the judge wrote in his order, released in Kootenai County District Court.
...
Dave Oliveria, who administers the Huckleberries Online blog, took the comment down a little more than two hours after it appeared.

Still, he and attorneys for the newspaper argued in court papers that the ability to comment anonymously draws in readers and points of view that would be lost if everyone had to ‘fess up to their identities.

“It’s based on a belief that we have freedom of speech in this country, even if it’s anonymous, and people ought to be able to say what they want in whatever fashion,” Spokesman-Review Editor Gary Graham said in a telephone interview.

Should you decide to take a stand and support anonymous (or pseudonymous) free speech by investing in bitcoin, you can buy them by visiting an exchange like http://mtgox.com, or, if you don't mind paying a higher fee, you can buy your bitcoin with much less of a paper trail, and, should the mood strike you, get btc possibly faster, by using a service like http://www.bitinstant.com (you deposit money at a physical bank branch, and you get your btc about an hour later).

Freedom of speech! Just watch what you say.

--

A satoshi (0.00000001 btc) is the smallest amount a bitcoin can be divided into, and this is the QR code of my own aforementioned personal bitcoin address:

Burger King Bacon Sundae Reportedly Causes Marital Discord in Muslim Couple, Fight at Restaurant

On April 17, a person identifying himself as Dave from Newark called the Len Tillem show, with a rather incredible story: he was in the employment of Burger King, promoting their new Bacon Sundae, when he was assaulted by a man. Dave then claimed he was subsequently fired by Burger King, and to add insult to injury, Dave was now being sued by the same man who assaulted him:
About 2 months later, June 14, Burger King formally introduced its new Bacon Sundae, and news of the introduction reminded me of this call. I tried to find out more about this purported incident, and discovered an apparently real Facebook user, by the name of Casey Foster, commenting on Dave from Newark with a degree of certainty and authority, indicating that the call was fake:

Now, Casey Foster's claim that the call was a joke could be false, and not necessarily because the man is a bad actor or acting maliciously; Casey's information could be incomplete or simply inaccurate, leading him to believe in a conclusion based on incorrect assumptions. Which brings us back full circle: is this story true? The jury is still out. Either scenario is plausible: someone who has a dietary restriction on pork for religious reasons might become very upset if this stricture of faith-based adherence has been violated, even unknowingly. People who like to play pranks sometimes successfully insert themselves into media events covered and broadcast by radio, television or newspaper, and the payoff is they become the topic of Internet chatter. Or the story could be fake, but the motivation may be more than the satisfaction of some joker, but that Dave from Newark could be part of a clever product placement or guerrilla marketing campaign, paid for by Burger King.

Whether the story comes from a credible witness or not, we have to be aware of the real possibility that a news story can be manufactured. A recent example of fake news making its way into the global consciousness came from the LA Times, published on May 10, 2012:

On May 1, The Times and a number of other media organizations followed the outrageous story reported in a British newspaper of a vengeful dentist in Poland who pulled out all of her ex-boyfriend’s teeth
...
Unfortunately, MSNBC.com reported Wednesday, the story was a hoax.

MSNBC did some digging into the story and found:

• Police in Wroclaw, Poland, had no record of such an incident.
• Poland’s Chamber of Physicians and Dentists also had no record of any such incident, nor of the dentist named in the article.
• The Daily Mail could not recall where the story came from.
• And the American Dental Assn. said [that] such a case was highly improbable.

MSNBC (now NBC News) reports that the source of the news story, the Daily Mail, provided the following non-explanation for how an unverified story became world news:

The article, which has been shared on Facebook more than 75,000 times since it was published on April 27, appears under the byline of staff reporter Simon Tomlinson.

But Tomlinson said he does not know where the story came from and distanced himself from it when questioned about its origins.
"I've drawn a bit of a blank," he said in an email. "The (Daily) Mail Foreign Service, which did the piece for the paper, is really just an umbrella term for copy put together from agencies. My news desk isn’t sure where exactly it came from."

Beware of fake news!

how to get past the LA Times paywall, and why you shouldn't

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Gay Sheriff? I care less! I could care less, but I couldn't care less.

A recent Associated Press story, reporting from Arizona, on the coming out of Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu at a news conference included an interesting phrase I had not heard before, coming from a supporter of the sheriff, who was trying to reconcile the sheriff's public statement of homosexuality with the supporter's own traditional conservative Republican hardline stance on God, guns, and, yes, gays:

Consider the comments of Bill Halpin, a 64-year-old ex-Air Force pilot who serves on the local tea party board: “I care less. I just care less. Don’t preach it on me. Don’t push it on me and, by golly, I respect your rights.”

