From Bruce Schneier’s blog:

One of the things I routinely tell people is that if it’s in the news, don’t worry about it. By definition, “news” means that it hardly ever happens. If a risk is in the news, then it’s probably not worth worrying about. When something is no longer reported — automobile deaths, domestic violence — when it’s so common that it’s not news, then you should start worrying.

One of the more annoying things about the generally great Spotlight is its Finder implementation. Maybe you already know that in order to search for a word in filenames only, use quotes around the search terms. (Maybe you didn’t.)

But here’s a new one. Command-F to bring up a search window forces you to start with terms “Kind” and “Last Opened”. These default to anything, so you can skip them, but it seems silly (and might have CPU implications) to start with global search terms. So instead, just type a space into the Spotlight search box of any Finder window. The space is ignored, and you’re switched to a view where you can begin refining your search terms before entering your information.

Some thoughts upon being chased from a Starbucks outdoor patio during a light drizzle.

I used to be the kind of person who enjoyed being out in the rain, but since I’ve started carrying around large amounts of electronics, I’ve become as sensitized to precipitation as the Wicked Witch of the West. A little rain never hurt those of us wrapped in epidermes, but my flat buddy with the big monitor can’t say the same.

So while the rain was pitter-pattering on my left arm (my right arm and laptop safely under the Starbucks umbrella), I pulled up the NOAA forecast for my zip code. 20% chance of rain today, going up to 70% around 9 PM tonight. This kind of forecasting made sense when most people checked the weather on their way to work in the morning, but is this really the best we can do now that most of us have access to this data all day long?

I’m guessing that a qualified meteorologist could look at a satellite map and tell me at 3 PM that I’m 95% likely to get shpritzed on at 3:30 PM within the square block I intend to be. Heck, I can pull up those same maps on my computer, I just don’t know how to read them. I realize that we’re still unable to do much better than that hours ahead of time (chaotic systems being what they are), but I’ve got this here Internet which I can use to ask, “hey, is it going to rain in the next hour on the 3000 block of Connecticut? Should I go sit outside or am I better off staying home?”

For all I know, what I’m asking for would require a supercluster. Or maybe Google will provide it for free in six months. Or an upstart Ph.D. with a smart hacker nephew could toss it together. Seems to me, there’s data I want that I can’t have; there’s data out there that can be used to determine this with high precision; someone should bring that together.

The Daily Telegraph reports that newly freed Iraqis can now participate in the exciting free market for their organs.

Russell Beattie blogs about a ridiculous experience regarding “security” questions he had to answer to renew his phone Boost Mobile service.

I’ve gotten into a discussion about PowerBall odds with a few friends over the last few days, and I noted that the numbers I was flinging about were for the old rules before they made it harder to win (and enabling more frequent prizes in the $200 million range).

All in all, what’s not true is that PowerBall is always a losing game, as can be determined from the posted odds. What is true is that the people who play it all the time are contributing their equity to the people who only come on board when the prize is big.

The straight odds at the beginning of the cycle are truly horrible: a $10M prize has a cash value of $5.7 million, which yields an expectation of $0.22 for every dollar wagered. If you play the Power Play (which multiplies a win from 2x to 5x for a $2 bet), the expectation is $0.376.

Needless to say, since doubling your bet will always at least double any prize other than the jackpot, you should always bet the Power Play.

Working upwards from there, and assuming that the cash value of the prize relative to the posted value is constant (it’s not, but fairly close), a normal $1 ticket wins more than a dollar on average when the jackpot is $174,803,787. Power Players can jump in when the prize hits $141,821,769.

Naturally, this skips some issues:

1. The whole system betrays the law of large numbers, which is to say that you won’t live long enough to play enough games to have a reasonable expectation of winning. Another way of phrasing this is that most people won’t bet a million dollars to win a billion on a coin flip. Even if the game is in your favor, large numbers make the betting considerations less than purely mathematical.
2. Prizes are split when the prize is won by more than one person. This is fairly rare, but reduces the effective expectation of the winner by some amount I can’t be bothered to calculate.
3. PowerBall has a bizarre pool system that spreads some jackpot money into the other wins when the prize gets very large. This increases the expectation of the winner by some amount I can’t be bothered to calculate.

But rule of thumb, when the prize hits $140 million, go ahead and buy a $2 ticket.

Jay Leno ran a contest between two kids with cell phones (one of whom is the fastest SMS messager around—who runs these contests?), and a couple of grizzled old guys with Morse Code tappers. Naturally, Morse Code won.

Equally naturally, the show says nothing about why SMS is better technology. The guy receiving the SMS message just has to read English, or at least, the hily cmprsed Eng f SMS msgs. The guy getting the Morse needed the same forty years of training to get the message that the guy needed to send it.

