Our baby girl (Kaija Elizabeth) was born at home yesterday afternoon, October 29, at 1:20 PM. She weighs 8 lbs. 5 oz. (3770 g) and is 21 inches (53 cm.) long. Mom and baby are doing well, but everyone's sleep is disrupted ... finally I have a good excuse for not posting!
Here's a picture of me cleaning her just after she was born.
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The first snow of the season fell on Wednesday. It was beautiful, even though I almost killed myself twice: once driving, once crossing the street. The next morning (yesterday) there was enough snow piled on the roofs to make a flurry effect when the wind picked it up and blew it around.
I broke out the winter jacket yesterday -- I needed it while I was sweeping off my walk.
And another thing happened yesterday: our baby was born.
Another anti-smoker comes out of the closet: Damian Penny on the smoking ban in Newfoundland, and "how filthy cigarette smoke can be."
I think spitting is a good analogy. Don't think about the public health concerns-- consider that for many years, cigarettes were expensive and tobacco-chewing was much more popular than it is now.
Your right to smoke in a restaurant, 2003 = a man's right to spit a plug of tobacco on a barbershop floor, 1950.
The difference is that in years gone by, when the majority of citizens choose to limit tobacco users' freedom to dirty up places of public assembly, the tobacco users took it like men. But now, after the "me decade" and the "sensitive 90's kind of guy" movements, they've learned how to whine (and even how to cast smoking as a libertarian slippery slope/rights issue, and we'll never hear the end of it.
Penny ends with this great quote:
You may think you need to smoke - but sometimes I need to piss, and I don't have a right to do that in public.which reminds me of the Steve Martin routine: "Do you mind if I smoke?"
"Do you mind if I puke on your shoes?"
Read the following two excerpts:
I don't know of any member of the press who has taken notice yet of one particular guiding principle in the merger agreement, though I can assure you that many thousands of Western voters already have. The new Conservative Party is committed to seekingA balance between fiscal accountability, progressive social policy and individual rights and responsibilities.
Fancy that! They took the "Progressivity" out of the Progressive Conservative name and installed it under the hood instead. I'm pretty progressive myself on social policy, but I never asked to have my views implemented by means of a swindle.
Now the other:
On the other other hand, the agreement-in-principle between the two parties confirms that the “progressive” bit has just been moved into the shadows, where it can operate more stealthily. As its first “founding principle” states, the Conservative Party will be guided by…A balance between fiscal accountability, progressive social policy and individual rights and responsibilities.
Pretty darn similar, eh? Similar idea, similar analysis, similar wording, even. It's definitely not plagiarism, which I think of as the copying of text. It's just that these two commentators are expressing the same criticism in an eerily similar way.
Item #1 was published on October 17th on Colby Cosh's personal website. Item #2 was published on October 18th on Mark Steyn's personal website. (No permalinks -- somebody get that man a CMS!) I know Mr. Steyn is a big print journalist and stuff, with a column in every paper and several books to his credit, but surely he's been around the internet long enough to send poor ol' Colby a link, right? (Cosh himself is too polite to notice the striking similarity of these two paragraphs when he links to Steyn's article yesterday).
I simplify grossly, of course. Steyn is a hell of a prose stylist, while Colby is still developing his style. And the follow-on analysis that Steyn presents is first-rate and (as far as I can tell) not cribbed:
The biggest issues in Canada arise from the attempt to find a “balance” between “progressive social policy” and “individual rights and responsibilities” – and, given that the fellows attempting to find the balance are the purveyors of progressive conventional wisdom, generally speaking they come down on the side of “progressive social policy” and against the individual every time, at least if the individual is a practicing Christian, gun owner, a landed immigrant who wishes to open a bookstore or buy a radio station, etc. That formulation, right up there in paragraph 1, is deeply disquieting for those who believe individual rights are in a far weaker state in Canada than they ought to be.That's national-level commentary -- best of all, it has an eastern perspective -- whereas Cosh wanders off into the personal. And in right-wing politics, the personal is definitely not the political.
