It didn’t really get a huge amount of coverage, and what coverage has existed leaves a huge number of questions unanswered:

Yang worked for TRADOC as an analyst, before his security clearance - and thus his job, apparently - were revoked because of “alleged security violations”. What kind of security violations are we talking about, here?

What was the “restricted Army field manual” he had on him? FM-what-dot-what?

How “restricted” was it? Secret? or just FOUO, NOFORN, or some similar sensitive-but-unclassified markings?

Was the airport screening truly random, or was he singled out for screening as part of an ongoing security investigation?

Why in God’s name would someone try to smuggle electronic files out of the country on an unencrypted flash drive? Has Yang never heard of the internet? (Most FMs are 3-12MB in size; easily sent via e-mail.)

I find it very, very interesting that the file in question was found by CBP screeners. As far as I am aware this is one of the first high-profile instances of CBP’s highly controversial egress searches of electronic media to make the news, and possibly the first to actually turn up something of (potential) criminal interest, even if that aspect has largely been overlooked.

I also find it very interesting that news reports refer only to a “restricted” field manual, and not a “classified” one. The distinction is important - being charged with theft for possessing something merely FOUO or otherwise restricted in distribution, rather than for possessing something actualy lawfully classified, could set an extremely chilling precedent for the government…

I noted with considerable personal interest the remarkable ingenuity and problem-solving skills you displayed last night when you “mowed” your entire lawn, between eight-fifteen and nine-fifteen, in the dark, using only your gas-powered weed-trimmer. May I commend you on owning a most remarkable piece of well-engineered, professional-level equipment? German, is it? The way its mono-filament blade tore through the dandelions and other weeds in your yard was a most impressive sight to nearly behold in the faint glow of the streetlight. The deafening roar of the engine, might I add, must have - in addition to significantly interfering with my attempts to enjoy a quite good movie - struck terror into the hearts of every living thing in your yard. I dare say it would have brought a tear to Tim Taylor’s eye, had he been there.

Incidentally, I thought you might like to know that you missed a whopping great spot near the boulevard, next to the maple tree. Also, you’re an appallingly inconsiderate excuse for a human being and a burden to society, and I hope you drop dead very soon of something tremendously painful, you disgustingly corpulent autofellator.

Sincerely yours, your neighbour,
Nemo de Monet

Anyway, I really like pickles. So do my roommates.

What does this have to do with China? Well, there’s a family at the local farmer’s market who sell extremely tasty homemade pickles…

…in some ridiculously flimsy plastic deli containers - the kind you get, you know, coleslaw in. There is no way they’d survive the bike ride back home from the farmer’s market when filled with pickles and brine. So we decided to buy a couple of wide-mouth plastic water bottles to transport pickles in. Brilliant, right?

We saved about four bucks a bottle at Target by buying a couple of different off-brand bottles, rather than the pricier Nalgene ones.

Three bottles. Three different brands. None of them are water-tight. Not even close.

Now, for a lot of people, this might not be a big deal; fill it with water and a little bit leaks out, who cares? It’s just water. When you fill it with 24 ounces of garlic dill pickles and brine, and the brine dribbles out, that’s a different story entirely.

It’s a water bottle. Shouldn’t it sort of be, you know, water-tight?

Apparently not in the plastic-molding regions of China. Between all my roommates, and a couple coworkers, I’ve been able to test eleven water bottles - Nalgene and fake Nalgenes, plus a couple of plastic bike water bottles and some stainless steel or aluminum ones. The only completely water-tight ones are the actual Nalgenes, and two of the metal ones (an aluminum Primus one and a stainless one from SubZero). All four of the Nalgene knockoffs, both the bike water bottles, and the sturdiest of the stainless steel ones… leak.

Our minds boggle, slightly.

The imitation Nalgenes, as near as I can tell, all leak for the same reason - because the caps and the lips of the bottles aren’t designed to mate particularly well. On an actual Nalgene bottle, the top of the lip is flat, and snugs down, compression-fitting style, into a tapered recess in the cap, actually creating two seals - one each at the inner and outer edges of the lip. Kind of clever, really. On the various fake Nalgenes, the edges of the lips taper somewhat, roughly, and the flat recess in the cap that the lip seats into is wider than the bottle wall.

Not a huge difference. But enough to make the Nalgenes water-tight, and the knockoffs leak like sieves.

It’s not rocket science; people have been making water-tight containers for thousands of years. Maybe in China they use these things for some other purpose - storing loose change, or glass marbles, or something.

It’s just kind of absurd. And aggravating.

(By the way, as near as I can tell, once you put pickle brine in a polycarbonate bottle, name-brand or otherwise, apparently it’s going to smell like pickles forever.)

You don’t really appreciate how important your index and middle fingers are until you can’t use them. D’oh.

Hopefully the bandages will come off, and the swelling will go down, in a couple of days. Until then, have a gander at a factory smokestack here in Saint Paul which got struck by lightning in a recent storm:

Electricity. Gotta love it.

Anyway, random observations of interest or amusement…

Minneapolis Will Pay $165,000 to Zombies. The headline says it all, really…

Fun cult-of-personality article from the Russian propaganda ministry: Putin Takes Care of Bears, Says They Should be Afraid of People. Regrettably, his “taking care of” the bears did not involve stripping off his shirt or personally wrestling a bear.

Fun America-Sucks article from the Russian propaganda ministry: 18 Signs That America is Rotting Right in Front of Our Eyes.

In England, apparently people are complaining because lamb prices have risen almost twenty-five percent in the last year. The cause is simple - increased demand, as lamb is a popular and inexpensive meat, and the economy… sucks. Poking around online, it looks like basic cuts - shoulder roasts and the like - start at prices (in GBP/kilogram) that work out to $2.50-$3.50 per pound.

Lamb is astonishingly uncommon in the United States, or at least here in the midwest, where cheap pork and chicken are the inexpensive protein sources of choice. I wanted to make Irish Stew last week, and the recipe called for lamb. When I finally found some for sale - at the fourth grocery store I tried, mind - they wanted $11.99/pound. For those of you following along at home, that’s more expensive than steak.

Happily, I eventually found another source - the University of Minnesota’s “meat laboratory”. It’s more than a little bit scary - the place is a basement freezer room in a working lab building, most of whose doors - as you wind your way through the halls towards the sales room - are adorned with friendly reminders that “all food products are meant for scientific purposes and are not for human consumption”. (The warning doesn’t apply to the stuff for sale, obviously.) There I was happy to pay a mere $5.50/pound for a shoulder roast. (And, just to give everyone an idea of how expensive lamb is, even at the U’s bargain prices - I got a boneless sirloin roast for $3.60/pound.)

