Nobody's using Unicode, as far as my life is concerned. Which is a bonus for me, because it means I haven't had to learn how to do Unicode.

What we do, by preference, is reverse-engineer file formats. This statement tends to generate two distinct responses. Most people's eyes glaze over; the few who understand it tend to sneer openly. At length, what we do is figure out how your X program (CAD, word processing, drawing, whatever) decides what the contents of a file mean, and then write a parser -- a program or module which converts the contents of the file into a useful form.

We rarely reverse-engineer code, for several reasons. First, it's rarely useful. Second, it's risky: simply decompiling object code appears to be a violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), and even if that weren't the case, most software licenses explicitly prohibit decompilation. Finally, we don't have any skill or interest in reverse-engineering code, so we'd probably do a lousy job and not enjoy it.

Reverse-engineeing files is legal. We're always under the "for reasons of compatibility" banner, which is explicitly written into the law. But even without that, we're generally safe. The files belong to the client; unlike the code, which is merely licensed to the client by the vendor. The client has the right to dispose of its property as it wishes, including sending it to us to be reverse-engineered. Often the client's aim is to get away from the vendor, but that doesn't affect us.

Of course, the DMCA may make it more difficult for us to reverse-engineer certain files. I believe that DMCA holds that circumventing any deliberate countermeasure against reverse-engineering is tortious. Any one -- no matter how trivial -- such as shifting each alphabetic letter thirteen places over. Some vendors, such as Adobe, have started to do precisely this. Luckily, DMCA seems to be a dead letter, thanks to jury nullification. But it was scary for a while.

Anyway, I was going to ramble about Unicode, instead of what I do to earn my living. But now my niece wants to use her computer, so I'll get off.

I forget about the homeless problem when I'm in Edmonton. Especially in winter, streetcorner panhandling is.. mmm, uncommon. That doesn't mean they're not there, of course. Just not visible. Here in L.A. they're visible.

The word "homeless" is a quite unfortunate euphemism. Homelessness is not the problem: in fact my father and his wife, enjoying their retirement, spent several months traveling, "homeless". Anyone can become homeless, as homeless advocates are fond of pointing out, and it's easier than you might think to become so.

The problem is beggary. Becoming homeless should be an unpleasant but transitory experience. Staying homeless means having embraced the lifestyle of a beggar; an urban scavenger.

When I take an ecologist's view, it's clear that the only way people could survive begging and scavenging is if there's unexploited value in the garbage. Food and valuables, a place to sleep: there is an ecological niche occupied by those unwilling or unable to do other work.

This niche can't exist without the surrounding city. After all, one can't be homeless alone in the wilderness. That's not homelessness, it's hermitage. Nor is it easy: the whole point of begging is to make the least possible productive effort by sponging off the work of others. It doesn't work when there are no others.

The size and wealth of this niche is directly related to the size and wealth of the surrounding human society. (Modified, certainly, by the weather.) Without our wealth, we couldn't support such a large homeless population. If everyone were strapped for cash and careful not to discard food or anything with use left in it, the niche would disappear. Beggars can exist because of the wealth accumulated in a city.

And here's a nasty closing thought: suppose there were no human beggars, somehow. A rich empty niche is created. What sort of animal would you prefer to fill it?

We arrived in LA just before noon yesterday. God, I miss LA. I miss the sight of smog and the rectangular street layouts. I miss needing to use the driving skills -- especially the team driving skills -- that we've developed.

I don't actually miss smog. It makes me choke. But I feel sentimental while I'm choking.

Budget was out of cars -- at least, in the economy/mid-size/full-size matrix. Rather than bumping us into an SUV or a minivan or (my hope) a Mustang convertible, they drove us over to Hertz and promised to re-imburse us. Whatever. So we have a tiny red Kia Rio.

We played with the kids for a long time: roughhousing, playing board games, arranging the dollhouse. We haven't seen them since last Christmas exactly, while we were returning from Africa. A year ago, the baby was, well, a baby of 8 months. Now he's 20 months old: he walks, he talks sometimes. He generalizes. We gave him a Kinder Egg (the Canadian kind with tiny chokable toys inside) and he pretended to crack it on the edge of a bowl.

