oct 2005 / greg goebel
* Entries include: banana horticulture, battle of Palmdale 1956, Afghan opium, virtual machines against digital decay, Japans rises, Democrats be careful, Transdimensional, drought in Africa & donkey protection, underground coal fires, London Underground map, Dick Feynman, global car industry, new PC file system approach, subliminal advertising, Magnatune music sharing, suburban wildlife problems.
* NO BANANAS? According to an ECONOMIST article ("Going Bananas", 22 October 2005), bananas are the fourth largest food crop in the world, after wheat, rice, and maize. Bananas are a staple of the diet of about 400 million people, and are commonly raised on small farms in the tropics. In the US, bananas are a sweet, put on breakfast cereal, but they mean survival in many areas of the world, with the starchy plantain banana in particular acting as an analogue to the potato.
Another interesting fact about bananas is how they grow. All banana strains in existence today are derived from two strains, Musa acuminata, originally from what is now Malaysia, and Musa balbiana, from what is now India. Bananas don't grow on trees, the plant instead being a very structurally robust herbal, with a "pseudostem" erupting from the ground in a whorl of fronds that, eventually, end up as bunches of bananas. The acuminata banana is only about the size of an okra pod or a sweet pickle, with the fruit carrying peppercorn-sized seeds; the balbiana banana is about four times bigger and the fruit is crammed with seeds. The plantain is a hybrid of the two types.
Somewhere along the line a farming culture found a mutant line of bananas that had vestigal seeds and decided to cultivate it. The lack of seeds in domesticated bananas is a very important fact, because it means that banana plants have to propagated by replanting cuttings taken from the base of a parent plant. That means that the genetic diversity of bananas is not very great, and so the global banana crop is highly vulnerable to diseases.
In the 1950s, nearly all bananas grown commercially were of a single strain, the Gros Michel, which was said to have been unusually tasty. It was all but wiped out by a fungus named "fusarium" that came from Panama. The Gros Michel now only survives in remote areas of Uganda and Jamaica. The current commercial banana strain is the Cavendish -- about the only type of banana sold in the West out of the wide range of strains, a bizarre situation compared to, say, apples -- but it is now threatened: a mutant strain of fusarium arose in 1992 and wiped out banana plantations in Malaysia. The disease remains local to Asia for now, but nobody expects this state of affairs to last much longer. Other strains of bananas grown as staples in Africa and Asia are also presented with serious fungal and other threats.
Banana research is dominated by the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. Although Belgium might seem to be a strange place to be growing bananas, the university has cultivated 1,175 different strains, learning how to cryogenically freeze samples so they can be preserved. The location has advantages for banana research: since bananas are not grown there, the specimens can neither pass diseases or pests to local crops nor pick them up in turn.
Hybridization of domesticated banana strains is difficult, since they have little ability to reproduce sexually -- but they can do so with a lot of help in the form of researchers accumulating pollen from male plants to inseminate female plants, and then sorting through the fruit that results for seeds. A tonne of such bananas will produce a handful of seeds, only about half of which will germinate. Researchers there are also working on transferring genes between strains to improve disease resistance, and a disease-resistant strain is now being field-tested in Africa. There is a certain irony in that humans, having decided to preserve a plant line that would have died out on its own, are now forced to directly intervene in its evolution so that it does not die out in the future.
* BATTLE OF PALMDALE: America during the height of the Cold War was a different place than it is now, with one of the particular features being the fact that the authorities could get away with a lot more. A case in point was the day when the US Air Force bombarded a southern California town.
During the 1950s, interceptor aircraft often used salvos of unguided rockets to shoot down intruders. At least, that was the plan; the idea wasn't all that practical, though during the Vietnam War there was a case or two in which US aircraft shot down North Vietnamese MiG fighters with unguided rockets. These incidents were pure freaks of chance: strike aircraft carrying unguided rockets for ground attack loosed them at a MiG to scare it off, and managed to score a hit.
The standard US unguided rocket, then and now, was the 70 millimeter (2.75 inch) diameter "Folding Fin Air Rocket (FFAR)", which was carried in pods, with the rockets popping out spring-loaded tailfins after launch. The rockets jinked all over until they stabilized, which wasn't too much of a problem for blasting a spread of rockets at a truck convoy or the like on the ground, but seemed unlikely to score a hit on an aircraft unless it was a big one. The usual comment of those familiar with supposed use of unguided rockets in interceptions was: "It was a wonder they could hit anything with them."
The Germans had used unguided rockets successfully during World War II to break up American bomber formations, but the target in that case was a large number of bombers flying in a small chunk of sky, huddled up for the mutual protection of their defensive guns. In the nuclear age of the 1950s, a single bomber could destroy an entire city and the nice fat target of a big bomber formation was history.
However, there was a reason for going with unguided rockets in the 1950s: collision-course intercepts. Traditionally, to shoot down a bomber, an interceptor got on its tail and blew the intruder out of the sky with automatic cannon, but with the development of modern radar and electronics, it was possible to vector an interceptor on a "collision course" against an intruder from the front or side. The problem was that the two aircraft flashed past each other at high relative speed -- so quickly that bomber crews on the receiving end of practice intercepts might not even see the interceptor coming and going -- meaning that there was very little time to score hits with automatic cannon. The only way to do that at the time was to loose a salvo of unguided rockets at the target; one hit by a rocket, with its relatively big warhead, would be lethal.
There was also the problem that combat aircraft could often soak up many cannon hits, and so using rockets even for traditional tail-chase intercepts made a certain amount of sense. The real solution was the guided air-to-air missile (AAM), but such weapons were only under development at the time. They wouldn't come into widespread service until the 1960s, and wouldn't become really effective until well into the 1970s.
In any case, in the 1950s there were several interceptor aircraft that were armed only with unguided rockets -- no cannon. I had heard a vague story that two such interceptors had tried to shoot down a target drone that had lost radio control -- "slipped the leash" -- and failed to destroy it despite using up all their rockets. I finally got all the details from an article in AIR & SPACE magazine ("Fast, Cheap, & Out Of Control" by Peter W. Merlin, August-September 2005). The story turned out to be interesting, and it's no surprise it was obscure: the military would have preferred to forget about it.
* On 16 August 1956, a Grumman F6F-5K Hellcat target drone was sent aloft from the Point Mugu Naval Air Station, in southern California up the Pacific coast from Los Angeles. The Hellcat had been one of the great US Navy fighters of the Second World War, but now it was reduced to the status of a target, painted red and flying under radio control.
