Boston Marathon Bombing: Deriving some Physics and other info from video analysis

While the official investigations proceed, there is a ridiculous amount of speculation about the bombing, who did it, what it was, etc. Very little of this speculation is evidence based. Almost all of it is just blathering based on the beliefs or prejudices of the posters.
Instead, let's take a quick look at what we can know with certainty from the evidence we have.
The first thing we have to do is determine where the bombs went off. Fortunately, the New York Times provides an excellent infographic for that purpose:

Thoughts on the gun debate part seven: Treat guns like cars.

One of the frequent things I hear when discussing the gun control issue with many people is the proposal that we treat guns like cars. Recently, Michael Z. Williamson took a turn at that idea that I want to build on a bit. Let's visit that guns/cars equivalency. Let's turn it around for a moment. There are already rather a lot of gun laws out there which most folks who aren't "gun people" don't know about.  So, let's try the analogy in the other direction; as Mike asked the other day, how about we treat cars like guns?  Here's what would happen if we tried that.

Thoughts on the gun debate part six: A scholar's view of history.

This is going to be a short post. I want to call your attention to Steven Halbrook's lastest piece for the Fordham Law Review. He explores efforts to include a right to arms in their 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, and adoption of gun registration just in time for the Nazi occupation and gun confiscations.

The full article is available here. I'm going to cite (claiming fair use) a section from his conclusion.

Comparing England (or UK) murder rates with the US: More complex than you thought

Thoughts on the Gun Debate part 4a -- wherein I fix my oopsie in regard to comparing US and English murder rates... Oooops. It turns out that I was wrong.

This post edited after comments were reviewed on 3/29/2013.  Edits from that date will be noted with an Edit tag. 

First, lets get this out of the way.  I'm not going to fuss here about the terms "England", "The U.K", "Great Britain", "The Olde Country" or "The folks with those classy accents who live on some islands off the coast of Europe."  I'll be careful to cite things in the links, but don't chew me up on where I'm talking about.

On to the oopsie. I have frequently in this series referred to the English murder rates as historically low and currently very low compared to US murder rates.  I blandly accepted the murder statistics published by the UK Home Office as definitive.  I overlooked the details of what and how the English counted "murders." It turns out that was a big mistake.  (I was first turned onto my error by this post at Extrano's Alley.)

I fell into a definitions trap you may not be aware of. The shortest version is this. We count and report crimes based on initial data. The Brits count and report crimes based on the outcome of the investigation and trial. Yep, that says what I meant it to say.

Thoughts on the gun debate part 4

So, quick re-cap. We know from the last several posts that banning handguns in England did nothing to effect the English murder rate, that the murder rate in the US has fallen since around 1990, that the suicide rate hasn't surged, and that in nations with strict gun control suicides still happen, sometimes at even higher rates than the US.

The other question that seems reasonable is about who has guns, where they are found and how they are used.  Specifically, I'm talking about concealed carry license holders.  Different states have different rules about concealed carry ranging from Vermont's "We don't need no stinking rules" to Hawaii's "We have the ability to issue a license, but that doesn't mean we're going to do it."

Thoughts on the gun debate part 3

In the last rock, we looked at the murder rate in England after the gun bad following Dunblaine, and came up with "basically no effect."

That is to say, after the handgun ban went into effect in England, in January of '97, from then until 2003, the homicide rate went up from 11.5 per million to 18 per million.  I.E., in the six years following the handgun ban, the murder rate in England went up by 1.5.  Meanwhile, in the U.S, from 1990 to 2003, the murder rate fell from 9.8 to 5.5 per 100,000, despite the fact that during that time the number of handguns in the U.S. rose by more than 2 million.

From 2003 to 2011, the murder rate in England fell from 18 per M back to the 11.5 per M that it was at the time of the ban.   Meanwhile from 2003 to 2011 the murder rate in the US decreased at a slower rate, from 5.5 to 4.8 per 100K despite millions more guns making their way into the US population.

This suggests that at the very least, handguns don't by themselves drive the murder rate.

