Rondam Ramblings

Gripe mode on:

If you think about it, sockets are the elephant in the unix living room. Everything in unix is supposed to be a file. "Real" files are, of course, files. Remote files are files. Devices are "files". And with the /proc filesystem, even parts of the kernel are files. Everything is a file.

Except sockets.

Sockets aren't files, but they really should be, and it mystifies me that someone hasn't written a FUSE file system that presents sockets as files. It seems like a no-brainer. Instead of having to call socket() and bind() and connect() and fill in sock_addr structures, I should just be able to call open("/fuse/sockets/www.whatever.com/tcp/80", "r+") and get a descriptor for a TCP socket to www.whatever.com port 80. It should be straightforward to implement this on top of FUSE.

Item the second:

Apache's mod_proxy allows Apache to act as a forwarding proxy to other machines, or even the same machine via a TCP connection, but NOT to a local unix-domain socket.

So suppose that I want to have Apache as my front-end to handle security and serve static content, and I want it to proxy interactive pages to a custom standalone server app. No problem you say, just pick a non-publically-accessible TCP port for the custom app and point mod_proxy to that port for the relevant URLs.

But now suppose that I have a single machine with a single IP address hosting multiple virtual servers, and I want to replicate this setup for each virtual server, i.e. I want each virtual server to have its own instantiation of the custom server application. Now I have to *manually* assign *each* instantiation of the app to a separate TCP port number. If I have hundreds or thousands of virtual servers on the same machine (Oh? You think that's not reasonable? Can you say "multi-core architecture"?) that can become a serious administrative (to say nothing of security) nightmare.

Wouldn't it be better if instead of assigning the custom server app to a TCP port number I could instead assign each one to a unix domain socket? Unix domain sockets don't have numbers, they have *names*, so I can just name each socket after the virtual server that it serves. Voila! no more manual assignment of servers to port numbers and associated administrative headaches.

Lighttpd can do this, but Apache can't (or at least couldn't the last time I checked). It's a conceptually simple thing to do, but actually making it work with the rest of the Apache infrastructure is not so easy for someone who isn't already intimately familiar with Apache's innerds.

If it turns out that these things already exist I'd be most grateful for a pointer. If they indeed do not exist, I hope someone will write them. I'd be willing to pay for the development if anyone out there wants to send me a proposal.

Hooray!

It seems to be working too. I'm seeing a lot of spam attempts, but nothing is getting through. Thanks, Google!

I don't want my money to be used for bullshit like this.

The AT&T 3G microcell is like a little personal cell tower that uses your internet connection to provide cell service in places where there is a weak signal, or none at all. Our new house sits in a cell dead zone, so I decided to try one. Six weeks, three trips to Fry's, two warranty replacement units, and I don't know how many hours on the phone with AT&T tech support later, I finally have a working unit. I thought I'd share the results of my experience in the hopes that it might save other people some time.

There are two fundamental problems with the microcell. The first is that it doesn't like to sit behind a firewall, but the documentation doesn't make this clear. It uses a proprietary protocol and some obscure IP port numbers which your router may or may not handle properly. It turns out this is pretty common knowledge on the microcell discussion forum but it's easy to waste a lot of time trying to figure this out. (AT&T does publish a troubleshooting guide that has this information, but it's hard to find. In fact, it's so hard to find that when I went to look for the link so I could put it in this post I couldn't find it.)

The situation is exacerbated by the second problem, which is much more serious: The microcell is not plug-and-play. In order to use the unit you first have to activate it. which requires you to register the physical address where the unit will be placed. AT&T says this is because of FCC requirements to provide cellular 9-1-1 emergency services, which makes a certain amount of sense I suppose. The problem is that AT&T doesn't just take your word for it that you've entered the correct address on their web site. The unit contains an internal GPS receiver, and before you can make any phone calls the GPS has to verify that the unit is in fact where you said it was. If it isn't, or if it can't lock onto its location, it won't work at all. (How it is supposed to be better in an emergency not to be able to make a call at all rather than make a call from a cell site whose location might not be known is not altogether clear to me.)

That is already bad enough, but get this: it can take up to ninety minutes for the GPS to lock onto its location. So if something isn't working properly you have to wait an hour and a half to find out. If after an hour and a half the unit hasn't activated, it gives you no indication as to what went wrong. Your only options are to power cycle or keep waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

My initial activation actually went fairly smoothly. The problems started a few days later. The unit can go off-line for any number of reasons (lost GPS lock, lost network connection, because it doesn't like your cologne) and when it does, the only way to get it running again is to power cycle it, which means going through the whole up-to-ninety-minute-long process of re-aquiring a GPS signal all over again. That is what happened to me, at first once or twice a day, then several times a day, and then it finally died altogether and refused to connect for five days straight. That's when I got my first warranty replacement unit.

Alas, the second unit was just as flaky as the first, which made me think that the apparently reliable operation I had experienced the first few days was a fluke (or maybe a hallucination). So I started experimenting. I relocated it onto a windowsill to provide better GPS satellite visibility. I added an external GPS antenna to help boost the signal. No joy. I was really discounting the possibility of a hardware failure because modern electronics tend to be pretty reliable, and the chance that I had somehow gotten two defective units seemed pretty remote. But one day I happened to plug in the external GPS antenna while it was working, and ten minutes later it went off-line. This behavior turned out to be repeatable, which seemed like pretty strong evidence that this unit was in fact defective. So I got a third unit, and this one seems to be working.

My verdict: the 3G Microcell is not quite ready for prime time. It has some serious design flaws and apparently some pretty bad quality control on the manufacturing side. I hope they fix these problems because when it works it's a very handy gadget.

I don't normally do endorsements on Rondam Ramblings, but I'm going to make a rare exception for the Singularity Summit (August 14-15 in San Francisco) which looks like it's going to be a worthwhile event. I was very much hoping to attend myself, but unfortunately they scheduled it on top of another long-standing commitment so I can't go this year. If you register through this link you can get a 150ドル discount off the normal registration fee.

The EFF has achieved a rare victory for individual liberty by convincing the U.S. copyright office to officially declare that circumventing digital rights management (DRM) is legal under certain circumstances. It is now officially legal to jailbreak your iPhone, circumvent copy protection for fair-use, and make mash-ups on YouTube. Three cheers for the EFF and the Library of Congress.