After we opened the presents (I got a copy of Comstock's Conversations on Chemistry from 1828!), we settled down to the real business of the evening: Vanguard. My sister and I set up the old Atari 2600 and had a 20-year Vanguard rematch. I'm in the lead so far, which is better than I used to be able to do at 8 or 9. I even get to quote Darth Vader at her: "Your powers are weak, old woman.... Now the circle is complete. Now I am the master."

So, Christmas is done. In about six hours we're flying down to California to see my family and our friends down there, so I'll make this quick.

We hosted dinner: 12 adults, two children, one 25-pound turkey. Now I have to find our passports and finish packing our bags.

It's easy for me to give in to depression at this time of year. It's dark, the holidays are over, and Christmas spawns a great deal of humbuggery in me. And here I am, having wasted the last hour reading blogs instead of finishing packing and going to bed. No wonder I'm cranky.

Charles Johnson quoted my favorite seasonally-appropriate Eliot poem. I would not yet be glad of another death. There exists a temptation; that of looking away from this world, condemning it for its unreality (or 'mere reality'). I do not usually feel it. Usually I have the opposite problem, living too much in the real world. Perhaps that's what I feel now.

Certainly I had hoped to have something more pleasant to say!

I will try to blog from on the road, but posts should be sparse until after Jan. 9. Sparser even than usual!

... or, chains of consequences.

Start with a trivial observation: The Czechs, being landlocked, have no maritime tradition. Therefore there was never a Czech navy. Therefore the Czechs had no overseas colonies or dominions. Therefore, Czech Christmas baking contains no brown sugar, molasses nor rum.

Of course it helps that the Czechs groaned, suffering inexpressibly under the yoke of the savage oppressors. (And there's more groaning to be had.)

Still I wonder if the oppressor actually gets the better of it. My wife's Christmas baking is basically Canadian, which is to say English: rum balls, butter tarts, lemon tarts, plum pudding. Czech baking is vanilkové rohlícky (vanilla crescents), pusinky (meringues, lit. "kisses"), and orechove pracny (no picture or translation available, sorry). The Czech baking is much better: lighter, more delicate in flavor, not overcome by rummy influences.

But then I'm obviously biased.

(Click here for an authentic view of Czech culture, complete with the cartoons of naked and topless women I remember from my childhood...)

I'm bizarrely multicultural, if I must say so myself. At least for someone so monoculturally Czech, anyway. Here is the latest import to our Christmas tradition: Finnish christmas tarts (joulutorttuja). Star-shaped pastry dough with a plum filling. Made 'em myself.

Eat your heart out.

I just finished reading an interesting article about SUV's (from someone's blog via my wife).

It's a good read, especially the debunking of claims that SUV's are safer than normal cars.

While reading this article, I had an insight about generational rivalry. The reason to hate baby boomers isn't that most of them have sold out -- that's irrelevant. What's wrong with baby boomers is what's always been wrong with them. They're self-centered pricks who violate the social compact. It doesn't matter if it's by buying cars which are likelier to kill, or by not vaccinating their children: these are people who maximize their immediate advantage, even though that incurs an expected long-term loss. They're defectors in life's prisoner's dilemma.

(Unfortunately for this generalization, the only baby boomers I know are my wife's parents, who don't fit this sterotype. They are pleasant, gentle, giving church people. My own parents/stepparents are not in the baby boom demographic; nor do they behave badly.)

But this Washington Monthly article is not without its howlers, notably:

Sport utility vehicles have become like guns

Oh? I must have missed the part where the author explains how SUV's can be used by the people to defend themselves against state tyranny.

Oh, you mean that nice leftists find them unpleasant! Well, then I do see how SUV's are like guns. Idiot.

It takes less than four hours to run a sizeable distillation. It is not reasonably possible to prohibit such an activity, which can be carried on indoors, with no outwardly visible signs (energy or water expenditure, for example), using legally-available materials.

