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The Canadian government issued a travel warning today, telling Canadian citizens that if they were born in certain Arab countries that they should avoid travel to the U.S., because they are likely to be mistreated by American authorities.

It is really refreshing in this age of fear and hypocrisy to have a government say something honest.   Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham said “Canadian citizens are Canadian citizens and both the United States and Canada are countries that are multicultural in nature and based on immigration.”

As a result, he refused to countenance a police state where some citizens are more equal than others, where some citizens risk detention, deportation, or arbitrary arrest, and other citizens go unchallenged.  Last month the U.S. took a Canadian citizen born in Syria, who was simply changing planes in New York, and refused to allow him to travel on to Canada, but sent him back to Syria.

In the same way that Jews learned that it was dangerous to travel in Nazi Germany before the war, Canadians of Arab descent, if they were born overseas, are learning that they can be arrested and detained in the U.S. because of their race.

In a typically Canadian approach to the dangers of arbitrary arrest and detention in foreign countries, the government has advised its citizens not to risk travel to the dangerous areas.  Thus the U.S. joins such wonderful places as Iran, Yemen, and parts of Indonesia, where travel has become too dangerous for certain people.

Although there is humor in the U.S. being hoisted by its own petard, the sad fact is that this is another example of the creeping totalitarianism we are experiencing in our daily lives.

Our country is based two ideas whose roots are hundreds of years old.  One is that all citizens are equal before the law.  The illegal detentions without charges or access to the courts single out some citizens for arbitrary arrest in a way that strips them of rights guaranteed all citizens under the bill of rights and the constitution.  The second, more modern principle is one of racial equality, that government decisions such as whom to arrest, to execute, to keep under surveillance or to reward cannot be made on the basis of race. 

Many 20^th century writers confronted the rise of fascism and dwelt on the phenomenon of diminishing freedoms, as more and more groups were first marginalized as outsiders, and then arrested as enemies of the state.  This is now happening here.  But of all the writers, sixteenth century John Dunne said it best, with his poem, part of a larger meditation.

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

Our freedoms are diminished as our government singles out groups for totalitarian treatment.  We must not allow citizens to be marginalized, whether Canadian or American.  It is time to literally fight for our freedoms if we are to preserve them.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 4:32:41 PM -

Posted by The Happy Tutor

Keep your vocabulary and opinions to a mininum.

It is a dumb employee who is smarter than her boss.

Never call your boss, Sir, especially if she is a woman.

Do not call yourself Doctor unless asked to preach the Sermon.

Reserve Poetry for Funerals.

When asked to do something say, It is not my job, not, It is not my Field.

Seek first to be enthusiastic. Then seek to make others so.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 4:31:39 PM -

60. What do you call the area of grass between the sidewalk and the road?

a. berm (3.65%)
b. parking (1.28%)
c. tree lawn (1.96%)
d. terrace (0.46%)
e. curb strip (8.24%)
f. beltway (0.15%)
g. verge (2.99%)
h. I have no word for this (69.07%)
i. other (12.20%)
(3919 respondents)

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 1:46:53 PM -

An interesting site -- for instance where else would you go to check out what Lee Marvin supposedly said about Captain Kangaroo on the Tonight Show?

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 7:40:12 AM -

I hadn't been to this site for some time, it is an incredible tool for exploring the universe of words.

Visual Thesaurus.

Two weeks old link from OLDaily: Visual Thesaurus for playing with meanings of English words. This is definitely something useful for improving my language skills :) [Mathemagenic]

» What a fun tool (think TouchGraph GoogleBrowser).  Thanks for the link.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 9:30:18 PM -

1. bubble wrap therapy
2. paper airplane flight simulator
3. what to do with plastic cups when you're jacked up on espresso
4. prevent assholes from touching your monitor and making it smudgy

Discuss (Thanks, Frank, mack daddy of Web Zen!)
[Boing Boing Blog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 3:57:47 PM -

Some visually creative counter-programming.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 9:12:25 AM -

"Samples of the type of sounds converted from plasma wave instruments are available online at http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/~jrp/sounds/sounds.html.
One from Galileo's studies of Ganymede's magnetosphere is at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/ganymede/pws.html.
One from Voyager's passage through the bow shock of the solar wind against Jupiter's magnetosphere is at http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/plasma-wave/tutorial/voyager1/jupiter/bowshock/text.html.
One from Cassini, also of the interaction between the solar wind and Jupiter's magnetosphere, is at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/jupiterflyby/gallery/gl_pages/rpws_release5.html."