Or at least it was supposed to be flying under radio control. Although the target area was over the Pacific, the Hellcat decided to head towards Los Angeles instead. Nobody wanted the unpiloted aircraft to crash into a school or whatever, so two US Air Force Northrop F-89D Scorpion interceptors were scrambled from Oxnard Air Force Base, not far from Point Mugu, to destroy the wandering drone. The Scorpion was a subsonic jet aircraft, with a two-man crew and a sophisticated (by the standards of the time) all-weather radar fire control system, armed with a pod of 52 FFARs on each wingtip. The two F-89Ds carried a total of 208 rockets in all.
The Hellcat actually passed over Los Angeles; of course, shooting it down over the city would have been lunacy and the interceptor crews could only hold their breath and wait for the drone to get clear. It finally decided to orbit over the town of Santa Paula, where the interceptor crews tried to get opportunities to take a shot at it. They were using an automatic fire-control mode, but as was not unusual for high tech avionics in those days, the fire-control system malfunctioned, and they didn't get a single rocket off.
Then the Hellcat decided to meander for a time, eventually turning back towards Los Angeles. The Scorpion crews switched to manual fire control and loosed salvos of rockets at the drone. They missed the Hellcat, the rockets falling to the ground to start a raging brush fire. They tried again, with no better luck, starting two more brush fires, one of them fueled by oil rigs in the unintended target area. Finally, as the drone headed toward Palmdale, the Scorpions fired their last rockets at it. They missed again.
This time, the rockets fell into Palmdale. A piece of shrapnel smashed through the living-room window of one house, passing through a wall to end up in a cupboard. Another fragment passed through a garage and home. A car's front end was shredded when a rocket fell in front of it. Astoundingly, nobody was hurt. Explosive ordnance disposal teams from Edwards Air Force Base picked up 13 dud rockets from around Palmdale. It took hundreds of firefighters two days to put out the three brush fires, after the blazes had consumed hundreds of acres.
The Hellcat finally wandered over the Mojave Desert near Palmdale, where it ran out of fuel, falling to earth in an uninhabited area but cutting three power lines doing it. By the records, the incident seems to have attracted very little public attention. Later models of the F-89 carried Falcon guided AAMs and were likely more effective. They could also carry the Genie missile, which was unguided but carried a small nuclear warhead -- leading to the passing thought that Palmdale might have got off lucky.
The author found fragments of the aircraft in that area in 1997. He also cited the names of the aircrews of the Scorpions in the article; I was reluctant myself to pass them on, but I do have to mention that the last name of one of them was "Einstein".
* POPPY FIELDS: An article in THE ECONOMIST ("Not What The Doctor Ordered", 8 October 2005) points out that the international effort to destroy Afghanistan's opium poppy agriculture is trapped in an ugly dilemma: the majority of Afghan farmers don't have any other cash crop to raise, and it will take a long time to fundamentally change the system.
The French-based Senlis Council suggests an alternative: legalize growing opium poppies. This is not as backwards as it sounds, since opium poppies are legally grown in Australia, India, Turkey, and France for production of legitimate pharmaceutical opiates. Given that medicines are in short supply in poor countries, large-volume opium production from Afghanistan might be what the doctor ordered.
The problem is that, in countries where opium poppies are grown legally, the business is under very tight control. Nothing in Afghanistan is under much control at all. Since illegal drugs in general fetch a higher price than legal ones, the temptation to divert opium production to the black market would be very high. Senlis acknowledges this, but claims that legalization would be the best of all the bad alternatives. Westerners involved in opium eradication in Afghanistan fear that the idea will muddy the waters and are giving it short shrift.
* VIRTUAL MACHINES: An ECONOMIST article ("A New Way To Stop Digital Decay", 17 September 2005) reports on efforts to preserve data stored on digital media. It might seem like data stored on a plastic CD-ROM is much more permanent than that printed on paper, but technological progress means that in ten or twenty years, the technology to read that CD-ROM may be long obsolete and hard to come by.
In 1986, for example, the BBC built a multimedia database for Britain and distributed it on laserdiscs that could be read by a BBC Micro home computer. This was essentially a proprietary system, and all the material was nearly lost; somebody spent over two years using a creaky old BBC Micro to port the database to a PC format.
The only way around this problem is to make sure that archival materials are updated to current media on a regular basis. However, even if that's done, there's another problem: file formats. For example, the popular GIF image file format is now being replaced by the more capable PNG format, and so in a decade or two or three, it may be hard to find anything that can read the GIF format.
The National Library of the Netherlands has a solution: file decoders written for a "virtual machine", essentially a computer implemented in software that runs on top of real computer hardware. The idea is not new; old videogames are often run on PCs without any changes to the game software, simply by implementing software that operates like the game machines that originally ran the games. If a new type of computer is introduced, all that has to be done to run the file decoders is to port the virtual machine to the computer.
The implementation is actually being performed by IBM. Work is now being done on decoders for GIF and JPEG image files, with a decoder for Adobe PDF document files next on the queue. IBM is also talking with pharmaceutical companies to develop decoders for data files storing results of clinical trials.
* SUNRISE: A survey in THE ECONOMIST of contemporary Japan ("The Sun Also Rises" by Bill Emmott, 8 October 2005) uses the recent elections in Japan as a springboard. Junichiro Koizumi, prime minister since 2001, had tried to push a bill privatizing the Japan Post service through the Japanese Diet (Parliament), and when it was rejected he took drastic action, dissolving the Diet and calling for new elections. In the election, he did all he could to block the reelection of members of his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) who had voted against the Japan Post bill, putting his own candidates in their place. There were those who suspected this was an act of political "seppuku" -- ritual disembowlment -- but this September Mr. Koizumi pulled it off.
Privatizing the postal service might not sound like the stuff of political revolutions. In itself, it wasn't, but it was a landmark in a process of gradual social and political turnaround that seems likely to continue. Why this is so requires a bit of background.
During the boom years of the 1980s, Japan's industries were the object of global admiration (as well as jealousy and fear). Even when things were at their best, however, there was somewhat more appearance than substance to things. Where this was most true was in the belief that wise government policies had created this economic miracle. To be sure, the Japanese government did some things right, but success was more in spite of the political system than because of it. In truth, while Japan's industries were world-class, Japan's government was second-rate at best.
