"Nothing Is Perfect" Has Leapt
The blog is now on dolben.org. This is the last entry that will be on comcast.net.

There might be a few glitches with links, some of which had to be edited by hand. I'll fix 'em as I find 'em.

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dolben.org Exists
The Internet domain name system (at least as far as my access) now has dolben.org. At the moment, there's only a PHP test page on its web site.

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"Nothing Is Perfect" Will Be Moving
I'm planning to move this blog to dolben.org, hosted by PagesGarden, probably sometime in the next week.

One motivation to use a more capable web hosting service is to be able to have PHP generate genealogical web pages from a database via PhpGedView. I'm not very interested in deep ancestry, except to the extent that it personalizes history, but would like my children to be able to have a picture of the family tree beyond first cousins, at least including second cousins and their children. I'm hoping that having the information online will encourage some of my relatives to fill in details missing from my own sketchy knowledge.

Stay tuned.

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Lance Armstrong Finishes Behind Teammate Floyd Landis in Season Premier
In his first race of the year, the Volta ao Algarve, Lance Armstrong finished fifth after winning the individual time trial on a new machine, while his USPS teammate Floyd Landis took the final stage and the overall victory.

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Does Nader Want Bush for President?
Ralph Nader is doing it again, entering the presidential race and improving Bush's chances of reelection. Will the disaffected and undecided be pragmatic enough to refrain from casting a "protest" vote for Nader this time around? Or, since he's running as an independent, will they vote for the Green Party candidate? We'll just have to wait and see what has happened when the chads have settled.

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Up to the Past - Mac OS 9.1
That's as opposed to "Back to the Future."

We got a new printer, one of those all-in-one deals, basically for two reasons: to have a copier, and to have a networked printer, which our old one wasn't. The Apple store's information claimed that the HP model we got is compatible with Mac OS 8.6 and above, even though HP's web site states that Mac OS 9.1 is required. We have an aged (around seven years old) Mac in our network that was running Mac OS 9.0, so there was some risk that the new printer wouldn't work with it. Of course, we didn't buy the printer from Apple, but from a retailer that had it on sale.

As you might expect, it turned out that HP was right. Their printer software installer refused to proceed once it found out that the Mac OS version wasn't at least 9.1. I searched the Apple support site and, to my amazement and relief, found a downloadable update from 9.0 to 9.1. Note that the update document was created 2001 Jan. 5, but was last modified 2003 Dec. 3. After installing the update, the printer software installation proceeded successfully. Printing works as much as I've tried so far, even background printing, once I used the "desktop" facilities.

My compliments and appreciation go to Apple for keeping available an update, over three years old, for an operating system they don't sell anymore.

Though there are further updates available, from 9.1 to 9.2.1, and from 9.2.1 to 9.2.2, I didn't push my luck.

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The Price of Loyalty
Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty, an insider's view of the workings of the Bush White House, is first on The New York Times nonfiction hardcover bestseller list again. A review by Fritz Lanham, published by the Houston Chronicle Jan. 16, and others indicate that reading the book won't add much to reading a review.

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Benjamin Franklin on Political Corruption
As quoted by Walter Isaacson in his biography Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, Franklin had the following to say at the Constitutional Convention on the corrupting influence of money in government.

There are two passions which have a powerful influence in the affairs of men. These are ambition and avarice; the love of power and the love of money. Separately, each of these has great force in prompting men to action; but, when united in view of the same object, they have in many minds the most violent effects ... And of what kind are the men that will strive for this profitable preeminence, through all the bustle of cabal, the heat of contention, the infinite mutual abuse of parties, tearing to pieces the best of characters? It will not be the wise and moderate, the lovers of peace and good order, the men fittest for the trust. It will be the bold and the violent, the men of strong passions and indefatigable activity in their selfish pursuits.

He was arguing for volunteer representatives, i.e., government service without pay, but sounds to my ear as though he is speaking of practically all politicians of our day.

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IETF Approves XMPP IM as Proposed Standard
Instant Messaging doesn't have to be a space owned by disjoint protocols and megalithic servers. Now the open protocol efforts of Jabber have been approved by the Internet priests, freeing us, in principle, from AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, etc. In practice, will the millions of users ever make the transition to standards based IM, or will the big IM service providers ever convert their servers to use standard protocols? Will ISPs routinely provide Jabber IM servers as they now provide email servers?

For now, users of multiple services are stuck with either an application that supports various protocols, or using Jabber and a cumbersome process of registering proxies for other services, in either case having to have accounts with all of the services used by the people with whom they wish to communicate.