It was very good meat, mind you, and well worth the hassle. (The “meat lab” is only open three hours a week.) Unless it’s the reason I haven’t been sleeping well…

Aww, how touching.

If the absence of DedicatedTV has left a gaping hole in your emotional chest, fret not. There are other places to go to get your pirated television.

They all just suck a little bit more than DTV, that’s all.

TV Dump is mildly sucktastic as a DTV replacement. It seems to be popular with Brits, but it’s not very user-friendly and lacks a lot of nice-to-have features. On the other hand, standard-def shows are generally made available as single-file downloads that don’t require extraction; “scene” purists will scoff, but when you’re using, say, a netbook with an 8GB SSD, it’s kind of convenient to just be able to download and watch.

Sceneflux is a tolerable site a commentor here turned me on to. It’s very, very fast, which is nice. In addition to television, it handles movies and music videos, which I don’t really care about, as well as French television, which I care even less about. It also has some usabilty issues, and the owner has begun Raymond Bennelsworth-like begging for money, however, so the site may not be long for this world.

ev0 is slow and very annoying, but some people seem to like it.

Katz is one of the great-granddaddies of internet piracy, having been around for several years now. It’s often very slow to post new releases, and handles everything people pirate, including porn. (Which probably makes it NSFW, in some environments.)

None of these are really good DTV replacements, unfortunately. There are other sites in this vein, about which, for the most part, the less said the better.

If you can’t find what you’re looking for at any of the above sites, allow me to turn you on to my super-secret weapon for finding download links for newly-released TV episodes:

Twitter’s search engine. Pretty much every site out there that posts pirated TV “announces” their uploads on Twitter. By searching for a keyword from the title of your favorite show, plus “xvid” (for standard-definition files) or “x264″ or “720p” (for high-def files), you should be able to find at least a couple of download links mixed in among all the bittorrent trackers. It may be useful to know that most standard-def files get uploaded to the web about an hour after they air (after they end - a one-hour show that airs from 7-8pm will usually hit the internet within a few minutes of 9pm), though high-def sometimes takes a little longer, but not always.

Useful things to know: Most television shows (and movies, and music, and games…) pirated onto the internet come from “the scene”. (Porn and anime are two notable exceptions.) If you can’t find an episode of a television show you’re looking for within a few hours of it airing, it’s worth checking that it actually aired… and once you’ve done that, you can check a “Pre DB” such as this one to see whether it was “announced” by a scene group. If it’s announced, and doesn’t get “nuked” (for quality or technical problems), it will eventually get uploaded… somewhere… eventually. You just need patience. Or a USENET account. Also understand that some shows - and some episodes of some shows - just don’t get pirated onto the web, period. The scene has a finite number of players with limited time and equipment, and a lot of stuff just doesn’t get capped and uploaded. Them’s the breaks. Sometimes there are too many new shows airing at the same time, sometimes everybody’s competing to be the fastest to upload a certain show, and sometimes people just drop the ball.

DedicatedTV was great, and I’m sad to see it go. But, hey, all good things must come to an end, and I’m sure some new site will eventualy show up to, however temporarily, try and fill the giant void left by it’s demise. Hopefully it’ll be run by someone who isn’t a giant tool…

This is one of a handful of open-to-the-public events the SPPD do every year, in the guise of community outreach. The goal is a noble one, of course - develop a rapport with the local community, earn the trust and respect of people in the neighborhood, and be “good neighbors”. Like a lot of community outreach efforts, I have my doubts about how well they actually work.

The Eastern District station is an old brick building that was once part of the Hamm’s brewery, a major employer on Saint Paul’s east side for about a century, until it closed in the 1990s. The “open house” was held in their garage, a large and very spartan concrete space with not a lot of light and not a lot of ventilation. Arrayed for public viewing were examples of most of the vehicles the SPPD owns - from a mobile command post to an EOD disposal trailer to a motorcycle with sidecar to… one of four EOD robots. (If you’re a military history buff, you might also be interested in the department’s oldest actively serving vehicle - an ex-USAF armored car.) The SWAT team was there to show off their body armor and weapons (AR-15/MP-5/40mm grenade launchers/.40cal Glocks). A K9 officer was there with his partner.

I hung around for a few minutes, talked to a couple of people - the officers were all very friendly, and extremely happy to answer questions - took a few really blurry photos with my cellphone, and left.

Here’s what I observed in the thirty minutes or so I was there:

The nominal idea seems to have been “come out and meet the officers who serve and protect your neighborhood” (I quote from the announcement), but the reality seems to have been more like “come and socialize with the police officers you already know”. Seriously, aside from people’s kids, of which there were a few, I think I was the only one there who didn’t know somebody there. All fine and dandy, but catching up with people you already know, one way or another, isn’t exactly outreach.

The emphasis was very much on the department’s neat toys, which (IMO) detracts heavily from the whole get-to-know-people, Officer Friendly side of things that was advertised. Sure, the gun nuts get to fondle an MP-5, and everyone (including other officers…) gets to ask questions about the EOD robot, and the armored car is certainly impressive, but the people present were by-and-large specialists. Oh, they may multi-task (the nice EOD guy doesn’t do EOD stuff eight hours a day, five days a week) on duty, but they’re not quite your common rank-and-file, the “officers who serve and protect your neighborhood”. So, you know, the opportunity for the department to really develop a relationship with the community, out at the pointy end of thngs, was largely lost.

Even among the neat toys the department has (and they have many!), the selection that was trotted out was fairly predictable and mundane. All of it was current-issue; the SPPD has an extensive historical archive, and it would have been easy to do the whole “here’s what we have now, and here’s what we used fifty years ago” thing. But, no. Also, aside from the EOD robot, none of the more technical goodies the department owns were on display, which kind of bummed me out. (I’ve been kind of curious about the car-mounted automagic license-plate recognition cameras they have. What, me, a nerd?) And, even for the gun nuts (of which there were many present), surely an AR-15 is fairly mundane? The department has trained marksmen; I have no idea what they use, but I’m sure it’s more interesting to look at than a nearly-bog-standard AR-15.