I had my own experience with this years ago when Plenarcast was in the business of transcribing conference talks, in the pre-audio streaming days. My solution was to hand out a stack of laptops and give my temps a training on how to get a good transcript by freetyping without any editing; the result was a good but not verbatim transcript. One day, a fiftyish temp shows up and declines my laptop, showing me her shorthand steno pad.

Need I mention that she had the highest accuracy and fastest turnaround of anyone I ever hired?

Adam Penenberg covered a story on a green merchant who was dinged for thousands of dollars in fees because of his anti-fraud mechanism.

What I find most interesting about this article is what’s not mentioned in the story. Question one, why was this vendor targeted? This attack wouldn’t have been useful against a vendor who didn’t have this very unique method of verification. That twigs me to think that it was launched by a disgruntled customer—or more insidiously, by someone inside the bank who knew about the arrangement. And who also happened to have 30,000 credit card numbers from Bank One customers. The merchant bank isn’t mentioned, but wouldn’t it be interesting if this bank and Bank One had shared files which allowed some employee to have access to both?

Of course, if the merchant bank cared one whit about this, they’d have followed up on this. But far easier to stick the vendor with the bill and be done with it.

Meanwhile, Congress is moving quickly to protect credit card companies from fraud. Which should probably read, “from all the fraud for which, by law, we can’t shift the risk onto other people.” Consumers are a protected class, so let’s just ding the merchants.

An enterprising URL hacker reverse engineered the calling URLs for Amazon images and came up with this guidebook for pulling your own hacked images directly from the Amazon servers. The snippet I have here is a local copy, but the image I copied it from was a live pull.

Enjoy this while you can, because I can’t believe it’ll last. All it will take is the first guy who decides to slap a fraudulent 50% off badge on his site in order to make a few affiliate sales to the gullible, and then Amazon will start checking the referrers on the incoming URLs. Which is a shame, because it’s nice to know how to strip those DVD images off of the movie posters.

I was chatting with a college buddy last night about the subtle amazement involved for a guy who grew up on the Atari 2600 to play a game like Half-Life 2 (which last week was responsible for my first “play a game ’til dawn” in years).

So I was amused today to come across this Java game with graphics straight out of Warlords. Sole controller: your mouse button. Fly through the tunnel. Try to stop playing in under an hour.

It all started today with the fighter jets scrambling outside.

Since 9/11, fighter jets have been one of those cues here in Washington that something might be going on. They’re not particularly loud if you’ve got the air conditioner running, but there’s a sound they make that can be mistaken for nothing else, and there’s something about that sound that triggers a primal feeling of urgency.

Just as our ancestors counted the number of seconds between lightning and thunder, Washingtonians have learned to measure the sound of the jets. One jet, one whoosh, he’s just on his way to Andrews AFB. Several minutes of it, and he’s circling, and you start to wonder why.

So I check my phone to see if there are any emergency text messages from the fine people in the DC government. Then I listen for the absence of dogs barking, or in this case, sirens blaring. There’s a calculus for this as well: one or two sirens are routine police or ambulance issues, medium sirens might be a dignitary and his motorcade, but sustained sirens mean trouble.

Seeing no messages and hearing no sirens, I return to my usual morning routine of catching up on fascinating bulk email. That lasts about 15 minutes, when I get an email from New York pointing me to a Reuters article about the Capitol evacuation. Unfortunately, they overwrite their old wire reports on the web, so you’ll have to take my word for it that it said that people in the Capitol were told to “run away” to Union Station, with no information as to why.

You know that prickly feeling you get in the back of your neck when you’re walking in a dark alley at 2 AM, that says, “maybe I shouldn’t be here?” Turns out, an entire city can feel that way from time to time.

So now I go to DefCon 3, which primarily consists of flipping on the radio and emailing some people near Capitol Hill. And as you probably know, that’s where the news portion of this story ends, since it turned out (at least, according to current news reports) to be two idiots flying a Cessna who understood neither the concept of “no-fly zone” nor the concept of “those fighter jets are not here to welcome you to DC.”

This led to a few thoughts on the nature of terrorism, especially the part of terrorism that means “inducing terror as an end in itself”. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that there was no threat today, but there was some terror induced nonetheless.

I’m not merely griping here about an inconvenience—these things have real consequences. One guy I wrote today has the authority to tell his entire office to go home. As it happens, it took three minutes between my email alerting him, and my second email with the all-clear. If that had been a longer stretch, this could have shut down their nonprofit for the day. Likewise, the entire DC region (or at least the part that was paying attention) felt their own ripples in their productivity today.

