I’ve long detested the way that just about every personal cleaning product that is sold has some added “fragrance”. I want to wash away odors, not mask them; but the people who bottle and sell such products don’t cater to my wants. Perhaps they live in some marketing bubble where they don’t know anyone with spartan tastes and so never consider us as potential customers. Notable in this regard is one shampoo I recently encountered which claimed to be “fragrance-free” but had a definite smell. Inspection of the list of ingredients revealed “burdock root” near the end; that substance is noted for its odor. The product seems to have been made for people who want their shampoo to be “fragrance-free”, not for people who want their shampoo not to stink.

With the continuing slump in oil prices, a lot of drilling and fracking equipment is idle. What better use to put it to than triggering earthquakes?

In offshore winds, pelicans ride the updrafts in front of waves, making it look sort of like they’re surfing. Here are some short video clips of this. (Rather than messing with HTML5 video embedding, I’m just linking directly to the video file. If that doesn’t work, there’s a YouTube version.) The audio track is “Legend of One”, by Kevin Macleod (CC by 3.0 license).

Notch the buried part to make room for an underground power cable:

In the Crypto Wars, arguments have occasionally been made that there is a constitutional right to cryptography. Most recently, Apple made that argument in trying to fend off the FBI’s request to help break into an encrypted phone. It went roughly as follows: writing code is an expressive act, freedom of expression is protected by the First Amendment, and so they can’t be forced to express themselves in ways they don’t want.

As this is being written, a judge is considering competing briefs from Apple and the government on the question of whether Apple should have to comply with the FBI’s request to help it brute-force the passcode of an iPhone which had belonged to one of the terrorists who did the San Bernardino shootings, and are now dead. (Update, May 10: the FBI withdrew its request a while ago, saying that they had found another way into the phone. But nobody doubts that they’ll be back at some point with another phone; so this article still represents what could easily be their next move. I’ve also edited this article for clarity, and to make some points more explicit.)

That’s the name of an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act: government agencies don’t have to reveal records if they are part of “the deliberative process”. Congressional subpoenas are limited by the same or a similar exemption, under the name “executive privilege”. But the reasons for these things are rather mysterious: when government officials are conspiring with each other (“deliberating”), isn’t that exactly the sort of thing the public should know? Or that Congress should know, in the case of “executive privilege”?

The authorities have recently been insinuating that the “flash crash” five years ago was caused by a guy in London who was trading on his own account from his parents’ house, trying to manipulate the market. Of course they have been careful to not say this explicitly, since it can’t really be true. There is an old jibe that “if people built houses the same way that programmers write programs, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization”. That’s unfair to careful programmers, but it’d be fair to apply it to the programmers of a stock market where trillion-dollar swings in valuation could be caused by the misdeeds of someone playing with mere millions of dollars. Not that there was serious reason to believe that even that happened; the announced link to the flash crash seems more like an attempt to grab headlines for a minor arrest than a real attempt to explain the flash crash. And the coverage from people who know finance (see, for example, columns by Matt Levine and by Michael Lewis) has indeed been appropriately skeptical.

Often in a controversy the things that are most interesting are the things that there isn’t any particular controversy about. Such is the case with the recent torture report from the Senate Committee on Intelligence. One of its twenty conclusions was:

A frequently given piece of advice for writers is to avoid long sentences. It’s one of the pieces of advice that I have always completely disregarded, as being obviously wrong: the thing to avoid is not long sentences, but complicated sentences. A sentence that is long can still be quite simple, if it doesn’t require the reader to remember previous parts of the sentence in order to parse the rest. Instead, each part of the sentence just extends the thought made in the previous one, with appropriate punctuation that shows the relationship between the two; a sentence of that sort can go on for many lines without confusing anyone. What is confusing is when a sentence does something like requiring the reader to remember which verb was used back forty words previously, before the sentence went off on a tangent. And the cure for such sentences is never as simple as just bisecting them. Often one can rearrange them to bring together the separated pieces of an idea; but if that doesn’t work, one has to drop the idea and then explicitly take it up again when one later comes back to it. Or, more brutally, one can axe the tangential remark; not everything needs to be said – or if it does need to be said, maybe it can be said somewhere else.