DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Security guru Bruce Schneier dissects the papal election process in a 1750-word essay. He comes away impressed with the security of the procedure: it would be very hard to hack this election.

In related news, Diebold is not going after the papal election vote-machine market.

Schneier’s conclusions are interesting and disheartening:

[O]pen systems conducted within a known group make voting fraud much harder. Every step of the election process is observed by everyone, and everyone knows everyone, which makes it harder for someone to get away with anything. Second, small and simple elections are easier to secure. This kind of process works to elect a Pope or a club president, but quickly becomes unwieldy for a large-scale election.

I find this disheartening because it would be great to apply the procedures of the Congress of Cardinals to our own horribly flawed national election procedure… but due to scale, we can’t.

So, one of my new goals is to make a CD of original music. The first tune is “in the can” but still suffering at the inept hands of an amateur producer; once he’s done fiddling I’ll release the song here.

That leaves me about 6 more songs to write. To begin, I’m trying a new approach, which I’ve dubbed “cut-and-paste songwriting.”

Songs are constructed from parts: a verse thing, a chorus thing, a bridge thing, maybe a solo, maybe an intro, maybe an outro. My old band used to create these parts during improv jams, which we’d record and subsequently mine for usable material.

In a jam, one person throws down an idea, someone else picks it up, plays along, changes it up, throws it back, etc. Collaboration happens in realtime.

Now that my bandmates have all grown up and moved away, jam time is hard to come by. So we’re doing it virtually instead: I set up a low-fi version of my recording gear at my band’s low-fi studio by wiring up three mics on my drum kit (Bonham style!). I put one mic in the kick drum and hung two overheads, mixed them to stereo, squashed the signal half to death with my compressor, and recorded the remains.

I tracked a couple minutes of each of four grooves, taken from my own groove library. For example:

Sanitized For Your Protection (drums excerpt)
Stomach Grapes (drums excerpt)

I sent these drums-only MP3s to my personal bassist, who laid down some great bass lines. For example:
Sanitized For Your Protection (drums + bass)
Stomach Grapes (drums + bass)

We have finished three such parts so far, and there’s a rumor of a 4th. I will attempt to add a dulcimer melody to some of these, and leave some for the guitarist. (As Andrew says, guitar is just a garnish anyway.)

We’ll exchange another round of grooves in a month or so, and then I’ll begin assembling them into songs by cutting and looping various sections and pasting them into arrangements. I’m sure we’ll be refining the parts and especially the transitions as we hone in on something we like; this initial assembly will just get us the basic outline of the song.

This approach gives us some flexibility: if the melody or lyrics demand a longer or shorter verse/chorus/whatever, we can make the edits easily before tracking the final arrangement. This gives all the players an opportunity to have a voice in the song structure. It’s a response to the sessions last Fall, in which the guitarist had to supply melodies and lyrics to fit arrangements that had already been finalized; the compromise was entirely one-sided. The new approach, if it works, should allow for more-equal collaboration.

Check out the latest UCS site: hybridcenter.org

It’s a hype- and BS-free, manufacturer-agnostic information source for hybrid buyers. There are a couple neat interactive features, such as the Buyer’s Guide, which calculates your gas and C02 savings based on your driving habits.

The Drivetrain Animation is remarkably similar to the “Energy Monitor” display to the 2004 Prius (which I described in my review).

The state-by-state hybrid incentive database is great to see. Even some of the red states have hybrid incentives.

The baby’s passport arrived in the mail. Page 1 shows the worst photo ever taken of him. He’s a cute kid, but the local post office’s cruddy Polaroid equipment yielded a truly mediocre picture, which the passport agency apparently squashed, posterized, and color-shifted, resulting in a monochromatic, carnation-pink, vaguely alien lump.

The idea that an infant photo will be of any use in identifying a toddler is already laughable. But this is ridiculous — it already doesn’t look like him. And this passport is supposed to be good for five years.

Page 2 of the passport shows a signature form, which warns, “NOT VALID UNTIL SIGNED.” No explanation is provided for teaching a 4-month-old to write his name.

I was tempted to ignore it, but then I pictured some officious TSA or INS brain-donor at the airport refusing to allow us to either leave or re-enter the country. That, I don’t need. So I called the passport office.

“We just got a passport for our 4-month-old,” I said, “and I have a really dumb question for you — “

“I know exactly what you’re going to ask,” interjected the agent. “You want to know how he’s supposed to sign his name, right? I get that question all the time.”

She told me the secret procedure, which curiously doesn’t match the one given on the State Department’s website. So we may end up getting hassled at the border after all.

David Lazarus reads between the lines of the recent Unocal acquisition and sees the Hubbert Peak. In a piece called ChevronTexaco’s CEO banking on peak oil situation, he reasons:

Because Unocal’s stock has soared 75 percent over the past year, the thinking goes, ChevronTexaco could find itself with a white elephant on its hands if currently sky-high oil prices end up coming back to earth.

Well, I’m prepared to say this much: [ChevronTexaco CEO David] O’Reilly isn’t stupid. He knows more than most people about world oil markets.

So if [he] is prepared to gamble more than 16 billion bucks on oil prices staying at stratospheric levels, I’m ready to give him the benefit of the doubt.

And reading between the lines, that means only one thing.

Peak oil.

Local gas prices topped $2.75/gallon recently. Is there any reason to believe they’ll go down?

I predict a run on crappy old Mercedes and BMW diesels, as greasecar conversions become mainstream. As ridiculous as it sounds that your neighbors will begin collecting discarded fry oil from the local fish ‘n’ chips for home filtering, it sounds even more ridiculous that the entire population of the country will happily pay $10 per gallon for gas.