Thoughts on the gun debate part 2

So, in the last installment, I had decided to try to figure out what my position in regard to gun ownership should be. What was right and proper?  Early on, it became clear that at various times in various places in this country all sorts of laws had been passed and enforced regarding all sorts of guns and all sorts of people.  A data-based approach to the question didn't seem to be served by spending a lot of time researching those laws or why they were passed or their constitutionality, or the legislative and judicial history of gun control in the U.S.. What I wanted to know was what the effect of the guns was.  What was the risk and reward?

Thoughts on the current gun debate.

No one changes their minds based on stuff posted on the intertubes, and anyone who reads this ever will already have had access to all this info, but I'm going to try to pull it together for my peace of mind.

The first 50 years of my life I owned no guns.  I didn't hunt, I didn't shoot.  I largely "protected" my kids from guns, and was of the opinion in general that guns are sufficiently dangerous that I don't need them around any more than I need a chainsaw or an dune buggy or a motorcycle.  Guns are dangerous hardware, and I just didn't want to go there.  Note that I also didn't play with chainsaws, dune buggies or motorcycles.  I'm a geek.  I sat at my computer, and was content.

However, around 2003 something changed.  Perhaps, as I became more and more exposed to the gun community, as I  hung out with the 1632 writers and fans, as I met and socialized with other Baen authors, I became somewhat more acculturated to guns.  They moved out of the motorcycle category into the circular saw category  something that is dangerous, sure but not so intrinsically dangerous that they can't be handled and used.

At about the same time, my political position shifted too.  I'll never be a right-wing-ideologue but the longer I was a partner in a small business, the more I was forced to deal with out-of-state business regulations and taxes, the more I interacted with my customers about the regulatory difficulties that they had running their business, the more I came to the position that MOST of the regulations that apply to small businesses in the US are trickle down regs resulting from bad actions of a few idiots, and of large impersonal businesses.  More and more I came to ask why the government was involved in regulating things that I didn't see a need for them to regulate, nor an authorization for them to in the US or state constitution.

Creating new homepage default widgets for vTiger

Create a new, custom "default widget" for the vtiger home page.  

We wanted to do this pretty badly. However, the vTiger documentation on the code sucks dead bunnies and the only post anywhere about how to do it was by someone whose native language was not english and who assumed "rather a lot" about the environment you were putting the modification into.

This post documents our process to get custom widgets running in vTiger 5.4.0. I make no guarantees that I didn't leave something out, but I tried by golly, and it's pretty good documentation as it sits. Good luck and happy programming!

-_ Rick

Malicious Chrome Plugin.

I got bit.  :-/   I installed "Youtube Downloader." for what appeared to be a good and valid reason, really it was.

Then, today, when I was attempting to work on a page for a client, I saw a weird javascript in my source that started:

var hkghawgalkgklrgjlargjsrhg_hejrghakwghakwegkawefak = (function(){ var e=null,f=[[15,18,7,19,2,0,17,14,6,3,11,20,16,1,9,4,8,13,12,5,10],[19,1,16,5,14,17,13,18,15,8,2,20,7,11,4,9,12,10,3,6,0],...... (lots more) 

What's weird is that this was getting injected on a page that I had on my c: drive.

Harry Harrison died yesterday.

I'm getting really really tired of this sort of thing.

I'm really glad I keep meeting younger writers our I would have shelves full of nothing but dead people.

Wait.  That's happening anyway since I read all the younger writers in E form.

But still, you know what I mean.

But Harry Harrison?  DAMN.

I remember when Jim Henson died, and I thought... "Kermit the Frog died today."  Well, no, because as it turned out other people could write for that character.

On the other hand,  Slippery Jim died yesterday.  No one but Harry would ever be able to write that character.

Ship It!

Kris Rusch once again jumps to the core of an issue indi writers face: When to ship.  It's a classic problem in every industry... the cliche is "rip it out of the engineers hands and ship it!"

No product, no story, no program, nothing made by humans is ever perfect.

Recently, I had a conversation with a mid-list writer friend who told me that he had a three novel fantasy series whos publisher had folded before the books ever came out, and he was thinking about going back and revising it before putting it up on Amazon because he was a much better writer now. I controlled myself mightily and did not hit him.  I explained clearly that he should ship it, and make more money by writing something else.