I care less, full stop. An interesting standalone phrase, used to express a devil-may-care attitude, perhaps even a professed dismissive nonchalance, with the hint of a barbed defense, on the speaker's part. While this phrase was new to me, I have certainly heard of other phrases people use to express a similar sentiment: "I could care less", full stop. Or "I couldn't care less", period.

Is "I care less" related to the aforementioned two phrases? They all seem related, and it's even possible one came before the other before the other, rather than they all arose at about the same time; "I care less" could be a clipped or shortened form of "I could care less", which could be a clipped or shortened form of "I couldn't care less". Those who are into the origins of words or phrases know that the Oxford English Dictionary does the work of tracking down the first recorded instances of a word or phrase being investigated, but I have not performed the necessary etymological research to reach an informed conclusion. While it's possible that "I couldn't care less" came first, and after some time "I could care less" arose and became widely used, and now, we have "I care less", the focus of my piece will be on how "I couldn't care less" and "I could care less" are used to express the same sentiment. Upon first encounter, an audience of one would be right to reach the conclusion that a literal interpretation of the two gives one the sense that they seem to convey two entirely different, even polar opposite, meanings.

A common saying about the entertainment industry in Los Angeles, in Hollywood especially, is that no one ever says no: "In this town, they kill you with yes." The idea is, anyone you meet could become very popular, accomplished, esteemed, powerful, rich, and in an enviable position. On the road to success, particularly in movies, television and music, but also in the related creative fields of fashion, photography, design, culinary arts, writing, and performance, there are few, if any, rules, and many exceptions, to making it big; the person who you very pointedly say no to today, who you offend with your rejection, in whose face you shut your door, that person may become a star overnight, and tomorrow, is in a position to say no to you. So, because people are social animals, even if you mean "no", you always say "yes":

Judy Greer and David Duchovny_The TV Set (2006) from Thuon Chen on Vimeo.

A similar thing may be happening in the brain with "I couldn't care less" and "I could care less". My immediate reaction to your proposal may be, I do not like your idea or even think it will work. Since the spirit of the times is, people don't ever want to burn bridges, I want to take the potentially dangerous step of rejecting something that you seem invested in, without seeming to do so. While "I couldn't care less" may be technically correct, and how I really feel, the problem is, it's too harsh. So instead, I say, "I could care less"; the idea being communicated is "I care, enough that it's quantifiable, and in fact, the amount of concern I have is distant from not caring at all", advancing the idea first that I, as the speaker, care, and once you see and hear the train of "yes" roar through, the engine is followed by the caboose, that, perhaps, the speaker might not care at all, or at least, not as much as you, as the listener, do.

It's certainly an idea, but I'll admit it's a little far-fetched. Usually, a person's face and body are contorted a certain way, or, in the heat of the moment, the shaking of the head, the look of defiance, the surrounding words, the unspoken information, all reveal and reinforce the speaker's true thoughts when exclaiming "I could care less" on a topic, so the idea that omitting the "n't" sound at the end of "could" is a believable way to spare a person's feelings seems a bit of a stretch. So here's another way to understand why people would rather say "I could care less" than "I couldn't care less". They really could care less! When it comes to using contradictory phrases to mean the same thing, I maintain that this practice is closely related to how people interchange "I couldn't give two bits", or "I could give two bits", or in the comfort of your home, among familiars, sometimes you may use coarser language to express your relative unconcern: "I couldn't give two [censored]", or "I could give a [censored]".

Thus, a final try to understand this phenomena of hearing someone say, "I could care less," or even "I care less", when he or she means "I couldn't care less" is, because the speaker is really saying what he or she means, but in shorthand, and, crucially, with the listener in mind. "I could care less" means "I could care less than how much you apparently think I should, but I won't even make an effort to, because I don't care at all." "I care less" means "I care less than you think I should care." Verbal shorthand is when, to save time, you substitute a shorter word or phrase for a much longer and unwieldy one, or, getting back to the first point, in order to save someone's feelings from getting hurt, verbal shorthand can be when you substitute a fuzzier, less clear word or phrase for an unambiguous one. Sometimes, this verbal shorthand uses a substitute that is the exact opposite of what you mean to say. So, in essence, the speaker seems to literally say "I care", but the message of "I don't care" is understood by the listener and the speaker.

By this time, our overly long discussion on language minutiae perhaps has you caring even less than you thought you could've possibly cared. I can tell by you glancing at your watch and tapping your foot that you couldn't, or could, care less. In that case, let us end with the immortal words of Green Day's American Idiot, "I don't care if you don't care."

