CNN misleads on the Shuttle

I heard that the shuttle Endeavour was going to launch tonight, but it may not because of bad weather in Spain, where the astronauts would have to land if trouble developed on takeoff. This made me wonder about the shuttle. I was going to walk out to a place in my development with a low southeastern horizon so I could see it take off. I had seen one of these before. But I could go out there and wait and wait and wait without knowing that it had been scrubbed at X minus 3 seconds. So I carried out a cellular phone and asked my wife to call me if a report on CNN says the mission is scrubbed. I took this extra measure to ensure that I see the shuttle. I stood out there a while and then my wife called me on the cellular phone. She said that CNN reported that the mission had been delayed to see if they could get better weather in Spain. So I walked back to the house to find out when they were going to launch it now. I was surprised to find instead that the shuttle launched! It was too late to go back. I was misled by an erroneous CNN report. It is all the more galling because later on CNN contradicted themselves by saying the shuttle launched.

This shows you can't trust the media any more. I asked my wife to call me if the shuttle was scrubbed as protection against waiting a long time for a shuttle that won't come. Instead, this prevented me from seeing the shuttle by getting me to leave the place before the shuttle was visible. It used to be that I could trust stations like CNN to tell the truth; I could have relied on it for information on the shuttle. But I can't. Since I can't, I feel I need to treat it as though they were going to do the worst against me. That results in this matrix game:

	CNN tells truth	CNN lies
trust CNN	see shuttle(10)	don't see shuttle(-20)
don't trust CNN	wait forever for shuttle(0)	see shuttle(10)

Game theory says then I should flip two coins. If both come up heads, I trust CNN; otherwise, I don't. CNN's most perverse strategy is to tell the truth 3/4 of the time and lie 1/4 of the time. This implies that the chance that I see the shuttle is (3/4)*(1/4) + (1/4)*(3/4) = 3/8 or 37.5%. The most probable outcome is to wait forever for the shuttle; actually, probably only 20 minutes. If I could fully trust CNN, the probability would be 100%. Amazing what a lack of trust can cost. Trust is lacking in our world today and sooner or later we will pay the penalty for it.

At least I helped someone see the shuttle. I sent a notice to an Internet group, someone noticed it there, looked for the shuttle and found it.

Where is Iraq?

I have found something surprising as of late. The National Geographic conducted a survey of 18-24 year olds around the world and found that only 13 percent of American young people could find Iraq on a map. 87 percent couldn't, and we want to send these people to fight a war there? Only 17 percent could identify Afghanistan on a map. About 45 percent knew where New York was, but an incredible 11 percent could not even identify the United States. Scores around the world are similar. Mexico is even worse than the United States. In general, young people around the world don't know their world. This is dangerous. A lack of knowledge about the world, about science, mathematics, and social systems is what dogmas, fundamentalist religions, and tyrannical regimes feed on. Don't you think that if instead 87 percent could identify Iraq, Afghanistan, Mongolia, the United States and so forth that tyrannical regimes would fall and fundamentalist religions would disappear? I think so. Get out your National Geographic maps and discuss them with your kids. The fate of the world may depend on it.

More Giséle and PETA

This thing is starting to get hilarious. So far I thought that when PETA activists barged into the Victoria's Secret fashion show when strutted out, that the only signs that they held read "Giséle: Fur Scum". But according to two other Blogs, namely right-thinking.com and Blogs of War (sorry, no URL; it has become invalid), there were other signs, such as "OMG, she's hot!!!" and "I'm a fat whore with no life", and even one with the F word. To me the photos look authentic, but either they are fake or the media has misreported the PETA intrusion, maybe because some of these signs are not for family audiences. In my opinion, the PETA people are missing the mark. Their target is cruel treatment of mink, not the sex life of Giséle. It is the sight of these PETA women walking around a sexy supermodel is what I find interesting. The PETA women had their mouths wide open, and looked angry and demonstrative, while Giséle did not crack a smile and looked like an unfriendly nearly-undraped statue. At least the PETA women were expressing themselves and making their positions clear. To me Giséle seemed stuck up.