Steven Den Beste writes, on the subject of random text in spam e-mail:
I don't think [bypassing the filter is] what they're trying to do when they include a lot of irrelevant prose from books or newspaper articles. I think they're trying to attack the filter directly. The goal isn't to increase the positive score for that particular message, it's to try to poison the filter. By including a lot of relatively normal text in what gets classified as spam, they hope it will start tagging legitimate mail as also being spam. If the false-positive rate is too high, the user will stop using the tool no matter how good it is at rejecting spam.
I first noted these random-etext spams a couple of months ago. Since I've told my e-mail client to prefer the text over the HTML portion of the message, I usually see the random text instead of whatever message the spammer is trying to send.
My impression is that this text was included so that different spam messages would have different checksums. Some anti-spam methods make a blacklist of known spam by storing a message hash calculated on the body of the e-mail. An anti-spam filter can check an incoming message against this blacklist by computing the same message hash and asking the blacklist server if the server knows that hash. (Vipul's Razor is such a system, which I use through SpamAssassin.)
The spammer's countermeasure against checksumming is to make every message unique, so each message will have a different checksum. First they tried something which could be called "gratuitous uniqueness", where random characters are added to each spam message to make it unique. I suspect this is why spam e-mail always has garbage characters at the end of the Subject: line. Similarly, a few garbage characters can be added to the beginning or the end of the message body to defeat a body-only checksum.
Vipul's Razor employs (actually, employed) a fuzzy signature algorithm precisely to defeat small changes which create uniqueness. It also randomly samples a the message, hashing only a portion of it to compute the signature. This approach works around small changes to make the message unique.
I believe the the inclusion of large passages of English text (drawn from etext archives, articles, etc.) is in part a countermeasure against fuzzy and random signatures. I note that Vipul's Razor has currently suspended the use of its fuzzy algorithm and is only sampling; a new algorithm is under development. Luckily for me, spamassassin also uses a Bayes filter like the one Den Beste describes.
In any case, good luck to Steven and his new toy.
I haven't seen any mention of this at the blogs I usually read (not even Instapundit), but an El Al jet was diverted from Ontario twice in the last two days. On Thursday, westbound, routing Tel Aviv - Toronto - LAX, the jet was diverted to Montreal and then to Hamilton before continuing to LA; on the eastbound flight the next day, the plane stopped in Hamilton instead of Toronto before returning to Tel Aviv.
The reason in both cases was a security threat to El Al aircraft at Ontario's Pearson airport. More information in Google News. The best article at this time was this one from the London (Ontario, Canada) Free Press.
The worst one has got to be this one from an outfit called Airwise News: Canada Assessing Future of El Al Toronto Flights
Canada said on Friday it was assessing the future of El Al flights to Toronto after one of the Israeli airline's planes was diverted twice because of an unspecified security threat.Assessing? What, Canada is going to disallow El Al to fly to Toronto because of a threat against the airline? Are we blaming the victim yet?
"This was a specific threat against El Al at Pearson Airport. I want to assure travelers that there is not a problem with traveling to Pearson, to Toronto."Unless the travelers are Jews. That's the subtext of Transport Minister David Collenette's remarks here -- no specific threat, unless you're a Jew or flying from Israel.
A spokesman at the Israeli embassy in Ottawa said Israel was fully co-operating with the investigation.And this is news because... why? For some reason did Airwise News expect Israel to not cooperate? Maybe I'm missing the part where Israel has a long history of failing to take terrorist threats seriously.
Things like this drive me nuts.
In other news, no baby yet.
UPDATE: 2003/10/25
lgf has picked it up.
No baby yet.
But apparently I inhabit the same parallel universe as Colby, for I too have personally witnessed no anti-semitism in my adult life. Of course that may be a function of where I've lived: Palo Alto, CA; Santa Monica, CA; Edmonton, Alberta. Or maybe the circles I move in, though I did attend grad school at UC Berkeley (briefly!).
