Esther Dyson: russian pol Yavlinsky said: “Problem is not freedom of speech. Problem is freedom *after* speech.”
August 22, 2009
US daytrips to Canada drop significantly
Megan McArdle has an interesting post about the precipitous drop in US visits to Canada:
Kevin Drum is puzzled:
Well, here’s today’s [chart]: day trips to Canada are down. Way down. It’s not clear why, either. The accompanying story blames it mostly on new passport rules, along with “other factors, including the recession and the higher Canadian dollar.” But that doesn’t really hold water. The downward spike from May to June might be due to new passport rules, but the chart makes clear that travel has been steadily decreasing ever since it recovered from 9/11 in early 2002. Obviously passport rules have nothing to do with this 7-year trend, and neither does the recession or the strength of the Canadian dollar.
Megan points out that the strengthening Canadian dollar does actually account for much of the change, with the passport requirement only being the final nail in the coffin. Security theatre, as pointed out in the comments, probably accounts for some of the decline as well.
The comment thread is quite interesting, as both facts and “facts” get deployed to support pre-existing positions. Do read through them.
I’m finding this an interesting discussion, as I’m headed the other way tomorrow . . . I’m taking a week-long course near Pittsburgh. I remember the days of the cheap Canadian dollar, when we used to use terms like “Canadian Peso” or “TundraMicroBuck”, and I don’t particularly miss them. I don’t know if I’ll be doing much shopping while I’m in Pennsylvania, but the price differences are much smaller than they were the last time I was in the states.
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August 21, 2009
For fans of The Clash
Today only, you can download the Sandinista Project for free:
Joe Strummer of the Clash would have been 57 today. So today seems like a good day to give Clash fans a present.
It’s been two years. Does anyone remember The Sandinista Project?
In May 2007, Abe Bradshaw and the crazy geniuses at 2 Minutes 59 Records let me put out a borderline-insane track-by-track tribute to the Clash’s Sandinista!, with a different artist performing each of the album’s 36 songs. (You can read Abe’s version of the origin myth here.) We received mostly positive reviews from publications ranging from The New York Times to Pasadena Weekly, although someone told me that Robert Christgau hated it. More important, it was a great experience: I got to work with many of my favorite performers and create something.
The Sandinista Project is free for a day
H/T to BoingBoing for the link.
Am I a sexist for saying I favour this?
By way of The Register. At risk of being labelled as a sexist, I think GoTopless (probably NSFW in most workplaces) is a worthy effort:
Welcome to GoTopless.org! – We are a US organization, claiming that women have the same constitutional right to be bare chested in public places as men.
[. . .]
Why a National GoTopless Protest day? Gotopless.org claims constitutional equality between men and women on being topless in public. Currently, women who dare to be topless in public in the US are repeatedly being arrested, fined, humiliated, criminalized. On SUNDAY AUGUST 23RD, 2009, topless women will rally in great numbers across the USA to protest this gross inequality in the law and will demand that they be granted the fundamental right to be topless where men already enjoy that right according to the 14th amendment of the Constitution (please see our exact legal argument on the right to be topfree for women under “14th amendment” in news section)
It’s legal here in Ontario, although I don’t think I’ve seen anyone taking advantage of the newly established right since the day after it became legal . . .
However, my support for this particular effort in no way means I’m in favour of the Raelian agenda . . . which is, um, spacey in the extreme.
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QotD: Heroin as a treatment for addiction
Stripped of the medicalese, what the researchers found is that if you give heroin addicts heroin, they will keep coming back for more. They will also be less likely to buy heroin on the street or commit crimes to support their habit. These findings, similar to the results of European studies, are not exactly surprising. The puzzling thing is that we’re asked to pretend that heroin is a “treatment” for heroin addiction. “Study Backs Heroin to Treat Addiction,” says the headline over a New York Times story that begins, “The safest and most effective treatment for hard-core heroin addicts who fail to control their habit using methadone or other treatments may be their drug of choice, in prescription form.”
