United States
Frankfurt Finally Gets Civilized
For a decade a I filled out complaint forms every week at United Red Carpet Clubs explaining that they were being short-sighted charging for internet service, a service they could provision for a few hundred dollars a month and would have drawn customers to them. They finally got around to fixing their stupid contract about the time airports started giving away wifi for free in the concourse, making the lounge the tier 2 place to be for a business traveler.
Finally, Frankfurt has realized the same thing. Oddly, Munich has been giving away access cards for years now, but Frankfurt was always a dead zone for an international traveler. today I was very pleased to see this slightly oddly worded greeting.
Visiting Radioactive Chernobyl
Carolyn and I visited the Chernobyl reactor site with a Singularity University reunion organized by Andrew Bain (who did an amazing job, BTW, thanks!).
We had a walk to the crippled facility, the visitors center (in the shadow of the west wall of the crippled reactor), and a walk around the town of Pripyat made famous by Elena.
Chernobyl seems a particularly relevant lesson in light of the hysteria over radiation reaching the US from Fukushima. It has been 25 years since the reactor accident at Chernobyl and it is a good test of what will happen in Japan.
In Fukishima the reactor cores melted and cooling water carried radioactive material into the ocean, while there were gaseous emissions of hot materials, including (apparently) some radio isotope emissions. There were a few explosions, but of hydrogen liberated by thermal reaction – that is chemical explosions (not a “hydrogen bomb” as in an explosive fusion reaction). When Chernobyl’s reactor 4 blew up, the core blew open and the 2,000 ton upper plate launched 30 meters in the air, through the roof of the containment building, to crash down 90 degrees rotated into the core base. Without coolant, the core itself vaporized (kind of a fizzle yield bomb, about 3 tons of TNT) which blew almost all of the fuel into the air to disperse over the countryside, mostly into Belarus.
We measured radiation levels on the site as we went:
- 0.14 µSv/h in Kiev (granite buildings).
- 0.10 µSv/h at the 30km exclusion zone
- 0.10 µSv/h at the 10km exclusion zone
- 0.66 µSv/h at the south fence line of the reactor
- 3.41 µSv/h at the monument in front of the west wall of the containment
- 7.04 µSv/h in some dirt at the abandoned amusement park
- 16.07 µSv/h in the car driving over the plume – that was the only place where it seemed as trees hadn’t returned immediately.
According to XKCD, a NY-LA flight = 5 hrs = 40µSV = 8µSv/h.
Working at the visitors center, right next to the destroyed reactor, results in an exposure rate less than half that a flight attendant gets. Not that it would be smart to dig around (the contaminated dust from the explosion is estimated to be buried about 10cm by now), nor would I suggest eating the local produce, but walking around one needs only minor precautions such as long pants and closed shoes as beta emissions are highest at ground level and are significantly absorbed by the air before getting to head level. The ground we walked on had been cleaned, radioactivity levels were higher in the woods and other areas that hadn’t been scrubbed and stripped, but by now are no longer particularly dangerous.
25 years after the explosion there is a lot of activity on the site and on a nice summer day, we were told, 1,000 tourists might visit. We were one of three small groups when we were there, a bit early in the season, and at 8, the largest.
The site itself has become very beautiful, pretty woods with lots of birds and apparently moose and other large animals roaming around more or less happily free of people. The degree to which the surrounding forest has overtaken the abandoned town of Pripyat is quite amazing and shows the transience of human construction. Like every tour group, we visited the iconic school and amusement park, which are particularly poignant.
On the way out, we had to pass through a tourniquet (or turnstile in alternate translation) with radiation detectors. We were told that if we were contaminated we would have to try to clean up to get a passing score and anything that couldn’t pass had to remain. Nobody set off any alarms.
Fight the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act
I wrote my representatives:
The “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act” introduced by Senators Leahy and Hatch to shut down internet sites accused of violating copyright is fundamentally unacceptable and must be blocked. It is predicated on three failed precepts.
First:
The law would provide for expedited prior restraint of free speech based on a claim of infringement. This extends the already over-broad powers granted by the DMCA, which has been used to silence political opposition (e.g. John McCain’s DMCA takedown of a critical video on YouTube) and shut down legitimate criticism of corporate and financial interests. This bill will further erode free speech in America and thus further delegitimize democracy itself.
Second:
The bill provides for in rem actions against a web site. In rem actions have become one of the most popular mechanisms which police forces have used to enrich themselves by taking legal action against private property (e.g. USA v. $124,700 (2006)). This has lead to massive corruption and even the murder of innocent people (e.g. Donald P. Scott 1992). In rem cases should be limited to acceptable legal situations where the owner cannot be identified, not as a method of prior restraint or as an extrajudicial shortcut that effectively extorts compliance from the target by creating an excessive cost barrier to seeking real justice.
