Coyote Blog

Beyond just being a good writer, one of the things that Arthur C. Clark did in his science fiction was to posit technologies that seemed outlandish, but turn out to be fairly prescient.  For example, the Fountains of Paradise posited a space elevator approach that seemed unreal when I first read it but now is being actively considered.

I am reminded of this as I read this story about photo-shopping out cigarettes from old childrens book photos in a spasm of political correctness.  I won't jump into the fray on this one, except to observe that Arthur Clark actually predicted this in his book Ghost from the Grand Banks.  It actually was not one of his better works, being a rather listless tale of multiple entrepreneurs competing to Raise the Titanic (Cussler did the story with a lot more dramatic drive if poorer science).  Each of the entrepreneurs in Clark's story had made their money from some interesting new technology they had perfected.  One of them had invented a series of digital processing algorithms to remove cigarettes and cigarette smoke from old movies in a response to a hypothesized backlash against smoking.  In 1990, I thought this was the stupidest and most unlikely thing I had ever heard.  Oops.

Eat your heart out Glenn Reynolds.

Update:  The #1 biggest issue my wife is trying to deal with is how to ramp up her business to larger scale production.  Nordstroms and Nieman-Marcus are interested in her bags, but its just a whole 'nother level of volume.  Turns out one of our Coyote readers addresses the issue of growing fashion businesses and manufacturing with her own blog here.

My son loves to rate mens rooms at restaurants and hotels.  This one is pretty awesome (make sure to click on the photo for the enlargement).  Here is a picture from the other end.  I think the girl third from the left is the funniest, with the disapointed look on her face.

Via Overlawyered, comes this fascinating confession of one of the young "accusers" in the McMartin pre-school sex abuse prosecutions, one of several witch-hunts from a mercifully brief era of a national day care sex-abuse panic.  While certainly abuse occurs, as is made clear from recent Catholic Church revelations, prosecutors used the excuse of "protecting the children" to justify all kinds of abuses of the fact-finding process (something we should remember in the Patriot Act era).

The lawyers had all my stories written down and knew exactly what I had said
before. So I knew I would have to say those exact things again and not have
anything be different, otherwise they would know I was lying. I put a lot of
pressure on myself. At night in bed, I would think hard about things I had said
in the past and try to repeat only the things I knew I'd said before.

I
remember describing going to an airport and Ray taking us somewhere on an
airplane. Then I realized the parents would have known the kids were gone from
the school. I felt I'd screwed up and my lie had been caught"”I was busted! I was
so upset with myself! I remember breaking down and crying. I felt everyone knew
I was lying. But my parents said, "You're doing fine. Don't worry." And everyone
was saying how proud they were of me, not to worry.

I'm not saying
nothing happened to anyone else at the McMartin Pre-School. I can't say that"”I
can only speak for myself. Maybe some things did happen. Maybe some kids made up
stories about things that didn't really happen, and eventually started believing
they were telling the truth. Maybe some got scared that the teachers would get
their families because they were lying. But I never forgot I was lying.

There is much more in the article, demonstrating how prosecutors manipulated children to get prosecutions. 

This topic has resonance with me because I sat on the jury of such a case around 1992.  Earlier sex-abuse prosecutions were starting to look suspicious, but there was still a lot of incentive for prosecutors to push high-profile cases (after all, Janet Reno would soon become AG for the US, largely on the strength of a number of well publicized and in retrospect very questionable such prosecutions).  By 1992, though, defense lawyers had caught up and were better at highlighting the egregious tactics used by prosecutors to coax stories out of children.  Many of the tactics we saw in our trial were identical to those recounted in this article.  There was even an eerie parallel to this recent Vioxx case, as the initial (3rd party) accuser who first reported that the victim was being abused seemed more motivated by getting on Oprah than getting her facts correct.

Update:  Neo-Libertarian has the details on the Janet Reno prosecutions I mentioned in passing.  Here is the PBS story on "the Miami method" and several of Reno's unethical abuse prosecutions.

