Slow and steady wins the race. They’re not kidding.

Over the weekend, a couple NFL records were broken. Most famously, Brett Favre broke Dan Marino’s career passing completion record (4,974 and counting), which is pretty cool. However, a sexier-sounding record fell this weekend, too: Most Career Points.

You’d sort of think this would be a running back or a receiver, but no, not really: it’s a kicker. Morten Andersen (perhaps the only Dane in the game) of the Atlanta Falcons took the title on Saturday night with two extra points against the Cowboys. Andersen, who is forty fucking six years old, now has 2,435 points in his 24-year career, edging past the former record-holder, Gary Anderson.

Andersen had previously broken another of the prior Anderson’s records last week, when he kicked his 538th career field goal. He’s 538 for 679 on field goals, and 821 of 831 on PATs. Also, he’s old enough to have fathered the last few seasons’ rookies, which is just cool.

Coolest. Model. EVAR.

Pierre Scerri loved Ferraris, specifically the legendary 312PB.

So he made one of his own at 1:3 scale. That works. It took him 15 years and 20,000 hours, but his model includes not just faithfully recreated body and interior work (the trademark shift grate is there!), but also a fully functional 1:3 scale 12-cylinder engine, transmission, and exhaust system — which means his tiny car even sounds like a Ferrari.

Mr Scerri has his own website now, detailing additional models he’s working on, including a Ford GT40.

NYT on the TSA, our Naked Security Emperor

The Times piece is called Theater of the Absurd at the T.S.A., so you can imagine the content. We’re sure some at DHS and TSA will whine about the piece, but it’s hard to fault its conclusions. We’re doing the wrong things for airport security, and for poor reasons, and nobody in power seems to have the balls to admit it even though everyone outside the system seems to know that it’s all bullshit.

The root problem, as some experts see it, is the T.S.A.’s reliance on IDs that are so easily obtained under false pretenses. “It would be wonderful if Osama bin Laden carried a photo ID that listed his occupation of ‘Evildoer,'” permitting the authorities to pluck him from a line, [Security expert] Mr. Schneier said. “The problem is, we try to pretend that identity maps to intentionality. But it doesn’t.”

What’s worse, the TSA is actively hostile to attempts at improvement:

Ostensibly interested in what security specialists and legal authorities on privacy issues thought of its Secure Flight plans, the agency convened an advisory group in January 2005. (Mr. Schneier was a member.) Nine months later, when the advisers turned in their final report, it showed that the T.S.A.’s planners had given little or no thought to basic security issues, such as the problem of stolen identities.

Expressing frustration, the T.S.A.’s advisers said in their report that the T.S.A. had been so tight-lipped when talking to them that they never received the information they needed to make a single substantive recommendation.

Professor Blaze [CS at the University of Pennsylvania] has a great deal of experience publicly discussing the most sensitive of security vulnerabilities. He acknowledged that disclosure of a security weakness prompts “a natural and human response: ‘Why should we help the bad guys?'” The answer, he said, is that the bad guys aren’t helped — because they almost certainly already know a system’s weak points — and that disclosing the weaknesses brings pressure on government agencies and their suppliers to improve security for the good guys.

Emph. added. This isn’t news; anyone worth a damn in cryptography knows that knowledge of an encryption algorithm shouldn’t give you an advantage in trying to crack it — or, at least, it won’t if the algorithm is sound. Secret encryption methods are assumed to be insecure.

The article concludes:

The issues raised by the discovery of security vulnerabilities are not new. A. C. Hobbs, a locksmith who in 1853 wrote the book on locks and safes (the title: “Locks and Safes”) knew that “many well-meaning persons” assume that public exposure of a lock’s insecure design will end up helping criminals.

His response to this concern is no less apt today than it was then:

“Rogues are very keen in their profession, and know already much more than we can teach them.”

It’s not any different now, but apparently the TSA thinks it is. It’s horrifying how wrong they are.

Dear Major Labels: Please Read This

Techdirt points out how well the number-2 online music provider, eMusic.com, is doing. A bit:

The idea that DRM-free music might just make good business sense smolders along, as eMusic is announcing they’ve managed to sell 100 million unprotected songs without the world coming to an end. As part of the promotion, the customer who purchased the milestone track will have a song written about him by the Barenaked Ladies, who’ll include the song on as a bonus track for their upcoming album. The record labels have consistently claimed you can’t be successful selling music that isn’t copy-protected — but eMusic’s second place showing (behind iTunes) shows that’s clearly not the case. They continue to sell more music than Rhapsody, Napster and MSN Music combined, all while catering to indie music fans by avoiding major label content.