Giséle's name is interesting; to me, unnecessary umlauts and accents are hifalutin. But apparently her real family name was Bündchen. That is a German name; the word means little "Bund", since -chen plus umlaut is what the Germans use for a diminutive. For example, "Hund" is dog, and Hündchen is "doggie" or "puppy". "Bund" has several meanings, all of which suggests a binding or putting together. It could mean "league", in which case Giséle is Little League; maybe I'll find her in Williamsport. It could also mean "waistband", in which case it describes what she wore: a little waistband.

To me PETA is the Coyote of the protest world. They are always uncorking goofy skits. They have a woman in a skimpy bikini in a cage in the middle of downtown to protest cruel treatment to caged animals. Their dress is interesting and is designed for maximum impact: they dress skimpy where people are normally dressed, and they dress well covered where people are normally skimpily dressed, as at the fashion show. They recommend that kids drink beer, not milk. Why not orange juice? Because they want impact. They even compare a grisly murder to the butchering of cattle and other animals destined for the dinner table. Their tactic is to get people to notice. But much of the time they simply alienate. I prefer the actions of groups such as the Humane Society or the Farm Sanctuary.

Victoria's Secret

It's name is alluring. Victoria represents the epitome of sexual repressiveness. So saying "Victoria's Secret" says that there may be more than we see of Victoria, hidden behind a curtain. The company sells women's lingerie, and tonight they had a fashion show of some of the skimpiest fashions that they sell. Women paraded around in these outfits, sometimes garnished with outlandish wings, to the tune of dance music with a heavy beat, including one of my favorites, "Independence" by Jon and Vangelis.

I looked at this program because it was doubly controversial. Women's groups such as NOW protested the show is sexual exploitation. It shows women as sex objects. There may be some evidence of this. They showed one man there as having a "family" of women, of their training women to get out there and parade nearly naked, and so forth. Women's groups maintain that shows like this help put women in second place in our society, and these scenes certainly did not do anything to dispel that.

We need to distinguish, however, between discrimination and exploitation issues and expression of sexuality. The former is negative, the latter positive. For a long time societal institutions, especially religious ones, have been trying to repress sexuality. The show tonight was an expression of sexuality, showing off products that are normally used to stir sexual interest in the bedroom. As such it sends a positive message, that sexual expression is good and can add excitement to your life.

Victoria's Secret could have cleaned up its act a little bit. If the women have to go out there half naked, then so should the men. They should have been just as alluringly dressed, including singer Mark Anthony, who belted out a great song tonight. The show described how a man can get a gift for his woman from Victoria's Secret. No. That's not how it goes. The woman is the one to buy the lingerie for herself as a gift for the man, perhaps as a surprise in the bedroom. And the show could have refrained from referring to the women as "girls" and especially as "my girls". But in general I praise the show for celebrating one of the joys of life, namely sex.

The other way in which this show was controversial was due to one particular model: Giséle Bündchen. Initially as they filmed this episode, when Giséle walked on the stage, three women from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) walked on the stage and called her "fur scum", because she had signed a contract with Blackglama to model mink coats. Indeed, PETA's web site describes the cruel way in which mink are killed to make mink coats - electrocution, gassing and so forth. The three women were arrested and charged, then released, and the segment was edited out. Too bad. I liked seeing the models, but I would have liked seeing the PETA protesters as well. PETA's stand is well-taken; we have been unusually cruel to animals over the years. But I do think they were off-mark here. Tonight Giséle was wearing hardly anything, let alone fur. Her fur business was elsewhere. If PETA wanted to protest, they should have protested by waiting until she appeared in a fur coat somewhere. Doing it here instead puts them in the sexually repressed group. They led us the wrong way.

So to sum up I'd say that Victoria's Secret should have equalize the field by including alluring models of both sexes, by not referring to the women as "girls", by being careful recruiting models so they don't wind up with controversial people such as Giséle Bündchen, and PETA should have chosen the timing of its protests more carefully. I give the show a C+.

Thinking is believing

I saw this on Time Magazine's web site today: "He runs Iraq, in no small part, because people think he runs Iraq." (I am not going to post a URL, because in no time flat, it will become invalid.) This exposes Saddam's rule for what it is: it is a rule of abstract entities, a rule of belief. If you are an Iraqi and you think Saddam runs Iraq, then he will continue right on "ruling" Iraq and things will stay the same. But thoughts are free. What if you think differently? What if you think that he is just an ordinary bully instead? If a large number of people in Iraq thought that, the regime would fall quickly.