I must admit that I always accepted the conventional wisdom that trick-or-treating was becoming more dangerous, with incidents of kids getting poisoned candy and the like.  According to Snopes, this is an urban legend.  In fact:

Tales of black-hearted madmen doling out poisoned Halloween candy to
unsuspecting little tykes have been around forever "” they were part
of my Halloween experience nearly forty years ago. And every year sees the same
flurry of activity in response to such rumors: radio, TV and newspapers issue
dark warnings about tampered candy and suggest taking the little ones to parties
instead of collecting goodies door-to-door. Even Ann Landers published a column
in 1995 warning us against the mad poisoner, saying, "In recent years, there
have been reports of people with twisted minds putting razor blades and poison
in taffy apples and Halloween candy."

It's a sadness that a holiday so thoroughly and greedily enjoyed by kids
is being sanitized out of existence in the name of safety. Sadder still is there
appears to be little reason for it.

Though I've yet to find evidence of
a genuine Halloween poisoning, I have uncovered a few isolated incidents
initially reported as random poisonings that, upon further investigation, turned
out to be something else.

So relax and have a happy Halloween  (and yes, I will still probably visually check my kids candy tonight just to make sure -- its too easy and its an ingrained habit now).

The Fat Triplets are having an online pumpkin carving contest.

Actually, I was back on Saturday, but Sunday was for rest and Monday was for catching up on a mail pile about 2 feet high in my office.  Hawaii was great.  For those of you who have not tried the Big Island, I highly recommend it.  While Maui and Kauai are perhaps more beautiful, the Big Island is a lot, lot less crowded, as Maui in particular is starting to look like Oahu.  The Big Island is also interesting for its active Volcanoes as well as glimpses of holdover ranching and plantation life from the 19th century.

Yeah!  Last night my wife won the Arizona Rising Star Fashion Award for best new Arizona accessory designer for her funky handbags at Kate Groves Creations.  It was an interesting evening, being about the only male, and perhaps the only straight male, in a room of about 100 women.  I will try to supply pictures, including some of her award, but right now I am piling my family on an airplane for Hawaii (yes, you can email me your condolences, but someone has to support the hotel industry).  I will leave you with some pictures of her bags:

Do you think you know your geography?  If so, try this quiz.  I did well on most of the other regions of the world, and even got most of the Balkans and the former Soviet republics rights, but this particular quiz is a bear.  I might have done better back in the day when I was a student of WWII.

The always useful Factcheck.org site has a well-sourced timeline of pre- and post-Katrina rescue efforts and related events.

While you are there, they also have what strikes me as a pretty fair roundup on Administration justifications for the Iraq war, and make the useful distinction between being wrong and outright lying.  Of course, being consistently wrong on intelligence matters is still a fair basis for criticism, but getting of this distinction right is useful for moving discourse along more productively. 

I tried to warn you to buy one of my wife's designer handbags before she got famous.  It may be too late.  Next week she will be a finalist in the Phoenix Rising Star Fashion Awards:

Phoenix may not be an international center of fashion, but it is a hotbed of design.

The Valley brims with independent designers who make everything from
purses to baby clothes to yoga wear, all available at local boutiques
and/or online.

Three promising Valley designers will receive Rising Star awards on Thursday, given by the Phoenix chapter of Fashion Group International,
a networking organization for fashion professionals. Awards are given
in three categories: clothing, accessory and interior design.

(click image to enlarge)

Sorry, newspaper photos really don't scan very well.  They just had to use the chick with the guitar for the online article, so my wife's photo didn't make the online edition.  Many of her funky handbag designs are online, and I posted here about the last exposure of her designer purses in Yes Magazine.

Technorati Tags:  fashion, knitting

My mom, who lives in Houston, spent much of today trying to get out.  Getting on Interstate 10 about 4AM, she doesn't seem to have made even 60 miles my 8PM at night, where she just plain couldn't drive any more.  Since she somehow got separated from my sister in their driving convoy, she pulled to the side of the road to rest.  Fortunately, a local minister and a fireman took her to a local shelter at a fire station to sleep tonight, where she reports all is well (many props to those folks).  Hopefully she can make it to San Antonio tomorrow, and hopefully they have not given away her reservation.

She reports that gas availability seems to worry folks the most.  No one was running their air conditioning, to save gas, and traffic was moving so slow that several were pushing their cars with the engine off down the road rather than running the engine.  There is apparently gas in inventory in the area, but tank trucks can't get to stations since inbound traffic is blocked.  Also, cars seem to be taking literally hours just to get to the next exit.  Yuk.

Since I grew up in Houston and know the people there fairly well, I can make one prediction:  They will evacuate this time, if only as part of the post-Katrina panic, but if the city is not leveled they are not going to do it again any time soon, no matter what is coming at them.