Anyone want to take bets how long it will take Apple, the RIAA and the MPAA to launch their PR campaign against this decision? Or to appeal the decision in court? Or to win that appeal? The cynic in me gives it two years. So enjoy your freedom while it lasts.

[UPDATE] Ars Technica has a very good and detailed analysis of the decision.

Lately everything I post collects at least one piece of Chinese comment spam. I've been manually deleting them, but I don't know how much longer I can keep that up. (I'll leave them on this post if they appear to illustrate the problem.) I already have every comment-spam-prevention measure available on Blogger enabled short of shutting down comments altogether. I'm not sure what I'm going to do if the problem persists. Suggestions welcome. Surely I'm not the only one having this problem?

The Boston Globe recently published an interesting story about how facts backfire:

It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. ... This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

What is surprising to me is not so much that facts cause people to become more entrenched in their beliefs -- whatever those might happen to be -- but rather how hard it is to convince people who claim to hew to the facts that this is so. The idea that more faithful adherence to objective fact will cause people's views to converge is supported by neither theory nor observation, but rather by a blind faith that Truth Will Prevail somehow.

To be sure there are circumstances where objective metaphysical truth can be very useful with respect to certain measures of utility. If you're trying to build a bridge, for example, you'll probably have better luck if you do the math than if you pray. But if you're trying to, for example, mobilize a large group of people to work together towards a common goal, you might do better by promulgating ideas that are not scientifically demonstrable (or, more to the point, falsifiable), like the idea that you are anointed by God.

But, counter the Hitchenses and the Dawkinses and the Harrises of the world, if you base your actions on a fiction then, being unconstrained by objective reality, anything is permissible, and all manner of evils predictably result: Slavery. Oppression of women. War. (It is, not coincidentally, ironic and revealing that this is exactly the same critique that is raised by the other side of the debate: if you are unconstrained by the Word of God then anything goes.)

And yet even a moment's reflection will reveal the flaw in this reasoning. It is simply not the case that "anything goes" in fiction. I cannot, for example, simply stand up on a soap box in the town square and proclaim myself to be anointed by God and expect anyone to take me seriously. The promulgation of ideas proceeds according to the laws of physics no less than the promulgation of genes. That the laws of the promulgation of ideas are not as widely known or as well understood does not change the fact that they are, in fact, in effect.

Ideas are information, and so they propagate by processes that are by now pretty well understood. Because they propagate by making copies of themselves, and because the resources required to make those copies are limited, they are subject to the laws of Darwinian evolution: ideas that are better at copying themselves make more copies and so are more likely to propagate. Being objectively true might offer a competitive advantage in some situations, but there is nothing fundamental about "truth" that makes it any more likely to propagate than fiction.

Consider the Shakers. The Shakers were a religious sect that, among other things, preached celibacy not just for priests but for everyone. Universal celibacy is not an idea that reproduces well. By way of contrast, the idea that one should be fruitful and multiply, and that abortion and contraception are evil, is an idea that reproduces extremely well. So it should come as no surprise that there are more Catholics and Mormons in the world than Shakers.

The relationship between ideas and their ecosystem (human brains and information-storing artifacts like books and computers) is an extremely complex symbiotic relationship. Ideas cannot exist without human brains to "live" in, and some ideas (like antibiotics) in turn provide benefits to brains. But sometimes -- and this is crucial -- the interests of brains and ideas are in conflict. For example, a brain that came to understand enough about objective reality might figure out how to have sex without producing offspring. The ideas resident in such a brain would then be deprived of one of their chief means of reproduction, namely, the ability to transfer into the pliable neural networks of newly formed brains that are captive audiences to their parents. On the other hand, the ideas resident in such brains might have access to other means of reproduction that would not otherwise have been available to them, like the Internet. But the fate of the idea that one should exercise conscious control over one's biological reproduction will ultimately be decided by evolution, not deliberation.

There is one aspect of the complex interplay between brains and ideas that ought to be deeply worrisome to anyone who values rationality: it is not necessary for a brain or an idea to be rational in order to benefit from the fruits of rationality. Antibiotics work equally well whether or not you believe in evolution. The Internet is equally accessible to the scientist as to the religious fanatic. As long as this is so, rationality will to a certain extent be self-undermining because the indiscriminate proliferation of the products of rationality helps irrationality to reproduce.

Viewed in this way it is no surprise that ideas become entrenched in brains in ways that make them impervious to facts. It's a defense mechanism. Ideas that resist facts have, all else being equal, a reproductive advantage over ideas that yield to them. It is dismaying how hard it is to get otherwise intelligent people to understand this. But it is not at all surprising.

It wasn't just the escrow from hell that has made our lives stressful over the last few months, but we've also had a fair amount of bad luck on our move as well. First there was a miscommunication with our builder, who thought that we weren't arriving for another week, so when we showed up at the house it was still a construction zone. The garage was full of stuff, and there were tarps and painting supplies all over the house. It was 7PM, and our movers were scheduled to show up at 9 the next morning. It eventually got sorted out, but it was a stressful night. Then it turned out that we didn't have any phone service. We had called ahead and arranged to have our new line active by the time we arrived, which it was, but our house is brand new and no one had actually run the wire from the pole to the house. We're also in a cell phone dead zone. (Well, it's AT&T. Most of the world is a cell phone dead zone.) So for a week we had no communications with the outside world at our house.

Don't even get me started about Comcast. Suffice it to say, they are legendary for bad customer service, particularly on new installations, and I can say now from firsthand experience that their reputation is well deserved.

All of which makes what happened today that much more remarkable. To fully appreciate the irony, I have to back up about two months and tell you about a little incident that happened while we were buying our new house. We were exchanging some email with our builder, and he happened to mention a sewage ejector pump.

Sewage ejector pump? We have a sewage ejector pump?

In case you don't know what a sewage ejector pump is, it's pretty much what it sounds like: it's like a cross between a sump pump and a garbage disposal, and it pumps the sewage from our house, which sits in a sort of a hollow below street level, up to the sewer line under the street.

I asked our builder, um, what happens if that pump fails? Does our house fill with sewage?

No, he said, there's a holding tank with a few day's worth of capacity, and if that fills up then it overflows and dumps into the creek behind the house. Which is bad, but not as bad as having a house full of sewage.