Read Kris's version here:  http://kriswrites.com/2012/06/27/the-business-rusch-perfection/

Oh dear, yet another Colorado wildfire, this time resulting in mandatory evacuations of the entire town of Manitou Springs, which my brother once lived in and potentially threatening Colorado Springs, where Sarah Hoyt lives.  Ick Ick.  See Sarah's blog today for the latest: http://accordingtohoyt.com/2012/06/24/i-wanted-to-post-on-the-end-of-the-world/

and the current incident map:  http://www.inciweb.org/incident/2929/

Another view from Indie Land

John Locke, the best-selling kindle author comments on his still being on the outside, even after a distribution deal with Simon and Schuster: http://indiereader.com/2012/05/john-locke-on-the-big-problem-still-facing-indies/

Obligatory snippet:

I knew as an indie author it was unlikely I would ever be interviewed on TV, or have my paperback, Wish List, reviewed in print media. So I knew there was an exclusive club. But I thought my distribution deal made me a member, or at the very least, an honorary member. Boy, was I wrong! I hired a publicist and offered myself up…and quickly learned I was not part of the club! Not one media outlet would talk to me or review my book.  Even the little papers in the towns where I grew up and went to high school and college refused to do a story on me!

wow...  who would have thought that Mass Market PB distributed by S&S wasn't enough?  Wow.

Indie land - the grass is greener on THIS side of the fence

Yet another self-publishing success story from Jessica Park:  http://indiereader.com/2012/06/how-amazon-saved-my-life/

a couple of snippets to drag you into it.

Publishers pay terribly and infrequently. They are shockingly dumb when it comes to pricing, and if I see one more friend’s NY-pubbed ebook priced at $12.99, I’m going to scream. They do minimal marketing and leave the vast majority of work up to the author. Unless, of course, you are already a big name author. Then they fly you around the country for signings and treat you like the precious moneymaking gem that you are. The rest of us get next to nothing in terms of promotion. If your book takes off, they get the credit. If it tanks, you get the blame.
No, thank you. I’m all set with that.  

and

But you know what these silly NY publishers are doing? Running around trying to buy now-successful self-published books. I know more than one author who is making $50-150,000 a month (yes, a month) who are getting the most stupidly low offers from big publishers to take over that author’s book. Why would my friends take a $250,000 advance (if even offered that much), take a puny royalty rate, see their sales hurt by higher pricing, and completely give that book up for life? 

Yeah...  even if we never ever see those numbers, why would we accept that stuff?  

Stephanie Osborne (Google+) (blog) called me to task on early copyright on the digital publishing workshop mail list with a somewhat detailed explanation of copyright prior to the Statue of Anne. There was some and it was occasionally exercised, and when it was, it could be -- tough.

In one such conflict, 3000 died.  See: http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/gikii/docs2/corrigan.pdf

The decision of King Diarmait Mac Cerbhaill in Ireland in the mid 6th century gave the judgement "To every cow belongs her calf, therefore to every book belongs its copy." Other actions, and monopolies for booksellers and such existed back into the Greek classical times. However, such actions were rare prior to the development of printing. Even in an active book culture like the Romans while Roman book sellers would sometimes pay a well regarded author for first access to a text for copying, they had no exclusive rights to a work and authors were not normally paid anything for their work. The Statue of Anne was the first modern  copyright law, and deserves that recognition.  


Which still doesn't make DRM anything but evil. 

Here's a lovely piece on the morality of filesharing and it's implications for musicians.

assuming his data is accurate, the following is really troublesome:

• Recorded music revenue is down 64% since 1999.
• Per capita spending on music is 47% lower than it was in 1973!!
• The number of professional musicians has fallen 25% since 2000.
• Of the 75,000 albums released in 2010 only 2,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. Only 1,000 sold more than 10,000 copies. Without going into details, 10,000 albums is about the point where independent artists begin to go into the black on professional album production, marketing and promotion.

I have no reason to doubt it. The question is, what implications this has for the ebook business.