I will never understand why the police inevitably bring along working dogs to events like these. Okay, everybody likes big, exuberant dogs, but the dogs don’t really get much out of the whole deal, and since you can’t pet them or whatever… what’s the point?

Don’t get me wrong - I commend the SPPD for making the effort to do community-outreach stuff, something they only started doing with any regularity a few years ago. I just can’t help but feel that - as with the ‘National Night Out’ involvement - the way they’re trying to engage the community is handicapping their effectiveness at doing so…

Over the weekend, some enterprising spammer managed to ramp this up to new heights hitherto unheard of by me.

Sadly, it was probably completely unintentional on his part.

It all started Saturday afternoon, when i received an e-mail in one of my inboxes informing me that I’d been added to a Google Group with a completely meaningless name - asfdsafdasdf, or somesuch. I didn’t pay a whole lof ot attention, because it looked like spam.

Fifteen minutes later, well…

In the opening moments of Hell on Earth, I received a spam. Just one. That’s what started the whole avalanche of horrors.

It was a phishing e-mail for a foreign bank.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, the dipshit spammer was evidently spamming addresses automatically “scraped” off the web. Know why this is particularly stupid? Because you wind up with lots of “role” accounts - orders@, support@, inquiries@, advertising@, sales@, and so on.

So, thanks to the magic of Google Groups, I received in my inbox one spam message.

And then about eighty auto-responses from various people’s ordering systems and support-ticket software and sundry other instantly-generated auto-acknowledgments. Each of which was promptly turned around by Google and sent out to the whole list again… including the seventy-nine or so other auto-responding addresses on the list.

Completely useless e-mail messages were arriving at a rate of around 200 a minute. And because Google’s servers usually aren’t blacklisted anywhere - they’re usually even whitelisted - this steaming torrent of effluvient poured into my inbox, unhindered.

Even after I hurriedly sent Google an “unsubscibe” message, another five hundred or so messages poured in before the request was accepted and everything in the queue was delivered.

I’m sure the idiotic phishing spammer didn’t mean to DDOS all his victims, but that’s pretty much what he did. I shudder at the thought of all the people who sat down yesterday morning to check their inboxes and found them completely full of this crap, and thousands more queue’d by their mailserver.

And I shudder at the thought that someone could unleash this sort of thing on purpose, if they wanted to.

Do no evil, Google. And don’t facilitiate others’ evil, either…

Acccording to Wikipedia, the chicken is the most-domesticated poultry - and possibly one of the most-domesticated animals, full stop. So domesticated, in fact, that most of us have probably never seen a wild chicken, and never will. (Of course, the domestic chicken’s wild counterpart, the red and grey junglefowl, is only native to southeast Asia…) It’s just kind of strange to think that something we in the west see as so ubiquitous and common is, or was once, something rare and unique from fabled far-away lands. I mean, the stereotypical image of a medieval British farmstead inevitably includes a dozen or so chickens scrabbling around in the dirt, and I wonder how many people then - or now - really realized the far distant origins of those ubiquitous critters?

Even less exciting than the origin of chickens as domesticated foodstuffs is my first novel, Mendacities. It’s a very atypical, dystopian, slightly trope-rich coming-of-age story. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy and girl agree to be just friends and nothing more, boy and girl meet a second, very strange, girl, and compete for her affections, while at the same time undertaking an ill-advised school project that winds up altering their lives, nearly killing them, and eventually helping overthrow the government. Also, there’s some casual nudity and underage drinking, a gunfight, and some ruminations on the practical inadequacies of modern K-12 education systems.

You know, same old, same old, just like all the other books out there.

Anyway, you can read about this appalling travesty to populist literature at it’s very own mediocre website, which includes links to several sample chapters, plus places you can buy the stupid thing, as either a paperback, a Kindle book, or an e-book in a dozen other formats. Those of you with an interest in self-publishing may find my boring page of facts and figures somewhat interesting.

My goal is to sell three-hundred copies in three years, and recoup the $200 I’ve got invested into this project. Let’s see how spectacularly I fail, shall we? Thank you in advance for your generous financial support, et cetera…

Thunder is fine, thunder is grand, but it’s lightning that actually does the hard work.
-anon

Lightning. It’s like magic, only harder to control.
-Me

Several weeks ago, a series of big thunderstorms blew through. A tree about 250′ away took a direct hit from lightning, and was blown to smithereens. The EMP-wave-electrical-blast-whatever completely killed my roommate’s shiny new iPhone, and fried the wireless part of our ancient ActionTec DSL modem. There are other wireless APs in the house (have I complained about the complexity of our household LAN recently?) so I’m in no big hurry to replace it.

Last night, we got another series of big thunderstorms. The tree down the street didn’t get hit again - it was blown into a thousand pieces a couple weeks ago - but there were several hits within a mile or less, and the power flickered a couple of times.

I spent much of the night trying to sleep - one of our cats, who used to be stray, really doesn’t like thunderstorms, and spent much of the night furiously cuddling me with all his might - but I did check really quickly before heading to work this morning whether any other electrical appliances had taken obvious damage. TVs all work fine, computers work fine, remaining non-Apple cellphones all seem to work fine.

Oh, and the half-fried Actiontec modem? Fully functional again.

My roommate was very unamused by my gleeful cackles of “its alive, it’s alive!”, but it’s not as if these sorts of opportunities come up very often.

Gotta love the awesome power of nature, eh?

“PuttingonTheRitz” is going to be my new WEP password for a while…

Only the intent actually seems to be a little different, this time - to connect with Sailors, and their families - especially their families - and remind them how totally awesome the Navy is.

On one hand, I think this is really to be commended, when viewed in light of some other commands’ (former) policies of proactive “social media engagement”, which was all about information control and spreading, evangelist-style, the “good news” about our nation’s (Soldiers | Marines | Airmen) and the important and entirely successful things they’re doing. The Army in particular were really bad about basically trolling the blogosphere with gung-ho propaganda, so it’s nice to see a branch of the military adopt a less adversarial stance for a change.

On the other hand, this tiny little feel-good booklet of guidance leaves one with that special, slightly creeped-out feeling that most military publications about “social media” and “emerging media” usually produce. One of the FAQs, for example, is “Our Sailors have been extended on deployment and the families are not happy. There is a very negative feel to our social media presence right now. What do I do?”, and the answer begins “First off, do not get discouraged and DO NOT close the page. Closing the page will only result in your families creating alternative presence(s) to continue complaining and you will have less opportunity to understand or influence this conversation.” (Bolded emphasis mine, though the ALL CAPS bit is the Navy’s.)

