The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn't--and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger
The subtitle of this book is 'Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn't - and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger". And that's an excellent one sentence summary.
There are a couple books I read every year that I wish I could buy in bulk and send to every one of my friends and family members. This is one.
It highlights the psychological tricks your brain plays on you when you estimate risk, and how these overestimates (and underestimates) cause us to allocate our resources in foolish ways, personally and politically. One by one, he slays the most common sacred cows in American culture. Environmental pollutants aren't a major cause of cancer, less than 2 percent, in fact. Do you believe in "better safe than sorry"? That's called the precautionary principle and it doesn't make as much sense as many think. So go read the book. :)
Really, I insist.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Spamtrum (noun): a tantrum thrown over spam
This term occurred to me a year or so after I began my current job. (Apparently, I wasn't the only one to put the words spam and tantrum together. But I can't find any other recorded entries with this particular definition.) For reasons which I still don't understand, a certain minority of people take spam very personally. Occasionally, we have someone who threatens to report every single copy of spam of they receive until we can "make it stop".
Yes, spam is annoying and occasionally offensive. But you're probably spending too much mental energy on it. In most cases, the easiest thing to do is delete it. If you want to know when to report it, here's a decision tree that covers the most common cases.
The truth is that spam is not the number one computer security issue. It probably doesn't even rank in the top five. Next time you feel the urge to pen an angry rant to your email provider about spam, check to see if your copy of Adobe Acrobat reader is up to date. Unpatched software puts you at a much greater risk than most spam emails and is an easy problem to solve.
Spam is a pernicious problem for a few reasons. The first is that email is so cheap to send that spammers don't have to succeed very often for the costs to justify the benefits. Nobody would bother to send out spam selling viagra if there weren't a few people in the world who purchase viagra from spam.
The second reason is that the sources of spam are difficult to eliminate. Even if you do find the source, there's no guarantee that the spammers are still using that particular account or computer. You know that classic game whack-a-mole where you keep hitting the mole and it just pops up in another place? It's like that. To further complicate things, sometimes the sources are places that don't care if they're sending spam or not. You can complain to that corrupt ISP in Ukraine until you're blue in the face, they're not going to stop.
The third reason is that it's hard to teach a computer to recognize spam. This post mentions the word 'viagra' twice (now three times). Does that make something spam? Well, maybe. Unless this is a medical article. Or maybe you have a genuine prescription for viagra (four times) and it's your pharmacy sending you a refill reminder.
So next time you're tempted to throw a spamtrum please cut the person on the end a little bit of slack. It's a hard problem. Email providers all over the world are doing their best to solve it. And you could channel your energy into much more fruitful, cheerful endeavors. Like baking cookies. Everyone likes cookies.
Yes, spam is annoying and occasionally offensive. But you're probably spending too much mental energy on it. In most cases, the easiest thing to do is delete it. If you want to know when to report it, here's a decision tree that covers the most common cases.
The truth is that spam is not the number one computer security issue. It probably doesn't even rank in the top five. Next time you feel the urge to pen an angry rant to your email provider about spam, check to see if your copy of Adobe Acrobat reader is up to date. Unpatched software puts you at a much greater risk than most spam emails and is an easy problem to solve.
Spam is a pernicious problem for a few reasons. The first is that email is so cheap to send that spammers don't have to succeed very often for the costs to justify the benefits. Nobody would bother to send out spam selling viagra if there weren't a few people in the world who purchase viagra from spam.
The second reason is that the sources of spam are difficult to eliminate. Even if you do find the source, there's no guarantee that the spammers are still using that particular account or computer. You know that classic game whack-a-mole where you keep hitting the mole and it just pops up in another place? It's like that. To further complicate things, sometimes the sources are places that don't care if they're sending spam or not. You can complain to that corrupt ISP in Ukraine until you're blue in the face, they're not going to stop.
The third reason is that it's hard to teach a computer to recognize spam. This post mentions the word 'viagra' twice (now three times). Does that make something spam? Well, maybe. Unless this is a medical article. Or maybe you have a genuine prescription for viagra (four times) and it's your pharmacy sending you a refill reminder.
