Battle of the primates

On the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, two wily groups of primates are competing for resources and habitat.

Hat tip: Carrie

Try always to blend in to your surroundings

Mister Gato is a very efficient little predator, equipped by Nature to move quickly (and almost silently) and kill with teeth and claws.

(Now that he's largely done away with the building's indigenous rodent population, thank God the Chows have a good sense of humor about being attacked randomly.)

He is also, of course, outfitted with a coat that is as sophisticated a system of visual camouflage as anything the Army's haberdashers could dream up. Note how well he blends in to the visual chaos of our desk, guarding our home desktop machine from the depredations of the dreaded CPU Mice (see also):

Tiger stripes are excellent camouflage in almost any setting.
Please do not be lulled into a false sense of security by my attitude of repose.

Be sure to check the Friday Ark at The Modulator for more furry (and feathered, and scaly) friends, and the April Fools' Day edition of the Carnival of the Cats this Sunday at IMAO.

Experiment: Amazon context links

Update: Sadly, context links do not appear to be ready for prime time. They're slowing down loading times and aren't producing interesting results. Will revisit at some future date.

As a purely mercenary experiment, we've signed up for Amazon Context Links...

Amazon's bots will scan the content of the blog posts here and automatically add product links when they "see" a meaningful phrase. Here's hoping for some wildly lucrative and hilariously inappropriate artificial intelligence action.

A bad week for White Trash

It's been a bad week for the White Trash portfolio, but then it hasn't been a terrific week for the market in general.

White Trash investors saw the value of their portfolio dip 1.42% in the last three days, meaning that $10,000 invested at inception would now be worth $9,857.90.

By way of comparison, over the exact same time period:

• DIA, an ETF which tracks the Dow Jones Industrial Average, is down 0.69%
• VTI, an ETF which tracks the performance of the broad US stock market as a whole, is down 0.61%
• IYC, an ETF which tracks the Dow Jones Consumer Cyclical index, is down 0.71%.
  

Whew. It's at times like this that you want to relax with comfort food (such as a Big Mac), drink a shot of Jack, chase it with a Coke, and finish everything off by smoking a Marlboro.

I hope.

Millions of housewives, beset by nightmares

Oprah has gone and done it now... the next selection of Oprah's Book Club is Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

I'm made of pretty stern stuff, but Mr. McCarthy's post-apocalyptic landscape haunted my dreams for months afterwards.

And, of course, this means that in about a month, Cormac McCarthy is going to be interviewed on television.

By Oprah.

I can't wait for my favorite Cormac McCarthy scholar to get back from his skydiving vacation to tell us what this all means.

Announcement: The White Trash and Minor Vices Portfolio

Everyone says "invest in what you know."

I'm about to put my money where my big mouth is. Carrie and I invest, mostly in index funds and ETFs, every month through Sharebuilder, which allows fractional purchases of shares in stocks and funds for a flat monthly fee.

The vast majority of our modest monthly stake goes into a total-market index fund and an aggregated bond fund.

But I'm going to make a modest investment in a stock portfolio -- a mini-fund of my own making, if you will -- called "White Trash and Minor Vices" (motto: don't beat your wife, beat the Dow) the constituent stocks of which are:

• BFB - Brown-Forman Corp. Cl B
  
  Holding company for distilleries that produce Jack Daniel's, Early Times, Canadian Mist, Southern Comfort, Finlandia, and others. Recently acquired a major stake in a Mexican tequila manufacturer.
  
  
• BUD - Anheuser-Busch Cos. Inc.
  
  Brewer of cheap domestic beer; owner of theme parks.
  
  
• CHB - Champion Enterprises Inc.
  
  Major manufacturer of mobile homes and modular buildings.
  
  
• F - Ford Motor Co. and GM - General Motors Corp.
  
  Contrarian picks to be sure, but here's the key: GM's share of U.S. pickup truck sales is 38.2%. Chrysler has 16.4% of the market. FordMotor Co. has 36.5%.
  
  GM is in talks to acquire Chrysler. Enough said.
  
  
• IGT - International Game Technology
  
  Designers and manufacturers of the most sophisticated video gaming machines (slot machines, video poker) on the market; they own the supply lines for low-end gambling.
  
