mcgees.org

I don’t know if you have heard the story of the Masai tribespeople learning of the September 11 attacks on  the world Trade Center.  It was only after one of their own returned from his studies abroad in the U.S. that they learned of the tragedy.  In proper oral history tradition, he sat down with them and told them tales of the attack.

The Masai could not comprehend of a building so high that a man would die if he jumped from the top, but the returned Stanford University student, Mr. Naiyomah, explained that these were buildings stretching high into the clouds, that there were giant fires, and that men with special tools and equipment went into the buildings to try to save lives.

The tribespeople were relieved that their friend was unscathed, and they were angry.  The village’s chief warrior, Mr. Oltetia, explained that if they got ahold of Osama bin Laden they surely would have to kill him.  They recognized, however, that bin Laden must be a powerful man to have caused this devastation, so he could not be killed directly.  Instead, the warriors would surround him in the bush and strike with spears and arrows.

Mostly, however, the villagers were saddened.  They asked Mr. Naiyomah to help find an important American.  Mr. Naiyomah contacted William Brancick, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi.  This past Sunday, he flew to a game preserve and then was driven two hours over very rugged roads to reach the village.  The villagers were waiting for him.  At a ceremony in a grassy clearing, the village bestowed a gift of fourteen blessed cows to help the United States.

This put Brancick in a difficult position, and he explained that it would be very difficult to transport a small herd of cows to America.  He told them he would probably sell the cows, use the money to buy Masai jewelry, and give the jewelry to America.  I have no indication about whether this was a faux pas.  Cattle are very important to the Masai, who believe that all cattle in the world belong to them.  Their exhaustive use of the cattle parallels the Native Americans of the Plains’ use of bison.  The animals are tapped for blood and milk, which are mixed together and drunk (this is, one would expect, highly nutritious.)  When the animal is killed the meat is eaten and all the parts used.  As Mr. Naiyomah explains, “It [the cow] is sacred.  It’s more than property.  You give it a name.  You talk to it.  You perform rituals with it.  I don’t know if you have any sacred food in America, something that has a supernatural feel as you eat it.  That’s the cow for us.”

I am touched by this gesture, but I cannot figure out how to write this post so that it does not sound condescending to the Masai.  Their act was so generous, so naïve, it reminds one of the gift of a child.  What an uplifting tale.

The New York Times has more info (registration required; you know the drill.)  Also, an American has set up a fine “thank you” site.

This clock is really cool.  Even cooler than the Industrious Clock.

The overpriced cable company that serves the new house has one of the most frustrating sales departments I
have ever dealt with.  I am ordering from them cable television and cable modem services.  To
get the cable television installed, however, I have to wait until the cable modem gets installed.  I
cannot even schedule an installation for the cable television until the cable modem is
installed.  This was scheduled for the 30^th of last month, but the guy never
showed up.  It was rescheduled for this morning, but the guy did not show up until 2 p.m. (Jenn waited
around for him.)  Jenn told me he had finished, so I called Ernesto (my rep) to schedule the installation of the cable television service.  Here is the conversation:

Ernesto:  Hi Josh, we can get the home installation taken care of now.

Josh:  Great!

Ernesto:   OK, how many televisions do you have?

Josh:  Two.

Ernesto:   OK.  So on the first one we’ll set up a cable box.  That’s 64
basic channels, plus 77 digital channels, plus [some number] of music channels, plus four talk radio
channels, plus ten HBO and eight Showtime.  On the other television you will just have the 64 basic
channels.  After the first month [that I'm receiving for free as a promotion], if you choose to
keep it, it will be $65 per month.

Josh:  The $65 includes the pay channels?

Ernesto:   Yes.

Josh:  And how much would it be without the pay channels?

Ernesto:   $43 per month.

Josh:  OK, so I would then have the sixty-whatever basic channels, the 77 digital
channels and the music.

Ernesto:   No.

Josh:  I’m sorry?

Ernesto:   No.  You wouldn’t have the digital channels.

Josh:  I’m trying to figure out how much it would be if I just dropped the HBO and
Showtime.

Ernesto:   So you don’t want the digital channels?

Josh:  No, I am interested in the digital channels, and I’m trying to see how much that would be without HBO and Showtime.

Ernesto:   $65.

Josh:  (pause)

Ernesto:   (pause)

Josh:  Ernesto, does that include the HBO and Showtime?

