Curiouser and Curiouser!

The poodle dialogues

I just read a funny piece by Jeremy Irwin about Bush & Blairs on-camera performance recently which reminded me I hadn't mentioned it here. If anything Irwin is too kind in comparing Bush and Blair to a couple of drunks who sneaked past security at the G8.

What great missives does our dear leader have to impart to the most powerful man in the world?

"Well ... it's only if I mean ... you know. If she's got a ... or if she needs the ground prepared as it were ... Because obviously if she goes out, she's got to succeed, if it were, whereas I can go out and just talk."

What was he looking for? A pat on the head and a biscuit?

If this is the quality of dialogue between my Prime Minister and the President of the United States of America then I think I would be happier if they had been a couple of bums who wandered in by accident.

This illuminating epsiode brings into the open the depths to which Blair has sunk. His feet under the table strategy compromised him from the beginning and the sunk costs have mounted to the point where he has no face-saving exit strategy and, fearing lest his place in history be further compromised, he lacks the spine to make a principled exit.

We are now left to imagine the great dialogues that will take place when FifiBlair goes for walkiesvisits with her MasterBush in Washington.

The Master Key

Robert Higgs shows why you can't be a pro-war Libertarian:

My claim is that those who give a free hand to the government in its foreign and defense policy-making will ultimately discover that they have handed their rulers the key that opens all doors, including the doors that obstruct the government's invasion of our most cherished rights to life, liberty, and property. The war-making key is, so to speak, the master key for any government, because when critical tradeoffs must be made, war will override all other concerns and, as an ancient maxim aptly informs us, inter armas silent leges. Anyone who has looked into the actions of the U.S. Supreme Court, for example, knows that during wartime the justices have placed themselves on the casualty list by effectively rolling over and playing dead. Without at least a semblance of the rule of law and an independent judiciary, all hopes for the maintenance of a free society are in vain.

Continue reading...

Free Markets

To be absolutely clear about this, for the benefit of those critics and e-mailers who think that when libertarians refer to free markets they mean the existing socialist or mercantilistic political economies, I do not consider any regime, any State, or any economy in the world as now having free markets. Nor do I think that when a politician extols freedom or free markets and then signs a trade agreement or makes a World Bank loan that we are seeing free markets in action. I don’t think States are necessary to define property or enforce contracts or property rights, and I do not identify capitalism with States. For the sake of clarity, I state categorically that the actions of States are and must be in opposition to free markets. It cannot be otherwise since State actions invariably coerce individuals and move them away from their preferred agreements with one another. --- Michael Rozeff

Awaited

It's been a long time coming but I'm pleased to see the time is drawing near...

Summoned to Rome

On top of my previous reading I could have done without this piece by Chris Floyd:

Well, that didn't take long. Two weeks ago we wrote here that the "lockstep, lickspittle" U.S. Congress would scurry to give their approval to the dictatorial powers asserted by President George W. Bush after the Supreme Court struck down those claims in the Hamdan case earlier this month. And lo and behold, last week Republican Senator Arlen Specter introduced a bill that would not only confirm Bush's unrestrained, unconstitutional one-man rule – it would augment it, exalting the Dear Leader to even greater authoritarian heights.

A more slavish piece of work – and a more abject surrender of Congressional authority – can scarcely be imagined. And the implications are profound. Besides providing what amount to ex post facto cover for Bush's clearly criminal domestic surveillance programs, the measure is a stinging confirmation that there is no crime the Bushists can commit that the craven rubberstamps in Congress will not countenance. Aggressive war, torture, rendition, indefinite detention, "extrajudicial killing" (i.e., murder), monumental corruption, spying on citizens, megalomaniacal assertions of tyrannical power – it's all good for the corporate bagmen, gormless goobers and extremist cranks now polluting the chambers on Capitol Hill.

But the reverberations go even further. Specter's bill also represents a message from the American Establishment, giving its imprimatur to the codification of presidential dictatorship as the new form of government in the United States, replacing the constitutional republic established in 1789. The bill explicitly embraces the core of Bush's claim to authoritarian rule: that the president cannot be restrained by any law or court ruling in his arbitrary actions on any "matters pertaining" to national security – and of course it is the president who will decide, in secret, what pertains to national security and what does not.

