A is for apple

A is for apple, B is for ball, C is for caterpillar sitting on a wall.
D is for doggy chewing on a bone, E is for eggnog that you drink all alone.
F is for farctate, G is for Grog, H is for helicopter flying in the fog.
I is for Igloo, J is for Jam, K for kalamari, and L is for lamb.
M is for mnemonic, N for networking, O is for a few people running everything.
P is for pituitary, the size of a pea, Q is for quaffing, R for rascally.
S is for slapstick, comedy that's dumb, T is for tungsten, U for ultimatum.
W is for Wabbit, X for XYZZY, Y is for yoghurt, Z for Zenity.
Now I know my ABC vocabulary. Next time maybe you will sing the song with me.

Book Review: The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World

One of the things various people have said over the years about Alan Greenspan is that he tends to underestimate his own influence. Reading his book, I think I'm seeing that too. For example, in the introduction, he relates how after 9/11 he made a speech that put a brave face on things, saying that the economy had become resiliant to shocks, but he didn't fully believe it and didn't expect he was fooling anyone. Then he turned out to be right: the economy recovered relatively quickly. It's obvious to me that at least part of the reason the economy recovered so quickly is because Greenspan suggested that it would. People believed (correctly, in my opinion) that he was the leading economics expert in the world, and so when he made positive statements, that gave people confidence, which generally has a lifting effect on the economy. Another example: barely a page later, he relates that after a meeting with lawmakers, he went home thinking all he'd done was reinforce what the lawmakers were already thinking, but the press acted like it was his agreement that made the whole thing happen. Well, it probably was. Apparently the lawmakers in question actually believe that the Chairman of the Fed is some kind of expert on economics, and if he agrees with what they're thinking, that gives them the confidence to go forward with it, and if he has reservations (as at the previous meeting) they hesitate (as they did). So now when out of retirement he comes out with a book saying that we are now living in a world with a "global capitalist economy that is more flexible, resilient, open, self-correcting, and fast-changing than it was even a quarter of a century earlier", people are going to believe that, too, and they're going to behave accordingly. I wouldn't have been very surprised if in the wake of the book's publication the economy surged up a bit: Greenspan just said a bunch of positive things about the economy, so let's all go out and do stuff with money. (It didn't work out that way because there were other forces at work, some of which I mention below...)

The historical narrative in the first half of the book is fascinating, not because I wasn't familiar with the basic events (I lived through and remember most of chapters 5-11), but because the perspective of an economist lights things up just differently enough to show up some things (trends, causes, and generalities) that I'd not been aware of before. Greenspan is a much better writer than I would have expected, and his story is compelling.

After going through the economic history of the last several decades, the author goes on to explore the economic issues that are currently facing various parts of the world, and the cultural and political issues that have important implications for economic policy and development. This is interesting material, as well, though of course much remains to be seen regarding how history will bear out his predictions.

Reading this book has raised in my mind some questions.

First, why is the short-term federal funds rate the only lever that the central bank in the US has to effect monetary policy? (I'm not saying, necessarily, that there should be other levers; I'm asking the question because I don't know the answer.) Greenspan indicates that the Fed was aware of the risk to the economy posed by the "irrational exuberance" of the dot-com bubble but was unable to do anything about it. Indeed, they briefly attempted to control the rising stock prices but found their measures ineffective and possibly counterproductive over the long term, so they left off trying. We can't fight market forces, they concluded. So then we had the dot-com bust and several years of pretty hard times for the IT industry, which had an impact on the entire economy. Not much later the Fed again saw a sudden inflation in another market they cannot effectively oversee, the real-estate market. There was nothing they could do about it, and when the bubble popped the housing market deteriorated quite significantly. The results include a credit crunch and the bankruptcy or collapse of a number of major lenders, especially in the subprime market (i.e., creditors that lend to normal people who don't have the 20% downpayment and other resources needed to get the best interest rates). A lot of first-time home buyers have been foreclosed, as I understand it not so much because of wrong that they've done as merely because the market now cannot support the loans they were offered during the real-estate boom. The home (which is the collateral) is not worth the outstanding loan amount, so if they can't make a payment they're stuck: there's no basis for an extension, and they can't sell their way out. This sort of thing is obviously not good for the overall long-term health of the economy, but what could be done about it? Are there additional levers that could (if Congress were so inclined) be granted to the Fed to assist them in more effectively smoothing out short-term economic forces and promoting the long-term health of the economy? And if so, what would be the other consequences of giving the central bank these additional powers?

