Dowbrigade

This Christmas, Norma Moreira and her husband are sharing their home with 45 wise men.

Moreira, who immigrated to the United States from Ecuador in 1996, has been acquiring Nativity scenes for the past two decades. With her collection now standing at 58 (15 of which contain the three wise men), images of a cluttered storefront might come to mind. But when you consider that some figures are not much larger than a fingernail, it’s easy to understand how Moreira is able to comfortably share her Watertown home with all those creches.

from the Boston Globe, Christmas Day 2008

Merry Christmas, everyone! We couldn’t be prouder of our lovely and loving wife who today was profiled in a feature in the Boston Globe.  This story began as a blog posting on Dowbrigade News two years ago. A few weeks ago, Norma suggested I submit it to the Globe. Her collection has grown in the past two years, and they jumped on it like dogs on a meat wagon.

Let the record show that the Dowbrigade considers himself the luckiest man in the world for having found the perfect wife for his problematic personality.

Whatever else can be said about Barack Obama, the guy has guts.  Naming Hillary Secretary of State puts her square in the line of Presidential succession. According to the 26th Amendment to the US Constitution, the Secretary of State is 4th in line to succeed the President if he, the VP, the Speaker of the House and the President Pro Temp of the Senate are simultaneously killed or incapacitated.

If I were Obama, I would keep a close eye on Hillary during the annual State of the Union address. Should she suddenly siddle towards the door, I would feel very, very nervous…..

Consider the Bear Stearns Alt-A Trust 2006-7, a $1.3 billion drop in the sea of risky loans. Here’s how it worked:

As the credit bubble grew in 2006, Bear Stearns, then one of the leading mortgage traders on Wall Street, bought 2,871 mortgages from lenders like the Countrywide Financial Corporation.

The mortgages, with an average size of about $450,000, were Alt-A loans — the kind often referred to as liar loans, because lenders made them without the usual documentation to verify borrowers’ incomes or savings. Nearly 60 percent of the loans were made in California, Florida and Arizona, where home prices rose — and subsequently fell — faster than almost anywhere else in the country.

Bear Stearns bundled the loans into 37 different kinds of bonds, ranked by varying levels of risk, for sale to investment banks, hedge funds and insurance companies.

If any of the mortgages went bad — and, it turned out, many did — the bonds at the bottom of the pecking order would suffer losses first, followed by the next lowest, and so on up the chain. By one measure, the Bear Stearns Alt-A Trust 2006-7 has performed well: It has suffered losses of about 1.6 percent. Of those loans, 778 have been paid off or moved through the foreclosure process.

But by many other measures, it’s a toxic portfolio. Of the 2,093 loans that remain, 23 percent are delinquent or in foreclosure, according to Bloomberg News data. Initially rated triple-A, the most senior of the securities were downgraded to near junk bond status last week. Valuing mortgage bonds, even the safest variety, requires guesstimates: How many homeowners will fall behind on their mortgages? If the bank forecloses, what will the homes sell for? Investments like the Bear Stearns securities are almost certain to lose value as long as home prices keep falling.

from the NYTimes

Martialis heureka is a living relic of the earliest stages of ant evolution. Scientists have unearthed an ancient ancestor of ants from the soil of the Amazon rain forest that is probably the species from which all other ants evolved.

University of Texas at Austin evolutionary biologist Christian Rabeling, who discovered the blind, subterranean and predatory ant, dubbed it Martialis heureka, or “ant from Mars,” because of its alien characteristics.

Genetic analysis revealed that it is of a new species, genus and subfamily — the first such ant discovery since 1923.

It also appears to be from the very base of the family tree for all the world’s ants.

Martialis heureka has survived relatively unchanged by remaining hidden underground in a stable tropical environment, free of competition from other ants, Rabeling wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

from EarthWeek

Appearantly, the version of Wordpress running on the blogs.law.harvard.edu server has gotten a major upgrade. Unfortunately a busy RL schedule and a broken hand have limited out ability to fully explore this brave new world, but tonight, at the Thrusday Blogger’s Groupo, I am giving one of the most exciting new fapacities - embedding video - a trial run. Without further ado, lets see how it works…

Only four days into her reign as John McCain’s “soul mate,” or “Trophy Vice,” as some bloggers are calling her, on the ticket known as “Maverick Squared,” Palin, the governor of Alaska, has already accrued two gates (Troopergate and Broken-watergate), a lawyer (for Troopergate), a future son-in-law named Levi (a high school ice hockey player, described by New York magazine as “sex on skates”), and a National Enquirer headline about the “Teen Prego Crisis” with 17-year-old daughter Bristol.

from Todays NYTimes Maureen Dowd OpEd

And the French think they are so chic having a sex symbol as the WIFE of the President. With Sexy Sarah a chicken bone away from the Red Phone, we might all be in for a rootin’ tootin’ straight shootin’ surprise…..

Google seems intent on following the same path to world domination as the previous heavyweight champ - Microsoft - by releasing a “better browser” of their own. Known as Google Chrome, its chief innovation seems to be putting the tabs on top of the address bar. Quite frankly, it will take more than that to wean the Dowbrigade from Firefox 3.1 (OK, it isn’t quite installed yet).

We have been using this browser, in one form or another, since installing Netscape 1.0 over Christmas vacation in 1994. Before that we used Mosaic, and since then we have tried, among others, Opera, iCab, Thunderbird, Camino, Safari, and about a million versions of Internet Explorer. But we keep coming back to Netscape/Firefox.

Our current version is tuned up and tricked out, and does everything but tell us tomorrow’s lottery number. Of course, Chrome doesn’t have to be better than Firefox to be a success, just better than IE7, a ridiculously low benchmark. Undoubtedly it will engage seamlessly with the rest of the Google universe, but we see problems with endowing any human-directed entity with that kind of omnipotence. We already use Google’s search, tabbed homepage, map service, calendar, photo service, email, reminder service and image search. They have most of our email and photos and some of our documents and medical records.  Are they satisfied?  Noooo, they want more.  They want it all.

Power corrupts, etc. and it’s only a matter of time until Google morphs into the latest incarnation of the evil empire. We know that the corporate climate at Google is “different”. The road to hell is paved in good intentions.

Meanwhile, they have published a 38 page comic book touting their Better Browser. Here are a few highlights from Blogoscoped

:

* Google Chrome is Google’s open source browser project. As rumored before under the name of “Google Browser”, this will be based on the existing rendering engine Webkit. Furthermore, it will include Google’s Gears project.

* The browser will include a JavaScript Virtual Machine called V8, built from scratch by a team in Denmark, and open-sourced as well so other browsers could include it. One aim of V8 was to speed up JavaScript performance in the browser, as it’s such an important component on the web today. Google also say they’re using a “multi-process design” which they say means “a bit more memory up front” but over time also “less memory bloat.” When web pages or plug-ins do use a lot of memory, you can spot them in Chrome’s task manager, “placing blame where blame belongs.”

* Google Chrome will use special tabs. Instead of traditional tabs like those seen in Firefox, Chrome puts the tab buttons on the upper side of the window, not below the address bar.

* The browser has an address bar with auto-completion features. Called ‘omnibox’, Google says it offers search suggestions, top pages you’ve visited, pages you didn’t visit but which are popular amd more. The omnibox (”omni” is a prefix meaning “all”, as in “omniscient” – “all-knowing”) also lets you enter e.g. “digital camera” if the title of the page you visited was “Canon Digital Camera”. Additionally, the omnibox lets you search a website of which it captured the search box; you need to type the site’s name into the address bar, like “amazon”, and then hit the tab key and enter your search keywords.

* As a default homepage Chrome presents you with a kind of “speed dial” feature, similar to the one of Opera. On that page you will see your most visited webpages as 9 screenshot thumbnails. To the side, you will also see a couple of your recent searches and your recently bookmarked pages, as well as recently closed tabs.

* Chrome has a privacy mode; Google says you can create an “incognito” window “and nothing that occurs in that window is ever logged on your computer.” The latest version of Internet Explorer calls this InPrivate. Google’s use-case for when you might want to use the “incognito” feature is e.g. to keep a surprise gift a secret. As far as Microsoft’s InPrivate mode is concerned, people also speculated it was a “porn mode.”

* Web apps can be launched in their own browser window without address bar and toolbar. Mozilla has a project called Prism that aims to do similar (though doing so may train users into accepting non-URL windows as safe or into ignoring the URL, which could increase the effectiveness of phishing attacks).

* To fight malware and phishing attempts, Chrome is constantly downloading lists of harmful sites. Google also promises that whatever runs in a tab is sandboxed so that it won’t affect your machine and can be safely closed. Plugins the user installed may escape this security model, Google admits.

Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network’s first
three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States.

In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States.

Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States
to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.

And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence — and conceivably
military — consequences.

from the New York Times

Although the “Internet” and the technology that made it possible was largely developed in the United States, that was eons and many generations ago in cyber-time. More recently, today’s internet, the WWW, was “invented” in Switzerland and is truly a world without borders - but lots of walls.

American dominance of the virtual worlds of the Internet, like American dominence of the Real World, is a delusion of grandeur, doomed to evaporate in the cold, clear light of the 21st century. Live with it. We may not own or control the Internet, but we still Rule it, by dint of our ingenuity, creativity and insatiable curiosity.

The Dowbrigade uses an icebreaking exercise with groups of recently arrived students in which one of the categories for discussion is “One thing you really want to do before you leave Boston”. When our turn came we always list visiting the Harbor Islands, something we have yet to do 37 years after we first came to live in the Boston area. This may be our chance.

from the Boston Globe

Take the ferry to Bumpkin Island this weekend, and you may come across a woman lurking in the underbrush, wearing burlap covered with leaves. Don’t be alarmed: She’s not a kook. She’s an artist.

So are the men in kimonos staging lectures and the folks who may invite you to chat with them via tin-can telephone.

About 40 artists have spread out across the Boston Harbor Island for Labor Day weekend as part of a special event called the Bumpkin Island Art Encampment, featuring 10 art installations, sculptures, and performances.

It’s free and open to the public today through Monday; ferries are available to the island from various locations.

Some of the artists are exploring the idea of home. With “Survival Kit,” Gabe Moylan and Rachel Roberts are trying to create a space of domestic tranquility using only a Federal Emergency Management Association survival kit and what is available on the island.

Other pieces have been sparked by 19th century history. “Astrodime Transit Authority,” the tin-can project, commemorates the 150th anniversary of the first official use of the trans-Atlantic cable - an 1858 telegram to President James Buchanan from Britain’s Queen Victoria.

At low tide, when it’s possible to wade to the mainland, a group plans to set up a tin-can call from Bumpkin Island to nearby Hull. They will invite visitors to join in a reenactment, playing an extended game of telephone.

WASHINGTON — Senator John McCain spent the summer arguing that a 40-something candidate with four years in major office and no significant foreign policy experience was not ready to be president.

And then on Friday he picked as his running mate a 40-something candidate with two years in major office and no significant foreign policy experience.

from the New York Times

Brilliant pick, from where the Dowbrigade is sitting. Undoubtedly McCain will pick up a hefty percentage of the women who took the collective dis of Hillary personally, and as an affront to women. Of course, this is a minority of all Hilliary supporters - those who supported her for ideological or purely practical reasons have shifted their support to the relatively benign Obama.

But among those true believers who feel that what ails the American body politic is an overdose of testosterone poisoning, voting for Palin, especially with a spectral John McCain growing older by the week and slumping at her side, is going to make sense. Hell, Vegas is probably giving even odds he doesn’t last out his first term. And there just might be enough of these sisters to sway a close election, which this is shaping up to be. As incredible as it may seem, the Democrats may somehow have found a way to blow another Big Game, in danger of becoming the Buffalo Bills of American Politics.

Hillary, despite all of her enthusiastic bombast, is obviously convinced Obama is doomed, and has plans for a triumphant told-you-so return to the stage in ‘12. But now the Republicans, whether or not McCain is forced to make a one-term pledge, will have an experienced female QB on the bench, ready to go into the game to counter Hillary. A younger, prettier female coming off of four years of high-profile photo-ops. Brilliant.

Personally, experience has shown the Dowbrigade that women are better at just about everything than men, except Football and Writing. For some reason, almost all of our favorite football players and writers are men. Call us a chauvinist. But we have no doubt that women would do a much better job of running the world than men, not that it would be much of a challenge considering how we’ve bolloxed up the past 3,000 years through Patriarchial mismanagement.

On the other hand, this conviction could not induce us to vote for Condelezza Rice for President, for example, or Margaret Thatcher, or Sarah Palin for that matter. We knew Pinky Bhutto from Winthrop House dining hall, and we wouldn’t have voter for her either,  God rest her soul, even had we been born in Pakistan.

We are so over the Hill, we can’t even see her in the rear view mirror. Given that the Bill is yet to be paid, we’d have to say their race is run and their day is done. But we’ve been wrong before.

So who is the Dowbrigade supporting this time around? As we tell our students when they ask us this question, as a registered Massachusetts voter, it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference. Our electoral votes were signed sealed and delivered long ago. However, who one supports, especially as psuedo-pundit, can make a difference. The truth is we are waiting to see who the Natural Law Party nominates, now that John Hagelin is President of the United States Peace Government.

Stay tuned…..

DAYTON, Ohio - A mother was convicted yesterday of killing her month-old daughter by burning her in a microwave oven, with jurors rejecting a defense attorney’s claims that there was evidence that someone else was responsible.

Prosecutors said Arnold intentionally put her baby in the microwave oven and burned the child to death after fight with her boyfriend.

Arnold’s cellmate testified that Arnold confessed to putting the baby in the microwave and turning it on because she was worried her boyfriend would leave her if he found out the child wasn’t his.

from the Boston Globe

We always thought this was an urban myth, but now that we think about it, the myth version was a woman who put her dog in the microwave after a bath to dry it more quickly. Never underestimate the depraved ingenuity of a technically human being, male or female, trying to avoid true paternity.

Look at this