As Glenn Greenwald notes, Specter's obsequious offering "bolsters the President's theories of unlimited executive power beyond Dick Cheney's wildest dreams." And Deadeye Dick has been dreaming of Oval Office tyranny since his days as an errand boy in the pay of Beltway crime boss Richard Nixon. As you recall, Nixon went down for a technicality – covering up a two-bit break-in –rather than for, say, murdering hundreds of thousands of people in the illegal bombing of Cambodia. Yet even that narrow avenue of redress has been closed off now. Obviously, Bush, like Nixon, was never going to be brought to justice for a war crime in which the entire Establishment was deeply complicit; but under the new dispensation, a renegade leader can no longer be removed even for a "lesser" infraction – like eviscerating the liberty of American citizens – because the president has been placed beyond the law. Whatever the Leader does is lawful and right, no matter what the legal statutes say.

You think this is an exaggeration? Not a whit. Bush's own top legal minions have asserted this royal prerogative in sworn testimony before Congress – after the Supreme Court decision in Hamdan. Last week, Deputy Attorney General Steve Bradbury told the Senate Judiciary Committee – chaired by none other than our old friend "Spineless" Specter – that "the president is always right" in his interpretation of judicial rulings. Even when, as in the case under discussion, Bush was publicly lying by stating that the Court's decision had approved the establishment of his concentration camp in Guantanamo, when of course the justices had not even addressed that issue. But who cares? After all, the "president is always right" – even when he lies, even when he breaks the law, even when he orders torture, even when he rapes a nation in an unprovoked war.

Continue reading...

I am a big fan of the 1976 mini-series I, Claudius. If it wavers somewhat from the excellent books by Robert Graves (I, Claudius and Claudius the God) I think that can be forgiven for Graves too has been critcised for playing fast and loose with the evidence in places and, well, it's just so good.

For those unfamiliar with them I can recommend all three. I've read the books twice and have watched the (approximately 10 hour long) mini-series probably yearly since about 1996. I just finished watching it again this week and it's as compelling to watch now as it was that first time.

The cast includes Derek Jacobi, Brian Blessed, George Baker, the excellent Sian Phillips, John Hurt, and Patrick Stewart (with hair no less), Stratford Johns, John Rhys-Davies, Bernard Hepton, Charles Kay, ... the list goes on and on. It's pretty much a who's-who's of British acting talent from the mid seventies. None of them have given better performances and the whole thing is so well put together (despite it's budget) that you always feel like you're right in among the intrigues.

I, Cladius plots the downfall of the Roman Republic ostensibly laid at the door of civil war but largely the result of the scheming machinations of the ruling family. The Senate hands supreme power to Augustus and names him "Emperor". Big mistake. During his reign the mechanism of government is increasingly the use of executive power and patronage. If August was, arguably, a benovelent dictator he nevertheless paved the way for his successors.

By the later part of the reign of Tiberius the Senate was no more than a rubber stamp for the Emperors whims. Roman politics becomes a cesspool and those who oppose the ruling family find themselves poisoned, banished, or executed on trumped up treason charges. The state is preserved, for the most part - the legions see to that - and the people are distracted enough.

Perhaps you can imagine then just how it strikes me to read of the craven way that the U.S. congress is kowtowing to Bush the Younger. Successive presidents have, following the ignoble example of Lincoln, asserted their authority over the constitution claiming that executive authority trumps all. Bush's "the Commander in Chief is above the law" routine is just the latest and most pernicious example. In complementary fashion a parade of ever more spineless congressmen and senators have conspired to make it possible. The Specter act is just the latest and most heinous example.

The secret prisons, the torture, the star chamber trials, the mass wiretapping, and the perversion of the courts. All this could come straight from the pages of Graves description of the later rule of Tiberius through his notorius (and ill-fated) commander of the guards, Alias Sejanus.

Sejanus: Sign it.
Gallus: What is it?
Sejanus: A confession.
Gallus: To what?
Sejanus: Your conspiracy with Drusus to subvert the armies of the Rhine. Sign it.
Gallus: You wrote it, you sign it.

Perhaps this is all fanciful thinking, a storm in a tea cup. Perhaps the heart of the U.S. republic beats as strong as it ever did. Perhaps Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and the rest wouldn't be up in arms, perhaps...

But the ill-wind blowing from RomeWashington seems to me as ominous as it is foul smelling. Scratch the surface and look fingerprints of the Bush family and their friends all over the empire. Look how they thrive and tell me there is no Livia working hard for her Tiberius. Look at the cronies surrounding Bush, the troops stationed in new provinces, the money going to old friends. Look at all this and tell me all's well. Keep on saying it when Jeb or (lord help you all) Jenna get hold of the seal.

