/project/multiplexer
Ramblings in a State of Insanity
RSA Conference
01 year ago
by zenith
in technology
Hey all –
This is a Public Service Announcement that I am attending the RSA Conference out in San Francisco, CA from February 14th-18th and coming home the 19th. If you want to meet up because you a) haven’t seen me in 10+ years or b) you are curious what I actually look like, let me know and I can make arrangements!
Review: Cleopatra: A Life
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Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
"When Egypt Ruled the East" by George Steindorff this book is not.
I have read many books on Egyptian history all the way up through the Ptolemies who, somehow, through some sort of rhetorical magic, were made to be as dry and dull as dead leaves in winter in "Cleopatra: A Life." I have read many history books. I consider myself a bit of a connoisseur of the genre. I even inhale historical fiction. Some of these books have been utter and complete crap. I have manned up and finished books that would defeat a lesser soul simply because it might have a tidbit, a _fact_, a grain of something cool lurking inside.
But wow does this book need an editor. I cannot tell if Stacy Schiff was covering for being far more interested in the Romans than the Egyptians, or simply having more knowledge of the Romans, or just seriously not liking the Latin language or what, but this book is so padded with passive tense that I cannot be certain that she is speaking authoritatively on anything. It comes off like: "Cicero who MAY HAVE somehow sort of rubbed against Cleopatra who MAY HAVE spent some time in Rome with Julius Caesar MAY HAVE said something bad about her but WITHOUT SPEAKING HER NAME so WHO KNOWS." Now read 384 pages like that. You get the general idea. Toss in paragraphs that are overwritten and that’s the whole book.
I will openly admit that the sheer terribleness of this book defeated me in mortal combat. I didn’t make it to the end. After a while, I didn’t care any more. I wanted to throw the book against the wall — except that would have broken my Kindle and I would have been sad. And this is me with a book on Egypt. Anything Egypt. Me. Egypt. I will drag people across oceans to stare at dead people from the sands in dusty museums and I couldn’t finish this book! That’s how bad it is.
Some little bits of this book actually had a little sparkle. When it stumbled aimlessly on a topic where Schiff knew enough to speak authoritatively, it was kind of interesting. Contrasts between Alexandria and Rome. Contrasts in Greek Alexandra vs. Egyptian Memphis. Some comments on trade. This bought the book an extra star and kept it from the one star trash can. Every once in a while there is a ray of hope among the rhetorical trash. But then it fades away and I was sad in snow.
But for the most part? Blech. Avoid. This book is a massive disappointment.
View all my reviews
An Ugly Intersection
0One of the questions I have seen bantered back and forth through the vitriol on the Internet is: “If Jared Lee Loughner was obviously schizophrenic and full of disorganized and confused thought, as many people who interacted with him reported, why did he not get help?”
Some thoughts on why:
1. Schizophrenia appears in young men around the end of puberty, between 18-25.
2. By time it starting showing obvious, overt signs of disorganized thought, he was unlikely to still be on his parent’s health insurance. It was only this year that a child could be on the parent’s health insurance until age 26.
3. According to reports, his father didn’t work and his mother had an hourly job with the city. Who knows if they even had health insurance, or if the city health insurance plan covered mental illness, which it probably did not.
4. He couldn’t hold a job and didn’t have any health insurance himself. The few jobs he had were big box stores and sandwich shops.
Getting into a psychiatrist, getting evaluated, getting seen meant seeing a doctor. That meant having coverage because the family was unlikely to have the cash on hand for psychiatrist visits. Even being involuntarily committed to a hospital for emergency treatment meant the uninsured going to a hospital where there would be incurred in-patient costs, doctor costs, medication costs. The costs for medications alone to help curb the effects of schizophrenia would be incredibly prohibitive for parents making little money and, of course, he would be totally uninsurable going forward because had he seen a doctor he would then have a “pre-existing condition.” And he would have that for the rest of his life. Those medications meant constant ongoing, expensive costs.
If he had gotten diagnosed — which was a very expensive and probibitive hill to climb to begin with — maybe he could have eventually gone on Medicaid, but at what toll? To live in poverty so he could get medications to control the hallucinations? That’s an option, but he would have had to get there, first.
The stark reality is that this country has terrible support for childhood and late adolescence mental illness but the seriously mentally ill can stroll casually into a Sportsman’s Warehouse and buy a gun with an extended clip. This says more about our priorities as a society than anything else that has been said the last five days about what happened in Tuscon. The system failed.
We stand at an ugly intersection of where health care for the mentally ill is prohibitive but gun access is trivial. We cannot have one and have the other and expect to live in in safety. We either put up with “nuts with guns” who kill little girls or this changes. If anything comes out of this tragedy, I hope we at least begin to talk about how difficult it is to get people like Jared Lee Loughner help long before it is too late.
