David Ernst chats with the World

Tuesday, 2006-02-28

On DPW, Bush is right, but doing it wrong

Filed under: journalism — David @ 8:31 pm

It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.

I was surprised when I first heard about this Dubai Ports World (DPW) thing. It didn’t seem like Bush to approve of the fact that several American seaport terminals would be operated by a firm run by the government of an Arab nation. But, only a few news reports later, I grew to agree with the President, that this is a perfectly acceptable thing. I even agree that it would send a bad message to reject the deal, and I even agree with his suggestion that racism is driving a good deal of the criticism.

In case you haven’t heard much about this, I’ll quickly go over my rationale: previously unbeknownst to me (and, seemingly, most Americans, most notably those who serve in Congress) the majority of our port terminals are already owned and operated by foreign firms. The US government oversees security at all of them, and does their own checks, unrelated to whoever’s running the port. DPW is not a fly-by-night operation, it’s one of the largest and most-respected companies in the field. I think a case could be made that we shouldn’t have foreign companies running these ports, that it would improve national security to have them managed by American firms or even (dare I suggest it?) the US Government. But, if one believes that, one should be advocating a complete overhaul of the system, because the number I remember is: 80% of the terminals are already foreign-owned. So, the question before us is: is there any reason to single out DPW? And, unless you are racist or otherwise believe that all Arab countries hate the US equally (even those who are allowing the US to launch attacks on other Arab countries from their soil, as the United Arab Emerates are), I can’t understand why you’d think this company should be singled out. And even if Congress can convince American voters that excluding DPW makes sense here, I can’t imagine that this wouldn’t become a huge selling point to radical Islamic groups who want to promote the idea that the US just hates Arabs. We don’t need any more fuel on that flame…

So, look! President Bush and I really see eye to eye on this one, and most of Congress disagrees with both of us. This may be a first in the six years of this Presidency.

Well, just in case the President has one of his staff keep up on my blog (go ahead and take a few minutes to laugh at that notion… I did), I’ll offer some free advice on where he did our shared cause wrong. Basically it comes down to this: People don’t like you to say “just trust us!” If there was ever a time when the President could get away with that, it hasn’t been in my lifetime (I was born during the Nixon administration). When news of this first broke, the President took his typical stance, something like “we checked it out, you shouldn’t worry about it.” I don’t like it. Usually I disapprove of what he’s advocating, but here I am agreeing with him, and I still don’t like it. And neither does Congress. And he should know better.

So, we’re in this sad state of affairs. Between Democrats who just want to take him to task for anything, and Republicans who are probably shoring up their racist voter bases, Congress is going crazy about this. Ideally, the President should have revealed this in a short speech, explaining things like how many ports are already foreign-owned, and why this company should be considered just as trustworthy as all the rest of them. But, the press got to it before he could spin it, so he starts by playing catch up. Then instead of saying “look, I can understand why this sounds like a bad idea at first blush, but here’s the case for why it’s really a good idea..” and then pelting Congress and the press with all the evidence that the executive branch’s review dug up, he just says “we checked it out, it’s fine, don’t question it.”

Bad move, Mr. President. And it’s too bad, because I agree with you on this one. After the dust settles, maybe we can chat about why it’s philosophically wrong for the US government to be involved in things that could be run by private companies, but the same doesn’t apply to foreign governments. That issue’s too subtle to be talking about right now, though. For now, why don’t you be very open with all the information that you have, encourage Congress to do their review quickly and fairly, and tell the American people that you’re confident that the Congressional review will result in the same recommendation that you’re offering. In short, send the message “you don’t have to trust me. I welcome scrutiny, because this stands up to scrutiny.” But, I know, that’s not your style.

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Sunday, 2006-02-26

Sort recyclables into only TWO piles for curbside pickup

Filed under: journalism — David @ 9:11 pm

I was trying to find out when my recycling pickup day was (I really don’t think I got one of the magnets this year) and I happened upon this Notice from the City of Bloomington that says that we only need to sort recyclables into TWO piles now:

Paper Products
Metal Cans, Glass Containers and Plastic Bottles

This is down from the three that was used to. I guess they figured out a way to separate plastic from metal and glass (doesn’t sound too hard when you put it that way).

Offered here as a public service announcement…

Comments (1)

Thursday, 2006-02-09

Yahoo Groups sometimes(?) misses MX Records??

Filed under: geek — David @ 9:23 pm

(Ok, warning, this message is far geekier than my average blog post.)

I talked with someone who said he kept getting kicked out of a yahoo group he was in because his messages were “hard bouncing”. I’ll skip the discovery process, but in the end I found that some (?? Not all!?!) of the mail being sent to him from the group was using the DNS A record for his domain instead of the DNS MX record for his domain.