Politics were dominated by the LDP, creating an effective one-party state. Politics were almost completely cynical, based on the acquisition of power and influence, with factions in the LDP maneuvering with each other for control. When the economic bubble finally popped in the 1990s, the deficiencies of the government were laid bare -- too addicted to pork-barrel contracts; politicians whose ethics would get them into big trouble in most Western states; and a financial system that was rotten with bad loans, granted mindlessly during the boom times and resulting in a mountain of debt.
There was high unemployment, even poverty and homelessness. Suicides soared, not too surprising in a nation where suicide is wired in various ways into cultural traditions, but crime rose somewhat too. The Japanese, once regarded as frugal, now only save about 5% of their income. Still, the economic changes were not all bad, at least on the macroscale, though not necessarily all that comfortable to the people on the bottom of the economic pyramid. In the good times, Japanese industry had a tradition of paternalistic "lifetime employment", though this was something more of a custom than a hard and fast rule. Still, there was resistance to firing personnel even when they were excess. In the new regime, companies hired on large numbers of "furiba" -- from the German "frei arbeiter" or "part-time worker" -- resulting in much greater labor flexibility.
With the economy now finally starting to pick up again, thanks in good part to exports to China, full-time employment is starting to pick up again, but the industries have become used to the idea of a more flexible approach to labor, and aren't unhappy about the fact that Japanese labor is, these days, not all that expensive. There is a looming problem that the population is graying and the labor market will shrink, but Japanese companies have been pathfinders in the use of industrial robots, and current social circumstances are encouraging for further automation. The companies may not find keeping up with a declining labor market all that difficult, ensuring a high GDP per head.
In the meantime, the ghastly debt, kept afloat by the reluctance of the government and banks to pull the plug on "zombie" companies that couldn't make good their repayments, has started to fall drastically, to less than half the level of 2001. This reduction was mostly due to mergers that finally allowed the bad loans to be properly written off. The banks are feeling much healthier.
Changing times have also meant macroscale improvements and microscale discomforts for businesses. Although Japan is stereotyped as overregulated, formally speaking the regulatory environment has traditionally been loose, governed mostly by traditions and obnoxiously vague laws that government bureaucracies could implement as they saw fit. Now corporate entities are being required to conform to more specific laws ensuring transparency and accountability, like they would in the West. To be sure, the new laws are a mixed lot, with some making life easier for company presidents, and enforcement is still weak, but things seem to be headed in the right direction.
The government itself is undergoing a comparable form of discipline. Mr. Koizumi's privatization of Japan Post is one of the centerpieces. Japan Post, it turns out, is no mere postal service, it also operates as the biggest personal-deposits banker and personal insurer in the country. This not only meant the government obstructed the operations of private companies in those fields, it also gave LDP politicians an immense source of "black budget" that could be siphoned off without accountability. Japan Post was indeed a distinctively Japanese institution.
The reform that Mr. Koizumi pushed through was also distinctively Japanese, since it will privatize Japan Post over ten years, in gradual stages. The Japanese do not like to do things abruptly. There was unusually large turnout for the special election, with voters clearly preferring the gradual approach to the more drastic prescriptions of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), the LDP's main rival: the DPJ was crushed in the polls.
The privatization of Japan Post was, however, somewhat symbolic of changes, many of which had already been underway. The government had been cutting pork-barrel contracts, in particular working to get public works projects under control. Building projects had been a particular source of patronage, with the absurd result of seeming to pave the country over completely, ruining much of Japan's natural splendor of mountains, streams, and forests. Now there's an effort emerging to deal with the worst eyesores. Finally, new laws are imposing greater accountability and transparency on the government itself, while changes in the LDP are undermining the power of party factionalism.
Finally, there is the question of Japan's relationship with the outside world. The alliance with the US remains strong, surprisingly so with the differences in mindset and sometimes unhappy history between the two nations; it gives Japanese some confidence in their dealings with their rising trade rivals -- China, Taiwan, and South Korea -- and potential enemies -- the unbalanced North Korean regime. North Korea has pushed Japan to measures that would have been unthinkable in the 1980s, such as launching spy satellites -- built with American blessing and support.
Indeed, there is a touch of belligerence in Japanese leadership these days. Mr. Koizumi has caused controversy by going to the Yasukuni shrine, a memorial to the nation's war dead. Being a war memorial is not a bad thing in itself, of course, but Yasukuni also enshrines convicted war criminals as heroes, which is grating, and even claims that Japan's war was a crusade of national liberation of Asian nations from Western colonialism. This claim merely annoys Americans and other Westerners, but generates rage in China, Korea, and the Philippines, where the war is generally remembered in terms of Japanese barbarities. There are alternate options for remembering the war dead that are less controversial. Japan still remains basically pacifistic and in fact has been gradually working towards the construction of regional economic and security alliances.
Mr. Koizumi plans to leave office for private life in September 2006. He is 63 and wants to have time to listen to music and go out to dinner. He is a political loner and will have little to keep him involved in politics once his time in office is done. The best odds candidate for his successor is 51-year-old Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, a member of the politically prominent Abe clan and a strong supporter of Mr. Koizumi's reforms.
There's no saying that the changes Mr. Koizumi has done much to implement will not be reversed, but this is Japan, where nobody likes to change things too fast. Once embarked on a course, the Japanese tend to stick to it.
* NO BUBBLY: An essay in THE ECONOMIST ("Hold The Champagne", 8 October 2005) points out the generally quiet pleasure of Democrats in the Bush II administration's bad case of second-term blues: a troubled and unpopular intervention in Iraq, a flatfooted reaction to national disasters, high officials indicted for leaking the name of a secret CIA agent to the media. Mr. Bush now is starting to get flak from the right -- the left has always detested him, that's not news -- since conservatives who have been unhappy about the Bush II administration's lack of fiscal discipline and efforts to override the other branches of government are not as willing as they were to swallow their misgivings.
That gives Democrats some hope of believing the next president won't be a Republican. However, as the essayist pointed out, that's getting way ahead of things. The Democrats do not seem to be benefiting much from the problems of the Republicans. As House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert put it in a recent meeting of fellow GOP politicians: "I submit to you that even today, as tough as things seem, it is much better to be us than them."
