10:42 - Many questions are as yet unanswered, but at least it seems that Washington, DC area residents can breathe a bit easier this morning. With the two presumed shooters now in custody, what remains is to find out why they did what they did. Assuming, of course, that these two men are in fact guilty of the shootings, which seems likely but is not yet proven.

The early reports made much of the fact that one of the suspects is surnamed Muhammad, but later reports made clear that Mr. Muhammad is an American who converted to Islam rather than a native follower of Islam. Mr. Muhammad apparently made statements after 9/11/01 in support of Islamic terrorism, but no connection has yet been made between him and Islamic terrorist organizations. So the question remains as to the motivation for these shootings. Were they the actions of an "ordinary" serial killer or an attempt to extort money? Or were they perhaps sanctioned or unsanctioned acts of terrorism in support of Islam? We may never know.

I was never convinced that the sniper shootings were organized acts of Islamic terrorism, simply because Islamic terrorists have sufficient resources to place multiple sniper teams on US soil. If these shootings had been sanctioned by Islamic terrorist organizations, I'd have expected them to employ many sniper teams, widely dispersed geographically. I'd also have expected clusters of shootings, with multiple victims over a period of a day or two, and then relatively long periods without activity. Nearly daily shootings increase the risk of the shooters without greatly increasing the level of terror, which could have been maintained at lower risk with less frequent shootings. None of that came to pass, which leads me to believe that these shootings had nothing to do with Islamic terrorism per se.

I'm sure we'll find out more over the coming days and weeks, so it's useless to speculate in advance of the facts.

12:20 - I really hate rude automated anti-spam mechanisms, which are becoming increasingly common. Here's an example. I've disguised the email address of my correspondent to prevent address harvesting software from grabbing his address:

With reference to your message with the subject:
"Re: Mozilla as browser"

The local mail transport system has reported the following problems it encountered while trying to deliver your message:

-------------------------------------------------------------------
*** dmagda at ee dot ryerson dot ca
550 5.0.0 Go away Spammer
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Your mail message is being returned to you in the next part of this message.

Should you need assistance, please mail postmaster@meepmeep.triad.rr.com.

Subject: Re: Mozilla as browser
From: Robert Bruce Thompson <thompson@ttgnet.com>
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 11:49:03 -0400
To: David Magda <dmagda at ee dot ryerson dot ca>

Thanks. I've been keeping my eye on that project, and I fully intend to give it a try once they release the 1.0 version.

Bob

David Magda wrote:

If you like Mozilla for browsing you may want to experiment with Phoenix [1].

It uses the same rendering engine as Mozilla but is only a browser - no mail, chat, etc. It uses less than 10MB of memory and is quite fast. It has tabbed browsing, blocking of images (added just recently), and several other features that you expect from a Mozilla-based browser.

It is still quite new, but developement is moving along quickly. I would suggest downloading it [2] and having a look: even if you don't use it now it may be something to revisit in a couple of weeks/months.

The developers are also planning implementing an email client in the future along the same lines - small, efficient, only the basics.

[1] http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/
[2] http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/phoenix/releases/

--
Robert Bruce Thompson
thompson@ttgnet.com
http://www.ttgnet.com/thisweek.html
http://forums.ttgnet.com/ikonboard.cgi

On what basis is Mr. Magda's ISP's mail server determining that I'm a spammer? I see nothing spammish about his message or my reply. The only thing I can think of is that perhaps Mr. Magda's ISP subscribes to a service that has wrongly added one of the pertinent domain names or address blocks to a blackhole list. I wonder how many other legitimate messages Mr. Magda fails to see because his ISP uses overly-aggressive anti-spam measures. I also wonder how many of my own messages are not received by the people I send them to. This time, I caught the auto-reply, but such messages often end up in my own Trash folder, where they may be deleted without being read.

I'd want to be pretty sure of myself before I blocked email to one of my customers, let alone before I sent an automated "Go away Spammer" accusation to possibly innocent people. I'm not picking on Mr. Magda, or even his ISP, because this problem is becoming commonplace. Ultimately, of course, spammers are to blame for problems like these, but it is annoying to get such a message in response to a perfectly legitimate message that I've sent.

10:08 - The problem with bouncing mail has been explained. Mr. Magda writes to say that his ISP admins had blocked the domain rr.com because they'd gotten some spam from a Roadrunner account in August. Way to go, folks. Shut out a few million Roadrunner users because you got spam from one RR account. I have no problem with ISPs choosing to use well-managed blackhole lists, but this is simply stupid. Their priority seems to be blocking spam at all costs, so I'm surprised they didn't take things a bit further and block all email from the .com top-level domain. In fact, by their logic, they should block all email from all top-level domains, thereby ensuring their users a spam-free environment.

Bob Walder was one of the people who took my advice to try Mozilla, but alas his trial didn't last long. He emailed me to say that he'd run into a showstopper with Mozilla. It didn't import his IE Favorites. I replied that I found that odd because Mozilla had imported mine automatically during installation. Bob replied that he'd downloaded the latest beta, so perhaps that was the problem. He then downloaded and installed the latest stable release, Mozilla 1.1, but found the same problem existed with it. He speculates that perhaps the problem occurred because he is running Windows XP, which I do not run.

I played around briefly with the bookmarks functions in Mozilla, but didn't see any obvious way to import IE Favorites manually. Any suggestions appreciated.