Occupy a Tea Party From the Cloud

Imagine you are going to a genteel scone and crumpets breakfast party in the English countryside. In another time and place, to be invited to such a gathering would have meant you had arrived, as they say, into the society pages. "Anything less would be uncivilized," you might utter, with your pinky finger sticking way out in the air, as you and your gentle friends titter over tea and biscuits and contemplate a jaunt to the opera. You are uninvited, but you still want to go, so you invite yourself to the gathering, knowing there are others like you in support of a planned assembly, a rally of sorts, even a demonstration of your numbers, and your attendance is part of a larger uprising and community movement. Before, during and after the event, you post and look at pictures and video, text, tweet, maybe facebook or google search, chat, email, all this in support of your common goal, to non-violently disrupt business-as-usual, and pleasure-as-usual, in the layers of society that seem to you unbearably hardened, even calcified. In preparation for the protest, you and your ever growing society hang out and chat in-person, then use your laptop and notebook computers, tablets, cellular phones, smart phones and PDAs, to form your own network of friends, to create a buzz and attract more people, and on the day of the event, you print out maps and directions, see what other people are doing and tag along, and before you know it, you've used the Internet and mobile phone network (collectively called the cloud) to plan, collaborate, share, publicize, attend, rally, demonstrate, and afterwards, document what happened, learn from others, and possibly prepare to organize and make the announcement to occupy another location.

About a year and a half ago, the author Clay Shirky gave a talk on cognitive surplus, "the shared, online work we do with our spare brain cycles. While we're busy editing Wikipedia, and making LOLcats," he argues, "we're building a better, more cooperative world." Clay states that people want to consume, but also we like to create, and sometimes we want to share. He relates the story of a woman in Kenya who found, in the midst of a disputed presidential election, that there was an outbreak of ethnic violence. In her blog, she solicited from her commenters more information about the dangers inherent in any succession of power in human society, and what areas to be mindful of, depending on who you were. She collated and posted the information flowing in, but there was so much data coming in, it became way more than one woman could manage. She asked if there was a way to automate the process. Two programmers saw her plea for help and, in 72 hours, launched ushahidi, which means witness or testimony in Swahili. This application very simply takes reports from the field, i.e., from the web, or mobile phones and sms, aggregates those reports, puts it on a map and makes it public. The app spawned a social push which became known as crisis mapping. Enough people found ushahidi valuable that the programmers decided to make it open source and turn it into a platform. The number of deployments of ushahidi went from a single idea and implementation in Kenya, to global reach, in less than 3 years. Cognitive surplus, then, can be the ability of the world population to volunteer, contribute, and collaborate on large, sometimes worldwide, projects.

In his talk (below), Clay Shirky states that civic value is when something is created by the participants, but enjoyed by society as a whole; when something is enjoyed just by the participants, that would have only communal value. When the Occupy Wall Street movement was getting started in New York, one of the first things the group did was put, at the top of their website, a link to the software platform that the participants used to consume, create and share. The idea was, should the movement catch fire (and how!), Occupy groups in other cities could download, install, deploy and begin their own geographic base of online operations. Github is where the occupy movement and ushahidi store their repositories, which contain the master copy of the project. Anyone in the world, on their own initiative, can download and install the software built from the master code, On a computer with a connection to the internet, you can soon host your own city chapter. You can contribute to the technological platform you downloaded by helping people get connected and stay more involved towards a common goal. For those who have spent enough time thinking about and using a tool, suggestions for improvement or features come to mind, such as adding the ability to show live video, or to display content in a specific language, or to give some users more or less responsibilities and privileges. If you make a change to your local copy, such as fixing a mistake, those improvements can be merged into the master code, and the communal becomes civic.

But that is all really big picture, so let's bring it back to the day to day life each one of us leads. How does this all apply to me? As we start in on 2012, what gets me out of bed in the morning is getting more users. I am here, and at your service. Last year, I had a goal of creating 2 blog posts for every month, which worked out well; now my new year's resolution is to make an app and host it on github, and to show you how to do it.

With the Tea Party, Occupy, the Arab Spring, and the demonstrations led by a Russian blogger Alexei Navalny against Vladimir Putin in Russia, it seems protest is in season.Here's the link to the page with the video:
http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cognitive_surplus_will_change_the_world.html

Hat tip to JJ Behrens for sharing the video.

