Here’s your quote of the moment:

“Individuals no longer possess a reasonable expectation that their [medical] histories will remain completely confidential.”

– U.S. Justice Department attorney Sheila M. Gowan, arguing in U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York

Note that this is the official position of the Bush Administration and the current Department of Justice.

Here’s a photo of a CNN Headline News broadcast I just shot. CNN often has typos in its ticker at the bottom of the page, but now the errors have made it to the big headline:

(In case you didn’t catch it, the word should have been “affect,” not “effect.)

Fires, floods, killer bees, mudslides, Schwarzengger, and now this:

SoCal city falls victim to Internet hoax

They fell for the old “dihydrogen oxide” joke. The idea is that if you want to, you can see water (chemical name dihydrogen oxide) as this nightmare substance.

…is the major component of acid rain.
…contributes to the “greenhouse effect.”
…may cause severe burns.
…contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape.
…accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals.
…may cause electrical failures and decreased effectiveness of automobile brakes.
…has been found in excised tumors of terminal cancer patients.

So the geniuses in Aliso Viejo, Calif., (who I assume are still awaiting the delivery of the Brooklyn Bridge) voted to ban styrofoam cups when they learned the cups contained this noxious dihydrogen oxide. [sigh] Knee-jerk reactions: They’ll get you every time.

Not too long ago, I posted about a BBC report of a three-headed frog.

Well it turns out that there’s no story. From that angle, the photo looked to be that of a three-headed frog. But it was, in fact, just three frogs mating — evidently common practice. (There are some better photos at Ray Girvan’s site.)

But based on the photo, the BBC was able to quote its own wildlife “expert,” Mike Dilger, who said “it could be an early warning of environmental problems.” Perhaps it is more a warning of the BBC’s inability to hire credible scientists.

Incidently, the story was originally titled “Warning over three-headed frog” but has since been retitled to “Puzzle over three-headed frog.” Not that the story has been retracted.

Anyone who has even walked by a classroom where Economics 101 is being taught knows that a dollar today isn’t worth as much as a dollar yesterday. That’s inflation for you — things cost more but people earn more.

That’s why people refer to today’s dollars. “Gone with the Wind” cost about $4.25 million to make in 1939. In 2004, that’s cheap. But when you adjust for inflation, that’s about $55 million In today’s dollars.

You can’t compare prices yesterday with prices today without adjusting for inflation. But people do when they want to scare you.

The American Automobile Association (AAA) put out a press release Monday that started:

Gas prices have jumped three cents in the past week, and are within a few pennies of breaking records, according to AAA Mid-Atlantic’s latest survey of area gas prices. Today, the price of a gallon of self-serve regular in metropolitan Washington is $1.69, up three cents since last Monday.

Yeah, $1.69 sounds high. In California, according to the Department of Energy, the average is $2.11 in 2004 dollars. That sounds really high.

Why, I can remember (vaguely) when gas was about 28 cents a gallon, back in the early ’70s. The good old days.

WRONG.

Do the math. (Or better yet, find a Web site to do it for you.)

That 28 cents a gallon in 1972 is about $1.25 today. Gas wasn’t so cheap. And when it jumped to 60 cents a gallon a couple of years later? That’s about $2.28 today.

In other words, gasoline at $1.69 today is a lot less expensive than gasoline at 60 cents a gallon in 1974. In fact, $1.69 today was only worth 44 cents back in ‘74.

So the next time someone tries to tell you how expensive gasoline is compared to the good ol’ days, hand him a calculator.

We be the editers ov Editur & Publisher maguzine — its for peeple who rite and edit.

(Don’t get the joke? First, what kind of résumé “Wins’s” interviews? And résumé, as the editors of E&P should know, should have two accents.)

Update:
Wow! They fixed the copy! Good thing I took my screenshot.

I (along with lots of other people) said that electronic voting — “black-box voting” — was going to be a problem.

