Honesty is a scarce virtue in the public sphere.

I wish it were not so, but consider:

• political campaigns, where outright factual falsehoods are flung unpunished

• news broadcasts, which make routine the amplification of the trivial and banal

• advertising, which treats as acceptable the deliberate implantation of absurd love/fear associations

• law enforcement, which dedicates manpower to the selective enforcement of financially lucrative anti-sensical laws, while pretending to be motivated just by safety

Strangers who want something from you (vote / eyeballs / dollars / capitulation) have normalized the act of lying in order to get their way. It is no wonder that the “spot the hypocrite!” game has become so easy, that cynicism is everywhere. This is a cultural tragedy.

I am a big fan of the movie Airplane!. Today, I happened across its serious predecessor Airport.

“Airport” was one of a whole series of air disaster films created during the 1970s. They went from okay to stinkier than kerosene exhaust, much like the earth-destruction meteor/volcano/tornado cliche factories in the 1990s. “Airport” was perhaps the first of them, and thus the least bad. It featured real actors (Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin), and made some attempt at technical plausibility. Sure, the suicidal passenger was overly obvious, the bomb he carried was impossibly ineffectual, the pilot/controller/official suffered stress acted at the level of catatonia, and the emotional outbursts of the passengers plainly begged for spoofing by the Zucker/Abraham/Zucker trinity. But one thing they got right was the air traffic control matters.

It gave me shivers to hear on the TV snippets like this: “Global 1, descend and maintain flight level two niner zero, pilot’s discretion.”, “You are leaving my sector. Contact Toronto Center at one one seven point two.”, “Request precision approach radar approach.”, “On the glide slope, turn left heading two seven five.”, “If receiving no reports for five seconds, break off radar approach, climb straight ahead.”. It was the first time I saw real live clips of operating air traffic controller equipment in the sixties: the old approach radar screens, the awesome PAR screen.

Then it hit me. This film was made before I was born, but the air traffic system has barely changed. Those radio conversations could have occurred yesterday. I flew a PAR approach at Trenton just last year, and it sounded the same. It’s the same darned system, almost forty years later. Longevity of good design, like road traffic laws? Or technology stagnation?

Private pilots often have the luxury of cancelling flights when something is wrong. This luxury is also a burden.

In commercial operations, the decision of whether to fly or not is to some extent taken out of the pilot’s hands. Minimum equipment lists dictate aircraft imperfections that require its grounding. Operating certificates and internal policies may impose limits on flying conditions, load, crew count and duty hours. While the desire to complete the “mission” may be strong, the PIC discretion is limited. Scheduled operators usually have procedures and equipment that make a “no go” a very rare event.

In recreational flying, it is often the other way around. Collective wisdom on amateur pilot forums like the “rec.aviation” newsgroups appears to be to cancel a flight if it “feels” wrong in any way. That is believed to be the conservative way, though it comes with the opportunity cost of experience not collected. I have indeed cancelled a bunch of trips that in retrospect could have been safely flown. Since no one else seriously depended on these trips, little harm was done.

But at this moment, I have a dilemma. There is a five-hour Hope Air mission to fly today or tomorrow. Yesterday, the Aztec decided to indicate a failed left alternator. What to do? The considerations include:

• redundancy This airplane after all is a twin, and has two alternators. The odds of the other one dying during a trip are small. The stakes depend on other factors.

• excessive wear If a long flight is taken with only one alternator powering everything, it would be loaded more heavily than normal, causing it greater wear and tear. Flying through icing could require such additional electrical load that could quickly exceed the capabilities of a single alternator.

• weather If the flight requires crossing instrument conditions, the possible loss of electrical power is of much greater consequence than if it was purely visual. The weather is currently looking favourable for a mostly-VFR trip, but those are approximate, and Northern Ontario is relatively scarce in terms of diversionary airports, controller contact, and weather details.

• condition of dying alternator Some alternator failures are mild, and have no consequences other than the above (and of course a bite out of the chequebook). Some however are nasty. It is possible for an alternator to start disintegrating, due to looseness or bent parts, and eventually shed parts into the engine compartment during flight. This would cause a bad day. To tell the current condition of the dying alternator, mechanics are looking at it as we speak. But news is slow; they are busy with other aircraft; definitive information may not come forth in time.

• alternatives for patient There may or may not be alternative transportation available for this Hope Air patient. Just this time, contrary to David Megginson’s ground support experiences, it’s been hard to get in touch with the organization. If the mission was cancelled, a new medical appointment could take weeks or months to secure.

I suspect I missed a few, but even just these factors make the go/no-go decision complicated for this putatively recreational flyer.

I can hardly await the written form of Paul Martin’s latest reelection gambit. From what his minions are already talking about on TV this morning, I can’t help but support it Huh?

Am I nuts? No. From the blurbs so far, this iteration sounds the same as usual: the “total handgun ban” is to exempt people like “legitimate target shooters”, collectors, police, etc.. In other words, the people exempt from the ban are the exact same people already permitted to possess handguns.