Ernesto:   Errr, yes.

Josh:  How much would it be for the service without HBO and without Showtime?

Ernesto:   $43.

Josh:  $43?

Ernesto:   Yes.

Josh:  Does that include the digital channels?

Ernesto:   No, but if you, I mean if you want to, I mean you don’t have to decide right
now, you can tell us after the first month….

Josh:  Ernesto, I’m not trying to be critical or to complain here.  I’m just trying
to find out how much this will cost.

Ernesto:   OK.

Josh:  OK.  Can I get the digital channels without subscribing to HBO and
Showtime?

Ernesto:   Of course.

Josh:  How much would it be to have the digital cable box, but not have HBO and
Showtime?

Ernesto:   $6 more per month.

Josh:  OK, $6 more.  So the total cost would be $49 per month, right?

Ernesto:   Errr, yes, $49.

Josh:  That sounds pretty good.

Ernesto:   OK.  And if you want the digital channels at some point, that would be
only $10 more per month.

Josh:  (pause)

Ernesto:   (pause)

Josh:  I thought you just said $6.

Ernesto:   Yes.

Josh:  For the digital cable box it would be $6 per month.

Ernesto:   Yes, $6 for the box.  And then if you decided you wanted the
digital channels that would be only $10 more per month.

Josh:  Why in the world would I want a digital cable box if I didn’t have digital
channels?

Ernesto:   (pause)

Josh:  One can’t be used without the other, right?

Ernesto:   Right.

Josh:  So it’s just that you guys list them separately, you need both to get the digital
channels, right?

Ernesto:   Huh?

Josh:  To get digital channels, I would need to pay $6 per month for the digital cable
box and $10 per month for the digital channels.

Ernesto:   Yes.

Josh:  So it would be $16 per month in addition to the $43.

Ernesto:   Uh, $16 … err … right.  That would put you around $60 per month.

If you have a policy against responding to spam you get, skirt around that problem by responding to spam I got.  Go to the Bombay Sapphire (gin) website and participate in their gorgeous interactive contest.  You could win a beautiful piece of art valued at over US$5,000; but even if you don’t win, the site design and the artistic merit of the content makes the trip worthwhile.

20:02 20.02.2002

Here is a list of the ten most frequent four-word phrases in the King James Bible:

This is the sort of thing that would have taken years of scholarship even forty years ago, and yet I created this in less than one minute on a notebook PC (Clarification added 06 February 2002: It took less than a minute to run.  It took somewhat longer to write the script.  But not years longer.)  I used a home-baked Perl script to do this.  Perl can stand for “Practical Extraction and Report Language”; see why?

For fans of Google Holiday Logos, the creative variations upon the logo of the Google search engine to celebrate particular events, note that Google maintains an archive page of all previously used holiday logos.

The author of a certain gardening book wrote that even if home buyers are gardeners, they rarely check the quality of the soil in houses they tour.  The implication is that, though soil quality is important to them, it does not enter their collective radar screens as an appropriate criterion for home selection.  This observation has stuck with me, and I think it may extend to another domain: street names.

A great street name, in my opinion, meets three criteria:

1. It sounds pleasant,
2. people on the telephone already know how to spell it, and
3. it is under 20 characters long.

Let’s start with point 3.  Take the USPS Postal Store.  As they are, after all, the postal service, it is important to them to be on the cutting edge of street address technology.  To wit, when you enter a street address into their text field, their program does not blindly accept it.  The USPS Postal Store checks to make sure that the street you name exists in your town.  Reasonable, in principle.  But the text field is set to a maximum length of thirty characters.  My private mail box is on “Avenida de los Arboles”; with the numerical portion prepended and my mailbox number appended, this does not fit in the field.  I cannot leave off either numerical portion, of course.  And I cannot shorten the street name to “Ave. Arboles”, for instance, because I will be told that this street does not exist.  This is not the only online store at which this has occurred.  My solution has been to save a local copy of the web page, fix the script address in the <FORM> tag to point at a fully-qualified URL rather than a relative URL, and submit from this page.  I am not sure how many customers of the Postal Store could do this.  So, “Avenida de los Arboles” is out as a good street name.