The problem is that simply having an adversary in disarray is not enough: the Democratic Party needs to have good ideas, and such good ideas seem to be in short supply. The problem behind the problem is the fact that the Democrats are stuck in a tug-of-war between moderates -- centrists who are pro-business, in favor of fighting terrorism, and not all that happy with the idea of gay marriage -- versus the extremists, who are anti-capitalists, call the US the worst of the terrorists, and are engaged in a frontal assault on "traditional values" in their online blogs.
To be sure, the Republicans have a similar split between moderates and their extremists, but the Republicans have been able to hold the middle ground. The extreme Democrats believe that they can win in 2008 by pushing their agenda energetically and mobilizing the hard core, but simple demographics prove this is a delusion: the Democrats will need to influence the centrists to win.
Mr. Bill Clinton had his unarguable, even well-documented, faults, but he was able to win the presidency, twice, by moving the Democrats towards the center. This important lesson is lost on the extreme Democrats, who give the impression that to them maintaining ideological purity -- to an agenda that seems a little less than carefully considered -- is more valuable than actually winning elections and having real power to influence events.
As for myself, I don't give a proverbial fig if a Democrat or Republican wins the next election. What I don't like is extremists of any sort running things, not even extremists whose goals I am sympathetic to. It would be a pity if the Democrats cannot provide a weight to counterbalance that of the Republicans. There is a great deal to be said for a balance of power and good reasons to fear when the balance tips too far in one direction.
* TRANSDIMENSIONAL: I spent 14 years working in customer service for The Corporation (never mind which one, doesn't make any difference) and had a wide range of experiences with unusual customer requests. Since I dropped out and started writing for the Internet, I've been amused to get some of the same sort of inquiries over email from readers.
Most of my correspondence is pleasant, even flattering, but a few times a month I get inquiries for quotes on parachutes, plastics, various types of helicopters and aircraft, and so on. This was strange even by my past experience at The Corporation. I kept wondering how people could look at a website that gave no suggestion of being associated with a business and get the impression that it was -- it's less surprising that they blow over the disclaimer on my email page that I'm not running a business, I know perfectly well some folks won't bother to read it. The requests for some reason are often from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Jordan, places like that.
I suspected it was part of some sort of a scam. If so, despite the fact that I try to keep up to date on the latest fads in scams, I've never been able to figure it out. My current theory is that they do a search on the terms relating to what they want on Google; out of coincidence my site comes up near the top of the list; and they automatically assume the match means they've found what they want. It was getting a bit weary to get this sort of thing over and over again, so I finally decided that if they wanted to pretend I was a company, I might as well pretend it myself, and came up with: TRANSDIMENSIONAL LLC.
TransDimensional is a diversified corporation on many planets of the Galaxy
and a large number of parallel Earths. Its products range from time-travel
technology to photon torpedoes to gravitational field bombs to terminator
robots to terraforming services ... ah, you get the idea. I enhance my
TransDimensional corporate response every time I get a request for a quote.
I had real fun with the address data at the end:
TRANSDIMENSIONAL LLC Headquarters Office
2548 Governor Benedict Arnold Street
San Francisco
Pacifica Province
Dominion of West America
Earth(1879654)
Nobody's answered yet. I'm expecting somebody will reply one of these days,
but if so I will refer them to a URL on the "Multiverse Web" to find the
sales office on their planet or parallel Earth: "For access to the
Multiverse Web, please contact your ISP." These days, I'm almost looking
forward to requests for quotes.
* Along the same lines I get people sending me bizarre questions on things that have absolutely nothing to do with anything on the site. I get the sense that they feel I'm some sort of super search engine. I suspect it's due to the same reason: they find me on Google and don't bother to investigate further. In any case, I hand back equally bizarre answers.
I got an email from a company in Peru that was trying to unload a set of batteries for a submarine and wanted to know if I had any likely buyers for them. I replied: "You're in real luck. I just happen to have a neighbor who bought a submarine which, astoundingly, did not have batteries. I'll make sure to pass your email address on to him."
I didn't hear from him again. Oddly enough, some folks will reply to answers like this, blandly pushing forward regardless: "Clues are not in our vocabulary." I block their email address.
One correspondent that I hit with the surreal treatment replied, sounding in a bit of a sulk: "OK, I won't bother you any more." I sent back: "No bother. I was enjoying myself." I could imagine his ears getting red. I know that was mean, but I didn't create the absurd situation, in fact took all reasonable steps to avoid it, and it wasn't like I was saying something nasty about his mother, or even him. Still, I should probably try to restrain myself.
* DUSTY AFRICA: An article in THE ECONOMIST reports ("From Hand To Mouth", 8 October 2005) that the nations of southwest Africa -- Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi -- are undergoing a severe drought that promises to make living conditions very difficult for the locals. The article goes on to say that droughts like this are fairly common in the region, occurring about every ten years or so.
The problem is not so much the droughts but the fact that much agriculture in the area is generally operating at about a prehistoric level of sophistication. Crops are completely dependent on rains, and if the rains don't come, the crops fail. Obviously, more sophisticated methods are needed, and considering how primitive current methods are, they don't have to be all that much more sophisticated.
Although Robert Mugabe's government in Zimbabwe appears to have little interest in developing a workable agricultural policy -- indeed, the government's focus on public welfare seems to be oriented towards making it worse -- the government of neighboring Malawi is clamoring for help, and with outside assistance has already implemented a few small scale, low tech irrigation schemes. Pumps that look like portable stairclimber exercise machines are used to irrigate small fields, and with the "new" technology farmers are finding out they can raise three crops a year, instead of praying to be able to raise one. One ironic source of agricultural expertise for Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia are white farmers from Zimbabwe who were evicted by Mr. Mugabe's land grabs.
Improvements are possible, but for the moment the situation remains difficult. Things are not all that good at the best of times, the region suffering from widespread AIDS and, at least in Mozambique, the lingering effects of civil war; the drought has only made bad things worse.
THE ECONOMIST reports in a side box that Namibia, in southeastern Africa, has an interesting problem: donkeys in the roads. It can get chilly at nights, and donkeys find the asphault warmer than the ground elsewhere. The result is car accidents that produce dead donkeys and sometimes dead drivers.
A British businessman named Russell Hay almost hit a donkey twice, and so he and a friend set up "Donkey Welfare of Namibia". The organization is raising funds, partly from foreign humane societies, to obtain reflective tags that can be clipped to the ears of donkeys so the beasts can be seen lying in the road. Local schools will be paid small fees to perform the tagging. Donkey Welfare is also thinking of buying donkeys and donkey carts painted like yellow schoolbuses to haul children to school. Namibia has about 200,000 donkeys and there's no reason to pass up a plentiful resource.
