Does an eBay auction really need this many exclamation points? (If you find this in the archives and the page has fallen off eBay's servers, here is an archived copy.)

OK, plans are in motion. No sooner had I switched my hosting service from DreamHost to the unlikely named WantSomeGetSome.Net than I changed my mind yet again. Enough paying people to host my pages, darn it! I'm going to do it myself, off of my DSL connection. What are the issues to consider? Well, the upload speed, for one: I will be limited by the outgoing bandwidth of my network connection. But mcgees.org and ScotchFinder (somewhat unfortunately) get little enough traffic that this will be a non-issue. Security is another concern, but that can be solved by using a Linux server. But I still want to be able to run Windows. My solution to that was to steal Jennifer's computer back from her to turn it into a Linux server, sharing an internet connection (via Windows 98) off of my primary machine. This will also allow me to look up online help while attempting to configure the Linux box.

I will pay $5/month extra for a second static IP address, but that is much cheaper than any comparable hosting plan. WantSomeGetSome is a great deal, but even it is $18/month. The other avenue this opens (let the world be forewarned) is for me to host even more sites!

I just reached a feedback rating of 100 on my eBay account. This means I get a new star:  

If you can see this post, you are on the new mcgees.org server.

You might be interested in my new Postal Cancel Art pages.

I just heard, in the background, a commercial for the drug Meridia, which I guess is a weight-loss drug of some sort. From the commercial:

"It's a controlled substance so patients who abuse Meridia may become dependent."

Wait a second ... it's a controlled substance so users may become dependent? Isn't it a controlled substance because patients may become dependent?

I just cleaned out the habitat of one of the hamsters (my favorite one.) He will regularly build a nest right against his water bottle, but the contact of the bedding material to the spout causes a slow leak, and he ends up with soaked bedding and an empty bottle. This weekend I will get some expansion modules to extend his habitat, and try moving the water to a different compartment.

The bedding was thoroughly saturated this time; I had to remove all of it, including his food store, which was also drenched. This is obviously stressful for him, and before I had even finished putting dry bedding in the habitat, he was already arranging it properly. He seems to know exactly where everything needs to go (they are fairly neurotic rodents, I feel.) I wish I understood the system so that I could arrange the replacement bedding in the proper fashion. But I don't, so I instead watched him for twenty minutes as he relandscaped the enclosure. Poor little guy.

It is hard to believe that it is after midnight now. There just doesn't seem to be enough time to do everything I want to do these days. This is mostly a good thing: there are a lot of activities that interest me at the moment, so I am never at a loss for something to do and enjoy. Here is a list of activities I have wanted to pursue in the past couple of days, only a subset of which have been accomplished or attempted.

1. Play with Cakewalk. Use it to record some of my musical compositions, with multiple vocal and instrumental tracks.
2. Order more stamps from Iowa Stamps & Coins for my ongoing (but unnamed) philatelic art project. Work on the art project. Transfer the pieces to a new album.
3. Work on a redesign of mcgees.org.
4. Install the new printer that has been sitting on my floor, in a box, since the day after Christmas.
5. Play some more with the new TiVo.
6. Watch some of the movies recorded by it.
7. Listen to my new CDs from Christmas.
8. Research the sport of fencing.
9. Add advertising to ScotchFinder (the advertisers are arranged, I just need to do some re-coding of the site.) Add the ability to search the database via a toll-free telephone number.
10. Research whale deafness.
11. Continue reading The Annotated Alice, Infinite Jest, and The Life of Samuel Johnson.
12. Research PocketPCs, potentially to buy one soon.
13. Make hotel reservations for the UK trip.
14. Search Fresh Air archives.
15. Buy add-ons to the hamster habitats.
16. Clean my study.
17. Reinstall Microsoft Visual Studio at home from my CDs, which I haven't done since my hard drive crashed.

These are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. (You probably think some of these are fake, thrown in for humor. That is not the case. Even the whale one.) Implicitly on the list, of course, is to write about the activities in this 'blog.

My makeshift way of dealing with the situation has been to get 5.5 hours of sleep per night. I think this is beginning to take a toll. It's getting close to 12:30. I will probably go watch half an hour of "Antiques Roadshow" on TiVo, pour a malt, maybe scoop a bit of Ben and Jerry's (which is, by the way, now the most popular tourist attraction in Vermont. Yikes.)

More descriptions of the activities on the list will follow, as time permits. I have found that it is frequently easier to write about one's experiences doing something after one has already done the something. Wish me luck for making the time.