(don’t say I didn’t warn you)

WHAT??! the whole point of an MX record is to tell MTAs where to send mail. When I first learned about DNS 10 years or so ago, I recall that it was common to include a comment in a BIND configuration file before an A record that said: “For braindead MTAs that don’t understand MX records”. Now, ten years later, Yahoo suddenly has such a braindead MTAs?? What is going on?

And then… only sometimes?? In some ways that’s even more baffling. All I can figure is Yahoo has some new or old code running on one of its countless servers, and whenever it happens to hit that one, this problem happens. For most domains, the A record is the same as the MX record, so they probably don’t notice right away. But I sure hope they get a clue. I tried to send them one, but they sure didn’t seem to be welcoming it. My message about their MTA’s handling of DNS records is probably in a pile of queries about how to create new entries in an address book. sigh Maybe this blog entry will shame them into fixing the problem….

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Ann Coulter: Just don’t go

Filed under: journalism — David @ 11:59 am

An open letter to Bloomington Lefties:

As I’m sure you know, Ann Coulter will be speaking at the IU Auditorium on February 23. I have a suspicion that some of you are planning on staging some kind of demonstration which will interrupt her time on stage. I implore you not to do this. There are two reasons I think this would be a bad idea: 1) it won’t do any good, and 2) it will do bad. At the very least, consider what good you hope will be accomplished by such a demonstration.

Do you have a vision of calling out a few words that will leave Ms. Coulter speechless and embarrassed, exposing the vacuity of her arguments? It will not happen. She’s heard it all before, and she’s very comfortable dismissing it. She’s probably already got a come-back line prepared for anything you might say. This woman is no slouch.

Do you just feel the need to let the world know that not everyone at IU agrees with her? Don’t worry, the world knows. If you feel you must express yourself, there are much better ways to tell this to the world. Write about it in your blog or something. :)

Do you have a hope that there will be interesting political debate at this talk? Ridiculous. I mean, first of all, it’s a ~~lecture~~speech, it’s not a debate. Who would she debate? You? Interrupting her time with catcalls? Ridiculous. But, even worse, this is a woman who wrote a book called How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must). Read it, and you’ll find that the way she recommends talking to a liberal is by making sure they don’t have a chance to talk (she makes the preposterous claim that liberals don’t want to talk in anything more than soundbites… In my experience, most liberals want to overtalk their subject matter… but I digress), by ignoring any compliments that they offer, and making sure that they get angry. And, I mean, the title of her talk (which I, in the great tradition of Dave Barry, must assure you that I am not making up) is with “Liberals Are Wrong About Everything!” (I presume, but do not know, that the exclamation point is included by her). Does this sound like a forum for reasonable debate?

I guess those are about the only reasons I can think of that you might think it would do good. Let’s talk about why it will do bad.

I disagree with Ms. Coulter on the vast majority of subjects, but there are quite a few things about which we agree. One of them is that interrupting someone’s well-deserved time on stage is rude. Now, there may be times when being rude is called for, but this is not one of them. Ms. Coulter is a well-known author and political thinker (yes, that’s right, she is a political thinker) and there is absolutely no reason that she shouldn’t be welcomed to speak at any university.

Ms. Coulter is also extremely skilled at rallying support for her cause by demonizing people who are rude to conservatives. So, just stay out of the trap. Stage a demonstration and I bet you anything that after you are escorted away by security, the Auditorium will rockin’ loud with first-pumping conservatives, feeling justifiably pleased that Ms. Coulter was allowed to continue. But it won’t stop there. Ms. Coulter will simply add the experience to a long list of examples she has of why Liberals are all bad. The fact that this would be using your actions to inappropriately represent everyone in the Democratic party and politically left of them will not slow her down one bit. She’s a master of this. (After listening to the first couple of chapters of How to Talk to a Liberal (if you must), I noticed I was starting to feel guilty about my affair with Monica Lewinsky. “Oh, right! That wasn’t me!”)

I could go on, but hopefully you get the point. Now, some of you might feel like you should attend to be exposed to different ideas. I sympathize with that, and perhaps you should. This is part of what led me to listen to one of her books on tape. You might want to save some time and just read a few items off of her website. But if you do go, don’t expect it to be anything other than what it will. She is vitriolic. She is the epitome of liberal bashing. She has no compunction about it. Be prepared to be hit with an onslaught of insults for believing what you believe, and set your sites no higher than to hope to weed through all of that to actually hear some of the reason behind her beliefs. Yes, she has reasons, and some of them even make some sense to me. I just wish that she would talk about them without being so insulting. But hey, she wouldn’t sell nearly as many books that way, would she?

