Category: Uncategorized

Enron or Disney?

Here’s a good post-apocalypse tale: as reported in click2houston.com, Enron designed a fake trading floor whose sole purpose was to fool investors and stock analysts.

“It was an elaborate Hollywood production that we went through every year when the analysts were going to be there to impress them to make our stock go up,” former employee Carol Elkin said. […] Elkin said that it was all an act, and that no trades were actually made there. The people on the phones were talking to each other.

Truth informs fiction and fiction informs truth. It all makes me wonder how deep the deception went. Is it possible that even as they designed these trading rooms they knew it was a front? That seems incredible, but then again, what has already been revealed seems incredible. To some extent we all live on a movie set, and a variety of appealing fictions can be painfully withdrawn at any point. Disney specializes in blurring fact and fantasy into an indistinguishable amalgam, but greatly to their credit, Disney will actually give you behind-the-scenes tours that show how it all works: where the garbage goes, how the character actors get around, where the Freemasons meet to control the global economy, and so on.

In fact, reality tours are quite popular these days. From the Harry Potter tour of London to the Seinfeld Reality Tour of New York, you can take in show business presentations of real world locations where show business incidents took place. Whether or not these incidents “really” took place is open to philosophical interpretation. Who knows where the ground floor is anymore? Which leads us back to where we started: can we look forward to an Enron reality tour that showcases the talents of master showman Jeff Skilling, his faux high-tech trading floor, and the breathtaking special-effects magic of his artists in accounting?

You say “tomato,” and I say “whipping shitties”

Dialect maps have been a standard research tool for linguists and philologists for a long time, but it’s becoming much easier to compile them. Now you can build yourself a nice website and let other people do the work for you. Of course you need some people to visit your site, so it helps if you get the New York Times to write about it. Harvard Linguistics Professor Bert Vaux has built just such a site, loaded with questions that geographically pin you down as a speaker of English in North America, automatically mapping the result. These questions include the venerable Soda vs. pop? and more than a hundred others. It makes for fascinating browsing.

Some of the maps are disappointing because you expect to see a more dramatic demarcation. I expect, for example, waiting in line vs. waiting on line to show a big “waiting on line” region around New York City and New Jersey. It doesn’t.
Some of the maps are very satisfying. I live in the land of the rotary, and if you look at this map you’ll see exactly where that is: rotary vs. traffic circle. I was surprised how often New England was the strongly contrasting region (see the maps for Aunt Mary vs. Ahhnt Mary and sneakers vs. tennis shoes). This suggests that New England doesn’t mix much with the rest of the country.

Finally we come to doughnuts vs. whipping shitties (i.e. driving around in circles). This latter seems to be exclusive to Minnesota and Wisconsin. Can this be real, or is the good professor being hacked? Hmmmm…. you know, where I grew up we referred to flatulence as “looking for Mr. Goodbar” or “chatting with the Vice President.” If you “remember” this too, why don’t you join me in telling Professor Vaux? It could really put us on the map. Or we could just grab a beer and whip some shitties together.

I’ll close with a question of my own: have you ever referred to a wool hat as a toboggan? I did when I was growing up (North Carolina), but people in Massachusetts think this is a hilariously funny indication of mental deficiency.

Inspired by the Zire


I’m very happy with my nifty little
Palm Zire PDA. It cost me $90, and that’s only because I didn’ know about the Amazon promotion that gets it down to $75. The conventional wisdom in the reviews is that this is a good PDA for non-geek first-time PDA buyers. It’s cheap, lightweight, and unambitious. But it’s also exactly right for me. I’m a geek, but I’m tired of paying for fancy features I never use. Plus, my last two PDAs crapped out on me. The first, a Visor Edge from Handspring, had a nice design, but I expected it to last more than fourteen months (considering the price), and it didn’t. Then I got a Sony Clie, and that broke within a week of buying it, so I sent it back. Using the Clie for a week was enough to convince me I didn’t need the color screen, or the multimedia applications, or the memory stick socket. I don’t even need backlighting for the display. I just need a basic PDA, and the Zire is just the ticket.