Forget questions about deliberate tampering; the complexity of these systems and the hidden nature of the software that runs it means glitches may happen without anyone noticing. And even if they do notice, voters can’t be quite sure that the person they voted for actually got their vote.

Guess what? Problems surfaced in Alameda and San Diego (California) on Tuesday (Mar. 2, 2004). (Big thanks to Liz in California for pointing this out.)

The first paragraph of the article is supposed to make people feel better: “County officials said Wednesday that they do not think significant numbers of people were deprived of their right to vote Tuesday…” Of course, if you’re an election official the last thing you want to have is an election foul-up, so what are the chances you’ll say, “Yeah, we had big problems”?

Another article, this one from the San Jose Mercury News, had a rather creepy headline:

Election officials report some e-voting glitches
But equipment worked better than expected

“Better than expected”? I expect something as important as a voting machine to work perfectly. When the “glitches” involved lost ballots or the inability to vote at all, that’s not a glitch. It’s a failure.

And don’t forget that, thanks to its quirky Diebold machines, Alameda County had problems once before, during the recall election. Somehow, the machines reported that not a single person in the county skipped the recall question. (At least a half percent of voters in every other county did just that.) That means either the machines discarded thousands of votes (those who abstained) or cast a vote for them. Which do you think is better?

The election officials may try to spin what happened as “glitches,” but the aforementioned Liz was there. What she has to say is long, but worth the read:

The election was total fiasco although mininized in the press.

Not all of the polls had trouble but many did. People were turned away or told to vote elsewhere. Some polls were gotten to work in a couple of hours and others half the day. Some people were leaving town and had planes to catch or work schedules that did not permit a return to the polls. Of course some could not vote in their district since ballot measures differ. Nobody wants to say whether there were hundreds of people turned away or just a few .

In a nutshell the County and the Registar of Voters wanted to go with the Diebold system and spent $31 million dollars. They spend a lot a money but did not seem to think it through, and rushed to get it online.

They gave the workers a little bit of training but on election day it proved to be not enough. (but remember most of the poll workers are the nice eldery ladies who are just using to being name checkers and not IT guys. ) Many precinct workers opened their computers that morning and the computers booted up to an unfamilar screen. It was supposed to automatically open to the program but didn’t. They had some IT troubleshooters but they were spread thin. (The talk show I listened to on election day had some MSCE certified people unoffically volunteer their services and some things were fixed. Although it was not easy.)

Of course then others were worried about unoffical volunteers and thought they were a security problem. It seems the system is easily broken into.

It is just on a Windows CE platform and supposed to open right to the program. Instead the program just opened to the Windows desktop and poll workers were totally stumped and did not have any instructions on what to do in this instance. Meanwhile people arrived to vote and there was no back up plan. They were turned away and told to come back later. Some areas had alot of polling places out.

[...]

Even thoroughly, well thought out, well planned for new software always have bugs to work out. Not all of the polls had trouble but many did. People were turned away or told to vote elsewhere. Some polls were gotten to work in a couple of hours and others half the day. Some people were leaving town and had planes to catch or work schedules that did not permit a return to the polls. Of course some could not vote in their district since ballot measures differ. Nobody wants to say whether there were hundreds of people turned away or just a few . Then there were issues of how the system counts and whether one can even trust it to be accurate. Some people had issues with the touch screen not registering the vote correctly having to go back and redo.

How many people didn’t get to vote? How close were some of the races? How many people thought they voted for Candidate A, but thanks to a lack of a paper trail will never know that they voted for Candidate B?

This is a bipartisan issue — it cuts across all affiliations. No one is served by having faulty or even questionable voting machines that are installed simply to give the appearance of a solid system.

Until the multitude of problems are worked out, these systems need to be removed from service, period. This is democracy we’re talking about — there’s a lot more at stake than the egos of election officials.