What the study actually shows is that the problems associated with heroin addiction are largely caused by prohibition, which creates a black market in which prices are artificially high, quality is unreliable, and obtaining the drug means risking arrest and associating with possibly violent criminals. The drug laws also encourage injection by making heroin much more expensive that it would otherwise be and foster unsanitary, disease-spreading injection practices by treating syringes and needles as illegal drug paraphernalia. When you take these dangers out of the equation, regular use of heroin is safe enough that it can qualify as a “treatment” dispensed by men in white coats. That rather startling fact should cause people to question not just current addiction treatment practices but the morality of trying to save people from themselves by making their lives miserable.
Jacob Sullum, “This Just In: Heroin Addicts Like Heroin”, Hit and Run, 2009-08-21
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Stratford: Canada’s gayest town?
It’s definitely the slow news season: the Ottawa Sun summarizes an article in Outlooks magazine entitled “The Gayest Small Town in Canada”:
Travel editor Randall Shirley came to see a show or two and met with some of Stratford’s prominent gay and lesbian residents and business owners, some of whom were featured in the article.
The piece — “The Gayest Small Town in Canada” — appears in the July/August edition in print and online. The national magazine is geared toward the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered (GLBT) population.
Shirley wasn’t surprised to find a relatively large gay and lesbian community in the southwestern Ontario city of 30,000, but what did surprise him was the openness he found there.
“Growing up in a small town myself, I know how difficult it could be. I was just really surprised at how open they are about it,” he said from his Vancouver home.
He noted the artistic community connected to the theatre is a draw for GBLT visitors but Stratford is unique because it’s in the middle of a rural area.
Okay, perhaps Ottawa is far enough removed from Stratford that this might come as a surprise to Sun readers, but really? Stratford has two industries: pig farming and the Festival. Historically, the theatre has been one of the few areas where being gay was not an automatic career-destroyer. Stratford’s theatre industry is huge for the town … it literally put the place on the map. Put these facts together, and you’re surprised that the town is gay friendly (or, at the very least, nowhere near as gay-hostile as a typical small town in a rural area)?
More on DNA as a crime-fighting tool
Charles Stross looks at the situation in Britain:
NDNAD, the UK’s National DNA Database, run by the Forensic Science Service under contract to the Home Office contains DNA “fingerprints” for lots of folk — 5.2% of the population as of 2005, or 3.1 million people. Some of them are criminals; some of them are clearly innocent, but were either charged with a crime and subsequently found not guilty, or had the misfortune to be detained but not subsequently charged (that is: they’re not even suspects). The Home Office takes a rather draconian view of the database’s utility, and objects strenuously to attempts to remove the records of innocent people from it — it took threats of legal action before they agreed to remove the parliamentary Conservative Party’s Immigration spokesman from the database (which he’d been added to in the course of a fruitless investigation into leaked documents that had embarrased the government) — so if senior opposition politicians have problems with it, consider the prospects for the rest of us.
In use …
Whenever a new profile is submitted, the NDNAD’s records are automatically searched for matches (hits) between individuals and unsolved crime-stain records and unsolved crime-stain to unsolved crime-stain records — linking both individuals to crimes and crimes to crimes. Matches between individuals only are reported separately for investigation as to whether one is an alias of the other. Any NDNAD hits obtained are reported directly to the police force which submitted the sample for analysis.
Now, this in itself is merely a steaming turd in the punchbowl of the right to privacy: but its use as a policing intelligence tool is indisputable. While there are some very good reasons for condemning the way it’s currently used (for example, its use in the UK has sparked accusations of racism), I can’t really see any future government forgoing such a tool completely; a DNA database of some kind is too useful. So what interests me here is the potential for future catastrophic failure modes.
Now that we’re pretty certain that DNA evidence can be easily faked, the focus of how it can be used in investigations must shift from “presence proving guilt” to “absence implying innocence”.
The Caster Semenya furor
Over at the Daily Mail, there’s a surprisingly comprehensive article on the debate over Caster Semenya’s gender:
At first thought, it seems strange that the South African runner Caster Semenya needs to take a sex test to determine whether she is indeed a woman — or a man, as rumours suggest.
One would imagine that sex is something fairly clear-cut: that you are either one or the other.
It seems even stranger to discover that the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) says that the tests are ‘extremely complex’, and that the results will not be known for days, even weeks.
