Monthly Archives: May 2002

MacSlash.Com Screwed by Apple’s Spam FIlters

Posted on by
Reply

Wow. Everybody was up in arms at Metafilter, Slashdot and other places over the alleged domain hijacking of MacSlash.Com, which is now a generic Dotster “coming soon” page. The MacSlash folks insisted their domain name had not expired which had me worried because I’ve been relying more and more on Dotster.

Turns out, Dostser did not screw up at all. The domain name did expire, but the MacSlash folks never go the notice because their ISP’s — Apple! — e-mail filter labeled it as spam and never sent it on to them.

According to an article at MacSlash.Net,

We have learned that our ownership of the macslash.com domain did in fact expire without our knowledge. The reason we never received any of the domain renewal notices from Dotster is because the email address we supplied to Dotster was a mac.com mail address, thus enabling Vicente Peiro Crespo to register macslash.com. (For the current situation with macslash.com redirection, see this informative post by user samiam).

Recently, it was discovered that mac.com filters email without users’ knowledge or user controls. We discovered yesterday that the folks at mac.com have at some point classified all mail from Dotster as spam, therefore trashing our domain renewal notices without our knowledge.

Not only is it wrong for Apple to filter our mac.com email without our knowledge, but also very ironic that Apple has so severly damaged MacSlash, which was created for the sole purpose of supporting and informing Apple’s customers.

Okay, on the one hand they should have known when their domains were going to expire. I have a nice list on my PDA of all the domains I own and when they’re going to expire as well as notes on my calendar a month in advance saying “re-register” (and with Dotster being so cheap to renew, there’s no point in not doing multiple year renewals, which I’m also doing to avoid this sort of headache).

But still, this is the problem with spam filters and why, personally, I wouldn’t use an ISP that filter out spam. That’s especially odd that they tagged Dotster as a spammer. I know they’re one of the few companies I don’t receive spam from, but maybe they are spamming and I’m just no on their list since I’m already a customer.

Suicide Advocate Was Not Terminally Ill

Posted on by
Reply

It looks like Australia has their own version of Jack Kevorkian. Kevorkian, of course, earned the moniker “Dr. Death” for helping terminally ill people kill themselves. Kevorkian was sent to jail a few years ago for violating Michigan’s law against assisted suicide.

For someone like myself, who supports assisted suicide, Kevorkian was an unmitigated disaster. Not only did his presence make it easy for opponents to paint the assisted suicide movement as a bunch of kooks, but Kevorkian played fast and loose with the facts, helping some people to commit suicide where it was questionable whether the person was even terminally ill.

Last week, 77-year-old Australian Nancy Crick killed herself in front of friends and family. Crick said she suffered from terminal bowel cancer and her cause was taken up by Australian euthanasia advocate Dr. Philip Nitschke. Media accounts said Crick wanted to choose when she died rather than having her disease choose for her.

Now, though, it turns out that Crick did not have terminal cancer, and Nitschke knew this all along. News.Com.Au reports that medical specialists told Crick as late as a month before her suicide that she was free of bowel cancer.

Crick apparently also lied about her alleged weight loss and malnutrition. In an Internet diary, Crick claimed her weight had fallen to 27kg, but hospital records showed she weighed 38kg a month before she died, which was 2 kg more than she weighed in late 2001.

Nitschke’s response is that yes, well, “in retrospect we should have said that” Crick was not wasting away and did not have a terminal case of cancer. Nitschke believes this is irrelevant because Crick was apparently genuinely in severe, chronic pain.

Even if that is true, however, Nitschke just gave away almost all credibility his movement might have had. This is, after all, one of the most frequent criticisms of assisted suicide — that doctors, other medical professionals, and patients will inevitably twist or shade the truth. And Nitschke went ahead and proved them right.

Source:

Crick told she was clear Chris Griffith, Paula Doneman, and Hedley Thomas, News.Com.Au, May 29, 2002.

Australian suicide tests euthanasia law. Phil Mercer, The BBC, May 23, 2002.

Who’s Afraid of CT Scans?

Posted on by
Reply

Well, some doctors and other public health officials.