Nevertheless, the state still outlaws private distillation, even for personal use only. Even though hard liquor is legal.

Why keep pot illegal? I've argued in this space before that one good reason is that pot is an enivronmental intoxicant. Legalization and public consumption of marijuana will inevitably expose innocent people to the smoke, as innocent people are currently exposed to tobacco smoke. Worse than tobacco, secondhand marijuana smoke can have intoxicating effects. You would have to be extremely sensitve to THC to show intoxication from passive inhalation. Here's a summary of a study that claims that passive inhalation in a social setting (i.e., not hotboxing) should not cause a positive test result.

I've also argued that valid conservative reasons -- avoiding disruption to settled social customs -- exist for keeping marijuana illegal. What is the mainstream etiquette for smoking weed socially? There isn't any. We'd have to develop it. What an annoyance. Libertarians may find this a weak reason, but it's a serious claim. Conservatives stand against change, unless it's trumped by social justice. There were, after all, valid conservative reasons to oppose desegregation. They just don't hold water against, you know, equal rights under the law. (Bye-bye, Trent.)

But I don't think that marijuana should be illegal pour encourager les autres.

Year-end is coming up, so our scheduled two weekly hours of charity work (I open the library while my wife does the books) stretched to six. Receiving the advertising revenue for the last magazine issue of the year; paying for things, including internet access; writing charitable donation receipts and making sure they get into this fiscal year. We choose to work together whenever possible, and there turned out to be lots of work for me, even though I'm not the accounting specialist. (Therefore, in my heart, I can still think accounting is kind of cool.)

I ran a couple of errands, so I listened to the car radio (unusually). Apparently some pedophile is now living in an Edmonton community. The question of a cover-up was raised. The RCMP should not be trusted with the investigation, opined an M.P. from Edmonton. Apparently Dudley Do-Right's reputation is no more.

Later, there was a call-in show. The topic was: how to structure your holidays, for the divorced set. Mostly women phoning in to complain about their kids' dads. I don't know: maybe my parents worked it out better than most -- I certainly didn't think so at the time. But I felt a strange compulsion to call in, or better, to grab these women by the lapels and say: "He'll be your child's father forEVER! Your child will remember your nasty comments for the rest of his life! Can't you swallow your pride for a mere ten years?"

My wife and I were talking about the Prisoner's Dilemma the other day because we were in one -- the details can be skipped.

The interesting thing about the Prisoner's Dilemma -- which I never appreciated deeply before -- is that it's a non-zero-sum game. In fact, the sum value of the game depends on the player's behavior.

Our position at the time we were discussing this was that the other side had defected while we cooperated, thus giving us 0 and them 5. The best strategy I know for iterated Prisoner's Dilemma games is Tit For Tat (TFT). TFT indicates that we should defect on the next turn.

The sad thing is, though, that we saw clearly that it would be possible for everyone to get 3 -- for a total of 6 -- of only both sides cooperated. We could do better than net five, if only the other side cooperated. Alas, they hadn't. So we defected next turn.

But there it is again -- the dream! Real growth! But only in certain circumstances can you realize it.

39.75 hrs last week + 0.25 after midnight today. But you could tell that by the dazed ramblings above, eh?

Argh.

We did our billing for November, and we didn't gross enough to cover salaries. Well, yes salaries, but not the payroll tax. Anyway, November was a deficit month. We're not in trouble, since we ran a surplus every other month this year. But it's not something we want to encourage.

Hence the brain melting. Today we went from 20.5 billed hours so far this week to 30.0. We fixed 12 bugs, worked on the client's network, and spent a goodly amount of time in the version-control system ("CVS Jail"). And we plan to do the same tomorrow. So I don't have much brain left to devote to political analysis or blogging.

That said, Colby is right about Trent Lott -- for five minutes.

The backstory is that conservatives in general and the blogosphere in particular has wanted Lott's head since Jeffords switched parties. Lott is not conservative. He has no conservative agenda and apparently no agenda at all. He (famously) didn't have a plan for regaining the Senate in '02.

