Suppose you go to the airport, ready to get on a plane to visit your aunt in Florida, or business colleagues in Boston, or to go whitewater rafting in Colorado, or maybe to exercise your constitutional right to participate in an anti-war protest in Washington DC. But you can't. Your name is on the Transportation Security Administration's "no-fly" list. No one will tell you how it got there, or why, or how to get it off. No one will even tell you which agency is responsible for the list, because no one seems to know.

Scary, isn't it? Far-fetched? I wish it were.

(Link by way of Metafilter.)

I've seen most of the classic optical illusions, but this is a new one. Just a standard checkerboard, or is it?

(Link by way of Brad Choate's blog.)

Testing template changes.

TrackBack? What the heck is TrackBack?

Here's how it works. Suppose you want to make a comment on this entry. For whatever reason, you want to host the comment in your own blog, rather than using the comment box on this site. If you're using Movable Type or another TrackBack-enabled package, your software can send my site a ping with the URL of your entry. Visitors who click on the TrackBack link at the bottom of the entry will then see your URL. The Movable Type documentation has a more complete explanation of how it all works.

As with comments, you are solely responsible for your words. I reserve the right to delete any TrackBack links at any time for any reason.

Users who have trouble with the comment links here will probably also have trouble with TrackBack. I'm still working on that problem.

Testing new Trackback enabled templates.

I've been writing for Semiconductor Magazine for a while now, and I already knew they'd pulled a great team together. Now the rest of the world knows, too. The magazine recently received two awards for design excellence from Graphic Design USA. Congratulations to everyone at the magazine.

The Boston Red Sox have two pitchers who've won twenty games or more and are contenders for the American League Cy Young award. They have two hitters with more than 100 runs batted in, one of whom may win the American League batting title. Yet they were
eliminated from playoff contention last night and will be playing golf in October. Sigh...

The October issue of Wired has an interesting profile of cyberlawyer Lawrence Lessig. The article doesn't spend much time on his ideas, which have been discussed elsewhere, but looks at how a rising legal star became a crusader for Internet fair use rights.

The independent committee investigating scientific misconduct at Bell Labs has released its report. Lucent has fired one researcher for scientific misconduct, including falsification of experimental data. The committee cleared nineteen co-authors, but raised important questions about the oversight role that collaborators should play.

Researchers in organic semiconductors and molecular electronics may want to pay particular attention. The committee report includes a list (Appendix F) of twenty-five papers based on the questionable data.

If you haven't been following this story, you'll find previous developments here.

A hundred years after John Steinbeck's birth, Of Mice and Men was the second most challenged book of 2001. Why not celebrate Banned Books Week by reading it? For other reading suggestions, try the American Library Association's list of the 100 most frequently challenged books.

Jeff Bairstow's In My View column in the latest issue of Laser Focus World says nice things about this site. Since he's one of the best editors it's been my privilege to work with, well, I'm doing a serious happy dance over here. Thanks for the mention, Jeff, and welcome to new visitors from the LFW link.

There. Added a comment field to the archive pages, so the ability to read and add comments isn't lost when the entry scrolls off the front page.

I also want to add Trackback capability and do some work on the Netscape compatibility problem, but I don't know if I'll get to those today.

Testing a new version of Movable Type. I'll be making some tweaks to the template, too, but this is the smoke test.

September is International Literacy Month. UNESCO estimates that about a quarter of the world's population can't read. The correlation between literacy and economic health is striking, for countries and for individuals.

If you can read this page, you can help someone else learn to read. Literacyonline.org is a gateway to literacy resources in the US and internationally.

As a materials scientist, I've always thought particle physicists were being a little grandiose with their "Theory of Everything" talk. Particle physicists, in turn, are famous for dismissing condensed matter physics as too non-ideal and applied to be interesting. Now, as funding for particle physics slumps and the smart students study biology and computer science instead, physicists are wondering how to unify the many splits in their discipline.

(Link by way of Arts and Letters Daily.)