Price controls obviously are NOT the answer. Just about all modern economists take it as an axiom that if the markets get too far out of touch with reality they will eventually correct themselves, and it is these market corrections that cause all the problems. The sorts of controls that characterize central planning (socialism and especially marxism) are only good for forcing markets further out of touch with reality, which invariably causes more problems than it solves, as Eastern Europe discovered.

However, the role of the central bank, primarily, is to control macroeconomic forces, most especially the value of money. (This is why we call it monetary policy, after all.) Controlling inflation (and deflation, if that becomes an issue) is very clearly within their mandate. But if the inflation occurs because of a situation in a market over which they have little or no influence, how can they control that inflation and keep the value of the currency stable? Besides the stock market and real estate, what other markets are there that the Fed cannot readily influence? What dangers does our economy face in the future? Just for instance (and purely *cough* hypothetically, ahem), what if labor becomes significantly overvalued? What kinds of havoc would the resulting market correction wreak?

A Word About Standardization

If you pay any attention at all to what people in technical circles (especially programmers) are saying, you will be familiar with the concept of standardization: everyone agrees to adhere to a particular standard, or the standards published by a particular body, and as a result everybody's stuff works together. To hear some of the zealots talk, virtually everything about computers, and especially software, should be standardized.

But that's not really necessary, or even a good idea.

What should be standardized in computers and software is exactly analogous to what should be standardized in the physical world. Specifically, it is not the things themselves that need to be standardized, but the connections and interactions between the things. This is equally true whether the things in question are kitchen appliances, part of your household plumbing, audio equipment, or computer applications.

Electrical and electronic equipment varies tremendously in terms of how it works inside and what it accomplishes, but it all interacts with other systems -- specifically, the power grid -- in pretty much exactly the same way. Setting aside for the moment what happens when you travel overseas, and heavy industrial equipment that runs off weird stuff like three-phase, normal stuff all runs off the same voltage (err, one of two voltages) and the same cycle of alternating current and plugs into one of a very small number of outlet styles. (Most things in the US plug into the same one style of outlet, but there are additional special styles for electric stoves, clothes dryers, and certain kinds of lighting. Other countries may have different exceptions. But even the exceptions are standardized: all clothes dryers in the US, for instance, plug into the same kind of receptacle.) If a device needs something different, the manufacturer includes (either inside the thing or along with it) a power supply or plug-pack that effectively makes the differences go away, or it runs off standard-form-factor batteries that can be recharged in a standard charger that plugs into a standard outlet. You can go to any store and buy any electric device for any purpose by any manufacturer, and it may do all kinds of weird stuff on the inside, who knows, but its interface with the power grid will be the same as for every other device. It doesn't matter if it's a computer, a blender, or an electric nose cleaner. You buy it, you take it home, you plug it in, and it Just Works.

Which brings me around to software.

Some things are pretty well standardized already. Network connectivity, for instance, is pretty much locked into TCP/IP. IPv6 has been coming for ten years, but at this point I am not convinced it will EVER replace IPv4, and there are no other contenders at all. There are some new application-layer protocols (e.g., BitTorrent), but these mostly are related to kinds of applications that were never standardized in the past. As far as things that have been around for a while are concerned (e.g., email), the standards are firmly entrenched. (The idea of an email-sending program that doesn't use SMTP has been tossed around in theory on a number of occasions, but trying to get anybody to use one is like trying to sell a life preserver that doesn't float.) The last time I can think of that established protocols were ditched in favor of new ones was when telnet and rcp gave way to ssh and scp. Even there, technically, telnet is still in use as a platform that other protocols (such as http and smtp) stand on top of.