Over the past few years, the cost of computed tomography (CT) scan equipment has fallen dramatically. The price is so low, in fact, that there are now a number of companies which sell CT scan services directly to consumers.

Gina Kolata writes in The New York Times about the controversy over one such company, CAT Scan 2000. For $200-$570, CAT Scan 2000 will perform a CT scan of your body. As Kolata notes, “It [CAT Scan 2000] proudly calls itself the Wal-Mart of scanning.”

This, in turn, is part of a growing trend of marketing medical diagnostic tests to individuals directly. In fact there are a number of referral services on the Internet that, for a fee, will arrange for all sorts of tests that your doctor is unlikely to order (unless you present evidence of having a related condition).

Doctors and public health officials seem to universally despise this democratization of medicine. How dare a patient presume to go out and get a CT scan just because she can? They tend to criticize these sorts of tests as wasting precious health resources — especially since such tests are likely to turn up small abnormalities that are really not health problems but which will cost a lot of money to investigate (Kolata does a nice job of chronicling one doctor’s expensive foray into tests following abnormalities that showed up on a CT scan). Of course, CAT Scan 2000 and others point to people whose scans found cancers and other diseases that would have otherwise went undiagnosed.

As Ronald Bailey notes in an article on private CT scans for Reason, the medical profession has a long history of wanting to keep patients from having direct access to diagnostic tests. As he notes,

The CT scanning dispute is reminiscent of the debate in the 1990s over whether women should have access to the test for the BRCA breast cancer gene. Medical professionals were nearly unanimous that women should not be able to get a BRCA test on the grounds that, if it turned out they had the gene, there was no clinically validated treatment available.

Despite these pronouncements, many women pressed on, obtained the test, and if they found that they were at risk, chose to have mastectomies. Subsequent research has conclusively shown that mastectomies dramatically reduce a BRCA gene carrier’s risk of getting breast cancer. Many women would have died had they waited until they got the gatekeepers’ okay to proceed.

I think CAT Scan 2000 and companies like it are an excellent idea. One company advertised that they would even burn images of the scan onto a CD-ROM for a fee. I’d love to post a scan of my lungs to my web site.

Sources:

Cheaper Body Scans Spread, Despite Doubts Gina Kolata, The New York Times, May 27, 2002.

Scanning for Health?
“Ignorance is bliss,” say some doctors. Ronald Bailey, Reason, May 29, 2002.

Better Living Through Chemistry: Bring On Melanotan and Provigil

Posted on by
2

Some people just can’t stand seeing other people happy — especially if that happiness is “unnatural.”

In Wired, for example, Wil McCarthy takes on the wonder drug Melanotan. Melanotan has chemical properties that sound like a pharmaceutical marketer’s dream come true. The drug’s major effect is to create a deep, healthy tan. And it also just happens to be an anti-inflammatory, increases sexual desire and suppresses appetite.

McCarthy derisively refers to Melanotan as “the Barbie drug.” He concludes his noting that by the end of this decade Melanotan and drugs like it will be common adding that, “this decade is a breathing period, a chance to prepare for our cultural destiny: the drug-fueled extreming an professionalization of shallowness itself.”

For McCarthy, using chemical compounds to increase the sheer joy of life is inherently shallow and a waste. To McCarthy, drugs like Melanotan are proof that “Yesterday’s drugs were about need; today’s are about desire.”

Much the same criticism was directed against Viagra when it first appeared. A drug to produce erections? Aren’t children still dying of malaria in Africa? Who needs Viagra?

Similar handwringing was on display over Provigil. Provigil has been used for years to treat narcolepsy. The drug’s maker wants the FDA to approve Provigil for more widespread use.

Provigil doesn’t increase sexual desire, but it does act as a stimulant to keep people awake — with very little side effects. Stimulants commonly used by people to stay awake tend to make people jittery or are addictive and all tend to keep a person awake for hours only to bring him or her crashing down later.

In studies Provigil keeps people awake for long periods without the jitters, addictiveness, and other problems associated with other stimulants.

The major concern about Provigil is that it may be abused, but certainly caffeine and other stimulants are already used excessively by many people.

