Steve Jobs dies and goes to heaven. At the pearly gates, he's surprised to see not only St. Peter, but also a stylishly dressed fellow who introduces himself as Lucifer. St. Peter says that the afterlife is now being run on a new policy: The deceased get to choose where they want to spend eternity - either heaven or hell.

Jobs tells Peter that he assumes he'd prefer heaven over the infinite, unrelenting agony of hell - but being a curious sort, he'd like to take a quick peek at both. Agreeing to his request, Peter ushers him through the pearly gates, and Jobs sees that heaven is, indeed, pretty much what he had learned in Sunday school: angels, clouds, harps, and hosannas.

The devil then mutters a quick incantation, and in a flash Jobs finds himself on a stunningly beautiful tropical island. Naked nymphs of every sexual persuasion are frolicking in pure white sands and colorful hammocks, fruity drinks in hand, while exquisite reggae tunes waft over gentle breezes. The devil mumbles more mojo, and Jobs finds himself back at the pearly gates.

"St. Peter," says Jobs, "heaven most certainly appears to be suffused with peace and contentment, but I must admit that hell's blandishments are quite appealing, especially for a man of the world such as I. Thank you for the kind offer, but I believe I'd prefer Hades."

"Your call," smiles St. Peter. Lucifer then chants a line or two from Dante, and Jobs instantly finds himself drowning in a vat of boiling feces as hideous demons stab at his eyes with white-hot daggers.

"Lucifer!" shrieks the now-hysterical Jobs. "Where are the nymphs? The Mojitos? The reggae?"

"Ah," purrs The Prince of Darkness, a cruel smile curling his lip. "That was just the demo."

An old joke, to be sure, but one that was brought to mind as I tested Apple's latest version of its Mac OS X operating system, Leopard, for an article I wrote for MacLife.com. There's plenty in Leopard to love - overall it's a fine advance over its predecessor, known as Tiger. But Apple - especially in the years since Steve Jobs has retaken the helm - consistently fails to take into account Tom Peters's well-worn maxim that the formula for success is to "under promise and over deliver."

Case in point: There's a feature in Leopard that allows one Mac user to video-chat with another by using a nifty piece of software called iChat. The new version has a number of solid enhancements, but its marquee gee-whizery is its ability to replace a chatter's actual background with a video or still image of another background so that it appears as if the chatter is in a different location - the Eiffel Tower, for example. As you can see by the demo image to the left (from Apple's website), the illusion is seamless.

Or is it?

Take a look at the next image (on the right), which is a screenshot taken from an actual iChat video conference between me and the Mac|Life reviews editor, Roman Loyola. Trust me, Roman does not, in reality, have holes in his head.

For the record, this linkup was between two high-powered, Intel-based Macs (Roman using a new iMac powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, me running a Mac Pro with two dual-core Intel Xeon processors). Roman was using the iSight camera built into his iMac; I was using an external Apple iSight. Both of us were using shipping copies of Leopard and iChat. Roman was at the Mac|Life offices, which has (if my memory serves me correctly) multiple bundled T3 lines, and I was at home, where I have a 1.5Mbps/384Kbps DSL connection.

Roman's "real" background - which was chroma-keyed out by iChat - was of the shelves in his cubicle. Needless to say, the chroma-keying was not successful, possibly because of some dark items on the shelves that matched Roman's hair. Indeed, when we tried different actual backgrounds and different backdrop images bundled with iChat, we were able to improve the effect, but we could never get anywhere near the performance implied by Apple's demos - and both Roman and I have seen this effect demoed many times during speeches by Steve Jobs.

About now you may be saying, "C'mon, Rik, get over it. So a software feature doesn't work as well as it had been touted? So what else is new?"

Well, permit me to get on my soapbox for a moment to respond.

I, for one, am getting mighty tired of bullshit in all its forms. There's a wonderful - if slight - book by the moral philosopher H. G. Frankfurt called On Bullshit that argues that bullshit is more corrosive to our culture than lying. One of his central premises is that both liars and truth-tellers maintain a relationship to truth, while bullshitters dismiss truth as irrelevant.

This insidious relegation of truth into the realm of irrelevancy can be found everywhere in our culture. What is "true" is not as important as what is conducive to "making the sale," whether the item being sold is a political candidate, a pop star, a sandwich, or a computer operating system. What's worse, we expect to be bullshitted (bullshat?) whenever a public figure opens his or her mouth. As the 1998 movie Bulworth so brilliantly expressed, truth-telling in the public sphere is so rare that to do so makes the honest man appear a fool.

Bullshit seeps from our TVs. ("Fair and Balanced." Bullshit.) It poisons our national policy making. ("They hate our freedoms." Bullshit.) It shouts in magazine cover lines. ("All your Mac problems solved - for good!" Bullshit - and, yes, I've been guilty more than once.)