  
• KO - Coca-Cola Co.
  
  Fizzy, flavored, caffeinated water.
  
  
• MCD - McDonald's Corp.
  
  Supersize me. I'm lovin' it.
  
  
• MO - Altria Group Inc.
  
  Holding company for Philip Morris USA and Kraft Foods, among others. Marlboros and Velveeta, baby. Spinning off Kraft on 30 March 2007.
  
  
• WMT - Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
  
  One-stop shopping for lower-middle America.

I've built a portfolio to track these stocks, and will report back periodically on their performance.

(Possibly coming soon: a "Freaks and Geeks" portfolio, including Apple, Google and Starbucks.)

Faith-based ignorance: choose your favorite flavor

With creationism now coming in Christian and Muslim versions, scientists, teachers and theologians in France are debating ways to counteract what they see as growing religious attacks on science.

Bible-based criticism of evolution, once limited to Protestant fundamentalists in the United States, has become an issue in France now that Pope Benedict and some leading Catholic theologians have criticized the neo-Darwinist view of creation.

An Islamist publisher in Turkey mass-mailed a lavishly illustrated Muslim creationist book to schools across France recently, prompting the Education Ministry to proscribe the volume and question the way the story of life is taught here.

The Bible and the Koran say God directly created the world and everything in it. In Christianity, fundamentalists believe this literally but the largest denomination, Catholicism, and most mainline Protestant churches read it more symbolically.

This literalism led Christian fundamentalists to reject the theory of evolution elaborated in the 19th century by Charles Darwin, the foundation stone of modern biology. Muslim scholars also dispute evolution but have not made this a major issue.

"There is a growing distrust of science in public opinion, especially among the young, and that worries us," said Philippe Deterre, a research biologist and Catholic priest who organized a colloquium on creationism for scientists at the weekend.

French scientists rebut U.S., Muslim creationism (Reuters via Yahoo News)

Perhaps we've dismissed Dinesh D'Souza's ideas too quickly. Plug your umbilical cords into your belief systems and stop that pesky thinking forever!

The interrupt-driven life

Several research reports, both recently published and not yet published, provide evidence of the limits of multitasking. The findings, according to neuroscientists, psychologists and management professors, suggest that many people would be wise to curb their multitasking behavior when working in an office, studying or driving a car.

These experts have some basic advice. Check e-mail messages once an hour, at most. Listening to soothing background music while studying may improve concentration. But other distractions — most songs with lyrics, instant messaging, television shows — hamper performance. Driving while talking on a cellphone, even with a hands-free headset, is a bad idea.

[...]

In a recent study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse news, sports or entertainment Web sites.

“I was surprised by how easily people were distracted and how long it took them to get back to the task,” said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft research scientist and co-author, with Shamsi Iqbal of the University of Illinois, of a paper on the study that will be presented next month.

“If it’s this bad at Microsoft,” Mr. Horvitz added, “it has to be bad at other companies, too.”

Slow Down, Brave Multitasker, and Don't Read This in Traffic (New York Times, March 25, 2007)

The collaborative nature of the modern workplace, especially in technology, seems to doom us to constant interruption. If I'm in a meeting, and especially if I'm meeting with a customer, it might well take me more than an hour to respond to an e-mail--it might take me more than a day--but in general, because of the nature of the work I do (proposal management), I am in constant contact with my colleagues, and I live in a world that is both deadline-driven and "interrupt-driven," to borrow (and misuse) a technical term of art.

Waiting an hour to check e-mail, ignoring IMs, or letting voicemails pile up just isn't an option. If I'm in the office and there are no meetings on my calendar, my co-workers feel free to just walk directly into my office and start describing their problems, and vice-versa... it's how things have to work.

It is absolutely true that long, uninterrupted stretches of time are required for work that involves heavy concentration and focus. I've done technical and marketing writing for so long that I can do it with one hemisphere of my brain (I'm not saying which one) tied behind my back, but if I'm working on something new and different, I leave the room with the humming and beeping electronics, turn the cellphone and Blackberry off (or mute the ringers), and sit in a quiet room with a notebook, a fistful of sharpened #2 pencils and a cup of strong coffee.