* SMOLDERING EARTH: I had heard stories of underground coal fires that went on for years, but it wasn't until I read an article in SMITHSONIAN ("Fire Hole" by Kevin Krajick, May 2005), that I learned the fantastical details of the phenomenon.
Welcome to Centralia, Pennsylvania, in coal-mining country. Many decades of mining left the town and its surrounding area sitting over a lattice of unused mining tunnels, many of which had caved in. In May 1962, local sanitation workers began to burn trash over the entrance to an old mine just outside of town. Soon afterward, smoke began to seep up out of the ground as fire slowly crept its way through the coal seams.
At first, firefighters tried to dig trenches to cut off the fires, but the fires infiltrated beyond the trenches. Then they tried boring holes and pouring down wet sand, gravel, slurries of concrete, and fly ash, but traditionally "flushing" doesn't work, and it didn't in Centralia. State and Federal officials tried to dig another trench, a big one this time, and it didn't work either. Flooding was considered but rejected, because the area was too well drained. Digging a pit that would have had a good chance of isolating the entire fire area would have cost $660 million USD, more than all the property in Centralia was worth even if the ground hadn't been oozing up smoke.
They gave up trying to put out the fire, and it is still burning. At last count, it covered 1.6 square kilometers (400 acres) and was spreading along four arms at 23 meters (75 feet) a year in each direction. It is believed that the fire will burn itself out after covering about 9.25 more square kilometers (3,700 acres) -- which could take over two centuries.
At first, the residents found the situation more strange than frightening; they could harvest tomatoes for Christmas in their heated gardens. Then people began to pass out in their homes from carbon monoxide poisoning. Sections of road began to subside into the ground as the coal beneath turned to ash, and in 1981 the ground opened up and swallowed a 12-year-old boy, who managed to save himself by grabbing onto a tree root. The Federal government finally bought out most of the 1,100 inhabitants of the town -- it was much cheaper than trying to stop the fire -- and leveled their residences with bulldozers. About 600 buildings were destroyed.
About a dozen die-hards, mostly old folks with no place else they want to go, cling on. The government doesn't want to evict them, though they could be poisoned in their homes, or even swallowed up into the ground along with their residences. Wild turkeys, deer, rabbits, and even the occasional bear walk down the streets where there were once houses; tourists drop in on occasion to see the little town out of the Twilight Zone.
There are dozens of other underground coal fires in the coal mining regions of the US. Pennsylvania has 38, the largest number for any one state; one's been burning since 1915. China has the most of any one country; one that had been burning for a century was just put out in 2003 after four years of effort. The coal fires amount to a substantial source of air pollution and a waste of an otherwise valuable resource, but in so many cases trying to extinguish the blazes has proven so difficult that people adopt the same solution as was applied to Centralia: let it burn.
* LONDON UNDERGROUND MAP: I was looking through the TV listings and found a short program on the Public Broadcasting Service on "The London Underground Map". I was intrigued, since the London "tube" system is the world's oldest and one of the biggest; detailed information on its history is a bit hard to find and anything I could obtain was all for the good. I was a bit surprised to find out the program, which was a BBC production, was strictly on the map of the London Underground -- and further surprised to find out that the map was both ingenious and significant. In fact, a copy is displayed as an exhibit in the New York Museum of Modern Art.
* The London Underground covers 400 kilometers (250 miles) of track, with 273 stations. 2.5 million passengers ride the Tube daily; without the map, many would find it much harder to get to where they wanted to go.
The Tube system is the product of an evolution from the mid 19th century, initially consisting of different subway lines operated by different companies -- a fact that would tend to promote confusion in itself. In 1933, a London Passenger Transport Board was established to bring order to the chaos of the Underground (as well as surface buses). The first chief executive of the board, Frank Pick, was strong on design, and imposed his stamp on the system, from building new terminals using modern design concepts down to remaking the logo to up-to-date style, creating a distinctive and uniform corporate identity for the system.
One aspect of the makeover was the introduction of a revolutionary map. Ironically, Pick had nothing to do with it. Harry C. Beck, a 29-year-old engineering draftsman who worked for London Transport, came up with it on his own initiative while he was on temporary layoff. He submitted it to the board and it was rejected, the board members thinking it was "too revolutionary". Some of Beck's friends recognized that he had a good thing going and encouraged him to try again. The board shrugged and decided to give it a go on a trial basis, printing a few hundred copies. Much to their surprise, Beck's map was a smash hit. Maps couldn't be printed fast enough.
Previous maps of the Underground system had been maps in the traditional sense of the word. They were scaled representations of the city geography, with the subway routes drawn in appropriately. Beck was the sort of person -- by no means universal among engineers -- who could actually get his head into what somebody using his product actually needed, not a trivial feat since users may not be able to specifically articulate their needs in the first place. What did someone riding the Tube care about curves or literal distances? All the rider wanted to know was how to make a connection, get from one station to an ultimate destination. In other words, the real issue was the topology of the network.
Beck's map got rid of the winding spaghetti of the old maps with a nice, neat, color-coded "connection diagram", with the core of the network represented as a rectangular ring and spur lines at diagonals off the ring. Since the core was the most heavily traveled part of the system and the densest in terms of the number of stations and lines, the core was represented in a larger scale than the spur lines, to provide the most detail where it would do the most good.
The map was not only easy to use, it was esthetically pleasing. Frank Pick showed little enthusiasm over the map, but he had created an environment where it could be more easily accepted by encouraging modern art concepts in posters and other displays in the Underground. Modern art's main point of divergence from classical art is the belief that it was not necessary to provide a literal representation of objects, a notion that the map embodied.
In fact, some have wondered if there were modern art influences on the map, for example the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, whose works consisted of grids of rectilinear lines and blocks of color -- not as silly as it sounds; modern magazine layouts and the like owe a lot to Mondrian, just look at 19th century periodical reproductions to see how suffocating their layouts were. However, any such influences on Harry Beck were indirect, since his real sources were engineering diagrams. Beck even made a joke of it, drawing up a version of his map labelled as if it were an electrical system diagram.
* Harry Beck was paid the magnificent sum of seven guineas for his map -- which made it an insane bargain for London Transport. Not only did subway riders like the map, it also helped London Transport improve utilization of the system. The spur lines to outlying regions of the system were underused except at peak commuting times; the reduced scale of the spur lines in Beck's map made the spur lines seem much shorter than they really were, helping advertising campaigns that encouraged people to take leisure trips on the Tube to the outlying areas.