And we've become inured to it. And by doing so we've become cynics. We believe bullshit to be the natural state of public discourse. We've become a culture that hears, disbelieves, and dismisses. Why not tune out? It's all bullshit, right?

And so, yeah, I wasn't surprised that Apple's iChat software didn't work as well as the demo said it would. Demos? They're bullshit.  [back to top]

Occasionally I run into something that makes it abundantly clear to me that I don't quite fit into this wacky world. For example, in this morning's San Francisco Chronicle there was a half-page cosmetics ad. Nothing unusual there, of course. For reasons that escape me, women (well, mostly women...) have been painting and scenting themselves for millennia. I don't understand it, but, hey, it's a culturally ubiquitous and time-honored craft. Decorated faces have never seemed attractive to me, but if you and the object of your affection are into face-painting, more power to you.

But this ad... There was a dog prominently featured in it (with pink hair, no less), which struck me as a bit odd, so I took a closer look at the photos and copy, and discovered that the ad was for a new line of cosmetics called Juicy Crittoure, and that the products - perfume, nail polish, shampoo, and the like - weren't for women who enjoy the sport and art of altering their appearance, but were, instead, for dogs.

Dogs?!

People, people, people. I'm no dog lover, but many of you are. Fine. Wonderful. Enjoy your companion animals. But please, remember that they are, indeed, animals. Let them be animals. Don't tart them up with alien scents; don't paint their nails; don't treat them like furry, four-legged dolls. Don't drag their happily anarchic little selves into your shallow world of shiny-shiny.

And, fer chrissake, if you have an extra hundred bucks burning a hole in your pocket, how about donating it to a good cause?

Okay, okay, so I'm a bit cranky. I'll leave it alone - but I'll end with a video made by the Juicy Crittoure folks (they're the women behind the Juicy Couture line of trendoid crapola for humans of both sexes). See if you can make it through all two minutes and sixteen seconds without needing a shot of insulin to rebalance your blood-sugar level.  [back to top]

City-wide Wi-Fi is being proposed in many quarters as the answer to the "digital divide" that's splitting us into a nation of information haves and have-nots. While overcoming this barrier to full info-equality is a laudable goal, I've one word for those who are championing Wi-Fi as the solution:

Stop.

There's a better solution on the way - and recent developments at Intel and elsewhere are bringing it rapidly within reach.

It's called WiMAX - well, actually its technical name is IEEE 802.16e-2005, but let's stick with the marketing term (which is actually a rather convoluted acronym for worldwide interoperability for microwave access). WiMAX's great advantage over Wi-Fi is that its range is measured in miles rather than in the mere feet of Wi-Fi's range.

To blanket an entire city with Wi-Fi would require hundreds - even thousands - of Wi-Fi base stations and antennae. To get the same coverage using WiMAX, only two or three WiMAX towers would be needed.

The benefits are obvious - especially when you take into account future infrastructure upgrades. Imagine, for example, a city that had installed a Wi-Fi network based on the 802.11g protocol - it would have to think long and hard about upgrading all those base stations to the latest and greatest 802.11n protocol. With only a few towers to attend to, WiMAX protocol upgrades would be far easier to implement.

Intel engineers are speeding WiMAX's development. Last month at its Developers Conference, Intel announced a technology initiative called Echo Peak that will combine Wi-Fi and WiMAX in a single power-efficient module. Be assured that Echo Peak is no theoretical pie in the sky - expect to see laptops with Echo Peak Wi-Fi and WiMAX combos appearing in the second half of next year.

Echo Peak has a number of slick technical innovations. (To read more about them, you can download an Intel marketing piece by clicking here.) One of the slickest is its implementation of an intelligent antenna technology called MIMO (multiple input, multiple output), first seen in broad use in the 802.11n protocol. MIMO allows both Wi-Fi and WiMAX to split signals into multiple streams, and send and receive those signals over two or three antennae at a time, thus doubling or tripling performance.

"So," you may be wondering by now, "if WiMAX is so cool, why will we even need Wi-Fi in the future?" The answer is simple: speed. Wi-FI is much faster than WiMAX - it excels in local-area network (LAN) settings; WiMAX shines in wide-area network (WAN) use.

How much faster is Wi-Fi? Ah, here we enter the murky world of reality. Wireless performance is a highly variable beast - there are many, many factors than affect real-world performance. Theoretically, though, Echo Peak's 3x3 MIMO-enabled Wi-Fi setup will be capable of 450Mbps downloads and uploads (3x3 refers to three antennae sending, three receiving); its 2x2 WiMAX downloads will max out at 10Mbps and 1x2 uploads at 3Mbps.