That wasn’t caused by the plane. And it wasn’t caused by the fighter jets. It was caused by the evacuation of Congress and the White House, and the lack of public information explaining whether the rest of us should.

Perhaps it might be useful to give some thought to why an evacuation might be a good idea. Union Station is an excellent place to go, as it happens—a giant marble building with a large underground area, with rail connections to get many people the hell out of Dodge if necessary. But news reports put that Cessna at three miles from the White House, which means at most four miles from the Capitol. That’s two minutes in a Cessna.

Which means that an evacuation is just enough time to move people out of their marble buildings with reinforced basements to put them out in the open. Under what circumstances is this a good idea?

Starting with conventional weapons (and yes, crashing a plane into a building counts as conventional), all you need to do is get people to a safe place. On a short time frame, the basement is usually the best bet provided you don’t expect the building to collapse on top of it. If the basement is hardened, then a collapsing building might even be tolerable provided you have the resources to mount a sizable rescue operation on a short time frame. I would expect that the Capitol and the White House meet both criteria.

If the attack is a small nuclear weapon, really, the most humane thing to do is tell everyone to spend a few minutes emailing their loved ones and making peace with their God. I once did a back-of-the-napkin calculation and determined that a mid-sized nuke (which would fit on a Cessna, although as far as we know only nation-states have access to these) would result in a 75% fatality rate between here and Baltimore. Needless to say, the people at the epicenter do not have that 25% chance.

For biological and chemical (ignoring infectious biological for simplicity’s sake), the rule is “don’t get exposed.” So if you’ve got a Cessna and you’re fearing a crop-duster attachment, the last place you want to put people is on Delaware Avenue NE hoofing it to the train station. Likewise, the train station is less useful in such situations because the first thing you’d need to do is lock down all the trains so they can’t move dangerous agents to other parts of town (or in the case of Amtrak, the country).

So I don’t understand at all the decision to evacuate. It’s more dangerous for the evacuees, and it scares the hell out of everyone else.

And here’s what I further don’t understand. If your goal is to attempt to decrease panic—and there are many good reasons why that should be the goal of the people in charge of emergency preparedness—the best thing you can do is get information out so those of us who live here can make our own decisions. We didn’t hear about the plane until after it was all over; all we heard was the evacuations. But as Reuters is reporting, there have been hundreds of small planes in restricted airspace, and so those of us who pay attention to such things know that this is highly unlikely to be an attack. My all-clear email was before the official announcement, because I sent it when I heard that it was just another small plane piloted by the encephalicly challenged.

On the other hand, Reuters has also pointed out that it’s rare for a plane to invoke a fighter jet response. I trust the people in charge to have done this for a reason, and perhaps it would have been worthwhile to let us know what got them concerned. Perhaps it would also have been worthwhile to do more public education so the rest of the city wouldn’t need to become experts on throwweights and chemical dispersion in order to make a rational choice about how to react to such news.

Instead, we’re told to “be alert to anything out of the ordinary” in a city where extraordinary events occur daily, and when events like this hit the news we have to rely on the national news media to make what might be life-or-death decisions. Because let’s be clear, with any WMD attack, that is exactly what we’re talking about, and the survivors will be the people who react first and react well. That survivability drops if we’re caught up in a mob panic, and an uninformed public is much more likely to create such a panic.

So I’ll close with some open comments to the people involved. To DC Emergency Alerts: an emergency involving the Capitol is an emergency involving Washington as a whole. You’ve been totally silent today, but you sent me an alert about a traffic delay three miles away two weeks ago. Turns out, unsurprisingly, that the federal government didn’t bother to inform you. But I would suggest that you’ve got an obligation to develop your own sources of information, and not just throw your hands up in the air when Uncle Sam acts as you should bloody well expect him to do after all this time. Otherwise, your alert system is nothing more than worthless.

To the agency which scrambled those jets: good show. Your response today seems to be the only thing that did any good and was properly measured.

To whomever is in charge of evacuating Congress: what are you smoking, and where can I get some? It would awfully nice to spend my time in a haze of pleasant optimism and lack of concern about facts or consequences.

And for those at the top… well, really, why do I bother? It’s very nice to know that GWB spent his day biking, and Dick was evacuated to a secure location from his previously secret, presumably insecure location. (And why is the president always biking or reading children’s books when this happens? Is it supposed to be reassuring that the president wasn’t interrupted in his pleasant afternoon? Headline of the future: Los Angeles decimated by nuclear attack; Bush pauses clearing brush, has frosty lemonade.)