Civility
0Years ago, Terry Gilliam made an excellent and understated movie called “The Fisher King” starring Jeff Bridges and Robin Williams. Jeff Bridges starts the movie off as an incredibly popular “shock jock” who specializes in making shocking statements to rile up his audience — popular in the 90s, popular now. A disturbed young man calls in to ask Jeff Bridges about something during the call-in show and Jeff Bridges’s character, playing to his audience, makes some nasty comments to the disturbed kid. The disturbed kid then takes a semi-automatic into a high-end restaurant and massacres the diners, including Robin William’s character’s wife.
There’s a saying: “Politics is Hollywood for ugly people.” Politics has always had a certain entertainment aspect to it. Saying utterly ridiculous things and getting them repeated in the media is a time-honored tradition since Benjamin Franklin Bache published the politics gossip rag the Philadelphia Aurora. Politicial speech has a certain one-ups-manship to it where, in the heat of a campaign, the more outrageous a statement, the more the base is fired up to go out and vote. And in this call-and-response environment where one is surrounded by one’s followers, one is tempted to say some pretty ridiculous things.
However, someone running for political office indicates that person wishes to be, ultimately, a leader of men. And a leader of men has to be cognizant of how their words will resonate, not just with the base or with trying to “get” the enemy, but with other people, out there, who might be listening — who probably are listening. Those people may not hear your remarks to “reload” or “use Second Amendment Solutions” as rhetorical campaign speech. They may take it literally. Saturate the airwaves with enough of this rhetoric and it will reach out to someone, somewhere.
This rhetoric of guns and murder and “getting them” in our political speech isn’t just Internet mouthbreathers. It’s everywhere: in political commercials that play during campaign seasons 24/7, on YouTube, on Facebook, on the Sunday talk shows, on Twitter, in newspapers, and on talk radio. It even leaks onto NPR. It’s inescapable and it has clearly gotten out of control.
My entire point is this: If you wish to stand up and put yourself forward as a leader of men, you need to be mindful of what is coming out of your mouth, the tone you take, and how it might be received. You might think it’s fun to use gun and violence in your political speech to score points and add a little swagger but more than your followers are listening. You know it will be picked up by partisan press and repeated and amplified a million times. It may be a young man with easy access to semi-automatic firearms with schizophrenia and command hallucinations who listens to you as one of the many authorities floating around and it just… helps things along. You simply do not know and it is your job to lead. If you lead with vicious speech full of violence, you will reap what you sow.
Also, I absolutely agree with the Mighty God King.
There’s other things here — how does someone with schizophrenia walk into a sporting goods store and buy a semi-automatic, why was he never given help, why did our health care system fail yet again, etc. etc. but the root, the core, is a culture currently seeped on TV and the Internet and the radio with violence against elected officials and it’s got to stop.
Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
There’s bad, there’s cheesy, and then there is trashy. This book is full-on trashy.
I don’t mean that in a bad sense. It’s difficult to attain truly trashy. It goes beyond bad and beyond tawdry, through cheesy, and out the other side. It embraces its trashiness. This is a book that knows it is just outright stupid, grabs it with both hands, and hugs it until the bad pops out and leaves only the shining goodness behind. It’s the sort of trash that takes work to attain. It takes planning. It’s trashiness is awe-inspiring.
It goes something like this:
Mikael Blomkvist is this super hot financial reporter with a smoking hot but married girlfriend with whom he runs a super hot financial rag called the Millennium. He got a tip off from a friend about this crooked financier and somehow the story was turned back on him and he ended up being convicted of libel. With his career in ruins, he gets a call from yet another bigwig, Henrik Vanger, who hires him to find out the truth about what happened to his niece, Harriet, in 1966. Henrik Vanger is convinced she was horribly murdered but he has no proof, and it has eaten away at his soul for decades. He must know the truth! Along the way, Mikhael Bloomkvist is hooked up with Lisbeth Salander, a smoking hot (in a different way) Aspergery super-hacker covered in piercings and tattoos. Then they uncover a tale of — yes, you can take it from here — deceit and lies and _murder_ and, oh hell with it, yes, Nazis.
There’s sex. There’s lots of sex. Mikhael is smoking hot himself and he radiates "can sleep with any hot chick" in a 40 foot radius. And he does! God, that man sleeps with everyone. He’d sleep with the dog if there was one in the plot somewhere. There’s also rape, too, and although there’s Glorious Vengeance the rape scenes are, fair warning, pretty graphic. That alone makes it difficult to recommend to friends who may be uncomfortable with such things. On the one hand, utter ridiculousness. On the other hand, graphic rape scenes. Milage may vary.
The book has a solid three star plot but the writing kicks it up to an extra star. Stieg Larsson knew instinctively the Elmore Leonard maxim: "Do not write the boring parts." The book does plod in a few spots, especially toward the end where it is all Glorious Vengeance Upon Enemies Of All Stripes — of course, it has to be — but he very very rarely wrote the boring parts. The book is all about "Oh come ON…. /now/ what happens?" I completely understand why this book has sold a million billion copies. It is one of the most head-eatiest, brainwormiest books I have read in a long time. It is compulsively readable, even in the dumb parts.