New Study Shows No Link Between Road Traffic Collisions & Daylight Saving Time

People who follow the news know that every year, around this time, there seem to be an increase in trusted information sources warning us about bicycles and pedestrians colliding with cars, and the correlation with Daylight Savings Time. Some of these vehicle collisions are fatal, and we remember when someone dies. Invariably the reports quote police officers and traffic safety officials attributing said automobile collisions to the twice-a-year annual changing of the clocks, the explanation being that either the onset of darkness is sooner and people are in a rush to get home, or there's not enough light early in the morning when people are in a rush to get to work, or people have to wake up earlier than they are used to, and this disruption in the body's Circadian rhythm means people are less aware at the wheel. In many cases, you add on the idea that some motorists have problems adjusting their eyes to the new light level, or the sun may be in their eyes, or it's too dark, and one can readily see why accidents might abound around the changing of the clock. The idea then that there is a correlation between Daylight Saving Time and an increased rate of accidents sounds plausible, even somewhat convincing. But what if there is no increase in traffic accidents around Daylight Savings Time? In order to avoid confirmation bias (the notion that "people see what they want to see", in that it is a particular human weakness that we all remember the purported evidence that supports an idea we want to believe, and we discard any suspect evidence that threatens that belief), one should approach an answer to this question using the power of science.

In the past, there've been studies to support this claim. However, the latest study, culled from Wikipedia, seems to show, at the very least, the jury is still out, and that there may even be no connection:

According to earlier studies, this change in time-schedule leads to sleep disruption and fragmentation of the circadian rhythm. Since sleep deprivation decreases motivation, attention, and alertness, transitions into and out of daylight saving time may increase the amount of accidents during the following days after the transition. We studied the amount of road traffic accidents one week before and one week after transitions into and out of daylight saving time during years from 1981 to 2006. Our results demonstrated that transitions into and out of daylight saving time did not increase the number of traffic road accidents.

2010 Jun 27.
Daylight saving time transitions and road traffic accidents.
Lahti T, Nysten E, Haukka J, Sulander P, Partonen T.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20652036

Flower Thieves

On a Thursday afternoon of last year, August 19, 2010, I walked outside and noticed that the pretty light-pink flowers in the pictures above had been removed without my permission and were now conspicuously absent. I have these plants growing in my front yard, and somebody had taken the blooms while they were still flower buds, before they had a chance to open up and blossom. Where the flower buds had been, I saw only the headless portion of remaining stalk, the flower bud and long stem missing. I suspected then that someone may have come onto the property, possibly in the dark of night or early morning, and stolen the budding flowers from the bulbous plants growing on the property, and that's why my flower buds were no longer there. Upon further examination, I saw that the top ends of some of the headless stalks had uneven edges, whereas some had clean cut edges, indicating that whoever stole the flower buds from the property used two different methods to remove the desired items, perhaps knife, scissors, or other sharp-bladed object on some, and snapping off a few of the others. The person(s) who did this left one stalk already in bloom, possibly because the buds are of greatest value when they have not bloomed yet. Flower thief? Flower poacher? Blossom bandit? Bloom burglar? I'm not sure, but in researching why someone would take my flowers, I ascertained that the scientific name for the plant in question is Lycoris squamigera, otherwise known as surprise lily, resurrection lily, or naked lady, and the ones pictured are the short-stamen variety. I tried to take a photo of what happened to my plants, but at the time my digital camera was not working correctly. Even though the perpetrator would unlikely ever be caught (I mean, how do you trace stolen flowers when I didn't do anything to mark them in any way) and it would probably be a waste of time, I went online and filed an Oakland police report. Then I stewed in my own righteous anger, mad at whoever would do such a dastardly thing as steal someone else's flowers from their front yard. I counted 11 of my flower buds taken from me.

Upon further investigation, I discovered I am not the only one this has happened to. Many parties, besides me, from people in homes with flowers in their gardens to destinations like the San Francisco Golden Gate Park, have reported flower theft, or flower poaching, or bloom snipping, or blossom burglary. Apparently, flowers can bring you $1 to $5 each, and the unscrupulous florists who buy the ill-gotten goods may not want to ask a lot of questions. Whoever thought your friendly neighborhood floral arrangement specialist and bouquet shopkeeper might be some shady criminal dealing in stolen goods? The police are onto the thefts, though. Thieves and the florists who buy from them have gotten caught with covertly-marked stems, and some plants worth as much as $1000 per have microchips embedded inside to indicate that they belong to someone else.

Bruce Ivins, maybe a creep, but the anthrax killer?

