Keeping quotation marks in their place

Tonight we parked behind a punctuation fussbudget on wheels, one with a penchant for giving smugly ironic bumper sticker advice. I always wonder about this sort of ironic advice. Since the people who need the advice presumably won't get the joke, the real point seems to be to say, "You're an idiot, and I'm not." Be that as it may, I wondered how many people shared the pet peeve about misused quotation marks. Thousands, apparently, devote significant time to this pressing issue. And if I'd never gone looking for them, I would never have found The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks, complete with its own quotation marks for emphasis and irony.

"Good versus evil isn't a strategy"

Madeleine Albright's: headline on the LA Times Op-Ed page really said it all. She always did have a way with words.

[T]he administration must stop playing solitaire while Middle East and Persian Gulf leaders play poker. Bush's "march of freedom" is not the big story in the Muslim world, where Shiite Muslims suddenly have more power than they have had in 1,000 years; it is not the big story in Lebanon, where Iran is filling the vacuum left by Syria; it is not the story among Palestinians, who voted — in Western eyes — freely, and wrongly; it is not even the big story in Iraq, where the top three factions in the recent elections were all supported by decidedly undemocratic militias.

It briefly made me nostalgic for a day when we had a government run by intelligent, liberal grown ups. I wasn't the only one. Shakespeare's Sister:

The whole thing's worth a read, but please be duly warned that you may be left a sobbing mess at the memory of a time when we had an intelligent and thoughtful Secretary of State working in allegiance with a president who knew where Iran was without looking at a map...

But was that really the way it was, back in the day?

Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it.
— 60 Minutes (5/12/96)

Our nostalgia for a day when liberal, intelligent grownups were in power shouldn't blind us to one of the Clinton administration's great failures. Clinton and Albright didn't start the sanctions, but they failed to stop them, through lack of political will and power when faced by a Republican Congress. Had the sanctions been stopped earlier, today's war might never even have happened — though maybe that's wishful thinking, given the gang we've got now. And no, Madeleine, the sanctions weren't "worth it."

Truth flies like a sparrow

Sometimes when I’ve been wrestling too long with words and the ambiguity of language, I start repeating to myself the mantra, “time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.” Its familiarity is somehow reassuring, perhaps because it always leaves me feeling I’ve passed some sort of miniature Turing test that proves I’m human, not a computer (the ambiguity trips up language parsing programs, which have a hard time analyzing the different meanings of “flies” and “like” in the two clauses). Sort of like being able to read the wavy letters in the online “type the letters you see in the box” spambot filters.

I was about to go to bed when I suddenly wondered whether there were any other plays on the word “like” that followed the same format. Did a Google wild card search that didn’t turn up much, except a few people who changed the first clause to “truth flies like a sparrow.” This doesn’t have nearly the impact. You get hung up on the flighty little sparrow and don’t have that strong sense of forward motion that tricks the mind into perceiving the second “flies” as being about motion rather than insects.

But I was curious about the phrase “truth flies like a sparrow” and googled that. Came up with this little gem from an old issue of the Daily News in Sri Lanka, introducing a column about the epidemic of rudeness seemingly plaguing that nation, “Being polite won’t kill you.”

Someone once said that truth flies like a sparrow, love flies like an arrow and fruits fly like bananas. I know there is something quixotic and wholly whimsical about this convoluted theory. But the words wouldn't have found a permanent niche in my mind if it was said differently. I mean, would it have piqued my curiosity if she said that truth sets you free, love hurts and fruits... they just go plop?

Linguistic evolution: The original harmless bit of wordplay has mutated into a convoluted theory, changing its meaning entirely and killing off the fruit flies along the way, simply by transposing the letter “s” like a fragment of bad DNA. That much seems clear. But have Sri Lankans become more polite? Or do good manners still fly like bananas and go plop?

The shape of the universe as ruffled crochet work

Is this what the universe looks like? Some say the universe is a hyperbolic space (find out more at the link). But nobody could figure out a practical way to model it. Until:

In 1997 Cornell University mathematician Daina Taimina finally worked out how to make a physical model of hyperbolic space that allows us to feel, and to tactilely explore, the properties of this unique geometry. The method she used was crochet.

Dr Taimina’s inspiration was based on a suggestion that had been put forward in the 1970’s by the geometer William Thurston (also now at Cornell). Noting that one of the qualities of hyperbolic space is that as you move away from a point the space around it expands exponentially, Thurston designed a paper model made up of thin cresent-shaped annuli taped together.