Is it just that we don't yet have the equivalent of Pirate Bay?

Letter to Emily White at NPR All Songs Considered.

http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/letter-to-emily-white-at-npr-all-songs-considered/

This screed is cross-posted from Amanda's digital publishing workshop email list...

http://digitalworkshop.amandasgreen.com/?p=71

In my message from my phone this past weekend, I asked anyone interested in my position on DRM to consider first reading Macaulay on Copyright. Anyone wanting to have a reasoned discussion on DRM has to start from a position on Copyright, and mine is little different than Thomas Babington Macaulay's.  Yes, it's from 1841, but honestly, there's little reasoning that changes from those two speeches.   Read them.  http://www.baen.com/library/palaver4.htm

Having said that, and assuming that you are informed on the subject of the history of copyright, then we can rationally move to DRM. 

Copyright didn't exist at all until the rise of the printing press in europe in the 15th century lead to the Statue of Anne in 1710.  Prior to the rise of the printing press, copying books was painful enough that little attention was given to paying the author, the payment (if any) went to the scribe for the manual labor.  Authors either wrote because they wanted to, or because their patrons paid them to.


[[[EDIT: Stephanie Osborne (Google+) (blog) called me to task on that - see more recent post.]]


After printing made copying books cheap and easy, authors decided that they would like to make -more- than the printer would pay them for the first run of their books, or more than they got by selling the books of their own that they had printed.  The idea of intellectual property, that "I wrote this, and I should therefore have ownership of my words" dates from this period around 1700. It's very recent.  Copyright law then, requiring that printers pay authors for later editions of their work and that you can't just create a new edition of a book at will came into being.  Book makers over the next century and a half expended no small effort on the book equivalent of DRM, putting in watermarks on some pages, fancy covers and titles, listing the edition and the printing on the copyright page so that unauthorized editions could be identified, etc etc.

Perhaps the finest moment of the fight against print-only copy prevention happened on the night of the release of the final book of the Harry Potter series, where a team of people had stationed a van with high speed internet uplink outside the first bookstore to offer the book.   Copies were purchased by people stationed near the head of the line, they had their spines cut off, and were dropped into multiple high speed double sided scanners, uploaded to waiting servers, OCR'ed, assembled and posted.  The first unproofed scans were on-line within 20 minutes of the opening of sales, and a well-proofed edition was completed by a croud-sourced efforted in less than three hours.    Ultimately, for reading, if a human can see the print in order to read it, that print can be captured to a camera, ocr'ed and posted. Nothing that allows a human to read a book can prevent copying. 

The effort for copy protection entered the technology arena in the last quarter of the 1800's as audio recordings entered the mass market.  Each manufacturer originally hoped to lock the people using their record players to the recordings that THEY made so that they wouldn't lose any money by people buying records from someone else.  Records were made with different diameters, rotation speeds, needle widths, etc etc in a hopeless attempt to limit aftermarket sales to just their artists and titles.  Needless to say it didn't work, and the industry quickly settled in on the 70 RPM shellac single.  In the late 1940's the introduction of the LP and '45 threatened to re-open the war but cooler heads prevailed. 

Rights restrictions reappeared again with the rise of the VCR and the introduction of intentional errors into the data stream which would be recognized by recorders and the recorder would refuse to record signals which had the "do not record this" flag set. Some manufacturers produced equipment that stripped it or ignored it of course, professionals needed that to LEGALLY copy video.

Then, the rise of the CD lead to 'real' DRM.  CD manufacturers were scared of the ability of home users to not just copy the music on a cd, but to copy it perfectly, bit for bit.  Over the years, the CD and then the DVD industry introduced attempt after attempt to make CD's and DVD's uncopyable.  Each effort resulted in the cooresponding copy tool being posted in an escalating war which has not yet ended but in which the encryptors are doomed. As we said above, if you can see it, you can copy it. 

Recognizing then, that ultimately, DRM is pointless in terms of copy-protection, what possible benefit is there to DRM on ebooks posted by individuals who are self-publishing to Amazon, Barns and Noble and iBooks? 