If you visit mcgees.org in the coming days and find it not responding, it just may be that my hosting company, DreamHost, has been hit by a rolling blackout  The company (and, relevantly, their servers) are based in Huntington Park, which is serviced by Southern California Edison (SCE) [1].  California's deceptive and ill-considered Assembly Bill 1890 has caught up with us.

Curious how California ended up in this pickle in the first place?  An undated report by the California Public Utilities Commission (from internal evidence, written some time between 1 August and 31 October 2000) sheds some useful light.  A couple of key passages:

Currently, the law requires that California electric utilities, which serve the vast majority of California customers, purchase all of their power through the ISO and the PX [at spot prices]. However, individual (usually large) customers and marketers may purchase power outside the PX by signing "bilateral" contracts with marketers or generators [for much lower prices]. The ISO's centralized system still directs the flow of electricity, but prices and service conditions are established by private contract.

The Federal Power Act requires that electric rates be "just and reasonable." Traditionally this has meant "cost based" rates in which investments in new or refurbished power plants were amortized over a long period of time, and profits were set at a reasonable level. Under the new market structure, wholesale prices for electricity are not necessarily based on costs. The FERC now permits power plant owners to sell wholesale power at "market-based rates," with very little evidence to support those rates as just and reasonable. It appears that the FERC's assumption-that the market will discipline wholesale prices-is not a reasonable one at this time in California.

SCE stock has seen better days.  So has its credit rating.  I suppose this is par for the course after defaulting on $596 million of debt.

My thoughts are with all Californians who have health- and life-critical energy needs.  Also: California drivers, please remember that an intersection with a traffic signal blackout is to be treated as a four-way stop (priority passes clockwise, i.e., the person on your right goes before you do.)  A political debacle is one thing; it would be far worse if there were deaths as a result.

Two items from NPR news Monday morning:

1. President Clinton voiced his support for designating Election Day a national holiday. I think this is an excellent idea: by not requiring employers to give their employees time off, citizens (especially the poor) can ipso facto be denied the right to vote.
2. Edward Teller turned 93. I remember being surprised, when Scientific American published their interview in October of 1999, that he was still alive. Simply from a statistical standpoint, he will likely die soon. One is left to wonder how much less the shame of our last century might have been if he had died in his crib.

On Friday (12 January 2001) my parents treated Jennifer and me to an evening at The Magic Castle, a private club for stage magicians. To be admitted, one must either be a member of the Academy of Magical Arts (which costs $550 to join for the first year and $330 for subsequent years) or the guest of a member. My father bid for and won an evening's guest pass at a charity auction.

Jennifer and I had a great time. We enjoyed a fine dinner, then proceeded to see three magic shows in different theaters of the club. One incident from dinner deserves a telling. The restaurant has a signature salad and appetizer bar which they call "The Original Victorian Festalboard." It is $19 as one's meal, or $9 to add to one's meal. None of us chose this option, so we were served green salads before our main course.

As I was eating my salad I uncovered a stark white vegetable; I expected that it was the white heart or stalk of some salad green, but (as far as I could tell under the low lighting in the restaurant) it was surprisingly pale. I touched it with my fork, and the texture was not at all right. I touched it with my hands and pulled it slightly apart. The waiter happened to be at the table side, and I said calmly, "Sir, this is not a vegetable, this is paper." It was similar to a paper towel or a coffee filter.

The waiter recoiled subtly in surprise and embarassment, exclaimed a quiet "Oh!", and whisked the plate away, disappearing out of sight. Ten seconds later he was standing beside the table once more, this time with the maître d'. "I am terribly sorry," said the latter. "The chef uses the paper to keep the salad crisp. Please visit our salad bar, at no charge." He then turned to the three others at the table and said, "Please, everyone is welcome to visit the salad bar." And turning back to me a final time, "I'm very sorry."

I thanked him, and when he had stepped away I stood and went to the bar. I was presented with an impressive selection: I sampled pâté, their three varieties of roasted bell peppers, oriental chicken salad, gravlax, gouda, and perhaps a couple others I have forgotten. Everthing was delicious.

The staff's reaction to the paper incident was impeccable. I cannot think of any way the situation could have been handled better. I am very pleased with the service, and would highly recommend the restaurant to all readers of this page.

I greatly enjoyed reading Author Unknown.  The topic was interesting, as were Foster's methods and writing style.  He continued to toss off priceless lines, like the one I mentioned before.  (All page references will be from the Henry Holt first edition.)