But, he said, these pumps are very reliable. They rarely fail.

Well, guess what. We've been in the new place for just over a month, and today the sewage ejector failed, and did do in a fairly spectacular fashion. It has apparently been going bad for a while because it has been making a gawdawful noise ever since we moved in. We thought that was normal, but apparently not. They are supposed to run silent. So it seems that this pump has been chewing itself up for some time. So for the moment we can't run any water, which means we can't flush and toilets.

Figures this would be the day I decide to wait until later to take a shower.

No word yet on whether this will be fixed today, or if we will have to check into a hotel.

UPDATE at 4:30PM: The county repair crew is here installing a new pump. Don't ever let anyone tell you that government doesn't work. Of all the infrastructure organizations we have had to deal with on this move, the worst by far have been the private companies, AT&T and Comcast in particular. The service from the government agencies has been uniformly good, and in this particular case, exceptional.

I was in the process of writing up the story of the Escrow from Hell. It was up to six or seven chapters and I was only about half way through when Nancy said words to the effect that publishing the story at that level of detail might not be the wisest thing I've ever done. Nancy tends to be right about such things, so I've decided to just put up a highly abridged and sanitized version of the story for now.

The long and the short of it was that soon after we put our house up for sale we got a letter from our next door neighbor saying that there was water draining from our yard onto hers, and that this had caused damage to a shared retaining wall that separated our properties. We were not on speaking terms with our neighbor because of a long-running dispute involving her dogs that ultimately resulted in us filing a lawsuit against her. We were ready and willing to fix the problem, but because we didn't have an open channel of communication it was hard to figure out exactly what the problem was. We were in the process of sending letters back and forth to try to get this situation taken care of when by an incredible stroke of luck we happened to get two offers on our house at nearly the same time. This resulted in a minor bidding war and we ended up getting our full asking price. There was only one little hitch: when we disclosed the drainage issue to our buyer he added a contingency to his offer: we had to completely resolve this issue before close of escrow.

So this left us in a bit of a pickle. How do you "completely resolve" an issue with a neighbor who refuses to communicate with you? I won't go into details, but suffice it to say it was by far the most difficult thing I've ever done. It involved, at various times, three lawyers, threats of physical violence, and a chain of indirect communications that was eight stages from end to end: from our buyer's lawyer to our buyer to his agent to our agent to us to our neighbor's husband (who was speaking to us even if our neighbor wasn't) to our neighbor to our neighbor's lawyer. Our agent, who is a trained mediator, finally managed to close the deal, but even she at one point threw in the towel and thought that the deal was dead before it ultimately rose from the ashes. In the end, between legal bills, interest on two mortgages, and extortion money we had to pay to our neighbor to get her to sign off -- oh, and let's not forget paying the contractor to actually fix the problem (which ultimately turned out to be the smallest of all the costs associated with this debacle) -- we were probably set back about 50,000ドル. I actually lost ten pounds because I was too stressed out to eat. (I'm starting to gain it back now.)

But we sold the house.

We sold the house!

It could have been a whole lot worse. I think there's a very good chance we're heading for a double-dip recession. The historical parallels between today and ~1931-2 are pretty uncanny. And if the next big economic shock had come while we were holding on to two houses, one of which was vacant, that could have ended up being very unpleasant. So going through two months with the sale constantly poised on the hairy edge of falling through was unbelievably stressful. I cannot begin to describe how relieved we are that it's over.

Rondam Ramblings has been quiet lately because we have been in the midst of the Escrow From Hell (and its companion feature, the Move From Purgatory). But now, at long last, the end seems to be in sight. Some time today, unless something really unexpected happens, we should be getting a call from our realtor telling us that we have finally sold our house in Los Angeles. The situation was so tenuous and dragged on for so long that I didn't want to write about it, partly because I was afraid that some of the other people involved would see the posts and that would make matters worse, and partly because I just didn't have the mental energy. I'm even a little hesitant to post this for fear that it will somehow draw Loki's attention back to us and he will find a way to make the deal fall through even though the only thing left to do is for the title company to record the transfer of the deed. So many things have gone wrong that it would hardly surprise me to hear that the person handling the paperwork got hit by a bus (God forbid) on his way to the county recorder's office or some such thing.

Once escrow is officially closed, and I have recovered from the bender I plan to go on once that has happened, I will be posting again, starting with the story of the Escrow From Hell. I actually started writing it up a few weeks ago. I'm up to six installments already, and I'm only about half way through the saga. So don't touch that dial, we'll be right back after this short commercial break.

[UPDATE:] Escrow did close. Woohoo! Stay tuned for the first installment of the saga.

This sneak peek at Windows 8 would be funny if it weren't so sad.

"There appears to be considerable planning taking place as to how a user will access Windows. Right off the bat, one of my favorites is the following prototype which shows a user logging in via facial recognition! Basically, you enroll your face, then all you should have to do from that point forward is sit down, have your webcam get a look at you and then log you in based on facial recognition"

Yeah. that'll work. Because no technology exists that can make a copy of my face.

Oh, wait...

You know you've made it to the big time as a blogger when people start stealing your material. Variable3.com has ripped off my top ten geek business myths piece.

What really pisses me off about this particular theft is this lame-assed attribution at the end:

Courtesy: RON (not sure where i read it)

I guess the folks at variable3.com haven't heard of Google.

[UPDATE:] I found out about the variable3 post through Hacker News. I posted a comment there about the ripoff and went to write this post. When I went back to Hacker News, less than five minutes had elapsed, but the post had already been killed and the site banned. Now that's customer service! Thanks Paul!

[UPDATE2:] Variable has issued an apology which I've accepted.

I've known for a while that AT&T sucks but they just took suckage to a whole new level. We recently moved to the Bay Area from Los Angeles, where we had two phone lines. When I called to move our phone service I asked for forwarding recordings to be placed on our old lines. They said no problem. It took us a week to actually get hooked up to our new phone lines (a story for another time), so today was the first day that we were actually able to make calls from our new house. I called our old numbers to make sure that the forwarding recordings were up and had the correct number on them. They weren't. They just said, "You have reached a number that has been disconnected..." So I called AT&T and asked them to fix it. They said that they could only put the recording on one of the two lines.