So the world hasn't ended yet, despite the bold and confident prediction of my former employer Harold Camping. On May 23rd, Harold declared that Judgment Day did occur, but only spiritually, and revised his doomsday prediction, moving it up to October 21. Harold's rationale was that sometimes God doesn't open our eyes and reveal everything to us, and it was good that the prediction was made, even if it didn't happen, because now the whole world knows about Judgment Day, and the Word of God. As I observed Harold on his Open Forum television program in the days leading up to May 21, and on May 23 and days after, I couldn't help but notice the resemblance between Harold Camping and the kind of person being spoken of in Man and superman; a comedy and a philosophy (1903) by George Bernard Shaw:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world : the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Sometimes, a person can be so fixated on the conclusion that s/he wants, that the possibility of a mistake, an error, or even reasonable doubt, cannot be tolerated. If the person represents not just himself, but is the face of an institution, sometimes the expense, wholesale investment, and senselessness of a wasted effort is magnified. I am reminded of an interview on Slate's The Wrong Stuff on what it's like trying to free people who have been wrongly convicted of crimes:

You become more certain over time; that's just the way the mind works. With the passage of time, your story becomes your reality... They're so convinced that they are right that they feel exempt from behaving right... There's still a whole category of prosecutors and detectives who say, "No, I'm sure [the guy I convicted] is guilty. I can't tell you how, I can't give you a logical explanation, but he's guilty." What's scary is that these people are part of a system that's predicated on logic and reasoning to see that justice is done. Yet they will ignore all logic and reason to protect their egos and their psyches. And it requires a complete disconnect, too, because these guys rely on DNA to convict bad guys all the time. But when the DNA works against them, they say something must have gone wrong.
...based on my own experience, about half the time police and prosecutors bury their heads in the sand and insist that they were right no matter what the evidence says.
If a prosecutor or a detective is totally unable to admit they're wrong in one case, what that tells you is that they will be making dozens and dozens more erroneous decisions, because they're not allowing new information to affect their views... -- Peter Neufeld

I think the best way to gauge whether the person you're dealing with is being unreasonable is to ask him if there's anything you or anyone can say or do that will make him change his mind. If he deflects, doesn't answer, or says 'no', then you have someone who probably cannot be swayed (least of all by reality).

A couple of days ago, an excerpt was published in the Los Angeles Times, written by LA Times reporter David Willman. From the soon-to-be-published The Mirage Man, the excerpt reads like a hatchet job on Bruce Ivins, the supposed anthrax killer who struck shortly after 9/11 (when it really did seem like the world was going to end), painting a picture of the man as a major creep who was obsessed with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. With no citations or references to sources, the excerpt describes in vivid detail how the man broke into KKG sorority houses in North Carolina and West Virginia and stole a cipher used to decode secret rituals, and a book of rituals used by the young women, respectively. But a McClatchy News article, published 20 days before the LA Times excerpt, painted an entirely different picture of the whole story:

In ending the inquiry last year, the Justice Department said that a genetic fingerprint had pointed investigators to Ivins' lab, and gumshoe investigative techniques enabled them to compile considerable circumstantial evidence that demonstrated his guilt.

Among these proofs, prosecutors cited Ivins' alleged attempt to steer investigators away from a flask of anthrax in his lab that genetically matched the mailed powder — anthrax that had been shared with other researchers. They also noted his anger over a looming congressional cut in funds for his research on a new anthrax vaccine.

However, the FBI never found hard evidence that Ivins produced the anthrax or that he scrawled threatening letters seemingly meant to resemble those of Islamic terrorists. Or that he secretly took late-night drives to Princeton, N.J., to mail them.

The FBI declared Ivins the killer soon after paying $5.8 million to settle a suit filed by another former USAMRIID researcher, Steven Hatfill, whom the agency mistakenly had targeted earlier in its investigation.

While there is certainly circumstantial evidence that the FBI was correct in trying to pin the crime on Bruce Ivins, my fear is that there was too much at stake, especially after the FBI mistakenly focused on Hatfill; once Ivins committed suicide, there was a need for everyone at the Bureau to unify and say with one voice that Ivins was the guilty party, rather than deal with the possibility that they were responsible for a second tragedy.

Thanks to Art Diamond for pointing me to the source for the Shaw quote.

The Gays and The End of the World

My former employer Harold Camping, a UC Berkeley graduate in civil engineering who sold his construction business and retired early so he could devote his life to studying the Bible and sharing the gospel, is predicting the world will end on May 21, 2011. Unlike many religious leaders who preach a prosperity gospel or claim that Jesus would have wanted us to invade Iraq, two messages that I believe are contrary to what Jesus taught, Harold, a lay preacher who lacks any formal training in theology and is proud of that fact, lives humbly, does not take a salary, drives the same brown pickup truck he's driven for many years, and usually tries to distance his religious non-profit, Family Radio, from political questions like what candidates and issues you should support and vote for. One thing he's done recently, though, that worries me a bit, is Harold has started to claim that the gay rights movement, and social acknowledgement of homosexuality in human society, is a sign that the world is becoming the embodiment of wickedness, and since God cannot stand the sight of uncleanliness, He will soon destroy us all, much like wiping dirt off the floor. Now, I no longer work for Harold, so I no longer have a vested interest in obeying the political instinct we all have of trying to please the man who signs our paychecks, but you have to give the guy credit for being bold enough to stake his reputation on something he insists, very authoritatively, "absolutely will happen"; this new behavior of his, where Harold says that the increasing political and social acceptance of homosexuals openly serving in the military and as religious leaders somehow is a sign that the world will end soon, is troubling to me, and reeks of desperation:

It's almost as if Harold is grabbing at straws, trying to pander to an ugly theme in popular religion of bigotry, in an effort to rally the troops, who would otherwise question why none of the other foretold signs of judgment day and world destruction are literally happening, such as the sun and the moon turning dark, and the stars falling from the sky.