"Professors of literature are rarely required to be 'right' about anything.  In my academic discipline, we don't usually produce facts -- we produce incredibly clever interpretive commentary." (p. 70)

"Philip Hone, onetime mayor of new York, speaks of the hotheaded Professor's 'attic fire' -- which was probably a compliment, meaning something like 'Athenian intensity,' but it's also true that you never knew when the professor's roof would blow[...]." (p. 247.  I think this is hilarious; if you don't get it yet, try pronouncing "attic fire" with and without the third syllable stressed.)

Foster had me laughing at numerous points during the book.  He has a distinctive tone of humorous derision, a couple examples of which I will cite:

"In New England, to protect children from this pernicious practice [of parents' leaving gifts for children on Saint Nicholas Day], veneration of Saint Nicholas was made a criminal offense.  (Christmas cookies in the State of Massachusetts were not decriminalized until 1681.)"  (p. 225)

"Moore [...] thought it his bounden duty, as a faculty member of the General Theological Seminary, to keep close watch on the subverters of public morals, such as Thomas Jefferson."  (p. 257)

There is much of Foster's writing that is distinctive; doubtless I noticed this because Foster spent much of the book pointing out distinctive traints of other authors.  I made note of a few amusing ones, elements that might come in handy if someone ever wants to attribute an anonymous work to Foster....

1. On page 54, and again on page 73, he refers to a "sports coat".  This is certainly not rare, but not most common either.  An AltaVista Search shows that "sport coat" occurrs 4,996 times in the index, "sportcoat" 2,222 times.  But "sports coat" occurs only 2,089 times.  Only "sportscoat" (497 occurrences) shows up less frequently than this.
   
   
2. Foster enjoys constructing mock definitions of phrases for comic effect:

   "This is what is known by Pentagon strategists as 'a preemptive strike,' and in Anglo-American literary studies as 'business as usual.'" (p. 45)
   
   "Scholars call this practice 'due caution.' The rest of the English-speaking world calls it 'covering your ass.'" (p. 70)
   
   "This is what is known to magazine editors as 'point-sharpening,' and to scholars as suicide." (p. 70)

3. He also enjoys putting imaginary sentences into his subjects' mouths for the sake of comedy:

   "The concern in that first paragraph with bedroom politics and masculine virility was another tipoff that [the article] was written by Joe Klein -- and that he was writing against [my article] "Primary Culprit." (See? The professor got me all wrong!  Anonymous is wayyy hetero!)" (p. 90)
   
   "The defense's argument seemed audacious (We don't believe that the prosecution witness even read these documents -- we know ours sure didn't!)." (p. 109)

4. The final one I'll mention is a more serious variant of the "humorous derision" discussed above.  He will present the views of his subject straightforwardly, implicitly trusting that the reader will agree with the absurdity of the statement:

   "Anonymous seemed to think like Joe Klein. [...] Good blacks are hardworking, middle-class, nonthreatening.  Bad blacks need quotas, affirmitive action, welfare, gerrymandering." (p. 69)
   
   "The ideal woman, for Moore, is 'noiseless.'" (p. 246)

It is fun to pick apart a writer's text that deals with picking apart other writers' texts...   :-)

On the whole, I think highly of the book.  I would be remiss, however, if I did not point out the few points that bothered me.

1. Foster lapses into Freudian analysis in a couple places, with skepticism-inducing results:

   "At a critical moment, [Klein] tripped over his own tongue [on the tape recording]: 'I am busy covering the pen -- uh, the presidential campaign.'  (Classic Freudian slip: I can't allow my pen to be exposed -- uh, no scratch that.)" (p. 81, emphasis his.)
   
   and
   
   "Anonymous half-acknowledges something else [...]: 'I feel a little bit like Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve, minus a face.  Which is not to say that I consider myself two-faced' (my [Foster's] emphasis).  The addition of that seemingly unnecessary afterthought is a little like saying to your therapist, 'Doc, tonight I feel a little bit like a tragic hero.  Which is not to say that I feel an urge to kill my fater and marry my mother.'  Red flag!" (p. 86, emphasis his.)

   Stick with the literary analysis, doc.
   
   
2. He seems a bit unfair with Joe Klein (Anonymous) at times; he takes a cheap shot on page 91 when he begins a sentence "Trying to walk a mile in Klein's Armani shoes," as if Klein's income has anything to do with questions of literary attribution.  And he labels his explicit baiting of Klein, suggesting he may be a homosexual when Foster knew this not to be the case, as "harmless mischief"; one wonders if the professor's evaluation would be as even-handed if Klein had baited him with an accusation he knew to be unfounded.
   