I recently worked on one of my favorite kinds of jobs -- an information architecture project, where I was working with a couple of very bright colleagues to design a new document storage and retrieval system for the office.

My final "deliverables" took the form of Visio diagrams and hierarchical Word outlines... but all of the design work involving skull sweat was done with a Ticonderoga on a really big pad of graph paper.

In a quiet room.

A.A. Gill on Brits in New York

Is there anything more bracing than a well-written rant, delivered by a man with a gutload of venom, a sense of timing and a way with words?

A.A. Gill, in the most recent Vanity Fair, unloads on Brits in New York City, and specifically a little strip of shops on Greenwich Avenue, around the corner from where we live:

What I mind is that they've re-created this Disney, Dick Van Dyke, um-diddle-diddle-um-diddle-I, merry Britain of childish grub and movie clichés, this Jeeves-and-Wooster place of mockery and snobbery, and I'm implicated, by mouth. Made complicit in this hideous retro-vintage place of Spam, Jam lyrics, bow ties, and buggery.

Lovely.

Although reading a scathing critique of Brits in New York City in Vanity Fair is a bit like seeing an op-ed criticizing the doctrine of papal infallibility in The American Catholic.

Letter From New York: Brits Behaving Badly (A.A. Gill, Vanity Fair, March 2007)

Related: Campaign For Little Britain In The Big Apple

My National Security Letter gag order

The Justice Department's inspector general revealed on March 9 that the FBI has been systematically abusing one of the most controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act: the expanded power to issue "national security letters." It no doubt surprised most Americans to learn that between 2003 and 2005 the FBI issued more than 140,000 specific demands under this provision -- demands issued without a showing of probable cause or prior judicial approval -- to obtain potentially sensitive information about U.S. citizens and residents. It did not, however, come as any surprise to me.

Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information. Based on the context of the demand -- a context that the FBI still won't let me discuss publicly -- I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled.

Rather than turn over the information, I contacted lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, and in April 2004 I filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NSL power. I never released the information the FBI sought, and last November the FBI decided that it no longer needs the information anyway. But the FBI still hasn't abandoned the gag order that prevents me from disclosing my experience and concerns with the law or the national security letter that was served on my company. In fact, the government will return to court in the next few weeks to defend the gag orders that are imposed on recipients of these letters.

Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case -- including the mere fact that I received an NSL -- from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie.

I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government and being made to mislead those who are close to me, especially because I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation.

The inspector general's report makes clear that NSL gag orders have had even more pernicious effects. Without the gag orders issued on recipients of the letters, it is doubtful that the FBI would have been able to abuse the NSL power the way that it did. Some recipients would have spoken out about perceived abuses, and the FBI's actions would have been subject to some degree of public scrutiny. To be sure, not all recipients would have spoken out; the inspector general's report suggests that large telecom companies have been all too willing to share sensitive data with the agency -- in at least one case, a telecom company gave the FBI even more information than it asked for. But some recipients would have called attention to abuses, and some abuse would have been deterred.

I found it particularly difficult to be silent about my concerns while Congress was debating the reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2005 and early 2006. If I hadn't been under a gag order, I would have contacted members of Congress to discuss my experiences and to advocate changes in the law. The inspector general's report confirms that Congress lacked a complete picture of the problem during a critical time: Even though the NSL statute requires the director of the FBI to fully inform members of the House and Senate about all requests issued under the statute, the FBI significantly underrepresented the number of NSL requests in 2003, 2004 and 2005, according to the report.

I recognize that there may sometimes be a need for secrecy in certain national security investigations. But I've now been under a broad gag order for three years, and other NSL recipients have been silenced for even longer. At some point -- a point we passed long ago -- the secrecy itself becomes a threat to our democracy. In the wake of the recent revelations, I believe more strongly than ever that the secrecy surrounding the government's use of the national security letters power is unwarranted and dangerous. I hope that Congress will at last recognize the same thing.

Usually, I quote excerpts.

This time I just cut and pasted the whole damned thing:

My National Security Letter Gag Order (The Washington Post, March 23, 2007)

Pork spread. Yum.