Consider that SOME DRM systems are one-way trap doors even allowing the above, if you were silly enough to purchase a PDF encrypted using Adobe's "Content Server 3" technology, and did not strip the DRM off of it then, while the decryption servers were still running at Adobe, you're screwed.  Adobe no longer supports CS3, not even to allow conversion to Content Server 4 (AKA Adobe Digital Editions).  Adobe only allowed a nine month window (March-December 2009) for migration to Adobe Digital Editions after the Content Server 3 servers were discontinued. Now, there are no servers running which can provide keys for CS3 content and so no way to get the content "on to the screeen" so that it can be un-drm'ed.  Even Adobe can't read those PDF's any more. 

Of  course, if you buy an Adobe Digital Editions book now, and don't strip the DRM off of it, it's likely that this fate will follow you again whenever Adobe gets around to offering CS5....

What putting DRM on an ebook (or a music file) does for the consumer is prevent the consumer from moving the content from machine to machine, from format to format as time passes. It means that if you quit using your ipod for listening to music and use an android phone instead, you couldn't listen to your Apple DRM'ed music.  It makes the publisher look greedy and hateful.  It causes pain and inconvenience. 

The one thing it doesn't do is increase sales. Publishers of movies, records, cds and books keep thinking that DRM prevents people loaning the content to friends and that means that the friends "steal" the content instead of buying it.  Not true. 

If you give me a book that I am unwilling to go pay for, then I -might- get hooked and go buy all of the works by that author, and might go buy the first one too.  If you give me all of them, I -still- might go buy my own in order to give the author a payment for the enjoyment.  But if you can't loan me the book, or cd, or mp3 or whatever, then I am -not- going to go buy the one that I was unwilling to go buy in the first place.  I -already- wasn't going to buy it. 

A file loaned is not a sale lost.  The movie and music industries like to pretend it is, but it's not true. Publishers who assume that their customers are thieves will result in their customers ACTING like thieves.  That is,  if they can't copy their books or tunes to a new machine, if they can't loan a book or a tune to a friend, then they have a REASON to learn how to crack the drm, and how to find "free" pirated copies on line.  If your pricing is reasonable, if your value is good, then most people are not theives.  I prefer to act on that basis. 

Finally, all of the data we have suggests that in the special case of books, titles without DRM result in more income to the author than titles with DRM. 

In discussions with a handful of Baen authors who have titles published by Baen and by other publishers results in a clear outcome when you crunch the numbers.

Publishers who insist on DRM sell fewer copies.  Platforms (apple) which insists on DRM sell fewer copies.

We also know that "here kid, try it, the first one's free" works.  Posting the first book of a series freely to the net, and posting non-drm copies of the books at reasonable prices results in increased sales even of unrelated backlist titles.  The data is unarguable for SF authors. 

MIT's results for their coursware, O'Reilly's results for their tech books, etc are exactly the same.

Note:  I make no comment in this about WATERMARKING copies as opposed to copy-protection.  Watermarking individual copies so that you can know what copy got posted to a pirate site and can track the copyright infringer may well be a reasonable action since it in-no-way interferes with the process discussed above. 

But, back to my original conclusion.  From both the POV of the author/publisher and from the POV of the reader, DRM is evil, full stop. 

Do not do it. 

-_ Rick

Yet another iteration...  http://www.vocshop.com/rick/barpost.html is now up to version 18.  I'm close to calling this good and moving to an epub creator based on it.  Comments welcome.

Prepping docs for e-books:

If you have a document you want to get into an ebook, there's a few things it's -very- hard for me to help you with.  The biggest one is the table of contents.  If you don't tag your chapter headings with Heading tags, it's really really hard for me, or for any program out there to get your chapters into the ToC.

Hint one of the week...  Sections should be Heading 1.  Chapters should be heading 2.  ToC Elements within chapters should be heading 3.  Things you do not want in the ToC should be heading 4 or lower, or should not be headings.

Hint two of the week:  Use BLOCKQUOTE to indent stuff you want block indented rather than changing the margins for the normal paragraph.

I know, this isn't the way you are used to writing.  Ebooks are different.  Sorry.

-_ Rick