   
3. Foster sees a portrait of Major Henry Livingston, whose descendents were claiming that he (Livingston) wrote "'Twas the Night Before Christmas".  Foster describes his encounter with the painting:

   "I found the Major's countenance a little disappointing: wooden expression, clean-shaven, George Washington smile, nothing like Santa.  I could not imagine the man in the the picture with a belly that shook when he laughed like a bowl full of jelly."  (p. 253)

   Yet thirteen pages later we find:

   "Moore [gives] one more indication that he stole "Christmas" -- Santa Claus, sleigh, reindeer, and all -- from a portly rubicund Dutchman named Henry Livingston." (p. 266)

   Did Foster forget what Livingston looked like?  Was this wishful thinking taking over his memory?
   
   
4. Finally, there is one that just plain puzzles me.  On page 249, he writes:

   "An overindulgent and playful father, Henry Livingston taught his children by example, without paying adequate attention to the Good Book and without corporal punishment."

   The use of the word "adequate" is surprising.  Livingston is being compared against the strict and pious Moore, but the context does not imply to me that Foster meant "adequate in Moore's eyes."  It also seems out of character for this to be Foster's judgement: nowhere else do I get the sense of Foster being an excessively religious man.  I am left simply confused by this passage.

Two final points: I learned the word mendacity on page 87, which has a nice ring to it.  And second, a plea: if someone can help me parse this sentence (from page 246) I would be grateful: "No person so seemingly virtuous or beautiful but that Professor Scrooge's pen can detect a rottenness at the core[...]."  I cannot find a use of "but" that makes this sentence intelligible.  "But that" can mean "with the exception that", "except that", "save that", "were it not that", or "unless".  None of these makes sense.  My read is that Foster means "Regardless of how seemingly virtuous or beautiful a person is, Professor Scrooge's pen can detect a rottenness at the core."  Is his usage of "but that" correct?

I finished Author Unknown earlier this evening. I have an index card (5" x 8", not 5" x 7", as I mentioned before) with notes ready for my write-up:

(Granted, my handwriting is not so great in general. But in partial defense of its particular hideousness here, let me state for the record that most of these notes were scrawled without the assistance of desk, table, or any flat writing surface whatsoever.)

One of the hamsters bit me tonight. It was not an angry or scared bite, it was a simple "is this thing food?" bite. He was sniffing my hand, then reached up and grabbed my index finger, opened his mouth, and took a tiny chunk right off the front of it. Their teeth are amazingly sharp; the bite felt like the pinch one gets when exercising insufficient caution playing with small rare earth magnets.

No complete report on Author Unknown yet, but I wanted to take a moment to follow a thread from a couple of chapters ago.  Foster writes:

[T]he Unabomber obtained names and addresses for Charles Epstein, a geneticist [...], and David Gelernter, developer of the networking software called LINDA.  Both scholars were critically injured by Unabom devices a week later. (pp. 136)

This passage suddenly personalized the Unabomber attacks.  I began (and abandoned) one of Gelernter's books, The Muse in the Machine.  I did not particularly care for his theories or his writing, but regardless I felt I somehow knew him.  Suddenly, the Unabomber attacks were personal.

I find the results of the Unabomber's actions to be horrific.  I am overjoyed that Gelernter and his family survived, and I mourn the three men successfully murdered by Kaczynski.  I felt somewhat foolish and irresponsible not knowing of his 1993 accident (which was, by the way, before I purchased his book.)  I set out to Google in an "Is he OK?" panic.  One article grabbed my attention but only listed his being "severely wounded", so I put the page in the background until I found the specifics (disfigurement and partial loss of use of right hand, partial loss of sight in right eye, disfigurement [implied] to the right side of his face, injuries to the right side of his body requiring ten surgical operations.)  I breathed a partial sigh of relief (he can see, hear, walk, type, etc.), as much as one can when learning when an injury "could have been worse".

Now I turned back to the attention-grabbing article entitled "Save the Unabomber" which argues (quite convincingly, I think) against executing Kaczynski:

If there were real justice in America, the Unabomber would be institutionalized, probably for the rest of his life. And his brother would be invited to the White House lawn and given a medal live on national television by our selectively empathetic president.

Like decorated veterans and patriots, David Kaczynski confronted one of the most awful choices in life - to betray a member of his own family to save innocent lives - and did the right thing. He saved others at dreadful personal expense. It's hard to think what more any country could expect of a citizen.

