Some interesting travel advice:

road-warrior laundry secret: rinse out the plastic hotel trash can, put your clothes in it along with some shampoo, and tread on them with one foot while you take a shower.

There have been times that would have been useful.

Two quick links from Godin: breakfast and business.

I recently wrote that I didn't feel much sympathy for a computer tester who lost her job because she pretended to be blowing a whistle at the CIA when she really didn't have any evidence of what she was claiming. One guy I do have sympathy for is Chip Salzenberg. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a good source for the details that doesn't make Chip look like the most harrassed programmer in history. So, with forewarning, you can get more details at Geeks Unite.

Chip used to work at a company that did things he believed were illegal, and if not illegal they were definitely something the company would rather keep hidden (because the company had a policy to deny the facts, and the facts weren't well-known inside the company). Chip investigated and made sure it wasn't just a rumor. He then wrote a letter to the CEO saying that if things weren't changed, he would quit.

A few hours later police arrested Chip for stealing trade secrets. And, while I feel sympathy for him (largely because he actually investigated things), Chip did download the evidence to his home computer under his real login name (another Perl programmer was known to act a little differently on his job). Since he wasn't working for the government Chip didn't have any whistleblower protection. Eventually the case against Chip was dropped, but it could be restarted at any time.

Oh, and the letter? The company said they understood it was a letter of resignation.

If anyone can help me, I'm trying to figure out why the UN argues so much when it draws up a resolution if it plans to enforce only half of the resolution (that is, why refuse to give Israel any ground if you won't honor that side of things anyway)?

Seth Godin on fast food marketing (if you can't read the picture, it says "An email offering a free Starbucks iced coffee beverage was distributed by Starbucks partners (employees) with instructions to forward it to their group of friends and family. Unfortunately, it has been redistributed beyond the original intent and modified beyond Starbucks control. Regretfully this email offer will no longer be valid at any Starbucks location effective immediately"). Personally, I'm shocked that people emails would be copied, forwarded, and even modified!

The working definition of terrorism is "violent acts committed against civilians with the intent of changing public policy." Why are there people working so hard to determine that any particular act of violence isn't terrorism when the person involved either explicitly says it is, or leaves quite a few clues (or, how many people decide to commit suicide by blowing themselves up in a crowded place unless they wanted to kill some of that crowd, for that matter)?

Coyote blog was busy today, with several excelent posts:

Post on McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform (and, yes, it does affect bloggers if there's any money changing hands to run the blog; courts can be tricky in deciding what's commercial speech);

Second-hand smoke/global warming;

A voting strategy;

Banking;

Racial politics;

and another global warming post.

In another post I said that I'm interested in research regarding how to make information easier to find. I have to admit that Google has done a great job solving that problem, but even Google makes mistakes.

One of the tricks to getting solutions is to look at who else has whatever problem you have, and see what they've done. For instance, the CIA deals with massive amouns of information, and needs to make sure it's easy to find. But the information doesn't fit into a database model as well as a sales history would. Turns out, one of the CIA's tools is to use blogs. In my opinion, that's brilliant.

***

As an aside, I don't feel so bad about the "software contractor" in this story. First, her writing doesn't sound all that special ("writing about lunch meat one day, the war on terrorism the next" isn't all that hard; writing well about different activities is). Second, she claimed to have read classified documents, and when asked about it she denied having read classified documents; the CIA leadership had to determine which statement was a lie, and whether she could be trusted if she ever did get her hands on classified documents. On top of that, CIA management had to determine if the lie had an effect on CIA employees reading her blog, since it could have sounded more believable than when the New York Times accused the CIA of torture. And, while I don't mean this as a terrible jab, her job was to "performance and stress test" computer programs. That really doesn't require much training. You find ways to feed a lot of information to the program. Understanding the results and coming up with solutions, that's hard; but stress testing's easy.

If you haven't already heard, Senator Ted Stevens is willing to spend $200+ million dollars on a bridge for fifty Alaskans, but believes $15 million (over four years) may be too much for an open database of funding/pork projects.

Apparently Alaska doesn't require a whole lot of its senators. Neither does Massachussetts or California (I couldn't let that one pass, but I'll admit that Senator Dole's been a disappointment too, and I won't be voting for her ever again).

NOTE: For the record, I would support the Senate using its Constitutional authority to "with the concurrence of two thirds, expel a member" (and, yes, I have a few members in mind). Yes, that's largely for discipline issues or when a lawmaker becomes a absolute liability on the rest of government. But the Constitution doesn't put any restrictions on it. And one-third of all Senators are up for re-election in even-numbered years, so a lot of noise could get us halfway to expelling Senator Stevens.

No, it's not "fair," but to me it doesn't matter. It's not fair that Alaskans get a cash payment each year for having the oil pipeline up there, and still get $200 million (from the rest of the country) to buy a bridge to nowhere.

This is too good to pass up.

If you thought the pressure to get married was tough, you ain't seen nothing:

In Japan, commentators have identified the "parasite single" who lives off society instead of doing his duty to start a family

In Germany, where the childless rate is the highest in the world, at 25 percent, the best-seller lists have been full of tomes forecasting demographic doomsday. In "Minimum," the conservative commentator Frank Schirrmacher describes a "spiral of childlessness."

Just a quick overlawyered link for fun.

