Danny's Weblog

Review: DHTML and CSS - 3rd Edition

I have been using css for many years, but I kept running into basic things I didn't know, so I wanted to go all through a book instead of just looking up details on the web.

This book is out of date, but well written and with copious examples, so I went through and made the following notes. Unfortunately I cannot find the code online – the author seems to have pulled it from his site. Possibly it's too severely out of date.

1. p19 Setting your DTD - The DOCTYPE Strict means all formatting in the doc is handled by CSS, so no formatting tags are allowed. Transitional allows a mix of regular HTML formatting and CSS. Frameset means "used with HTML documents used to create framesets". I don't really know what the last one means.

2. p21 Kinds of HTML and XHTML tags - There are 3 types of tags, inline like the bold tag that has no line breaks around it, block tags that do have line breaks like the paragraph tag, and "replaced tags that have set or calculated dimensions".

I must admit I can't remember seeing that term "replaced" tags before. These include the br, img, input, object, select and textarea tags. See "5" below.

"Although the paragraph tag <p> is often used without its closing </p> tag in HTML, the closing tag *must* be included if you want to define something using CSS."

"Although the break tag <br> does not have a closing tag, you can add styles to it. However, tremember that in XHTML, the break tag becomes <br />(with a space in between the br and the /) so that it is self-closing."

3. p51 Creating drop caps with pseudo-elements: the solution shown involves applying a special class to the first paragraph of a section of text. It seems to me this is no easier and somewhat more opaque than just applying a class to the first *letter* and avoids using pseudo-elements.

4. p112 Changing how an element is displayed - You can use the display property to set the element to various options, eg setting "display:inline" in CSS.

Considering how fundamental this property is, I find it a little weird that you are allowed to set it.

I'm actually not sure what this feature is good for except surprises. It occurs to me it might be nice to use "code" as a block element, because actual code sections normally need block-style formatting and it's more semantic to call them "code".

5. p119 Setting the width and height of an element - "Although you can set the height of any element, only elements with replaced tags will use it. Other tags ignore a height value unless you define what should happen to the overflowing content of the element. (See "2" for what "replaced tags" are.)

6. p154 Setting an element's position - "To position an element using the left and top properties, you have to include the position property in the same rule." Eg,

{position:relative; top:1cm; left:1cm; }

It seems slightly strange to me that it really has to be in the "same rule". That seems to make it an exception to the general cascading feature of CSS.

7. p160 Stacking ojects (3-D positioning) - I have to admit I was left confused about what the z index is of elements that you do not explicitly set. The text refers to "sibling" elements, suggesting that they all have the same z index, but the text also says "positioned elements are assigned stacking numbers automatically, starting with 0 and continuing incrementally with 1,2,3 and so on in the order in which the lements appear in the HTML and relative to their parents and siblings".

I will need to experiment with this I suppose.

8. p219 Using the DOM - The text rather labors the point about assigning the string "60px" to a parameter.We already know that we have to set the CSS to "60px" not just the integer 60, so what is strange about that?

9. p254 Finding an object's 3-D position - "There's a catch. Browser's can't easily see the z-index until it's set dynamically. To get around this little problem, you have to use JavaScript to set the z index of each oject when the page first loads."

This seems to make the ability to read the z index not very useful, because your Javascript must *already know* what it set it to, right? Or am I missing something?

10. p264 Detecting which event type fired - The JavaScript includes some code like this:

var object = document.getElementById(objectID);
object.onmousedown = findEventType;

This looked like nothing remarkable at first, but then it looked weirder and weirder – at least if you don't know JavaScript. It looks like you're creating a *new* variable called object, and then setting a handler for that new variable. But actually what you're doing is getting the *address* of the existing object called "objectID" , and using that to set the handler for that existing object.

This is actually defined on p218: "(the var object = syntax creates) a variable called object, to store the address for the object".

Btw, why do authors persist in using misleading names for variables? It would be much clearer if they used "banana" as the variable name instead of "object".

11. p387 Creating sliding menus - This section just has a sidebar on Access Keys, but I think they're more interesting than the section topic. You can use the HTML accesskey attribute to allow a user to navigate the page with the keypboard, like this example:

<a href="index.html" accesskey="h">Home</a>

It's funny I've never noticed this in an HTML book.