It's always been clear that Jerry Pournelle is a very smart man, but his post yesterday [link here after 27 October] made it clear that he's a very brave man as well. In that post, Pournelle states outright that real differences in intelligence exist among different human populations. That's not news to anyone who understands anything about the topic, but it is a subject that has been made taboo by the forces of Political Correctness.

I can imagine the squeals of outrage now gathering in Pournelle's inbox. He'll be called a racist and accused of advocating "bad science." All of that is crap, of course. What he writes is truth based upon observable facts. The most intelligent subgroup in the human population is, on average, Ashkenazi Jews. Behind them are the Chinese, followed by whites of European origin, followed by the Japanese, and so on down the list to American blacks in next-to-last place, and African blacks in last place.

None of this says anything about the intelligence of any particular person, but merely about how the curves plot. There are moronic Ashkenazi Jews, just as there are brilliant African blacks. Neither is intelligence the sole determinant of human value, nor even the chief determinant. But the fact remains that these differences are important, with implications for education and other aspects of our civilization. The logical inference is that our advanced placement classes should be largely populated by Jews, Chinese, American whites and Japanese, with blacks proportionately underrepresented. Those more intelligent groups should be more heavily represented among our physicians, engineers, and scientists. To the extent that that's true, it's not racism operating, but reason and natural selection.

Similarly, the emphasis on state-to-state variations in the SAT and other standardized test scores should take population groups into account. North Carolina and other Southern states rank very low by these measures if one looks at only the raw data, and accordingly are damned for providing poor education to their students. But if you normalize those scores by taking into account the percentage of students who take the tests and the weighted numbers by population group, you find that in fact the scores are similar from state to state. That is, the scores of white North Carolina students are similar to those of white Minnesota students, as are those of Chinese North Carolina students versus Chinese California students, as are those of black North Carolina students versus black Iowa students. For obvious reasons, states in which a higher percentage of all students take the test have lower average scores than states in which a lower percentage of all students take the tests. States in which a high proportion of students who take the standardized tests are from more intelligent population sub-groups have higher average scores than states in which a relatively high number of students who take the standardized tests are from less intelligent population sub-groups. Well, duh.

10:02 - The Russians pulled off a miracle, successfully storming the theatre with only 67 hostages killed. I use the word "only" advisedly. Obviously, 67 hostages dead is 67 too many, but the miracle is that ten times as many weren't killed. About 750 hostages are still alive, thanks to those Russian special forces troops. Imagine the difficulties involved. Hundreds of hostages intermixed with 40 terrorists, who were armed with automatic weapons. The whole place wired with explosives. It would have been difficult enough had the terrorists each been wearing a blaze orange shirt with bulls-eye targets front and rear. I can't imagine having to sort out terrorists from hostages when all were wearing similar clothes. But the Russian special forces troops managed somehow.

None of that is any consolation to the families and friends of the 67 dead hostages, of course. But the families and friends of the 750 rescued hostages owe a vote of thanks to the brave young soldiers who risked their own lives to rescue those hostages.

The second-guessing by the media is truly foul: "Were some of the hostages killed by rescuers' bullets?" "Did two of the hostages die from suffocating in their own vomit as a result of the gas used?" Even if those speculations turn out to be true, how are they relevant? The inference is that somehow the rescuers were at fault for some of the hostage deaths, and the implication is that the rescue was botched. Give me a break. All 800+ hostages might as well have been dead already. Those who did die were killed by the terrorists. The rescuers weren't responsible for any of the hostage deaths. They brought 750 hostages back from the dead.

9:06 (EST) - All our clocks are changed, the computer clocks automatically, and all the others manually. What a stupid thing to have to go through twice a year. I keep the clock in my truck set to UCT (formerly GMT), and I'd just as soon everyone used that. But if we do have to have an offset, can't we at least have an unchanging one? This DST crap annoys me more as I get older.

There's another huge Leonids meteor storm this year, and it's the last that any of us will live to see. The Leonids peak for a few years on a 33-year cycle, but those peaks vary dramatically in meteor volumes. Last year's Leonids storm was the show of the century, both because of the high number of meteors visible and because it occurred during a new moon. This year's storm may be even heavier than last year's, but occurs during a full moon, which reduces the number of meteors visible. Even with that reduction, this is a show that you don't want to miss. The next Leonids storm of this magnitude won't occur until the 22nd century, so this is an event comparable to the return of Comet Halley.

There are actually twin peaks this year, with the first spanning 106 minutes centered on 0403 UT 19 November (2303 EST 18 November) and the second spanning 122 minutes centered on 1046 UT 19 November (0546 EST 19 November). The radiant (the point from which the meteors appear to originate) is in the scimitar of Leo. For us, that will be just at the Eastern horizon during the first peak, which means that the meteors arriving during this peak will be "skimmers", arriving nearly parallel to us and therefore going through a lot of atmosphere. Unfortunately, Luna will be high during that peak. During the second peak, the radiant will be nearly at zenith for us, and Luna will be very low on the Western horizon.

If you have kids, get them out to see it. It's something they'll remember all their lives. Seeing one "shooting star" is neat. Seeing them arriving at 1,000 per hour, with peak rates of one per second or more, is incredible. For more information about how and when to view the Leonids storm, see this Sky & Telescope article.