Perhaps there is an explanation, though. In a flip-side version of the "passing" stories Meryl Yourish mentions (where someone who is Jewish but doesn't "look Jewish" might hear casual anti-semitic comments), it might be that I look Jewish and this discourages anti-semites from spouting off around me. I confess that I don't really know what "jewish" looks like, but I do look Eastern European or Slavic, and it's certainly possible that someone could mistake that for a semitic look.
Of course, these notional anti-semites would have to be exceedingly delicate and polite. I assume that belligerent, mouth-foaming anti-semites, if they suspected I was a Jew, would shout ethnic slurs at me or threaten me. Haven't run into a lot of that, either.
I know that anti-semitism exists; it's easy to find on the Internet, for one. I don't know many Arabs or Muslims, and the few I do I don't know well enough to talk politics with. Certainly I expect if the subject came up, it would lead to an argument.
But casual anti-semitism from North Americans of European ancestry, I don't see. Phrases like "jew him down" or "shylock" -- never heard them. The casual anti-Semitism of civil society described here is something I just don't encounter.
Surely you've heard by now that researchers at the University of Alberta figured out how to turn water into electricity? No?
Lucky you -- you haven't been subjected to the barrage of science illiteracy flooding the news.
Here's an article which actually explains the technology. It's a new method of generating electric current from a pressure difference; or if you prefer, converting mechanical energy to electrical energy.
Obviously energy is not created nor destroyed. Just as obviously, you need to have more energy available from the pressure than you get in the generated current. This is a direct consequence of the laws of thermodynamics: energy is conserved, entropy is increasing.
As it turns out, the process is only 1% efficient, which is to say that 99% of the energy available is lost. Compare this with the traditional method of converting pressure to current -- i.e., magnetic generators like those in dams -- which are over 90% efficient. Clearly some effort needs to be made here: microfluidics-powered cell phone batteries are not coming soon to your pocket.
It's still a cool technology, and it's still exciting. The University's press release actually has a pretty good perspective on it. It's a new way of generating current that hasn't been described in the literature before. But if you're only getting 1-2 microamps from 3/100 of an atmosphere, even if it scales linearly, you'd need 10 atmospheres to get 6 milliamps. And if the efficiency went up from 1% to 90%, you'd be getting .5 amps -- you could almost power my cell phone charger for that. Of course, you'll have to keep that head pressure sustained while you're drawing charge, so expect to take a pressure tank with you wherever you're going... oh, did you want to fly on a plane?
Nor labor either. Baby without labor would probably be nice, but labor without baby -- especially extended -- is not so nice, I've heard.
In other news: I called my doctor's office and asked if they wanted the stone I passed to analyze. They said they don't usually do that (WTF?) but they'll give me a call back when the doctor gets back into town. If they don't want it to analyze, I think I'll have it encased in lucite -- or else stuffed and mounted over the fireplace.
Sunday evening I spent an hour turning my wife's younger sister (my other sister-in-law) on to 80's rock. She mostly listens to country, but she's started to like country/rock crossover (Chris LeDoux), and so she wanted more stuff like that. She was nine, I guess, when Nevermind came out, so of course she has no memory of Bon Jovi, Van Halen, Def Leppard, and them all. I don't really appreciate them as much as I should: at the time, I was listening to new wave and punk. Only since we moved here have I realized that I really like 80's rock, and that's because the only radio station I can listen to here has a rock/hard rock format.
I also got something out of it: she loaned me a Toby Keith CD, and I finally got to listen to the famous "Angry American" song.
Back to work.
Wife woke up about 4:00 AM with mild contractions. I woke up around 6:30 because she was sitting up in bed and eating Corn Nuts, and everybody knows there's no way to eat corn nuts quietly.
We got up and I tidied the house while she did the dishes and made pancakes. We watched the sun rise, and then we walked to the store (about a mile round trip) to get a pumpkin. Then she had a hot shower while I inflated the pool. Now she's trying to nap a bit.