Another place where things need to connect has to do with data. Internally, when a program is working with data, it can use whatever data structure it wants, whatever makes the programmer's job easiest. Nobody cares what structure the program uses internally, except for the people who maintain the program itself. But when the program goes to export the data and store it somewhere (in a file, in a database, wherever), now you have to consider the possibility that the user might also want to work with this data using other programs, and so you need a standard file format.

Programs that don't consider this possibility can end up creating data that the user can't ever do anything else with, and that severely limits their usefulness. There are lots of examples, but I'm going to pick on Microsoft Publisher in particular. Everything I say about it, of course, also applies to any other software that doesn't support any standard formats or other mechanisms for data interchange.

If Publisher could export its publications to a widely-supported format like PDF (or Word document format, or anything else that's widely supported), then people who wanted to send their flier or poster or whatever by email would have a way to do so. Better still, if it just used a standard format in the first place, then the user wouldn't have to go through the extra step of exporting: they could just attach the thing and send it. But Publisher can't do that. It only saves in one format: Publisher format. Nothing can open its files except Publisher. So if a user creates something in Publisher and asks me, "How do I send this to [someone]", there's only one answer I can give them: "Well, first, instead of Publisher, you have to create it in a program that supports a standard file format." Users do not like this answer, because it means the work they've already done has to be thrown away, but there's nothing to be done about that: Publisher simply does not provide for data interchange. (Copy and paste can be used to extract limited portions of a Publisher document, mostly the text, but that is usually not what the user put the most work into and is most eager to preserve.)

I call software like this Dead End Software, because there's no outlet: any data you put into it is trapped there, and there's no way to get it out. I strongly recommend against using such software for anything other than quick one-off work. (By "one-off" I mean something you're never going to need to refer to later, e.g., a Wet Paint sign. Even there you want to be careful, because a lot of times you think you won't need to refer to something later and then it turns out that you do.) It's a black hole, a final resting place for your data. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

Hepburn Must Stop

People who know me generally are aware of the fact that I am interested in language. The topic has always fascinated me, even since I got my dad to explain parts of speech to me when I was three or four years old. (Actually, come to think of it, I already was familiar with three writing systems at that point, as well.) So it should come as no surprise that I've been looking at assorted language-related stuff in my spare time ever since I left college.

Most recently, I've been looking at Japanese. Yeah, I know, it's a weird one to pick (especially since it seems almost all of the English-speaking people with any interest in it are obsessed with anime and manga, which don't interest me at all), but hey, I've seldom been accused of being excessively typical.

Anyway, in the course of reading (mostly on the internet) about Japanese, one of the things I've run into is the Hepburn Romanization. This is a system whereby Japanese text is transliterated into Latin characters. Transliteration is seldom without problems, and studying a foreign language from a text that transliterates everything is generally inadvisable (unless all you want to learn is how to say "Does anyone speak English? Does this airplane go back to the United States? How much is a ticket?"), but it seems to me that Hepburn is particularly obnoxious, especially for English speakers.

In the first place, learning to correctly pronounce the Romanized Japanese is at least as hard as learning Hiragana, maybe worse, because of the need to unlearn long-ingrained habits associated with English use of the same characters (e.g., it's difficult to learn to pronounce "ou" as a held long o rather than as it would be pronounced in English). This is compounded by the fact that Hepburn uses Latin vowel pronunciations, so e is a and i is e and u is oo and so forth, like in Spanish. The Latin vowel mappings by themselves, if they were the only major issue, would be no big deal at all, but in Spanish you don't have combinations that would be dipthongs in English showing up every other syllable to screw with your mind.

Hepburn doesn't even have the good graces to be easy to type on a US-English keyboard, because it uses a diacritical mark (which for added bonus points is not even a mark that's particularly common in European character sets) on vowels when they are held for an extra mora. Since this is untypeable on most keyboards, most of the time in practice you usually either simply don't see any indication that the vowel is held (which is extremely bad, because it makes non-identical words identical, and the absolutely *last* thing Japanese needs is twice as many homonyms) or else a second vowel character is used, which aggravates the aforementioned vowel pronunciation issue for English speakers. Using a punctuation mark to indicate a held vowel should have been an extremely obvious approach, since after all that is what katakana does, but no.

