Apple Mail Searching: Still Broken

Published at 20:13 on 10 April 2019

It’s pretty pathetic. It was back in 2013 that I gave up on Apple Mail, in part because its searching function had gotten more and more broken as the years passed.

The other day I had a chance to use Apple Mail, mainly because while searching works OK in Thunderbird, printing is broken. Well, it works fine if you think it’s acceptable to waste a page of paper printing every damn header in your message in a ridiculously small font.

Really, now: just what’s their problem? It’s a trivial operation to filter out all but the most significant headers before printing. Do most people care about seeing every relay hop the message went through, and its antispam heuristics? No, of course not; most of us just want the message body and a few of the most important headers (time stamp, subject, origination address, and destination address, primarily). Make that the default and have the option of also printing with full headers. Is that so hard?

But I digress. I wanted to print a message without all that extra header crap so decided to print it from Apple Mail. Of course, that meant finding it. No problem: it contained some pretty unique keywords; searching should uncover it in a snap. No dice.

Again: Just what’s their problem? It’s not as if searching for a substring in a file is that difficult a problem to code. Is there some “intelligent” indexing at work? Is there a “smart” search heuristic deciding that my keyword isn’t “important” enough to merit reporting as a match? Who knows, but it’s enough to keep me away from Apple Mail for another five years.

I’ll point out that even Thunderbird is somewhat broken when it comes to searching. The default search function is one of those useless “smart” searches that is always hiding messages because it decides they are not “relevant” enough to match (even though they do). Thankfully, Thunderbird has a Quick Filter option that has a good old-fashioned plain vanilla search. No stupid indexing or “smart” heuristic to get in the way.

Really, if I can remember an unusual keyword or two, I should be able to use it to find a message. Anything that gets in the way of this is a huge step backwards. Come the revolution, software developers who make “smart” searches the only possible option get the guillotine.  They will not be missed.

Frum: Dead Wrong on Immigration

Published at 11:14 on 7 April 2019

In a provocatively-titled article published in this month’s Atlantic, David Frum (himself am immigrant to the USA) claims that “If Liberals Won’t Enforce Borders, Fascists Will.”

He points out (correctly) that the current level of immigration in the USA is historically high, then starts using lots of rhetorical hand-waving to imply that this is certain to cause all sorts of problems and resulting discontent in the voting public. And then, if liberals refuse to clamp down on the immigration, the scenario in the article’s title will presumably play out.

The problem with Frum’s contention is, what statistical evidence there is doesn’t precisely support the presumptions of his hand-waving very well. (That probably explains why hand-waving and not hard evidence is used in his article.) In fact, what evidence there is directly contradicts most of Frum’s assertions.

The Cato Institute recently published an article showing that public support for more immigration has actually increased since a fascist administration (and yes, Trump, is a fascist) took office in the USA. Actually, it’s been increasing since the mid-1990’s. Then, roughly 65% wanted immigration to be decreased. Now only about 30% do.

That’s right, roughly 70% want immigration kept the same or increased. And that’s after a decade of high levels of immigration! In a country with a fascist president who uses his bully pulpit to regularly promote xenophobia! There is, simply put, no evidence of growing public support for reducing immigration.

And let’s consider who tends to support restricting immigration? Republicans, that’s who. Where do Republicans tend to live? Away from the big cities. Likewise, Democrats (who support continued or increased immigration) tend to live in or near big cities. Where do immigrants tend to live? Also in or near big cities. That’s right, those who live near immigrants tend to view immigration in a positive light. Exactly the opposite situation one would expect if the mere presence of immigrants produced unease about immigration.

This goes for the border wall, too. The closer a person lives to the US/Mexico border, the less likely he or she is to support building Trump’s wall.

Finally, the Pew Research Center has done comparative surveys on immigration in multiple countries. Here’s the most recent one. Note that, compared to the world as a whole:

  • Americans are more likely to believe immigrants are a source of national strength.
  • Americans are less likely to associate immigrants with crime.
  • Americans are less likely to associate immigrants with terrorism.
  • Americans are less likely to support the deportation of illegal immigrants.

In short, there’s simply not much evidence in favor of Frum’s contention.

Quite the contrary, I would say. Support for fascism in the USA comes primarily from rural right-wingers who have little or no regular interaction with immigrants. Simply put, they fear that which they don’t know.

Newly-naturalized citizens naturally see such fascist proclivities as personal threats and as such oppose them. Therefore, increasing the number of immigrant voters will improve the quality of the electorate, by increasing the fraction of it that has a profound revulsion to fascist politics.

And it’s not just the situation on the electoral battlefield that will be helped by the presence of more immigrants. The electoral battle itself will tend to be less fought and more conceded in the pro-immigration, pro-diversity direction. Remember, the mere presence of immigrants tends to cause a more positive attitude towards immigrants.

“You’re promoting immigration because you want to destroy America,” the fascists say. And on this one, they are right; or rather, we should act in ways that make this accusation correct. When fascists say “America” they are referring not to what actually is but their fascist vision of what they believe it ought to be. That vision is evil and should be destroyed.