Lott's latest gaffe is another opportunity for conservatives to call for his ouster. As a bonus, it gives us a chance to publicly proclaim an anti-racist position.

And that's the way it was. Signing off from melted cerebellum land, this was Sam Mikes. Now I'm going to go play video games.

So Colby thinks that the retail sector is more important than the entertainment sector "only to retailers" -- this when retail accounts for 4 times as many jobs as entertainment -- and that's in California. In 1997 across the U.S., retail receipts were 28 times those of enertainment (actually "Arts, Entertainment and Recreation"); retail paid 10 times as much in total payroll. (1997 US Economic Census). Wow. First time I've ever caught Colby being provincial, if only in a technical sense. He's Alberta-focused.

Retail, wholesale, and services are the backbone of a mature economy, which Alberta manifestly does not have. Here in Alberta it's still about the oooiiiil. If the oil (and the coal, and the tar sands) disappeared, Alberta would become a right-wing Saskatchewan; Canadian Nebraska.

But mature economies aren't like that. Nobody goes to New York for the farms, or the mineral wealth, or the docks. They go to New York because it's New York -- the economy is huge, it's self-sustaining. Like LA's economy: in LA the economy is not about oil or movies or the defense industry or software or real estate or construction. The LA economy exists because three million people live in LA. A major component of the economy is the provision of basic goods like food and clothing. And that is retail.

I don't want to talk about the working conditions in retail jobs, which are reportedly horrible. Part of the reason retail gets a bad rap is that nobody wants to work in retail. Fine. I'd probably enjoy retail, because I'm a contrary person.

No, I want to talk about value creation in retail. I think that's part of the distaste people feel for retail -- it's distaste for crass commercialism, mercantilism -- fundamentally, distaste for the bourgeoisie. (Great: first I call Colby provincial, now I'm calling him a communist. Sorry, old chap.) Retail looks like a business enterprise based on taking money from the consumer by marking up the price of goods.

It's easy to see that value is created in a retail operation. If it makes a profit, then value must have been created somewhere, right? But it's hard to point a finger at when. And until recently it was a silly question to ask.

In my line of work -- computer programming -- it's easy to see when the value is created. We sit down and one of us types and the other watches for errors and between the two of us we just, y'know, create value. The same is true for writers, animators, singers -- all intellectual property creators -- they just create value all day long. If you watch you can see it happen.

But when does it happen in retail? When the wholesale order comes in? When it's broken up and stored? When an item goes on the shelf? When the customer comes into the store? When the item goes in the basket? The value is realized when the customer pays. But when is it made?

I'm not entirely sure what Colby is so worked up about, here:

Lest I be accused of being Scrooge-ish, let me rephrase this way: our Christmas-shopping decisions should be determined entirely by our sentiments, and not at all by naive Keynesianism.

Does Colby really believe that people are motivated to spend money on Christmas shopping for the sake of the national economy? Somewhere out there, is Ronald Reagan dying on screen and saying "Go out there and spend just one for Wal-Mart!" Come now! It must be obvious that when people say things like, "Oh well, at least it helps the economy" to half-excuse a purchase, they're just humorously displaying shame and justifying their greed.

Or does Colby object to the heavy reporting of retail sales figures during the Christmas season? Surely then he also objects to the reporting of retail sales figures in other seasons, and to economic statistics in general.

To me the Christmas retail figures are like the box office gross receipts reported weekly for movies -- they provide a useful datum about my fellow citizens' behavior. But they're much more relevant, since retail is a more important sector of the economy than entertainment.

But that must be because my own Christmas buying decisions are already dictated only by sentiment, not by a perverse altruistic patriotism which expresses itself in consumption.

About every month or so I need to stay up all night. I feel justified in saying 'need.' My body seems to hold the mistaken belief that the day has twenty-five hours. (Here's a sympathetic alternative-medicinistic article that treats the subject.) That's why I stayed up last night until 5:30 AM and got up at 9:30.

