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April 30, 2006
"These stories about my intellectual capacity really get under my skin. You know, for a while I even thought my staff believed it. There on my schedule first thing every morning it said, 'Intelligence Briefing.'"
TDK develops 200 gigabyte Blu-Ray discs. via
Providing the same capacity but with fewer layers means each layer must hold more data that a single-layer BD can. Indeed, TDK said it upped the capacity to 33GB - 32 per cent more than a standard BD data-carrying layer can. According to the report, it uses bismuth peroxide as the recording medium - heat it sufficiently with laser light and it forms bubbles of air. These reflect light differently than the surrounding material does, so can be used to record digital information in the way a CD or DVD's pits do.
The trick seems simple. Instead of using a smooth surface, the team scored it with a series of skewed triangular grooves. This gives it a kind of saw-tooth profile.
Now the water droplets appear to push themselves off the long-slope side of the grooves and rocket across the heated surface - instead of just dancing on the spot as they do in the kitchen pan.
The mechanism is a little more complicated and took a while to work out, Dr Linke told the BBC. "The vapour," he explained, "mostly flows in one direction, and the droplet sits on the flowing vapour, a bit like a boat carried along in a flowing river."
Droplets can also climb over steps, and up inclines of up to 12 degrees. Filmed with high-speed cameras, the droplets appear to take on a life of their own, sliding along like sloppy amoebae.
At the White House Correspondents' Dinner, Stephen Colbert exhibited his balls. He mercilessly mocked Bush, who was sitting only a few feet away. Very few laughs, many more gasps. It was like the court jester revealing to the king all the realities from which the court has hidden him. Also available is a full transcript of Colbert's words and the complete CSPAN video footage of the Correspondents' Dinner. via
He attacked those in the press who claim that the shake-up at the White House was merely re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. “This administration is soaring, not sinking,” he said. “They are re-arranging the deck chairs--on the Hindenburg.”
Addressing the reporters, he said, "You should spend more time with your families, write that novel you've always wanted to write. You know, the one about the fearless reporter who stands up to the administration. You know-- fiction."
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April 29, 2006
~This idiot box is the pupil in the retina which makes up the all-seeing eye.~
YouTube spends a mil a month for bandwidth. via
The bandwidth companies typically charge video sites up to a penny per minute of video streamed. Big players who buy in bulk get discounted rates: Industry observers estimate that YouTube, which is streaming 40 million videos and 200 terabytes of data per day, may be paying between a tenth of a cent and half a cent per minute. Neither YouTube nor Limelight would comment on their pricing.
Feds hide illegal domestic spying as state secret. The Bush administration is stymieing the EFF's lawsuit against AT&T. The EFF has a former AT&T employee who claims the telecom giant is illegally allowing the NSA to record every single bit of internet traffic, and now the government's saying that it falls under state secret privilege. via
The federal government intends to invoke the rarely used "State Secrets Privilege" -- the legal equivalent of a nuclear bomb -- in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's class action lawsuit against AT&T that alleges the telecom collaborated with the government's secret spying on American citizens.
The State Secrets Privilege is a vestige from English common law that lets the executive branch step into a civil lawsuit and have it dismissed if the case might reveal information that puts national security at risk.
In related news, the federal government used national security letters 3,501 times last year. via
The FBI secretly sought information last year on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents from their banks and credit card, telephone and Internet companies without a court's approval, the Justice Department said Friday.
It was the first time the Bush administration has publicly disclosed how often it uses the administrative subpoena known as a National Security Letter, which allows the executive branch of government to obtain records about people in terrorism and espionage investigations without a judge's approval or a grand jury subpoena.
The FBI delivered a total of 9,254 NSLs relating to 3,501 people in 2005, according to a report submitted late Friday to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate.
The department also reported it received a secret court's approval for 155 warrants to examine business records last year under a Patriot Act provision that includes library records. However, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has said the department has never used the provision to ask for library records.
The number was a significant jump over past use of the warrant for business records. A year ago, Gonzales told Congress there had been 35 warrants approved between November 2003 and April 2005.
The spike is expected to be temporary, however, because the Patriot Act renewal that President Bush signed in March made it easier for authorities to obtain subscriber information on telephone numbers captured through certain wiretaps.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the same panel that signs off on applications for business records warrants, also approved 2,072 special warrants last year for secret wiretaps and searches of suspected terrorists and spies. The record number is more than twice as many as were issued in 2000, the last full year before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
The Devil's Music (The comments are great.) via
On the surface there might appear to be no link between Black Sabbath, Wagner's Gotterdammerung, West Side Story and the theme tune to the Simpsons.
But all of them rely heavily on tritones, a musical interval that spans three whole tones, like the diminished fifth or augmented fourth. This interval, the gap between two notes played in succession or simultaneously, was branded Diabolus in Musica or the Devil's Interval by medieval musicians.
"[Dissonance] is something that yearns to be resolved. A very good example would be the opening of West Side Story, Maria. It wants to resolve into the next note. It is a special kind of tension. It gives that angular, edgy, spooky feel. Film music is often extremely sophisticated at signalling to a listener here is a particular kind of character. It is a leitmotif, first used by Wagner."
Never mind the tritone, some music scholars even thought the major scale was the devils work! Belive it or not, but the notes behind such diabolic tunes as 'doh a deer' and 'row row row your boat' was once considered satanic. Aparrently it made you want to do naughty things, and so was dubbed 'the lustful scale'. Funny thing is, it's now been the basis of western music for at least five hundred years, and what once was 'pagan' and degenerate was soon used to compose many religious songs/masses, nursery rymes and folk songs. It kind of reminds me of how ragtime and jazz were viewed not so long ago.....
Shane, London
It seems much more likely that the use of the tritone in Heavy Rock comes from it's origins in blues music. The ubiquitous blues scale derives much of its tonal character from the tritone at its center.
Noel, Nottingham
Tritones don't have to sound evil or demonic. When used in jazz they can sound very beautiful. For example the standard (and sometimes boring) II-V-I cadence G7 - C7 - F gets transformed into something wonderful if the C7 chord is replaced with a chord based on its Tritone - such as F#13. Ask any jazz pianist for an aural demonstration and you'll see what I mean.
Tony Jackson, London, UK
At the risk of being labelled a music anorak, there's one thing far more common in a lot of popular music (and almost everything written by Wagner and co), and that's the diminished seventh (C - E flat - F# - A). The odd thing is that this is composed of two tritones. Spooky eh?
Peter, Newbury, UK
It's a classic blues sound - at first hidden in the dominant 7th chord used in most blues turn-arounds. Players like Hendrix (e.g. intro to Red House), BB King (e.g. Live at the Regal), etc. brought it out into the open. I like using it because it gets me out of sounding too melodic. I admit that it's not that easy to fit into the worship music that I play at church. Perhaps there's a reason I hadn't thought of before...
Andy Harris, Washington, DC
There is a tritone present in every dominant chord in music - and dominant chords crop up in all musical genres, from nursery rhymes to grand opera. So the tritone is everywhere in music harmony - proving that the devil has all the best tunes!
David Mead, Bath
This is not a coincidence. The esoteric school of Pythagoras taught that certain sounds can trigger different states of mind. In later centuries, the church knew this (scripts still locked in the Vatican) and tried to make illegal all the sounds that could bring sexual, joyful, sensual or other feelings.
Elias Kostopoulos, Athens, Greece
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April 28, 2006
"But I always have liked to think of it as if we're taking teo-nanacatyl." "What's that?" "An Aztec word. It means 'god's flesh.' "
'nother late entry...
Our fiscal future, straight from the White House Office of Management and Budget, as explained by the formidable Angry Bear blog:
But let’s turn to those graphs. The first one shows the GDP growth rates since 2000 (more volatile than high) and projections that GDP growth will taper down to around 3.1% per year. And I thought these tax cuts will lead to rapid future growth according to the free lunch supply-side crowd! The next graph documents how weak employment growth has been since 2001. Well, that’s what the data shows but the titles of both charts talk about strong growth. As Brad might say – HUH?
But ilsm wants us to look at the last graph, which I have to admit is truly fascinating. Its title is “Current Trends Are Not Sustainable”, which is consistent with what Greg said. It also provides taxes as share of GDP from 1970 to today and projections through 2070. Note the rise in the share of taxes relative to GDP during the Clinton years and the dip after 2000. The chart does not say – but I suspect its projections are based on the assumption that we ignore President Bush’s calls for permanent tax cuts. Finally, the chart breaks out Federal spending among interest payments (ilsm wants us to notice how they grow over time), mandatory spending, and discretionary spending. Am I reading this graph correctly? The projected increase in spending as a share of GDP is not from a projected increase in discretionary spending but from a projected increase in mandatory spending. So why are so many rightwingers concerned about controlling discretionary spending?
Update: Looking at the actual GDP growth figures for 2001 through 2005 as well as the OMB projections for the rest of the decade, it seems that our average annual growth rate over the past 5 years was only 2.55% and will be only 2.9% for the decade if actual growth follows these projections. Think about it. From 1947 to 1980, average annual growth was 3.5% and for the 8 years that Clinton was President, average annual growth was 3.7%. During the Reagan-Bush41 years, average annual growth was only 3.0% and according to the OMB, average annual growth for this decade will be less than that. So much for that supply-side mythology that President Bush keeps muttering as if it were the gospel.
Okay I know this is incredibly nerdy to bring up, but Stargate SG-1 just filmed its 200th episode, and by the time shooting's complete for this 10th season, it will be the longest running American sci-fi show of all time.
Once the 202nd episode is in the can, Stargate SG-1 will offically be the longest running scifi show in US television history, only surpassed in the world market by the nearly 4-decade long "Doctor Who" series that has run in one format or another longer than any other.
Apple just patented a virtual touch-screen keyboard. via
The virtual keyboard learns which keys are touched more often than others and adjusts the sensitivity of each key accordingly. Certain keys are given more weight over others, depending on the likelihood of the person pressing one key over another. That likelihood is determined by the person's distance of touch from the closest key, as well as frequency of use.
The keyboard would assume, for example, that someone who frequently types the name "Vin" did not mean to type the word "fin" given the close proximity of the "v" and "f" keys on a QWERTY keyboard.
Mexico's about to go Dutch—Vincente Fox is set to sign a bill legalizing personal drug use: via
The bill says criminal charges will no longer be brought for possession of up to 25 milligrams of heroin, 5 grams of marijuana (about one-fifth of an ounce, or about four joints), or 0.5 grams of cocaine -- the equivalent of about 4 "lines," or half the standard street-sale quantity (though half-size packages are becoming more common).
"No charges will be brought against ... addicts or consumers who are found in possession of any narcotic for personal use," according to the Senate bill, which also lays out allowable quantities for an array of other drugs, including LSD, ecstasy and amphetamines.
Some of the amounts are eye-popping: Mexicans would be allowed to possess more than two pounds of peyote, the button-size hallucinogenic cactus used in some native Indian religious ceremonies.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 27, 2006
"If you connect these three districts, it makes a triangle!"
There's going to be a Battlestar Galactica spin-off. Not sure whether that's a TV movie, a miniseries, 13 episodes, or a whole 20 episode season. via
"Caprica" will be set more than 50 years prior to the events of "Battlestar Galactica" and focus on the lives of two families -- the Adamas (ancestors of future Galactica commander William) and the Graystones. Humankind's Twelve Colonies are at peace and on the verge of a technological breakthrough: the first Cylon.
As "Battlestar Galactica" is about a lot more than space battles, "Caprica" will be as much family drama as sci-fi tale. Remi Aubuchon ("The Lyon's Den," "24") is writing the pilot script; "Galactica" veterans Ronald D. Moore and David Eick will executive produce it.
Nintendo has decided that their next generation console, codenamed Revolution, will be called Wii. Metafilter has the best reactions to the name:
Here's the name.
Here's how you pronounce it.
Here's the lame justification for it.
Here's the person we're going to fire.
posted by jon_kill
I think I prefer to pronouce it "Why", as in "DEAR GOD NO, WHYYYYYYYYYYY!"
posted by shinji_ikari
Looking at the official, I can see the 'two people sitting together' aspect of the 'ii'. But the 'W'? It makes the name look like some crude asci porn of two midgets watching a stick-figure goatse.
posted by robocop is bleeding
Nintendo: Killling the art of orthography one letter at a time.
posted by blue_beetle
I've been saving this one up all day: wiik.
posted by Sibrax
Wonkette has something to live for again. Did Duke Cunningham get plied with prostitutes?
Oh please please please please please say other members of Congress “used” the same “services.” Hell, say all of them did. Oh man, we are excited about Congress again. People, FBI agents have “fanned out across Washington, interviewing women from escort services” — this truly is the best of all possible worlds. AND THEY MIGHT’VE DONE IT IN THE WATERGATE!
Mitchell Wade, for telling investigators that you provided a congressman with hookers, limos, and rooms at the Watergate, you are an American Hero. We salute you, corrupt contractor, and hope there are plenty more where you came from.
One of the big NROM manufacturers (they resell flash memory to companies like Sony and Matsushita) has figured out how to quadruple the data density of flash memory by adding two more bits to each cell. If that math sounds fishy, as it did to me for a spell, brush up on your binary. via
The NROM cell comprises a nitride layer, surrounded by two insulating oxide layers. The nitride layer serves as a trapping dielectric for two separate localized charge packets at each end of the cell, effectively storing two bits. The bit state, either “programmed” or “erased” corresponds to the presence or absence of trapped electrons.
Quad NROM technology multiplies the basic NROM density by adopting a multi-level approach for each of the separate charge packets. Thus, a single cell behaves like four distinct cells providing four times the density in a given area of a standard Flash device as well as assuring data integrity and reliability.
There's actually a Wikipedia page for Colbert Report recurring elements. That's stuff like the latest Threat Down, Stephen's fictional biography and family, a list of everything on Colbert's bookshelf, every Meet a District, and a table of who's "On Notice," "Dead to Me," or "Never Existed to Me."
In addition, Colbert has put a number of things on notice over the course of the show that have not been formally acknowledged as having been removed, but nonetheless do not appear on either of his boards, including candy apples, Holiday Haters, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and The Washington Post. Colbert has also mentioned during a brief dialogue with Jon Stewart at the end of The Daily Show that people who watch The Daily Show and don't stay for The Colbert Report are dead to him as well, but as this was mentioned as part of a specific joke, they have not been added to the official list.
Colbert once offered Jon Stewart the chance to add two things to his "Dead to Me" list during the conversation between shows. When Stewart declined, Colbert informed Stewart that he was "Wounded to Me" and "Fading Fast."
Most of these topics are non sequiturs unrelated to anything Colbert has mentioned in the show, and are meant to demonstrate how arbitrary and absurd the "threats" he fixates on are. The list is regularly updated with new additions and removals, such as "New York City intellectuals" being moved to the "Dead To Me" list and replaced by "pant cuffs", the E Street Band (who were subsequently interviewed by Colbert and given a gift basket to commemorate the occasion) being replaced by Michael Adams on January 9, 2006. Additionally, Hamas was on the list during its last appearance, but were presumably removed on January 24, 2006 after Colbert's realization that the bears featured in a Hamas-sponsored television program were fake. Also, Colbert has mentioned that all of Canada (except for Nunavut) was previously On Notice sometime before the first episode aired.
It should be noted that on the April 17th episode of the Report, The Sea had been added to the 'On Notice' board while Ed Colbert was inconspicuous in his absense. It can only be presumed that The Sea has done something to incur Colbert's wrath since January 9th, the last time we officially saw the On Notice board.
Cleversafe is an open-source redundant distributed grid storage system. via
Bush approval ratings graphed against gas prices. You know what it'll look like without clicking, though. via
Scrambledhackz is this weird technology demo where you speak into a mic and the computer synthesizes what you're saying but made out of sampled bits of some audio/video track. Wired finally found out the hardware requirements:
WN: When might Scrambled Hackz be released to the public, and under which license and operating systems?
SK: I'm currently very busy with lots of other things, but because there's such a great interest I hope to find the time to launch (Scrambled Hackz) on SourceForge in mid-May. The initial release will be just the core so the nerds can already start to play with it. All code will be licensed under the GNU GPL and it will be platform-independent.
WN: I was astounded by the speed with which the program is able to reassemble the Michael Jackson interview once the sound sample database has been created. Can users of the eventual release expect that sort of performance on a normal machine? Will any special hardware be required?
SK: Michael works in real time on my 2-year-old laptop, a 1.7-(GHz) Centrino with 1.5 (GB of) RAM. No special hardware is needed; any recent computer will do it.
WN: Could the sample lengths be made longer to enable Scrambled Hackz to act as the search mechanism for full measures of music? I'm picturing using it to find the right four-measure sample in a large database, for instance.