Harry Beck kept tweaking the map for the next 26 years, adapting it to additions to the network and tweaking its style. He found it particularly difficult to figure out a way to represent station transfers, coming up with a series of different graphical devices. Ordinary stops on the line were originally represented by dark blobs, but Beck came up with the idea of using simple tick marks instead, much reducing clutter. He did all the work in his spare time, taking notes on pieces of scrap paper that his wife would find everywhere -- in his bedclothes, in odd corners of the house.
By 1949, Beck had finally come up with a map that he regarded as satisfactory. It was even more rectilinear than earlier maps; station transfers were designated by two circles with a "pipe" between them. In 1960, the London Underground dropped his map in favor of one drawn up under the direction of Harold Hutcherson, boss of publicity at London Transport. However, Hutcherson didn't have Beck's knack of making things clear, and Underground riders found his map confusing. Beck's map was restored in 1963, updated by a London Transport official named Paul Garbutt, who also did the work in his spare time. It gave him an appreciation of Beck's skill in design, since Garbutt found that it was impossible to make relatively minor changes without having to adjust the layout of the map as a whole.
Harry Beck died in 1974. By that time, his map was no longer unique. Anyone riding a subway system, trying to navigate through a sprawling airport complex, or even using a city bus system, will have encountered a schematic map that is clearly a descendant of Beck's Underground map. Beck's map continues to be updated as more changes are made to the Underground system, and it remains as valuable as ever in the 21st century.
* ED: The prominent arts / design guru Milton Glaser, famed for his "I <heart> New York" logo, was quoted in the program and made a very interesting comment: "You frequently have the most serious intentions, intellectually, and then you do something, and it turns out to look absolutely dreadful. And all design, basically, is a strange combination of the intelligence and the intuition -- where the intelligence only takes you so far, and then your intuition has to sort of reconcile some of the logic in some peculiar way."
I found this intriguing because I draw diagrams for my physics documents and the like, and go through much the same process. To be sure, sometimes I see a diagram in a book and then basically redraw it in my own style -- playing with colors and arrangement a bit, but really adding nothing that wasn't in the original.
However, some of the diagrams may seem simple but are products of a surprising amount of effort -- some of the stuff I did on relativistic physics paradoxes, and on stirling-cycle engines. As drawings, they were nothing much, but figuring out what to draw was not easy. It can be a real struggle to come up with a diagram that conveys the appropriate information in a way the readers can clearly understand: "Eh, try this ... oh, that won't work ... hmm, there's maybe a better way ... " -- and sometimes the insights just magically pop into my head.
Anybody who's in a creative line of work understands this phenomenon perfectly well, and it's one of the major attractions of the life. There is a certain deep pleasure in waking up at 2:00 AM when the answer to a difficult problem simply materializes out of the darkness.
* FEYNMAN CONSIDERED: I just finished reading James Gleick's 1992 book GENIUS: THE LIFE AND SCIENCE OF RICHARD FEYNMAN -- or maybe I should say finished skimming through it rapidly. It's a typical biography, giving me about three times more than I wanted to know. I'm not slamming Mr. Gleick for that, since he needed to be thorough and the book wouldn't have been salable if it hadn't been: by their nature biographies are usually overstuffed.
The book travels through Feynman's upbringing on Long Island, then his stint at MIT, graduate studies at Princeton with John Wheeler, duty at Los Alamos, and then postwar work that eventually landed him at Caltech. It goes through his construction of quantum electrodynamics, playing him off Julian Schwinger, Murray Gell-Mann, and Freeman Dyson -- then his work in superfluids, tinkerings with genetics and nanotech, and his publications of popular books and the Columbia shuttle accident panel. He didn't die easy, suffering a sequence of cancers, some of them imaginative, that took him down in stages.
As far as his personal life goes, the book plays up his first marriage to Arline, who was tubercular when they tied the knot -- he didn't dare kiss her on the lips at the marriage ceremony -- and died in 1945. If she had held out about another year, she might have pulled through, since antibiotics were just becoming available that could deal with the disease. The marriage caused some problems with his family, since his mother Lucille had good reasons to oppose it and did so, but the rift was eventually patched up.
After that he became something of a rake -- I used to have a roommate along the same lines, it might look fun from a distance but up close it seems more foolish, tiresome, and sordid, just as it does here -- with a four year intermission of marriage to his second wife, Mary Lou, in the early 1950s. The divorce actually made the news, not because of he was famous with the public at the time, but because Mary Lou cited "mental cruelty" in the divorce, claiming he played the bongos too much and did mathematics in his head when he went to bed. He finally settled down with his third wife, Gwyneth, a Briton, and raised a family.
There's a few anecdotes in GENIUS that didn't get much play elsewhere. When
he was a grad student at Princeton he was having an argument with a colleague
about the mobility of sperm; Feynman went away for a bit and came back with a
sample. "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman." Another interesting item was
the colleague who said that following Feynman's thought processes was like
listening to Chinese opera. One of my favorite bits was a side reference to
Francis Crick, the blunt Briton who won the Nobel for determining the DNA
double helix, and was later compelled by his admiring public to create the
following form letter:
Dr. Crick thanks you for your letter but regrets that he is unable to
accept your kind invitation to:
[ ] send an autograph [ ] help you in your project
[ ] provide a photograph [ ] read your manuscript
[ ] cure your disease [ ] deliver a lecture
[ ] be interviewed [ ] attend a conference
[ ] talk on the radio [ ] act as chairman
[ ] appear on TV [ ] become an editor
[ ] speak after dinner [ ] write a book
[ ] give a testimonial [ ] accept an honorary degree
I had to laugh because I get a bit of this sort of thing over email myself --
and I'm not even famous!
The more I know about Feynman, the more he influences my ways of thinking and my writings in physics. I also learn more that I am well off that I never met him, since at least part of the time he acted like the south end of a northbound horse -- definitely a genius, but still mouthy, rude, obnoxious, a terror to students. It becomes more obvious that much of the Feynman myth was a creation of Feynman's own self-promotion.