So the “total handgun ban” is to effect whom exactly? One can only infer, and the campaigning politicians clearly imply, just one group: the criminals. And like motherhood and apple pie, who can possibly fail to support disarming criminals? Now all we need is for all criminals to please stand at the front of the class for a quick pat-down.

UPDATE @13:30:

This being campaign season, it is hard to take literally or assume much thought behind any particular slogan. Some of the new verbiage on the liberal party website gives a nasty hint that only “participants in genuine world-class sporting events such as the olympics” may be deemed “legitemate target shooters” for purposes of ban exemption. That is, they might play games with the term “legitimate” to strangle our little minority.

This topic of course poses a challenge to the conservative party. If they can find a way to “unwedge” this issue, it would help emasculate the naive gun phobia of the common urbanite. They could go along with their own “no guns for criminals” slogan, basically daring the liberals to go into an in-depth debate on the details: about who’s a criminal, what to do with the many law-abiding gun owners, and so on. The bulk of the population would tune out of the debate, treat the pinheaded “guns are bad” idea as carving no difference between the two frontrunner parties, and move on to other well-deserved wedgies.

Of all places, a Toronto Star article about the proposed handgun ban brought together for me a bunch of issues I’ve written about here.

The article argues that public policy should be evaluated based on its expected outcome, not its stated intentions. Pause a moment and think about that. It’s basic but it’s deep.

The neat thing about this idea is that it applies all over the place, not just to public policy. All the following truisms express the same respect (or disrespect) for reality:

truism	falsism
actions speak louder than words	it’s the thought that counts
criminals are bad	guns are bad
form a plan and follow it through1	pray and hope
fortune favours the prepared	buy these lucky charms
science is respectable	creationism is respectable
deliver a good product	create public relations buzz
make tough decisions	hold an opinion survey
steady management	announce new direction each week

Over a short time, many get away by internalizing the falsisms. They feel good. They are simple. However, feeling good and being simple are not necessary principles for operating within this universe.

In the real world, we have tough decisions about complex situations. We guess, we predict, and we may be right or wrong in the end. If we apply our minds, and honestly revise our ideas as experience accumulates, we can try to duplicate the success of the scientific enterprise in other spheres of life. We would have a whole lot less bullshit in the world.

¹ ‘cause that’s what Brian Boitano’d do.

My old colleague Ian Lance Taylor is not only a great software guy, but has an argumentation style that I wish I could more frequently emulate. Whether pondering technical or political subjects (see the blog and essays links), he has a calm, fair, honest tone that makes it impossible to come back at with a quick “you silly git!” jerk of a comment. I don’t agree with everything he says, but it’s intimidating trying to match wits with him.

Can it exist? Should it exist?

All the standard examples (parent-child, man-dog) fail to imagine the very real possibility of abuse. Children can turn into terrible criminals (after all, murderers have parents too), and can sufficiently disappoint their parents to emotionally disown them. (Pathetically, this appears not to have happened to multiple-sex/murderer Karla Homolka and her parents. “She was always a good girl.”) LIkewise, parents can perform abuse from the routine to the awful, which over time can shrink the hearts of children; turn the dominant feeling from love to fear.

As to the normative aspect of “unconditional love”: why would it be such a good thing? One may imagine it as a permanent substrate of a relationship, and infer that it is invincible. Instead of earning it, polishing it, strengthening it every day, one may presume it, enabling an attitude of recklessness. Likewise, from the point of view of the recepient of “poor-quality” love, being told to nevertheless offer unconditional love is tantamount to promoting Stockholm Syndrome. It is not healthy to be uncritical.

As the punchline about the physics of Santa Claus, if there ever was unconditional love amongst the living, it is gone now.

Both Ian and Graydon have talked about the matter of cars and suburbia. I am not an expert in urban philosophy, but I might risk one small insight.

Both gentleman have expressed fondness for public transit, preferring to ride a bus instead of a car, though in a different way. Graydon thinks cars isolate people from their surroundings by glass and velocity. Ian finds a little familiar society on buses.

To me, the urban social contact found while walking along on a street, or riding along in a bus, is not substantial. There is only potential interaction. In a crowded downtown as in a crowded bus, people will just be passing through to their real destination, while being metaphorically or actually enclosed together. The group that forms from such incidental co-enclosure is not a miniscule family to gather comfort from – it is just a mellowed-out mob of anonymous passerbys.

My current favorite objection to mass transit is the self-disempowerment that this entails. A passenger relinquishes direct control over one’s travels, the safety of one’s person, and hands it to the driver/pilot. He surrenders his preferences to the logistic constraints involved in serving the aggregate demand. It is a little like going to a supermarket to pick from a standard menu of mass-produced food. He is depending on the system.

Driving is a little like farming in terms of being the reward and burden of individual effort. They still depend on infrastructure (fuel, roads, maintenance), but these are less immediate, more easily substituted by one’s own efforts. They cut a tangible umbilical cord between the individual and the impersonal society at large. I like that.

