Slashdot recently posted this article on scaling and I found it just fascinating. The essential idea is that the properties of physical structures are dependent on their scale, e.g., a flea could not jump 130 times its own height if it were 1,000 times larger.

Galileo wrote about this in the 17th century, Haldane wrote a wonderful, accessible essay about it in 1928, and this fellow LaBarbera applies the principle as it relates to (some of my favorite) B-Movies.

Unsurprisingly, ring tones have joined branded clothing, vanity plates and the vehicles attached to those vanity plates, as emblems of individual expression. People are out there right now asking themselves (apologies to Chuck Palahniuk), “What sort of ring tone defines me as a person?”

Hava Nagila?

Super Mario Brothers?

‘Memory’ from Cats?

He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands?

Sanford and Son?

For those of you struggling with this decision, my suggestion is to turn the question around. Ask instead “What does it say about me as a person that I would deliberately subject friends, colleagues and complete strangers to irritating little spurts of noise pollution that in turn precede the infliction of longer, more irritating intervals of one-half of a conversation?”

It’s like the prick of a dentist’s needle before lengthy drilling, except at the dentist’s at least you know it’s coming and that it’s for your own good. That’s right, bad cell phone manners are broadcast dentistry performed on the unsuspecting.

I have this swell fantasy where I walk straight up to a person whose phone is ejaculating the William Tell Overture and let them have it with a belt from an aeresol-powered, portable air horn.

So the next time your phone begins bleating ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’ and you see me smiling, either I’m thinking my happy thought, or the package recently arrived.

A federal judge, fed up with two attorneys unable to agree upon the simplest of logistical decisions, ordered them to settle their latest impasse with a round of Rock Paper Scissors (CNN has the ruling).

The issue at hand is the venue at which a deposition will be held, and the winner gets to choose. My favorite part is that the ruling specifies that this battle of wills is to take place:

…at a neutral site agreeable to both parties. If counsel cannot agree on a neutral site, they shall meet on the front steps of the Sam M. Gibbons U.S. Courthouse, 801 North Florida Ave., Tampa, Florida 33602.

In reading about this, I discovered that Rock Paper Scissors enjoys a great deal more interest and creative offshoots than I ever realized. There is a world championship, a strategy guide, political satire, cartoons and game variants involving up to 25 different possible throws. I was most amused by Rock Paper Scissors Spock Lizard.

Update – 7/4/2006: The epic showdown did not take place. Instead the attorneys, successfully chastened by Judge Presnell’s “alternative dispute resolution,” settled the matter beforehand. The article goes on to mention previous methods that Judge Presnell has used to “spur cooperation.” My favorite is the practical embodiment of Rawls’ Original Position. In a divorce proceeding, Presnell had one party make two lists, dividing the property any way hu saw fit, with the understanding that the other spouse would get to pick the list hu wanted.

With Summer Solstice nearly upon us, I thought I would share one of my personal favorite markers of time’s cyclic passage, the Aqueous Equinox. This twice-yearly event occurs when the hot and cold water taps on full result in the perfect shower temperature. The things I like best about the Aqueous Equinox are:

1. The Aqueous Equinox can be savored since each one potentially lasts for a few weeks. This is unlike, say, the Autumnal Equinox which is over in an instant.
2. Other arbitrary milestones like Hump Day or Casual Friday are one-size-fits-all. Since “perfect shower temperature” is entirely subjective, each Aqueous Equinox feels like it’s just for you.

On January 31st 2006, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a class action lawsuit against AT&T, accusing the company of giving the National Security Agency direct access to AT&T customers’ telephone and Internet communications and records, without a warrant. Of course, without a warrant. AT&T’s network handles millions of calls a day, and thousands of terabytes of data. According to the EFF, these data affect 73 million U.S. households. Since they can’t all be terrorist suspects, the very idea of a warrant, even one provided by the super-secret, highly permissive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is ludicrous. Warrants are born of targeted, specific requests supported by probable cause. NSA access to these data bears none of those hallmarks. However, the EFF’s suit is against AT&T, not the NSA. The relevant laws pertain to the obligation of telecommunications providers to protect the confidentiality of customer data, dating back to the Telecommunications Act of 1934 (955KB pdf).

On May 15th, 2006 the United States government filed a motion to dismiss the suit, citing the “state secrets” privilege. This legal precedent dates back to 1953 and gives the United States government the power to dismiss lawsuits that it claims would compromise national security. The outcome of this filing is not yet known.

