Live from Austin!

The "cell phone electromagnetic fields are giving you cancer" people have a new target: now it’s hybrid cars that are going to kill you. The NYT gasps:

While Americans live with E.M.F.’s all around — produced by everything from cellphones to electric blankets — there is no broad agreement over what level of exposure constitutes a health hazard, and there is no federal standard that sets allowable exposure levels.

Yeah, that may be because nobody’s ever managed to reliably, scientifically demonstrate a negative health effect from everyday electromagnetic fields applied to human beings.

Testing with a TriField meter led Brian Collins of Encinitas, Calif., to sell his 2001 Honda Insight just six months after he bought it — at a loss of $7,000. He said the driver was receiving “dangerously high” E.M.F. levels of up to 135 milligauss at the hip and up to 100 milligauss at the upper torso.

Who is this Brian Collins? Given the way the NYT quotes his verdict that 135 milligauss is "dangerously high", I hope he’s a scientist. Wouldn’t want to think the NYT was scaremongering, eh?

Let’s go back to 1995 and see what the NYT had to say about electric fields then:

The world’s largest group of physicists, the American Physical Society, has taken a stance on a contentious public health issue by saying it can find no evidence that the electromagnetic fields that radiate from power lines cause cancer. [...]

By comparison, at a distance of one foot, home appliances radiate fields from about 1 to 280 milligauss, the highest figure being for an electric can opener. [...] The earth’s magnetic field, which humans are constantly exposed to, is about 500 milligauss.

Oh well. I guess that means Brian Collins is just a random crackpot with an EMF meter then.

So, if you’re worried about the electric field given off by a hybrid car, make sure you do all your laundry by hand, leave the planet as soon as possible, and for god’s sake don’t use an electric can opener.

Me, I use the phone in the car. I’m crazy that way. Yet my blood pressure has dropped over the last few years. You know what raises it, though? Stupid scaremongering.

From the Wall St Journal:

 Up until two years ago, only 15 of Indiana’s 92 counties set their clocks an hour ahead in the spring and an hour back in the fall. The rest stayed on standard time all year, in part because farmers resisted the prospect of having to work an extra hour in the morning dark. But many residents came to hate falling in and out of sync with businesses and residents in neighboring states and prevailed upon the Indiana Legislature to put the entire state on daylight-saving time beginning in the spring of 2006.

Indiana’s change of heart gave University of California-Santa Barbara economics professor Matthew Kotchen and Ph.D. student Laura Grant a unique way to see how the time shift affects energy use. Using more than seven million monthly meter readings from Duke Energy Corp., covering nearly all the households in southern Indiana for three years, they were able to compare energy consumption before and after counties began observing daylight-saving time. Readings from counties that had already adopted daylight-saving time provided a control group that helped them to adjust for changes in weather from one year to the next.

Their finding: Having the entire state switch to daylight-saving time each year, rather than stay on standard time, costs Indiana households an additional $8.6 million in electricity bills. They conclude that the reduced cost of lighting in afternoons during daylight-saving time is more than offset by the higher air-conditioning costs on hot afternoons and increased heating costs on cool mornings.

“I’ve never had a paper with such a clear and unambiguous finding as this,” says Mr. Kotchen, who presented the paper at a National Bureau of Economic Research conference this month.

A 2007 study by economists Hendrik Wolff and Ryan Kellogg of the temporary extension of daylight-saving in two Australian territories for the 2000 Summer Olympics also suggested the clock change increases energy use.

So there we have it. Dicking around with the clocks twice a year and making life awkward for software developers is not only a waste of time, it’s also a waste of energy and money, at least in places where people have air conditioning in summer.

In Chicago, the police are asking loyal citizens to report anyone seen using a map or binoculars, or taking photographs.

Meanwhile in California, police are stopping drivers who have done nothing wrong in order to compliment their driving and give them $5 gift vouchers.

Both of these seem to me to be misguided. The former is obviously nutty; do they really want the 911 dispatchers bothered by some paranoid who just saw someone take a picture of Chicago’s art deco architecture?

The latter I can understand the motivation behind, but I can’t help wondering how many recipients will feel that the gift voucher is worth  the stress and/or anger of being pulled over. And for a US cop, any time you stop a vehicle, you’re risking your life; I can imagine them stopping a good driver who happens to have a car full of drugs, and having him freak out and start shooting.

