I've always been a fan of Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken." It suggests an approach to life that I aspire to:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
A traveler down that road would undoubtedly be marching to her own drumbeat. And as I recently discovered, that image comes to us, courtesy of the Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. I'm no authority on Thoreau, but from what I know of him, I'd have to guess that this quote from Walden probably expresses his quintessence:
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
So Sidharta! I like an extended version of that passage, as well:
"Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute?"
As a public service, I thought I'd provide a little forensic analysis of an incident I experienced yesterday. The punchline is: when in doubt about the legitimacy of a web site, try a whois search.
Annapurna was very excited yesterday evening at receiving an email that purported to be from the school of her choice, encouraging her to request admission info from them.
Now, let me say from the start, that I think that said school would be very wise to encourage her to apply, and I think it not unlikely that it will in time be brought to its senses and will ultimately send her a supplication to grace it with an application and a $50 application fee.
But that may not be what she got yesterday.
No. This was a college admissions phishing email. It said,
Based on your achievements thus far, I invite you now to request our viewbook [with a link to...well...you'll hear more about that later], Within its pages you will discover the countless ways our dynamic campus in [city of School of Choice] can educate, invigorate and inspire you.
Sincerely,
[Real name of Dean]
Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid
P.S. We also offer one of the most generous need-based financial aid programs in the country. We received your contact information from the Student Search Service of the College Board.
Flattering, no? Who could resist clicking on that magic link? And if you did, you'd see a page that looked like something the School-of-Choice might put together, complete with school colors, logos, links to legitimate pages at School-of-Choice, etc.
Here's how I got in this story.
I had heard Annapurna going on for a while about the invitation, but I didn't pay much attention. She's gotten enough legitimate solicitations for applications that in my books this one was no biggie. It was when she started pestering me about "Should I put your email or Dad's?" that I started to tune in. I was like, "What? What do they want MY email for???" My spam detector was buzzing.
Dawn's Helpful Hint (DHH) #1: when a site that already has YOUR email and has already taken the liberty of establishing a relationship with you, they probably don't have any legitimate reason to be asking for anyone else's email address or contact info UNLESS you are in some very, very official process (like an actual college application or providing death benefits information). Whenever you get a request for someone else's info, your scam detector should go off. Before you supply the information ALWAYS think very carefully...does this site REALLY need this? Really? Why??? And would that person get upset if I gave out their information?
Further investigation showed that the link went to something that looked like it might be related to School-of-Choice, but wasn't quite right. Let's pretend that the URL for School-of-Choice is http://www.soc.edu. This thing went to http://www.soc-admin.org.
DHH #2: universities almost always use a .edu If you see something purporting to be from a university but doesn't end in .edu...be suspicious.
DHH #3: when in doubt about whether a web page is associated with a large organization like a university or a bank, try to get there from the home page of the organization. In this case, we went to http://www.soc.edu, and of course the normal admissions pages we got to from there had nothing to do with http://www.soc-admin.org.
And here's the piece de resistance:
DHH #4: You can always get some pretty interesting information about who really owns the site by performing a WHOIS search. Network Solutions provides a reasonable one. For example, if you do a whois search on mtsd.us, you will find
Registrant Name: Thomas DeSisto
Registrant Organization: Montgomery Township Board of Education
Registrant Address1: 1014 RT. 601
Registrant City: Skillman
Registrant State/Province: NJ
Registrant Postal Code: 08558
Registrant Country: United States
Registrant Country Code: US
Registrant Phone Number: +1.6094667182
Looks pretty legit for Montgomery, no? But when we did that whois search on that soc-admin.org, we found it was registered by one Royall and Company in Virginia. Nowhere near School-of-Choice. Not surprisingly, when we combed through Annapurna's email for the assorted solicitations she has received over the past few months, many, many of them contained links to websites registered by that very same Royall and Company.