Are the Swedish names a problem? No, not really.
Will I read the next two books? Most certainly.
Can I recommend it? It’s a fun, trashy thriller. But it has some scenes that may be upsetting. I lean toward yes with a caveat that it might not work for everyone.
View all my reviews
Review: White Teeth
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White Teeth by Zadie Smith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is a funny book. White Teeth is about a whole bunch of things — growing up an immigrant in 1980s London, the feelings of displacement at trying to make a living in another country, World War II, Muslim fundamentalism, atheism, science, and alienation. Archie Jones marries Clara, a Jamaican immigrant and daughter of Jehovah’s Witness Hortense while his best friend and Bengladeshi immigrant Samad Miah Iqbal marries (the much younger) Alsana via an arranged marriage. They have Irie and the twins Magid and Millat, respectively. As Samad watches the children grow up, he wrestles with feelings of alienation and makes a fateful decision to send one son back home to Bangladesh to be raised "properly" while keeping the other one in London. They all intertwine with the Chalfens, an Oxford-educationed Jewish-English family.
The plot is a bit thin as is in any post-modernist novel drawn as a "portrait of a life" but the characters are compelling and distinct. Where these novels fall down are thin characterizations that cannot carry the narrative but that is not the case here. The women, especially, are clear and real and each one different than the rest. They aren’t just thin caricatures designed to hang off the main character’s arms and spout platitudes. They feel like flesh and blood.
For a longish book, it is a surprisingly quick and easy read. Highly recommended.
View all my reviews
DADT
1After the final repeal vote for Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, Senator Burr of North Carolina (R-NC) released an interesting statement. No, he did not personally support repealing DADT but he voted for the repeal anyway because his world was no longer this world. He’s an 80 year old man legislating on the morality of 20-somethings, and his view on the world is no longer their view of the world. The world has moved on.
People forget that the military was integrated by a stroke of a pen by Harry S Truman long before interracial marriages were legal or civil rights passed. The military, stoic and conservative, has always been on the bleeding edge of civil rights for a very simple reason: if you want to serve, here’s a gun. We need bodies, go go go. The military cannot afford to be picky in an all-volunteer army and here they were being told to be picky.
The end result of DADT was 13,000 people given involuntary honorable discharges regardless of their performance. It instituted date rape — sleep with me or else I will claim you’re a lesbian. It fostered an atmosphere of fear when the fear should be those guys over there shooting, not being kicked out for filling in a same-sex name for life insurance benefits.
So first goes the military, and then when the world fails to end, goes everyone else.
What the McCains of the world are railing against and gnashing their teeth and swearing vengence on is not the integration of a small population of the military with the rest of the greater population of the military. They are railing against their world ending. The morals of their generation are passing and the new generation isn’t quite so uptight about things. Generation Xers and the following generations simply do not care about gay or straight or lesbian or bi the same way their forebears did. We have Ellen on daytime TV and Neil Patrick Harris on How I Met Your Mother and gay friends on twitter and on facebook and gay blogs and it’s all out there. As a voting block coming to age and coming to power, we don’t care. It is not an issue for us. Senator Burr was amazingly cognizant of this simple fact: on this issue of Civil Rights, Generation X is just going to wait until the Boomers all die and give the gays integration with the military and eventually gay marriage and universal gay adoption and gay equality. You can either roll your eyes and scream and yell and freak out or move on.
Yay for a victory. It will be interesting to see how the changes are implemented.
The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.7
Outsourcing
0We’ve been having these conversations about religion at work — yes, yes, I know it is one of the verboten topics but we’ve been talking about it anyway at lunch — and I was thinking about the Catholic way of handling prayer. It’s a bit like having to call for a computer support and then, if the issue is something that the guy on the phone cannot help via following the script, it has to be pushed to the supervisor.
I’m kind of partial to St. Theresa of Avila who went through life being too intelligent for her own good. For me, I suppose, it would go to St. Theresa to Mary to Christ to God who, as the CEO, is too busy running the universe and perhaps putting together merger deals with other universes to deal with my pithy problems. And I feel kind of bad telling St. Theresa to let me “talk to her supervisor” and even worse when she puts me on hold hell. Because she would. She was that kind of person.
Then I got a bit freaked out the other day that maybe, like everyone else, even the ranks of Saints and Angels were having budgetary issues and they outsourced their prayer call center to India or China. (This would explain the spread of Catholicism in China — but the strange, statist Catholicism where the State picks the Bishops instead of the Vatican but that’s a whole different rabbit hole.) Does God have a budget so large even He can dodge the Recession? Is the ranks of Saints now too expensive with their lavish monestary and nunnery based lifestyles that they, too, have to be laid off and replaced by low-cost call centers?