Say what?

Yes, that's right. It's obviously not technically impossible for them to do it, it's strictly a business decision. Because the two numbers were on one residential account, I can only get one forwarding recording. I can't even pay to get a second one. I have no choice but to have one of my numbers come up as "disconnected or no longer in service."

Un freakin' believable.

On the plus side, this makes it a lot easier to decide whether or not to get a second line from AT&T this time around. I can't wait for my iPhone contract to expire so I can get a Nexus One. I've absolutely had it with AT&T. (I'm none too thrilled with Apple nowadays either.)

Scientists the INFN1’s Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy announced today that they have detected a muon neutrino spontaneously changing into a tau neutrino . This is exciting because the standard model of particle physics says that neutrinos don't have any mass, but in order to undergo this spontaneous change they must have a non-zero mass. So this means new physics could be at hand. It also means that neutrinos are a candidate explanation for dark matter.

From a philosophical point of view two things are worth noting. First, obtaining this result took years of painstaking work. And second, despite the fact that this result contradicts the orthodox view, it is being received with open arms, even excitement, but the scientific community. Contrary to the claims of creationists, scientists love it when experiments show that a theory is wrong because that is the only way that scientific progress is made. But nowadays, results of this magnitude are very hard to come by and they just don't happen very often.

---

[UPDATE:] Rob Warnock sent me an email that basically says that I have this all wrong. Rather than try to distill his critique at the risk of getting it wrong again, I'll just post what he sent me, edited for formatting only:

---

While this is indeed very interesting news, your article puts all the
emphasis on neutrinos having mass. But what was actuallyu announced by
CERN is simply that a muon neutrino was "caught in the act" of changing
into a tau neutrino, *not* that neutrinos change (oscillate) between
flavors nor that they have mass (which oscillation *requires*) -- that's
rather old news from the 1990s [with roots back to the 1950s]:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino
...
Neutrinos have a very small, but nonzero mass.
...
The solar neutrino number discrepancy problem
Starting in the late 1960s, several experiments found that the number
of electron neutrinos arriving from the Sun was between one third and
one half the number predicted by the Standard Solar Model (SSM). This
discrepancy, which became known as the solar neutrino problem, remained
unresolved for some thirty years. The Standard Model of particle
physics (SM) assumes that neutrinos are massless and cannot change
flavor. However, if neutrinos had mass, they could change flavor
(or oscillate between flavours).
...
Direct detection of flavor oscillation in solar neutrinos
Starting in 1998, experiments began to show that solar and atmospheric
neutrinos change flavors (see Super-Kamiokande and Sudbury Neutrino
Observatory). This resolved the solar neutrino problem: the electron
neutrinos produced in the Sun had partly changed into other flavors
which the experiments could not detect.
...
Mass
The Standard Model of particle physics assumed that neutrinos are
massless, although adding massive neutrinos to the basic framework is
not difficult. Indeed, the experimentally established phenomenon of
neutrino oscillation requires neutrinos to have nonzero masses.[11]
This was originally conceived by Bruno Pontecorvo in the 1950s.
...
In 1998, research results at the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector
determined that neutrinos do indeed flavor oscillate, and therefore
have mass. While this shows that neutrinos have mass, the absolute
neutrino mass scale is still not known.
...
The initial results indicate |#m232| = 0.0027 eV^2, consistent with
previous results from Super-Kamiokande.[22] Since |#m232| is the
difference of two squared masses, at least one of them has to have a
value which is at least the square root of this value. Thus, there
exists at least one neutrino mass eigenstate with a mass of at least
0.04 eV.[23]

In 2009 lensing data of a galaxy cluster were analyzed to predict a
neutrino mass of about 1.5 eV.[24]
...

I don't know if it's hard to change articles once they're on Blogspot,
but you might want to shift the focus just a little bit, to put the
emphasis on the observation of the very specific flavor changing that
they saw. Muon neutrino <--> electron neutrino oscillation had been seen
[or at least inferred] before [in the context of the Solar "missing" neutrino
problem, as above], but direct observation of muon neutrino <--> tau neutrino
had never been seen before... which is the news here.

You might also be interested in comparing the coverage of this on
Tommaso Dorigo's excellent blog, which also has some background
on the history:

http://www.scientificblogging.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/opera_sees_tau_neutrino_appearance
OPERA Sees Tau Neutrino Appearance!!
By Tommaso Dorigo | May 31st 2010 03:17 PM
...
In the late 1990s the Super-Kamiokande experiment in Japan proved that
neutrinos may "oscillate": they may change flavour, such that a muon
neutrino may turn into an electron neutrino, or vice-versa. But a muon
neutrino had never been directly seen turning into a tau neutrino yet.
...

I wasn't planning on blogging about this until later, but since Miles pointed out that I'm being pretty gloomy lately I decided to go ahead and mention this now. Eliezer Ydkowsky has written what is quite possibly the best work of fan fiction ever written. Well worth the read, and that's saying something because it will take you a few hours to get through it all. If you haven't read any of the original Harry Potter books (or seen the movies) do that first or it won't make a lot of sense.

I'm starting to think that Eliezer is actually as smart as he thinks he is. That would be really scary.

It appears that there may be some actual benefits from acupuncture.

As usual Glenn Greenwald gets to the heart of the matter:

Late last night, Israel attacked a flotilla of ships in international waters carrying food, medicine and other aid to Gaza, killing at least 10 civilians on board and injuring at least 30 more"...
...
If Israel's goal were to provoke as much disgust and contempt for it as possible, it's hard to imagine how it could be doing a better job.
...
it is only American protection of Israel that permits the Israelis to engage in conduct like this. ... it is only the massive amounts of U.S. financial and military aid, and endless diplomatic protection, that enables Israel to act with impunity as a rogue and inhumane state.

There's more, of course. Worth reading the whole thing.

[UPDATE] I wrote in a comment that boarding a ship without permission in international waters is piracy. Turns out it's only piracy when it's done by a non-government entity. If a government does it (as in this case) it's an illegal act of war. Israel can't have it both ways. Either it is occupying Gaza or it is not. If it is, then it has a responsibility to look after the welfare of its inhabitants, and if it isn't then it has no right to blockade Gaza's ports. One way or another, Israel is clearly on the wrong side of the law.