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The Word of the Day
The Oxford English Dictionary's word of the day is "blog". (Thanks, Dave.)

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"Subscribe" Has the "Feed" Link
Reconsidering what I had done ten days ago, I decided to link in the conventional way to the XML, and link the word Subscribe in the sidebar to the feed, for which there is as yet no commonly accepted graphic.

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My PMC Profile
I've constructed my PMC profile, in case someone is looking for me through the Pan-Mass Challenge web site.

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Yahoo! Is Cool

Over time I find myself using Yahoo! for more and more things.

• I used to use the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, but recently it (further?) restricted the entries available for free and suggests using the paid access to an unabridged edition when you lookup a word which is not in the free edition. So, now I use Yahoo!'s interface to the American Heritage dictionary.
• I used to use weather.com, but it loads slowly, possibly due to ads with elaborate graphics. So, now I use Yahoo!'s interface to weather.com.
• I've used Yahoo! Maps for a long time, preferring it to MapQuest.
• I use the Yahoo! RSS news feed, which collects stories from many sources, including AP, Reuters, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, in my news feed reader.
• I use Yahoo! Travel, as well as Yahoo! Yellow Pages to find lodging that isn't in Expedia's database.

Yahoo! pages are lean and clean and useful. In short, they're cool.

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Solar Power Satellites
In my rant against the use of space colonization as an escape from environmental stewardship, I referred to The High Frontier by the late Gerard O'Neill. To be fair, I should point out that one of the justifications for colonization of space that O'Neill provided was the amelioration of humanity's impact on Earth's fragile ecosystems, most significantly by the use of Solar Power Satellites (SPS) which, by converting solar energy collected in space to microwave energy beamed to the surface of the Earth, have the potential of supplying huge amounts of renewable energy with only the impact of microwave receiver antennas on the ground and the allocation of some airspace to microwave beams. Even more important to the overall plan is that the economic benefit of manufacturing SPSs in space provides an incentive to the investment required for building orbiting space habitats. Analysis showed that it is much cheaper to mine materials from the moon and build manufacturing facilities in space than to manufacture the parts for an SPS on Earth and lift them into geosynchronous orbit for assembly.

The problem, which is not overlooked, but underestimated by O'Neill, is that before private capital could be induced to support SPS construction, the technical feasibility of the complete system, from mining and manufacturing to power generation and transmission, will have to be demonstrated in space. Environmental considerations alone should be enough to get some government to fund such a program, if only there were the long term vision and political will. Again, there's the rub. Over the last thirty years, there has been very little public support for a program to develop SPSs, even though it would give NASA a concrete purpose. Private support, through the Space Studies Institute, founded by O'Neill, has been small though enthusiastic.

The idea is by no means dead. There is still time to do it before environmental catastrophe makes any large investment untenable. It won't cure all the ills of the biosphere wreaked by the infestation of man, but it could help an enormous amount. (O'Neill's environmental naïveté is revealed in his contention that ecosystems on Earth could be restored when space colonization reduced the terrestrial human population. Well, something would grow in to replace the destroyed, unique ecosystems. Likewise, he writes of saving endangered species by providing habitat in space, as if we could create ecosystems we were unable to preserve.) Clearly the project would be larger than the practically useless International Space Station, but probably close in size to the pointless exercise of putting a man on Mars.

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Valid CSS Level 2
Likewise, according to the CSS validation service, the main page of this site is valid CSS level 2.

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Valid XHTML 1.0
According to the W3C markup validation service, the main page of this site is valid XHTML™ 1.0 Strict. It is unfortunate that in order to make the whole blog comply with the standard I would have to edit, and fudge the modification date, of almost every entry file because the entries themselves contain HTML, e.g., links and images. Oh well, nothing is perfect.

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Feed Validator
Mark Pilgrim has a good web page about his RSS feed validator, which is the one used by NewNewsWire when "Validate this Feed" is selected from the pop-up menu on a subscription.

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Nothing Is Perfect, but Blog Is Valid RSS
According to Dave's validator, this blog is valid RSS.

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Version 1.0.8 of NetNewsWire
Version 1.0.8 of NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire Lite fixes a couple small but important bugs and adds a bunch of feeds to the Sites Drawer. NetNewsWire Lite is a freeware, easy-to-use RSS Web news reader for Mac OS X.

Note that as of version 1.0.7, when a feed URL is passed to NetNewsWire by a web browser, as is done by Safari and Mozilla, it subscribes or selects that subscription if already subscribed. The in this blog's sidebar now has a feed link.