A while ago I was doing some research about WWII when I discovered what some modern-day companies were doing back then. (In one case I looked back to WWI.) Just for fun, I created some fake ads for three of them — BASF, Mitsubishi, and Volkswagen.

I forgot about them, then discovered them sitting in a folder. I actually think they’re pretty good considering I’m self-taught in Photoshop.

Now before you start getting upset (if you’re that kind of person), realize that 1) the stuff in the ads is true, 2) I don’t have any kind of agenda, and 3) my father and maternal grandfather were in the Army in WWII. So if you’re easily offended by people making fun of German and Japanese companies, maybe you should skip them.

This was just an exercise in humor, nothing more. I just thought it would be funny to create some ads that you would never, ever see.

Click here to see the BASF ad.
Click here to see the Mitsubishi ad.
Click here to see the VW ad.

(I’m sure there were a lot more companies — American, European, Asian — doing their bit to help kill their fellow men. I just chose these three.)

The BBC is reporting about the discovery of this little wonder — a three-headed frog found by some kids in a nursery.

Follow-up: Please see my newer entry on this frog.

In his review of Ian Wilson’s book Nostradamus, Gregg Easterbrook points out something I found amusing:

Supposedly the seer predicted September 11, but his “predictions” of this event were lines that could mean almost anything: “The sky will burn at 45 degrees/fire approaches the great New City.” Devotees assert this foretells September 11 because one plane hit one of the World Trade Centers at a 45-degree angle, and New City sounds almost like New York City! Yet the same uncanny “prophecy,” Wilson notes, goes on to declare that immediately after the fire hits the New City, “The undead will roam the Earth for a little time.”

If you’ve ever seen people on the subway at the end of the day, you know that the undead really do roam the Earth.

For a story on Bill Gates’s suggestion that users have to pay for e-mail, CNN Headline News reporter Christina Park said, “First music, now e-mail.”

Wait a sec. She’s first they started asking people to pay for music, now they want you to pay for e-mail.

Um, Christina, it’s not like music was free until last year. You were always supposed to pay for it. But people have been ’stealing’ it lately, see, and the music industry is trying to crack down. E-mail, on the other hand, has always been free.

(And please don’t take my use of the world “stealing” to indicate support for the RIAA and its methods.)

I just have to say this:

There is no such thing as “very critical.” The word critical, by definition, is “very.”

Saying “very critical” is like saying “hugely big.” It’s redundant and makes you sound like you don’t know the language.

A while ago I put down some random thoughts on computer file systems. Not the most coherent thing I ever wrote, but still — it’s on my mind.

The basic problem is this: Computer files are organized the way paper files are — folders within folders within folders. But computers are different, and it seems to me there ought to be a better way to store data.

My thought for today is a simple one.

Imagine if all your data files were stored in one place on your computer — not nested folders, but a single space. Heck, you wouldn’t even have to know that it was called “My Documents” or whatever. Your data was just ‘on the computer.’

See, today we organize our files by the folders or directories they’re stored in (e.g., “2004 Taxes”) and their file names (”SalvationArmyReceipt.jpg”). That could be a problem. What if you had a bunch of files named, say, “Receipt.doc” and the only way you could tell them apart was by the directory they were in. If you lose the directory structure, you’re faced with a bunch of Receipt.docs.

Instead, every file should include a bunch of identifying information: Keywords, a description, etc. Some kinds of files already do this. MP3 files include “tags” that identify among other things the artist, song, album, etc. You don’t need to rely on the file name. Ditto for some image files; a standard called EXIF is a way of including information about images within the image file — creation date, artist, camera settings, etc.

But these are separate standards, and they don’t require much user intervention. When you rip a music file to an MP3 or snap a photo with a digital camera, this information is included automatically.

Maybe what we need is a standard, probably XML-based, data format for all files. Then they could be lumped together on your hard drive — it wouldn’t matter where — and you would find what you needed by browsing or searching on the information in those built-in identification files.

Just a thought.