Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Hmm.. it appears that for $25/month we Broadband Achievers can transfer an existing phone number to www.lingo.com, an Internet Protocol telephony service, and get unlimited calling domestically and to Western Europe.  Should we sign up and start calling random people in France, Spain, Germany, Italy to discuss the big issues?

[Would multi-lingual readers please fill up the comment section with French, Spanish, German, and Italian language translations of the following potentially useful phrase:  “Why can’t you speak English like an educated person?”]

Update:  I actually did try to sign up to Lingo immediately after posting this entry and 12 hours later.  Their server responded with “No backend server available for connection” and “A java.lang.IllegalArgumentException exception was thrown and not handled by any Page Flow.”  It seems as though Java, the SUV of programming tools, is not working out too well for these folks.  Let’s hope that the actual phone service was not built by the same programmers and/or that these folks don’t suffer the same fate as my students who were using Java.

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Stuck at home for the last couple of days with a sore throat and earache and catching up on my TV viewing…  Just finished “Eye of Vichy”, a 1993 collection of newsreels produced in France during the period of the Vichy French government.  As the victors we’ve tended to write the history of World War II and forget that not everyone was unhappy in the France of 1940-44.

The film is a chronological assemblage of newsreels with a touch of commentary but mostly just subtitled translation.  Occupation and surrender initially usher in a great wave of optimism.  The French dream of a unified Europe from Japan through Siberia and west to the shores of France and Spain.  (Remember that at the time of the German invasion the Soviets and Germans were allies).  It was upsetting to have lost the war in a matter of weeks but the future of European union looked bright.

For the speakers featured in the newsreels “collaboration” is a good word.  They are proud of the millions of Frenchmen working in Germany, fighting in the German army (mostly on the Russian front), and building military hardware for the German army.  Cheerful young people are shown leaving France on special trains to take up apprenticeships in German firms where they are then shown alongside cheerful helpful German workers.  A narrator notes that France contributed more labor and war production to Germany than any other country; invading France really seems to have been one of Hitler’s best ideas.

The Jews come in for a bit of beating in these newsreels as you might expect and are blamed for having led a “peace-loving nation” into war.  Jews are compared to rats as a danger to the human race.  They are cowardly but are still dangerous due to their “superior numbers”.  [This is an odd claim considering that French Jews numbered only about 225,000 in 1933, less than one percent of the total French population.   For an explanation of how any of these Jews survived the war, see this review of the book IBM and the Holocaust]

As in German films of the same era the final year of the war brings a lot of sad coverage of bombed-out homes and cities.  The British and American air forces are the villains here, of course, bombing the innocent civilians that they were hypocritically claiming to be saving.  There is a clever animated film in which airplanes piloted by Disney characters drop “Made in USA” bombs on the home of some French suburbanites who’d been chatting about how much they were looking forward to liberation by the English and all of the beloved foods they’d be able to eat again as well as the English cigarettes that they’d be smoking.

If you’re a World War II buff this is worth seeing because of the 60th anniversary of Normandy.  If you’re an imperialist it might be worth seeing as an example of how to make invading and occupying a country pay off big time economically (cf. American invasion of Iraq 2003 for what not to do).

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Starting in July police will begin searching subway riders at random in Boston, according to this article.  I’ve always like the T because it is one of the few dog-friendly mass transit systems in the U.S.  Probably best to leave at home anything that you don’t want the police to find, however.  It isn’t clear how effective this is going to be as a security measure.  Just as we often see airport security folks taking apart 85-year-old grandmothers the Boston police say “the planned searches will randomly pick out riders and are not aimed at singling out anyone”.

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According to this recent New Yorker magazine article, Ahmad Chalabi, formerly Our Man in Iraq, is an MIT graduate.  The article also talks about the spectacular ups and downs of his life.  He went from being a math professor in Lebanon to head of the 2nd-largest bank in Jordan.  Just like a modern American executive, he practiced some creative accounting…

“An Arthur Andersen audit commissioned by Jordanian authorities found that the bank had overstated its assets by more than three hundred million dollars. In addition, a hundred and fifty-eight million dollars had disappeared from its accounts, apparently as a result of transactions involving people linked to the former management.”

After the bank collapsed, Chalabi turned to making his living from covert CIA funding.  After a falling out with the CIA he still managed to get $97 million in overt funding from the U.S. taxpayers beginning with the October 1998 passage of the Iraq Liberation Act.

