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July 21, 2006
"Sea waves are green and wet, / But up from where they die / Rise others vaster yet, / And those are brown and dry."
For today, here's a bunch of stale links I've had tabbed out in my RSS aggregator far too long.
The universality of sand dunes, be they on Earth or Mars, is a result of self-organized criticality:
Where the dunes become sparser - for example, near that icy hill - they break apart into "barchans". These are crescent-shaped formations whose horns point downwind. Barchans are also found on the deserts of Earth, and surely on many other planets across the Universe. They are one of several basic dune patterns, an inevitable consequence of the laws of nature under fairly common conditions.
The upwind slope of a barchan is gentle, while the downwind slope is between 32 and 34 degrees. This is the "angle of repose" for sand - the maximum angle it can tolerate before it starts slipping down.
Barchans gradually migrate in the direction of the wind at speeds of about 1-20 meters per year, with small barchans moving faster than big ones. In fact, when they collide, the smaller barchans pass right through the big ones! So, they act like solitons in some ways.
What makes sand dunes interesting is that as they seem to enjoy living on the brink of danger. As the wind blows, they heap up until their slip face is right at the angle of repose... ready for landslides!
This is the idea of "self-organized criticality": some physical systems seem to spontaneously bring themselves towards critical points, without any need for us to tune their parameters to special values.
SOC occurs in sandpile models because one adds the sand extremely slowly, i.e., one grain at a time. Otherwise a critical state is not obtained. This makes SOC be a special example of dynamical critical phenomena in the case that the flux variable (here the rate of sand addition) is set to ε+, i.e., an infinitesimal value greater than zero. This formulation allows SOC to be studied using quantum field theory.
Malcolm Gladwell reviews a book about explanations:
In Tilly’s view, we rely on four general categories of reasons. The first is what he calls conventions—conventionally accepted explanations. Tilly would call “Don’t be a tattletale” a convention. The second is stories, and what distinguishes a story (“I was playing with my truck, and then Geoffrey came in . . .”) is a very specific account of cause and effect. Tilly cites the sociologist Francesca Polletta’s interviews with people who were active in the civil-rights sit-ins of the nineteen-sixties. Polletta repeatedly heard stories that stressed the spontaneity of the protests, leaving out the role of civil-rights organizations, teachers, and churches. That’s what stories do. As Tilly writes, they circumscribe time and space, limit the number of actors and actions, situate all causes “in the consciousness of the actors,” and elevate the personal over the institutional.
Then there are codes, which are high-level conventions, formulas that invoke sometimes recondite procedural rules and categories. If a loan officer turns you down for a mortgage, the reason he gives has to do with your inability to conform to a prescribed standard of creditworthiness. Finally, there are technical accounts: stories informed by specialized knowledge and authority. An academic history of civil-rights sit-ins wouldn’t leave out the role of institutions, and it probably wouldn’t focus on a few actors and actions; it would aim at giving patient and expert attention to every sort of nuance and detail.
Tilly argues that we make two common errors when it comes to understanding reasons. The first is to assume that some kinds of reasons are always better than others—that there is a hierarchy of reasons, with conventions (the least sophisticated) at the bottom and technical accounts at the top. That’s wrong, Tilly says: each type of reason has its own role.
Tilly’s second point flows from the first, and it’s that the reasons people give aren’t a function of their character—that is, there aren’t people who always favor technical accounts and people who always favor stories. Rather, reasons arise out of situations and roles. Imagine, he says, the following possible responses to one person’s knocking some books off the desk of another:
1. Sorry, buddy. I’m just plain awkward.
2. I’m sorry. I didn’t see your book.
3. Nuts! I did it again.
4. Why did you put that book there?
5. I told you to stack up your books neatly.
The lesson is not that the kind of person who uses reason No. 1 or No. 2 is polite and the kind of person who uses reason No. 4 or No. 5 is a jerk. The point is that any of us might use any of those five reasons depending on our relation to the person whose books we knocked over. Reason-giving, Tilly says, reflects, establishes, repairs, and negotiates relationships.
Douglas Hoftstadter, the fugue, and computer-generated music in the style of actual composers
Thinking in C is a huge Flash video tutorial.
