Posted 1:30 PM by Floyd

I just called up four friends to invite them over to my place tomorrow evening, and to do so I dialed four different area codes. (For the curious: 408, 415, 510, 650.) This is a measure of how many more area codes there are now -- when I moved to the Bay Area, 650 and 510 (and 925) were both 415; 408 would later split off its southern half as 831. But it also shows how the automobile liberates us. I am able to have frequent contact with friends who live 30 or 50 miles away because they can get in their cars and drive down here in an hour or less.

Some people complain about how the automobile leads to "suburban sprawl"; I guess they think it's immoral for me to have friends who live in different area codes.

Posted 12:31 PM by Floyd

Today's Lileks has this great throwaway line:

The presence of Cameron Diaz doesn’t help either - for a month I had to turn away from that awful Vanity Fair cover, which showed she has successfully completed her transition into America’s Happiest Skeleton.

I'm glad I'm not the only person who finds Diaz creepy. It's not just that she's skinny; it's those sunken eyeballs. I knew a woman who lived across the parking lot from me in college, and she had the same sunken eye syndrome. Said woman had photos from when she was 15 pounds heavier and she looked great. Someone airlift poor Cameron a few dozen milkshakes!

Posted 12:23 PM by Floyd

From today's San Jose Mercury News letters to the editor, an interesting view on the proper relationship between American government and its military:

EARLIER this week, the aircraft carrier USS Tarawa sailed out of San Diego harbor, escorted by two other ships, headed for the Persian Gulf. On board was one of the most precious people in my life -- my 20-year-old grandson from San Jose.

Sixty-one years ago, I stood beside a train and watched my husband of three months head for the war in North Africa. I ran along the tracks. They had open windows on the trains then, and he would reach out and sometimes we would touch hands. I never saw him again.

Back then, Gen. George Patton led them in the fight against Rommel across the hot sands. On Jan. 22, 1944, he landed on the Anzio beachhead under constant strafing from the Nazis. The last letter I ever received from him was dated June 11, 1944, when the Nazis -- angered by the Normandy landing -- bombed the hospital tent where my husband was staying.

Alexander the Great always marched at the head of his troops. So did Teddy Roosevelt. Where was President Bush Monday when these Marines and sailors -- not really ready for battle yet -- were sent out on a trip to reach the Middle East? He was running around the country trying to make himself ``popular'' so he can win re-election in 2004.

Does anyone, besides myself, worry if these young boys will even survive until 2004?

I circulate among quite a few people, and I have not met one who doesn't think that this is a phony war.

Rosemary K. Breckler
San Jose

I'm sorry that Ms. Breckler's husband died. I'm also sorry that she believes that George Patton was President of the United States in the year 1944.

One problem that many liberals have when they debate is that they tend to throw any argument they can find against the wall in the hope that something will stick. Such people never seem to consider what it would mean if their arguments were taken to their logical conclusions:

• Breckler seems to think that President Bush, like Alexander or Patton, should "march at the head of his troops." No president has ever done this, and it's a good thing; our military is separate from, and subordinate to, the civilian government. Does Breckler really want the president to be a warlord seeking glory as he marches with his troops, a la Napoleon?
  
  
• Breckler states that American soldiers are "not really ready for battle yet". I doubt that to be the case but let's allow that America's armed forces are unprepared, for the sake of argument. The only way to get them ready for battle is to either fight a small war to gain some practice, or to increase the military budget to allow for additional training. Is this what Breckler and her wide range of acquaintences want?
  

By the way, why is it that all the peaceniks in the Bay Area are so old? It seems like whenever I see a car with a "Attack Iraq? No!" bumper sticker, the driver is late middle-aged or older.

Posted 8:40 PM by Floyd

One of the mottoes of the Internet is this quote attributed to John Gilmore: "The Internet sees censorship as damage, and routes around it." Now that China has censored blogger.com -- assuming this is not a temporary glitch in the way that censorship works -- what "routing around" can the Chinese do to defeat the blocking?

Two workarounds occurred to me. (Disclaimer: I am not a security expert. I did spell "occurred" right though. I spell-checked it.) First, there is the Google cache. China has made noises about censoring Google but has backed off; if Google is safe so is Blogger (though of course there will be some time lag).

