Category Archives: Musings

Sixteen? Sweet

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Spent the weekend in at the Massanutten resort in Virginia for a family reunion to celebrate my dad’s 80th birthday — hadn’t seen a lot of those folks since the 70th birthday bash or before. It was a nice, though tiring time, and I was glad to get back to good old Cary.

And apparently other people feel the same way, because I saw today that Cary was ranked #16 on the list of the 100 best places to live in the U.S. according to Money magazine’s list of America’s best small cities.

Yeah, we like it. We’ll probably stay for a little while. 😉

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Are phone calls intellectual property?

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All the boo-hooing over the FISA reauthorization bill, on the part of the Huffington Posters and the BoingBoingers and the “left-right coalition” that I blogged about a while ago, got me thinking about the Fourth Amendment. The amendment states,

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrant shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Somewhere along the line the courts decided the amendment applies to telephone conversations, but I’m not sure I agree with that. Phone conversations certainly aren’t persons, or houses. Might they be considered papers or effects? I don’t think so, because papers and effects have an element of permanence that conversations lack. Electronic files, stored on computers or other media, seem practically preserved in stone compared to the ephemeral nature of phone calls — they would certainly fall under the broad category of “papers and effects,” as intellectual property. But phone calls? Maybe if they were recorded calls 😉 .

When the civil libertarians wrap telephone conversations into the Fourth Amendment, it seems to me they’re establishing an unreasonable expectation of privacy. Personally, I don’t say anything over a telephone that I wouldn’t say across a table in a restaurant — my expectation of privacy is very low, whether I’m using a land-line or a cell phone. To me, because the phone signal traverses the boundary of my home, talking on the phone is about equivalent to opening the window and having a conversation where any passerby can hear it.

Then again, I’m biased in favor of the dedicated professionals who work every day to protect us. I was one of them (not on the Intel side and only in my own small way), and I believe in what they do and appreciate their devotion to their duty. This new version of FISA helps them to protect us from the bad guys, and that’s all I care about.

It helps that I’m not plotting to blow up buildings or assassinate leaders or overthrow the government; I like our government just fine, thank you. I’m not real thrilled about the candidates running to lead it, but that’s another subject — and why I developed the Anti-Campaign, in case anyone was wondering 😀 .

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New Blog: NC State of Business

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Today I kicked off the “NC State of Business” blog for North Carolina State University’s Industrial Extension Service; as a staff writer and one of a handful of IES members acquainted with blogdom, I now “own” the blog.*

Thankfully, I’m not responsible for developing all the content on the blog. The Executive Director and several of the other key folks will make most of the blog entries — I’ll just moderate the thing and post my own occasional screeds.

Check it out here: NC State of Business.

___
*The power’s not going to my head. Really. 😎

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Happy Independence Day

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I hope you have a splendid 4th of July, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing.

A special “thank you” to our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, and Coastguardsmen who keep us safe, secure, and free every day. I salute you all.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident ….” Yes, we do.

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Guess It's All in My Head …

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The doctor called this afternoon, and the results of my MRI are in: as suspected, the problem in my head appears to be just in my head, not in my head.

Got all that? 😀

For those who want more detail: the MRI looked normal, meaning there’s no obvious physical reason why I have nearly continuous pressure on one side of my head. No tumors, no infections, no bats — although they sleep in the daytime, so they might not show up on the machine. That means we’ve ruled out the ear canal, the middle ear, and the inner ear, leaving only … we don’t know. So, it appears the problem may be all in my head.

Which is better, in many ways, than the problem being in my head. Wouldn’t want that.

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My MRI

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Yesterday I had the protons in my brain aligned with an extremely strong magnetic field — alas, it did not make me smarter or give me super powers — while radio waves excited the protons and pushed them out of alignment. As they snapped back into alignment, they produced tiny magnetic fields of their own that the imager picked up. Today I await the results.

My friend Oliver could explain all this much better, but as with almost everything else there is a Wikipedia page about it.

I got a little anxious when the tray I was lying on slid into the machine: my arms touched the sides and reminded me how small the space was. And the thing kept moving! I told the technician that since they were looking inside my head I didn’t expect they’d push me so far into the beastly thing. (I don’t remember being so encapsulated when my shoulder was scanned, but that was many years ago.)

I almost fell asleep while they were scanning me. Had the vibrations and noise been a little more consistent, I probably would have — especially since some of the vibrations were quite rhythmic. But the part where the whole tray started shaking was a little unnerving.

I hope they got good pictures of the bats in my belfry. And I hope all that unaligning and realigning didn’t make me more stupider. :p

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Worriers of the World, United in Fear

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On boingboing Thursday, Cory Doctorow reported that the worriers joined together to tie the hands of those who try to protect the freedoms they cherish so much.

An extremely diverse group of online activists ranging from the ACLU to Ron Paul supporters have come together to create The Strange Bedfellows, a campaign dedicated to preventing Congress from offering immunity to the telephone companies that participated in the President’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program.

Who is in this “extremely diverse group,” you ask? You can check the link for the list, but in addition to the ACLU (proud to defend the civil liberties of people who would kill ordinary citizens), the coalition includes “activists from the Ron Paul campaign …, civil liberties writer Glenn Greenwald of Salon, and leading liberal bloggers.”

Yet this group of libertarians (whom I think of as anarchists without the commitment) and liberal bloggers claims that they are

mobilizing a broad-based left-right coalition of office holders and candidates, public interest groups and individuals who are devoted to preserving basic constitutional liberties …. The goal is to work together to impede the corrupt FISA/telecom amnesty deal.