As we enter year five of the Iraq war, President Bush is demanding a second surge—not of soldiers, but of spending. Congress has been glad to oblige, seeing his $93.4 billion "emergency" request and adding an extra $21 billion, with subsidies for such military necessities as America's citrus farms ($100 million), fisheries ($60 million), and new congressional office space ($16 million).

Two years ago Bush promised this war would "support democratic movements in the Middle East and beyond." Obviously, he has been true to his word. Once, to be a war profiteer, you had to be involved, however peripherally, in war-making: building weapons, supplying troops, or at the very least making money off some supposed reconstruction project. Now you can rake in the war profits from the shade of your orange grove. What better example could there be of democratization, of replacing the rule of elites with an open, more participatory system? Talk about sharing our wealth: Every Man a Halliburton!

Blood and Treasure (Reason Magazine, March 22, 2007)

Keeping it clean

Mister Gato seems capable of making a comfortable perch--and even going to sleep--in the oddest places.

On top of a bucket full of cleaning supplies and rags in the utility cupboard?

This cupboard once held mice, and might again one day.
A cat can dream, can't he?

No problem.

Be sure to check the Friday Ark at The Modulator for more furry (and feathered, and scaly) friends, and the Carnival of the Cats this Sunday at Scribblings.

Thought for the day

"If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side." -- Orson Scott Card

Basketball erudition

If John deVille won't start posting on his own blog again, I'm just going to have to start reposting his comments from mine.

Like this one:

The last [UNC basketball] game was my favorite of the year. After the first five minutes of clock time, when Hansbrough took off the protective man to return to the floor to play like a man possessed for the rest of the game -- it took me back to 1993 UNC championship team when George Lynch (my all-time favorite Carolina player) simply willed the championship.

Hansbrough has a fire, an indomitable will to go along with mediocre talent and his will wins almost every battle near the rim. He's expanded the range from where he's comfortable shooting during a game (story has it, that he regularly drains 15-footers and beyond during practice). Watching him bang around inside, knowing that he knows there's an 85% he's either gonna score or get a foul and score (big men, learn how to make free throws like Tyler) always gets the adrenaline hitting my system.

The Reyshawn Terry of last year resurrected during the ACC tourney and has been spectacular on both ends of the floor. Hopefully Wright gets more touches - Lawson seems to feed Tyler better than Brandon; Quentin and Brandon share the same alley-oop neural circuit. Teams are starting to learn that the if-I-hear-it-one-more-goddamn-time label of "defensive stopper" hung on Ginyard only tells half the story - the man will take your sleeping ass on the baseline with a reverse before he heads back down to the other end to harass you like a tabloid paparazzi.

Lawson....you mean the Flash? A Carolina point guard that's the fastest in history WITH THE BALLS TO SHOOT? Well, fuck me and fuck all his opponents because Ty is the new sheriff and he takes no prisoners. And that's a freshman? Only in the press guide - he's Mr. Prime Time. And if he needs to grab some air well there's last year's starter Frasor who is perfectably serviceable for as long as you need him and then Quentin who is only 1/100th of a second slower than Lawson and has some outstanding moves of his own if not the court command of Lawson.

Green doesn't dazzle, he just comes in and outscores the starters on a per minute basis while the starters are resting, that's all, nothing to see here, move along. Wes Miller, who looks and plays like a Duke point guard, which means he's got a center of gravity about three inches off the hardwood and is as ramped up as a Jack Russell on Mountain Dew and visualizes the ball as a chew toy on defense so he can dish it to a pick on the other side while he's scouting territory about 30 feet from the basket to launch his gorgeous mortar which finds the target the longer he's in the game.

There's this Thompson kid who has Sean May's hands which Sean must have left -- they're "soft" as we say -- that means go ahead, throw him a shitty, uncatchable pass - he'll catch it and stuff the rock in the basket while Stephenson blocks out for the rebound.

Love this time of the year - well, let's just say I want to see Dewey "Biscuit" Burke play in four more games.

(For the uninitiated, Dewey Burke is a player that UNC Coach Roy Williams puts in for a few minutes at the end of the game, when victory is well and truly clinched. He earned the nickname "Biscuits" because the regional fast-food chain Bojangles offers a two-for-$1 sausage biscuit special to the holder of a ticket stub for any game in which Carolina scores 100 points, and Dewey made that happen a few times this season.)