How much “opportunity” do you need to understand why family members are pissed when deployments are extended? And how are you supposed to “influence the conversation” without just coming right out and calling the complainers self-absorbed? Beats me; they forgot to put that part of the instruction online, apparently…

Last weekend [Minneapolis Police Department] mounted officers had their horses assaulted after bar-closing by five men, reflecting horsing around that police say is on the increase in recent years.

The men were jailed and cited with assault on a police horse and other misdemeanors. The incidents doubled the number of assaults on police horses this year and put the city on last year’s pace, which far exceeded earlier years.

(Minneapolis Star-Tribune.)

The first instance this past weekend occurred about 1:50 a.m. Saturday on 1st Avenue N. near 4th Street, with Kyle Soderberg, 22, of northeast Minneapolis, being arrested.

Less than 30 minutes later and a block away on 1st Avenue, Anthony William Gonzalez, 22, of Brooklyn Center, slapped police horse Jesse after being told he had to leave the area, the police report read.

About 2:20 a.m. Sunday, police arrested Matthew J. Semler of Glenshaw, Pa., and Randy D. Schock of Eden Prairie outside Sneaky Pete’s on 5th Street N. Semler, 24, and Schock, 35, were also cited for obstructing the legal process.

About 45 minutes later, Justin M. Mobley of Eagan was arrested outside Brothers Bar & Grill in the 400 block of 1st Avenue. Along with assaulting the horse, Mobley, 25, was accused of fleeing a police officer.

What is the world coming to?

Normally I use Paypal. Or Google Checkout.

This particular merchant - in a country infamous for it’s credit card fraud, I might add - only accepted bank transfers, Western Union transfers, and credit cards.

On a $25 transaction - what I wanted to pay - my bank charges $49.95 for an overseas transfer, and Western Union fees aren’t a whole lot better. So, if I wanted what these folks were offering, I’d need to use a credit card.

I only have one credit card, however - a credit/debit card tied to my checking account. Having that compromised by thieves would be… extremely inconvenient.

So, what’d I do? Got another credit card, that’s what. And in the process discovered a very, very interesting opportunity to engage in, if not anonymous, at least pseudonymous banking.

At my local chain grocery store, there’s a machine near the checkouts that allows you to pay utility bills from it, by entering your account information and feeding it cash. It also issues and reloads prepaid Mastercard debit cards. I’d never really looked at this thing before last week; I had this sort of prejudice that the whole thing was an extortionate, fee-ridden plot to prey on the impoverished and those with poor credit history.

I was right, as it turns out. But these things also have quite a bit of potential for more technologically interesting uses.

Here’s how it works: You feed the machine cash - $5, $10, $20, $50, and/or $100 bills - and it gives you a prepaid Mastercard debit card for the amount of cash you entered, less $4.95. It asks for absolutely zero personal information. You can use it at retail locations just like a regular debit card.

To use it online, you need to “register” the card at a website. To do this, you create an account - it prompts you for a username and password and e-mail address. I used an anonymous Gmail account, and it was accepted. (Also, interestingly, they never sent any sort of e-mail to verify the address was valid.) Then, you register the card you purchased earlier, by entering the card number and so on. Then, if you’d like to use it online, you enter the name and address you’d like to use with the card. A helpful little notice reminds you that whatever you enter at this point is what you must enter in the future when prompted for your card’s “billing address”. Hmmn…

What I was buying online did not require shipping, so I decided to test and see if you could be creative here. (If anything balked somewhere along the way, I could still use the $35.05 on the card to buy coffee and stuff, locally.) So, I registered the card - through a web proxy - and dutifully entered in a name and address as follows:

Paul Bunyan
321 Oxhammer Circle
Saint Paul, MN 55101
(612)989-7635

Paul Bunyan, if you’re not aware, is a mythical lumberjack. There’s no Oxhammer Circle in Saint Paul; 55101 is the zip code for downtown, and that phone number is the requests line for a local classic rock station.

I then proceeded to the merchant’s website, placed my order, entered in all the (notional) information, and clicked “submit order”. It thought for a few moments, then gave me a confirmation number and a receipt to “print for your records”. A few hours later, I checked the debit card’s website, and saw that there had been a successful charge for $25 from the company involved.

Pseudonymous international e-commerce. Not quite as easy as it is in cyberpunk novels, but still pretty damned slick.

(Incidentally, my cynical belief that these prepaid debit cards are a plot to prey on the poor and financiallly-irresponsible appears to be well-founded. The prepaid debit card expires in just under a year, and will incur a $5 “service charge” per month until either that time arrives or the funds on it are exhausted. So, this isn’t necessarily great for regular use or recurring purchases, but seems perfectly usable for one-time online purchases or donations or whatever.)

Please, dear reader, only use this discovery for good. Or, failing that, if you must use it for evil, at least make it amusing evil…

This afternoon - August 2nd - the site is now no more, the domain is up for sale, and most of the auxiliary webpages - the two Twitter feeds, the Facebook group, and so on - have disappeared down the memory hole, without any word or notice. No goodbye, no farewell, no teary-eyed sentimentality. No ’so long, and thanks for all the fish’. Just… poof. Gone. And this just days after Facebook messages suggesting new owners had been found for the site.

Ah, well. Easy come, easy go. Screw you too, Bennelsworth, and your little dog Bertie, too.

The dedicatedtv domain is for sale, apparently, should you have a thousand pounds to spare and a desire for an obscure bit of internet piracy history. There were at last count eight or nine others that pointed to the same site; perhaps some of them are valued a bit more realistically?

Now, I expect that most of you just tuned out a little bit right there, because nobody with a Y chromasome normally really wants to discuss, or even think about, relationship stuff. It involves words like “feelings” and “trust” and “emotion”, and soul-searching, and questions even trickier than “does this make me look fat?”, which is scary territory indeed.

To help remedy this problem, some of us have come up with an entertaining and surprisingly insightful method of relationship analysis through the use of hand grenades.

No, really.

How it works is this: Each person in a relationship (nominally two, obviously, but there’s nothing wrong with polyamory, right?) is asked to answer a set of n simple open-ended questions (where (n=2(x-1)), when x is the total number of people in the relationship); after this is done, the people involved exchange and compare answers.

What are the questions?

1. For each other person in your relationship, suppose that they gave you a foreign-looking hand grenade which they swore was inert. It’s fairly heavy, there is no hole in the bottom, and there are no discernible legible markings anywhere upon it. Your partner suggests you remove the safety clip and pull the pin. What do you do?

2. For each other person in your relations, suppose you gave them a foreign-looking hand grenade and swore to them that it was inert. It’s fairly heavy, there is no hole in the bottom, and there are no discernible legible markings anywhere upon it. You suggest your partner removes the safety clip and pulls the pin. What do they do?

It’s amazing how many people think their partner would just blindly pull the pin on a hand grenade-shaped object because they told them to, but wouldn’t do so themselves in the same situation - my experience is that most of the women who’ve answered these questions answer the first one something to the effect of “what am I, an idiot? No, I don’t pull the freaking pin” but at the same time think their boyfriend or husband would. It’s also very amusing to see how many guys (that I know, anyway) assume that under these circumstances the grenade is live, their wife/girlfriend/boyfriend knows this, is lying about it, and is trying to get them to kill themselves.

Trust issues among baby boomers and the oldest edge of Generation X? Nah, couldn’t be…

Negotiations are reportedly underway to have Brian Blessed lend his voice to TomTom GPSes. There’s a very awesome YouTube video here. If you don’t know who Brian Blessed is - for shame! - TVTropes can help.

War is hell. With bunnies. Bunnies make everything better.

I was recently searching Google for something computer-related, and wound up reading a thread on the subject on what is - apparently - an extremely busy porn forum popular with users from the Indian subcontinent and the Mideast. Three brief observations made in the spirit of scientific inquiry:

1. Indians seems to have some refreshingly odd tastes in porn… and some very bizarre-sounding (to this westerner, anyway) euphemisms for certain body parts.
2. There is Iranian porn.
3. Somewhat disappointingly, it’s not really any different than any other cheesy porn made with low production values.

(E-mail me if you’re really that amazingly desperate to see, um, yeah…)

The Saint Paul (MN) Police have recently installed a bike rack at their downtown headquarters. Considering there’s no public car parking anywhere nearby, one can only assume this is a sign of Progress.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) is sounding the alarm bells about American cybersecurity, saying “we are suffering what is probably the biggest transfer of wealth through theft and piracy in the history of mankind”. Will the public notice? Probably not. Will the public care? Probably not. Will the U.S. government do anything? Maybe. Will they call out China? Never in a million years.

Last weekend, I was walking to the post office Saturday morning to mail a package, when an adorable little reddish-brown ball of fur came tumbling out of a bush a few feet in front of me. “Awww,” I said, “aren’t you just the most adorable little kitten ever?” It made a sort of half-grunt, half-growl sound, nothing at all like a purr or meow. I squatted down and held out my hand a few feet from it, and it looked like it was about to come over and sniff my fingers, but then it’s mommy stepped out of the alley and made a sound and the little ball of fur trotted awkwardly off to join her, and the two foxes - yes, foxes - took off down the alley. (Yes, I fail biology forever, I know. I wasn’t really awake, and you don’t really expect to see baby foxes in the city… right?)

I got to talking about this stuff with some people I know, and the question came up as to why, if you’re going to bother to codify what WEPs mean in terms of percentages, you don’t just skip the WEPs and use percentages?

I’m not sure there are any good answers to that. But I think there are some interesting aspects of the issue that deserve discussion. So…

The “real answer”, by the way, is probably simply that using lots of percentages in written works is annoying and user-unfriendly. No real magic or mystery, I know. Sorry.

(A possible extension of this is that it’s not uncommon in the intelligence community to see statements like “The authors have moderately high confidence that the scheduled elections are likely to take place”, which looks like good, conscientious analysis at first glance, and probably is. If you replaced the qualifiers with percentages, though - “The authors are 60% sure that the scheduled elections have a 60-70% chance of taking place” - things can get very confusing, because not everyone will interpret a 60% confidence in a 60-70% chance the same way, and the whole point is to be understood clearly and without ambiguity. Does your head hurt, yet?)

A more complicated answer - and one just as real, for a given value of “real” - is that humans probably don’t treat all percentages equally. What I mean by this is that we (or at least I) tend to infer certain things about some numbers that may not be intended - or, indeed, intuitive.

“Even odds” means things could go any of a number of possible ways, pretty much by definition, and none is more likely than another. Will a new domestic Islamist insurgency rise in Sri Lanka from the ashes of the LTTE? Will surviving extremists from the war era come under the influence of foreign militants? If I tell you there are even odds of these things happening (which may or may not be true; these and all other examples in this post are things I’ve pulled out of my posterior orifice), you should hopefully infer and understand that the situation in question is hard to predict, potetially volatile, and with no really obvious long-term indicators.

On the other hand, what do you infer if I explicitly say there’s a 50% chance of these things happening? I sound indecisive, don’t I? And that indecisiveness hurts my credibility, right?

That’s how I and a lot of people I know tend to look at it, even if we don’t consciously realize we’re doing it.

A 100% chance = absolute confidence, a guarantee. But a 99% - or even 95% - chance kind of looks like someone is saying something they think you want to hear, but that they don’t really believe is true. (”There’s a 99% chance she’ll agree to go out with you, of course!” probably really means “Look, I like, respect, or work for you, and am telling you what you obviously, desperately want to hear, but that remaining 1% is my way of saving face when she laughs at your proposal, you fat slob.”) 50% = indecisiveness; 51% = uncertainty. Nobody likes a perceived weasel. Don’t ask me why.

A 70% chance sounds pretty good. A 75% chance sounds vaguely suspicious, for some reason. A 66% chance sounds even more suspicious. Non-round numbers, like a 73% chance, inspire a probably unwarranted degree of confidence. Adding decimal points - a 73.651% chance - suggests that science was involved somewhere; the interpretation of this varies from person to person.

Moderately low percent probability - 25-40% - instills distrust in everyone I know. (”Things with a thirty percent chance of occurrence seem to happen about three times in five,” one friend said.) I blame meteorologists for this. Actually, I blame meteorologists for a lot of public distrust of statistics; never before in the annals of human history have so few been so wrong about so many things so often with such precision. When it’s the middle of a drought and it doesn’t rain for a fortnight, but the forecast every day has a ten percent chance of rain, even relatively thick people start to notice that the numbers aren’t adding up as expected.

Call it a triumph of emotion over reason, I guess.

It’s now noon. Well, eleven fifty-eight, to be pedantic. Assuming the clock’s right. Either way, I infer that my lunch break is now over, so that’s it for today…

The Task Force further alleges that this is a ginormous problem that poses an imminent danger to capitalism, democracy, and the American Way of Life(TM) in part because our conventional military forces are just so gosh-darned awesome that the only way a deranged third-world tyrant could ever hope to defeat us is through the use of nuclear weapons.

This is the point, dear reader, where I sincerely hope you just did the whole facepalm thing.

But wait. It gets worse.

The whole report is chock-full of unfounded assumptions, strawman arguments, logical fallacies, and jingoist blather. The recommendations are refreshingly short, and so distressingly full of meaningless, clueless babble that it makes me want to pull my hair out:

+ Immediate attention should be given to:

- Making nuclear survivability a routine issue for leadership attention, focused in the current context of growing horizontal proliferation by both state and non-state actors.

- Taking the first step in establishing a national enterprise by forging an agreement with the Department of Energy to reverse the decline in the nuclear weapons effect enterprise. Engage the intelligence community as well.

+ In the near term, actions should focus on: advancing the human skills base; improving the Department’s understanding of reliance on net-centricity and unmanned systems in a nuclear environment; updating survivability standards; and pursuing radiation hardening advances.

+ In the long term, the Department needs to move to a model-based approach for the weapons effects enterprise to make up for the lack of underground testing; expand agreements to collaborate with other agencies with a stake in the enterprise; and ensure that a minimum “national enterprise” capability in trained expertise and above-ground simulators is sustained.

(Before you ask, yes, they can’t agree on whether it’s the “nuclear weapons effect enterprise” or the “nuclear weapons effects enterprise”; that’s not a typo I inserted.)

I cannot be the only person who gets irritated by idiotic and meaningless statements like this. “Let’s take the first step to establishing a national enterprise, whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean, by forging - love that word, so dynamic and sexy - a relationship with another agency to reverse the decline - good phrase, that - in the very national enterprise we’re supposed to be newly establishing.”

Hnur, what?

Don’t worry, it gets even worse than that.

Ever heard of the Federal plain language initiative? It’s a law that requires government agencies to produce material intended for public distribution that’s actually comprehensible by the, you know, public. It’s okay if you haven’t heard of it; almost nobody has - including the Task Force on The Nuclear Weapons Effects National Enterprise, obviously.

…[T]he nation lacks a clear understanding of the response to nuclear radiation exposure of general purpose forces, the Global Information Grid (GIG) and the GIG-edge, and critical infrastructure on which the Department of Defense (DOD) relies. Moreover, the technical expertise and infrastructure to help remedy the situation has decayed significantly. Investments in addressing nuclear survivability have declined precipitously.

How did this atrophy of attention and capability come about? The root causes seem to lie deep in the corporate point of view among DOD leadership that has developed since the end of the Cold War about these matters. A number of factors have contributed. Nuclear weapons have not been used, other than in deterrence, for over sixty years. And for the past twenty years, even the deterrent uses have been less immediate and direct, and have seemed less important than before. Since the first Gulf War, conventional
operations of great difficulty and importance have consumed DOD and national attention, and have displaced nuclear deterrence as the reigning paradigm. Furthermore, there seems to be widespread belief that the United States will be able to deter enemy use of nuclear weapons. For all these reasons, the possibility that U.S. forces would have to operate effectively in a nuclear environment simply seems, in this view, to be extremely remote. Finally, the costs of hardening military systems, and the difficulty of developing ways of operating forces to be effective in a nuclear environment, seem larger to many than the likelihood of the threat warrants—and are assumed to be greater in real dollars than they actually are. The complicated—and, to many decision-makers, arcane—nature of assessing the nuclear cost/risk trades exacerbates the problem. As a result, fewer
and fewer military and civilian leaders in DOD have had experience with nuclear weapons and issues around them … and the downward spiral continues.

The task force believes that this point of view, though generally tacit (and often denied when alleged) holds sway widely in DOD—how else could one explain what has happened? The task force also believes this point of view is profoundly wrong and dangerous. It is wrong in part because, although deterrence seems to have worked during the Cold War, the situation is different today. Some adversaries today are prima facie undeterrable. Some may be desperate. Some may believe that asymmetries in the perceived political stakes of war, perhaps compounded with perceived U.S. unwillingness to break the “nuclear taboo,” will prevent the United States from retaliating forcefully against
their use of nuclear weapons.

That’s pretty representative of the report as a whole. Badly-written gibberish that goes on and on and on for ninety-two painful pages, and can’t decide at any given moment what point it’s trying to make, if any. At times it tries to argue that nuclear terrorism by non-state actors is the gravest threat freedom and democracy have ever faced, and that not enough is being done to deter it. At other times it tries to argue that a reliance of missile shields has left the free world vulnerable to other forms of nuclear weapon delivery, which may possibly even be true, unlike most of the other idiocy in the report. Occasionally it seems to argue that the downsizing of America’s nuclear arsenal - and de-facto moritorium on new nuclear weapons development and testing - has somehow left us all incredibly vulnerable. And repeatedly they argue that enemy actors - including “terrorists” - would logically choose not to use nuclear weapons to, say, create a giant smoking crater where the Pentagon or White House used to be, but to set them off way off in the middle of nowhere, creating an electro-magnetic pulse that would inevitably destroy all the conveniences of modern society within hundreds, thousands, or even millions of miles… and “enhance the earth’s radiation belts with fission electrons.” (Page 19, if you want to see this particular bit of idiocy in context.)

The only boogey-man they forgot to include was little green men from Mars, who might bombard our population centers with tetra-phased gamma-ray ion-flux cannon beamers from their invisible ships high in orbit.

If we’re all really, really, unimaginably lucky, not a single idiotic recommendation from this task force will be considered by decision-makers, let alone implemented.

I have a bad feeling we’re not going to be very lucky. How about you?

Sure, they said. Bring it on.

So I gave them the info, and written authorization to act on my behalf in the matter. On the 17th, they sent off a nice legal-looking DMCA notice to The Planet, the datacenter where the spamblog is hosted. They sent me a copy of the notice as well, as a courtesy.

Just now I check my email, and learn that today - six days later - The Planet have responded:

To Whom It May Concern:

Please note that below-referenced copyright infringement notice does not
substantially comply with the required notification elements of the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (”DMCA”).

Please note that we have not passed on the substantive merits of your claim.

Gee, guys. Thanks for filling me with awe and respect at the incredibly speedy way you respond to these sorts of things. It’s almostas if you actually give a rat’s ass, or something. Almost.

Things like this are why I rarely bother with DMCA takedown notices in the first place; getting to wait a week just to be told to go pound sand is not a productive use of my time.

Time for plan B, I think. The spamblog hotlinked to some images of mine as well, so I think I’ll rename the legitimate versions and leave the spammer linking to something reasonably horrific. Hmmn, I wonder what awful horrors the internet can provide me with…

This is not news. Anyone who makes a lot of FOIA requests is very much aware of this going on, and not just at DHS - most branches of the military perform similar inquries, too… and have since well before July 2009. (I can document it in mid-2008 via server logs, and know it was going on well before that.)

Now, it is sort of newsworthy that DHS ‘fessed up about this, and was stupid enough to claim that they were doing it for “awareness purposes”. But these are not exactly earth-shattering revealations, when all is said and done. (I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned it here on Entropic Memes at least once in the past, though I can’t immediately find mention of it… having to dig through 1300 posts will do that to you.)

Oh, and the absurd claims that DHS never blocked release of documents, and is being all responsive and stuff? Bullshit. They’ve been stonewalling at least one of my requests for well over a year now, and in October 2009 I was informed of another request that DHS process requests on a first-in, first-out basis, and “there are currently three (3) open requests ahead of yours”. Nine months have since passed… you figure out what’s going on.

I spent a little time recently digging into it, and I was a bit surprised at what I found. You might be, as well.

If you hunt around with Google, it’s possible to find baseball being used as a metaphor for progress in general as early as 1920, and possibly even a few years before that. But that’s distinctly non-sexual, non-romantic.

As near as I can tell, baseball as a metaphor for (romantic) progress between two people can be documented to 1935 or so , and can be documented in a popular magazine a year later.

All these references are to first base, and it’s not clear that the term had any actual codified meaning or limits.

The first reference I can find to “second base” in a relationshop context is this 1965 Ann Landers column, which is unfortunately not particularly helpful.

What brought this on, you might ask? I was browsing through an old collection of the Gregg Writer, a magazine for secretaries and shorthand writers, and came across this January 1940 article:

…which I thought was an unexpectedly early use of baseball metaphors in a romantic context. Hence, i turned to Wikipedia, which wasn’t of much help, so I decided to spend a couple hours delving through Google.

Pointless? Perhaps. But interesting? Well… I think so. Your mileage may vary…

One of Kloxo’s big virtues - and one of the reasons it’s becoming quite popular - is because it requires substantially less memory than other hosting setups, thanks - in part - to it’s use of Lighttpd.

When setting up Wordpress under Kloxo and Lighttpd (on CentOS under OpenVZ, incidentally), I was a bit surprised by a couple of things I discovered, which I figured I’d share with the internet at large.

First of all, Lighttpd is very, very fast, and can scale really well. The Kloxo implementation, however, appears to scale quite well but is not terribly fast at all. Why? The way it handles PHP. PHP is run as a CGI or FastCGI process, which isn’t in itself a problem, but it’s run in such a way that a new process is spawned for every request. This affects performance, as you might expect. It also means that most opcode caches - Eaccelerator, APC, Xcache - are 100% useless under the Kloxo/Lxadmin system. You can enable Xcache from the control panel, but there is absolutely zero point in doing so. It does nothing, for all intents and purposes, and the developers should really remove it.

That in turn means that the (arguably) most popular caching and performance-enhancing plugin for Wordpress right now - the W3 Total Cache - isn’t as beneficial as it could be under Kloxo. Oh, it installs and works just fine - but enabling Xcache caching has absolutely zero benefit, and actually slows down page generation times - on a single-core 2.4GHz machine - by about 0.2 seconds compared to “vanilla” Wordpress. Page generation times are not the be-all end-all of performance metrics, but since Xcache is essentially nonfunctional, the plugin’s utility in these circumstances would seem to be marginal. You can still use disk-based caching, but since most people using Kloxo are using it on a virtual server, and virtual server disk i/o is always unreliable and generally piss-poor, I’m not convinced the whole thing is of any real benefit.

So, what does work? Well, I haven’t played with every plugin out there, but I’m quite impressed with DB Cache Reloaded, which shaves about 0.2 seconds off page generation times by minimizing SQL queries. (That’s 0.2 seconds per page compared to vanilla Wordpress, so it’s about 0.4 seconds faster than W3 Total Cache.) And WP-Minify appears to help things a bit. The former of course uses a disk-based cache, so you’re uncomfortably dependent on disk i/o for raw performance, but it seems to offer fewer performance penalties than W3TC, so I’m cautiously optimistic there.

The important thing to keep in mind is that nothing PHP-based (or Perl-based, or anything else “dynamic”) is going to measure particularly well under Kloxo’s implementation of Lighttpd. All the “website speed checkers” are going to say your site is fairly slow, and page generation times are going to be pretty lackluster, because there’s a delay of a few hundred milliseconds in every request, while a new instance of PHP is launched. So if you’re super-concerned about what YSlow or whatever say about your website, Kloxo is probably not for you. That said, it should perform quite well - or at least consistently, if you want to be pedantic - under load, even given fairly marginal resources.

One other thing to note is that the default configurations that ship with Kloxo for both PHP and MySQL are pretty appallingly suboptimal, and you can see some marked improvements under most circumstances by optimizing them. You can only tweak MySQL if you have root access, but one of the dubious possible benefits to Kloxo’s otherwise peformance-crippling implementation of PHP is that the end-user gets a fair degree of control over their own personal PHP settings; if you know what you’re doing, you can squeeze a little extra performance out of your website by adjusting some of these.

I could move the website to a regular, Apache-based server. Or get another server of my own, and run a proper implementation of Lighttpd that supports PHP opcode caches. But, you know, it’s a crappy website that nobody’s ever going to visit, for a crappy novel that nobody’s ever going to read. More-or-less identical to 99.9999989% of all the other websites out there. I’m happy with the Kloxo setup; it’s easily “good enough” for what I need it to do - and probably just as adequate for whatever you need it to do, too.

ZOMG!

First of all, this is patently disingenuous, in that - despite the promises and claims of politicians - law-enforcement policies have relatively little (if any) measurable effect on the number of crimes committed. There is no magic method of keeping people from beating, robbing, or killing one another, and to imply otherwise is a wee bit dishonest.

Second, as far as I can tell, Arpaio and Maricopa County have only aggressively enforced immigration laws since 2005, making the 2002-2009 figure irrelevant.

Third, the numbers quoted by “America’s Voice” don’t appear to be correct. Per the official state data they link to, Maricopa County had 224,905 “index crimes” in 2002, and 164,094 in 2009. That’s NOT a 58% increase in crime, obviously. (On other pages, they claim the increase is in “violent crime”… but that’s not true, either.)

The ONLY index crime that was higher in 2009 compared to 2002 was arson, which went from 924 to 1084 - a seventeen-percent increase.

For the past three years - 2007-2009 - almost all categories of “index crimes” have decreased year-to-year in Maricopa County:

Murder: 324-270-215 (2007-2008-2009)
Robbery: 7228-7364-5833
Assault: 10627-10100-9181
Burglary: 37154-37333-33759
Theft: 108226-109187-95852
Vehicle Theft: 33599-25616-17059
Arson: 933-1082-1084

(italics denote a rise against the previous year)

Crime, overall, is down in Maricopa County, not up by fifty-eight percent.

It has nothing to do with immigration, or Arpaio’s policies, most likely.

Telling lies about documented numbers is just stupid, especially when you link readers to the raw data. And using that to try and generate fear to push a political agenda that has nothing to do with the numbers, anyway? Retarded. Absolutely retarded. Look, I dislike Arpaio as much as the next guy, and I think most of his policies are stupid and ill-conceived. There are a multitude of factually-based criticisms of the jerk; there’s no need to invent patently fearmongering ones out of whole cloth!

Anonymously-registered domain name, hosted on the same server as an outdated immigration-reform site and an anti-Arpaio website. You’d think “the Howard Dean web team” would be a little more clueful, huh?

I don’t know about you, but I kind of expect better of Left-leaning organizations. What ever happened to the whole “reality based” thing?

“America’s Voice” = mendacious idiots.

Sure. But you have to be kind of naive to overlook the fact that it’s the dumping ground of choice for stolen property… and a chaotic sea of almost endless fraud. Caveat emptor doesn’t even come close to covering it.

I’ve got a friend who reckons that about twenty percent of all eBay listings at any given moment are technically fraudulent - that is, they (knowingly) misrepresent to greater or lesser extents the items for sale. I don’t know how accurate that is, but my guess, based on years of experience with eBay, is that it’s certainly in the right ballpark.

I know a lot of people who - wary of fraud on eBay, and rightly so - won’t buy anything above a certain dollar value there; be it $20, or $50, or $100, or $400. I’m sure there’s a lot of fraud at higher price points, especially with computer and electronic equipment. But I’m constantly surprised at how much fraud there is with sub-$5 items.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised; the odds of people complaining and creating a fuss over $3 or $4 is a lot lower than if $300 or $400 is involved. Better to rip 100 people a week off for $3-5 each over the course of a year or two, than to rip 3-5 people a week off for $100 for a month or two, right?

What brought this on? For about three weeks, I’ve been trying to get a replacement battery for an older cordless phone. The original battery was ni-cad, and I want a higher-capacity ni-mh one. This shouldn’t be difficult, as apparently they’re fairly common at specialty battery retailers.

The first battery I bought was listed as a brand-name item in retail packaging, but came in loose “bulk” packaging, and didn’t have any manufacturer markings. It fit the phone, but was completely dead - wouldn’t take a charge at all.

I was refunded the full purchase price, including shipping, in about four hours.

The second battery I bought was also (a different) brand name item, also in retail packaging. It arrived, in retail packaging. It didn’t fit the phone, though - and while the packaging says “Made in China” and “2200mAh Nickel Metal Hydride”, the battery itself says “Made in Japan” and “Nickel-Cadmium 800mAh”. Hmmn…

I just got a full refund for that one, with shipping costs included, seven minutes after contacting the seller. No argument, no protestations of innocence, no excuses.

Both vendors, by the way, were based in the United States, not China.

These people know they’re peddling crap, and don’t care. Legitimate vendors don’t just immediately refund your money the moment you complain about their merchandise, because they not only know that the occasional defective product exists, and can be pretty sure that a replacement will work, but they can usually get reimbursed from their vendor for the faulty item, meaning they don’t lose out on anything but maybe shipping. Crap merchants, on the other hand…

Battery number three is on its way, ordered from a non-eBay online merchant. Wish me luck…

See, there are a bunch of us, and one bathroom. As a result, whenever someone wants to bathe or shower, it’s standard operating procedure to check and make sure that nobody has any especially pressing need to use the porcelain throne beforehand. Responses to these inquries can range from “yeah, whatever” to “go ahead” to “don’t let me stop you” to “oh please yes” to “have fun”…

On Saturday, one of the male roommates went through this routine, and was, erm, cleared to commence showering. One of the female roommates - in front of the visiting friend - responded to the “I’m going to shower now” statement with “have fun”. A simple, harmlessly sarcastic sort of comment, right?

Well, the visiting friend interpreted that exchange to mean that the male and female roommate were in a relationship - which they aren’t - and that she’d just given him permission to perform a, um, “manual override” in the shower, which was not the case. To make things even more interesting, the friend then decided that the only reason she’d give him “permission” to you-know-what is because the friend’s presence over the weekend was getting in the way of their romancin’, so she really awkwardly spent most of the weekend either trying to get them together (on the same couch, side-by-side at the dinner table, or whatever), or announcing that she’d be on the deck, reading a book and listening to headphones for the next ninety minutes, or was going to go see a movie, didn’t I (the only other person home at the time) want to come with, hint hint?

Eventually Sunday afternoon the female roommate confronted the friend over why she was acting so strange and being a total dick - “you said you came to see me, but we haven’t done anything together and it seems like you’re avoiding me!” - and the whole grand confusion was sorted out with some not terribly flattering sort of denials. “You thought I’d date him? Ugh!”

All that drama because of two not-terribly-innuendo-laden-at-all, mildly sarcastic words, a dirty mind, and (probably) some sort of psychological issue.

Moral of the story: everyone pleasures themself in the shower, and it’s your moral duty to explicitly discourage this at every possible opportunity, otherwise squickiness, angst, carpal tunnel, and strained friendships will result…