Heather Havrilesky asks How can the Lost finale not suck?

[UPDATE:] Yep, pretty much every bit as bad as I was expecting it to be. God, I'm glad that's finally over. When Lapidus sends Miles out to repair a hydraulic leak on a jet airplane with duct tape I actually laughed out loud. That was pretty much the highlight of the show for me.

What a waste of talent and potential.

[UPDATE 2:] It was almost worth putting up with the last few years of Lost just so I could fully appreciate Jack Shafer's brilliant shredding of the finale. Laura Miller's deconstruction over at Salon is pretty good too. More cathartic than the actual finale.

A Pennsylvania man faces eight years in prison on what are almost certainly trumped up charges of assaulting a federal agent. The alleged "assault" was almost certainly (the crucial evidence is being held by the government) nothing more than an attempt to photograph the agents on public property, which is not and never has been a crime. But it may soon become one if people continue to sit idly by.

Slate has a fascinating interview with Diane Ravitch, former member of the Bush I administration, about her changing her position on the value of public education. But education is just the MacGuffin, the piece is really about being wrong, and being able to admit it. This is my favorite part:

"I sometimes wonder whether you might be attracted to the things that you say are wrong—if you're kind of guarding yourself against something that secretly appeals to you. It's like people who are vehement, militant atheists; I think they could easily become religious crusaders, because they're almost religious in their atheism. You have to be careful what you choose to engage yourself with, because the thing you're fighting could be the very thing you want."

But it's worth reading the whole thing.

Facebook seems to be getting more and more evil. I have an FB account. I hardly ever use it, but I'm seriously considering shutting it down regardless. Assuming I can figure out how.

Finding examples of things that CSS can't do seems suddenly to be all the rage.

Here is my favorite example of something that is impossible in CSS but trivial with tables: a fluid layout with nested grids, such as what you need if you want to lay out a form inside a multi-column page.

Jeff Atwood agrees with me that CSS should not be used for layout.

...even if you have extreme HTML hygiene and Austrian levels of discipline, CSS has some serious limitations in practice.

Things in particular that bite us a lot:

* Vertical alignment is a giant, hacky PITA. (Tables work great for this though!)

Wikipedia thinks so too!. Take that, ChristianZ and Pherdnut!

(I wrote this many years ago as a web page but decided to repost it here so people can comment on it.)

The Email Cold-Call HOWTO

A "cold call" is an initial communication with someone who doesn't know you. I've gotten a lot of email cold calls over the years that have left me scratching my head wondering how to respond. This has prompted me to compile a few hints on how to compose a cold-call email. By following a few simple rules you can make it a lot easier for the person you are contacting to respond effectively.

These rules really boil down to one of the cardinal rules of communication: know your audience. This rule runs both ways, and is particularly problematic for cold calls because almost by definition you don't know your audience, and your audience certainly doesn't know you, which makes it that much harder for them to frame an appropriate response. So the object of the game is, first, to learn as much as you can about the person you are contacting *before* you contact them, and then give them as much information about yourself and what you want as you can without getting long-winded.

Specifically:

0. Know your audience. Find out as much as you can about the person you are contacting before you contact them. You don't have to become their biographer, but you should at a minimum do a quick web search. If the person has a home page, read it.

1. Introduce yourself. A sentence or two is all it takes. If you can't come up with anything better, start with "My name is..." If you are writing in connection to your work, give your title and company. If you are a student, give your status (grade level, undergraduate year, or graduate level) and the school you attend. In short, say something about yourself to help your contact anchor their first impression of you and tailor their reply appropriately.

1a. If you are not fluent in your audience's native language, give some kind of a hint what your native langauge is. If you are writing from an institution located in a country where your native language is spoken that's good enough. But if you are, say, a native Farsi speaker who is living in Canada then you should say something like, "I am a visiting scholar from Iran currently at the University of Toronto." Knowning where you are from will help your audience filter out any language stumbles. It will also give them the opportunity to respond to you in your native language if they happen to know it. You never can tell.

2. Say a few words about what you are doing that motivated you to contact this person. Were you referred by someone? If so, who? Did you find some information on the web? If so, what was it?

3. If you want the person to do something for you that you expect will take more than just a few minutes, don't ask directly. Instead, ask if the person can spare some time and give a general idea of the magnitude and character of the task. For example, "Could you spare fifteen minutes to answer some questions about Australian Aboriginees?" is much better than, "Please answer the following fifty questions ..."

4. If you are asking for information, say what efforts you have already made to get it. Where did you look, and what did you find? As a bare minimum you should do a quick Web search before asking anyone for anything nowadays. If the person you are contacting has a home page, read it.

5. Make it easy for your contact to reach you and learn more about you. Put your email address at the bottom of your message. If you have a home page, put the URL there too. Some mail systems munge return addresses so that replies don't work, and this may be the only way your contact has of reaching you.

One last minor point: if you aren't sure about how to address someone, just open with "Hello."

It's because I regularly get email messages that look like this:

Joe Shmoe requested to add you as a connection on LinkedIn:

Ron,

I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.

- Joe

and I have no idea who Joe Shmoe is. So I have three choices:

1. Accept the invitation and end up with a bunch of connections who I don't actually know. (Actually this might not be so bad. I have never actually made a useful contact through LinkedIn.)

2. Reject the invitation and risk offending Joe if it turns out I actually have met him and just forgot about it (which is likely -- I have a terrible memory for names).

3. Send Joe a message saying, "Um, who the fuck are you?" though maybe not in so many words.

It's just so freakin' annoying that LinkedIn would supply this completely useless default message that everyone uses instead of encouraging people to write a personalized message that goes something like, "Hi, this is Joe Shmoe. We met the other day at the underwater basket weaving society. I'd like to add you to my network."

For the love of Pete, people, a LinkedIn invitation is no different from any other cold call email unless you are absolutely positively certain that the person you want to link to knows who you are. You should put at least a little bit of thought into the content of the message before you send it.

Japanese researchers have built a robot that balances on a ball. It's wicked cool, like a Segway taken to the next level. It is really amazing to me the extent to (and speed with) which science fiction from the 1960's has become reality. Today we have Star Trek communicators (cell phones, blue tooth headsets), tricorders (PDA's) and now we seem to be one voice synthesis circuit and some molded plastic away from Rosie Jetson. Still waiting for my hand-held phaser though.