Cladius dreamed of restoring the republic by showing Rome what a sewer her government had become. He made the sewer before he died but was cheated of his republic:

The frogpool wanted a king,
Jove sent them Old King Log
I have been as deaf and blind and wooden as a log
Violent disorders call for violent remedies
Yet I am, I must remember, Old King Log
I shall float inertly in the stagnant pool
Let all the poisons lurking in the mud hatch out

It all makes one glad to live in the provinces.

Chilling

I've been following William L. Anderson's reports of the Duke non-rape case and they certainly make for chilling reading if you have any interest in justice being done and being seen to be done:

...

Lest anyone be surprised that [state prosecutor] Nifong will follow this path, keep in mind that if a jury questions whether or not a rape occurred, his case is dead in the water. Therefore, he has no choice but to pursue this path if he hopes to win. Now, should he attempt to invoke rape shield laws in order to bamboozle a jury, one might give him points on audacity – or even dishonesty – but he will forfeit whatever integrity the man might have had. Any prosecutor who attempts to foist what he knows is a lie is someone who deserves whatever consequences befall him.

...

When you grow up on a diet of Hollywood movies and L.A. Law it can come as quite a shock to realise the depths that the U.S. legal system has sunk to:

...What we see here is that the federal system has become a legal system that exists of the prosecutors, by the prosecutors, and for the prosecutors. When Rudy Giuliani, then the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, remarked that the Crime Control Act of 1984 tilted the playing field in favor of prosecutors, he was not exaggerating. A legal system that at its founding was set up as a mechanism to ensure rights of the accused has become a system of guilty pleas and show trials, and is more akin to what Stalin enjoyed in the U.S.S.R. than what George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the great William Blackstone helped create more than 200 years ago. [cont...]http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1744()

Strangely I know more about the U.S. legal system than I do the U.K. system. Does anyone know of any libertarian legal bloggers in the UK?

Success

Well now... my Data Protection Act pledge at PledgeBank just went over the top with 4 days to go! It would be great to get a few extra so if you were thinking of signing up you still can.

Over the next couple of days I will assemble my subject access request and document the process here on C&C.

Why I love Ruby so much

module Enumerable
    # return a new array of tuples where each element of this array
    # is matched with each element of the other array
    def permute( other )
        self.inject( [] ) do |container,element|
            container | Array.new( other.size, element ).zip( other )
        end
    end

    # Return a map using a new Thread to compute each mapped value asynchronously
    def map_asynch( &block )
        self.map { |element| Thread.new { block.call( element ) } }.map { |thread| thread.value }
    end
end

I'm particularly pleased with how simple the asynchronous map turned out to be and the fact that it becomes available to any Enumerable is gravy.

Corpus

If anyone knows of a free modern English corpus that's available online I'd be very grateful to hear about it. Or if they can suggest an alternative way to solve my problem:

I have a database of terms that are used for making associations from English to a set of ideas. However because the number of terms relating to each idea may be different and because the popularity of each can be different it makes it very hard to compare how each is expressed.

It occurred to me that using a corpus I could build a frequency map to highlight popular/unpopular terms and apply discounts appropriately, normalizing (to some extent) the associations expressed and making comparisons more meaningful.

I am aware of the Brown corpus, the LOB, and the BNC. However each of these costs money which I don't have.

All ideas gratefully received.

Update: with Zed Shaw's help I found a page that includes a lexicon of about 57,000 English words with relative frequencies. I'm hopeful that this might offer a way forward.

Cycling with Dad

Last week my Dad bought a bike as well and, the weather being glorius this afternoon, we took our bikes and our cameras for a ride. We didn't go terribly far, about 2 miles down the road to White Waltham village where they were playing cricket on the green and there was a pub right opposite.

I think the heat, our general lack of fitness, and the pub made it seem an excellent place to stop. We had a pint and then went to take pictures of the cricketers at play.

That's my favourite of the shots I took. I had to mess with the exposure afterwards as most of them were over-exposed (it was extremely bright). I'm still very much learning my craft. Of course my Dad's shot will probably be much better because (a) he is a good photographer, and (b) he was using a Nikon D70 with a 300mm telephoto.

We watched a couple of wickets fall then got back on the bikes and pedalled home. I'm looking forward to our next outing!

Effort

Today is the first day of the new cycling-to-work regime. The distance according to Google Maps is about 2.5 miles and I'm doing the round-trip twice a day for a total of about 10 miles a day.

That may be too ambitious to begin with (having done 3/4 today my legs are pretty tired, they probably won't want to do it tomorrow) and I'm considering either doing only one circuit a day to begin with, or doing it alternate days.

