Russell's Blog

The Supreme Court of California has ruled that the ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional. Even the dissenting justices wrote that they support same-sex marriage -- they are of opinion that it isn't mandated by the California constitution.

Honestly, I was expecting it to go the other way.

Patt Morrison had a lawyer for the losing side on her show a few minutes ago, and he basically framed his position this way: Allowing same-sex couples to get married places personal choice above community standards. Allowing people to ignore community standards will erode the morality of our culture. That sounds like a pretty weird argument for a supposedly conservative point of view.

When it comes to something as private and personal as marriage, let community standards be damned. America's uniqueness flows from its protection of personal liberty, even when that means protecting things that you would not do yourself, or that make you feel uncomfortable when other people do them. I've visited the Harmonious Society, and I like it here better. A lot of blood has been spilled over the years for the liberty we now enjoy. If living in a free society means we have to watch dudes kissing on TV, I'd say that's a bargain price for a lot of protected liberty.

Mazel Tov.

When I was little, we used to have Smog Alerts in Los Angeles fairly regularly, sometimes for a few consecutive days. My elementary school used to keep us inside on those days, and I used to stand on the second floor balcony that overlooked the foothills, staring at the crap in the air. Around noontime, it looked like an overcast sky, but without the ceiling effect. It diffused all the way to the ground. Then, in the afternoon, the sky would explode in a malignant display of colors. The horizon was capped by a black line hovering above the ground with a mantle of crimson and orange, like the lips of a steamed muscle. The sun would squat over the ocean in a rust-colored splotch smeared across a quarter of the sky. Shadows turned the color of tea, and the air turned pinkish and cloudy like you were peering through gasoline. It looked genuinely dangerous.

Astonishingly, those days were a measured improvement over what my parents experienced. The smog used to be thick enough to obscure the sun completely, turning the daylight into a diffuse glow. Sometimes, it blocked enough of the daylight to create a sort of murky twilight. Here is the first known photo of LA's smog, from 1943 :

Beijing is like that, except the mantle of smog is much, much wider than the one that covered Los Angeles in its worst years. For the Olympics, China has been working to improve the situation, but the progress so far is not very impressive. Days with good air quality, called "Blue Sky" days, would be emergency smog alerts in Los Angeles. The Beijing Air Blog has some interesting data on China's ongoing battle with air pollution, though there haven't been many posts in a while. Here is Tienanmen Square on April 27, 2008, which was officially a Blue Sky Day :

The smog extends pretty far from the city. This is the shot from a train window about a hundred miles north of Beijing. The factory (refinery? LNG plan? cement factory?) is only about a mile or two away, and it's almost completely invisible.

I'm not going to delve into why this is a bad thing. Global warming, cardiopulmonary disease, lead, mercury, yadda yadda. You already know the arguments, or you can make your own. Here's a reason that doesn't require any sort of scientific background to understand. The day after I took the photographs above, a heavy thunderstorm scrubbed the smog out of the sky. This is what China is supposed to look like :

China is a damn beautiful country, when you can see it.

I keep meaning to sit down and write a blog entry about what it's been like so far, but things keep happening at a break-neck pace, and I just haven't had time. I only have a few minutes to write something, so I'll write about one of the small annoyances of this crazy place: Plumbing.

As everyone knows, China is making a huge effort to modernize. For the most part, it has been quite successful. In America, we mostly experience China's modernization in the form of the ever-escalating technical complexity of Chinese imports. Not so long ago, only crappy plastic toys and knock-offs had Made In China stickers. Today, you are probably reading this post on a computer made mostly out of parts bearing the same imprint. However, the overwhelming majority of China's modernization is for domestic consumption only. The streets are jammed with cool Made In China products that you will never see in America. The electric scooters, for example. The cell phone service is better in your average one-horse Chinese village than it is in Los Angeles.

Americans tend to assume that most of China's economy is geared toward exports; it isn't. The flood of Chinese goods we see coming into the Port of Long Beach is just the oversplash of China's industrial berserker rage. Most of it stays right here.

