Lessons from the Civil Rights Movement

Yahoo! News today covered the story of how the Birmingham News recently found a box filled with photos from the Civil Rights era that were never published. The paper basically felt (then) that the whole business was just embarassing and that if they ignored it, it wasn't really happening and would go away. Eventually the NY Times and the AP got in and made it a national story, forcing them to cover it to at least some extent, but it took a long time for that attitude to come around. This weekend, they printed some of them in the paper, and the rest are at http://www.al.com/unseen if you want to go take a look, but have patience, that server's getting massacred.

Anyway, while I was looking at one of those pictures, it mentioned something about "after the NAACP was outlawed in Alabama in 1956," which was something I never knew. So I did a little research. The then-AG of Alabama, who later became governor, got a court there stopping the NAACP from conducting business in the state. At issue was a state law that required foreign (out of state) corporations to "qualify" before conducting business. The business? Trying to help blacks enroll in public schools. The complaint that got the injunction said that the NAACP was "causing irreparable injury to the property and civil rights of the residents and citizens of the State of Alabama."

Only 50 years ago. Wow. So, the NAACP argued their activities weren't covered under the state law, and that the law was suppressing their first ammendment rights to freedom of speech and assembly. The state then subpoenaed a bunch of records, including most notably the membership rolls of the NAACP, which understandably refused to turn them over. They were held in contempt. The NAACP moved to dissolve the contempt order on constitutional grounds, but the court refused to hear the argument as they were in contempt. Catch-22!

So the NAACP went to the US Supreme Court, which dismissed the contempt violation. Back to Alabama, where the judge said the USSC ruled based on a "mistaken premise" and found the NAACP in contempt again, which the USSC reversed again, and forced Alabama to try the case on its merits, with the proviso that the Federal District court should try the case if Alabama refused to. It's just astounding looking back that such an order would be necessary.

Naturally, you can see where this is headed. The Alabama court found in favor of the state. The Alabama appeals court refused to hear the appeal. So, after 5 years, the USSC heard the appeal and found in favor of the NAACP, and this is what I found both most interesting and relevant to the present day. I'll just quote Wikipedia and let you take from it what you will:

In an opinion delivered by Justice John Marshall Harlan II, the Supreme Court decided in favor of the petitioners, holding that "Immunity from state scrutiny of petitioner's membership lists is here so related to the right of petitioner's members to pursue their lawful private interests privately and to associate freely with others in doing so as to come within the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment" and, further, that freedom to associate with organizations dedicated to the "advancement of beliefs and ideas" is an inseparable part of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Because the action of the state obtaining the names of the Association's membership would likely interfere with the free association of its members, the state's interest in obtaining the records was superseded by the constitutional rights of the petitioners.

Well, it CAN'T be that I'm expanding...

I admit it, when it comes to clothes, I really just don't care. While I might like or dislike the color or pattern on a shirt, if it's the right size and it doesn't make my eyes bleed, I'll call it wearable as long as it fits and doesn't have any holes, and occasionally beyond that. One of the benefeits of this laissez-faire attitude toward my clothing is, I really don't spend much on clothes, since I only decide I need more shirts or pants when I find myself having to recycle the few I have left so often I start getting funny looks.

One of the downsides to keeping a shirt for a few years though, I've found, is that the darn things shrink. Suuuuuure, you say, it's all the shirt's fault. Then you'll wink, because you're being clever. Stop that. I know I'm right about my shirts shrinking, because they only shrink in one direction.

One day I've got a perfectly nice shirt and two or three wearings later, I'm showing more belly than Cristina Aguilera... umm... has. But that's not the point. I'm 6 foot 3 (1.90m), so there's a fair amount of shirt length there, and it just vanishes in big chunks sometimes. After going through my closet a few weeks ago and finding several shirts that had somehow become wider than they are tall, I decided to toss them out. But the mystery remained: why are they only shrinking lengthwise?

It all has to do with scales. Most fibers (silk is an exception) have microscopic scales on them. When a fabric is woven, a bunch of strands of the fiber are pulled lengthwise next to each other, these are called the "warp." Then, other strands of the fiber are woven through the warp fibers, these are called the "weft" (you can remember this because they go from right to weft. [rimshot] Thanks, I'll be here all week.)

Anyway, when the weft strands have been woven through the warp strands, you have a piece of fabric, and due to the scales, the strands tend not to move much after that, which is a good thing for people who like plaid. Everything's hunky dorey and this is how you buy the shirt... the warp going up and down your torso (and down your sleeves generally) and the weft going across your chest. I assume this is because the shirt or sleeves getting shorter isn't as much of an issue as the whole thing getting tighter.

