sharbrough.net

There are something like 11 million illegal aliens living in the US. The country is full of people with lots of opinions about what to do. And this week, the Federal government filed suit against the state of Arizona over a law related to the topic.

I'm understating the gravity of the issue. People on both sides of this issue are angry. It's difficult to describe the Arizona law without accidentally editorializing – using "value words" that reflect a bias about whether the law is good or bad. I don't intend to describe the specific law or the reaction to it, around the nation and the world – there is plenty of that information elsewhere. Instead, I want to suggest that this problem exists today because we failed in previous attempts to address it. Instead of the hysterical perspective I see everywhere, I want to take a historical perspective.

There are three thoughts that we might entertain today.

• One is about the nature of immigration reform – what has not worked, what has worked, what might work …. how we might go about constructively addressing the issue.
• One is about the history of lingering problems in the US, and what we might learn from them. I'm thinking about fights that lasted centuries, such as slavery, banking, and dealing with the indigenous population. And immigration.
• One is about the long view. On so many issues today, there is a winner and a loser. And if there is ever a decision on a divisive issue, after which we will be united, then the winners and the losers have to live together. For a long time. Living together in a country is often approached as if it were a zero-sum game – that in order for one group to win, another must lose. That's not the only way to play the game.

It won't come as a surprise to anyone who knows me: I'm going to do this backward.

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Pet peeve. People who don't put the carts neatly in the cart corral. You push it a mile around the store, a quarter mile out to your car – and it's full of stuff the whole time. Then, when it's empty, and presumably lighter and of less resistance to the wind, you can't push it over to the cart corral?

When you take a cart, you are implicitly agreeing to be responsible with it, and not to leave it where it presents a hazard to other shoppers. When you fail to put it away, you are in breach of that contract.

Shopping carts left near the cart corral

As you can see above (click on the photo to embiggen, as John C Dvorak says), at least four people have shoved their carts into the snowbank that's right next to the corral. It's close, but no cigar. Close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and public toilet seats. A miss is as good as a mile.

This is nothing short of sloth. Selfishness. Laziness.

Stop it.

Resolve, right now, to never again cut a corner while putting the cart back. You are committing one of the 7 deadly sins here.

If you find yourself absolutely unable to replace the cart, after your best effort, just ask me for help. I'm very good at putting them back. I'm kind of strong. I can push the whole row together tighter. I've practiced and I can often roll a cart into the back of the last cart in the corral from a distance of 50 feet. It's great sport, and if a cart sails wide on me, I just laugh at it while I chase it and put it back like it goes.

And if you see someone else leaving the cart in the wrong place, perhaps someone who doesn't read this blog and doesn't know better, don't fuss at them. Just offer to take the cart since you're on your way into the store and will a) need a cart anyway; and b) walk past about 4 good places to put a cart. Leave judgement to god and Pat Robertson, they've got the energy for it.

If, however, you are leaving when you see a cart sloth, and don't need to go into the store again, feel free to honk at them and point at the corral. Be careful not to text while you do this.

This splice was degrading the signal for the internet.

Not long ago, I started to have trouble with internet pages here at my home office. In the browser, I'd get a message saying that the page wasn't found. Two or three frustrating refreshes later, I'd have a page that should have been up in a couple of seconds. It was a bit of a hassle for me, and Red was so upset she couldn't get anything done.

So I called Comcast and told them about the problem. They said that the signal to noise ratio for me and my neighbors was yellow, not green, nor red. He had heard of a case where a customer put a nail in the wall and unknowingly touched the cable, and degrading the signal quality. They scheduled a serviceman to investigate. The customer service rep also told me that they had upgraded the speed of the signals about the same time that I started to drop pages.

The day came when the serviceman arrived. He took one look at my modem and said that they were changing those out. There had been reports that they didn't do well with the speed upgrade. I thought, "Ha! They broke my internet by improving it!"

Then the serviceman went out into the yard. A few minutes later he came back with the tiny assembly pictured above. It's a "coaxial cable splice." Years ago, some technician connected two pieces of coax cable with it. I'm sure it was the proper procedure at the time. It's a plastic sleeve with two crimped metal collars at each end. The problem, which can be seen at the bottom of the plastic part, is a slim metal strip that runs the length of the splice. It picks up radio noise, like an antenna.

After replacing the splice with whatever they use now, the technician said that my neighbors and I have "green" signal to noise now. About 45 minutes after the guy arrived, I had great signal, a new modem, and no problems bouncing around the web.

One of the best things, and one of the worst things, about people is that they have dreams. James Cameron had a dream of Avatar, and shared it with the rest of the world. But as Fantine sang, some dreams are not meant to be. Here are two examples, from the two most recent US presidents.

BUSH'S FOLLY

The most sensible thing I've heard about the presidency is that campaigning is about making promise, but being president is about making choices. The former is easy, the latter is guaranteed to win you less friends, less support, and the open animosity of people who you were counting on.