What else exists because of simply believing it exists? How about the value of the paper money in my wallet? Is there a dollar's worth of material in a dollar? No. That piece of paper is worth a dollar because I believe it is worth a dollar, because my friends and acquaintances think it is worth a dollar, and because the US government says it is worth a dollar. There used to be money that was really worth that (silver coins) but you don't see that anymore. In this case we want to keep on believing. If we don't, a monetary crisis will result and we will lose all of our savings. That happened during the Great Depression and in Germany in 1923.

But maybe with other things, if you stop believing in what you have been in habit of believing or what others tell you to believe, you may blaze a new trail. This is how clothing fads change. For example, people said in the 1960s and early 1970s that people will never own computers, and that it is not necessary to own one. But Wozniak and Jobs had a different idea: they wanted to own a computer and to make a living by getting others to own their own computers. So therefore the Apple II, and now many of us own computers, including this one I am writing on.

Be careful carving out a new belief trail. Trying to live life as you feel like it in Saddam's Iraq may not be a good idea. And you may startle people with your new thinking. But there are so many other belief trails to choose from, and the rewards can be great.

Nature Shows

I see a generational difference in the way that nature shows are presented. Take Wild Kingdom, for instance. I used to watch it in the late 1960s and 1970s when I was a young adult. The show was presented by the Silent Generation then; those born between 1925 and 1942. The show presented mostly the animals, in their adventures in obtaining what they need to survive. It would show cheetahs chasing springbok; jaguars hunting capybaras, and elephants grazing on the savanna. Once in a great while a human would appear, as in one case when one wrestled with an anaconda.

Wild Kingdom has reappeared on the Animal Channel, but it is different. It is now presented by Generation X, noted for practicality and adventurousness. Today is the day of wrestling crocodiles and "crikey". Now people appear all over the place on Wild Kingdom, especially young men who go out in the wilderness and investigate all over the place even to the extent of holding the necks of black mamba snakes in their hands. Instead of a travelogue of animals, we now get a wild safari. The show is just as interesting and informative; it is just presented differently.

If generational trends as theorized by Strauss and Howe in Generations continue, in 10-20 years the Millennial Generation will present the show. We then will see nature people going into the wilderness showing how we can preserve the environment and how to live peacefully among the animals. It will show a much more loving attitude than the bookworms of the 1960s or the daredevils of today.

A new telescope?

I currently own a Meade 2045 telescope but am looking for a bigger model. Somoene from my astronomical society wanted to hold a telescope party in which we showed our scopes to the rest of us. I figured this would be a good place to find out what scopes are available. It was not the best day to do it, as it was pouring rain much of the time. Some of us showed the hand-made scopes we made, including one called the StarStalker, named that as no commercial ad-generating enterprise will want a name like that for their scope. I got interested in the Meade LX-200, a solidly built telescope that takes 15 minutes to set up. It is a go-to scope, meaning that if you want to see the Ring Nebula, you bring up Ring Nebula in the little remote-like device that comes with it, press Go, and it slews the scope to it and hopefully you will see it. But it weighs a lot! Further, there is so much gadgetry and details involved. At $1,500-$2,500, it is a rather expensive gizmo. Still, it may be ideal to show to the public at skywatches because of the "go to" features. But if I think it is too symbolic of the conspicuous consumption in this country, I may settle for a ten-inch Dobsonian telescope: you plunk it on a lawn, use the guide scope to move the dob to your object, using old-fashioned star-hopping, and look. I still have not decided what to do.

Autumn Maple

In 1992 August we purchased a Norway red maple for our yard. It was a little taller than us, with only a thin (maybe an inch) trunk. Since then it has grown into a nice pear shape and as tall as our two-story house. It is a beautiful tree. This year the leaves stayed green all October, the first time I have seen that happen here. After the first week of November, the leaves turned into a brilliant shade of red. I took a few pictures of it admired its beauty. In just ten short years, we now have the prettiest tree on the street. Sad to say, its autumn glow did not last long. This week, some windy storms came, and all of the leaves dropped off to the ground, leaving me with a leaf raking chore this weekend. But it was something to see while it lasted.

Like Iraq!?

