Category: 2004 US Election

The browser war may be long over, but the lessons of history have much to say about winning the peace.

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I took delivery of 11 pounds of ripe Italian prune plums yesterday, after my son’s piano lesson: his piano teacher has a tree that I expect bore 50 pounds of the little gems this summer. There’s another 10-20 pounds still on the tree, and probably as much on the ground under it.

So with all that ripe goodness on hand, I decided I had better find some way of preserving it (we’ll eat quite a few, I’m sure). As with anything else that came out of the home kitchen as opposed to a food lab, there are many variations on how to can fruit, depending on the fruit, the taste of the canner, and other factors. I found this one entertaining but not all that helpful.

As I usually do, I chose a few recipes, distilled out the essentials, and proceeded from there.

Continue reading “canning”

These clips supposedly show someone opening a Krytonite U-lock with a ballpoint pen: the video doesn’t make clear exactly how it’s done or if the locks are otherwise good. The forum has more detail . . .

Opening a pricey bike lock with a plastic ball point pen
Mark Frauenfelder:
Over at Bike Forums, some guy posted a video clip showing how he opened his Kryptonite U-Lock with a plastic ball point pen. Uproar ensues on the board. Link (Direct link to movie clip, and here’s another movie with a different lock.) (Thanks, xavii!) [Boing Boing Blog]

So this is a exploit against the barrel-keyed locks: the right size pen barrel (or soon to be available on the internet custom tool, unless I miss my guess) is inserted instead of the key and with a little luck, it serves to turn the innards to open the lock.

The big draw of Kryptonite has always been a mixture of deterrence and prevention: like the burglar alarm sign, you hope the Bad Guy takes someone else’s bike since yours will be too hard to steal. Now it sounds like they may have lost that edge . . .

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Main Page – Wikiquote:

“He, who will not reason, is a bigot; he, who cannot, is a fool; and he, who dares not, is a slave.” ~ William Drummond

Connecting some dots. Brad DeLong notes that the president sees/saw Al Queda as an organization rather than a movement.

Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog: Richard Clarke Is Moderately Shrill:

George W. Bush asked for an organizational chart of Al Qaeda so that he could cross people off as they were killed or captured. A very “MBA” way of looking at it, it seemed to me. I remembered “The Battle of Algiers”. At the end, the French have caught and tortured and killed all of the urban guerrilla leaders they had identified at the start. And the French had lost the war.

Gregg Easterbrook sees fit to revive the “flypaper” theory. Shorter flypaper theory: our troops are set up as a honeypot on the enemy’s turf and all the terrorists come to kill them but are killed themselves as a result of our genius. No more terrorists.

The New Republic Online: Freedom Core:

Finally, a thought: History may judge the invasion of Iraq a political fiasco, or simply judge it as morally wrong. But is it necessarily a diversion from the war against Islamist terror, as the Fallows article contends? What if the invasion of Iraq is having the unintended consequence of drawing terrorists and killers to that country, where our army can fight them on our terms? Supposedly bin Laden and a few others of his ilk trained thousands of fanatical followers. Though there have been awful terror strikes since September 11, world events have simply not reflected what might be expected to happen if thousands of fanatical terrorists were loose in the Western nations. Now there are said to be “foreign fighters” crawling all over Iraq, and whatever else is going wrong there, our military is killing significant numbers of armed fanatics, many of them not Iraqi. If we hadn’t invaded Iraq and drawn them there, where might these guys be instead, and what harms might they be doing?

I wonder if the reverse is true? Perhaps the terrorists have set up their own honeypot and by stretching the military thinner and thinner, they can do some unanticipated damage.

Is it not obvious that these terrorists, whoever they are, eschew conventional military doctrine and strike in ways that are hard to defend against?

Hmm, so the job I left last November is open again. Seems my successor didn’t even last as long as I did . . .

University of Washington Staff Jobs:

General Duties/Description: The Shidler Center for Law, Commerce & Technology is focused on the intersection of law and business innovation by examining the impact on domestic and global markets of changes in law and technology.

The Shidler Center currently consists of faculty and students from the Law School as well as an active external advisory board and external committees helping with specific projects. The Center has received funding from Microsoft, Boeing, Amazon.com and private donors as well as the University and the Law School. The Center offers various types of educational and outreach programs to members of the legal and business communities in Washington State and nationally; edits and produces a quarterly journal for legal practitioners; and is developing longer term research programs for which it will seek external funding.

Perhaps the job isn’t as fulfilling as advertised . . . . ?

Continue reading “another one bites the dust”

I found this collection of wisdom earlier today, and I was struck by this quote and how it flies in the face of the “nuke ’em back to the stone age” rhetoric:
Words to Live By:

You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life — but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men in the mud. – T.R. Fehrenbach

So I looked up Colonel Fehrenbach and learned that he wrote the definitive history of the Korean War and drew some keen observations about troop readiness and realistic planning from it.

Severe peacetime budget cuts after World War II left the U.S. military a shadow of its former self. The terrible lesson of Korea was that to send into action troops trained for nothing but “serving a hitch” in some quiet billet was an almost criminal act. Throwing these ill-trained and poorly equipped troops into the heat of battle resulted in the war’s early routs. The United States was simply unprepared for war. As we enter a new century with Americans and North Koreans continuing to face each other across the 38th parallel, we would do well to remember the price we paid during the Korean War.

The whole business of “serving a hitch” was how Vietnam was fought with its one year tours, 15 years later. Doesn’t sound like anyone learned from Korea.

Continue reading “why — and how — we fight”

Guardian Unlimited | Arts features | New adventures in hi-fi:

While [Michael] Stipe and [Mike] Mills have developed other interests in their adult life beyond the band and music, [Peter] Buck hasn’t. He recently filled up the iPods of everyone who worked on REM’s new album with songs that he thought they might like – and considering iPods can take up to 10,000 songs, this was a Herculean feat of downloading. “He’s become obsessed with it,” says Stipe. “He has done this for everyone who worked on our new record, including the engineers, who he had only known for a couple of weeks. What’s interesting is to discover what he thinks we should be listening to. Mike got entire albums by Miles Davis, for example, while I only got the greatest hits. It must have taken him weeks, but he really isn’t interested in anything apart from his family and music,” adds Mills. “He reads books, and plays music, and hangs out with his family. That’s it. So he loves the iPod because it gives him a chance to go through thousands of records that he hasn’t played for the last 20 years.”

And who wouldn’t want Peter Buck to turn you on to a playlist, even one that had 10,000 tracks: I wonder how long it would take to listen to that? My 10Gb one has 1,565 tracks, for 8.78 Gb of space and a playing time of 4 days, 18 hours, 52 minutes, and 23 seconds. So a 40Gb one might have as much as 480 hours of music on it: that’s a lot of bus rides. I shudder to think how much disk space he has at home . . .

This is the second city where I have had a chance at a Peter Buck sighting: it was always interesting to see people’s reactions in Atlanta when he would stop into Oxford Books (RIP) or Wax n’ Facts. Oxford? Awe and speechlessness. Wax n’ Facts? Who cares?
Continue reading “the iPod is not a WalkMan”

You don’t have to worry about Florida using electronic voting.

Florida would have to have electricity for that to happen.

My brother-in-law in Flagler Beach, Florida.