Interesting and inspiring reading.

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Took the airplane down to my hometown of Washington, DC for a bit of exercise this weekend.  The city was built to awe the citizens with an inhuman scale.  Plazas are vast and the Mall itself is a forbidding barrier if you’re trying to walk from place to place on a hot or cold day (the architects who wrote A Pattern Language concluded that no public square would be effective unless it was small enough that people could recognize each other from opposite ends).  The government buildings are huge and discourage casual entry by being set back from the street and not having any retail shops on the ground floor as a commercial office building might.

The D.C. of my childhood is vastly different from the D.C. of today.  Those imposing buildings that symbolize the government’s power are now wrapped in concrete highway barriers that broadcast the government’s fear of a lone terrorist driving a truck filled with a fertilizer bomb.  Around the Federal Reserve building, for example, the barriers cover part of the sidewalk so as a pedestrian you’re separated from the street by a wall of concrete.  The effect is certainly ugly and it will be interesting to see what happens if a beautiful Old World city such as Paris needs to be secured against lone terrorists in trucks.    But in a way the cowering of the government marks the triumph of the individual in American society.  “God created men; Colonel Colt made them equal” wasn’t quite right after all.  It was the terrorists who blew up the Marine compound in Beirut and those who blew up the World Trade garage in 1993 who actually made individual men the equals of government.

There is one new building in Washington, D.C. that harks back to an era when governments were all-powerful and individual men and women subordinate:  the World War II Memorial.  This is at the east end of the Reflecting Pool and adjacent to the Washington Monument (now wrapped in an ugly high security fence).  The new monument looks as though it was built by Soviet architects and indeed looks a lot like the WWII memorial in East Berlin.  The thing is huge and it makes one pause and reflect… “We’d better not start any more wars or we’re going to run out of space on the Mall.”

[My visit to the Memorial coincided with protests in Europe against American power in the form of George W. Bush, visiting to celebrate the American victory over the Germans in Italy.  Picking up on the theme of an earlier entry, I suppose it would not have been very politic of him to respond by saying “We’re sincerely sorry for being so bellicose and we’re going to show it by giving Italy back to the Germans…”]

Overall I still love Washington, D.C.  Where else can you drive on a riverside parkway, 100-percent paid for with Federal tax dollars, and pass adjacent signs reading “The George Bush Center for Intelligence” and “Turkey Run”?

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Just back from seeing the movie “Super-size Me” and it occurred to me that, in an age of limitedless wealth, cheap food, and universal private automobiles, nutrition is best not left to amateurs (i.e., us).  Consider the process of going to a restaurant.  You, a completely ignorant and probably somewhat fat person, walk in and they hand you a long menu of potential dishes.  For each dish the menu lists a tiny fraction of the ingredients but does not fully disclose sauces or overall calories.  Even if the content of each item were fully disclosed it wouldn’t do most of us much good because most of us don’t know how many calories are appropriate.  Finally there is the problem that everyone gets the same quantity of food.  If you’re a 5′-tall woman and order “Chicken surprise” you get the same quantity of food as a 6′-tall man who orders the same dish.

Here’s an idea for a restaurant…  You walk in and give them the following information:  (1) height, (2) weight, and (3) whether or not you have exercised today.  They come back to you with a few choices, e.g., “fish, chicken, steak, or vegetarian?”  You choose one of those and finally an appropriately-sized quantity of food shows up on your table.  This is, I think, how the $1000/day fat farms operate.  But in an age of computerization it doesn’t seem as though it would cost a standard restaurant anything more to operate this way.

Thoughts?

[P.S.  I went through a 3-month period in which I ate almost every meal at McDonalds.  This was in 1993 while driving to Alaska and back (see Travels with Samantha).  I was a graduate student and the 59-cent hamburgers, 99-cent chicken fajitas, and drive-thrus were hard to resist.  I was about 30 years old and a tiny bit pudgy when I started the trip.  I probably lost at least 5 lbs. during that period.  I didn’t order fries or regular (sugar) Coke and I was riding my bike every few days.]

Addendum:  It occured to me after posting this that existing menu-based restaurants could adopt this system without chucking out their menu.  You tell them what you want plus your height and weight.  They then size the portions of your appetizer, entree, and dessert so that the total calorie count is appropriate.