But Thurston’s model is difficult to make, hard to handle, and inherently fragile. Taimina intuited that the essence of this construction could be implemented with knitting or crochet simply by increasing the number of stitches in each row. As you increase, the surface naturally begins to ruffle and crenellate. Taimina, who grew up in Latvia with a childhood steeped in feminine handicrafts, immediately set about making a model. At first she tried knitting - and you can indeed knit hyperbolic surfaces - but the large number of stitches on the needles quickly becomes unmanageable and Taimina realized that crochet offered the better approach.

Find out more about this and other visual manifestations of the intersection of art and mathematics at The Institute for Figuring, which currently exists only in cyberspace and an LA post office box. It's the creation of Margaret Wertheim, author of "The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace," and her twin sister Christine.

Go. Explore. Also check out the exhibit of computer assisted origami and its connection to protein-folding. Learn to crochet your own hyperbolic space.

So who will we attack between now and November?

Jonathan Singer comments in My DD that Democratic chances of winning back control of the House seem to be improving rapidly. He cites Gallup historical data saying that in elections since 1974, when congressional approvals ratings fall below 40%, the party in power loses an average of 29 seats. Democrats need half that. And approval ratings have dropped to 27%.

And if the historical trends prove true this fall -- if the Democrats pick up the average of 29 seats, or even only half of that number -- the United States House of Representatives will be back in Democratic hands come January.

Trouble is, the Republicans see the same stats. They won't give up without a fight — or at least a diversion. So, what do they have in mind? What's the October Surprise going to be?

Embedding GPS data in digital photos — a hack today, a feature tomorrow?

GPS applications are reshaping the way we look at the world, as all the overlay applications for Google Maps are demonstrating. You could almost say they’re reshaping our view of space and time.

One of the things that make digital photos hard to file is that the jpegs themselves aren’t searchable by content. The computer can’t tell you what’s pictured in the file. Sure, you can tag them with labels using different software packages — but what casual shooter has the time or bothers to do that? Being able to search by time and location would make it much easier to find that missing photo needle in your digital haystack. Wouldn’t it be great if in addition to the time a photo was shot, it’s exact geographic location could also be embedded automatically?

Turns out you already can. It’s a computer hack today, one that’s rapidly becoming a feature. On the hacker side, here’s an amazing QuickTime time-lapse video by David Goldwasser of a drive from Tucson to San Diego. It’s a split image, and on the right a streaking little red comet shoots across a map in sync with the view through the windshield. It’s really eerie to watch.

On another page of his website he shows what he calls a “field test of GPS tagging of photos to GPS data/tracks.” What that means is that as you mouse across miniature camera icons overlaid on a city map, photos taken at that exact location appear on screen. Again, it’s a hypnotic merging of cartographic and photographic ways of perceiving the world.

Goldwasser had to play around a bit to get his camera, GPS and computer to talk to each other. Here’s his introduction to GPS hacking. But you can count on today's hack to be tomorrow's camera feature — and in one case, tomorrow is already here. The Ricoh G3 is a bit pricey and mainly intended for business uses.

But clearly the day is coming when this will be a standard feature of consumer digital cameras (or maybe it will enter the mainstream through mobile phones first). Just as iTunes goes out on the internet to look up track titles when you rip a CD, it’s probably not that long until iPhoto goes out and fetches geographic labels for your digital photos automatically.

Maybe we are destined every 40 years to elect a former vice president who "lost" eight years earlier, left public life, and then reinvented himself

In 1960 Mayor Daley’s graveyard vote put JFK over the top. Richard Nixon chose not to contest the result, and left public life. In 1968 the “New Nixon” was elected president. In 2000, Jeb’s Florida machine, with the help of the Supreme Court, put his brother over the top. Al Gore contested, but bowed to the inevitable, and left public life. So in 2008 is history going to repeat itself, with ideology and party labels reversed? I hope so. (Thanks to The Last Duchess who urged me to steal the poster from her site. I did and suggest you do, too, and pass it on.)

These musings were triggered by a variety of web browsings tonight. Shakespeare's Sister writes about viewing "the unseen Gore campaign video" and shedding tears over what might have been (she has a link to the video). And then Crazy Apple pointed me to a couple of articles about the new Al Gore: One in the American Prospect and another by Ben Smith in the New York Observer back in January, writing about the world premiere of a documentary at Sundance featuring Gore.