Harold Camping's moment of truth will come in a few days, no matter what. Either the end of the world will ruin your Saturday, May 21st, at 6pm standard time, or there will be no great earthquakes, nor bodies of true believers flying out of their graves to meet up with Jesus Christ in Heaven. If it's all business as usual, then Harold will have some explaining to do.

The matter of Armageddon Day aside, when I was last there, Family Stations Incorporated was taking in approximately $15 million in donations every year. If you ever wanted to start your own religion, here's what the Economist has to say:

FANCY founding a religion? Keen to reform a flagging faith? Here a few tips on how to attract and retain followers, thus ensuring that your gospel spreads far and wide, affording spiritual solace to as many souls as possible.

At the outset, you must realise that success is unlikely if you go wholly against the grain of human nature. Granted, religion is all about forging the perfect man, or at least ensuring that, as far as possible, he lives up to divine expectations. But preternatural power has forged man in such a way that he will swallow some of your ideas about how to achieve this more easily than others.
...
As in the case of states, your principal concern is to encourage co-operation among your flock. In the long run, groups that co-operate more have an advantage over those whose members are less willing to do so. This also means limiting the number of actual and potential shirkers. People, it seems, are naturally inclined to do this anyway, but you can egg them on with a few simple tricks.

First, you are better off plumping for a personal god, rather than some sort of indeterminate life force. Research shows that people who profess a belief in such a deity judge moral transgressions more harshly, which in turn tends to make them more willing to abide by the rules, and expend resources on enforcing them. This may be down to a conviction that they are being incessantly watched over by an attentive minder, who tallies their contributions (or lack thereof) and rewards (or punishments) in a cosmic ledger. Speaking of which, incorporating the idea of just deserts is a fine plan, too. Apparently, people are born with an intuition to that effect. Just remember to keep the misfortunes visited on wrongdoers commensurate with their misdeeds. Otherwise people will think it unfair and won't buy it. No fire and brimstone for littering, and suchlike.
...

The Almost Perfect, Guilt-Free, Shrimp to Eat

Pandalus platyceros. Spot Prawns range all along the Pacific coast, but mostly in the North Pacific.

Courtesy of The Atlantic:

But one shrimp has it all: the spot prawn caught off the coast of British Columbia. The species is big, luscious, and caught in a completely sustainable manner. Its only drawback is that Canadians have recently awakened to these virtues, and devour most of the catch before it can be exported...Instead of dragging nets, spot-prawn fishermen use round, washtub-sized traps that operate on the same principle as lobster pots—prawns are lured in by containers of fishmeal and are unable to get out.

I remembered these live shrimp being offered for sale at New Sang Chong Market in Oakland Chinatown, so I went this morning and took some pictures:

Año Nuevo Felicidad

My first new year in the Fruitvale, an extremely noisy, raucous, firecracker and gunfire peppered midnight. Oh, and I found a bullet on my driveway this morning:

In Memoriam: Alicia Scott Lee, 17, of Mill Valley, California

My heart goes out to Alicia's family. The photograph being referred to in the last sentence of the article is here:

[Alicia] was the subject of a published photograph herself recently, when a Chronicle photographer captured her examining a puddle at Crissy Field after a rainstorm in January.

The photo, which she adopted as her Facebook profile picture, shows her traipsing ankle-deep through the water, studying the ripples, camera around her neck.

Reference:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/21/MNB41CJAEO.DTL&tsp=1

The Influence of the Stars

Right around the time I found out Brittany Murphy died yesterday, I finished reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. In an eye-opening piece on the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic (which killed more humans faster than any other disease, or any other anything, has before or since), the author goes into the history behind the word 'influenza':

Much like the virus it names, the word influenza comes to us by way of a mutation. The word itself was first used in Italian and originally referred to the influence of the stars - that is, astral or occult influences that would have been felt by many people at once. By the 16th century, though, the word has begun mixing and blending with the meanings of other words and come to refer to epidemic and pandemic flues that simultaneously strike multiple communities (as if the result of some malevolent will).