We added the emphasis, but that’s a big point. eMusic has a subscription model; you pay ’em X dollars a month for the right to download Y number of unprotected MP3 tracks in any given month. Plan costs and volumes vary, but they’re all quite reasonable. Content’s fresh — for example, they’ve got the new Tom Waits. Check ’em out.

Ahmet Ertegun, 1923 – 2006

The Atlantic Records founder, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member, and all-around music industry legend fell and hit his head at a private Rolling Stones show in October, and never recovered. He was 83. The Guardian has a comprehensive obit; they open with this:

The word “legend” is liberally bandied about in the sphere of popular music, but it is a term which can truthfully be used to describe Ahmet Ertegun, the co-founder of Atlantic Records. Ertegun’s death, at the age of 83 following a fall, severs a vital link to some of the most significant chapters in the development of soul, rhythm & blues and rock. He helped to discover or nurture many of the most influential musicians of the last half century, including Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, The Drifters, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, Bobby Darin, Cream, Led Zeppelin, Crosby Stills & Nash and the Rolling Stones.

Wikipedia points out that this Ahmet is why Zappa named his kid Ahmet.

Michael Crichton: World Class Jackass

Crighton, uberwealthy author of crappy potboilers, is also a well-known global warming dissenter. He’s none to fond of his critics, either, as he appears to have gone and put one of them in his latest book as a pedophile. The critic? Michael Crowley, a Washington-based political columnist and Yale graduate (and author of recent TNR cover story critical of Crichton’s environmental pontification). The charcter? “Mick Crowley,” a Washington-based political columnist and Yale graduate.

Classy.

Worst news we’ve heard in weeks

Continental is apparently in talks to merge with United, according to the Wall Street Journal (registration required; AP blurb here).

Continental typically ranks very highly in terms of customer service, on time performance, perqs, etc. They’re the only major not to hit serious trouble after 9/11 (Southwest, while bigger, is not usually called a “major” for some reason). United, on the other hand, is infamous for their customer-hostile behavior, baggage problems, and performance in virtually every category. But they’re big, so there’s that. Every single time we’ve flown on an airline that isn’t Southwest or Continental, we’ve had some sort of problem — lost or delayed baggage, cancelled flight, overbook, rude employees, something.

If this goes through, we suspect we’ll be on Southwest a hell of a lot more.

Perhaps our last post on the BCS nightmare

From the Onion: BCS Determines No Team Worthy Of Facing Ohio State In Championship Game:

COLUMBUS, OH — In what many BCS officials are citing as “proof that their flawless system indeed works,” no Division 1-A college football team was found to possess the sheer excellence required to face Ohio State, the No. 1 ranked team since the season began, in this year’s BCS Championship game.

[…]

Florida Gators head coach Urban Meyer agreed with [Michigan head coach Lloyd] Carr, saying that even if his team had been offered a chance to play Ohio State, he may not have taken it.

“We don’t deserve to play Ohio State. Period,” Meyer said, adding that though Florida had a tough schedule, being the SEC champion was not the same thing as being Ohio State. “Every coach that I know voted for Ohio State in the coaches’ poll, or at least had them second after their own team. In any case, I can certainly see why no one who votes in the BCS wants the national championship to be decided by a mere football game.”

All coaches interviewed supported Meyer’s claim, with the notable exception of Notre Dame head coach Charlie Weis, who said that despite his team’s two losses, weak schedule, and unremarkable defense, he still felt in his heart that Notre Dame deserved a chance at the title — a feeling that, according to a BCS official who wished to remain anonymous, was not completely overruled.

“First of all, I should note that although Notre Dame is an independent, and a highly regarded independent at that, it does not have its own special set of rules as far as determining its football team’s rankings,” the official said. “Instead, we use a special set of mathematical algorithms to determine its football team’s rankings, which the BCS specifically determines only after ranking all the other teams. And though I shouldn’t say this, we — er, the computer — would have dearly loved to have seen Notre Dame in the championship.”

Perfect.

What shocks us is that people PAY for this analysis

So, in a real “sky is falling” sort of piece, the Register reported yesterday that iTunes Music Store sales were “collapsing,” purportedly based on research from one of those “never in doubt, seldom right” firms (this time, it was Forrester). Predictably, the story was picked up by some big blogs. Trouble is, it’s bullshit, as several have pointed out.

