Author Archives: Danny Silverman

_NYT_ calls the TSA(Transportation Security Administration) airport screening process a “theater of the absurd” and extensively quotes security god Bruce Schneier: “‘It would be wonderful if Osama bin Laden carried a photo ID that listed his occupation of “Evildoer”,’ permitting the authorities to pluck him from a line, Mr. Schneier said. ‘The problem is, we try to pretend that identity maps to intentionality. But it doesn’t.'”

Currentlies

Currently listening to: The Fountain soundtrack. It’s pretty.

Currently watching: Nothing! Battlestar Galactica just finished for the year.

Currently reading: I…err…keep meaning to pick up one of the several books I have scattered around my room that I want to read, but keep not doing it. I finished Rainbows End a few weeks ago and it was pretty good and interesting, although it took me a while to get into it.

Currently adventuring: Hiked part of the Mt. Holyoke Range on Saturday, see the pictures below.

Currently traveling: Leaving for California on the 22nd. Staying through the 2nd. Part of that time spent in Palm Desert. Should be fun.

What are you up to?

I’m not the only one to wonder why the British have the ridiculous two-tap system in most of their sinks (seperate hot and cold spigots). The _WSJ_ did an investigative report back in 2002 and discovered that a combination of tradition, outmoded building regulations, and just plain stubbornness keeps the Brits from entering the bathroom’s 21st century and moving to the single mixed tap: “Britons don’t understand why foreigners raise a fuss over this issue. ‘The British are quite happy to wash their hands with cold water. Maybe it’s character-building,’ says Simon Kirby, managing director of Thomas Crapper & Co.” And Jess, our correspondant is Scotland, reports that in the vet school’s labs all of the taps are hot, so your only choice for hand washing is “scalding.” Doesn’t that just take the biscuit?

Changing cultural values and market forces have decimated Japan’s 1200 year old kimono industry. Only three artisans remain — all over 80 years old — who can make a kimono from scratch. Most production is now outsourced to China, and rarely is any fabulously expensive Japanese silk used. “All we can do now is keep trying to make kimonos so beautiful that they will no longer be able to resist it,” says a 102 year old artisan with no apprentice, “What choice do we have?”

Leave the very strange circumstances aside, and just think about the possibility (hopefully remote, but possible) that a 13 year old girl and a 12 year old boy who had consentual sex will be branded for the rest of their natural lives as sex offenders and therefore denied jobs, forced to live on the outskirts of society, listed on police web sites, shunned by their communities, and tracked with monitoring bracelets. Yeah, clearly the lawmakers are doing a good thing here.

Is it possible to feel nostalgia for the future?

I’m decorating my home in what I like to think of as a retro-futurist motif. (In truth I have little experience with home decorating and am just as liable to make a mess of things as to create a unified vision.) I’m trying (within a modest budget) for a combination of contemporary sleek styling with touches of the imagined future of the 30s and 40s, things like posters that extol the wonders of air travel and magazine clippings from the 1939 World’s Fair and a clock shaped like an old metal oscillating fan.

I chose this style because I want to live in an environment full of promise and excitement about the future, about the wonders of technology, about progress and a better life and amazing advances just around the future. It is with interest, then, that I read an article I discovered in _Technology Review_ by Henry Jenkins titled The Tomorrow That Never Was. “Science fiction, post 9/11,” he writes, “has offered little by way of alternative visions of the future beyond more of the same. Perhaps the only way forward is to retrace our steps.” He looks at the graphic novel _In the Shadow of No Towers_ and the movie _Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow_ as two examples of societal yearning for a different sort of future.

Nostalgia is the powerful yearning to return to a more idyllic time. Most nostalgia focuses on times that never really existed in the first place. Is it so wrong, then, to yearn for a future that never came to pass derived from a past that is itself steeped in nostalgia? Can those of us looking for such things find a happy refuge in this doubly-imagined, meta-nostalgic, retro-future?

_The Observer_ in the UK prints an investigative story about a US government drug enforcement operation, run through Homeland Security rather than the DEA, that kept an informant on payroll even after he tortured and killed a man and continued to support him as he assisted in the abductions and killings of 11 others, one of whom was an American resident caught up in a case of mistaken identity. The operation was approved by the Department of Justice and, as is common in the current administration, when employees inside the agencies questioned the operation, they were punished and threatened. Reminds me a lot of the movie _Traffic_. Glad to hear we’re trying new and innovative strategies in our quest to to “win” the “war” on drug trafficking.

An explanation of the new MBTA fare system, launching January 1

In 1948 a couple folk singers composed a song about the plight of poor Charlie, who got stuck on the Boston trolley system forever because he didn’t anticipate the complex new fare system that required a 5 cent exit fee to disembark. Ironic, then, that on January 1, 2007 the MBTA will be rolling out its new CharlieCard system and bringing additional confusion and complexity to an already difficult to understand system.