Now for point 2: Prior to my current residence I lived on “Calle Quebracho” (my bastardized American pronunciation rendered this as KIE-aye keh-BRAH-cho.)  I never found someone on the other end of the telephone who knew how to spell this without instruction.  And a significant subset proceeded to ask me, “OK, is it ’street’, ‘road’, or ‘avenue’?”  Even my current street, the somewhat pompously-named “White Ridge Place”, causes its share of confusion.  If I pronounce ‘white’ with a proper, aspirated, unvoiced ‘wh’, Americans inevitably hear “light”.  This happens to my wife as well.  I know that if I were to pronounce ‘white’ as WYE-it, with an appropriate drawl, they would understand what I was saying, but I am not going to do this (just like I will not say kwuh-BEK and chwenty to appease the IBM ViaVoice engine at work.)  This might be foolish; refusing to bow to this is certainly not the most efficient way of doing things.  But even if I communicate “white”, there is no way to tell over the telephone whether the street is “White Ridge Place” or “Whiteridge Place”.

Point 1 is the least tangible.  In my area, there are many streets with names that I like: “Chaucer”, “Shakespeare”, “Lost Hills”, “Whim”, and “Falling Star”, to name a few.  But how do they fare against the other two points?  “Whim” is definitely out; it causes the “White Ridge” problems, just at a greater magnitude.  “Chaucer” is likewise out because I doubt many American telephone operators could spell it (I know this might sound patronizing and elitist, but I’m pretty sure it’s true.  My faith in their abilities has been weakened by, among other things, the number of ways they have discovered to misspell ‘Joshua’.)  “Shakespeare” might be almost as bad.  Here is a quick look at word frequencies in the AltaVista index:

• shakespeare: 2,691,612
• shakespear: 39,172
• shakespere: 19,674
• shakspeare: 8,800
• shakspere: 3,688
• shaksper: 2,953
• shakspear: 879
• shakesper: 105
• shakespeer: 82
• shakspier: 35
• shakespier: 26
• shakspeer: 17

To be honest, this is better than what I expected it to be, but it is still around three percent.  Compare that to the one percent error rate in this list, which I consider to be a very frequently misspelt word:

• massachusetts: 8,710,938
• massachussetts: 42,614
• massachussets: 26,398
• massachusets: 13,691
• masachusetts: 6,363
• masachussetts: 270
• masachussets: 192
• masachusets: 167

At least states get two-letter abbreviations.

In any case, if anyone wants to send me mail, the street is “Avenida de los Arboles”.  You can get the details from my online resumé.

Jenn and I set our first geocache yesterday.  Feel free to read about it.

Jennifer and I visited our first GeoCache site today, not far at all from our home.  It was terrific fun; it is quite similar to the Degree Confluence Project in which we have participated.  I will not go into detail here … you can read about that at the site … but it boils down to hiding a secret stash somewhere, recording the GPS coordinates, and telling people about it.

We have our first cache (that is, the first that we will place) set up and ready to go.  We have the rough location picked out.  We just need a proper day to do it.  Sometime this month, I’m sure, and I will certainly post details here.

I have just found what may be my favorite snack chip: Sweet Brown Rice & Black Bean 100% Organic Kettle Tortilla Chips from Kettle Foods.  They have an extremely satisfying snap, a good high-resistance crunch, a delicious interplay of sweet whole grain flavors, and are not oily or stale.  The flavor and texture profile is different from any other tortilla chip I have tried; the back of the bag explains this:

Kettle^TM Tortilla Chips emerge from organically grown corn, slowly hand cooked, and then stone ground with sprouted corn for a natural sweetness.

Aha.  Interesting.

Even more interesting is the fact that there is a footnote for this sentence, which describes that this process is patented.  I visited the IBM Patent Server and, sure enough, US Patent #5,298,274, issued 03/29/1994 to Nirbhao S. Khalsa of Portland OR, is entitled “Methods for making tortilla chips and tortilla chips produced thereby”.  The patent comprises 26 claims, the first five of which I reproduce here:

    1. A method for making tortilla chips, comprising:

• mixing a raw, germinated grain fraction with a non-germinated grain fraction to produce a grain mixture;


• grinding the grain mixture to produce a dense dough;


• sheeting the dough to form a dough sheet;


• cutting the dough sheet to provide desired dough shapes; and


• heating the dough shapes to produce tortilla chips.

    2. A method for making tortilla chips according to claim 1, wherein the raw, germinated grain fraction comprises raw, germinated whole kernel corn, and the non-germinated grain fraction comprises non-germinated corn.