Concerned about possible future victims, he decided to notify the FBI of his suspicions in the spring of l996. Federal officials have repeatedly have said they might never have arrested Kaczynski - or any suspect - if not for this information. The only thing David asked for from the beginning was that his brother not be executed.

I did not need any convincing in the first place.  I am a strong and vocal opponent of the death penalty, which I consider to be barbaric, ineffective, and cruel.  But this objection is a novel, and quite moving, twist.

So continuing with the Google search, I find that Gelernter has written a book entitled Drawing Life : Surviving the Unabomber in which he advocates killing the Unabomber and (according to Amazon) "locate[s] the madman on a continuum of modern social degradation," with the remainder of the "degradation" composed of scum such as liberals, intellectuals, feminists, etc. (one Amazon reader wrote an excellent critique; I wish the author had left an email address so that I could write to express my compliments.)  Amazon describes the book as "not tightly reasoned".  Well, no, one wouldn't expect it to be: this is Gelernter.  This is the reason I gave up on The Muse in the Machine to begin with.  That book, which would like to consider itself in the same category as books by Denett, Hofstadter, and even Penrose, is full of absurd assertions that Gelernter does not bother to substantiate.  An example, from my copy of the book:

"If I ask you to close your eyes and imagine lying on the beach, the better you succeed, the closer you've come to staging a small-scale auto-hallucination.  If we say you have a vivid imagination, we mean that what you imagine seems real to you." (pp. 10, emphasis his.)

This is, at best, a miserably incomplete definition.  What if my next question is "What do you see?"  Subject A reports:

A blue sea, with perhaps three-foot swells.  The sky is pale blue, paler than the water, with small pockets of white cumulus clouds.  To my right is a mother, dressed in a red and black one-piece bathing suit, sitting on a striped beach towel under a green umbrella.  She is trying to applying sunscreen to her four-year-old boy straining to run after his big brother into the surf.  Above, a few seagulls, cawing out of unison.  To my left, a boy and girl, probably siblings, building a sand castle with an old garden spade and an empty plastic plant pot.  The sand is near white, the reflection blinding around the rims of my sunglasses; I'm glad I wore them.  When I stretch my arm out, the sand is perceptibly and uncomfortably warm on my hand.  So are my kneecaps and earlobes; I should probably apply some sunscreen or get in the shade.  A quiet breeze is blowing up from the water.  I can smell the kelp, a gentle iodine rot-smell, a stone's throw away.

Subject B reports:

Umm ... the ocean?  Some sand?  Uhhh ... a sand castle?  I guess that's about it....

The relevant difference here is not that Subject A is more accomplished at self-deception.  Subject A is, in my view, better at associating stimuli and memories with each other, visually modeling situations in order to closely examine them, holding complex images in the mind at once, etc.  But the hallucination interpretation is apparently obvious enough to Gelernter that it does not deserve supporting evidence, not even supporting examples.  Further Google explorations uncovered a transcript of Gelernter's C-SPAN "Booknotes" interview.  Gelernter continues in the same fashion, with unjustified generalizations and instances of false consensus perceptions:

"There are very few people who can live their lives without [religion]."

"Environmentalists are explicit about the spiritual, religious side of what they're doing."

"[T]here are [...] many other people who, when they look for this New Age stuff [...] and that self-esteem movement, seem to be groping pathetically in the dark for the kind of moral and spiritual guidance that traditional Christianity rendered very successfully for a couple of millennia and Judaism for even longer."

"And I have a feeling that many of these people are coming up with makeshift simulated religions [...] because they don't know what their traditional religions are. I can tell you the average Jew in this country has no concept of what Judaism is[...]."

"I've always been in favor of the death penalty for murderers [...] I can't conceive of [...] our not sentencing such a man to death if we are serious about murder, if we are serious about our absolute refusal to tolerate murder."

"[T]he art market today is such that there isn't a person in America who couldn't sell artwork for money. My pet parrot could. Anything goes on today's art market."

"I'm not a great talker; I mean, I'd rather write than talk. But very--all writers feel that way."

As a jab at him, note:

"I'm just tremendously impressed by the imaginativeness of this technology [that repaired my right eye after the bombing] and by the skill of the surgeons who did it."

Good thing those technologists are adept at "auto-hallucination", eh David?