The new system incorporates Automated Fair Collection, a fancy name for fancy new turnstyles that confuse the heck out of people, make it harder for fare evaders, and allow the MBTA to charge variable fares and change them easily at any time. The system is networked (via fiber optics in the tunnels, and radio on busses) so that computers can centrally track who is riding where and when, ostensibly to allow things like free transfers, but at the same time allowing for sophisticated tracking and data gathering for the government agency.

Anonymous fares can still be purchased on a CharlieTicket, a paper card with a magnetic stripe that comes in two varieties, one that can act as a declining balance account (load up $5 and use it for 4 rides, for example), and another that works for monthly and other pass programs. The tickets are sucked into the turnstyles, read, and then spat back out prior to the gate opening. CharlieTickets expire, unlike the previous token system. The new fare vending machines that dispense the tickets use touch screen interfaces to give users various options (in an incredibly unintiutive way) and allow for payment with cash, credit, or ATM cards. A word to the paranoid: if you buy your CharlieTicket with a credit card, you have already lost.

The new CharlieCard is a contactless RFID-enabled plastic card that can “store” declining balances, fare programs, or a combination of both. Thus your CharlieCard can be “loaded” with money as well as, say, a 7 day LinkPass. The “Pass,” then, is no longer a physical object, but an authorization placed on the “Card” or “Ticket”. Straightforward, right?

Users of CharlieTickets (or cash) pay an additional surcharge, although why this is the case has never been adequately explained. A CharlieCard holder pays $1.70 for a subway ride, while a CharlieTicket purchaser must pay $2.00. Because the CharlieCard and CharlieTicket are both free, and because all stations are already setup to handle the Tickets as well as the Cards, I can’t think of any cost savings justification, so the only other possibility that occurs to me is that the MBTA wants users to use the Cards so that they can better track our behavior and usage patterns. And because they’re giving us a discount, it is difficult to not comply.

There are additional problems and exceptions. People who take the commuter rail in Zone 1A or 1B (which have no been combined) need to keep a CharlieTicket rather than a CharlieCard, becase there are no Card readers on the trains, whereas the conductors can simply read the text printed on the Ticket. These commuters, then, probably need a CharlieCard as well to avoid surcharges elsewhere, but this is unclear from the literature I’ve read. Additionally, the LinkPass, which includes both subway and bus passage, does not include Commuter Rail Zone 1A coverage, a seperate pass is required for that which costs the exact same amount. Why is it not given by default on normal LinkPass accounts? Probably because of the T’s desire to force users to have the CharlieCards.

Finally, all toll booths have been shut down, replaced instead with the occasional customer service station, where people have reported mixed results getting help. And while the transition is ongoing, there are various exceptions to the rules, not helped by the many T employees who seem just as befuddled as the pasengers. It is interesting to note that, while the MBTA has installed $6 million $89 million or more in new infrastructure to support the new fare collection system, it has not done anything to actually change or expand the transport services it is offering. But I’m sure they’ll get around to that just as soon as they finish raising rates.

Or maybe they’ll decide to actually publish a comprehensive guide to the changes that explains what is happening, how it affects people, and what benefit justifies how all of our lives are being so disrupted. Nah.

“The relevance of Third Reich Germany to today’s America is not that Bush equals Hitler or that the United States government is a death machine. It’s that it provides a rather spectacular example of the insidious process by which decent people come to regard the unthinkable as not only thinkable but doable, justifiable. Of the way freethinkers and speakers become compliant and self-censoring. Of the mechanism by which moral or humanistic categories are converted into bureaucratic ones. And finally, of the willingness with which we hand control over to the state and convince ourselves that we are the masters of our destiny.”

I’ve been occasionally following Amazon’s forays into web services, and spent the last couple hours reading up on their fairly new Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, which provides an infrastructure for anyone to inexpensively setup and run one or many server instances within the Amazon data center. EC2 is darn cool, not only for things like scientific computation sets but also for more standard tasks like web serving and such. Combined with Amazon’s existing S3 storage service for reliable storage, the possibilities are pretty amazing for building scalable web apps. There are some obviously missing components, however, such as effective load balancing and some sort of database environment not to mention the problem that when a virtual server goes away so goes all of its data. I’m sure Amazon is well aware of these problems, and I suspect that they’re working on them. Depending on the latency of S3, I suspect an enterprising hacker could create a filesystem driver for it that, used correctly, could solve a lot of the storage issues. If/when Amazon reveals a database web service, they’ll have quite a platform on their hands. I’m really impressed by how Amazon is creatively opening up their infrastructure in ways that improve their bottom line while also dramatically leveling the playing field for small players in the web space.

_Wired Mag_ runs a cover story on Lonelygirl15 that, while late to the party, is pretty interesting and informative. It talks about the genesis of the show, the promise of the medium, and why Lonelygirl hasn’t made the jump from YouTube to a network. My favorite bit of fan speculation noted in the article was the idea that the whole thing was a sophisticated viral ad campaign for Target since the entire set was purchased there.