I've read that Anonymous has found the names of about a thousand members of the Ku Klux Klan, and is preparing to release them.

I'm hoping that none of the 10 other people in this nation with the same first and last name as I are members, because it could be Hell for the rest of us. I'm also hoping that Anonymous doesn't add names of people whom it dislikes, especially as I might be amongst them.

A few years ago, I challenged their attack on Stratfor. Stratfor was a journalistic enterprise, focussing on issues of global politics (including military action) and security, and publishing both free content and content that required a paid subscription. Some at Anonymous were sure that Stratfor were, effectively, a criminal undertaking because

• Stratfor communicated off-the-record with policy wonks and with state officials (as did and do almost every other major journalistic enterprise and many of the minor journalistic enterprises); and
• Stratfor expressed opinions with which Anonymous vehemently disagreed.

So Anonymous stole e.mail, e.mail addresses, and credit-card information from the Stratfor servers. If one had so much as subscribed to a free newsletter from Stratfor, then one's e.mail address was made public, and one was subjected to hoax e.mail from Anonymous. Many who had simply paid for something from Stratfor had their credit card information used to make contributions to charitable organizations (each of which then had to spend resources on returning the stolen money, at a net loss).

The e.mail itself was given to WikiLeaks, which processed it with the help of other journalistic institutions. Some of these institutions shamelessly used the stolen information to their own advantage, though it didn't provide evidence of wrong-doing by Stratfor. Indeed, after almost four years, no evidence of criminal wrong-doing has ever been presented. Stratfor's greatest sin was gross incompetence in the field of security.

None of the major media outlets has drawn attention to the point that the supposed end that was to justify Anonymous's means was not met. They have been virtually silent about this attack on journalistic freedom. That's because, as I suggested in my entry of some years ago, these outlets are themselves afraid of being attacked by Anonymous.

Journalists are fond of seeing their profession as brave. Well, there truly are some brave journalists in this world, but they're in a minority, and the rest don't deserve to see themselves as heroes for keeping company with that minority.

Years ago, a friend and I were talking about something, and he mentioned Hitler. I declared

I don't know why you ever liked that guy!

in reply to which he barked

Oh! That is a lie![1]

Well, no, it wasn't a lie. I escalated by betting him dinner on the matter. Then I explained to him that, since the truth of a proposition is a precondition for it to be known, one of the ways that I could not know why he'd ever liked Hitler would be if he'd never liked Hitler. Another way would be if I'd never believed that he'd liked Hitler, regardless of how my friend really felt about Hitler.

Indeed, the contradiction of I don't know why you ever liked that guy! is I know why you at some time liked that guy! Formally,[2] So,

I don't know why you ever liked that guy!

was a truth (though perhaps not a simple truth, as he'd had trouble seeing it).

Having won the wager, I waived the prize; my objectives in betting had all been met. Now, had he won the wager, then I'm sure that he'd have collected; but had I claimed, as he'd thought, that he'd once liked Hitler, then he'd have been quite justified in extracting the dinner; it would have disincentivized my insulting him in such a way, and off-set the felt sting of the calumny.

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[1] That was how he spoke. He often began with Oh!, and when learning English in Hong Kong he had been taught to avoid contractions.

[2] (2015:09/24): I have edited the formal expression, seeking to have it capture more completely the structure of the natural-language expression.

A number of visitors have pinned images from this site to their boards at Pinterest. These actions wouldn't bother me, except that I am very offended with the way that Pinterest attempts to compel visitors to log-into their site to look at boards, and to register an account even to contact them over an issue. Pinterest throws a mask between their content and a visitor (and have tweaked the coding of the mask to prevent its blocking).

I used to have a Pinterest account, but I walked away from it over the demand that I be logged-in to see what my then-girlfriend had pinned to her boards. I find now that Pinterest has the chutzpah to mask the specific set of images from this site pinned to the boards of various of their users.

(Pinterest can drive visits to a site. But I don't allow such concerns to determine the management of this site.)

