Review: IT'S ME, Edward Wayne Edwards, the Serial Killer You Never Heard Of

IT'S ME, Edward Wayne Edwards, the Serial Killer You Never Heard Of by John A. Cameron
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

What motivated me to start this book was another case, advanced in an interview with the author that was posted to YouTube, suggesting that the murder of Teresa Halbach was yet another of Edwards' dirty deeds, fitting the modus operandi the author developed for Edwards. This was the murder made famous in the Netflix documentary miniseries Making A Murderer, for which Steven Avery was ultimately convicted. In the interview, the author suggests that a bystander, captured for only one second in one courtroom hallway scene, was none other than Edwards himself. He suggests that this seemingly incidental cameo would have been no accident, that Edwards could have been in the area during the time in question, and that the framing of another person, indirectly manipulating law enforcement to pursue a false version of the crime, was Edwards' murderous career stock-in-trade. The author theorizes that the attention given to Avery's earlier wrongful conviction may have attracted Edwards to come to the area to do the alleged murder and frame-up.

I felt rather open-mindedly optimistic about that theory after watching the YouTube clip, and it was shortly after that when I coincidentally spotted this book while wandering the stacks at my local library! After getting to page 211, however, I am very decidedly pessimistic about not only the theory that Edwards killed Halbach and framed Avery, but also the entire related story which the book advances.

A good story though both are, I've abandoned this book for now. I may finish it later. I should be clear that the Steven Avery/Teresa Halbach connection was advanced by the author after the book was published, so you'll find no details about that within.

This edition (likely the only one) is a lovely hardcover. Yet I am baffled by the publisher's choice of typeface. Who sets a book entirely in sans serif? While the materials of the book are quite lovely, and no-doubt not cheap to use, the publisher seems to have given the book to a team of noobs to execute, and the author was apparently left entirely to his own devices as to how to present the story. After reviewing an intermediate draft, I think any reasonable editor would have had a serious conference with the author on points of style and presentation to insist on a serious reworking. Alas, what you see is what you get.

This book attempts to sell you on a serious crime theory, and to do this, you need a first-person documentary account. Instead, we have a very awkward third-person retelling that essentially novelizes the whole concept. Conversations are had, set in passages of quoted dialog, and the reader is left to wonder: is this an actual quote, as in, did he really say this, or is this just a bit of stylistic dialog advancing a point in the narrative, intended to be interpreted as the "gist" of what transpired? To take this book SERIOUSLY*, you do not want to find yourself confronted with such questions.

The author advances a novel theory of crimes alleged to have been committed by Ed Edwards, some of which have been attributed to other perpetrators, a number of whom have been convicted and, if the author's theory is correct, are wrongfully so. If the author's timeline and attributions are correct, it would make Edwards the No. 1 serial killer in the world, par excellence, with a killing career spanning some 62 years or so. From the first kill in the late 1040s to the last in 2010 (if I'm remembering correctly), every one done with an extremely high level of skill and precision so as to not attract attention at the wrong moment, and not leave evidence pointing directly at him. Here is a purported serial killer who required no learning curve, no sloppy or hesitant early kills to acquire skill and technique. He was born a master, and that was by itself going too far for me to believe.

The author assembles various prison and judicial records (or unofficial reports, the formatting set in the book for some exhibited listings appears contrived to look official, but may not be an actual record in any real database or file, in this way becoming only a dressed-up synopsis notation) in an attempt to create a timeline tracking Edwards movements and correlating them to crimes. But, there are very large empty spaces in the result of this process where no firm evidence is forthcoming. The author also gives us the cryptograms from the Zodiac case, along with a purported solution and recovered plaintext messages via his friend Neal, a genius. The messages are interesting, for what it's worth, and feed into the notion that Edwards might be the Zodiac, but not one page is spent elucidating the process which arrived at this solution, nor a discussion about how Neal can be confident it is a valid solution.

Another opportunity to gather firm evidence to bolster the theory is completely wasted in the letters and conversations which the author and his friend Neal have with Edwards. Rather than frank factual discussions about their ideas and direct solicitations from Edwards for corroborating statements or dis-confirming evidence, the keystone players engage in a sort of tongue-in-cheek string-along game with the man. They adopt personas and hedge their information, structuring a contrived relationship with him which they think might get Edwards on their side; somehow make him more cooperative, less likely to be dismissive or engage in deliberate misdirection (a tactic the author warns Edwards is a master at).

Well, I think they seriously misplayed their chance. Edwards responded very cordially to all their inquiries, eludes that there are more bodies and stories to talk about than they apparently know about, and that in any case, a meeting ought to be arranged soon as he knows a state execution is already pending on other recent convictions. Yet, in my opinion, the author and his friend instead choose to continue to toy with Edwards about their theory and knowledge, and in due course not long after their direct communications open, Edwards' death sentence is carried out...leaving all their questions still effectively unanswered!

The rest of the author's evidence consists of little more than entirely subjective handwriting and photo analysis. Does this writing sample from Edwards' correspondence with the author look like this note left by the Zodiac? Does this face, known to be Edwards, sufficiently resemble this face, possibly the perpetrator of one of the other documented crimes?

And with that the whole book's case melts down to the simple judgement of the eye of the beholder. No real leads are developed or run down conclusively. No new evidence is brought to light. And most tragically, Edwards' is never really given the opportunity to come forward and explain how "It's ME" and provide details of the listed crimes and leads or details which could be later corroborated and verified, the substance that would form the foundation of a solid case.

If in fact Edwards is the killer he is alleged to be, guilty of the other murders the book attributes to him, especially the Zodiac and Black Dahlia killings, I am afraid that clear and convincing evidence of this fact may be, with Edwards' death, forever lost to history. But, at least with respect to the Zodiac legend, we can add both Edwards and the author's names to the very long list of people who have claimed to have clear and convincing evidence to have either been or known the Zodiac.



* This use of capitals is an INSIDE joke. The text is infected with plenty of words and sentences highlighted in all-caps; the author makes no use of typographical or other mechanisms for adding emphasis to his points (well, except for !!!). Instead he's written it all out in a sort of plain-text fashion that reads a little like an emailed screed from a CRACKPOT. Too bad really, as I don't think he is one, exactly.

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Review: Radiation: What It Is, What You Need to Know

Radiation: What It Is, What You Need to Know by Robert Peter Gale
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is reasonable at addressing commonplace radiophobia and addresses radiation from all sources, natural and man made, especially medical. A lesser amount of attention was given to accidental radiation releases from nuclear power, and given it was for primarily this reason I chose to read the book, I was slightly disappointed. In all though, I found it worthwhile.

I am one of those people who are of the opinion that if we wish to maintain and enhance our standard of living for the future, especially if we ultimately decide that fossil-fuel carbon dioxide inputs need to be eliminated as much as possible, then only nuclear power will be able to maintain us in the energy-available standard to which we've become accustomed. More energy makes life more productive and more enjoyable and more long-lasting for all. We should be efficient about our use, certainly, but energy abundance give us comfort and choice. We would not have this under a purely renewable-source energy economy. So, does it make sense to exclude nuclear power on safety grounds, from the outset? That's a question I was hoping the book would help me answer.

In the book, nuclear power disasters were discussed, just not in the clearest way, and the information given was fragmented across the chapters. I hoped for an answer to the question of whether it's actually necessary to cordon off large territorial exclusion zones in response to such catastrophes, in the interests of protecting human health. I was left to gather the fragments presented in the book, and make a judgement about this myself, which ended up like this:

In such disasters there three isotopes which convey just about all the radioactivity exposure risk to people in the general vicinity of the release: I-131, Cs-137, and Sr-90.

I-131 is risky, but mostly to children, and only for a short time (about three months overall), and only if foodstuffs produced within the affected area aren't temporarily replaced with outside supplies during the danger period. In Japan, food was handled expertly and most Japanese have iodine rich diets which tend to make them far less at-risk to start with.

Cs-137 is pretty ubiquitous, and has a very long half-life, making it especially concerning to the public. But this long half-life also means that the activity of the element is very low, reducing risk. Its biological half-life is also quite short, happily, further greatly reducing risks to human health. Any amount of it you do manage to ingest is likely to be excreted again before hardly any of it at all will have a chance to deposit radioactive energy in your tissue. So the great concern over this, perhaps second most prevalent element released in an accident, is probably misplaced.

Sr-90 has a half-life similar to Cs-137, but has a complex biological half-life. To our bodies, it resembles calcium, and so some proportion may end up migrating into bones and teeth, where it will probably stay long enough to release a good portion of its radioactive energy.

This is pretty much all the book has to say on those matters: two-to-one in favor of the idea that our reaction to the risks from a catastrophic nuclear accident is hysterical. The Sr-90 question deserves more attention. How much of this is present around an accident zone? What's the risk?

Since this is supposed to be a book review, I won't detail them here, but I've encountered various materials that offer me some pretty great hope for Cs-137 in particular, that this is just not enough of a risk to human health to warrant massive exclusion zones with their life-altering permanent evacuations and costly and elaborate washing and soil-stripping operations. According to this work, people could return to their homes and lives in the zone like that around Fukushima right now, if they wanted to, and not be at significant added risk for future radiogenic health problems.

For Sr-90, while a significant product of fission, it's non-volatile nature makes it much less likely than the others to escape to the environment in significant amounts during a disaster. This may be the best reason to allay concerns with it. Sr-90 was more of a risk during the era of atmospheric atomic weapons testing, and for the Japanese atomic bomb survivors, from the fallout nuclear weapons produce. This main source of Sr-90 exposure has long been now, happily, over.

I-131 seems to be the single biggest risk in a reactor disaster, and with its short half-life, within a few months of a point immediately following a meltdown with containment loss, it is simply no longer a factor, it has all decayed away. In the early phase, people should do their best to avoid exposure if they can, but for most it will be enough simply to eat clean food from outside the affected area, and follow limited evacuation for those most at risk (e.g. families with young children).

For people like the Japanese, who have ready access to clean replacement foodstuffs, and a diet rich in natural iodine, little special action is needed. Most are best served by eating outside food and waiting things out.

For others, like those near Chernobyl in 1986, short-term evacuation with supplemental iodine administration, particularly to the young, would've produced similarly low levels of risk. The impoverished condition of most of the population, and lack of a robust food system were main drivers increasing their risks.

However, in both cases once the I-131 has decayed off there's no longer much risk. People could move back into the zone and resume life as before. To allay fear, those who want them could obtain dosimeters to understand and place into perspective the actual radioactivity they are receiving. Most people would probably see amounts very close to the original background radiation anyway. A few may see more, and this can be either rationalized in terms of measuring it against statistics (an education requirement attaches to do this effectively). Or, anyone who feels uncomfortable by the amount they see, no matter how small, can be allowed to take charge of their lives as before and choose to move away. In this way, people are empowered to freely identify and manage their risks as they choose, just as in other parts of their lives.

The important takeaways here are (1) people are overly fearful of radiation, despite living lives continuously within its effects, and in some cases depending on it /for/ health, (2) understanding the real risks from radiation may allow us to overcome these fears and make more intelligent choices regarding how we obtain the energy we need to enjoy the lives we desire.