A funny thing has happened in the last few years. A lot of surveillance satellite technology has been declassified, and a lot of commercial companies have launched satellites with high-end imaging capability. Oil companies can survey potential drilling sites, logging companies can monitor forests, and average citizens can see military facilities all over the world.

The above link is part of GlobalSecurity.org, a non-profit, non-partisan research group working to prevent the proliferation of (and reliance on) weapons of mass destruction. Their site is huge, but the part of it that I've reviewed so far is refreshing in its focus on facts rather than politics. Highly recommended.

A tip of the hat to Peter Clarke at EE Times for a good survey of the outlook for MEMS devices, covering both technology and business issues. Well done!

Apologies for the outage this morning. My ISP tells me that there's another Internet worm going around. My hosting software was properly patched and immune, but the link to the outside world still got pounded by infected systems trying to break in. Sigh...

I'm reminded of the distinction between hackers and crackers. As the Jargon Dictionary explains, "hackers figure that anyone who can't imagine a more interesting way to play with their computers than breaking into someone else's has to be pretty losing."

Microsoft just doesn't understand portability. First they gave up 80% of the PDA market to Palm OS because they kept trying to squeeze a full-functioned PC into a handheld, never mind that the whole reason to carry a PDA in the first place is speed and ease-of-use. Windows CE-based PDAs are only just now starting to make significant inroads, and only because Palm dropped the ball.

The latest example of Microsoft's complete inability to get it is the much-hyped Tablet platform. It's a nifty concept: use it like a paper notebook, for those occasions when a laptop is too clumsy and a PDA is too limited. Capture your notes as data and manipulate them using the full array of desktop software. Problem is, at least the version discussed in the linked article is a full functioned Windows XP PC, which means it weighs about as much as a laptop and has a battery life of about three hours.

BZZT! Sorry, no sale. My Palm OS PDA lasted through a two week business trip on one charge. My paper notebook lasts until I run out of ink, and even then I can usually borrow another pen. Both of them combined don't weigh as much as this behemoth.

Try again, Microsoft.

Everyone already knew the 90-nm node would be difficult for semiconductor manufacturers. Now we're starting to get a sense for just how difficult. Intel's 90-nm process will include SiGe, strained silicon, and low-k dielectrics. That's three radical process changes at once, not even counting the node's reliance on extreme resolution enhancements for lithography, or the complexities of designing for non-ideal devices. Fun for those of us who get to write about it, not so fun for those who have to actually make it work.

I've been to Gettysburg. The part of Pennsylvania where I grew up looks a lot like Somerset County, where Flight 93 went down. Dave Barry captured the spirit of both places exactly.

Sometimes, a picture really is worth a thousand words. Here are pictures from September 11, 2001, taken at the World Trade Center site and from space.

(The second link worked earlier, but their server seems to be overwhelmed at the moment. Try back later.)

September 11. It's shaping up as a beautiful day, too, just like it was a year ago.

My morning paper has a full broadsheet page of event listings, of remembrances and memorials here and in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. Speakers at those events will no doubt talk about our national tragedy, about how the world has changed for all of us.

Yet, as Eileen McNamara's column in the Boston Globe this morning reminded me, it has changed far more for some than for others. Let's face it, I didn't find shoes and bone fragments amid the broken glass of my apartment in Battery Park. I didn't run for my life as a debris cloud swept through lower Manhattan. I didn't wake up September 12 and every morning since to the absence of a lost loved one. Neither, I suspect, did most of you.

My thoughts this morning are with those for whom this tragedy was deeply, indelibly personal. With those who are thinking this morning not of iconic heroes or faceless victims, but of friends, colleagues, and family members. I hope you find comfort in our fumbling attempts to honor your loss, and I hope you find peace and healing in the months and years to come.

I've mentioned the fight between Hollywood and Silicon Valley over digital rights management before. This article traces the conflict back to the introduction of the VCR and explains the competing positions in more detail than I've seen elsewhere. It's also one of the few articles to concede that consumers have a stake in all this, too.