Reference: page 13 in Eating Animals.

Much like an Italian villager in the 1500s, I feel like the universe is conspiring against me, trying to prevent me from discovering more about three Asian American actresses in a movie with Brittany. I searched IMDB, on Google, and even posted a question on Yahoo Answers, all to no avail. So I ask you, Gentle Reader, what are the names of the actresses who portrayed Janet Hong and 2 other unnamed Asian female characters in the movie Clueless (1995) ?

determine your prorated share of the utility bill

Americans are scared, for these are lean and mean times, for anyone who has read the news, though we may be encouraged by signs that the economy has hit bottom and the downturn could be due for an upswing. With experts saying the unemployment rate is likely to go up past 10% before companies start hiring again, the sheer number of unemployed Americans in the middle of a jobs recession will likely provide the necessary heat to make people change their debt-accumulating, hypomanic ways. What I mean by "necessary heat" is, in a recent Lehrer News Hour segment analyzing the latest political events (concerning David Souter's retirement and Arlen Specter changing party affiliation), David Brooks offers a profound insight that, after turning it over in my head, I would tend to agree with more than not:

You don't change when you see the light. You change when you feel the heat.

Reference: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/jan-june09/politicalwrap_05-01.html

Because this economic slump may be severe and prolonged, an article on how Americans need to start consuming again makes the following points:

• We've gone from an age of entitlement to an age of thrift.


• the American population, continually infused with immigrants, has self-selected for hypomania, i.e., a tendency to action, an appetite for risk, an endless belief in human possibilities

Reference: http://www.slate.com/id/2213595/pagenum/all/#p2

Ever since I turned 19 and left home for college, I've lived with other people (and still do). This has not only expanded my social repertoire, but saves me a lot of money. In the spirit of the age of thrift, you, former sole occupant of the 1 bedroom or studio apartment, now may be in a shared housing situation, via Craigslist, living with one or more mates in a room, flat or house. When it comes time for roommates to divvy up the gas and electricity bill by figuring out who owes what, one of the more difficult tasks to settle may be how to fairly apportion the amount you owe, given that the day you move in may be after the day the billing period begins (or the day you move out before the date the billing period ends). In either case, you may not feel it's entirely fair to divide the gas & electricity bill, which accounts for energy usage in the unit, evenly among you and your fellow tenants under the lease, because then you would be liable for days when you could not possibly have drawn power from the grid or gas from the line. Now, courtesy of my former housemate Kimberly Scott (now Kimberly Lightholder), who provided this formula to me after a bit of trial and error, here's a simple and easy way for you to fairly prorate your share of the utilities (assuming, of course, that there are no other issues involved in the fair split, or prorating, of the monthly bill, such as one or more flatmates' constant use of a high energy consuming device, such as the central gas heater, or an electric heater, air conditioner, mini-refrigerator, grow lights, and/or aquarium):

The test for this formula is, if you add up the amount that each person is calculated to owe, for all residents, that should equal the amount in the electric & gas bill.

1. ascertain the number of billing days in the billing period. Let's call this b. For example, if your billing period is from June 7 to July 8, b should be 32 days


2. count the number of days you lived in the residence. Let's call this a.


3. determine the number of total billing days. That is, add up the number of days each person lived in the unit, for all residents. For example, let's say 4 people were already residing in the 5 bedroom house you just moved into:
   
   total billing days = b + b + b + b + a


4. divide the bill amount by the total billing days. The quotient let us call k. k is what you will multiply by the number of days you lived in the residence in order to arrive at your prorated share:
   
   amount of power bill
   -------------------------- = k
   total billing days


5. k * a = your prorated share of the utility bill

taking the police at their word

Confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor's Supreme Court nomination begin next week, and I wanted to share an article on the Obama nominee's powers of persuasion in a previous ruling that hinges on her taking the police at their word, then asks how broad are the grounds for arrest; Sotomayor's ruling nullified the decision of a jury that saw a process rife with police abuse of power:

A semi-truck breaks down on an expressway, with about 4 feet of the trailer jutting out into the right-hand lane. Worried about causing an accident, the truck driver runs almost a mile to the nearest gas station, which has a payphone with an extra long cord attached to the receiver that, at the time, was being used by a man sitting inside his car.

The truck driver claims he ran up and told the man there was an emergency because his truck was jutting out onto the expressway. The man told him to find another phone. The truck driver repeats it's an emergency, the man swears at the truck driver, the truck driver hangs up the phone, and soon the man in the car (who turns out to be an off-duty police officer) has a gun pointed at the back of the truck driver's head. Eventually another officer formally arrests the truck driver.

