sj's Longest Now [v.1]

Our persimmons in Houston
are heavy, and fall off in the slightest gust of wind. Any serious
storm is enough to ruin the year’s crop. None fell off this morning; it
was just like a strong thunderstorm. 
Elsewhere : sporadic trees and branches were down elsewhere in the
city, with a localized gust of 70mph; one high-rise lost a few windows; 300,000
are without electricity.

Galveston,
too, was largely untouched.  East Texas had it worst; but Beaumont
escaped destruction.  No towns were flattened, or even mauled;
though some houses lost roofs and some buildings suffered heavy damage.

On the other hand, there was extensive highway gridlock,
with people on the roads for over 24 hours; some deaths from
heatstroke, many people running out of gas b/c of the stalled traffic
and leaving on their A/C in the 100-degree heat. I wonder if people used up the breakdown lanes…  Yesterday at
6pm, there were still people stranded on the road w/o gas, despite many
locals (in addition to official FEMA efforts) making sorties to bring gas and food to those poor souls.  Here is a typical evac experience from Dwight.

The
unofficial evacuation orders were too broad (‘everyone in the hundred
year flood plain!’), too thorough (‘everyone get out of the city’
rather than ‘everyone get to higher ground’), and too individualist
(‘everyone to his/her own car!’).

The standard evac orders were fine — here is the canonical Galveston/Houston evacuation map.
Note that even the “C” evacuation zones, for Category 4/5 hurricanes,
only come into Houston as far as the East 610 Loop (to which point the
ship channel extends).  However,

• The orders were also amazingly persistent :  ‘ALTHOUGH
  TRAFFIC HAS BEEN HEAVY AS THE TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT PLAN HAS BEEN
  IMPLEMENTED…TRAFFIC MOVEMENT SHOULD ACCELERATE. DO NOT LET THE
  TRAFFIC DELAYS HALT YOUR EFFORTS TO EVACUATE.’ was repeated a few
  times, even after the originally hoped-for acceleration didn’t happen.
• Complementary orders were not given (if you are in the following safe zones, STAY OFF THE HIGHWAY)
• “Evacuation” was not well-defined.  Do you have to drive 3
  hours out of the city?  Is it enough to get to places within city
  limits, where there is much more highway space?
• Extra mandatory evacuation orders were made up on the fly. 
  Whoops!  The mayor has tried to write it off as a slip of the
  tongue, but many officials made it.   “If you live in a
  flood-prone area…” — Houston, Pearland, and others issued such
  warnings.  Since the 2001 flood affected many areas that had never
  flooded before, this worried many people who had nothing to fear from
  flooding thanks to Rita… the city had been parched for two weeks, and
  its bayous were empty.

When you tell people to stop trusting their own judgment and to
trust yours, you suddenly have an enormously greater responsibility to
care for them…

As of 6pm CST tonight, mandatory evacuations are in effect for “Zone A”
of Harris County.  Mandatory evacuations of Zones B and C will
follow as of 6am tomorrow. (notice)

Our house in Houston falls under the ‘suggested evacuation’ list, because it is in a low-lying area.

Rita is getting progressively stronger — currently
passing over a warm-water region that fed the last surge in Katrina’s
strength — and likely to exceed expectations of its strength.  See Jeff Master’s weather blog for more depressing coverage. 

And freenode is relocating, too; hopefully a temporary business.

An increasingly neglected minority in the United States has gotten some
of the worst of the latest storming, flooding, infection and
dehydration deaths, largely overlooked by the press : the newly
deceased..

An unspecified number of corpses in the Superdome were left there for
days.  Others were seen floating through the water by what seems
to be an entire regiment of amateur and professional reporters and
support staff.  People working with the dead feel the need to
justify their efforts — “Families need to know what happened to the people they lose,” says
one Dr. Senn, a forensic dentist from San Antonio, in a Katrina-related
interview.  I hadn’t realized leaving the dead to rot in anonymity
had become a community-lifestyle choice.

Even in a city bereft of order and shepherds, there are always alternatives. 
Even a gob of tobacco spit on a dead man’s face is a reminder that
someone saw fit to walk right up and leave a remembrance. 
Abandoning bodies to float and decay at will, even those of strangers,
is worse ignominy still.  Have we forgotten what it means to honor the dead?

Reading about the Great Galveston Hurricane reminds me that this has
often been the result of disasters; I wonder how that has played out in
other countries and times.   Certainly the 1900 Galveston
disaster, with 2 corpses per rescue worker, was a very different story
than the latest NO disaster, with a ratio of more like 1:10.

Never trust infrastructure that doesn’t provide rapid feedback —
automatic, world-readable feedback where appropriate.  Not with
anything invaluable.

Not with your life; not with critical contingency plans; and for God’s sake, not with your children or your mother’s life.

An old friend from another life died last month; brilliant, brave, full of remarkable dreams. Unrealized dreams. I hardly knew what to think at the time; we hadn’t been in touch for years. But in the weeks since I have despaired of it; I have lost myself. It has preyed on my thoughts, in a way my grandfather’s death, and even my father’s, have not.

I am not a person afraid of mortality. Death is a beautiful part of life; without constraints, freedom and art cannot flourish and find expression; without the stricture of language, we would have no spaceships. Yet there are shades of death… Recently I have slept dreamlessly, eight hours at a time, something I rarely do. There are those who might say this is healthy for anyone. I wake up each morning feeling refreshed; but as soon as I open my eyes, I feel a twinge of senseless fear which only exercise can suppress.

