Have you ever had the experience of walking through a doorway from the "pull" side only to have the person directly in front of you try to pull it closed behind them? This happened to me yesterday, and reminded me of the trash compactor scene in Star Wars.

Inside, an army guy was standing at the counter talking loudly on his mobile, while the cashier stood by patiently. I think a certain proportion of army people think they are the most important people in the world and are quite prepared to tell you that. They fall heavily into the widespread "my job is most important" trap — the one where we all think our job is the most important as society would fall apart without it. They forget, for example, how important sewage treatment workers and garbage collectors are.

Well what can I say that hasn't already been said? Michael Moore has produced some seriously mediocre work such as the Awful Truth TV series, and (I thought) much of the new book Dude, Where's My Country? However, Bowling for Columbine is Mike in top form. He explores the simple question: why are there so many gun-related deaths in the USA? And there are a lot: 28874 in 1999 alone. The film doesn't really find an answer. If it's the availability of guns, then why doesn't Canada have the same problem. If it's movies and video games, then why doesn't the entire Western world have this problem? Ultimately, Moore suggests that maybe it's the unrelenting stream of violent stories fed us by the newsmedia.

I guess the biggest question about this movie is whether it is based in fact, or a massive misrepresentation of the truth. Websites have been set up to discount the purported facts, one even proclaiming that Michael Moore hates America. I'm sorry but even if Moore were a bad or deceitful filmmaker, I can't see how anything he has done demonstrates his hatred for his own country.

Moore has recently responded to the criticisms, working through them point by point. He indicates the 1999 CDC report where the quoted figure of "11,127" comes from. It's actually quite hard to find: you have to download the PDF, turn to page 68, and add the figure for assault to legal intervention. But it's there. It's interesting to see that considerably more people turn firearms on themselves than others.

I tracked down the Canadian figure: here it is in the 1999 column. Of course Canada has less than 1/8 the population of the US, so we should adjust for that. By my calculations, the 1999 chance of being the victim of homicide in the US was 1:24500. The figure for Canada was 1:187917. You are 7.6 times more likely to be shot in the US, it's that simple. 

One final point about these figures. You are of course much more likely to be killed by something much more prosaic like heart disease (for example, roughly one in 389 Americans die of this per year), cancer, accidents, strokes, or diabetes. Maybe we should all just focus on eating healthily, exercising, wearing sunscreen, and driving carefully.

Oh, one last highlight was the interview with Marilyn Manson, the rock singer parents love to hate, who was vilified after the Columbine shootings. He came across as impressively literate and thoughtful. Asked what he would have said to the students at Columbine after the shootings, he says: "Not a word. I'd have listened to them. That's what nobody has been doing."

There's a perfect 22° halo around the sun over Christchurch right now — go look!

Good conditions for a circumzenithal arc too — look out for that directly overhead early evening.

Well, Grace won the amateur section of the Telecom "Pictures From the Surface of Aotearoa" competition. Here is her winning entry. While she has a good SLR now, this photograph was taken some years ago on a basic compact. That's a good reminder that photography isn't primarily about the technology. Well done Grace!

Telecom seem to have been a little disorganised running this competition. First the rules said one entry per person, then they said multiple entries. Then Telecom said they'd only display one entry on the web site per person. I notice both the winning entries are displayed, and I can't help wondering if they simply picked the winners from the web site. Then the results were described as a draw, even though they were judged. Then the "draw" was a week late. But the idea and the prizes are very good. I hope I can get my hands on them.

We all know that New Zealanders along with Americans and the English are a tad uncomfortable about bodies. But sometimes the degree of this neurosis staggers me. Take Russell Brown's recent Hard News post about the topless man at the grocery store. Going by the responses he printed, this behaviour provoked howls of outrage. For example:

When did this become OK? Women manage to keep their tops on regardless of the heat. I don't see why men can't do the same.

and

[U]nsolicited physical contact with slightly sweaty nude body hair is close to assault in my book.

Un freaking believable.

I suspect the horror might be due to the fact that the guy in question was hairy. Well that's bullshit. Are we so indoctrinated by the the norms of body shape instilled in us by the media that that we can't even tolerate nonconformity in other people, let alone ourselves? Yes, apparently.

It is a virtual reflex for governments to plead security concerns when they undertake any controversial action, often as a pretext for something else. Careful scrutiny is always in order. Israel's so-called security fence, which is the subject of hearings starting today at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, is a case in point.

Today I took my hammer and wrenched a bunch of weatherboards off the front of the house. I was surprised how much the borer beetles and rot had eaten, and I kept prizing off boards, each a spongy mass sealed inside a skin of paint. Underneath, one of the studs was just a squishy mass.

At this point I called my father, who actually knows what he is doing.

My lesson for the day: under the paint, things can get a little scary. I have more respect for the term, "permanent materials" now.

Well finally a sunny weekend so Grace and I took a micro-holiday to Gore Bay and Nape Nape. At Gore Bay we found the the fruity stench of decaying karaka berries, a smell that reminds me of places further north.

We planned to camp at Nape Nape but found the camping area has been closed, and the toilets decommisioned with a sledgehammer — the Department of Conservation: such panache! It was too late so we camped there anyway in the wind.