We’re sure that the idea of something like iTMS sales tanking is a great way to drive traffic to your site, but wouldn’t it be nice of researchers and tech journalists cared about whether what they ran was accurate? As the aforelinked debunking noted, iTunes is still one of the biggest music vendors in the country — online or off. They rival the Best Buys of the world, something that no other online vendor can claim, and have sold better than a billion tracks. That’s not exactly “collapse,” now, is it?

Update: Techdirt has more. Unlike Forrester, et. al., they seem to mostly be right.

Dear Bill: You Suck at Software

It’s no secret that, here at Heathen, we prefer Macs and Open Source tools to the Microsoft juggernaut. We didn’t care all that much until about 1998 or so, when we realized how awful Windows was on a laptop — for example, sleep never worked right, and if recent experience is any indication, it still won’t, even on XP — and how much easier things seemed to be for our Powerbook-using colleagues. We were doing project management consulting at the time on Internet software, so we lived in Office, which meant we could make the jump with little or not trouble. We jumped, and were MUCH happier — even moreso when Apple went to OS X, which gave us our geekiest heart’s desire: Unix with a good front end.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying it’s been a coon’s age since we actually had to DO something with Windows. “Get a Mac” has been our advice to friends and relatives for years, and we back it up with a growing inability to troubleshoot “modern” Windows installations (not that the tech support people are much better; “nuke it from orbit,” a/k/a “wipe and reinstall” seems to be the standard bit of advice for a Windows machine with some odd problem).

Today, though, we’re working with a piece of software our firm wrote to integrate our main product with client back-end systems. It’s Java, so it’ll run anywhere, but we’re testing on an XP machine because that’s the target platform for the current client.

Holy CRAP XP sucks ass. Just a few fun things we’ve discovered:

  • Can’t find the Control Panel window you just opened? That’s because the Control Panel is actually an instance of the “Windows Explorer” file manager. This in contrast to, say, the Services manager, which IS a program. Is interface consistency somehow antithetical to the Windows worldview?

  • XP Pro and XP Home have drastically different expectations user-wise; among them are the location of the home directory for the system user. Why is this? What the fuck, Bill?

  • WTF is the Windows equivalent of “tail -f”? Is there such a thing? How else do you watch a goddamn log?

Grrrr.

Sometimes, people ask us why we don’t take WorldNet seriously

And, oddly, sometimes they don’t quite get it when we say, truthfully, “because they’re like the bastard child of right-wing loonies and the Weekly World News.”

I mean, how else can you explain them running a story on how soy milk makes kids gay? The headline is, we shit you not, “A Devil Food Is Turning Our Kids Into Homosexuals.” Where do they FIND these nutbirds?

“Good and evil bores the shit out of me” — David Simon

David Simon‘s The Wire wrapped up its fourth season last night. If you haven’t seen this, you’ve missed the best goddamned thing to ever be on television, and we say that knowing full well how strong contenders like Deadwood and the Sopranos are. They’re not even in the same league; in a real sense, they’re not even playing the same game.

You can’t start the Wire in the middle, though. If you haven’t seen this, get ye to Netflix and put the first season in your queue. You won’t be sorry.

If you’re hip, though, go read Heather Havrilesky’s column on the final episode and the fourth season in general over at Salon. Havrilesky’s a damned fine TV writer — she’s the one who did a column all in Milchian Deadwood-speak, brilliantly. Don’t read it if you’re not caught up; it’s full of spoilers. If you’re watched, though, it’s a great reverie.

There is one more season of the Wire coming. We have no idea when it’ll air — 2008, probably, which gives you all plenty of time to catch up on the world of the Barksdales and Stanfields; the Greek, the port, and 13 dead girls in a can; Royce and Carcetti and Davis; the collapse, rise, fall, and resurrection of Prez; McNulty and Bunk; Omar and Brother Mouzone; and the sad tale of Bubbles. Do yourself a favor. Seriously.

(The Wire ran June to September in 2002 and 2003, but slipped to September to December in ’04 and ’06. Since HBO is already running promos for what’s happening on the network this year, and said promos have no Wire goodness in them, smart money says to look for the final installment of Simon’s opus in June or September of 2008.)