Here is the Wikipedia article: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_key]

Regrettably, you don't access the link with just the accesskey: you have to press some combination, like Alt-accesskey. Refer to the Wikipedia article for details. Browsers vary.

Remember to avoid assigning access keys that already are assigned, like alt-F for the file menu. Indeed not so simple: www.cs.tut.fi [http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/forms/accesskey.html]

12. p478 Appendix D Browser-safe fonts - This is a nice table of font names and a font sample for each font, for the Microsoft Core Web Fonts, Mac OS, and Windows OS. I don't remember seeing such a comprehensive guide before. It certainly makes me wish every computer had the full Mac set.

I did a search for something similar and the first result was the actual PDF for these pages in the book, at the site of the book's author, Jason Cranford Teague: www.webbedenvironments.com [http://www.webbedenvironments.com/css_dhtml_ajax/downloads/BrowserSafeFonts.pdf]

He appears to have put the PDF on his site in 2009-05 in the hope of encouraging someone to help him extend it with MS Office 2007 fonts. It is well worth downloading. It is actually interesting just as a PDF because it includes crop marks.

The bicameral mind and spectator sport

Many years ago I read "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes (referred to below as "BCM" ). It speculates – with an overwhelming collection of historical references – that the human mind worked in a fundamentally different way until just a few thousand years ago, so that people did not perceive that their own minds were functioning to produce plans, beliefs and judgements, but that spirits, gods or ancestors were supplying advice.

Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)]

I found the possibility fascinating but unproved and perhaps unprovable. However, I filed it away.

Recently I was wondering about rock concerts. Why do people bother going to them? They are very expensive, and the live version of music (even assuming it is actually live and not lip-synced) is almost always technically inferior to the recorded version. It occurred to me that a concert is very analogous to religious ceremonies as described in BCM. Jaynes speculated the experience of such a ceremony – immersed in sights and sounds designed to form a single experience, and surrounded by other devotees – amplified and solidified a shared belief into a shared fantasy. In the case of religious ceremonies, they culminated in the mass perception of gods and miracles. I have often heard reports of rock concerts which stress aspects which seem to me to involve supernatural elements, or at least aspects which have no rational basis: shared, synchronized emotions and perceptions.

But why would anyone *enjoy* this experience?

Jaynes saw the shift from bicameral consciousness as a gradual one. He believed that elements of it survived to today: for instance, in schizophrenics, or in the "general sense of need for external authority in decision-making". My own speculation is that many people still *enjoy* the experience of subjecting themselves to a shared hallucination – our minds are wary of *personalized* hallucinations, but when surrounded by fellow devotees our guard is let down. We can simultaneously perceive the internal certainty provided by the bicameral mind, and the external confirmation of everyone in our surroundings. And in the case of a hugely popular band, one is surrounded by tens of thousands who can be relied upon to largely support one's fantasies.

Still, if I were present at such a concert, even if it were by a band that I really liked, I know I would feel absolutely nothing of this shared consciousness. In fact, if I perceived it at all, I would find it creepy.

So, many people enjoy subjecting themselves to such shared experiences, and many do not. One can think of so many examples. For instance, there is a Monty Python sketch about Nazis who have gathered together in some quiet seaside town in England, and struggle to mobilize the local population; as the leader's incomprehensible harangues blare out, one of his confederates sidles up to one of the sparse crowd and says, "he's right, you know!". The local yokel stares at him, puzzled. Of course, it's easy to resist even a well-organized appeal to one's bicameral mind if only a handful of devotees are present. Once some critical mass surrounds the unwary, their innate vulnerability allows them to be overwhelmed.