* GLOBAL CAR INDUSTRY: THE ECONOMIST magazine had an interesting article on the global automotive industry in a recent issue ("Extinction Of The Predator", 10 September 2005), pointing out that the emergence of middle-class consumers in China and India means a huge expansion of the world market for cars, with one expert claiming that 180 new plants producing 300,000 vehicles a year would be needed. The irony, as the article went on to say, is that the established giant automakers are not likely to benefit, in fact they are likely to suffer in the face of more agile competitors who steal their lunches.
The world automotive industry has been under pressure for decades. One of the reactions has been to merge. Mergers of car companies are not new, of course, since automotive production began with large numbers of small manufacturers that were either swept aside or absorbed as the giants began to emerge. By the middle of the 20th century, the US automotive industry was dominated by the Big Three -- GM, Ford, and Chrysler.
The mergers have continued, with GM swallowing up SAAB and Daewoo, while buying into Isuzu, Subaru, and Suzuki. Ford annexed Mazda and Volvo, as well as Aston-Martin, Land Rover, and Jaguar. The biggest recent deals were the DaimlerChrysler merger in 1998 and the Renault-Nissan merger in 1999. In South Korea, seven manufacturers have shrunk to one, Hyundai, in two decades.
Overall, the mergers have not achieved much success. Neither GM nor Ford are very profitable even after all the mergers, though they still are the biggest manufacturers. Usually what happens is that the company being acquired was in decline, and reversing that decline proved difficult. Jaguar is still bleeding red ink for Ford. The DaimlerChrysler merger was partly to restore the fortunes of Mercedes, where quality was slipping in the face of competition from BMW, but Mercedes just kept falling behind. The Renault-Nissan merger has somewhat bucked the trend, since it was carefully done and has proven profitable.
The current winner in the game is Toyota, number three in terms of production, number one in terms of profitability. Toyota has had little interest in mergers, preferring instead to focus on a relatively small number of different lines of cars, building the cars well using efficient factories and giving good value for the price along with good service. Instead of buying up a "prestige" automotive product line, Toyota decided to build their own, the Lexus. Industry observers laughed, but Toyota has had the last laugh, since the strategy was successful. The name "Lexus" might not carry the same weight as "BMW" just yet, but Lexus drivers aren't complaining about what they get for their money. In five years or so, Toyota may well be number one.
It is not impossible that some of the giants like GM may turn their fortunes around. However, one of the lessons of industry is that companies are like people: they grow old and infirm. The old giants pass away, with new ones rising in their place, to eventually wither in turn.
* NO FOLDERS? An ECONOMIST article ("Death To Folders!", 17 September 2005) presents an interesting proposal: that the day of the computer file system based on folders is now past, and something better is needed.
Traditionally, PCs have used a "hierarchical" file system, with a directory of files also including directories of other files, with those directories in turn also including directories of other files, and so on, constructing a file system "tree". This has long been a workable scheme, but now it is under strain. PCs have huge hard disks, tens of gigabytes, with massive numbers of files that are hard to sort and keep organized.
On the other side of the coin, PC users are now comfortable with search engines, particularly Google, which have now established themselves as resident PC search engines as well as Internet search engines. PCs have had file search facilities almost since day one, of course, but they have not been all that convenient to use. In 2005, Apple released MacOS X 10.4 AKA "Tiger", which came up with a new idea. When a PC is idle, the OS scans through the hard disk and indexes files. The user can then perform a detailed query using the OS's "Spotlight" search engine that returns the appropriate files immediately. Microsoft is working on a comparable scheme.
Search engines do have problems with things like image or audio files, where there's no simple way for the engine to figure out what the file contains. However, increasingly such files have "tags". For example, digital cameras usually stamp a picture file with the time and date the picture was taken using a tag, and MP3/WMA audio files use tags to describe what song is in the file, who the performer is, and so on. There's no reason in principle why a tag system can't be created to allow users to build their own tags to keep their files organized.
The end suggestion is that a search / tag scheme might well be more convenient than a traditional hierarchical file system. For those who see this as too drastic a change, it should be noted that it less rules out the traditional model than makes it more flexible. The MacOS Spotlight search engine allows the user to create "smart folders" that contain lists of files, as well as smart folders of their own, recreating the hierarchical file system in a dynamic fashion that can be restructured with relative ease when needed. In ten years, the notion of a fixed folder may seem impossibly quaint.
* HIDDEN PERSUADERS: I was paging through a pile of discard magazines I had picked up in the local library, and on the back of one I saw a liquor ad. It immediately brought back memories going back to the 1970s.
During that decade, an author named Dr. Bryan Wilson Key published a series of books titled SUBLIMINAL SEDUCTION (1974), MEDIA SEXPLOITATION (1976), and THE CLAM-PLATE ORGY (1980) that insisted that billions of dollars a year were being spent by advertisers to create ads that had subliminal sexual cues. When I was going though college at the end of the decade, I was talking to a classmate named Jeff and the subject came up. I scoffed at it, but Jeff said: "No! Look!" He grabbed a magazine with a liquor ad on it. There was a couple walking in the evening, with the woman carrying a bag of groceries. In the top of the bag was a melon, and a loaf of French bread was sticking out the top. The arrangement of the melon and the loaf had a certain sexual suggestiveness that was hard to think of as coincidental.
That reset my prejudices, and I started looking out for similar things. I found another liquor ad where the sexual suggestiveness was impossible to think of as coincidental. The ad involved a couple, the man sitting at a table, the woman leaning over behind him. She was holding a lemon over her breast, with the "nipple" of the lemon directly superimposed in the viewer's line of site where her real nipple was.
There really was at least one advertiser during that time who was playing with sexual sublimination cues. However, I finally found a copy of Dr. Key's THE CLAM-PLATE ORGY in a used bookstore and paged through it. It was silly, with the author claiming that nude figures could be seen in icecubes in liquor ads and that an orgy (complete with a donkey) could be seen in a plate of clams. The smooth curves of ice and the writhing mass of clams did have a certain suggestiveness to them, but finding any specific patterns in them was an exercise on the same level as seeing patterns in clouds.
One writer on the Web called Dr. Key "insane". That seems a bit excessive to me: in hindsight, he was just an ordinary crackpot. Apparently quite a few people still think that the advertising industry uses these subliminal tricks, but though I've been tuned to liquor ads ever since and always look them over to see if I can find something, I've never spotted anything but the two items I mentioned above. If anybody put subliminal cues in the ads, I couldn't see them when I was deliberately looking for them. Some cues.