Once I build my stamina up I'm looking forward to exploring the cycle tracks in the area of which there seem to be quite a few. I also discovered today that cycling over fields is much harder than cycling on the road ;-)

Before I do any of that though I need to get the bike checked out. I'm pretty sure the duraliers aren't adjusted properly and there is a creak I'm not too comfortable about.

Pledge-9

Today my pledge is in much better shape. Nine people are now signed up and I feel happier.

My special thanks to Suw of the Open Rights Group (and other fame) for not only blogging it, but also putting it out to the ORG mailing list. That yielded quite a few sign-ups. My thanks also go to folks like Luke Razzell and Tim Kitchin of Glasshouse Partnership for putting the word out.

A few people have told me that they think this is a good wheeze and it's really only the beginning... a prelude to a bigger event.

Lastly my apologies to all those of a presbytarian upbringing for any mental distress caused :-)

Titles

Over the last month I've been experimenting with using a single word as the title for my posts. In the past I've always taken a pleasure in coming up with a title that amused me. Recently I've taken pleasure in trying to distill the essence of what I'm saying down to a single word.

Sometimes it's quite hard and I don't capture it. Then I'm sure I must have more than one post called 'tools' or somesuch. Then there are things where I end up using #1, #2, ... which feels like cheating (I'm writing this post because I was about to start another called pledge#2).

I'm not sure whether to soldier on and see if I can make an artform of choosing the right, one, word to capture the essence of my post. Or to go back to being creative with titles. Or both.

Tools

Yesterday I upgraded to the newly released VoodooPad 3.0 personal wiki. I bought VP about 2 weeks ago to use as my primary note-taking application and I'm really impressed with it. The improvements in 3.0 (such as tabbed pages, swapping the drawer for OmniGraffle style inspectors, and the print to PDF inside a VoodooPad page) are just icing on the cake.

I now mainly use a trio of tools when working on a project. I use VoodooPad as my note taking tool to track ideas, links (I never really got on with del.icio.us or ma.gnolia), and so on.

Then I use MindJet MindManager for brainstorming and thinking things out. As an aside I think MindJet are to be commended on having done a fabulous job with MindManager for Mac. It's a beautful Cocoa application not some crappy conversion of a Windows app.

Lastly I use OmniOutliner Professional to flesh things out, drill into the detail, and organize. From there I tend to either go straight to implementation, or create a Word document or a PDF.

In the last few days the division of labour between MM and OO has shifted though. MindManager has a great, free, viewer for Mac & Windows. This means I can share maps with the rest of the company. I haven't found anything like a good solution for sharing outlines with my windows using colleagues and it's a real problem.

This means I am tending to use maps more than outlines, even when the outliner really is the better tool for the job. I wish the folks at OmniGroup would do a decent outliner viewer for Windows and solve my problems.

Other tools I have kicking around in the information tools category are Microsoft Office (although I only tend to use Word), KeyNote, OmniGraffle Pro for when I need to diagram, EasyCrop for screen captures and general image futzing, CMapTools when I want to draw concept diagrams, and of course the veritable TextMate for general text wrangling.

Pledge

No i'm not giving up alchohol or leeches. This is just my public realisation that a pledge is no use if nobody signs up because you didn't tell them about it.

A little while ago I used PledgeBank to create a pledge asking people to test the UK Data Protection Act's Subject Access Request mechanism. The idea is to see how well the system works for us individuals, what the process is like, and what sort of data you get back. I'm going to send mine to my cell phone company, Orange, but any supplier is fine.

Unfortunately I've failed, spectularly, to actually tell anyone about the pledge and am now trying to make amends.

Please; If you are interested in privacy, in what companies think they know about you (and the information they will process in making decisions about you), and in what you can do about it then I urge you to take the pledge. If you sign up you aren't committing yourself to anything arduous and, in return, you may learn something very interesting.

On the other hand if you don't think this is a worthwhile exercise I'd really like to hear why. Knowing what they know is of considerable interest to me and I'm keen to understand if that is (or will be) universal. Are there are other perspectives out there to be heard?

Somnolence

I thought I had linked to this 2004 piece by Martin Van Creveld (professor of history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem) before, when I first read it, but searching my archives I can find no trace. I'm making up for that by posting about it now as it strikes me, reading it today, that it's even more relevant than it was in 2004.

It describes Moshe Dayan's experiences (as a former Israeli commander, defence minister, and politician) reporting on the Vietnam war (in I think 1965) and contrasts it to the state of Iraq in 2004. In my opinion the two intervening years only make the comparisons more striking.