The Guardian:

In recent years networking sites like MySpace and Facebook have seen remarkable growth and become some of the most heavily trafficked destinations on the internet. But Danah Boyd, a researcher at the University of California and internet sociologist, says populations of different networks are now divided on a rough class basis.

Her evidence, collected through a series of interviews with US teenagers using MySpace and Facebook over the past nine months, shows there is a clear gap between the populations of each site.

“MySpace was the cool thing for high school teens and Facebook was the cool thing for college students,” she wrote in a paper available online. “The picture is now being blurred … it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class.”Typical Facebook users, she said, “tend to come from families who emphasise education and going to college. They are primarily white, but not exclusively”. MySpace, on the other hand, “is still home for Latino and Hispanic teens, immigrant teens” as well as “other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm”.
[...]
“A month ago, the military banned MySpace but not Facebook. This was a very interesting move because there’s a division, even in the military. Soldiers are on MySpace; officers are on Facebook.”

According to Ms Boyd, Facebook is not used by young soldiers, who are generally less well-educated and from poorer backgrounds, and there is an element of social conflict in the ban.

So, MySpace is Facebook for the uneducated?

InfoUSA is a list broker, a company that aggregates personal data and sells it to telemarketers and catalog sales companies. The New York Times reports:

InfoUSA advertised lists of “Elderly Opportunity Seekers,” 3.3 million older people “looking for ways to make money,” and “Suffering Seniors,” 4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. “Oldies but Goodies” contained 500,000 gamblers over 55 years old, for 8.5 cents apiece. One list said: “These people are gullible. They want to believe that their luck can change.”

So InfoUSA actually sells lists of suckers deliberately selected for their gullibility. You might be wondering who buys these lists. Well, the NYT investigated.

InfoUSA sold [one list] dozens of times, to companies including HMS Direct, which Canadian authorities had sued the previous year for deceptive mailings; Westport Enterprises, the subject of consumer complaints in Kansas, Connecticut and Missouri; and Arlimbow, a European company that Swiss authorities were prosecuting at the time for a lottery scam.

[...]

Records also indicate that infoUSA sold thousands of other elderly Americans’ names to Windfall Investments after the F.B.I. had accused the company in 2002 of stealing $600,000 from a California woman.

Between 2001 and 2004, infoUSA also sold lists to World Marketing Service, a company that a judge shut down in 2003 for running a lottery scam; to Atlas Marketing, which a court closed in 2006 for selling $86 million of bogus business opportunities; and to Emerald Marketing Enterprises, a Canadian firm that was investigated multiple times but never charged with wrongdoing.

The story goes on to reveal that according to internal e-mails, InfoUSA knew some of their customers were scammy, but continued to sell them lists of sick and/or gullible elderly people to exploit.

Update: InfoUSA have put out a press release giving us their side of the story. My summary: “We’re not selling lists of suckers any more, we sold that part of the business. Plus, the authorities didn’t find us criminally liable, and anyway it was a long time ago.”

Microwave popcorn uses an artificial butter flavoring called diacetyl.

Numerous studies have now linked diacetyl fume inhalation to a rare condition called bronchiolitis obliterans, in which the bronchioles of the lungs get blocked by masses of fibrous tissue.

The problem has been known about since 1999, but so far federal agencies haven’t done anything. There’s now a bill in California proposing to ban diacetyl by 2010.

The Delve Special episode “Food for Thought” just seems more and more relevant as the years go by.  Random quote: “Everyone has to die of something, so it might as well be something delicious.”

Thank you, Bush administration. I’ve just been required to spend the most mind-numbing couple of hours carefully reading page after page of ethical guidelines. Rules that should be blatantly obvious to anyone with any ethical sense whatsoever. It’s all about ensuring that I don’t do things like take Dick Cheney out to the Country Club in order to get juicy government contracts on a no-bid basis, or organize a price-fixing system to defraud California.

Apparently some government agencies no longer allow their employees to accept any free food or drink from contractors. There’s a written notice I have to make sure is displayed before I offer any government employee coffee or a doughnut. If I’d known public officials were that cheap…

Much as I appreciate the problem, I can’t help despairing of a world where there’s a need to tell people “You are prohibited from engaging in fraud”. The course material even then goes on to define the term, enumerating examples. Perhaps at some point someone said “What, false invoices are fraud? Fraud isn’t allowed? Nobody told me!”

I’ve beem thinking about how one can actually spot shady businesses. It’s not as easy as it initially seems—there are plenty of dodgy retailers that manage to look totally legitimate, and there are plenty of good companies that you might assume to be crooks because (for instance) they don’t list any kind of address online.