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Review: Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century

Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century by Thomas E. Woods Jr.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



You'll know we've made good progress reclaiming the Republic when plural forms of denominating the United States return to common language. This helpful perspective illuminates how this a one time federation of States has devolved into a set of almost mere administrative districts of The State.

"Cooperative Federalism" is what one clumsy-yet-slick YouTube channel called our present state of affairs (Crash Course, made possible with support from PBS).

This book shows you how any such sense of federalism as that is nonsensical and is no federalism at all, yet we (or the government) continue to use that term because not doing so would be to admit a bit too plainly that the Constitution stopped having any serious force at the root of our Republic almost since it got going, certainly after the Civil War, and ever more starkly so in the decades since then.

This book shows that the path to restore the originally designed balance is not so hard to see, yet would still require courage and some difficult to manage sense of agreement among fellow States in order to see results. Herding cats, that would be.

The book also shows that a big part of the problem for our present era is the distortion of our history that's taken place through the public education system's civics curriculum. It's a short walk to start sounding like a conspiracy theorist, and yet it needn't be any planned conspiracy that got us to this point...just simple step-wise expediency and time.

The book offers a refreshing take at what it would be like swimming up that particular stream.



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Review: Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk by Massimo Pigliucci

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



(unedited and lightly proofed)

I found this book well worth reading, esp. the last 30 pages or so. I withheld two stars from my rating mostly for what didn't happen in Chapter 6. If you're short on time, here's a shortcut approach to getting the book's chief take-away:

Start with Chapter 11, § "Science as a Bayesian Algorithm" (page 275 in the edition I read from), and read from there through Chapter 12 and the Conclusion. That'll be about 31 pages. The essence of the book and its take-away for readers is right there. Glance at the footnotes for that portion too. After this, if you're wanting more depth, rewind to the beginning and start. Otherwise, you'll have the most important bit and will be primed to think about Goldman's Five Criteria when evaluating the judgements of experts you may be exposed to, no matter what the topic of interest. That will serve you quite well. This last part of the book is really the only part that to me affirmatively addressed the statement in the subtitle, "How to tell science from bunk." That there wasn't more to flesh out the premise of the subtitle perhaps was also a reason I withheld some stars.

As for the rest of the book, I felt there was somewhat less than I wanted on the philosophy of science and science-vs.-pseudoscience. The types of logical fallacy are important, and didn't get much more than an incidental treatment here. I need bolstering in this area myself, and didn't get it here. Types of logical fallacy seem to show up very often in arguments portrayed in media, so having a toolkit for this would help in making quick evaluation of what some "news" program's analyst or magazine article's author is trying to sell you.

The history of the development of science is interesting backstory, and worth including, but I think if other parts of this book were edited down to make room for it, I would have appreciated a different cut.



That's about it for the hard review. In the remaining space, I'm going to talk about a silent parade of elephants that sit quietly among you as you read Chapter 6, which is good, but could really be a whole book in itself if you wanted to address said elephants. As it is, the author pretty much confines himself to an orthodox narrative and leaves the elephants unaddressed (perhaps he wasn't even aware of them).

Chapter 6 addresses the relationship of science and politics by focusing on the global warming issue, which is too bad in my view, because this issue has too much baggage attached to it for many lay readers, myself included, and as a result it makes too narrow a survey of the relationships between them.

There is much more to say about the relationship of politics and science, and I won't touch on any of it except to suggest that this alliance of politics and science (where it gets the majority of its funding now, a relatively recent innovation for good or ill) is a key reason behind the anti-intellectualism addressed in the book. "Scientific American" magazine, for example, today could be regarded more as a public-policy advocacy magazine which derives its authority from the science it portrays, rather than a magazine devoted to the promotion of science, and dissemination of its discoveries. The politically focused parts of the magazine have become dominant over the pure science articles. The pure science features have also been cut down in length and scope to make room for the political, with more reliance on freelancing science writers over the researchers themselves, who used to write up their own features more often.

When the name of science is used to justify political ends, and those ends run counter to basic human liberties, or even simple expectations about the role of government in a polity, the resentment for the politic bleeds over into a mistrust of science too. Science then gets tossed out wholesale, at worst, as just additional government propaganda. The solution may be greater separation. Science should retain its typical conservative (in the non-political sense) approach and disclaim public policy action when the science upon which the policy is relying for its authority, doesn't support that policy. We have good science supporting bad policy, and when the policy fails or backfires, the public will (and has) link the failure with the science, and this may be unjustified if the science didn't support the policy action in the first place...so scientists should say so...beforehand!

I have serious reservations about the conventional presentation of current climate change science. I have to do several gut-checks each time I confront it to try and evaluate if my own biases can be justified. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I think they can, yet I will listen. But I am also tired of being labelled a "denialist" just for having my doubts, and being able to conceive of a mechanism whereupon the science process could be hijacked for a political result. This chapter doesn't soothe this ache any, but instead left me with an impression along the lines of: "You shouldn't take my word for it, but if in fact you don't, you're a denialist because Al Gore got it mostly right. Just sayin'..." Oh man.

Not addressed in Chapter 6 were issues like the co-opting of science for political ends. And climate science could be the poster child for this. We could say that the IPCC's pronouncements that current global warming is human caused are true. Our national and supernational governments immediately leap to a conclusion that they now have license to take action, and that they also know the appropriate action to take and the proper way to assess and balance the consequences of any such action. We've been presented truckloads of new proposals or in some instances been saddled with new law and regulation about various forms of anti-carbon or carbon-trading tax schemes. Evaluations of the likely impact of such schemes all so far as I am aware, all suggest that these will ultimately have insignificant effect, but do significant economic damage in the meanwhile, and simultaneously bolster and centralize government authority over economic affairs. Whoops! Was that what we wanted? The science may be sound, and careful analysis should answer any skepticism in time, but what we really ought to be skeptical of are governments and their plans to fix things. The track record is terrible, and the incentives almost always line up in ways that are destructive to long term freedom, prosperity, and enjoyment of life.

Few realize or take the time to contemplate the implications that the IPCC is primarily a government-consensus body, not a union of concern scientists. Further, it's divided into two groups, Working Group 1, which is charged with public relations, advocacy, and public policy, and whose work is usually what is reported by media. The other is Working Group 2, which in my opinion is the group to actually focus your attention, for this group is more interested in doing the research and integrating the scientific picture.

The results of present science and their interpretation between the two working groups, to my present understanding, has a wide gulf. While WG1 tells you we're sure what's going on here, it's going to be terribly catastrophic for all life on earth, especially human, and the fast majority (>90%) of scientists agree, WG2 is far more conservative, restricting itself to a more reserved opinion that the climate is changing, and that humans are influencing that change, but how bad it could be, and how it might go anyway if humans had no role is not clear. WG2 is more open about its confidence in current understanding of the mechanisms behind the climate system, and shows that the agreement among scientists is not so uniform as WG1 would like you to think; that the basis and confidence for selecting any particular sort of mitigation strategy is very premature at present.

WG2 shows that this science is largely one of measuring and modelling, making ever more complex data models to fit the observed historical data, then extrapolating these models to attempt to forecast the future. But why would such a model work? Answering this key question requires actually understanding the climate system, and unfortunately the focus has been too much on the data modelling (it's easier and gets funding). Here's a lesson on what that can get you:

Ptolemy had presumed the orbits of the planets were circular, and made predictions for their motion that soon strayed from observation. Not wishing to abandon the idea of circular orbits, he was able to introduce increasingly complex modelling terms he called "epicycles" that permitted this original concept to approach any desired level of accuracy and permit the observations to match his model. Great! At least you'll be able to predict where in the sky to look for a planet at any arbitrary time, but holding onto the Ptolemaic model, no matter how precise, would deprive you of actually understanding what was really going on: the planets' orbits are elliptical, not circular, and the reason is gravity. If you don't know this, you cannot progress in understanding the solar system or motion itself. Ptolemy's epicycles would've sufficed to predict the map of the solar system on the sky, but if we had held to them, we would have become stuck in his era, and our modern world would likely look more like his did then, and less like ours does today.

Our climate science is very possibly "Ptolemaic" at this point. And disagreeing with or remaining justifiably skeptical of the IPCC's orthodoxy gets you shunned as a "denialist." I think using such labels at this point is more a way to foreclose legitimate dissent, give license to policy ends for political reasons, and perhaps safeguard government funding streams to certain corners of the science establishment.

Okay, I shall end this massive digression and this review with a nod to Chapter 5, which is very useful if you are a "denialist" because you'll need to consider the sources that are feeding your "denialism". A process of re-normalization and filtering may need to be applied if there is any hope at screening out bias which may be present in opposition arguments. Ultimately, this could require you to become expert in the subject yourself. The end of the book, cited at the top of this writeup, is most helpful in giving you a strategy to proceed short of making that great leap to becoming expert.



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Fukushima Radioactivity a Complete Non-issue

I write this in reaction to a discussion group posting I saw recently, citing this article from The Register

I admit to having a starry-eyed youth regarding nuclear power. Growing up in the 80s, I viewed it as a boogeyman that made all the adults wary, but which just made the industry interesting to me. I saw all the old 50s "Our Friend the Atom"-type films. It seemed like _the_ miracle that would solve all our energy needs. We could be fabulously wealthy with essentially limitless electrical power available for just fractions of a penny/kWh.

Then, in April 1986, I lived under a mild pandemonium as Chernobyl became a household word, and civic officials from my town began patrolling sidewalks with civil-defense issued Geiger counters from the 50s, waiting for the arrival of the fallout clouds (despite living in Northern Minnesota; the fallout never came...of course). Terrible, frightening, and captivating for the curiosity of a young boy. Gradually, the bloom came off the rose. I witnessed recountings of the Three-Mile Island accident. I was scared by the spectre of films like "Silkwood" and "The China Syndrome". I Began to view it like other magic-bullet cure-alls of past and present. Hypothetical promise unable to live up to testable reality.

Before the 2011 Tohoku earthquake/tsunami, I was already doubtful about the future of nuclear power. I thought that, much like wind/solar/etc., it was a power technology that was just-competitive only because of massive subsidy and investment by government, making its real cost far greater than it's advertised price.

I've since learned that there is too much conflation in the minds of the public of the two kinds of nuclear tech: weapons and power generation. Weapons tech is completely incompatible with civilian power generation, and the two technologies overlap very thinly at one end of their Venn diagrams. The inputs into civilian use simply cannot be repurposed for weapons use. Power reactors of any design simply cannot become nuclear explosives (though one design, Chernobyl's RBMK, can explode (by steam) if operated incompetently). I've also learned that next to the modern-era renewables subsidy (most especially wind power), the subsidies to the nuclear industry are just about non-existent, and only very slightly more than that handed out to fossil fuel sources (yeah, we subsidize it all).

I'm opposed to subsidy on general principle, and I think that the cost disadvantage of nuclear power today can be explained by the largely unnecessary and over-reactive nature of government regulation of the industry (safety standards too stringent vs. real risks, and protection and waste mitigation policies administered in inefficient and idiosyncratic ways, and a culture of secrecy bourne mostly out of US Navy pressure (read: ADM Rickover) to ensure that Soviet nuclear tech remains behind the US), and also due to available economies of scale going unexploited (each plant is a unique and custom facility, insufficient total reactor buildout, etc.). With private market development (which definitely would require public acceptance, presently unlikely), I believe the already small price differential compared with coal would diminish to negligibility, and definitely be superior to oil and nat-gas.

In the wake of the Tohoku quake/tsunami, I became further pessimistic of nuclear power, esp. a completely private industry without government involvement, namely: how could the industry secure for itself the necessary liability insurance to cover any disaster, like  Fukushima, absent a government backstop?

Over the past several years, I've gradually come back around on the potential of nuclear power. I still think, for the present, it's unlikely we'll see much growth in the industry worldwide, but I now think this will mostly be for reasons of public attitudes, not of economic or technological impracticability. If you're one of the many who are convinced by the present climate science, to believe that we are responsible for a carbon-fueled global warming trend that can only be mitigated by forced de-carbonizing (I am not)...then you especially must re-examine nuclear power, because it is the only economically viable alternative whose technology is mature, and that can be produced affordably and at scale, compared with other renewable sources.

Since 2011, I've been studying radiation. It's /the/ great bugaboo in the public mind when they think of nuclear power. People are too afraid of it. If you want to find a nuclear power station, with government regulations what they are today, your best bet is to map and search for the conspicuous hole in the natural background levels! Our fear is caused in part by an obsolete model (the Linear/No Threshold model) of biological response to radiation doseages. Especially at the small end of the curve described by this model, most of our data is interpolated or simply guessed at, the signals of damage have been insufficient to reliably measure. Yet this old model implies that there is "no safe level" of radiation. That conclusion is highly dubious, borne mostly out of an abundance of caution given significant gaps in our scientific understanding. New research (too preliminary as yet) suggests that the may be a hormetic effect produced by low-levels of radiation above the average background level of most places. But even as considered under current practice, the LNT model /is/ saying that the lower the dose, the lower the risk...so the question which must be asked is, what /is/ the specific risk? Perhaps in the totality of your living situation, and relative to other risks, living in a previously contaminated disaster zone would, for you, represent an insignificant added risk to enjoying a healthy, happy, long and satisfying life!

Even with the handful of nuclear power disasters, including Japan's, an insufficient amount of radioactivity has been released to do much harm to anybody. Most people will be totally unaffected, medically. In fact, it can already be said that more people were harmed or killed as a result of mandating evacuations in Japan, than would have come to harm in the future (due to elevated cancer rates) from the added radiation exposures. Both in the Chernobyl exclusion zone and in Fukushima's, the real threat from contaminated soil and water is too small to warrant having those exclusion zones persist. Your skin is adequate shielding from the radioactivity of the released substances. In most situations, the volume of air or structure nearby will stop any emitted radiation long before it even reaches you. The real threat is from ingesting radioactive isotopes which would then have an extended opportunity to do damage to your cells while your body worked to remove them. But even here, the quantity of isotopes available for ingesting is simply too small to hardly warrant mention. The fear factor would preclude it being legal, but it's likely you could drink milk from a cow that was eating hay grown on contaminated soil, and eat fish modestly contaminated from swimming in the contaminated waters near the reactor sites, and live a full lifetime free from any side effects.

Folks served electricity from a coal-fired plant are generally exposed to more radioactivity from the coal itself, and the air emissions and ground waste after its combustion, than they would be had they lived right next door to a nuclear power station and been powered by it, instead.

All that to say that, even when nuclear power goes horrifically and catastrophically wrong, compared to other sources of power, it's orders of magnitude safer for human populations. How many coal miners died last year, and every year since coal became a primary fuel source? How many oil workers? How many refinery plant accident deaths? How much death, disability and destruction from flyash retention dams which have given way?

And Fukushima taught the industry lessons, such that in the future (if the public will accept it) reactors will be better designed to withstand such cataclysm without releasing anything dangerous. Most the operating reactors in the US are pressurized-water types. The designs evolved from similar designs used for the nuclear-powered carriers and submarines in the US Navy. Now you talk about robust: the Navy nukes are put through more strenuous regimes of operation than the earthquake/tsunami gave Fukushima Daiichi: extremes of load, extremes of temperature, extremes of vibration and angles of tilt. They've all operated without fail. There hasn't yet been a nuclear-plant related disaster aboard a US Navy ship. Simply building to the standard of these Navy reactors eliminates most risks.

This is already way TL;DR, but the worries about nuclear waste are similarly vastly overblown. I'll simply indicate that what is regarded as waste today, the retired and casked spent-fuel assemblies currently stored on-site for lack of a geologic repository a-la Yucca Mountain, Nevada, are not especially dangerous even if they were left un-casked. They represent a harvest of only 3-4% of the obtainable nuclear energy within, and so are actually a valuable future fuel resource (to alternative reactor designs than could extract it). Even if unpursued as a future fuel source, the operational lifetime of a plant and the relative harmlessness of the material itself is such that the most prudent course of action would be to just secure the sealed casks permanently on-site after decommissioning. The earth will long be a cinder from the expansion of the sun as a red giant, before we could burn up enough nuclear fuel to make the spent-fuel waste require any serious land area to store.

So...now I'm circumspect. I once again believe in the untapped potential of nuclear power. I think that future research and education may show that the post-catastrophe exclusion zones of Chernobyl and Fukushima may not be necessary to protect human life in the aftermath of what are the sufficiently rare worst-case scenarios for nuclear-power gone wrong. With adequate demonstration of contingencies to minimize the rate of such incidents (these would become actuarial and public-image considerations), I think a key critical stumbling block for nuclear power, a privately generated and maintainable market for accident liability insurance to bulwark the remaining risk, becomes realizable. With that, there is no great economic barrier to entry for nuclear power tech to achieve dominant adoption rates. /If/ the public will accept it in their backyard, and if government will permit it, plants could be built and come online w/o any coersive economic incentives that we currently use for renewables. The true cost of nuclear would be measurable, and I think it's likely to be low enough to once again have a shot at being the /magic-bullet/ promised us in the 1950s.

There will never be the magnitude of obtainable power from all the various renewables, that there is right now from nuclear. Whether we actually tap into and exploit it will depend on education and public attitudes, which are currently very poor. If we must de-carbonize, unless we shift to nuclear we will be forced into accepting a very austere energy future, as renewables cannot reliably come up to replace what would be lost from fossil-fuel, even if we could afford it (which we couldn't...a close look at subsidy levels to renewables will make that clear).

Most humans still find it quite difficult to accurately measure and quantify risk. Since 2011, I've become convinced that overall negative risks from non-nuclear power technologies are at least equal to or greater than those from nuclear power. Greater use of nuclear energy would allow us to reduce and perhaps eliminate reliance on coal, the dirtiest of the fossil-fuel sources and the backbone of electrical generation now; saving our oil-based sources for transportation that cannot be converted efficiently to utilize renewables (e.g. jet travel, diesel shipping). We could also perhaps feed more people, as this hopelessly misguided push for biofuel grown from land that might otherwise be growing food would be priced rightly back out of economic viability.

Not only is the Fukushima radiactivity a complete non-issue, it may just be the story that points the way to a new future course. It may be a phoenix rising.

More resources:

An important independent source of factual nuclear energy information.
A podcast on the impact of Fukushima radioactivity.
Take a look at Rod Adams' Atomic Insights, and follow @atomicrod on twitter.

Review: Signals: The Science of Telecommunications

Signals: The Science of Telecommunications by John Robinson Pierce

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



The most shocking thing I've learned from this book: the technology that makes phone number portability possible has existed in widespread deployment for USA customers since 1983!

That's it. The following association and implication of this statement is not within the book, but one I came to with information from other sources, including study of my own phone service billing, so permit this little digression:

***

This technology was developed and activated long-ago by phone companies to satisfy their internal needs. It has side benefits for external customers of phone service, who could from a technical standpoint access a portability feature. No providers actually made this capability available to subscribers back then.

In the 1990s, as cellular phones drove demand by subscribers to change service providers or service locations, these consumers increasingly desired to keep an old numbers. Eventually, this resulted in government regulations to "force" providers to make subscriber phone numbers portable. The new law compensated providers for their effort by legislating a number-portability tax, which feeds a subsidy program paying providers back for the administrative and technology overhead they insisted would be required to comply with the portability mandate.

This being the case...why are USA subscribers STILL paying federal line taxes to "pay" for the "hardship" phone companies say exists today. In fact, why were USA subscribers EVER paying this tax? The capability was already extant!

The truth is, since at least 1983 (before the portability laws) this capability has been an existing core property of national network! All subscriber lines are referred to by internal network numbers, and have separate external numbers (the number you dial). The association between these two numbers is established inside the phone network, by editing the switching databases in the part of the network your phone is attached to. This is something your chosen service provider must do to establish your service, regardless whether you wanted to port over an old number or were willing to accept an assignment of a new one.

This gives the phone companies the greatest internal flexibility, which is why they implemented it. For their needs. But WE subscribers pay for it, not by private company charges to our phone bills, where competition would work to bring about the best available price, but through legislatively mandated taxation, which works independent of market forces and where, years and decades now since implementation of this network function, we're STILL paying at a fixed rate; as though the supporting switch gear was just installed, and as if new switch gear today wasn't more feature-rich at a lower marginal cost like all other technology we buy.

The galling thing for me is that this is a capability that pre-existed the taxation, and was already necessarily factored into rate-structure for service. Because we foolishly allowed the government to make mandatory, a capability that from a technical standpoint was already available, we end up with a slightly less efficient and unreasonably more expensive system.

***

The book is not very deep, and aimed at curious individuals who know rather little about the field, and may have little interest in anything beyond acquiring a grand overview.

Curious and technically or mathematically adept people who are otherwise unaware of the field will gain entry points for followup to deeper learning.

I gather the authors were famous titans of comm technology's previous era. I found this a pleasantly easy reading introduction to the world of communications signals, with an early focus on the dawn of radio, and a later concentration on the development of telephone technology.

It's old enough that quite a lot has changed since the book was published. From the perspective of 1990, it's very interesting indeed to read the authors' forcasts for the future. Most of this turned out to be nearly spot-on. We have indeed gone almost entirely digital; optical fiber trunk lines are preferred both locally and internationally.

It's also interesting to read about past technologies that predated the wide adoption and development of internet services, that filled a niche and enjoyed some popularity in some countries for a while. Like videotext in the UK and France (especially France).

With videotext, the driver was a desire for interactivity with high-bandwidth content (video and graphics), but with only low-bandwidth channels available (analog modems). The solution there was to have the low-bandwidth channel control and high-bandwidth broadcast. You got some interactivity in the ability to select amongst a limited set of high-bandwidth object, essentially controlling your receiver to preset to you only the desired objects, and have the others coming over the TV broadcast filtered and discarded.

The future seems to be video-on-demand, delivered via the internet. And while access to fully interactive bandwidth has increased several orders of magnitude for most people, that bandwidth still is not yet wide enough in most cases for efficient service. E.g. it doesn't yet make sense to try to stream HD video content from a server direct to an end user device in most situations.

Yet with proliferation of smart cell-phones, etc., more people are coming to expect and demand access to high-bandwidth services beyond basic phone and low-bitrate web interactivity. They want to treat it like just another TV, and the devices themselves are capable of a good viewing experience, if only the content can be delivered.

We've made the internet work with high-bandwidth media by proliferating caching servers to disparate locations. I don't have data, but there might be more caching data centers online now than commercial broadcast TV transmitters.

In the future, we might want to re-examine neglected multicast technology as a means to get more service to more endpoints out of limited bandwidth channels.

This serves as an entry point into new realms of discussion, far afield from the book, so I end here.



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Review: Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956 by Anne Applebaum

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



The book is mostly exposition of specific events in the history of the Sovietization of eastern Europe after WWII. It is very matter of fact, and doesn't stretch out too far in passing judgement on what happened, other than weakly conveying a sense that it was bad. I think that was on purpose, as I found the tales themselves did a good job of illustrating the oppression and "badness" resulting.

This is not intended to be a very serious review, more of a free-form stream of thoughts I'm having since finishing the book.

I think what I found most striking was, that whole nations and societies were quickly and (relatively easily) subsumed into a totalitarian regime with lasting impact to personal freedom and even basic mental and physical well-being. Even if your personal story, living within the regime, was rather benign (as a few were), you could still, mentally, feel the weight of the oppression.

What did that take? Really, I think this was an episode of an epidemic. A period of disease passing over the populations of eastern Europe as a kind of virus of pure ideas. A pathology of thought. Force was involved, certainly, but as the events of the fall of the Berlin wall so clearly demonstrated: always and everywhere, governments consist of some minority which imposes its will and authority upon a larger majority. This majority, acting perhaps under notions individual self-interest, tacitly acquiesces to the authority of the reigning minority (seeing no obvious alternative). The resultant state of affairs can be benign or tyrannical, and the critical realization is that there is nothing preordained about the outcome. You can just as easily land in a totalitarian horror show as in a free society, or at any place along this continuum.

Once set, that's a state of affairs which can persist for a surprisingly long time, possibly indefinitely in some cases. Until, all of a sudden it stops working. By the end of the book we have illustrated for us numerous cases of popular passive and active resistance to the regime. All of a sudden, a sort of critical mass is reached, and enough people stop accepting the authority of the people tasked with being the instruments of the regime. And these implementers, individually realize something alike with their fellows on the other side of the baton and shield. They blink, and the collective effect of these individual actions witnesses an earthquake in the political power landscape. The majority reclaim something of their natural human freedom. The upheaval will later settle out, and society will land at some other point on this continuum of free-unfree.

The fall of the wall, though not addressed specifically in the book, represents the ideas of the final chapters, and represents an idea I took away from a contemplation of the book's accounts. The fall was spontaneous, unplanned and unwanted by the reigning minority. A tipping point was reached as a new meme took root in the minds of enough of the public on both sides of the wall. The asymmetry of information in the hours immediately proceeding the mass descent of the public upon the Brandenburg gates served to be the final grain of sand that starts the whole pile to avalanche down toward a new level. The border guards, steeped in the undercurrents of dissatisfaction with the current oppressive state, and cut off from their leadership at this critical moment, were left to operate on their own individual best judgement. The crushing masses of cheering people on both sides were unprecedented, and seemed to suggest an idea in the minds of at least some of the guards, "perhaps these people know something important which I don't." And finally, when the first few brave individuals (possibly not as brave as you might think since they were acting under the belief that cross-border movement was no longer restricted) moved the final yards to cross the line, the guards had a choice: shoot or let-pass. And without specific orders, they chose not to act, just observe. And the massed majority retook possession of their own individual freedom in a brilliant moment.

This notion of how societies allow themselves to become oppressed, and later retake their freedoms, fascinates me. Within this book are stories tracing the descent of several societies of eastern Europe into fealty and bondage to the Soviet regime. It's frightening how easily it happened, and to be successful, how it had to have taken the action of the transmission of ideas as well as a small bit of targeted coercive force. As the wavefront of the Soviet meme spread, the previously infected peoples actively participated in the process of constraining and coercing the submission of people later exposed to the meme. From an active core, the regime oppressed itself into being. The oppression occasionally reflecting back upon the members within that active core, becoming a self-reinforcing situation for a good long time.

A free society or a totalitarian state? What makes either possible seems to come down to the culture of the moment and the ideas which hold the minds of the people therein. The regimes are sticky, though. Once one sort becomes established, whether benevolent, benign, or oppressive, it seems like it takes a outsized communication of ideas to reach a critical mass strong enough to reshape it into something else. But like an earthquake, the tension can seem to build almost completely unnoticed, until all of a sudden, enough people recognize their inner notions are not just their own, but the same as their neighbors, and the earth heaves and the waves sweep over. Cultural consciousness builds up like a pile of sand grains. At some unknown point, the last few grains before the avalanche fall and bring about an awakening. Depending on the ideas represented by those grains, we seem fated to either knuckle-under to an oppressive tyranny, or emerge into a refounding of respect for our own freedom and our neighbors.



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Review: Knowing the Ropes: A Sailor's Guide to Selecting, Rigging, and Handling Lines Abroad

Knowing the Ropes: A Sailor's Guide to Selecting, Rigging, and Handling Lines Abroad by Roger C. Taylor

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Plenty of great ideas in this book make it a useful read for boaters of any stripe, large or small, motor or sail powered. There are useful ideas here for amateur riggers as well. Perhaps the only negative comment I might have, and it's a weak one, is that some of the knots and hitches used with the rigging ideas are a bit dated. Knot tyers have come up with more secure, stronger alternatives. However, sailors tend to stick with what experience has taught them. The author has put the knots presented to the test in his own sailing experience, and they've proven themselves adequate to the tasks he's set. So, if it ain't broke, don't go trying to fix it. Maybe something might snap. It's no big deal, however, to substitute a different knot or hitch to one of the author's setups, if you've learned an interesting and perhaps innovative alternative.

This book as lasting value, and I'm sure I'll be going back to it again and again.

A quick aside about a gentlemen the author mentioned several times in this book: A few years ago, I knew nothing of knots and ropework, and happened to travel through the charming seaside town of Port Townsend, WA during a festival while on vacation. It's too bad I hadn't yet heard of the man, master rigger Brion Toss, who the author holds in high esteem. Brion's rigging business is located there, and I missed a chance to stop in and watch a seasoned professional at work!

I'd like to visit the town again, and when I do, I'll be by to see that knot tying celebrity.



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Review: 1984: And Related Readings

1984: And Related Readings by George Orwell

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Because they so neatly did my thinking for me, I'm selecting two popular user reviews to represent my opinions with a correlation above 90%:

Con:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4448847

and Pro:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3728007

The book is still relevant today, as the demonstrated by the pro review's advanced setting. The warnings are timeless; a free civil society is always at risk from a number of malignancies. Ideas and culture keep them in check, but what can happen if these mechanisms are subverted?

What do you do when you've drafted a brilliant essay on political theory and realize its only hope of having an impact is through the widest possible exposure? Novelize it, and cross your fingers. If it goes viral, you have an audience and now your work is immortal.

As described in the con review, this novel is pretty "meh", not poor, but not great. I found the ending thoroughly lacking in power, and wondered if something important had happened, or not. Like Winston, at the end I found myself questioning the reality of the novel's events. Was is comfortable endgame existence at his sinecure all just a simulation? What's really motivating his sudden love for BB at the victory announcement? To use a piece of Brit slang, the end seemed bodged on. I found it difficult to integrate the experiences from the moment Winston and Julia are raided, clear to the end of the book, with what had taken place in the book up to that point. At the moment of the raid, I see this novel as having many possible alternatives, some of which might have made it a superior work of fiction while leaving the underlying political message unaffected.

Perhaps I have just not thought things through completely (I am a rather concrete and pragmatic thinker, abstractions can sometimes escape me). Although in Winston's hands in the form of "Goldstein's" book, he never gets to read the part where central secret, the primary motivation for the construction of this pointless society was revealed. Society fell down a developmental cul-de-sac, and we're never shown how that happened, or why the power structure felt it was a great idea as they led the world toward it.

For all I understand, the whole shebang happened inside the Matrix. How else do you explain "agent" O'Brien?



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Calorie counting is the only diet method you ever really need to know

Caveat emptor. This is only my experience, but in my uncredentialed and completely unqualified opinion, it's probably applicable to most otherwise healthy people.

Before Thanksgiving 2010, I was listening this "The Skeptics Guide to the Universe" podcast, and mentioned among the stories was one called The Twinkie Diet about this nutritionist who held a premise that challenges most of the weight-loss industry's fad diets-du-jour: that you can lose weight on any diet, because it is calories that count. To drive home the point, he set for himself the challenge of losing significant weight on a diet consisting almost entirely of convenience store junk food. Two months and many cans of pop, packets of Doritos, and Twinkie wrappers later he'd done it, down 27 pounds.

Notes from Happy Harry's 2011 Oktoberfest Beer Tasting

Jane and I thoroughly enjoyed the Oktoberfest beer tasting, yesterday at Happy Harry's. Some surprising newcomers impressed me greatly, and I found fault with one of my ol' standby favorites this year.

Winning!

Empyrean, Grand Teton, Crow Peak, Spaten

I am on a drug. It's called Charlie Sheen (a/k/a not winning).

North Coast, Lucky Bucket

I never met an Oktoberfest marzen I didn't like--until this year. I encountered a few breweries that tried mixing styles: marzen + IPA. Eww. Why the hell? Par exemple:

Widmer Okto Festival
New Belgium Hoptoberfest

I just don't understand why you'd wreck a good marzen by making it excessively hop-y and bitter like an IPA. I can get IPAs anytime, but Oktoberfest marzen is almost always seasonal.

Notably absent from the tasting and the stockroom was celebrated German brewer Hacker-Pschorr, whose Oktoberfest has been my personal favorite, par excellence, since I first tried it some years ago. I think this makes it the third season in a row where Hacker-Pschorr was absent as a taste-able or even stocked offering up here in the north. A shame.

To my chagrin, my go-to trusted 2nd to Hacker's Okto, Spaten Oktoberfest, shocked me with disappointment. My instant reaction was, "hey, something's missing here, something's off."

Spaten has always been available at all the tastings I've attended, and have produced a most excellent Oktoberfest in past years (just behind Hacker). But not this time. I'm so surprised by this that I'm going to assume that the case out of which we were served got excessively hot or something. It was not bad, but well, lacking. Thankfully, Spaten redeemed themselves in fine style with their classic Munich Lager, just delicious!

In the middle I tasted serviceable Oktoberfest offerings from Shiner and Schell. I consider them reasonable seconds when your first choices in an Oktoberfest are unavailable.

In the high-tier, I tasted very good offerings from Sam Adams and Boulevard. I haven't exactly cared for Boulevard's other beers. I tend to avoid them like I do Sierra Nevada. They do good work, it's just my taste preference. However, Boulevard Bob's Oktoberfest was excellent. I would personally put it above Sam Adam's offering, which itself has always been "a Good Decision" (sm).

This year's pinnacle for me was an offering from a label new to the Red River Valley: Empyrean Aries Marzen - Oktoberfest. Empyrean Brewing hails from Lincoln, NE, and has never had distribution into my area before. I'd never heard of them. At this tasting, they were prospecting the market.

Aries Marzen was smooth, golden, and very well balanced. It also had a unique sensation I'd never experienced in an Oktoberfest before: a gentle field-ripe wheat flavor. In farm country, then the sun's low in August and the temperature's coming down, you can stand beside the ripened ready-to-harvest wheat fields and almost taste a certain wholesomeness in the air. To me, growing up close-by to such places, this is memorable. The essence of farm country at harvest time has been masterfully brewed into this product, it's just amazing! Well done Empyrean!

Also served were a number of Empyrean's other brews, all great, including their Burning Skye Scottish Ale. I didn't expect to enjoy this one, as my only other experience with a scotch-style ale was McEwan's, and I found the syrupy taste of the unfermented sugars objectionable. This was much better, still sweet, but not sickly-so. I could get into it, whereas I don't think I can normally with this style.

At another table I was introduced to Pilsner Urquell, the famous Czech lager whose claim to fame is to have invented the pilsner style. I am not a beer expert, but I love learning, and so I was pleased to learn that this beer has much in common with Oktoberfest marzen, a cousin style in the bottom-fermenting lager family. I've always seen this stuff around at the better stores, but never tried any. I'm glad I did this time! I found much similarity between the flavors in Pilsner Urquell and Empyrean's Aries Oktoberfest. What's better for me, who wishes Oktoberfest seasonals were available year-round, is that Pilsner Urquell is available year-round. Jane commented she found something slightly off-putting about the aroma of this beer, but hastened to add that the flavor was very nice. I didn't notice an off aroma myself, but this beer had a the same or stronger character of field-fresh wheat as the Aries, which might cause a strange nose in a warm glass at anything warmer than refrigerator temp.

Talking to the table servers, I guess the company distributing Empyrean also handle some other labels I've not seen before in the RRV. Crow Peak Brewing hails from close-by in Spearfish, SD. _Why haven't I see your stuff up here?_ Their IPA was on offer, in a can, and I must say it was my favorite IPA of the tasting, and there were many to choose from. It's exceptionally balanced with no single flavor lording it over the others. It's hop-y, it's bitter as any IPA will be, but also refreshing, easy to drink, not thin and watery, but full bodied, but not harsh. A fine brew. I hope I see more.

The biggest looser, however, was another of this new distributor's tables featuring the Lucky Bucket and North Coast labels. I surely hope something went wrong, horribly horribly wrong, with the transportation of these beers, because they were all skunky and sour. Wall of shame:

North Coast Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout (gosh I had high hopes for this, dashed)
North Coast Red Seal Ale
North Coast Acme IPA
Lucky Bucket Lager
Lucky Bucket IPA
Lucky Bucket Certified Evil Ale (and it was...dagnabbit)

If you can't cheaply get a taste to see if it was just our stock that was wrecked, then I'd say move on, nothing to feel good about here. A shame, as absolutely everything else this distributor brought to the tasting, Empyrean, Grand Teton, and Crow Peak, were wonderful!

I recommend:

• Tallgrass IPA
• Tallgrass Buffalo Sweat
• Redhook Wit
• Spaten Munich Lager (the Oktoberfest is still good, but on probation)
• Guinness Foreign Extra
• Empyrean Chaco Canyon Honey Gold
• Empyrean Burning Skye Scottish Ale
• Empyrean Third Stone Brown
• Empyrean Dark Side Vanilla Porter
• Empyrean Aries Marzen Oktoberfest (Andrew's all-show winner!)
• Crow Peak IPA
• Grand Teton Sweetgrass Pale Ale
• Grand Teton Bitch Creek ESB
• Grand Teton Black Cauldron Imperial Stout
• Boulevard Bob's 47 Oktoberfest
• Sam Adams Octoberfest
• Pilsner Urquell (do try if you liked Empyrean Aries Marzen)

I recommend against:

• Molson Canadian
• New Belgium Belgo
• New Belgium Hoptoberfest
• Lucky Bucket Certified Evil Ale
• Lucky Bucket IPA
• Lucky Bucket Lager
• North Coast Acme IPA
• North Coast Red Seal Ale
• North Coast Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout
• Manger's Irish Cider
• Manger's Pear Cider
• Widmer Okto Festival
• Boulder Kinda Blue
• Shock Top Pumpkin Wheat (if this is your thing, try Blue Moon Harvest Pumpkin instead)
• Shock Top Raspberry Wheat

Getting a replay on my ReplayTV

In 2003 I purchased a ReplayTV DVR unit after watching an interesting show on the now defunct TechTV network about DVRs and hacks available for the ReplayTV units.

The ReplayTV has a lot of faults, but the technology was quite new for the time, and its execution was better (in some respects) than the generation one Tivo DVR units. Generic ReplayTV systems made their way into numerous cable and satellite system customer premise equipment, becoming the basis for early DVR receiver/decoder offerings for these systems.

I purchased the nearly $400 unlimited service activation (required to get access to electronic programming quide data, without which a DVR becomes little more useful than a traditional VCR), figuring I would own the unit more than two years, the time necessary to earn back the money spent on the month-by-month service option.

Overall, it's been a really good experience. The unit fulfilled its promise to change the way we watch TV. It did that instantly. At my house, we were chained to the TV schedule. A VCR alleviated some of this, but programming it successfully required error-prone transcription of a paper or web schedule. Even then, you only had 2-7 hours of recording time to work with, assuming you start a new tape.

VCR technology was game-changing for its time, and DVRs like the ReplayTV re-revolutionized the TV viewing experience, allowing one to watch-pause-instant replay live TV. Traditional VCR-like functions of recording individual shows were made an order of magnitude simpler by integrating a guide grid into the unit's user interface. No more scanning a paper or web table and manually entering times. Scroll to your show with the on-screen guide and press record. Done.

The DVR further revolutionized TV by harnessing the power of database-driven scheduling of recordings. The ReplayTV and Tivo units diverge slightly in this area, and some regard the Tivo as being stronger in this regard. But, the ReplayTV is pretty decent at this too, allowing for variable-priority theme channels, which attempt to record shows on supplied criteria, giving way to other such themes you set at higher priority (record Scrubs, unless Mythbusters is on, then record that instead), and giving way once more to specific individual or repeated-timeslot recordings you specify.

I was able to pore over a generic TV lineup at the beginning of a season, and setup this database to essentially automate our TV watching. After a few days, the ReplayTV started to fill up with a library of constantly updating shows of my interest. I stopped watching TV and began watching the ReplayTV. I was unchained from broadcasters' schedules. If there was first-run programming coming on which I was desperate to see that night, I made sure to wait at least ten to fifteen minutes into the show before starting to watch the recording as it was being made. This way, I could watch the show from start to finish without waiting during commercial breaks (advertisers note: I often found myself entranced by some commercials, and never skipped them, even though the skip button was always under my thumb).

While groundbreaking tech for 2003 on, here in 2011, much has advanced. Were it not for some specific hackability of my model unit, I would have lost the use of my ReplayTV within the first two years. Its original hard drive failed rather alarmingly quickly, and a replacement drive I installed myself failed after several years in service. In both cases, thanks to backups I made of the unit's software, I was able to return the unit to service after replacing the drive and its factory software.

My ReplayTV unit was designed before HDTV standards were solidified, and almost no providers were offering HD programming. Today, over-the-air TV has transitioned to digital broadcast, and most broadcasters have adopted an all HD format. I am a cable customer, and my provider, in addition to having a standard-def. lineup, over the last few years has made continual improvements such that essentially the entire lineup is available also on HD channels further up the "dial." There are also plenty of the earlier special-purpose HD channels which originated from day-one as an HD only offering (when HD was still new and quasi-experimental), and have no SD equivalent.

Anyone who has bought a TV set in the past few years has purchased an HD model, with QAM digital tuners able to get the OTA broadcast and in increasingly-many cases even new digital cable programming without the aid of a special receiver.

I am still using a quite serviceable SD tube-type analog TV. And ReplayTV, designed for the analog SD TV world, is becoming increasingly irrelevant in this universe of digitally delivered HDTV. However, if you don't mind the SD, this legacy equipment still works great when paired with a receiver from my cable provider.

I was saddened then to hear the news that after many years of near-trouble-free operation of my ReplayTV, the corporate entities behind it were going to finally switch off the internet servers delivering the electronic program guide data that make the DVRs so useful. Forever.

After July 31, all ReplayTV units still functioning out there will lose guide data, and will (gracefully, we all hope) fall back to functionality equivalent to a VCR, just with random-access digital storage.

The die-hard user community has been working tirelessly toward an alternative solution to deliver guide data after this date, and with ReplayTVs corporate stewards offering some modicum of help (or at least not standing in the way), appear to have forged a likely workable path forward.

Your home PC, with special software, will stand-in for the outgoing ReplayTV guide data servers. It will get its guide data for a minor fee paid to a non-profit company with a mission to promote open-source DVR technology.

Last night I endeavored to set this software up on my home PC and give it a test. After a lengthy series of hiccups and other not-insurmountable minor gotchas and snags, I was ultimately able to start my own server, and get my ReplayTV DVR to accept it. The server ingests schedule data from a third-party (right now I am testing it with software known as an XMLTV scraper, which reformats publicly available TV listings into a format which this server software can ingest), and offers it to my ReplayTV upon request.

The result? So far, it's working beautifully! I have cut-ties 100% from the corporate-sponsored ReplayTV guide data servers, and have every expectation that after July 31, I ought to continue to be able to run this way.

The server need not run continuously, but often enough to keep the ReplayTV DVR's schedule database populated as far into the future as data availability and convenience dictate. On the server-side, the experimental XMLTV scraper doesn't download much data, but requires a good 15-20 minutes to assemble and reformat it, making it the slowest and weakest link in this chain.

During this testing-phase, I imagine initiating a manual update about once-or-twice a week, given this. After July 31st, assuming everything continues to work, I will likely buy a cheap subscription to the third-party data service, replacing a 20min free scrape with a cheap download lasting only seconds.

One problem likely solved, but still uncertain, is the ability of this home surrogate-server software to set the time-of-day clock in the ReplayTV units. I believe this has been solved, based on an experiment I did.

As part of its nightly network connection, the ReplayTV units use the NTP protocol to reset their clocks by polling an NTP server also maintained by ReplayTV's corporate stewards. You wouldn't want this clock to become off, or the DVRs idea of the current time would yield partly or completely missed recordings.

The community forums speculated that the NTP time updates were cryptographically signed with a key maintained in the corporate servers, and the DVRs would not accept unsigned NTP time replies. I don't know if this is the case or not, but I did notice that the home surrogate-server software came preconfigured with the address of the ReplayTV corporate NTP server, but that this was changeable.

I updated the configuration to point my server at my favorite NTP source: north-america.pool.ntp.org, a domain-name that reverses (in the load-balancing mechanism of DNS) to any of a number of publicly available NTP servers aimed at covering the continent.

The server software accepted this address without complaint, appeared to use it in the logs, and offered the time derived from it to my ReplayTV DVR, which likewise "appeared" to accept it (there's no easy way to tell, except to enter a hidden code to get the unit to display its clock onscreen, which had previously been 5 seconds off, but is now less than one second offset from my radio-controlled wall clock).

So I have every reason to be optimistic that after July 31st, I will be able to continue enjoying my ReplayTV experience in all its 2003 analog standard-definition shininess!

In the future, I expect that once my existing SD TV goes, I will modernize my whole viewing experience. I expect to become a Roku box customer, perhaps even playing with the idea of ditching my cable-TV subscription in favor of a combination of OTA digital signals and a more expensive, but higher-bandwidth cable-internet offering with a Netflix account riding on top. To be the best, the Roku or similar solution would need to be able to ingest OTA HDTV signals in addition to having connectivity with my home network to play media stored their or stream content from the internet. That way I get full DVR-style flexibility with local broadcast content too!

Until that heady future, I'll enjoy a replay of the future circa 2003, and continue enjoying my ReplayTV, faithfully (more or less) recording content for presentation on my analog TV!

(My analog TV is a 32" model from Sharp. I bought it in 2000, and it's still bright and saturated, undistorted and color accurate. I've been astonished how many newer-model tube-type analog TVs have degraded to unsuitable picture quality after far fewer years in service! It's only problem is a stuck relay, which prevents it from being turned off occasionally. I have to get up and pull its plug, but other than that, it's still going strong. In fact, it's outlasted a couple of Sony Trinitron models my folks have owned!)

"Blue Bloods" Blues: how CBS can't do drama.

"Blue Bloods" You know the TV's bad when you find yourself wanting, trying hard to like the show...but the magic is not there. It feels like there's something special about to happen when the opening title music rolls, but the intensity is doused.

The actors/casting is perfect. The character stories underlying the episodes are intriguing and have huge dramatic potential. But the meat...the main plot each episode...uugh! I want to gouge my eyes out! What is this, CSI:Miami, in NY dress? It's all point and tell, rather than show, imply, and feel. There's nothing for the viewer to do, nothing to think about. "This feels like TV," I said to my wife. "Law and Order, at its very best, that felt dramatic. You got lost in the show."

With this, I'm just watching the clock, hoping it breaks through and becomes spectacular. TOO BAD! Put Sellick and Wahlberg into some stuff they're worthy of. When there's been TV out there like Nip/Tuck, Mad Men, Sons of Anarchy, 24, Rome, The Tudors, Deadwood...heck even great cop shows like Third Watch, this simply doesn't measure up.

I watched the 3rd episode, "Privilege" tonight, waiting for a spark. There was a scene near the end where the young cop, Jamie Reagan (Will Estes), is on the couch looking through old photo albums with his grandfather, Henry (Len Cariou). As Jamie notices a photo of his detective older brother, Danny (Donnie Wahlberg), wearing a lapel pin emblem of the mysterious "Templars" cop-club, a thought occurred to me: why is the show spreading itself so thin trying to be seen giving all these great characters something to do each week?

Why not stop trying to do everything at once, and narrow the focus? Let each episode be a vignette more zeroed-in on just one of these major characters, and the work they must do to execute a case, from their perspective. Make the story more about these characters. Not about these so far ridiculous crime plots. You can allow one or two of the other major characters to intersect in the story, if it becomes the obvious and logical thing to do, but stop trying to FORCE it together for everyone, in every 10 minute segment!

Think how much more rich and engrossing you could make the stories then. You'd have time to carefully orchestrate the scenario that's going to propel the story of that week's character forward. Think about "Homicide: Life on the Street" in that sense. The show didn't try to cover everyone in the whole homicide squadroom each week. It used the squadroom as a touchstone, opening and closing the show, coming back to relieve the tension. We get to see everyone there. But then, for the real story and plot development, the show narrowed the focus and kept on just a couple of the major characters for the evolution of the episode.

Like that.

CBS's got a really great concept here, with Blue Bloods. I don't want to stop watching, because the underlying characters, and the larger picture that is tying them together, is so captivating. But the weekly stories and scene setups that these characters must wade through...so far it's just devastatingly BORING!

I don't have any faith that'll get better. So I best stop with the show now, or grow bitter over the future of serial disappointments that await.

The VOR Visualised (as a lighthouse)

Last night, I watched the recorded video session of TWiT.tv network podcast, "Maxwell's House" (which is currently undergoing a slow redevelopment along strictly aviation lines).

The topic for the episode (74) was aviation navigation. Ray Maxwell tried to explain how a VOR beacon worked using a visual metaphor. I found his explanation a bit confusing in the moment, but after re-listening today, I now have his visual idea burned into my head, and it's so elegant that I now just have to write it out!

Ray kept expanding the acronym as visual omnirange, but VOR actually stands for VHF Omnirange. However, a search of the interwebs revealed quite a few aviation authorities who use the word, visual, as the first word encoded by the acronym, strangely, as the signal is entirely radio.

I suppose they're meaning "visual" in the sense that interpreting the signal in the cockpit for navigation is normally done by visual reference to an instrument (In the way way back, there were aural navaids that depended on your listening to a certain formatted sound for changes to determine your location in relation to the signal).

A VOR is an improved radio beacon which, by the way of it's construction, permits the user receiving its signals to determine with great precision their exact bearing from the beacon's perspective (called a radial in the parlance).

Before VORs, most radio navaids were NDBs (non-directional beacons). So called because they provide no directional cues. They are simple AM stations. An ADF (automatic direction finder) receiver in your aircraft (or boat/ship, they were also commonly used for coastal navigation at sea) used a directional antenna to localize the NDB, causing a pointer on your aircraft instrument to literally point to the direction from which its signal was strongest (presumably co-incident with the station's transmitting antenna...but this is radio).

Because an NDB's signal can tell you nothing about what direction you happen to be from the station, it's use for fixing your position is less accurate. Its direction from your perspective must be estimated with respect to a compass reading and the ability of your ADF equipment to precisely pinpoint the azimuth of the strongest signal.

To get a sense of how this might not be the most accurate thing, take a handheld AM radio (its internal bar antenna is directional) and swivel it around while listening to a station. Notice how the signal fades? Notice how the strongest signal occurs over a rather wide span of arc?

With a compass, you can compute a compass bearing to the NDB. And with such a reading from two NDBs, you can plot a position fix, and thereby know where you are!

Unfortunately, accuracy is limited by your compass and ADF equipment. Magnetic variation is also a factor, possibly a major one, because it varies with location. When you measure your compass bearing to two NDBs, it's with respect to the magnetic variation at your location, which cannot be known precisely because you don't yet know your location.

This is its own interesting problem to think about, but suffice it to say that if you're following a constant compass track toward or away from an NDB, the varying magnetic variation along your route will cause this line of constant bearing to be curvy, perhaps significantly so in areas on sectional charts called out with special warnings about magnetic disturbances.

With VORs, the variation programmed into the station will be the same or often similar to the actual variation at the station's location. It actually doesn't matter because the programmed variation is depicted on your chart, evidenced by the differing cant of the north-arrow for different VOR stations. Since the unique signal of a VOR lets you determine in what direction you lie with respect to that station, you can use those values to much more precisely plot your location when you take readings from two or more stations. You don't need to take magnetic variation into account (in fact you don't even need a compass) because the bearing being determined is referenced from the station, where the variation is known, to you. Not the reverse, where the variation is not known.

The way a VOR does this is where the novelty of Ray Maxwell's description comes in, re-imagined now by me into hopefully clearer terms. This is so cool, and so simple, it blew my mind!

Imagine a VOR station, not as a radio beacon, but as a lighthouse. It has a bright white rotating beacon, which emits a powerful beam in a single direction and rotates at a constant speed, say one RPM, sweeping clockwise when viewed from above. Now, imagine that as the beam rotates through north, a red beacon on top of the lighthouse flashes at the instant the rotating beam hit 360 degrees.

If you were standing due north from this lighthouse, staring south back at it, you would see the white beam rotate past you giving you a flash of white as it hit 360 degrees. You would also see the red beacon above flash at the same instant. Now, the steady white beacon is still rotating, one RPM, or in other words, six degrees per second.

If you were now at some random location nearby the lighthouse, knowing its configuration as we do, once you sighted the beacon on the horizon, you would be able to quickly determine your location relative to the beacon by timing the appearance of the red and white flashes. Start your stopwatch when you see the red beacon flash. Stop timing when you see the steady white rotating beacon sweep past you. Then, your location relative to the lighthouse is:

time	from the lighthouse
simultaneous red+white flash	due north
white 15 seconds later	due east
white 30 seconds later	due south
white 37.5 seconds later	due southwest

For each additional second between the red and white flashes, you are located someplace along a bearing from the lighthouse, 6 additional degrees from the north reference. These bearings radiating away from the station are then known as radials. If you know the timing between the red and white pulses, you know which radial you are on.

This can be plotted accurately on your chart because the depiction includes the station's north reference. You can draw a line away from the station corresponding to the radial you observed. Repeat this with a second station and you have an accurate position that's immune to the effects of compass accuracy and magnetic variation!

As you travel along, by keeping the radial indicated by a given station constant, you are assured to be travelling along that radial, either toward or away from the station.

For the real VORs, the signals are radio, not light. The signal analogous to our flashing red timing beacon is broadcast omnidirectionally, while the signal analogous to our rotating white beacon is a tight directional radio beam, rotating through a full circle, just as our light beacon was. On old VORs, there is a directional antenna inside the VOR housing that physically rotates. Newer VOR stations have a circular array of antennas that are electrically modulated to create a tight, directionally focused radio beam which rotates without moving parts.

Simplifying slightly, these two VOR radio signals are modulated differently so the VOR receiver in your airplane can tell them apart. The receiver handles comparing the two signals to determine their timing with respect to each other, as we did by looking at the lighthouse in our example. And in this way the receiver knows which radial it is located on from the VOR it is receiving. Because of this fact, no special directionally tunable reception antenna is required for a VOR receiver, unlike ADF. This makes VOR navaids more accurate, and the airborne equipment is simpler and cheaper.

A technical discussion is available on Wikipedia, but this simple and intuitive visual analogy just made so much sense to me that I decided I had to share it here.

On doppler VORs, or D-VORs, I think both radio signals are omnidirectional, but the phase of the modulation of the "rotating" signal varies around the circle of antenna elements, creating a unique phase relationship between the two signals as one travels around the circumference of the station. There is no directional beam, but the VOR receiver computes the radial you're on by referring to this unique phase relationship between the signals that couldn't be received along any other radial from the station. I think... The Wikipedia article started to get math heavy at that point.

To my knowledge, our visual lighthouse analogy for VOR operation has never actually been used for real navigation by nighttime visual reference, but it could be. An additional light signal would be required to flash out an identifier signal, so you could determine which lighthouse-VOR you were looking at on your chart.