After you wear your new piece of adornment, you toss it in the wash and drier. What happens when the shirt gets hot is that like almost all hot things, the fibers expand a little. As they cool off and start to contract, the scales aren't in such close contact any more, and there's room for some slippage, and this is where the shrinkage can make its move.

Okay, but why only in one way? Remember how it was woven in the first place? The warp fibers were stretched to make it easier to weave the weft fibers -- and those weft fibers weren't. They were just drawn through with relatively little strain. So the warp fibers sieze the opportunity and start to revert to their original length. The process is called "relaxation shrink" since the warp fibers are relaxing toward their original length.

According to clothing industry standards, the stanard for relaxation shrink is around 2-3% over the life of the garment, but they define "life" as 2 years or about 40 wearings. If you wear things like I do, more often than that, for longer, or both, the shrinkage will continue. Their answer? Buy more clothes!

Hello, planned obsolescence, my old friend. Washing things in cold and not machine drying will also help. Or wear all silk, I can think of worse fates. One more mystery solved, see you Monday.

Male Nurses

With a baby on the way, my wife's naturally spent a lot of time thinking about breast feeding. As usual, I introduced one of those random facts I picked up somewhere, and as usual, she argued with me about it: whether or not men can lactate. Well, the record is clear: I'm right. Which makes me glad I didn't accept the wager terms she offered, that I would be "allowed" to do half the feeding.

It's actually not all that uncommon, though I've found more citations of the facts behind it than number of occurences. Here's the ones I found:

Historically, male lactation was noted by the German explorer Alexander Freiherr von Humboldt prior to 1859, who wrote of a 32-year-old man who breastfed his child for five months. It was also observed in a 55-year-old Baltimore man who had been the wetnurse of the children of his mistress.
Compleat Mother, Fall 1996 issue

We’ve known for some time that many male mammals, including some men, can undergo breast development and lactate under special conditions. We’ve also known that many otherwise perfectly normal male domesticated goats, with normal testes and the proven ability to inseminate females, surprise their owners (and probably themselves) by spontaneously growing udders and secreting milk....Lactation, then, lies within a male mammal’s physiological reach.
"Father's Milk" in Discovery, February 1995

And in 2002, Pravda and some other international papers reported on a Sri Lankan man who nursed his daughter following his wife's death.

So, it's possible. What causes it? Basically it takes production of a hormone called prolactin, which as you might guess is much more prominent in women, especially just after childbirth. Men can produce it, however, and apparently attempting to nurse will encourage production of the hormone in a surprisingly short time. I wouldn't generally recommend this, though -- the enlargement of the breast that happens seems to be at least partially permanent.

There was also a Baby Blues sunday comic on this. Frankly, I'm with Darryl on this one.

That Mickey Mouse Law

Today's topic comes to us courtesy of Aamthen, who in the Dewey Decimal comments thread, asked:

[I]f the DDC was invented in the 1870s how can it still be under copyright? I thought copyrights (before the DMCA) only lasted 17 years.

Good question! The current copyright terms are as follows:

- For works created in 1978 or later, author's life plus 70 years (upped from 50 years in 1998). If it's a non-person creator (John Doe created Screwy McSquirrel for Disneycorp, Disneycorp holds the copyright) it's 95 years from initial publication or if the work isn't published for a long while, 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter.

- For works created before 1978, the initial term was for 28 years, then renewable for another 28 (then upped to 47, for a total of 75 years.) In 1998, congress extended the renewal by 20 years to make the the total 95. Also, congress passed a law that the renewal is automatic for any work published between 1964 and 1977.

Maybe you're confused with patents, which last 21 years after the patent grant. Maybe it's confusion with trademarks, which last 10 years. Maybe it's confusion with the law dealing with copyright, U.S. Code 17. Or, maybe you're confused with the 17 year cicadas, which are back this year. Look out though, someone just had a severe allergic reaction after sauteeing and eating thirty of them. He was allergic to shellfish, though.

Cicadas aside, we still haven't covered how the DDC is covered by copyright still. The answer is versions. The DDC is under its 22nd edition, and each new version is covered under a new copyright. As long as the system undergoes significant modification on an ongoing basis, it can more or less be covered indefinitely. So, there's your answer on that.

You may have noticed above that all the terms were extended by 20 years in 1998. This is largely due to those happy-go-lucky folks at Walt Disney. Mickey Mouse was first "published" in 1928, which meant the design of Mickey would have gone into the public domain in 2003, with several other characters to follow on soon after. Rather than let that happen, the folks at Disney (plus some other lesser contributors) threw millions and millions of dollars at congress, and in 1998, the Sonny Bono Copyright Extention Act was passed, meaning all the works that were supposed to go Public Domain in 1999 got pushed off until 2019.

