One of those offers one cannot refuse.

I would like to make an offer of a Christmas present: unlimited helicopter transportation for him and his family, at no cost to him or the U.S. taxpayer, through the end of his reign.

Background: the U.S. military has spent the last 10 years or so trying to buy some replacement helicopters for presidential transport. They settled on a huge $30 million Eurocopter with three screaming jet engines that put out a big welcome mat for a cheap heat-seeking missile, such as the Stingers that U.S. tax dollars purchased for the Taliban during the 1980s. By the time our military and Lockheed Martin added some anti-missile defenses and some U.S. manufacturing, the cost of each 14-passenger helicopter went up to about $400 million, far in excess of what airlines pay for the 853-passenger Airbus A-380. The program was shut down, in theory, but recently Congress authorized a $100 million gift to Lockheed Martin to keep the program alive (source). Does the U.S. really need to spend $15 billion on a handful of helicopters that will be used mostly for 10-minute hops? And should we buy helicopters that are so heavy that it will require several C-5 cargo planes to get them to foreign destinations (the president of the U.S. always travels with his own helicopters rather than borrowing local ones)?

Running the existing helicopter fleet is not cheap. There are literally 800 pilots, mechanics, and administrators, all paid federal salaries and pensions that are more than double their private-sector counterparts (source). Jet fuel is purchased in prodigious quantities.

I happen to own two nearly brand-new four-seat Robinson R44 helicopters. Powered by efficient Lycoming piston engines, these burn less fuel in a 130 mph cruise than each Eurocopter engine would burn at idle. Currently we use these for flight training at East Coast Aero Club, but in the interest of sparing the taxpayer from further ruin, I would be willing to move them down to Washington, D.C. I will also move myself down and one or two additional instructor-pilots from East Coast Aero Club. All of us have more than 1000 hours of helicopter experience. All are U.S. citizens and one of us is an Army veteran (given the recent tragedy in Texas involving a continuously promoted and decorated Army officer, it may be necessary to clarify that, to the best of our knowledge, he was not simultaneously serving in the U.S. Army and waging jihad on behalf of Al-Qaeda).

Footnote: Phil Greenspun founded ArsDigita and teaches web application programming at MIT. He writes an entertaining blog.

… in 1988, a terrorist bomb exploded aboard a Pan Am Boeing 747 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people.

This used to be Borders bookshop in Cambridge. Closed last week.

Frank Stajano and Paul Wilson have written an intriguing paper on learning from scams. The abstract reads:

The success of many attacks on computer systems can be traced back to the security engineers not understanding the psychology of the system users they meant to protect. We examine a variety of scams and “short cons” that were investigated, documented and recreated for the BBC TV programme The Real Hustle and we extract from them some general principles about the recurring behavioural patterns of victims that hustlers have learnt to exploit.

We argue that an understanding of these inherent “human factors” vulnerabilities, and the necessity to take them into account during design rather than naïvely shifting the blame onto the “gullible users”, is a fundamental paradigm shift for the security engineer which, if adopted, will lead to stronger and more resilient systems security.

They give a detailed description of each scam scenario they studied. They’re all fascinating and repellent in equal measure. For example:

Jess identifies a young and wealthy mark in a café and descends on him with her charms. Once the mark
believes he’s making an impression on the pretty girl, Alex turns up, posing as a Bulgarian builder who
knows Jess. He has a lottery ticket which has won a prize of £2,800 but he can’t cash it because the
winner must show some ID and he, as an illegal alien, fears he will be deported if he shows his. So he
asks Jess to cash it in for him: in fact, he’ll let her keep all the winnings if she just gives him £1,000
cash. Alex leaves temporarily and, while he is away, Jess phones the National Lottery helpline to check
whether (or rather to prove to the mark that) it’s actually a winning ticket. It turns out that not only it is
but, thanks to the “bonus number”, it has actually won not just a couple of thousand but over a hundred
thousand pounds! And Alex doesn’t know! Poor Jess doesn’t have the thousand pounds cash that Alex
wants in exchange for the winning ticket, but perhaps her new friend the mark is interested in a piece of
the action? They’d pay Alex the thousand pounds he asked for and pocket the huge difference! Yes, the
mark is quite willing to side with Jess in defrauding Alex. Jess and the mark each pay Alex one half of
what he asked for and he gives them the winning ticket. Jess is happy for the mark to cash the ticket and
give her her share of the money later because it’s actually a worthless fake that Paul made earlier on his
inkjet printer after the winning numbers had been announced on TV.

Bruce Schneier (who provided the link to the paper) summarises the scenarios in his monthly newsletter (which is itself required reading IMHO).

1. The distraction principle. While you are distracted by what retains your interest, hustlers can do anything to you and you won’t notice.

2. The social compliance principle. Society trains people not to question authority. Hustlers exploit this “suspension of suspiciousness” to make you do what they want.

3. The herd principle. Even suspicious marks will let their guard down when everyone next to them appears to share the same risks. Safety in numbers? Not if they’re all conspiring against you.

4. The dishonesty principle. Anything illegal you do will be used against you by the fraudster, making it harder for you to seek help once you realize you’ve been had.

5. The deception principle. Things and people are not what they seem. Hustlers know how to manipulate you to make you believe that they are.

6. The need and greed principle. Your needs and desires make you vulnerable. Once hustlers know what you really want, they can easily manipulate you.

Inexplicably, Bruce misses out the seventh ‘principle’:

7. The Time principle

When you are under time pressure to make an important choice, you use a different decision strategy.
Hustlers steer you towards a strategy involving less reasoning.

As it happens, I know (and admire) Frank Stajano. He’s smart and charming and — if I remember rightly — an expert in martial arts. But he keeps such odd company!

In his NYT column today, Paul Krugman remembers that when he started writing for the public prints he entertained the idea that serious people in public life were prepared to have their views changed by reasoned argument. The current US Congress has cured him of that illustion:

Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question.

Oh, and conservatives simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups, because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don’t fit the narrative.

In part, the prevalence of this narrative reflects the principle enunciated by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” As Democrats have pointed out, three days before the House vote on banking reform Republican leaders met with more than 100 financial-industry lobbyists to coordinate strategies. But it also reflects the extent to which the modern Republican Party is committed to a bankrupt ideology, one that won’t let it face up to the reality of what happened to the U.S. economy.

So it’s up to the Democrats — and more specifically, since the House has passed its bill, it’s up to “centrist” Democrats in the Senate. Are they willing to learn something from the disaster that has overtaken the U.S. economy, and get behind financial reform?

Which neatly brings us to Michael Tomasky’s sobering column about how dysfunctional Congress has become.

Watching American politics through British eyes, you must be utterly mystified as to why Barack Obama hasn’t gotten this healthcare bill passed yet. Many Americans are too. The instinctive reflex is to blame Obama. He must be doing something wrong. Maybe he is doing a thing or two wrong. But the main thing is that America’s political system is broken.

How did this happen? Two main factors made it so. The first is the super-majority requirement to end debate in the Senate. The second is the near-unanimous obstinacy of the Republican opposition. They have made important legislative work all but impossible.

The super-majority requirement – 60 votes, or three-fifths of the Senate, to end debate and move to a vote on final passage – has been around since the 19th century. But it’s only in the last 10 to 15 years that it has been invoked routinely. Back in Lyndon Johnson’s day – a meaningful comparison since American liberals are always wondering why Obama can’t be “tough” like Johnson – the requirement was reserved for only the most hot-button issues (usually having to do with race). Everything else needed only 51 votes to pass, a regular majority.

Both parties have contributed to this problem. But guess which has contributed more? In 2007, when they became the minority party for the first time in five years, the Republicans invoked the super-majority measure 60 times, an all-time record for a single year.

And Obama’s problems are not limited to Republicans, of course. Think of it this way: in a 100-seat body, getting 51 votes is hard but not impossible. But getting those 57th, 58th, 59th and 60th votes to end debate … Well, the situation gives those senators incredible bargaining power. They can basically dictate terms in exchange for their votes. Which is exactly what senators Ben Nelson (Democrat of Nebraska), Joe Lieberman (independent of Connecticut), Olympia Snowe (Republican of Maine) and others have been doing publicly for weeks. A sharp friend has mordantly taken to referring to them as “President Nelson”, “President Lieberman” and “President Snowe” in emails. My friend is not exaggerating. With regard to the final content of the Senate bill, each has more power than Obama.

And the result: a huge, rich, smart nation that can’t fix even its most pressing problems. Or, in Tomasky’s words, “a distended nightmarish version of what the founders wanted. We’ve got a Congress that can not only stand up to the executive branch but can (at least on domestic matters) dictate terms to it. And we have a minority that has the power to stop the majority from doing much of anything”.

And the depressing thing is that there’s nothing Obama can do about it.

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I don’t normally link to AP stories because of their somewhat aggressive stance towards bloggers, but they have performed a useful service by doing a detailed and — as as far as I can judge — pretty detached study of the UEA email trove. The overall conclusion:

E-mails stolen from the computer network server of the climate research unit at the university show climate scientists stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data, but the messages don't support claims that the science of global warming was faked.

I had thought of going through the trove myself but desisted because (a) they were stolen, (b) they were downloadable only as a zip file from a .ru server and (c) laziness, so it’s interesting to see what a detailed study reveals.

At first sight, the UEA people seem to be too jokily dismissive of climate change ‘sceptics’, and that’s obviously embarrassing. But there’s a context here: what the stolen emails don’t reveal is the level of intrusive, aggressive harassment that climate change researchers can face from sceptics and deniers. The tool of choice of these people (some of whom are clearly obsessives) is FOI requests and these are very blunt and time-consuming instruments. I imagine that the UEA researchers were constantly bombarded with these, and might understandably have developed a siege mentality — traces of which are clearly visible in the emails.

The other thing that’s interesting about the AP analysis is the light it throws on the real — as opposed to the idealised — practice of science. Students of these things will remember that the criterion that Karl Popper proposed for deciding whether an activity is scientific or not is whether its practitioners actively seek ways of falsifying their theories (as distinct from ways of verifying them). This seemed to me to fly in the face of everything we know about science in practice: in order to make real advances in a field one has to be an absolutely passionate advocate for a theory. The last thing one wants to do is pick holes in it; that’s the job of others (and of the peer-review process). Very few scientists are falsificationists in the Popperion sense — at least about their own theories. So it’s hardly surprising that the UEA researchers might express in private emails what might seem, in retrospect, to be a less than detached attitude towards their theoretical findings and beliefs. They’re perfectly normal scientists.

Thanks to Roger Highfield of New Scientist for the original link.

Later: My colleague Joe Smith has a thoughtful blog post about this, in which he says, en passant:

The IPCC has serious limitations, including a gaping hole when it comes to investigating the social, cultural and philosophical dimensions of climate change, but it remains the most ambitious peer review process modern science has undertaken. The truth about climate science is that it is inevitably messy and unfinishable – its a hugely complex system we’re trying to understand – but that hard intellectual work conducted by a very large number of people (who win little publicity and are modestly rewarded) is doggedly narrowing the boundaries of uncertainty. There is, almost all climate science researchers agree, plenty of justification for very urgent and bold action.

From the If-You’re-Really-Desperate Department: some advice.

If you’re giving a presentation, make sure your script is full of tweetable content. Think in terms of 140 characters or less. As you’re preparing, literally write out those tweetable points to ensure they’ll fit with room for retweets to spare (right around 100 characters is about right).

If your goal is to share your story not just to those in the room, but their followers as well, this will ensure you’re getting maximum pass-along for yourself and your message.

The number of dames claiming to have discussed Ugandan affairs with Tiger Woods grows daily and now stands at nine, at least according to ABC News.

I suppose it shows how naive I am, but I’m genuinely astonished by this unfolding story. I’m fascinated by golf but never really warmed to Woods. He always seemed so, well, boring and controlled: a golfing automaton. He’s the last man in the world I’d have suspected of hanging out with porn stars and night-club hostesses.

Francis Bacon had a nice aphorism for Tiger’s current plight: “He doth like the ape, that the higher he climbed the more he showed his arse.”

It’d be interesting to be a fly on the wall at the moment in the ad agency that handles the Accenture account. They made such a big deal of Tiger’s invincible, calm, rational image

LATER: This from the Irish Times:

Companies whose endorsements have helped make Woods perhaps the world’s richest athlete, with a fortune estimated at $1 billion, have said they are standing by him.

Oh yeah?