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:41:25 AM -

Adina Levin, having read my ramble about Stephen Wolfram's presentation at PopTech, recommends Kurzweil's appreciation of him, which she has summarized here. The Kurzweil piece is well-written and leave us humanities majors behind about a third of the way in.

There's also a good article — again only two-thirds beyond my comprehension — by Steven Weinberg in the NY Review of Books.

Steve Yost writes pithily about reading Wolfram. He says:

The repetitiveness of Wolfram's style led me to think that near the end he'd reveal that the book was generated using his main thesis as the initial condition of a CA algorithm. Now that would be a substantial example.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:36:45 AM -

I was at the Newseum, a site that thumbnails newspaper front pages from around the world. (Thanks, Dan Pink.) I clicked on the Australia's Courier Mail and saw their tag line:

Unfortunately, I freudianly misread it as:

Two letters can make the difference between marketing and truth, eh?

And while we're discussing news about news, J.D. Lasiter has asked various digeratti what they read for news. For extra fun, try to guess the answers the ecelebs give; I bet you won't be far wrong. (Kudos to Henry Jenkins for mentioning TheOnion as a news source.) [JOHO the Blog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:36:17 AM -

William Blum... "The American Empire for Dummies"

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 10:14:27 PM -

1. Go to google.com
2. Type in your phone number, in quotation marks
3. When it finds your name and address, click on "Maps"
4. You are here. [JOHO the Blog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 9:58:56 PM -

"[Mr.] Stanford claims the 8- by 10-inch document, which is written in a language not known on Earth, entitles him to full ownership of the moon and all materials within a 500-mile radius of the orb’s surface... [he] insists that he is owed royalties on any television, film, or printed material bearing the likeness of his property or songs using the word moon in their title, including the movie Man in the Moon, and popular songs like Moon River.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 6:17:46 PM -

Counsel: And people come to you, do they, asking you to make special wardrobes so that they can use stolen clothes hangers?

Chrysler: It isn't so much the fact that they are stolen that makes them attractive. You have to remember that many top businessmen spend more of their time in hotels than in their own home. They become used to hotel life. They think of hotels as home. Therefore they become used to hotel hangers and think of them as normal, and on the rare occasions when they spend some time at home they can't stand these fiddly things with hooks which you and I may think of as normal but which the business traveller thinks of as loose-fitting and badly designed. So they come to me and get me to make a hotel-style wardrobe.

Counsel: Are you seriously suggesting that there are people who prefer hotel life to home life?

Chrysler: Certainly. A lot of businessmen would never go home if they had the chance. So when they get home they like to recreate the hotel experience in their own house. Many of my clients have their own mini-bars in their bedrooms. They have TV sets at the end of the bed on a raised shelf, often with an adult sex channel on it. All their bathroom products come in wrappers and are thrown away each day. I have even known people in their own home put out "Do Not Disturb" notices on the door of their own bedroom.

Counsel: Stolen, presumably, from some hapless hotel.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 4:11:45 PM -

[From PopTech] Vinge, the science fiction writer, talked about nutty stuff, presenting seriously insane ideas with the right mix of conviction and humor to suspend our disbelief.

Vinge began by giving us a Google URL, i.e., telling us to find a site by looking up "vinge technological singularity" in Google. That leads to a page about "the singularity," the extropian notion that "...we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth." What will life be like for those before and after the change? This lead him to talk, with only a glimmer of a smile, about life for the "early post-humans."

"The surface of the earth may not turn out to be the best place to think." Maybe we'll have to seek out better places. (Better in what way? Better reading light?) Vinge points us to Hans Moravec's "Pigs in Cyberspace" that suggests that we convert the universe into a place that computes. [What a lead in to Wolfram, who speaks in the next session.]