I would think that GM would stop these commercials hawking its SUVs, trucks and vans. I keep hearing about the Chevy Tahoe, how it is "like a rock". But that sounds a lot like "like Iraq", and while Saddam runs that country, I don't think anyone, no matter what their stand on war in Iraq is, would want themselves or items associated with them to be anything like Iraq. But if GM wants to be known in the future as having these SUVs that are like Iraq, that's their call.

Not a War

This is an interesting web site: http://irregulartimes.com. It has articles from an independent minded Republican; certainly not your run of the mill Republican. He's an "irregular Republican". Especially interesting is the article Not a War. In the article, entitled "When is a war not a war? When it's a crime", he maintains that the campaign against terror is not a war, because it is not against a nation; otherwise, anyone can attack our soldiers or our installations and claim that they are fighting a war against our country. Terror, such as what happened on 2001 September 11, does not come from a nation and so therefore it is not a war. It is an interesting article although somewhat overdrawn. His main point I feel is valid: our effort to combat terrorism is not a war.

Negative blogs

I note that I have been posting a lot of negative blogs as of late. Perhaps that is because times are negative: war with Iraq, stock market dropping, the sniper. I think we should all try to find good and happy things in life, and I shall try to find some myself.

Theft of time?

I found an editorial in the local newspaper that takes a stand that I question. The editorialist condemned the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) for its "terrorist" actions. I for one believe that the actions of the ELF do damage to the cause of environmentalism and preserving this planet as a place of beauty to live. They cause people to oppose ELF, and hence by association, environmentalism.

However, I take exception to one comment that the author makes. He quotes from the science fiction novel Dune in which he says that depriving a man of an hour and depriving him of his life is merely a difference of degree. He cites the case of a person who has to replace the tires of an SUV after they get slashed. If that's the case, then I can name quite a few mass murderers. Take the computer companies, for instance, especially Microsoft. Think of how much time has been wasted, probably billions of person-hours, because computers crash. How about the time wasted waiting for service at some of these computer and cellular phone places? I did not have cable modem service for four days, when it was the modem that was bad instead of all the other things they had me do and had me waste 10 hours or so on. Today I was forced to wait two hours for a service only to be told that I had to make an appointment another day. How about all the times that car repair places misrepaired my car or made me wait a long time for it? If this editorialist is correct, this constitutes many killings worth of time many thousands of time over.

I have never thought of things this way. To me there is a difference of level as well as one of degree between a vandalism and a murder.

Pure Theater

President Bush called the action of the Iraqi parliament in unanimously rejecting U.N. Resolution 1441 "pure theater". Interesting way of putting it. At least I'd rather have pure theater than polluted theater or dirty theater. Maybe he means a theater that has been scrubbed of germs so that you won't catch a cold there, or maybe he means one in which all of the things that are done and all that the actors ever do is devoted to producing plays in a theater. It is pure theater, and nothing else but theater. In any case, Bush still says that Iraq must comply else there will be another kind of theater - a military one.

Looms

I have noticed recently that the media likes to use the verb to loom a lot. The war on Iraq looms, unemployment looms, the top-rated Florida State Seminoles loom, new restrictions on tax shelters loom. Everything seems to loom. Here a loom, there a loom, everywhere a loom loom. Don't they get tired of using that word?

How about "approach ominously", or "is coming" or even my nonword ominate? The impending war with Iraq ominates while Iraq mulls U.N. Resolution 1441. Budget cuts ominate. At least it is new and different. But don't use it too often. Else the day when everything ominates in the media will loom.

Bubble Bees Revisited

Bubble Bees has become my favorite game on the Internet. It is relatively easy to play, has a few mysteries to pique you, and, most importantly, is non-violent. I have played many games and have deduced a few rules which I feel should have been stated up front;

1. Fast red bees are 50 points.
2. Catching two objects (clocks, ordinary bees, or red bees) gets you 100 points.
3. Catching an ordinary bee by itself counts 10 points, but does not count anything if caught with other objects; then you get the bonus instead.
4. Catching a clock gives you 5 more seconds.
5. You have 60 seconds to start with
6. Going past a multiple of 500 gets you 10 extra seconds.
7. Catching three objects at once gets you 500 points.
8. Catching four objects at once gets you 1000 points (not 2500 points).
9. Bubbles vary in size.