So next time you're tempted to throw a spamtrum please cut the person on the end a little bit of slack. It's a hard problem. Email providers all over the world are doing their best to solve it. And you could channel your energy into much more fruitful, cheerful endeavors. Like baking cookies. Everyone likes cookies.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Beaches, photos and paintings
A couple months ago my mom shared a card I sent her with one of my photos with her art group and it became a painting. :)
My photo:
My mom's painting of it:
And the other painting:
My photo:
My mom's painting of it:
And the other painting:
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Following the rabbit to Washington, DC
Last Friday I flew to Washington, DC for what I hoped would be an exercise in civil discourse between a government and a citizen. The topic for this discourse was a possible exception to the rule that prohibits bypassing digital rights management mechanisms. What I found was surreal.
In the hearing I testified in the lawyer representing the joint commenters (the AAP, the MPAA and Time Warner) simultaneously argued that:
a) platform restrictions on streaming video should not be bypassed because doing so would mean less video streaming services and everything would be leaked to P2P networks which implies that the platform restrictions are an intentional access control enforced by the content creators and
b) platform restrictions are just a matter of technological incompatibility, not an access control
So platform restrictions are an access control when the content creators want you to only stream video on the devices they choose, but they're not when I'm requesting an exemption for them.
I guess when you start with ridiculous rules, it's only natural that you would end up with ridiculous logic in ridiculous hearings. It felt a little like I was having tea in the garden with the queen.
I wasn't as clear as I would have liked about the difference between technological incompatibility, the inability of a particular platform to stream video, and an access control, a software program preventing access to a video stream by requiring a specific platform.
The panel seemed to consider anything to do with platform restrictions a mere inconvenience. I should have asked what is the cost threshold for a mere inconvenience. How much should we expect consumers to pay extra to watch their programs on the devices they choose? Perhaps next year I should request an exception to the rule for all people under a certain level of income, if that really is the standard.
Even when it was crystal clear that an access control was in place - as is the case with cellphones locked to a particular network - the conversations quickly descend into discussing what should be irrelevant minutiae. Like whether a ring tone publisher has the right to expect the DRM on a cellphone to protect their product, or whether they should be putting additional DRM in place, or whether the value of a ring tone is enough to justify not allowing a consumer to choose which network a device they purchased should be used on.
Please.
The coup that content creators won when the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA was passed was this - a debate that should be happening in the public arena about the extent to which content creators can control their works is instead pushed into a forum that few citizens can understand and even fewer citizens participate in.
Companies and public interest groups are left staring at the unsatisfying, watery gruel that the process prescribed by the DMCA has granted them, and every three years they line up in the front of the Library of Congress and ask "Please, sir, may I have some more?"
In today's intellectual property law, common sense has no place. Unlike healthcare, the solutions are clear. It isn't fixed because our leaders lack the political will. If the true measure of a government is what it does when it thinks its citizens aren't looking, then our government is sorely failing in this arena. Even President Obama, hailed as refreshing change from the previous administration, has been busy appointing the same lawyers that have made copyright law into the mess it is today to key positions in his administration.
Einstein's third rule of work is "In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity." There's a good opportunity here for President Obama, or any other political leader to do something good. And I'll keep reminding them that they should take it.
In the hearing I testified in the lawyer representing the joint commenters (the AAP, the MPAA and Time Warner) simultaneously argued that:
a) platform restrictions on streaming video should not be bypassed because doing so would mean less video streaming services and everything would be leaked to P2P networks which implies that the platform restrictions are an intentional access control enforced by the content creators and
b) platform restrictions are just a matter of technological incompatibility, not an access control
So platform restrictions are an access control when the content creators want you to only stream video on the devices they choose, but they're not when I'm requesting an exemption for them.
I guess when you start with ridiculous rules, it's only natural that you would end up with ridiculous logic in ridiculous hearings. It felt a little like I was having tea in the garden with the queen.
I wasn't as clear as I would have liked about the difference between technological incompatibility, the inability of a particular platform to stream video, and an access control, a software program preventing access to a video stream by requiring a specific platform.
The panel seemed to consider anything to do with platform restrictions a mere inconvenience. I should have asked what is the cost threshold for a mere inconvenience. How much should we expect consumers to pay extra to watch their programs on the devices they choose? Perhaps next year I should request an exception to the rule for all people under a certain level of income, if that really is the standard.
Even when it was crystal clear that an access control was in place - as is the case with cellphones locked to a particular network - the conversations quickly descend into discussing what should be irrelevant minutiae. Like whether a ring tone publisher has the right to expect the DRM on a cellphone to protect their product, or whether they should be putting additional DRM in place, or whether the value of a ring tone is enough to justify not allowing a consumer to choose which network a device they purchased should be used on.