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Photos of Alex’s 11-week-old cousin Roxanne are available at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/knicholls/

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Just got my new airplane insurance policy.  Several pages in the front are devoted to excluding coverage for a nuclear attack on the U.S.  If a big bomb is dropped on the hangar in Bedford they don’t have to pay:  “the radioactive, toxic, explosive or other hazardous properties of any explosive nuclear assembly or nuclear component thereof”.  Not do they have to pay for a dirty bomb set off in a shipping container in the harbor:  “ionizing radiations or contamination by radioactivity from … any other radioactive source whatsoever.”

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Here’s what I learned on my trip to New York City:

• the old Continental-powered Piper Malibu is a lot quieter and smoother than the newer Lycoming-powered Piper Mirage (flew down from Boston in a couple of for-sale Malibus)
  
• the Petra exhibit at the Museum of Natural History is inspirational–it might be time to take a leaf from Indiana Jones’s book and head over to Jordan
  
• there are several good shows at the Metropolitan, as usual
  
• the Whitney Biennial was one of the best in a long time.  At least 20 percent of the works were charmingly creative.  The show just ended but it might still be worth taking a trip to the Whitney because they’ve concentrated the best of their permanent collection on the fifth floor and also brought in some Thomas Hart Benton murals from Connecticut.  [If you want to get into the Biennial for 2006 just take a page from one of Edward Tufte’s books and blow it up to wall size, then reverse it and stick it next to the first enlargement… that’s what one of the artists in the exhibit had done.. without credit to Tufte.]
  
• the RM seafood restaurant on 60th between Madison and Park is fantastic and for the summer does a weekday $20 3-course lunch menu that is as good as any meal I’ve had in Boston at any price, www.rmseafood.com
  
• seeing Shrek 2 with a 4-year-old girl is fun but the movie is disappointing after Shrek 1.

No New York experience is complete without at least one cabbie story.  The fellow who drove me to LaGuardia Airport was a Coptic Christian from Egypt (the Copts are the descendants of the original Egyptians who built the pyramids, etc.; after the Arab invasion of 640 A.D. they’ve survived as a minority within their ancient homeland).  Fully trained as a lawyer in Egypt, he came to the U.S. 12 years ago.  “The Muslims were making it harder and harder for Christians to survive.  I was just starting out so I decided to start in the U.S.  Of course the situation in Egypt is much worse now for Copts than it was back then.”  He couldn’t work here as a lawyer easily because Egyptian law is based on the Napoleonic code rather than cases.  “I got a degree in networking from NYU and worked at a French bank in mid-town until 2001 when they downsized their IT department.”  Since then he has been driving a cab.  How does he like living in New York compared to Egypt?  “I came here to escape the Muslims but now they are coming to America.  They may appear to accept American values but 15 years from now you’ll see that they haven’t.  They can’t stop fighting Christians and they hate the West because it represents Christianity.  Americans don’t understand anything about Islam.”

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Why is it that governments have so much trouble admitting that they’ve made mistakes?  Let’s take the U.S. government, for example.  Right now we have troops deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq.  We don’t seem to be achieving our goals or be welcome in either place.  Why can’t we apologize sincerely and go home?

In Afghanistan the U.S. spent a huge amount of effort trying to thwart Soviet control in the late 1970s.  Jimmy Carter sent all kinds of money and weapons to the Islamic rebels so that they could kill Russian kids in uniform.  In retrospect this seems like a bad mistake.  If the Afghanistan had been a Russian possession there would never have been a Taliban and perhaps never an Osama bin-Laden or September 11th.  Could we offer a sincere apology today to the Russians and offer Afghanistan back to them?

Saddam Hussein seems to be alive and well.  The Iraqi people don’t like us, if newspaper articles and armed resistance are to be believed.  Why not say to Saddam “We were wrong about your weapons programs and we’re sorry for invading and here’s your country back?”  Our troops could get on planes in Baghdad and wave goodbye to a restored Saddam.  (We might want to split off an area in the north and give it to the Kurds since we made them some promises back in the early 1990s and it would be good to keep them.)

[We could warm up by apologizing to the Vietnamese:  “We’re sorry that we got involved in your civil war.  We know that we can’t truly make it up to you but if you’re in the U.S. we’ll treat you to a three-day pass at Disneyworld and a day at Universal Islands of Adventure.”]

Governments do this with wrongly convicted criminals.  We say “Sorry for your 15 years in jail.  We didn’t have DNA testing back then.  Enjoy the rest of your life.”  Why not do this in foreign policy instead of trying to come up with contorted ex-post-facto justifications?

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