For example, if you’ve ever shopped online for camera equipment, or browsed the ads in magazines, you’ve probably seen lots of stores in New York selling photo equipment at way below MSRP.

Don Wiss decided to start a project to photograph the actual storefronts of all the discount camera businesses in NY and NJ. He has put the photo gallery on his web site.

For instance, I’ve seen legit-looking ads from Cambridge Camera in magazines, so it’s interesting (ahem) to see their actual business premises.

In the UK we call these places “box shifters”. They all used to collect along Tottenham Court Road in London, though that may have changed.

The problem is that not every obscure online store in Brooklyn offering amazingly low prices is run by crooks. I bought our new TV from Best Buy Plasma in Brooklyn. It arrived promptly, in perfect condition, and has made me very happy; so Best Buy Plasma are clearly not to be confused with PC And Plasma.

Similarly, HKFlix are legit and knowledgeable (in my experience), even though it seems to be almost impossible to find out where they’re actually located. (No address on the site, domain hosting points to Hawaii, stuff ships from California.)

Generally speaking, I’ve been able to shop online and save a ton of money and not get ripped off. But I don’t think I could write down a set of objective criteria for working out if a vendor is honest; it’s usually an intuitive decision for me. I do a bunch of research, but ultimately there’s some kind of non-logical synthesis of the available information.

During the Great Prius Hunt, I joined several web forums to try and pick up leads and get advice. I noticed that a lot of the discussions ended up resembling the Monty Python “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch…

SFGuy14: Lovely car, the Prius. Of course, it wasn’t easy to buy one.

carguy30: No, and a lovely car because it’s hard to buy one.

mpg55plus: I remember waiting 8 months for my dealer to get my Prius.

green14: Ha! You were lucky. It took my dealer 6 months to get me on the waiting list, and then I had to wait another 12 months.

carguy30: But we were happy to wait.

SFGuy14: Yes, we were…but when my Prius came in the dealer sold it to someone else, and made me start waiting all over again.

mpg55plus: You got off lightly. When my Prius turned up at the dealership, it only had three wheels.

green14: What, three wheels? Luxury. Our Prius had no wheels. We had to carry it home on our backs and wait for the wheels to be shipped to us. And we had to pay extra for the shipping.

SFGuy14: We had to pay extra, and we had to give the dealer a non-refundable deposit of $4000 in small unmarked bills in a brown envelope.

carguy30: At least you only had to pay extra. My Toyota dealer wouldn’t let me take delivery until he’d slept with my wife.

mpg55plus: I’ve met your wife and that’s a bargain.

SFGuy14: Well, here in California it’s not that easy to get a Prius. My dealer made me toss his salad.

carguy30: Made you what?

mpg55plus: Right…let’s see…My great grandfather put me on the waiting list to get on the Prius waiting list just after Otto Benz invented the 4-stroke internal combustion engine in 1867. After that I had to wait four years and pay a non-refundable bribe of half a kilo of finest Columbian. A year after that when the car arrived, it said “batteries not included”, so I had to buy 1,000 nickel metal hydride batteries at Radio Shack and fit them myself. And when I took delivery of the car, the dealer gave me a golden shower.

green14: Yeah, and you tell people you went through all that to get a midsize car, and they call you a lunatic.

The SciFi Channel is showing Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 starring John Travolta, and the ReplayTV is recording it. Normally I don’t watch TV-broadcast movies, but in this case I’m prepared to make an exception, because the only reason I want to watch Battlefield Earth is to see if it’s truly as awful as almost every single reviewer says it is.

If you believe IMDB, Battlefield Earth rates 2.4 out of 10. The worst movie I have ever seen in my entire life is Xanadu, and the IMDB voters give that 4.3 out of 10.

Xanadu is a musical about Greek gods returning to California and opening a magical disco roller rink. It has a lead actor who cannot even begin to act, for whom this was his finest hour. It has special effects which would have be charming if they were filmed in Super-8 by Mike Jittlov, but are just jarringly cheap and unconvincing in something that was supposed to be a major motion picture. It is so awful it make me cringe with embarrassment for the people who appeared in it; it forever soiled my enjoyment of a couple of perfectly good ELO songs.

So, can Battlefield Earth be significantly more awful than that? I’m very skeptical. I will, of course, post an update when I get around to watching it.