The law was challenged in Eldred v. Ashcroft, where the plaintiff argued that the copyright extention was unconstituional. It's an interesting argument. Here's what the constitution says about copyright:

the Congress shall have power [...] to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.

The intent is fairly clear: if no copyrights existed, people wouldn't have much incentive to create new things, so we grant them patents and copyrights (for limited times) so they can make some money for their effort and innovation, and continue to do so. Makes sense. The Eldred case said, "what progress is being promoted by letting a corporation cash in for 95 years instead of 75 years? It's not relevant."

While Eldred lost, they did make the additional argument that a healthy public domain is also necessary to promote the advancement of art -- many famous works were based on others that would have been a violation under current copyright terms. In fact, one notable company makes a habit of making a lot of money off redoing public-domain nineteenth century works, such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Pinocchio, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Alice in Wonderland.

So, what happens when Mickey is threatened again in 2019? A very cynical person might remark that with that much financial weight to throw around, copyright law will always be just long enough to make sure Mickey Mouse never enters the public domain. A very cynical person may add that Disney's The Jungle Book was released months after the expiration of Rudyard Kipling's copyright. A very cynical person just might be on to something.

Own Your Own Island! On Second Thought, Don't!

Last night in bed, my wife and I got to talking on a subject that I'm sure every couple has had a deep heart-to-heart on. I am, of course, talking about bird poop. Specifically, petrified bird droppings.

She's in the middle of a novel and mentioned it takes place on an island that used to be part of Haiti, but the U.S. took it over. I asked if it was covered in doo, and she applied in the affirmative. I confirmed for her that one of the side details in the book was, in fact, based in reality: the U.S. has a bird poo island annexation law.

Passed in 1856, the "Guano Islands Act," reads:

Whenever any citizen of the United States discovers a deposit of guano on any island, rock, key, not within the lawful jurisdiction of any other government, and not occupied by the citizens of any other government, and takes peaceable possession thereof, and occupies the same, such island, rock, or key may, at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the United States.

The best part about it is that this law is still on the books. So, if you're sailing around the South Pacific and find an uncharted island covered in dung, you can claim it for America. Uhhh... yay.

Why would we have such a bizarre law? Well, it's because people wanted the guano. Bird droppings are naturally high in phosphates, which make amazingly good fertilizer -- unchallenged until chemical fertilizers in the mid-20th century. The problem is, in non-equatorial climates, they all degrade, but if you have the right kind of weather, hoo boy, you get the creme de la crap. Of course, it's hard to collect except in places where a lot of birds congregate in a smallish area most of the time -- like a small island. And in the 1840s and 1850s, the only known islands with the really good stuff were off the coast of (and owned by) Peru.

The Peruvians were making a lot of money off this fetid resource -- they limited its supply to the rest of the world, and charged a lot for it. One of the reasons was it was a nasty job to get the stuff. Fresh shite is obviously no picnic, and after it dries to a desireable amount, it more or less petrifies, and you need to basically mine it like stone -- including using dynamite.

None of the Peruvians really wanted the job, so they resorted to the solutions men had turned to for millenia -- get immigrants to do it! Whether they want to or not! Peru shipped in chinese coolies, sometimes in chains, and freelance slavers depopulated the Easter Islands to sell the islanders to work the mines. You know those big heads that nobody knows what they're for? That's because everyone who could read the inscriptions died mining fecal matter.

Anyway, in 1855, we wanted bird BMs, Peru had them, and we weren't happy. But an American discovered that Baker Island in the South Pacific had a lot of this precious commodity, so congress lept into action as quickly as possible, and a year later we had the Guano Islands Act.

Two guano islands stand out, one as a military landmark (I'll let you guess which one, and reveal it at the end) and one for actual Guano harvesting. The latter is an island called Navassa, in the Caribbean, still at least nominally claimed by Haiti. In 1857, an American entrepreneur took control of the island under the Act, and set up a mining company there. While not quite as harsh as the Peruvian conditions, the mining situation on Navassa was so bad for the (almost all black) workers that they eventually revolted, killing several overseers. The rioters were brought back to the U.S. and sentenced, some to death with the company denying the claims of severe abuse.

However, after operations restarted, one of the miners actually managed to slip a letter through the island's company censors to President Benjamin Harrison, and the letter actually made it to the President himself. He dispatched a Navy destroyer to investigate the matter, and the allegations of the miner and those on trial were confirmed. Public opinion turned against the company, and the death sentences were commuted.