Now for the next step. Vinge suggests that the "principle of mediocrity," along with Occam's Razor and entropic rules, are ways of getting answers when you don't have facts. The Principle of Mediocrity says that if you don't know what's going on, assume you're an average case. E.g., the earth isn't special, so the planets probably don't revolve around us. Moravec's conclusion is that the principle of mediocrity says that it is almost certain that we are ourselves living in a simulation. Says Vinge: "This is a moderately logical argment, especially if you are into this sort of thing" (i.e., if you're a nutcase).

But is this an "operationally significant issue"? Vinge says we might actually be able to tell if we're living in a simulation by "looking for the jaggies." (The "jaggies" is the stairstep effect you get with straight lines painted in inadequate resolution.) Perhaps, he suggests, the jaggies are the quantum mechanical anomalies. Apparently there are physicists who take this seriously.

Great fun. [JOHO the Blog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 10:15:00 PM -

The increasing gap in incomes doesn't come as a surprise to me.  Unregulated capitalism always trends strongly toward concentrated wealth.  In the corporate world, companies that are dominant can easily remain dominant if they are unregulated.  They can set up barriers to entry in previously competitive markets.  They can leverage monopolies in one market segment into monopolies in other segments.  They can purchase competitors just to put them out of business.  Individual wealth works along the same principles.  Without social and governmental pressure to disband concentrated wealth (which is not in the cards as far as I can see), we will continue to see wealth concentrate in the hands of a small number of companies and individuals:

So claims that we've entered a second Gilded Age aren't exaggerated. In America's middle-class era, the mansion-building, yacht-owning classes had pretty much disappeared. According to Piketty and Saez, in 1970 the top 0.01 percent of taxpayers had 0.7 percent of total income -- that is, they earned ''only'' 70 times as much as the average, not enough to buy or maintain a mega-residence. But in 1998 the top 0.01 percent received more than 3 percent of all income. That meant that the 13,000 richest families in America had almost as much income as the 20 million poorest households; those 13,000 families had incomes 300 times that of average families.

The above statistic implies the doubling rate of wealth concentration is a mere 14 years.   Without serious counter pressure from government and society by 2030 we will see more than 15% of all income in the hands of the top 0.1% of American society. 

Of course, that assumes things don't accelerate -- which with the repeal of the estate tax and Bush's tax cut -- it is likely to do just that.  Another factor impacting accelerating wealth concentration is the ability of dominant companies (and the individuals that own them) to thrive during a protracted downturn by consolidating market share.  As less wealthy companies struggle, they are easy prey to better financed companies.  Microsoft is proving this with their record profits this last quarter as the rest of the industry struggles for footing.  Individuals of extreme wealth can do this by investing at pennies on the dollar in otherwise strong companies.  When economic health returns, we are likely to see concentrations of wealth at substantially higher levels due to this effect alone.

The emergence of an American plutocracy would change things for the worse.  We would be much less innovative and poorer as a result.  Toll taker values would replace the values of the innovators and risk takers.  Are we ready for that? [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 9:59:58 PM -

The Dead Grandmother/Exam Syndrome and the Potential Downfall Of American Society.

"The basic problem can be stated very simply: A student's grandmother is far more likely to die suddenly just before the student takes an exam, than at any other time of year".

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 10:49:07 PM -

John Perry Barlow: The American Republic is Dead. Hail the American Empire. Or else.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 5:55:57 PM -

"I'm not sure which planet they live on". Hawks in the Bush administration may be making deadly miscalculations on Iraq, says Gen. Anthony Zinni, Bush's Middle East envoy. [Salon.com]

» Gen Zinni (ret) seems to be a remarkably clear headed leader of men.  His analysis of past military actions was thoughtful and a warning to all those who think war in Iraq is either necessary or desirable.  If only the Commander-in-chief were half as thoughtful or half the leader.

 

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 10:06:04 AM -

Britt Blaser is a real bright guy who reliably delivers well-informed contrarian perspectives.