This is the stuff that worries me sometimes. And, perhaps, just perhaps, I am overthinking it a little.
The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.7
Extending the Bush Tax Cuts and Obama’s Deal
0Here’s how a tax cut for those making piles and piles and piles of dough works for those of us who do not, due to various circumstances and life choices, make piles and piles of dough:
Step 1: Take out a shiny new Chinese Co credit card with an introductory low low teaser rate and a huge limit.
Step 2: Take a huge cash advance on that Chinese Co credit card.
Step 3: Find the richest person with the biggest house around.
Step 4: Give cash advance to said person.
Step 5: Watch said person light money on fire.
Step 6: Go pay interest payments on that Chinese Co credit card in perpetuity.
So much for all those campaigns on fiscal responsibility and ‘having to get our house in order.’ We get to extend the tax cuts and the estate tax over $5 million thing and some sort of payroll tax holiday and the unemployment insurance extension. I am for one of these (the unemployment insurance extension) which will, of course, sunset because it’s for people trapped in awful circumstances, and can only see the rest becoming permanent, which are for people who are not.
The payroll tax break is supposed to sunset in a year but really? Honestly? It will be extended forever and ever because we need to protect our middle class voters in a time of recession that will certainly still be going on and we cannot place burdens on our middle class when we are not. Isn’t the money coming out of Social Security? How does that get paid now? Magic fairy dust? And having the big tax cuts expire in an election year? What genius thought that up?
You know, I’m not big on pushing Mish, he’s a little bit on the crazy side, but I think here he is pretty much right. And on the other end of the spectrum, Krugman says pretty much the same thing.
They should have asked me. I would have recommended printing $800 billion in small bills, giving everyone in the US a marshmallow, having a huge bonfire, and inviting everyone. At least we would have gotten toasted marshmallows.
Over at Naked Capitalism there’s a nice post that has a chart with the stimulative effect of various spending programs. Food stamps, unemployment insurance, building stuff people use — all good stuff. Everything else? FABOOSH.
But hey. All those people getting more money can use it to invest in more Chinese businesses.
This crap is like the TSA arguments. Circular and stupid. No way to win because no one with a spine will stand up and say “this crap has to stop.” Oh, by the way, we are wasting more government funds to put crappy video messages about scary scary brown people in Walmarts because, you know, that’s where terrorists from Pakistan go. Walmart. Presumably to buy socks made by the Chinese.
On Wikileaks
01 year ago
I am torn on the latest dump from Wikileaks. On the one hand, the United States needs to be able to conduct its dealings on a world stage with the security standbys of “integrity, confidentiality and availability.” Diplomats need to be able to prove they are who they are, have confidential communications with other parties, and do so securely. This is basic security: they need to be able to have the dealings they need to have, no matter the content, without fear of unauthorized prying eyes. Otherwise, it is very difficult for people who have to have sensitive conversations as a routine part of their job to have these sensitive conversations. A government needs to work behind closed doors from time to time to function properly.
On the other hand, this is the same United States government that wants to read my email and see me naked if I want to fly to Detroit. I want to have sensitive conversations too.* I want to not have the government peer at my daughter’s body “for her own good.” I find my sympathy a bit limited. When I see heads of state complaining of feeling their privacy has been violated, I want to give them a Club Membership and a Beanie. It has a propeller. Welcome to the Club: it’s nice of over here.
We live in a data-centric world and, if data wants anything, it wants to be free. It’s like pollution: pour a little into a stream and the whole fish stock is contaminated. We generate so much data even on a daily basis as individual human beings that simply attempting to analyze it all or even record it is currently prohibitive.** Data is just noise, for the most part; a denial of service attack on our higher brain functions. To do anything with data, it has to be correlated and sifted and sorted. To get the right data across the right functions, the data has to be, above everything else, shared.
This is where the government is way behind the curve. Most of the three-letter agencies have been working in absolute silence for their entire existence. But now, data has to be shared to make any sense of it. There’s just too much data coming from too many points and it all needs to make sense. And going from a full confidentiality environement to one with availability of data is actually and honestly a hard problem. Data is going to get everywhere. It is going to leak. It is going to pour out the cracks. This is what data does.
Hard problems are hard.
The DoD immediately banned USB drives***. Lots of people started screaming and yelling about espionage or treason****. There’s a few hair shirts. From what I have seen — and I admit I haven’t sat down to read the cables, only the NYT summaries of the cables — there’s nothing really amazing or breathtaking in there. The Chinese Government attacked Google. People think Iran getting the Bomb is Bad. I have seen people yelling with hands clutched over their chests that it will end transparency in government — although this is staggeringly unlikely. The government is not particularly transparent to begin with; that’s the entire point.
So ANYWAY, To Sum Up, My feelings in Exciting Bullet Point Form:
* When journalists get juicy information they publish it. Where they get it doesn’t matter. As long as it’s verifiable, it gets published. That’s what journalists do. Or at least they did once upon a time. And not all foreign journalists are super nice to the People In Power.