Even my own hyperactive imagination is having a hard time wrapping itself around the idea. I'm familiar enough with Cold War history to know the United States has at least considered the first use of nuclear weapons before—in Korea and even in Vietnam—and I know it was long-standing U.S. strategic doctrine never to rule out a nuclear response to a Soviet conventional attack on Western Europe. But the current nuclear war gaming strikes me as much more likely to end in the real thing—partly because the neocons appear to have convinced themselves a "tactical" strike doesn't really count, partly because of what Hersh politely refers to as Bush's "messianic vision" (Cheney may have his finger on the bureaucracy, but Shrub is still the one with his finger on the button) but mostly because I think these guys really think they can get away with it. And they might be right.
I've been trying to picture what the world might look like the day after a U.S. nuclear strike on Iran, but I'm essentially drawing a blank. There simply isn't a precedent for the world's dominant superpower turning into a rogue state—much less a rogue state willing to wage nuclear war against potential, even hypothetical, security threats. At that point, we'd truly be through the looking glass.
One can assume (or at least hope) that first use of nuclear weapons would turn America into an international pariah, at least in the eyes of global public opinion. It would certainly mark the definitive end of the system of collective security—and the laws and institutions supporting that system—established in the wake of World War II. The UN Security Council would be rendered as pointless as the old League of Nations. The Nuremberg Principles would be as moot as the Geneva Conventions. (To the neocons, of course, these are all pluses.)
Nuclear first use would also shatter (or at least, radically transform) the political alliances that defined America's leadership role in the old postwar order. To the extent any of these relationships survived, they'd be placed on roughly the same basis as the current U.S. protectorate over Saudi Arabia—or, even worse, brought down to the level of the old Warsaw Pact. They would be coalitions of the weak, the vulnerable and the easily intimidated.
In other words, the current hegemony of American influence and ideas (backed by overwhelming military force) would be replaced by an overt dictatorship based—more or less explicitly—on fear of nuclear annihilation. U.S. foreign policy would become nothing more than a variation on the ancient Roman warning: For every one of our dead; 100 of yours. Never again would American rulers (or their foreign counterparts) be able to hide behind the comfortable fiction that the United States is just primus inter pares: first among equals. A country that nukes other countries merely on the suspicion that they may pose a future security threat isn't the equal of anybody. America would stand completely alone: hated by many, feared by all, admired only by the world's other tyrants.
Mutiny at the Supreme Court (the Hamdan and Padilla decisions)
The Logic Alphabet turns Booleans into a physical toy that can be rotated into valid declarations.
Glenn Greenwald explains that we are not at war, something conservatives always seem to forget...except when it provides legal cover.
Who might be able to explain to Law Professor Reynolds why it is plainly false to assert, as he did, that Congress has declared war -- either against Al Qaeda or Iraq? Let's see . . . who would volunteer for this job . . . how about Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Or how about the Justice Department's 42-page memorandum from January 19, 2006, defending the President's right to eavesdrop on Americans in violation of the law.
There are all kinds of issues surrounding the Bush administration's terrorism arguments which are subject to debate. Whether we are a country "at war" is not one of them, as Bush's own Attorney General, and as his administration's Justice Department, have made quite clear.
Even they have expressly acknowledged that there is no declaration of war from Congress with regard to either Iraq or al Qaeda, and to state otherwise -- as Instapundit did twice, including once after it was pointed out to him that there has been no declaration of war -- requires either great confusion or outright ignorance with regard to Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution specifically, and to declarations of war generally.
The notion that we are in "a time of war" is used to "justify" a whole array of extremist and even illegal policies, and much attention is often paid to the fact that such conduct, as the Founders stressed, does not become any more acceptable because we are at war.
“This guy gets pulled over on suspicion of a DUI,” she said, “And it turns out that he only speaks Spanish. So the cop radios for a Spanish-speaking colleague. A second officer shows up, reads the driver his rights in Spanish off of a little card that all cops carry, and they administer the breathalyzer test. Sure enough, the guy is soused.
“We figure this case is a slam dunk. But a few weeks later the driver’s lawyer submits a motion to have the results of the breathalyzer voided, saying that the defendant didn’t understand his rights before we gave him the test. And we’re all, like, ‘Nuh-uh! We read him his rights. In Spanish, even.’
“But the defense somehow got a copy of the Spanish language card that the officer read from, and noticed that the little squiggle was missing from above an ‘n’ in the sentence: ‘¿Tiene veinteuno años?’ In English that literally translates to ‘Do you have 21 years?’—in other words, this was just a routine question to make sure the guy was an adult. But without the tilde over the ‘n’, the word ‘años’ becomes ‘anos’—Spanish for ‘anuses.’
“They’re claiming that the driver thought the officer asked ‘Do you have 21 anuses’, despite the fact that the officer reading the card spoke fluent Spanish and would have pronounced it ‘años’ anyway. And the defendant said ‘si.’ We’re supposed to believe that the guy genuinely thought he was being asked if he had multiple anuses and answered with an enthusiastic ‘yes!’
“The best part is that the defense attorney can’t even bring himself to say the word ‘anus.’ Instead, he calls it ‘the back region.’ We’re going in front of a judge next week, and I’m going to make a point of saying the word ‘anus’ as many times as I can during the proceeding. I even got them to call the legal brief ‘The Anus Motion,’ so he won’t even be able to refer to it by title.
Stoner hacker Gary McKinnon claims NASA is involved in UFOs. "Claims" being the key word.
GM: I got one picture out of the folder, and bearing in mind this is a 56k dial-up, so a very slow internet connection, in dial-up days, using the remote control programme I turned the colour down to 4bit colour and the screen resolution really, really low, and even then the picture was still juddering as it came onto the screen.
But what came on to the screen was amazing. It was a culmination of all my efforts. It was a picture of something that definitely wasn't man-made.
It was above the Earth's hemisphere. It kind of looked like a satellite. It was cigar-shaped and had geodesic domes above, below, to the left, the right and both ends of it, and although it was a low-resolution picture it was very close up.
This thing was hanging in space, the earth's hemisphere visible below it, and no rivets, no seams, none of the stuff associated with normal man-made manufacturing.
SK: Is it possible this is an artist's impression?
GM: I don't know... For me, it was more than a coincidence. This woman has said: "This is what happens, in this building, in this space centre". I went into that building, that space centre, and saw exactly that.
SK: Do you have a copy of this? It came down to your machine.
GM: No, the graphical remote viewer works frame by frame. It's a Java application, so there's nothing to save on your hard drive, or at least if it is, only one frame at a time.
SK: So did you get the one frame?
GM: No.
SK: What happened?
GM: Once I was cut off, my picture just disappeared.
SK: You were actually cut off the time you were downloading the picture?
GM: Yes, I saw the guy's hand move across.
The new CIA director refuses to deny he spied on Bush's political opposition when he lead the NSA's illegal domestic operations.
When Hayden dodged the question, the questioner repeated, "No, I asked, are you targeting us and people who politically oppose the Bush government, the Bush administration? Not a fishing net, but are you targeting specifically political opponents of the Bush administration?" Hayden looked at the questioner, and after a silence called on a different questioner. (Hayden National Press Club remarks, 1/23/06)
This past spring, a bunch of NeXT execs left Apple...not sure what that means.
Nancy Heinen, Apple's General Counsel and Secretary, quietly left the company for unknown reasons, AppleInsider reported. Heinen is the third senior executive to leave Apple is the last six weeks.
Ms. Heinen joins Avie Tevanian, former Chief Software Technology Officer, and John Rubinstein, former Senior Vice President of the iPod division, in departing from the company. All three joined Apple in 1997 following the acquisition of Steve Jobs' NeXT Software; their concurrent might signal a "changing of the guard" at the company.
Thanks to legal hero Eliot Spitzer, Universal Music's been busted for payola, along with most of the other big labels.
Most notably UMG and its labels--Def Jam, Interscope, Universal Motown Recordings Group, Uni-South, Universal Nashville and Verve--have agreed to stop making payments and providing expensive gifts to radio stations and their employees in return for airplay of particular artists’ songs. UMG used such tactics to secure airplay for Nick Lachey, Ashlee Simpson, Brian McKnight, Big Tymers, Lindsay Lohan and others.
Among the egregious violations cited in the Spitzer probe: Universal Motown spent close to $300,000 in July 2003 to drive airplay of Lumidee’s “Dream”; and the program director at WBEE (Rochester, NY) asked Uni-South to pay for a $2,500 laptop computer for the station in exchange for the station adding two songs, one by Joe Nichols and the other by McHayes.
...still got dozens and dozens of tabs open in NetNewsWire....oh well.
Posted by Jon Rubin at July 21, 2006 01:29 PM
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