My strategy has improved over time and my high game is now 6,230 points. Here are some of my strategies:

1. Balance between snatching bees before time passes and waiting to get more than one at a time.
2. Catch single bees while you can while you wait for two bees to get close enough to get the 100-point bonus.
3. In catching the clock, you need to put the bubbler lower than usual, especially near the bottom of the screen.
4. Wait, if possible, to catch the clock until it is near some bees, so that catching it will get a bonus.
5. Wait, if possible, to catch the fast red bee until it is near some other bees, so that catching will get the 100-point bonus.
6. Bees porpoise up and down and go at different speeds. If you watch their flying pattern, you can anticipate groupings.
7. When your score has a 4 or 9 as the hundreds digit, catch whatever you can, even if it be ordinary bees, to get you over the next multiple of 500.
8. It is better, when going after two bees, to miss them both than to catch just one of them. If the latter happens, your chance of getting the 100-point bonus with them is forever gone. I call this a "chop", borrowing the term from bowling.
9. Don't snare bees immediately upon going on the screen. You miss groupings by doing that.

My high score is 6,230, which is a far cry from the six-digit amounts that are on the top 10 list. How does one get those? I counted the bees once and determined that in 10 seconds, 8 bees appear on the average. To stay in the game indefinitely, you need to get 500 points every 10 minutes, with a little help from the clocks. To get 500 points out of 8 bees, you need to snare three of them together or catch them with the clock and the fast red bee. Usually they are too far apart to catch in pairs, so I don't see how one can last a long time in the game to get those six-digit scores. I tried stretching the bubbles, but there is only so far that they will stretch. Another way in which you can get high scores is if catching huge bunches of bees gets you tremendous scores. That is whay I thought that 4 bees would get you 2,500 points, 5 gets you 12,500 points, and 6 gets you 62,500 points, each one being 5 times the previous. But when I caught 4 bees once, it yielded not 2,500 but 1,000 points. Apparently it goes up only arithmetically. So that rules that out.

So how then does one get those six-digit scores? There must be an Easter egg in the game.

Anti-muslimism and Anti-whitevanism

In the past two years two types of discrimination have appeared. The first appeared after Planeattack, and was directed against Muslims, since it was Muslims who piloted the planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. People looked askance at them, or anyone of Mideastern descent, because of Planeattack. The second appeared while the DC sniper was terrorizing the Washington-Richmond area and was directed against owners of white vans. Police inspected these vans much more than other cars, and people started to avoid and look wary of white vans.

There are similarities and differences between the two discriminations. They are similar in that they are based on unwarranted stereotypes - the Mideasterner as suicide bomber and the white van owner as a sniper. These stereotypes are frequently wrong; it was for the sniper case, as the snipers did their killing from a Chevrolet Caprice instead. The two discriminations are also based on the same human emotion: fear. It is different in that a person's religious beliefs are much more integrated with the person than what kind of vehicle he drives. The anti-Muslim beliefs also are more like to turn into hate, as they are directed against people, while the white-van fear was directed against things.

The white van discrimination makes it clear that discrimination of other types frequently is based on fear. This makes it important that community groups be organized once in a while to allow people to experience each other as for a common cause. This could go a long way to alleviating the fear.

Bomb Iraq with...

One of the more interesting pastimes I found on the web is to hunt in Google for a famous phrase with one word changed. Take, for example, "Loose lips sink ships." If I want to get the entire phrase except the word "lips", I enter "loose * sink ships" -lips, telling Google I want "loose" followed by any word (the wild character *) followed by "sink ships", and that I don't want the word "lips". The first entry I get is "loose chips sink ships", which may be appropriate for today's cybernetic world. "Give me liberty or give me *" -death yields "Give me liberty or give me, um, a Game Boy", and then "Give me liberty or give me Microsoft". Have it your own way. If I star the liberty instead, I get "Give me pixels or give me death." They probably mean the Blue Screen of Death. "Read my lips, no more *" -taxes yields "science" first, then "terror" and "Bush". The choices get better all the time. I tried "Bomb Iraq with *" and got this list:

Ballots
Food
Lots of smart bombs
Blair's backing
our a*hole smart technology
Prayer
Sh*loads of DU
No provocation
Love
Really bad jokes

As you can see, some interesting alternatives.