The letter y is even worse than the vowels, because you have to unlearn the notion that it could ever under any circumstances be a vowel, even when it directly follows a stop consonant. Did you know that "Tokyo" is two syllables? Also "Kyoto". This shows up in approximately seven out of every ten Japanese words and is *hard* for an English speaker to get used to reading correctly. When you see the corresponding hiragana, you don't have this problem, because each symbol stands for exactly one syllable (or "mora" or whatever they call them), so it's very obvious where the syllable divisions go. This is fairly important in Japanese, and the Romanization obscures it.

Just in case the y issue didn't do enough to obscure the syllable boundaries (which, it bears repeating, are important in Japanese), Romanization also obscures the syllable divisions in other areas, though I think a certain amount of that would be fundamentally unavoidable in any system that transliterates a syllabary into a true alphabet. (Alphabets are inherently suited for writing languages with a more freeform syllable structure allowing for closed syllables and arbitrary blends; the only closed syllables you have in Japanese are with the sokuon, and the only blends you have are the aforementioned yoon.) The only thing worse than transliterating a syllabary into a true alphabet is trying to go the other direction and write a language like English in something like katakana, which is just wholly altogether unworkable (not that that stops the Japanese from doing it, of course).

The most egregious offense I want to talk about, though, is the letter r. Hepburn uses the r to represent an alveolar flap, a sound we don't have in English at all. Now, the idea of using a letter that wouldn't otherwise be used to represent a sound that wouldn't otherwise be represented makes a certain amount of sense, but r is a particularly unfortunate choice here, at least for English speakers, because of the various bizarre properties of the r sound that English speakers take for granted and do without thinking. (For native speakers of Romance languages, I suppose Hepburn is maybe not so bad, but in practice how many people are there who speak Spanish and Japanese but not English?) There are other letters that could have been used, not least l, which is somewhat closer to the sound anyhow, but no, Hepburn uses the r. Problem is, if you pronounce it as r, or anything even vaguely like r, you're in for all manner of trouble, because r has all sorts of phonemic consequences. It colors every letter it sits next to, either before or after, especially vowels. It's also completely impossible to form certain very-common Japanese blends (most notably ryo and ryu, which it should be noted are one syllable each, see the previous paragraph about y) if you pronounce this r as the English r.

Aside from the blends, and the weird and unfortunate mess it makes out of adjascent vowels, r isn't even a stop ("plosive") consonant. It's a liquid. Japanese doesn't have liquids, unless you count the syllabic nasal (which is altogether another topic, and believe it or not Hepburn Romanization manages to make that one harder to read easily as well).

So anyway, all of that is to say, every time I run into Japanese language-learning materials that make extensive use of Romanization (which is *annoyingly* common), I cringe and go looking for something else. I suppose the writers of these materials believe that transliterating everything will make it "easier" for English speakers by removing the need to learn kana, but honestly, anybody who is even *slightly* serious about learning a language can certainly handle picking up at least hiragana, and everything thereafter will be *much* easier than with the Romanization.

It's not like hiragana is anywhere close to being even the tip of the iceberg for what characters you've got to learn if you actually ever want to be able to read any actual Japanese. I mean, you can't even look up words you don't know in a dictionary without learning two or three hundred radicals (and their lexical order) just to get started, so 46 hiragana characters is really no big deal.

The economy: near death, or cuts and scrapes?

Last night somebody told me that the stock market has lost trillions of dollars (he said how many trillion, but I don't remember) in a few days. Okay. My immediate response was, "What's that as a percentage?" I mean, yeah, trillions of dollars sounds like a lot, but the US economy is bigger than most people realize. It can afford to lose a few dollars here or there, from time to time.

As it turns out, the overall percentage of loss, since the last major peak (in 2007) is around 30%, depending on which index you look at. That sounds like a lot, and for a short-term drop it is a pretty good-sized chunk, but it's hardly the end of the world as we know it. There are peaks and bubbles (the fruits of periodic irrational exuberance), and then there are corrections back down to a more sane, gradual, and sustainable growth rate. 30% is a pretty large correction, but it's not out of line with what we've seen in the past.