* … and this is healthy, because Democratic Governments really and truly need an adversarial press to keep it honest. This is why we have enshrined the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press as some of our highest cultural ideals. The government needs to be exposed and of course a government will do anything they can to repress information that got out of their control. That is what governments do. These sort of things are good for governments. It’s like getting a flu shot. Sure, yeah, we’ll have a few months of retrenching but it might make some people think. It is the job of the people to keep their elected officials plausibly honest and it is the job of journalists to pour data into the heads of the people.
* And it is not like foreign countries are going to stop hosting systems with Wiki software. In fact, it’s kinda fun! Except for the DDOS parts; those are a little annoying.
* Meanwhile, the Federal Government is learning what lots of us in industry have learned: defending data while still making it usable and useful and safe is really freaking hard.***** What do I always say? Security is hard and encryption is slow. Yes, I absolutely believe that people who need AIC should get AIC while sharing data between two parties. Yes, I feel the State Department should be able to work in a confidential atmosphere. Yes, I feel this is important for the security of the United States. But see points A, B and C, above.
* There’s a balance to be struck between what the governments can do and what the people know. We need to rediscover that balance.
* Ta-da! Behold what the Slashdot crowd and security crowd has been yelling about for years: privacy is important. And not just for people in the public sector. For everyone. FBI back doors into ISPs and unauthorized wiretapping and tracking cookies and naked scanners and you name it. Privacy is important. It is. It really is.
* Sure, I can. I know how. It’s not that difficult but it is time consuming and nonstandard and key sharing/rotation is annoying.
** Although, dear God, who knows for how long. I can run a MySQL DB on my laptop and mine hundreds of gigs of data. I can buy a T from Best Buy. A T! And I made a fool out of myself in graduate school asking: “Why would you ever need a T of space?” Why indeed.
*** Yeah. Well, good luck with that. Physical security of teeny devices that can look like bananas or coke cans is a bit challenging. I hear the TSA has some new machines to search people for plastics, I guess. I would fill all the USB ports with rubber cement but I know that’s really not workable because it blows up service contracts.
**** Not sure how treason works with a foreign citizen living in a foreign country but whatever. We don’t let details get in the way of a good soundbyte.
***** I know this initiative has been going on for a while now, actually.
On the TSA
11 year ago
Security conferences are a little microcosms of the security industry mindset. Everyone herds excitedly to the talks with the new, big, lurid hacks because offense is super sexy. We all ooh and aah as someone with a Powerpoint deck demonstrates some explosive breach of known security. Then the talk is over and immediately we’re herded to the vendor aisle where the vendors shlep an array of expensive pieces of hardware. Seen the attack? Now here’s the countermeasure! It will only cost you $100,000 and several hundred man-hours to get up and working but you don’t want to be subject to that attack you just saw, did you? The CTOs and CEOs, many with MBAs instead of engineering degrees, shake hands, watch demonstrations, take cards, promise to make calls because this hoopy new equipment will stop that very scary new attack because wow was that scary. They have room in their budgets, they promise.
As a security professional, my brain isn’t wired right. I love hot new attacks. I find them fascinating. I read about them obsessively. I should be working but no, I’m reading some new way to take out a database with a well crafted command. But I’m also an engineer and I know that an offensive demonstration sells expensive, and somewhat dubious, defense hardware and defense is big business. Yeah, you need a big heap of hardware these days to run a secure network, I’m not claiming you don’t, but I also know that the sexy new attack may also be mitigated, not with another $100,000 expenditure, but with a few hours of expert code review. I have a dollop of doubt gleaned from many years of experience.
But that doesn’t stop the anxious CTO or CEO who has a mandate and, instead of doing threat modeling and risk analysis, wants to fix the problem quick with a new piece of hardware because wow that Powerpoint deck was pretty scary. Everyone get to work! Plug this in! Make system changes! So it goes. It keeps us all employed.
Terrorism is a physical security problem that cannot be stopped at the gates of an airport. If a terrorist has reached an airport, the terrorist has breached many layers of other security — real security and law enforcement. It is far too late. The system has failed. At that point, only three things mitigate the attack: reinforced doors on airplanes, passengers who will not be cowed, and people who blow themselves up are generally not the sharpest tack in the pile.* That’s it and those goals have been achieved. Past that, putting money into police and emergency response would be useful. It’s a crime and like any crime it’s essentially random; it’s an externality whose real risk probability is low. If you have 300 million fliers and 1 terrorist, then you deal with the problem when it happens because searching for the real risk at the point of entry is futile.**
Logic and good engineering dictates we model for high probability risks when securing our systems and work to mitigate those risks. However, the Powerpoint deck for global terrorism offensive attacks is super hot: it shows buildings blown up and dead people in the streets and bodies and planes crashing into buildings. It’s damn scary. Worse, it makes the stakeholders unelectable if such a thing comes to pass. Non-engineers sitting in elected or appointed office look at those Powerpoint decks and Get the Fear. They then walk out down the aisles of vendors afterward and they say: “I will take one of everything.”
