james_nicoll

There's a very good reason why the word prorogue doesn't come up that often in our society. Why would it? The word has absolutely no resonance with anyone in Canada because the notion that you can shut down anything for months at a time is a total fantasy. That's the thing about life; it's relentless. If you are an adult and live in the real world, proroguing isn't on the agenda, in much the same way levitating isn't.

bruce_schneier

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/gift_cards_and.html

Retail theft by employees has always been a problem, but gift cards make it easier:

At the Saks flagship store in Manhattan, a 23-year-old sales clerk was caught recently ringing up $130,000 in false merchandise returns and siphoning the money onto a gift card.

[...]

Many of the gift card crimes are straightforward, frequently involving young sales clerks and smaller amounts than the Saks theft. Among the variations of such crimes, cashiers often do fake refunds of merchandise and then, with the amount refunded, use their registers to electronically fill gift cards, which they take. Or sometimes when shoppers buy gift cards, cashiers give them blank cards and then divert the shoppers' money onto cards for themselves.

That last tactic is particularly Grinch-like.

someposifeed

http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp01072010.shtml

If there are any problems with the comic or website, or if you have any questions, comments, or complaints you would like to address directly to Randy, please email him at choochoobear@gmail.com.

sinfestfeed

http://www.cartoonlabs.com/comics/index.php?date=2010-01-07&show=sinfest

Sinfest
Tatsuya Ishida

makinglight

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012091.html

A few lines from Wikipedia’s summary of the anime film TAMALA2010: A Punk Cat in Space:

The film is in a large part a cartoon cat version of Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49 […] It begins in Meguro City, Tokyo, Cat Earth, a world of corporations and commercialism, where a giant mechanical Colonel Sanders wanders through streets with an axe embedded in its head repeating an advertisement for meat over a loudspeaker.

(via Calamity Jon)

Also, looking over Pynchon’s page on Wikiquote has me determined to finally get around to reading Gravity’s Rainbow. Might need new glasses for Against the Day, though.

And hey, look:

“If America was a person, — and it sat down, — Lancaster town would be plunged into a Darkness unbreathable.” — Mason & Dixon (1997)

“If the U.S. was a person,” he later became fond of saying, “and it sat down, Columbus, Ohio would instantly be plunged into darkness” — Against the Day (2006)

sluggy_feed

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/sluggy_freelance/~3/rz4P4hPvqDI/COMIC100107

Ads by Project Wonderful! Your ad could be here, right now.

dieselsweet

http://www.dieselsweeties.com/archive/2453

makinglight

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012090.html

As further proof of Jim Henley’s boast that SF&F geek culture is the new mainstream, the NY Times has run an article about something bored role-playing gamers have been doing ever since the white box days: Packing dice together in odd configurations.

I look forward to the upcoming five-part series investigating the world of doodling on graph paper and quoting Monty Python.

bruce_schneier

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/nate_silver_on.html

Over at fivethirtyeight.com, Nate Silver crunches the numbers and concludes that, at least as far as terrorism is concerned, air travel is safer than it's ever been:

In the 2000s, a total of 469 passengers (including crew and terrorists) were killed worldwide as the result of Violent Passenger Incidents, 265 of which were on 9/11 itself. No fatal incidents have occurred since nearly simultaneous bombings of two Russian aircraft on 8/24/2004; this makes for the longest streak without a fatal incident since World War II. The overall death toll during the 2000s is about the same as it was during the 1960s, and substantially less than in the 1970s and 1980s, when violent incidents peaked. The worst individual years were 1985, 1988 and 1989, in that order; 2001 ranks fourth.

Of course, there is a lot more air travel now than there was a couple of decades ago. Although worldwide data is difficult to obtain, U.S. air travel generally expanded at rates of 10-15% per year from the 1930s through 9/11. If we assume that U.S. air traffic represents about a third of the worldwide total (the U.S. share of global GDP, which is probably a reasonable proxy, has fairly consistently been between 26-28% during this period), we can estimate the number of deaths from Violent Passenger Incidents per one billion passenger boardings. By this measure, the 2000s tied the 1990s for being the safest on record, each of which were about six times safer than any previous decade. About 22 passengers per one billion enplanements were killed as the result of VPIs during the 2000s; this compares with a rate of about 191 deaths per billion enplanements during the 1960s.