Third:
The bill promotes the fiction that copyright law is a property law. It is not. Limited monopolies on the fruits of inventions are offered to inventors to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. These monopolies are in the form of copyrights and patents. There is no constitutional basis for creating laws to protect the privilege of copyright beyond what can be proven to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. It is an offense to democracy to privilege profits over basic civil rights. American society would not suffer meaningfully without the copyright industry, but American democracy is meaningless without free speech. Unfortunately, the copyright industry leverages profits into campaign contributions and lobbyists while free speech is, by its nature, free and thus profitless. Free speech can only be defended from profiteers by patriots.
This bill must be blocked. Please stand up for democracy.
March 1997?
What happened in March of 1997?
- March 4 – U.S. President Bill Clinton bars federal funding for any research on human cloning.
- March 6 – President of Guyana Cheddi Jagan dies in office.
- March 6 – Pablo Picasso‘s Tête de Femme is stolen from a London gallery (recovered a week later).
- March 6 – In Sri Lanka, Tamil Tigers overrun a military base and kill more than 200.
- March 11 – An explosion at the Tokaimura nuclear waste reprocessing plant in Japan exposes 35 workers to low-level radioactive contamination, in the worst nuclear accident in Japan’s history.
- March 13 – India‘s Missionaries of Charity chooses Sister Nirmala to succeed Mother Teresa as its leader.
- March 13 – The National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China creates a new Chongqing Municipality, out of part of Sichuan.
- March 13 – The Phoenix Lights are seen over Phoenix, AZ.
- March 16 – Sandline affair: On Bougainville Island, soldiers of commander Jerry Singirok arrest Tim Spicer and his mercenaries of the Sandline International.
- March 18 – The tail of a Russian An-24 charter plane breaks off while en-route to Turkey, causing the plane to crash, killing all 50 on board, and resulting in the grounding of all An-24s.
- March 21 – In Zaire, Etienne Tshiksekedi is appointed prime minister; he ejects supporters of Mobutu Sese Seko from his cabinet.
- March 21 – Mercenaries of Sandline International withdraw from Papua New Guinea.
- March 22 – Tara Lipinski, 14, becomes the youngest women’s world figure skating champion.
- March 22 – The Comet Hale-Bopp makes its closest approach to Earth.
- March 24 – The 69th Academy Awards, hosted by Billy Crystal, are held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California, with The English Patient winning Best Picture.
- March 26 – In San Diego, California, 39 Heaven’s Gate cultists commit mass suicide at their compound.
- March 26 – Julius Chan resigns as prime minister of Papua New Guinea, ending the Sandline affair.
Working Toward Workable Time Zones
PIMs (Personal Information Managers, what we used to call things like Outlook, or Sunbird, or Lightning, or Zimbra before they were integrated with email) haven’t progressed much in the last 20 or so years. Actually, neither have email clients. Perhaps the most essential of our daily tools, these classes of products have failed to progress much at all over the decades.
Sure, email has styled text now and you can compose a message in Outlook using Word, but these wizzy tricks distract from the function of email–communicating the written word. There’s rarely any reason to style text in email and HTML mail has only been a boon for spammers and a distraction for users. One of the few useful enhancements is inline images which I do find useful.
The best email clients ever, Eudora and Mulberry (the BAT might qualify too, though I haven’t used it) have failed to keep up in OS level support. Thunderbird is OK, and pimped out with extensions to enable proper formatting, forwarding, text wrapping, etc. it is usable, though it still doesn’t handle frequent IMAP disconnections all that gracefully (it pains me to admit it, but only Outlook does this really well).
PIM functionality has actually gone backwards as the years have gone by. Calendar programs have always handled reminders and notifications and scheduled events fairly well. DateBook was great in 1990 and there’s very little useful that has been added since . In the mid-90’s Motorola shipped a great little PIM along with their TimePort phones called TrueSync Desktop. You could create an event in a time zone other than the one you were in. Wow. Amazing. The developers actually considered the possibility that you, the user, might have some business in a time zone other than the one you’re in. At the time, some people pointed to Outlook’s then “dual time zone” functionality as the be-all end-all. True, two time zones are better than one, but hardly a solution suitable for the whole of the US, let alone the world and the pixel heavy dual time zone stripe precluded anything more comprehensive. At the time, the official M$ work-around was to change your computer’s time zone to the time zone you wanted to create the event in, create the event, then change the time zone back. Brilliant.
Lightning (for Thunderbird) and Sunbird (stand alone) Calendar programs have finally incorporated some timezone functionality, you can at least set the starting and ending time zone of an event independently and differently from the time zone you’re in:
It is a start, but the time zone picker is still pretty much unusable:
This is a huge enhancement though, one I’ve been pushing for a long time:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=224905
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=364750
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=364751
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=364751
The right answer is a simple pop-up menu with my favorite time zones in it. I can use the semi-infinite list of seemingly random city names as a geography quiz along with Wikipedia to figure out what my favorite time zones are as long as I don’t have to spend 10 minutes scrolling through them every time I’m trying to find America/New York for ET or America/Los Angeles for PT (or America/Dawson Creek for MST, no DST).