The TSA is not a security organization. They don’t serve any real security purpose. Other people in other government organizations deal with the real work. No way can people hired from ads off the back of pizza boxes and given 40 hours of web-based instruction know what to do if they encountered an actual terrorist. That’s absolutely absurd. The threat model shows the probability of an actual terrorist in an airport line instead of, say, just mailing the bomb, is infinitesimally low. It’s an acceptable risk to put non-security personnel in security positions. It makes for a great government work project in a recession. And wouldn’t a terrorist with an actual live bomb just blow himself up in one of those backscatter machines?
The TSA does serve a very important purpose to the Federal Government: Marketing. They market security. They have SIGNS. And UNIFORMS. They give people Very Meaningful Looks. They stand around in airports with big machines that go bloop like great big advertisements full of warm fuzzy safety. They market for elected leaders who want to show they are keeping us all safe. They’re like the election time TV advertisements except with groping. Go through the bloop machine! Don’t you feel safer now?
Take off shoes, take off jackets, throw out liquids, get pat downs, go through scanners — none of it serves any actual purpose except to sell to a jittery public who feasts on capitalist marketing a feeling of security because real security is hard and doesn’t always succeed. That’s the hard truth the public will not accept: we are unable to defend against all risks. It’s not physically possible. But the Government will give you a pleasant illusion. To sell warm fuzzy non-offensive security when faced with a real (if lame) attempt, the TSA must buy more machines that go bloop because someone in a suit watched a very scary Powerpoint deck indeed and some smiling vendor was standing with their card right outside the demonstration. If they don’t install the machines that go bloop, what do they do?
Funny thing, the Government, under money pressures, now has to provide a strategic, risk-based assessment of their security countermeasures starting Real Soon Now. The machines that go bloop and the new security measures must be in place before the risk-based models go in. The TSA has not turned in any risk assessments of the new machines to the GAO to justify the purchases and they won’t because the risk of finding someone real with their current operation is so tiny and the risk of something going wrong with the machines is so much greater that the purchase can’t be justified. But they don’t need risk assessments because, at the core, the mission isn’t security.
My stance on the TSA is well known. I don’t like such obvious wastes of money, and I especially don’t like it with machines that go bloop and may or may not cause skin carcinoma. Nate Silver has an interesting article on the hidden costs of extra airport security. But next time you go through security, you should ask for a Coke with your grope — at least with a Coke, you get a Coke!
I have more stuff, about how security has a customer service and customer expectations model to it, about how the TSA needs to think of itself as a customer service organization first, about how the entire organization has to be rethunk, but this post has gone on long enough. The TSA is here to stay. They provide too much CYA to lawmakers to ever disband. But to save us all money, they should just pull the plugs on the machines and send us all through. It will help with global warming, at least. If they unplugged the machines, would you ever be able to tell?
Here’s the recruitment pizza box. You can find it a bunch of places.
Threat Level’s discusson on TSA training. 40 hours of web based instruction and 60 hours on the job!
Here’s the GAO report I cite. I cannot find if their position has changed but as far as I can tell, no risk management study has been completed.
* If you think strapping a bomb to your nads is smart then I have some equipment I can sell you!
** The argument here is “but the attack is huge.” Yes, that’s possible, but the point stands: if the terrorist gets on the plane there are bigger problems with the system.
Review: White Noise
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My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Don DeLillo won the National Book Award for White Noise in 1985. Theoretically, as marked as our Great Minds as a Great American Novel, I should be very for this book. I picked it up because I am a fiend for all things David Foster Wallace and I know he had an ongoing professional relationship with Don DeLillo and took some of the craft of his dialogue for Infinite Jest from this novel.
So why didn’t I love it?
It’s a couple of things. The Kindle edition has a double space between each paragraph which throws off the flow of the dialogue which, I’m sure, was a mitigating factor. Some of the black comedic assessments of our media culture seem dated simply because they were so prescient. (A friend recently pointed out that science fiction that fails to come true is fascinating; science fiction that does is cliche. Think of the 20 page digression on SSH in Cryptonomicon. It was certainly interesting for its time and a pointless digression today.) Partly because the book seems, in the end, like it is trying to be a meaningful meditation on modern existence and it tries too hard.
Jack (J.A.K.) Gladney is a professor at a small midwestern college in Hitler Studies. He and his current wife Babette have numerous children from previous marriages. One day there is an enormous industrial spill — the Airbourne Toxic Event — where they all pile in the car and flee. During which, Jack is infected with a small dose of industrial compound and is informed that, some day in the future, it will kill him. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday. Eventually. The last half of the book is consumed with Babette’s addiction to a drug Dylar, Jack’s obsession with the way Babette acquires the Dylar and the Dylar itself, and Jack’s obsession with death.