According to the story, [snip story, click on link to get the details]. But some details troubled me. I wrote the reporter seeking more detail; his reply is edifying. ...

like you, i assume, i wasn't at the may trial. ... if you need additional details wal-mart officials may be willing to talk about it, or perhaps the victim or her attorneys. best of luck and thanks for reading.

Wait, did the reporter just tell me that the gaps in his story require more reporting that I should be doing? ... (Note that the story doesn't even claim that Wal-Mart refused to comment.)

The rest of the article is about the laws involved and all that. But that little "great, if you want details, go an dig for them" attitude is both astonishing and unsurprising.

Does anyone else find it interesting that the first sentence in a CNN article about the Plame fiasco ends with the phrase "two sources familiar with Armitage's role tell CNN"? By the way, while the article refers to two authors making money off the story ("The Armitage connection to the Novak column is also outlined in a new book titled "Hubris" by Michael Isikoff and David Korn."), those two writers are not the unnamed "sources familiar with Armitage's role."

I think we ought to put somebody in jail until we find out who those sources are.

One of the blogs I like reading is TJIC. And while some people here may be reading what he's writing, I found a particular post there very interesting/entertaining, so I'll share it with everyone.

You're a publisher of children’s textbooks, and you have a problem. ... Kids confined to wheelchairs often suffer from afflictions that affect their appearance. ... You can always do what Houghton Mifflin does ... keep a wheelchair on hand as a prop and hire able-bodied children. ...

A Houghton Mifflin spokesman claimed that able-bodied models are presented as handicapped only as a last resort. But according to one of the company’s regular photographers ... publishers have to keep track of all the models they use for such pictures, so that a child posing as disabled in one chapter isn’t shown running or climbing a tree in another. ...

The cofounder of PhotoEdit Inc., a commercial archive that specializes in pictures of what it calls “ethnic and minority people in all walks of life,” [ says that ] pictures of authentic Hispanics who happen to have blond hair or blue eyes don’t count toward the Hispanic quota “because their background would not be apparent to readers.” In other words, rather than expose schoolchildren to the fact that “Hispanic” is an artificial classification that encompasses people of every color, publishers promote the fiction that all Hispanics look the same. ...

Some images are banned from textbooks because they are deemed stereotypical or offensive. ... McGraw-Hill’s guidelines specify that Asians not be portrayed wearing glasses or as intellectuals. ... “One major publisher vetoed a photo of a barefoot child in an African village, ... on the grounds that the lack of footwear reinforced the stereotype of poverty on that continent.”

Pure gold!

You can avoid the technical details, but after explaining how no less than seven researchers rediscovered one of the coolest little ideas in programming, this email includes the lines:

There must be a moral to this story of continual re-discovery;
perhaps someone along the line should have learned to read.
Or someone else learn to write.

That learning how to write (and how to make it possible to find things to read) is one of the big questions I like to research.

Robert Jordan breaks a little silence. Most of the post is trivial, but fun. And it is nice to hear that two of my favorite authors get along with each other (and I know Orson Scott Card gets along with Martin, but that's not relevant to this post).

The interesting quote is

Mario Plateau asks how can we deal with death, and Anne asks whether I am afraid of death. You deal with death the way you deal with breathing, or with air. Death is a natural and inevitable end. We all come to it eventually. I’m not eager for death, certainly, and I intend to fight it, but neither am I afraid of death. I made my accommodations with death a long ago, when I was a young man. Face to face with it.

I have to admit, I think those accomodations made "face to face" with death were part of an initiation ceremony. But, overall, I think it's great advice.

Wow, my hundredth post.

Two funny stories from Seth Godin:

Standing in the airport security line. The guy behind me ... [is] busy dumping toothpaste and shaving cream in the garbage. Then he grabs an aftershave product and says, quite loudly, "I think I can bring this... it's a balm."

And

palinode (PAL-uh-noad) noun

A poem in which the author retracts something said in an earlier poem.

[The illustrator and humorist Gelett Burgess (1866-1951) once wrote a
poem called The Purple Cow:

I never saw a purple cow,
I never hope to see one;
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I'd rather see than be one.

The poem became so popular and he became so closely linked with this single
quatrain he later wrote a palinode. ...

No, I won't tell you what he said. You'll have to click the link.

Wow. Turns out that climate change is a complex topic.

First, a Russian scientist believes we're headed for another Little Ice Age. I don't agree with him, but it's interesting that several scientists thought that in the '70s. The best part of the article is the line "During the 16th century, the Baltic Sea froze so hard that hotels were built on the ice for people crossing the sea in coaches." Do you think that little tidbit of information would help explain why the world is the warmest it's been in a thousand years -- maybe because the last thousand years included a large period of below-average temperatures?

Then, it looks like a warmer earth has led to larger glaciers in some parts of the world. Apparently a warmer region leads to more humid air (if there's water in the region, otherwise it leads to a nastier desert), and if it's not too warm, that comes down in the form of more rain or snow. Hmmm, so global warming may affect some parts of the world differently than other parts of the world. Why don't they explain that on the news? Why didn't the Day After Tomorrow make that distinction? How about An Inconvenient Truth?

And how inconvenient is that truth?

UPDATE About a week after I wrote this, the Boston Globe ran an article about a particular scientist that has a problem with all the certainty in what we, the ign'rnt public, are allowed to hear from the climatologists.