Election Night

It seems the Republicans have the advantage tonight. That could have been predicted in advance, in my opinion. If the election had been held in July, Democrats would have swarmed into power in both houses. The reason why the Republicans have the advantage is that the economy seems to be doing better. The stock market is consistently going up; the days of the ebearient plummets of July and August are gone. The economy is the dominant determiner of elections by far. How else can you explain a popular victorious war president with a 90% approval rating losing to someone who had extramarital affairs, especially after the Gary Hart affair of 1988? The economy was in recession in 1992, and that cost George H. W. Bush the election. Good economies explain the victories of Reagan in 1984, Bush in 1988, and Clinton in 1996, and bad economies explain the defeats of Ford in 1976 and Carter in 1980. So who's going to win in 2004? I predict a booming economy in 2004, so I think Bush will be reelected. However, there may be an electricity shortage then due to lack of power plants, and if that occurs, a Democrat will be elected President. Elections ultimately reduce to bread and butter.

Media Ambiguity

Today CNN came out with an article entitled "Saudis: No Bases for Iraq Strike". CNN, that has two meanings! The Saudis could mean either. It depends on what "bases" is the plural of. If it is the plural of "base", it means that Saudi Arabia will not allow use of its territory for a US strike on Iraq. If it is the plural of "basis", then it means that the Saudis feel there that there are no reasons why the US should invade Iraq. Both sound reasonable, so CNN needs to reword its headline to tell which one is meant.

OK, so CNN took down that ambiguous headline from its web site. Then they come up with another ambigublooper just a few hours later! "Election 2002 hours away", screams the headline. Assuming the election begins on 2002 November 4/5 midnight, they are saying that right now is 2002 August 13 at 1400 hours, 2 in the afternoon. Obviously it is not. What they really mean is "Year 2002 Election hours away", meaning "Year 2002 Election is hours away". Let's hope most of their news is more recent than 2002 August 13.

Metaphors in mathematics

I attended a mathematics conference over the weekend. One of the more interesting talks I attended was one by Jennifer Bergner of Salisbury University, who illustrated by example the use of metaphors to illustrate mathematics. A math professor says, "Let P be a point". What are you thinking of? A point. Right. But what do you imagine when the professor says "point"? Most people, she finds, think of something that is round, like a circle or ball. Theoretically, a point is a one-element set, an infintesimally small extent at a specific point in a line or plane. But we don't think like that. We need to imagine something, so rather than imagining a tiny five-pointed star, or even a tiny square, we imagine a little filled-in circle. According to one book I read, indeed a circle is a fat point.

Here are some other metaphors that come to mind when I hear words:

bird - a passerine bird, such as a warbler (NOT a duck or an ostrich, in other words).
rodent - a mouse.
building - a moderately tall brick edifice
forest - a mid-latitude deciduous forest
vehicle - a minivan
car - a Toyota sedan

and so forth. This shows that we may think of general or abstract concepts by imagining something
that is concrete.

Halloween

It's that scary time of the year again. So scary that for the first time that I can remember, the head of my work unit let out everyone at 1630 (4:30pm) regardless of their actual work hours, so that people driving home would not have to drive through trick-or-treaters. We had our share of trick or treaters tonight, but it is less than previous years. Perhaps people are being more cautious and taking their children to Halloween parties of having them trick or treat. Here are the amounts per year:

Year	Trick or Treaters
1997	68
1998	84
1999	88
2001	62
2002	49

Apparently I lost the file in going from one computer to another; I recovered most of it but I don't have figures for 2000. Here is how in these five years the trick or treaters broke down as far as half-hour period is concerned (I use 24-hour time; for example, 1800 is 6 o'clock):

1730-1800, 0.9%
1800-1830, 27.1%
1830-1900, 24.1%
1900-1930, 20.9%
1930-2000, 17.2%
2000-2030, 9.2%
2030-2100, 0.5%

This shows that most of the trick-or-treaters come between 6pm and 7:30pm. The earliest I have seen one is 1748 (12 to 6 pm), and the latest 2048 (12 to 9 pm). Some come between 7:30pm and 8pm, but then it really drops sharply after that. This enables one to plan for Halloween, what time to come home, how long to leave the pumpkin and candy out and so forth.