So we have the big themes: rampant consumerism (lots of scenes in the grocery store), death, more death, media saturation, underground conspiracies, the family, and violence.
Not really for everyone, no. White Noise is a black satire. It is humorous in places, and has some incredible bits of craft in imagery and language. I found myself highlighting some of the better and more interesting passages. But in the end, the story didn’t hang together as well as it could. This novel is definitely Your Milage May Vary.
Review: The Windup Girl
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The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi is the Coen Brothers meets Blade Runner.
It’s the 23rd century and global warming has run amok. The great cities of the world are under water. Enormous corporate conglomerates genetically manipulate strains of wheat and rice to feed the world while extorting the last bit of cash and blood. Countries incessantly war over resources. Genetically created diseases ravish societies. And the Japanese genetically generate the New People, their perfect servants to support a rapidly aging and non-replenishing society.
Set in Bangkok, Thailand, the book follows the stories of four main characters “Song of Ice and Fire”-like: Anderson Lake, the American ‘calorie man’ coming for Thailand’s stock of genetic diversity, Hong Seck a Chinese Refugee from the US, Jaidee Rojjanasukchai a “white shirt” Tiger of Bangkok who works for the ministry that polices the health of the country and Emiko, a discarded “windup,” a genetically modified human turned into the perfect servant but now without a master.
The four main plotlines sort of wander along telling four parallel stories that cross over and intersect and explode in exciting ways while exploring this science fiction future of ecological devastation. This is not an uplifting or positive book — it is /very/ Coen Brothers where people are generally awful in an ever increasing tide of awfulness until the plot explodes on everyone in a mess of fiasco.
It definitely does move. As a book, it is well written, if not meandering at times. The problem is that the plot does meander and some of the stories don’t feel terrifically satisfying. The story of Emiko the Windup Girl is by far the best of the four stories in the book but the other three tend to fall flat at times without drive.
I knock it one star for occasionally losing its point. As a science fiction book its a thinker. A downer, but a thinker.
Lack of Posting
01 year ago
by zenith
in life update
Sorry about the recent lack of posting. Life went on hold due to a serious case of LIFE. Posting should resume sometime next week. Really!
[Review] Smallville RPG
3Smallville RPG by Cam Banks, Joseph Blomquist, Roberta Olsson and Josh Robey
From Margaret Weis Productions
I would never have picked up the Smallville RPG if it wasn’t enthusiastically evangelized to me from multiple sources. I avoid games based on licensed properties for a number of reasons. It has the double whammy of being JLA and I am allergic to JLA in all its forms. ”It has a great relationship system!” they said. ”Character creation is neat!” I can be worn down by shameless promotion and, despite never having seen an episode of the show and breaking out into hives if I pass old Green Lantern collections, I picked up a copy from DriveThruRPG. Never say shameless promotion doesn’t work.
First Impressions
The Smallville RPG PDF is one of those PDFs used as a demo piece to show off how well RPG PDFs can look. The colors are sharp and crisp. The font is clear and easy on the eyes. The art is mostly, with some exceptions, stills taken from DVDs and photograph-clear. It’s a pretty, professionally laid out game with top notch graphic design. Dark blue on white for callouts is more effective than bold or italics, and the text scans easily. It reads easily, too: the text is clear and takes an optimistic, upbeat tone. I found few errors in the text throughout the book and found it surprisingly easy to comprehend. RPG texts are notorious for being muddied and confusing, but not so here.
The PDF itself has the same attention to detail as the art, text editing, and layout. It reads a single page/screen on my iPad so no squinting required. It has bookmarks. However, the table of contents is not hyperlinked. I never missed that feature, though.
The content flows from overview of Smallville -> overview of the game system -> character creation -> playing the game -> game resources -> Smallville reference. The only issue I had was in flipping between the “overview of the game system” chapter (called “The Basics”) and the actual play chapters (“The Scenes”), and that character creation and character resources are separated by the chapter explaining how to frame scenes — a little awkward. I never felt confused by the presentation and the information was well grouped together. I just found it mildly strange going from the Basics to Scenes and back again to understand how to play the game. It also had a bit of inexplicable filler in the form of an “online” chapter which should have been cut or placed at the back. From 5,000 feet, I understand why the overview of the system is placed before character creation. Otherwise character creation makes no sense. How can a player buy anything in character creation without some passing familiarity with the system? But still, it felt off. Speaking of character creation…
Character Creation
Character creation is where the Smallville RPG shines. It is a game within a game; a game session where the text recommends one puts out snacks because everyone is going to be awhile.