Distrust of the Police is Natural and Good, Part II

New York State Troopers made a game of DUI arrests so much that they openly arrested people they knew weren’t drunk. The goal was “the 100 club,” meaning 100 arrests in a year.

According to the report, it took serious misconduct for the troopers to log that many DUI arrests. The report said troopers were discouraging people from taking breath tests.

The troopers told people that if they took the breath tests they would have to stay in police custody longer before they could post bond and be released, the report states.

Subsequent laboratory tests showed that many of the people arrested did not have drugs or alcohol in their systems, or had amounts well below the legal limit.

People with authority and power must be watched even more closely than normal citizens. They should get no pass at all an the abuse of this power, because if they do, they’ll just become bigger bullies. We have to have police, but we don’t have to tolerate this kind of bullshit.

Dept. of HOT HOT HOT

A pepper grower in Dorset has managed to create the hottest chile ever, based on a pepper plant from Bangladesh. The Dorset Naga, as it’s called, weighs in at nearly a MILLION Scovilles. For comparison’s sake, pepper spray is only 5M, and a “normal” habanero is about half a million. (A jalapeno is a paltry 2500 to 8000, depending.)

We sort of want some. Sort of.

DRM on the way out?

RoughType.com has an interesting bit on why Digital Rights Management — i.e., copy protection for music — is completely and utterly doomed. Hint: EMI is actually looking into selling unrestricted MP3 files. Why? Because right now, that’s the only format other than the iTunes protected format that works with iPods, and selling online music that you can’t put on your iPod is a nonstarter at best.

DEA vs. AMA

The drug warriors think they know better than doctors how to manage pain, and have been locking up pain management specialists for prescribing painkillers in volumes the DEA (not the AMA) thinks of as excessive.

Great. Consider for a bit whether or not it’s a good idea for thugs as the DEA to have veto power over medical decisions made by highly trained physicians.

Cool.

Check out Undercover, software to install on a Mac to facilitate recovery in case it’s stolen. Obviously, the primary market is laptops, but it works for any OS X machine. There’s even an example of recovery on the site, including pictures of the thief (possible because all new Macbooks and Macbook Pros have built-in cameras). In that case, the laptop was recovered by police within 3 days thanks to the information reported by Undercover to the monitoring service (which led them to a physical address, supplied by the thief’s ISP).

This Administration Is Still Shitting On Privacy and the Rule of Law

Via Wired News:

The first public meeting of a Bush administration “civil liberties protection panel” had a surreal quality to it, as the five-member board refused to answer any questions from the press, and stonewalled privacy advocates and academics on key questions about domestic spying.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which met Tuesday, was created by Congress in 2004 on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, but is part of the White House, which handpicked all the members. Though mandated by law in late 2004, the board was not sworn in until March 2006, due to inaction on the part of the White House and Congress.

The three-hour meeting, held at Georgetown University, quickly established that the panel would be something less than a fierce watchdog of civil liberties. Instead, members all but said they view their job as helping Americans learn to relax and love warrantless surveillance.

More at Wired’s 27B Stroke 6 blog.

What the Drug War does

There’s a guy in Florida serving 25 years in prison for having pain meds with a prescription. There is no evidence he ever sold a single pill, but the charge is for trafficking on the grounds that the State seems to think they know better than his doctor about how much medicine he should get.

This is of course bullshit, but not even the appeals court has the balls to do anything about it.

Do this.

Here at Heathen, we like art. Some dude at the Guardian does, too; in fact, he’s put together a list of 50 pieces you should see before you die, which seems pretty reasonable.

Of course, we’ve seen only seven of them:

  • Pollack’s One: Number 31, 1950 (MoMA, New York)
  • The Rothko Chapel (Houston)
  • Van Gogh’s Starry Night (MoMA, New York)
  • Jasper Johns’ Flag (MoMA, New York)
  • Matisse, The Dance (Hermitage, St. Petersburg)
  • Manet, The Dead Torero (National Gallery, Washington)
  • King Tut’s funerary mask (currently in Cairo, but we saw it in New Orleans)

Holy Crap

There’s liquid water on Mars.

Not to overstate, but this is fucking huge.

However, certain Heathen have nothing but snark; quotes included “And big four-armed green monsters? Because if there are no big four-armed green mosters, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” and “Interesting. Are there REAL LIVE YETIS?”

Sadly, NASA remains silent on the subjects of four-armed monsters or yetis of any color.