My lingering curiosity about this issue is not focused on Dr. Key -- he's old news -- but on the fact that there really was somebody playing subliminal advertising games way back when. There must be a story behind it, but if so nobody's come forward and admitted it. I suspect it was because it was such a foolish idea. If somebody wanted to sell using sex, why not cut to the chase and stop playing games? Instead of a woman posing with a strategically-placed lemon, why not just give her a low-cut dress and have her lean over? That would get my attention.
The only thing the subliminal liquor ads succeeded in doing was pushing Bryan Wilson Key off the deep end -- if he wasn't there already. In fact, since the only times I saw the subliminal liquor ads were well after he went public, it seems possible that somebody got the idea from him.
* SHARE THE MUSIC: An ECONOMIST article ("Hear No Evil", 17 September 2005) reports on the activities of a music download site, "magnatune.com", that operates on an "open source / shareware" basis. Magnatune, which was established by a Mr. John Buckman in 2003, helps aspiring musicians reach a global audience by allowing end users to listen to streaming audio for free, then buying downloads for whatever price they think is fair. The downloads are not protected by digital rights management mechanisms, with the only protection provided to musicians in the form of requests for civil conduct by loyal users.
For non-commercial applications, such as student projects, downloads can be used under a "Creative Commons" license, a scheme devised by Dr. Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor, as an alternative to traditional copyrights. For commercial applications, licenses are available easily and cheaply; independent video makers are enthusiastic Magnatune users.
Magnatune lists music in seven genres: classical, electronica, jazz-blues, metal-punk rock, new age, rock-pop, and world. Magnatune places an emphasis on supporting musical genres that are not likely to be pushed by the major recording labels and might otherwise all but die out. Mr. Buckman says: "We're going to stick to second-tier genres and we're not going after the majors."
Magnatune seems to project a bit of a crusading mentality. The site's slogan is "We Are Not Evil", which is both a reference to the Google slogan of "Don't Be Evil" and a jab at the "greedy" mainstream record labels. I find this mindset a bit amusing. Admittedly, much of the work of corporations to nail down their IP rights is extreme and obnoxious, for example attempts by overzealous legal staffs to step on obvious "fair use" citations and satire, and in particular the only-too-successful lobbying efforts of Disney Corporation to extend their copyrights "in perpetuity". However, although I am supportive of Dr. Lessig's attempts to challenge the creeping extension of copyright law, it's hard to see it as a moral struggle.
Certainly, not everyone is sold on open source. Despite the fact that the cut to musicians from sales by mainstream record labels is only about 10%, as one record company executive put it, any musician would jump on the chance to record with a major label. One of the musicians who distributes via Magnatune is sympathetic, saying that "the majors front all that money and take a lot of risk and deserve to get some money back." Mr. Buckman admits that most young musicians aren't interested in Magnatune: "They have an unpleasant attitude and still think they'll get the limo and the drugs." Sex! Drugs! Rock'n Roll!
Open-source and copyright distribution are simply opposite poles. Although copyrighted distribution has traditionally been the way that things are organized on the big scale, there is plenty of room at the lower end of the scale for open-source: it doesn't have the same opportunities for huge financial payback that traditional copyrighted distribution does, but the barriers for entry and level of risk are very low, giving opportunities and some payback for folks like me who would almost certainly find trying to penetrate the mainstream difficult. I don't see open-source so much as a challenge to the mainstream as an alternative system that provides options the mainstream doesn't. The reverse is also true; the two systems are at least as much complementary as opposed.
A crusade? No, it's more like fun to figure out moves on the game board that don't follow the way the game has traditionally been played.
* BAMBI & COYOTOES: It is often assumed that human settlement of wild regions is necessarily hard on the wildlife, but this is not entirely the case. Large predators and free-ranging herbivores will suffer, but some other creatures will find the new order to their liking.
One species that has adapted very well to human settlement is deer. It is believed that the deer population of the US is now larger than it's ever been, since the deer can live in surprisingly small open areas and have no large predators to cull their numbers. People who live on the outskirts of towns find them cute at first -- they are, I remember playing with a captive fawn when I was an adolescent -- but once the deer start destroying their gardens, the citizens start to think of setting up booby traps.
Rising populations of deer also mean automotive accidents -- there's some rural roads near where I live where I'm very paranoid whilst driving in the dark about what might jump out onto the road -- with US statistics claiming about a billion USD is lost and a few hundred people killed a year in collisions with animals, mostly deer. There is plenty of justification for declaring energetic open hunting seasons on deer, though that isn't a real solution when residences are in the line of fire.
There also have been a series of attacks by bucks in rut on humans and dogs. One person who was badly gored in the face died a few weeks later of complications. Deer are normally frightened of dogs, but in some of the recent attacks the bucks have killed fairly large dogs. Bambi -- with an attitude.
* Coyotes are another species that has adapted well to human habitation. A recent study of urban coyotes in Tucson, Arizona, found they were getting aggressive, following after people walking with dogs on a leash. Urban coyotes are fond of cats and small-to-middling dogs as prey; there are reports of attacks on small children as well.
I live on the outskirts of Loveland, Colorado, a town on the prairie in the shadow of the Rockies, and on a walk before sunrise a week ago I heard the eerie wailing of the coyotes, having one of their "pow-wows" on nearby farmland. In the summers, when I kept the window open at night, I could hear them getting it on near a pond to the west. One night I heard the wailing and then: BAP BAP BAP BAP! BAP! BAP BAP! Somebody was taking pot shots at them. That was the end of their sessions at the pond; they're cagey creatures and decided to go serenade someplace else. I told my mother the story over the phone and she suggested: "He probably wanted to get rid of them so he could get some sleep."
When I was an adolescent, some neighbors at our lake place in north Idaho had a pet coyote. Coyotes really are wild animals, and the whole exercise ended up a little tragedy -- it's not sensible to keep one as a pet. However, it was an adorable creature, with some odd habits. I picked it up one time, wrapping my arms around its body, front legs to back, enjoying its deep soft fur. It gave me a "kiss" in return, which in coyote talk was to open its jaws very wide and gently frame my face with its fangs. I felt not the least fear; it was obviously anything but a hostile act. If it had meant to do me harm, it would have gone for my throat.
* ED: Those who are inspecting this blog archive may wonder why there is an issue for October 2005 when the November 2005 blog states that it was started in that month. The October 2005 issue was actually made in 2007 -- some of the early issues were overstuffed, so I cut out and collected a set of articles that were from sources dated to October 2005 or earlier to streamline the set a bit.