The Spanish-American War of 1898 forced the island to be evacuated, and by that point, significant phosphate deposits in the U.S. south had been found, and it was not profitable to restart the operation. The mining operation shut down. Nevassa hosted a Coast Guard lighthouse until 1996, and is now run by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife department, who have closed it to the public.

Oh, and some guy in California tried to invoke the Guano Islands Act to take posession of Nevassa, then sued the government for $50 million over the whole thing when they turned him down. He lost, because the claiming was ruled to be a one-time event, you can't claim an Island of Doodie that someone else claimed in the past. So keep a list of what's been taken when you go to stake your claim.

Oh, and the other famous guano island? It's known to Americans as Midway.

Let's Make a Deal

Doing research and then trying to explain it to others isn't something new to me. I've always been of the opinion that if you're going to wonder about something, you might as well find out the answer, so I end up doing that a lot off of discussions I have with friends. Never in my life have I encountered such a storm of fury as when I tried to explain the Monty Hall Selection Theory.

And it's not just me, I've been reading on other people going ballistic over this, so I'm going to warn you up front: the solution to this problem is nonintuitive. That means, it doesn't work like you feel it "should." Keep an open mind and we'll get there.

The Monty Hall problem is named after its resemblance to the old TV game show Let's Make a Deal. Here are the rules to your game:

1. There are 3 doors to select, you may select any one of them.
2. Behind exactly one door is a prize.
3. After that selection, one door that does not have the prize behind it will be opened and eliminated as an option.
4. You then have the option of keeping your initial selection, or switching to the other unopened door.

The puzzle then says: what should you do to try to win? Keep your pick, switch to the other door, or does it not matter? Not to beat around the bush, the answer is: switch. Your odds of winning double if you change your selection.

This is where I'm going to remind you of what I said above about it being nonintuitive. Here's where I try to explain 4 ways. If one doesn't get you there, maybe the others will.

I. Logical

Your odds of getting the correct choice on the first pick are 1 in 3, obviously. Also obvious, if you don't change your selection, your odds don't change, so staying with your initial selection keeps your odds at 1 in 3.
However, if you didn't select correctly initially, as you won't 2 times in 3, switching will win.
Odds while staying: 1 in 3. Odds while switching: 2 in 3.

II. Mathematical/Rigorous
There are 3 options for where the prize is, we'll call them doors A, B, and C, and similarly 3 selections you can make, so there are 9 scenarios to consider.

If you keep:
Select A, prize A: Either eliminated, you win.
Select A, prize B: C eliminated, you lose.
Select A, prize C: B eliminated, you lose.
Select B, prize A: C eliminated, you lose.
Select B, prize B: Either eliminated, you win.
Select B, prize C: A eliminated, you lose.
Select C, prize A: B eliminated, you lose.
Select C, prize B: A eliminated, you lose.
Select C, prize C: Either eliminated, you win.
Odds of winning: 3 in 9 (1/3)

If you switch:
Select A, prize A: Either eliminated, switch to the other and lose.
Select A, prize B: C eliminated, switch to B and win.
Select A, prize C: B eliminated, switch to C and win.
Select B, prize A: C eliminated, switch to B and win.
Select B, prize B: Either eliminated, switch to the other and lose.
Select B, prize C: A eliminated, switch to C and win.
Select C, prize A: B eliminated, switch to A and win.
Select C, prize B: A eliminated, switch to B and win.
Select C, prize C: Either eliminated, switch to the other and lose.
Odds of winning: 6 in 9 (2/3)

III. Intuitive

Imagine the same game, but with a million doors instead of three. After 999,998 eliminations, you can keep your door or switch to the only one of the other 999,999 not eliminated. Does your first one-in-a-million pick still seem so good?

Does it help if you think of your choice not as "Door A. vs. Door C" but "Door A vs. everything else?"

IV. Experimental

As a last result, play the game. Keep track. After 50 or so trials, you'll see, you win twice as often by switching. Seeing it happen should also reinforce the first explanation: the keeping strategy only wins (1/3) when you were right the first time, and every other time (2/3) the switching strategy wins.

If you're really clever, perhaps you can get a friend to play with you. One with deep pockets is even better.

Dewey or Don't 'e?

Today's topic is a request from Viroaquix, who writes:

"Yeah, the Dewey Decimal System. What's up with that? I wanna know."