The heart of the Smallville RPG are character relations. All of the player characters (called ‘Leads’ throughout the book) have interconnections. Character generation proceeds in rounds where each round is a stage of life. During that stage characters increase in power, pick up major life connections, and move to new locations. As characters change and grow during their formative years connections grow or whither, and some disappear all together to be replaced by new connections. The process is visual where the GM draws circles and squares on a map to demonstrate the connections.
This section of the book is… stupendous, actually. Not only is it chalk full of explanations and examples, but the book walks through the creation of a full map complete with all the important connections and life changes. The end product is a dynamic game where all the players have a stake in each other’s lives. Characters are not just people who hooked up in a bar and went off to go kill orcs. These are people. And it makes me want to play the game. It deeply makes me want to play the game.
The character generation chapter is worth the price of admission alone.
Playing the Game
The system is dead simple. Every stat, relationship, power, asset, or resource in the game has a die value associated with it (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12). When characters get into conflict, they have a contest — and contests can be over far more than mere punching. The Smallville RPG has no combat chapter, as combat — if it actually comes to blows — is another kind of contest. When having a contest, one picks the associated drive (basic stat) and whatever relationship/asset comes into play, reads the dice value, rolls them, and adds the values together. Whoever is highest, wins. Whoever loses takes some stress. That’s… pretty much it from what I can gather without having played it.
The simple system hides some neat subtleties. The stress tracks ride along five different tracks: Anger, Exhaustion, Injury, Afraid and Insecure. A contest can bring stress into play. As a character takes more stress, the more an opponent can use it against them until the character ends up not in a hospital but curled up in a ball of fear or so angry they lash out at all around them. It is very cinematic.
Why would anyone want to get into a contests? Because contests yield up Plot Points, little bits of currency to spend in-game to make cool things happen. New relationship! New details! More dice! Activate powers!
The system works well with the recommended way to play the game: in tv show-like scenes. While most of this information feels a little filler at times, it does have good advice on how to frame, begin and end a scene so the game moves quickly. The chapter on how to build episodes through building on the existing character maps is interesting, especially when it explodes out into how to build in tension and conflicts into a gaming session. Good stuff.
Examples, examples, examples. The chapters with actual game information are full of examples. The material presents so many examples even I can follow the basic gist of the system while reading the book. Between the Basics, character generation, scenes and episodes, I find myself wanting to run the game. It’s simple! It uses dice! It’s highly cinematic! It looks like it is tons of fun. But… then again…
Other Stuff
The Smallville RPG is still a licensed property, so a good third of the book is dedicated to setting information. I cannot attest if this information is useful or not — I found it amusing to read some of the JLA members (Flash! Black Canary! The Martian Manhunter!) written up as various characters in the show. If nothing else, the large sections full of characters work as great examples and templates. It’s all in there somewhere.
The episode writeups came off as a bit flat. Having written these myself, I know they’re a drag to write. Most of the seasons are hyper compressed into summaries. Only the last two seasons are exploded out into full capsule summaries of each episode. And having never watched the show, I couldn’t do much with the information. It is aimed at the original audience of the game: fans of the Smallville TV Show. It is telling that, on the strength of its game system, it has wandered past its intended audience and into the hands of the uninitiated. It doesn’t help that Netflix doesn’t have Smallville on streaming.
Also, I so docked the game points for having writeups of the Wonder Twins. I don’t care if they do or do not show up. Dude, no Wonder Twins. Seriously. I’m duding the game here, man! *shudder*
Overall
The Smallville RPG is a strange game. I heartily recommend the character creation and the basic game system. Typically, the mark of a good game is three game ideas after reading the source material. But instead of three game ideas, I have three other games entirely I want to run and/or play using this system. It is the perfect system for playing “The Tudors RPG” based on the (incredibly tawdry) TV show. Or “The Reign of Elizabeth I — THE GAME.” Or any soap opera-like game — it would be perfect for Amber RPG. If I was going to pick a system for Amber, this would be it, the full on supers soap opera game.
I’m left with a mild glass-half full feeling. Smallville fans will likely find the exhaustive list of leads, features, extras, villains, and locations satisfying but may not be completely happy with seasons 1-7 summarized and only seasons 8 and 9 broken down into individual episodes. Those not a fan of the show may wish for more ways to adapt the system to other worlds and find the task of coming up with new Pathways or assets a bit daunting, and wish for a more generic game.
These are mild complaints. Overall, it is a well written, well produced game with a clever system at its heart. Character creation makes me desperately want to gut it and play my own supers/soap opera game with the rules. This is a rare game where not only is playing a villain a viable option, it’s a desirable option supported by the game system and game mechanics. The villain, the ultimate supervillain bad guy, has loves and hopes and wishes and backgrounds and has value as a PC — and that alone is worth the price of admission. You can be the Professor X and you can play Magneto and you have dice on your sheet that shows their adversarial relationship — and they come into play. Isn’t that what comic books are? Soap operas with punching?
Worth purchasing on PDF. I would run this game.
Smallville RPG: 4 stars out of 5
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