In order to obstruct the pinning of images from this site to Pinterest, I have added the tag

<meta name="pinterest" content="nopin" />

to the headers of this 'blog. This obstruction is imperfect, but Pinterest uses Amazon Web Services, and I don't want to block everything else that does. Nor do I want the code for this 'blog to test each visit to see whether the Pinterest client is attempting to effect a pinning.

On 15 July, there was a slip in my mailbox from the letter carrier, declaring that 71¢ postage were due on an item, which could be redeemed and retrieved at the post office after 09:00 on the next day. I was explicitly named on the slip.

Had this been an item that I'd allegedly sent without sufficient postage then, instead of my just receiving a slip, the item would have been physically returned, with a demand for more postage; so it was something sent to me.

USPS rates for First-Class mail are 49¢ for the first ounce, and 22¢ for each ounce thereafter. So, if someone were to misjudge the weight of an item, then it would be expected to have some integer-multiple of 22¢ too little (or too much) postage. To be 71¢ short, it would most likely have been dropped in the mails unstamped, or had all of its stamps stripped by postal machinery; in the latter case, one expects the stripping to occur sooner rather than later.

The most likely thing would be that this item were without stamps very early in process. And, in that case, it would have been delivered to the return address, with a demand for more postage, if there were a return address; so I guessed that there weren't. That had me curious.

Very shortly after 09:00 on 16 July, I was at the post office, with the slip. But the postal clerk was unable to find the item, and the carrier was not available. (He or she was probably already out, making deliveries.) The clerk insisted that she would take care of the postage due — I suspect that there were no provision for me to pay postage due on a lost item! — and have the carrier deliver the item.

However, it was not in my box on 17 July, nor on 18 July; it would seem still to be mislaid. So I'm left to conjecture.

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On 10 September, there was another slip in my box, declaring 71¢ postage due. While it might have been for yet another item, my guess was that it were for the same piece, having resurfaced. I had reason to go to the post office anyway, as some registered mail was there waiting for my signature.

When I attempted to pay for and collect the mail with postage due, it was again declared to be lost. The fellow behind the counter angrily resented my angry resentment, and I demanded to speak to his manager. The manager found the mail, which was lost as one more aspect of not following normal procedures.

The item was, as it happened, indeed the same item, and something that I had mailed. My scale had said that it were one ounce; apparently theirs said that it were two.[1] So it should either have been sent on to the addressee, with a demand for 22¢ more postage, or returned to my box with that demand, instead of my having been summoned to the post office with a demand for 71¢.

Instead of arguing about 41¢; I just decided to take the thing home, and not to resend it. There is no love lost between the intended recipient and me; and I consider him to be the primary victim of the USPS in this case.

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[1] Some day, I plan to invest in a one-pound weight of the quality used by Bureaus of Weights and Measures, and visit various post offices, testing the scales of their automated dispensers. My guess is that almost every one will overstated the weight. I don't expect that I'll have an opportunity to test the other scales, but I'd bet the innacuracies to be coördinated.

Although this is a non-commercial 'blog, I've no objection to those who make a living at 'blogging. And I've no general objection to those who try-but-fail to make a living at 'blogging. But making the principal theme of every few entries a pitch for support amounts to trying to make a living at 'blogging about
trying to make a living at 'blogging. And that's just not a good idea.

Addendum (2015:06/19): It might be art were one

At various times, I'm confronted with confusion by persons and by systems of characters with glyphs. Most of the time, that confusion is a very minor annoyance; sometimes, as when wrestling with the preparation of a technical document, it can cause many hours of difficulty.

It's probably rather easier for people first to see that a character may have multiple glyphs. For example, here are two distinct yet common glyphs for the lower-case letter a: and here are two for g:

People have a bit more trouble with the idea that a single glyph can correspond to more than one character. Perhaps most educated folk generally understand that a Greek Ρ is not our P, even though one could easily imagine an identical glyph being used in some fonts. But many people think that they're looking at a o with an umlaut in each of these two words: whereäs the two dots over the o in the first word are a diæresis, an ancient diacritical mark used in various languages to clarify whether and how a vowel is pronounced.[1] The two dots over the o in the German shön are indeed an umlaut, which evolved far more recently from a superscript e.[2] (One may alternately write the same word schoen, whereäs schon is a different word.)

Out of context, what one sees is a glyph. Generally, we need context to tell use whether we're looking at Ϲ (upper-case lunate sigma), our familiar C, or С (upper-case Cyrillic ess); likewise for many other characters and their similar or identical glyphs. Until comparatively recently, we usually had sufficient context, mistakes were relatively infrequent and usually unimportant. (Okay, so a bunch of people thought that the Soviet Union called itself the CCCP, rather than the СССР. Meh.) But, with the development of electronic information technology, and with globalization, the distinction becomes more pressing. Most of us have seen the problems of OCR; these are essentially problems of inferring characters from glyphs. It's not so messy when converting instead from plain-text or from something such as ODF, but when character substitutions were made based upon similarity or identity of glyph, the very same problems can then arise. For example, as I said, one sees glyphs, but what is heard when the text is rendered audible will be phonetic values associated with the characters used. And sometimes the system will process a less-than sign as a left angle bracket, because everyone else is using it as such. In an abstract sense, these are of course problems of transliteration, and of its effects upon translation.

Some of you will recognize the contrast between character and glyph as a special case of the contrast between content and presentation — between what one seeks to deliver and the manner of delivery. Some will also note that the boundary between the two shifts. For example, the difference between upper-case and lower-case letters originated as nothing more than a difference in glyphs. Indeed, our R was once no more than a different way of writing the Greek Ρ; our A simply was the Greek Α, and it can remain hard to distinguish them! I don't know that ſ (long ess) should be regarded as a different character from s, rather than just as an archaïc glyph thereof.

Still, the fact that what is sometimes mere presentation may at other times be content doesn't mean that we should forgo the gains to be had in being mindful of the distinction and in creating structures that often help us to avoid being shackled to the accidental.

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[1] In English and most other languages, a diæresis over the second of two vowels indicates that the vowel is pronounced separately, rather than forming a diphthong. (So here /koˈapəˌret/ rather than /ˈkupəˌret/ or /ˈkʊpəˌret/.) Over a vowel standing alone, as in Brontë, the diæresis signals that the vowel is not silent. (In English and some other languages, a grave accent may be used to the very same effect.) Portuguese cleverly uses a diæresis over the first of two vowels to signal that diphthong is formed where it might not be expected.

[2] Germans used to use a dreadful script — Kurrentschrift — in which such an evolution is less surprising.

There has been and is a lot of confusion over the English word entrepreneur. Now, I say English word advisedly, because, though entrepreneur was derived from a French word spelled exactly the same way, a word is not merely a sequence of symbols, but such a sequence in association with a concept or set of concepts, and the English word entrepreneur doesn't have quite the same meaning as the French word.

The French word means contractor or, more generally, one who undertakes.

We didn't need a new word for contractor; it would be contemptible affectation of one sort or of another to introduce a longer French word for such purpose. In fact, there was some attempt to engage in that sort of affectation in the 19th Century, first in the entertainment industry.

But the sequence entrepreneur was reïntroduced to English in the mid-20th Century with the intention of identifying a narrower concept that meritted a word of its own. That concept was of a person who attempts to create a market where one does not exist — offering a new sort of product, or offering a sort of product to those who have not been purchasers of such things.

The entrepreneur is not merely a small business person, nor an active business person, nor an independent contractor, nor some combination of the three. The entrepreneur is an economic explorer, seeking to cultivate new territory — typically with pecuniary profit in mind, but sometimes just for the satisfaction of having brought a market into existence.

Whatever the motivation, it is in the rôle of attempting to create markets that the entrepreneur is the great hero and the entrepreneuse the great heroine of the market economy. And some unconscious sense of that heroism has passed through our society, causing business people aren't such explorers to want to label themselves entrepreneur. The word has become diluted in general use, and many people are using it as if, well, it meant no more than the French word from which it were derived. Economists with a fair understanding of the market process shake their heads in dismay. We need a word for those heroes.