Oddly, Lightning actually has a half-decent map view that shows you the time zone you’ve selected, but you can’t click on it to pick the time zone you want (!?):
I really like worldtimezone‘s view as a graphical picker:
Something like this, plus a search tool into a database of time zones for cities would be just perfect for creating my list of favorite time zones. Even the most worldly traveler is unlikely to need more than a dozen time zones in their favorites list and thus a popup would make selecting the start and end time zones very straight-forward. Way back at the start of 2007 I proposed something like:
Which is pretty much a copy of Starfish’s TrueSync Desktop (though TSD didn’t support different starting and ending time zones). Someday… maybe someday I’ll have a calendar program as advanced as they were in 1993.
UPDATE 2023:
It took about 7 years or so to finally get this into release Thunderbird, but time zones are now workable. Thanks devs! Open source software rocks.
Also, even more recently, we FINALLY got ISO 8601 (like, not quite standard since that requires an icky date/time delimiter rather than a readable ” “) time as a universally selectable date/time format. It took about 6 years, but has been a problem much longer. It is just that for a decade or so, one could select Denmark as a rational date structure and then that broke and we had stupid date formats for years until the devs put in an awesome fix.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1509096
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1426907
Lookin’ good!
A week of tweets: 2010-07-18
- Hertz Traverse LT minivan: why does GM add pointless power tailgate but no USB interface? Sadly, US cars still suck. #
Stuck at ORD after the RCC closes…
I travel with various electrical adaption and extension devices as one might find useful in various countries including the US. It turns out a lot of people got stuck by the multi-hour delay here in ORD and needed to work beyond their battery capacity. My collection of wires has turned into an AC farm near the gate.
Abetone Ski Resort
Abetone is literally within sight of our apartment in Tuscany. While it is not more than 15km away as the crow flies, it is a 52km drive that takes a bit more than an hour because it goes through a lot of small towns and up into the mountains (much longer in inclement weather).
We did not try the Mutlipass (a la 5th element) but we did ski all the trails lifts in Val de Luce, which is a US equivalent resort with condos and rental shops and big parking lots and easy lift access about 10km and 20 min further away from us than the first lift that access the greater Abetone ski area.
It is about half the size in terms of lifts and capacity of Megeve, and not nearly as extensively developed. Where Megeve has lots of gondola and acceleration lifts, Abetone is dominated by treadmill acceleration lifts. It is gorgeous, wide-open terrain.
We visited after a long season of heavy snows, but late enough that warm days had made a hard cover and thus skiing on piste was barely distinguishable from off-piste, in fact the piste had more scraped powder.
But the open, forgiving terrain invites exploration and there certainly is plenty of it. While we only spent a half day there (vs. three days in Megeve) we found our own favorite geography and never had to share it with anyone else. The user small compared to Megeve, and infitesimal compared to US resorts: we never had to wait in a lift line and once we cleared the debark we were free of any other skiers even when the schools were operating.
I’m not sure I’d make Abetone an international destination, but as a convenient, local resort, it is far superior to Tahoe on anything but the best days, and only an hour away. If I was in Borgo A.M., I’d make the trip after every fresh snowfall.
DS-5513
The Department of State is proposing a new questionnaire as a precondition of getting a US passport. If the applicant is a newborn it might not be too much of a burden, but for an adult it reads like it was written by George Orwell.
If you’re a grown up and considering getting a passport, you should check in at the comment site or just email GarciaAA@state.gov and let DoS know that their estimate of 45 minutes to gather the required information is probably off by a couple of years.
A few of the questions, which I swear I am not making up:
5. List your mother's residence one year before your birth:6. List your mother's residence at the time of your birth:7. List your mother's residence one year after your birth:8. Mother's place of employment at the time of your birth:- Dates of employment:- Name of employer:- Address of employer:9. Did your mother receive pre-natal or post-natal medical care?
- Name of Doctor:
- Dates of appointments:
10. What type of document, if any, did your mother use to enter into the United States before your birth?
11. Please describe the circumstances of your birth including the names (as well as address and phone number, if available) of persons present or in attendance at your birth:
Section D
Please list all of your residences inside and outside of the United States starting with your birth until the present.
Section E
Please list all of your current and former places of employment in the United States and abroad.
Section G
I declare under penalty of perjury that all responses contained in this document are true and correct, to the best of my knowledge.
False statements made knowingly and willfully in passport applications or in affidavits or other supporting documents submitted therewith arepunishable by fine and/or imprisonment under the provisions of 18 U.S.C. 1001 and/or 18 U.S.C. 1542.
This is so far beyond idiotic, so completely utterly absurd, that I’m tempted to believe that someone is pulling a hoax in releasing the document to get people riled up, like claiming there will be death panels or some stupid fabricated outrage like that. I suppose filling in “I’m sorry, but my memory of the circumstances three months before I was a zygote is a little hazy these days” would at least be true and correct, but might not lead to quick issuance of a passport. It is not just the flabbergasting stupidity of asking questions that no adult could possibly answer, but questions that utterly irrelevant to providing a passport that is galling. Dear DoS: derp?
Category: Negative • Politics • Reviews • Travel