So in one way my inability to respond is a strength. But viewed by the mass of people, it is a weakness. Most people *like* to behave like a mob; like "the madness of crowds". When I have watched programs about fashion, I am stunned by how ugly and tasteless the fashions are. There is one particular fashion presenter, Gok Wan: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gok_Wan]

Not only is his taste appalling, but his putdowns of the taste of the poor souls who he "advises" are brutally contemptuous. I could not imagine who would willingly subject themselves either to appearing on his show as a literal fashion victim, or to watching his show to pick up fashion advice. But now I realize that what he is doing is reinforcing the shared fantasy that fashion exists and is important, and that people who invest enough energy and time into chasing the phantasmic goals that Wan is pushing have bought their way into a shared fantasy. Whether they are the "winners" – the adequately fashion-conscious who meet Wan's capricious and inconsistent standards – or the losers that he ruthlessly derides, his devotees can feel the warm, close presence of their bicameral mind.

And once this shared fantasy – this "folie a la plupart" – has been built up, the devotees will fanatically defend it. If I wear clothes, or god forbid a hairstyle, that was popular in 1970, or 1930, or 2005, I can be identified as a rebel and rejected. I cannot escape this; I am allotted the role of "rebel" even if I have no idea of the "rules" and no intention of causing offence and exclusion.

Similarly, fans of organized sports seem to believe that the performance of "their" team has something to do with them, but in fact what they are responding to is a bunch of half-understood theatrical tricks essentially similar to those employed by Goebbels. And if I were to make that point to them, they would be as sympathetic as the SS.

My guess is that about 80% of humanity is still eager to hear the voice of its bicameral mind. This corresponds to Van Vogt's estimate that about 20% of men are what he calls the leader type. Even when I first read this many years ago, it was clear that this fraction is not actually particularly skilled at leading people. Instead, they are terribly unskilled at following. Many of the hobos one sees do not seem to be simply alcoholics or insane; instead, it's striking that they just do not want to engage with other people. Perhaps they have an inner voice, or perhaps they are tired of pretending to hear society's inner voice.

It must be wonderful to believe that you have supernatural powers. With the certainty of someone who is hearing his bicameral voice, you can believe, for instance, that you have perfect empathy with strangers, family members, or animals, when in fact people are collaborating on a shared narrative, and the animal has been socialized to play along. There was an old cartoon I remember, about a mole who lives in a beautiful fairyland until a wily fox sells him a pair of spectacles; when his eyes are sharp, he sees that he lives in a hovel in the middle of a garbage dump. At the end of the short, he kicks out the fox and throws the spectacles away so that he can live in paradise again.

But imagine how horrible it is when someone in the group does not play along. You can't just allow him to exist: everything about his actions makes it clear that your sparkly universe does not exist for him. You have to exclude and reject him, or he may actually break down your entire reality system. Apparently it's not unusual for many fans of soap operas to behave as if the characters are real: knitting clothes for newborns etc. Such people may be completely able to function in real life, but somehow have this one hole in reality. The fact that such a thing is possible suggests the existence of a larger mental system that is otherwise dormant, or invisible. Apparently early literature was normally presented as true; I wonder if it was normally accepted as such? tvtropes.org [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LiteraryAgentHypothesis]

What happens when two separate shared worlds collide? For instance, football fans from two teams? It's like Jaynes' picture of two competing city-states: both sides agree that what they are doing is good and important and worth dying for, when unconcerned observers are wondering what the fuss is about.

Here are a few notes on Jaynes' book. The page numbers refer to the Pelican (USA) 1982 edition. I include several example of weird English usage by Jaynes; I wonder if his book would have led to a real revolution in Western thought if he had not thrown away the version of his manuscript that the publisher's editor handed him.

1. Book 2 Chap 2 p176 (Literate Bicameral Theocracies): He states "writing proceeds from pictures of visual events to symbols of phonetic events". He asserts "writing of the latter type, as on the present page, is meant to tell a reader something he does not know. But the closer writing is to the former, the more it is primarily a mnemonic device to release information which the reader already has".

He intends this as support for his theory that men developed over this period from the bicameral mind to the conscious mind.

I note it however as relevant to a pet theory of my own: that writing developed before speech. I have never seen anyone else make this speculation because, I'm sure, everyone is used to children learning speech years before they can read and write. But imagine the situation in prehistory before *either* has developed. How much harder is it really to make pictogram notes *for oneself*, whose significance one *does not need to first communicate*, compared with making sounds, which are almost impossible to correctly identify, let alone emulate, without growing up in a society using that speech for years?