After several hours of pretending to sleep while listening to the nylon rustle in what turned out to be really quite a strong wind, we gave up and retreated to the back of the car. Much better, and we could see the stars through the windows, hanging there like hailstones lying thick on grass. Living in a city you forget what the sky really looks like, that it's a continuum of light rather than just a handful of stars picked out on black velvet. Each one a gigantic ball of uncontrolled thermonuclear fusion. Living in a city, you forget how gloriously insignificant you are.

Today at 6:56am I watched our particular ball of fusion rise out of the Pacific Ocean.

This documentary looks at the effects of International Monetary Fund globalisation policies on the economy of Jamaica. The IMF has insisted on Jamaica lowering trade barriers and competing on the world market. The result has been that various industries are disappearing. The dairy industry is one example, where local milk cannot be produced as cheaply as imported milk powder. The dairy industry in the US is powered by substantial subsidies that enable the production of the cheap milk powder.

The interview with the smug representative from the IMF doesn't go far enough. He doesn't get asked any difficult questions, which is a shame.

One summary of the problem is that the West wants to sell to Jamaica, but it doesn't want to buy anything.

Excerpts from several seminars and a face-to-face interview largely devoted to the "War on Terror" and the situation in the Middle East. The editing of this documentary is odd, with occasional ponderous musical interlude. There seems to be a disproportionate amount of starting and stopping, and not so much actual talking. It's a little like Chomsky has been fetishised. It looks like it was produced primarily for a Japanese audience. I wonder if they have a different approach to documentaries.

Chomsky is interesting. He doesn't seem to add anything new to the debate, although this film is two years old so perhaps showing its age. I guess his pre-war comments have been substantially upstaged by the massive public protests and the fiasco of post-war Iraq.

Perhaps the most interesting point to me was his assertion about how war crimes were defined. After World War II, anything the Germans did that the Allies didn't do became a war crime. Thus destroying the dykes in the Netherlands was a war crime, but bombing civilians as in Dresden, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima was not.

Today, war crimes are defined by the Geneva Conventions.

I'm just working through this book and thought I may as well compile any serious errata I find. I'll just keep updating this post as I find them. If you're not a CF developer please skip!

• 2.5.1 Hello.java
  The book says to type java Hello to run the program. This is incorrect, which is unfortunate as it is the very first example in the book. You need to change to the parent folder and run the program from there:

  cd ..
  java javaforcf.Hello

• 3.4.2 Floating Point Types
  "If you are interested in the use of 'e' in numbers, it is engineering notation for an irrational number representing the base of the natural system of logarithms, having an approximate numerical value of 2.7182818284. It was first used in the mid 17th century and has been calculated to 869,894,101 decimal places. So, 4.5E6 is another way of writing 4.5*10⁶."
  
  This is seriously wrong and doesn't even make sense. e, the constant, is not the same as the E that appears in numbers written in engineering notation. In the context of floating point numbers, the only relevant sentence is the last one.
  
  
• 3.4.6 Unicode in Java
  "Unicode is referred to as a double-byte character set, because it uses 16 bits to store character data, unlike the 8-bit ASCII with only 128 characters. Unicode is therefore capable of storing 65,535 different values. . . ."
  
  This is, as Joel points out, one of the great myths of Unicode. UTF-8 is an 8 bit encoding of Unicode, while UTF-16 is a 16 bit encoding. Unicode itself already contains more than 65535 characters, so it cannot be represented fully by a 16 bit encoding.
  
  
• 3.6.5 Bit Manipulation Operators
  "Note that while the operators for bitwise and logical operations appear the same, Java knows the difference based on the types of the operands involved. If you ask Java to mix, say, a boolean and an int in an expression, it will refuse."
  
  But they're not the same! Boolean operators look like && and || whereas bitwise operators look like & and | .
  
  
• 4.2.3 StringReplace.java
  

  greeting.replace('1', 
  'x');
  // here's the difference: in CF, the original
  // string would have been modified. not so in Java

  That's not true. The ColdFusion equivalent is:

  replace(greeting, "1", "x", "all");

  which returns the new string but does not change the original. To change the original you'd need:

  greeting = replace(greeting, "1", "x", "all");

Riverbend's latest posts describe the abduction and ransoming of her cousin's husband two weeks ago:

We spent the rest of the day rushing to sell gold, collect money and my uncle took a broken L. to the bank to empty the account- they've been saving up to build or buy a house.

and the anniversary of the Amiriyah Shelter massacre, when US forces bombed a shelter full of women and children in 1991:

My first visit to the shelter came several years after it was bombed. We were in the neighborhood visiting a friend of my mother. She was a retired schoolteacher who quit after the Amiriyah bombing. She had no thoughts of quitting but after schools resumed in April of 1991, she went on the first day to greet her class of 2nd graders. She walked into the classroom and found only 11 of her 23 students. "I thought they had decided not to come…" I remember her saying to my mother in hushed tones, later that year,"… but when I took attendance, they told me the rest of the children had died in the shelter…" She quit soon after that because she claimed her heart had broken that day and she couldn't look at the children anymore without remembering the tragedy.

Horrifying reading.

I am finding a disturbing trend. When I go to search for something on the web, increasingly I am being returned this very weblog. This has happened at least three times recently:

• sixth state of matter
• coldfusion maze competition
• Pictures from the Surface of New Zealand (I note I've dropped to second place on that one)
  
  

It's like a Midas Touch where everything I comment on points to me instead of the original target.

Of course it's just an illusion. The problem is I tend to search for the same things over and over. I search for the things that interest me, and these are things I've probably posted something about already, and I don't notice when I don't find my own site, only when I do find it.