SK: Scrambled Hackz is not made for that, but with some tweaking and improvements it should be possible.
WN: Will users be able to analyze their own video and audio libraries using Scrambled Hackz?
SK: Yes, of course.
Baby, you mean the World of Warcraft to me:
You are the sun, the moon, the Cinderhide Armsplints of the Monkey. There is so much we have to offer one another. Unfailing loyalty, a Strength of 250, someone who can go out for snacks in the heat of battle. Can't you see we're made for each other?
Darling, no orc can keep me from you. I would make my way into the heart of Moonglade and fight an army of trolls just to be by your side. I would go up against Varimathras, the ruler of the Undead himself, if he so much as hinted that he was a danger to you. Make no mistake, I would get aggro on anyone who would threaten you.
This is, of course, provided the system is not down due to a faulty patch.
Don't you see that I did it all for you? My love for you exceeds Level 60, higher than anyone thought possible in this fantastic computer universe. My spirit soars when you are near. You restore my mana with a kiss. I even named my epic mount after you. Her name is Helen, and her hair shimmers in the sunlight, and together we ride forward into destiny.
The only worthwhile Mac backup program is SuperDuper. The others don't preserve metadata. via
One may speculate about reasons for the devastating failure across the board. Some tools use flawed underlying engines such as ditto (Carbon Copy Cloner) and psync (Déjà Vu, PsyncX), so they inherit their deficiencies. Many other developers seem to try to roll their own proprietary copying/archiving routines, but the results show that this is an extremely bug-prone endeavor. Only Shirt Pocket with SuperDuper has succeeded at this task. I would expect that many of the “custom” engines have even more bugs in corner cases that my tests didn’t cover.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 07:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 26, 2006
"True beauty is to be found in natural forms. The more we magnify, and the closer we examine, the works of Artifice, the grosser and stupider they seem. But if we magnify the natural world it only becomes more intricate and excellent."
I know no one's probably interested in reading me ramble on about Quicksilver, but it's late and if I'm going to go for two straight months of daily posts, this is what it's going to be—so you'll just have to cope. =)
I just read some fascinating math I barely understand.
There's a weird conversation in Quicksilver between one of the protagonists, Daniel Waterhouse, and Isaac Newton—Newton's claiming that with calculus he's just rediscovering ancient geometrical secrets embedded in Solomonic architecture.
There's an annotation for the passage in the Quicksilver wiki from Neal Stephenson hisself, saying that Daniel's an unreliable narrator in that scene and we'll learn a lot more in the later volumes of the Baroque Cycle that'll make Newton seem a little less batshit insane. I haven't gotten further into the Cycle yet (although a pretty golden hardcover of The Confusion rests on my bed right now), so I can't really say.
This account may be justly criticized for making Newton seem a little wacky. In future volumes we will see more of Newton's side of the story and get a more balanced view of all this. In modern critical parlance, Daniel Waterhouse is an "unreliable narrator." We are seeing everything here through Daniel's eyes, but his eyes are clouded by his hostility towards Alchemy, and so the picture drawn here is biased and melodramatic.
Anyway, I decided to google, and found some amazing stuff.
Solomon, of course, hired the Phoenicians of Tyre to build his Temple. They'd learned architecture and math from the Egyptians.
There's this real-world papyrus (the Moscow papyrus) from the 1800s BC, which was discovered in the 1800s AD. It's a list of math exercises, one of only two documented examples of Egyptian math.
One of the problems in it is finding the volume of a frustum—a cone or prism with the top and bottom cut off.
The Moscow papyrus contains only about 25, mostly practical, examples. The author is unknown. It was purchased by V. S. Golenishchev (d. 1947) and sold to the Moscow Museum of Fine Art. Origin: 1700 BC. It is 15 feet long and about 3 inches wide.
Problem 14. Volume of a frustum. The scribe directs one to square the numbers two and four and to add to the sum of these squares the product of two and four. Multiply this by one third of six. "See, it is 56; your have found it correctly."
But see, there's this lingering issue:
Question. Speculate on how the Egyptians could have known the formula for a frustum, given that its derivation depends on the methods of modern calculus.
The prismoidal formula the Egyptians used is almost identical to what's now known as Simpson's Rule of Integration, a method of calculus used to find the integrals of polynomials of three or less degrees. But it can be used to bootstrap to formulas for integrating higher degree polynomials, the whole sequence of which is called the Newton-Cotes formulas. (Roger Cotes was one of Newton's assistants, and one of the historical models for the character of Daniel Waterhouse.)
And just to connect this even more to Quicksilver, the Egyptians claimed their mathematical knowledge came from Thoth, who merged over time with Mercury to become Hermes Trismegistus*...the crafter/trickster-god figure to whom alchemical mysteries are traditionally attributed.
The level of sophistication of this result is quite a bit higher than that of the rest of the papyrus (for example, the same papyrus gives incorrect formulas for some relatively simple plane areas), leading some people to suspect that either the Egyptians just stumbled into this particular formula, or else perhaps it was part of a more advanced body of mathematical results not generally reflected in the papyrus. Incidentally, according to tradition the god Thoth (Djhowtry), originally associated with time and the Moon, gave the calendar, astronomy, and mathematics ("reckoning") to the Egyptians. Thoth was later identified with the Greek god Hermes, who was later called Hermes Trismegistos (thrice great), the supposed author of the hermetic works revealing the secret knowledge of the ancients. Even as late as the 1600's this tradition was still influential in Europe. Isaac Newton, for example, was a devotee of hermetic studies, and actually seems to have believed that his own discoveries, such as calculus, universal gravitation, and much more, had been in the body of secret knowledge handed down from Thoth! Not surprisingly, Newton usually kept ideas like that to himself.
This is interesting because it is identical to what is known in calculus as Simpson's Rule of integration. In general if f(x) is any polynomial of degree less than or equal to 3, then we have [missing math] where m = (a+b)/2. It's easy to see why this is true for quadratic f(x), because it's essentially just the familiar integration rule for powers. For example, if we have f(x) = x2, then the indefinite integral of f(x) is (1/3)x3, which implies that the definite integral from a to b is [missing math]
This is identical to the rule described in the Moscow papyrus, bearing in mind that the area of a horizontal slice through a pyramid is proportional to the square of the distance from the (projected) apex of the pyramid, so we have A(x) = x2. (Notice that this applied to truncated pyramids whose bases have any shape, not just square as drawn above. Hence the expression is sometimes called the prismoidal formula.)
There's a bunch of math I'd love to copy, but can't seem to. Go read that last link. It's not some crank, it's serious math. It goes on into using the formula to derive integration formulas for higher-degree polynomials...
*I just checked Wikipedia to verify I was spelling Trismegistus right, and one of the first sentences in the entry for Thrice-Great Hermes is: "He has also been identified with Enoch." ("Enoch" is the first word of the novel—the name of a suspiciously long-lived character, Enoch Root, an enigmatic figure who seems to know everything and links the series with Stephenson's earlier novel, Cryptonomicon. I doubt Stephenson would go for anything so...incredible...as to have Enoch Root actually be the Biblical Enoch, but the connotations for the name are so rich.)
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April 25, 2006
"You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life."
For a brief period during the early 1980’s, oil prices exceeded $60 in terms of 2004$. They also show nominal prices from April 1, 2005 to April 21, 2006 reporting a price equal to $73.60 per barrel. With general prices about 5% higher than they were in 2004, we are talking about $70 per barrel in terms of 2004$. One has to go back to 1869 to see real oil prices that high.
In WW1, American and British seacraft would use razzle dazzle camouflage, a kind of cubist optical illusion: via
Instead of trying to conceal the ship, it simply broke up its lines and made it more difficult for the U-boat captain to determine the ship's course. The British called this camouflage scheme "Dazzle Painting." The Americans called it "Razzle Dazzle."
U-boats did not aim their torpedos directly at a ship to sink it. Because the target was moving, it was necessary to aim ahead of its path in order for the torpedo to arrive in the correct spot at the same time as the ship. If the torpedo is too early or too late, it will miss. The primary goal of dazzle painting was to confuse the U-boat commander who was trying to observe the course and speed of his target.
Trigaux: CEO pay eclipses ridiculous. via
CEOs at larger U.S. corporations on average earn $430 for every $1 earned by the average U.S. worker.
Twenty-six years ago, CEOs received an average of $10 for every $1 earned by a U.S. worker.
According to Greg Saunders, the only campaign ad the Democrats should need is a set of three graphs over time: gas prices, oil stock prices, and oil industry campaign contributions split by party lines. Well, it'd sew up the votes of all Americans who know how to read graphs. What was it Adlai Stevenson said? "That's not enough, madam, we need a majority!" via
The Nintendo DS now has a functioning WiFi driver that's open source, and VNC is working on the DS as well.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 08:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 24, 2006
"Noah's ark is a problem." "Really?" "We'll have to call it 'early quantum state phenomenon.'"
It's 11pm and I'm just starting today's post...cutting things close. No particular reason.
Someone's figured out how to get a Nintendo DS to play against a Sony PSP in a wireless match of ascii art tic-tac-toe.
Meanwhile, Natrium42 is hacking the DS with hardware. He's crafted a developer's chip that slides into the Nintendo DS game slot and gives the DS a serial port, a USB 2.0 port, and even a tilt sensor.
Strangely, neither "humongous" nor "ginormous" are in the OS X spell check service's dictionary. However, both words are in the Dictionary in the Applications folder. "Humongous" dates from the 1960s, and "ginormous" began as WW2-era military slang.
I'm learning the strangest things, reading the wiki for Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle series of novels. For example, did you know Noah was born circumcised? He was also a drunkard.
According to Midr. Agadah on Gen. v. 29, Noah obtained his name, which means "rest," only after he had invented implements for tilling the ground, which, owing to the lack of such implements, had yielded only thorns and thistles (comp. Gen. iii. 18). In this manner Noah really brought rest to mankind and to the earth itself. Other reasons for this name are given by the Rabbis; e.g., Noah restored man's rule over everything, just as it had been before Adam sinned, thus setting mankind at rest. Formerly the water used to inundate the graves so that the corpses floated out; but when Noah was born the water subsided (Gen. R. xxv. 2). The apparent discrepancy in Gen. v. 29, where it is said that Lamech "called his name Noah, saying, This shall comfort us," is explained by the "Sefer ha-Yashar" (section "Bereshit," p. 5b, Leghorn, 1870), which says that while he was called in general "Noah," his father named him "Menahem" (= "the comforter"). Noah was born circumcised (Midr. Agadah on Gen. vi. 9; Tan., Noach, 6).
The planting of a vineyard by Noah and his drunkenness (Gen. ix. 20 et seq.) caused him to be regarded by the Rabbis in a new light, much to his disparagement. He lost much if not all of his former merit. He was one of the three worthless men that were eager for agricultural pursuits (Gen. R. xxxvi. 5); he was the first to plant, to become drunken, to curse, and to introduce slavery (Tan., Noah, 20; comp. Gen. l.c.). God blamed Noah for his intemperance, saying that he ought to have been warned by Adam, upon whom so much evil came through wine (Sanh. 70a). Noah took into the ark a vine-branch which had been cast out with Adam from paradise. He had previously eaten its grapes, and their savor induced him to plant their seed, the results of which proved lamentable. When Noah was about to plant the vineyard, Satan offered him his help, for which he was to have a share in the produce. Noah consented. Satan then successively slaughtered a sheep, a lion, an ape, and a hog, fertilizing the ground with their blood. Satan thereby indicated to Noah that after drinking the first cup of wine, one is mild like a sheep; after the second, courageous like a lion; after the third, like an ape; and after the fourth, like a hog who wallows in mud (Midr. Agadah on Gen. ix. 21; Midr. Abkir, in Yalp., Gen. 61; comp. Gen. R. xxxvi. 7). This legend is narrated by Ibn Yalya ("Shalshelet ha-Habbalah," p. 75a, Amsterdam, 1697) thus: "Noah, seeing a he-goat eat sour grapes and become intoxicated so that it began to frisk, took the root of that vinebranch and, after having washed it with the blood of a lion, a hog, a sheep, and an ape, planted it and it bore sweet grapes."
The vineyard bore fruit the same day that it was planted, and the same day, too, Noah gathered grapes, pressed them, drank their juice, became intoxicated, and was abused by Ham (Gen. R. l.c.; Midr. Agadah l.c.; Tan., Noa?, 20). In Jubilees (vii. 1 et seq.), however, it is stated that Noah planted the vineyard in the first year of the seventh Sabbath of the twenty-sixth jubilee (see Lev. xxv. 8 et seq.), that is, the year 1268 of Creation, seven years after he had come out of the ark. It bore fruit in the fourth year. Noah gathered the grapes in the seventh month of that year, but conserved the wine till the new moon of the first month of the fifth year, on which day he made a festival and offered sacrifices on the altar. Being filled with joy, Noah drank of the wine so freely that he became intoxicated.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 23, 2006
"See the løveli lakes, the wøndërful telephøne system, and mäni interesting furry animals."
While 'W' has long been a letter in its own right in other Nordic languages, Swedish linguists have always viewed it as a lesser sibling of the letter 'V,' as the two letters are pronounced identically in Swedish.
But the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize in literature and whose members are considered the guardians of the Swedish language, decided it was time for 'W' to come out of the shadows.
The letter, called "double-v" in Swedish, "can no longer be sorted in under the single V," the academy said when it introduced the 13th edition of its dictionary this week.
If you have signed up for Google's personalized search history, you can answer the question: How much do you Google? I'm up to 6450 since April 21st, 2005—or 17+ searches a day. And that only includes when I'm signed on to Google. I know I did plenty of Googling in the past year on other computers... via
A Long, Painful History of Time: via
The basic problem with time is that we need to express both time and place whenever we want to place some event in time and space, yet we tend to assume spatial coordinates even more than we assume temporal coordinates, and in the case of time in ordinary communication, it is simply left out entirely. Despite the existence of time zones and strange daylight saving time regimes around the world, most people are blithely unaware of their own time zone and certainly of how it relates to standard references. Most people are equally unaware that by choosing a notation that is close to the spoken or written expression of dates, they make it meaningless to people who may not share the culture, but can still read the language. It is unlikely that people will change enough to put these issues to rest, so responsible computer people need to address the issues and resist the otherwise overpowering urge to abbreviate and drop context.
This paper is almost all about how we got ourselves into trouble by neglecting to think about time frames longer than a human lifetime, how we got all confused by the difference between time as an orderly concept in science and a mess in the rest of human existence, and how we have missed every opportunity to fix the problems. This paper proposes a fix to the most glaring problems in a programming language that should not have been left without a means to express time for so long.
Yeah, I know. Not much of an entry. I almost forgot to post altogether, and basically just want to maintain this inordinately long string of daily posts. =)
Posted by Jon Rubin at 10:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 22, 2006
"We are starstuff, we are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out. As we have both learned, sometimes the universe requires a change of perspective."
Writing is the nearest thing to telepathy we have discovered (to steal a leaf from Stephen King's On Writing). It's a technique we use for serializing a stream of consciousness, freezing it for posterity, and injecting it into other human heads whereupon, by some process we don't fully understand, it is unpacked and hopefully creates a structural cognate of the original author's conscious experience in the reader's mind.
You're reading this essay right now and quite possibly scratching your head — there! Break out of the text for a moment and look back at that last sentence. Second person narrative is uncomfortable because it has the power to coerce our behaviour and direct our vision. If the first-person telepathy module is a bunch of electrodes in the brain of one actor, feeding us their stream of consciousness, and the third-person telepathy module is a brain-sucking mosquito bouncing around the actors, the second-person telepathy module is an alien mind control parasite that gloms onto you, sticks its electrodes into your brain, and tells you what to think. It's got amazing potential for fine-grained insight into the guts of a story — after all, the second person is the most immersive viewpoint — but it's a very hard tool to use without tickling the reader into noticing it. Alien mind control parasites tend to be one of those things that make most humans go "eek!" and run away very fast, and the same is true of this story-telling mode.
The second person's big strength is that it lets you show by doing, and it renders infodumps — those big, intrusive gobbets of metainformation that are so useful to the jobbing science fiction writer who's trying to portray an unfamiliar world — transparent. (It's big weakness is that if it isn't done carefully, it feels like an itchy straitjacket to the reader, but you already know that, don't you?) It's not so much about metafiction as about metainformation for the fiction at the centre of the narrative process. If you fine-tune your use of the interior monologue you can illuminate your character's experience of their universe, lending the "showing, not telling" narrative some experiential references and weight so that it feels familiar, even if it's full of novel placeholders. And you can banish the old didactic mode for good, consigning it to the howling wilderness of pulpish prose where it belongs.
Digicams leave fingerprints in the background noise of images.
Fridrich's lab analyzed 2,700 pictures taken by nine digital cameras and with 100 percent accuracy linked individual images with the camera that took them.
The former highest-ranking CIA officer in Europe comes forward with more evidence the Bush administration cherrypicked information in the lead-up to the Iraq War. via
Drumheller, who retired last year, says the White House ignored crucial information from a high and credible source. The source was Iraq's foreign minister, Naji Sabri, with whom U.S. spies had made a deal.
When CIA Director George Tenet delivered this news to the president, the vice president and other high ranking officials, they were excited — but not for long.
"[The source] told us that there were no active weapons of mass destruction programs," says Drumheller. "The [White House] group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they were no longer interested. And we said 'Well, what about the intel?' And they said 'Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change.' "
They didn't want any additional data from Sabri because, says Drumheller: "The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy."
The White House declined to respond to this charge, but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has stated that Sabri was just one source and therefore not reliable.
Drumheller says the administration routinely relied on single sources — when those single sources confirmed what the White House wanted to hear.
"They certainly took information that came from single sources on the yellowcake story and on several other stories with no corroboration at all," he says.
Are Woodcrest-based PowerMacs coming soon? via
Apple customers may be the first to enjoy Intel’s new CPU goodies, with the Woodcrest family of processors making it into Macintosh workstations as early as the third quarter. Woodcrest systems will be symmetric multi processing (SMP), with dual processors with up to four cores each. One such machine was demonstrated at IDF, running benchmarks under Windows XP 64-bit edition, showing eight active cores.
As zinc and other commodities rally, we're running out of cost-efficient metals to coin into pennies. via
This week the cost of the metals in a penny rose above 0.8 cents, more than twice the value of last fall. Because the government spends at least another six-tenths of a cent — above and beyond the cost of the metal — to make each penny, it will lose nearly half a cent on each new one it mints.
Since the end of 2003, zinc prices have tripled. Gold, by contrast, is up only about 50 percent.
The White House wants a mandatory rating system for web sites. Apparently, they're so clueless they think that can legislate morality for an international computer network. via
Web site operators posting sexually explicit information must place official government warning labels on their pages or risk being imprisoned for up to five years, the Bush administration proposed Thursday.
A mandatory rating system will "prevent people from inadvertently stumbling across pornographic images on the Internet," Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said at an event in Alexandria, Va.
The Bush administration's proposal would require commercial Web sites to place "marks and notices" to be devised by the Federal Trade Commission on each sexually explicit page. The definition of sexually explicit broadly covers depictions of everything from sexual intercourse and masturbation to "sadistic abuse" and close-ups of fully clothed genital regions.
"I hope that Congress will take up this legislation promptly," said Gonzales, who gave a speech about child exploitation and the Internet to the federally funded National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The proposed law is called the Child Pornography and Obscenity Prevention Amendments of 2006.
A second new crime would threaten with imprisonment Web site operators who mislead visitors about sex with deceptive "words or digital images" in their source code--for instance, a site that might pop up in searches for Barbie dolls or Teletubbies but actually features sexually explicit photographs. A third new crime appears to require that commercial Web sites not post sexually explicit material on their home page if it can be seen "absent any further actions by the viewer."
Everything I need to know about religion I learned from South Park: via
Stan : "But then, why does God give us anything to start with?"
Chef : "Well, look at it this way: if you want to make a baby cry, first you give it a lollipop. Then you take it away. If you never give it a lollipop to begin with, then you would have nothin' to cry about. That's like God, who gives us life and love and help just so that he can tear it all away and make us cry, so he can drink the sweet milk of our tears. You see, it's our tears, Stan, that give God his great power."
John Gruber schools Cringely, and oh does it burn:
Also, just forget about Cringely’s explanation about “integer calculations” being the cause of the performance difference. That’s not it at all, and the real reasons are densely technical. Trust me that it has nothing to do with “integer calculations”, which is a claim that doesn’t even really make sense.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 09:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 21, 2006
"The changing of bodies into light, and light into bodies, is very conformable to the course of Nature, which seems delighted with transmutations."
How-to: transmute a $3 pen into a $200 one via
Mont Blanc pens are the worlds finest writing pens but they make specialized refills so you must buy their $200+ pens to use their amazing ink...until now. This is the easiest hack/adaptation to give anyone the king's writing ink.
Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, and Root tasked with building detention centers across America for the Department of Homeland Security.
The contract, which is effective immediately, provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs.
"The zone" proven scientifically. Empirical evidence that your self-awareness shuts off when you're busy. via
Goldberg found that when the sensory stimulus was shown slowly, and when a personal emotional response was required, the volunteers showed activity in the superfrontal gyrus – the brain region associated with self-awareness-related function.
But when the card flipping and musical sequences were rapid, there was no activity in the superfrontal gyrus, despite activity in the sensory cortex and related structures.
“The regions of the brain involved in introspection and sensory perception are completely segregated, although well connected,” says Goldberg, “and when the brain needs to divert all its resources to carry out a difficult task, the self-related cortex is inhibited.”
The brain’s ability to “switch off” the self may have evolved as a protective mechanism, he suggests. “If there is a sudden danger, such as the appearance of a snake, it is not helpful to stand around wondering how one feels about the situation,” Goldberg points out.
JJ Abrams to direct new Star Trek movie for Paramount:
I'm quite excited that a new Trek film is coming out. This one will probably use advanced new techniques like 'Phaser Time' filming and motherfucking snakes on the motherfucking Enterprise.
And Teddy-clad pink-haired Uhura, she'll be in my dreams tonight.
posted by sebas at 12:59 PM EST on April 21 [!]
Posted by Jon Rubin at 08:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 20, 2006
"Immediately it smokes, and gives out such a vapour as no Grecian vapour-bath can exceed; the Scyths, delighted, shout for joy."
mu:
The correct answer to the classic trick question “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?”. Assuming that you have no wife or you have never beaten your wife, the answer “yes” is wrong because it implies that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but “no” is worse because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her. According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct answer is usually “mu”, a Japanese word alleged to mean “Your question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect assumptions”. Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm. The word ‘mu’ is actually from Chinese, meaning ‘nothing’; it is used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. In Chinese it can also mean “have not” (as in “I have not done it”), or “lack of”, which may or may not be a definite, complete 'nothing'). Native speakers of Japanese do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use, which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer in the following well-known Rinzai Zen koan:
A monk asked Joshu, “Does a dog have the Buddha nature?” Joshu retorted, “Mu!”
Ever since Tiger, OS X has the underpinnings for a resolution-independent interface.
Tiger continues the evolution of resolution independence in Mac OS X, bringing it to the computer user interface by breaking the software assumption that all display output is 72 DPI. From its inception, the Quartz graphics system was designed to be resolution independent across output devices. For example Quartz can take content displayed on-screen at 72 DPI and scale it for output to printers of varying DPI. Now the same is true for the display. Resolution Independent UI uses a combination of technologies across the different application development frameworks to scale the UI for varying output resolution.
The Bosnian pyramid's for reals, and it turns out there are a couple more of them, and all three are connected by underground tunnels. via
Buffy/Angel/Firefly's Drew Goddard is going to be writing/producing Lost for the next two seasons. He's also writing the series finale for Alias. I don't watch that show, but I was amused to note last night that it has Angel's Amy Acker (Fred) as an assassin or something. And then there's Daniel Dae Kim, of course, the token Korean guy on Lost and former eeeevillle lawyer on Angel.
Were there any big differences between the finished product and your early prototypes?
The very first prototype He-Man was black haired with a deeply tanned eastern European or Middle Eastern appearance. His helmet had no horns. Later, at the direction of Tom Kalinske, then in Mattel's upper management, He-Man was made more clean-cut and changed to a blond... Plus, He-Man's skin was lightened, though definitely still tanned.
How did you come up with the name?
At the time I did the first prototype figure, I still didn't have a name for him. So I brainstormed 40 or 50 names. Among those names were Mighty Man, Megaton Man, Strong Man, Big Man, but the instant I got that name He-Man...
You knew that was it.
[Long Pause] I cannot tell you... [breathes deeply]... how big a bell rang in my head. The whole line came together. Here was a highly generic name that had a kinda brute-force feel to it. And what could be more of a direct name than this for a heroic figure? It's just one in a million.
Some fish produce indoles, enough to make people trip.
Ichthyoallyeinotoxism, or hallucinogenic fish poisoning, is caused by eating the heads or body parts of certain species of herbivorous fish and has previously only been recorded from the Indo Pacific.
The effects of eating ichthyoallyeinotoxic fishes, such as certain mullet, goatfish, tangs, damsels and rabbitfish, are believed to be similar to LSD, and may include vivid and terrifying auditory and visual hallucinations. This has given rise to the collective common name for ichthyoallyeinotoxic fishes of "dream fish".
I was really digging the Joan Miro Google logo today, but Miro's estate forced Google to take it down. via
Bush hits 33% in a poll from Fox News: via
President Bush’s job approval rating slipped this week and stands at a new low of 33 percent approve, down from 36 percent two weeks ago and 39 percent in mid-March. A year ago this time, 47 percent approved and two years ago 50 percent approved (April 2004).
Approval among Republicans is below 70 percent for the first time of Bush’s presidency. Two-thirds (66 percent) approve of Bush’s job performance today, down almost 20 percentage points from this time last year when 84 percent of Republicans approved. Among Democrats, 11 percent approve today, while 14 percent approved last April.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 06:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 19, 2006
Q: "You can't say you're challenging the facts and then not say which ones you're challenging." SCOTT McCLELLAN: "Yes, I can. I just did."
Stirling Newberry has a financial update:
It isn't an accident that on the day that the Federal Reserve releases minutes that hint that their rate raising campaign is coming to an end that yield curve kinks back towards inversion, the Dow Jones Industrials rally to near an all time high, which is expected to be the start of a world wide rally for equities - and oil and copper hit all time nominal highs, with oil's peak nearing the peaks set the two great inflationary spikes of the 20th century. The September West Texas Intermediate - an important benchmark contract - briefly hit an eyepopping $74.06 a barrel.
Last year I was told by traders that the over/under number for oil was to close above 70. Even many energy bulls said they would take the "under" side of that number. At this point my same sources are saying that a good Katrina like disruption could bring us over the $80/bbl mark this year. As 70 was the new 60, 80 is the new 70. So what is going on?
Scott McClellan's out as White House press secretary, and Rove's been forced to relinquish his role as policy director, relegated back to the rat warren. He'd been forced to distance himself from his first love for the past few years, as he tried to get Social Security "reform" and energy "reform" passed, but now it's back to dirty politicking for Karl.
Meanwhile, rumors abound about Scotty's replacement. The prime candidate? Fox News anchor Tony Snow. Joshua Micah Marshall provides the witticism: via
Isn't that more like an interdepartmental transfer than a job change?
Coming soon: the "second liberation" of Baghdad. The article also contains some disturbing anecdotes about life in Baghdad: via
Baghdad is a swirling mess of competing Sunni and Shi’ite militias and Al-Qaeda fighters, and the city has been sliding into chaos at an alarming rate.
“My brother was killed by somebody who told us he was paid $10 for the job,” said a Baghdad victim of the violence. “A man met him in the street, pointed to my brother and said he was a bad guy and had to die. He never knew why.”
Kidnappings have risen to 50 a day in Iraq. Abu Ali, whose 12-year-son was kidnapped in Baghdad last month, said he had received a demand for $250,000 for his release. “Sometimes they let me hear him begging or crying for me to help him,” he said. “At other times they threaten me and say his brothers will be next.”
Anybody connected, however remotely, with the administration is seen as a target; 18 traffic police officers have been killed in the past two months. “They were simply doing their duty and trying to prevent traffic jams. There are no traffic lights,” said Major Hussein Khadem of the transport police.
Residents have taken to carrying two ID cards and ostentatiously religious CDs because of fears of sectarian violence. “If you are stopped at a Shi’ite checkpoint, you have to show you have a Shi’ite name, and if it is a Sunni insurgent checkpoint, it is good to show that your name is Omar,” said a Baghdad resident who had recently obtained a new ID.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 08:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 18, 2006
"Corporations are neither physical nor metaphysical phenomena. They are socioeconomic ploys — legally enacted game-playing."
Sometime when I wasn't looking, Auditor and WHAX merged to form backtrack, the ultimate Linux security/penetration testing boot CD.
A former student of Bucky Fuller's claims $100 oil is coming. via
I believe we're approaching a repeat of that 1973-1974 crisis. Once again, oil prices are going through the roof. During the mid-70s, oil went from under $3 a barrel to over $35 a barrel. And in 1974, we were stuck in an unpopular war in Vietnam, a war we would not win.
In 1998, oil was just $10 a barrel, and today it is over $60. We're also stuck in a war we may not be able to win.
The difference this time is that things are actually worse than they were in 1974, at least in my opinion. One difference is that the oil crises back in 1973 to 1974 and again in 1978 were political problems. Today, the oil crisis is a problem of diminishing supply and increasing demand. In other words, this time, there really is an oil crisis.
Many people today believe that oil will once again return to the $35-a-barrel level and aren't concerned. Or they believe that with better technology, energy companies will find more oil, and happy days will be here again.
I believe differently. Not that I'm an oil expert, but in 1966 through 1968 I was hired as an apprentice by Standard Oil of California, where I learned a lot about oil and the oil industry. Although I did see oil prices slide back down in the 1970s, this time, I believe they will go higher, not lower. I wouldn't be surprised if we soon see oil at over $100 a barrel and gasoline at $5 to $12 a gallon at the pump.
Here's an old St. Pete Times article about "How the Price Adds Up." It tracks oil from the fields to the consumer.
EasyBib is a free MLA citation-crafting web app. via
CitationMachine is another citation-crafter that also handles APA for free. via
Guide to web proxies via
Posted by Jon Rubin at 04:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 17, 2006
"Genua had once controlled the river mouth and taxed its traffic in a way that couldn't be called piracy because it was done by the city government."
Turbotext Adventure is Matt Haughey imagining TurboTax as a text adventure. via
Remember: to get past the Big Boss near the end, you have to answer 'no' to every audit alert you see. Yes, even the big red flashing ones.
When you first buy a house in the game, they send you into this level that goes on and on, with one brutal question after another, but don't fret, because at the end you get a bunch of bonus money.
Some crazy Cisco guy commutes seven hours a day, from Yosemite to San Jose. via
This is potentially why the housing slowdown may have a larger impact on the economy than some people realize. Many homeowners have been using their homes as an "ATM". Perhaps last year people believed that higher energy prices would be a short duration problem, and they borrowed to maintain their lifestyle. This year, they might not have that luxury.
Yeah, I know...short post. And with so few links, it took me forever to find a title that was even tangentially related...
Posted by Jon Rubin at 10:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 16, 2006
~Sleep with one eye open while the other two drift to gather specimens from the promised land.~
Why are there 24 hours in a day?, being a survey of various theories as to such. My favorite part is this comment at the end: via
The solution may be a mystery but an elegant mystery and there may be something deeper. If one were to look at the face of a clock and go around the clock twice numbering from 1 to 24 a number of things emerge...
-note the patern of prime numbers: 1 & 13; 5 & 17; 7 & 19; 11 & 23
-note the squares 1, 4, 9 & 16...4 and 16 overlay one another and is it possible that the relationship of 1, 4, & 9 represent the placement of the prymids?
-if you continue the sequence there are 5 prime numbers lined up with the 5 position: 5, 17, 29, 41, 53
Coincidence? Right!
comment from Bill at 4:27am on 16th November, 2004
"An illegal prime is a prime number which contains information forbidden by law to possess or distribute." via
Protest against the indictment of DeCSS author Jon Johansen and legislation prohibiting publication of DeCSS code took many forms. One of them was the representation of the illegal code in a form that had an intrinsically archivable quality. Since the bits making up a computer program also represent a number, the plan was for the number to have some special property that would make it archivable and publishable. The primality of a number is a fundamental property, one outside the scope of the law.
The parietal eyes of lizards see blue and green.
Specialized nerve cells in that eye, which looks more like a spot on the lizard’s forehead, use two types of molecular signals to sense light: those found only in simpler animals, like scallops, and those found only in more complex animals like humans.
According to the researchers, when the lizard’s third eye sees blue light, the blue pigment triggers a molecule called gustducin, which is very similar to a molecule found in human photoreceptors as well as the lateral eyes of the lizard – those on the sides of its head. But when the lizard’s third eye sees green light, the green pigment triggers a different molecule called Go, known as “G-other,” which also signals light responses in the light-sensing cells of the scallop and other creatures without a backbone. That Go is found in spineless creatures suggests it is the evolutionarily more ancient light-triggering signal.
Although gustducin and Go are different molecules, they are similar and considered “related” proteins. However, gustducin and Go each activate different molecular pathways that work against each other physiologically. Blue light and gustducin generate an “off” response in the nerve cell while green light and Go generate an “on” response.
“It may seem strange to have two opposing signals in the same cell,” says the study’s senior author, King-Wai Yau, Ph.D, a professor in the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience at Hopkins, “but the unique mechanism renders these parietal photoreceptors most active at dawn and dusk.”
“So incorporating two different pigments and two separate signaling molecules in one cell may have been an economical way, in a primitive eye with relatively few cell types, to tell the transitions of the day based on changes in the spectrum of sunlight,” says Chih-Ying Su, Ph.D., the first author of the study and a former neuroscience graduate student at Hopkins.
Because of that parietal eye's connection to the transition between day and night, and the Science Blog headline calling it a "third eye," I began to wonder if there was an evolutionary connection between reptiles' parietal eyes and the pineal gland. Googling didn't reveal anything of the sort, but it did lead me to this fascinating theory about how the pineal gland evolved from retinal cells.
The evolutionary resolution of the serotonin/retinaldehyde conflict was to separate retinaldehyde from serotonin by creation of the pinealocyte, allowing the melatonin factory to continue to evolve in one cell and visual transduction in another: ”the retinal photoreceptor. Gradually, the pinealocyte lost the ability to detect light, and the retina lost the ability to make melatonin, as seen in primates.
Since Bush became President, America has squandered its lead in broadband access. via
The history of the equals sign: via
Howbeit, for easie alteration of equations. I will propounde a fewe exanples, bicause the extraction of their rootes, maie the more aptly bee wroughte. And to avoide the tediouse repetition of these woordes : is equalle to : I will sette as I doe often in woorke use, a pair of paralleles, or Gemowe lines of one lengthe, thus: =====, bicause noe .2. thynges, can be moare equalle.
If you are still having trouble reading this, try reading it aloud. The only tricky things are the spelling and the word "Gemowe". Reading aloud will solve the spelling problem. "Gemowe" means "twin", like in the astrological sign of Gemini.
I knew that the German "umlaut" symbol was originally a small letter "e". A word like schön ("beautiful") was originally spelled schoen, and then was written as schon with a tiny "e" over the "o", and eventually the tiny "e" dwindled away to nothing but two dots. I have a German book printed around 1800 in which the little "e"s are quite distinct.
And I had recently learned that the twiddle in the Spanish ñ character was similarly a letter "n". A word like "año" was originally "anno" (as it is in Latin) and the second "n" was later abbreviated to a diacritic over the first "n". (This makes a nice counterpoint to the fact that the mathematical logical negation symbol ∼ was selected because of its resemblance to the letter "N".) But I had no idea that anything of the sort was ever done in English.
Recorde's book shows clearly that it was, at least for a time. The short passage illustrated above contains two examples. One is the word "examples" itself, which is written "exãples", with a tilde over the "a". The other is "alteration", which is written "alteratiõ", with a tilde over the "o". More examples abound: "cõpendiousnesse", "nõbers", "denominatiõ", and, I think, "reme~ber". (The print is unclear.)
I had never seen this done before in English.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 08:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 15, 2006
Spametry
I was going to call this spamku but that term is already taken several times over.
Here's some surreal comment spam I've been getting on this blog, reappropriated and slightly reformatted.
This one I call "Broadcast":
Astonishing corner is always collective.
Slot—destroy rape loose—
that is all that TV is capable of.
Fetch gnome is very good corner,
girl can destroy soldier.
And this one, "Stendhal":
To create table you should be very small:
Curious, small, red nothing
comparative to black.
Big cosmos becomes good pair. In final,
grass will table unconditionally.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 07:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 14, 2006
"Always... never... forget to check your references."
Jack Abramoff and the Tale of the Red Scorpion: via
But for Abramoff, the pivotal moment in Jamba came when he was approached by someone trying to secure funding for a documentary about Savimbi. Abramoff scoffed. Rambo: First Blood Part II had just been released in theaters three weeks earlier, becoming the first film to open on more than 2,000 screens. "Why would you want to make a documentary? Nobody watches documentaries," he told me. "I said to the guy, 'You should make an action film.'"
Virtue is an extremely pretty and supremely quick virtual desktop manager for OS X. Kicks CodeTek's VirtualDesktopPro's ass, and it's still in alpha.
Why Windows is less secure than Linux, pictorially. via
The Catholic League on South Park's "Cartoon Wars" two-parter: via
"The ultimate hypocrite is not Comedy Central _ that's their decision not to show the image of Muhammad or not _ it's Parker and Stone," he said. "Like little whores, they'll sit there and grab the bucks. They'll sit there and they'll whine and they'll take their shot at Jesus. That's their stock in trade."
Joss Whedon comments on what Firefly would be like on the Country Western channel:
3) People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.
The only person who wasn’t bothered at all by it was Alan, who was hilarious. He kept saying, “Um, my script ends at page 105. Everybody else’s seems longer.”
“No, that’s the end – you land the ship, the credits roll.”
“Oh, OK. It just seems like everyone else has more pages.”
“No! It’s an optical illusion.”
“Oh, OK. And every time I go in the cockpit I get this funny feeling in my chest. It itches, I don’t know why…”
BoxOver makes efficient JavaScript tooltips. via
In the real system, where the secret vectors have forty entries, not four, it takes a conspiracy of about forty devices, with known private vectors, to break HDCP completely. But that is eminently doable, and it’s only a matter of time before someone does it. I’ll talk next time about the implications of that fact.
Is one of Arthur Conan Doyle's obscure Sherlock Holmes stories Masonic allegory? via
The Scottish writer Arthur Conan Doyle is most familiar to us today as the creator of the detective Sherlock Holmes, but a lesser known fact about him is that he was also a Scottish Rite Freemason. He was unarguably a highly intelligent man, who later in his life turned to mysticism and the occult and relished the writings of Crowley and Madame Blavatsky. He was also a known cocaine addict, which drug was legal and socially acceptable during his the time, and had been described as causing one to make strange mental leaps.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 08:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 13, 2006
"Gold is the corpse of value."
Oil set to top $80/barrel. Has world production peaked? I think this guy just means the yearly production cycle's peaked. The line about sugar is disturbing: via
"In the next few months we will see oil above $80, as it has passed the peak of the production cycle," David Murrin, chief investment officer at UK-based Emergent Asset Management said at the Reuters Hedge Funds and Private Equity Summit on Wednesday.
Although oil markets are well supplied, worries about Nigeria and fellow OPEC producer Iran, which is embroiled in a dispute with the international community over its nuclear programme, have prevented prices from falling far.
Murrin said energy, like other major commodities, had much further to run in the current bull market.
"They (commodities) are more and more in vogue. This cycle ... is 15 years away from the peak. The world is becoming over-populated and under-resourced," he said.
Prices of many key commodities have soared during the last two years in a red-hot bull market fuelled by buying from systems-based, hedge and, most recently, pension funds.
"Base metals are on fire at the moment, and softs will be next ... Watch sugar," Murrin said.
Omega and why maths has no TOEs: via
To put it bluntly, if the incompleteness phenomenon discovered by Gödel in 1931 is really serious — and I believe that Turing's work and my own work suggest that incompleteness is much more serious than people think — then perhaps mathematics should be pursued somewhat more in the spirit of experimental science rather than always demanding proofs for everything. Maybe, rather than attempting to prove results such as the celebrated Riemann hypothesis, mathematicians should accept that they may not be provable and simply accept them as an axiom.
AT&T tries to hide evidence they aided and abetted the NSA's mass violation of internet privacy.
I've been reading Neal Stephenson's novel Quicksilver, and am perusing the Quicksilver Wiki, a collection of annotations. It's a wonderful source of trivia.
For example, did you know King Charles II personally fought the Great Fire of London, blowing up houses as he went?
I have found reference to the King personally being involved in the fighting of the fire. I summarize from Will Durant's The Story of Civilization VIII;
"In this crisis both the King and and his brother James labored with thier own hands among the firefighters, directing and financing relief, providing food and shelter and, against much opposition, blowing up houses to stop the progress of the fire (perhaps saving part of the city north of the Thames). ghash 16 Dec 2003 (EST)
Eric S. Raymond, bizarrely (or should I say bazaarly?), decided to contribute a nitpick about Stephenson's anachronistic use of Victorian-era sexual innuendo in Restoration England.
When Tom the Vagabond says lewdly "What is to come? I have spied one candidate--" he is committing an anachronism. The verb "to come" as a term for for orgasm is a Victorian development, not well-attested until the 1890s. In period, Tom might have used the verb "to spend", but that would have ruined the play on words.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 09:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 12, 2006
"I was with Moses as he sent Caleb into the Promised Land ahead of his people."
DailyKos, of all places, has a brilliant analysis of the NSA's capabilities, as understood in light of the recent news regarding AT&T. In particular, it has a nice explanation of what these Narus semantic traffic analyzers the NSA is abusing en masse can handle. Bewert breaks down the bits so you laymen out there can get a grasp on the extent of this little government project: via
How powerful is this? OC-192 carries about 10 gigabits of data per second. Ten billion bits per second, monitored in real-time. That is stunning. This is one damned powerful machine, one of the most powerful I've ever heard of in 25 years in IT.
And what does it monitor while looking at this 10 billion bits of IP data per second? First lets take a look at what the network model is, the OSI model of seven layers. NarusInsight focuses on two layers: number four, the transport layer, built on standards like TCP and UDP, the physical building blocks of internet data traffic, and number seven, the application layer, built on standards like HTTP and FTP, which are dependent on the application using them, i.e. Internet Explorer, Kazaa, Skype, etc. It monitors 10 billion bits per second at level four and 2500 million bits per second at level seven. For reference, the 256K DSL line I am using equals .24 million bits per second. So one NarusInsight machine can look at 10,000 million DSL lines at once in great detail. That is a pretty damn big number. This is some really serious hardware with equally serious software. Which is our next subject.
Note that bewert's connection is kinda slow, so the calculations might highball a bit. It's immaterial, though, since I doubt the NSA'd use only one box at a time. They probably have racks of them in each peering station.
The basic plot arc of Microserfs is that an ensemble of 'softies quit their jobs and move to San Fran to create a new software start-up. They begin building something called Oop! (can this sound any more like present?), which actually is a pun off object-oriented programming, but is essentially a 3D modeling program which you can use to create pretty much anything. The idea is loosely inspired by Legos, but in the intervening decade nothing has been invented to compare it to -- until I recently saw Will Wright demo his new game, Spore.
+ Even though the inaccurate predictions are less numerable, they say more about the mid-'90s than the accurate ones.
+ The descriptions of Microsoft campus life -- right down to the soccer fields and hidden paths -- are still quite accurate. The detail that seems to have changed the most is the relationship of employees to Bill. He was apparently a Geek God in 1994, whereas now he's more of a beleaguered Yoda. It's good we skipped over the anti-trust days though.
+ There's a great observation early in the book about how Microsofties don't put bumper stickers on their cars. This is still startlingly true, and it gives campus a sort of post-political feel. Or at least as post-political as 20,000 Audis lined up in a cement parking garage can be.
I've been trying to track down the origin of Red Box. Back when Apple bought NeXT, but before Jobs kicked Amelio out, the company laid out a roadmap for OS X, then code named Rhapsody. It was all about compatibility back in those days. Rhapsody would run on PowerPC and Intel chips, and there would be an API layer offered for Windows as well. People would compile once to run under OS X and Windows. But the coolest part was the rumored Red Box. This component of Rhapsody-on-Intel would allow native use of Windows applications, translated on the fly like under WINE in Linux. Now, Apple never, as far as I know, ever said a damned thing about Red Box. I looked through all the old Rhapsody faqs in the Wayback Machine, but there's nary a word. The oldest source I can find is this MacKido post that references Red Box. I'm beginning to think MacOSRumors made it up.
To make the platform even more appealing and compete in a corporate world - Red Box will allow many Windows Applications (Win32 apps) to run as well. Apple is not talking about this much, so this is a lot of speculation and rumor. On Intel, RedBox will be the Windows API's running natively on top of the other services. On PowerPC, the RedBox will be an Emulator that will allow Windows Application to work on Rhapsody. Apple may not directly offer RedBox on the MacOS since there are already a few good emulators available, or they may just make a licensing deal with Connectix (or Insignia) to bundle their emulators.
How-to: build a modern Enigma machine via
Posted by Jon Rubin at 07:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 11, 2006
~You gave me the stone, gave me the chisel, didn't say how to hold 'em.~
Okay so I have way too many windows open and Safari's been really finicky lately so this post is going to be heavy on links and light on commentary.
In a LiveJournal post early this morning, Jamie Zawinski used a phrase I'd never heard before but liked immediately: "cargo cult googling." I searched Google, but found no references to the term "cargo cult googling". I think it deserves to be popularized on grounds of awesomeness. Read the moment of what I must assume to be its glorious coinage:
I want this set of radio buttons to be associated with a preference called "textMode" and take on the string values "date", "literal", "file", or "url". That is, when the first radio button is selected, I want the "textMode" preference set to the string "date", and not to the string "Computer Name and Time". Likewise, when the window comes up, I want the first radio button to be the selected one if the "textMode" preference already has the value "date".
I'm making the radio buttons like this:
[CODE]
Now how do I set the damned labels? Based on some cargo-cult googling, I tried this, and it doesn't work:
NSArray *cnames = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:
@"Computer Name and Time",
@"Text", @"File", @"URL", nil];
[matrix bind:@"contentValues"
toObject:cnames
withKeyPath:@"arrangedObjects.title"
options:nil];
Where is this magic "arrangedObjects" string documented, and what does the second word in the string actually mean?
Any emphasis above and all excluded code are my fault. Anyway, see what it means from context? My rough working definition is that "cargo cult googling" is when you google for someone else's solution, cut and paste, tweak some names, and pray that it works. Like a cargo cultist crafting imitation rifles from sticks, faithful that if he makes something look just like a real gun he once saw, it will work like one too.
UPDATE: Ah-ha! It's a play on "cargo cult programming" which in turn is a play on "cargo cult science."
A style of (incompetent) programming dominated by ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose.
Boustrophedon writing has one line written left to right, and then the next line written right to left—with the alphabet characters flipped.
Church of the Swimming Elephant (a Packetderm Service) is a Texas-based online privacy and anonymity filter, with SSH tunnel VPNs and such.
Unison, Panic's Usenet reader, has gotten to be remarkably good.
JumpCut is an open source clipboard manager for OS X. via
Xgl is a pretty 3D graphics subsystem developed by Novell and open sourced to the X Window project. Look at the video demo of Xgl. It makes Gnome look slick, almost OS X slick. It has a really cool way of handling virtual desktops. via
Intel's dropping the price of Core CPUs on May 28th by like $200 a piece, so if you're in the market for a Mac, you might want to consider waiting to see if that price drop trickles down to consumers or if Apple just gobbles up the difference. via
Err...those last four are me trying to figure out a reason why I think that object relationships in a formal object oriented programming language don't fully reflect the possible object relationships in a natural human language.
The flexible comfortStylus. via
How-to: build a game in a week from scratch with no budget
The Black Triangle via
Photoshop's shadow/highlight tool via
Washington Post: Zarqawi-as-a-big-bad is a military psyops campaign via
onegoodmove: John Kasich is nuts via
As a chaser for that, Early Christian Writings got a nice unpacking at MetaFilter recently.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 04:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 10, 2006
"Who can impress the forest, bid the tree / Unfix his earth-bound root?"
I've always liked how the French use the word "si."
Suppose someone asks you the negative form of Peter Potamus' catch phrase. To wit: "Didn't you get that thing I sent you?"
Now, in English, you can respond "Yes" or "No." But when you say "Yes" you have to clarify you meant, in fact, "No"—"I did not not [these cancel each other out] get that thing you sent me." Contrariwise, when you say "No" you have to clarify that you meant "Yes"—"I did not get that thing you sent me."
The French are more elegant. They give "Yes" and "No" literal meanings, as if the question posed is a Boolean logic problem for which the answer is either true or false. Then, in order to avoid confusion, they have another word, "si," that positively answers negative questions. So a Frenchman, when asked "Didn't you get that thing I sent you?" ("N'avez-vous pas obtenu ce que je vous ai envoyé?") could respond "Si" and have it understood that he means "Yes, I got it." If he said "Oui," then that would most likely mean "Yes, I did not get that thing you sent me."
There are analogs of the French "si" in several tongues:
The following languages were reported (with confidence) to have an
equivalent to "Si" in French:
German "doch"
Dutch "jawel"
"Danish Norwegian" "jo'"
Swedish "jo"
Icelandic "ju'"
Finnish "Kyll�p�"
Hungarian "dehogynem"
Sorbian "ju"
Japanese "iie"
Occitan (related to catalan) "hoc"
Arabic "balaa" stress on first syllable
Eastern Armenian "inchu che" or "her che"
Other possibilities are Korean and perhaps Portuguese ("sim", at least in
some circumstances).
Interestingly, Quebecois French does NOT have "Si" and a forerunner to
Catalan DID ("hoc") but does not now.
The topic is also covered in the Jargon File (née the Hacker's Dictionary) entry on hacker speech:
This speech style is a variety of the precisionist English normally spoken by scientists, design engineers, and academics in technical fields. In contrast with the methods of jargon construction, it is fairly constant throughout hackerdom.
It has been observed that many hackers are confused by negative questions -- or, at least, that the people to whom they are talking are often confused by the sense of their answers. The problem is that they have done so much programming that distinguishes between if (going) ... and if (!going) ... that when they parse the question "Aren't you going?" it may seem to be asking the opposite question from "Are you going?", and so to merit an answer in the opposite sense. This confuses English-speaking non-hackers because they were taught to answer as though the negative part weren't there. In some other languages (including Russian, Chinese, and Japanese) the hackish interpretation is standard and the problem wouldn't arise. Hackers often find themselves wishing for a word like French `si', German `doch', or Dutch `jawel' - a word with which one could unambiguously answer `yes' to a negative question. (See also mu)
For similar reasons, English-speaking hackers almost never use double negatives, even if they live in a region where colloquial usage allows them. The thought of uttering something that logically ought to be an affirmative knowing it will be misparsed as a negative tends to disturb them.
In a related vein, hackers sometimes make a game of answering questions containing logical connectives with a strictly literal rather than colloquial interpretation. A non-hacker who is indelicate enough to ask a question like "So, are you working on finding that bug _now_ or leaving it until later?" is likely to get the perfectly correct answer "Yes!" (that is, "Yes, I'm doing it either now or later, and you didn't ask which!").
I've found taking questions literally to be an endless source of amusement. Once, a friend of mine dropped a lighter by my foot. When he asked me if I "could move my leg real fast" I physically demonstrated that I was indeed capable of doing so.
I have a feeling that it'd be easy to connect geeks' literal-mindedness with their love of the Lord of the Rings. In particular, I'm thinking about the way Tolkien took two of Shakespeare's cop-out metaphorical prophecies from Macbeth and used them literally.
The march of the Ents on Isengard and the slaying of the Witch-King of Angkor mirror, respectively, Burnam Wood coming to Dunsany, and the slaying of Macbeth by a man of no woman born. Ol' Billy Shakespeare resolved those with some guys in camo and a C-section. Tolkien had a baddie who could only be killed by a Hobbit/woman tag-team, and giant fucking trees walking around destroying castles and stuff.
Because of the evidence in his letters and biography, J.R.R. Tolkien is often thought of as being "unswervingly hostile" to William Shakespeare and his works (Shippey, Century 310) . As a schoolboy at King Edward's he had already formed his opinion of the playwright, and did not enjoy studying Shakespeare, whom he "disliked cordially" (Tolkien, Carpenter and Tolkien 213) . The Carpenter biography records that in a debating society speech at age sixteen Tolkien "poured a sudden flood of abuse on Shakespeare, upon his filthy birthplace, his squalid surroundings, and his sordid character" (Carpenter, Tolkien 40) . He blamed Shakespeare for playing an "unforgivable" part in the “debasement” of the English concept of the Elves (Tolkien, Carpenter and Tolkien 185) , and his plans for curriculum reform at the Oxford English School, based on the program he developed at Leeds University, reduced the emphasis on Shakespeare and Milton that he felt privileged modern literature studies at the expense of historical linguistics (Carpenter, Tolkien 137) . He thought that the Honour School of English Language and Literature course should have a rigorous language component “based on ancient and medieval texts and their language, with at most only a brief excursion into ‘modern’ literature – ‘modern’ being anything after Geoffrey Chaucer” (Carpenter, Inklings 24) .
He was not always consistent in his opinions, either, particularly when it came to his thoughts on reading Shakespeare versus seeing the plays in performance. In "On Fairy-stories" he states that he feels the witches in Macbeth are intolerable on stage but significant in reading, and in this case Shakespeare ought to have written a story instead of a play (Tolkien, "Fairy-Stories" 50) . Tolkien thought it was impossible to translate fantasy to the stage without violating the “Secondary Belief” of the audience.
As Tolkien said in a 1967 interview, he knew that at some point in The Lord of the Rings there would be "trouble with treelike creatures" (Norman 6) . A long letter to W.H. Auden in 1955 includes a footnote explaining the origin of the Ents:
Their part in the story is due, I think, to my bitter disappointment and disgust from schoolboy days with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of 'Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill': I longed to devise a setting in which the trees might really march to war. (Tolkien, Carpenter and Tolkien 212) .
The other element taken most directly from Macbeth is the foretelling that "none of woman born/ Shall harm Macbeth" (Shakespeare IV:i) . In the original Holinshed Chronicles, the more specific prophecy was that Macbeth “should neuer be slaine with man born of anie woman” (emphasis added) (Boswell-Stone 36) . In Macbeth's case the fulfillment of this prophecy rests on a technicality - Macduff tells Macbeth he was "from his mother's womb/ Untimely ripp'd" (Shakespeare V:viii) ; or as he says in Holinshed, “was neuer borne of my mother, but ripped out of her wombe” (Boswell-Stone 43) . Although in Shakespeare’s time Caesarian sections were being performed on living patients with the expectation that at least some might survive, at the time of the historical Macbeth, a child was only cut out of the womb if the mother was dead so that the infant might be baptized. If the mother died, “the newborn was [considered] the child not of a living woman but of a corpse” (Blumenfeld-Kosinski 1) . The audience is cheated yet again - there is no way to tell by looking at Macduff that he was born by Caesarian section, or whether he is even telling the truth about his birth.
However, in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien's completion of the prophecy plays fair with the reader.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 09:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 09, 2006
"Ants again; that's what we are. . . chitinous reflex machines who aren't really alive."
Bewarned: lots of quotations in this post...
Ants are really old. How old? Like 140 million years old. Or more.
So, undeniably, the biggest story of the weekend is that Seymour Hersh piece in the New Yorker, "The Iran Plans," which contained the salacious (to some) nugget that Bush is considering using nukes. Sadly, the story, which is quite lengthy, has been reduced significantly in the retellings. Hersh's article is informative, colorful, and a joy to read even as it imparts scary news. I'm having difficulty picking out excerpts...
There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush’s ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change. Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence official said. “That’s the name they’re using. They say, ‘Will Iran get a strategic weapon and threaten another world war?’ ”
A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was “absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb” if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do “what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,” and “that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”
One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”
Clawson said that he fears that Ahmadinejad “sees the West as wimps and thinks we will eventually cave in. We have to be ready to deal with Iran if the crisis escalates.” Clawson said that he would prefer to rely on sabotage and other clandestine activities, such as “industrial accidents.” But, he said, it would be prudent to prepare for a wider war, “given the way the Iranians are acting. This is not like planning to invade Quebec.”
“You have to be ready to go, and we’ll see how they respond,” the officer said. “You have to really show a threat in order to get Ahmadinejad to back down.” He added, “People think Bush has been focussed on Saddam Hussein since 9/11,” but, “in my view, if you had to name one nation that was his focus all the way along, it was Iran.” (In response to detailed requests for comment, the White House said that it would not comment on military planning but added, “As the President has indicated, we are pursuing a diplomatic solution”; the Defense Department also said that Iran was being dealt with through “diplomatic channels” but wouldn’t elaborate on that; the C.I.A. said that there were “inaccuracies” in this account but would not specify them.)
“This is much more than a nuclear issue,” one high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna. “That’s just a rallying point, and there is still time to fix it. But the Administration believes it cannot be fixed unless they control the hearts and minds of Iran. The real issue is who is going to control the Middle East and its oil in the next ten years.”
In recent weeks, the President has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of Congress, including at least one Democrat. A senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, who did not take part in the meetings but has discussed their content with his colleagues, told me that there had been “no formal briefings,” because “they’re reluctant to brief the minority. They’re doing the Senate, somewhat selectively.”
The House member said that no one in the meetings “is really objecting” to the talk of war. “The people they’re briefing are the same ones who led the charge on Iraq. At most, questions are raised: How are you going to hit all the sites at once? How are you going to get deep enough?” (Iran is building facilities underground.) “There’s no pressure from Congress” not to take military action, the House member added. “The only political pressure is from the guys who want to do it.” Speaking of President Bush, the House member said, “The most worrisome thing is that this guy has a messianic vision.”
Some operations, apparently aimed in part at intimidating Iran, are already under way. American Naval tactical aircraft, operating from carriers in the Arabian Sea, have been flying simulated nuclear-weapons delivery missions—rapid ascending maneuvers known as “over the shoulder” bombing—since last summer, the former official said, within range of Iranian coastal radars.
He added that some American intelligence analysts believe that the Russians helped the Iranians design their underground facility. “We see a similarity of design,” specifically in the ventilator shafts, he said.
He went on, “Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details of damage and fallout—we’re talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don’t have a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out”—remove the nuclear option—“they’re shouted down.”
The attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he added, and some officers have talked about resigning. Late this winter, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans for Iran—without success, the former intelligence official said. “The White House said, ‘Why are you challenging this? The option came from you.’ ”
The adviser added, however, that the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons in such situations has gained support from the Defense Science Board, an advisory panel whose members are selected by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Under Ahmadinejad, the Revolutionary Guards have expanded their power base throughout the Iranian bureaucracy; by the end of January, they had replaced thousands of civil servants with their own members. One former senior United Nations official, who has extensive experience with Iran, depicted the turnover as “a white coup,” with ominous implications for the West. “Professionals in the Foreign Ministry are out; others are waiting to be kicked out,” he said. “We may be too late. These guys now believe that they are stronger than ever since the revolution.” He said that, particularly in consideration of China’s emergence as a superpower, Iran’s attitude was “To hell with the West. You can do as much as you like.”
Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, is considered by many experts to be in a stronger position than Ahmadinejad. “Ahmadinejad is not in control,” one European diplomat told me. “Power is diffuse in Iran. The Revolutionary Guards are among the key backers of the nuclear program, but, ultimately, I don’t think they are in charge of it. The Supreme Leader has the casting vote on the nuclear program, and the Guards will not take action without his approval.”
Other European officials expressed similar skepticism about the value of an American bombing campaign. “The Iranian economy is in bad shape, and Ahmadinejad is in bad shape politically,” the European intelligence official told me. “He will benefit politically from American bombing. You can do it, but the results will be worse.” An American attack, he said, would alienate ordinary Iranians, including those who might be sympathetic to the U.S.
The government consultant with ties to the Pentagon also said he believed that the oil problem could be managed, pointing out that the U.S. has enough in its strategic reserves to keep America running for sixty days. However, those in the oil business I spoke to were less optimistic; one industry expert estimated that the price per barrel would immediately spike, to anywhere from ninety to a hundred dollars per barrel, and could go higher, depending on the duration and scope of the conflict.
A retired four-star general told me that, despite the eight thousand British troops in the region, “the Iranians could take Basra with ten mullahs and one sound truck.”
“If you attack,” the high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna, “Ahmadinejad will be the new Saddam Hussein of the Arab world, but with more credibility and more power. You must bite the bullet and sit down with the Iranians.”
Another great article is Amy Sullivan's "Not as lame as you think," a thorough examination of how well the Democrats are holding together, and her prognosis is quite positive. via
It's understandable that pundits take one look at congressional Democrats today and declare them to be a far cry from the mighty mighty Gingrich revolutionaries of 1994. The implosion of the Bush administration and congressional Republicans has led to speculation not about whether Democrats could regain power but about how they will muff up the opportunity. Turn on a television these days, and you won't have to count to 10 before you hear, “Where is the Democrats' Newt?” or “Why don't Democrats have a Contract with America?”
But the truth is that Newt Gingrich and his Contract loom so large—and today's DC Democrats seem so small—largely because of the magic of hindsight. Back in 1994, Republicans were at least as divided as Democrats are now, if not more so. Traditional statesmen like Robert Michel, Howard Baker, and Robert Dole were constantly at loggerheads with the conservative bomb-throwers like Gingrich, Bob Walker, and Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas). As for unity of message, the now-revered Contract with America didn't make its debut until just six weeks before the election; Democratic pollster Mark Mellman recently pointed out that one week before Election Day, 71 percent of Americans said they hadn't heard anything about it. And while political journalists rushed to hail Gingrich's genius after the election, before November they were more likely to describe Republicans in terms we associate with Democrats today. “Republicans have taken to personal attacks on President Clinton because they have no ideas of their own to run on,” wrote Charles Krauthammer in the summer of 1994, while a George F. Will column in the fall ran under the headline, “Timid GOP Not Ready for Prime Time.”
What the GOP did so brilliantly in 1994 was exploit Clinton's weaknesses (his 1993 tax increase, his wife's failed health-care initiative), as well as the sense among voters that reigning congressional Democrats had become complacent and corrupt (reviving the Keating Five and House banking scandals). Well, guess what? This is precisely what congressional Democrats have been getting better at doing over the past 18 months.
If you read the press coverage of the story, you would have thought the issue surfaced on its own. In fact, however, the story was a little grenade rolled into the White House bunker by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.). No one was aware of the port deal until Schumer—who had been tipped off by a source in the shipping industry—held a press conference, and another, and another until the press corps finally paid attention. As for Schumer, he popped up in news reports about the deal, but almost always as a “critic of the administration,” not as the initiator of the entire episode.
Not only were moderates predicted to jump ship and join with Republicans to support the president's plan, but Social Security—one of the foundational blocks of the New Deal social compact—would be irrevocably changed. But then a funny thing happened. Reid and Pelosi managed to keep the members of their caucuses united in opposition. Day after day they launched coordinated attacks on Bush's “risky” proposal. Without a single Democrat willing to sign on and give a bipartisanship veneer of credibility, the private accounts plan slowly came to be seen by voters for what it was: another piece of GOP flimflam.
As the privatization ship began sinking, Republicans challenged Democrats to develop their own plan, and when none was forthcoming, pundits whacked the minority party for being without ideas. But not putting forth a plan was the plan. It meant that once the bottom fell out on public support for Bush's effort—which it did by early summer—Democrats couldn't be pressured to work with Republicans to form a compromise proposal. It was a brilliant tactical maneuver that resulted in a defeat at least as decisive as the Republicans' successful effort to kill Clinton's health-care plan.
Consider, for instance, what happened last fall when Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Pa.), a Vietnam veteran and hawk who initially supported the Iraq war, called for immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq. When reporters asked Pelosi what she thought of Murtha's statement, she replied that the congressman spoke for himself, not the caucus. Her response was immediately denounced by liberal critics and portrayed by reporters as evidence of Democrats' lack of message, discipline, and shared conviction. In fact, as Howard Fineman would later report, Pelosi had worked behind the scenes to convince Murtha to go public with his change of heart and orchestrated the timing of his announcement. Knowing that the credibility of Murtha's position would be damaged if it looked like he was the token hawk being used by “cut and run” liberal Democrats, Pelosi made the strategic calculation to put Murtha in the spotlight by himself for a few weeks before stepping forward to endorse his suggestion.
Over in the Senate, Reid temporarily silenced his critics when he staged a showdown last fall, shutting down the Senate to compel Republicans to discuss pre-war intelligence. GOP promises to pursue inquiries into how the intelligence was gathered, interpreted, and used had gone nowhere, and Democrats had no institutional means to conduct their own investigation. So Reid forced the issue, invoking an obscure parliamentary procedure that sent the Senate into a closed session. Republicans were furious, but they were also backed into a corner. Reluctantly, the leadership agreed to restart the investigations, putting the issue of intelligence back in the national spotlight. The in-your-face move signaled that Reid had the inclination, and the electoral security, to push Republicans around in a way that his predecessor Tom Daschle never could.
The defeat of Daschle, the nice-guy Democratic leader, and the nasty tactics of the campaign against him particularly outraged congressional Democrats. The anger was only compounded by the party's new degree of powerlessness. They didn't control a single thing in Washington—not the House or the Senate or the White House. Autocratic GOP chairmen turned off their microphones at hearings, reporters ignored their press conferences, and late-night comedians used them as the butt of every joke, a kind of institutional Kato Kaelin. And the base was mad as well; everywhere Democrats turned, they got an earful from activists and funders who wanted the party to fight back, to kick some ass. In the end, Democrats snapped.