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Yeeehaaa!

Unbelievable! For the second time, Adam Vinatieri kicks the Super Bowl winning field goal. Yay, Pats!
Photo by Richard Carson/Reuters

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Mars Rovers' Embedded Systems
An article on Space.com gives some details on the computer systems in the Mars rovers, which are nothing more exotic than radiation hardened PowerPC based machines running VxWorks - pretty standard stuff, except for the radiation hardened, for high end embedded systems.

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Bush Gave Al-Qaida What It Wants
When Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq I said that this accomplished nothing so much as increasing Arab enmity towards the U.S. In today's column in The Salt Lake Tribune, Gwynne Dyer has this to say about the rationale of Islamist terrorists:

If the real goal is still revolutions that bring Islamist radicals to power, then how does attacking the West help? Well, the U.S. in particular may be goaded into retaliating by bombing or even invading various Muslim countries -- and in doing so, may drive enough aggrieved Muslims into the arms of the Islamist radicals that their long-stalled revolutions against local regimes finally get off the ground.

(So I'm on a Gwynne Dyer kick, sue me.)

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A Climate Change Disaster Scenario
With Gwynne Dyer back on the radar, and the connection I made between his take on Bush's space exploration fantasy and environmental disaster in the previous posting, I wondered what he thought about such questions. In one column he explains the process of ice age inception that is triggered by global warming.

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Men On Mars, Good Thing?
As I feared, Bush's empty electioneering has reignited the hopes of science fiction dupes. It's more than a little disconcerting that one so seemingly hardheaded as Gwynne Dyer would fall into that trap. In a column in The Salt Lake Tribune he says

It really is a good idea to go back to the moon and onward to Mars, for reasons so long-term that they barely get mentioned in the usual debates: the survival of the human race and contact with extraterrestrial life. The payoff on these two issues, if it ever comes, is probably at least several centuries in the future -- but they are still important issues.

Since there are no short-term payoffs to manned space exploration and settlement that are likely to repay the huge investments that are required, and since the political process does not favor really long-term investment, the only incentive that will actually get governments to spend this kind of money on space is a "space race" that involves national pride and prestige.

Will that be enough?

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Go Pats!

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Revisionist Apple History

It was twenty years ago today.
Apple Computer taught the bland to play.

(Not exactly twenty years ago today, but close enough.)

Apple has tampered with an historical document, the famous 1984 Superbowl Ad for the Macintosh, which now has the hammer thrower wearing an iPod.

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Go Pats!

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2004 Pan-Mass Challenge
On August 7th and 8th, for the fifth year, I'll be biking with Team Dolben in the Pan-Mass Challenge, a Jimmy Fund event benefiting the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a leading center for research in prevention of cancer and treatment of people with cancer.

You can contribute on-line in support of my ride. Or if you would rather make a donation by check, and don't receive a direct solicitation from me, please contact me by email.

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Version 1.0.7 of NetNewsWire
Somehow I'd missed the announcement of the release of version 1.0.7 of NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire Lite, even though I subscribe to the ranchero.com news feed. Now that I can see it in the news reader, I'll have to figure out how to change my favicon from Netscape's (ick).

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No Escape From Environmental Disaster

Do you think that mankind can escape an earth it has rendered uninhabitable by thoughtless environmental negligence, and rocket away to colonies in space? I know it's risky to predict what technology cannot accomplish, but feel so strongly about this that I will speak out anyway. OK, what do I risk, you ask. Being proved wrong? When? Who will know? Who will care? Who cares now? Can you see the irony in the ultimate absurdity of "wasting" the environment and then throwing the whole ecosphere away by leaving it behind, as if tossing a styrofoam, fast-food container out the window of an SUV, speeding down the interstate.