Today's is Wetware, the Killer App. In it Britt kind of agrees with Dave about software, then takes off in a whole 'nuther direction. It's good stuff, but it isn't scary. For that we have The Five Scourges, which Britt wrote last week.

In that piece, Britt sources Howard Bloom's The Lucifer Principle, which was written in 1995:

This book is a tour de force and should be required reading for anyone who is part of the neural network called web logging, whether as a writer or reader. The blogging world seems to generate as many words about it as we bloggers write about our other interests. This must be a powerful meme that is probably building its own neural network. Notice that many astute bloggers are already calling for mechanisms to consolidate our burgeoning collective so its collective archive is as searchable as one of our RSS feeds.

Did you catch that line about America's decline? In this 1995 book, Bloom described the real dangers that fundamental Islam poses to the withering American civilization. The chapter is so prescient that it's now available online, along with photos from Bloom's apartment of the burning twin towers.

American Decline?!! Can he say that in Public?

Bloom did say it, in 1995, and his case is airtight. He demonstrates that we've been in decline since 1973 and any honest reader will be forced to agree with him. The reason one is forced to agree with him is that he uses real metrics - not vague impressions - to show that we're behaving just like the Chinese empire when confronted by the Europeans, the Aztecs facing the Spaniards and the English upon the rise of the Germans and Americans.

It also answers Larry Lessig's important question - why aren't we Netizens up in arms over the travesties being perpetrated in Washington by corporate toadies and religious zealots? The reason is that thinking people have given up hope and are suffering from a collective depression. The best and brightest who may be the only ones who might lead us out of this dark political era are asleep at the switch, presumably watching The West Wing, imagining how we might also act like Toby and Sam and Bartlett, if we could only muster the energy.

I don't agree with what Bloom says about Islam (though I offer it to my warblogger friends as primo fodder), but I do have to say it creeps the shit out of me.

Especially lines like this:

The moral is simple. Never forget the pecking order's surprises. Today's superpower is tomorrow's conquered state. Yesterday's overlooked mob is often the ruler of tomorrow. Never underestimate the third world. Never be complacent about barbarians.

Anyway, provocative stuff.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 12:25:29 PM -

A friend of mine recommended I take a look at Malcolm Gladwell's site. Malcolm is best known as the author of The Tipping Point, but he's also a staff writer at The New Yorker. The best part of Malcolm's site is an archive of all his New Yorker pieces. We've subscribed to The New Yorker for years, but there are lots of wonderful pieces that I missed.

My friend sent along the recommendation because he knew I liked John McPhee (another New Yorker staffer). McPhee is more of a marathon runner: his pieces cover lots of ground very throughly. Gladwell is more of a sprinter. His prose isn't as lyrical as McPhee's can be, but his insights are penetrating.

I'll mention a few favorites, but almost every essay in his archive is a gem.

"The Social Life of Paper"

"The piles [of paper on your desk] look like a mess, but they aren't. When a group at Apple Computer studied piling behavior several years ago, they found that even the most disorderly piles usually make perfect sense to the piler, and that office workers could hold forth in great detail about the precise history and meaning of their piles."
 

The Art of Failure: Why some people choke and others panic

"Human beings sometimes falter under pressure. Pilots crash and divers drown. Under the glare of competition, basketball players cannot find the basket and golfers cannot find the pin. When that happens, we say variously that people have "panicked" or, to use the sports colloquialism, "choked." But what do those words mean?"
 

The New-Boy Network: What do job interviews really tell us?

"Ambady's next step led to an even more remarkable conclusion. She compared those snap judgments of teacher effectiveness with evaluations made, after a full semester of classes, by students of the same teachers. The correlation between the two, she found, was astoundingly high. A person watching a two-second silent video clip of a teacher he has never met will reach conclusions about how good that teacher is that are very similar to those of a student who sits in the teacher's class for an entire semester. "

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 7:13:16 AM -

Kuro5shin on port closures. Interesting discussion of unions and the West Coast port closures.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 7:07:38 AM -

This site is on vacation until 10/15.   Ciao!

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 6:49:43 PM -