So I went to a website that does stock charts. There are a number of sites out there that do basically the same thing, but in this instance I happened to select MSN Money, because it came up first in the search results. I went to the financial site, and I asked for charts of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, because that's a well-known index. It's not the only index we could look at, but it's a common choice, and, I believe, an instructive one.

I'm going to show two different charts here. The first represents the short-term view, on a linear scale.


Okay, yeah, that looks pretty bad. Actually, it looks worse than it should, because they've left off the bottom portion of the chart, starting the linear scale with eight thousand at the x axis. When you have to leave off more than half the numbers at the bottom of the scale in order to show the interesting part without making the chart too big, it usually means you should have used a logarithmic scale.

Now, let's step back and look at the larger picture. This second chart is on a logarithmic picture. (Otherwise the first three quarters of it would sort of resemble a flat line across the bottom.) Take a look:



What a difference! The black lines are original. I've taken the liberty of putting a red circle around the current economic crisis. On the one hand, yes, that's one of the biggest drops on the chart. On the other hand, it's clearly nothing very far out of the ordinary. If anything, that weird bulge around the (most recent) turn of the century is more unusual. The big dip at the left, of course, corresponds with the Great Depression.

I said I was going to show two charts, but here's an extra bonus image of the second chart, this time with a trend line drawn in, in green:


On the one hand, we're not seeing the steep growth of the eighties and nineties, but on the other hand this crisis has got to go some to look anything like the sharp drop of the early thirties.

That flat section across the seventies is called "stagflation", and in some ways that was worse than the current crisis, because it just went on and on and on, and then it went on and on and on some more, some twelve or thirteen years before things really started to pick up in the early eighties.

Of course, I don't know the future, and it's conceivable that things could keep going down until the current crisis turns into a second Great Depression. But there's no reason to assume that's what's going to happen. What we've seen so far is part of the normal up and down motion that happens all the time.

I don't want to be accused of being an unbridled optimist, so I'll say now that just because the economy hasn't completely collapsed doesn't mean our society isn't headed for a peck of trouble in other ways. All I'm saying is, some people are blowing the current economic crisis out of proportion. It's not really our gravest concern. There are, indeed, much more worrisome things to be upset about. (The condition of the public education system, just for instance, is outright terrifying. But that's a topic for another day.)

Bad Analogies 101

At church we're going through an evangelism course called Way of the Master. I want to be clear up front that just because the course uses one tortured analogy doesn't make the whole course bad. It only makes the analogy bad. Indeed, the course could potentially be valuable. (How valuable? Too soon to tell. We've only had one week of it so far. Though, already, it has managed to set me thinking, and that in itself is not without value.) Still, I feel the need to vent about exactly how terrible this analogy is, so here we go.

The analogy is that a firefighter arrives at a house fire and proceeds to sit locked in the fire truck, listening to music on headphones, while the house burns to the ground around a family of five, whom he can see screaming and calling out to be rescued, which pleas he ignores. When questioned about his actions, he says he was testing the CD player that he'd bought as a gift for the fire chief, at great personal expense.

Aside from the obvious physical problems with the analogy (he can see the family from the truck, but they can't get out of the fire without help), the really broken part is the spiritual side of the picture. I don't know about you, but to my knowledge I've never had an unbeliever cry out to me for help with spiritual things. Ever.

Believe me, if somebody even *asked* me to explain salvation to them, let alone *cried out*, I'd be... willing isn't even the right word. Enthusiastic probably falls short of the mark as well. That's the kind of thing you daydream about, but it does not generally, you know, happen. On the contrary, people typically don't know the house is burning around them, and the few who do know it are usually convinced they cannot be helped.

Now, I'm not saying it's right for us to sit and do nothing just because unbelievers are content to stay that way. It's certainly not. But I *am* saying the analogy is flawed.

Here's another analogy: I'm not a firefighter. I'm a geologist. My geology degree is from an unaccredited college, which most people have never heard of, which has had to move across international boundaries numerous times as various governments have tried to shut it down. The government of my country officially tolerates the school, but you can tell they consider it an embarrassment.