Gelernter says he does not wanted to be treated as a "victim" (as I understand it, this is a central point of Drawing Life.)  I believe this statement and I congratulate him.  But in my view the most dangerous possibility is that people consider him a victim anyway and neglect to question his assertions simply because "he's been through so much" or "I could never understand what he went through."  Mail-bomb or no, these statements deserve skepticism on our part and justification on his.

But all this notwithstanding: Dr. Gelernter, please accept my best wishes for you and your family.

I returned from the conference last night. I have not finished the book yet but, in my defense, it is not the "middle of [this] week" yet.

Interesting side-note: it suddenly occurs to me that I have been using hyperlinks to disambiguate pronoun reference. That is, a reader who understands the context can read a concise (or relatively concise) passage and an unfamiliar reader will still have access to all the relevant information. I am not the first one to do this, of course, I just have never thought of it in these terms.

Finally: I am considering constructing a topic index for these posts, as the number of them keeps increasing. What do you think?

I'm tired. No insomnia tonight, I've just been staying up to finish reading a chapter of Author Unknown. I am making notes on the 5" x 7" index card that I use as a bookmark (I tend to do this) and was going to type some observations tonight, but I won't.

I'll be out of town until the middle of next week, at which point the blogging will continue. I will likely have finished reading the book by then.

One quick note, before I fall asleep at my keyboard. I forgot to add one complaint to last night's post. One of the most reproachable aspects of Bennett's site is the picture she chooses to begin the page. According to the Library of Congress entry for the book, Foster was born in 1950. This is consistent with the "portrait of the author" on the book's dustjacket. Let me describe Bennett's picture, if you haven't clicked over there already. The picture is of a man in (I would say) his mid thirties. The picture is in profile, subject's right side to the camera, clad in blue jeans, sweater, waterproof lined jacket, and cap. He is sitting on a tombstone, in a graveyard, in the snow, holding a human skull in his right hand so that it appears to be gazing at his head. His head is turned the camera, bearing a solemn expression.

OK, even if you haven't looked at the picture yet, you get the reference, I'm sure. It's Hamlet, of course (Act V, scene i, actually, but I had to look that part up.) It's not a particularly sophisticated reference, to be sure, but certainly it is reasonable to indulge a Shakespeare professor a bit of silly humor. Perhaps he photocopied the picture onto the front sheets of students' midterm exam booklets to help release examination anxieties (in the same way that we were given The Far Side on Chemistry exams and Dilbert on math exams in college.) In fact, it is likely that the setting was not Foster's idea in the first place, as the photo is attributed to a magazine shoot. But given the tone of animosity in Bennett's writing, I can't help but think this was intended merely to look morbid and threatening, as another ill-reasoned jab at Foster. The photo had to be at least ten years old at the time of the murder. There are certainly more recent photos available, especially given the recent publication of Foster's book. She certainly knows of the book, as she updated the page in November 2000 to add comments on it. Yet she chooses a fifteen year old picture of him holding a skull.

Kudos to Google! I am always heartened when a web site takes time to personally respond to an email message. On Friday, 22 December 2000, I wrote the following note to suggestions@google.com with the subject "Amusing":

If one calls up [http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.google.com], one sees the following message:

"This is Google's cache of http://www.google.com/. [...] Google is not affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its content."

Perhaps a special-case exception is in order here? :^)

Love your search engine; you have broken my AltaVista ties permanently.

Sincerely,
Joshua McGee
Thousand Oaks, CA, USA
http://www.mcgees.org

Today I received this pleasant note:

Thanks for the praise - We love hearing from our users!
Please consider joining our Google-Friends Newsletter distribution list for the latest scoop on Google. You can do this at http://www.google.com/contact/newsletter.html .

You are right about the cached page . . . this is too funny.

Regards,
The Google Team

Reading nonfiction at 2:30 a.m. is probably a more defensible pursuit than playing video games at 2:30 a.m. This does not erase the fact that I am still awake, unable to sleep, in the wee hours of the morning. The book I am reading is Don Foster's Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous, a requested Christmas gift that I am enjoying thoroughly. A priceless bit of deadpan humor from page 50:

To propose an addition to the Shakespeare canon is like announcing that you've found a lost Book of the Bible, due for inclusion in future editions. A challenge to the canon of an important writer like God or Shakespeare invites a trial by fire.