Politics is war by other means. Fight it. Support continued and even increased immigration.

New Software Won’t Fix the 737 Max

Published at 07:18 on 4 April 2019

Disclaimer: I am not an aircraft engineer. But I am a software engineer, one who looks at my own field with a critical enough eye to see how software is often used inappropriately, and I see the signs of the latter all over the place in this latest story.

The original software didn’t fix its fundamental unairworthiness, so why should new software be able to? The problem with the 737 Max isn’t that it has buggy software, it’s that it should never have been built in the first place. Its safety should come from its airframe being compatible with its engines. It can’t come from a software-and-sensor kludge that tries to compensate for an unsafe physical design.

In an article in today’s Washington Post:

Boeing said it would take about an hour for technicians to load a software update for the planes. The company’s software fixes will change the way the MCAS receives information, requiring feeds from both outside “angle of attack” sensors, rather than one, before it is triggered.

The system will also have more limits on how often it will engage, and Boeing will make changes that prevent the anti-stall feature from angling the plane’s nose too far downward in its attempts to correct for a possible stall.

Let’s take the fix of requiring both sensors to concur. We know the angle of attack sensors are unreliable, because they sometimes falsely indicate an excessive angle of attack. Being unreliable, it seems reasonable to presume that they also sometimes fail to indicate an excessive angle of attack. So this “fix” will actually fix nothing. It will merely trade one form of unsafe behavior for another.

The second fix is in fundamentally the same category as the first: like the former, it makes the system more conservative in deciding when to engage. That system was put there for a reason: the attempt to compensate for an unairworthy plane, whose airframe mismatches its engine size and placement. The physical plane will remain as unairworthy as before, only with less software compensation for it. Again, one problem is merely being traded for another.

Instead of tragedies caused by planes falling out of the sky because MCAS engaged in error, we will have tragedies caused by planes falling out of the sky because MCAS didn’t engage and they stalled.

I strongly suspect the only fix for these planes will be to scrap them and sell their bodies to recyclers, who will turn them into new metal stock from which fundamentally safe planes can be built. Those “fundamentally safe planes” will mostly be Airbus A320neo’s. Boeing’s attempt to get out of the corner they found themselves in the cheap and devious way is going to end up costing that company a lot.

The 737 Max Scandal

Published at 08:18 on 2 April 2019

I was going to make a long post of my own about it, but Vox just preempted me. Executive summary (I encourage you to read the Vox article):

  1. Boeing found themselves painted into a corner by decades-old design decisions whose consequences they couldn’t have foreseen.
  2. Basically, it was not possible to easily and quickly make a safe aircraft that was more fuel efficient, to compete with the new Airbus A320neo.
  3. Boeing should have sucked it up and taken the loss involved in playing catch-up with Airbus.
  4. Instead, they decided to bolt new, more efficient engines on the existing 737 airframe (even though they didn’t really fit) and christen the result the 737 Max.
  5. The new planes had kludges installed (sensors and software) in an attempt to paper over their fundamental unairworthiness.
  6. A corrupt relationship with the FAA allowed the kludged-up planes to be approved and sold.
  7. The inevitable happens.

Really, it should come as a surprise to absolutely nobody that a plane that substitutes good engineering practices based on the laws of physics operating in the real world, for software operating in cyberspace, ends up sometimes startling and surprising pilots, sometimes with tragic results. It should also come as no surprise that said software has bugs, also sometimes with tragic results.

The most important overall rule of software development is that it’s extremely difficult to get right. As someone who’s worked in that field, I know this by first-hand experience.

Bad Advice from Rick Wilson

Published at 11:50 on 1 April 2019

In a recent New York Daily News opinion piece, Rick Wilson claims:

That’s why the Democrats have two options for the 2020 presidental race: Make the race a referendum on Trump and Trumpism, or lose.

No. No those are not the two choices the Democrats face. This is not even remotely true.

The Democrats already have had an election where they campaigned as a referendum on Trump and Trumpism: the 2016 presidential election. That was most of Hillary Clinton’s platform: being the Not Trump candidate. And we all know how well that worked out.

Moreover, opposition parties facing authoritarian movements have generally failed when they campaign on the “at least we’re not them” platform. It’s what doomed the opposition for decades in Venezuela and Italy. They campaigned on being Not Chávez and Not Berlusconi in multiple elections… and lost every one.

It was only when the opposition changed their campaign tactic to “what we can do better for you” that their fortunes changed.

Ignore the Not Trump line. Everyone interested in voting Trump out already knows that means voting for the Democrats in 2020. The Democrats have an absolute lock on the Not Trump vote; as such, any additional effort focused on this sales tactic is wasted.

Look, I get it: Rick is a conservative. For him, personally, about the only thing good about the Democrats is that they are Not Trump. He’s not enthused about any of their other policies. He’s not looking forward to holding his nose and voting for a Democrat. But hold his nose and vote Democrat he will.