So I have an unaccredited degree, and I call myself a geologist, but I am not employed as a geologist. I work some other job to pay the bills. The equipment I use is different from the equipment that other geologists use, too.

For the past few years I've been independently studying a certain mountain, and I have concluded that not only is it actually a stratovolcano (a fact which was previously unknown), but furthermore it is active, and is building up tremendous seismic pressure even as we speak and will soon erupt. It's impossible to know an exact timeframe, but with every passing month the pressure builds higher. There is a large bulge on the side of the mountain that has doubled in size over the last six weeks. It's going to go, soon, and furthermore it's going to be a very potent eruption. From the amount of pressure that's building up, my estimates say it could be bigger than Krakatoa, or at least comparable.

At the base of the mountain there is, of course, a town. When the volcano erupts, it will blow a large chunk of mountain, tens of thousands of tons of rock, down the mountainside and straight through the town. And on top of that there could be lava, volcanic ash, quakes, and so on, all the usual destructive stuff that goes with a major volcanic eruption.

I have to convince the people to evacuate.

People have been living in the town for generations. The mountain has never erupted in the past. The local news runs stories about what a crackpot I am. The local authorities, as well as the state government, are reassuring people that of course the mountain is an ordinary mountain, just like all the other mountains in the area.

But the people still need to evacuate. They're going to die if they stay. I know they're going to die, but I sit in my bedroom and make excuses for why I'm not talking to them about the volcano. I even post about it on my blog (which nobody reads), but I don't go out and tell people about the volcano.

Okay, so this analogy isn't perfect either. I think it's closer than the other one.

Esoteric Knowledge Quiz #3

Do your friends, family, and coworkers accuse you of being a repository of useless information? (Mine do.) Here's your chance to test your knowledge of obscure tidbits...
I've had some help coming up with the questions for this one, so hopefully they represent a broader spectrum of topics.

1. Which was the first toy to be called an action figure?
   
   
   
   1. Barbie
   
   
   2. Captain Action
   
   
   3. G.I. Joe
   
   
   4. Superman
   Thanks to Mark Harris for sending in this question.



2. Which of the following is not a hardwood tree?
   
   
   
   1. Hickory
   
   
   2. Cedar
   
   
   3. Sycamore
   
   
   4. Balsa



3. The 1985 NFL season will forever be remembered by fans for the historically great Chicago Bears defense, which helped power the team to a convincing 46-10 win over the New England Patriots in Superbowl XX. But what team lead the league in offense that year?
   
   
   
   1. Chicago Bears
   
   
   2. Miami Dolphins
   
   
   3. San Diego Chargers
   
   
   4. San Francisco 49ers
   Thanks to Dave Gable for sending in this question.



4. What is the traditional well-known TCP/IP port number commonly associated with NNTP?
   
   
   
   1. 17
   
   
   2. 70
   
   
   3. 119
   
   
   4. 179
   For an extra bonus geek point, which one is (or was) commonly associated with gopher?



5. If you have desmodromic valves on your vehicle's engine, what is their function?
   
   
   
   1. Opening and closing the intake and exhaust valves without the use of return springs
   
   
   2. Removing air from the crankcase to lower internal air resistance
   
   
   3. Routing exhaust gases through the engine to help it warm up faster
   
   
   4. Allowing gaseous fuel vapors to be burned alongside liquid fuel
   
   For bonus points, which of the following brands of vehicle is most likely to have these valves?
   
   
   
   1. Ducati
   
   
   2. Peugeot
   
   
   3. Kawasaki
   
   
   4. Honda
   Thanks to Andy Kerr for sending in this two-part question.

Most of the answers are in the comments now.

Past Quizzes: 1, 2

Quiz four is already in the works. If you have questions to contribute to future quizzes, send them in to jonadab@NO SPAM THANKS ANYWAYbright.net with the phrase Esoteric Knowledge Quiz in the subject line (or. if you are on the Wheeitology list, you can just post them there). Thanks!

Esoteric Knowledge Quiz #2

Do your friends, family, and coworkers accuse you of being a repository of useless information? (Mine do.) Here's your chance to test your knowledge of obscure but interesting tidbits...