There is a topic I want to broach, but it feels as if I am on the edge of a steep slope, at risk of getting far too deep into a topic I do not truly want to explore in depth right now. Foster makes brief reference to the Jon-Benét Ramsey murder, a case on which he volunteered his assistance. The details are well beyond the scope of what I want to cover here, and I am far from an expert person to sort out the conflicting facts and reports. But while searching for an unrelated hyperlink for this post, I encountered a site run by one Sue Bennett who posted extensively to online discussion fora under the name "jameson" following the murder and who is mentioned specifically in Foster's book.

Again, for the record, I have no basis to objectively judge the facts in the case. I probably know even less of it than the average American, as I ignored popular media that seemed to latch voyeuristically onto the case in the months (years?) following. The point I want to bring up concerns the attribution of credibility based on factors other than objective fact. In short, I instinctively give perhaps an order of magnitude more credibility to Foster than to Bennett. Foster is a Ph.D., a recognized academic, a professional man. Bennett is self-professedly (see "48 Hours" transcript segment) "a stay at home housewife [who] bakes bread"; she also speculates obsessively in chat rooms. Foster's writing is measured, grammatically excellent, and littered with subtle humor and literary references (the fact that I picked up on some of them lead me to suggest that there are jokes and allusions that went right over my head.) Bennett's is hasty, poorly-edited, humorless, and logically flawed. While I would like to believe that the gender difference alone would not influence me, the above factors combine to paint very different pictures of the two parties. My mental image of Foster has him standing at a podium, challenging a class of students to delve deeper into a point of literary analysis, wearing an oldish tweed coat and dry-clean only slacks, and winding down the day with a well-worn Chaucer and perhaps a smoker's pipe. My picture of Bennett is of an overweight woman in an ill-fitting housedress, with Jerry Springer providing background noise as she types speculative and inflammatory postings in some forsaken corner of Usenet.

I have no idea how much of these pictures are accurate, but that's not my point; my point is rather that these images highlight my own bigotry, that I correlate poor spelling with trash television, obsessive speculation with slovenliness, literary interest with sincerity, and sophistication with trustworthiness. Mea culpa.

And now the precipice: in a situation such as this, where is the "line" between constructive skepticism, useful to weed out crackpots, and simple prejudice? I continue to promise myself that I will not delve into this right now. So I'll settle for an outline of some points and questions that occur to me:

1. Skeptical Inquirer and Science regularly err on the side of prejudice.
2. Is academic bigotry essential for academic survival in a crackpot-ridden world?
3. How do we distinguish between ad hominem attacks and "goes to character" arguments?

One of my conclusions, if I were to explore one right now, would be that the apparent rigorous standard of credibility employed by the scientific community and (less strongly) the academic community at large, while being rather harsh at times and undeniably imperfect, may be a worthwhile mantra (i.e., mind-tool.) There seem to be three points to this standard. One, relevant credentials confer credibility. Two, prior accomplishments and successful predictions in the field in question confer credibility. Three, a single error, indiscretion, or hasty conclusion can derail one's credibility for life (e.g., the Fleischmann and Pons cold fusion debacle.) According the evidence I have available, Foster meets conditions one and two and has managed to avoid three. Bennett meets neither one nor two, and I do not have the requisite data to know if she has avoided number three, although (more bigotry) I expect she has not.

Alright, enough already. Now it is time to see whether the insomnia has worn off.

For the most part I have been exploring THPS2 without outside help.  But poking around a bit online I have found a large number of sites dedicated to compiling cheat codes, game secrets, and other tidbits of inside information.  This is not too surprising: this is cut out for the user-contribution model of website design and is essentially a specialized extension of software "Easter Egg" compilations common on the Web.

I have been careful to only skim these descriptions so that I will not ruin my surprise (in much the same way that I avoid previews of movies and episodes of television programs I have already decided to watch.)  In my skimming, however, I discovered an intriguing aspect of Playstation cheat codes.  There is apparently a standardized mapping of game controller buttons onto a subset of the English alphabet.  The directional keypad maps onto U, R, D, and L for the four cardinal directions, and the four symbol-decorated buttons map similarly: square maps to S, circle to C, triangle to T, and cross to X.  One well-known cheat code for THPS2 is right-up-square-triangle to toggle whether or not splattering blood is rendered when the character wipes out (the meaning of "wipe out" is fairly obvious.  This glossary should be useful for anything more esoteric.  I, for one, do not yet understand 90% of it.)  This spells out RUST; I'm assuming the association for a skater is the similarity in flavor between blood and ferrous oxide.  (A quick tangent here: many cheat sites assume that the user already knows how to enter these secret codes.  This was not the case for me.  In case you found this page through a search engine and are looking for this info: depress L1 while you press and release each of the code buttons in sequence, then release L1.  This is supposed to work from menu screens and pause screens, at least in THPS2.)