Another possibility is proxies. A proxy allows you to go to a web page, submit a URL, and have the proxy serve the page for you. This defeats censorship because the local routers don't see the proxied site, just the URL of the proxy. I Googled a bit to find proxies, and all the ones I found were anonymizers, like anonymizer.com.

The problem with proxies is that if the censors figure out that proxies are being used, they will block the proxy site. It would help if some interested private individuals could step up to fill in this breach by donating their servers to become proxies for Chinese web surfers. If the Chinese catch on, no big deal, you just take your server offline and pat yourself on the back for doing your bit in the fight against tyranny.

Posted 8:19 PM by Floyd

I don't usually refer to posts that appear on InstaPundit -- I assume everyone has already seen them. But this post by John Jay Ray on China's censorship of all blogger.com sites is worth a look.

Posted 8:04 PM by Floyd

Paul Hepburn (the Mad Commenter) noted that my comment's time zones were off. I edited my enetation account; this post is a test.

Posted 7:51 PM by Floyd

One way to embarass yourself is to say something derogatory about someone, which they subsequently find out about. Awhile back I made fun of a Mountain View startup's name, "Encover." What are the odds that someone from Encover would be one of the two dozen people a day who read my blog? Well, here is some email I received last month:

I came across your musings on the web. Encover stands for "enable coverage" as in providing service and support with service contracts. BTW, the company is post dot-com era.
Sridhar Krishnan
Founder/CEO
Encover

I assume that Sridhar found me by Googling "Encover". In the future Google will probably cover all public human conversations, leading to, say, this tearful confrontation in a school lunchroom:

"Clarissa, you jerk, I can't believe you said that about me! I was just super-googling "Alicia Hayes" "loves Roger" and I saw the video of you saying I have a crush on Roger! I thought you were my friend!"

Posted 7:39 PM by Floyd

Through TalkLeft I found a link to a CalPundit post on the death penalty. He says:

The death penalty has always been a curiosity to me. I don't really have a philosophical objection to it, but let's face it: the risk of killing innocent people is a really big practical objection. If you imprison someone and later find he's innocent, at least you can free him and make restitution. You can't do that after you've executed someone.

I don't think this is a good objection. The problem is that the issue underlying the death penalty debate is what punishments to apply to those who do murder. Any mistake made -- convicting an innocent person, failing to convict a guilty person, failing to deter people from future murders -- has the potential to cause the deaths of innocent people.

Posted 1:18 PM by Floyd

Here's an example of the San Jose Mercury News' fetish for "diversity": An article on the Grammys is summarized as follows on the Merc web page:

This year's Grammy nominations reflected the diversity of the record-buying public -- in a year when record sales declined almost 11 percent.

When I was a kid, I was watching a classic sitcom like All in the Family or I Love Lucy, and a character was playing the violin incredibly badly. My father pointed out that it takes talent to make such horrible music. I feel the same way about the sentence I quoted; it takes talent to string twenty-odd words together in such a jarring manner. What does the first half of the sentence have to do with the second? How do the choices of the Grammy nominators tell us anything about the music-buying public?

Posted 1:09 PM by Floyd

Something I left out when detailing our Sunday beach trip: While walking along West Cliff Drive, we saw a little memorial for someone named Mike, presumably a surfer who had died. There were flowers, sheets of poetry protected in plastic, and a 16-ounce can of Budweiser.

The can of beer bugged me, and I spent awhile thinking about why. If meant as an offering one beer is too cheap. If meant as tribute to the dead's favorite activities, it's quite a backhanded compliment. I could see a surfboard or a musical instrument, but a beer? Is that what you want people to remember you for?

There seems to be an attititude that whatever means a family member or friend wants to use to mourn their loved ones is ipso facto appropriate. This attitude was on display during the infamous Paul Wellstone memorial -- one poster to VodkaPundit's comment page said "If Wellstone's family wants to have hookers parading on donkeys, that's their business" -- and several years ago, when Courtney Love screamed and ranted at Kurt Cobain's funeral.