Please.
The coup that content creators won when the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA was passed was this - a debate that should be happening in the public arena about the extent to which content creators can control their works is instead pushed into a forum that few citizens can understand and even fewer citizens participate in.
Companies and public interest groups are left staring at the unsatisfying, watery gruel that the process prescribed by the DMCA has granted them, and every three years they line up in the front of the Library of Congress and ask "Please, sir, may I have some more?"
In today's intellectual property law, common sense has no place. Unlike healthcare, the solutions are clear. It isn't fixed because our leaders lack the political will. If the true measure of a government is what it does when it thinks its citizens aren't looking, then our government is sorely failing in this arena. Even President Obama, hailed as refreshing change from the previous administration, has been busy appointing the same lawyers that have made copyright law into the mess it is today to key positions in his administration.
Einstein's third rule of work is "In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity." There's a good opportunity here for President Obama, or any other political leader to do something good. And I'll keep reminding them that they should take it.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Why Everyone Should Garden At Least Once
The great thing about a garden is how quickly it humbles you. You make these perfect plans on paper only to find out that due to forces beyond your control they just won't work.
Thursday night this was the plan - spend an hour at the garden mixing compost into the soil and laying down mulch (newspaper covered with cocoa bean shells). I figured that wetting the newspaper down as we went along would be enough to keep it from blowing away until we were ready to pour the cocoa bean shell mulch on top. Apparently not.
So my carefully thought out plan of laying down three layers of newspaper with cocoa bean shell mulch on top in one hour turned into a frantic hour and a half of Matt and I holding down the corners of newspaper sheets with one hand while trying to reach into the mulch bags to throw cocoa bean shells on the other corners. Sometimes while one of us had the hose, spraying down the sheets as we went. Which still turned their corners up into the wind, leaving rumpled blank spots in our weed barrier.
But in the end things mostly worked out, as you can see here. What's all that white pipe you see? An experiment I'll explain another day.
This isn't the first time the garden has stymied my best efforts. The first year I learned that while your seeds come up, so do a bunch of other weeds that also have two leaves and look remarkably like the herb you're trying to grow. I ended up digging up that whole corner of the garden and letting volunteer dill take over. (Fresh dill is lovely in a salad even if you don't like dill pickles.) The second year, my herb garden failed miserably, but that left room for my neighbor's yellow pear tomato plant to lean over the fence and introduce me to what is still my favorite variety of tomato. The third year my squash plants died an untimely death due to some very nasty looking worm things and instead I planted a pineapple sage plant that was leftover from someone else's garden. We're still using the dried pineapple sage from that little plant which grew into a small bush.
All of this proves that line from that old song, "You might not get what you want, but you might get what you need". And this is why everyone should garden at least once. :)
Thursday night this was the plan - spend an hour at the garden mixing compost into the soil and laying down mulch (newspaper covered with cocoa bean shells). I figured that wetting the newspaper down as we went along would be enough to keep it from blowing away until we were ready to pour the cocoa bean shell mulch on top. Apparently not.
So my carefully thought out plan of laying down three layers of newspaper with cocoa bean shell mulch on top in one hour turned into a frantic hour and a half of Matt and I holding down the corners of newspaper sheets with one hand while trying to reach into the mulch bags to throw cocoa bean shells on the other corners. Sometimes while one of us had the hose, spraying down the sheets as we went. Which still turned their corners up into the wind, leaving rumpled blank spots in our weed barrier.
But in the end things mostly worked out, as you can see here. What's all that white pipe you see? An experiment I'll explain another day.
This isn't the first time the garden has stymied my best efforts. The first year I learned that while your seeds come up, so do a bunch of other weeds that also have two leaves and look remarkably like the herb you're trying to grow. I ended up digging up that whole corner of the garden and letting volunteer dill take over. (Fresh dill is lovely in a salad even if you don't like dill pickles.) The second year, my herb garden failed miserably, but that left room for my neighbor's yellow pear tomato plant to lean over the fence and introduce me to what is still my favorite variety of tomato. The third year my squash plants died an untimely death due to some very nasty looking worm things and instead I planted a pineapple sage plant that was leftover from someone else's garden. We're still using the dried pineapple sage from that little plant which grew into a small bush.
All of this proves that line from that old song, "You might not get what you want, but you might get what you need". And this is why everyone should garden at least once. :)
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