The image of Jesus has shown up on Google Maps.

The inventor of Tickle Me Elmo (and no, I am not making this up) has invented a new gun -- as in weapon -- that can be adjusted to fire both lethal and non-lethal shots .

Researchers at U.C. Berkeley have built a robot that can fold towels. Veeeeeeerrrrrryyyyyy sssslllloooowwwwllllyyyyy. But it actually works. Now it's a mere matter of optimization.

Seriously, I would have given you even odds that this problem would not have been solved at all in my lifetime. It's one bet I would have been happy to lose, and I'm even happier that I didn't actually make it. But folding laundry -- indeed manipulating any kind of non-rigid object -- is really, really hard.

Next challenge: a robot that can tie shoelaces. To get some appreciation for how hard this is, try doing it with gloves on to simulate being a robot that doesn't have touch-sensitive skin, which most robots, including the Berkeley laundry folder, don't have. I'll bet a case of wine that this will still be an unsolved problem in 2020. Any takers?

Barack Obama has apparently ordered the assassination of a U.S. citizen without a trial in the name of fighting terrorism. This is an even more blatant assault on the Constitution than anything the Bush administration ever did. Bush merely spied on, tortured, and imprisoned American citizens without a trial. He never actually had one killed.

I predict that the people who are calling on members of the Bush administration to be prosecuted for war crimes will not be calling for Barack Obama to be prosecuted for conspiracy to commit murder, even though that is clearly what this is.

I haven't been writing much because I've been too busy dealing with getting ready to move. Buying and selling houses is a nice problem to have, but it can still be a royal pain.

But I couldn't resist posting this. I actually invented a Zen koan as part of a usenet thread on self-replicating programs:

Zen master Kwine was raking pebbles in the garden when a student approached and asked, "Master, what is the shortest self-replicating Lisp program?"

The master said nothing and continued raking. The student was annoyed and asked, "Master, why will you not answer my question?"

The master looked up and said, "But I did answer your question."

At that moment the student was enlightened.

:-)

Before the ink even had time to dry, the state of Virginia filed suit to challenge the health care reform bill as unconstitutional. And I think they'll succeed on both the merits and the politics.

To be clear: I'm a strong supporter of health care reform. The current system is badly b0rken and absolutely needs to be fixed. But forcing people to buy insurance -- or any other product made by a private company -- is pretty clearly (to my unschooled eye) not one of the federal government's enumerated powers. So the current health care reform bill should be overturned on the legal merits. Of course, the legal merits seem to have precious little to do with how the Supreme Court actually rules nowadays. But the politics also auger in favor of overturning. The current Court lists heavily to towards the right, and the cynical part of me is convinced that John Roberts in particular is eagerly awaiting the opportunity to stick it to Obama after the State of the Union flap.

I wish things were otherwise, but I gotta call 'em as I sees 'em.

[UPDATE:] It has been pointed out to me (and I actually knew this but spaced on it when I was writing this post) that the bill doesn't really force you to buy insurance, it just taxes you if you don't. This makes it part of a long tradition of the government coercing people to behave in certain ways through the tax code that have passed constitutional muster. So when I wrote "the current health care reform bill should be overturned on the legal merits" that was my own personal opinion. (Some days I'm a liberal, other days I'm a libertarian.) That is how I think things should be. It is clearly not how they are.

Notwithstanding that there are ample precedents for the government to coerce behavior through the tax code, I still predict that the Court will overturn. This prediction is based purely on my cynical belief that the Court is politicized, and if the Right can muster any reasonable arguments that the law should be overturned (and I think they can) the SC will tend to view those arguments favorably. I could be wrong. I hope I'm wrong. Time will tell.

An orange dwarf star is going to collide with our solar system in about a million years, more or less. That's million, with an M. That's not very long in the grand and glorious scheme of things.

Oh wait...

The good news is that Bobylev says the chances of Gliese 710 penetrating further into the Solar System, inside the Kuiper Belt, are much smaller, just 1 in a 1000. So that's all right, then.

Keep calm and carry on.

What a relief.

Winston Churchill once observed that the history books are written by the victors in a conflict, but I sometimes wonder if even he appreciated the extent to which the causality can run both ways. Conservapedia has edited the Treaty of Tripoli to make it appear that the United States was founded as a Christian theocracy.

Why bother even to note this? Surely everyone knows that Conservapedia is a biased unreliable source. The bias is proudly heralded even in its very name. It would be easier to be blase about this if not for the fact that Conservapedia is just the tip of the iceberg. It is not out of the question, if current trends continue, that factual objective history will become more and more inaccessible. After all, I have never seen the original Treaty of Tripoli. The only reason I have to believe that it even exists, let alone that it says what it says is that I have never seen the claims of its existence and its content challenged.

Until now.

I can dismiss this challenge because I can remember a world where there was historical consensus about the Treaty of Tripoli. But imagine what it might be like for someone born today. They might well grow up in a world where half -- maybe even more than half -- of the sources available to them say that the Treaty of Tripoli says what Conservapedia says it says, and that any claims to the contrary are a liberal plot to undermine the foundations of the nation. How would a person growing up in such a world be expected to sort out the truth? (For that matter, how can we be sure that we ourselves are not growing up in such a world?)

Farfetched? Consider that the Texas State Board of Education recently decided to make some changes to the curriculum, including removing Thomas Jefferson and the Enlightenment from history classes, and placing more emphasis on "The strong Judeo-Christian influences on the nation’s Founding Fathers."

This is not some random right-wing web site. This is the State of Texas.

I fear that George Orwell may have been more prescient than anyone ever imagined.

Forbes has a thorough debunking.

I just had a very disturbing conversation with a Rackspace Cloud CSR. It went something like this:

CSR: Can I have your account user name and password?
Me: You want my password?
CSR: Yes sir.
Me: You know that's, like, security 101 that you should never reveal a password over the phone?
CSR: Yes sir, but in this case we need it to verify your account.
Me: OK, let me go change it to something I'm willing to tell you over the phone.
[Typety type type]
Me: OK, my password is now somereallylongbogusthing.
CSR (without any delay): Thank you. How can I help you?
Me: Wait, you must either be the world's fastest typist, or you can see my password on your screen.
CSR: That's right, sir, I can see your password.
Me: (The sound of my jaw hitting the floor.)