Anyway, for those at the top: credit where credit is due for whatever involvement you had on the fighter jet part of today. It’s noted, however, that you cut DC’s emergency response budget (while increasing those budgets for red state towns in sensitive districts), and forced us to use that budget to pay for your inauguration security. It’s noted that not all of our National Guard troops are here at home. It’s noted that the communication from top to bottom in the event of emergency shows the communications efficiency of the Tower of Babel.

But it’s especially noted that most of what you’ve done in the last four years will contribute to ignorant panic on the day that it really hits the fan, or even appears to. On that day, I’ll predict that you’ll see fatalities from mistakes, from fear, from mob action against whomever can’t get out of the way. We could have been—we should be—Londoners during the Blitz, rather than uneducated cattle. Most of the emergency response on 9/11 was from the grassroots—will those same people show up next time, now that they have spent the last four years being made fearful of imaginary WMD?

Yes, it made you very popular in states that weren’t attacked and that have little to fear from terrorism. I hope your bill doesn’t come due. Today was another dunning notice.

An actual conversation I had today:

Me: Hi, I was in this store about two hours ago. Did I happen to buy a pack of cigarettes and then leave them on the counter?

Employee: What brand?

Me: Marlboro Medium.

Employee: Yeah, you did. Here you go. You want matches?

Joel on Software is recommended reading for any computer programmer. I’m reading his latest article on coding conventions, and two things occur to me:

1. This is what John Scalzi would sound like if he were Jewish and thought in binary.
2. Thank God I don’t have to work in C++.

So last week I went over to Apple Discussions, and on the theory that with the release of 10.4 there would be a lot of stuff I’d like to hear about, I subscribed to the entire Tiger discussion area for email distribution.

All of my list mail gets filed away for me, so I don’t necessarily know what’s coming in. I did note an uptick in incoming email, but hadn’t noted how much.

Result: 4 days, 8,408 messages. About 33 megs on my HD. Whew.

There’s simply no way in heck I’d actually read this much traffic; I was already swamped to begin with. So the question is whether I want to keep this around for offline archive purposes, which can be extremely useful at times. The second question is whether I trust Mail 2.0 to handle a folder of 500,000 messages, which this one will have in the none-too-distant future.

Some days, the only possible explanation is that they’re trying to make our heads explode.

You know, I can already tell that the sick brilliance of Medium Large is going to be my best new web find of May. Or at least, a tie with The Comics Curmudgeon, where I found this link in the first place.

If this isn’t Photoshopped, then it’s oddly the most disturbing image I’ve seen this year. Taken from a site with an equally disturbing obsession with Garfield.

I note that today marks the eightieth anniversary of the arrest of John Scopes, which put into motion the Scopes Monkey Trial.

When I first learned about the trial, it was presented as an historical parable from back when the forces of ignorance held sway over reason and science. Of course, even then there were a few stalwarts who claimed that the theory of evolution denied their religion in some way that the theory of gravity or the theory of propagation of radio waves did not. But it was generally recognized, at least in my small-l liberal arts secular education, that science and reason were such obvious social goods that no one could consider legislating against them.

Now ignorant is the new black. Evolution is losing the popularity content it didn’t think it had to fight. Alfred Kinsey is just a character in some movie, because sex research isn’t all that important. (To paraphrase an old joke, “No sex please, we’re American.”) And of course, it doesn’t matter what Saddam could have done to us, it matters what we think he could have done. Who needs facts, when you have perfectly good public opinion polling?

We’re with you, John. Much more than we expected to be.

My buddy Rik comments on his web site about the cherry blossoms at UN Park, and how no one is allowed to see them.

NYC, DC, two sides of the same coin. Another friend was here in DC a few weeks ago for a security briefing, and her meetings at the Pentagon were cancelled. Seems that some Ph.D. students who were Not From Here were too dangerous to be allowed in, and so the whole venue had to be moved and several briefings cancelled.

But hey, if the armed services want to say that they need to keep their 23,000 troops with heavy weaponry and metal detectors safe from Chinese academics, that’s fine with me. It seems a little silly, but I can buy not letting some people into your military HQ.

What gets me are the Men in Public with Large Guns. Like the SWAT teams that now make regular patrols on Capitol Hill with automatic rifles. Or the cop on the Metro the other day guarding the Money Train, who stepped out on the platform and held up his shotgun in a classic “Arnold Schwarzenegger at the motel window in T2” pose.

I probably have 5,000 words on this topic, so more later.

This site is likely to be all-Tiger, all the time, once I get through my initial understanding of the new beast. Those of you still waiting for Longhorn should consider themselves warned. In that ilk, from a discussion about Mac developers who have not yet abandoned the original QuickDraw system for the new Quartz renderers in OS X: