Stardate 20040711.2144

(Captain's log): I was going to write an article today. I really was. I've been composing one about the contrast between form and substance in all its many manifestations: de jure versus de facto, authority versus power, credentials versus capabilities, awards versus achievements.

But instead I ended up writing a really long letter to Greely about the anime series Angelic Layer. He bought the 7 DVDs of the series about the same time I did, and liked it just as much as I did.

I ended up turning that letter into a separate article here. It's loaded with spoilers, so don't read it if you think you might want to watch the series. And you should watch it; it's superb. One of the reasons I've been overloading Greely's mailbox lately is because it reached me so strongly.

There's a major surprise revealed in the last episode; it made me gasp. Fortunately for me, I hadn't looked at the back of the DVD case and I had skipped watching all the "coming next episode" sequences at the end of each episode, because the idiots gave away the surprise both in the preview for episode 26 and on the back of the DVD case. That's not the only thing they gave away; if you buy and watch this series, don't read any of the DVD cases before you watch all the DVDs, and skip all the episode previews!

Anyway, my letter to Greely offered two explanations for that surprise, two entirely different ways of looking at the series which are mutually exclusive.

I'm also going to be writing in non-spoiler terms about the anime I've been watching lately, and I'll include Angelic Layer when I do.

Stardate 20040709.1543

(On Screen): Once I discovered Belmont Club last year, I soon became a regular reader. I'm happy that Wretchard has gotten a lot of exposure, because what he writes is both good and important.

As part of commentary about Iraq, yesterday Wretchard discussed the Battle of Waterloo, and included an extensive quote from a work by Conan Doyle which imagined the end of the battle.

For students of military history, Waterloo must occupy a special place. There are few battles in history more famous. Waterloo was the last battle of the Napoleonic era. And in that battle, Napoleon was defeated so decisively that he was forced to return to Paris and to abdicate for the second – and final – time.

The Waterloo campaign was a desperate one. Napoleon's first defeat had been at the hands of a coalition consisting primarily of the British, the Prussians, the Russians, the Austrians, and the Swedes.

In 1810, the Swedish king died leaving no heirs. The Swedes offered the crown to Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte, who at that time was one of Napoleon's top generals. Napoleon consented, and Bernadotte accepted the Swedish throne. His loyalty thereafter was only to Sweden, and in the end it was Bernadotte who was most critical in creating that coalition and holding it together. It was Bernadotte who came up with the overall strategy which defeated Napoleon in the campaigns of 1813 to 1815.

After Napoleon's return from Elba, the nations which had combined to defeat him once again prepared for war. Even if Napoleon had won the Waterloo campaign, it would not guarantee his survival as Emperor or ultimate victory for France.

But he had to win the Waterloo campaign if there was to be any chance at all. The Russians and Austrians were not yet ready. However, the British and Dutch collected their forces under Arthur Wellesley, 1st duke of Wellington. And the Prussians collected a large force which the King placed under command of Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher. Napoleon scratched together a force to face them, as best he could in the short time he had.

The French overall were badly outnumbered, but had at least some expectation of being able to defeat each enemy army individually as long as the other was kept away from the battlefield. The Anglo-Dutch army and the four corps of the Prussian Army were bivouacked in Belgium, in preparation for the anticipated campaign.

But Napoleon stole a march on his enemies, and showed up before they expected him. His goal was to try to fight each enemy separately, in hopes he could defeat them in detail.

The first day of battle in the campaign was 16 June 1815, with the parallel battles of Ligny and Quatre Bras. Marshall Ney commanded a relatively small French force which made a demonstration against the Anglo-Dutch at Quatre Bras, while Napoleon took the bulk of the French force and attacked the Prussians at Ligny. The Prussians were viewed as the weaker, more vulnerable of the two armies, and Napoleon hoped that if he defeated the Prussians decisively, they'd shatter.

Ligny was a ferocious battle, and it is generally viewed as a significant French battlefield victory, Napoleon's last. But the Prussians were not shattered, and continued the campaign.

17 June was a day of maneuver. Napoleon determined to try it the other way. He detached Grouchy and gave him orders to pursue the Prussians and to make sure they did not join up with the Anglo-Dutch army. He took the remainder of his force and marched to join up with Ney, in hopes of engaging the Anglo-Dutch army and defeating them.

Wellington gave him that battle, the one which comes down to us as "Waterloo". And what is most remarkable about Waterloo is that for the last 150 years the standard account of the battle was wrong. It was a fabrication. In its essence, it was historical fiction.

Few battles in history have inspired more books than Waterloo, and virtually all of them repeated the same basic fable. Historians writing those books relied on earlier books, whose authors in turn used even earlier books.

About 20 years ago, David Hamilton-Williams set out to write yet another history of Waterloo. But unlike so many previous authors, he sought out original sources of material, located in libraries and collections all over Europe. And as he did, something puzzling became impossible to ignore: they didn't seem to be describing the battle he thought he knew about.

In the end, he wrote his own book. I recommend it highly. Not only does he write a deep and important analysis of the Waterloo campaign as it actually happened, but he also explains why the standard account was so badly wrong.

It turned out that a book written in the early 1840's by Captain William Siborne became the definitive history of the campaign. All later accounts were directly or indirectly based on his.

Siborne was not a very successful man in life. He was deeply in debt. He had tried to create a massive diorama of the battlefield which would have included some 70,000 figures, for instance, and had engaged in other similar projects.

To keep these projects going, he had borrowed money from many wealthy Brits who had participated in the actual battle. As his financial situation deteriorated, he wrote his history of the battle, and he presented the events of the battle so as best to flatter his benefactors. Hamilton-Williams eventually sought out Siborne's own papers.

Scrutiny of Siborne's own correspondence relating to the development of his models revealed a sad and sordid story of a man pursuing an obsession to the detriment of his health, wealth, and ultimately, his good name. In 1833, Captain Siborne, already heavily engaged in his project, was informed by the British government of the day that public funds would no longer be provided to finance what was a private endeavor being carried out in hope of private gain (monies to be paid by the public to view the model). The government agreed only to settle his account to date. Determined to continue, Siborne raised a private loan of £1,500, an enormous sum at the time. He was thus able to continue his work for a further period, although it represented a considerable burden in addition to his military duties, and there was also the worry of carrying such a large debt. By 1836 he was in an extremely embarrassed financial situation. In desperation he decided to try to raise loans from some of the veteran officers with whom he had been in correspondence, to be repaid from the proceeds of the eventual fee-charging exhibition. One such request, which may be seen in the manuscript collection, asked the recipient for £5, but was amended to read £10. Sir Richard Hussey Vivian, who had commanded 6 Cavalry Brigade at Waterloo and was, when solicited, Siborne's own commanding officer, agreed to lend him £1,000.

From now on the objectivity which had marked Siborne's approach to his project became a luxury he could no longer afford. He felt constrained to enlarge the roles played by his benefactors, and correspondingly to suppress the evidence of other officers that tended to contradict those who had paid. He pressed on with the preparation of the model, haunted by the spectres of a bankrupt's disgrace and the debtors' prison. The completed model was placed on exhibition in 1838, but it never made enough money to pay half its cost. Nor did his 'investors' see their loans repaid, although Siborne tried to repay them with a coin of a different stamp. ...

With the financial failure of the first model, Siborne remained deeply in debt. To ameliorate his situation, he decided, with a perverse persistence, to make another model such as the one which had already nearly ruined him and had consumed years of his life. The second model, too, was a failure as a speculation, and served only to increase Siborne's heavy weight of debt. However, the campaign history which he produced in 1844 became at once a best-seller in military circles around the world. Naturally the book, which had been written to support the models, could not contradict what they showed.

In his story, the British were the heroes. The Dutch infantry were depicted as being unreliable. The Prussians tried to help but just didn't have what it took. Finally, the British ended up defeating the French all by themselves.

When his book was published, many men who had been at Waterloo were still alive, and some of them objected to his account of it. Yet somehow their objections (including articles printed in magazines of the time) got lost, and Siborne's account became canonical. For 150 years, his story was "the truth".

As Hamilton-Williams looked deeper into the battle described by primary sources and compared them to Siborne's account, what he found was that Siborne had deemphasized or totally omitted nearly every major contribution to the victory by anyone besides the British. He had written a morality play which claimed that the British had done it all.

Siborne's single most astounding omission concerns the way the battle ended.

In the standard story, the Anglo-Dutch force held its position through most of the day, in face of every assault the French could throw against them. Prussian forces appeared in the distance, and a Prussian corps, and then eventually two of them, engaged the French right flank. They were fought off and the flank was held by the French Young Guard, with help from the Middle Guard. With a third Prussian corps finally entering the battle, Napoleon gambled desperately and sent the Old Guard against the British. The Grognards marched resolutely, confidently, and came up the British position. But British units in front of them did not waver. In the end, it was the Old Guard which routed, for the first time ever. And as word spread, the entire rest of the French army broke and ran, in one of the largest routs in military history.

Here's one description of the events leading to the rout, based on the standard story:

The Middle Guard threw back the British battalions of Halkett’s Brigade but were assaulted by the Belgian and Dutch troops of General Chassé and Colonel Detmers who drove them back down the hill. The 3rd Regiment of Chasseurs approached the ridge opposite Maitland’s Brigade of Foot Guards (2nd and 3rd Battalions of the 1st Foot Guards). Wellington called to the brigade commander “Now Maitland. Now’s your time”. One authority had him as saying “Up Guards, ready”. The Foot Guards stood, fired a volley and charged with the bayonet driving the French Guard back down the hill.

The last of the French Guard regiments, the 4th Chasseurs came up in support as the British Guards withdrew back over the ridge. Sir John Colborne brought the 52nd Foot round to outflank the French column as it passed his brigade, fired a destructive volley into the left flank of the Chasseurs and attacked with the bayonet. The whole of the Guard was driven back down the hill and began a general retreat to the cry of “La Garde recule”.

Within fifteen minutes Wellington appeared on the skyline and waved his hat to give the signal for a general attack in pursuit of the French troops. The British, Belgian, Dutch and German troops poured forward and the French retreat became a route [sic].

So in the end, not even the Old Guard could defeat the strong, resolute, heroic British, who were gracious enough to let the Dutch and Prussians watch as they defeated the French, which they most certainly could have done anyway even if the Dutch and Prussians hadn't been there. Ah, we British are really something, aren't we?

They say that the victors write the history books, and this self-congratulatory Victorian British account of the battle, written by a frightened man trying to convince his creditors not to toss him in gaol, somehow became accepted wisdom.

The standard story offers an explanation for a famous decision made by General Ziethen, commander of the Prussian I Corps. He was last to arrive on the battlefield, and ended up in a position between where II Corps and IV Corps were engaged with the French right flank and the position held by Wellington. Blücher sent him a courier carrying emphatic orders that he disengage and march to join II Corps and IV Corps, but Ziethen decided to disobey those orders. He continued to fight where he was.

In Siborne's story, Ziethen is given much credit and praise for this decision, because he chose instead to reinforce the British left flank. He gets praised for being a good supporting actor in the play.

Siborne didn't think we needed to know that the Prussian I Corps broke the French line. That was easily the most astounding thing Hamilton-Williams discovered from primary sources that Siborne had omitted.

The Old Guard didn't rout because they saw resolute English in front of them. They routed because they were within minutes of having Prussian cavalry behind them. Steinmetz's 1st Brigade had opened a massive breach in the French position, and Prussian troops pushed through it and began to fan out to both sides, to roll up the French line. Ziethen had 8 regiments of cavalry (2 Dragoon, 2 Uhlan, 1 Hussar, 3 Landwehr) organized in two brigades, and at the time the Old Guard routed, one of those brigades had already moved through the gap.

In his book, Hamilton-Williams provides a map with this wry caption:

Battle of Waterloo: situation at 7.30 p.m. showing the Old Guard going forward and the brigade of von Steinmetz smashing through the right-angle of Napoleon's line, thus arriving behind the French lines. At this point the French army dissolved into a panic-stricken mob.

At the moment when Blücher's courier found him, Ziethen saw the weakness of the French position facing him, and recognized that he had an excellent opportunity to win the battle by breaking through. That was why he ignored a direct order from Blücher.

Wretchard's post includes an extended quote of Conan Doyle's visualization of the battle. Conan Doyle's description is firmly based on Siborne's fictional account. Conan Doyle, in his turn, fictionalizes it even further. (Of course unlike Siborne, Conan Doyle didn't claim to be writing history.)

But a sight lay before me which held me fast as though I had been turned into some noble equestrian statue. I could not move, I could scarce breathe, as I gazed upon it. There was a mound over which my path lay, and as I came out on the top of it I looked down the long, shallow valley of Waterloo.

Except that the valley wasn't named "Waterloo". The battle was not named after the place where it was fought.

Blücher suggested that it should be given the name La Belle Alliance, but Wellington ignored him and continued his practice of naming battles after his HQs. Thus it is that one of the most celebrated battles in history carries the name of a small village near Brussels which was nowhere near the battlefield, because Wellington had been sleeping in an inn there.

It was that up the long slope of the British position was moving a walking forest-black, tossing, waving, unbroken. Did I not know the bearskins of the Guard? And did I not also know, did not my soldier's instinct tell me, that it was the last reserve of France; that the Emperor, like a desperate gamester, was staking all upon his last card? Up they went and up--grand, solid, unbreakable, scourged with musketry, riddled with grape, flowing onward in a black, heavy tide, which lapped over the British batteries. With my glass I could see the English gunners throw themselves under their pieces or run to the rear. On rolled the crest of the bearskins, and then, with a crash which was swept across to my ears, they met the British infantry. A minute passed, and another, and another. My heart was in my mouth.

They swayed back and forward; they no longer advanced; they were held. Great Heaven! was it possible that they were breaking? One black dot ran down the hill, then two, then four, then ten, then a great, scattered, struggling mass, halting, breaking, halting, and at last shredding out and rushing madly downward. "The Guard is beaten! The Guard is beaten!" From all around me I heard the cry. Along the whole line the infantry turned their faces and the gunners flinched from their guns.

That's the standard story, in all its (exclusively-British) glory. The French Old Guard, the most feared military battalions in Europe, which had never been defeated, engaged the British. British doggedness prevailed over French élan, and it was the French who fled.

"The Old Guard is beaten! The Guard retreats!" An officer with a livid face passed me yelling out these words of woe. "Save yourselves! Save yourselves! You are betrayed!" cried another. "Save yourselves! Save yourselves!" Men were rushing madly to the rear, blundering and jumping like frightened sheep. Cries and screams rose from all around me. And at that moment, as I looked at the British position, I saw what I can never forget. A single horseman stood out black and clear upon the ridge against the last red angry glow of the setting sun. So dark, so motionless, against that grim light, he might have been the very spirit of Battle brooding over that terrible valley. As I gazed, he raised his hat high in the air, and at the signal, with a low, deep roar like a breaking wave, the whole British army flooded over their ridge and came rolling down into the valley.

The image of Wellington waving his hat and causing his entire force to advance on the French is quite poetic. The standard story implies that the advance was the final straw which caused the French army to break.

However, it's much more likely that he ordered that advance because the French were already routing. And even if the British "flooded over their ridge and came rolling down into the valley", they didn't go beyond that.

It was actually Prussian cavalry which pursued the French. Despite being bone-tired, they were able to prevent the French from rallying and reforming. That converted victory on one battlefield into victory in the campaign, and in the war.

Napoleon spent the rest of his life confined to the island of St. Helena, closely supervised by British officers. He was treated with respect, but they made sure he didn't return yet again to France, to rally the people and once again plunge Europe into bloody war. (Of course, eventually the Europeans found other reasons, and other leaders, to plunge them into bloody war.)

About 25 years ago, someone sat down and worked out a family tree of all the tigers then kept in American zoos. When they got done, they were appalled to discover that all of them were descended from just three original tigers. They were massively inbred. Almost in a panic, American zoos started to borrow tigers from European zoos for breeding purposes to try to improve the genetic stock.

Zoo tigers had nothing on historians of the Waterloo campaign when it comes to inbreeding. At least they had three original sources; the historians had only one.

By the way, if you'd like to see the "standard story" on the big screen, you can watch "Waterloo", with Christopher Plummer as Wellington, and Rod Steiger chewing the scenery as Napoleon. As battle reenactments on film go, it's one of the best. Of course, as history it's a total crock. I first watched it at a gaming convention about 30 years ago, and the audience rooted for the French. Probably the biggest cheer was when the French Lancers countercharged the British cavalry.

Update 20040710: Wretchard responds.

Stardate 20040708.0833

(On Screen): Muqtada al-Sadr is a half-pint Shiite cleric in Iraq who is almost certainly being funded and controlled by Iran. When things got nasty in Falluja, he (or his owners) decided it was a great time to rise up in armed revolt.

The Mehdi Army wasn't big enough to actually have a chance of winning, but that wasn't the point. I think that the hope was that simultaneous uprisings among Shiites and Sunnis might cause the Americans to come down hard militarily, using indiscriminate and excessive force, angering and polarizing Iraqi Arabs and inspiring further unrest and opposition.

al-Sadr's primary power base was certain slums near Baghdad, but he soon got chased out of them. Eventually he moved his forces, and other militants who rallied to him, to the south and seized a couple of major cities there, ones considered holy by Shiites. In so doing, he (or his owners) hoped that American military response against him would be viewed as sacrilege by Shiites in Iraq and elsewhere. That would put a squeeze-play on Sistani and other Shiite clerics who had been supporting the Governing Council and cooperating with the Coalition. If they refused to change sides, they would be discredited with the broad mass of Shiites because they did not respond to desecration by opposing the desecrators. But if they did acknowledge and condemn such desecration, there'd be no half-way. They'd have to fully switch sides.

Initially there was much hand wringing about it all, and even barely suppressed triumph amongst many, as they saw what they thought (and hoped) was the long-awaited eruption of Iraqi resentment against the evil Anglo-American occupation of Iraq. After all, "everyone knows" that the invasion was illegal, and Iraqis are worse off than they were before the invasion, and that they all have been seething in hatred and resentment. "Everyone knows" that it would just take a spark to make all of Iraq go up in flames, finally (at long last) giving Americans the bloody nose and comeuppance that they so strongly deserved which fate has been so uncooperative in dishing out to them. Nemesis, so long delayed, would finally reward American hubris. Then the Americans would (at long last) meditate about why they were so hated, hang their heads in shame, and apologize to the world and promise to change. (And ratify the Kyoto Accords and the ICC treaty.)

For a while it got pretty exciting in Iraq. The rate of American casualties rose. It looked to some as if the castle of cards was about to come tumbling down.

The American response to the simultaneous uprisings didn't achieve everything many of us hoped for, "us" being supporters of the war. Falluja is still a nest of resistance. But military operations rarely achieve perfect success, and evaluation of "success' depends on your goals. It now seems that the primary objective of the American military strategy (and it was American forces who did nearly all the fighting) was to prevent the uprisings from gaining popular support and causing Iraq to boil over in revolt – exactly what al-Sadr hoped would happen. And after the militants were defeated, it was important to try to minimize the chance they'd be able to coordinate another mass uprising later.

"Killing all the militants" was not on the list, because the strategies and tactics required to do so could very easily have inspired exactly the mass uprising al-Sadr hoped for.

To prevent the uprising from spreading, the response was slow, methodical, and relatively cool. 1st Armored Division got the job of fighting against the Mehdi Army, and it refused to give al-Sadr the provocations and incidents he needed and hoped for. Even when members of the Mehdi Army used major holy sites and at least one major cemetery for military purposes (a war crime, just in passing), the Americans didn't respond by flattening them.

Thus it was that the average uncommitted Shiite saw that the Americans treated those holy sites with more respect than the Mehdi Army did.

Shiites did consider those holy sites to have been desecrated. Sistani publicly condemned the desecration, and those responsible for it: al-Sadr and his forces. There was no general Shiite uprising.

The Mehdi Army found itself surrounded, isolated, and on the losing end of a massively lopsided campaign of attrition. They tried to borrow the tactics used by the Chechens against the Russians with considerable success, but the problem was that those same tactics failed miserably against American troops.

They were on the receiving end of small raids, increasingly tight siege, and constant predation by snipers. Occasionally the Americans would drop a precision guided bomb, which infuriatingly always seemed to kill militants or take out supply dumps. The Mehdi Army suffered hundreds of casualties and in the end had nothing to show for it.

Days turned into weeks, and it became clear that they had failed. al-Sadr started looking for a way out. So did a lot of the surviving men who had rallied to his flag; the Mehdi "Army" (such as it was) began to melt away through desertion. In the end, al-Sadr's uprising ended with a whimper, not with a bang.

al-Sadr is still alive, and he's still loose in Iraq. It would certainly be nice if he were behind bars (or six feet under), but what's mainly important is that his power is shattered. Iraq did not rise in revolt. What looked in March like a potential catastrophe won't end up being even a footnote in most history books. (Or at least, most honest history books.)

A few days ago al-Sadr sounded his defiance and tried to look strong:

"We pledge to the Iraqi people and the world to continue resisting oppression and occupation to our last drop of blood," al-Sadr said in a statement distributed Sunday by his office in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, where his al-Mahdi militia battled American troops until a cease-fire last month.

"Resistance is a legitimate right and not a crime to be punished," he said.

But his minders almost immediately "clarified" that to make clear that we're talking peaceful resistance here, guys, not armed rebellion, and please don't send 1st Armored after us again, OK?

Al-Sadr issued a statement Sunday from his office in the Shiite holy city of Najaf calling the new interim Iraqi government "illegitimate" and pledging "to continue resisting oppression and occupation to our last drop of blood."

But Sadr's spokesman in Baghdad, Mahmoud al-Soudani, called a news conference Monday to clarify that the statement was not a call to arms. He said that many of al-Sadr's supporters in Baghdad had begun taking up arms again and he needed to correct their misperceptions.

"We are still committed to the cease-fire," al-Soudani said.

Nope, no armed rebellion here. We're just another political party, OK?

The week before, the Coalition Provisional Authority handed over power to an Iraqi government, two days ahead of schedule.

The military response to his uprising ultimately has to be considered a victory by the only standard that really counts: achievement of political goals. al-Sadr hoped to inspire a general uprising and to prevent us from transferring power to an Iraqi government. We hoped to avoid a general uprising, and to transfer power to said government on schedule, without the transfer being seen as us cutting and running.

Whose hopes were fulfilled?

You have to keep your eyes on the true goal, and you have to be willing to be patient. Sometimes slow-and-steady wins the race, even though it looks as if you are falling behind at the beginning.

al-Sadr rallied his forces to Shiite holy cities mainly because of their symbolic value. He hoped that the devout would rally to defend those holy sites against the infidels. He also hoped that the Americans could be provoked into actions which would be seen as desecration by devout Shiites.

From a military point of view, however, they were dreadful places to try to defend against American soldiers, as the Mehdi Army ultimately discovered. He rallied the most violent amongst the discontented to his flag, and gave 1st Armored a concentrated target and a legitimate excuse to reduce it.

It isn't just al-Sadr who is now discredited. Any other Shiite firebrand who tries the same thing will have little luck. A lot of the Mehdi Army eventually got away, but how many of them are still dedicated to the cause? How many of them will rally the next time?

The twin uprisings this spring resulted in a lot of negative headlines (for the US), the now-traditional wildly inflated predictions of gloom and doom, and a lot of combat. But both threats were decisively defeated. The militants in Falluja have been reduced to use of car bombs, and most of their victims have been Iraqis, making them increasingly hated.

Al-Sadr is still loose, and he still has some supporters. But he took his best shot, failed utterly, and he won't get a second chance. He is now marginalized, little more than a leader of a criminal gang which once again rules over a couple of slums on the outskirts of Baghdad, a minor but tolerable pain waiting to be eliminated when the time is right.

War is conflict, but not all conflict is war. Nonetheless, some conflicts which are wars have things in common with conflicts which are not wars. In the latter you don't fight with bullets and bombs, and defeated opponents don't necessarily die or land in jail. But the defeat can be just as real, even if less deadly. And sometimes the stakes are actually higher.

A few days ago I read an editorial in the Telegraph about Michael Moore, by Matthew d'Ancona. It seems to overly emphasize Moore's influence and impact in Europe, but that's not really surprising since that's where d'Ancona lives.

The morning after I saw Michael Moore's new film, Fahrenheit 9/11, I visited my local book shop to inspect the titles it stocked by the director himself and by other writers implacably hostile to George W Bush. On the counter was a pile of Moore's most recent bestseller, Dude, Where's My Country?. And his 2001 polemic, Stupid White Men, which has sold 350,000 copies in Britain alone, was also prominently displayed.

In the same genre, though not by Moore, the shop offered such gems as The Bush-Hater's Handbook, Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species, Ugly Americans, What's Wrong with America?, and Amerika Psycho: Behind Uncle Sam's Mask of Sanity. According to the assistant who served me, there are now so many of these instant America-bashing books that the store simply cannot stock them all. When I told her that Moore's new film was compelling cinema and had to be seen, whether or not you agreed with its politics, she snorted with derision: "You just wonder how many people in the States will get to see it, since they live in a country under censorship."

Now, one angry bookseller does not a political trend make. But when you bear in mind that Stupid White Men has already sold more than three million copies worldwide and that Fahrenheit 9/11 took $24 million at the US box office last weekend - the first documentary ever to top the American film charts in its opening days - it becomes less easy to dismiss the fat man in the baseball cap as a marginal figure. Indeed, it looks to me as though Michael Moore is pretty much at the centre of things these days. The subculture has invaded the mainstream: it is an army of occupation.

What I found myself wondering, after I read that, was whether Michael Moore may, in the end, turn out to be the American Loonie Left's Muqtada al-Sadr.

He's become the rallying point. He's raised the flag, and the most motivated LL's are flocking to support him. He's become their poster boy, their public face. He provides a focal point; he's a magnet around which they can gather and organize.

He has chosen the ground they will defend – and it is dreadful ground indeed.

His movies and books sell really well in Europe. But that isn't as important as D'Ancona thinks.

As I watched Fahrenheit 9/11 - a ferocious attack on Bush's record since September 11 and a clarion-call for "regime change" in Washington - it struck me that Michael Moore's critics are missing the point by directing their wrath at the dodgy detail of his work. Certainly, some scenes in the film are downright offensive. In particular, the slow-motion images of an allegedly idyllic Iraq before last year's liberation campaign - children smiling, kites flying - are an insult to the one million or more Iraqis who died as a consequence of Saddam Hussein's policies.

Other sequences are plain daft. The invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Moore insinuates, was the result of a wicked plot by big business to build a natural gas pipeline across that benighted country - in spite of the fact that the pipeline scheme was ditched in 1998. As part of its bid to portray the Bush family as hopelessly beholden to the Saudis, the film also claims that the White House improperly authorised the flights from America of bin Laden family members immediately after the September 11 attacks. But guess what? The flights were personally cleared by none other than Richard A Clarke, Mr Bush's former counter-terrorism chief, who has since written his own book attacking the President's wartime record and has consequently become something of a hero to the Moore-istas.

Yet the forensic demolition of Fahrenheit 9/11 which has already been carried out in the American press has apparently done nothing to diminish Moore's appeal or his popularity around the world. He has himself said that the film is not meant to be fair. Nor is it aimed principally at the liberal elite, however much they may endorse its conclusions: Fahrenheit 9/11 is a movie for viewers reared on MTV and video games, not on arthouse cinema. This is popcorn politics, militancy for the multiplexes. And, as such, it is extremely successful. Moore uses all the techniques of modern mass entertainment with supreme skill: comic intercutting, brilliantly-selected music, shocking images of civilian casualties, a laconic voiceover interspersed with scenes of untrammelled emotion. I confess that I found it gripping.

Successful at what?

There are some who think that Moore is quite cynical. (He's even made comments which could be interpreted to support this reading of him.) While there's little doubt that Moore does really hold the political position he espouses, the cynical reading of Moore is that he is primarily interested in selling books and movie tickets, and in winning awards. The cynical reading is that his goal is to become rich, famous, and notorious. And he's been very successful at that.

Moore's stuff sells very well in Europe. It is comforting for the many Europeans who fear and hate America. They've found an "honest" American who bravely and forthrightly tells "the truth" about America: that the vast majority of us are stupid, venal, unsophisticated, uneducated, provincial, oblivious, and self-absorbed.

Moore's stuff sells in Europe precisely because it seems to justify and reaffirm the prejudices many there have about Americans. It is unlikely that Moore is actually changing any minds, however. The Europeans who buy and read his books and pay to watch his films are the ones who already agree with him. They consume his material so they can laugh as he makes fun of us, and nod sagely as he explains how Big Oil and Corrupt Businesses are actually behind it all. (And the Jews. And the Saudis.)

His primary audience here in the US is exactly the same. He's preaching to the converted. Non-LL's who have gone to see his movie have concluded that it was a total crock.

If one accepts the cynical evaluation of Moore, then it would be clear that he doesn't care. If someone watches his film and finds it shoddy and totally unconvincing, he still gets a piece of their ticket price, and laughs all the way to the bank.

Nonetheless, as D'Ancona says, the LL's have rallied to his flag. They've moved to his holy city. They've adopted positions on the terrain he's chosen for the battle. And they're using the arguments and evidence he provides as ammunition.

In the short term, it may seem as if the LL's are mobilized and fighting hard. But it also leaves them concentrated and vulnerable. And they are fighting on just about the worst ground they could have chosen.

Unlike Moore, I supported the destruction of the Taliban regime and the liberation of Iraq. But I also have to acknowledge the aplomb of his campaign, and the cunning of his strategy. He has not only touched a nerve; he has filled a vacuum. He has identified the feebleness of the campaign to persuade the public that the war on terror is necessary and exploited that weakness to the hilt.

In the process, he has done much to nurture the delusion that the war is simply the folly of a deranged President and his greedy acolytes, rather than a deeply-rooted global crisis and the defining challenge of our time.

Moore may or may not believe that, but a lot of the LL's who have rallied to his flag do believe it. However, will it really be the case that he nurtures that delusion? Or merely bring together those who already suffered from it? Will his flag inspire LL's to loudly proclaim that which they already believed, thus ultimately making their paranoid delusion blatantly clear to the broader electorate?

Will the LL's rallying to Moore's flag be able to inspire the broader electorate to join them? Or will they end up isolated, discredited, and ultimately disillusioned, to slink away quietly when the uprising doesn't materialize?

One reason for al-Sadr's failure was strong suspicion among Iraqis that he was an Iranian puppet and served Iranian interests. LL's rallying around Moore's flag will end up delivering many unpalatable messages, and one of those will be that France was actually right all along. Moore is no French puppet, but his movie was endorsed by France, which blessed it with the Palme d'Or at Cannes. D'Ancona is concerned because Moore's material sells so well in Europe overall. Will his popularity in Europe increase or decrease his prestige and credibility with the broad American electorate?

It strikes me that for all the short-term hoopla and enthusiasm about Moore from the left, and trepidation about him from the non-left, that in fact he may turn out to be just the man the non-left needs, appearing exactly when and where the non-left needs him most. A non-left mole couldn't have done a better job framing the LL position to their disadvantage.

Moore has planted his flag smacko in the middle of the Holy City of anti-Americanism. To defend that position, the LL's will now vocally proclaim something many have long believed but avoided admitting: they hate America and everything it stands for. That is not a message that will sell well to the broad electorate. They will proclaim that they love this nation, but... and then make clear that they despise most of the people who live in it, and despise the very features of this nation that the majority of us see as its greatest virtues. And they will poison the leftist political position even for non-loonie leftists. (Since Moore's supporters constitute a significant base of support for the Democratic Party, they're going to represent an ongoing headache for the Kerry campaign by their antics. And that will force him to continue to equivocate about his position on major issues, to avoid alienating them, and at the same time avoid alienating the broad electorate.)

It may well be possible to make a rational and convincing argument for the leftist position. It may well be possible to present that argument in ways which persuade the broader electorate. It's possible that there is actually a reasonable case to be made against the war. I haven't seen such a thing, but I don't deny that such a case might be made.

Bush may be vulnerable to substantive criticism of his personal capabilities and his policies and motivation. There might be a rational and convincing argument to be made for voting for "anyone but Bush".

But we won't find out in 2004. Michael Moore has done more than any other single man to guarantee that. Someone on the left may voice such an argument, but he'll be drowned out by rabid LL jihadists as they stridently deliver a message tailor-made to alienate the broad electorate in style of presentation, in attitude, in substance, and in underlying message. Moore holds a locus of extreme political positions, and most Americans will consider at least one of them to be utterly odious. (For instance, Moore strongly favors gun control, but Americans actually own more guns per capita than do the citizens of any other nation.)

It is rare for a political faction to be blessed with an opponent who is so charismatic to his fanatical supporters, so repulsive to non-supporters, and so vulnerable to criticism and caricature. I can't think of a high-profile leftist I'd rather have "at the centre of things" than Michael Muqtada al-Moore.

If one was particularly cynical, one might entertain the suspicion that Moore secretly hates the left, and is laughing twice as hard. Not only is he getting filthy rich off them, and laughing all the way to his bank, he's also helping to engineer their marginalization, and laughing all the way to their political destruction.

If I couldn't have Moore leading my opponents, my second choice would be Ted Rall. But Rall blew his chance a long time ago, and he's a distant second anyway.

Update: Brian Tiemann comments.

Update 20040709: Via Room 101, comments about al-Sadr written by an Iraqi.

Update: TMLutas is not as optimistic.

Update 20040711: What hath Moore wrought? Brian Tiemann found an example of the rot.

Update: Jay Currie comments, and Ian Welsh responds. His post defends Moore and Moore's message, and it is a perfect example of exactly what I predicted.

Welsh says, "The deliberate confusion of anti-Americanism with anti-Bushism is tiresome." There's no confusion. The LL is both anti-Bush and anti-American.

Stardate 20040706.1950

(Captain's log): Tom writes:

I live in Northern Ireland and really appreciate the way you explain the working of the US government and was wondering of you could explain this: how is it that riders can be attached to bills going through the Senate? This seems to me, an outsider I admit, to be an odious way of blackmailing the Senate to pass a bill and bypasses the openness of debate on the merits of the amendment.

Please understand I am not criticising how Americans govern themselves. It may be that there are advantages to this system that aren't apparent to me. I would really like to know.

I think you may be under the impression that the US Senate is America's equivalent of the British House of Lords, with our House of Representatives corresponding to the House of Commons.

I don't fully understand the British system. The way it was explained to me is that as a practical matter Commons has all the power. Bills which pass Commons are sent to Lords, and Lords can vote to approve or reject the bill, and can vote to amend the bill. But regardless of what they do, the bill will then go back to Commons, who can vote to reverse any changes Lords made, and can vote to approve the bill even if Lords rejected it. Lords doesn't have any real power to directly prevent adoption of legislation. All they really can do is to try to focus attention on anything in a bill they think is particularly pernicious.

The role of the House of Lords in the UK is not at all similar to the role of the Senate in the US Congress. Constitutionally speaking, the House and Senate are considered more or less peers. The Senate is generally thought of as the senior chamber. There are some differences between them, though.

The biggest difference between the House and Senate has to do with their numbers and how their members are elected. The Constitution says that each state shall have exactly two US Senators. The 17th Amendment says that each Senator will be elected by state-wide popular vote. In 1959 Hawaii and Alaska became states, raising the number of stars on the flag to 50, and since then there have been 100 Senators.

Since there will always be an even number of Senators, the Constitution states that in cases of ties, the Vice President has the power to cast the tie-breaking vote.

Unlike Senators, the number of Representatives is not directly specified by the Constitution. The Constitution requires that each state must have at least one Representative, and each House district must have at least 30,000 people in it according to the most recent census. Aside from that, it's pretty much up to the House itself to decide the number of Representatives. In 1910, the House adopted rules fixing the number of Representatives at 435, which are divvied out to the states based on their populations as of the last census.

There are a small number of powers uniquely assigned to the Senate. The President has the power to negotiate and sign treaties, but treaties have to be ratified by a 2/3rds vote in the Senate in order to go into effect. The Senate also has to approve by simple majority nominees for federal judgeships, nominees for cabinet positions and certain other appointed positions in the Executive branch. The House is not involved in these matters (at least, not formally).

In the impeachment process, it is the House that impeaches. An impeachment is analogous to an indictment. It forces a trial. The trial is held before the Senate, with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court presiding. A small group of Representatives (usually from the House Judiciary Committee) prosecute the case. The federal officer who was impeached may send his own lawyers to defend him. After the trial, the Senate votes on whether to convict. If they do the impeached government official is removed from office, but there are no other direct consequences.

Impeachment in the House requires a simple majority. Conviction in the Senate trial requires 2/3rds vote.

The only power uniquely granted to the House is listed in Article I, Section 7:

All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.

For most practical purposes, especially with respect to legislation and budgeting, the two chambers are essentially peers. For a bill to become law, it has to pass both chambers. It then goes to the President, who can approve it, veto it, or do nothing. If he approves it (by signing on one line), it becomes law. If he vetoes it (by signing on a different line), it is returned to whichever chamber originated it, and they may decide to drop it, or to try to override the veto. If ten days pass and he doesn't do either of those, it becomes law without him.

Aside from tax measures, any bill can originate in either chamber. That chamber will debate it, perhaps amend the original proposal, send it to sundry committees, and if the chamber eventually votes to approve it, it goes to the other chamber.

The other chamber might well not approve it at all. (They might not even consider it seriously.) Or they may choose to amend it and pass the amended version.

It's not uncommon for the same text to be introduced into both chambers more or less simultaneously, but they're not formally considered the same bill. What that really does is permit both chambers to debate it simultaneously. That's what happened in October of 2002 when Congress debated passing an authorization under the War Powers Act to permit invasion of Iraq. All the nasty debates about amendments and suchlike take place on what amount to separate bills. Then one chamber drops its bill, accepts the one from the other chamber, and if it previously had amended its version of the bill, it will hold a pro-forma vote to amend the new one the same way. Then they take a real vote to approve or reject.

In the case of that War Powers resolution, both chambers ended up approving the original bill without any amendments. After the House voted to approve its version of the measure, the Senate dropped its version, and ended up voting to approve the one sent to it by the House. That went to President Bush, who signed it.

Sometimes (usually, in fact) each chamber ends up approving a different version of the same bill. For instance, one chamber may approve a bill, and will send it to the other, who may then amend it. Or simultaneous consideration of the same bill in both chambers yields different results.

In that case, a few Representatives and a few Senators will be sent to what's known as a "House/Senate Conference Committee". Usually they are chosen from the House committee and Senate committee which originally considered the bill in each chamber. The conferees will negotiate over the differences to try to come to an agreement on a single version of the bill most likely to be agreeable to both chambers. If they do arrive at a compromise, then the compromise bill would go to one chamber for a straight up-down vote, and if they approve it, it would go to the other chamber.

So the answer to Tom's question is that there isn't really anything unusual about the Senate amending bills sent to it by the House. The House quite commonly does the same thing on bills sent to it by the Senate.

Tom also thinks that Senate amendments "bypass the openness of debate on the merits of the amendment". It doesn't bypass anything. Bills can be amended in committee, and they can also be amended as part of the debate when the chamber as a whole considers the bill. Individual amendments are proposed, discussed, and voted on. Eventually there's a motion to end debate, and then there usually will be a vote on whether to approve the bill itself.

Tom implicitly asks the question of why it's like this, and what advantages there are to it. The answer is that it was one of the compromises agreed to in 1787 in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention. Those who attended needed to come up with a structure for government which would work, but they also had to come up with a Constitution which could be ratified. That was going to require approval of 9 of the 13 states.

In this particular case, the problem was an inherent conflict between a few states with big populations and a larger number whose populations were much lower. If there were only to be a single chamber in the Legislative branch, how did you allocate seats? If they were allocated proportional to population, then the big-population states would dominate and could screw over the small-population states. But if they were allocated by states, the opposite would be true: the larger number of small-population states would be able to screw over the large population states.

The compromise was to do both, by creating two chambers, and requiring that legislation pass both chambers. Thus neither large-population states nor small-population states would dominate overall.

Without that compromise (and a few others) the Constitution probably would not have been ratified. That alone is enough to justify our two-chamber system, irrespective of how it works today. The advantage of our two-chamber legislative branch is that we probably wouldn't have become a nation if we hadn't done it that way.

There is still a big-state/small-state conflict in this nation, and the compromise still works. Big states dominate the House, while small states have much more influence in the Senate.

As of the 2000 census, California was the most populous state. California has 53 US Representatives and 2 US Senators. At the other extreme, the states of Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, Vermont and Wyoming only have one US Representative each. But each has 2 US Senators.

With 435 Representatives, 218 is a simple majority. Just ten states between them have 223 Representatives. The other forty states have 212 Representatives. On the other hand, the 26 least populous states have 52 of 100 Senators, even though they have just 54 million citizens, less than 20% of the total population of the nation.

But how else do you deal with this problem, given the wide disparity between the states. California has almost as many citizens as the 22 least populous states combined: Connecticut, Iowa, Mississippi, Kansas, Arkansas, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, West Virginia, Nebraska, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, Vermont, Wyoming?

The 2000 census found that California had a population of 33.871 million. Those 22 states collectively had a population of 34.985 million. Our system gives California 53 Representatives and 2 Senators. Those 22 states have 83 Representatives and 44 Senators.

The big-state/small-state compromise still works well enough. It worked well enough in 1789 to get the Constitution ratified, and it works well enough today to keep this nation from falling apart. That seems like advantage enough to justify it.

This was intended as a high level summary, to explain the basics to someone overseas who didn't know anything at all about it. As such, I deliberately left out a lot of pedantic details only of interest to squirrels. That's why I deliberately omitted any mention of the other five members of the House. They can't vote on the floor, and do not matter.

Update: Daniel writes:

I believe that you didn't quite answer the question Tom asked, "how is it that riders can be attached to bills going through the Senate?"

 I understood that Tom meant 'riders irrelevent to the original stated purpose of the bill'; for example, adding a dairy subsidy to a bill on regulating pornography (or vice versa). In many parliamentary systems, such a rider would be deemed out-of-order and rejected by the Speaker of the House; however, it appears to be quite common in US politics.

That's something which happens in both chambers. It isn't unique to the Senate. It happens all the time, on nearly every major bill. I guess the only answer to that question, in general, is the famous one: "Men who love sausage or the law should not watch either one being made."

I would say that the answer is probably that our tradition is that giving the Speaker that power to decide what is or is not relevant is dangerous, since he might use that power to the advantage of his own party. Not giving the Speaker of the House (or the President pro-tem of the Senate) that power means you get sausage bills, but the alternative is concentrating too much unchecked power in one place. We Americans generally believe that concentrated and unchecked power will always be abused, eventually, by someone. Sausage bills are a lesser evil.

Stardate 20040702.1344

(Captain's log): In response to comments here about latency, Bart writes:

As an agronomist (soil chemist) and farmer I work with living systems. My experience is that an overwhelming percentage of the time cause and effect are separated in both time (latency, as you discuss) and space. We are fortunate indeed to pry an R² of 35 out of most work. I'm curious... is something like mechanical engineering 'cleaner' in that respect?

It's different. I don't know that it's cleaner. Our time and space issues were more constrained, but our standard for acceptable performance was much more strict than anything Bart ever has to satisfy.

And for us, latency was one problem among many.

I'm not an ME; I'm a programmer. I spent most of my career doing embedded software. That means I wrote firmware for microprocessors which were incorporated into larger systems. Usually the microprocessor was responsible for the human interface or the control interface fed by another computer, and it also had to control custom hardware in the system and report back what happened. But most of my jobs involved controlling custom electronics. There was the only one time in my career I worked on controlling mechanical systems.

It was at a company which produced robotic arms for the semiconductor processing industry. Our robots operated in ultra-clean high-vacuum environments, and were designed to move silicon wafers around. There were incredible constraints in terms of particulates, vacuum, speed, reliability, and precision.

Our motors had to be outside the clean volume so they could be cooled. (Also, motors are inherently "dirty" and shed particles.) That meant we had to run shafts through the wall from normal air into high vacuum. We had to make sure we didn't leak excessively at the interface. There's always some leakage; it's impossible to avoid. But when you're trying to maintain vacuum at levels below 10^-7 torr, you can't tolerate damned much leakage. Sealing rotating shafts without screwing up their ability to rotate is an interesting problem.

We generally had excellent reliability. The requirements were quite strict (but not unreasonable) for mean time to failure, mean time to repair, mean interval of maintenance, and mean time to perform maintenance. (All of which was summarized as an "uptime" spec.)

We had quite challenging requirements for precision. Absolute accuracy was not important at all. But our spec for repeatability was extremely strict: no more than 5 mils worst case (where a "mil" was .001 inch), about 125 microns (one eighth of a millimeter).

We also had major constraints for cleanliness. Every particle which lands on an IC and is present during some kinds of processing steps ruins the die it sits on, so obviously you'd like to minimize that.

We were not permitted to touch the top or edge of the wafer or even to have anything extend spatially above the top plane of the wafer anywhere near it. So we couldn't clamp onto the top of the wafer or hold it in place by its edges.

That meant the wafer sat on three small plastic pads on the end effector, making contact only on the bottom, well away from the edges. The wafer was held in place solely by friction. Given that the wafer didn't weigh much, there wasn't really very much friction. So when we moved, we had to be extremely careful to make sure that the lateral force between pads and wafer did not become so great as to cause the wafer to shift.

The primary challenge in motion control related to the geometry of the robot arms, and before I discuss that it would probably be helpful for me to give you a mental model of the robot.

Imagine a human holding his hands flat, palms face up, in line with his shoulders. His elbows stick out to the side. (That isn't a very comfortable position, but just imagine it that way.) His job is to pick up and move dinner plates, and he is only permitted to touch the bottom of the plate. The robot actually had only one "hand" (the "end effector"), and it was connected to both arms. So imagine that the person's hands are taped together.

The robot had three "motions" it could perform. The "rotate" motion was analogous to the human turning in place over a single spot. "Lift/lower" was analogous to the human using his calf muscles to raise and lower himself with his ankles. The "extend/retract" motion was like the human moving his hands horizontally in whatever direction he's facing, directly away from his chest or towards his chest by straightening or bending his arms.

To move a wafer from one place to another, we executed the following sequence of motions:

1. With the arm retracted and lowered and empty, rotate the robot to face the source station. (this was fast)
2. Extend the arm to the wafer station. The end effector slides under the wafer. (fast)
3. Lift the wafer.
4. Retract the arm, holding the wafer. (slow)
5. Rotate to face the destination station. (slow)
6. Extend the arm carrying the wafer to the destination station. (slow)
7. Lower the wafer.
8. retract the arm, leaving the wafer in place. (fast)

"Lift" and "lower" usually was on the order of two or three millimeters. But most of the robots I worked on could extend to a position more than a meter from the center of the robot, and retract so that the wafer was less than a quarter of a meter from the center of the robot. They also had a rotary range of 370° stop to stop.

What we referred to as "movement profiles" were extremely complex to manage, since our customers wanted wafers moved as fast as possible.

"Fast" motions had to be smooth but didn't have to limit the force used, since there was no wafer on the end effector. The goal was to move as quickly as possible without overshoot or other potentially disastrous miscontrol.

"Slow" motions, when there was a wafer, were a real bitch. The wafer was held in place solely by friction, so we had to make sure that the total force applied to the wafer by the end effector pads never was great enough to exceed friction and cause the wafer to slip.

At all times, we had to know all the force vectors applied to the wafer and had to make sure that the magnitude of the vector sum didn't exceed the threshold which would overwhelm friction and result in wafer movement relative to the end effector.

When we had a wafer and were rotating, if we rotated too rapidly then the centripetal force could cause the wafer to shift. A small shift would violate our precision spec. A medium shift could result in eventual collision. A huge shift would throw the wafer like a Frisbee. Any shift was very bad.

When we were rotating rapidly, there was considerable centripetal force. That meant we couldn't use as much force to accelerate and decelerate. When rotational speed was lower, at the beginning and end of a rotational movement, we could use more force to accelerate or decelerate.

Controlling the motion so we didn't exceed the friction between the end effector and the wafer was tough. But we couldn't "play safe".

Our customers wanted the wafers moved as fast as possible. In a fab, amortized cost of processing equipment is huge even when measured per-day. A modern state-of-the-art fab can cost upwards of $2 billion, and most of that is for the processing equipment. That is by far the largest component of the operation cost for a fab, and most of the other operating costs are also "fixed".

Revenue comes from sales of ICs, and if you want to be profitable, your revenue better exceed your operating cost. Roughly speaking, total revenue per day is the product of the revenue per IC and the number of ICs produced per day. Roughly speaking, that in turn is calculated by multiplying the percentage yield (useful ICs per wafer) by processing speed (number of wafers processed per day).

One tradeoff is part complexity. Small ICs which don't require many processing steps have a low commercial value, but you get a lot of them per wafer and yields tend to be very high. Big ICs which are very complex require far more processing steps. There are fewer per wafer and a larger percentage will be bad. But they also sell for a much higher price.

However, no matter how you decide to handle that tradeoff, the more wafers you can process per day the better. The limiting factor is another tradeoff, because to some extent processing speed trades off with yield. When you process faster, you ruin more dice per wafer, but you can also process more wafers per day.

Wafers have to be moved in order for them to be processed. Time spent moving wafers is time spent not processing them. Our customers wanted them moved as fast as possible with negligible impact on yield.

That meant that when we moved wafers, we had to push the friction limit as close as we could without ever exceeding it. If we "played safe" we'd move too slowly.

The extend/retract motion was by far the most complicated to control. Our actual control mechanism was extremely indirect. Our motors drove the angle between the body and the upper arm member. We had no "muscle" controlling the elbows and wrists; instead, there were passive mechanisms built into the arm which made them behave properly.

So at the first level of indirection, the microprocessor controlled the angular force applied by the motor at the shoulders. Our "sense" was an encoder on one of the shafts which precisely measured the angle of one of the shoulders.

The basic geometry changes as the end effector extends, and constant rotational force at the shoulder yields widely variable force on the wafer at different points of the motion, being lowest when fully retracted or extended, peaking when the angle between the upper and lower arm members is somewhere near 90° (usually, though by no means always). "Fully retracted" and "fully extended" were extremes of permissible motion. "Full retraction" didn't mean 0° angle at the elbow, and "full extension" didn't mean 180°.

The actual physical position (and mechanical response) of the robot end effector (the "hand") as a function of shoulder angle was complicated to even describe mathematically, let alone to control well. Just keeping motion smooth was tough. Stopping was also tough. In these kinds of systems, you may end up with metastable oscillation centered on the destination point, because the control loop doesn't settle.

One potential hazard was that the force profile would have right overall shape, but would have a high frequency oscillation imposed on it. The integral would be right, but if the amplitude of the high frequency oscillation was great it could cause us to exceed the permissible force threshold and result in wafer shift. That kind of oscillation can easily happen in this kind of system if the control loop isn't tuned well. Unfortunately, it isn't always apparent to the eye when it's happening. You have to use accelerometers to find out for sure.

That's one place where latency came into the picture. That kind of oscillation is very often caused by time lag between measurement/command and physical response if the control loop logic doesn't properly take the lag into account.

In terms of how latency affected the robot, there were three primary ways. The simplest one was due to the fact that the microprocessor wasn't infinitely fast. It controlled movement using a pre-calculated motion profile. During motion, it monitored the motion to make sure it conformed to the profile, and compensated for any divergence. There was non-zero time between when the microprocessor measured and detected a deviation from the profile and when it began compensating for it by modifying the commands sent to the hardware.

Another source of latency was motor response. Above I mentioned that at the "first level of indirection" what we controlled was angular force applied by the motors to the shoulders. What the microprocessor actually controlled was how much current passed through a small number of power JFETs. The JFETs controlled phases on the motors.

It's kind of hard to describe how multiphase analog motors work without thousands of words. The short description is that the microprocessor controlled the amount of current fed to different motor phase coils aligned at different angles. That created a polarized magnetic field inside the motor, and the permanent magnets on the rotor naturally tried to align themselves with that field. It was possible to control the angle to a very small fraction of a degree, and to control the field intensity. Indirectly, therefore, that controlled the amount of force applied to the rotor if it wasn't aligned, which effectively was the force applied to the arms at the shoulder.

The JFETs were blazingly fast, but the motor phase coils had significant inductances, and therefore it took some time from when we changed the current to when the induced magnetic field fully responded. (Just to make things even more interesting, the effective inductance of each motor phase coil was partially a function of rotor orientation and the magnetic field orientation of the rotor's magnets, and also of the fields being produced by other phase coils.)

The more force we needed to apply, the more change we made in the current flow, and the longer the delay until the inductor responded.

Processor response time was significant and had to be taken into account. I believe that motor response was treated as one kind of inertia folded in with all the other kinds of inertia, and was handled as part of the overall feedback control loop.

I think the worst latency problem was due to physical resonance in the arm assembly. The arm members (the "bones") were as stiff as we could make them subject to other constraints, but there is always some degree of flexibility, and if you twist one end of a long object, the other end doesn't follow instantly. The force is transmitted by arm "springiness", and there's a small delay in response at the far end.

There was also a secondary resonance. We applied force to the upper-arm member, and its stiffness and mass yielded a resonance. As a function of that resonance, there would be a small delay in response. But once it did respond, that then applied force to the lower arms, who also had a small delay in responding. As they resisted, responded, and resonated, that fed back force to the upper arm member, affecting its response to our motor force.

There's a tendency for such systems to ring. In terms of mechanical design, you try to minimize that by making all the members as stiff as possible and all the linkages as tight as possible. It also helps to make the lower arm members physically as similar as possible in length and mass to the upper arm members. But this can't be eliminated entirely, and the motion control algorithm still had to compensate for it.

Another problem is manufacturing tolerance. You can't insist that every manufactured unit be exactly identical because your yields would be dreadful. You have to allow a degree of variation in manufacturing, and what that meant was that each individual robot responded a bit differently, because the motors were different, the bearings were different, the seals were different, and the arms were different. The differences were small, but were more than enough so that they could not be ignored. That meant that the control algorithm had to be tuned manually for each robot.

So the control algorithm had to be designed to be to be tunable. There needed to be parameters which could be set per-robot and stored in that robot in non-volatile memory, and there had to be a way to test the completed robot and figure out what those parameter should be set to for that particular robot.

I wasn't directly involved in the design for any of this. I helped create some of the tools which were peripherally involved in the testing process, to support the tech who did acceptance testing on completed robots and who figured out the parameters to tune each one.

Originally that tuning process was done by an engineer. (He was quite a character; a really good guy. I enjoyed working with him a lot. He was Persian. His English was so good that I thought he'd grown up in the US. He had no trace whatever of a foreign accent. In fact, to my Oregon-tuned ears he had a slight Boston accent. So I was surprised when I learned that he came to the US for college. He had been an anti-Khomeini activist here as a student, and when he graduated and his student visa expired, after the revolution, he was granted "political refugee" status by the State Department. [They contacted him about that, not the other way around.] Eventually he naturalized, and like every other naturalized immigrant I've ever worked with he was fiercely patriotic about the US, because he knew how much worse things could be from personal experience.)

Setting up those parameters for each individual robot was really hard. If they were set wrong one way, the robot could exhibit jerky motion. Set wrong another way, it could lose wafers. Set wrong yet another way, it would be slower than it should be. There was a lot of art involved, and I don't really know how it was done.

What I do know was that we had long since reached the point where PID didn't cut it. The first robots I was involved with had a hardware PID controller, but the microprocessor had to monitor and supervise it – and override it when necessary. Later robots got even larger, and we abandoned PID entirely. We ended up using a dedicated signal processor which ran a much more complicated control algorithm which I didn't even slightly understand.

I have by no means listed all the problems; there were many others. For instance, when the arm was extended, it sagged a bit. So the end effector faced away a bit. That meant the force we applied wasn't aligned with the wafer plane. When we began to retract, a small part of the force applied to the wafer would try to lift the wafer off the pads rather than trying to move the wafer laterally. Thus the effective "weight" was reduced, and there was less friction holding the wafer in place.

Is this problem "simpler" than the problems Bart deals with in agronomy? In some ways it is. We didn't have to concern ourselves with outside influences which were variable and unpredictable, like weather or banking interest rates. It was possible to analyze our system using statics and dynamics and the principles of classical mechanics. The resulting model was grotesquely complex, but didn't contain any black-boxes labeled "Heere be draggons".

Any feedback system is potentially chaotic, but it wasn't necessary for us to use chaos theory in our design. (If our system became chaotic, we had already failed.)

And though latency was a problem for us, the latency time constants were well understood and quite consistent, and we could influence them to some degree with the mechanical/electrical/software design.

The challenge Bart faces is that his system isn't fully understood or analyzed. There are draggons in his system, it is influenced strongly by external factors which are unpredictable. Our challenge came from the extraordinarily high performance standards our customers demanded.

I can't say one problem or the other is necessarily harder. They're different, that's all.

Stardate 20040701.1834

(On Screen): There's a web site called Expatica, in English, about France. (It has a sister site for Germany, and probably others.) I found the following amazing "letter to the editor" there:

Dear editor,

I would not worry about easing the tensions between France and the USA for the following reasons.

Most of the American people feel the way the French do.

Bush is not the legal President of the country. He was appointed by the Supreme Court even though Gore had the popular vote.

Had Bush won he has started the war in Iraq which voilates the constitution. Congress is the only body that can declare war and they are not empowered to assign that decision to anyone else.

Bush has created the Patriot Act which suspends the rights of the individual so he is holding US citizens in jail without charges.

Bush has killed a number of people by direct order to the CIA to rocket the cars in a foreign country. That violates the constitution which protects us from harm until tried in a court of law. Everyone has the right to a trial by a jury of their peers.

Now these are the first four reasons I can think of. There are many others. Lying, Stealing, Cheating, and Fraud against the people of California in the ENRON scandal.

The most heinous crime of all is that they have closed the Statue Of Liberty to the public. A shameful act and disrespectful of the French that gave us the statue and the American children that paid to display it with their pennies.

Peace on Earth

John D. King

I could take this apart, line by line, even word by word. ("most"?) But why bother? There's nothing new here; we've heard it all before. We've refuted it all before, too. (Actually, that's not true. I honestly don't think I've seen anyone try to interpret the Sixth Amendment that way before. And I didn't know that "us" included al Qaeda terrorists in Yemen.)

We're going to hear it all again, too. Over and over and over and over, during this election campaign, from the people who suffer from what Charles Krauthammer facetiously dubbed Bush Derangement Syndrome. (Which someone named Teresa Simon-Noble felt obligated to argue against, because These Things Are Too Important To Joke About.)

I started suffering from election fatigue months ago. I was tired of the November, 2004 election in November, 2003. But my fatigue may lift a bit in the next few months, because the most hysterical anti-Bush rhetoric is about to start ringing a bit hollow. And then it may stop ringing entirely. (One can hope.)

See, Saddam Hussein is about to go on trial in Iraq. And for western journalists in Iraq, it will be an irresistible story: it will take place in Baghdad, it can be covered with minimum risk to the reporters, it will be sensational. So it won't matter that it's going to seriously undermine the narrative.

Eric M. Johnson served in Iraq with the Marines, and wrote about news bias:

Iraq veterans often say they are confused by American news coverage, because their experience differs so greatly from what journalists report. Soldiers and Marines point to the slow, steady progress in almost all areas of Iraqi life and wonder why they don’t get much notice – or in many cases, any notice at all.

Part of the explanation is Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post. He spent most of his career on the metro and technology beats, and has only four years of foreign reporting, two of which are in Iraq. The 31-year-old now runs a news operation that can literally change the world, heading a bureau that is the source for much of the news out of Iraq.

... Chandrasekaran's crew generates a relentlessly negative stream of articles from Iraq – and if there are no events to report, they resort to man-on-the-street interviews and cobble together a story from that. Last week, there was a front-page, above-the-fold article about Iraqis jeering U.S. troops, which amounted to a pastiche of quotations from hostile Iraqis. It was hardly unique. Given the expense of maintaining an Iraq bureau with a dozen staffers, they have to write something to justify themselves, even if the product is shoddy.

So it's noteworthy that even Chandrasekaran can't resist reporting on this story.

One reason this is significant is that it's going to bring perspective back into a lot of political discussion. As the trial (and the news reports) cover Saddam's torture chambers, and talks about how prisoners were treated under Saddam, leftist hyperbole about the American Abu Ghraib abuses will lose much of its force. Extravagent claims will be seen for what they are.

Another reason is that leftists are going to find a lot of their rhetoric being usurped by Saddam himself. Bush is a criminal, right? Saddam sure thinks so.

It's also going to make clear just how bad life was in Iraq before the invasion, and therefore how much it has improved.

There is already press spin trying to "balance" this issue, but it approaches the ludicrous.

Saddam Hussein stands accused of gassing Iraq's Kurds, crushing its Shi'ites and condemning thousands to death in his dreaded torture chambers, but some Iraqis still want him back as president.

"I don't know why they are trying Saddam. He is guilty of nothing," said Ahmed Abdallah, a student from Baghdad's Sunni Muslim Adhamiya district, once favored by Saddam.

"If it were up to me, I would bring him back as president today, not tomorrow."

... "He was a president, an Arab leader. I feel all Arabs are humiliated when I see him as a prisoner like this, no matter what he did," said Faleh Jasem, a driver who was watching the first footage of Saddam facing an Iraqi judge.

"I would feel so hurt if they executed him, because he took a heroic position. He stood up to America and that makes him a real man in my eyes."

That was from Reuters. (But then, you knew that already, didn't you?) Never mind peccadilloes like using nerve gas against Kurdish villages; what was really important was that he stood up to the US. That makes him the hero, and we should never have invaded and removed him from power.

I don't think that particular line will fly. (I think it will have the flight characteristics of a brick.) I think instead that reporters concerned about the narrative will spin Saddam not as "heroic leader of a sovereign nation" but as "broken, harmless, silly old man". That's the subtext I read in Chandrasekaran's WaPo report, but that won't fly, either. The facts are going to get in the way.

My fellow countryman John D. King thinks that Bush is a murderous dictator who usurped power and converted the US into a police state. But we're going to see detailed coverage of a real murderous dictator, who really usurped power, and who really ran a police state. And it's going to be increasingly difficult for even the most hardcore BDS sufferers to make those claims about Bush with a straight face. (Well, perhaps I shouldn't go that far.)

Dick Morris wrote an analysis of the election campaign where he suggested that the Kerry campaign stop attacking Bush's foreign policy and instead concentrate on domestic issues.

Voters overwhelmingly believe that Bush would be the better president to wage the War on Terror. In the Fox News survey, voters said that Bush would be better than Kerry at "protecting the U.S. from terror attacks" by 49 percent to 28 percent. (Women said Bush was better by 46-27; men, by 54-30.)

But voters also have more faith in Kerry to deal with a host of domestic issues. Despite the relatively positive economic news of recent months, voters give Kerry an edge of 10 to 30 percentage points on creating jobs, lowering health care costs, protecting Social Security and helping the environment. Even on education, a signature Bush initiative, Kerry has a double digit lead.

The economy still works to Kerry's advantage. His edge shrinks with each good job-creation report — but the lag time in popular perceptions is huge: A plurality of voters still believe we're in a recession, two years after it ended.

This election will hinge on what Americans want in a president. It's not so much a contest between two candidates, ideologies or even parties as it is a clash between two different issues or priorities for the voters.

... If terror is dominating the headlines in November, Bush will probably win. If not, he'll likely lose. Events, more than campaigning, are likely to determine the outcome.

If foreign affairs (not just "terror") dominates the headlines, Bush has the advantage. And Saddam's trial will guarantee that foreign affairs will remain in the public eye.

Obviously BDS sufferers will think it's a conspiracy, right? It's all a Bush plot to influence the US Presidential election, right? "[E]veryone knows this is theater by Bush the criminal in an attempt to win the election." -- Saddam Hussein

Update 20040702: Pej voices skepticism (as did some of my readers).

Update: Stephen writes:

You wrote:

See, Saddam Hussein is about to go on trial in Iraq.

Yeah, sometime next year in 2005. At least that is what Fox News is =
saying. So how is that going to affect the 2004 election?

It isn't as good if the trial is delayed, but it will still be in the news during preparation of the case and pretrial maneuvering. Saddam's lawyers, in particular, will make sure of that.

Stardate 20040629.1308

(On Screen): Chaos theory is fascinating to me. As a systems engineer, I'm well aware of how complex they can be, and how difficult it can be to understand how a complex system will respond to a particular change in the operating environment. I also know that such systems are everywhere, and that they profoundly affect every aspects of our lives.

Indeed, "our lives" are themselves complex systems. The biological processes involved in life, and the neural processes involved in thought, are extraordinarily complex. So one reason I am fascinated by chaos theory is that it has real, day-to-day significance. But it isn't the only reason why complex systems are, well, "challenging."

The way even a moderately complex system responds to changes in environment is often totally counterintuitive. It's certainly something that doctors run into all the time. Take, for example, hormone replacement therapy. The adrenal glands produce both estrogen and testosterone in small quantities in all healthy humans, including boys and girls and women. But at puberty in males, the testicles begin to produce testosterone at a much higher rate, and the blood level of testosterone in men is much higher. It is not, however, stable.

For one thing, it varies quite a lot over the course of each day. In most men it peaks in the morning and is at its lowest in the early evening, and can vary as much as 2:1. It also varies over the course of a year, peaking in late summer. As a man ages, the average level tends to drop, and in general young men have higher blood levels than older men do.

But disease or injury or poor nutrition or a variety of other insults can make the level drop significantly, and that affects a man's mental and physical health in a lot of ways. Pharmaceutical companies learned to synthesize testosterone and developed ways to administer it to men whose testosterone levels were too low. (It was a tough problem, because like most hormones it is metabolized quite rapidly by the liver. There were a number of approaches eventually found to deal with this, which I won't go into.)

Suppose you're a doctor, and you have a male patient whose blood testosterone level seems to be about two thirds what you think it ought to be. Suppose that you think this is negatively affecting his health. So you write a prescription for one of the forms of testosterone at a dosage level which you estimate will result in absorption of a quantity of testosterone equal to the apparent deficit. In other words, you try to supply the testosterone which isn't being produced naturally, in hopes of increasing the overall blood testosterone level in that patient by about 50% to bring him back into the normal range. What will you actually see, clinically?

The surprising answer is that in the majority of patients, there will be no significant long-term change in blood testosterone level at all. That's because you've run into a regulation mechanism.

One region of the human brain is called the hypothalamus. It monitors and regulates a lot of things such as body temperature. "Regulate" doesn't mean "hold constant"; our body temperature drops considerably when we're asleep, for instance. It often rises when we're sick. "Sleep" is controlled by a hormone, and the hypothalamus responds to that hormone by turning down the temperature. "Sick" also turns out to be a hormone, and this one is released by certain white blood cells. The hypothalamus reacts by turning up the temperature.

In men, the hypothalamus monitors blood testosterone level, and regulates it. It releases Gonadotropin Releasing Hormone (GnRH), and increases the GnRH if the testosterone level is too low, while decreasing the GnRH if it is too high. The pituitary responds to GnRH by producing two hormones called Leutinizing Hormone (LH) and Follicle Stimulation Hormone (FSH), with their levels proportional to the detected level of GnRH. The blood level of FSH controls the rate of sperm production in the testicles, and the blood level of LH controls production of testosterone, also in the testicles.

This turns out to be a classic negative feedback control loop. When you, the doctor, introduce synthetic testosterone into the male patient's system at a rate of about 50% of his natural production rate, his hypothalamus decides that the blood testosterone level is "too high" and responds by producing less GnRH, which causes the pituitary to produce less LH, meaning that the testicles produce less testosterone. You hoped you'd raise the blood level of testosterone by 50%, but what you actually did was to reduce natural production of testosterone by 50%, for a net gain of zero. To actually increase the blood level, you first have to "rail" the feedback loop.

This feedback loop also functions in women between menarche and menopause, but the behavior is radically different. Where in men it's incremental/proportional negative feedback, in women the blood level of these three hormones are step functions with relatively slow transition slew rates, uneven duty cycles and a overall cycle period we call "a period". During part of a woman's period, blood level of GnRH/LH/FSH is quite high, and during other parts it's negligible. That's also true for the blood level of estrogen, except that its curve is approximately the inverse of the other one. (And during pregnancy, progesterone produced by the placenta dominates, and the other four are all shut off.) This difference between men and women arises because the rate at which the ovaries produce estrogen is not directly controlled by GnRH, FSH and LH. This is also a fascinating subject, but one for another time.

That particular system doesn't respond quite like we initially think it would, but at least the feedback mechanism itself is pretty straightforward (unless essential components of it are damaged or missing). But in some systems the response to a particular stimulus is difficult to predict. Sometimes it's even difficult to explain after the fact. Sometimes you can't even be sure what the response was, or if there even was a response.

Really complex natural systems often inherently include many feedback loops, some positive and some negative, and some of those loops can be interlocked. The feedback amplitude can differ, and that can be nonlinear. Latency and hysteresis can vary radically. And if you don't even know what all the loops are, or what affects each of them, it isn't possible to predict how the system will respond. You may not even be able to determine if there was a response at all. Even if system behavior changed, you can't be sure it might not have changed for other reasons – or for no external reason whatever.

Endocrinologists have it easy compared to psychiatrists. Clinical practice of pharmaceutical psychiatry is more art than science. Simply coming up with a diagnosis can be very tough. But having a diagnosis doesn't necessarily help much. The fact that you can recognize something and have chosen a name for it doesn't mean you know why it happens.

And in fact we don't know what actually causes most psychiatric disorders (as distinct from conditions like Cerebral Palsy or Parkinson's Disease.) In fact, no one has any idea what causes unipolar depression, or bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia. Virtually all the drugs which have been developed to treat them derive from serendipity and empirical clinical practice. Which is to say, that the drugs seem to work, but no one knows what they're really doing or why it's useful.

Certain early drugs were more-or-less found by luck to help depression. It was also determined that they boosted the brain background levels of one or more of the monoamine neurotransmitters (serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine). Searches were made for other drugs which also changed those levels, via various mechanisms, and some of them also ended up having clinically useful effects in treatment of depression. But different people react differently to the drugs, and no one knows why. Sometimes a low dosage causes a radical improvement. Sometimes a high dosage yields no useful effect. Sometimes the side effects are minimal; sometimes they are debilitating.

The clinical evidence is that there's more involved than just neurotransmitter levels. Some tricyclic antidepressants induce substantial changes in neurotransmitter levels almost immediately, but it usually takes 4-6 weeks before clinical benefit, if any.

And even when these treatments are helpful, they're palliative.

The human brain is the most complex system known per unit mass, and its behavior is affected by genetics, nutrition, age, current environment, past stimulus, time of day, time of year... Psychiatrists are often faced with what may be program bugs or miswired hardware, and the only tool they really have is one which changes the power supply voltage. What's remarkable is just how often they're successful. And psychiatrists are certainly glad when they can help a patient with drug treatment, but if they're honest they'll admit they don't really understand how they did it: they don't know how the drugs actually affect the cause of the disease. That's because no one knows what actually does cause them.

(Actually, they have one other tool. In software terms, it amounts to choosing small random segments of the binary, disassembling it, and examining it without any of the original comments. If you're lucky, you may stumble into something.)

Chaos theory studies systems which are iterative, such that the system state at time Tn+1 is a function at time Tn, where the system has a property known as extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. Among other wonderful and pernicious results from Chaos Theory is that long term detailed behavior of such systems cannot be predicted, even if the system itself is fully understood and the behavior is deterministic. Long term prediction requires exact knowledge of the starting state, but in natural chaotic systems you can't actually know the starting state with sufficient accuracy. The more initial error, the sooner your prediction goes awry. There will always be some initial error, so your prediction will always go awry eventually.

As I was contemplating writing about this, it occurred to me that I was having a hard time categorizing Chaos Theory. It actually emerged from a subdiscipline of computer science, because it demonstrates that there are fundamental, and apparently insurmountable, problems with some kinds of computer models. But it's been applied in other areas, so it isn't really computer science. It isn't really mathematics, either, and though it's quite useful in many areas of biology, it isn't really biology. I guess it refuses to be pigeonholed. (Just like me. Maybe that's another reason I am fascinated by it.)

Most natural systems have elements which are random, but which are statistically very consistent overall. If casinos run honest games, no one knows who will win the next hand of blackjack. But the casino can predict the sum result of a hundred thousand hands of blackjack very closely.

On the other hand, some natural systems have equivalent elements which are random individually, statistically consistent overall, but where the statistical result changes as a function of other things. Statistically, it will cluster nicely – but you don't know where the center of the cluster will be, or whether it might suddenly shift.

That's true for capitalist economies. The world's economy is preposterously huge and complicated and intricate, and can potentially be affected by anything from solar activity to scientific advances to outbreaks of diseases to fads. Some stimuli end up having no effect at all, because the system apparently compensates. Other stimuli can cause radical changes. Sometimes the effects "ring" and then dampen out over time; sometimes they result in what seems to be a permanent change in overall state. A lot of the time it's damned hard to even know what happened.

It was originally believed that all systems eventually settle into a state of equilibrium, but we now know that's not true. Some systems naturally oscillate, and some systems are subject to long term alterations in behavior which seem to be permanent and irreversible which are not induced directly by external changes. And the long term behavior of some systems is naturally irregular.

It appears that capitalist systems naturally oscillate. It may not be possible to prevent that. But even if it might be theoretically possible to stabilize economic activity and prevent the boom/bust cycle, it appears that it isn't possible in practice because you can't come even close to knowing enough about the system state and component interactions to figure out what to do.

So pity the central bankers of the world. They're supposed to try to manage fiscal policy to optimize performance (for a wide variety of contradictory meanings of "optimize" and "performance") of systems which are bewilderingly complex, and which are understood even less well than the human brain. Overall economic activity in a nation or in the world is in part an emergent result of billions of decisions made by hundreds of millions of individual people. And many of the most important decisions are influenced by how each such person expects things to go overall, which is partially a function of how things are going now. The whole system is interative and is chaotic.

If "consumer confidence" is high, then statistically speaking "consumers" will spend a lot more. If it's low, they won't. It's probably statistically clustered, but clustered where? What makes consumers confident, and when and how does it change? Let me count the ways...

One of the reasons weather prediction is fun is that local factors tend to dominate over global systemic behavior. Rivers, mountain ranges, coastlines, major and minor lakes, presence or absence of forests all strongly affect the result. That's why the climate at latitude 42°20' North is so different at longitudes 71°W, 12°30'E, 102°E, and 160°W. Those are respectively Boston, just north of Rome, the Gobi Desert, and in the middle of the Pacific Ocean about halfway between Alaska and Hawaii.

And when it comes to economics, different nations perform differently. So like psychiatrists, central bankers really can only learn what seems to work and what doesn't through clinical experimentation. Like psychiatrists, they only have a small number of crude tools to influence system behavior. And like psychiatrists, they know the immediate detailed effect of those tools, but don't really understand overall how they work – if they do work at all.

Generally, the Fed uses two main tools to try to control the economy. The Fed can pump new money into the system by "buying" federal bonds with money they conjure out of thin air. The Fed does this at a pretty regular rate, but generally they don't like using this for primary control, and prefer to rely on the discount rate.

When the Fed changes the discount rate, in theory other kinds of interest rates tend to track it up and down. Of course, in practice it's nothing like that straightforward. Sometimes they respond immediately and proportionally. Sometimes there's a delay. Sometimes it has no effect. Sometimes other interest rates move in the opposite direction. Sometimes they move the same direction but less far; sometimes they move the same direction but much further. And in terms of larger effects, sometimes changes in interest rates affect overall activity and sometimes such changes don't. And almost always it takes a long time.

The theory says that lowering the discount rate leads to lower interest rates overall, which tends to stimulate economic activity. But it doesn't always work that way. Japan's central bank has held its discount rate near zero for years without any significant success in stimulating the Japanese economy.

Japan's economic stagnation results from some serious overall problems. Changes in interest rates alone aren't enough to overcome them.

Individual nations don't really exist in a vacuum. If interest rates drop, instead of causing increased borrowing it can cause capital flight (as investors seek better returns elsewhere). Oddly enough, it can also cause capital influx, as investors anticipate economic recovery and want to get in on the ground floor.

But even if a given nation's economy isn't as screwed up structurally as Japan's, one problem for central bankers is trying to determine what should be tuned. If you're trying to "regulate", what do you look at to tell you that you're too high or too low?

Trying to directly tune the rate of expansion doesn't work. The latency is too long. Those of us who have worked on control loops know that if there's too much latency in negative feedback, you get oscillation instead of damping. (There are a lot of ways to get oscillation. Oscillation is easy; damping is hard.)

The longer the delay between your stimulus and your observation of the results leading to changes in stimulus, the harder it is to control the system and keep it stable. We used to bitch if our latency was 25 milliseconds. Economic activity can lag fiscal stimulus by as much as three years.

What you'd like to do is to find one or more intermediate values you can monitor which react sooner to fiscal stimulus and which predict the longer term performance.

In the 60's and 70's the Fed tended to rely heavily on the unemployment rate, and tended to tune fiscal policy so as to try to keep unemployment within a certain bracket. But that wasn't really as successful as one would like, and since the bracket was set pretty high, it was politically unpopular in certain circles. About twenty years ago they began to pay more attention to the rate of inflation as one of the most important of many factors which fed decisions about fiscal policy. Generally that's thought to have worked a lot better, which is why Alan Greenspan can probably keep the job of Chairman of the Federal Reserve for as long as he wants it.

So is that the real answer? Apparently not. The European Central Bank was created as part of the process of replacing various national currencies with the €uro. Its charter requires it to concentrate nearly exclusively on controlling inflation. So for the last couple of years, when the Fed in the US dropped its discount rate to a 40 year low, the ECB's discount rate was held at much higher levels. That was one of the reasons why the value of the €uro rose so far relative to the Dollar. And it's made economic recovery in Europe more difficult. (As if Europe didn't already have enough serious structural problems which impede economic growth.)

In fact, no one knows what the formal "answer" is, and probably no one ever will know, even if there is such a thing. Likely that there is no one answer. Different economies have different properties, and they change over time. Each has to be treated individually.

I'm not an expert on this, but even the experts are not really experts. But I do see some ways in which the US economy seems different. Obviously the US economy is much larger than any other on the planet, but there's more to it than that.

We seem to be able to "unilaterally" begin an economic recovery. We can do that even if the rest of the world is in recession. And there have been times when the US was in a boom and the rest of the world sat it out. It seems as if most of the other major economies in the world can only begin to grow if we already are doing so, and that's because their economic growth relies on exports – more often than not, to us.

Tomorrow the Fed is widely expected to increase its discount rate. An article in the IHT notes:

For many central bankers, the Fed's long-awaited campaign to wean Americans off a diet of easy money will ease pressures on them that stemmed from the historically low rates in the United States.

For Europe, for example, a gradual closing of the gap in rates between the United States and the 12-nation euro zone could weaken the euro relative to the dollar, as higher rates for dollar deposits attract investors.

The relentless rise in Europe's single currency, though recently tempered, has fed fears that the Continent's export-led recovery would stall. The European Central Bank resisted intense pressure earlier this year to cut rates, which are also at record low levels in the postwar era.

"Greenspan will get a lot of applause in Frankfurt," said Holger Schmieding, a senior economist at Bank of America in London. "The U.S. is reducing the risk of what Europe fears most."

And in fact, most other nations generally drive economic recover using exports.

Which means they can't recover unless someone else is recovering who wants to buy lots of their stuff.

Which usually means the US, which has had a chronically high trade imbalance for a hell of a long time, causing some to predict that we're heading at high speed for a cliff.

I don't know. I don't think it's possible for us to maintain a huge trade deficit forever. But I'm not so sure that the situation is quite as straightforward as those doomsayers claim.

The Fed injects new currency into the economy by buying bonds, using money it conjures up from nothing. (A nice trick, that; wish I could do it. But for me it's a felony.) But why do we believe in money, anyway? Why do we take pieces of paper, or binary values in a bank computer, in exchange for real goods? Why do others in turn accept those things from us in exchange for their real goods?

Money was first used more than 4000 years ago, as a mechanism to facilitate barter. If I have rice to sell and want to buy sandals, and if Sam the sandal maker has sandals but wants a robe, and if Rob the robemaker has a robe and wants rice, then it gets complicated to make a deal. But if I can sell my rice to Rob for money, I can give that money to Sam in exchange for sandals. He can then use it to buy a robe.

If I have rice and want to barter for five things, and none of the five who make those things want rice, it gets really painful. But if someone buys all my rice for (enough) money, I can go buy the five things I want.

Money was precious metals, which had inherent value. I didn't trade my rice for nothing, I got gold or silver for it. That worked pretty well for a long time, since an economy based on money scales better than one based on barter. But it often ran into liquidity problems: what if there wasn't enough gold or silver for the size of the economy?

Sometimes it ran into the opposite problem: What if there was too much gold or silver?

European economic activity was choked by liquidity problems for a long time, and one solution was paper money. One problem was counterfeiting. Another was perception of ripoff: you want me to give you my rice in exchange for a bunch of paper? You nuts? So it didn't really work for quite a long time.

A huge silver strike in 1516 near Joachimsthal in what was then Bohemia ultimately supplied the liquidity to set off a major round of economic expansion. Spanish plunder of gold and silver from the Americas flooded Europe with too much gold and silver, leading to inflation for a while. But economic growth continued, and by the 18th century it was clear that there simply wasn't enough gold and silver out there. So paper money started getting used because there really was no choice.

For a long time paper money was supposedly "backed by silver" or "backed by gold", so that you didn't feel as if you were getting ripped off, but eventually there wasn't even enough silver and gold for that. The US formally abandoned that more than 40 years ago. (Some demand we go back to it.)

So what actually is the reason for the value of the dollar? If it isn't backed by gold or silver, what is it backed by? The answer is an odd one: a dollar is valuable because the US government accepts dollars for payment of taxes. A lot of people are willing to accept dollars because they can pay taxes with dollars. A lot of people accept dollars because they know a lot of other people accept them.

And there are a hell of a lot of dollars out there in the world, being used to facilitate licit and illicit trade of all kinds. The almighty buck ain't just our currency; it's also the world's currency. The US$ used to be the official currency of Panama. In a lot of places, it's effectively the currency even though not officially recognized as such.

If the world needs more dollars for liquidity, they have to get them in exchange for real goods exported to us. We, in turn, get dollars from the Fed, which creates them out of thin air. (It's a nice racket, if you can pull it off.)

Of course, they don't have to get dollars from us. They can do their own conjuring, and a lot of US currency in circulation in the world is counterfeit. But the majority of it is legit.

It isn't only dollars which are used that way. There's a lot of £Sterling which isn't in the UK. There are a lot of ¥en which are not in Japan. There used to be a lot of Marks, and now there probably are some €uros. But the dollar predominates. (It likewise isn't a logical necessity that it will continue to dominate. The rest of the world could lose confidence in the dollar and switch to something else. But if that happens, it would get extremely messy for nearly everyone, and I think no one in a position of authority wants to find out.)

Suppose that the US somehow balanced its trade rapidly and forcefully. One thing that would do is seriously cripple a lot of nations which depend heavily on unbalanced exports to us, since most of the "balancing" would amount to decreasing our imports.

But it would also mean that there would no longer be a net flow of dollars out of this country. Would that potentially lead to an international liquidity problem?

We can't maintain a huge deficit in our balance of trade indefinitely. But the Fed buys some bonds every year and injects some new money into the economy by doing so, because our economy is growing. As the world economy grows, then if it continues to rely on dollars as a de-facto international currency, doesn't that mean it would need a rising supply of dollars, gotten from us via a moderate trade imbalance?

I don't know. What I do know is that if we got radical about trying to balance our trade in the short term, we'd risk setting off a world-wide depression. Last one of those ended up setting off a world war.

I also know that anyone who claims they know for sure what will happen in any scenario is either lying or deluded. No one knows what's really coming. No one can know. And that includes the decision makers at the Fed.

Update:

I think I'm going to go hide in a bunker now; I anticipate a incoming email saturation strike. (whimper, moan) Gad; engineers, programmers, psychiatrists, other doctors, economists, anyone with an opinion about economic policy... is there anyone in my readership I missed with this post?

So let's try some demurrals: I deliberately made a lot of generalized statements here which are not perfectly true. I know that they are not perfectly true. I know that there are exceptions to them. I know what the exceptions are. I made a conscious and deliberate decision to not write about them.

I deliberately did not discuss the exceptions because it would have made this post book-length, and because they didn't matter. Generalizations are always at least a little bit wrong. But it is impossible to read articles which pedantically explore every aspect of every statement including those which are totally irrelevant.

Update 20040630: TMLutas comments.
John Weidner comments.

Update 20040706: Harscand has some comments.

Stardate 20040628.0912

(On Screen via long range sensors): Someone decided there was a vital need to do an online porn census, to find out how many porn sites there were and which domains they were in. Among their findings:

Virtually every European domain had some pornographic sites, with Germany at the top of the heap with 10 million porn pages – closely followed by the UK with 8.5 million. Australia was third, with 5.6 million pages, while the domain belonging to the tiny Pacific island state of Niue came fourth in the league, with an astonishing 3 million pages of porn.

Oh, dear. I wonder if my site was counted as one of the 3 million?

[Niue is the official "owner" of the .nu domain.]

Stardate 20040627.1351

(On Screen): Greg writes:

I'd be thrilled if you had thoughts on what constitutes honorable sports play in a game which is officiated by referees. In that situation, should one "play by the spirit of the rules", or should one manipulate the presence of the referees to one's own competitive advantage? If you're the parent of a high school athlete, it is a perplexing question.

His blog post discusses the problem in more detail. It strikes me that the reason Greg is confused about this is that he's confused about his goal.

What is high school sports for? Why do you want your kid involved in it?

Is it all about winning?
Is it a way of learning how to compete, how to win, and how to lose?
Is it about learning how to be part of a team?
Is it an end in itself?
Is it a means to an end?

Oddly enough, Greg has stumbled into Clausewitz. Sports is a form of conflict. Team sports are stylized and abstracted allegories for war and institutional competition. And Clausewitz's most important observation about war also applies to sports.

There are five main elements of warfare: objectives, strategy, tactics, logistics, and morale. There are reasonable analogs of all five in team sports.

The analog of logistics is important, but relatively uninteresting in terms of analyzing the conflict. The sports logistics question has to do with making sure that there are playing fields available for scheduled games, and making sure that required equipment, referees, and both teams are at the field at the scheduled time for the game so that it can be played. It's a problem, but usually it's not considered a partisan problem.

In war, interdiction is the strategy of attempting to interfere with enemy logistics. Anyone who tries to use interdiction in sports will be roundly condemned if caught at it.

One example of "interdiction" in sports would be to try to prevent a competitor from being able to compete, thus causing them to forfeit. It's happened. (More than once.) But it's also damned unusual.

The other four elements are much more significant. For instance, it's obvious how morale manifests. It relates to team spirit, to player dedication. And it can be targeted by an opponent, and often is. You can try to psyche your opponent; convince them that they are going to lose, in the hope that it will make them play worse. You might try to intimidate them. Fancy uniforms, a good band at the football game, and pretty cheerleaders are all helpful. So is "gamesmanship", which can be carried to extremes. (Consider, for instance, John McEnroe and Bobby Fischer.)

Strategy manifests in different ways for different sports. For baseball, one element of strategy is how the coach decides to schedule his starting pitchers. Choosing the starting five in basketball is strategy. Deciding when to take them out as a function of how many fouls they have is strategic.

Fouls in basketball are moderately analogous to formation casualties in war. A given unit becomes useless once it takes too many casualties, and you as a commander might decide to hold some of your best units back to be used later in a battle, while making a decision to commit other good units early, accepting that they would be rendered useless before the battle ends. You also have to decide where and how to use units which are not as good, recognizing that they will represent a vulnerability the enemy may try to exploit. Equally, a basketball coach might decide that some of his best players should get a lot of playing time continuously until they foul out, and decide that one or two should be taken out when they are one or two fouls away from fouling out, so that they can be put back in near the end. He has to decide when and how to use his bench, presumably made up of players who are not as good as the starters. He may decide to use a lot of players from his bench simultaneously, or might decide to stage them in one or two at a time.

Football plays are an example of tactics in sports, but that kind of elaborate organized play is only possible because football is played in discrete chunks. Most sports are more fluid. Hockey, basketball, soccer, lacrosse and the like are played continuously. There are still plays, where opportunities arise and two or more players will try to arrange themselves so as to exploit that opportunity, but it isn't the same as in football.

Baseball players practice how they will respond when the batter hits the ball. That varies depending on where the ball gets hit, whether there are already base runners (and where), and how many outs remain. Pitchers must charge towards first base if there's a bunt or a slow grounder going towards the first baseman, because he has to field the ball and needs the pitcher on the bag to make the out. All infielders practice making double-plays. All of that is tactics, and that kind of training is a lot like the training soldiers are given in things like street fighting, providing them well developed skills which they can use to capitalize on opportunities as they arise.

Playing style is also an element of tactics, and Greg turns out to be asking a question about tactics. Specifically, Greg asks whether a particular tactic should be used.

Clausewitz offered many important insights, but his main and most important observation was that objectives in war affect all of the other four elements so strongly that it isn't possible to meaningfully evaluate any of the other four with regards to a particular war without understanding the objectives of all participants.

One can academically analyze potential strategies and potential tactics in general terms, but it isn't possible to conclude whether they are acceptable or will be effective in a particular war without reference to objectives. A strategy or tactic which would contribute strongly to winning one war might lose another and might be considered totally unacceptable in a third, entirely as a function of objectives.

Likewise here: we can, and Greg does, discuss various aspects of a particular sports tactic in general terms, but we cannot determine whether it would help or harm a particular team without knowing what our objectives are. And that's why Greg finds this question perplexing and can't answer it. He's trying to evaluate the tactic of "gaming the refs" without making any reference to his objectives. Clausewitz says you can't do it.

Why do you want your kid to participate in high school sports? It looks to me like Greg either has not really thought that question through fully, or else doesn't realize that his objectives will provide guidance regarding tactics. (He begins to grapple with that at the end of his post, it should be noted.)

A lot of parents don't really think that question through. Sometimes that leads to problems. (Occasionally it leads to tragedy.)

If you have some sort of intuitive feel for your objectives but can't really clearly describe them, then there's an exercise you can go through which will probably be helpful. Sit down and make a list of potential outcomes, as varied and exhaustive as you can:

• Our team wins every game by playing dirty.
• Our team gets massacred by playing honorably, and our kids become angry and resentful.
• One of our players gets pissed by enemy cheating and starts a fight at a game.
• etc.

Then go through the list and score each outcome on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being "intolerably bad" and 10 being "ideal".

Often, that process of scoring will make clear to you what your objectives are, because you'll discover that you're looking for certain things in each scenario order to determine each score. But if that doesn't happen, go back over the list one more time, and try to consider what the high-scoring scenarios have in common, and what the low-scoring ones have in common. What I think will emerge is that there will be some elements common to high scoring scenarios, some common to low scoring scenarios, and some elements which end up not correlating to score.

The ones which strongly correlate to high scores will be the objectives you intuitively were seeking. Those which strongly correlate to low scores will show you what you're trying to avoid. Once you spot those, it's likely that some of them will suddenly seem obvious. Others may turn out to be repulsive once revealed clearly, and you might decide to reject them. One way or another, you'll end up knowing your objectives. (If you still don't, you probably shouldn't let your kid get involved in sports at all.)

And once you know what your objectives are, it will be much easier to decide whether a given tactic actually helps achieve those objectives.

The reason Greg is perplexed about this particular tactic is that it can be effective in achieving some objectives, but will be counterproductive in achieving others. He's trying to find a global, universal evaluation of the tactic, but Clausewitz says there isn't any such thing.

Let me demonstrate that with three particular objectives carefully chosen to result in contradictory answers to Greg's question.

Objective 1: Win as many games as possible. Nothing else matters.

If this is the objective, then Greg's question is easy to answer. You use whatever tactics are necessary to win. You instruct your players to play dirty whether the other team does or not. You encourage them to game the referees and teach them the fine points of doing so, and make them practice it.

Objective 2: Turn your kids into saints, who always act correctly irrespective of the consequences. Motives and choices are more important than results. The goal is to raise kids who never sin. (We'll call this "idealistic honor".)

Again, the answer to Greg's question becomes obvious. Tell your kids to not do those kinds of things, no matter whether the opponent does them or not. That will probably mean they'll lose more games, but winning and losing are unimportant. What's important is that they act correctly.