Mr. Gore is the star of a documentary entered in the Sundance Film Festival, An Inconvenient Truth, and all the questions were for him. The director, Davis Guggenheim, stood quietly to his left; a bit farther away was the woman who made the film happen, Hollywood Democratic power player Laurie David, the wife of comedian Larry David.

The documentary opens in May. Gore has said he is uninterested in running, but what is he suposed to say at this stage? Both articles talk about Gore looking better and better to people who hate Hilary's position on the war and are looking for a candidate strong enough to stop her — partly because Gore is the only other Democrat who could raise enough money on short notice, and partly because they regret what might have been and like the way he has been handling himself. Interestingly, neither mentioned the Nixon precedent, but if there's one thing Tricky proved it was that it's never over until it's over.

Where does mere incompetence end and actual criminal negligence begin?

You don’t have to be a conspiracy nut to wonder why the Bush administration has totally escaped being held accountable for the 9/11 attack that happened on their watch. Reading about testimony from the Moussaoui trial is enough to make anyone sick.

As Moussaoui's death-penalty sentencing trial resumed here after a week's delay to investigate witness tampering by government lawyer Carla Martin, Minnesota Special Agent Harry Samit said on cross-examination that he wrote FBI headquarters about 70 memos about Moussaoui's likely terrorist plans between his arrest on Aug. 16 and Sept. 11, all to no avail.

Republicans mercilessly attacked Roosevelt for deliberately letting the Pearl Harbor attack happen. There were endless investigations and insinuations. It was an effective campaign — even now, nearly 65 years after the fact, there are plenty of people who still think he had something to do with it. If you think I’m exaggerating, try typing Roosevelt responsible Pearl Harbor into Google. You’ll see what I mean. Actually, we Americans blame our presidents for most everything, usually. So, when the shoe is on the other foot, what’s with Bush's free ride? Especially considering testimony like this.

Samit acknowledged that he had accused Maltbie and other supervisors of taking a "calculated risk" with 3,000 lives to protect their careers in testimony to the Justice Department. Maltbie now heads the Joint Terrorism Task Force in the Cleveland FBI office.

Mere incompetence is one thing. We expect that of this administration. It’s par for the course. But why, exactly, would Mr. Maltbie think it was a good career move to ignore repeated warnings about Moussaoui. What’s that all about? And if he did, why is he still working for the FBI today?

It's early in 2006 and the great manliness debate of the 2008 election is already getting started

The NYT helped launch Harvard political science professor and conservative gadfly Harvey Mansfield's "Manliness" into public significance with a double-barreled blast from its editorial shotgun: Walter Kirn's witty dissection of the hapless mysogynist in the Book Review and David Brooks' promotion of his fellow neocon as a deep thinker, over on the other side of the Times Select wall. The great manliness debate of 2008 has begun.

Over at Pandagon, Amanda comments on the review in the NYT:

Kirn puts his finger on how comical this version of masculinity is, and I have to concur. I’ll admit, I’d find it pitiable if it wasn’t so funny–Mansfield is promoting this definition of masculinity as toughness and courage and whatnot and the men eating it up are the sort who are so uncourageous, so insecure that they can’t feel good about themselves unless they get reassured constantly that their penis makes them superior to half the human race.

But I suspect what's going on here has more to do with political mischief than with propping up insecure male appendages. Karl Rove proved in 2004 that painting Kerry and his fellow Democrats as girly men could trump Republican responsibility for an ever more unpopular war. If it worked once, why not try it again in 2008? Especially as a woman may well head the Democratic ticket.

The war being that much more unpopular, they just have to get an earlier start, work harder and bring on bigger guns. The usual suspects, the conservative think tanks, aren't enough — they need to throw real professors into the fray. Harvard prof Harvey Mansfield obligingly steps to the plate. At first you can only laugh, the poor professor is so out of it. Or rather, the cloistered academic lavishing praise on "manly men" like Donald Rumsfeld would seem laughable in his anachronistic male chauvinism — if he weren't so clearly a part of a well-orchestrated larger campaign. From that perspective, it's not so funny after all.

Why would we trust an administration as corrupt as this with data mining?