I am just stunned. I have used Rackspace for mission-critical servers in the past. They have always seemed reasonably competent, if not always 100% reliable. But this calls into question Rackspace's entire security policy. The first rule of computer security is that you do not store passwords in the clear. Never. Ever. No ifs ands or buts. You Just Don't Do That. And security is particularly critical in cloud computing, where your data ends up on hardware that can be reused by other people. If Rackspace is storing passwords in the clear, what else might they be screwing up? This really calls into question whether Rackspace can be trusted with mission-critical data.

Good grief, Rackspace, I really wanted to like you. But what were you thinking?

[UPDATE:] It really is as serious as I thought. WIth the account password you can change contact information and reset the root password on all your servers. So unless and until this is fixed you should not use RSC for anything mission critical. I hope they do fix this because other than that I really like RSC. Their UI is very well designed, and setting up a server was amazingly fast and painless.

Theodore H. Frank observes that Toyota vehicles apparently engage in age discrimination. Not Toyota the company mind you, the vehicles themselves. The age profile of people who have had runaway acceleration problems seems to be heavily skewed towards older drivers. Maybe this is a safety feature gone rogue? Has Toyota developed a sensor that can detect older drivers and installed the wires backwards? Hey, I'm just asking questions.

Allen Hartwig created this freakishly accurate Toyota simulator. It's even better if you have sound turned on.

James Sikes, the driver of the runaway Prius in San Diego the other day may have had ulterior motives. Are we about to see a repeat of balloon boy?

And since I'm on the subject: I had occasion recently to rent a Toyota Corolla, with which I did a couple of experiments to see if the brakes could overcome the engine. I don't want to get too specific about my methodology, but suffice it to say the experiments took place on a wide open stretch of freeway where there was no danger. It should come as no surprise that the brakes were easily able to slow the car down even at full throttle. It wasn't even close. And, of course, shifting into neutral slowed the car down instantly.

But there was one very peculiar incident: on one one of my test runs (I did several) when I pressed on the brake with my left foot while holding down the throttle with my right, the brake did not respond normally. It felt much stiffer than usual. The brake pedal did not depress as far as it normally does. And the brakes did not seem to engage; the car continued to accelerate. I immediately took my foot off the gas, whereupon the car slowed down and the feel and operation of the brake returned to normal right away. I was not able to reproduce this, and in fact I can't be completely sure that I'm recalling the details correctly. The entire episode lasted only a second or two. But it surprised the hell out of me at the time.

This was a brand new 2010 Corolla. It had about 500 miles on it.

Just stumbled across this amazing video of an ant colony that was pumped full of cement and then excavated. I can hardly imagine a more striking refutation of the creationist claim that (the appearance of) design requires a designer.

He calls the uncontrolled acceleration hysteria (ambiguity intended) a witch hunt.

Washington DC has become the sixth "state" to legalize same-sex marriage, joining Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont. The dominoes continue to fall.

It seems the Toyota hysteria has spread to Australia:

A former recreational rally car driver says she experienced sudden unintended acceleration on four occasions while driving her 2008 Toyota Corolla Ascent in north Queensland.

Kuranda resident Mary Von Keyserlingk, 72, has come forward as the US congress investigates Toyota over safety defects linked to as many as 30 deaths.

Ms Von Keyserlingk said her latest scare was a "horror show", with her car speeding to more than 160 kilometres per hour.

"All of a sudden the noise was nearly deafening," she said.

"The heart was pounding and I thought, 'if this goes on any longer I'm going to die [from] a heart attack if nothing else'."

Wow. Scary. And this is a rally car driver. She must know what she's doing, right?

Ms Von Keyserlingk said she decided to turn the car off but she then lost control of the steering wheel.

Hm, odd, why would an experienced driver turn off the car instead of shifting into neutral?

"[Because] power-steering operates on computers ...

Um, no. The reason you lose your power steering when you turn the car off is not because the steering depends on computers, but because it depends on hydraulic pressure supplied by a pump that is driven by the engine. No power from the engine, no pressure, and hence no power steering. It's called power steering for a reason.

But here's the real kicker:

A spritely septuagenarian, Ms Von Keyserlingk still works full time and says she has always driven a manual car.

This car had a manual transmission! (Automatic transmissions are much less common outside the U.S. than in.) There is absolutely no way that a car with a manual transmission can accelerate out of control without either operator error or a serious mechanical failure that would show up on subsequent inspection. This car has a clutch and a manual linkage between the shift lever and the gearbox. You can physically disengage the engine from the drive train by either engaging the clutch or shifting the car into neutral. Now, it is possible for clutch linkages to fail (I've actually had it happen to me). It is even theoretically possible for a manual transmission linkage to fail, though I've never heard of such a thing happening. But it is not possible for both of these things to fail at the exact same time that you have a runaway throttle and leave absolutely no evidence behind. If a mechanical linkage breaks, it stays broken until you fix it.

[UPDATE:] The same article has this story:

Mudgeeraba resident Giulia Greenall says she had a similar experience in her 2007 automatic Toyota Corolla Ascent on three occasions.

On the third and worst occasion she says she was merging with traffic when "the car just started accelerating like mad".

Ms Greenall says tapping the brake pedal or accelerator failed to bring the vehicle under control, although it had worked on previous occasions.

"You could feel underneath your foot that the accelerator could move up and down, but when it got to a certain point there was this hell of a loud vibrating noise coming out of it and you had no control over that," she said.

"It was droning out this noise and vibration, you could feel it under foot. I thought, 'oh we're in trouble' so I pumped the brakes."

Ms Greenall says she travelled for up to 400 metres under full brake and full hand brake before she turned the car off and nursed it to the side of the road.

She estimates she was doing 80 kilometres an hour under full brake.

Again, this begs credulity. This is not a Camry, this is a Corolla . It has a 130 horsepower engine. It take more than nine seconds to get from zero to sixty under full throttle with the brakes off. This car can barely sustain 80 kph (50MPH) going uphill, let alone with the brakes on.