I think that this is not right. The ways in which we respond to death are not for the benefit of the deceased, but for the living. It is important for people who have been touched by death to comport themselves with class and dignity, to show that the terror and sorrow of death and aging cannot crush the human spirit.

Posted 12:36 PM by Floyd

I recently added a referral script to this blog. This referral detector, from Stephen Downes, finds all web pages that referred to this site two or more times within the last 24 hours.

Ann Salisbury was nice enough to toss a link my way. This link added to her blogroll link to me caused my referral report to list her page:

Two Tears in a Bucket [2]

Ann also uses Downes' referral system. So now my referral report and my blogroll link to "Two Tears in a Bucket." This caused an update to her referral report:

The Declarer (Floyd McWilliams' Blog) [2]

This is Ann's third link to me; now my referral report says

Two Tears in a Bucket [3]

Ann's script got the news, and now says

The Declarer (Floyd McWilliams' Blog) [3]

My web page has a more active social life than I do.

Update: Downes has a comment page and I left a comment detailing the problem. He said "Um, yeah, I guess that would be pretty important. Thanks for pointing this out. To the top of the upgrade list it goes!"

Posted 7:27 PM by Floyd

I played at the club today with my friend Eric. We didn't do well -- a little above 52% -- but there were two very interesting hands.

The first hand is a declarer play problem. I held:

Jxx KQT8x x KQJ7

Eric opened 2, which we play as 20-22 balanced or semi-balanced. I bid 2, a puppet to 2N. Eric bid 2N as requested, and the auction developed along standard lines: I transferred to hearts with 3, and Eric bid 3. (So far he has shown an excellent talent for following orders.) I bid 4, which Eric raised to 5. I carried on to 6; with this much power it's likely we have a slam.

LHO led the T and dummy appeared:

AKQx Ax Kxxx A98

This should be easy to play; win the club in dummy, ace and king of hearts, ruff a heart, pull trumps, and run good hearts and spades. But when I played the ace of hearts, RHO followed with the 9.

Should this cause me to change my plan? If RHO has the stiff 9, I need to pull three rounds of trumps and hope they break 3-3. Then I can run four spades shaking a diamond, and knock out LHO's heart jack.

If RHO has 9x, I need the heart ruff for a 12th trick. (Actually it will be a 13th trick as well.) If RHO has J9, anything works.

Against an expert who would know to falsecard you, I think that trying for the ruff is correct; 9x of hearts is much more likely than stiff 9. Against a club player, I think it's right to pull trumps. ("Club player" is a polite way of saying "bad player.") Most club players probably don't give count when following to declarer's side suit.

In practice, I led a heart, and RHO ruffed and cashed her DA. I was down 1 for a 25% board. Clubs were 4-2 so trying to pull trumps would have resulted in down two or worse. This is another reason to try for the ruff; with 32 HCP these hands rate to be played in a slam by other tables, and it's worthwhile to try to limit the damage.

*********************

Here is the second hand, which is a defensive problem. You hold:

AQT72 83 52 AQ64. You are second seat and unfavorable. RHO opens 1, you overcall 1, and LHO closes the proceedings with a jump to 3N. (This is British bridge writing style. One never delays or prolongs or adjournes the proceedings. It's jump to game, close the proceedings, God save the Queen.)

Partner leads the 7, which could be from two or three small. Dummy tracks with

9 AQ954 AJT76 J63

You win the spade ace and switch to a low club. This doesn't work; declarer runs it around to the jack and plays another club off the board. You duck and declarer puts in the ten. It appears from the carding that declarer had four clubs, partner three.

Declarer plays the 2 and finesses the queen. Then he plays off the diamonds; he has KQxx. Partner pitches 6, 3, 2. What do you pitch?

I will leave the answer in the comments.

Posted 7:14 PM by Floyd

"Your coffee is in the brew station under the picture of a cat"

Many people overestimate the balminess of Northern California weather. It is only Southern California that has a beach-in-February climate. Northern California is wet and chilly from November through April. Typical weather is a high in the 50's and a low in the 40's, with precipitation about a third of the time. We have had a lot of rain recently, so it was a pleasure to have dry conditions and higher than normal temperatures last week. Yesterday my wife and I drove down the coast to Santa Cruz.

