We’re Number One?

We Americans seem to think it’s really important that people think we’re the best country in the world. But are we, really? At the moment, I’d say we’re more like a guy with a genius level IQ, an acceptance letter to a prestigious university and lots of resources. But instead of attending university, he settles for a dead end job at Pizza Hut, drinks heavily in front of the TV every night, has frequent dumb brushes with the law and flips a coin in the voting booth when he bothers to vote.

Now imagine someone who realizes that guy is wasting his potential sits him down and gives him a good talking to, pointing out that he still has the opportunity to carve out a fantastic life. That’s where we are right now in the US, standing at the crossroads between two paths: one leading to excellence, the other to entrenched and unnecessary mediocrity. Which way would you choose?

• We never talk about goals or destinations; we only talk about changing directions whenever we get bored. When one group or the other says we need higher taxes or lower taxes, peace or conflict, let’s have some sort of objectives and value system decide the answer instead of just deciding based on what we feel like at the moment.

• We let the two major parties distract us, with each making us angry or fearful of the other, when it’s the parties themselves that are our common enemy. Look at the slimy decision the Supreme Court rendered yesterday, with Justices Thomas and Scalia indifferent to the injustice that a lower court nearly sent an innocent man to his death. Look at President Obama supporting the TSA’s contemptible and unconstitutional “security” practices over American civil liberties. Look at Tea Party candidates elected on a small government platform and now obsessing about abortion, where Democrats do the same regarding dumb firearms restrictions.

• We allow the media to keep us in a constant state of irrational panic.

• We don’t make education and a robust infrastructure as much of a priority, compared with keeping up on Dances with the Stars

• We’re arguably a society that excels at obedience but is poor at the intelligent cooperation that is the basis for advanced societies. I see this highlighted when I go up to Canada: the driving is brisk, with vehicles staying to the right except when passing. Here in the US, speed limits are set ridiculously slow and the passing lane clogged with morons in pickup trucks and people having earnest cell phone conversations in SUVs. When there's a cop watching us, we're on our best behavior - otherwise, we act like sullen teenagers.
  

We still have the potential to always be one of the leading countries in the world but if we don’t act on it soon, hungry, determined people from other countries who appreciate opportunity will take our place there.

Strange USA Politics

Maybe it's time for the USA to recapture some of the passion for freedom that has set the Middle East on fire, over the past couple months. For most of the 20th Century, we let fear of foreign enemies and ideas and people different from us frighten us into turning our backs on the freedom-loving principles that are stated ideals of the US. Ten years into the "War on Terror", we are still falling over ourselves to let a small number if Islamic extremists give government thugs like the TSA license to humiliate us and abrogate our rights at airports and other transportation sites.

Much of this springs from the fear-mongering platforms of both major parties, which we have foolishly given the power to make us choose between two sets of vitally important rights:

- we have the Republican lifestyle police, elected en mass in 2010 on a "small government" platform and now going all out attacking...abortion and gay marriage.

- on the other hand, where justifiably Republicans get a bad rap for being anti-woman because some even oppose abortion in cases of rape, many leading Democrats would not want women to have the option of avoiding rape by carrying a pistol and using it as a last resort (which certainly makes calling them pro-choice a bad joke in my mind).

Come on America, wake up and stop being so easily manipulated and fearful! They only do this to us because we let them turn us on each other so easily...

Dear Microsoft: Bite Me

The misuse of software patents has become rife in the software industry, with common software features being claimed as proprietary "intellectual property". Worse, these claims are being used by large companies like Microsoft and Apple to extort payment from other companies. In my mind, this is a virtual statement by those companies that they are no longer capable of innovation.

The latest such misuse is in the form of a lawsuit by Microsoft against Barnes & Noble, claiming that its Nook eBook reader infringes on Microsoft patents due to its use of the Android operating system. Seriously, is there ANYTHING more pathetic than a company like Microsoft attacking a book selling company in this economy because they won't hand over their figurative lunch money?

This article is the best summary of the situation that I have seen recently:
Drunk On Licensing Fees And Patents, Microsoft Has Become A Joke.