Update: Mom is back on the road this morning, and traffic is moving much better.  She reports she is 99 miles from San Antonio and has a half tank of gas.  That means in her first 27 hours of travel she made less than 100 miles of progress.  She says that there are hundreds of cars by the sides of the road that have run out of gas.

Final Update:  Mom reached SA OK, and in fact as of Monday morning is back at home in Houston.  The power is on, the cable is running, and the house is fine.  Mom lives does not live in a low-lying area, and her house has survived many hurricanes.  I know that Rita veered off from Houston, but was it really safer for her to be on the road for 30 hours, with no place to sleep at night, worrying every minute about running out of gas?

Technorati Tags:  Katrina

For nearly six years I was a consultant at McKinsey and for another six I held corporate staff roles and marketing leadership roles.  In these twelve years, I did a lot of presenting.  By the end of those 12 years, I felt like I knew about functionality in PowerPoint that the guys in Redmond didn't know about.  But by the end of those 12 years, I had nearly abandoned Powerpoint as a medium and I avoid it like the plague today. 

The main reason is that I don't like to be a slave to my slides.  So many presenters become trapped by their slides, redefining the presentation as getting through the slides in a given amount of time rather than getting their message across.  Today, I like to present to people, looking them in the eye, without any other visual effects to take their attention away from me or my message.  I will use a flip chart or a computer projector from time to time - there is always a need to punctuate your points with data and charts and pictures, but I don't leave them up there after they have had their impact.  The projector goes off and focus is back on me and my message. 

At one company we made presentations using 2 or even 3 projectors
simultaneously, projecting multiple slides all at one time.  I remember
several key strategy presentations I gave using a hundred or more
slides.  Today, I know I could give those presentations better with
just 5 slides showing the key market research and cost data that drove
the decision, and then explaining the logic of our plan without any distractions behind me.

There is nothing I hate more than bulleted text slide after bulleted text slide.  There are only two possibilities from these slides:  Either they are easy to read, but then their message is so generic as to be meaningless; or they contain real content, making them hard to read in a presentation.  I prefer the latter, but save them for a leave behind that people can flip through after I am done.

Anyway, so much for my patented 20 minute semi-off-topic introduction to the real point of this post.  Via gongol.com comes this interesting analysis of how the use of PowerPoint might be affecting the quality of scientific presentations, and specifically looks at how PowerPoint may have impeded quality understanding of the risks that led to the Columbia accident.

Postscript: I must give credit where credit is due.  McKinsey takes the art of presentation very seriously, and did more for me than anyone in making me a good presenter of complex information, either in verbal or written form.  Their pyramid principal for writing was more useful to me than anything I learned in six years at Princeton and Harvard about the subject of communication.

I don't want to be too much of a Monday morning QB, but this sure is a missed opportunity:

The city declared a mandatory evacuation.  Why then did it stick tens of thousands in the Superdome, right in the middle of town, rather than evacuate them with the assets they already owned in quantity?

Some critics are calling it a racist plot.  If we rely on Coyote's Law, the most likely answer is incompetence and stupidity.

Update:  Junk Yard Blog has extensive reports on unused busses, including more sattelite imagery, local evac plans, reports from locals, etc.  Just keep scrolling down the page

Thanks to Big Cat Chronicles for the banner images.

Marginal Revolution has an incredible roundup of FEMA and disaster-preparedness articles, many from a libertarian point of view.

Very funny from Scrappleface.  Here is an excerpt:

Fears increased today among hundreds of thousands of refugees from the
hurricane-ravaged gulf coast as they faced a Labor Day weekend with little hope
of an eloquent speech from President George Bush....

One New Orleans man, currently living in the 'Plaza End Zone' section of the
Superdome as he awaits news of his missing family members, said, "I can survive
for some time with little water, no food and highly unsanitary conditions...but
if I don't hear some poetic words of comfort and stirring verbal imagery from
the president pretty soon, I'm a goner."

Read it all.

Technorati Tags:  Katrina, Humor

When you first see the comparison of Katrina before and after photos, you will think the "after" photos seem underexposed.  Examining the larger images, you will find that they are not underexposed, just everything is now covered in dark green water.  What a mess.  Here are downloadable versions of many of the same photos.