I believe that the United States government’s motive to get the suit dismissed is not about the sensitivity of the information that would be disclosed in court, but about the precedent that would be set if AT&T loses. At present, the NSA’s domestic spying program operates in a bubble of legal uncertainty. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the authoritative law regarding both foreign and domestic surveillance, and it makes this warrantless, wholesale hoovering of purely domestic communications spectacularly illegal. However, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has stated that the program is legal under the presidential powers given by Congress in the days following September 11th, 2001. Specifically, Congress “authorize[d] the President to use all necessary and appropriate force,” which, of course, could include just about anything.

By going after a source of the data (AT&T), and the laws that govern telecommunications data, the EFF avoids miring its resources in the government’s “it’s legal because we say it’s legal” quicksand. True to its current form, the United States Government responded by moving to “disappear” the lawsuit. Otherwise, the government risks the court ruling that AT&T broke the law, and must therefore rescind the NSA’s data access, and pay damages to each affected customer to the tune of at least $21,000 each. The other telecoms would then respond by doing what Qwest did, which was ask for a FISA warrant or a document signed by the Attorney General stating that the request is legal. To do otherwise would expose them to liability.

Here’s hoping.

Update, 5/22/2006 8:45pm: Wired.com just made public the AT&T internal documents and testimony of Mark Klein, former AT&T technician and whistleblower. The court had put these documents under seal, but Wired felt that “the public’s right to know the full facts in this case outweighs AT&T’s claims to secrecy.”

I am weary of listening to the longest running death rattle ever that’s been coming out of the movie theatre industry since televisions became popular in the 1950s. Then it was VCRs, then the Internet, then DVDs, then high speed Internet. Each one of these was supposed to wipe theatres off the face of the earth. None have.

True, 2005 was the third consecutive year that ticket sales were in decline. Hence, the 2006 Academy Awards were basically about fellating movie theatres. Sid Ganis, President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a man with no gag reflex, said at the awards presentation:

I bet none of the artists nominated tonight have ever finished a shot for a movie, stood back and said, ‘That’s going to look great on the DVD!’ Because there is nothing like the experience of watching a movie in a darkened theatre, looking at images on an eye-enveloping screen with sound coming at you from all directions, sharing the experience with total strangers who have been brought together by the story they are seeing.

This irritates me more than a little. See, I love movies. Our home DVD collection is prodigious, and we subscribe to every movie channel our cable provider offers. I do not like being told that I’m not watching them correctly. Those in the industry who want to expand rather than narrow the interval between theatrical and DVD release dates are artificially trying to dampen the effects of what Sid Ganis knows the actual problem to be, but couldn’t exactly talk about at the Oscars:

Because there is nothing like the experience of handing over 10 bucks to freeze your ass off for 2 hours watching trailers, commercials and the latest remake emanating from an out-of-focus projector with audio about 20 decibels too high blasting at you from all directions, sharing the experience with some jackass loudly discussing a calf birth on his cell phone.

Attendance is down because of what people are expected to put up with when they go to the movies (notwithstanding the quality of the fare), and the theatres are actually starting to get that. Because Americans simply cannot be trusted with public courtesy, the National Association of Theatre Owners is lobbying for legislation making it legal to jam cell phones. Combine that with better equipment maintenance and perhaps some value-added amenities like valet parking (or whatever) – things that movie theatres have control over, unlike the quality of the content – and attendance numbers will come back up. People won’t even mind paying the obnoxious markup on concessions, because that, too, is part of the experience.

John Gilmore recently lost an appeal on his lawsuit against the United States Government for the right to fly without presenting identification.

The one good thing to come out of this was that the Transportation Safety Administration stated to the 9th Circuit Court that the reason that Mr. Gilmore was not allowed to board a plane without ID was because he additionally refused to submit to a secondary screening in lieu of presenting ID. The court’s ruling is here (166KB Acrobat pdf). Since the rules governing what is and what is not allowed with respect to air travel are secret (how I wish I were joking), it took Mr. Gilmore more than three years of winding his way through our legal system for the TSA to cough up this fact.

Hm.

The Identity Project wants to put the TSA’s claim to the test. They are asking people to decline to present ID during some or all of their air travel, and report their experiences back to them. I don’t travel by air very often, but I certainly intend to provide them feedback at my next opportunity. Here’s why.

In cases such as air travel, using identification as a security measure is ineffective at stopping bad people, while being unnecessarily invasive to honest people. For those of you who don’t care about showing your ID for every silly little thing, that’s fine. I would simply ask for you to consider that each person has hus own threshold when it comes to privacy, that mine is different from yours, and that this wonderfully diverse arrangement where you get to be you and I get to be me is protected by our Bill of Rights.