It is too strong and insistent to be simply fear for myself — for who am I? — but fear for continuity, for those I love, for the dreams I cherish. Or is it something beyond that? All I know is that for a while I had to resort to external hints to distinguish one day from the next; I held onto receipts, reviwed my posting and edit histories, sorted my papers and problemsets by last edit, simply to remember what I had been thinking the day (the meal!) before.

In the process I discovered two things: Wikaddiction is stronger than dirt (surely tapping the same primal urges that fuel Verant‘s success), and memorization is successful even when done as a background process. The last point I knew, but had all but forgotten.

I have neglected posting, and many of you. If I owe you apologies or regrets, please trust that I will send them. I have a small list of names here, and am working through them in roughly alphabetical order.

Taking off for a long weekend in an attempt to relax may sound wise, but in practice is generally a Bad Idea. To do it properly requires is far too expensive, and to do it poorly just wastes a few perfectly good days. Please remind me of this the next time one comes around, and sabotage my helicopter if necessary. Now I have a project draft to finish by tomorrow, and I’m not looking forward to it. And a book to finish. There’s no way I’m sleeping tonight. And tomorrow… I’m adjusting my diet, just in case.

While reading up on international 50-year ”’identities”’ the other day, and thinking about how fundamental names are (even in this post-biblical and post-$10M domain-name purchase era), it occurred to me that I should take more seriously the matter of preemptive name-conflation.

I keep running across other SJ’s on the web (some of whom don’t even know how to pluralize or punctuate “SJ“), so I thought I’d just clear up some of my private identity crisis by keeping tabs on them all. After an early on-wiki attempt to do this, I realized there were enough instances to warrant a separate story on the issue. I hear some people have entire sites devoted to people with their name… but that seems like overkill.

If you find (or ARE) a particularly compelling version of me out in the rest of the world, ping me and I’ll update the list. I think the only reason I never did this before was my abiding shame that a nutrition doctor name Samuel Klein was vastly more popular than I… but his clever SEO schemes could only hold out for so long.

Somewhere between my machine and Google [and a whole chunk of domain
names], something in the vicinity of DNS went wrong.  I
don’t know how widely or by whom or since when, but since yesterday
night, I haven’t been able to access any of a wide variety of google
IPs from my machine without an explicit entry in my hosts file.  
Labs.google.com worked, for instance, but google.com, www.google.com,
google.us, google.co.uk, google.de, google.fr, etc. have not. 
Neither hotmail, aim, gmail…

The annonying thing about maintaining my own hosts entry for google is
that it changes… 216.237.57.99 worked earlier today, but now it
doesn’t.  Right now I’m using 216.239.59.99, a subtle
difference.  Now google itself works, but if I accidentally follow
a link to google.de, my browser times out unless I actively ping
google.de and then insert a new line for it into my hosts file..  What’s going on?  Clearly DNS itself is working, since ping and whois can resolve their IP addresses…

Two men came to repair my kitchen ceiling yesterday morning. 
Second time in three years that ceiling had to be fixed.  Last
time it was a professional, three-day job.  This time it was a
hack job, two days of patchwork followed
by a week of half-finished ceiling and another day of patchwork. 
Now the ceiling looks like a failed home-deco experiment, with seams
where the repair took place, but you have to look twice to notice.

These men were two of the laziest people I have ever met in the confines of a city. 
They moved slowly, came to decisions slowly, talked slowly except when
yelling at high volume (and even then the process of argument was slow,
only the words were staccato and fast).  Their tools never worked, and they had to leave on two occasions to buy replacements from a hardware store three miles away.

They also had no common sense, so perhaps retiring to the countryside
wouldn’t solve all of their problems.  They started work with a
tiny tarp and no ventilation… and began to sand.  No wait, they
opened the basement door for ventilation.  They turned on a fan
while sanding (“to blow the dust towards the wall”), and got a fine
layer of plaster-dust all over the room and the one next to it before I
stopped them. 

Meanwhile, a friend’s apartment complex in central square burned terribly,
damaging many of his things..  I remember the last time there was
a big fire in that part of town in an apartment complex…  it was
just across the road from Upton St where I was living, and I happened
to miss it by being out of town.

How easy it would be to lose everything.  I think of the hundreds
of years of labour put into building beautiful monuments, opulent
houses, glorious fortifications, which were later targeted not even for
theft and recycling, but for destruction,
because of their quality.  And of the millions of years put into
building beautiful biomes, life-forms, other crystallizations of order, which are inevitably disintegrated, wiped out, crushed into the simple chaos of their component parts.

Our world is built on such layers of dust.

If you want to see the world through some disturbing and deeply tinted glasses, there’s always Jihad Unspun, a flashy site featuring columns by proudly pro-terrorist journalists, and others by Americans (like Steven Backus, professor of English at a university in Minnesota).

Here’s an exceprt from an article explaining how recent beheadings of captives by terror groups in the middle east jibes with the dictates of the Koran.  There are some one-liners in here that would have seemed like hilarious MadLibs five years ago.

Seymour Hersh revealed that young Iraqi boys were sodomized and shrieking while… being filmed as souvenirs for the friends and relatives back at home. When the Pentagon showed the pictures and videos, implicit references were made to executions and Necrophilia… If this were not an American phenomenon, why else did Arnold Schwarzenegger recently abolish Necrophilia in California?  The abuse is not confined to Abu-Ghraib [1]. 

Beheading a handful of captives is far less painful than being tortured to death as acknowledged by Nick Berg’s father. Even… degrading sexual torture can be worse than beheading. However, that only applies to those who have some degree of self-respect and honor. Sexual abuse inflicted on Lyndie England is unlikely to constitute punishment but rather a kind of titillation… Islam is indeed very different from the secular fanaticism of ‘freedom’!

Phew. Maybe someone can market this site as a diet drug.