Update:  These photos of the Mississippi Gulf Coast don't have the flooding, but very dramatically show the type of damage sustained.  The USGS has a gallery of before and after Katrina photos here. This site shows the levee breaks in New Orleans from space.

Other Katrina-Related Topics:
Technocrats and the Katrina Response  **Popular**
Bottom-up vs. Top-down Solutions
Hurricanes and Big Government
In Defense of Price Gouging
Fallout of Federal Control and (here too)

Technorati Tags:  Katrina

Started off my day today by getting the world's dumbest traffic ticket.  I got a ticket for "improper position making a right turn".  Huh?  The cop pulled me over, and asked me if I knew why he was pulling me over, and I said "I have no idea".  At the previous intersection, the two lane road has a very brief dedicated right turn lane.  The officer argued that I did not get all the way over into that lane before I turned right.  You have got to be kidding me - he must be behind in his quota for this month.  Ironically, he issued me the ticket while I was sitting in the very parking lot that my car was broken into 3 months earlier, a crime the police did not lift a finger to investigate.

Look, I am no virgin here.  You could probably nail me for speeding on any given day.  But "improper position making a right turn??"

The NCAA has effectively banned the use of "hostile and abusive racial/ethnic/national origin mascots, nicknames or imagery" at NCAA events.  Apparently, despite the broad language, the rules are aimed narrowly at teams named using Native American imagery, since "Fighting Irish" is not on the hitlist, despite the fact that Notre Dame has no formal approval from Ireland to use the name, while "Seminoles" is on the hitlist, despite the fact that Florida State has the Seminole tribe's blessing to use the name.  The "Dutch" and the "Dutchmen" are apparently OK, as are other teams named after non-Indian peoples such as the "Gauchos", the "Highlanders", the "Quakers", the "Norse", the "Scots", the "Swedes", the "Trojans", the "Vandals", the "Vikings", and of course, the "Nads" (Go Nads, go).  Complete mascot list here.  As a resident of Phoenix, can I sue the University of Wisconsin - Green Bay for denigrating me?

So I started to think about the University of Utah Utes, who are also on the hitlist.  Apparently, using a name derived from the Ute Indian tribe is no longer Kosher in the NCAA.  Which leads to the obvious question - can the University of Utah even use the name Utah any more at NCAA events, since it is derived from the Ute tribe?  Instead of "Utah" on their uniforms, will they have to have something like "that state between Nevada and Colorado"?  Same with Missouri, Illinois, and both the Dakotas, all state names derived from local Indian tribe names.  And don't even get me started on the 40 or so state names (including my own Arizona) derived from Indian words.  How about Indiana, which means "land of Indians"?  Or Oklahoma, which is Choctow for "red people".  If we can't put "redskin" on a NCAA jersey, how can we put "Oklahoma"?  Coming soon: The Nebraska Cornhuskers vs. The Far North Texas Sooners.

The FIRE website has more, noting the irony of university presidents suddenly chafing under the same type of vague and arbitrarily enforced speech code that they have blithely imposed on their own students for years.

Update #1: I heard an interesting interview on this topic with an NCAA spokeman on the Dan Patrick Radio Show.  The host pressed the NCAA figure on why FSU can't use the "Seminole" name, when the Florida Seminole tribe had given their blessing.  The response from the NCAA official was typical of a lot of elitist thought nowadays.  It boiled down to "its for their own good, even if they don't agree".

Update #2: Being from Texas, I knew that calling Oklahoma "Far North Texas" would incite some response.  I have gotten several emails.  The conclusion to an email from reader Dale was typical:

So,
from one fellow libertarian to another, can you do me a favor?  Henceforth,
please refrain from associating my Sooners with anything texas-like.  Thank
you.

Posting will be kind of light this week because I am away at camp.  My wife signed us up for a family camp that they have run for years at UC-Santa Barbara.  One good sign already:  most of the guests have been coming for years.  One lady I had dinner with is here for the 28th year.

Basically all the family stay in the dorms here, and there are activities arranged by age group all day for the kids and optional activities for the adults.  Meals are in the cafeteria, where the food has been pretty decent.  The whole family has had a good time so far, though it had a bit of a rough start for me.  We drove here from Phoenix, and I am usually fine with long-distance drives.  However, the last 4 solid hours were spent basically inside LA fighting traffic.  I was ready to blow my brains out when I got here.  Unfortunately, our car was met at the gate by a group of camp counselors who were channeling "Up with People" or maybe the Mousketeers, but they were way to jolly for my mood at the time.