An audio morse-code identifier is part of a radio VOR's signal, to which you listen after tuning the station to confirm the signals you are receiving are from the station you wanted (and these days, more advanced avionics monitor this morse ID code for you and present the three or four letter code on your navigation display, saving you the trouble).

The lighthouse example did remind me of my coastal navigation days, where different signal lights and lighthouses do indeed flash various ID codes at you, to which you can reference on your nautical charts to determine which light you're looking at. But in this case, the signal lights are the visual equivalents of NDBs. The flash pattern contains no embedded directional signals. Taking a bearing to the light from the pelorus, and along with the ship's heading you can draw lines of position on your chart radiating from lights sighted, a process essentially the same as using an ADF with NDBs in the air, with the same accuracy pitfalls from compass and magnetic variation variances.

Later in life I observed that the visual airport beacons for different airports in my local area tended to rotate at significantly different speeds. From my earlier nautical light knowledge, I assumed that aeronautical charts might have timing data for each airport's beacons so that one might confirm the identity of the field they have in sight at night. Alas, it's just a coincidence. The timing is crudely specified, a slower range of flash rates for airports, a faster range for heliports. There are also color codes in the flashes which serve to differentiate civil, military, land, water, and emergency services aerodromes, but specific aerodromes are not positively identified by this signal.

I should note that terrestrial radionavigation aids are effectively obsolete now by the extremely accurate, increasingly cheap, and highly available satellite navigation systems. It's expected that these satellite constellations will become more numerous and feature rich, increasing the likelihood of guaranteed signal access for civil navigation uses. It's practically this way already for lower accuracy positioning, but for the most precise uses (i.e. for instrument landing systems and automated landing) there are periods of unsuitability due to the configuration of the orbits of the satellites, or maintenance of the error correction mechanisms (check RAIM and WAAS). Most of the time though, you can get accuracies of a few feet, anywhere with a decent view of the sky. That's better than any terrestrial system.

The FAA desires to shut down most VOR stations as soon as the GPS system is deemed available and precise enough, as they are expensive to maintain. But if the decommissioning of LORAN is any guide, we'll probably have access to VOR signals for some years to come.

In the event of a major space storm disabling a good deal of orbiting satellites (plausible, but not very likely), access to such terrestrial systems would become highly desired again.

Most VORs and NDBs are used for navigating from one station to another, or along specific VOR radials. The better GPS based systems allow one to specify any GPS waypoint for use as a "virtual VOR", whereby traditional VOR-style course-deviation-indication (CDI) and omnibearing-selector (OBS) controls allow you to precisely fly a given course to or from the waypoint. Such functions can be helpful when given random holding fixes to fly, for example. Today, however, much of the emphasis is on database navigation. Where any and all possible waypoints and procedures for flying between them are encoded in a database stored inside the GPS navigator, and you fly by querying the database for the route between desired waypoints and procedures for instrument approach. The navigator, if coupled to an autopilot, can then navigate the aircraft all the way through the approach with little for you to do but monitor and assure yourself it's going where you expected and intended.

With the newest "highway in the sky" features available as part of the synthetic vision systems of avionics like Garmin's G1000, flying complex procedures with curving approach and departure paths and tight glidepath and obstacle restrictions is as easy and ubiquitous as using the flight controls to guide the little computer airplane through the series of hoops on the video display. It's becoming literally as easy as a video game. Remember Pilotwings for the SuperNES? Or Independence War on the PC? Or the dropship sequence from Aliens on the C64? Like that.

You just have to be sure you programmed your navigator correctly before you start out!

This is one area where general aviation has advanced (temporarily) ahead of the airlines. Most airliners do not have avionics as advanced as a G1000 system with synthetic vision. A rare instance were the smaller guys were able to be more nimble, thanks to ever cheapening computer technology. The airlines are catching up, however, and G1000-type systems with synthetic vision are going now into business jets, with similarly featured systems planned for the latest iterations out of Boeing and Airbus.

That's all, thanks for reading! Hope you had fun!

Busted Trades

Fun times were had last Thursday (6MAY10) as the stock markets saw some really wild volatility occur in the mid-afternoon. At one point, the Dow was down around 1,000 points, the biggest intraday decline in the history of the index.

In the aftermath, there's a lot of blather going on about what exactly happened and who's responsible, as nobody believed the declines were real or that markets could really move that fast. Plenty of finger pointing as the heads of the highly competitive exchanges blame each other for the event.

The trading behavior and price movement of the markets are a collective emergent phenomenon, a large-scale effect of individual entities (large and small) behaving according to their own local rules (personal tradeplans, automated trading platform configuration, values of parameters, etc.). In this sense, the price action and movement of the indexes is more like the weather. Back away a bit, and you can get a general gist of what's happened and what may be likely to happen in the short term, but you just can't predict where bolts of lightening will strike, or when and where a tornado may form.

I don't think in any way that Thursday's price action was the result of any one thing, or even a small collection of things. Rather, I'm inclined toward the notion that it was probably a phenomenon that emerged when great masses of various individual conditions happened to line up just so, and trigger a storm. To me, that's what this felt like, a market storm.

By the end of the day, the market recovered much of the staggering afternoon meltdown, but was still down sharply. The NYSE Composite started that day at 7259, and took most of the day to trade down to 7000, then within 15 minutes it moved down, then back up, over 300 more points, touching 6667 at its lowest.

Apparently, the action in individual equities was quite something to see. Jim Cramer, on with Erin Burnett in his usual afternoon CNBC segment, reacted in a manner that was probably consistent with quite a few traders out there.

Jim watched P&G start to trade far away down from it's opening price, and failing to understand why such a price was justified, exclaimed that if he were still at his hedge fund, "Forty-nine and a quarter bid for fifty-thousand Procter" would be his order, and "Just buy it, who cares?"

Jim's a believer in the fundamental picture of P&G, that it's a good long-term type of stock to have in a retirement portfolio, and that it's also attractive due to it's relatively good dividend yield, make unnaturally juicy by Thursday's downward action. So on those merits, Jim's in there thinking, 'I don't know why it's down here, but it's a great company and WOW, THAT'S A LOW PRICE!'

As he talked over the course of the next couple of minutes, P&G traded through 49 to 42, and back to 59. By the end of his segment, he was saying, "I now flip it at 59 and I've just made 500Gs."

You might have been able to do that trade, if you were watching the market all day and right in front of a trading screen. I'm sure plenty of people did do precisely this sort of trade.

So, now comes the crux of why I decided to write this post. After-hours, word came down from the NASDAQ and also from NYSE that trades which executed 60% or more away from the last market print between 14:40 - 15:00 eastern time, would be canceled.

In the vernacular, this is known as "busting trades" and typically occurs when exchanges can point to obvious system breakdowns, corruption of price data, or intentional fraudulent market manipulation leading to faulty reporting of trade data.

Well, I suppose it may turn out to be the case that the first snowflake to start the avalanche was the result of intentional manipulation, but the way things are playing out, I highly doubt it.

Duncan Niederauer, CEO of the NYSE, speaking before the opening bell on CNBC Friday gave me some great food for thought about the implications of busting trades.

Picture Jim Cramer's hypothetical trading in PG the previous afternoon. Now, presumably he's watching the prices print on the "tape" and reacting in his own interest. He's playing completely open and by the book, barking a limit order for 50k PG at $49.25. Let's say he got filled, saw the tape print prices around $59-$61, as it did a few minutes later, and he flips with a new limit order, selling at $59 we'll say. Let's assume he got filled there too, and made his $500,000 profit.

It's certainly possible, and this very type of thing probably did happen to many traders Thursday night, that the first trade in that pair was found to conform to the "busting" criteria and reversed. However, the second trade in the pair, perhaps due to other executions at nearby prices happening within milliseconds of Cramer's hypothetical order, was deemed fair and not busted. What is the result Friday morning as you log onto your trading platform and await the opening bell?

Well, those 50k shares you sold did "sell", but the preceding "buy" never happened. Through no fault of your own, that $500,000 you thought you'd made Thursday afternoon has turned into a liability. You sold shares you never owned. You're short PG to the tune of $2.95 million worth of stock, and the market's about to reopen!

Talk about a shock! What do you do now? Do you buy back to cover the short right away, or wait a while to see if the stock resumes the prior day's downtrend? No time to think about it...here's the bell and PG's about to print is first trade, and it is: $60.61 (crap!)

You decide to sit on your hands a moment and call your broker and try to get some answers...you sit on the phone awhile, your broker is fielding hundreds of calls like yours perhaps. By the time you're off the phone at 10:20, you've learned that you in fact ARE short PG for 50k shares, and the last trade now is a throat-grabbing $61 (maybe other traders who awoke to find themselves unintentionally short are scrambling to cover...how many of them could there be? This might be bad if I don't act now, a real serious short-squeeze). You squelch further risk and buy-to-cover at $61. Rather than having a great Thursday $500,000 wealthier, you now have a disastrous Friday, having closed out your position (for real this time) for a $100,000 loss!

Who was at fault in this scenario? You played by the rules, placed your orders, and got filled according to exchange rules. How is it that for playing fair, you have to part with $100Gs? Now perhaps the decision by the exchanges to bust some of these trades save some people serious bacon. But these folks would've placed those orders eyes-open too, expecting them to execute if the conditions for their triggering were satisfied.

It seems to me, since someone is on the other side of every trade, that for every potential $500Gs-winning hypothetical Jim Cramer out there, there was a $500k loser (or collection of tiny losers, whose losses summed to $500k as they became part of the other side of Cramer's trade). Going in and intervening has the effect of converting some of the losers to winners, and some winners to losers.

The rule then ought to be, were the counter-parties acting in good faith, relying on the exchange to match their orders and execute their trades, was the data they were relying upon accurate, and did the system perform as designed? If so, the trade should stand. PERIOD.

From the evidence I've come into contact with in the aftermath of Thursday's action, there doesn't seem to be any malfeasance behind the price movements. It does in fact appear that all the price action was the direct result of the various exchanges acting precisely correctly (that is: precisely in keeping with SEC regulations, and their own published exchange rules for how trades and exchange data are to be handled and what procedures will be implemented when unusual price action develops). In short, the system behaved as designed. It did EXACTLY what we asked it to do, matching orders from buyers and sellers.

Exchanges and the market-makers and specialists at them, compete by trying to keep their assigned stocks liquid and trading. But this service comes with risk, and when the market starts to move at the same time that participants start to leave the venue, as a market-maker you have to be thinking about saving yourself at some point and cutting off your exposure to being stuck with stock at prices at which you cannot afford to trade.

On the human-side of the NYSE, this is exactly what happened. Volume began to trail off. The fastest price moment often happens when there are significantly fewer market participants, because within order books of bids and offers, the different price levels awaiting execution tend to get more spaced out and thinner. As this is happening, if someone comes in with a market order, particularly a large enough one, he'll start sweeping through those thin layers of supply at each booked price level very quickly. The exchange gets an order to sell 50k of XYZ at the market, and it's sending stock away to the first buyers it can see, starting at the highest bid on the order book. When that demand is used up, if supply in the original order still exists, the system sweeps down to the next highest bid, and so on until all the requested shares have been sold, or the buy side of the order book is used up completely.