But don't let that speed disparity concern you. Take a moment to test your current download and upload speeds, and you'll see that 10Mbps is quite zippy, indeed - especially when it's free and available everywhere.  [back to top]

Sometimes you need to slap together a fast, easy meal that's also "guestable" - that is, more impressive than Ragu 'n' spaghetti. Here's a fast, fast, hard-to-screw-up dinner. This recipe is for two, but it's easily modifiable for more - many more, in fact, if your pots are big enough.

INGREDIENTS:
• 12 tightly closed (live) clams - Although I suggest around six clams per diner, that number's not an absolute. If the clams are small, get more; if you love clams, get even more; if you don't like clams at all, then why are you reading this recipe?
• 1 can Snow's Chopped Clams - Minced are also fine, but I like 'em a bit bigger than those tiny stick-between-your-teeth minced pieces.
• 2 8-ounce bottles of Snow's Clam Juice
• 1/2 cup chopped mushrooms - Wild mushrooms are almost always better than those flavorless Buttons that you find in most every American market. For this recipe, Lobster mushrooms are great. Chop them into cubes of about a half-inch or so.
• 3 cloves garlic - Minced or crushed.
• 1 tbsp. olive oil - The lighter the better.
• 1/4 tsp. dried red-pepper flakes - Don't overdo it!
• 4 to 6 leaves fresh basil - Dried basil will work, as well, though the flavors won't be as fresh and pronounced. Slice them across their width, with each slice being about one millimeter in width. Use about a tablespoon or less of dried.
• 1 handful fresh parsley - Dried parsley is okay, but nowhere near as "bright" as fresh. Chop it up rather coarsely. Use about a tablespoon or more of dried.
• 2 tsp. dried oregano - I'm a fan of Mexican oregano, such as that from Ranch Gordo, but practically any kind will do. (If you can find fresh oregano, you're doing better than I.)
• 2 scallions (aka green onions) - Clean and skin them, then cut the white and half of the green on a diagonal, with each slice being about a millimeter in thickness. If the scallions are thick, you may want to cut them lengthwise before beginning the diagonal slicing - even into lengthwise quarters, if that makes you happy.
• Your choice of pasta - Traditionally, this sauce is served with linguini, but it's totally your call regarding type and amount. Just make sure it's a good, dense, dried pasta - fresh pasta is too mealy and squishy to stand up to all the clam juice. I'm a fan of Gragnano ("Pasta makers since 1555"), but even such standard brands as Barilla or De Cecco are better than fresh pasta. I use about half a pound of pasta for two diners.
• Fresh ground pepper and sea salt to taste

PREPARATION:
First, the 'shrooms. Start the pasta water so that it'll be boiling by the time you'll be dumping the clams into the pot - about ten to fifteen minutes from now. Then heat the olive oil in a lidded saucepan until it's more than medium hot, but not smoking. Dump in the garlic, and stir constantly so it doesn't stick to the bottom of the pan - some will, but don't worry about that now. After the room smells nice and garlicky - about two minutes or so - dump in the mushrooms. Keep stirring and scraping until the mushrooms are gently cooked - about two to five minutes, depending on the kind of mushrooms you're using. You may need to add a bit more oil, depending upon how "thirsty" your mushrooms are.

Let it Snow! Turn the heat down to low, wait about 15 seconds for the pan to cool a bit, then pour in the bottles of Snow's Clam juice. Stir and scrape to make sure than there's no (or very little) garlic stuck to the bottom of the pan. Now pour in the can of Snow's Chopped Clams, including - of course - all the clam juice in the can. Now dump in the basil, parsley, oregano, and red-pepper flakes. Stir the whole mix well, then put the lid on the pan to let the sauce simmer for five minutes or less.

Kill the clams! Before you initiate the clam-execution phase, start boiling your pasta. (Of course, the timing will differ depending upon the type of pasta you're using.) Now turn the heat up a bit under your sauce, but keep it around medium or lower - if the clams cook too fast they'll get tough. Dump the live clams into your pan, making sure that they're as covered as possible with the clam juice. Put the lid back on the pan, and let the clams simmer at medium or low heat - don't let them get to a rolling boil, just a nice, gentle simmer. By the time your pasta is done, the clams should be fully open - when they are, it's time to serve 'em. If a clam should fail to open when all of its bretheren are fully a-gape, toss it - it was already dead, and trust me, you don't want to eat a bad clam. Heap the cooked pasta into bowls, array the cooked clams around the outside of the pile-o-pasta, then pour the sauce into the middle of the pile, making sure you use up all that precious clam juice. Sprinkle the scallions over it all, and serve, letting your guests salt and pepper the dish to their own tastes. A nice olive bread is great for soaking up all those juices.