2. Book 2 Chap 5 p278 (Foolish Perses): "The often tedious recital... and without development".

I don't wish to reproduce the text here because my point is that his argument in some places, as here, is embarrassingly weak. If something fits his chronology he eagerly adduces it, and if it doesn't fit he insinuates that it must therefore be wrong! Similarly his chronology of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

3. Book 2 Chap 5 p290 (The Invention of the Soul): "According to the theory of the bicameral mind, hallucinations of a person in some authority could continue after death as an everyday matter".

I must admit I rather lost the thread of his argument. In his discussion of brain functions he seemed to be saying that audible hallucinations had a special relevance to bicamerality, but he also speaks of mass hallucinations involving all the senses, at least in earlier periods.

4. Book 2 Chap 5 p290 (The Invention of the Soul): "For there is nothing here of dead strengthless souls wailing about in a netherworld, guzzling hot blood to get their strength back..."

This note is not about bicamerality at all. I am simply struck by the similarity of this description "added into the Odyssey as book 11" to the modern vampire idea.

5. Book 2 Chap 6 p297 (Some observations on the Pentateuch): "Indeed, in trying to do so, whatever our religious backgrounds, we feel, if not blasphemous, at least disrespectful to the profoundest meanings of others".

I have noted that down because of the phrase "profoundest meanings". I just don't know what he meant by that phrase, and that usage is representative of hundreds of others that are at least as foreign. He may mean "profoundest opinions" (like "Meinungen" in German), or he may mean something like "profoundest semantic distinctions". It reminds me of a character in a TV play by Stoppard, who gives a paper at a conference on philosophy and asserts a distinction between "what we mean and what we want to say". Stoppard shows us the interpreters struggling with the simultaneous translation of that, and rolling their eyes at each other.

Jaynes several times in the book gives the impression that he can read classical Greek in the original. It may be that his usages have been colored by this. It may also be an affectation. I have certainly felt the urge many times to use a peculiar form of words in English for the sake of a pun in another language... however weak.

6. Book 3 Chap 2 p355 (Possession in the Modern World): "The vestiges of the bicameral mind do not exist in any empty psychological space... Instead they always live at the very heart of a culture or subculture, moving out and filling up- the unspoken and the unrationalized."

The most interesting part of Jaynes' theory for me is its relevance to the current world, and to current societies and systems of thought. It is a commonplace observation that people brought up in different societies not only believe different things, but interpret the same events in radically different ways.

Or to put it another way, as Gilbert and Sullivan did, isn't it strange that every Englishman born becomes a little Liberal or a little Conservative.

To what extent do the rulers of modern societies understand, or at least unknowingly emulate, the theatrics of Egyptian god-kings and Greek seeresses? When the spectators at a football match spend a hundred pounds to watch a game, grow hoarse with shouting, and then run through the streets scuffling with rival supporters, are they being watched by cold-eyed psychologists with stopwatches and spreadsheets?

7. Book 3 Chap 3 p368 (The Nature of Music): "Try hearing different musics on two earphones at the same intensity". "Musics"? This kind of usage makes me wonder if Jaynes was a native English speaker at all.

8. Book 3 Chap 4 p403 (Objection: Does Hypnosis Exist?): "We are learned in self-doubt, scholars of our very failures, geniuses at excuse and tomorrowing our resolves". Just another example of weird English.

Review: PHP & MySQL for Dummies 2nd Edition 2004

This is quite an old book now but I was happy to spot it in my local library. I was actually looking for a PHP book as I more or less know MySQL at least as of a few versions ago, but a lot of the stuff you use PHP for needs to hook up to a database of some kind anyway.

I have already used PHP with MySQL for a couple of little projects, but I was hoping to get a better overview of how to set up and debug a project.

Overall, the book has some surprising omissions. For one thing, no object-oriented features are discussed. For another thing, there is a lot less emphasis on security than I was expecting. For instance "register_globals": I actually did not see any reference to it when I read through the book, and only found it just now when I was looking for the PHP version used for the book. (Most people know about this issue by now, although they might not have in 2004; if you don't, you should probably Google it right away.)

On the other hand, I liked the way it discussed the use of include files to make the code more understandable. I actually had not realized that you could put so much html in them and still have php variables that work (although you wind up depending on a lot of global variables, as opposed to using a bunch of subroutines as I'm used to doing in Perl).

The following is a list of items I noted.

1. p143 Chap 6 Joining comparisons with and/or/xor

"If you are familiar with other languages..." Apparently the "and" form has exactly the same precedence as "&&". That is *not* the same as Perl.

2. p 155 Chap 7 Creating arrays

$capitals = array( "CA" => "Sacramento", "TX" => "Austin", "OR" => "Salem" );

I find myself not really liking either PHP or Perl's fundamental syntax very much. As you can see from the above example, all PHP variables just have a leading "$", whatever they are – scalar, array, hash (although the book just calls a hash "an array ... viewed as ... a list of key/value pairs"). On the other hand, Perl wants you to designate a variable by the variable type it winds up as once you've appplied all the trailing items; eg "$orange[3]" is scalar element 3 of the array "@orange", but scalar "$orange" is a separate variable which has nothing to do with either of the former.

I prefer the object style, something like this: "@orange.element(3)" or even "orange.element(3)".

3. p 155 Chap 7 Viewing arrays

I was interested to see the example of the "print_r" function to print the contents of any array:

print_r($capitals);

I had no idea that PHP had this built in and it would certainly have made some of the debugging I've done easier.

Now I think about it I wonder how PHP really knows whether to display an array as pairs or individual elements. Presumably it always displays them as pairs; if there's a mixture of numeric and text keys... I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

4. p 156 Chap 7 Sorting arrays

The way "sort" and "asort" work seems a little arbitrary, although handy.

5. p196 Chap 8 Sending SQL queries

I often run into problems when I start forming a query string to eventually send off to the SQL server. For instance, I usually try to leave a semicolon on the end, even though that never works.

So it's good that the book has a section on this, However, I was surprised to see the following example:

$query = "UPDATE Member SET lastName='$last_name'";

The wacky thing is the single quotes around the variable name, of course. I think the way it works is that the quotes prevent PHP looking up the value of the "$last_name" at the time you assign the string to "$query". However, it *will* look it up when the string is inserted in "mysql_query":

$result = mysql_query($query);

I can't remember how I handled this problem before! I think I threshed around until something worked and then tried to put the horror behind me.

6. p199 Chap 8 Getting and using the data

This page has an example of using "extract($row)", which very neatly produces and sets all the variables you usually need from a row you get from the database. Example:

$row = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC);
extract($row);

So if one of the fieldnames for the row was 'password', the value of that field for this row will be in $password.

When I've had to do something like this in the past, I've had to tediously create a bunch of variables individually, as well as doing an assign which is prone to error (especially when you modify the table definition).

7. p 302 Chap 11 Adding data to the database

The book suggests using the LOAD command to recreate a table easily while debugging:

LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE "pets" INTO TABLE Pet;

Neither this, nor the section in Chap 4 which this section refers to, clearly makes the point that the LOAD statement is very limited in where it can read the data file from. My understanding is that for security reasons, the file *must* be in the same directory as the data file is located in; the text briefly says this, but I don't think the book has ever referred to *how to find* what the directory is. I think when I first ran into this many years ago, I had to create a table with a wacky name, run updatedb, and then locate to figure out where the data files are! (Try looking in /etc/mysql/my.cnf.)

Also, although it's nice to use LOAD sometimes because it can understand files that you can create in Excel – ie way before you have the rest of the database software set up to enter data in the required format – I think the author should have referred to the "mysqldump" command too, as well as the reverse of the LOAD command:

SELECT * INTO OUTFILE 'file_name' FROM tbl_name

8. p 320 Chap 11 Adding pets to the catalog

Listing 11-6 includes the following code:

if (@$_POST['newbutton'] == "Return to category page" or @$_POST['newbutton'] == "Cancel")

I was about to grumble about how wacky this syntax was, and then I remembered. This is explained on p124; the "@" sign has nothing to do with arrays, it just tells PHP to suppress error messages if the variable is not defined!

There are copious notes on the listing which do not include this point. Perhaps everyone else was paying more attention on p 124.

9. p 337 Chap 12 Building the login table

I mention this tiny point only in order to show that I sometimes *do* pay attention: the text says "MySQL will not allow two rows to be entered with the same loginName and loginDate". That "loginDate" should read "loginTime" to match the rest of the text.

10. p 337 Chap 12 Adding data to the database

This paragraph mentions "to test the programs while you write them you need to have at least a couple of members in the database". This deserves rather more consideration than the book gives it.

For instance, you need to do testing continuously, even after the database has gone live: you need to keep making sure all of the existing features are *still* working while you continue to add features. So you may need to retain a lot of artificial corner cases in the tables, like a customer who makes an order which includes 80 items, or a customer with a foreign address to make sure your new invoices still work with them, even though your company still hasn't actually had a foreign order.

Sometimes I actually include a flag field in every table to identify test records.

Thoughts on "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

1. This book is an essay on what the author sees as a fundamental error which people are prone to in judging statistical information of all kinds, particularly relating to the economy.

Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory]

2. He argues that we assume that all statistical distributions are similar to the Gaussian bellcurve, ie that almost all instances are clustered close to the mean, and that an instance well away from the mean is of negligible likelihood.

He points out, engagingly, that we continue to believe this when we know it is not true, telling ourselves that when such extraordinary instances do occur they are somehow outside any theory, when in fact they tell us that the theory is wrong.

3. I had read several accounts of this book before I finally got around to reading it over the last couple of weeks. I was irritated to find that he goes into certain specific points which I thought were my own inventions, eg p44, at the end of a section "Trained to be Dull", there is a footnote "The main tragedy..." which is almost exactly the same as this posting of mine: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Opinions/Politics/Miscellaneous/credit08.html]

Now I wonder whether I had actually absorbed them from reviews of the book.

4. The tone of the book is rather odd. He spends a lot of time telling us how successful and even swashbuckling he is, an iconoclast, which I suppose is a necessary part of pushing a theory, but seemed excessive to me. He characterizes his opponents with a plethora of dismissive terms: middlebrows, second-rate, sterile and so on and on. He seems to want his readers to blink nervously and think "I'm going to be rich and cool like him, not a loser like those guys!"

5. Overall he takes what seems to me to be an interesting and even revealing line. His message is that large fluctuations in the economy, which seem to be far greater than normal statistical noise, are nonetheless to be expected.

I think that anybody who wanted to engineer a large shift in the economy would find the promulgation of such an opinion to be helpful.

6. I think his narrow point about statistics is probably very true. We simply assume that bond prices, or whatever, are varying in a Gaussian distribution, so we assume that a certain quantity of observations will be sufficient to tell us the total distribution. But there are indeed other distributions which mimic the Gaussian over the short run, and the fact that we encounter conditions which are impossibly far from the Gaussian mean even once should be sufficient to throw out the Gaussian assumption.

I just think that if you observe even once an attempt to manipulate national or world economies for profit, that should be sufficient to throw out the hypothesis that the economy can be modelled like a physical process at all.

...In other words, if you have a fair coin, and it comes up heads a hundred times, what is the chance of it coming up heads the next time?

William Shawcross's "Sideshow"

This book deals with the sad history of Cambodia and the effects of US policy.

It was first published many years ago, around the time Kissinger wrote his memoirs of the period, and is striking because it contains a succession of afterwords, containing the text of objections to "Sideshow" and the author's responses.

The book was interesting to me for several reasons. One is the fact that it is about Cambodia; another is that it deals with perhaps the central propaganda war of the 20th century, more bitterly-fought than any other: the Spanish Civil War, the Holocaust lie, NATO.

Personally, I felt the dissection of the maneuvering inside Cambodia in the years up to Lon Nol was very readable. It's interesting to know that Sihanouk and his family, for instance, managed to achieve the throne although the Norodom line had a prior claim.

In addition, I feel that many general criticisms of US policy are valid. The concept of the title – that the US saw Cambodia as a tiny "sideshow" important only insofar as it could be diverted to serve other interests – seems incontrovertible. (I recently happened to see a TV show about Watergate, and I saw no mention of Cambodia although this was the period of the "secret war".)

Additionally, it seems clear that US diplomats based their decisions about Cambodia on zero knowledge of or insight into Cambodia's culture and history. For instance, the effects of allowing ARVN to roam unrestrictedly inside Cambodia should have been anticipated, and special precautions taken.

On the other hand, I feel strongly that some of the criticisms made by Kissinger and his supporters are obviously true. Shawcross is evidently a supporter of the Vietnamese communists: sparing no effort to malign every ghastly *unintentional* consequence of the US war effort, he draws a veil over the horrible *intentional* results of the NVA's strategy and tactics, such as their programme of assassinations throughout the war, or their massacre of civilians during the Tet offensive.

It may well be the case that a more clever, or even less duplicitous, policy by the US could have saved Cambodia from the unmitigated hell it went through for many years. However, it is ludicrous to try to assign final blame for that atrocity to the US. The US was there because of the program of the NVA to subvert and invade South Vietnam, and the US aim of holding back the NVA, and communism in general, has only been further justified by the events in South-East Asia since then, and the admissions by the NVA of its aims and operations.

"Sideshow" is a deeply tendentious book. Its logic would have been torn apart by the same reviewers who praised it, if its intention had not been to make those who opposed US involvement in SE Asia feel less guilty about Cambodia.

Luke Rinehart's "The Dice Game"

This novel presented a very interesting idea that seems to have vanished from popular thought. It's the story of a man who realizes that all his life he's decided what to do by balancing his different needs and doing the one which is most important. He has therefore been totally suppressing certain minor drives. He decides instead on a new plan: he will allocate a percentage value to his different desires, and then roll dice for outcomes which correspond to those percentages. In other words, if he mainly wants to go home and watch TV, but one per cent of him wants to go to a bar, he will look for a dice combination that corresponds to one per cent and go to the bar if it comes up.

The novel itself just explores what that plan means, both in terms of what he does once he starts occasionally acting out those minor drives, and what it has meant to his mind to have suppressed those drives all his life until then.

I've never actually carried out this plan because the mechanics of the dice probabilities seemed cumbersome. Also, I wonder whether I would actually have the determination to overrule a major drive for the sake of a minor one occasionally. Still, the concept that so many of our drives remain unfulfilled forever – and how a simple strategy might change our lives – was an intriguing one.

It reminds me of the matter of guilt compared to the value of the individual. In most cases, for instance, of murder, the victim is arguably a better person than the perpetrator, even neglecting the circumstances of the murder, so it seems reasonable to execute the murderer. However, one can certainly imagine cases where the value of the murderer is very high compared to the murderee. In law, this issue is not taken into account at all, at least in criminal cases, but most individuals would definitely do so. A mother, of course, would consider her son more valuable than any murder victim. But one could imagine many employees who could take the view that their boss had done many good things and it would be a mistake to subject him to death because of one little slipup. That certainly seems to have been the case for Sen. Edward Kennedy.

Weird fake posthumous interview w Philip K. Dick

frontwheeldrive.com [http://frontwheeldrive.com/philip_k_dick.html]

Slashdot discussion: slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/articles/03/07/15/0053234.shtml?tid=186&tid=214]

I was struck by one particular quote from the (notional) Dick:

I do seem attracted to trash, as if the clue lies there.

What do you mean, "the clue"?

The symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.

Here's another selection from the simulacrum of Dick:

Do not believe – and I am dead serious when I say this – do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life.

...Actually, that reminds me of a conversation I had with my father when I was a teenager. I quoted to him the line from a Gilbert and Sullivan opera: "Things are not always what they seem. Skim milk masquerades as cream". (This line is referred to in one of Dick's novels, I forget which.) Irritatingly, he immediately responded that the line was identical to Shakespeare: "All that glisters is not gold". How dare one's parent have insight.

Here's the canonical (it would seem) website on Dick: www.philipkdick.com [http://www.philipkdick.com/main.htm]

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