After a few days of work, sourceware’s new web search engine, mnogosearch is running.

Because of FSF political reasons, two separate installations / databases spider sourceware.org and gcc.gnu.org. The transition from htDig is not yet complete: it still runs sometimes, and there are still links to it from e.g., mail archive web pages. We’ll get to those soon.

The performance is so-so. mnogosearch uses a mysql database runing on a nearby dedicated computer for all its data. This was necessary because a local database incurred too great an additional load on the sourceware machine. This unfortunately means lots of tcp traffic going back and forth, especially during indexing. Search results are cached, so if you all look for “silly frank”, only the first person will get to pay the full waiting price.

Here are some interesting (?) statistics.

parameter	sourceware	gcc.gnu.org
mnogosearch version	3.2.25	3.2.25
mysql database size	11GB	18GB
number of documents	711000	974000
initial index run	24 hours	72 hours
refresh time	5 hours	8 hours

GIve it a try and enjoy. Let us know on the overseers mailing list what you think of it.

This morning, our one-year-old brat solved the common puzzler: what’s the sound of one hand clapping?

The setup: Eric already entertaining himself with a flashlight. His fine motor skills starting to show, he’s able to control a teeny spring-loaded button to turn on the light. We reward him with a little clap. Then kicks in that other reflex of similar aged little people: clapping back. But he does not want to let the flashlight go, resulting in only a single spare hand.

About to clap, he realizes something is wrong. He looks at his hands, one then the other. Then a smile as he comes up with a solution: He uses his free hand to slap on his own face. It makes a sound.

It can’t be helped. Sometimes good people leave to go work elsewhere. How does the truncated organization react?

It seems like often the organization doesn’t react at all. After the announcements have been sent, future email addresses exchanged, good wishes passed and last minute cleanups done, what to do?

To the organization just left behind, even if the impending loss is severe, this cannot be dwelled upon. For the sake of continuity, and preservation of collective self-esteem, the company must not go into shock. The job is now to minimize the negative effects, to continue as if nothing happened. Some places take this to attitude to the limit, and don’t announce departures at all, beyond those people who grudgingly take over the orphaned responsibilities. Sometimes they pretend that the person was never needed after all, not bothering to search for a replacement.

Consider if the person left because of perceived systemic problems, being a martyr of sorts. Except in extreme cases, those left behind won’t instantly focus blame on those problems. Most won’t have been aware of the details, and will feel insulted. Those who know of the details will likely be employees at the same level or below, so even if sympathetic, can’t possibly rouse a revolution. Those causing the problems may breathe a sigh of relief in losing a critic, and continue the status quo.

Consider instead if the person left not because of unhappiness here, but because of a better opportunity elsewhere. Those left behind may still resent it, unable to imagine a better place, or else just feel unconscious envy. And betrayed double-woe upon an ex-employee perceived as joining “the enemy”.

Are there more “enlightened” companies out there, ones that don’t behave naturally like spurned lovers?

Several European countries are putting together a GPS-type satellite service of their own. But why?

From this article at the BBC, even proponents realize that “Galileo is a political project.”. There is an element in European politics that can’t stand to go without something the bigger countries already have (and are already sharing). The billions of euros of tax money going to local high-tech companies is being justified by a variety of reasons of mixed plausibility. Some of it descends into laughable propaganda.

“GPS is not good enough for safety-critical purposes like landing planes”. They better tell that to the thousands of North American aircraft that have been using GPS for navigation for a decade, and precise ILS-type landings for a year or so. Even though GPS signal coverage is fine worldwide, European aviation regulatory bodies have not embraced it. One may speculate that this is not for lack of data (decades of experience) or suggestion that the US military might deliberately degrade signal there (despite their own needs), but rather that there exists no major European manufacturer of GPS receiving equipment whom indirectly to support with such regulatory blessings.

From reading the ESA web page, they gloat that the assessed “cost/benefit ratio of 4.6 is higher than any other infrastructure project in Europe”. Ironically for a publication of a supremely technical organization, a high cost/benefit ratio is a bad thing. (One should desire maximum benefit at minimal cost, making an ideal cost/benefit ratio small. Same thing with “price/performance”.) While one may excuse this as a mere typo, I suspect it is a Freudian slip admitting that this government-funded body honestly believes that high cost (== higher budgets) is a good thing.

Well, whatever rationale they have constructed, it appears to have been good enough for their electorate. Maybe it will be completed on schedule (2010). Maybe I’ll get to use it, if real technical advantages justify purchasing the necessary new equipment. Or maybe it will become a good target for mild snickers from abroad. We’ll check back in a few years.

Lordy lordy, I still hear some ignorant Americans and others talk about the “failed attempt to impeach” Bill Clinton. In fact Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998, but not because he lied to “the american people” about his sex life. It was because he and conspirators lied to a court holding a sexual harassment trial against him.

Canadian commentator Mark Steyn collects a “best of” from his hundreds of articles this year in an online summary (part 1, part 2). His political, comic, and elocution sensibilities tickle me giggly.