Usually I can spend this time doing useful things, or at least reading a favorite novel. Last night I spent working myself into a downward emotional spiral. Whee.

One thing that helped was finding this old piece by Eve Tushnet. I'll excerpt a bit:

Recently I had a bad weekend. A really, really lousy, stressed-out, low, hateful weekend. And at some point I realized something: You know, I used to feel like this all the time! Thinking over it, actually, I used to feel worse than that, all the time. Like between the ages of, say, five or six, and 20. After 20 or so, I've had frequent bad patches, grim little self-hate-fiestas, but they've been interludes between longer calm, basically happy stretches. This correlates very roughly with my entrance into the Church, which is interesting; I don't know what to say except "interesting," because entering the Church has certainly provoked new anxieties and fairly painful self-assessments. But there it is.

This is similar to my own experience. The darkest parts of my life came before I joined the Church at 18. After that came the long slow climb that continues today, punctuated by sharp slides (like yesterday's) followed by quick reversals.

I don't consider the New York Times a credible news source.

This actually has very little to do with liberal bias, or the recent flap about that country club. I believe the incident which finally turned me off the Times occurred even before Howell Raines became the editor.

In 1993, the New England Journal of Medicine published an editorial by Marcia Angell, M.D. endorsing single-payer health care. (You can read about that here). This rated a front-page news story and an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. The New York Times ignored it. I believe the Health headline of the day was "Man With Icepick Through Eye Will Live."

I don't care whether the Times supports or opposes single-payer. But in order to maintain its credibility as an impartial news source, the Times should at least try to cover the main health news of the day, don't you think?

I had a funny nightmare on Monday morning, and I haven't had a chance to write about it yet. I had forgotten to do the oral exam to complete my undergrad, so I had to go back there -- only the campus was a weird mix of Mudd and Berkeley. The orals were heinous, as they always are in this sort of dream. The only question I remember was "Draw the NMR spectrum of this compound."

The next night I had a dream where I was discussing economics with the clerk in an airport concession stand. I explained, "When you buy a bag of chips today for the same price as you did yesterday, but today it creates a penny more of capital, that's growth!" He ran around whooping like a maniac, and started explaining some complicated scenario using Boris and Natasha and other Jay Ward characters, but I couldn't follow it.

We've stepped back a bit from childcare, which is a relief for us. We've spent the extra time reading fantasy novels, going to movies, shopping for new office furniture -- in short, anything other than working. And virtually no running -- once this week so far.

I've also been reading a lot of blogs, but not doing any posting. I think the answer to that is to post first and read later.

I'm glad to see that Colby, too, is making up bizarre conspiracy theories about media behavior. Unfortunately, more and more of the behavior of Al Gore, the liberal media (perhaps even liberals in general?) can only explained by bizarre conspiracy theories.

If you divide the population by two distinctions -- those who believe that people are mostly smart vs. mostly stupid, and those with a postive outlook vs. a negative outlook, you find:

Those who have a positive outlook and believe that people are mostly smart. Libertarians, in a word.

Those who have a positive outlook and believe that people are mostly stupid. Welfare-state democrats.

Those who have a negative outlook and believe that people are mostly stupid. Angry and insecure people who believe that their rightful place is to be the benevolent dictator of the world. Usually they vote with the welfare-state democrats

Those who have a negative outlook and believe that people are mostly smart. Conspiracy theorists.

Boron doesn't really work, of course. I mean to say: it's electron-donating, sure, but you couldn't use it in medicinal chemistry, which is where Derek wants to use it. You can't put boron compounds in water -- well, you can, but they stop being boron compounds because they react swiftly and completely with water.

It's an interesting thought-experiment though. To me, it points out the supreme un-utility of theoretical chemistry, which is the field I left to become a computer programmer. But maybe I'm just bitter.