Bonus bread trick: If you do decide to serve some sort of good bread with this dish - which I heartily recommend - preheat your oven to 450 degrees. Then when you have about three of four minutes left before serving time, run the loaf under the faucet until its surface is wet, then pop it into the oven, right on the rack. When you're ready to serve the pasta, take the bread out of the oven (it'll be hot, so be careful), put it on a dish, and serve it up.  [back to top]

Just a short note today, and - to me at least - a bit of a depressing one.

Yesterday Marilyn and I went to the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco (JCCSF) to hear an interview with Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Prize-winning novelist, author of Snow, Istanbul, My Name Is Red, and other works. He being Turkish and Marilyn and I both being large-scale Turkophiles, it was a can't-miss event (though a dud in my opinion, but a success in Marilyn's).

What I will remember about the evening, however, was something that happened before the interview began, while Marilyn and I were killing some time in Dayenu, a Judaica store that rents space in the JCCSF. After perusing, oh, about a squillion menorahs, various ritual items whose meanings escaped my meager knowledge of the religion, and a tightly packed wall of Jewish-themed books (although I'd argue it was a wee bit of a stretch to include Fear of Flying and Ulysses), I spotted a laminated map of Israel hanging on a wall. My knowledge of Hebrew hovers around absolute zero, but I was able to read the title of the map, which, unsurprisingly, translated to "Israel."

But was it? This map had no visible indication whatsoever of any distinction between the disputed West Bank and pre-1967 Israel. Perhaps some of the Hebrew writing on it indicated some sort of demarcation between the disputed and undisputed lands, but there was no border that I could discern. Israel was Israel, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan.

So there we were in famously liberal San Francisco, gazing at a map whose large type and lamination made it appear as if it were designed for sticky little kids' educational purposes - and that map had no indication whatsoever of the national and cultural aspirations of the people from whom the West Bank was taken forty years ago.

As I said above, just a short note today, and - to me, at least - a bit of a depressing one.  [back to top]

I'm woefully out of shape, but that's not the point.

I just returned from a few days of hiking in Yosemite National Park, where I saw the future - my own, my country's, and my planet's - and it spooked me. We have some painfully important decisions to make as a culture in the next 100 years or so - and, no, I'm not talking about climate change, conservation, or sustainability, as important as all of those may be. I'm talking about how long each of us should live.

Let me explain.

These ruminations began as I entered the park, and stopped for a moment to gaze up at the towering magnificence of El Capitan, which rises 3,593 feet straight up from the valley floor. A few other valley visitors stood with me, many pointing out climbers scaling the rocks two-thousand or so feet above our heads. I couldn't see the climbers - aging eyes, you know - but with the help of some young-uns I pointed my Nikon's long lens in the right direction, and shot the images that accompany this blog entry: first a simple photo of El Capitan itself with the area of the next image marked, then a lucky long-lens capture of five climbers, and finally one fuzzy blow-up of one of those climbers. Though I didn't think about it at the time, this inability of mine to see what others could see may have begun the train of thought that has led to this entry.

A few hours later I found myself at the trailhead of the Happy Isles to the Top of Nevada Fall trail - a 5.8 mile loop that my guidebook rated as "moderate" in difficulty. My idea was to take a leisurely four or five hour jaunt and return with a hearty appetite for a manly steak-and-beer dinner.

Things didn't work out quite as I had planned. But that's not the point, either.

The first mile or so of the trail was steep - well, it was to me and other over-50 hikers that I passed as they were panting in the shade of the pines. I'd love to have blamed the elevation, but at only 4,000 feet it was a good 1,000 feet lower than the Colorado Rockies' ballpark, and if Troy Tulowitzki can run out a triple at that elevation, I should certainly be able to climb a hill. So I hiked on, heart pounding and chest heaving. No problem, just a good workout - something this keyboard jockey rarely subjects himself to.

The real challenge began after I crossed the Vernal Fall Bridge and continued up the Mist Trail, with the goal of reaching the top of Vernal Fall before heading on to Nevada Fall. Vernal Fall is 317 feet from crest to river, and the Mist Trail climbs that elevation as an irregular, slick, granite stairway - the equivalent of a 30-story stairway.

To make a long story short, by the time I had finished trudging up those 600-plus stairs, I was able to manage only 20 steps at a time without resting, was beginning to feel noticeably dizzy (despite good hydration practices), and was beginning to viscerally understand the verb "to bonk" (and I definitely mean understanding it in its physical and not its British sexual definition). Most important however, was the fact that my bum knee was bummer than it had ever been.

As I flopped onto the granite apron around the head of the falls, observing that none of my fellow (and mostly younger) hikers seemed all the worse for wear, it dawned on me that not only had I just completed my day's uphill hiking a bit early - Nevada Fall being now unattainable - but that this was a hike I'd never make again. My knee would see to that. My aging knee. My knee that'll most likely need to be replaced some day in the not-too-distant future.