The new look

floyd
Originally uploaded by enrevanche.

OK, so people have weighed in publically and privately on the new look (short hair, heavy black-rimmed glasses) with their own private theories about who I resemble.

The answers have spanned a range from (predictably) Drew Carey to (somewhat unexpectedly) Ira Glass, with one brave soul venturing "Barry Goldwater" (and, of course, Vic made me out to be the "Know -It-All" character from Polar Express, which, as I play a know-it-all in my actual adult life, hits a little close to home.)

Well, you're all wrong, but you can hardly be blamed.

I look like this guy. That's Grandpa Floyd, of blessed memory.

Dean's List

The LA Times' Robyn Norwood explains UNC basketball to USC fans:

Imagine if every summer for more than 30 years, young Trojans in the NBA — some of them already All-Stars — kept returning to USC's North Gym or the Sports Arena or now the Galen Center to play pickup games.

And imagine if year after year, Bill Sharman, Tex Winter, Paul Westphal, Bob Boyd, Stan Morrison, George Raveling and Henry Bibby — all of them with some connection to USC — got together with Tim Floyd to play golf, talk basketball and hold a coaching clinic.

That is what USC is up against in North Carolina.

"They've got the best tradition in the world," said Trojans guard Lodrick Stewart, who remembers playing at the Dean E. Smith Center as a sophomore. "You look up and see all the best names — James Worthy, Sam Perkins, Michael Jordan — players I grew up idolizing. You just look at them and are like, 'Man, I'm on the same court and sitting in the same chairs where the best played.' "

Never mind that the Smith Center opened after Jordan, Worthy and Perkins finished their careers. And Stewart and his teammates don't have to face NBA greats, just Tyler Hansbrough and a batch of talented freshmen, when they play the Tar Heels in an NCAA tournament East Regional semifinal Friday at East Rutherford, N.J.

I love this time of year.

Tar Heels' Tradition Wins Big (Los Angeles Times, 22 March 2007)

Hat tip: Greg

A rodent to give even Mister Gato pause

As dusk fell on the tropical wetland crawling with iguanas and small crocodilian caimans, José Ismael Jiménez pointed his harpoon at a rodent about the size of a Labrador retriever. With aim that comes from years of practice, he landed his spear on the back of its head.

But this hunt was not about ridding the country’s southern plains of varmints. It was about what’s for dinner.

The hunter’s only goal was the meat of the capybara, reputed to be the world’s largest rodent. Unlike other South American countries, including Argentina and Brazil, where capybaras are raised mainly for their hides, here the rodent’s meat is a sought-after delicacy, fetching prices almost double those for beef.

In Venezuela, Rodents Can Be A Delicacy (New York Times, March 21, 2007)

Survey: Outsourcing does not save money

Outsourcing may be commonplace, but it continues to confound IT executives’ expectations. Take the common myth that companies outsource to save money. Not only is this not true in half the cases, but our survey shows that most companies aren’t saving money by outsourcing.

And that’s not the only surprise: Insourcing and outsourcing, though polar opposites, are both on the rise. Companies spend more on offshore vendors than domestic ones, despite problems with quality and delivering return on investment. Dissatisfaction with outsourcing vendors is widespread, yet most of the 401 IT executives who took our survey blame their own companies most of all for the disappointing performance of their vendors.

CIO Insight: Outsourcing Does Not Save Money

Houses cheaper than cars in Detroit

With bidding stalled on some of the least desirable residences in Detroit's collapsing housing market, even the fast-talking auctioneer was feeling the stress.

"Folks, the ground underneath the house goes with it. You do know that, right?" he offered.

After selling house after house in the Motor City for less than the $29,000 it costs to buy the average new car, the auctioneer tried a new line: "The lumber in the house is worth more than that!

Houses cheaper than cars in Detroit (Reuters via Yahoo News)

Think a good thought for Cathy Seipp

Journalist and blogger Cathy Seipp, whose work has appeared, well, just about everywhere, is in a bad way. The doctors say she's got a few more days to live.

If you can spare a good thought, or a prayer, for a fine person, please hold Cathy (and daughter Maia) close by in your mind.