I came up with some other weird ideas. One was to use tritium instead of a proton. Tritium decays to ³He by emitting a beta particle; the process has a half-life of 12.43 years. The new helium atom would fall off (it's a leaving group!), taking two electrons and leaving behind a radical carbon. In this case the radioactivity of the tritium would be incidental to the chemical change triggered after the decay. (As an aside, I don't know of any radioactive drug where the change in chemical properties after the decay is used. I may ask our neighbor, a doctor who does nuclear medicine over at the U of A.)

Another weird idea would be to stick on some meson or other particle. Something with two or three +2/3 quarks, for a net charge of +4/3 or +2. On sober reflection, this would of course tend to draw electrons away from the substituted carbon, so I don't know what I was thinking.

Derek Lowe, a real live medicinal chemist (link via Colby Cosh, says this on his site, Lagniappe:

We need something electron-donating that's no bigger than a fluorine.

Although it's been a few years since I left chemistry, I have been obsessed with this question for the last few days. Unfortunately, I can't expand on this now as we're going over to the in-laws for dinner.

But, in a word: boron.

Long entry today, but disjointed. See:

We celebrated American Thanksgiving on Thursday. We: my wife and I; our housemate; my wife's sister "Karen" and her baby. Dinner was a roast stuffed chicken and most of the usual Thanksgiving trimmings, scaled back a little.

It was nice. Next year if it's just the two of us, we're thinking of having a miniaturized Thanksgiving. A cornish game hen. Apple and mince tarts. Delicate, tiny new potatoes.

We've been sleeping next door for the last three days, since Karen is just-recently-released from the hospital and still edgy about being alone at nights. Her husband and their son were down in the States for American Thanksgiving. Her husband is a Yank like me.

Actually, on paper he looks quite a lot like me. Same home city, same college, similar field, unusual musical instrument, similar glasses, hair, height, width. I suppose that's what it means to be "a type".

What is it with this Canadian disgust about Canadian health care? I've spent a lot of time looking at it from next to inside in the past six weeks, and it seems pretty good. Have any of these guys lived in the States? (Apparently Jeremy Lott does now. Maybe we'll hear from him.)

The U.S. insurance system primarily differs from the Canadian system in that for-profit insurers are allowed to pick the best risks to insure. Those who don't or can't get insurance (we'll talk about this later, but I really do mean "can't") either pay from their own pocket, join the state "uninsurables pool", or go bankrupt. Bankruptcy is our health insurance of last resort.

I've lived under both systems. Perhaps it's important that I've been self-employed under both systems. It was impossible for me to find coverage in California as a self-employed individual -- that is to say, I was unable to find anyone willing to write me a policy. I believe that any policy that would have been written would exclude treatment for kidney problems because I have a pre-existing condition. (I had the bad taste to pass a kidney stone while I was leaving graduate school.)

But then we incorporated our company. Suddenly, it was trivial to find coverage -- pretty good coverage too! There were no pre-existing condition exemptions, and it even covered pregnancy. Same two people, but because they were employees of our corporation, we were able to find someone to write the policy. And it was a steal -- at $110 USD per person per month.

Then we moved to Canada. When we crossed the border, we were covered. My wife is a returning Alberta resident; she gets Alberta health care. I am her dependent spouse, legally present in Canada. I get Alberta health care. I had to present my immigration document before I got my card, but my coverage is backdated to the date I entered the province. We pay $120 CAD per person per quarter. We pay one-fifth what we were paying in the States; or only one-third, if you don't convert the dollars. And we can go to any provider we want, instead of only to network providers, as per our U.S. plan.

Alberta Health Care has probably spent over $100,000 on Karen's care so far. Her family has had no out-of-pocket costs until now, after discharge, when they're filling prescriptions at normal pharmacies. Under our U.S. plan, in a similar situation, we would have paid $5000 by now out of pocket, our annual maximum co-payment. The $100,000 would count against a lifetime maximum of (I believe) $5,000,000 -- which is the escape clause for catastrophic life-altering illnesses. If you go over your lifetime cap, your policy is over, and your insurer can decide not to write you a new one. That's the free market, baby.

So yeah. Thanksgiving. Be thankful for what you've got.