---

It's important to note that I'm not saying that there are no problems with Toyota cars. There may well be, I don't know. What I am saying is that many of the stories that are coming out sound fishy, and at least a few of them are flat-out physically impossible. Even that is not so disturbing -- people make shit up all the time. What bothers me is that all of this testimony is apparently being accepted uncritically without even the most basic reality checks being applied.

(Speaking of basic reality checks, think about this: Greenhall reports traveling for "up to 400 meters" before turning the car off. Doesn't that sound a little odd? 400 meters is awfully precise. And why hedge with "up to" instead of "about"? For that matter, why a distance? It seems to me that the natural way to recount an incident like that is in terms of time: "I was out of control for a minute or so." Distances are very hard to estimate even under non-stressful circumstances. Again, I do not doubt that something out of the ordinary happened, but "up to 400 meters" has all the earmarks of a concocted embellishment.)

Ever since I was a geeky kid lusting after a 48k Apple ][+ I've dreamed of moving to the Silicon Valley and making it big there. That dream came most-of-the-way true when I spent my year at Google, but even then I was commuting from LA so even though I've experienced the Silicon Valley dream, I've never really lived there (except for two six-month co-op stints when I was in college, but that doesn't really count either).

Looks like that's about to change. A few weeks ago we found a house that we really like, and today we learned that the last major obstacle to our buying it has been removed. So while this is not yet a done deal, it appears that Nancy and I are moving to Redwood City, and I'm going to be looking for a new gig. So if anyone reading this knows of any startups in the Valley that could use an ex-Googler/rocket-scientist drop me a line. I'm available.

... a crocodillo!

Unlike the crocoduck and the ever elusive jackalope, the crocodillo is (or at least was) a real creature. Take that, creationists!

Sometimes I think the entire world is going completely nuts.

We're at Wag Style, a doggie day spa on the side street of a trendy Tokyo neighborhood. I've brought Ruby here to test out a canine hyperbaric oxygen chamber .... The technology is the same as that rumored to be used by athletes ranging from Lance Armstrong to Michael Vick — it sends concentrated amounts of oxygen to problem areas in higher atmospheric pressure, supposedly expediting the recovery process.

Yesterday's Congressional testimony about the Toyota runaway acceleration problems featured a tearful Rhonda Smith testifying under oath about how she "lost all control of the acceleration of" a Lexus ES350 sedan in October of 2006. (Lexus is, of course, Toyota's luxury nameplate.) Here's a transcript (made by me so there might be the odd mistake):

On that thursday, October the 12th 2006, I was driving from my home in Sevierville and upon entering the interstate I accelerated with everyone else into the flow of traffic. At this time I lost all control of the acceleration of the vehicle. The car goes into passing gear and the cruise light comes on. I put the car into all available gears including neutral, but then I put it in reverse and it remains in reverse as the cars speeds to over 100 miles per hour down the interstate. I placed both feet on the brake after I firmly engaged the emergency brake and nothing slows the car. I prayed for God to help me. I called my husband on the bluetooth phone system. I knew [breaks down into tears]... I'm sorry... I knew he could not help me but I wanted to hear his voice one more time. After six miles, God intervened as the car came very slowly to a stop. I pulled it to the left median. With the car stopped and both feet still on the brake the motor still revved up and down. At 35 miles an hour it would not shut off. Finally at 33 miles per hour I was able to turn the engine off.

I'm sorry, but I don't believe her. It is certainly plausible that the cruise control kicked in uncommanded. It is even possible that the interlock that would normally have disengaged the cruise control as soon as she touched the brake failed. It is even possible that the brakes failed to slow the car below 100 MPH (although this begins to really stretch the limits of my credulity). But it is not possible that she "put the car into every available gear" including neutral and reverse, and that that failed to slow the vehicle. For that to have happened, the transmission would have had to first fail in a way that transmissions never do, and then somehow magically fix itself so that subsequent inspection of the vehicle would reveal no problem. That is simply not possible.

There are a number of other aspects to her story that I find highly questionable. We are supposed to believe that she's speeding down the interstate at over 100 miles per hour in traffic and yet she somehow still has the presence of mind to call her husband on the phone. I suppose that's possible, but it means that she wasn't focused 100% on trying to figure out a way to stop. Finally, at the end of her story, she flat-out contradicts herself when she says that first she was able to stop the car (with the engine still revving "up and down"). But then she says that the car was still going 35 miles an hour, and that at 33 miles an hour she was "able to turn the engine off." So which is it? Was she stopped, or going 33 miles an hour down the left median?

There are other troubling questions as well. She says that at 33 miles an hour she was "able to turn the engine off" but she made no mention of trying to turn it off before, only of stepping on the brake and shifting gears. And doesn't "33 miles an hour" seem suspiciously precise, particularly after making a point of saying that the car would not shut off at 35?

It doesn't add up.

I do believe that the car accelerated out of control. But the rest of her story sounds like cover to me. I don't know what happened after the incident started, but I'm pretty sure that whatever it was, it isn't what she testified to.

There are a lot of other weird things associated with this whole Toyota kerfuffle. Steve Wozniak's report of trouble with his Prius turned out to be at best overblown and at worst a publicity stunt. And it is also mighty odd that, as far as I can tell, not a single incident of unintended acceleration has been reported outside of the United States.

I'll go out on a limb and predict that when all the dust settles this will turn out to be a replay of the Audi incident.

Finally, the Wall Street Journal (which content should of course nowadays be taken with a big chunk of sodium chloride) reports that Rhonda Smith sold her Lexus after her incident, and that the new owners have driven it for 27,000 trouble-free miles.

The idea that the earth is round is only a theory after all.

Hm, some of the flat-earth arguments actually make interesting reading. I don't think exposing kids to this stuff as an exercise in critical thinking would be an altogether bad idea.

Bristol Palin is starting a new career as an actress.

Bristol Palin, whose unplanned pregnancy became a national news story that engulfed her mother’s vice presidential campaign in 2008, is bringing her experience as a teen mom to bear on the small screen. ABC Family announced Tuesday that Bristol, the oldest daughter of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, will play herself on an episode of “The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” a drama about a teenager who becomes pregnant.

I think it's telling that the name of Bristol's baby doesn't appear in the story. I wonder, too, if we'll be hearing much noise from the Right about Bristol not staying home to take care of her kid. I'm not holding my breath.