If you really feel you must protest, I recommend simply standing outside the auditorium with signs that say something like “We welcome Ann Coulter even though we disagree with her” and pass out leaflets with well-reasoned arguments against her positions along with links to her website and some of your choosing. But really, I recommend just not going. You’re not going to convince conservatives or even moderates or undecideds to believe what you believe by interrupting her talk. The idea that you might succeed at that makes about as much sense as thinking that the we will discourage Anti-American sentiments and behaviors in Muslims by attacking Islamic countries with the US military.

P.S. After formulating most of this blog post in my head, I happened across this columnist’s take on the same thing in the IDS. Our reasoning is not the same, but the result is: Just don’t go.

Comments (3)

Monday, 2006-02-06

John didn’t invent “Old Flattop”

Filed under: what I did today, journalism — David @ 11:03 pm

Cleaning my house a bit, I decided to put on some music, which turned out to be Chuck Berry. During a song called “You Can’t Catch Me” I was very surprised to hear him sing “Here come old flattop, he come groovin’ up..” What?? Must consult The Orb.

Needless to say, a Google search did not disappoint. That page actually says “John famously lifted” the line (originally “he was movin’ up with me”), which of course makes me feel like I should have known. (I kind of like that use of the word “famously” which I’ve felt a bit attuned to since NPR reported, on the occassion of the death of the “Queen Mother”, that she “famously” said during WWII that she wouldn’t move to the US because “The children can’t go without me, I can’t go without the King, and he can’t go.” I like that line too…) Anyway, if it’s supposed to be known famously, then I should spread the word, right? Mostly I just thought it was remarkable that such a signature line was not even original.

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Saturday, 2006-02-04

Looping Music

Filed under: music & dance — David @ 12:18 pm

I just heard K. T. Tunstall interviewed on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday. Scott Simon introduced her as a “one woman band”, playing multiple instruments and singing all at the same time. “How do you do that?” he asked repeatedly after she performed a song like this.

Coincidentally, tonight at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, Andrew Bird is headlining a sold out show. I was introduced to Mr. Bird’s music when he opened for Ani DiFranco at a show I saw a couple of years ago. I did not hear the interview with him on Weekend Edition Sunday about a year ago. Apparently Scott Simon didn’t either, because if he had, he probably wouldn’t have been at such a loss as to how Ms. Tunstall did what she did.

I’m sure I have an advantage over Scott Simon on understanding this. I’m a musician, and I’ve played with electronic gadgetry of the general sort that these musicians use to build their layered sound. And, perhaps because of that, when I hear these types of performances, I come away more impressed with the electronics than with the performers. This is a shame, because both of these musicians impressed me with their (traditional) musical abilities. Mr. Bird plays his violin very well, and his whistling is remarkable to say the least. Ms. Tunstall’s voice is so lovely that I didn’t even mind her joke about Ella Fitzgerald being her voice teacher. But, yeah, when either of them get into that layered-loop effect, I find that the music suffers.

It’s an amazing technology. We’ve all got to wowed when we first hear it, and I’m no exception to that. But for me, that first hearing was years ago. I’m not wowed anymore. What I find now is that I think about how they build these soundscapes, and the limits that the technology places on them. They always have to build the sound one layer at a time. If they want harmony, they have to first sing or play one line, then the next, etc. Then, once the layers are going, their options are to keep repeating or to stop repeating, at least for a while. I believe I noticed instances in both of their music where a loop dropped out for a while, and then came back. Again, it’s great that their gadgets have that ability. But even with it, I find that the implications of this approach to making music are very limiting, with the result being that no matter how different two artists may be, if they use this layered-loop approach, the results ends up sounding kind of similar.

I’m not a musical Luddite. Nor am I opposed to lots of repetition in music. Music like Steve Reich’s Come Out fill me with awe. But in that case, Reich is specifically focusing on electronics and repetition, and listening to it we find that we learn fascinating things about sound that we’d never dreamt of before. Mr. Bird and Ms. Tunstall, in contrast, seem to trying to build a sound that makes it sound like they are magically creating a band all by themselves. If either of them led a large band, the sound of the band would probably be a fair amount like they layered-loop sound that they make by themselve. But, if they actually had the bands, their hands would not be tied when they were writing the songs, and I’d rather hear it that way.

Of course, in a world glutted with highly talented musicians, if they took that approach, would they reach even the level of fame that they have? Would I bother writing a blog post about them? Would I even give them a second thought if I heard them? Likely not. So, there’s a publicity component that also cannot be denied.

It’s all so complex. But, what it comes down to for me is that my favorite of the songs that Ms. Tunstall performed on the radio was the one where she just sang and played the guitar.