Personally, I’d love to get my hands on either drug. Why should not used drugs not only to treat/cure disease, but also to improve our general well being? These sorts of drugs need to be safe and have potential side effects disclosed, but I would hope that once those criteria are met that we would not slip into McCarthy’s brand of biomedical Puritanism that sees the pursuit of joy and happiness as inherently shallow.

Sources:

Thin! Tan! Hotter than Hell! Wil McCarthy, Wired, June 2002.

Stay-awake pill keeps users alert. Dan Springer, Fox News, May 2, 2002.

Altogether Now, Can We Say “Selection Bias”?

Posted on by
Reply

Theory three — anecdotes are not evidence.

Maureen Dowd was pushing this lamebrain idea about female whistleblowers awhile ago. It actually makes a lot of sense provided you ignore male whistle blowers. Plus it is a lot more fun to turn out hackneyed theories based on limited evidence than do a Google search for whistleblowers.

But it makes little more sense than if I went through and assembled a few anecdotes from the past year about mothers who murdered their children and then wondered aloud why women are so darn violent.

Robert Horry and the Lakers

Posted on by
Reply

Robert Horry’s clutch 3 pointer in yesterday’s NBA playoff game is the reason I occasionally still watch the NBA. Having that opportunity and actually making the shot is the sort of thing that kids on playground fantasize about endlessly, and watching Horry actually make that shot was exhilirating (yes, I was on my feet shouting at the television as his shot swished through the net).

Sacramento’s Chris Webber and Vlade Divac both chalked the shot down to a lucky play — Divac just happened to punch the basketball to precisely the point on the court where Horry was standing.

But that ignores the fact that a) luck did not pull the Lakers out of a 20-point first quarter deficit to trailing by just two with 11 seconds to go, and b) much of success in life is about taking advantage of opportunities that present themselves, often through sheer dumb luck.

And what really made the win priceless was Horry’s reaction — while his teammates and everyone in the Staples Center were screaming and throwing up their hands, Horry’s demeanor was cocky but subdued as if to say, “Of course it went in — what else were you expecting?”

Colleen Rowley’s “Bombshell Memo”

Posted on by
Reply

Time magazine has appropriately called FBI counsel Colleen Rowley’s memo to FBI director Robert Mueller “The Bombshell Memo”.

The most disturbing thing about the memo has to be that the higher ups that Rowley dealt with in the FBI were so dismissive of the Minneapolis field office’s views of the risk posed by Zacarias Moussaoui, that this continued into the post-9/11 period. In her memo, Rowley writes,

Just minutes after I saw the first news of the World Trade Center attack(s), I was standing outside the office of Minneapolis ASAC M. Chris Briesse waiting for him to finish with a phone call, when he received a call on another line from this S[upervisory] S[pecial] A[gent]. Since I figured I knew what the call may be about and wanted to ask, in light of the unfolding events and the apparent urgency of the situation, if we should now immediately attempt to obtain a criminal search warrant for Moussaoui’s laptop and personal property, I took the call. I said something to the effect that, in light of what had just happened in New York, it would have to be the “hugest coincidence” at this point if Moussaoui was not involved with the terrorists. The SSA stated something to the effect that I had used the right term, “coincidence” and that this was probably all just a coincidence and we were to do nothing in Minneapolis until we got their (HQ’s) permission because we might “screw up” something else going on elsewhere in the country.

This from the same SSA that had previously dismissed French intelligence information about Moussaoui’s terrorist connections as worthless, and, according to Rowley, had acted to sabotage efforts to obtain a search warrant for Moussaoui’s laptop.

Why would an FBI agent be this obtuse? Rowe cites disincentives within the Bureau to take risks, but ultimately those disincentives come back to the schizophrenic views that the American public has of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.

You can see this depicted in films where the two popular genres of police-oriented movies are alternatively a) the super cop who kicks ass, saves the day, and rarely considers the constitutional rights of suspects and b) the corrupt cop who usually does all of the above but is condemned for it. It is as if Americans do not realize that the cops from Lethal Weapon and Training Day are almost identical (though, for some reason, the Lethal Weapon cops are cheered when they step outside the limits of the law while clearly audiences are not meant to cheer for Denzel Washington’s corrupt narcotics officer).