Why? Because over the past decade, the risk of airplane terrorism is very low:

Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.

These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 mles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.

Assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles per hour, these airplanes were aloft for a total of 163,331,261 hours. Therefore, there has been one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours airborne. This can also be expressed as one incident per 1,134,245 days airborne, or one incident per 3,105 years airborne.

There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.

In 2008, 37,000 people died in automobile accidents -- the lowest number since 1961. Even so, that's more than a 9/11 worth of fatalities every month, month after month, year after year.

There are all sorts of psychological biases that cause us to both misjudge risk and overreact to rare risks, but we can do better than that if we stop and think rationally.

goats_comic

http://www.goats.com/archive/100106.html

bruce_schneier

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/david_brooks_on.html

David Brooks makes some very good points in this New York Times op ed from last week:

All this money and technology seems to have reduced the risk of future attack. But, of course, the system is bound to fail sometimes. Reality is unpredictable, and no amount of computer technology is going to change that. Bureaucracies are always blind because they convert the rich flow of personalities and events into crude notations that can be filed and collated. Human institutions are always going to miss crucial clues because the information in the universe is infinite and events do not conform to algorithmic regularity.

[...]

In a mature nation, President Obama could go on TV and say, “Listen, we’re doing the best we can, but some terrorists are bound to get through.” But this is apparently a country that must be spoken to in childish ways. The original line out of the White House was that the system worked. Don’t worry, little Johnny.

When that didn’t work the official line went to the other extreme. “I consider that totally unacceptable,” Obama said. I’m really mad, Johnny. But don’t worry, I’ll make it all better.

[...]

For better or worse, over the past 50 years we have concentrated authority in centralized agencies and reduced the role of decentralized citizen action. We’ve done this in many spheres of life. Maybe that’s wise, maybe it’s not. But we shouldn’t imagine that these centralized institutions are going to work perfectly or even well most of the time. It would be nice if we reacted to their inevitable failures not with rabid denunciation and cynicism, but with a little resiliency, an awareness that human systems fail and bad things will happen and we don’t have to lose our heads every time they do.

There's a pervasive belief in this society that perfection is possible. So if something bad occurs, it can never be because we just got unlucky. It must be because something went wrong and someone is at fault, and then things must be fixed. Sometimes, though, this simply isn't true. Sometimes it's better not to fix things: either there is no fix, or the fix is more expensive than living with the problem, or the side effects of the fix are worse than the problem. And sometimes you can do everything right and have it still turn out wrong. Welcome to the real world.

bruce_schneier

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/tsa_logo_contes.html

Over at "Ask the Pilot," Patrick Smith has a great idea:

Calling all artists: One thing TSA needs, I think, is a better logo and a snappy motto. Perhaps there's a graphic designer out there who can help with a new rendition of the agency's circular eagle-and-flag motif. I'm imagining a revised eagle, its talons clutching a box cutter and a toothpaste tube. It says "Transportation Security Administration" around the top. Below are the three simple words of the TSA mission statement: "Tedium, Weakness, Farce."

Let's do it. I'm announcing the TSA Logo Contest. Rules are simple: create a TSA logo. People are welcome to give ideas in the comments, but only actual created logos are eligible to compete. (When my website administrator wakes up, I'll ask him how we can post images in the comments.) Contest ends on February 6th. Winner receives copies of my books, copies of Patrick Smith's book, an empty 12-ounce bottle labeled "saline" that you can refill and get through any TSA security checkpoint, and a fake boarding pass on any flight for any date.

EDITED TO ADD (1/6): Please leave links to your submissions in the comments, and I will add them to the post. After the contest is over, I'll choose five finalists and post them. The winner will be chosen by popular acclaim.

Here's the first entry (click to enlarge):