Well, as long as you follow their advice, you should be safe.

A security flaw has surfaced in Microsoft Word that is so severe that Microsoft is recommending you not open or save Word documents until a patch is available.

…the flaw can be exploited if a user simply opens a rigged Word document.

Affected software versions include Microsoft Word 2000, Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Office Word 2003, Microsoft Word Viewer 2003, Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac and Microsoft Word 2004 v. X for Mac. The Microsoft Works 2004, 2005 and 2006 suites are also affected because they include Microsoft Word.

There are no pre-patch workarounds available. Microsoft suggests that users “not open or save Word files,” even from trusted sources.

We suggest you do as they say. Forever.

How to Keep Up

It has come to our attention that many of you aren’t keeping up with Heathen, or perhaps other sites you wish you had time to read. We admit, it’s a daunting task. However, the Web has answered at least part of this problem with the idea of feeds.

Most blogs today have a feed you can access with a special program called a feed reader (or news reader). You give these programs your list of feed addresses, and they obligingly go out, check for new material, download it, and present it for your review in a neat interface. Obviously, this is way more efficient than manually visiting each site, or even than having a folder of links to be opened as tabs simultaneously. You just leave it running in the background, and it shows YOU when, for example, BoingBoing has new material. Most of them also cache the info, so it can be read when you’re offline.

We here at Heathen use a program called NetNewsWire, which is really the go-to feed application for the Mac. It’s not free, but it is very strong and quite worth the modest cost. There are, of course, alternatives, including both Thunderbird (Firefox’s mail-reading sibling) and Apple’s Safari, but neither have the capabilities or flexibility of NNW.

On a PC, you of course continue to have the option of Thunderbird, but you can’t have NNW. However, the firm that owns NewNewsWire also makes a Windows app called FeedDemon that we suspect is also cool (though we’ve never used it). It’s also not free, but it is cheap. We’re sure there are free and open-source options as well, but have no idea what they may be.

Enjoy.

Nice Job, Haley

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour is basically responsible for the evisceration of the state’s highly successful anti-smoking campaign — which was funded not by taxpayer dollars, but by the tobacco settlement.

Mississippi’s program was funded by a settlement with tobacco companies, and was noted as one of the best in steering kids clear of a lifetime of tobacco use. So how did Barbour manage to destroy an effective program that wasn’t costing taxpayers a dime?

Barbour complained that the program received its funding directly from the courts and that it needed legislative approval, according to Myers. When the legislature passed a bill to continue the funding, Barbour vetoed it and went back to the courts to withdraw all remaining monies from the program.

That’s slight of hand you won’t see on a stage in Las Vegas.

Way to go.

Dept. of Good Meme Propagation

Laura Lemay’s husband was in a bad biking accident on Saturday, which is scary and awful. He’s ok, but he was riding without ID, which isn’t. Ms Lemay’s now a believer in always having something with ID on it now (as is her husband), but the more interesting idea came late in the post.

Put ICE in your damn phone. ICE is short for “In Case of Emergency.” This meme was spread around the net last year as the number you program into your cell phone for emergency personnel to call if they find you unconscious n the road. Eric thought this was an urban legend. Soon after Eric called me on Saturday I got a call from the group ride leader who had picked up Eric’s cell phone and started noting down numbers to try to find someone to notify. The random number method eventually works, sure, but ICE is much more direct. I’ve got ICE in my phone, and as of this morning Eric has it in his. My phone also lets me add longer notes to the address book entries so my ICE also has my name and blood type. Put it in. OK, one more lecture: hug your family today.

This meme is new to us, but you can bet your ass we’ve put ICE in the Treo just now. We suggest you do the same. You never know when it might help, and the cost of doing it is pretty damn low.

Sometimes, we really love Reason

Like now, when they point out the absurdity of restricting OTC cold medicine to combat meth production: Where Have All Our Cold Pills Gone?

The ONDCP [Office of National Drug Control Policy] cites declines in meth lab seizures as evidence that the peudoephedrine restrictions are working. But as state officials have acknowledged (and as anyone who was paying attention could have predicted), the decline in local production has not reduced the overall supply of meth, because the vast majority of it comes from Mexican traffickers who are not affected by the Dayquil crackdown and who were happy to pick up any slack. There is no evidence that forcing cold and allergy sufferers to register as suspected meth manufacturers has had any impact on meth consumption.

We could’ve told you that, nobody asked.