When in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Bush quietly suspended the Davis-Bacon Act in order to allow federal contractors to avoid paying the prevailing wage to workers involved in clean-up efforts, Miller led Democrats in handing the president a rare defeat. Appalled that “the President has exploited a national tragedy to cut workers' wages,” Miller unearthed a little-used provision of a 1976 law that allows Congress to countermand the president's authority to suspend laws after a national emergency. While it is usually nearly impossible for Democrats to get bills through the all-powerful House Rules Committee, Miller's maneuver would have bypassed that step and guaranteed an automatic vote by the full House. Bush, faced with a vote he was sure to lose, reversed his earlier action and reinstated Davis-Bacon.
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) introduces an amendment to rename the FY2006 budget bill the “Moral Disaster of Monumental Proportion” Act.
Leading that charge for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), a former Clinton White House enforcer much-admired for his bare-knuckle approach to politics. The man they call “Rahmbo” has no patience for anyone who would go down without a fight or waste time crying into their chai tea about the odds against them. And so he has scraped, cajoled, and arm-twisted to expand the number of congressional races that Democrats are seriously contesting from a few dozen to nearly 50 this time around. Emanuel has done it by throwing out old ideas about who gets to be a Democratic congressional candidate—career politicians, such as state representatives or city councilmen moving up the ladder—and going after military veterans, sheriffs, ministers, and even one former NFL quarterback.
Congressional press secretaries say that reporters won't write about their efforts unless or until Democratic legislation comes up for serious consideration. “A lot of reporters tell me, 'Yeah, I'll write about that when it's on the floor,'” complained the Democratic communications director for a Senate committee. “So then some columnist writes that Democrats have no ideas and everybody in America says, 'You're right—I haven't read about any.'”
Ever since the Gil Amelio era, or maybe even before, Apple has had more cash and short-term investments than it knows what to do with. It's Apple's safety net, it's nest egg. Even in Apple's darkest times, they have that cash as an ace up their sleeve. Now, Apple's started a company to manage its investment portfolio. via
Braeburn -- named for a variety of apple that's uniquely sweet and tart -- will be a vehicle for managing Apple's investment portfolio. By incorporating in Nevada, Apple will be shielded from certain taxes imposed by the state of California, according to a person briefed on the matter.
The Braeburn job ads stipulate that the person hired would be given the assignment of finding external money managers specializing in fixed-income and money market investments with maturities ranging from one to five years. That could give a clue to the potential size of Braeburn's portfolio. Apple says that as of Dec. 31, $172 million of its short-term investments is tied up in instruments with maturity dates of "one to five years."
Here's how the rest of Apple's cash breaks down: $233 million in cash; $21 million in government treasury instruments; $2.5 billion corporate securities, mostly commercial paper and certificates of deposit; and another $1.3 billion in foreign securities. Apple's short-term investments -- which it defines as securities with maturity dates of more three months -- included $3.2 billion invested in corporate securities (again, mostly corporate debt) a little more than $1 billion in foreign securities and another $296 million in treasuries.
TAX HAVEN. So why incorporate in Nevada? Nevada has no corporate income tax, no capital-gains tax, and the state doesn't share information with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, says Neal Chambers, a corporate attorney with the firm of Bullivant Houser Bailey in Las Vegas.
YouTube has a video of Doom II playing on an iPod video using an open source firmware called RockBox. via
Posted by Jon Rubin at 09:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 08, 2006
"One of the chief sources of cultural paranoia is the [...] rift between the beliefs of people and their actual behavior, and the tacit assumption [...] that [...] this contradiction between idealism and practice [...] is a normal state of affairs."
That whole NSA-vacuuming-the-whole-Internet-with-AT&T's-help story? Wired has the official statement from Mark Klein, the whistleblower, an AT&T technician with 22 years' experience. via
In 2002, when I was working in an AT&T office in San Francisco, the site manager told me to expect a visit from a National Security Agency agent, who was to interview a management-level technician for a special job.
I saw a new room being built adjacent to the 4ESS switch room where the public's phone calls are routed. I learned that the person whom the NSA interviewed for the secret job was the person working to install equipment in this room.
I learned that fiber optic cables from the secret room were tapping into the Worldnet circuits by splitting off a portion of the light signal. I saw this in a design document available to me, entitled "Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco" dated Dec. 10, 2002. I also saw design documents dated Jan. 13, 2004 and Jan. 24, 2003, which instructed technicians on connecting some of the already in-service circuits to the "splitter" cabinet, which diverts some of the light signal to the secret room. The circuits listed were the Peering Links, which connect Worldnet with other networks and hence the whole country, as well as the rest of the world.
One of the documents listed the equipment installed in the secret room, and this list included a Narus STA 6400, which is a "Semantic Traffic Analyzer".
While working on a particularly difficult one with a technician back East, I learned that other such "splitter" cabinets were being installed in other cities, including Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego.
Based on my understanding of the connections and equipment at issue, it appears the NSA is capable of conducting what amounts to vacuum-cleaner surveillance of all the data crossing the internet -- whether that be peoples' e-mail, web surfing or any other data.
Here's Narus's product page, which proudly states: via
Universal data collection from links, routers, soft switches, IDS/IPS, databases, etc. provides total network vew across the world’s largest IP networks.
Normalization, Correlation, Aggregation and Analysis provide a comprehensive and detailed model of user, element, protocol, application and network behaviors, in real time.
Industry-leading packet processing performance that supports network speeds of up to OC-192 at layer 4 and OC-48 at layer 7, enabling carriers to monitor traffic at either the edge of the network or at the core.
Unsurpassed and limitless scalability to support the world’s largest, most complex IP networks.
In the mean time, over in the pages of the Atlantic, James Bamford, the man who literally wrote the book on the NSA, reminds us that "Big Brother Is Listening."
It used to be that before the NSA could place the name of an American on its watch list, it had to go before a FISA-court judge and show that it had probable cause—that the facts and circumstances were such that a prudent person would think the individual was somehow connected to terrorism—in order to get a warrant. But under the new procedures put into effect by Bush’s 2001 order, warrants do not always have to be obtained, and the critical decision about whether to put an American on a watch list is left to the vague and subjective “reasonable belief” of an NSA shift supervisor. In charge of hundreds of people, the supervisor manages a wide range of sigint specialists, including signals-conversion analysts separating HBO television programs from cell-phone calls, traffic analysts sifting through massive telephone data streams looking for suspicious patterns, cryptanalysts attempting to read e-mail obscured by complex encryption algorithms, voice-language analysts translating the gist of a phone call from Dari into English, and cryptolinguists trying to unscramble a call on a secure telephone.
Once a person’s name is in the files, even if nothing incriminating ever turns up, it will likely remain there forever. There is no way to request removal, because there is no way to confirm that a name is on the list.
With the acquiescence of the telecommunications companies, it is possible for the NSA to attach monitoring equipment inside the landing station and then run a buried encrypted fiber-optic “backhaul” line to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, where the river of data can be analyzed by supercomputers in near real time.
Tapping into the fiber-optic network that carries the nation’s Internet communications is even easier, as much of the information transits through just a few “switches” (similar to the satellite downlinks). Among the busiest are MAE East (Metropolitan Area Ethernet), in Vienna, Virginia, and MAE West, in San Jose, California, both owned by Verizon. By accessing the switch, the NSA can see who’s e-mailing with whom over the Internet cables and can copy entire messages. Last September, the Federal Communications Commission further opened the door for the agency.
More than a dozen years ago, an NSA director gave an indication of the agency’s capability. “Just one intelligence-collection system,” said Admiral William O. Studeman, referring to a listening post such as Sugar Grove, “can generate a million inputs per half hour.” Today, with the secret cooperation of much of the telecommunications industry, massive dishes vacuuming the airwaves, and electronic “packet sniffers,” software that monitors network traffic, diverting e-mail and other data from fiber-optic cables, the NSA’s hourly take is in the tens of millions of communications. One transatlantic fiber-optic cable alone has the capacity to handle close to 10 million simultaneous calls.
“I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge,” Senator Church said. “I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that [the National Security Agency] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”
Posted by Jon Rubin at 08:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 07, 2006
"Mister Order, he runs at a very good pace / But old Mother Chaos is winning the race."
AT&T forwards all internet traffic to the NSA, and the EFF is taking them to court. via
"The evidence that we are filing supports our claim that AT&T is diverting Internet traffic into the hands of the NSA wholesale, in violation of federal wiretapping laws and the Fourth Amendment," said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston.
"More than just threatening individuals' privacy, AT&T's apparent choice to give the government secret, direct access to millions of ordinary Americans' Internet communications is a threat to the Constitution itself. We are asking the Court to put a stop to it now," said Bankston.
EFF's evidence regarding AT&T's dragnet surveillance of its networks includes a declaration by Mark Klein, a retired AT&T telecommunications technician, and several internal AT&T documents. This evidence was bolstered and explained by the expert opinion of J. Scott Marcus, who served as Senior Technical Advisor for Internet Technology to the Federal Communications Commission from July 2001 until July 2005.
In addition, AT&T is also forwarding to the NSA its voice communications database:
In the lawsuit, EFF alleges that AT&T, in addition to allowing the NSA direct access to the phone and Internet communications passing over its network, has given the government unfettered access to its over 312 terabyte "Hawkeye" database, detailing nearly every telephone communication on AT&T's domestic network since 2001, according to the complaint. The suit also alleges that AT&T allowed the NSA to use the company's powerful Daytona database management software to quickly search this and other communication databases.
There's a first edition of the Principia Discordia scanned and online. Hail Eris! via
In related news, there's been some fresh reporting on advancements in the understanding of chaos, synchronicity, and coupled states. For more, see this post wherein I link to better material on the topic.
According to a computational study conducted by a group of physicists at Washington University in St. Louis, one may create order by introducing disorder.
While working on their model — a network of interconnected pendulums, or "oscillators" — the researchers noticed that when driven by ordered forces the various pendulums behaved chaotically and swung out of sync like a group of intoxicated synchronized swimmers. This was unexpected — shouldn't synchronized forces yield synchronized pendulums?
But then came the real surprise: When they introduced disorder — forces were applied at random to each oscillator — the system became ordered and synchronized.
Neurons, for example, have been modeled as interconnected, or "coupled," oscillators because of the way they interact with one another. In the model, coupled oscillators can be imagined as being tethered to their nearest neighbor, thus influencing their movement. Neurons, on the other hand, may display repetitive electrical activity that can be influenced by the activity of neighboring neurons.
Dellen explains that neurons can exhibit synchronous activity in response to a stimulus. To this point, she said, nobody has come up with an adequate explanation. And Wessel said, "Maybe the details of the neurons are completely irrelevant. Maybe it is only a property of oscillators."
A vital similarity between the model system and neurons is that they are both "nonlinear" — meaning that there is not a linear, or straight-ahead, correlation between the applied force and displacement. In other words, the oscillators in the model may be likened to a child on a swing. Within a small range, the child will move in constant proportion to how hard you push them — if you push twice as hard, they will go twice as far. But nearly all complex systems in nature, like the physicists' model, are nonlinear. Once the child gets to a certain height, pushing twice as hard will not make the child go twice as far.
Tom Delay and Chris Matthews are tight: via
MATTHEWS: Thanks. I owe you one. I owe you two -- today and last night.
DELAY: No you don't.
MATTHEWS: No, I do.
DELAY: I appreciate it.
The problem with selective, ad-hoc declassification for political purposes: via
When Scooter Libby met with Judith Miller on July 8, 2003 and revealed classified information from the 2002 NIE, he was giving her information that she had already received before the NIE was even finalized. But, not only that, a full year after the Libby met with Judith Miller at the St. Regis Hotel and revealed the identity and job of Ambassador Wilson's wife, the administration was refusing to declassify huge portions of the NIE.
The bottom line here is that Judith Miller was given information all the way back in September 2002...some of which may have been denied to Congress in 2004. She was given information in July 2003 before the information had been vetted and cleared for declassification. Libby's claim that Bush declassified the information prior to his meeting with Miller is nonsense. As far as Miller was concerned, nothing was ever classified.
Ajax in one line is a technology by which you can send and receive data without the page being reloaded, so it looks more 'dynamic'. I guess this could be the dummy way of explaining it.
I wanted to know more about AJAX and learn how to code with AJAX. Just the basic stuff.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 02:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 06, 2006
"Woe to the flesh that depends on the soul; woe to the soul that depends on the flesh."
Oops! Almost forgot to post today. Here's a quickie.
Bush embroiled in Plame affair: via
A former White House aide under indictment for obstructing a leak probe, I. Lewis Libby, testified to a grand jury that he gave information from a closely-guarded "National Intelligence Estimate" on Iraq to a New York Times reporter in 2003 with the specific permission of President Bush, according to a new court filing from the special prosecutor in the case.
Well, Republicans, obviously, are going to use it as evidence of a total lack of wrongdoing, saying, à la Nixon, that "If the President does it it's legal." I don't think Fitzgerald is really going to try to go after POTUS for leaking classified information to the press.
I figure the only real result will be Bush's poll numbers for trustworthiness dropping a couple of points, as one more tiny segment of blinkered Americans realize Bush has been lying his ass off. Won't be many. Just a few conservatives who A: actually follow the news, and, B: really believed him when he said he didn't know a thing about this and wanted the leakers found, and, C: care.
Anyway, Fitzgerald wouldn't have a very strong case against Bush. This is turning into a conflict about Executive fiat. Bush is going to say he didn't break any laws by leaking classified information because he has a secret executive order saying it's okay for him to declassify whenever he wants. So whether or not Fitz has a case depends on what Bush said to him in his private interview last year. However, even that doesn't matter. It wasn't under oath, so Bush can't be charged with perjury like Clinton. Maybe obstruction of justice? But the defense would be: "Obstruction of what justice? How can you obstruct the investigation of a crime when no crime was committed because we gave ourselves the authority to do it?" That argument might not hold up in court, but it'll definitely win public opinion to bush's side.
"Semiotics and the Media" is Tom Streeter's "hypertext essay and tutorial on using semiotic techniques to analyze advertising, media, and contemporary culture." via
Did you know that there was a typographical irony mark? via
This mark was proposed by the French poet Alcanter de Brahm (alias Marcel Bernhardt) at the end of the 19th century.
Although this character has never been officially adopted by typographers, it happens to be identical to the backward question mark found in Arabic. The irony mark may thus be represented by Unicode character 1567 or 0x061F: '؟' (due to technical limitations this character might not be visible in all browsers).
Gospel of Judas unearthed via
The most revealing passages in the Judas manuscript begins, "The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot during a week, three days before he celebrated Passover."
The account goes on to relate that Jesus refers to the other disciples, telling Judas "you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me." By that, scholars familiar with Gnostic thinking said, Jesus meant that by helping him get rid of his physical flesh, Judas will act to liberate the true spiritual self or divine being within Jesus.
Unlike the accounts in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the anonymous author of the Gospel of Judas believed that Judas Iscariot alone among the 12 disciples understood the meaning of Jesus' teachings and acceded to his will. In the diversity of early Christian thought, a group known as Gnostics believed in a secret knowledge of how people could escape the prisons of their material bodies and return to the spiritual realm from which they came.
Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton who specializes in studies of the Gnostics, said in a statement, "These discoveries are exploding the myth of a monolithic religion, and demonstrating how diverse — and fascinating — the early Christian movement really was."
The Egyptian copy of the gospel was written on 13 sheets of papyrus, both front and back, and found in a multitude of brittle fragments.
Rudolphe Kasser, a Swiss scholar of Coptic studies, directed the team that reconstructed and translated the script. The effort, organized by the National Geographic, was supported by Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art, in Basel, Switzerland, and the Waitt Institute for Historical Discovery, an American nonprofit organization for the application of technology in historical and scientific projects.
The entire 66-page codex also contains a text titled James (also known as First Apocalypse of James), a letter by Peter and a text of what scholars are provisionally calling Book of Allogenes.
Discovered in the 1970's in a cavern near El Minya, Egypt, the document circulated for years among antiquities dealers in Egypt, then Europe and finally in the United States. It moldered in a safe-deposit box at a bank in Hicksville, N. Y., for 16 years before being bought in 2000 by a Zurich dealer, Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos. The manuscript was given the name Codex Tchacos.
When attempts to resell the codex failed, Ms. Nussberger-Tchacos turned it over to the Maecenas Foundation for conservation and translation.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 09:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 05, 2006
"That war be, and the same is hereby, declared to exist."