On the other hand, they don't seem to have quite figured out plumbing. I was trying to figure out why my 17th floor hotel room always smells like a sewer. It occurred to me that maybe there was something wrong with the drain. Notice anything missing?

That's right. No trap. From the booming roar that issues from the drain every time I use it, it sounds like it's a pretty straight shot from the sink to the sewer main in the basement, seventeen floors down.

Whoever designed this fixture was clearly aware of this problem; the drain has a built-in airtight, noise insulated drain cover. They opted for a heavy rotating high pressure plug instead of a little bendy bit in the pipe.

As Mimi would say, "That's China."

From somewhere above the Mongolia/Siberia frontier.

I suppose it is somewhat fitting that, on my way to visit the planet's newly crowned Number One Emitter of carbon dioxide, I should get a fantastic view of the patch of the planet that all this carbon dioxide is having the most dangerous effect. I visited Greenland in 1993, so it's interesting to see what it looks like 15 years later. Normally I think out-the-window shots are pretty crummy, but I think these make up for their poor image quality and composition by being pretty damn interesting.

This is the ice pack on the Davis Straight, between the west coast of Greenland and Canada. As you can see, there really isn't any pack ice. In August of 1993, we had planned to sail across the straight to visit the Baffin Island. We had abandon those plans because the pack ice was too heavy to navigate, even for our specially equipped vessel. We had to hug the coast of Greenland, following shipping lanes kept clear with ice breakers.

This is the west coastline of Disco Island. In 1993, it was kind of impossible to tell where the pack ice ended and the island started. Now, it's pretty obvious. After we visited Disco Island, we spent a few rough days hammering our into Baffin Bay. The noise of the ice crashing against the hull was awful. Imagine being trapped in a garbage can while someone beats it with a chandelier. We gave up and turned around after a few days of it.

This is Disco Bay. In 1993, I remember standing on the Greenland side. The pack ice on the bay had ruptured, but it was very thick and clogged with icebergs. The noise of the ice grinding and grumbling on the chop was so loud that it was impossible to have a conversation without shouting. Now, it looks like the Charles River in Boston around springtime.

Here is a glacier on Disco Island, just 'cause it's awesome.

I have a bad habit. I often open my IMAP mailbox directly on the mail host with mutt. This inevitably causes occasional complicated messes when I butterfinger something. For example, a few days ago I accidentally moved all of the read messages to a separate mailbox. I merged the message back in, but not before my desktop, which was patiently monitoring my IMAP mailbox on the other side of town, decided to synchronize a few thousand messages with the IMAP server. This resulted in lots and lots of duplicate messages.

The trouble was, the duplicate messages had different X-IDs so, their MD5 hashes would be different. After fiddling around with formail for a few minutes, I got impatient and banged out this fun little Python hack :

import email, imaplib, getpass

M = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL( '**********' )

typ, data = M.login( getpass.getuser(), getpass.getpass() )
if typ != 'OK' :
    raise Exception, 'Login failed.'

typ, data = M.select()
if typ != 'OK' :
    raise Exception, 'Selection failed.'

typ, data = M.search( None, 'ALL' )
if typ != 'OK' :
    raise Exception, 'Could not get message IDs.'

id_list = data[0].split()
mids = []
for id in id_list :
    typ, data = M.fetch( id, '(RFC822)' )
    if typ != 'OK' :
        raise Exception, 'Could not fetch message ' + id
    mail = email.message_from_string( data[0][1] )
    mID = mail.get( 'message-id' )
    print mID
    mids.append( (mID, id) )

mids.sort()

dupes = []
for i in range(len(mids)) :
    if m[i] == m[i+1] :
        dupes.append( m[i+1] )

print 'Found ' + len(dupes) + ' duplicate messages.'

for m in dupes :
    typ, data = M.store( m[1], "+FLAGS", '(\\Deleted)')

print 'Marked ' + len(dupes) + ' for deletion.'

typ, data = M.expunge()

print 'Expunged ' + len(data.split()) + ' messages.'

Duplicates begone!

It's a little annoying that imaplib doesn't have a friendly wrapper function for marking messages for deletion, but M.store( m[1], "+FLAGS", '(\\Deleted)') does the job just fine.