Within the FBI, this sort of dichotomy seems to have induced bureaucratic paralysis. On the one hand, the American public wants the FBI to catch the bad guys no matter what. On the other hand, when the risk taking leads to screw ups like Waco, Ruby Ridge or COINTELPRO, we are suddenly shocked that the FBI would so routinely sidestep constitutional protections.

In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. Congress quickly passed and the President signed the Patriot Act. That act was decried by many civil libertarians, pundits and not a few politicians — many of whom are now wondering why the FBI did not search Moussauoi’s laptop sooner.

Similarly, on the one hand the political climate dictates that even in the post-9/11 era, airports cannot target Arab men for special treatment. On the other hand, much of the debate over a memo authored by an FBI agent in Phoenix center around why the FBI did not conduct a nationwide investigation of Arab men at flight training schools.

Is it really that surprising in this sort of environment that an FBI bureaucrat would decide to take a safe, easy choice rather than risk making national headlines?

Why Not Hundreds of RSS Feeds From a Single Weblog?

Posted on by
Reply

Seth Dillingham writes about a conversation he had with Jon Udell weblogs and RSS feeds about “the need for a new meta-layer above them to associate them together topically without worrying about their physical storage location. (This is the opposite of Radio Community Server, which associates blogs together by the server they’re stored on.)”

But what really caught my attention was Seth’s take on the need (my word, not his) for weblogs having multiple RSS feeds. Seth wrote,

Lots of weblogs now provide multiple RSS feeds (RSS is a syndication format.) Unless your entire weblog is devoted to a specific subject, and you never stray from that subject, you might want to belong to more than one community. TruerWords, for example, could provide RSS feeds for posts realted to Conversant, Birmans, or digital photography. Those feeds would be picked up by different communities, and it wouldn’t matter that my site isn’t actually hosted by any of them.

This is something I have been working at in my spare time. Frankly, Conversant makes it easy to set up RSS feeds for distinct categories, the real issue is that most of the people I talk to have never heard of RSS.

But as an example, I have a topical faq about animal rights that automatically categorizes the thousand or so articles I’ve written about animal rights into hundreds of categories. The obvious next step is to create topical RSS feeds. For example, a lot of people just want to track what PETA is doing. So I have a PETA RSS feed that shows the last 15 stories I’ve written that are about PETA.

It would take only a couple hours to create RSS feeds for the other 300 or so topics, so people who want to track animal rights terrorism or maybe the Humane Society of the United States could do that too.

Seth’s and Jon’s ideas about a meta-layer that brings together multiple such feeds is the obvious next step. For example, a lot of the warblogs include discussions and critiques of Noam Chomsky. A couple weeks ago there was discussion about starting a multi-editor blog just devoted to dissing Chomsky.

But that’s sort of hard to sustain on such a narrow topic. A much better solution would be for warbloggers who write about Chomsky occasionally to offer an RSS feed of just those stories and then use something like Seth is talking about to bring them together.

The major obstacle to this, of course, is that the number of bloggers who are attaching any sort of metadata to their posts is almost nil. I’ve seen more of it than in the past, since Radio and Movable Type support categorization systems (though neither seems to have the flexibility that Conversant does), but most of the blogs I read are done in Blogger and have no categorization at all (which is extremely frustrating as a user. Many times I visit a site and would like to see all the posts a person has written about Noam Chomsky, but that is very difficult without metadata).

Anita Roddick Is a Moron (But Google Should Let Her Advertise)

Posted on by
Reply

Anita Roddick is a moron. She repeats the nonsensical claim by idiotarian Robert Fisk that John Malkovich threatened to kill him.

In fact what really happened was that Malkovich was talking to students when someone in the audience asked him who he would most like to “fight to the death.” Malkovich replied that “I’d rather just shoot them” than engage in a fight to the death, and named Fisk and a Scottish MP as his candidates of choice.

In the minds of lazy people unwilling to do any fact checking — like Anita Roddick — this has been transformed into some sort of overt threat on Fisk’s life.

But what is Google’s point in preventing her from taking out an AdWords ad just because she called John Malkovich “a vomitous worm.” What harm can come from allowing morons like Roddick to advertise?