My limitations were staring me in the face.

Oh, of course, I've always known that I have limitations - I'll never catch for Roger Clemens, astonish Stephen Hawking with my deep understanding of supersymmetry, or find a picture of me and my band on the bedroom walls of college students everywhere - just to name three activities I've enjoyed but never excelled at.

But somehow this was different. Here I was, in a place that I'll most likely never visit again, watching backpackers pass me either on their way to climb Half Dome or to travel 211 miles down the John Muir Trail to Mt. Whitney. Somehow, it was more sobering to me to know that there are places I can't go rather than simply things I can't do. But this is still not the point I'm working towards.

Then my dad crossed my mind. Dad will turn 90 this year. He's been retired for about 30 years. He can't walk any distance at all - a half a block is a killer trek for him, even after hip replacements. He sits, reads, cooks, watches television, and putters around the house. That's all - and in thirty years, I'll be like him. And so will you. Dad's one of millions of people around the world whose lives have been radically extended because of modern medical technology, but whose lives are limited because of both age and infirmity.

I'm one of those people, as a matter of fact. Without modern medicine - once with powerful antibiotics and another with cutting-edge diagnostics - I'd be double-dead. Multi-kaput. Dupli-fini. There'd be one fewer blogger. One fewer liberal. And, more important, one fewer mouth to feed.

And so I'm finally ready to posit my point after that long, tortuous, personal introduction...

How long should we live?

Perhaps "population control" shouldn't just focus on the limitation of population increase on the front end, meaning birth, but also on the back end, meaning death.

Of course, it's nigh-on heretical to say that life shouldn't be extended, to use Malcolm X's words in a new context, "By any means necessary." And in the mind of the fundamentalist, you can remove the "nigh-on" - cf. Terry Shiavo.

But do the math. According to the CIA, as of July of this year world population passed the 6.6 billion mark. An average American white guy born in 1900 could have expected to live until he was 46.3 years old (his black brother, by the way, wouldn't even make it to his Jesus Year - he was scheduled to snuff at 32.5 years old); a white guy born in 2004 can expect to hang around until late 2081 - 77.8 years.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the population of the U.S. grew at an average annual growth rate of 1.2% between 1950 and 2005; however, the rate of annual growth for those over 75 years old was more than double that at 2.8%. The same study notes that by 2050, 12% of Americans will be over 75.

In past centuries, population growth was kept in check by war, famine, and disease. Aside from the horrific slaughters of the 20th century (over a million people per month died during the final years of WWII - the Greatest Generation, my ass), we're making good progress towards alleviating the ravages of disease and famine in locations where we industrialized nations care to spend our dollars. As a result, populations are growing - and aging - worldwide. Technology is doing its part to extend life as well - and when I say "technology" I don't only mean multi-million-dollar diagnostic tools; I also mean more-modest technology such as that which enables mass production of malaria-preventing mosquito nets.

All in all, we're all getting older. And as we age, we - let's be brutally honest now - become more and more of a drain on the resources of our communities and our countries. That is simply a fact. A cold fact. A hard fact. But a fact.

So what do we do? Put a ceiling on life, and at Age X hand our seniors a nice parting gift and ship them off to become Soylent Green? Hardly - to do so goes against every tenet of cross-cultural morality.

We do, however, have some immovable objects and irresistible forces - facts - that we need to face. Let's take a look at 'em:

• Our planet's ability to sustain human life is not infinite (insert "duhhh!" here).
• In all but a few benighted locations, life-spans worldwide are lengthening.
• Older people, on average, have declining mobility, independence, and productivity, and are net drains on a community's physical resources.
• Over-population is threatening the ability of large areas of our planet to sustain ever-enlarging human communities, as are declining energy availability and increasing energy consumption.
• Religious pressure groups are resolutely fighting voluntary population control on both the front end and the back end of life.

Questions need to be asked: Should we get older simply because we can? Is it moral to do so? Can we - and our planet - afford it? Is it moral to search for a solution? Do we need to rethink our own attitudes about our own aging - its inevitability and its length?

I have no answers to these questions yet - but I'm certainly going to start wracking my brain to try to figure out what the next steps should be.

After all, I'm not getting any younger.  [back to top]

Homelessness is the number-one, top-of-mind, hot-button topic here in San Francisco these days. The newspapers and radio shows are all over it, with readers opining in group-think articles such as "Residents Want Answers to Homeless Problem," one local public radio station hosting a forum on the S.F.P.D.'s new "Homeless Sweep" of the South of Market area, and an unending drumbeat from the sagging San Francisco Chronicle, with stories such as "'Enough Is Enough,' SF Says of Homeless" and editorials such as "The Mayor's Dropped Ball," all led by columnist C.W. Nevius's ongoing reports from the streets and the parks.

This being San Francisco, there's more heat than light to this debate. The homeless are portrayed either as poor unfortunates being victimized by the heartless and the selfish, or as good-for-nothing bums who spend their days crapping in public, harassing passersby, and leaving used hypodermic needles in kiddies' playground sand. If you're tired of stepping in bum dung on your doorstep each morning, you're branded as a yuppie Nazi, and if you want your city to not criminalize bad luck, you're branded as a softhearted, softheaded patsy of the parasitic.

Both sides are wrong - and there can be no resolution to this debate until we correctly define the challenge.

Let's start, then, with the label we've given to those people about whom the debate centers: "The Homeless." Bad terminology. There's no such thing as The Homeless. There are a myriad different reasons for those folks to be wandering the streets day and night, and lumping them all into one group - The Homeless - is as absurd as defining The Japanese, or The Overweight, or The Music-Lover.

You'd think that, of all places, this self-congratulatory City That Has Risen Above Stereotypes would be able to recognize this simple fact.

There's no blanket solution to all those wandering individuals. The down-on-their-luck need to be given a clean cot and three squares while they get their act together. The raving lunatics need to be taken into treatment before they hurt themselves or others. The lazy bums need to be tolerated unless they're breaking the law, then they need to be busted. The addicted need treatment, not jail. And, of course, there are those who have various combinations of each challenge, and need combinations of each form of support and justice.

Of course, individualized attention is expensive - but it works. And it's the only way that we can make our streets clean and safe for all of us - which, as citizens of this crazy ol' town, is perfectly our right to expect.

So let's stop talking about The Homeless, and look at each wandering soul as A Homeless Person, and treat each of them as individuals - helping, treating, tolerating, and busting each as appropriate.

So no more name-calling, okay, fellow citizens? It's a rare San Franciscan who's either a Nazi or a patsy - let's work together on this one, along with all those individuals who are currently making our city a far less pleasant place to live than it has ever been - for all of us, whether we have a fixed address or not.  [back to top]

The Nobel Prize in physics was awarded today, and to the delight of all of us computer-storage geeks, it went to Albert Fert and Peter Gruenberg, the discoverers of the giant magnetoresistive effect (aka GMR) - which, by the way, I defined briefly in a recent article I wrote for Mac|Life.

I won't dig into GMR here (the links above can explain it to you, should you care), but suffice it to say that this effect is what makes possible the enormous amount of storage in your computer, your TiVo, your hard-drive-based iPod, and the like.

(Look out! Memory Lane ahead!)

When working at the Exploratorium in the early 1980s, I was one of the administrators of a 16-person multi-user computer system. (For you aging geeks out there, it was a CompuPro 8/16 running Digital Research's MP/M.) We had been using 8-inch floppy drives for our storage, but with multiple users on the same machine, a system based on four 1024-kilobyte floppies was a true pain. When two people tried to save their files at the same time, for example, all work ground to a halt as the drives thrashed. When four people decided to save at the same time, we referred to the resulting delay as "burger and a beer" - meaning it was time to go to lunch rather than wait for the sytem to catch up

To the rescue came an Exploratorium donor - sadly, I can't recall the name of the company - who gave us an 80-megabyte hard drive. We were absolutely astounded at the vast capacity that had been gifted to us. Eighty megabytes! Even when we partitioned it up for our sixteen users, that left each of us with an astonishing five megabytes all to ourselves! How would we ever fill that much space?!

Now, of course, one tune on our iPods can consume five megabytes - or more, for those of us who like to encode using Apple Lossless.

There are, of course, many reasons for the incredible leap in storage capacity from then until now, but I'd be willing to bet that nothing has had quite the impact on storage capacity than the work of Fert and Gruenberg. Thanks, guys, for making - among a squillion other things - this website possible.

And thanks to the Nobel folks for recognizing such a practical, quotidian device as the common hard drive. Salut!  [back to top]

First things first. If this website is being monitored by one of Bush's covert ops, I want to get two things straight.

One: Ye gods, you guys must have a wonderfully healthy budget! Can I have some? Just a couple hundred thou a week would do - you wouldn’t even miss it.

Two: I have no love for the Iranian mullahs and their cranky spokesmodel, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Any country that executes gay folks is not my idea of a lovely place to raise kids. Or, for that matter, to find advice on Victorian window treatments.

Now that we've got that out of the way, come with me for a moment on what Albert Einstein called a “thought experiment.”

It’s 2075. You’re a proud American. Your neighbors, Mexico and Canada, have been invaded by a country with the most powerful military force ever assembled on our planet. Both succumbed quickly; both are in anarchic disarray.

This invasive superpower has in its arsenal a weapon that could instantly flatten any American city - New York would be a wasteland, Houston an open sore, San Francisco’s little cable cars would be blown halfway to the proverbial stars.