During the next few days his feeling that the Americans did not really know where they were going was reinforced. Everywhere he went he was received courteously enough. Everywhere he went the people he encountered were committed and extremely hard working. Intensely patriotic, they seemed proud of what they were doing and would not admit any errors. At one point he asked whether they had changed their methods since they first went to Vietnam and was told that they did not have to do so since everything worked much better than expected. Thereupon he noted that the US Military never made any mistakes; however, that comment he kept to himself. He was subjected to a flood of statistics – so and so many enemies killed, so and so many captured – meant to prove that the situation was well under control and that large parts of the territory of South Vietnam, as well as its population, were now safe against terrorist attack. As he noted, however, even a few elementary questions revealed that things were far from simple. Later he was to discover how right he had been in this; in the whole of South Vietnam there was not a single road that was really safe against the Viet Cong. Nor was there anything to prevent the enemy from returning even to those places that had been most thoroughly “cleansed” and “pacified.”

If you replace Vietnam with Iraq and Viet Cong. with insurgents (or freedom fighters -- your choice) this could have been written in the Times today. Later on it says:

Flying to Vietnam by way of Honolulu and Tokyo, Dayan summed up his impressions so far. Almost all of the Americans he had met were pleasant enough. None, however, could tell him how they were going to win the War. Most could not even give a convincing reason why the US had to be in Vietnam in the first place; at least one had said that, had President Johnson been presented with a way to get out, he would have jumped on it and withdrawn his troops. What really infuriated them was any attempt to question their motives. As far as they were concerned their cause was noble and just. The fact that the Communist States did what they could to support the Viet Cong and North Vietnam was bad but understandable. They were, however, puzzled by the attitude of their European allies. Those Europeans supposedly shared America’s liberal-democratic values. Still many of them were strongly critical. At a loss to explain the problem, the Americans attributed it to cowardice, envy, and the resentment that arose from Europe’s own recent failure in waging “Imperialist” war. He thought that, in ignoring the Europeans, the Americans were making a big mistake.

How true. What we read about Iraq today tells us:

• Most Americans are pleasnt
• They don't know why they are there
• They don't how to win
• Their cause is "noble and just"
• They are infuriated when you question their motives
• They are puzzled by liberal, democratic, European states not supporting them
• They explain this in terms of cowardice and envy

What is scary for me, as a 30 something, is realising just how long the Vietnam conflict went on. In my ignorance I imagined it was a few years in the late 60's and early 70's. According to Wikipedia however, it was fought between 1959 and 1975.

By the time America pulled out they had suffered over 58,000 dead and nearly 3 times as many wounded. Total deaths approximated 1.4 million soliders from both sides and over a million wounded. I'm not sure how to read the figures for civillian dead and wounded but it seems to be somewhere between 4 and 8 million total.

For the sake of argument lets call it about 8 million total dead and wounded. What did they die for? What was won? Was it a worthwhile sacrifice to win hearts & minds and establish democracy? Well as far as I can tell it wasn't worthwhile in Vietnam and I have no reason to believe it will be in Iraq either.

Back in Paris Niceault had told him the “battle for hearts and minds” would not work, given that that the Vietnamese had their own cultural traditions – as well as “immensely beautiful women” – and that “Californization” was the last thing they wanted.

...

the campaign for hearts and minds did not work. Many of the figures being published about the progress it was making turned out to be bogus, designed to set the minds of the folks at home at rest. In other cases any progress laboriously made over a period of months was undone in a matter of minutes as the Viet Cong attacked, destroying property and killing “collaborators.” Above all, the idea that the Vietnamese people wanted to become Americanized was an illusion. All the vast majority really wanted was to be left alone and get on with their lives.

I certainly hope that the next American administration is prepared to admit that Iraq was a mistake and should never have happened because this will allow them to change course and to leave. With us gone who knows what will happen but it will be in the hands of the Iraqi's. If it goes the worse for us well... that is the price we pay for meddling and, perhaps, learning that price will inform and teach us not to listen to our leaders when they bay for foreign wars.

But of course the next administration will hold to the line democracy at the point of a sword and we'll still be in this mire 10 years from now looking at casualty figures that rival the bloodbath in Vietnam. For those that question this I would remind you that the numbers in Vietnam were achieved even though the North Vietnamese had no effective means to strike at foreign homelands.

But of course I am crazy. I think the answer is not to fight harder and be more vicious but to bow out and leave them alone. I think our leaders (on both sides) should explain themselves before a war crimes tribunal and the evidence.