The scenery was spectacular. It was abnormally warm for the coast, resulting in a hazy sheen over the water. I have never seen such a heavy surf; waves crashed on the beach and the water was white with foam. We drove by fields of yellow flowers.

We got to Santa Cruz and parked near West Cliff Drive. West Cliff Drive is my favorite street in the world; it is several miles of road on a cliff 25 feet above the shore. On the coast side is a paved pathway, some overlook points, and staircases down to small isolated beaches. On the other side are houses built to take advantage of the view; most have fronts which are mostly windows, and little balconies on the second floor.

We walked along West Cliff, part of a stream of walkers, bikers, roller bladers, and kids on scooters. The temperature was in the low 60's; it was comfortable walking in jeans and a sweatshirt. We looked down the cliff to see the beachgoers. There was a child of about five who had a boogie-board; he was determined to use it like a surfboard, and kept climbing on top of it and falling off. There was a white dog who tried to join his master on a surfboard. There was a black dog happily running around with other dogs, despite the fact that he was missing a front leg. (Obligatory Religion of Peace quote: 'Therefore, if the Muslim is forced to have a dog to protect his home or his property, he should be careful not to choose the black dog. And that is due to the statement of the Prophet, "The black dog is Shaytaan"')

And there were the surfers, hundreds of them in the shallow water offshore. Every now and then we would catch sight of one riding a wave for thirty seconds or more. The surf was rough; waves spashed against the cliffs twenty or thirty feet high. Apparently the waves had reached even higher earlier, as we saw puddles of water on the sidewalk and even clumps of seaweed on the street.

Towards sunset we went back to the car. (We were startled by someone screaming out the window of a passing car; later we realized it was a reaction to the 49'ers playoff comeback.) We went downtown and got some coffee at the Santa Cruz Roasting Company. That's where the title quote comes from; I ordered a hot chocolate for Sherry, and a coffee for me. The clerk said, "Your hot chocolate is number 35, and your coffee is in the brew station under the picture of a cat." (The "brew station" is a series of coffee filters in a rack, beneath which cups may be placed. So your coffee is brewed personally and freshly for you. Absolutely wonderful.)

After that we did some window shopping, browsed in a bookstore, and went to a pub called 99 Bottles of Beer for dinner. I had a Sierra Nevada Brown Ale, which I had never tasted, and which flirted with a violation of the Iron Law of Sierra Nevada: All SN varieties taste the same. Then it was time to return home.

Posted 12:50 PM by Floyd

Awhile back I mentioned that I regarded reading Little Green Footballs as a "painful duty," because the constant descriptions of Muslim misconduct are so depressing. I now feel the same way about Steven Den Beste's USS Clueless site, though for a different reason; Den Beste's articles are so damn long-winded and insubstantial that it's impossible to read them.

Let's take his antepenultimate post as an example. In an earlier post Den Beste had criticized "just war" theory; this post is a response to five people who emailed him criticism or questions. Here is the structure of the post:

• Introduction: 2 paragraphs
  
• Robert's response
  
• 8 paras
  
• Russell
  
• 26 paras
  
• Dennis
  
• 6 paras
  
• Shannon
  
• 5 paras
  
• Joseph
  
• 17 paras
  

The total number of <P> tags killed to make this post was 64. Den Beste clearly needs an editor, because there isn't anywhere near enough content to mandate this much text.

One problem with Den Beste's writing is the mind-numbing restatement of the obvious. Maybe Den Beste thinks that he has double the IQ of his audience, and has to spoon-feed them. Or maybe a teacher gave him failing grades whenever he failed to show his work, and the lesson has really stuck with him. Check out these nuggets of genius:

So I can't reject any of torture, rape, mutilation or mass murder on the basis of cruelty. What I would have to say is that they would need to be evaluated on the basis of cost to us, cost to the enemy, and expected effectiveness. And on that basis they come up rather different.

Furrowing his brow and saying "I wouldn't want to reject any of our options out of hand" is how a computer software middle-manager with an oceanography degree gets through his day. But it's not a good technique if you want to be considered the Ur-genius of the blogosphere.