Throughout this, her contractions have been about 30 seconds long and between 3 and 7 minutes apart. Sometimes she gets short ones which start, but don't progress all the way down.
Sometimes this sort of early labor stops; then it's called "false labor". Our midwife prefers "practice labor". But of course all true labor starts with early labor signs, so this could be the real thing. This morning as we were cleaning up I felt that the day was marked, somehow. Even if this isn't the day our child is born, I'll remember it for a long time.
20mg of hydrocodone and nine and a half hours later, I am stone-free. Probably.
Normally when you "pass a kidney stone", what really happens is a part of the stone breaks off and passes through your urinary system. Sometimes you pass the whole damn thing, though. See:
I'm reasonably sure that it's the whole thing because a) it hurt like hell coming through, and b) the ultrasound sized it as 4-5mm, and this stone is about 3mm x 4mm (stone with ruler (87k)).
Next step is to get it analyzed for content.
Well, not for long.
A couple of weeks ago I went to see a specialist about my kidney stone, and we all agreed to leave it alone, since I hadn't had an attack in two years. The alternative is breaking up the stone (I prefer to say "blowing it up") with sound waves in a process called Extracorporeal Shockwave Lithotripsy. The downside to this process is that the fragments of the stone pass out in the usual way, and as any kidney stone sufferer can tell you, it's the transition from kidney to bladder which is painful. One stone in the kidney is better than 500 in the ureter.
So went my thinking.
This morning I woke up at about 6:00 AM with a minor back pain. Well, stabbing back pain but minor compared to what I have now. I tried changing position or massaging it, but it didn't go away. That was, I guess, the first indication of a kidney stone attack.
About half an hour later I decided, to hell with pain coping, I'm getting some drugs. So I took two tylenol + codeine pills. That worked for another hour. Ten minutes ago I took two tylenol + hyrdocodone pills given to me by the good Dr. Schumb back in 1999 when I had my first attack. I will probably be unconscious for the rest of the day. Cheers!
And yes, it still hurts like hell. In fact, it hurts more now, through the building fog of painkillers, than it has at any time in the past. Thank God there's no memory of pain.
And my wife has promised not to go into labor until I wake up, which is awfully sporting of her.
Good night.
Eugene Volokh writes (but see UPDATE below):
The second half of my prediction was that the Court will reverse, and I would have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for that darned Justice Scalia and his dog.
Although I am aware that he is merely making an ironic cultural reference to Scooby-Doo here, please note that some confused people will probably misunderstand this to be a denigrating reference to Justice Thomas. And that makes it an irony "two-fer":
- any reference to Scooby-Doo is ipso facto irony;
- Thomas as Scooby-Doo draws ironic attention to the claim that Scalia is leading Thomas around by the nose, a claim which Volokh has refuted in the past
I still fear that confused people will misunderstand Eugene's point, but to be honest my imagination is now captured by a different question: if Thomas is Scooby-Doo, then obviously Scalia is Shaggy. So which of Ginsburg and O'Connor is Velma and which is Daphne? And does that make Rhenquist Fred? What about the other four?
UPDATE: The "and his dog" is now off the Volokh Conspiracy. Probably wise, since it wasn't what E.V. intended, but a bummer for me, because this was one of my better jokes.
I had a dream last night. I went to the grocery store and bought some good beer.
Then I woke up.
In California, they sell alcohol of all types in regular grocery stores, liquor stores, and convenience stores. In college we would go to the VONS for well alcohol, because it was cheaper there, and then go to Liquorama for high-quality stuff, because the selection was better. Then of course there were the corner liquor stores (converted from corner groceries) in easy walking distance from our place in Oakland. The same in Santa Monica.
In Alberta you still have to go to a liquor store to buy alcohol-containing drinks. Before 1993, there was a state-owned liquor monopoly. In 1993 the liquor industry was privatized, and the province says encouraging things like:
• The government privatized liquor retailing in September 1993.
• The private sector retails, warehouses and distributes liquor in
Alberta.10. Will the number of retail liquor stores be limited?