1. What is the major factor usually blamed for Dutch Disease?
   
   
   
   1. too much lowland in too small an area
   
   
   2. too much of a natural resource
   
   
   3. too many seventeen-year cicadas
   
   
   4. too little magnesium in the diet
   
   



2. What does the word farctate mean?
   
   
   
   1. stuffed full
   
   
   2. fluoroastatic acid
   
   
   3. play in an irresponsible manner
   
   
   4. pass gas



3. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, when Dr. Soong puts the emotion chip intended for Data into Lore, the android sings a song. The song that he sings features two major characters, only one of whom is named in the part that Lore sings. What is the name of the other character?
   
   
   
   1. Abu Hasan
   
   
   2. Kassim Baba
   
   
   3. Enkidu
   
   
   4. Ivan Skavinsky Skavar



4. Which of the following islands is currently claimed by Japan, but controlled by another country?
   
   
   
   1. Atlasov
   
   
   2. Iturup
   
   
   3. Wake Island
   
   
   4. Okinawa



5. The following quote is an excerpt from (a translation of) a letter sent to a civil authority. Who wrote it? "In the second place, I was not even examined, let alone asked what my faith was, much less found guilty of any misdeed. Such a procedure, firstly, is counter to the Jewish law, John 7:51, where Nicodemus says: 'Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?' Yes, it is also counter to the Gentile justice, Acts 25:16, where Festus says, '... it was not the custom of the Romans to give up any one before the accused met the accusers face to face, and had opportunity to make defense concerning the charge laid against him.'"
   
   
   
   1. Johann Reuchlin
   
   
   2. Huldrych Zwingli
   
   
   3. Alexander Mack
   
   
   4. Galileo Galilei

The answers have been posted in the comments.

Microsoft Gives a Month for Seven

Okay, it's time to revisit Windows Seven Dates and my Vienna Timeline. Network World reports (see also the slashdot discussion) that Microsoft is now putting a specific month to their projected release date: January 2010.

Of course, that doesn't mean it'll actually be available in January 2010. Haha. No. In the first place, the date can and probably will still slip a bit. In the second place, new versions of Windows are never actually available to the public on the official release date. No, they become available only to select partners on the official release date. (Select partners, in Microsoft parlance, are the large multinational megacorporations whose Software Assurance licensing allows them to install any version they want, any time they want, on any computer they want. Typically the IT departments of these large corporations would never in a million years actually deploy a brand new release the same year it comes out. Most of them have only moved from Windows 2000 to Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP in the last few months; some of them still haven't.) Actual availability to the public comes several months later. That's how it was with Windows '95 (officially released in December 2005; not available until 2006), Windows XP, and Vista. There's no reason to believe Seven would be different in this regard.

Nonetheless, their putting a specific month on their release prediction is significant. Very significant. There's a lot less wiggle-room in a month than there is in a vague projection like "early 2010", and in the past Microsoft has usually not projected specific months until they're legitimately close to having something they believe they can bang into release-quality shape in approximately that amount of time.

If you look at my timeline, it doesn't call for a specific-month release projection until 2016Q2, less than a year from actual release in 2017. Going by just that alone, one could be excused for concluding that my timeline is off by eight years.

I don't think my timeline is off by quite that much. For one thing, even if Microsoft actually comes out with the product in January 2010, that's only seven years ahead of my timeline. Furthermore, the projection in question on my timeline is for a release date only two quarters forward from when it's projected; as of now January 2010 is still six quarters out, three times as far into the future. Historically, the further into the future a projection is, the more room there is for it to still be pushed back. I fully expect Microsoft to push back this release date at least once yet, and then on top of that I expect them to release to select partners only, buying a few extra months before actually shipping the new OS to the public.

Still, this caught me off guard, and I'm now very much convinced that my timeline is overlong, and that Microsoft will beat it by several years. Also there have been fewer feature announcements than I predicted, and I believe this is significant: Microsoft actually learned from the Vista development experience and is aiming somewhat lower for Seven, no doubt deliberately. More realistic goals, less wasted time. My timeline was written with the assumption that they had not learned this lesson, but it appears now that they have. Which is good, for Microsoft and for their customers.