I dressed up as a magician with an Aladdin-type costume, with black with blue silk design on it, with a dreamcatcher on a necklace. I put devil-ears on top that I bought at Busch Gardens this past summer just before Imaginique; some child though I bought it at King's Dominion instead. One young lady said I wasn't a devil because I was dressed in blue and black. Devils are dressed in red. This is an observant and inquisitive girl. She'll probably grow into a prominent mathematician or computer programmer, scientist, or investigator. Others praised my costume. It did win second place and came close to winning first at a costume contest at SUUSI in 2001.

Halloween is gone; next is Thanksgiving.

Some miscellany

Here are some comments I have about words people use. The words very and extreme are used far too frequently. "The revelation is shocking." sounds much stronger than "The revelation is very shocking.", for example. That word shocking carries with it a jolt that gets lost when very is put in front of it. As far as I can see, that is a phrase that can be eliminated. Why don't we ever say "as near as"? It is important to complete applications before the doo-doo date indicated on the form. On the other hand, why not go over the deadline, even though it is a very unique point in time. On the other hand, you can't have something that is "very unique"; unique means there is only one of them, and you can't be oner (pronounced wun-ner) than one. On the original hand, why doesn't anyone say that? Take this quote, which comes from a recent financial article on the web:

The Conference Board's October consumer confidence report -- due a half-hour after the markets open -- is expected to show a significant drop to 90 from 93.3 in September, according to a consensus of economists surveyed by Briefing.com. The drop may be attributable to a six-week decline in stocks that ran through September, thus not reflecting the recent three-week runup that has seen the Dow gain nearly 15 percent.

Whaaa?? How can runups see? They don't have eyes. I give speeches at Toastmaster club meetings; I do this because I know these speeches are apotamy. I.e., they are a part of me. All in all in all, I say this is a good blog, and I say very goodnight.

Disappointment

I was disappointed to find today that Maryland intends to seek the death penalty for the DC sniper defendants, even to the extent of lifting a moratorium on the death penalty to do it. Maybe Hanover County, Virginia should try him since the victim there was not killed; therefore, no death penalty. But then he could get only one life term, meaning he would be out in the streets in a decade. I still think Maryland should seek six consecutive life terms for all three defendants.

Bugbearisms

A new virus is out, and it can cause mischief that can result in serious embarrassment or consequences. The virus is Bugbear.

Bugbear is like Klez, a virus that has been going around hitting my computer every one or two days, whereupon my antivirus program traps it, enabling me to get rid of it. Bugbear, however, instead of leaving behind a blank email message, leaves an intact message that was intended to go from someone else to someone else, and not to the user of the computer that gets the virus. So far I have gotten one from a Toastmaster and one from a Unitarian-Universalist, and in each case I called them up to inform them that they have a virus. This virus can do things like take your love letter to Sue and send it to your other girl friend Tricia; it can take a file with some of your private financial data on it and send it to an employee of the IRS; it can do all sorts of trickster things like that, some of which is funny, but most of which is not.

The best way to ensure that this type of embarrassment does not happen is to get an antivirus program, make sure it is always up to date, and have it scan email. I see now from the viruses I have received that computers must absolutely have an antivirus program with up to date virus signatures. You are headed for trouble without one.

Try them, Maryland

Yesterday Virginia Attorney General Jerry Kilgore said that Virginia is a better place to try the sniper suspects than Maryland because Virginia has the death penalty and Maryland does not as much, especially for Malvo, who is a juvenile. No, Jerry. Maryland is the better place for that reason. The death penalty is an expensive way to deal with a murderer and it duplicates his crime - killing a person. Many organizations (e.g. Amnesty International) have come out against the death penalty because of its inhumaneness and it is forbidden in many countries in the world, especially developed countries such as Australia and Germany. In fact, the US having the death penalty puts it in the same league with many of the developing nations in the world, including all of the Islamic ones. Kilgore wants the death penalty for a juvenile. That puts it in the same league with only five nations in the world, including Libya, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Yemen. It is a blight on our country for it to have the death penalty and sets us off as a bunch of rurale brutes. Maryland, try these suspects. Give them six consecutive life terms so that they spend the rest of the life in a Maryland prison, so that Virginia never gets to try them. An amendment is needed to abolish the death penalty worldwide.