A retail liquor store licence will be granted to anyone who meets the criteria and conditions set forth by the AGLC, including those requiring that municipal approval be granted. The marketplace will ultimately determine how many retail liquor stores may operate successfully.
Good, eh? The province has a "shall-issue" policy on liquor licenses. But what's this?
20. Can a retail liquor store sell non-liquor products?Emphasis added, obviously. Let's try that again: "the appearance of a convenience store." Because God forbid that anything about your life be convenient.
The retail liquor store, at its discretion, may sell limited non-liquor products. These include: soft drinks, juices and waters (mixes); de-alcoholized beers, wines and coolers; draught beer and wine containers; disposable drink containers; glassware (beer mugs, wine glasses, shot glasses); ice buckets; cocktail shakers; pour spouts; stir sticks; bottle openers and corkscrews; and liquor related books, magazines, videos.Such products are restricted to those listed, to ensure a retail liquor store does not take on the appearance of a convenience store.
There's more, of course. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area during the dot-com boom of 1998-2000, I didn't wind up with any hot stocks, but I did develop a taste for a few choice Northern California microbrews: Sierra Nevada Stout, Anderson Valley IPA. When we moved down to LA, I was still able to find the stout those in my corner liquor store, but to find the IPA I had to go to The Wine House. Actually, I found out about The Wine House from a Canadian guy I bumped into at a bar; he said that you could get Maudite there.
They don't carry my favorite California microbrews here, and they probably never will. There's a list (Liquor Wholesale Price List, can't find it online) which tells you the wholesale price of every kind of liquor that is sold in Alberta. You can import and sell things which aren't on the list, at some considerable extra hassle: you have to go through an approved Liquor Agent. If it's wine or hard liquor you want to bring in, it has to go through a warehouse in St. Albert. (So, hypothetically, if you were importing wine from a vineyard in Northern Montana into Lethbridge or Calgary, your transportation costs are triple nominal because the wine has to go north past you to St. Albert, turn around, and back south again to you.) Why would anyone bother importing something not on the list?
As much as the situation sucks in Alberta, it's still worse in those provinces which still have a liquor monopoly. But there are people actively arging for a return to the halcyon days when liquor store employees were $14-per-hour pensioned civil servants. Exhibit A: A Sobering Result, a ten-year review of privatization. Among its gems are:
The consumption of alcoholic beverages is positively correlated with income (Figure 2.4).Shocking! In other news, disposable income is positively correlated with income.
The potential misuse of alcohol and its associated problems lends support to those who call for public regulation and control in the marketing of alcoholic beverages.Maybe Colby is right about the anti-smoking zealots: when they're done with the smokers, they'll come after us beer-drinkers.
In the meantime, I'm going to sit back, relax, and bottle some homebrew. If I can't buy it here, I'll damn well make it.
Canadian tax law includes a concept known as "arm's length". It is intended to make cheating or gaming the tax system more difficult.
The tax laws of this great country assume that two people who are not dealing at arm's length have coaligned interests. This presumably increases the possiblility that these people will try to take inappropriate advantage of some feature of the tax system, and therefore transactions between non-arm's-length actors are more carefully scrutinized by the tireless public servants at the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency (CCRA).
The definition of arm's length is stupid. Two persons are not at arm's length if they are related, or if there is a chain of related persons. What's related? A parent and child are related. Siblings are related. Spouses are related. A corporation is related to its controlling owners.
The upshot? Our company is related through a chain including blood and control to another company, which buys some of our time. Therefore we're not at arm's length with them.
The work we do is eligible for a special refundable credit under Canada's bizarre research & development tax rules. But since we are a non-arm's-length actor, the amount that is eligible for this refundable credit is less than the amount that they pay us -- significantly less, actually. The approximate equation as set out in Canada's charming tax law is A = B * C * D where A is the eligible amount, B is the amount paid, C is the fraction of our revenue that came from them, and D is the ratio of expenses to revenue. Expenses in this case includes regular salary (up to a cap) but not bonuses dependent on profit.