Objective 3: Teach the kids lessons about life so that they grow up to be honorable men who survive and prosper in a world where many are not honorable. (We'll call this "practical honor".)

If that is your objective, then you want your kids to participate in sports precisely because sports is an abstracted simulation of conflicts in real life. The advantage of sports is that winning and losing are the object of the game, but losing doesn't ruin your life or lead to your death. So it makes a good laboratory setting for demonstration of the realities of life.

In this case, the lesson you want your kid to learn is pretty clear. But the answer to Greg's question is not as easy.

Both idealistic honor and practical honor agree that you should deal honorably with other honorable men. But dishonorable men can take advantage of your honor to screw you over. Idealistic honor says that doesn't matter, and you should act honorably anyway. (This often flows from a religious view of life on earth as a test of our virtue. We will get rewarded or punished in an afterlife based on how we behaved while alive. Those who act virtuously will gain their reward in Heaven, even if they suffer for it in life. Those who sin and prosper end up in Hell.)

Practical honor says that honor is strength but should not become a weakness. When honorable men deal honorably with each other, everyone benefits. But honorable men should not let dishonorable men take advantage of them. An honorable man must be prepared to act like a sonofabitch with sons of bitches if he deems it necessary. (Sometimes it isn't necessary, and often you only have to go part way.)

This is straight Jacksonianism.

Jacksonian America has clear ideas about how wars should be fought, how enemies should be treated, and what should happen when the wars are over. It recognizes two kinds of enemies and two kinds of fighting: honorable enemies fight a clean fight and are entitled to be opposed in the same way; dishonorable enemies fight dirty wars and in that case all rules are off.

An honorable enemy is one who declares war before beginning combat; fights according to recognized rules of war, honoring such traditions as the flag of truce; treats civilians in occupied territory with due consideration; and—a crucial point—refrains from the mistreatment of prisoners of war. Those who surrender should be treated with generosity. Adversaries who honor the code will benefit from its protections, while those who want a dirty fight will get one.

It's also defensible in terms of game theory. It is the foundation of our entire concept of law and punishment: we as a society choose to do things to lawbreakers which we do not think should be done to those who abide by the law. In international affairs it is the foundation of deterrence. (It's the reason why the Geneva Convention doesn't apply to those who violate it.)

If one subscribes to Objective 3, Greg's question is not easily answered, because there are two ways sports can be used to further this goal. Either you use sports to give your kids an object lesson in failure, or you use sports to teach them strategies for success.

If you decide on "strategies for success", kids should be taught how to play dirty, but also should be told that they should only play that way if the other team is doing so.

This can be perilous. What you're trying to do is to teach your kid how to follow practical honor instead of idealistic honor. But there's a risk that your kid will end up being dishonorable, and will play dirty no matter what. You'd have to closely monitor every game, and chastise your kids if they didn't match the way the other team played in terms of dirtiness.

That's why I lean towards the other choice, at least in general. In this case you use sports to give your kid an object lesson in what happens if you don't give a dirty fight to those who fight dirty. You instruct your kid to always play honorably, knowing that this will result in defeat. Afterwards, kids will understand that playing clean against dirty opponents is a recipe for failure. By letting your kids be defeated this way in sports, you can help them to avoid similar defeats in life, where the stakes are much higher and the consequences of defeat are much greater.

So you would instruct your kids to follow the principles of idealistic honor, precisely because you know they'll get beaten when doing so. After the losing season, you can explain to them why they lost.

This maximizes the chance that they will learn the advantages of practical honor over idealistic honor, while minimizing the chance of them becoming dishonorable.

But if you're secure about your kid and are confident that they won't become dishonorable, then you might opt for the other choice. If, for instance, they've already had lesson #1 (being honorable with dishonorable men will get you screwed over), then you can use this for lesson #2 (Only honorable men are entitled to be treated with honor). It's a chance to practice the strategy of practical honor with minimum consequences if they don't get it quite right.

I lean towards using sports for an object lesson, but only a bit. The actual answer to Greg's question in terms of Objective 3 depends mostly on the kids.

The answer to Greg's question given by Objective 1 is, "Always play dirty." Objective 2 says, "Never play dirty." Objective 3 says, "Well, it depends." That's why Greg is perplexed: he's trying to find a single universal answer, and there isn't one.

Update: By the way, another reason you can be confused by this kind of question is because your objectives contradict one another. In that case, you're going to have to decide which ones are more important to you in order to resolve the contradiction.

Stardate 20040625.1354

(Captain's log): You'd think that after 35 years of being a computer freak and 20 years as a software professional, I'd cease being surprised by bizarre behavior from computer software and hardware, wouldn't you? Yeah, right.

The ship's computer (Draconis) is getting on to 2 years old now, but its performance is still excellent and there is no need to replace it. But recently the drive for optical media hasn't been working as well.

It's from Toshiba; it can read DVDs, and can read and write CD-R and CD-RW. And it has served me well and gotten used heavily. Recently it's also started causing problems. It has a hard time recognizing some DVDs. There are a few where I sometimes have to open and close the tray again up to 10 times before the drive properly identifies the disc.

Old-style LPs were played from outside in, but all optical media play from inside out. And there's a special section at the innermost part of the disc which is formatted identically for all optical media. When a disc is detected by the drive, it reads that part. It describes the format of the rest of the disc so that the drive can deal with it. Based on that, the drive knows whether it's a 3" or 5.25" disk, whether it's CD or DVD, whether it's read-only or is writeable, how much information it holds or can hold, and a lot of other stuff like that.

But sometimes my drive would have trouble reading that special area for a particular DVD, even though it had previously had no trouble with that same DVD. My assumption is that it's beginning to go out of cal. It also doesn't read DVDs or burn CD-R's as fast as I'd like.

So I recently bought an external USB2 drive for optical media. It came from Iomega, and it actually can read and write DVD+RW and DVD-RW, which I don't care about. What I do care about is the fact that its DVD read speed is a lot higher, and it writes CD-R at 24X.

Iomega included a DVD player program, Cineplayer. And it works, too, but it's pretty bare bones. The sound processing is minimal, and it doesn't have any video adjustment, and it doesn't support bookmarks. What I actually use most of the time to watch DVDs is InterVideo WinDVD, which is much fancier.

But WinDVD seems to have a love-hate relationship with the new drive. I have DVDs which both drives recognize easily, which WinDVD will play regardless of which drive the DVD is in. I have other DVDs which both drives recognize easily, but WinDVD will only play them if they're in the internal drive. However, Cineplayer plays those DVDs equally well from both drives. It's the kind of thing that makes you go "Hmmm..."

Another thing made me go a lot more than "hmmm". It made me go "Eeek!"

A couple of days ago, I noticed that a couple of times when I right-clicked a drive in an explorer window, there was a trap and the shell (explorer) restarted. Today it happened again, so I did some experimenting and it seemed to happen consistently. That is, needless to say, very disturbing. I decided that there was a possibility that I had gotten infected with some sort of malware, and decided I better restore the system state from the last backup set I made.

That was exciting. It's done using a program called "ntbackup", and the usual way of invoking it is by right-clicking a drive, selecting "properties", and choosing the "tools" tab. Then you can press the "backup" button to fire up the program.

But it has to be done as administrator. If a malware program were trying to run on top level right-clicks, it was possible it was getting trapped because it was trying to do something which my normal privilege don't permit. (I don't routinely run as administrator for exactly that reason.) If I did such a right-click as administrator to reach the backup program, it might do whatever dirt it wanted to do before I was able to restore the system state, and it might not be something that would be fixed by restoring the system state.

I tried invoking ntbackup directly. But the system state restore didn't work properly, and from the error log it became clear that it was because the "starting directory" was incorrect. Because of how I was running it, it began in "\WINNT\System32" on my system drive, and that didn't seem to be the right context.

But I couldn't figure out what the right context was supposed to be, so that I could alter the "starting directory" field in the icon. Finally, I decided there was nothing for it but to invoke it the normal way.

When I did that in the administrator, the popup informing me that the shell needed to restart identified the offending code. (That didn't happen when I was running my normal user account.)

Fortunately, it didn't turn out to be malware. It was this: \WINNT\system32\ShellEXT\CDWshext.dll. It came from VoB Computersysteme GmbH and it appears to have been trying to add an entry to the context menu for drives permitting access to some sort of CD Wizard program. I think it was one of the many things which got installed for me when I added the new drive.

The Iomega install disk was actually quite obnoxious and it helpfully installed all kinds of things and created all kinds of associations I didn't want. This seems to have been one of them, and I refuse to speculate about why it was bombing. I don't really care, because I don't want it to do whatever it was it was trying to do.

After the system restore, the shell doesn't restart in that case. So I'm happy. Except that certain apps I installed since that backup will now have to be installed again, and there are likely some other changes I made since then which I'll have to change again. Such is life.

Meanwhile, I thought I'd touch on a few reader emails I've received. In response to this post regarding an AFP report about declining sales of French wine in the US, several people wrote to point out that one paragraph in said the following:

Part of the decline can be attributed to the surging euro, which has jumped from 84 cents to a high of USD 1.29 over the past three years, and anti-French sentiment stemming from the fallout over the US-led invasion of Iraq.

My post said they didn't acknowledge any backlash, yet there it was. I don't remember seeing that when I first found the article and wrote about it. All I can say is that either it was updated (which has been known to occur) or else I was careless and missed it.

Even though it does (now) acknowledge the possibility that political backlash might be a factor, it seems to assume that the two primary problems are the rise of the Euro relative to the Dollar, and the bewildering labels on French wines.

Neither explanation washes. Arthur pointed out this news post from Italy:

Reporting the data of the Italian Wine & Food Institute for the first quarter of 2004, on the eve of the first edition of Miwine to be held at the Milan Fair (June 14-17) Coldiretti stated that "the value of Italian wine being exported to the USA has risen by 10.2 pct, showing the best performance among the great competing Countries. There was a 10.1 pct increase from Australia, but also a 5.5 pct decrease from Chile and a drastic 23.1 pct less for French wines". He further commented: "This is a result that allows Italy to maintain top national presence on the American market, where a third of the money spent on imported wine is spent on Italian wine (33.3 pct) compared to 26.8 pct for Australian ones and only a fifth (21.4 pct) for French wines".

Arthur comments, If the decline in French wine sales to the USA was due to the high price of the Euro, then one would expect other European countries to be facing similar problems -- but Italian wine sales to the USA are up over 10%.

Exactly so. And if the problem was confusion about labeling, why should that suddenly become so critical in just the last couple of years?

Matt wrote:

I can assure you that I've stopped purchasing French Wine solely and specifically because of the actions of the French government in connection with the invasion of Iraq. Though primarily a Martini drinker, I'm very fond of a good Rhone especially a Chateau Neuf-de-Papes. However, for over a year now, I haven't purchased a single bottle of French wine, including Champagne. American, Italian, and South American wines do me just fine.

Odd that the decline coincides with the little 'misunderstanding.' The real truth is, French wines are overpriced, and I suspect that a lot of people who boycotted the stuff and switched to American, or Australian, or especially Chilean, realized that many other wines are as good or better. That's the problem with a luxury product – if people discover the same quality for much less, they may not see the value in the cachet anymore. That is ever more true when that cachet is so tainted. People may or may not still be boycotting French wines, but I suspect that the 'snob-appeal' is severely diminished, and the French wine industry may have to adjust to the reality that their government pulled the curtain aside. No amount of marketing paint can varnish the fact that the French trollop is looking mighty long in the tooth.

I received several letters from other people who assured me that they had ceased buying French wines for political reasons. Blair wrote:

My knowledge of wines is extensive. I know that the stuff with a cork in the bottle is better than the stuff with a screw top, and both are better than the stuff in a plastic bag. I used to find some dinner parties stressful due to the requirement of arriving with an acceptable and hopefully impressive bottle of wine, often buying an expensive French one on general principals. Times change. None of my small circle of friends purchase what we now laughingly refer to as 'Surrender Juice' for the reason you mention, and we're Canadian. I can't imagine our buying habits making a dent on Frances' export market, but to judge by looking in our recycle bins, we're doing great things for Chiles'.

I must say I like the term Surrender Juice, and I'm happy we Americans still have friends north of the border. (Not that there was any doubt about that, despite the pro-French policies of the Chrétien administration.)

In response to this post about sudden academic interest in political blogging, Carol wrote (and I responded):

Subject: Being Watched post

Well, not to say that you AREN'T...but I think there is an easier explanation for the "survey" sent your way.

One, you probably generate enough traffic that you were "gleaned" as a worthy subject.

Of course.

Actually, no one besides me (and Road Runner) is actually able to determine how much traffic I do. While it's true that I'm on some "top" lists, those actually rate based on number of incoming links to the site.

It's not something I pay a great deal of attention to. It's been months since I've even looked to see where I rate. But...

Right now I'm #50 on the Technorati Top 100: http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/top100.html

And I'm #9 in the Blogosphere Ecosystem: http://www.truthlaidbear.com/ecosystem.php

I get a lot of what amounts to "junk-email" because of that. For instance, it means I'm the target of a lot of link-whoring. It's possible that these guys found me through the Technorati list.

Two, the reason they just don't (paraphase from memory) "read your blog and answer their own questions" is because that would not be "scientific" -- i.e., that would call for a subjective judgement of the principal investigator.

What's subjective about checking the posting dates on the entries in my archive, or looking at my main page to see if there are links to permit people to post comments?

"Scientific" has nothing to do with it. They're LAZY.

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