Last June, when Apple announced the switch to Intel, the first thought that popped into my head was: "Apple just declared war on Microsoft." Today, that war escalates with Apple's Boot Camp. Boot Camp lets a MacIntel boot Windows. A huge impediment to the adoption of Mac OS by the masses is that testing it requires buying a Mac. Macs are expensive, and it's hard for a PC user to justify buying an expensive computer that's incompatible with all their software. Geeks had already hacked XP to boot, but Apple is bundling all the correct drivers for video, etc., and making the boot process smooth and GUI-tiful. Apple's intention, no doubt, is that users will boot Windows up less and less as they become addicted to the quality experience of OS X. But this is only the first step. Dual-booting is a way for Apple to remove all the kinks Windows might have on Apple hardware. Once Windows is happy in its own runtime environment, the next step is virtual machines. Instead of booting up in Windows, users will boot a Windows runtime environment inside of OS X. Step 3? "There's no step 3!" as Jeff Goldblum put it. But what if there is? Step 3 would be the computing world's nuclear option. Step 3 is Apple reverse-engineering the Windows API like the WINE project has for Linux, allowing Windows applications to launch in OS X itself. But this is all speculation. For now, we only have Boot Camp. Apple's page for Boot Camp is filled with delightful snark. via
With Boot Camp, the Mac can operate smoothly in both centuries.
Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it’ll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world.
Google has a new service called Google Related. via
Google Related Links use the power of Google to automatically bring fresh, dynamic and interesting content links to any website.
By the way, it can also be moved back, according to whatever's politically correct, what show it is and who owns the network. Friends who created American Dad were told they had to remove more egregious anti-Bush comments from their pilot and series. Yet, I'm pretty certain that The Simpsons would be afforded this kind of leeway, since they are a huge money maker for Fox (in the billions when you include merchandising) and they can't afford to lose it.
For years, Linksys's popular WRT series of wireless routers ran Linux. Recently, Linksys switched to an OS called VxWorks, and marked up the Linux routers to $80. Now it looks like you can get Linux to run on the new Linksys WRTs. via
Now based on VxWorks, the WRT54GSv5 and WRT54Gv5 come with a significantly reduced memory architecture and a different firmare setup that many assumed would be impossible to replace with a 3rd party linux solution.
Fascinating Ask MetaFilter thread about Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem:
What does all this mean for non-math folks? It is still a topic of hot debate in the logic community. At minimum, it indicates that there are certain things that cannot be reached by language, since even if language is paraconsistent, there exists some consistent formal language that simulates it and is incomplete. This is why people often connect Goedel and Wittgenstein, and there are some similarities in their arguments.
posted by sonofsamiam at 10:18 AM EST on April 5 [!]
The future of science, as imagined by Kevin Kelly: via
Compiled Negative Results — Negative results are saved, shared, compiled and analyzed, instead of being dumped. Positive results may increase their credibility when linked to negative results.
Triple Blind Experiments – In a double blind experiment neither researcher nor subject are aware of the controls, but both are aware of the experiment. In a triple blind experiment all participants are blind to the controls and to the very fact of the experiment itself. The way of science depends on cheap non-invasive sensor running continuously for years generating immense streams of data. While ordinary life continues for the subjects, massive amounts of constant data about their lifestyles are drawn and archived. Out of this huge database, specific controls, measurements and variables can be "isolated" afterwards.
Combinatorial Sweep Exploration – Much of the unknown can be explored by systematically creating random varieties of it at a large scale. You can explore the composition of ceramics (or thin films, or rare-earth conductors) by creating all possible types of ceramic (or thin films, or rare-earth conductors), and then testing them in their millions. You can explore certain realms of proteins by generating all possible variations of that type of protein and they seeing if they bind to a desired disease-specific site. You can discover new algorithms by automatically generating all possible programs and then running them against the desired problem. Indeed all possible Xs of almost any sort can be summoned and examined as a way to study X.
Multiple Hypothesis Matrix – Instead of proposing a series of single hypothesis, in which each hypothesis is falsified and discarded until one theory finally passes and is verified, a matrix of many hypothesis scenarios are proposed and managed simultaneously. An experiment travels through the matrix of multiple hypothesis, some of which are partially right and partially wrong. Veracity is statistical; more than one thesis is permitted to stand with partial results.
Unrelenting rivers of sensory data will flow day and night from zillions of sources.
And just as we now expect a hypothesis to be subjected to the discipline of being stated in mathematical equations, in the future we will expect all hypothesis to be exercised in a simulation. There will also be the craft of taking things known only in simulation and testing them in other simulations—sort of a simulation of a simulation.
"Science is the way we surprise God," said Kelly. "That's what we're here for." Our moral obligation is to generate possibilities, to discover the infinite ways, however complex and high-dimension, to play the infinite game. It will take all possible species of intelligence in order for the universe to understand itself. Science, in this way, is holy. It is a divine trip.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 02:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 04, 2006
"I believe all God's creatures have a soul...except bears, bears are godless killing machines!"
O frabjous day! For DeLay did say: "I'm going away." Callooh! Callay! via
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Rep. Tom DeLay , who was forced to step down as House majority leader last year after being indicted in his home state of Texas, will drop out of his re-election race, two Republican congressional sources told CNN Monday.
The reason for DeLay's departure was unclear.
DELAY: Why? Well, this campaign actually started over a year ago. It's very nasty.
Sean-Paul, proprietor of The Agonist, calls it likes he sees it:
Tom DeLay, says politics is too nasty? The guy who impeached Bill Clinton? The guy who once famously roared, "I AM THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT!"
What a crock. Republicans have been spewing jingoistic bile and vitriol at the Democrats for years and now DeLay gets his own medicine and guess what? He can't take it.
What a pussy.
Jake Tapper has the best obit on DeLay's political career.
Single-molecule diodes explained:
Created by a research team at the University of Chicago, the single-molecule diode is merely a few tens of atoms in size and 1,000 times smaller than its conventional counterparts. Recently, theorists from the University of South Florida and the Russian Academy of Sciences have explained the principles that make the device work.
The researchers showed electron energy levels in a molecule are efficient channels for transferring electrons from one electrode to another. Because the molecule in the diode is asymmetrical, the electronic response is also asymmetrical when voltage is applied. The asymmetry contributes to a phenomenon called molecular rectification: the channels conduct electrons in one direction, but limit flow in the opposite direction when the voltage polarity reverses. That property makes the molecular diode a potential gatekeeper for circuits and a candidate to one day replace silicon in computer chips.
Leonardo grids can make spheres by weaving together planar elements. via
How-to: tunneling SSH over HTTP(S) via
In an interview, a developer describes some cool upcoming features in OpenSSH: via
Damien Miller: Reyk and Markus' new tunneling support allows you to make a real VPN using OpenSSH without the need for any additional software. This goes well beyond the TCP port forwarding that we have supported for years - each end of a ssh connection that uses the new tunnel support gets a tun(4) interface which can pass packets between them. This is similar to the type of VPN supported by OpenVPN or other SSL-VPN systems, only it runs over SSH. It is therefore really easy to set up and automatically inherit the ability to use all of the authentication schemes supported by SSH (password, public key, Kerberos, etc.)
The tunnel interfaces that form the endpoints of the tunnel can be configured as either a layer-3 or a layer-2 link. In layer-3 mode you can configure the tun(4) interfaces with IP or IPv6 addresses and route packets over them like any other interface - you could even run a dynamic routing protocol like OSPF over them if you were so inclined. In layer-2 mode, you can make them part of a bridge(4) group to bridge raw ethernet frames between the two ends.
A practical use of this might be securely linking back to your home network while connected to an untrusted wireless net, being able to send and receive ICMP pings and to use UDP based services like DNS.
Okay, I'm gonna end with a bit of Lost. Last week, the show's producers flashed a hell of a lot of information on the screen for maybe 60 frames. The lights turned off, some UV lamps turned on, and a here-to-now invisible diagram is illuminated on the wall. Filled with a rough map, crabbed, hard to read handwriting, half-scratched out notes, mathematic equations, and ambiguous Latin phrases, the entire thing has been deciphered.
Lost.cubit.net, the same people who translated the Egyptian hieroglyphs on the countdown timer earlier this season, have produced a screenshot of the map with an overlay explaining everything. The Latin is translated and the notes are all typed up and easily legible. So what does the map reveal? via
Well, one of the men on the Black Rock, the mining ship that crashed on the island generations ago, was Magnus Hanso, presumably an ancestor of Alvar Hanso, the mysterious head of the DHARMA Initiative.
The black smoke monster has a great name: Cerberus.
The incident, whatever it was, took place in the medical lab in 1985.
All the hatches on the island are arranged in a hexagon, with closed-off tunnels leading to a mysterious center facility.
We've known since the pilot that there's a radio transmitter on the island. It was broadcasting Danielle's distress call at that point. She'd changed it 16 years ago, but in the time since the Others had gained control of it. The enduring mystery is why they leave her message playing. Anyway, whoever drew this new UV map in the hatch was curious about that transmitter. He didn't see why there were some many "Dharmatel relays" there since it's so hard to reach. It was in the mountains, where it could be used for meteorological research, but the "geological composition" would cause "magnetic interference" with some kind of weather project, and make the station unusable as a listening/crypto station.
Whoever drew the diagram was fascinated by the numbers. He wrote "√16 √64 √225" and "3 of 6 (4 8 15 16 23 42)."
One thing the diagram answers conclusively: the polar bears. The stated goal of the zoological research facility was "repatriation and accelerated de-territorialization of Ursus Maritimus through gene therapy and extreme climate change."
Posted by Jon Rubin at 03:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 03, 2006
"And so the obvious phallic symbolism of Wolverine's claws provides a counterpoint to the Oedipal blindness motif of Cyclops' ruby visor." —Carl Rigney
Safari crashed earlier, and took a blog post's worth of links with it.
Tony Rudy, Tom DeLay's recently-charged friend, used to do day trading from the Capitol building.
There are few issues here that are deeply troubling to us. First, there is a huge problem with a senior leadership staffer spending his days making stock trades instead of serving the people he is supposed to represent, as seems to have been the case with Mr. Rudy. This represents yet another compromise of the integrity of this leadership and another failure to impose accountability where it should have been already.
Second, we need to find out whether or not Mr. Rudy was trading on sensitive nonpublic information he gained while working in Congress. More than likely only a full investigation could bear that out.
Of course the deeper issue here is the vast potential for abuse. The possibility that members of congress and their staffs could use information not available to the public to make money in the stock market is very real. The fact that entire political intelligence firms exist for the sole purpose of garnering such information and trading on it suggests it happens more than any of us have ever imagined.
Another day, another lie crafted by O'Reilly to defame Krugman.
On the March 27 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly falsely attacked New York Times columnist Paul Krugman for "writing about illegal immigrants" but refusing to "put the word 'illegal' in there." In fact, the portion of Krugman's March 27 column that O'Reilly read -- in which Krugman argued that "[b]asic decency requires that we provide immigrants, once they're here, with essential health care, education for their children, and more" -- referred to all immigrants, not only those here illegally. Later in his column, Krugman referred specifically to "illegal immigrants," "illegal immigration," and "an illegal immigrant."
O'Reilly also misrepresented Krugman's views on illegal immigration, falsely suggesting that according to Krugman, "we have to let them all in." In fact, Krugman -- who O'Reilly said was a "quasi-socialist" -- wrote in his column: "Realistically, we'll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants. Mainly that means better controls on illegal immigration."
Wired writes up Zfone and makes a funny:
So as nice as it is, unless Zfone is adopted by mainstream VoIP providers, it will probably occupy the same limited market niche as the hyper-secure PGP program that ruffled so many government feathers over a decade ago.
PGP didn't become standard e-mail fare outside of the community of geeks, cypherpunks and those with special privacy needs, like human rights workers and people living in countries where the government routinely spies on its citizens without oversight. Fortunately for Zimmerman, there are a lot more of us these days.
Wonkette catches Republicans red baiting.
SCOTUS denies certiorari for Padilla appeal. via
Six justices refused to hear the case. Three justices said the court should have agreed to take up the case: Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.
But three court members, including Chief Justice John Roberts, said that they would be watching to ensure Padilla receives the protections "guaranteed to all federal criminal defendants."
An appeals court panel had all but called for the high court to deal with the case, saying it was troubled by the Bush administration's change in legal strategy -- it brought criminal charges only after it looked like the Supreme Court was going to step in.
Justices first considered in 2004 whether Padilla's constitutional rights were violated when he was detained as an enemy combatant without charges and access to a lawyer, traditional legal rights. Justices dodged a decision on technical grounds. In a dissent Justice John Paul Stevens said then that "at stake in this case is nothing less than the essence of a free society.
John Gruber says "Adios Avie"
I asked a few engineer friends at Apple whether my perception was correct — that Tevanian has had one foot out the door ever since he stepped down from day-to-day management of Apple software engineering in 2003, and that the news that he’s leaving the company completely isn’t really a big deal at all. They all agreed, more or less, that Tevanian has had both feet out the door but just hadn’t yet turned in his keys. No one I spoke to at Apple has any idea what he’s been up to the last three years.
When he was vice president of software engineering, everyone knew what he was up to. One reason I think Tevanian was successful is that he was an engineer at heart, not a manager. He truly understood how Mac OS X was designed and how it works.
In short, Tevanian’s leaving has nothing to do with the switch to Intel processors, or the continued growth and success of the iPod, cockamamie theories that Apple is switching to Windows or that Microsoft is switching to Mac OS X, or anything else that might be construed as big news. It’s just a case of a very smart guy who decided a couple years ago to move on to something else, and tomorrow is moving day.
The funniest thing I read this weekend:
If you want to see the most embarrasing and amazing collection of online short-bus conversation, Google the fight all the kiddies are waiting for: Batman VS Spider-man.
Who really would win? Hey - if you're looking for my opinion, I agree with this guy (SIC throughout):
"well every one has their story so here is my it all start as peter parker aka spiderman is walking down the street the night is young and peter is tried and wants to go home to his wife mary jane than he hears a loud shoosh in the air he looks up and see a gaint bat so peter gose and in vestigate by changing into spiderman and crimb up a side of a building to see the bat-man himself looking down at manhattan " what a breatiful night aint huh ? spider-man says the surpised bat-man throws his batarangs at spider-man but spiderman quickly sense it and flips out the way "who the hell are u batman says!!! the amazing spider-man if u would like to know ! "i dont who u are u are in my town so leave now " i dont know what the hell is wrong with u says spiderman but this is manhattan so u leave!! the angry batman dose a fly kick but the amazing spiderman sense it and move out the way the batman double flips over spiderman head and kicks him in the face the angry spiderman shoots a web line that the batman hits him in the back making him fall on the grown but batman cuts off the line with his batarang and gets up quickly "round 2 batman says "fine with me spiderman says then the batman quickly throws gas pellents to the grown leaving spiderman helpless. batman moves quickly through the smoke but see no one there " right here big ears spiderman moans then with the quickness kicks batman in the mid section leaving batman falling to the grown head first and defeated " what a night as spiderman jumps and swing home."
So. There you have it. All in one sentence, too.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 05:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 02, 2006
Red Flagged Links Vol. IV 6/27/05 - 6/30/05
(Some Guy) [Fark]
The summer of 2001 was declared "summer of the shark" despite the fact that the number of shark attacks wasn't abnormal. Then a little tragic event happened and they shut the hell up about sharks for a little awhile.