I frequently run across the problem of websites whose coders silently presume that all their visitors of interest have Javascript enabled on their browsers. Yester-day, I found this presumption affecting a page of someone whom I know (at least in passing), which prompts me to write this entry. (The person in question did not generate the code, but could suffer economic damage from its flaw.)

The reason that one should not presume that Javascript is enabled on the browsers of all visitors is that Javascript is itself a recurring source of security problems. Careful users therefore enable Javascript only for sites that they trust; very careful users enable Javascript only for sites that they trust and even then only on an as-needed basis; and paranoid users just won't enable Javascript ever. Now, in theory, the only visitors who might interest some site designers would be careless users, but we should look askance at those designers and at their sites.

(And trusting a site shouldn't be merely a matter of trusting the competence and good will of the owner of the domain. Unless that owner is also owner of the server that hosts the domain, one is also trusting the party from whom the site owner leases hosting. In the past, some of my sites have been cracked by way of vulnerabilities of my host.)

A designer cannot infer that, if-and-when his or her site doesn't work because Javascript is not enabled, the visitor will reälize that Javascript needs to be enabled; many problems can produce the same symptoms. Most of the time that sites don't work with Javascript disabled, they still don't work with it enabled. Further, the party disabling Javascript on a browser might be different from the present user; the present user might have only vague ideas about how web pages work. (An IT technician might disable Javascript for most browsers of users at some corporate site. Some of those users, perhaps very proficient in some areas but not with IT, may be tasked with finding products for the corporation.)

The working assumption should typically be that Javascript is not enabled, as this assumption will not be actively hurtful when Javascript is enabled, whereäs the opposite assumption will be actively hurtful when Javascript is not enabled.

The noscript element of HTML contains elements or content to be used exactly and only if scripting has been disabled. That makes it well suited to for announcements that a page will work better if Javascript is enabled

<noscript><p class="alert">This page will provide greater functionality if Javascript is enabled!</p></noscript>

or not at all if it is not enabled.

<noscript><p class="alert">This page requires Javascript!</p></noscript>

(It is possible to put the noscript element to other uses.) So a presumption that Javascript is enabled certainly need not be silent.

However, in many cases, the effect got with Javascript isn't worth badgering the visitor to enable Javascript, and the page could be coded (with or without use of the noscript element) so that it still worked well without Javascript. In other cases, the same effects or very nearly the same effects could be got without any use of Javascript; a great deal that is done with Javascript could instead be done with CSS.

The most effective way to hide some things is to shine a light directly upon them. People will then not believe what they are shown.

There's a recurring joke that proceeds along these lines:

What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual. What do you call someone who speaks just one language? American.

Sometimes, the reference is instead to the British. But let's consider the reality that lies in back of this joke.

The vast majority of people who are bilingual speak English as their second language. Why English? At base, because of the economic significance of those who speak English, especially of those for whom English is their native tongue. This significance originates in the past scope of the British Empire, especially in North America. The American economy was once the world's largest — at the present, the matter is muddled — and the combined size of the American economy with that of other primarily Anglophonic regions still exceeds that of the Sinophonic[1] or Spanish-speaking regions.

If no language had something like the economic significance of English, then most people who are now bilingual would instead be monolingual. As it is, they had good cause to know English, but it wasn't their first language, so they learned it as their second.

Thus, mocking people for being strictly Anglophonic generally amounts to mocking them for having been raised amongst the peoples of the linguistic group that has the greatest economic significance. It would be actively stupid to mock them deliberately on this score, and doing so thoughtlessly is not a very great improvement.

(I'm certainly not saying that there are no good reasons for those who know English to learn other languages.)

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[1] It may also be noted that the differences amongst what are called dialects of Chinese are often greater than the differences amongst what are regarded as separate languages. These variants of Chinese are labelled as dialects as part of a more general effort to create an illusion of national unity. Mandarin is a widely spoken language, but Chinese is really a family of languages.