(Link by way of TechDirt.)

Note to aspiring web publishers: Google is your friend. The search engine accounted for fully 25% of traffic to this site last week, including visits from Germany and South Korea. No other search engine made the top ten.

Very strange. My server log tells me that three people had "Document not found" errors while trying to read a subsection of my article on HSQ patents from last year. The link seems to be working fine now, though.

In other site news, I think I may have found the problem that caused comments to not work with some browsers, notably some Netscape 4.x versions. If you've been having trouble, please try again.

In general, if you find a problem with the site, please leave a comment here or send email using the link at the top of this page. Thanks!

A hundred miles off the west coast of Canada, there is a cluster of islands that the Haida people who live there call the Islands on the Boundary Between Worlds. In 1900, a young linguist named John Swanton went there and captured a rich oral literature, with depth and scope comparable to Homer's Odyssey.

I know this because I stumbled across a book called A Story as Sharp as a Knife at the library the other day. The book translates the Haida myths Swanton recorded, but also provides the cultural context and background that most collections of indigenous folktales lack. It's fascinating reading.

Okay, this is silly. It's Friday, okay? It's probably the world's shortest and smallest remake of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

(Link by way of Metafilter.)

Ah ha! You may have read that the RIAA is suing Verizon to obtain the name of a Verizon customer accused of file sharing. This article in the Washington Post explains the legal issues a bit more clearly than other stories I've seen.

"[Verizon associate general counsel Sara] Deutsch said the industry's motives in the case are particularly suspect because Verizon offered a simple alternative: The RIAA could sue the user, naming him or her as an unknown party, and then subpoena Verizon for the user's name. Under that scenario, Deutsch said, Verizon would comply because there would be a valid legal action pending.

But the labels 'would like to be able to serve millions of these types of subpoenas and collect subscriber names, and then pick out the most favorable for a lawsuit against the user community,' Deutsch said."

This seems like a pretty good idea. Teenangels is based on the discovery that older teenagers are concerned about Internet safety for their younger siblings, as well as for themselves. The group teaches students and parents about Internet safety and privacy. Their site includes a good collection of safety tips.

SEMI is collecting donations for Dresden flood relief on behalf of the American Red Cross. The Red Cross estimates that damages due to this year's severe flooding exceed US$10 billion in Germany alone.

It's been a bad year for floods all over, not just in Europe. The International Red Cross is providing food, clean water, shelter, and medical assistance in India, China, and throughout Southern Asia. They accept donations online.

Okay, maybe my politics are showing, but I love Molly Ivins. This time, she looks under the covers to see who maintains Iraq's oil fields.

My server logs tell me that the most popular article on the site last week was part one of January's look at the Nikon vs. ASML patent infringement suit. For those who might have missed it, there's also a part two. Apparently the surge in interest is due to the beginning of the administrative law trial in the ITC portion of the suit.

The Hynix Semiconductor rumor mill, dormant for most of the summer, is back with a vengeance. The company's creditors, mostly state-owned banks, took control earlier this year and now must decide how to restructure the struggling memory manufacturer. Various Korean government officials are pressuring them to do so well in advance of the December presidential elections. One official, quoted in the Korea Times, strongly suggested that Samsung should buy Hynix's assets. Another, quoted in the Korea Economic Daily, flatly insisted that Hynix should be sold overseas, presumably to Micron.

Never mind that both Samsung and Micron have repeatedly said they are not interested. After five months of negotiations leading to this spring's debacle, Micron in particular is no doubt heartily sick of the whole situation. Samsung, meanwhile, has no reason to add still more capacity in the face of sluggish PC sales and weak DRAM prices.

I'm back in town after spending a long weekend driving my convertible around Central New York with my husband. Before I left, I wrapped up next month's article for Semiconductor Magazine, on photoresists. As usual, there will be a link on the publications page once the article is online.

Happy Labor Day! If your picnic was rained out, as mine was, this might be a good time to remember where the labor laws most people take for granted came from.