This mapping is fairly constraining: eight letters, only one of which is a vowel, and the least common one at that.  I do not know if anyone ever maps circle to O or (with a bit of a stretch) triangle to A.  This problem seems to be avoided, to some degree at least, by employing the same alternate spelling reasoning that gives us such online treasures as "C U Later": XTC ("extasy") shows up in many codes.  But disregarding this for a moment, an interesting question remains: how many English words can be formed using only these eight letters?  My method for answering this question may seem absurdly inefficient to the UNIX hackers among you: sorry, it's a "quick and dirty" method for answering this question.

First I needed a list of English words.  A Google search led me to Orchy.com which bills itself as "The Biggest Online Text Dictionary on the Web".  The site divides each letter of the alphabet into its own page.  I cut and pasted the words beginning with C, D, L, R, S, T, and X into Wordpad (my preferred Notepad++ was unavailable), saved as wordlist.txt, and uploaded to mcgees.org.  A series of UNIX commands follows:

cat wordlist.txt | tr ' ' '\n' > wordlist2.txt
("Display file wordlist.txt.  Pipe output to tr to translate all spaces into newline characters.  Output to file wordlist.txt."  "cat" is the concatenate and display command in UNIX systems; we are not using the concatenate feature here.)

cat wordlist2.txt | egrep -v [^cdlrstuxCDLRSTUX-\'] > wordlist3.txt
("Display file wordlist2.txt.  Pipe output to egrep to retain only lines wherein it is not the case that the line contains a character other than a permitted letter (regardless of case), a hyphen, or a single quote.  Output to file wordlist3.txt.")

Now I want to sort by word length.  Here is the very inefficient part.  A visual search showed that the longest word in wordlist3.txt contains eight characters.  I entered the following lines:

cat wordlist3.txt | egrep '^........$' >> wordlist4.txt
cat wordlist3.txt | egrep '^.......$' >> wordlist4.txt
cat wordlist3.txt | egrep '^......$' >> wordlist4.txt
cat wordlist3.txt | egrep '^.....$' >> wordlist4.txt
cat wordlist3.txt | egrep '^....$' >> wordlist4.txt
cat wordlist3.txt | egrep '^...$' >> wordlist4.txt
cat wordlist3.txt | egrep '^..$' >> wordlist4.txt
cat wordlist3.txt | egrep '^.$' >> wordlist4.txt
("Display file wordlist2.txt.  Pipe output to egrep to retain only lines containing 8 characters.  Append to wordlist4.txt.  Repeat for 7 character words, 6 character words, etc."  Since wordlist3.txt is alphabetized, wordlist4.txt will be sorted in descending order by word length, then alphabetically.  I did not have to type all of these lines, by the way.  I typed the first line, then for each subsequent line I hit the up arrow to retrieve the last command, moved to cursor to the left, and deleted one dot.)

So, if you want it, go ahead and use the entries in wordlist4.txt in your Playstation games to see if any of these CDLRSTUX words cause cool things to happen.

THPS2 update: I have unlocked Venice Beach as well as SkateStreet Ventura and Philadelphia (all of these are, of course, computer rendered environments.)

My vacation is officially at an end: I have work tomorrow (today) morning. Prudently, therefore, I only played THPS2 until 2:30 a.m.  :-)

Well, the weblog is back after my week+ hiatus.  The holidays were great: Jenn and I were able to see both our families, and in the days after Christmas Jenn's sister, Jenn's brother, and my brother (ages 20, 18, and 18, respectively) came to stay with us in Thousand Oaks.  We had a fabulous time.

The highlight, perhaps, was my developing a serious addiction.  To a video game.  I don't play video games.  Jenn has a Sony Playstation that I gave her as an anniversary gift because she does enjoy video games.  I have played and enjoyed games such as Roll Away and Mortal Kombat 4, but they never manage to hold my interest for more than an hour or so.  My brother rented some games to bring with him and, on a whim, picked up Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 since he knows I enjoy watching competitive skateboarding.

I love this game!  After they left Jenn and I went out of town, and on our way home I stopped to purchase a copy ($40, by the way) at Toys Backwards-"R" Us.  Last night I started playing about an hour after midnight, lost track of time, and finally stopped at 4:30 a.m.

So, I'm hooked.  I'll probably play more tonight: I am very close to unlocking Venice Beach.