Programming tool makes bugs sing. (Link from GirlHacker.) Interesting if it works. There’s a similar idea in Bruce Sterling’s early novel Schismatrix: the control panel of the ship Red Consensus makes a sonic pattern designed to fade from conscious perception until it changes.

2006: See also.

James Lileks says several right things about the WTC.

It’s not cowardice to suggest that there might be difficulty renting the upper floors of two 110 story towers; I can imagine myself as someone looking for office space, standing in the exact same spot in the sky the walls of the WTC enclosed before, feeling naked, and wondering whether this just wasn’t proving some point that didn’t need proving.

. . .

It’s not that people hated Modernism – they hated seeing good old buildings fall to the reaper’s scythe, replaced by ugly tall graceless slabs, again, and again, and again. Modernism wore out its welcome long ago. Modernism had no time for people. People returned the favor.

In Time Bandits, in the scene introducing Agamemnon, the script read: Helmet comes off to reveal Sean Connery (or an actor of equal but cheaper stature).

Imagine, if you will, that the casting director hired Roger Moore.

Later: I learned last night from some website or other that Franz Liebkind, author of Springtime for Hitler, was almost played by Dustin Hoffman (who did The Graduate instead).

Over at Little Green Footballs, chins are pulled:

For all the talk about bringing democracy to the Arab world, this problem seems nearly intractable. If the uneducated, highly propagandized people of the Arab world are given freedom of choice, many are likely to choose a political system that will destroy that very freedom.

And if they’re not given a choice?

What if Iran had got real democracy in 1979? The Islamists would have won – and by now the electorate, presumably almost as sick of Sharia as they are in real life, would have booted them out. Of course, the theocrats’ first act might have been to cripple democracy — in which case Iran would be, er, no worse off than it is in our timeline.

What’s to lose by risking the same process in Algeria or Egypt?

Not ready for democracy? Perhaps not; but ‘protecting’ them from it is no way to prepare them. Temporary dictatorship is rarely temporary.

Steven den Beste, in “An act of faith”, puts words in the mouth of an anonymous blogger:

. . . I, myself, do not admit to holding those opinions to those around me because I’m afraid of the consequences. But I believe that American voters should do what I say, not what I do, and they should publicly embrace the opinions that I myself fear to admit to in my own name.
They should be courageous and take chances based on my writings, even though I’m not willing to. They should risk social censure, even though I do not.

I haven’t read the blog in question, so I won’t comment on it in specific; but —you knew a ‘but’ was coming, didn’t you?— but it seems to me not unreasonable to say: “Here are some things I wish someone would do, and I hope to persuade you that they are good ideas. I am unwilling or unable to do them myself; but maybe my constraints do not apply to you. Maybe you can see a way to do whatever-it-is without the same risk that holds me back.”

Maybe only an underachiever would think of that.

Homeland Insecurity by Charles C. Mann in The Atlantic, September 2002:

Indeed, Schneier says, Kerckhoffs’s principle applies beyond codes and ciphers to security systems in general: every secret creates a potential failure point. Secrecy, in other words, is a prime cause of brittleness – and therefore something likely to make a system prone to catastrophic collapse. Conversely, openness provides ductility.

From this can be drawn several corollaries. One is that plans to add new layers of secrecy to security systems should automatically be viewed with suspicion. Another is that security systems that utterly depend on keeping secrets tend not to work very well. Alas, airport security is among these. Procedures for screening passengers, for examining luggage, for allowing people on the tarmac, for entering the cockpit, for running the autopilot software – all must be concealed, and all seriously compromise the system if they become known. As a result, Schneier wrote in the May issue of Crypto-Gram, brittleness “is an inherent property of airline security.”

Secrets are not the only thing that makes the system brittle; as the passengers are made more helpless, any sharp object smuggled in is made more powerful. Schneier goes on:

“The only ideas I’ve heard that make any sense are reinforcing the cockpit door and getting the passengers to fight back.” Both measures test well against Kerckhoffs’s principle: knowing ahead of time that law-abiding passengers may forcefully resist a hijacking en masse, for example, doesn’t help hijackers to fend off their assault. Both are small-scale, compartmentalized measures that make the system more ductile, because no matter how hijackers get aboard, beefed-up doors and resistant passengers will make it harder for them to fly into a nuclear plant. And neither measure has any adverse effect on civil liberties.

The lonely death of Robert Burnham Jr, author of the Celestial Handbooks. (Cited by Ron Campbell.)