One article gets it wrong, they all get it wrong.

I saw in Google news that some of the Gitmo interrogation techniques were definitively (instead of probably) traced back to Chinese techniques used on U.S. military during the Korean war. This was done by discovering that a training chart in use now was taken word-for-word from an identical chart written in 1957, describing the Chinese approach.

Credit for this paper was given to "Alfred D. Biderman." Now, I happen to know Biderman's work. He was an accomplished scientist and a pretty decent human, from what I know; I have his 1961 book, The Manipulation of Human Behavior. Unless there were *two* Air Force sociologists named Biderman working to understand interrogation techniques, his first name was Albert.

So I wrote a comment to the NYT article telling them so. Then I went back to Google News, and saw that it was "Alfred D. Biderman" in every article. In other words, one person wrote an article, and all the others copied from that. Not a single one looked beyond that. A little bit of online research might have given them this obituary, which would have made the error clear.

So, I've written to the NYT, the WSJ Morning Brief editor (subscription only - if this link is denied, try linking to them from Google News), the Australian, and several other papers letting them know (yes, I have the "something is wrong on teh intarweb!" gene ;-) We'll see if anyone of them change their articles. I'm highly curious to see how many will admit the mistake....

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Update, 20 minutes later
While they haven't posted my comment yet, the NYT seems to have changed it from Alfred to Albert. Perhaps they discovered their own link to the paper in question, which also says Albert ;-)

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Update #2
In a nice little piece of irony, I found a grammatical mistake to correct in the above, and did so. Owning up to it here!

Now, if only the paper of record would own up ;-)

I'm home, recuperating. Bart is looking after me. Everything went as well as possible, and I should be working next week.

Thanks for all the well-wishes :-)

If you're familiar with MZB's work regarding women's roles in various imagined societies, you may also be interested in this real-life cultural anomaly.

Until very recently in some parts of Albania, women who swore eternal virginity became valued as highly as men (twelve oxen, instead of six), and enjoyed(s) the rights of men. Some of these women are still alive. Read about their stories.

Very cool.

Courtesy of nadalia, who suggests modifying it into your best and worst moments today if you don't have best & worst from past Fridays the 13th.

My best was the day my cousin Amy was born - on a June Friday the 13th, exactly 40 years ago. She is very cool, and a blessing to everyone that knows her.

My worst was the day they stormed into our priory and arrested everyone just so that broke, pimply King Philip could steal our coffers - oh, wait. That wasn't me. My mistake.

Today's best and worst moments:
Best: My husband arrives tonight from Texas! Yay!
Worst: I have to wait a few more hours to see him, and my brain is so excited I'm incapable of rational thought. (And I can hear you all out there wanting to ask, How can you tell? Don't! ;-)

Courtesy of madwriter:

Comment and I'll...
1. Tell you why I friended you.
2. Associate you with something - fandom, a song, a colour, a photo, etc.
3. Tell you something I like about you.
4. Tell you a memory I have of you.
5. Ask something I've always wanted to know about you.
6. Tell you my favorite user pic of yours.
7. In return, you (should) post this in your LJ.

Keep it, if at all possible to do so legally. This sounds like the definition of doing what's in front of you, as St Francis advocated.

Which of course tells you the name ;-)

I'm starting to embrace the cloud network, both as improving my quality of online life, and providing a back-up to the data on the alexfiles site. A symptom of this is that I've finally broken down and opened a Flickr account.

See photos of the new home. Some are boring interior shots, so Bart knows what he's moving to, but most are flora and fauna on the property. A few, like ladybud, are worth clicking on All Sizes to see the enlarged version. (I swear that bug is looking at me!)

Sneak preview


I'm still figuring out the best taxonomy for the sets and collections, so forgive any repetition if you go looking around. I'm trying to minimize it.

Here, a confession: the Mountain is one of the primary reasons I took this job. Yes, I had a great interview day and yes, I was impressed with the place and the corporate culture. But on my flight back I saw Mount Rainier from the plane, and fell in love.

I had passed over the Rockies on the way to the interview, and was looking out the window for the Cascades to compare. There were clouds, and the occasional peak peeking through the clouds. And then a monster appeared, looming above the mountains and the clouds, with a second, thinner layer of clouds just below its topmost peak.

Renton and Seatac, the Seattle suburbs in which I work and currently live, have mountains on every horizon. They also have lots of tall trees and hills and valleys, which means actually seeing the mountains is not a constant. But every so often you'll round a curve on a hill and get a clear shot to the horizon, and there will be mountains. And on some days, when the usual clouds are gone or are very high, you'll see the Mountain.

I have tailored my commute to take me on just such a curve, so that on clear mornings I can say hello. It's about 50 miles from where I work.

In the picture below, the light blue band just beneath Rainier's glaciers is about as tall as any of the other mountains surrounding us, including much closer ones. Driving through the Cascades in White Pass you will occasionally glimpse Rainier through breaks in the trees, and it makes you catch your breath.


The Mountain. Everyone here calls it that. Even the US Geological Survey calls it that. It's easily twice the height of any of the mountains near it, and heavily glaciated. The carving by the glaciers makes it look older than its half-a-million years. ("It's not the years, it's the mileage." ;-) From the USGS:

Mount Rainier volcano dominates the landscape of a large part of western Washington. It stands nearly 3 miles higher than the lowlands to the west and 1.5 miles higher than the surrounding mountains. The base of the volcano spreads over an area of about 100 square miles, and lava flows that radiate from the base of the cone extend to distances of as much as 9 miles. The flanks of Mount Rainier are drained by five major rivers and their tributaries.

The rivers are why native Americans (the Puyallup tribe) named it Tahoma, the mother of waters.

It's the most dangerous volcano in North America, and is listed as one of the "Decade Volcanoes," volcanoes chosen for special research precisely because of their danger. I actually researched where lahars and flooding might occur if it erupted before looking for a house.

I've been writing about kobolds a few years now, but it wasn't until Rainier that I saw their home. I should have known; only a volcano would be a sufficient forge. And I keep hearing the same line, though I've never heard it before. It's a paraphrase from Tolkien:

Her mountain, she calls him, but he owns her not.

Read more:
http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/Cascades/volcanoes_cascade_range.html#rainier
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decade_Volcano

After passing through Colorado into Wyoming, I turned west and headed through Laramie to Rawlins, where I spent the night before crossing the Rockies the next day. The weather was lovely, but I'd gone far enough north that there were numerous snow patches near the road, and the strong, constant west wind created a minor whiteout blowing snow off the mountain tops just before Rawlins.

Early in the drive, these hills began to appear, looking like rocks piled by giants as trail markers or shrines.


( More behind cut )

Playing catch-up on the travelogue :-)

Crossing the Llano Estacado from Texas across northwest New Mexico was lovely. There were long stretches of flat land, frequently punctuated by various mesas, buttes, and mountains. These are just a couple of shots. I was only there for a morning's time, crossing into Colorado through the Sangre de Cristo mountain range around lunchtime.

My first snow-capped peaks on the trip, in New Mexico. I was going to see a lot more of these.


After the Sangre de Cristo range, the road took me through Colorado parallel to the Front Range, a southern range in the Rockies. Here I liked the tree, the small butte, and the mountain behind it all.

Courtesy of prettygoodword: clustercoitus.

Courtesy of watermelontail

Yep, that's about how I see things breaking down.

Rejoice, those who love a good read! las, whose fiction I've had the pleasure of knowing since 1990, has just signed a three book deal with Del Rey.

It couldn't happen to a better writer :-)

Read Lucy's Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Read more about Lucy here.

Roller pigeons climb high and fast. Then roll over and fall just as fast towards the earth. There are shallow rollers and there are deep rollers. You can’t breed two deep rollers or their young – their offspring – would roll all the way down, hit, and die. Agent Starling is a deep roller. Let us hope one of her parents was not. —Hannibal

Some of you may not know, but there was a tragedy at the Kentucky Derby last Saturday. The second place winner, a filly named Eight Belles, broke both her front ankles just past the finish line. Not having a supporting front leg, she was killed immediately for humane reasons. What was not humane was her being raced in the first place.

Eight Belles was a dark brown, nearly black filly with slim legs and a lot of heart. She was reminiscent of another licorice-colored filly, Ruffian, the great tragedy of the seventies who died in a match race in 1975 with that year's Kentucky Derby winner, Foolish Pleasure. While Eight Belles was not the freakishly gifted horse that Ruffian was, they did have one thing in common - bloodlines.

Eight Belles shares a common ancestor with Ruffian. They are both descended from Native Dancer*, a fragile horse but outstanding racer. He won 21 of his 22 race career, but this career was short for his time (most racers of his generation ran 40-50 races). Nonetheless he was bred quite a bit, and traces of him were in all the Derby entrants this year. He's also partly responsible for Ruffian. Ruffian's existence and tragic end was the result of crossing the weak-boned Native Dancer with the offspring of Reviewer, a horse who broke down twice before finally being euthanized over a broken leg. Such breeding was criminal negligence. An outcry was made for better care and breed practices in response to Ruffian's death, but obviously the industry as a whole is not concerned enough to act on this.

Ruffian was closer in generations to Native Dancer, but he shows up twice in Eight Belles' background. And Barbaro, the great colt who died a year ago of complications resulting from a leg broken while racing, was also descended from Native Dancer.

So here's my solution: I think high, punitive fines should be applied to owners who run horses with a certain percentage of known "problem" bloodlines, or breed one problem line to another. When an owner breeds, health considerations should come first. When a horse is raced, its pedigree should be affirmed to show no signs for concern. If this is not done, or if a horse is hurt or killed as a result of breeding or racing negligence, those responsible should be held to account for the crime.

It's been over three decades since Ruffian died for exactly the same reasons Eight Belles died, and nothing has changed. Well, one thing has changed. I'm not watching any more licorice fillies die.

---

* Credit goes to Bart for thinking to check for and discovering this common link.

I'm safely in Seattle, but I'm still catching up on the travelogue (Best Worst Western didn't have functioning internet access). But now I am comfortably ensconced in a Sleep Inn, and thought I'd upload these before going off for my first day on the job :-)

Driving through the Cascades was an adventure (more on that later), but I did get to see moose meese!.


More moose.


This Oregon hawk kindly landed on a telephone pole, then proceeded to preen.

( More hawk behind cut. )

I stopped for gas in Baker City, Oregon, where I learned it's illegal to pump your own gas in Oregon. Apparently this has been the case for some time, because citizens are viewed as prone to improperly handing gas and polluting/endangering the environment. More recently, drive-offs have created an increase in vigilance in enforcing this law. The solution is the very pleasant "mini-serve" concept, in which a station attendant comes over and runs your card, pumps your gas, etc. The woman who helped me was extremely quick and pleasant. I liked the experience, although I'm not certain I like the law as such.

Next to the gas station was a charming little restaurant, Sumpter Junction, and I decided I needed to actually sit down for a meal instead of eat and drive. The food was good, the service excellent, but the thing I loved most was the miniature train track running through the entire restaurant, next to the booths, along the top of the wall, and through a coiling display.

Running by my table.

( More photos behind cut. )

A quick note on the animal tally. I can now add ravens, magpies, and a flock of seagulls. The seagulls were amazing. I've seen them inland before (there were a couple even in Rawlins, Wyoming), but at the junction of interstate 80 and 15 in Utah I saw a field full of them, at least a couple of hundred. I don't think I've ever seen that many in one place before, apart from the sea shore.

The weather has been interesting. For most of my journey the wind has been a constant companion, blowing strong out of the west. Mostly I've seen partly cloudy blue skies, but between Laramie and Rawlins there was a brief snow storm (it may simply have been the wind blowing snow off the mountains, but the effect was the same), and in the Texas panhandle I saw the most intense storm of my life - and I've seen tornadoes, so that's pretty intense.

Green storm. When things go green before a storm, you know it's going to be strong, at least in Texas. Panhandle and West Texas storms are known for their intensity; las is probably familiar with the green storm phenomenon, having lived on the edge of West Texas herself. Note: these first three photos were taken within the space of five minutes, maybe less; all were taken at the same exposure, and leveled in photoshop with the same settings as every other photo in my trip log. Here, a suddenly darkening sky began to take on a green tone. Green:


Greener:


Greenest. Seconds after I took this shot the storm broke, wind shaking the windows in the car, hail falling, rain like a bucket. All traffic stopped, and cars huddled near each other on the side of the road as we had no shelter. The roar of the wind was astonishing. I called Bart, convinced a tornado was about to hit us as we sat there.

There were more panhandle storms, heading west to east, but I wasn't in the middle of them. This was just an interesting curve of cloud when I took this shot, thinking it was post-storm loveliness:


Within ten minutes it had moved to my left as I drove and become this:


( More photos behind cut. )

First, I must share asakiyume's comment about having to drive the distance. I found it both insightful and hopeful. By doing this journey in this way, you get a physical sense of just how far you are flying from unhappy times in Texas.

My unconscious is getting a strong sense of just how much is depending on this job, too. Hope is a two-edged sword. When it shows up after a long absence, "and with it the bite of care and fear renewed" (thank you, Tolkien), it exacts a toll, and my brain will take it out one way or another. But I feel better now.

On Thursday I met a dog of the pit bull variety in an Arby's parking lot in Raton, New Mexico. He was brown and peaceful, lying on the concrete in the sun, right in the drive-through lane. (He looked like an older, battle-scarred version of this, except he was redder, and I don't recall any white on him.) I thought he wasn't safe and he should move, and pulled up near him, opening my door and talking to him. (I did not get out at this point, because his jaws were so impressive. At no point did I reach to touch him, because I didn't want to appear threatening.) Most loose, unattended dogs, feral or not, would jump up and move at this.

Not him. He just lifted his head and looked at me. I saw he was missing his right eye - an old wound, completely healed but poignant.

We had a one-sided conversation. I offered him a sandwich and water, which moved him to get up and eat, but while he remained friendly and relaxed, he didn't come over and make a fuss, either. I thought about finding a vet to check and care for him (though how I'd fit him in the car I couldn't imagine, let alone get him to go into it). But I had no cell phone signal, and while I was wondering if I should go borrow the Arby's phone he loped off. I was unwilling to go chasing after a strange pit bull, so I wished him well and left.

I should have felt good about the incident, but I worried.

The night I stopped in Rawlins, Wyoming, and I had the following dream:

A woman (I don't know who she is) is telling me about a tattoo she's getting. I asked who she was using, concerned, and she told me he was a true artist, very gifted. As she spoke, offstage from my dream perspective, I watched an owl fly in toward a large wooden sign. As it landed on the sign it changed into a little old Native American man, who sat there smiling at me from his perch, crouching with hands on knees.

Then a co-worker I respected at TI (he was skilled at his job, and he spoke truth to power) pointed out something on the ground, and I looked to see that Sacha, a dead basset hound of my mother's, had come to say hi, and she had a friend, a classic flop-eared hound (like a foxhound), white, with large black and tan spots. I knew they were both dead, or at least not living like I was, in the dream. I said, "Who's your friend, Sacha?" and the stranger began to turn its head to me. Just before it turned, I was abruptly certain I would see a very large, sky blue eye, filled with wisdom which it might impose on me. Instead I saw that its right eye was missing. Remembering the pit bull I suddenly grew scared and woke up.

This dream scared me because I felt guilty about not doing more for the pit bull, and wondered if it was okay.

I told the dream to minirth, who immediately had a different interpretation. "One eye - it's Odin, the all-father. Someone is watching over you." This felt so right it gave me a frisson. In mythology Odin gives up his eye to obtain wisdom. He's also the sky-father (the sky-blue eye?). Maggie also pointed out that some Native American mythology probably incorporated that of the Vikings who came to North America.

Odin is also (to my convoluted unconscious at least) reminiscent of Christ, by means of Gandalf. Here's how: Most people get Gandalf as a Christ figure in the Lord of the Rings, but he's just as much an Odin figure. Like Gandalf, Odin is known as a wanderer, hooded and a staff bearer, sometimes called Greybeard. Also, he dies (hanging from a tree) only to come back stronger and more able to do what he must. I think the fact that I had been listening to the FOTR on tape Thursday may have influenced this dream.

Now, all of this information was in my unconscious. I knew the Viking/Native American connection, I knew about Odin, I knew about Gandalf, I even knew some little about Native American mythology in New Mexico. But that doesn't make it any less real. And now that I have a one-eyed dream dog walking beside me and an owl flying above, I will go with less fear.

So, I'm halfway on my way to Seattle. Right now I'm in Rawlins, Wyoming. It's a pleasant trip, although there have been a couple of exciting moments (like snow in Wyoming, and the sudden storm just north of Sweetwater, Texas - but more about that in the next post).

Pronghorns, New Mexico


Rough animal tally:

• Hawks: dozens, most in North Texas. Just north of Dalhart I saw one bringing twigs to its nest; see behind cut.
• Pheasant: one, north of Dalhart but before New Mexico. It disappeared into the grass by the time I pulled over.
• Vultures: dozens, all over. I love how they soar.
• Crows: dozens, mostly in Colorado and Wyoming.
• Golden eagle: one? It was a very large raptor, medium brown, flying in the Sangre de Cristo mountain range in southern Colorado. I can't imagine what else it might have been.
• Doves: hundreds.
• Cattle: hundreds. In Wyoming they're charmingly shaggy in their winter coats
• Pronghorns: dozens, all in New Mexico.
• Coyotes: one, dead, being returned to the biomass by a vulture.

( More photos behind cut. )