First, our destruction of the environment seems inevitable. Humanity is a virulent infestation, unlikely to be stemmed by anything short of a catastrophic collapse of the ecosystems it lays waste. By the time the crisis is reached it will be too late to save ourselves, the losses irreversible. It's not that living in harmony with the biosphere that we haven't yet ruined is technically infeasible, rather politically unattainable. I won't try to prove that. I couldn't anyway. I'll even admit that I might be wrong. The optimist in me sees that polls show that people generally want to save the environment. It's just simply and completely inconsistent with the way people have always behaved and continue to behave. The retrograde policies of the current U.S. administration reinforce my pessimism. Our strength is in our ability to exploit the world to satisfy our appetites. Even our environmental consciousness seems to be based on an aesthetic hunger that can be satisfied by little (on global scales) nature parks, which by themselves couldn't provide sustainable support for more than a handful of primitive humanoids. If there is any optimism in my view, it is that the destruction will not be complete. Life on earth will go on, even as it has in the deep past, following astronomical cataclysms, though certainly not as we know it. Among other species, small pockets of our infestation may even survive, as the uneven collapse leaves isolated populations some naturally protected ecosystems, perhaps a Pacific island for example. Life on earth will likely survive until the Sun heats up enough to boil it dry, though anything like humans will be gone long before then. Meanwhile, I'll be scouting Pacific islands.

Second, we will never accomplish the colonization of space. Again, not because it is technically impossible, though certainly much more difficult than most people seem to appreciate. How can one imagine that we could create artificial ecosystems that would be sufficiently rich and robust to support human life as we know it, when we could not prevent our own destruction of the natural world that gave us our existence to begin with? What potential return on investment would motivate the unimaginably huge expense of attempting the establishment of a self-sustaining colony? Or do you think that some government would have the political will and resources to accomplish it? There would not be enough resources if the crisis were reached, not enough will if not. In short, there is a better chance of saving our existing environment than creating a new one. Still, it's unprovable, only refutable by counterexample.

Last, given that the colonization of space is theoretically possible, or rather not provably impossible, its potentiality provides a psychological escape hatch that permits our self-annihilation. If you're availing yourself of that excuse, can you at least appreciate that it would be an awful exchange; our beautiful earth for some artificial environment? And, of course, what about the poor bastards we couldn't get off. All x billion just aren't going to fit in those shuttles you know. Well, there won't be so many left by then. Oh, that's not good either. We might even say, look, the earth is doomed by the eventual heating up of the Sun anyway, so we're going to have to get off sooner or later. Now that's taking a long-term view. But, why not go further? Unless there's an as yet unknown loophole in the third law of thermodynamics, life is doomed no matter what we do. Might as well live for today. My point is that there are lots of available escape hatches if that's what you're looking for. The colonization fantasy just happens to fit into a loosely imaginable time scale and relieves some scruples we might have for the lives of future generations that look pretty grim to the environmental pessimists.

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Happy New Year, Goldberg
Here's a good old one that a friend sent to me to kick off the new year with a grin.

Goldberg was bragging to his boss one day, "You know, I know everyone there is to know.  Just name someone, anyone, and I know them."

Tired of his boasting, his boss called his bluff, "OK, Goldberg, how about Tom Cruise?"

"Sure, yes, Tom and I are old friends, and I can prove it."

So Goldberg and his boss flew out to Hollywood and knocked on Tom Cruise's door. When he saw who his visitors were, sure enough, Tom Cruise shouted, "Goldberg!  Great to see you! You and your friend come right in and join me for lunch!"

Although impressed, Goldberg's boss was still skeptical. After they had left Cruise's home, he told Goldberg that he thought Goldberg's knowing Cruise was just lucky.

"No, no, just name anyone else," Goldberg said.

"President Bush," his boss quickly retorted.

"Yes," Goldberg replied, "I know him. Let's fly out to Washington."

And off they went.  

At the White House, Bush spotted Goldberg on the tour and motioned him and his boss over, saying, "Goldberg! What a surprise! I’m on my way to a meeting, but you and your friend come on in. Let's have a cup of coffee first, and catch up."

Well, the boss felt somewhat shaken at this point, but he was still not totally convinced. After they’d left the White House grounds, he expressed his doubts to Goldberg, who again implored him to name anyone else, anyone at all.

"The Pope," replied his boss.

"A good man!" said Goldberg. "I've known the Pope a long time."

So off they flew to Rome.

Goldberg and his boss had joined the assembled multitude in Vatican Square when  Goldberg said, "This will never work.  I can't catch the Pope's eye among all these people.  Tell you what, I know all the guards so let me just go upstairs and I'll come out on the balcony with the Pope."

With that, he disappeared into the crowd headed toward the Vatican.  

Sure enough, half an hour later Goldberg emerged with the Pope on the balcony. But by the time Goldberg returned, he found that his boss had had a heart attack and was surrounded by paramedics.  

Working his way to his boss's side, Goldberg asked him, "What happened?"

His boss looked up and said weakly, "I was doing fine when you and the Pope came out on the balcony, till the Japanese tourist next to me asked, “Who's that on the balcony with Goldberg?”"

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