DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

San Francisco hosted an anti-war demonstration on Saturday. I was suspicious and disheartened that the San Francisco Chronicle reported the crowd size at “tens of thousands of people”. See also the headline: Huge protests for peace / Tens of thousands in S.F. demand Bush abandon war plans

Within the latter article, two more estimates are given:

The protest’s organizers, an umbrella coalition called International ANSWER, or Act Now to Stop War & End Racism, estimated the crowd at 200,000. Police put the number at 55,000.

Here is the report from A.N.S.W.E.R: 200,000 March in San Francisco. I understand that it is in the organizer’s best interests to overestimate attendance. But I don’t understand why it’s in the Chronicle’s best interests to underestimate it.

Today the SFPD realized their numbers were impossibly low: Protest numbers don’t add up / Police now say 150,000 safe guess. This makes the Chronicle’s earlier headline even more irresponsible and inaccurate. Kudos to the SFPD for admitting their mistake. Kudos to the Chron for publishing the SFPD’s recount. But I’d still like to see them publish a recant.

In other Peace Rally news, here’s the Chron’s Peace Rally Photo Gallery.

Here are aerial photos (with yet-another crowd-size estimate over 100,000).

Here is a gallery of rally photos taken by Bim Lipp, a participant who according to the Chronicle’s reporting could not possibly have been in San Francisco that day, because at least “tens of thousands” of participants coming from less far away had already arrived.

Mmmm, bialys!

(Those are raw, by the way.)

The recipe is from Artisan Baking Across America, and it’s the fastest bread I’ve made in months: about six hours, start to finish. The stuff in the center of each round is caramelized onion paste, apparently the traditional topping for these flatbreads.

They turned out very well for a first attempt, but I can’t help but wonder if they wouldn’t be improved by an overnight fermentation, and maybe roasted garlic rather than onions on top. Fortunately, I have more flour in the cupboard…

Recently I wrote about an apparent shortage of wireless network detection software for MacOS X.

I’m happy to say I’ve already found a solution. The free-software world moves really quickly sometimes.

KisMAC is a network scanning (and cracking) application that includes its own Prism-chipset-compatible driver. The latest rev, 0.03a as of this writing, is stable in my testing, and functions just fine with my scanning rig.

I described my rig previously; here’s a picture.

Also, here’s a screenshot of KisMAC in action — a drive across town picked up a dozen different wireless networks. The next step is to get up on the roof — assuming it ever stops raining — in hopes of spotting the local community network from here. It’s a longshot (about 13 miles as the 2.4 GHz crow flies) but would deliver me from the evil that is ISDN.

Having a PowerBook running OS X has made me a Mac fanatic again. Last week I had a long list of software updates to purchase, and a long list of questions to find answers to, so I went to the best place in the Macintosh universe to satisfy both needs: MacWorld Expo.

Many exhibitors offer “show specials” — they sell their products at discounted rates at the expo. It’s not like I generally need an excuse to buy software… this is equivalent to giving free needles to addicts. But I saved enough in discounts to cover my admission fee.

I also got some important questions answered. This is a key feature of the Expo: many of the best software engineers in the community are working their employers’ booths. So are the company founders. Often, this is the same guy.

At one point I was in a conversation with one of the three-letter-title guys for a particular company, and I asked a technical question he couldn’t answer. He said he’d go get an engineer to answer the question. I didn’t want to put him to the trouble, so I said, “Hey, that’s OK; I can call your tech support folks tomorrow.” He paused for a second, and said with the air of a man admitting something that’s commonly known but not commonly admitted, “Er, you don’t want to do that.”

The best part of the Expo this year is that I did not contract any apparent disease.

The hygenic low point of the day came when I was introduced to a senior engineer from a particular company. I planned to pepper him with obscure and difficult questions (the type that the phone-support guys can’t even spell, much less answer). The engineer turned away to cough — a suspiciously wet Expo-style cough, indicating the incubation of foreign microscopic nasties deep inside his respiratory tract — and then he reached out to shake my hand, offering the hand he’d just coughed into. Insofar as I needed his help, I felt it would have been rude to refuse the shake. But I quarantined my hand until I could get to the restroom for emergency disinfection procedures. Ech.

Mark Morford’s SUV column is over the top and worth an immediate read: Are Hummer Owners Idiots? - More delightful proof positive that most SUVs are, in fact, morally repugnant. Go, America!

Just in time to crush a few thousand smaller cars and kill a bunch of pedestrians and poison the environment and still be able to traverse six feet of standing floodwater in order to make it in time for Timmy’s soccer game, it’s the rollout of the new Hummer H2, the biggest joke of the entire SUV world, representing, well, just exactly everything that’s wrong with America’s view of the world.

Beyond the comic value of his indignation, some of the statistics are downright frightening: “the Chevy Tahoe kills 122 people for every 1 million models on the road; by comparison, the Honda Accord kills only 21 per 1 million such vehicle.” In simpler terms, this SUV is 5 times more dangerous than a given passenger car. Perhaps not to the driver — just to everyone else.

Also worth an immediate read is the source article Morford quotes, Bumper Mentality by Stephanie Mencimer of the Washington Monthly.

One step further back into the ancestry of this diatribe is Keith Bradsher’s new book, High and Mighty: SUVs — The World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way, which just went onto my reading list.