Again, this seems to run contrary to common sense. Surely, one would think, determining one’s sex is as simple as removing one’s underwear and taking a look.
In fact, it can be rather more complicated than that. It is not generally appreciated that gender in humans — and many other species, too — is not just a binary affair, a simple case of being male or female.
While the vast majority of people are clearly either a man or a woman, many others are somewhere between the two — often with tragic consequences.
Indeed, while people have been making jokes for decades about burly, allegedly female shot putters and javelin throwers, who turn out — after often humiliating and invasive ‘investigations’ — really to be men, the fact is that such cases do not always involve intentional deception, and can result from true biological ambiguity.
H/T to Ghost of a Flea, who says “Ban all sports or award points for freakishness”.
August 20, 2009
The Billionaire’s Vinegar-scented lawsuit
Mike Steinberger discusses the recent lawsuit launched by Michael Broadbent against the publishers of Benjamin Wallace’s The Billionaire’s Vinegar:
Broadbent, the legendary former head of Christie’s wine department, alleges that Wallace defamed him in his gripping whodunit about the so-called Thomas Jefferson bottles — a trove of wines initially said to have belonged to the oenophilic Virginian but now almost universally believed to have been fakes. Three of the bottles, all Bordeaux, were auctioned off by Broadbent in the 1980s, and of the many wine luminaries caught up in this saga, his reputation has suffered the most damage. Broadbent contends that he was falsely depicted in the book as being complicit in a crime. But his suit makes no claims one way or another regarding the authenticity of the wines that he sold, which can be taken as an acknowledgment that the evidence is not in his favor. Broadbent can’t undo the fact that he was at the center of what now appears to have been the greatest wine hoax ever perpetrated. By pursuing legal redress, he is simply making it harder for a more considered judgment of his actions to emerge.
[. . .]
As Wallace meticulously documents, Broadbent repeatedly and insistently vouched for Rodenstock and the Jefferson bottles. He was dismissive of the researcher at Monticello who cast doubt on the authenticity of the wines and of questions raised in the press. In addition to doing business with Rodenstock, Broadbent benefited from his largesse. Rodenstock was famous in wine circles for the marathon tastings that he held, multi-day extravaganzas that typically featured wines back to the 18th century. Broadbent attended these bacchanals, served as the authority-in-residence during them, and came away with tasting notes for many old and exceedingly rare wines. If, as now seems undeniable, Rodenstock was a con artist who trafficked in counterfeit wines, those tasting notes are worthless.
But contrary to what Broadbent is claiming in his lawsuit, The Billionaire’s Vinegar does not suggest that he was a witting accomplice to Rodenstock. Rather, the portrait that emerges is of a man who let his hopes and competitive zeal cloud his judgment.
I’ve read Wallace’s book — which I heartily recommend — and I think, based on the information presented, that Broadbent was not complicit in the apparent fraud itself, although he certainly took full advantage of the opportunity (and thereby reap the fame to go along with being associated with the “discoveries”).
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It must be a slow week in movies . . .
. . . so John Scalzi decides to kick over the hornet’s nest of Star Wars geekdom:
I’ll come right out and say it: Star Wars has a badly-designed universe; so poorly-designed, in fact, that one can say that a significant goal of all those Star Wars novels is to rationalize and mitigate the bad design choices of the movies. Need examples? Here’s ten.
R2-D2
Sure, he’s cute, but the flaws in his design are obvious the first time he approaches anything but the shallowest of stairs. Also: He has jets, a periscope, a taser and oil canisters to make enforcer droids fall about in slapsticky fashion — and no voice synthesizer. Imagine that design conversation: “Yes, we can afford slapstick oil and tasers, but we’ll never get a 30-cent voice chip past accounting. That’s just madness.”C-3PO
Can’t fully extend his arms; has a bunch of exposed wiring in his abs; walks and runs as if he has the droid equivalent of arthritis. And you say, well, he was put together by an eight-year-old. Yes, but a trip to the nearest Radio Shack would fix that. Also, I’m still waiting to hear the rationale for making a protocol droid a shrieking coward, aside from George Lucas rummaging through a box of offensive stereotypes (which he’d later return to while building Jar-Jar Binks) and picking out the “mincing gay man” module.