This, in some sense, happened Thursday. The order books got thin, and consequently prices started to move about faster. (I think it's a common enough practice for many traders out there to put out speculative bids or offers far away from the last trade, "just in case" this exact sort of situation develops. If I have a new position in some stock, I'll frequently place a GTC sell limit order on at my target price, so I can be assured of booking the profit I'd hoped to realize, if the market trades up to me for ANY reason.)

On the NYSE there is a feature to help control fast markets known as liquidity replenishment points (LRPs). LRPs are trigger prices set into the order books for stocks at specific distances away from the last-traded price. They're there to control volatility such as we had on Thursday. The NYSE's designers recognized that high-speed data networks and electronic trading made it possible to execute trades so fast, no human could follow the price action. And "quant" systems are designed to exploit this fact, analyzing trade data and submitting orders on behalf of an individual or institution as fast as possible according to pre-programmed rules for behavior. These systems are human designed to try to make profits by trading quickly or according to complex dynamic criteria, and work because they can see and adapt to market conditions faster than humans can type in individual orders. It's a perfectly legitimate way to put technology to work for you.

The NYSE recognizes that one side-effect of this type of assistive technology is that unanticipated feedback mechanisms could become set-up as automated trading systems start to react to patterns generated by other automated systems. Market liquidity could suddenly dry up or flood in, and prices could start moving faster than humans could react to really understand the situation.

So when an LRP is triggered at the NYSE, the electronic execution temporarily flips into a slow, manual or auction-type mode to allow the human beings on the exchange floor, and at home or the office at their computers, time to see what's just happened and react as they think appropriate. It's a kind of "circuit-breaker" to ensure that markets don't move into absolutely absurd price territory for reasons nobody can make sense of, or have time to act upon. It's a good idea! This IS about the humans after all, and our technology is there to try and serve our interest.

And here's where I get to put my anti-regulation libertarian hat on: Thursday's market volatility was magnified by our very own SEC, and a recently new bit of regulation they imposed called "Reg. NMS" (for National Market System).

A few years ago, the SEC (in their porn-surfing-all-day kinda infinite wisdom), decided that investors needed to be "protected" from "unfair" price activity that might be happening on the exchange they're dealing with, when prices might be better outside that exchange, on another exchange or wholly electronic order matching system. The rule was hotly debated during its gestation, but the SEC planted its feet and dragged the exchanges along, who eventually acquiesced to the new order of things.

Reg NMS was supposed to protect market participants by seeking to ensure that the best displayed bid and offer (the top of the book) were protected and unable to be ignored if they came from an electronic system. Manual quotes and hidden orders are exempt. What that means is that if an order comes into the NYSE, but on the other side of the trade, another exchange is displaying a better price at the top of its displayed order book than exists on the NYSE order book, the incoming NYSE order must first "trade around" the NYSE to match with the order on the away exchange or system. If the incoming order wasn't fully satisfied by that away quote, then it can continue executing back on the NYSE, where it had been sent to begin with.

This was supposedly to protect smaller traders using brokers. Such traders don't interact directly with an exchange to execute their orders, and rely on market data typically presented in a consolidated stream representing the best bid and offer available within the entire market system, not just one particular exchange.

Before this rule, you might see an offer quoted on your trading platform, and this might prompt you to send out a bid to your chosen exchange (this is from a broker's perspective, from your perspective, your order goes into your broker's system). The exchange might have been able to execute your order completely from their own order book, and in many cases this would happen, ignoring (or trading-through) the quote you saw on your screen, as it was from another exchange. On the other side of things, the entity on the other exchange with the superior offer might wonder why he saw a trade print which executed at a price inferior to his offer. He's just been traded-through on a foreign exchange. Reg. NMS was designed to prevent this situation, at least for the displayed quotes at the tops of each market centers' order books.

So as the markets in certain stocks started to get volatile, at the NYSE, LRP points started to be hit. At NYSE, these stocks then flipped into manual or auction mode for a set time. Electronic execution stopped, and quotes from there were designated as slow. Specialists now have time to examine the market and decided if they're going to add or change orders on behalf of themselves or the institutions they're representing. Since automatic execution stopped, if pricing becomes superior at the NYSE compared to other market centers, these superior quotes will still get disseminated, but other market centers are permitted under Reg. NMS to "trade through" them if they wish. So if a new order comes into a different market center, that order might get traded through the NYSE's superior (but slow) quotes and execute on that market center fully. How this is controlled must depend on the order type that was sent to the market center. I believe it is the case that, using the proper order type, if you sent an order to a given market center away from the NYSE, and the NYSE was showing a superior price, you could control whether the order was forwarded over to the NYSE for slow execution, or executed directly at the center you'd sent it to, using the quotes on that center's order book.

Meanwhile, back at the NYSE, electronic orders coming in can start participating in an auction system which determines at which price the first execution will occur once the LRP halt time limit expires. In addition, floor specialists can manually execute trades at any time during the LRP halt period. Automatic electronic execution resumes immediately after such a manual execution.

So as trading volume diminished and liquidity bled away from certain stocks, the increase in their price volatility started to trigger LRPs at the NYSE, causing this market to slow down. This had the effect of isolating the other market centers' automatic electronic execution from the liquidity which might otherwise have been available at the NYSE. These market centers had some degree of choice of either continuing to match trades from their own order books, or, when the NYSE began showing superior quotes, route orders to it with the knowledge that execution will be slow (nothing will happen until a manual floor trade takes place, or failing any manual trades, until the auction price is determined by the end of the LRP halt period).

As I interpret Duncan Niederauer, it seems that most of the time, the other market centers chose to continue automatic electronic execution from their own books, eschewing the liquidity building up at the NYSE during the LRP periods and trading through NYSE's superior quotes. In one sense, these other market centers were preferring speed of execution and transaction rate to execution quality.

Choosing this path meant trades were executing off of thinner books with less available at each price point, and the result seems to have been very very rapid sweeps through those order books down to price points that, to a slow-acting human trader, would be completely baseless and silly. Because the all-electronic market was so fast and efficient, prices moved totally outside of a rational range before any human could recognize an opportunity was available and step in. Now, with last trades printing well beyond normal, such human traders on the sidelines are thinking..."is something wrong? Was that a real price? Perhaps I should just sit on my hands a moment."

Now, you can see why the NYSE's system of LRPs is such a good idea. It applies a brake when all-electronic algorithmically-driven trading causes the market to move more quickly than seems rational, giving the humans time to react, notice the prices, and start placing "bets" in a manner they think appropriate.

Duncan's thrust during his CNBC interview before the bell, was that pricing almost certainly would not have become so irrational if other market centers had policies similar to the NYSE's concept of LRPs, and that in any case, once LRPs were hit at the NYSE, movement would have been more rational if other market centers chose instead not to trade through superior NYSE quotes.

Reg. NMS worsened the situation once the NYSE isolated itself, by forcing the other electronic market centers to respect the superior top-book quotes of other electronic venues, which by this point were certainly all algorithmically generated orders, not based on human judgment or rationality.

Now, it's all algorithmic, all electronic, but it's also all still REAL. These are REAL trades, valid trades, placed by and crossed by computer programs at the request of their operators. Regardless whether the operators might have understood what their programs were up to exactly, these operators chose to run these programs to post these trades.

Finally, humans start reacting to the absurd last-trade prints coming in. The Jim Cramers out there are seeing the absurd prices and sensing opportunity. They step to their platforms, and place their trades, which also execute properly according to the rules of the system. Maybe they profit at the expense of the silly people who commanded their "quant" systems to trade on their behalf. Good! This is how a free market works! If algorithmic traders come by later and discover their beloved "quant" program did a bad bad thing to them, then they ought to take the pain and rethink their trading strategy a bit. It was a FAIR TRADE.

So who wins? Well from here, it appears the industry organizations which determine if a trade ought to be busted clearly stepped in to bail out the users of algorithmic systems...perhaps at the very very dear expense of later-reacting human traders who, in good faith, and in accordance with published rules, placed their own trades seeking to profit from what they rationally saw were stocks priced for opportunity. It IS the case that ANY TIME a trade is placed, the traders are placing orders because they think the price is wrong and will move a certain way. They place the trade with an aim to make the move toward the price they think is more correct yield a profit for them. If this were not so, NO TRADES would ever happen.

So just because the price seems by some vague unquantifiable measure more wrong than usual, the regulating agency is going to bust trades made honestly and intentionally?

If it comes to light that there was real fraud intentionally committed by some entity or group out there, then I will feel less indignant. The Jim Cramer hypothetical still would get no satisfaction, as he would've been acting in good faith to data presented as valid and trustworthy. If you busted his buy, the only proper solution would then be to also bust his later sell, and follow those shares and bust every other single trade involving them from that point forward to the close (a daunting data mining challenge).

But I am thinking that it will be the case that there will be no boogeyman found on this, no actual fraud committed, and no actual corruption of data discovered from some sort of system fault. In the end, my money is on the notion that the system operated precisely the way it was set up to operate, only that in this instance, the system's configuration led to a period of unexpected behavior. That might be a necessary condition to start going in and busting trades, but I argue it is not a sufficient one.

To any traders from Thursday who acted openly, seeking as always to profit from prices they think are wrong, and wound up in a position similar to my hypothetical Cramer scenario, losing serious money solely because a regulator thought the price movement was somehow too wrong to be real, I feel for you.

It's been suggested that perhaps a large institutional trader entered into a large trade or started a significant algorithmic process in error (the fat fingers excuse) and never intended to enter that trade or start that process, and the price avalanche was the direct result of a cascade of effects occurring as a result of that unintentional action. If that scenario turns out to be the case for this mess, then tough bounce for that guy! If I setup an order with my broker, mistype a number on the computer form, and before realizing my mistake, I push the send button, is the broker going to make me whole? NO WAY! It was my bad, my error, and I'll have to live with it. Perhaps it's not too late and I can get in quick and hit the cancel button on that order. Maybe that works, but brokers are always careful to point out that canceled trades are subject to prior execution, the news of which might still have been making its way toward your terminal while you were pushing the cancel button. If so, too bad, they say. And we accept this before choosing to use the platform. Why should Mr. Fat Fingers, in this instance, get a pass and see trades busted in his favor?

It was interesting to me to see, Thursday night, notice come down from the exchanges about some industry-wide consensus to go on this trade busting plan, followed quickly with the statement that there would be no appeals. How could you be so sure so soon that no one would have valid grounds to appeal unless you know the cause of the problem? You can't. A statement on Friday from the SEC included a closing comment I found to be quite telling:

"Market clearance and settlement processes functioned well and without incident."

Translation: the system behaved as it had been designed to behave. Now that to me suggests we can rule out a system fault or data corruption as causal.

These trades are what they are. If no explicit fraudulent actions or direct data corruption due to system fault is found, then shame on you, regulator. Your meddling might be what we really need protection from.