Kurtz and Rather had this exchange around that time: [Eschaton]
Supreme Court Swings Both Ways on Hot Church-State Action
Suddenly, the marriage of church and state sounds just like obscenity. Some government displays of the Ten Commandments are faith-porn, others are art (or at least Cinemax). How to decide which is which? [Wonkette]
Hacking Apple’s Weather Widget to Show the Time of the Last Update
My frustration was that I wanted to know at a glance whether I needed to wait for updated data in Apple's Weather widget. So I hacked it. [Daring Fireball]
Pinceton University asked the university's scientists and engineers to collect and submit images "produced in the course of research or incorporating tools and concepts from science." The resulting gallery is mind-boggling. [Boing Boing]
The Supremes Are Trying to Break Your Heart
Bachelor, close to his mom, brings his own lunch to work -- we always suspected David Souter was the "emo justice." Now we know for sure: [Wonkette]
Influential Rabbi Thinks Bush Looks Like God
Rabbi Daniel Lapin eats breakfast with Karl Rove and dinner with President Bush, and it's easy to see why. He religiously opposes government pork. And, we're guessing, many forms of non-traditional porking: "His specialty is finding support in the Torah for what turns out to be the current Republican platform: lower taxes, decreased regulation, pro-traditional family policies." [Wonkette]
Wonkette operatives read The Note so Wonkette doesn't have to. One operative in particular draws our attention to some recent reflexive snobbery. [Wonkette]
Zombie Dogs U.S. scientists have succeeded in reviving dogs after three hours of clinical death, paving the way for trials on humans within years. [MetaFilter]
Don't like my driving? Call 1-800-flesh-eating-hemadrones
Snip from Court TV item: [Boing Boing]
Siva Vaidhyanathan's editorial on the Grokster decision is up on Salon, and it considers the fallout from the vague new "inducement" standard that the court invented: [Boing Boing]
The Unofficial War: U.S., Britain Led Massive Secret Bombing Campaign Before Iraq War Was Declared [MetaFilter]
Bush, 1999:
"I think it's also important for the president to lay out a timetable as to how long they will be involved and when they will be withdrawn." [Eschaton]
Drug War Fails to Dent U.S. Supply
Drug War Fails to Dent U.S. SupplySonni Efron | Washington, DC | June 28LAT - The Bush administration and congressional allies are gearing up to renew a plan for drug eradication in Latin America despite some grim news: The $5.4 billion spent on the plan since 2000 has made no dent in the availability of cocaine on American streets and prices are at all-time lows. [The Agonist]
Khuffie writes "According to Wired, Warner Bros. Entertainment recently passed on a pilot of a show called Global Frequency. However, due to a leak on bit-torrent the pilot episode has reached thousands of viewers who are clamouring for more, and has given the show a new lease on life. What's more interesting is what the show creator learned. From the article: "It changes the way I'll do my next project," said Rogers. If he owned the full rights, he said, "I would put my pilot out on the internet in a heartbeat. Want five more? Come buy the boxed set." Frankly, I'm all for this method of distribution, as I barely watch 'regular' TV anymore." [Slashdot]
Legitimate MP3 downloads! If you like the big beat duo The Chemical Brothers, I'm sure you'll be impressed by these two excellent remixes: Flip The Switch & Believe EP. Primal Scream's deep house masterpiece is given similarly impressive treatment in Screamixadelica. Maybe you prefer the punkier electronica of The Prodigy; check out Always Outsiders, Never Outdone. BTW don't forget to donate to the nominated charities on each site if you decide to keep the tracks. [MetaFilter]
France Will Be Home To Fusion Plant
ScentCone writes "After years of politicking, France has won the right to be the location for a $12 billion fusion research facility. The plant will use deuterium-from-seawater and a huge electromagnetic ring to produce the 100-million-C conditions in which researchers hope to produce viable fusion. The debate over whether this is even possible continues to rage. The ITER project started in 1985, and there has been a running fight over money and location since. France indicated that if Japan (one of the holdouts) didn't see it their way, they'd build a coalition of the willing and do it anyway. With financing and contracting agreements in place, the 10-year construction can begin." Coverage also available at MSNBC, the NYTimes, CNN, and the BBC. [Slashdot]
In December 2003, elevated terror alert levels led to the cancellation of nearly 30 international flights. What prompted this action? CIA analysts believed Al-Jazeera was broadcasting "secret messages hidden in the moving text at the bottom of the screen, known as the 'crawl.'" [Wonkette]
50Mbps Cable Launched on Long Island
the-dark-kangaroo writes "Cable Vision have teamed up with Narad Networks to provide a new 50Mbps broadband service in the New York metropolitan area. The current deployment has a capability of 100Mbps (the connections are symmetric) with future developments allowing up to 10Gbps connections. The system utilises current cabling systems allowing enterprise level connections to homes and businesses." [Slashdot]
Pentagon Aided Halliburton, Official Charges
Pentagon Aided Halliburton, Official ChargesSteven Bodzin | Washington | June 28LAT - A top Army Corps of Engineers official charged Monday that Halliburton Co. was able to receive no-bid contracts for work in Iraq because of repeated assistance by the office of the secretary of Defense. [The Agonist]
Journalist's blog documents DEA's war on California
My friend Ann Harrison is covering the ongoing skirmishes in the drug war in California. The state of California has legalized growing and distributing pot to people who have medical marijuana prescriptions, but the DEA has begun to arrest these people on federal charges (despite the fact that federal laws only have jurisdiction over interstate matters, so pot grown and distributed in California is outside the DEA's jurisdiction).
The DEA is conducting this war like a guerrilla attack on the people of California. Private citizens who record their busts from public sidewalks are assaulted by DEA agents who try to erase their camera-memory. The press-conferences are closed to the public. The dispensary raids concentrate on computer records of patients and growers, and many of those arrested face ten-year minimum sentences.
Ann is bent on blowing the lid off of this. While the stories she files with newspapers get trimmed to "news haiku," on her blog she's publishing transcripts of the secret press-conferences, information on the use of local law to do the Feds' bidding, and the myriad ways that the DEA is cooking the process to wage its war on Americans. [Boing Boing]
Impressive Benchmarks: Sorting with a GPU
An anonymous reader writes "The Graphics research group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has posted some interesting benchmarks for a sorting implementation which is done entirely on a GPU. There have been efforts on doing general purpose computation on GPUs before ( previous slashdot article). However, most of them had generally utilized the fragment processing pipeline of the GPUs which is slower then the default high speed rendering pipeline. Apparantly, the above implementaion is done using "simple texture mapping operations" and "cache efficient memory accesses" only. There also seems to an option to download the distribution for non-commercial use, though the requirements seem pretty hefty (a very decent nVidia graphics card and the latest nVidia drivers)." [Slashdot]
Protesters To Disrupt Soldier's Funeral
Protesters To Disrupt Soldier's FuneralJune 27WCVB [Boston] - A Massachusetts soldier who was killed in Afghanistan is scheduled to be laid to rest Monday, but a church group from Kansas is expected to try to disrupt the services and police are on alert for any problems.The church group claims U.S. soldiers like Staff Sgt. Christoper Piper, 43, are dying because the country is being punished for its tolerance of what they see as immoral behavior, such as homosexuality. [The Agonist]
What are you doing for July 4th? I just found out I'll be working. Our spacecraft Swift is going to be observing comet Tempel1 at the time of the Deep Impact encounter. (Previous discussed here on MeFi 2 years ago.) We'll probably have images and movies first, but the first images you'll see after the encounter will likely come from either JPL or Hubble. You can't have Penn State scooping NASA. Oh well, at least we will have a barbecue at work to celebrate. Our acting Mission Director during this time is a great bloke from MSSL. It is oddly appropriate to be celebrating the Fourth with a person from the UK. [MetaFilter]
DVD Jon cracks Google Video in 24h UPDATED
[Boing Boing]
U.S. intelligence firm says bomb unlikely to have come from Syria
U.S. intelligence firm says bomb that killed Lebanese politician Hawi unlikely to have come from SyriaKristin Dailey | June 29 Daily Star - A leading U.S. private intelligence firm said in a recent report the bomb that killed former Lebanese anti-Syrian politician George Hawi this month is unlikely to have emanated from Damascus. Texas-based Statfor, which specializes in intelligence and counterterrorism analysis, believes the blast was "so sophisticated that few in the world could have done it." It adds the "complex nature" of the remote-control technology used in the attack narrows the list of suspects considerably. In an interview last week with press agency UPI, Fred Burton, vice president of Statfor and author of the report, said: "This type of technology is only available to government agencies." [The Agonist]
You've Got MailMichael Crowley | June 23 Under the arrangement, dubbed "gimme five" by Abramoff and Scanlon, Abramoff would retain a client, then bring in Scanlon as an independent consultant, records show. Scanlon would then allegedly charge exorbitant fees for his services and expenses in representing tribal interests and secretly split much of the money with Abramoff. [The Agonist]
Bush sets up domestic spy service
Other measures include: • An executive order allowing US authorities to seize the assets of any person or any company thought to be aiding the spread of WMD, targeting specifically eight companies including two from North Korea, one from Iran and one from Syria • The establishment of a national counter-proliferation centre, to centralise US efforts to stop the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons • Giving control of all overseas human intelligence operations to the CIA • Seeking the creation of a new assistant attorney general position to centralise responsibility for intelligence and national security at the Justice Department. [The Agonist]
Special Report Goes on the Offensive
Special Report Goes on the OffensiveAl Kamen | Washington, DC | June 29WaPo - The U.S.-Asia foreign policy establishment here is positively gaga over a teensy transmission error last week by consultant Chris Nelson , author of the highly authoritative Nelson Report, a must-read for those involved in foreign affairs, especially on Asia. [The Agonist]
Apple patent dug up docks iPod in PowerBook
You know how much we love patent applications, especially Apple's patent applications, since they love to stonewall everyone on their plans. Which is why we're totally giggling to ourselves at their latest to surface, which proposes iPod integration directly into a laptop. Granted, this patent application also proposes iPod docking into just about every device imaginable, including images of the device docked in a regular dock, speaker dock, wall mount, and so on. And yes, they specifically outline that the "[media player's] user interface may be the primary user interface of the notebook; for example, the touch pad of the media player shown may be used to perform actions on the notebook computer. Take it for what it is though, people: something that not gonna happen by Apple's hand (at least not anytime soon). [Engadget]
Are you worried about the future glut of obituaries in national newspapers? Because I sure am. Think about it: because of our networked world and mass media, there are so many more nationally known people than there were 30, 40, or 50 years ago. Fifty years ago, to be famous you had to be a politician, a movie star, a sports star, a general/admiral, a writer, a musician, a TV star, or rich. These days, we have many more popular sports, more sports teams, more movies are being made, there are 2-3 orders of magnitude more TV channels and programs, more music, more musical genres, more books are being written, and there's more rich people. Plus, these days people routinely become famous for appearing in advertising, designing things, being good cooks, yammering away on the internet, etc. etc. A year's worth of guests on Hollywood Squares...there's 2300 people right there that probably wouldn't have been famous in 1953, and that's just one show. [kottke.org]
Secret air campaign against Iraq?
Secret air campaign against Iraq?Tom Regan | June 30CSM - Most American media have focused on the allegations from the Downing Street memo that the Bush administration was going to "fix" the intelligence in order to justify the war against Iraq. Now the reporter who broke the original story says they have missed a more substantial allegation to arise from the same set of leaked documents. [The Agonist]
Posted by Jon Rubin at 01:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 01, 2006
Red Flagged Links Vol. III 6/22/05 - 6/26/05
$99 Dell Laser Printer 1100: Lasersharks v. Inkjets?
If Denton caught me talking about something as uncool as printers—budget printers, at that—he'd probably flog me with his Tron slippers, but I'm in the market and I can't help but think a $99 laser printer from Dell is pretty interesting. Dell pimps $99 laser printer, throws up gang signs [ArsTechnica] [Gizmodo]
I don't even know if that's a title, but I have a quick technical question about the radio interference chirps that are sent by phones right before phone calls that can be heard in speakers or seen in CRT monitors. [Gizmodo]
Slashdot the vote: We're beating back the Broadcast Flag!
Donna sez, "EFF Activism Coordinator Danny O'Brien shares inspiring stats from the 48-hour campaign to stop the Broadcast Flag: [Boing Boing]
O'Reilly Calls for the Arrest and Detention of the Entire Air America Staff
Hilarious. [Eschaton]
Holden:
Q Just following up on that question, you said at the outset of that, the terrorists have made it a central front in the war on terrorism. I thought it was a central front in the war on terrorism before we invaded.
MR. McCLELLAN: It is. It's part of the war on terrorism, yes.
Q It was.
MR. McCLELLAN: No, it is.
Q It is now --
MR. McCLELLAN: Both.
Q Was it prior to --
MR. McCLELLAN: Both. It's part of the war on terrorism, David.
Go ahead.
E&P has more. [Eschaton]
A first look at Apple's Intel Mac (with photos)
Apple's Intel-based Mac development kits have started trickling into developer's hands, Think Secret has learned. The Apple Development Platform ADP2,1, as the systems are officially designated, feature 3.6GHz Pentium 4 processors with 2MB of L2 cache operating on an 800MHz bus with 1GB of RAM. More details and photos inside... [Think Secret]
Triacetone Triperoxide (TATP), also known as acetone peroxide, is the explosive of choice for Palestinian suicide bombers since it's easily made using commonly available materials. It was also part of the mixture in Richard Reid's shoe bomb. It contains no nitrogen and is thus undetectable by commonly used methods such as NQR, though an effort to cheaply detect it shows promise. What I find most interesting is the way it detonates; unlike most high explosives, it doesn't combust, but instead decomposes rapidly to form acetone and ozone. [MetaFilter]
Rove: Liberals Want Troops To Die
The Kool Kids will probably wet themselves with glee at this bon mot from Karl. [Eschaton]
Pentagon Creating Student Database
Pentagon Creating Student DatabaseJonathan Krim | June 23WaPo - Recruiting Tool For Military Raises Privacy Concerns The Defense Department began working yesterday with a private marketing firm to create a database of high school students ages 16 to 18 and all college students to help the military identify potential recruits in a time of dwindling enlistment in some branches. The program is provoking a furor among privacy advocates. The new database will include personal information including birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity and what subjects the students are studying. The system also gives the Pentagon the right, without notifying citizens, to share the data for numerous uses outside the military, including with law enforcement, state tax authorities and Congress. Pity the "Do Not Call List" doesn't include recruiters" ~ candy [The Agonist]
Exclusive: interview with Mr. Sun about the OS X Weather Dashboard widget
One of my favorite Dashboard widgets is the Weather widget. It's been pretty hot and sunny for the last few weeks here in NYC so I've been seeing quite a few pictures of my favorite yellow celestial object depicted on the widget. I recently had a chance to sit down with Mr. Sun, a long-time resident of both our solar system and the blogosphere, and I asked him about his Weather widget representations. [kottke.org]
An android embodiment of surrealist SF author Philip K. Dick will be demonstrated at Wired's NextFest this weekend in Chicago. [Boing Boing]
Smugglers conceal heroin "mini bricks" inside bricks of cocaine
"The Microgram Bulletin" is a monthly web-based newsletter published by the Drug Enforcement Administration. The April 2005 edition has a short item about 17 bricks of cocaine that were intercepted by the DEA in Nogales, AZ. Upon inspection, agents discovered a surprise inside the cocaine: [Boing Boing]
George Russell, jazz's first theoretician, has released a new album to commemorate his 80th birthday. When Miles Davis remarked that he "wanted to learn all the changes," Russell responded by conceiving his Lydian Chromatic Concept. First published in 1953, the Concept resulted in the most influential album in jazz history. Today Russell turns 82. [MetaFilter]
Dock Ellis, psychedelic pitcher
During the late 1980s in my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, there was a cool band called Dock Ellis. Their music was good but I liked their name even better. Dock Ellis was a player for the Pittsburgh Pirates who in 1970 pitched a no-hitter while tripping balls on LSD. The Dallas Observer just profiled Ellis and retold the psychedelic sports tale of the century: [Boing Boing]
Nunc Dimittis. My favorite waiter-blogger's finest piece so far. [MetaFilter]
Kickass Kung Fu: Like Dance Dance Revolution for martial artists
Kickass Kung Fu is a video-game in which you use real martial-arts moves to control an on-screen kung-fu fighter in order to best both human and AI opponents. [Boing Boing]
Someone at CNN.com doesn't like Dick Cheney: [Eschaton]
Justice Rehnquist close to death?
Yesterday afternoon, the Washington Post posted a series of stories in their RSS file for the national news page on Chief Justice William Rehnquist's death. Here's a screenshot from Bloglines: [kottke.org]
Religious Gadget Thursday: The E-Meter
Over a ball-breaking glass of Fantome Brise-Bonbons at Blind Tiger last night, I made a stunning revelation: I'm totally entranced by this Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes experiment. It has everything I could ever want from a news story: Potential brainwashing, aliens, ninjas (well, Tom was a samurai once, which is like a ninja with a bamboo fetish), and gadgets. One in particular: the 'e-meter,' or 'Electro-psychometer,' a "pastoral counseling device" used by the Church of Scientology to detect, among other things, the emotional state and thoughts of those attached to the device. [Gizmodo]
Dianne Feinstein on the Broadcast Flag: Idiot or liar?
Senator Dianne Feinstein wrote back to constituents who complained about the Broadcast Flag with this amazing, disingenuous note: [Boing Boing]
The New York Times, whose odious reg system requires you to personally identify yourself in order to simply read the news, publishes an endorsement of Bugmenot, an excellent service that circumvents registration for websites like nytimes.com. [Boing Boing]
Toilet-wall graffiti from 18th Century London
Bog House Miscellany is a large collection of 18th Century toilet-wall graffiti from the coffee- and ale-houses of London. [Boing Boing]
Hagel: "Iraq could be worse than Vietnam"
Hagel, Republican senator from Nebraska, speaking to veterans back home (subscription only link). [Daily Kos]
Officer in Charge Eyeballs Buhriz Body Count
June 26, 2005 [Cryptome]
"Neal Pollack" is Dead, Long Live Neal Pollack
Sadly, "Neal Pollack" is dead, though Neal Pollack is still alive.
To honor his memory, let's remind ourselves of a few of his greatest hits.[Eschaton]
Posted by Jon Rubin at 04:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack