Monday, 28 October 2002

Spent a relaxing weekend in Sussex Inlet, about three hours south of Sydney by car. We paddled around in canoes all day, then rented a boat the next morning and went beachcombing.

We found a whole bunch of these little spiral cone-shaped shells that looked sort of like conch shells, but they were no bigger than a thimble....

There must have been thousands of them on the beach (tourist season hasn't really started yet, and I think we arrived at the beach just as the tide went out, so we had first pick of the shells).

I had never seen anything like them before.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 8:00 am. comments.

Friday, 25 October 2002

Bushfires today. You can smell it as soon as you walk out the front door—it smells like your neighbors are burning leaves, except that it's everywhere. Asthmatics are advised to stay indoors.

Australia had bushfires last summer too, but not this early. The drought's getting worse.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 7:28 pm. comments.

Friday, 25 October 2002

Winston Churchill once said that "democracy is the worst form of Government, except all those others that have been tried from time to time." With all the recent talk of "regime change" in Iraq, and since I did my patriotic duty this afternoon, I thought I'd post a rejoinder to Eric Raymond's Why I Am An Anarchist essay, and explain why I'm for democracy.

(Eric has since written that 9/11 is causing him to re-examine his beliefs, because an anarchy may not be able to defend itself against Al Qaeda-like threats. What better time, then, to make democracy's case?)

Why not anarchy?

Anarchy is really the absence of government, rather than a form of government: It proposes that, instead of a central body, individual citizens perform the duties of governments. The "state" has no armies, but rather a group of people who come together in time of need, and then return to peaceful pursuits afterwards. The heavily armed population is self-policing, and they promote justice and tranquility through the simple technique of minding their own business. Vernor Vinge's short story "The Ungoverned" is about a society where anarchist farmers with nuclear weapons fight off an invasion from a neighboring military state, and is probably a good depiction of the anarchist ideal.

As a political system, anarchy minimizes the risk that a heavy-handed government will interfere in the lives of citizens and businesses, because there isn't any government per se. Anarchy relies on market forces to provide necessities like product safety and environmental conservation—the FAA, FCC, FDA, and other government agencies are privatized and subsidized by industry—and you're free to take whatever drugs you like, educate your children in whatever manner you prefer, and generally live your life as you please.

The problem with the anarchist utopia is that it doesn't exist outside of science fiction. History's empirical evidence suggests that anarchist societies can't exist, or at least that anarchies are about as stable as francium isotopes and are doomed to rapidly decay into tribalism, feudalism, or city-states. Anarchy requires a balance of power among citizens that is difficult to establish or maintain, and it demands behaviors from its citizens that run counter to the patterns we know.

Anarchy effectively requires that all citizens be equal in their ability to call upon force at need, which in turn requires economic parity—if you have to choose between putting food on the table and paying for privately-run police and fire services this month, you're not going to last in this system. Likewise, if your rich neighbor decides to become a tyrant, you can either pool resources to match him or become his 19th province; you don't have any other recourse. Anarchy is a poor distributor of scarce resources (e.g., water and fishing rights), and its lack of a binding legal system means that dispute resolution is likely to be inefficient as well.

Even if you do manage to set up a working anarchy, though, it will very likely degrade into tribalism within one generation. The chilling implications of the Milgram experiments suggest that humans are predisposed to obey authority figures, and will follow orders from an authority figure even when those orders violate their own morals and the person will suffer no extraordinary consequences from refusing the order.

An anarchist might argue that Milgram's findings are the end results of a lifetime of indoctrination in an authoritarian society, and that people who lived under anarchy wouldn't follow this pattern of behavior—in hacker parlance, that it's a bug in the software, not the hardware. But what if it isn't? What if we apes are hardwired for hierarchies, and the anarchist utopia is no less alien to human nature than the Communist utopia?

It would certainly explain a lot of things. If one person in every hundred has an inbred authoritarian streak, and the other 99 are pre-wired to follow orders, then the ideal anarchist society will quickly degenerate into Afghanistan. With apologies to Voltaire, history suggests that if an authority figure does not exist, human nature will find it necessary to create one.

More on this topic next week.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 4:45 am. comments.

Tuesday, 22 October 2002

Steven Den Beste of the U.S.S. Clueless reveals the secret behind his amazing volume of blogging output: He's using an Intel Pentium™ processor! Yes, the Intel Pentium allows Steven to blog almost twice as fast as those deluded Mac users, who are hobbled by the technological inferiority of their crippled Mac machines.

Or something like that. I think Neal Stephenson said everything that needs to be said about Mac bigots vs. PC bigots, and I think John Dvorak first noted that pundits have been predicting Apple's imminent demise for almost 20 years now. Steven joins a long list.

Okay, I can't leave it completely alone: Steven's diatribe that starts with "In hardware, Apple has been a follower in nearly every regard for the last five years" is amazingly myopic, especially given Steven's background. Um, Steven? Meet 802.11, the technology that's doing for CDMA 1X what Clark Gable did for men's undershirts. Guess what company brought it to market? How about those FireWire ports on the back of your digital camera? USB?

Apple and the PowerPC chip may (today) be losing ground to Intel's relentless effort to self-fulfill Moore's Law, but that in itself is not the Seventh Sign. Apple still has the advantage of being the only major player in the computer industry who controls both hardware and software, which means they can avoid chicken-and-egg problems with introducing hardware and software support for a product or technology. Dell or Gateway couldn't do this and make it work with their machines out of the box.

Steven may be a good engineer (or not - I really can't say), but his critique of Apple is misguided—one might as well argue that the Ford F-150 pickup truck is technologically superior to a Volvo C70 convertible, so anyone driving the Volvo is a deluded moron.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 5:25 am. comments.

Saturday, 19 October 2002

After only a day and a half of tweaking, I'm standards-compliant. If your browser can handle it, check out the "Style" menu and pick your favorite style. (If you're behind a proxy server, you may need to reload the page.) I can now display the W3C logos with pride.

Of course, the trade-off is that I can't put the Blogger logo at the bottom of the page any longer, because you can't (easily?) put things at the bottom of a page using CSS. (There are commands that logically should do this, but they don't work with any of the browsers I've tried.)

I'll just put it below the navbar. After another day or two's effort, I have all the links working again in the archives; it turns out that putting relative links in your Blogger template, and then putting your archive files in a separate subdirectory, is Not Good.

Incidentally, if the USA/Oz logo in the corner looks to you like it has a white background, then your browser does not display PNG files with transparent backgrounds correctly. I've tried to rework the style sheets so that they don't look especially horrible in this situation, but you should really file a bug report with the people who wrote your browser.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 9:13 pm. comments.

Thursday, 17 October 2002

You may have heard about the October 12th car-bombing of a nightclub in Bali. Bali is an island in the Indonesian chain, a little northwest of Australia (see map), and until now it was a popular vacation spot for Aussies. As of this morning, there were 30 Australians confirmed dead, 180 still missing, and they're still sorting through the charred remains of the dead and trying to identify bodies that were burned beyond recognition.

Australia has a population of 19 million, compared to America's 285 million. This is their 9/11.

Bali didn't have much in the way of hospitals, so Oz is flying in doctors and flying out burn victims. Australian newspapers and television are filled with horror stories of children without parents, families searching the makeshift morgues for loved ones, and the "lucky" burn victims and amputees who escaped with their lives. Most of the victims were students, or families on holiday; unlike the 9/11 attacks, the terrorists in Bali killed Australians from every city and every part of the nation.

Australia is often our overlooked ally. I didn't realize this until I came here, but Australia fought alongside the U.S. in every war of the 20th century, a record that not even the British can match. In World War II the U.S. Navy stopped the Japanese advance on Australia, and the Australians haven't forgotten that. Oz sent troops to Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait and Afghanistan, and even before the Bali attack they were supporting our Iraq plans.

Australian reaction to the Bali attack has been equal parts of shock, anger, and grim resolve. They're a little miffed at the lack of American attention and sympathy; the ever-vigilant U.S. media reported "foreigners die in foreign car-bomb attack; film at 11," and you'd have to read closely to realize that someone just murdered about 200 Australians. Dubya issued a statement that expressed our sympathy for almost two whole sentences before it turned into a public service announcement about the War On Terror; again, you could read it and not even realize.

Sorry for the not-so-upbeat update, but it's a grim topic.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 12:05 am. comments.

Sunday, 06 October 2002

I suppose I should write a few words about who I am and why I'm writing, for those who found this site by accident and don't know me. I'm originally from Illinois (I was born in Tennessee, but lived there only eight months), and came to Australia about three years ago on a work assignment. I work for a company you've probably heard of; that company has been going through some rough times lately, as has the entire industry, but we're hanging in there and hoping to hit bottom soon.

I came to Australia to do the thing I did for a living these past eleven years - build a cellular telephone network - but it didn't work out as planned: When the telecom boom went bust, the customer cancelled the network; I was transferred to New Zealand for a while, and had to claw my way back to Oz. (Not that I really have anything against New Zealand, except for the weather - but I had someone very important waiting for me in Sydney, so I had to get back there.)

I've been living abroad since March 2000, with a few trips home each year - but none in the past 18 months. When I last lived in America, Bill Clinton was President and the economy was booming; when I last set foot on American soil, the World Trade Center towers were still standing. I was in New Zealand on September 11th and learned of the attacks the following morning, seven hours after they occurred. I witnessed first-hand the outpouring of sympathy that America received in the aftermath of September 11th, and since then I've seen how the outside world has perceived America's response.

In my spare time I write computer software and send out rambling e-mails to friends and family about Australia, travel, politics and life in general - so rambling into a weblog is really just a change of format. Mostly I write to keep in touch with people on the other side of the planet, but lately I've also been having some one-sided discussions (in several senses of the term) with a number of political bloggers on the web. I think that political debate between private citizens is a sign of health for our democratic society, and should be strongly encouraged; I also think that the rabid, fire-breathing right-wing side of the political spectrum is extremely well-represented online, and that viewpoints from the center or the left are harder to find. So, I'll at least add a different perspective every now and then, for whatever it's worth.

For those who remember me from somewhere, but can't quite place me: I attended the University of Illinois from 1987 to 1991, earned a B.S. in Computer Science, was (am) a member of the Alpha Chi Rho social fraternity, and was way too involved in the student government. I receved a M.S. in Management from Purdue in 2000. Online, I wrote a series of parodies called the Usenet Olympics and was a Priest of the Internet Oracle for several years. There are a few pictures of me hidden in the photo album pages - look through the photos of Cambodia and New Zealand to find them.

I also tend to start more projects than I finish, like most people, so there's a chance that I'll experiment with blogging for a few weeks/months and then develop a renewed interest in genealogy or photography and go back to letting my web site lie dormant for years at a time. These things happen.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 5:45 am. comments.

Thursday, 03 October 2002

Okay, I think I've got everything sorted out now - the style sheet could use a little more work, but I've built a nice clean template that doesn't look like an art student's nightmare. Part of the problem here is that my favorite browser isn't really fond of JavaScript, which Blogger uses a lot when I'm editing templates.

Now comes the hard part: Writing something.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 10:18 pm. comments.

Thursday, 03 October 2002

Less than ten minutes into blogging, and I've already learned something new: The "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" text, that Blogger (and everyone else in the free world) uses as sample text for page layouts, is a mangled quote from Cicero. All this time I thought it was the Latin translation of "Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!"

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 9:14 pm. comments.