Viagra: between the horned and the horny

What comes to mind when you see the phrase “Viagra helps save endangered species”? You may be picturing a toothless but newly inspired panda mounting his world-weary zoomate, thereby expanding rather than ex-panda-ing the population. But that’s not where this story is headed. Follow this logic: endangered species get slaughtered with horrific regularity because there is a market for them. Why is there a market? The single biggest reason is traditional medicine based on the ancient belief of sympathetic magic. Here is a quote from the Trade Environment Database at American University (TED): “In Chinese Traditional Medicine, animal parts are reputed to endow a man with the potency of the animal itself, or with the potency implied by the shape of the appendage.” Want to be as strong as a tiger? Eat some tiger bone. Order today, as supplies are limited!

Being as strong as a tiger is all well and good, but few medical treatments generate more interest than those that treat impotence, and this is where Viagra fits into the picture. Reasoning with the logic of sympathetic magic, tiger penis and rhino horn (hubba hubba!) are prescribed for impotence. And while they may provide an important placebo boost to the credulous afflicted, Viagra has the strength of modern biochemistry behind it. It works. The big question is: will demand for dead animal magic drop as Viagra sales in Asia rise? There are some indications that the answer may be yes. As reported in the Economist, “Frank von Hippel, of the University of Alaska, in Anchorage, and his brother Bill, of the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia, have shown that the trade in such exotica as seal penises is falling rapidly. They suspect, though they cannot yet prove, that this is because men with ‘vigour’ problems who once placed their faith in penis soup have found that Viagra works rather better.” This is a very appealing story, though it may be too late to help the vanishing tiger and rhino populations. And besides, as we read on the TED site, “Tiger bone is used to cure rheumatism, muscle pain and paralysis. Rhino horn is prescribed for delirium.” It might well be said that rhino horn causes delirium. The extinction of the animal might ultimately be the only real cure for the devotion to the potion.

Get those weights out of the basement!

The cosmological conundrum of the missing mass is one of the great riddles of modern science. Imagine watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance in a movie. Then remove Fred from the movie frame by frame. What remains doesn’t make sense according to your intuition about how things should behave. You can tell that something is missing. Similarly, astrophysicists look at dancing galaxies and it just looks all wrong. Where is Fred? There are two guesses, both of which seem far-fetched at first viewing: lots of cold heavy dust that is mysteriously hard to see, or lots of zippy heavy particles that are mysteriously hard to see.

But there might be another answer. Perhaps the solution lies in your hometown, maybe even in your basement or under your sofa cushions. Americans for a Closed Universe is an organization that needs your help, because you or someone you know might have the vexatious missing mass and not even know it! Click to see how you can help.

The Show Me state sets us straight

Mikey O., denizen of Missouri and molecular biologist extraordinaire took issue with our most recent post. He writes:

Dearest Paracelsus,

I was reading through your weblog today with my wife and our au pair, and
was upset to see an erroneous message regarding the Isle of Capri in
Kansas. I would direct you to the Missouri Gaming Commissions regulations
on Riverboat Gambling:

http://www.sos.state.mo.us/adrules/csr/current/11csr/11c45-6.pdf

That’s right, you read it correctly: Riverboat Gambling. The Isle of
Capri is a “Riverboat” insofar as it is built in a basin of water and
functions as a “permanently moored platform” according to the U.S. Coast
Guard. We Missouri people call them “boats in moats.”

Even before the Commission imposed the exchange limit, the “player’s
passes” were required as “tickets” for the “excursion”, and some of the
casinos actually had to move players through in timed shifts to give the
appearance of leaving the dock.

So the Isle of Capri is a boat after all, despite Nabeel’s statement to the contrary. I have heard of this faux-riverboat phenomenon, and I understand there are places in Louisiana where a puddle of greasy water around a shed will make a passable riverboat for gambling purposes. It’s charming to think that what I used to consider my house is actually an exotic (though navigationally-impaired) permanently moored platform… so long as the dew is on the grass.

Guest Rambles from Kansas City

My friend Nabeel works with money professionally, making software for financial types. So it’s no surprise that when he went to Kansas City on a business trip that he ended up in a casino. Casinos in Kansas City? you may ask. But keep in mind that, although gambling used to be considered a vice, we like it now. Plus, Kansas City is no stranger to gambling. It was a wild place back in the Depression, when Tom Pendergast single-handedly ran the whole debauch. Despite the Prohibition, there was no shortage of booze or gambling. Pendergast’s power was such that he was able to name his man for the Senate in 1934: a former Kansas City haberdasher named Harry Truman.