However, in the past, other countries had successfully prevented their cities from being annihilated by developing a comparably hellish weapon.

Remember, you’re a taxpaying American threatened by a technologically advanced superpower. You know that your country is also technologically advanced, replete with world-class scientists and weapons architects. Wouldn’t you demand that your government spend whatever it took to develop an effective deterrent to attack from the country that had recently overwhelmed Canada and Mexico? Wouldn’t you hail as heroes your proud countrymen who looked that superpower straight in the eye and said, “We’re Americans. Don’t mess with us!”

Sure you would.

Personally, I don’t know how to solve the Iran-with-the-bomb problem (and it is a problem - as is Israel-with-the-bomb, and, for that matter, us-with-the-bomb). But I sure as hell know why they’re racing to get one.

If I were an average, day-to-day, working-for-a-living, patriotic Iranian, I’d vote out of office any politician who didn’t want to protect me from the nightmare of the American neocons.  [back to top]

If you haven't yet read Seymour Hersch's excellent article in the October 8, 2007 edition of The New Yorker about Bush's Iran-attack planning, please do so. Now. I'll wait. (Don't subscribe? Don't worry - it's also available online.)

Back so soon? Now, If you're like most people I know, you're probably thinking, "Yeah, that's a bit scary, but there's no way in hell that Bush would be dumb enough to bomb Iran. Even he's smart enough to see what a mess we've gotten ourselves into in Iraq, and even he knows that Iran is a far more powerful, far more modern, and far more united country than Iraq ever was. Even the Iraqi government has declared that bombing Iran would be A Very Bad Idea, knowing - since they actually live in that neighborhood - that doing so would seriously destabilize the entire region, embolden both Shia and regional nationalists, incite revenge attacks and blockades, and anger geopolitical heavyweights with economic interests in that region - such as China. Even if Bush isn't foresighted enough not to go there [you think], there are plenty of others in government and the military who'll stop him. No worries."

Don't be so sure.

First of all, while you (and most of America) may see Iraq as an unmitigated disaster, Bush actually believes that we have turned the corner there, and that - thanks to David Petraeus - "victory" is now possible. The lens through which he views the middle east is colored by that rosy outlook. Where most viewers see a slide into disaster - or, at best, a brutal stalemate - Bush sees measureable progress towards his goal of stabilizing America's future oil supplies (oh yes, and "bringing democracy to oppressed people").

Also - and more importantly - the marginalization of Iran's growing influence is critical to Bush's vision of a middle east that leans west when it comes to supplying a safe and steady stream of affordable oil. Never mind that the Iraq war removed Iran's (then) largest and most brutal enemy, and never mind that the Iraq war also gave Iran easy access to powerful influence in the government of its former adversary - that is, never mind that Bush's actions have greatly strengthened Iran's hand in the area. From Bush's point of view, a middle east with Iran as the dominant political player is an unthinkable outcome. He simply can't let it happen.

And then there's good old-fashioned hubris. The United States, after all, has the most powerful military that the world has ever seen. Every time that military is unleashed on a specific, measurable, limited target, it thoroughly crushes all opposition - as it did to the Iraqi army in 1991 and 2003. A series of "surgical strikes" on Iranian targets would no doubt be generally successful - if success can be measured merely in targets destroyed. Most certainly, American lives would be lost due to Iran's rather sophisticated defenses, but that's the cost of war, and a cost Bush believes he can afford.

So, Bush believes that things are looking up in Iraq, that the marginalization of Iran is critical to the success of his plan to westernize the middle east, and he's confident that he has the overwhelming military might needed to strike effectively.

Still think he won't bomb Iran?

The problem is, do you for a moment believe that he and his cadre have thought through all the ramifications of such a strike? If the hideously botched occupation of Iraq is any indicator of the depth of the Bush team's competence and foresight, the moment that a "successful" strike against Iran has been completed is the moment that our next disaster will begin.  [back to top]

One of the great treats of this time of year - the weeks surrounding the Harvest, Chrysanthemum, Nut, Mulberry, Singing, or Open Sea Moon (depending upon whether you're American, Chinese, Cherokee, Choctaw, Celtic, or New Guinean) - is the wide variety of peppers to be found in farmers' markets. Whether you eat them raw, slice and sauté them, stuff them, or roast them, there's very little you can do to ruin a fresh, ripe pepper, whether you're working with a sweet Giant Marconi or a tongue-ravaging Red Savina Habanero. (For a great introduction to chile lore, check out the website of the "UK Chile-Head," Graeme Caselton - his database of varieties is especially impressive.)