Other companies have been down this road before. For example, SCO. In 10 years, will anyone except former employees and a lot of lawyers remember SCO or Darl McBride, Microsoft's former anti-Linux sock puppet?

Snap out of it, Microsoft. Go back to your roots and focus on innovation again (you have the people with the smarts for it) or age with dignity but stop acting like a high school bully, either way.

Sincerely, Don

Social Networking for Book Lovers

Social networking sites seem to be all the rage these days, from general conversational/reconnecting sites to blogs to specific interest sites. For example, there are loads of sites dedicated to specific interests, e.g., television shows, photography, sports.

Given that popularity, I started wondering what sites existed for book lovers. Books don't seem to get a lot of love from the public, compared to interests like television and sports, and so we in the book-loving tribe need to stick together! While looking around, I found a few interesting sites and also had an idea of my own that I'm debating as a project...

Virtual bookshelves:

• LibraryThing: Book reviews and discussions.

• Shelfari: Book reviews and discussions. Published authors participating as well.

• Goodreads: Book reviews and discussions.

Really Original:

• BookCrossing:This site has a REALLY cool gimmick. It's sort of a combination of a book club and a geocaching/travel bug site, in which you tag a book and leave it in a public place for others to find. They can then enter its tagged information online, so that the book's progress as it travels around, from person to person, can be tracked. This is one that I'll be participating in myself!

An idea that I had:

Personally, I enjoy both eBooks and paper books and hope that both continue to be available indefinitely. However, there are a lot of books that I'd like to buy for my Nook Color that haven't been published in eBook format yet. And you CAN go to B&N or Amazon and click a link that sends a message to the publisher indicating interest in that book in eBook format but who knows how much weight that carries?

What I was thinking, though, is that if I could get a few friends to click those links (and in exchange, I'd do the same for their links), and they could get a few friends to click the links, then maybe we could generate some real interest in publishing some very cool books in eBook format.

So how about these steps:

• a site is created where you can register a new account of your own, with your eBook reader(s) of choice specified
  
  
• once you have an account, you can search for favorite books and add them to your profile. Perhaps these choices are then available when friends navigate to your current profile; perhaps they're content you can embed in a mashup page. Maybe the content lists your top 5 requests and the top 5 requests of 2-3 of your friends.
  
  
• other friends click on those links, which (for example) send a vote for B&N to release a Nook version of "Double Rainbows for Dummies" or Amazon to release a Kindle version of "Can I Take My @#%& Vote Back, Please?"

I don't know if it would be workable and the intent is NOT to simulate a non-existent interest in books but to stimulate interest. But it's fun to think about...

March 1, 1917 - The Zimmerman Telegram

94 years ago today, the headline below was dropped like a bomb on the front page of the New York Times. Its news that Germany had proposed an alliance with Japan and Mexico against the US finally nudged a waffling Woodrow Wilson over the edge, leading to a declaration of war against Germany and her allies.

The telegram in code below is the fatal VERSION of the telegram that was presented by Britain to the United States. But there's much more interesting history behind the story...

You see, that's not the version of the telegram that Britain's cryptanalysts in Room 40 initially intercepted and decoded. On January 16,1917, German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmerman transmitted the original version from Berlin to Germany's embassy in the US. However, the telegram didn't go straight to the US. You see, on the first day of WW I, the British ship Telconia cut German's transatlantic cables, a farsighted move that forced Germany to communicate via other nations' cables or via radio...both options rendering them much more vulnerable to interception.

So Zimmerman sent that fateful telegram by way of Sweden to the US, using a US code (more Wooodrow Wilson brilliance). And when Britain intercepted and decrypted it, they had to step carefully and not raise questions of how they were intercepting neutral Sweden's cables or decrypting American cyphers.

What they did is arrange to have an operative in Mexico intercept the version that was sent there and have it decyphered again. Then they sat on that telegram until it became clear that only a serious nudge would bring the US into World War I. In the end, they revealed the SECOND version of the Zimmerman telegram to the US, leading us to make war against Germany after an infuriated American public demanded it.