So why does Royall and Company want to pretend to be assorted gourmet universities? I don't know. I'm not Royall and Company. Their web site indicates that they do direct marketing for student recruitment. So maybe I'm being too cynical and these universities really have hired Royall to reach out to students who fit some profile or other. Or maybe they want to sell mom and dad's email address to banks looking to make student loans. Or both. I can't tell.
I just finished watching the 1999 version of Mansfield Park. (I started watching it on Netflix and then they did a weird bait and switch on me, and decided it was no longer available as a Watch Now option. But the movie was so intriguing that I had to get it out of the library.)
Now, I think I've mentioned previously, that I kind of hate Mansfield Park. I'm very sorry to say such a thing about an Austen piece, but so it is. What I hate most about it is that Fanny is such a prissy, passive, mousy, helpless thing, unlike most of her other heroines. So I was roped in by the movie on seeing an utterly different sort of creature, a girl with imagination, wit, and spirit.
Unfortunately, despite the inspiring take on Fanny and fabulous acting by all, I found the movie a little annoying. It took huge liberties with the plot and characterizations, which would have been fine, had the script been stronger. Since I kept comparing it to the book, it's a little hard for me to say, but I think the plot would not quite stand on its own.
I found it particularly hilarious that on the DVD cover, it says, "For everyone who loved 'Emma' and 'Sense & Sensibility' comes the story Jane Austen loved best." I am 99.9% certain that Jane would have disapproved of this movie.
Inspired by the film, I'm re-reading the book, and I still dislike it. However, I did notice that it used the phrase "life of the party," which I would have guessed to be of much more recent origin.
So regardless of its faults, on balance, I still think I like the movie better than the book. Which is something I can rarely say.
Rush's obscene comments are based either on a profound ignorance of how most woman-based contraception works, or on a profound cynicism about the American public's ignorance of how it works. Or (since we're talking about Rush, here) both.
I'm a computer scientist, so let me put it in computer science terms.
Cost of the most popular male-based contraceptives (i.e. condoms): O(n), where n is the number of sexual encounters. (Withdrawal not included.)
For non-computer scientists: to oversimplify somewhat, a function f(n) is O(n) if it is roughly proportional to n. In other words, as you increase n, you also increase f(n). A function f(n) is O(1) if it really doesn't matter how big n gets, it's always the same value. A good example of an O(n) function might be cost-of-gas-per-week as a function of number of miles driven. As the number of miles goes up, so does the amount I'm paying for gas (assuming prices don't drop). An example of an O(1) function: price-per-gallon as a function of the number of miles driven. It really doesn't matter how many miles I'm driving -- the cost per gallon remains the same.
Which brings me back to Rush. He thought he was being so clever with accusing Ms. Fluke of having so much sex that she couldn't afford to pay for it. Whereas for most forms of birth control that are fully in a woman's control (and I think that last bit is significant), it really doesn't matter whether you're getting it once an hour or (as primly as Rush or Rick could desire) conceding it once a year...the cost is the same. And it's jolly expensive, even for once a year.
Which is in stark contrast to the most popular male method: pay per use, and a fraction of the cost of the dinner/movie that precedes its use.
Why is that?
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that we're having this national conversation about who pays for birth control. Who wants to pay more to let women have control?
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Good piece on the importance of locally grown food.
The notion of importing fruits and vegetables, the idea of having everything “fresh” all the time, was until recently inconceivable and is likely to become so again, as production and transportation costs rise and the absurdity of the “system” becomes evident even to those who now profit from it. When we ignore large-scale production of local food we invite apocalypse, or at least food shortages.
I always wonder about those $1.79 strawberry specials in December.
A couple of years back, BBC reported that public sanitation was considered by doctors the best medical advance in over a century. It's really sad that it's not available for a large portion of the world. Toilet technology improvements could really make inroads into that. In particular, the ability to process sewage locally, with minimal access to water infrastructure could make huge improvements in quality of life.
Apart from health considerations, the other big benefit they are looking into is use of raw sewage for energy generation (possibly using the energy for processing the waste, to recover water and minerals). Why should it only be cattle whose waste products produce power?