So in order to maximize their credits under this rule, they would like us to make C and D be as close to 1 as possible. That is, that we do all of our work for them (and thus derive all of our revenue from them, so C is 1). And that all of our revenue is expensed, which in our case means paid out as regular salary: no retained earnings, and no year-end bonus payments.
Both of these are against our interests, of course. It's nice to have a steady client, but if they need to cut someone from the payroll, contractors are always first in line -- blood relation or no blood relation. The standard contractor defense for this is to always have something else going, even if it's just a small side project.
Similarly with the salaries. We set our salary low deliberately, so that we only pay payroll and income taxes on the money we need to pay the mortgage, eat, and have a little fun. We try to retain money in the company (now that we're exempt from evil foreign investor tax) both so we can pay salaries even if there's a dry spell in revenue, and because we have this crazy idea of saving some money and investing it, y'know, maybe creating some jobs in the Canadian economy, creating some more value, building a business. Call me a foolish idealist.
So basically we have a situation where, because we are deemed to be not-at-arm's-length, our client suddenly cares deeply about how we run our company. Because small changes in our behavior can mean that they lose real money, they put pressure on us to behave in a particular way. Since we want to behave in a different way, we have arguments where we and they try to make some compromies between our competing interests. In summary: the tax code says our interests are coaligned so therefore we must be treated in this way; and the difference between our and our client's responses to this treatment shows very clearly that our interests are at odds.
The correct answer, in my opinion, is to eliminate the R&D tax credit. If this boondoggle of a credit is so widely abused that people who file for it must be presumptively treated like tax cheaters, get rid of it!
Oh yes -- there's another solution. Payments to employees up to 2.5 times the maximum pensionable salary are fully eligible for the credit. But we don't want to be employees.
And a double bonus: 2.5 times the 2003 maximum pensionable salary is about $300,000 CAD per year, or about $200,000 USD per year. So any company with a "key employee" who is worth more than that is not able to take the credit on the employee's full salary. The net effect will be to tend to encourage businesses to keep salaries for research personnel at or below that number. And the people who are worth more can go south -- brain drain, anyone?
Just had a whole week of nasty downtime, coming from a variety of directions.
It was mostly my fault: I hadn't been keeping the name servers in my whois records up-to-date when my own IP addresses changed. Tuesday, when a client's server (which just happened to be hosting my backup DNS) had its IP address changed by their upstream provider, that was the end -- because it wasn't just my backup DNS, it was all my DNS, as far as the whois database was concerned.
It took some hassle to fix that -- finding my whois password, reconfiguring the name servers on my current IP addresses. I had to get a new IP address for one of my upstreams too. Then I had to wait two days while the name server changes propagated through the top-level DNS system.
Finally mail works again, and I'm hit with a metric shitstorm of bounced spam messages forged from our work domain. Great. Then, as that subsides, I start getting postmaster messages -- double bounces -- from the client's machine. Apparently they're receiving -- more to the point, they're accepting -- e-mails from some site in Korea.
At least I have someone to complain to.
We had our last prenatal class today, which included a sort of a graduation ceremony. All the expectant moms got a little bit of face paint, which I thought was cool but my wife thought was hokey.
I really need to get better about not guessing people's politics from their political positions. Not too long ago at Sunday dinner with my in-laws, we were all talking about Alberta's position in the confederation. As usual, the conversation degenerated into griping about how Alberta would be better off financially if the Federal government went away and Alberta paid for its own health care and social services. Then my mother-in-law, who I had thought was a Federalist Liberal, said (without cracking a smile) "Don't forget that the Federal government funds our national airline... and defense!" at which point the conversation ended, since everyone was laughing.
(I can't give the whole history of my wife's family's troubles with Air Canada here -- for both space and privacy reasons -- but it's a good tale. But anyone who lives in the prairie provinces can pour you out a tale of woe regarding Air Canada's crappy schedules, lack of customer service and outright hostility to Western Canada. The Canadian military, of course, is a joke that needs no explanation.)