    3. A method for making tortilla chips according to claim 1, wherein the raw, germinated grain fraction comprises about 2% to about 25% of the grain mixture.

    4. A method for making tortilla chips according to claim 1, wherein the dense dough produced by grinding the grain mixture has a moisture content of about 48% to 50%.

    5. A method for making tortilla chips according to claim 1, additionally comprising germinating a raw grain by soaking dried, whole grain in a liquid for a soaking period, draining the soaked grain, and periodically rinsing the soaked grain and maintaining it in a constant temperature environment for a germination period.

This is deeply amusing to me.  First is the use of language, not as a rapier or a scalpel but as a barbell.  Consider the semantic content of “sheeting the dough to form a dough sheet.”  I see.  It is terribly counterintuitive that by sheeting dough one would end up with a sheet of dough.  Or “mixing a raw, germinated grain fraction with a non-germinated grain fraction to produce a grain mixture.”  The enlightenment continues: not only does sheeting dough yield a dough sheet, but mixing grain yields a grain mixture.

Now I know that the corn chips’ lawyers did not invent modern legal parlance, so it would be unfair to shift the entire burden onto them.  But it is startling how little information can be conveyed by such detailed description.  Imagine I were to tell you that “blorking the dough forms a dough blork”, or that “zripping two kinds of grain yields a grain zrip.”  Either you know what a blork and a zrip are, in which case my sentence is pointless, or you do not, in which case my sentence is meaningless.  The mathematician in me rebels against circularly-defined terms.  What is a bisected angle?  Well, silly, it’s an angle that has been bisected!

But this is also funny on a tonal level.  It would be interesting to me to explore whether modern legal sentence forms derived from Church documents, as this is terribly reminiscent of the Athanasian Creed:

Now this is the catholic faith:

     That we worship one God in trinity
     and the trinity in unity,
     neither blending their persons
     nor dividing their essence.
          For the person of the Father is a distinct person,
          the person of the Son is another,
          and that of the Holy Spirit still another.
          But the divinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is one,
          their glory equal, their majesty coeternal.

     What quality the Father has, the Son has, and the Holy Spirit has.
          The Father is uncreated,
          the Son is uncreated,
          the Holy Spirit is uncreated.

          The Father is immeasurable,
          the Son is immeasurable,
          the Holy Spirit is immeasurable.

          The Father is eternal,
          the Son is eternal,
          the Holy Spirit is eternal.

               And yet there are not three eternal beings;
               there is but one eternal being.
               So too there are not three uncreated or immeasurable beings;
               there is but one uncreated and immeasurable being.

          Similarly, the Father is almighty,
          the Son is almighty,
          the Holy Spirit is almighty.
               Yet there are not three almighty beings;
               there is but one almighty being.

          Thus the Father is God,
          the Son is God,
          the Holy Spirit is God.
               Yet there are not three gods;
               there is but one God.

          Thus the Father is Lord,
          the Son is Lord,
          the Holy Spirit is Lord.
               Yet there are not three lords;
               there is but one Lord.

          [etc....]

Or, on a less reverent note, Monty Python:

"And the Lord spake, saying, 'First shalt thou take out the
      Holy Pin.  Then, shalt thou count to three, no more, no less.  Three
      shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting
      shalt be three.  Four shalt thou not count, nor either count thou two,
      excepting that thou then proceed to three.  Five is right out.  Once
      the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou
      thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thou foe, who being naughty
      in my sight, shall snuff it.'"

An excellent venue to explore the necessity of such legalistic speech would certainly be the game Nomic, invented nineteen years ago by philosophy professor Peter Suber and popularized by Douglas Hofstadter in his late great Metamagical Themas column in Scientific American.  In the game of Nomic, changing the game rules is a move.  I first read about this several years ago, but have yet to actually play it; it has been essentially a thought experiment.  One of these days I would like to play an actual game (perhaps, or even preferably, online.)

Just now, in hunting for hyperlinks, I thought I would try to purchase a copy of Suber’s book The Paradox of Self-Amendment in which Nomic appears as an appendix.  I checked BookFinder but all the offers I found were for new copies of the book for $68 apiece, and I expect that the author would see very little (or any) of this.  Yes, I want to read the book; but perhaps it makes more sense to read the free online version.