Pres Bush 43 had a dream of slapping Saddam Hussein around. It seems that he believed that there were WMD and that americans were at risk. I'm not coming down on either side of that issue, but pointing out that there have been tensions between Islamic militants and the US going back to the Nixon and Carter administrations. The fundamental problem there is Arab-Israeli relations, and the need for a lasting peace. It may never happen. Each US president in memory has tried to broker a deal, and we send billions of dollars to the middle east to pay for peace each year. We send billions to Egypt and Israel as part of the Camp David accords alone.

If it sounds like a lot, it's a great deal less than we spend in Iraq. And by occupying Iraq, we obligated ourselves to huge payments in that country, preventing us from spending whatever it took to address the more fundamental issue of arab-israeli peace. I'm not saying that W could have brokered the Big Treaty. I'm saying that he made a choice that kept him from even having a chance.

OBAMACARE

Barak Obama took office in Jan 2009, and on 24-Feb announced an agenda to change energy, education, and health care because he believed that the government owed it to the people to improve each of those. Through no fault of his own, this took place in a climate of economic stagnation, and the typical tests of a new president by foreign opportunists. Like his predecessor, Obama believed that he was making the right choice for the american people.

But the huge deals made for bailouts (which began, in fairness, before he took office), and the huge costs of conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, made it somewhat difficult to address those three issues (energy, education, and health care) without going way into the hole. Obama chose to go forward with a trillion dollar healthcare makeover, and the congress went about pretending it was going to be paid for. You can count on some people all of the time.

As I look back at the past 50 years, I see that everyone has a dream about what is important, about something that they think really needs to be done. And every once in a while, a person gets a chance to take a shot. It almost never works out. The Houston Astros spend too much on an aging middle reliever. The Chicago Cubs give long contracts with no-trade clauses to deadbeats. The president does what he or she thinks is right.

It appears to me that these are cases where people have proven how NOT to realize your dreams. But that's not very helpful, is it? I mean, I have dreams, and so do you. In the movies, they always work out in the end. Is there any source of guidance for our choices, some way to help us achieve better outcomes? Surely the best thing to do is to keep dreaming, to "never give up" to "never never never never never never never surrender" right?

Sure there is. But it starts with more patience than most people show. You have to do what's most important first. You're not helping yourself if you just bet the long shots – if you don't improve your odds of success. Ask yourself what would happen if it took four times as long and cost four times as much. What important other thing would go wanting? How damaging would that be?

And if it comes down to it, if you can't see any possibility for having your dreams and doing the right things at the same time, then you gotta get a lot more creative than these guys. You'll have to pull a rabbit out of your hat. That's a lot harder than deciding to nationalize health care, or choosing to invade another country.

Your life, and your dreams, are just as important as theirs. I'm just saying, try to do better than that, okay?

I'm declaring the War on Terror to be over, and the open societies of the west to have won. On Christmas Day, a young Nigerian who had been in Yemen flew from Amsterdam to Detroit, on Northwest Airlines. In his underwear was a small amount of explosive.

His attempt to detonate it was less than successful. There was a bang, and there was some smoke. There was also some screaming. If a guy lights his underwear on fire, well, it can be sensitive, and painful.

This is what the mighty al Queda has come to. Eight years ago, they had 20 guys. Okay, 15 of them didn't know that they were expendable, but it appears that the word got out. Here they are today, and recruitment can't be going well.

Finding engineering students that are stupid enough to try to blow up their own balls on a flight to Detroit. Seriously, I saw an accident while in college. A fellow was lighting a flammable gas that came out of his body, and burned himself in a tender place. You're telling me that they are down to the guys who have never tried to light a fart.

This baby is over. The suspect is reported to have claimed that there are hundreds more like him coming. I have one thing to say to that.

Pants on fire.

One of my favorite holiday gifts this year was a set of two CD's from the TV series, "Glee."

I admit that I'm a big fan of the High School Musical phenomenon. I might be totally missing the point, but the Glee episodes that I've seen have been kind of a reflection of HSM – except the songs are covers. And they pack a punch.

I think there's some kind of soap opera going on, and I try to ignore that. I'm really only interested in the songs.

Not enough of a Red Sox fan to like "Sweet Caroline." But some of the songs are as good or better than the originals.

If you like to hear young people revitalize classics, you should not only consider Glee, but the East Village Opera Company. My buddy Bruce turned me on to them years ago. You've not heard Nessun Dorma, not even if you have seen the gap-toothed Brit cell-phone salesman sing it, until you hear them do it.

Thinking of that reminds me of the Tran-Siberian Orchestra, doing rock versions of the Nutcracker.

In 1997, I saw Phantom in London, and thought how great it was to see talented young people carrying on that tradition with such excellence.

At the same time, I've despaired that we'll see songwriting bands like the Beatles, Eagles, Chicago (yeah, I know that some of them are still playing, but they are parodies of themselves now. There is something wrong with a bunch of fat bald men playing rock and roll. Except for Loggins and Messina, I just want someone else to come along, to carry the baton, to pass on the code).

I had such high hopes for Dakota Moon. The songs, and the performances, were so energetic. I felt the same way about Living Colors, but they ran out of steam.

These days I'm settling for Gavin DeGraw and Josh Kelley. And then, there's the music from Glee!

And the bottom line? There is hope for the human race. The young ones are doing something besides rap about sex and gangster games.

I think we started a nice thing, this rock music. And it's encouraging to see someone get it, and carry it on, and make it better. Good luck with it.

This morning, I checked my email and left to take Red to the airport. By the time I left there, maybe an hour after having checked my email, I got a note from my daughter that my gmail had been hacked. And I got the email that the hacker sent out. And then, in rapid succession, I got three more emails from people in my gmail contacts that received this message.

I came home, and checked my email. That was maybe 9am. The password for my account had been changed. So had the back-up email address. So had the phone number for a text message (to a Nigerian phone number!).

If people don' t use strong passwords, someone might try to hack their account. This happened in my case. Google has a place to say that you've lost control of your account. I filled out the forms, and in less than 30 minutes, I had control of my account.

I googled the "my gmail was hacked" to see if everyone else had it. There was a very nice post from 18-Dec-2009 that I think is helpful. I include the link here.

I'll clean it up as time passes.

I have seen the movie Avatar, in 3D. I have heard that it will change the way that movies are made, but I'm not sure that I understand what that means. I have heard that people will remember seeing it, like the first time they saw Star Wars, or Lord of the Rings, but I'm not sure that I understand what that means, either.

I can say that it's an awesome movie. It's got your new planet, your new species, your really powerful bad guys, and your pure-hearted hero. The battle scenes in the 3rd act are epic.

My college buddy, Tim McCanlies, once told me that the movie 2001 advanced the craft of movie making by 20 years. Later in life, after he had successfully written and directed movies for a career, I asked him if he still believed it, and he said, "It sounds like something I would say." But the point – that innovative projects change things for everyone, seems true.

In this case, I'm not sure if the innovation is the improvement of 3D techniques, or the improvement of the CGI. I am not an expert in either domain, but what I saw looked at once different from anything I had seen in a movie before, and very familiar to me, as a person who has had eyes for a long time. I should mention that I have an unusual visual / mental shortcoming – I don't have stereo vision. I can't see the picture of the ship in the screen full of dots. I don't have the software that creates a stereoscopic image in the brain. I feared that I would not be able to see the 3D. That was foundless. I ducked two or three times during the movie, as things appeared to be coming right out of the screen to hit me.

James Cameron, the explorer of movie possibilities, previously directed the Terminator movies, and Titanic. In Titanic, he showed a love story, and some incredibly detailed period costumes, silverware, and ways of speaking. In Avatar, we see "Star Wars meets Lord of the Rings" in a way. I see story elements that feel familiar. The movie will be reviewed many times and in more detail, but suffice it to say that it has "a green message, and an anti-war message," as Roger Ebert wrote.

MUST HAVE BARANCE

My friend Bob White loves skiing, and his ski instructor was a Japanese man who emphasized the importance of keeping ones balance. When I watch the movies, I admire Matt Damon's balance. In every fight scene, he's got his feet under him, as if his center of gravity is in his hips, not his shoulders. When I watch cartoons, the characters just move like dream figures, independent of the force of gravity, like spectres floating across space. A guy like Jar Jar Binks has no real sense of balance when moving, neither did the Droid Army. Gollum didn't have it. But their intellectual grandchildren do. Shrek doesn't pay the gravity bill, either.

Something about our brains knows when someone else is about to fall over. When watching images of moving creatures, the classification of them as "true" or "false" is a fundamental brain function. Watching how someone moves, knowing their walk, is as basic as recognizing how angry or crazy they are from watching their face.

In this movie, the CGI characters looked true to me, for the first time. Well, most of the time. There were times, when they were climbing vines or rocks, that they looked like cartoons again, but in the set pieces they were a comfort to behold.

CHARACTER IS DETAIL

That's been said many times, that character is in the details. Mr Cameron said in an NPR interview that he has made an effort to observe and preserve details such as eye movement, and the articulation of the lips and tongue. I think this also went into the tiny movements of the other muscles in the face. I saw many hand and face gestures that I recognized, even though they were coming from a 12-foot tall blue humanoid with yellow eyes (called Na'vi).

Sometimes I think the actor is doing, let's say 20 things, in a scene. Maybe the actor really did 7 on purpose, and I just imputed the others as I watched him or or her. Or maybe the actor did a bunch of things that I missed. I'm talking about concrete conscious choices – "Look left, purse the lips, swallow hard, rub the temples." Lots of non-verbal messages about what the character is thinking and experiencing. Well, I saw little tics, grand gestures, general postures, and all of the rest.

And the grass? When the helicopter is landing? So many blades, so much detail. I had to tell myself that there was never any grass there.

IS IT DEEPER, OR IS IT JUST ME

Something about the 3D made the scenes appear deeper to me. The separation of the foreground and background, traditional in a 2D image, became a separation of the foreground, mid-ground, and background in 3D. I realized as I watched it that we routinely dismiss foreground objects to focus on middle ground objects. Literally, we don't even focus our eyes on them. I had a similar experience watching this film, as I dismissed foreground objects (no threat, look farther away) to watch conversations or creatures at a distance. Once, I looked through a filthy window at a character outside it, and well, no reflection on the window cleaning at my house, it seemed like a normal bit of perception.

In most films, the middle ground is the foreground. In 3D, there is a nearer foreground, which adds depth and realism to the viewing experience.

NITPICKS WITH THE STORY

Twice, I saw characters do things that I couldn't imagine them doing. First, a Na'vi warrior jumped into the middle of a bunch of gun-toting "Skywalkers" – that's what earth people are. The most basic awareness of the threats of bullets would lead a guy in that situation to use whatever cover was available, since shots might come from everyone there. Instead, he tossed a bunch of them around like children (well, no one tosses children, okay?), leaving one to shoot the pie out of him. The six or so that he had tossed around would have made good shields and good projectiles, and it seemed like a waste of a good character to have him die in such a noob effort at hand to hand combat.

Later, a pilot in a damaged craft sat in clear range of enemy fire, when there was a lot of cover available, and the craft she was flying was really important to her side. In real life, the pilot would have preserved the craft, and her life, by bugging out and being available to fight another day.

Apparently, the story had a quota for body count.

DANG, THAT WAS PRETTY

The creatures, the plants, and the planet of Pandora are a sight to see. The colors, the details, the vistas … it's the best vacation I had this year. Ebert said that after the movie, he felt like he had spend 2-1/2 hours on the planet. I felt a bit more displaced from it, but I did enjoy the scenery, and the image.

I often describe movies as "shared dreams." As the technology for re-creating experiences and the distance from the artist's minds to ours shrinks – by going from conception to image without the intermediary of an actor, or a real location to shoot, for example – the line between experience and imagination blurs. Was that a dream or a memory? Does art imitate life, or is it becoming something in between?

I enjoyed watching Avatar, and I hope to understand it better as time passes. The sense that this is a milestone persists.

I've been active on Facebook for a couple of years now, it seems. And it seems like they change something fundamental every two months. It's unstable, I tell you.

The most recent irksome thing is the new overhaul of privacy settings. A friend said, "I can't see your list of friends anymore." I looked at my page, and I could see them fine. I looked at her page, and I could see her friends fine, too.

Then I found a gizmo in the new privacy settings that lets me see my profile the way it looks to any friend, and typed in her name. Aha! My profile only showed our mutual friends.

So I googled it. What would you do?

And I found that the Facebook blog had a note about a little pencil above your friends list in your profile page. If you click it, you can turn on and off whether your friend list shows on your profile.

Dear Facebook. If you are gonna change the ways that ANYTHING works, why don't you put it into that 3-step transition gizmo you made  me use?

I think that they have gotten too big. The end of casual involvement with Facebook appears to be coming over the horizon.

My Aggies went 6-6 this year. I think I might know how they can win more games.

In the 6 games they won, the other team scored 30 points or less.

In the 6 games they lost, the other team scored 31 points or more. To whit:

DATE OPPONENT RESULT
9/05 New Mexico W 41-6
9/19 Utah State W 38-30
9/26 UAB W 56-19
10/03 vs. Arkansas L 47-19
10/10 No. 15 Oklahoma State L 36-31
10/17 @ Kansas State L 62-14
10/24 @ Texas Tech W 52-30
10/31 Iowa State W 35-10
11/07 @ Colorado L 35-34
11/14 @ Oklahoma L 65-10
11/21 Baylor W 38-3
11/26 No. 3 Texas L 49-39

In the 6 losses, the other team scored 47,36,62,35,65,49. In those games, A&M scored 19, 31, 14, 35, 10, 39. Scoring 31 and losing is generally a sign that there's a problem on the other side of the ball.

A&M was seriously outmatched against Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. The losses to Oklahoma State and Colorado look like games that could have been won with one more defensive stop. In the K-State game, it looked like the teams were not 50 points apart, but it was a terrible night for the maroon and white.

Well, it felt a lot better than last season, I'll say that. And like we have said since the 60's – Wait til next year!