A few things to consider:

• Even if we could with 100% confidence authenticate the identity of every single person boarding a plane, authenticating an individual is not the same thing as understanding that individual’s intent.
• Terror organizations capable of attacks of the sophistication and scale as those perpetrated on September 11, 2001 are not deterred by these kinds of measures.
• Every time a practice like this is imposed, citizens have to work a little harder to exercise their rights. In other words, the focus continues to shift from “Show me where it says I can’t,” to “Show us where it says you can.”

There are several reasons that the TSA gets away with these sorts of things:

Reason 1: Many Americans don’t know their own rights. A recent survey (231KB Acrobat pdf) shows that while only 28% Americans can name more than one freedom guaranteed them by the First Amendment, 41% can name more than one judge on American Idol, and 52% can name at least two characters from The Simpsons. About one in five stated that among the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment is the right to own pets.

John Gilmore’s arguments went to the First and Fourth Amendments. For the record, here they are:

Amendment I:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment IV:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Gilmore argued that his First Amendment right to assemble was violated by the government inhibiting his movements. Additionally, he stated that the government violated his Fourth Amendment protection against search and seizure without probable cause.

Reason 2: I think it’s fair to assert that most of us want to feel safe. For some, presenting ID is a reassuring ritual that lets them know that there are People In Charge. That’s fine, as long as it’s not at the price of rights I hold dear, and not when there is no hard security value complementing the warm-fuzzy.

Reason 3: It’s simply easier to comply. Couple that with fear of being hauled off for non-compliance (how far gone are we when we’re afraid of getting backroomed by our own government for hazy reasons?) and it’s easy to see why most people go along.

My good friend Gokmop once told me that one way to determine the right thing to do is that it’s frequently the harder choice. Challenging authority (for me anyway) is hard but it gets a little easier each time. I live in a country that was founded on the principle that citizens should be suspicious of their own government, and I think that’s amazing. Challenging these kinds of wrong-headed, worthless practices is my form of patriotism.

I have Caller ID, Anonymous Call Rejection, and I’m on the National Do Not Call Registry. Nevertheless, occasionally, telemarketers get through. Contrary to what you may have heard, I am by nature a polite person. Unfortunately, telemarketers are trained to take advantage of good manners. They use scripted run-on sentences so you cannot get a word in edgewise until they get out their spiel. They employ emotionally manipulative language. They use decision tree software that provides them with responses to every customer objection ever documented, to keep you on the line until they make the sale.

Clearly these tactics are impolite, and this playing field is not level. Today a thought popped into my head as to how I could even things up a little, and in an amusing way.

Nonsense.

Telemarketer: So how many ElastaGyms can I sign you up for?

Me: Magnetic banjo monkey nozzle.

Telemarketer: Pardon?

Me: Steering wheel mandible banana meter.

Telemarketer: …

Me: Hello?

Telemarketer: Uh…yes, sir. I was just asking –

Me: Veal shank kaleidoscope phenomenon.

Telemarketer: Thank you for your time. Goodbye.

Me: Mambo.

What I like about this idea is that it doesn’t involve being rude. By speaking nonsense to the telemarketer you’re opting out of the call, not meaningfully participating in their data acquisition of objections, and having a little fun in the process.

Keep a list of fun phrases by the phone. If speaking nonsense is too strange for you, try reading from a children’s book. I recommend Goodnight Moon.

“Virginia is for Lovers” was introduced in 1969 and has enjoyed enduring popularity and global recognition, but legislation before the 2006 General Assembly proposes to replace it with “Biting the Hand that Feeds.” The proposal is attached to SB 648, which would ban smoking in most public areas, including restaurants.

Virginia is the third largest tobacco grower in the country, tobacco is one of Virginia’s most profitable crops, and Philip Morris’ Richmond factory produces approximately 700 million cigarettes per day. In 2004, Virginia increased the state tax per pack from 2.5 cents to 30 cents (HB 5018). Prior to the increase, annual tax revenue from cigarettes was $15 million. The tax increase is projected to yield Virginia an additional $130 million annually.

Competing bills for the slogan’s replacement include HB 2044: “Do As I Say, Not As I Do,” and SB 1026: “Virginia is for Hypocritical Dickheads.”

For those who don’t know, a mint julep is bourbon, simple syrup, fresh mint and shaved ice. Prepare one properly and you will see the face of God.

Yesterday I invented the poor man’s mint julep by drinking bourbon right after brushing my teeth. I didn’t see the face of God, but when I squinted really hard I swear that I could see Tom Waits.