The facts in this story are one of many fascinating anecdotes from history found in David Kahn's fantastic book, "The Codebreakers".

See "North Face"!

I just finished watching the movie North Face and enjoyed it so much, I had to post here right away and suggest others look at this movie. It hasn't garnered a fraction of the attention it deserves here in the US. (Official site: link. IMDB: link Wikipedia: link)

The North Face to which the title refers is the North Wall of the Eiger, one of the last mountains in the Alps to be successfully climbed. In 1936, as Hitler was preparing to annex Austria, his Berlin PR machine was eager for publicity showing the superiority of the Aryan blah blah blah. The Berliner Zeitung was hoping to report news of a successful German climb of the Nordwand and when a woman working at the paper (the excellent Johanna Wokalek from the Baader Meinhof Complex movie) mentions that she know two mountaineers who might be considering a climb of the mountain, she gets her big break as a reporter. As it turns out, she has been in love with one of these two since they grew up in the mountains together.

In one review that I read, the comment was made that the movie starts slow. This may be true for those cursed with the attention span of a gnat but personally I found that the time wasted on the wacky notion of character development made me care what happened to them later, when they're fighting for their lives on a cold-hearted killer of a mountain.

Dumb reviews aside, there is plenty of climbing drama throughout the movie, well before the assault on the Eiger. To give a little background, I visited the Eiger in a non-climbing visit 25 years ago, buying this postcard at the Jungfraujoch. Notice the label for the Hinterstoisser traverse about a third of the way up. Toni Kurz and Andi Hinterstoisser are the two primary climbers and the Hinterstoisser traverse gets its name from a maneuver Hinterstoisser used, running/swinging along the face of the mountain in an increasing arc in order to reach an inaccessible route upwards. Early in the movie, you see Hinterstoisser nearly die using this maneuver on a more pedestrian mountain, so when you see him start to go for it on the bloody Eiger, the suspense is amazing.



In the movie, Hinterstoisser and Kurz unfortunately team up with a pair of Austrians, one of whom suffers some bad injuries that require retreat. So they're not only on the Mountain from Hell, they're trying to descend it in horrible weather carrying a disabled man.

The Eiger has a number of long term features, including a few ice fields (a big challenge if you don't have crampons). Another, visible on the postcard above, is labeled Spinne, German for Spider. In bad weather, you can freeze to death on the vertical wall of the Eiger. In good weather, temperature changes release volleys of rocks and ice, which the Spider "drops" onto you.

Anyway, I hope that you will tale a chance on this movie, which is available for streaming from Netflix. You'll want to see it before Hollywood's Mediocrity Factory attempts to clone it, replacing the awesome actors in the German version with Anne Hathaway and cast Jack Black and Tom Cruise in what has become a 1930s bromance.

Why kellyoxford should stick to whimsy

Kelly Oxford is a poster on twitter who is usually quite humorous and enjoyable, with a keen sense of snark. However, in response to last weekend's tragic shootings in Arizona, she took it upon herself to lecture the US about why Canada's gun laws are better.

It's unfortunate that she's fallen into the trap our two closely related countries frequently rediscover, why we shouldn't try to urge the other country to emulate us. When I visit Canada, I embrace their country without trying to encourage gun rights activism or even encouraging them to at least allow women to carry pepper spray for self defense. I suggest she do the same, especially as she is now doing some work for Hollywood.

(Full disclosure: I consider myself a consistent liberal and therefore consider most gun controls about as appetizing and smart as analogous attacks on reproductive rights. And attacking the NRA is about as cool in my mind as attacking the ACLU or GLAAD)

One thing that I found disturbing about her comments is how blithely they gloss over the fact that in Canada, a bad breakup ever can mean you can never own a gun. If all it takes is a vindictive ex without even the legal proof of a restraining order, that's a pretty poor basis for governing.

Finally, another of her tweets concludes with "and you aren't billed for treating your cancer", which is demonstrably untrue. Otherwise, why would Spider Robinson and his unfortunately now-deceased wife and collaborator have been financially devastated by her battle with cancer?

Stick to being amusing, kellyoxford, you're much better at it.