We need to talk more about data mining, and less about wiretapping. As the polls confirm, focusing on wiretapping simply plays to the way the Bushies have framed the NSA issue — when listening in on terrorists, they really don't need a warrant, it's a meaningless technicality, and anyhow, FISA is so pre-9/11.

The trouble with talking about NSA data mining is, of course, that it's classified. Those in Congress who were briefed were sworn to secrecy. The rest of us can only read between the lines, try to interpret the hints and whispers we get in the press now and then (Times Select archive warning).

During the last decade, mathematicians, physicists and sociologists have advanced the scientific study of networks, identifying surprising commonalities among the ways airlines route their flights, people interact at cocktail parties and crickets synchronize their chirps. In the increasingly popular language of network theory, individuals are ''nodes,'' and relationships and interactions form the ''links'' binding them together; by mapping those connections, network scientists try to expose patterns that might not otherwise be apparent. Researchers are applying newly devised algorithms to vast databases -- one academic team recently examined the e-mail traffic of 43,000 people at a large university and mapped their social ties. Given the difficulty of identifying elusive terror cells, it was only a matter of time before this new science was discovered by America's spies.

All in all, it seems likely that the real reason the administration didn't go to FISA for approval is that FISA could not issue a warrant for data mining because it has no authority to do so. A wiretapping warrant involves listening in on specific individuals, not plugging into virtually all of the nation's digital telecommunications. To do so would require new law.

Data mining may or may not be useful in fighting terrorists. It may simply increase the size of the haystack the needle is in. Assuming that NSA is trying to use sophisticated software coupled with supercomputers to model networks, links and connections between nodes revealed by the data, the trouble is, once you start breaking down telecommunications data into its constituent underlying structures, you don't only learn about possible terrorists. You also can learn about other network relationships — such as those in business enterprises and other large groups. Someone unscrupulous enough could abuse the information on a truly vast scale.

The public needs to learn what's really at stake. That's why we need to talk about data mining. A lot of people seem apathetic about their own electronic privacy these days. Perhaps they figure the horse is already out of the barn, that they have already given up so much data to credit bureaus, website cookies and whatnot, that there's no point worrying about it. But they might have a different opinion of large-scale data mining by the government. After all, the potential for abuse is virtually unlimited.

Instead of worrying so much about keeping Russ Feingold and his censure resolution at arm's length, Democrats should be drawing the public into an issue of what's really going on, and what's at stake.

Happy Equinox! Did you balance your egg?

They say that today’s the day that all the gravitational forces are in perfect harmony and you can balance a raw egg on end — and only on this day. Well, not really.

The egg legend apparently got its start in 1945 when a reporter for Life Magazine wrote a story about a Chinese ritual in which people stood eggs on end on the first day of spring. But the Chinese recognized the first day of spring in early February, or about six weeks before the spring equinox, which now marks the first day of spring. Later, in 1983, one hundred New Yorkers got together on March 20 to balance eggs, an article about the event appeared in the New Yorker magazine, and the legend grew.

The truth is that if you can get a raw egg to balance upright on the day of the spring equinox, you can get it to balance any other day of the year. The pull of gravity or the position of the sun in the sky has nothing to do with it.

If you’re going to try, here’s a hint: Make a little mound of table salt. Press the upright egg into the little pile. Make sure it balances, and then blow away the salt. Call in your friends and amaze them with your handiwork. Heighten the impact with Equinox mumbo jumbo.

"Jagged Little Pills"

That's the title of Lauren Slater's Op-Ed in Sunday's NYT about how our exaggerated expectations of the latest miracle psychotropic drug regularly seem to crash and burn about every 20 years or so. Now it seems to be Ambien's turn. What's with the 20-year cycle?

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that a new drug has patent protection for about that length of time, after which it loses much of its profit power. Maybe drug companies are highly motivated to quash consumer complaints only until their patents expire.

Whatever the reason, it looks as if today's sleep-walkers, sleep-eaters and sleep-drivers will probably soon have to move on to the next new thing. If Slater's right, soon there won't be much money in feeding their habit.

Tangled up in intellectual property gridlock

It's reaching the point that you soon won't be able to even think without violating someone else's intellectual property rights. You'll certainly have a hard time innovating or creating anything new. Increasing numbers of facts are being patented (which used to be impossible) and more and more ideas are receiving copyright protection (likewise). "Fair use" is becoming an endangered species.