And the crowd goes wild.
New Guild Wars 2 trailer
I’m certainly looking forward to the as-yet-undetermined release date for Guild Wars 2. I resisted getting into the original Guild Wars, despite Victor’s strong enthusiasm for the game, but I eventually gave in . . . and I’m still playing it several hours per week now.
Here’s the new trailer. It certainly looks attractive, but you can’t tell much about game mechanics from the cinematics.
I’m hoping that they’ll retain the “flavour” of gameplay in the original, while still bringing the game up to the current state of the art in other areas. Call me an optimist . . .
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Is the US still a racist country?
Matt Welch gets a bit het-up about an academic’s easy characterization of the racism and hatred he feels is still a malignant, powerful force in American politics: “Hate, if it ever truly threatened to leave the political stage, is most definitely back, larger and nastier than ever.”
To get all journalistically theoretical for a moment, what is the definition of journalism? Well, I don’t know, but I do know that one thick chunk of the idea is to write or say (or aim to write and say) things that are unequivocally 100 percent true, and hopefully verified in some way. This is even more true, if such a thing is mathematically possible, for those who deliver lectures on all that should be true and good about journalism.
What, class, do we notice about Davis’ statement above? IT IS DEMONSTRABLY FALSE. We used to have slavery in this country, and Jim Crow laws, and all kinds of officially sanctioned, legalized discrimination against disfavored minorities. And you want to tell me that hate is “larger and nastier than ever”? We had a CIVIL WAR in this country, where people not only brought their legally licensed firearms to townhalls, but they MURDERED THE SHIT OUT OF ONE ANOTHER. How many people died in racially fueled street riots 41 years ago, compared to how many died in racially fueled street riots in 2009? This little couplet, tossed off without evident concern, as if OF COURSE we all know this is true, is blatantly, sophomorically, and insultingly untrue. It’s an advertisement for the author’s fundamental lack of seriousness about the very subject he aims to address.
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Testing their hypotheses
Steve Chapman looks at the opportunities to test all the reasons conservatives oppose gay marriage:
Opponents of same-sex marriage reject it on religious and moral grounds but also on practical ones. If we let homosexuals marry, they believe, a parade of horribles will follow — the weakening of marriage as an institution, children at increased risk of broken homes, the eventual legalization of polygamy, and who knows what all.
Well, guess what? We’re about to find out if they’re right. Unlike most public policy debates, this one is the subject of a gigantic experiment, which should definitively answer whether same-sex marriage will have a broad, destructive social impact.
Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire have all decided to let gays wed. Most of the remaining 44 states, however, are not likely to follow suit anytime soon. So in the next few years, we will have a chance to compare social trends in the states permitting same-sex marriage against social trends in the others.
Oddly, he was unable to find many of the same outspoken critics who were willing to go on record as to the kind of dire consequences we should start to see in those six states, compared to the rest of the country. I did a bit of googling, and thought I’d found one, but it turned out to be something different:
Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, “biblical”?
Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!
The above is not actually representative of what the critics of same-sex marriage actually said. It’s actually from a transcript of the last Climate Change conference . . .
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August 19, 2009
24th Air Force now activated
The US Air Force has officially activated the 24th Air Force, consisting of the 688th Information Operations Wing and the 67th Network Warfare Wing:
According to Air Force Space Command, under which the new cyber force comes, the 688th will be “exploring, developing, applying and transitioning counter information technology, strategy, tactics and data to control the information battle space”. The unit was formerly known as the Air Force Information Operations Center, and will continue to function as an “information operations centre of excellence”.
The 67th, by contrast, seems to be a more offensive unit. It will “execute computer network exploitation and attack” as required, and when not doing that will conduct “electronic systems security assessments” for US military units and facilities.
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QotD: The annual Beloit College Mindset List
If the entering college class of 2013 had been more alert back in 1991 when most of them were born, they would now be experiencing a severe case of déjà vu. The headlines that year railed about government interventions, bailouts, bad loans, unemployment and greater regulation of the finance industry. The Tonight Show changed hosts for the first time in decades, and the nation asked “was Iraq worth a war?”
Beloit College, 2009-08-18
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