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Branch Beauty

Filed under: what I did today — David @ 8:49 am

I hope, and expect, that for as long as I live, scenes like this one will never fail to fill me with wonder. The photo, taken this morning out of my bathroom window, really doesn’t do it justice.

When I was in college, shortly after the peak of society’s interest in fractals, Pete and I stayed up late (and by the standards of my college years, that’s really saying something) one winter night writing programs to draw simple Julia Sets (or something very similar to them anyway, it was a fractal recipe out of the book Chaos by James Gleick). After a short sleep, I woke up to go to class, and some amazing frozen rain was thickly covering all of the branches of all of the trees, all the way to the tips. They glistened brilliantly in the morning sunlight, and the similarity to the fractal images floating in my brain were inescapable. I’d seen such things before and since, but this was the most beautiful such scene I can recall. And, of course, the fractal factor made it even more striking.

So, every time now that I see a scene like this one, I’m reminded of that amazing morning.

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Thursday, 2006-02-02

“Free Market” and “Good for Entrepeneurs” are not the same

Filed under: journalism — David @ 9:59 pm

(I just can’t write a simple blog entry, can I?)

I find our nation’s relationship with intellectual property troubling. So, when I hear or read news coverage about the issue, my ire is frequently raised. This happened this evening when I heard this quote (which you too can hear) from Vergil Daugherty on Marketplace:

If you’re a capitalist, if you believe in free markets, then the [US Patent] system is working fine, and I don’t see anything broken with it at all.

Mr. Daugherty is the CEO of Economic Inventions LLC, and he holds this patent on a trading idea that some people are calling XPOs — expirationless options.

(I had a hard time finding that patent (I hope the US Patent and Trademark Office’s website doesn’t get nominated for any usability awards), mostly because I didn’t know how to spell the guy’s name. I still can’t find anything about the other inventor they interviewed, whose name sounded to me like “Judd Bowman”, but must be something else, because they said he held a patent and the uspto.gov site showed no patents by that name. Definitely a weakness of radio.)

I’m sure not an expert on these things, and reading the actual patent application wasn’t very enlightening to me. But I did find three other references to his patent on the web. First I found this one, which is an academic paper that suggests that Mr. Daugherty’s invention offered practically nothing new beyond ideas that had been presented in the academic literature of economics decades ago. That idea was echoed in the second article that I found, although it certainly saw it a bit more favorably. The third article was by far the most informative, and also the most favorable to Mr. Daugherty’s patent.

I am skeptical (at best) of software patents, business practice patents, and other “soft” patents that aren’t actual hardware inventions. Actually, I’m skeptical of almost all patents, especially those issued in the Internet era. This one is certainly no exception. There seems to be reasonable doubt as to whether Mr. Daugherty’s idea should have qualified for a patent under current US law. But, I personally am in no position to assert anything about that.

What interests me more is the underlying philosophical issue relating to intellectual property and economics. What upset me about Mr. Daugherty’s comment was equating belief in free markets and patents. Patents are clearly government interference in the marketplace. At risk of exposing my lack of understanding of Mr. Daugherty’s invention, I’ll use it to illustrate why:

Suppose I need some cash, but for some reason I don’t want to sell some stock I own in Acme, Inc. right now (maybe I want to attend Acme’s annual shareholder meeting…). So, I offer to sell an option to buy it at a given price, at ANY time in the future (no expiration date). If anyone buys that from me, I believe I would owe a royalty to Mr. Daugherty. If I don’t pay it, he could sue me. If I don’t comply with the suit, I’ll eventually get the police after me (for contempt of court, or something).

This type of contract sure doesn’t seem very complicated. It’s probably been done before. It’s certainly been written about before. And yet, now, because of our intellectual property laws, the coercive power of the government is behind the idea that I should have to pay a patent holder just for carrying out this transaction. That is not a free market.

Mr. Daugherty could have taken a more free market approach. He could have just started a business specializing in such transactions, written computer software that would have enabled such transactions, and otherwise consulted with people on the value of this kind of transaction. If the idea has merit, he should have had little trouble making money this way. He would have saved the undoubtedly huge amounts of money and energy he spent securing the patent. And the idea would have been available in the marketplace much sooner. However, his potential earnings are much greater with the patent, which of course is why he took the trouble of getting it. By bringing the government into the equation, his potential for getting rich skyrockets.

So, my point (like my orginal vision of this post) is actually simple: patents are government interventions in markets. A case can be made that they are worthwhile interventions, and there might even be some extent to which I would agree with that. But in his statement, Mr. Daugherty, in my opinion, is confusing “free market” with “good for entrepeneurs”. They are not the same thing.

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