How bad have things gotten? The lede of Michael Crichton's Op-Ed in the NYT today, entitled "This Essay Breaks the Law," dramatically summarizes the extent of the problem.

• The Earth revolves around the Sun.

• The speed of light is a constant.

• Apples fall to earth because of gravity.

• Elevated blood sugar is linked to diabetes.

• Elevated uric acid is linked to gout.

• Elevated homocysteine is linked to heart disease.

• Elevated homocysteine is linked to B-12 deficiency, so doctors should test homocysteine levels to see whether the patient needs vitamins.

ACTUALLY, I can't make that last statement. A corporation has patented that fact, and demands a royalty for its use. Anyone who makes the fact public and encourages doctors to test for the condition and treat it can be sued for royalty fees. Any doctor who reads a patient's test results and even thinks of vitamin deficiency infringes the patent. A federal circuit court held that mere thinking violates the patent.

While it sounds absurd, Crichton points out it's a case that will be argued before the Supreme Court Thursday. It used to be that you couldn't patent a fact of nature like a gene, but that was in the old days, before biotech heated up.

For example, the human genome exists in every one of us, and is therefore our shared heritage and an undoubted fact of nature. Nevertheless 20 percent of the genome is now privately owned. The gene for diabetes is owned, and its owner has something to say about any research you do, and what it will cost you. The entire genome of the hepatitis C virus is owned by a biotech company. Royalty costs now influence the direction of research in basic diseases, and often even the testing for diseases. Such barriers to medical testing and research are not in the public interest. Do you want to be told by your doctor, "Oh, nobody studies your disease any more because the owner of the gene/enzyme/correlation has made it too expensive to do research?"

While the problem is particularly acute in medical research these days, it affects virtually all areas of human endeavor — including what we can do in our own homes with music or other media we buy. Intellectual property lawyers are finding more and more opportunities to ply their craft. (At the rate we're going, somebody is bound to be sued because their baby has been found to have one or more patented human genes. Indeed, maybe one of these days we'll be paying patent royalities on the act of procreation itself.)

Congress and the courts are going to have to get real, or things will become so fenced-in it will be impossible to do much of anything. Yet their track record doesn't inspire confidence. Perhaps the recent threat of losing their Blackberries served as a wake-up call. Here's hoping.

Pattern surfing on Metacritic

I read film reviews because I find them interesting and provocative, but only incidentally as a guide to what movie to see. This was especially true of my all-time favorite, Pauline Kael — loved her reviews, her humanity and wit, the way she expressed herself, but really hated some movies she liked, and vice versa.

No one person can accurately reflect all your tastes and interests, so when trying to decide where to spend your hard-won movie dollar, it’s nice to have a variety of views to triangulate as an aid in decision-making. Ebert and Roper’s “At the Movies” offers some of that, but it’s just two guys, and in the broad scheme of things, they’re both kind of middle-of-the-road.

For a broader range, there’s Metacritic. Not only does it aggregate in one place links to just about every review that’s been posted on the net, but it also ranks the reviews numerically and color codes them for convenience. The numerical ratings are based on normalized, weighted averages — check here if you want to know more about what that means.

Metacritic allows you at a glance to see patterns in critical response to a film. What critics love the movie, who hates it, and who’s in the middle? It gives me more to go on, and some patterns coincide more with my own interests. For example, the reviews of two films I’m planning to see— “V for Vendetta” and “Ask the Dust” — fall in two very different patterns — which suggests to me films with very different, distinct points of view.

Graph them, and the curves are almost complementary. At the extremes, those who like the one, tend to dislike the other just about as strongly, with reactions moderating toward the middle, ending up with the Onion and Roger Ebert, who gave each film a favorable but not overwhelming review. Check them out.

By far the most negative review of “V for Vendetta” on Metacritic is from the WaPo. The writer almost seems to be frothing at the mouth.

"V for Vendetta" is a piece of pulp claptrap; it has no insights whatsoever into totalitarian psychology and always settles for the cheesiest kinds of demagoguery and harangue as its emblems of evil. They say they want a revolution? Then give us a revolution, one that's believable, frightening, heroic, coherent and not a teenagers' freaky power trip.

Almost sounds like a vendetta. Lots of folks in Washington and many of their establishment colleagues seem to be getting really riled up about it. I wonder why. It’s just a movie, after all.