As I normally do on Saturdays, I visited San Francisco's Ferry Plaza Farmer's Market last weekend, checked out what was freshest, then built a dinner around that ingredient. Luckily for me (and, I flatter myself, for my fellow diners that evening), fine peppers were in abundance. I was seduced by a lovely heap of Italian Gourmets, and so I came up with the following extremely simple-to-make centerpiece for that evening's meal (serves six).

INGREDIENTS:
• 3lb boneless pork loin roast (Pastured and grass fed, if possible - factory-farmed pigs live a tortured life; we shop at the Golden Gate Meat Company. Humanely raised meat may cost more, but you don't have to eat meat every day, now, do you? Spending twice as much half as often is a tasty zero-sum way to shop.)
• 10 or 12 sweet Italian peppers, each around five or six inches in length (Try Carmens, Gypsies, Sweet Bananas, Italian Gourmets, Giant Marconis - whatever looks good.)
• 2 medium-sized sweet onions (I like Yolos, but they can be hard to find - Visalias or Mauis are nearly as good.)
• Sea salt (I'm partial to the bright white flaky stuff from the Ile de Re - you can pick some up at Williams Sonoma.)
• Fresh ground pepper

PREPARATION:
First you'll need to roast the peppers. There are two schools of thought concerning pepper roasting. One group of pepper aficionados says to brush them with oil, grill or broil them just enough to make their skins start show black spots, then enclose them in a tightly closed container to let them steam sufficiently to loosen their skins, then skin 'em (There's a good explanation of this technique on AllRecipes.)

This is a great method if you plan to feature you peppers in salads or sandwiches, and need them to retain a good measure of their raw flavor. However, when using peppers as ingredients in a meal such as this one, I'm more of the "burn 'em 'til they're black" school - I simply place them in the fire of my gas stove and let them sear until their skins are nearly completely black (a broiler will work, as well). After they're totally seared, I let them rest until they're cool enough to handle, and then, under running water, I wash off all the blackened skin, tear out the stems, rip 'em open, wash out the seeds, and strip off the inner ribs. If you followed this method, you should now have flat sheets of roasted peppers. Simply leave them to dry or pat them dry.

Then it's time to prepare the pork. You want to turn that nice cylindrical loin roast into a flat sheet-o-pork. Before you do, you can first remove the layer of fat on top of the roast. It's completely your call - I've both removed it and let it be, and my rolled roasts seem to come out fine. Leaving it protects the roast for drying out a bit, but leaving it also results in a layer of fat at the end of the cooking process, which you may want to then remove. Your call. Totally. Oh, and now would be a good time to preheat your oven to 325.

Find the sharpest knife you own. If the roast is tied, untie it. There's often a little "extra" strip of meat running the length of the roast; if there is, start cutting there; if there isn't don't worry about it. Being careful to keep the thickness of the slap you're creating consistent, "unroll" the roast by cutting it lengthwise in what will become a spiral pattern when you re-roll it. You should be able to turn a standard-sized roast into a slab that's around 12 to 15 inches in length.

Sauté your onions. Cut your onions into rather small pieces - say, about dime-sized or less - then warm some butter or olive oil to a medium heat and dump all the onion pieces in. Stirring constantly, sauté the onions until they're barely translucent - about five to ten minutes, depending upon how you define "medium heat." If you'd like, after you take them off the stove to cool, you can dump in a handful or so of finely chopped Italian parsley to brighten the overall taste a bit.

Assemble the roast. Now take your pepper sheets and cover your slab-o-pork with them. If you've used a variety of peppers, distribute them alternately - red, green, yellow, whatever. Then dump all your onions on top of the peppers. Finally, liberally dust the slab with sea salt and crack some fresh pepper over the whole concoction.

Rolling the roast back up can be a bit of a pain, so prepare to get messy. Roll it as tightly as you can without squeezing all the pepper/onion mixture out of it. Some will inevitably escape, but just stuff it back in there. Tie up the roast tightly with some strong cotton kitchen twine - you'll then need to restuff some of the escaping peppers and onions back in, most likely.

Roast the sucker. Place your rolled-up roast onto a rack in a roasting pan (if you left the fat on, it should be on top). Pop it into the preheated oven, where it should roast, undisturbed, for 1.5 to 2 hours. Check the meat's temperature after about 1.25 hours with an instant-read thermometer (every kitchen should have one - they're cheap) - normally pork is done when the thermometer registers 160, but I've found that rolled roasts often are done in the 135-145 range; I assume that's because the thermometer may be hitting the stuffing and not the pork. I dunno.

When the roast is done, take the pan from the oven and let the roast sit for about 10 minutes before you carve it. When you do carve it, first untie it (carefully!), then slice it into rounds of about a half-inch thick - they'll have lovely pinwheels of peppers and onions in them. A nice crisp Sauvignon Blanc goes well with this, as does a good hard cider or fruity lager. Enjoy.  [back to top]

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