By the way, how does anyone study at a University that sits on a beach?  Well, at least the high speed LAN in the rooms works really well.

A woman in Nigeria wants to buy 10 of my wife's handbags.   Right now, we have paypal's foreign credit card option turned off, and of course the Nigeria angle sends off warning bells.  Are there any good ways to accept money from Nigeria with minimal risk of fraud?

If you are so lost that you find yourself passing strange four-legged structures covered in gold foil and surrounded by scientific experiments, try this new Google mapping tool.  Oh, and make sure you don't miss the Easter egg you get from zooming all the way in to the highest zoom setting.

Gerry Thomas, inventor of the TV dinner, died here in Phoenix at the age of 83.  Though decried by the intelligentsia of this country, the TV dinner opened the door for a huge influx of products aimed at letting people who don't want to or can't cook create a decent meal.  As a kid, it never ceased to be a treat to get one of these for our evening meal, and looking back, Mr. Thomas and his successors probably cooked for me more than my mom.  Mr. Thomas is a member of the Frozen Food Hall of Fame (I kid you not) in Orlando.  This strikes me as a story that James Lileks should be all over.

Update:  According to CNN, James Doohan, recently diagnosed with Alzheimer's, has died as well.  How many times have you asked this guy to get you out of a tough spot?  Beam me up, Scotty.

I just finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

The first question my wife asked me was "how did it rank with the other books?"  This is very hard to answer, because it is very different from the first five.  Each of the first five was fairly self-contained.  There was a dominant story cycle that came to closure at the end.  Yes, there was still Valdemort running around out there, but that was kind of just like knowing that Blofeld and SPECTRE would still be a villain in the next Bond movie.  The best comparison I can make, for people of my generation who saw the original Star Wars movies as they came out, was that the first 5 Potter books were like the New Hope, while this book is Empire Strikes Back.  The only problem was that Empire Strikes Back stands out as perhaps the best Star Wars movie, and this definitely is not the best Harry Potter book.  In a real sense, book six is really part 1 of a two-part finale that presumably ends with book 7.  I was left with the same thought as at the end of the LOTR Two Towers movie:  OK, so when does the last one come out?

I found a couple of things about the book unsatisfying.  The mystery of who is the half-blood prince does not really drive the story as well as other mysteries, like say how the Sirius Black mystery or Chamber of Secrets mystery or the Tri-Wizard tournament drove other books.  This book is driven more by revelations about Harry and Valdemort, and by the time these play out the identity of the Half Blood Prince is kind of a letdown, or more precisely, irrelevant.  More unsatisfying to me was that this book is mostly about Harry.  While stuff is happening to all the traditional suspects, the mysteries are being solved by Harry alone, not by the traditional Harry-Ron-Hermione team.  Harry has always had to stand alone at the end of each book, but Ron and Hermione contributed to his getting there in the middle, and there is less of that here (Ron and Hermione, as well as everyone in the book seem distracted by their hormones). 

I guess I would say that a number of the traditional Harry Potter story elements were kind of half-hearted, even the Quiddich.  Rowling is obviously trapped by the need to get a lot of exposition done to bring the 7 book series to a close, and as a result the book never really gets moving until the final few chapters, and then all-too-much occurs in a few pages. 

This will never be considered the best book of the series, but the best spin I can put on it is that it was probably essential to start driving the series to a conclusion.

Update: Several folks have argued that I am missing the point, that quiddich and friends and school stuff are fading in the background as part of the wizarding world going to war and Harry coming of age to face his destiny.  This hypothesis about the ending is very interesting but only if you have read the book, it is FULL of spoilers.  If he is right, then it may be possible to look back and find this book more interesting in light of what we learn in book 7.  We'll see.  I still stand by my statement that the first 3/4 of the book is much less satisfying than the previous books.

2nd Update:  I guess predictably, various groups on opposite sides of the political spectrum and the Iraq war are claiming that Rowling is supporting them with this book.  Jeez, can we politicize everything?  Here is what are two clear tenants of the book:

1. There are times you have to actually fight evil, rather than just hope it goes away or is not really there
2. Governments can't really be trusted to do #1 responsibly

If my reading is correct, you can see why there is a bit in it for everyone.