What a crock. The goal is to impede national security. I find it interesting that the far left treat our military and intelligence preparedness as if it were a paranoid delusion — as if the threat weren’t real — and then succumb to the paranoid delusion that their own government is out to get them. If you believe that, I hate to break it to you: few of us are important enough to need to worry about wiretaps and communications intercepts. And as for the high-minded and righteous protection of all manner of rights and liberties: I bet all the people in the rubble of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and that field in Pennsylvania felt very proud that at least their civil liberties hadn’t been violated. But isn’t life itself a civil liberty?

I’m not afraid of wiretaps, warranted or unwarranted, because I’m not plotting to commit criminal acts. Back in February, in a response to a comment on this blog, I wondered if the civil libertarian doomsayers “type on their keyboards in the dark of night, with the shades drawn, and jump at every sound in case it’s the dark-suited men come to collect them.” On that score, I found a line from Friday’s WSJ amusing: “… those who think that letting our spooks read al Qaeda’s email inevitably means that Dick Cheney is bugging your bedroom.”

And now, thankfully, the House agreed to extend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for six years, including eavesdropping on terrorist communications overseas and immunity for telecommunications companies that cooperate with intelligence operatives. Hopefully the Senate will follow suit. Even though this isn’t the perfect solution, it allows the Intelligence Community to do what it’s charged to do.

I feel safer already. I can’t help you if you’re one of the worriers.

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Proud Papa

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Father’s Day weekend, so I’ll get right to the point: I’m really proud of my young-uns.

Today we picked up our daughter after four weeks as a production assistant on an independent film. That’s four weeks in the farm country of northeast North Carolina, in the middle of which she went to the emergency room for heat exhaustion. And they liked her work so much they changed her unpaid internship to a paid position.

And as I type this, our son is performing at his first paying musical gig: he’s playing violin at a wedding with some other members of the high school chamber group. He’s done some charity gigs before with the band he formed at church (Clantannin), but this is his first time driving to an out-of-town gig and coming home with money.

My kids are cool. Pity I can’t take the credit for their coolness.

But I’m proud of ’em.

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YouTube, MeTube

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I didn’t expect to make the cut (which may mean there wasn’t a cut), but there I am on the “videoblog” fantasy author Gail Z. Martin made at ConCarolinas. Here’s the YouTube link. I’m the last person she talked to that day, right after GOH Mike Resnick.

Surprise, surprise, as Gomer Pyle used to say. And of course I didn’t take the opportunity to plug my web site. Ol’ dopey me.

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Vive La Difference

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It’s nice to see research upholding what some of us have recognized and celebrated for so long: men and women are different after all. Unfortunately, that reality probably won’t quiet the yelling from the political fringes.

In her May 18 article, “The freedom to say ‘no’,” Elaine McArdle wrote (emphasis added),

Now two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a perhaps startling conclusion: An important part of the explanation for the gender gap, they are finding, are the preferences of women themselves. When it comes to certain math- and science-related jobs, substantial numbers of women — highly qualified for the work — stay out of those careers because they would simply rather do something else.

… if these researchers are right, then a certain amount of gender gap might be a natural artifact of a free society, where men and women finally can forge their own vocational paths.

Aside from the curious idea of a “natural artifact” — why not just say “natural consequence” or “natural outcome”? — McArdle’s article gives a nice, brief overview of the central issue that many women simply don’t want to follow the same paths as men.

Christina Hoff Sommers wrote a more in-depth treatment a couple of months ago, with the provocative title “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?” In her article, Sommers noted that

Women now earn 57 percent of bachelors degrees and 59 percent of masters degrees. According to the Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2006 was the fifth year in a row in which the majority of research Ph.D.’s awarded to U.S. citizens went to women. Women earn more Ph.D.’s than men in the humanities, social sciences, education, and life sciences. Women now serve as presidents of Harvard, MIT, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and other leading research universities. But elsewhere, the figures are different. Women comprise just 19 percent of tenure-track professors in math, 11 percent in physics, 10 percent in computer science, and 10 percent in electrical engineering.

After noting an October 2007 hearing on “why women are ‘underrepresented’ in academic professorships of science and engineering,” she wrote,

As a rule, women tend to gravitate to fields such as education, English, psychology, biology, and art history, while men are much more numerous in physics, mathematics, computer science, and engineering. Why this is so is an interesting question — and the subject of a substantial empirical literature. The research on gender and vocation is complex, vibrant, and full of reasonable disagreements; there is no single, simple answer.

Yet the hearing apparently found the simple answer: “All five expert witnesses, and all five congressmen … attributed the dearth of women in university science to a single cause: sexism.”

Sommers took a bold stand in her article, charging that the political rationale is unidirectional:

If numerical inferiority were sufficient grounds for charges of discrimination or cultural insensitivity, Congress would be holding hearings on the crisis of underrepresentation of men in higher education. After all, women earn most of the degrees—practically across the board. What about male proportionality in the humanities, social sciences, and biology? The physical sciences are the exception, not the rule.

So why are there so few women in the high echelons of academic math and in the physical sciences? In a recent survey of faculty atti*tudes on social issues, sociologists Neil Gross of Harvard and Solon Simmons of George Mason University asked 1,417 professors what accounts for the relative scarcity of female pro*fessors in math, science, and engineering. Just 1 percent of respondents attributed the scarcity to women’s lack of ability, 24 percent to sexist discrimination, and 74 percent to differences in what characteristically interests men and women.

It seems that some people with power to gain from controversy, or perhaps with power to gain from exercising control, have a vested interest in provoking debates where little debate is needed. In this case it’s not enough, apparently, for them to let gender differences exist and accept them: they have to explain and challenge the differences for their personal pleasure or their personal esteem.

Or maybe some folks just don’t appreciate the differences.

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