The man in the car claims he was asked for the phone by the truck driver, but there was never any mention of an emergency, and that the truck driver hit him in the face with the receiver, at which point the off-duty police officer pulled out his gun, and made the arrest.

Reference: http://www.slate.com/id/2219251/pagenum/all/

where is journalism going ?

I find myself habitually navigating to one website (sfgate.com) for local breaking news and weather forecasts. Other fountains that I drink deeply from are The New York Times, Slate and The Economist. With the latter three, the content is more like steak and requires sitting down and more leisurely-paced chewing than the former, which is a bit like a quick bite of pesto and olive tapenade on toasted sourdough over the kitchen counter. Like most of you, I don't pay for what I read, and if you're like me, you feel a pang of guilt when reading of the troubles in the newspaper industry. Journalists need to eat, and the good ones usually need to go to college in order to speak, read and write well. Food requires money, and who will pay these journalists for their sweat and labor at the sites I mention if we all contribute nary a red cent for the carefully prepared content that we consume ? This was the question I struggled with as what a journalist friend said turned over in my head, specifically her lament that newspapers were "in a death spiral", with every single major national paper having "major, devastating layoffs".

After this sobering assessment, one would think newspapers really were going the way of the Neanderthal. To the contrary, Jack Shafer, Slate's editor at large, believes we may be entering the Golden Age of journalism. He compares what's going on now with the newspaper industry in 1938, when Mark Sullivan, a journalist, then 64, published his memoirs lamenting the state of his trade amidst all the upheaval caused by a new technology then coming into its own, the radio:

But just when you're ready to dismiss Sullivan as another doom and gloomer, carping about modern-era disappointments and disruptions, he zigs from the normal zag to find opportunity in the decline of newspapers. He writes:

Not only did the market for writing shrink. New means of expression, of conveying thought and facts and description and narrative, came into the world. …

I felt as if I were like one of those old monks, the scriveners, who continued to copy by hand long after printing had been invented. To young writers looking forward the lesson is as plain, and even more important, than to old writers looking backward. Learn the art of writing, of course, but learn also the art of the motion picture, and of the radio.

Reference: http://www.slate.com/id/2221856/pagenum/all/

Michael Jackson is my Lord and Savior

For those who don't know, Michael Jackson's breakout moment came in 1983 when he performed at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium for the Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever reunion. The moment the lights dimmed on his breathtaking solo performance, Michael Jackson was no longer just a multi-regional (not quite national) celebrity, but an international superstar, as well-known as Coca Cola, McDonald's, and Mickey Mouse the world over. No one had ever seen a person, let alone a scrawny young black man with a single white glove, move like that, sing like that, do that thing with his feet like that, and dance in a way that made you want to join him. Even though Michael was lip-sync'ing throughout the performance, it didn't matter, because the moment was his, and Michael Jackson was showing us the way:

On a personal note, I have actually suffered in the name of Michael Jackson. In grade school my parents enrolled me in a religious private school called Heritage Baptist Academy that to this day may still practice corporal punishment. Once a person in a position of authority determined you deserved to be punished, you were called as your classmates' eyes tracked you out of the classroom and into the principal's office, where usually one or two authority figures were waiting. You were told what you were being held to account for, that you were about to be spanked because the authority figure loved you, and then you had to stand, put your hands on the edge of a desk, bend slightly over, and wait for the adult, usually a teacher or someone in a position of authority, to swat you several times on your clothed buttocks with the flat surface of a large wooden paddle. Depending on who the authority figure was, the experience could be absolutely terrifying, or merely shameful. There was a teacher, Mr. Hilton, who we all suspected would smack your behind with the crack of a baseball bat because he was tall, strong, with glasses and hairy forearms, who proudly swatted his toddler daughter. Then you had to go back to class with a red face and watery eyes and try to make it through the day knowing everyone knew what had happened to you.

Well, one morning during recess I found myself trying to copy Michael Jackson's trademark moonwalk, and was spotted by a fellow student, who told an authority figure about my behavior. Soon I was called into the principal's office, and you know the rest of the story. As it was explained to me at the time, the figure of authority who was about to strike me was doing so because he loved me; Michael Jackson was a worldly figure, and moonwalking was dancing, and dancing is of the world, and since being worldly was a sure path to hell, and as Christians, in this world, we must behave as if we are not of the world, I would be punished for trying to be like Michael Jackson. Afterward, the authority figure prayed that God would teach me that the most dangerous way to be was like this worldly figure. In retrospect, it was probably good advice, since we all know Michael Jackson was reported to be involved in some very strange things, such as trying to buy the bones of the Elephant Man Joseph Merrick, hanging around with a chimp, sleeping with young kids in his bed, and trying to look like a white woman.