Anyway, I asked Nabeel to fill me in on the dang deal in Kansas City, and this is what he said.

There’s a lot to do in Kansas City. Well, not really. But now you can gamble. There are probably lots of stories about riverboat gambling, but that’s all long gone now. The casinos I saw were built on solid ground, no need to be on the water to gamble. There may be riverboat casinos left, but the Isle of Capri (where I went) was on dry land.

What makes them interesting, however, is one of their rules (I believe it’s a legal requirement for casinos in Kansas and Missouri). To enter the casino floor, you must get a player’s card for the casino. Why? Whenever you exchange real money for chips, they take your player’s card and swipe it through their machine, recording the amount you’re trying to get. You are limited to exchanging no more than $500 in 3 hours; they won’t let you exchange more than that. Essentially, this caps your losses.

This gives casinos in Kansas a totally different feel than anywhere else. There are no “high-rollers” areas — if you can’t get more than $500 cash in 3 hours, you really can’t bet too big. Most tables I saw were $5 tables. This simple policy really changes the feel of being in the casino; it’s a lot less stressful.

Of course, they still end up with your money :)

Melvyn and Manson

On the night of Mr. Melvyn’s murder is a hypertext murder mystery, the sort of thing people got very excited about at the dawn of the HTML age. I remember very clearly there was a strong current of belief that hypertext fictional webs had the potential to be as rich and widespread a medium as the novel. Instead they became a novelty, and Mr. Melvyn’s murder illustrates why. The “story” is a complicated thread that winds through perhaps a few dozen character pages, including fictional creeps like Moe and Mr. Earl as well as cameos by the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and
Elton John. Each page has a portrait of one character and their part of the story. The story is convoluted, but the artwork is very good, so I clicked and clicked in an absent-minded sort of way, watching the pictures go by until I found Mr. Melvyn at the end of the maze. That by itself didn’t reveal the mystery, but I wasn’t motivated enough to go back and unravel it.

Serendipity brought me, in less than two week’s time, to a different web of pages in much the same format: the Manson Girl Info Center. The gruesome backstory of creeps linked together by murder is nonfiction this time, but the shape of the site is very similar to Mr. Melvyn’s. Despite this similarity, I was extremely compelled to read my way through the Manson Girl site. Why was Susan Atkins called Sadie? Did Squeaky Fromme really intend to kill President Ford? Why were these women so infamously dedicated to Charles Manson?

The hypertext format works well with facts, because the world is endless and complicated. But when it comes to stories, you long for a single burning fuse. The point here is not so much the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. The point is that I know the basic story of the Manson murders and am curious to learn about the context, whereas I don’t know why I should care that Mr. Melvyn was murdered, and so the labyrinth of background information is merely wearying.

Come fly with me

More joys of the Astronomy Picture of the Day, a.k.a. APOD. I think this must be one of the best (and most cost effective) public relations efforts ever managed by NASA. I used to work at NASA Ames Research Center, and I remember how important PR was, given their steady diet of taxpayer’s cash. It’s a good arrangement… I want to see cool space pictures, and NASA wants to show them to me for free. Last week APOD featured this: Liftoff With the Space Shuttle, which led me to a bonanza of online video here: STS – 112 Video Index (which is to say, videos from space shuttle mission 112, the most recent one). I really must insist that you take the time to download the movie that shows the view looking down from the external fuel tank as the shuttle takes off. You get an unbroken visual record as the shuttle moves steadily from one world to the next. First there is the familiar view as from an airplane of grasslands, beach, and ocean. Then after only 90 seconds (17 miles high! 2800 miles per hour!) the scene has become a view from space, with tiny clotted splotches of cloud painted flat against a dim Florida coastline. The last frame seen from this camera shows the soft curvature of the earth clearly highlighted against the black void beyond.

Before I leave the topic of APOD, I have to mention another title that caught my eye: October 24 – Gullies on Mars. Since my last name is Gulley, you can imagine I looked long and hard for a peek at my Martian cousins, but to no avail. Still, if their house is somewhere in the picture, they must have a marvelous view from their back yard.