Neither will happen of course. Let the somnolence continue.

Wisdom#1

"When tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."

James Madison

Pedal

I picked up my new bike today. It's taken two weeks because of a difficulty in ordering this particular frame model & size which is, apparently, a popular combination.

I proudly rode it back home for the first time (actually I cheated and went out on a friends bike last weekend so this is not my first time on a bike in 20 years) and it felt pretty good. The front disc brake seems pretty effective (enough for me to worry about going over the handlebars) and the suspension is a noticeable nicety. I'm still a bit wobbly and nervous but already better than I was last weekend.

It also seems that Maidenhead is fairly well served for cycle routes. As a motorist I've never noticed the signs but there is a route running from the centre of town more or less to my front door and two other routes that get me to work. This means that, for the most part, I can avoid cycling in traffic if I want to although I will probably do so a little just to get used to it.

Obvious things I am going to need: gloves (after 20 minutes my hands were sweating enough to make gripping the handlebars interesting), a puncture kit (even though I have nice chunky tires), and a water bottle.

Aid

A week ago, writing about philanthropy, I stated that I was unhappy with the present situation where the government steals money from me (i.e. taxation) and then makes itself look good giving it away to foreign powers as aid.

Today I read a piece by Walter Williams about the aid situation that just reinforces this point for me:

...

Zimbabwe provides an excellent example of why foreign aid, as a way out of poverty, is a fool's errand. "Few countries have failed as spectacularly, or as tragically, as Zimbabwe has over the past half decade. Zimbabwe has transformed from one of Africa's rare success stories into one of its worst economic and humanitarian disasters."

...

Botswana shares a heritage with Zimbabwe, for it, too, was a British colony. What it doesn't share with Zimbabwe is what explains its success: the rule of law, minimal corruption and, most of all, respect for private property rights.

...

No amount of Western foreign aid can bring about the political and socioeconomic climate necessary for economic growth. Instead, foreign aid allows vicious dictators to remain in power. It enables them to buy the allegiance of cronies and the military equipment to oppress their own people, not to mention being able to set up "retirement" accounts in Swiss banks. The best thing Westerners can do for Africa is to keep their money and their economic development "experts."

Allowing government to get into the aid business is tantamount to making it foreign policy and, as such, I'm against it. I'd much rather give the same amount of money, voluntarily, to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and see it do some good.

Granfalloon

Via Reginald Braithwaite: An article, by Brian Vaszily, about the marketing power of granfalloon tactics.

As with all the most effective marketing tricks, granfalloon tactics prey on this fundamental human need. They manipulate you into feeling part of a group -- centered of course around their product, service, political party, or idea -- in order to obtain your allegiance and your money.

The idea of a granfalloon comes from Kurt Vonneguts novel Cat's Cradle and originates in research by Henry Tajfel into group psychology.

The social psychologist Henri Tajfel once conducted a simple experiment that demonstrates the power of granfalloon tactics: He brought a group of subjects into his lab and randomly, based only on a coin toss, assigned each subject to be labeled an X or a W. Each member of both groups was then asked to make a variety of assumptions about each of the other subjects. Though they were ALL total strangers, each person made MUCH more positive assumptions about those within their group than about those in the other group.

Social psychology is a fascinating area of study and Brian's article an interesting read.

Vox

One of Euan's recent posts prompted me to take a look at SpinVox:

SpinVox converts your voicemails into text messages and sends them straight to your mobile phone or email.

I pretty much hate voicemail so this sounded ideal. My SpinVox account got activated this morning and here is the first result:

Hi Matt, it's Matt. Hopefully this message will get converted into text & You'll be able to understand it. That'd be pretty cool if it did. Let me know. <*01> From: Graham Sadd

It's not quite Alexander Graham Bell but for me it's pretty close. That is a word-for-word translation of a message given in a casual speaking voice. I think it's also pretty neat that it correctly identifes the sender (Graham's office phone) in the message.

What a great service!

Gods

Well the mind is a funny thing. For about 3 years (on and off) I have been trying to remember the name of a band I really used to like. A chance remark in the RailsMachine campfire chat-room gave me the breakthrough:

• The Young Gods

Anyone have any idea where I can pick up some of their albums? I think TV Sky was the last thing I heard by them.

It also reminded me that it's been a long time since I've listened to The Swans, Big Black, or KMFDM. All bands I used to enjoy back in the 90's but haven't heard since I gave away my record collection a long while ago.