One of the greatest errors in thinking one can make is to extrapolate one’s own beliefs onto others. For millions of Americans, Trump is not so abjectly repugnant as he is to Wilson (or, for that matter, yours truly). Yes, it would be a great thing if he was: Trump would have never been elected. But wishing something were so does not make it so.

Western Thatching Ant (Formica obscuripes)

Published at 22:04 on 27 March 2019

I still remember the first time I discovered this ant, decades ago in a subalpine meadow in Colorado. I stepped on what I thought was an odd patch of dried bits of last year’s meadow grass. My foot sank into it and my leg was instantly covered in angry ants! Fortunately, I managed to brush them off before I received many bites.

I was astounded by how large that anthill was. Little did I know at the time that that particular colony was only a small-to-medium-sized one as this ant goes. After I moved to the Pacific Northwest, I started regularly encountering colonies of this ant. One I spied in the Cascades of Oregon was five feet high and a dozen feet in diameter!

The anthill pictured below is a fairly average size for this species’ colonies (note my bicycle helmet for scale). As always for this species, it is constructed of plant debris, not soil or sand. This anthill is near a road and I first noticed it when riding my bicycle past it.

Formica obscuripes colony.

It was teeming with activity; every square inch of it contained at least several ants.

Formica obscuripes.

These ants have an undeserved reputation for being aggressive biters. Bite they do, and after their mandibles break the skin they add insult to injury by spraying formic acid into the wound, causing further irritation and pain. But unless one is one of the few unfortunates who is abnormally sensitive to formic acid, the bite is minor and the pain quickly vanishes.

Moreover, in my experience these ants tend to be reluctant to bite. I spent ten to fifteen minutes acquiring the photographs in this article, and received but a single bite for my efforts, despite being in the immediate proximity of a hill teeming with thousands of ants and even accidentally bumping that hill and doing minor damage to it with a leg of my tripod.

Formica is the Latin word for “ant,” and this genus is the type genus for entire ant family, Formicidae. The plastic used for kitchen countertops that goes by the same name has nothing to do with ants, being so named because it was originally envisioned as being a substitute material for mica. Formica is, however, how formic acid (first discovered in ants) and chemically similar compounds like formaldehyde got their names.

These ants have quite a profound impact on the plants in the areas they inhabit. This is one of the ant species that tends and spreads aphids, feeding off the honeydew that the aphids secrete. They also dislike plants in the immediate neighborhood of their colonies, and will chew through the bark and spray formic acid on the resulting wounds, which eventually kills the attacked plants.

Their impact on the plant world is far from entirely baleful, however: many of our woodland wildflowers, such as trilliums and bleeding hearts, are dispersed by ants. Their seeds bear oily, nutrient-rich bodies called elaiosomes whose purpose is to attract ants, which usually carry the seeds for some distance before removing the elaiosome and discarding the rest of the seed.

These ants are plentiful here on Bainbridge Island, and our woods are full of blooming trilliums in the spring. I have never seen these ants inside the city limits of Seattle, and even in Seattle’s larger wooded parks, trilliums are an unusual sight. I do not believe these facts to be mere coincidence.

So, No Collusion*

Published at 12:44 on 25 March 2019

* No knowing, orchestrated collusion by the Trump campaign, that could plausibly be demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt to a judge and a jury, that is.

There is, however, a big puzzle piece that simply doesn’t fit right: why did Mueller catch so many people in and closely connected to the campaign lying about their connections to Russia? It doesn’t make sense: why like to an investigation (exposing yourself to being prosecuted for perjury), if you have committed no crime?

There are a number of plausible explanations, some that are fairly innocent, some otherwise. (In the latter category, what if Mueller almost found enough to prosecute the campaign for illegally colluding, but not quite?) Absent as full as possible a release of the report, we will never have any idea how to explain this discrepancy. It is for this very reason that a full release is desirable.

Beyond that, all of us in the anti-Trump crowd should put a lid on the whining. The whole reason for investigating was that we didn’t know enough and thought that there probably, but not definitely was serious dirt to be found. Mueller didn’t find the expected dirt, most likely because that dirt simply doesn’t exist. Sometimes, gut feelings end up being wrong. Deal with it.

This is, after all, why societies that worry about becoming repressive don’t automatically punish wrong-doers on mere suspicion, but instead require evidence, evidence that must typically be uncovered via investigation. An investigation is not a conviction.

On top of all that, there are many other reasons for which Trump should be opposed, and many of those reasons are more likely to be fruitful and convincing campaign material. Trump’s personal faults, as bad as they are, have never ranked terribly highly. Consider this poll, for example.

One of the reasons the opposition failed to unseat Berlusconi for so long in Italy was that they were too preoccupied with Berlusconi himself, instead of the conditions that had prompted many to vote for him. So can the “Russia, Russia, Russia” crap and move on to more fruitful avenues of criticism.

Coltsfoot (Petasites frigidus subsp. palmatus)

Published at 20:57 on 18 March 2019

Normally these boom in late February, but we did not have a normal February. This one was in a wet ditch by a road, so its young shoots probably spent much of last month smothered in dirty, compacted snow pushed there by the plows. Aside from being delayed in blooming, little harm seems evident to them.