Torture is pretty straight forward. If you've captured a member of the enemy and he knows something important and you need to get it out of him fast, then you do what you need to. If terrorists have hidden a nuke in an American city and are threatening to detonate it if we don't give them something intolerable (e.g. revoke the Constitution and institute Sharia and convert the US into an Islamic Republic) and if you capture a member of that group and he knows where the nuke is, are you going to respect his human rights?

Hell, no. Of course you aren't. You're going to start shoving sharp pointy objects underneath his fingernails.

It's a good thing the fate of America is not in my hands, because I would challenge the terrorist to a Game of 99.

The argument against rape as a deliberate tactic of war is mainly that it's unlikely to be very effective. For reasons both cultural and ingrained, it's far more likely to enrage than to cow, and as such it's largely counterproductive. It's cruel, but everything in war is cruel; the main argument against it is that it's pretty much pointless. Anything you could conceivable achieve by the use of rape as a weapon can be achieved in other ways at least as effectively, but without the danger that it represents of causing breakdown of discipline among your own troops (as happened in China at Nanking, when for several weeks discipline in the Japanese army completely broke down).

I will note that no one who criticized the Catholic Church for its complicity in the priestly pedophilia scandal felt it necessary to waste four sentences deducing that kiddy-diddling was immoral.

I also note that Den Beste is occasionally detached from reality. The USS Clueless schtick is that a bright engineer can solve all the world's problems by analogy with what he learned working at his safe, air-conditioned desk. Maybe Den Beste should get out of the house more; then he wouldn't make alarming statements like

"If anyone ever nukes us even once, even in a small way, we will commit genocide in retaliation."

Thanks, but no thanks. It's not what most people want, and it's not what is likely to happen. After all, there was no civilian bombing in response to the World Trade Center attack. Of course, I realize that Den Beste can't reject genocide on the basis of cruelty, but ...

Or check out this confusion of the real world and board games:

In game theory, you can analyze a simple two-person game and actually figure out what your opponent's optimal move is, and then base your move on that. But if you do that, you become predictable and your opponent can in turn base his move on that analysis, to your detriment. Such an analysis can be carried out arbitrarily deeply, of course, but it turns out that the best strategy is to randomize. If you have two things you can do and one of them is far better than the other, then you slant the odds so that it's chosen more often. For example, you might decide that you want to use one choice with 2/3's odds, and the other 1/3. So you roll a dice and on 1-4 you do the one, and on 5-6 you do the other.

The United States attempted such a policy once, during the Kissinger era; Kissinger and Nixon deliberately considered the advantages of appearing unpredictable and arbitrary. This was during a period when the US was viewed as weak, and when the foreign policy of detente assisted America's enemies. Given that Den Beste was going to write a 64-paragraph post, don't you think he could spent a sentence or two examining the real-world consequences of random behavior?

Den Beste styles himself a "Jacksonian;" hardly a post goes by without several paragraphs spent on chest-puffing that invokes Jackson. I might note that if you really want to be random, sometimes the die roll has to mean "do nothing". Was Jackson unpredictable in any of his martial or foreign policies? Can you imagine a foe threatening America and Jackson doing nothing?

Posted 9:41 AM by Floyd

I thought this was funny: A software review in the ACBL Bulletin (for Roger Dunn's BridgeMania) listed the following minimum requirements: a PC with Windows 95/98, 4MB RAM, 800x600 video and a CD-ROM driver (sic). Let's not forget an on/off switch, a monitor, and one of those newfangled keyboards that distinguishes between I and J and U and V.

Posted 10:13 PM by Floyd

Been busy this weekend. Yesterday Sherry and I went down to the Palo Alto club for the noon game, and clubbed the opposition like baby seals. We were first with a 63%. (I did see probably the simplest auction I had never encountered: RHO passed, then Blackwooded her partner's 1S bid. She had inadvertently passed a 19-count.) Then we went to Milpitas for our friend Heidi's birthday party. Today we went down to Santa Cruz and walked along the beach, then hung out downtown. More on the Santa Cruz trip tomorrow.