Okay, Viro. The Dewey Decimal Classification system is actually owned by the Online Computer Library Center, which bought the rights to the DDC in 1988. It was invented in the 1870s by a guy named Melvil Dewey who was 21 and working in the Amherst College library as a student. Pretty impressive. The DDC was one of the things that gave a kick in the pants to the whole library movement, since this was also an era where public education became more important. He went on to be a big-shot librarian, I won't bore you with the details or tell you if that's a joke or not.

The DDC is generally pretty straightforward and reasonable. All books are given numbers dealing with their subject matter. DDC Numbers can be any number of digits long, depending on how specific the content is. All the DDC numbers are given 3 digits to the left of the decimal, everything else to the right. So something really general, let's say, a book on dogs would have a DDC number of 6 (Applied Science, and I'll cover this below) then 3 (Agriculture and related topics -- yeah, it's weird), then 6 (Domesticated Animals. Ahh. So general "domestic animal" books are 636. Then, dogs are 7 within that, so they're at 636.7. If you want to read up on your wiener dog, you'd have to add a 5 (Sporting dogs, hounds, and terriers) then a 3 for Dachshunds.

Wiener dogs are 636.753.

Books are then sorted numerically. Of course, some subjects are going to have lots of books in them. For instance, "dogs." That could make it hard to find a specific book among all those 636.7s. So what they'll do is then alphabetize those by the author's name, often including the first letter or 3 on the DDC, or "call number" tag. The DDC category that's probably overflowing more than anything, though is 813, "fiction." Bet you didn't think fiction books had DDC numbers. Well, they do, but there are so many 813s, that they're usually split out in libraries and they don't bother to number them (sometimes they're just given an "F" or "Fic" but it really means 813 -- they're in the system.

So far, it seems like a pretty reasonable system, right? Along the lines of what you or I would come up with. There are only a few weird bits. The biggest is the godawful mess of the 500s and 600s. The first digit 5 was assigned to "natural science" and the first digit 6 to "applied science." The "golden rule" is if it's about things in their unchanged state, it's a 5, but if it's been modified in some way, it's a 6. This is why dogs are in the 600s -- they're domesticated, and therefore altered. Wildebeests, though, would be in the 500s. Unless it was a book about keeping Wildebeest pets, I suppose.

It also leads to weird stuff like books about bees being in the 500s, but beekeeping books are 600s. Trees? 500s. Lumber? 600s.

Another kind of odd but neat bit is that certain "major" (read: European) languages and nations get special numbers that they keep across sections. It starts in the 400s (Language) where English gets 420, German 430, French 440, Italian 450, Spanish 460. You can tell it's (understatement alert) kind of a biased system by noting Latin gets 470, Greek 480, and the "minor languages" (i.e. every other one) has to shoehorn into the 490s.

Anyway, you see those 2-6 numbers for England, Germany, France, Italy, Spain pop up again later: General history of England? 942. Germany? 943. France? 944, etc.
German lit? 830s. French? 840s. Italian, 850s. You get the idea. Same bias, too. Greek lit? 880s. Lit of all East and Southeast Asian languages? 895. Lots of room for those new works by Aristophanes, I guess.

The one other notable thing about the DDC is that it's copyrighted. That's right, you have to buy a license to use it. Didn't know that? Neither did these folks:

25 Sep 2003
Dewey Decimal system owner sues Library Hotel

The nonprofit library cooperative that owns the Dewey Decimal system has filed suit against a library-themed luxury hotel in Manhattan for trademark infringement. The Library Hotel, which overlooks the New York Public Library, is divided according to the classification system, with each floor dedicated to one of Dewey's 10 categories. Room 700.003 includes books on the performing arts, for example, while room 800.001 has a collection of erotic literature." A lawyer for the library group, Joseph Dreitler, claims a "person who came to (the hotel's) Web site ... would think they were passing themselves off as connected with the owner of the Dewey Decimal Classification system." [...] The suit demands triple the hotel's profits since its opening.

In case you were wondering, the price for the DDC ver. 22 goes from $585 per year for a single user to an $1150 annual site licence for libraries with 10 or more staff members.

So, Viro, that's what's up with the Dewey Decimal system.

Update: Boxer Rebellion Hoax

Lurker Finduilas dropped me a note hoping to help with the Boxer Rebellion Hoax story. Turns out there's a project underway in Colorado to digitize all their newspapers from 1880 to 1899, adding to an existing project that covers the 1870s. This was announced last October. Since the supposed hoax stories were in 1899, when this project is complete, we should be able to either debunk or partially support the story.

Plus, reading old, old newspapers is pretty cool. If you want to check it out, you can search the already scanned and indexed papers at http://www.cdpheritage.org/newspapers/index.html.